Open Thread 154.75

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1,349 Responses to Open Thread 154.75

  1. ana53294 says:

    How are Trump’s reelection chances? Have they gone up or down?

    Until January, Trump’s win seemed like a sure thing. The economy was good, he was the incumbent, his base is loyal. Then, when the economy went down, it seemed like his chance went down, and he could lose, because the incumbent is blamed for the economy. Now, with the riots, and the unfortunate photo-op, did Trump’s chances go up or down?

    To me, it feels like they went up. The riots are unlikely to be popular with the independents, or the Never-Trumpers. Who will win in November?

    • broblawsky says:

      Biden’s betting odds have improved substantially since the protests began.

    • Loriot says:

      I suspect that the riots have helped his chances, but I doubt it will prove decisive. I guess a lot depends on how long this lasts and how it is covered.

      The coronavirus will probably swamp every other effect, especially if it comes roaring back as seems likely.

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      In January I thought he was very likely to win, 65%, “unless something crazy happens.” Well then we had a global pandemic, and probably a depression, and massive race riots. These are bad things, but whether Trump gets blamed for them and takes a hit, or responds well and gets a boost is too early to tell. And it’s only June.

      Basically I have no idea. Flip a coin.

    • RalMirrorAd says:

      It All depends on who gets blamed. Mass protests that go without a hitch? Good for Biden. Sadly that didn’t happen. (The ‘going without a hitch’ part, I’m ambivalent about Biden)

      Trump could take the blame for not acting quickly enough or acting too quickly.

      Because protests and riots aren’t conscious individuals the demands placed on police/government officials will be contradictory. Any two people will want the opposite government response, or any one person wants two things that are mutually exclusive.

  2. Uribe says:

    So I’m in Houston, and I think this city has done a great job managing the protests, at least relative to other big cities. I think the main factors that account for it are:

    1) The mayor and police chief have done an excellent job showing they are on the side of the protesters. The mic at the protest in front of City Hall was given to some radical and obnoxious speakers today, as well as some reasonable and good ones. The mayor and some foolish congressman also spoke, but the overall effect dampened the anger from the angry speeches.

    2) George Floyd is from Houston, so that helped with #1, but that fact could have made things worse. For instance, the angriest, most provacatove speaker was a BLM activist from New York, here because it’s where Floyd is from.

    3) The lack of white radical leftist activists here. I hate Orange Man Bad as much as anyone, but I’m not a leftist activist. From what I can tell, the protesters here, percentage wise, are much blacker than those in other cities.

    4) Geography. Because city officials planned the protests with the BLM and other activists, which included some local rappers, they were able to plan the path of the march wisely, allowing it to end in front of the Convention Center, which is basically the middle of nowhere.

    5) No Curfew. I think this is key. The crowd of protesters, finding themselves in the wasteland of east downtown Houston in front of the convention center, had trouble breaking the law even if they wanted to. They spent a lot of time chanting all the lyrics to Fuck the Police. They got in the faces of cops and baited them as much as they could, the cops didn’t have any reason to arrest the protesters because they weren’t doing anything illegal.

    6) Patience. The cops plan was to wait out the protesters and not take their bait. Basically the opposite of what Trump and Barr did Sunday.

    I’m not claiming there was no bad behavior or that things went perfect (I hope I don’t wake up tomorrow and read that something horrible happened), but I think other cities could learn something by following Houston’s example. Granted, I acknowledge above that some of the factors are luck.

    I think having no curfew is the right spirit of things. A curfew puts cops and protesters in conflict the moment the clock strikes Curfew Time.

    • broblawsky says:

      I think this is right. Protesters usually seem to go home if they think they’ve made their point, and the easiest way to make people protesting about police brutality think they aren’t being heard is by using additional police brutality.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      This is completely off-the-cuff, but my impression is that curfews are put in place the day after things get violent. If it turns out that the crowd of protestors is providing too much cover to rioters, and since the rioters typically want to do their rioting when it’s dark, work with the protestors and encourage them to disband before dark.

      But maybe I’m wrong. We have lots of cities to look at.

  3. MisterA says:

    It’s hardly a novel idea that a lot of what is going on with cops/Black Lives Matter right now has to do with social media capturing video of events which at most we might have read about in the past, if even that.

    But I am curious if what we are seeing now will create an accelerated version of that. Because everyone at these protests has their camera out, so every time some cop decides to act like an idiot or a thug, it’s getting broadcast, in a way that has never really happened before. Not in this volume, one incident right after the next. Videos of cops driving cars into crowds of protestors, firing pepper spray or rubber bullets at seemingly random people.

    This just occurred to me when I pulled up Twitter and the first thing on my feed was a video of cops wrestling a guy to the ground, dropping a club next to him, and then forcing his hand around it, presumably so they could say he was armed. This is the kind of thing you hear claims about but you never get to see it; as of this posting it has been viewed 4.3 million times.

    Link: https://twitter.com/brutumf/status/1267575655509577728?s=21

    One thing these protests are doing is providing every cop in America a chance to perform for the camera, all at once, which is kind of new.

    • acymetric says:

      I had not seen that, that is unbelievable.

      I mean, I completely believe it, I’m not even surprised, but it sure is crazy to see it on video. Regardless of the merits of the riots/property damage, I hope there are a lot of cops out of a job after this is all over, and these guys should be at the top of the list.

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      and then forcing his hand around it

      I don’t think that’s what’s happening there. The cop foolishly (intentionally?) drops the stick, goes for the man’s hand presumably to pin it behind his back and arrest him, the man sees the stick and reaches for it. Look how fast his hand moves. I don’t think a cop would be able to move a man’s hand that fast and that precisely during a ground struggle. Then the cop has to punch the guy’s hand to get him to let go of the stick.

      It also doesn’t make any sense. They’re already arresting him. Whether or not at some point he had his hand on a stick is irrelevant. If they were going to that much trouble, just lie and say “he had a stick.” There’s certainly no point doing it for the benefit of any watching cameras because, well, the reaction to this video.

      • MisterA says:

        I just went back and watched it again – the cop’s hand is around his wrist when his hand moves to the stick, and it is self-evident to me watching it that the cop was the one moving his arm. I genuinely don’t know how you can watch what I just watched and conclude what you concluded – would be curious what other people here saw.

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          I can’t tell that his hand is around his wrist. The quality of the video is awful. There’s a white shaped blob near a dark shaped blob. But the man hasn’t gone limp and appears to be struggling. I find it unlikely that he’s struggling against the people attempting to contort his body with the rest of his limbs, but then allows his arm and hand to be moved to the stick precisely and with no resistance. The more likely explanation is he reached for the stick, and the cop’s hand follows his.

          The cop was either foolish to drop the stick within eyesight of the man, or he did it on purpose hoping he’d go for it. But I also don’t understand the purpose of making sure he had held a stick. They were already arresting him for, something, I assume some kind of disorderly conduct. Whether or not he had touched a stick at some point in a way they would be lying about anyway doesn’t seem like it would matter. Just lie and say he had a stick without the “gotcha” drama.

          I too would like to know what others think.

          • Simulated Knave says:

            My own view of it is that I think the guy’s moving his arm, but I don’t think he’s grabbing the stick (at first). I think he’s just trying to stand up again, and then he just holds onto the stick by reflex.

            It’s certainly possible that the cop is trying to force the stick into his hand, but lying would be easier and not involve arming someone with a motivation to use the weapon against you.

            Also, practically speaking, that officer’s not in a good position to force the guy’s hand anywhere.

      • Ketil says:

        I don’t think a cop would be able to move a man’s hand that fast and that precisely during a ground struggle.

        Hard to tell? Clearly, the guy being arrested holds on to the stick when shaken by the wrist by the police officer – I suppose that could be expained as just reflex.

        Edit: The interesting thing is how the interpretation depends on prior beliefs. If you consider police as prejudiced, violent, and corrupt, then you clearly see how the officer is trying to frame a helpless victim of police violence. If you think police officers are just trying to arrest an unruly and probably criminal citizen, then clearly this citizen is grabbing the cop’s stick and has to be subdued – and obviously there is no benefit to the cop if he did.

        Nobody bothers to fact check much when they see evidence that supports their prior beliefs. When these beliefs are extreme and fervent, people will interpret evidence accordingly. Combined with a veritable torrent of video material – there must be millions of recordings, and some are statistically bound to be misleading or easily misinterpretable – there will be myriad videos that can (and will) be interpreted as firm evidence of whatever you want to believe. And you only really need a single one – we’re counting eight days of riots in 100 cities, but people will form their views from the video that gets most coverage on social media.

        • gbdub says:

          To your edit, I agree, and wonder if we have found a scissor statement video.

          It’s like the spinning dancer illusion – sometimes it spins one way, sometimes the other, sometimes it flips mid viewing.

          I’m curious on the context of the video. At the beginning, it looks like the man is being detained by two non police?

          A potentially salient thought: this doesn’t match my idea of “cop plants weapon” because I can’t imagine why a cop would do that before a subject is detained. Intentionally giving your weapon to a guy you are actively struggling with seems incredibly stupid (not to mention the obvious non police witnesses). “Clumsy” may therefore be a better / more likely explanation than “both evil AND stupid”?

        • Trofim_Lysenko says:

          Quite a lot of video evidence is less unequivocal than people initially think. This phenomenon was all over the place in the 2000s with leaked gun camera and drone footage from Iraq and Afghanistan, as people spent lots of effort and thousands of words arguing what was OBVIOUSLY clear from a partial clip taken out of context of a grainy, shaky, low-res IR video.

  4. Loriot says:

    This morning, one of my Facebook friends posted something along the lines of “If you declare fellow citizens to be the enemy, you’re on the wrong side of history, de-escalation blah blah blah” to which one of his friends responded saying that police ARE the enemy and they need to be attacked, cars burnt, etc.

    I came here ready to post angrily only to see reports about police using flashbangs to break up a completely peaceful protest just because Trump wanted a photo-op. Now I’m just depressed. There are atrocities on both sides, and it’s really hard to see how we can get out of this in a non-disastrous manner.

    • baconbits9 says:

      The best shot at breaking the current cycle is for a national figure with an impeccable reputation to get the backing of both police unions and protest leaders to announce that we there is going to be a national day of protest on date X and that everyone should stop protesting for a week and let the looting and violence stop and see if we can get low conflict protests going.

      I’m having trouble thinking of a person who could pull that off, Lebron James is pretty much the only name that comes to mind.

      • 2181425 says:

        Can’t vouch for an impeccable reputation, but Killer Mike may deserve a shot:
        Twitter video. Someone with an interest in both camps maybe (law enforcement and minority).

    • albatross11 says:

      There aren’t actually sides in the nationwide protests–there are millions of individuals and thousands of organizations and maybe a couple dozen loose organizations/ideological alignments involved. There are looters stealing stuff while everyone’s attention is diverted, and chaos tourists looking to burn down/tear up some stuff for fun, and guys who like busting heads and street fights going out for some action. There are cops who would like to bust some heads, and other cops who want to keep things peaceful, and some cops who are heartsick about what happened to George Floyd and others who think he mostly brought it on himself. There are protesters who are mainly protesting racism and others who are protesting police impunity and still others who are just disgusted at what happened to Floyd. And so on.

      Every protest and every city is a separate thing. There was apparently a pretty big protest where I live (suburban Maryland) that went down peacefully, and there were protests in other places where the cops waded in with batons to bust some heads in a righteous cause. In some places the cops actually started marching with the protesters, and in others they opened up with tear gas and rubber bullets without overmuch concern for who got hurt. NYPD != LAPD != CPD, BLM != Antifa.

      There’s not a “their side” or an “our side.” Trying to bin everyone together in some giant collective isn’t going to make anything clearer, even though that’s basically how like 99% of politics ends up working.

    • 10240 says:

      “If you declare fellow citizens to be the enemy, you’re on the wrong side of history […]”

      What happens when both sides declare each other enemies?

      it’s really hard to see how we can get out of this in a non-disastrous manner.

      Fight for a while, then sooner or later everyone gets bored of it. Isn’t that the usual way?

      • fibio says:

        What happens when both sides declare each other enemies?

        Then whoever loses is declared on the wrong side of history.

  5. Edward Scizorhands says:

    So many bad things I’ve seen in the past two weeks can be explained someone having the view “I’m going to teach you a lesson.”

  6. Ketil says:

    To be honest, I thought the idea that looting and violence was caused by police attacking the demonstrators was somewhere between laughable or indicative of the rioters being a bunch of psychopaths in the “see what you made me do” sense. Especially as the argument is made in the mix of claims that looters were actually nazi provocateurs, undercover police, and from out of town, I didn’t give it much credence over all the other emotionally motivated nonsense. But apparently, 538 comes down in favor for this theory, and links to scientific evidence and expert opinion. The police should have let the riots alone, and fewer and less bad things would have happened.

    Should I revise my ideas on the causality of this, or my opinion on 538 as a serious outlet for analysis?

    https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/de-escalation-keeps-protesters-and-police-safer-heres-why-departments-respond-with-force-anyway/

    • Paul Zrimsek says:

      Should I revise my ideas on the causality of this, or my opinion on 538 as a serious outlet for analysis?

      It probably depends on what they’re analyzing.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      SPLC, who has never ever wasted an opportunity to attack right-wing extremists, say they have no evidence that right-wing extremists are masking up and smashing shit.

    • baconbits9 says:

      Three overlapping bins:

      1. Looting isn’t caused by anything in general, its opportunity theft. A whole bunch of people only behave because of the immediate repercussions and looting occurs when those repercussions aren’t visible/likely. You get looting with natural disasters and political riots.

      2. Property destruction is (that isn’t in service of looting ie smashing windows to get into stores) more anger driven. Lighting cop cars on fire, tearing down signs and barricades, graffiti is an expression and is likely to increase as anger increases and anger is likely to increase with aggressive police responses.

      3. Protests are the legitimate wing here, but they hold the potential to devolve into riots. That threat is part of their power, but it is weak without the ability to decommit to violence as well.

      The author of the article spends to much time focusing on police tactics. The tactic of de-escalation works (and they note) when the protesters allow it to work.

      But the era of negotiated management basically fell apart after the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999, when protesters blocked streets, broke windows and successfully shut down the WTO meeting and stalled trade talks. When protesters violated the negotiated terms, police responded with tear gas and rubber bullets and took away the wrong lessons, Maguire said.

      Now the police do have more resources, training and time to prepare de-escalation strategies but they also generally have little experience with large scale and spontaneous demonstrations. There is a large difference between a single protest in a single city where other departments/federal agencies etc can promise to lend support if things get out of hand. This dramatically cuts the risks of appeasement and escalating demands, however multiple protests over multiple cities strains resources further, and creates a much larger set of dynamics. A single strategy is very unlikely to work broadly.

      Then there is the Chamberlain issue: The worst thing you can do in a confrontation is project strength and then back down when challenged, for a police force this means showing up with a demonstration of force and then backing down. In Minnesota the abandoning of the precinct wasn’t met with victory and dispersal of protests, but the destruction of the precinct and continued protests/riots/looting. For a de-escalation strategy this means you have to offer up an explicit vulnerability, a show of much less than maximum force which allows for the de-escalation to fail without a complete loss of control. Of course this requires some level of cooperation as a violation by the protesters can quickly gain ground.

      More or less these strategies work when both sides see the other as ‘not the enemy’, protest organizers often negotiate with officials about where, when and how many on both sides which means the protesters effectively have high quality intel on what the police will do. This is not something that you would provide to an enemy in war time for obvious reasons which sets some highly limiting parameters to attempts.

      In short such policies are clearly two sided, and it doesn’t take much of a violation from either side to break an agreement, acting as if the police should behave in way X without regard to how protesters behave is very naive and is basically an unstated assumption of the piece.

      • AG says:

        The common thread in recent days is that looting breaks out after the main brunt of protests have dispersed for curfew.

        However, before that, the incentive calculus was kind of laughable:
        “What happens if I throw rocks at the police?”
        “They’ll tear gas and pepper spray us.”
        “What happens if I protest peacefully?”
        “They’ll tear gas and pepper spray us for the people throwing rocks right behind us.”
        “What happens if I set things on fire and loot places?”
        “They’ll tear gas and pepper spray the protesters over there.”

        To me, it seems that if the police had been positioned to guard property rather than to focus on guarding protesters, the opportunity costs for looting are raised much higher. It doesn’t answer the opportunities that open up for looting even further away from the protest site, but that only further shows how concentration of police presence and equipment at the protest sites isn’t a great decision. What would the protesters even have to throw rocks at if the police aren’t there? It seems to be that internal discipline (peaceful protesters preventing others from doing bad things) would be easier in that situation, since then the peaceful protesters don’t have to deal with the conflict of interest.

        • baconbits9 says:

          1. There are plenty of examples of daylight looting, in santa monica an amazon delivery van was robbed in the early afternoon for just one example.

          2. Positioning to protect property is easier said than done. Even large police forces dont have 1 cop per city block, and you cant have 100% of your police force on duty. Your only option is strategic placements which require time to plan. This is yet another reason why negotiations between police and protesters are the key element for more peaceful protests.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          There have been arguments that, rather than forming a line across the street to pen up the protest, the police should form a line along the street to protect property.

          I think it fails if the police are worried about being bum-rushed.

          • gbdub says:

            Yeah, a lot of police seem to be trying to hold choke points to high value areas. That can be confrontational but the alternative is defend nothing and/or spread police so thin they are liable to be dangerously overwhelmed.

          • baconbits9 says:

            I think it is important to note that lots of departments are going to make significant mistakes, and lots of individual cops are going to act badly.

          • AG says:

            Holding chokepoints doesn’t work because the looters aren’t arriving from inside the protest group. They’re arriving from outside of the police line.

    • gbdub says:

      The article seems fairly short on hard analysis (mostly because it seems like solid data is genuinely lacking) so the title may overstate the certainty of the case.

      One issue that the article raises but doesn’t really resolve, is that de-escalation works a lot better if you have defined organizers who can be negotiated with in good faith, something these protests lack. Also, de-escalation is a cooperative strategy – only one side needs to defect to start the escalation feedback loop. So how do you simultaneously apply a “soft touch” AND come down swiftly and effectively on the rabble rousers on the protester side looking to escalate a riot?

    • Blueberry pie says:

      I won’t argue the strong version (Police is the only cause of riots/looting), but I think the weaker version is very defensible (The riots/looting would be much less severe if the police was more restrained in use of force).

      I’ll start with the moral aspect: The police have more power (guns, vehicles, jails, …) and it is literally their job to handle protests so they IMHO should have more responsibility and be held to a higher a standard than the people protesting. One thing that seems to roughly hold in my country (and I guess most of Europe more generally) is that police using violence is generally seen as a failure in any context. The police is expected to prevent violence. Guy pulls a gun, the police shoots him. The police gets questioned whether they did all they could to deescalate the situation before the gun was drawn or if they couldn’t incapacitate the guy in some other way.

      Similarly in handling protests. If you need to use teargas, you will be heavily questioned on everything you’ve done before. Because teargas makes people stressed and stressed people are less predictable and you increase the chance that someone will feel like a hero for throwing bricks. It is hard to handle the people who came for the violence, but this is not helped by making the crowd sympathize with them.

      Also harm reduction: We have pro-cannabis legalization march every year, tons of people smoke weed in public, arresting all of them would be hard and risk conflict with the crowd. So once a year, police watches as a crowd of people smoke weed in public and helps them safely cross major streets while they’re at it. Not sure how that applies to US (know too little about details), but in this vein, curfews are IMHO problematic. Instead you might want to provide incentives for protesters to gather en masse at some lower-risk areas. If they want to march, make it easy to march in a direction better for you and harder in others. Attempts at dispersing the crowd means more area to watch for and more places where crowd can provide cover to violent elements. The details are guesswork, but I think the general stance (don’t try to enforce stuff that is unenforceable without huge collateral) is solid.

      And I think this is morally right and it also works quite well. But for all of this work well, there needs to be at least some trust. And trust needs to be built. And the police in USA seems to have a huge trust deficit and there are no simple quick solutions to rebuild it.

      Not that it seems they are doing serious attempts – e.g. I’ve seen a video where police rams people with cars. This IMHO is something that police just should not ever do. Even if it happened just once, even if everybody in the crowd was throwing Molotovs. (neither seems to be the case). There is no sensible goal to be achieved. The same is IMHO true for every video at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/05/george-floyd-protests-police-violence.html I watched the videos from halfway over the world with little at stake in the case and it still made me rehearse mental scenarios in which I test ways to disable a police car.

      So maybe deescalating the current protests completely was never in the books, but there is IMHO ample evidence that there is instead active escalation by the police and that might not have caused the riots and looting, but it is almost certainly making it worse.

      • gbdub says:

        Trust is a two player game. If the cannabis march has gone off without incident for several years, the police can be confident a “herd them on their way” sfo touch will be successful.

        But what if the cannabis march had some nontrivial number of participants seriously motivated to engage in aggressive confrontations with police Regardless of the police response (or lack thereof)? Or property destruction / looting?

        You need some way to get these bad apples out of the crowd before they escalate everyone around them, and a disorganized protest will lack the internal leadership to self police.

        • Blueberry pie says:

          Trust is two way, but as I said: I think the police are to be held to higher standard than “they started it, it’s OK to beat them” (while I’m quite OK with applying lax standards to disorganized protesters). Also the police as institution actually is the only side here that can take coordinated and systematic action to increase trust.

          what if the cannabis march had some nontrivial number of participants seriously motivated to engage in aggressive confrontations with police

          Then you take a lot of care to not make the whole crowd take their side by attacking everybody. Obviously if the police ignores the touting, they might escalate. But then the aggressive ones may easily lose the favor of the crowd. I won’t claim there are easy solutions. But indiscriminate use of force is also IMHO very unlikely to work here (as we’ve seen in the news).

          get these bad apples out of the crowd before they escalate everyone around them

          I don’t think this happens that often. It is IMHO (but I have no data just a hunch) much easier to escalate the crowd by police missteps – simply because there are usually more police than the aggressive protesters. Some other comments here actually mentioned from first-hand experience that most protesters disapproved of the brick-throwers.

          I think there is some parallel to how it is more important to not convict innocent than to convict guilty – if the society/protest functions well the contract that “nothing bad will happen to you unless you do something bad” is quite powerful, but once this guarantee is broken you a) start considering the police as an enemy and value those who fight it and b) since you might get hurt whatever you do, the deterring effect of force is quite weak (also no data, just my current understanding)

          • baconbits9 says:

            I think the police are to be held to higher standard than “they started it, it’s OK to beat them”

            The police are, and should be, held to a completely different standard than the protesters. A large part of that comes right up front where the protesters choose to be there and the police are there as part of their job responsibilities, and further more as they are generally expected to take verbal abuse and obscene gestures with little reaction. It is unrealistic to expect them to start from this base and then continue to respond either proportionally or less to any escalation by the protests. Even simply from a game theory perspective it is well understood that letting one side defect without punishment can quickly cause mass escalation.

            This applies in the other direction just as much, if police break up peaceful protests then the only two options will appear to be no protests and violent protests and eventually violent protests will win out. It took an extraordinary person in the figure of MLK during the 60s to keep organizing non violent protests in the face of violent reprisals, and I am not currently hopeful that a person like that will emerge in the near term on either side.

          • albatross11 says:

            It seems likely to me that part of what makes protests work better in other countries is that there’s a culture of protests as part of the normal political process, with norms everyone basically follows, experienced people passing on those norms and techniques/tactics for effective protest to the next generation of protesters, etc.

      • edmundgennings says:

        It is police’s job to handle protests only in the most vague of senses. Their primary role is to enforce the law, investigate offense, and capture criminals. It is one very narrow and unique form of their secondary and incredibly multiform role of generally maintaining order. It is part of their job only in the sense that it is the job of a janitor to hurricane prep a building in the North East. He may be slightly more competent to do it than the average person and it is entailed by their job description, but I would guess this is the first experience a majority of the police involved have in dealing with situations that are on the awkward border of protest and riot.

        Secondly Police are showing massive restraint and deescalating, as they should for the reasons you describe. But we should give them credit for this and not just treat their restraint as them being neutral.
        Police neither showing restraint or arguably deescalating is answering ever single thrown rock with rubber bullets at the line of protestors who are just standing there. (Rubber bullets are less dangerous than thrown rocks of a certain size and can be more easily aimed away from the face than rocks can). Nowhere is anything slightly like this happening and we would be rightly horrified if it did. Nowhere are police answering each rock thrown with rubber bullets aimed at people throwing rocks. Some rubber bullets are used, sometimes foolishly, but there is not a tit for tat retaliation policy. Police are not responding to people yelling obscenities at them by yelling obscenities back each time. Do police occasionally answer back with pointless obscenities? Yes, but you do not by and large see lines of police yelling back personal attacks and obscenities at lines of protesters yelling obscenities and personal attacks at them. We rightly expect this deescalating behavior of the police, but we can not let that expectation obscure the fact that it is deescalating.
        Also, this is massively situationally dependent, but in some cases particularly the ones that in fact get violent the protestors are in violation of a curfew or other ordinance and are continuing to do so despite being as it were caught. Whether these curfews etc are the best way to empty streets so that clearly bad actors can be focused on or not is an interesting question, but is a mayoral not police action. In some cases curfews have been not announced with sufficient advance warning, but there is still an obligation to do one’s best to comply. If I continue to engage in some minor criminal activity, say sun bathing next to strangers at the beach, in the presence of police officers and against their instructions, they are neither escalating or deescalating but simply doing their job normally in moving to arrest me and using force if I did not comply. In cases where there are large masses of people in violation of curfews, permitting, standing on streets, possibly violating social distancing laws we rightly would be shocked if police exercised no restraint and did not deescalated by imprisoning literally every single person breaking curfew etc, but we should not forget that they are exercising restraint in not doing this. And in many places this is much more restraint that would be shown for people sunbathing at a beach.
        There is a fundamental asymmetry between the police and not the police. The state (is taken) as having a monopoly on the legitimate initiation of violence.
        Importantly if the police habitually deescalate and these deescalations become taken for granted, then they risk that a reversal of a policy of deescalation gets seen as an escalation. This creates a strong motive to avoid ever deescalating more than one already does, which is an issue.
        Maybe they should deescalate more in particular cases; there are certainly examples of them making mistakes. But recognizing habitual deescalation policies as deescalation and not taking them for granted, is a road towards more not less deescalation.

        • Blueberry pie says:

          I think we agree that police should try to avoid violence, but we disagree about how far should they go in doing so – is that right?

          If I continue to engage in some minor criminal activity, say sun bathing next to strangers at the beach, in the presence of police officers and against their instructions, they are neither escalating or deescalating but simply doing their job normally in moving to arrest me and using force if I did not comply.

          That is IMHO a bit too authoritarian view on police. Assuming that you automatically shouldn’t do anything the police/state says you shouldn’t do is a very strong statement. Allowing the state to criminalize something that a large number of people considers legitimate is very dangerous. This is actually what the communist regime did in my country: the rules were setup that if you wanted to live a normal life you were in constant breach of all sort of minor rules that were usually not enforced. This give the police great power – they could freely choose who to arrest, because you could find something on everybody.

          This is IMHO why democratic countries tend to have strong protections of “civil disobedience” – you are under some circumstances allowed to publicly break laws that are illegitimate (don’t know the details in the US). And this is why the police was IMHO right in not arresting people at the anti-lockdown protests, despite them breaking the law.

          Secondly Police are showing massive restraint and deescalating, as they should for the reasons you describe.

          I understand that the videos that reach me are selected to be the most shocking, but there have been literally dozens of videos that show stuff that are not minor missteps and IMHO should not happen even once (e.g., ramming with cars, using teargas without giving the protesters an obvious exit route, attacking people standing on their porch). Quite a lot of what we see is not crowd control, it is trying to crush the protests by force. So I think it is not unfair to say that part of the police not only doesn’t deescalate, but actively escalates the tension. I wouldn’t blame the individual cops too much either, it looks like a problem of organizational culture and leadership.

          The most similar experience from our country is the CzechTek 2005 fiasco (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CzechTek#CzechTek_2005). What could have been a fairly non-controversial action against an illegal activity performed by unpopular group of people turned unnecessarily violent and made many people support the tekno fans. The main issue that was identified was that police took a bunch of regular cops with little experience in crowd control and gave them riot gear. Unsurprisingly (in retrospect) the unexperienced cops used excessive force, because they got agitated and they just could. And from the distance that seems quite similar to what I see on the news. Broadly: If your department doesn’t do regular exercises on how to use X safely and effectively, than just don’t give them X.

          I think the comment at https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/27/open-thread-154-75/#comment-906179 discusses some other tools the police can use instead.

          Importantly if the police habitually deescalate and these deescalations become taken for granted, then they risk that a reversal of a policy of deescalation gets seen as an escalation. This creates a strong motive to avoid ever deescalating more than one already does, which is an issue.

          That sounds like trying to use theory to answer an empirical question: do strong deescalation tactics make protests less violent? I don’t have data or understanding of the current research, but the anecdotal experience from my country is that it does. Since the aforementioned CzechTek the police invested in deescalation and it paid off. Absent police violence, violent protesters are judged harshly by the public so there was a bit of virtuous cycle. Standoffs between police and protests became somewhat ritualized to a game where the side to use more violence loses (with somewhat stricter eye on the police). The biggest downside is that protesters try to figure out the most obnoxious non-violent tactics (to increase likelihood of provoking violence by the cops), but that is IMHO quite a civilized way to go about protesting.

          • Randy M says:

            This is IMHO why democratic countries tend to have strong protections of “civil disobedience” – you are under some circumstances allowed to publicly break laws that are illegitimate

            Usually what happens when you break a law you disagree with is you are arrested and challenge it in court. It isn’t so much the case that the police check to see if you or others around think the law is illegitimate before arresting you.

          • Blueberry pie says:

            I didn’t mean you won’t get arrested, but that the law protects you (e.g. you might not have to pay a fine or go to jail). I assumed US has such protections, but I don’t understand their legal system. Our Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms – which is a part of our constitution says:

            Article 23
            Citizens have the right to resist anybody who would do away with the democratic order of human rights and fundamental freedoms, established by the Charter, if the work of the constitutional organs and an effective use of legal means are frustrated.

            (From official English translation at: https://www.psp.cz/en/docs/laws/listina.html)

            This gets interpreted quite broadly, because the charter protects A LOT of rights and freedoms. For example, ecologists can occupy mining property and get away without repercussions, if the court agrees that “legal means were exhausted” (this is decided on case by case basis and sometimes the protesters lose).

    • Mark V Anderson says:

      As someone else pointed out, the article was pretty short to show much of anything.

      It may be true that there are ways to defuse exuberant protests so they don’t turn into riots, but I didn’t see much there in the article. What I do know is the worst thing to do is to just let protesters do whatever they want, even when they are destroying property. We saw that in Seattle in 1999, and we just saw it again in Minneapolis. What happens then is the city is destroyed. The protesters always claim it is violent outsiders, but it doesn’t matter, because the city burns either way.

  7. Ketil says:

    In the Floyd case, are any of the coroner reports available in full? In particular, I’m curious the evidence presented for the proposed causes of death, including numbers from the toxicology reports indicating the actual doses involved.

    (Media makes it almost impossible to get at the actual facts, if you Google there are thousands upon thousands of links news services, half of them are paywalled, and the rest tend to provide carefully selected fragments of the evidence, clipping videos to omit important parts and covering up details with logos and other splotches of irrelevant graphics. I wonder why I should pay for subscriptions when the net contribution from journalism to actual information flow is negative?)

  8. salvorhardin says:

    How is it that the heads of large liberal-city police unions can express public, undisguised, explicit contempt for their elected civilian superiors and still keep their jobs?

    Bob Kroll in Minneapolis and Ed Mullins in NYC are the examples I’m thinking of here, but there are probably others. How on earth can their conduct not get them fired for insubordination? Do the mayors have the legal power to fire them and are just politically afraid to do so, or are they restricted from firing them due to union contracts?

    I think this sort of behavior is a significant reason why urban populations, white and black alike, so often view their cities’ police forces as occupying powers. If the police don’t respect their elected leadership, they’re not really protecting and serving the voters who voted for that leadership, and it’s dangerous to the rule of law and democracy to let them get away with that disrespect for the same reason it’s dangerous to allow military insubordination that imperils civilian control of the military. I’d like to reduce that danger, so I’d like to know what we can do in the way of institutional reform to curtail that disrespect.

    • Aftagley says:

      I began writing this reply 100% convinced that union officials were actually just retired cops, and that’s why they were allowed to go off the chain like this.

      Turns out, no. Both the individuals mentioned are still drawing a paycheck from the city governments and are actively saying stuff that undermines their civilian leadership. Huh, the more you know.

      • Another Throw says:

        TIL.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        Being in union leadership usually gives you more free reign to call out your superiors.

        We want people in unions to be able to criticize their bosses. That’s good. But our city workers should probably rely on civil service protections, not unions.

        • cassander says:

          That cuts two ways. That ability will let them criticize their bosses for doing bad things, but also for doing things that aren’t bad, just bad for the union.

    • Trofim_Lysenko says:

      I’m trying not to be snarky, but are you really asking why relations aren’t cordial between the chief executive of a corporation and the head of one of the more influential unions of that corporation’s employees? If you think about it in those terms, the answer basically jumps out: Unions are unions, they exist to forward the interests of their members, and there is nothing privileged about the public sector that makes Management-Employee relations any more harmonious than in the private sector.

      • salvorhardin says:

        I’m not asking why the head of the union doesn’t get along with the chief executive. I’m asking why he’s allowed to publicly express contempt for the chief executive, with respect to matters directly concerning the rights and liberties of the people who voted for that chief executive, and still keep his job.

        There are situations where, and topics on which, it may be justified to give union officials protection from being fired for criticizing management on those topics. But allowing those entrusted with the police power to have that protection, on topics bearing on how and whether they respect the rights of citizens subject to that power, strikes me as incompatible with the security of free and democratic institutions. Bob Kroll shouldn’t have to like Jacob Frey, but he should have to keep his opinions about Jacob Frey’s directions to the police force to himself, or resign from the force.

        • Trofim_Lysenko says:

          The two are inextricably linked. ALL government actions, from the municipal to the federal, impact the rights of citizens, and ALL government employees have power over those citizens that can be abused. You can fire public sector employees for criticizing their (elected) leaders on matters related to public policy (which will inevitably include matters of the public or national interest), or you can have public sector unions.

          Pick one.

          For my part, I lean towards “no public sector unions”.

    • John Schilling says:

      As others have pointed out, this is how labor, union, and management are supposed to interact. I think you may be outsmarting yourself by imagining that it somehow has to be different when “management” is a government entity and not a for-profit corporation. So, look at how your questions almost answer themselves in a more traditional corporate context.

      The Ford Motor Company hires auto workers, who are represented by (the local chapter of) the UAW. This is an organization which represents the private interests of the auto workers, which are not aligned with those of Ford’s management. Let’s assume that the key dispute is that the auto workers feel very strongly that they need to be allowed to goof around at the water cooler for ten minutes out of every hour, whereas Ford would be much better off if they spent that time on the assembly line making cars.

      The auto workers create the UAW, and hire (perhaps from among their own ranks) specialist leaders and negotiators who defend their position. It’s their job, as UAW leaders, to strongly assert that auto workers should be able to good off at the water cooler for ten minutes every hour. They complain vociferously when Ford tries to stop the workers from goofing off. That’s what they’re supposed to do. The two sides negotiate. Ford’s leverage is that they can fire the insufficiently submissive workers and then they won’t get paid any more. The UAW’s leverage is that they can go on strike and then Ford won’t build any more cars. They cut a deal where the workers get to goof off at the water cooler for ten minutes every two hours. And almost certainly including a “you can’t fire any auto worker without going through an elaborate formal procedure” clause, because otherwise Ford managers would go about glaring at the workers around the water cooler and vaguely hinting that they are about to be fired for insubordination or something.

      Ford can’t fire the head of the UAW for the same reason that Ford can’t fire the head of General Motors – that guy doesn’t work for them. Or, if the head of (the local chapter of) the UAW is also working a 9-5 job on a Ford assembly line, Ford can only fire him from that job, not the UAW leadership job. But only after going through an elaborate formal procedure, because see above. And if they do fire him from his Ford job, he’s still the head of the UAW and he’s just going call a strike. Which the union will support, because if Ford is going to mess with their leaders for advocating the union members’ pro-goofing-off interest, then that’s certainly going to end in either their losing what they really care about or in a knock-down fight with management, so it’s fighting time.

      Add to this, the bit where the US Federal Government (and most state governments) don’t like being dragged into this sort of fight, and so have passed actual laws forcing management to negotiate with unions in approved ways and not just going around firing uppity union organizers. Complete with a federal agency to make sure management knows its place and stays there.

      None of this changes if “management” is e.g. a police department. Now maybe the key dispute is cop-labor’s intense desire to beat up insufficiently obsequious civilians, and the negotiated settlement is that cops can beat up civilians but only if they do something vaguely like “resisting arrest”. And no chokeholds. Definitely the bit where cop-management can’t just arbitrarily fire cop-labor, they have to go through an elaborate formal procedure. All the while with the head of the union asserting that civilization will collapse into anarchy if cops can’t bust the heads of insufficiently-obsequious civilians, because so long as that’s what cops want to do, it’s their job as union leaders to make that argument as best and forcefully as they can.

      The police chief can’t fire the head of the police union from his union job because, in that job, he doesn’t work for the police chief. If he tries to fire him from his day job as a cop, then A: he’ll have to go through an elaborate formal procedure and B: the union will probably cover his salary and his legal fees for the duration and C: the cop union will go on strike and you won’t have any cops. Also, D: the NLRB will get pissed that management isn’t playing by the rules that are supposed to keep things from reaching that level.

      Occasionally, people have suggested that it shouldn’t work this way when “management” is a government agency serving the public interest, and even that we shouldn’t have labor unions for that sort of public-sector work. But, first, that’s crazy talk, right up there with social security reform on the “never gonna happen” list. And, second, it’s conservative crazy talk, and you specified a liberal city. Liberal city politicians are going to be primaried right out of their jobs if they go against the unions.

      • AG says:

        I don’t disagree with you, but I suppose people have different intuitions about branches of government authority because they are not customers of the government. They can’t vote with their wallet, the way they can stop buying products that aren’t worth it from a company whose union has negotiated policies with serious deleterious effects.
        (This is similar to aristides’ point below, on why the military is therefore not allowed to unionize.)

      • salvorhardin says:

        Fair points. I hope that the incentives operating on liberal city politicians will change as their constituents come to realize that the police union is their enemy. Unfortunately they will probably come to realize this mostly on tribal grounds and rationalize a policy change that approximates “unions likely to be headed by Red Tribers are bad and must be destroyed, those likely to be headed by Blue Tribers are essential to social justice and must be defended.” But I’ll take that over the status quo.

    • aristides says:

      I have a law degree and work HR for the Feds. I’m not sure what the differences are between state and Feds, so I’ll give you a Fed example. If we were to fire union Presidents for voicing their disdain for publicly elected officials that are in the supervisory chain during non-work hours, we would first, temporarily have very few union presidents while Trump is in office, since they are all pretty public about their disdain for him. Second, we would lose a massive civil lawsuit.

      The question isn’t whether we would lose the lawsuit, the question is on which grounds. It could be considered an unfair labor practice to retaliate against a union president based on his robust defense of the union. It could be an infringement of his 1st amendment rights since he is criticizing a public, electable figure. It could have gone against the terms of the Collective Bargaining Agreement, based on all sorts of terms they include. There could be an insufficient nexus to connect his off duty statements with his performance in the job. These are only the grounds I could think of in 5 minutes, a good union lawyer will write a 100 page bread on why it is illegal, easily.

      As an aside, this is why it is illegal for the military to unionize. There is a recognition that a military union would be too powerful, and be furtive grounds to start a coop. With how militarized our police is, should we start considering whether the same logic applies?

      • salvorhardin says:

        Yeah, I think your last paragraph is the key here (and thank you for the details on how these union protections work). If you wield the sharp end of the stick, so to speak, you should give up union protection as part of taking on that power. I don’t disagree with Trofim_Lysenko’s proposed solution of “no public sector unions period” but prioritizing those who directly, rather than indirectly, inflict legal violence seems prudent.

      • Aftagley says:

        How much of a Union President’s job is being a Union President? My vague expectation would be that for any union of over a few hundred people that it would be full time or at least close enough to significantly impact their ability to do “real” work. Is this the case?

        Because if so, I don’t understand why these Union President’s are still allowed to present themselves as being active duty cops and continue to collect a paycheck from the city. I understand the right of the cops to unionize and I understand even that value of it – but that value can be at cross purposes with the city/state/whatever and it’s citizens.

        • John Schilling says:

          Union members want their leaders to be “one of us”, not a professional suit, so they often elect from their own ranks someone who has been and promises to continue working a daily shift on the assembly line, beat, whatever. You may be right that this poses a conflict of interest and/or takes up so much of their time that they’re probably not giving 100% to their day job, but so what? You can’t fire someone from their day job for volunteering to lead a labor union in their spare time; that would be a sure recipe for a strike if it ever got to that point, which it won’t because it’s a slam-dunk loss for you in front of the NLRB.

          Again, think of this in terms of a bunch of assembly-line workers at the Ford plant, electing one of their rank and file to negotiate with management on behalf of all of them. It still doesn’t change if management is a police chief. Making it change requires changing federal laws, changing state laws, going through massive strikes in every city where you try it, and trying to find electable replacements for all of your party’s politicians who just got voted out of office for it.

          • salvorhardin says:

            FWIW, I’ve seen Minneapolis city councilmen, all liberal Democrats, tweeting about looking for a way to outright disband and replace the current police department, possibly on the Camden model, to the approval of my friends there, also liberal Democrats, who are in some of the worst affected neighborhoods.

            I don’t think a police strike in Minneapolis would endear the citizenry to them, I think the state government would step in with temporary policing coverage as necessary to get them through the strike– especially if the Democrats recapture full control of the state legislature this fall– and I don’t think the municipal elected officials would lose their jobs for being anti-police at this point no matter how much the police union spent to try and defeat them. They would have before, but it really looks like the MPD has got a critical mass of people sick and tired of their mafia tactics at this point. But this may be wishful thinking. Twitterati != electorate and all.

          • Thomas Jorgensen says:

            Replacing the entire police department sidesteps most of the problems John lists, for much the same reason an industrial union cannot stop Widget co from closing down an entire factory. It of course, replaces it with the separate problem that you now have to spin up a new police department right damn quick, and also the new police department will also unionize.

            This does not make it pointless! If your current police department is unusually toxic, replacing it from the ground up will at a minimum reset things back to baseline, and with care taken, you can set up a police department which is better than average, and consequently has a union which focuses on asking for things like “Money” and “Generous parental leave”.

  9. Aftagley says:

    Trump Orders Police to Clear a Peaceful Protest

    I just watched this happen first hand. The protest north of the white house was 100% peaceful. Light chanting, but no one throwing anything, no one even getting to close to the cops. Ideal protest scenario. I was trying to take a picture of two high school kids who were getting their senior picture taken in front of the police line, that’s how calm it was.

    Then, out of no where the cops started throwing flashbangs and advancing on the crowds with mounted police. They’d throw a round of flashbangs, drop some gas then advance around 15 feet, then pause for a minute before retreating. It went from calm and reasonable to absolutely nuts in less than a minute. At the time, we had no clue why it was going on: it wasn’t curfew, we’d been given no warning that it was going to happen and again – there was no protester violence that could have justified this.

    Come to find out, Trump wanted to go out to a church that’s across the street from where the protest was taking place and take a 5 minute photo op of him tossing around a bible. That desire apparently superseded everyone’s right to public assembly. I was pretty conflicted on the protests before, but now I’m just angry. I just got gassed put in a dangerous situation for absolutely no reason.

    • Trofim_Lysenko says:

      I agree that was absolutely a stupid act on Trump’s part, but I don’t think it retroactively changes any of the analysis or takes on any other protests over the past few days.

      • cassandrus says:

        Stupid? He just ordered federal officers to assault peaceful American citizens who were engaged in entirely legal activity. As I understand it, there wasn’t even an order to disperse given before the cops charged in, or at least not one given with sufficient time for anyone to disperse even if they wanted to. It’s a deliberate and systematic infringement of constitutional rights, not “stupid.”

        • Aftagley says:

          No – there was no order given to disperse. The first thing I heard were the flashbangs being thrown.

        • Trofim_Lysenko says:

          It certainly might be a deliberate infringement of constitutional rights. I don’t know the exact “time, place, and manner” case law as it relates to DC, but it sure sounds like it. But that’s pretty much a non-sequitur to my response to Aftagley, and specifically his comment that this particular response made him change his feelings retroactively about -other- protests in other areas.

      • Aftagley says:

        I don’t think it retroactively changes any of the analysis or takes on any other protests over the past few days.

        I don’t know how to express this any better than to say that it does for me. Maybe this is irrational and I need to step away and go cook dinner, but assuming that protesting takes some threshold of outrage to happen, well, I feel like I’ve reached that threshold now.

        • Trofim_Lysenko says:

          I’d say it’s the textbook definition of irrational. It’s also entirely understandable, especially since you were personally there. Emotional response to perceived threat is -entirely- irrational, but that’s not the same thing as wrong, at least insofar as it applies to the specific inciting incident or situation. It’s when you take that response and expand it that you start running into issues, and that’s the part of your post that I’m trying to respond to.

          I was in the Army from 2000-2005, including a year in Iraq from late 2003-2004. I have personal experience with what I’m talking about here, both in my own reactions to coming under attack and observing the reactions of others. In the aftermath of a VBIED, I heard a lot of soldiers suggesting entirely seriously and non-jokingly that we simply light up any vehicle that came with X meters of our vehicles or facilities, no warning, no nothing. The vast majority of them calmed down later, and in any case leadership -stays- calm, and the military has an entire structure of both individual and institutional discipline precisely to control and channel that sort of reaction. But in that moment? The idea of worrying about targeting, proportionality, and discrimination relative to military necessity seemed stupid. It’s NOT stupid, but it SEEMS that way to those of us there in that moment.

          • ltowel says:

            This is an excellent response and kind.

            Is it possible that first hand experiencing an unnecessary and cruel police action could be the wafer-thin fact that convinces you that a lot of police action is unnecessary and cruel? Would that be a rational reason to re-evaluate the necessity of protests?

          • Aftagley says:

            @Trofim_Lysenk
            I’m now well fed, I showered off the remains of the gas and meditated for a bit. I think I can approach this from a better perspective.

            I’d like to state that a desire to protest doesn’t imply a desire to do violence or harm to anyone, just a desire to make your displeasure with the actions of authority well-known. I retain my previous and constant revulsion of the idea of harming other people or even breaking laws. I was previously unconvinced that there were sufficient wrongs that could be tied back to any kind of overall leadership to make the current sustained protests against the state worthwhile. Having experienced what I did, I now am convinced. I might not have been ride or die with the aims of BLM, but I am now motivated to protest based on this. If I am protesting this in the larger context of BLM, fine, but I’m protesting that my freedom of assembly was violently suppressed for no reason.

            One vet to another – I respect your service. We’ve all had stressful events happen to us in which objectively awful options seem more reasonable only because we had got adrenaline flowing. I’d counter your point, however, that by saying that just because you reached a decisions while undergoing stress, it doesn’t mean that the decision is completely invalid, just that you have a necessity to reevaluate that decision once the stressor has passed.

            @Itowel
            I don’t know. For reference, these weren’t police forces that did this, these were feds.

            ETA – by I don’t know I mean that’s a legitimate question that I feel the need to think on and process.

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:

            EDIT: Edited to add @s to make it clear who I’m addressing, and to respond to Aftagley.

            @ltowel

            Is that question directed to me, or Aftagley?

            I don’t think we were talking about re-evaluating the necessity of protests, but rather the evaluation of the conduct of protesters and police during them. I don’t want to put words in Aftagley’s mouth, so just go down to his earlier effortpost from yesterday and you can see what he said and what I and some others had to say on the subject.

            If you’re asking what -I- think of the necessity or wisdom of these sorts of protests in general, that’s a whole other question and frankly I don’t feel like derailing the current subthread with a long screed on my own two cents. The short version would be that no, any individual incidence of police misconduct doesn’t move the needle for me because of base rates (~50-65 Million public-police contacts per year, of which ~950K-1M involve the threat or use of force, resulting in ~900-1,500 deaths depending on whose numbers you believe and how broadly you construe “arrest related deaths” and deaths in custody.)

            @aftagley

            I think your counterpoint about the correctness of decisions made while one’s blood is up is entirely valid, and thank you for your thanks, and back at you.

            Leaving aside any issues I may have with the claims and proposals associated with BLM (and there are some), the problem I have with these protests is that BLM isn’t the AFL/CIO, or the SCLC, or the NOW, or ANY sort of organization such as those that have previously come into existence to organize, channel, and direct public outrage and the desire for change into policy and social changes.

            Perhaps this is simply personal bias, but I think that simply saying “Everyone with an axe to grind, take to the streets NOW because of [issue]!” gets you exactly what happened in Minneapolis, or LA in 1992, and this is true regardless of how legitimate the grievance OR how good or bad the proposed changes/demands are.

          • ltowel says:

            @Trofim_Lysenko

            It was directed at you – I definitely read that post but missed the context and so was asking unnecessary questions. I agree that there’s no reason to further derail this subthread.

    • gbdub says:

      Sorry you got caught up in that and glad (apparently) no one got seriously hurt.

      Not saying this should change your take at all, but for context it seems like it should be noted that the church in question is a 200 year old national historic site that was damaged (minor damage, due to quick firefighter action) by fires started as part of the protests last night.

      Kind of mad about all of it at this point. Mostly I’m mad that a moment where it seemed like we were all on the same side of an important issue for once is turning into the usual stupid partisan fight, only this time with people getting hurt and killed.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        From news reports, [1] the priest of the church was there and chased off with no warning. I might buy “we need to secure this previously-attacked location from randos” but, from the legitimate caretakers?

        Screenshots of his Facebook: https://twitter.com/jackmjenkins/status/1267654371032039430

        • gbdub says:

          I’m not asserting yesterday’s police action was smart or necessary, just trying to provide some context for why Trump chose that particular church and that particular time for a photo op.

          And also explaining why I’m pretty mad at the DC protesters too.

    • Jaskologist says:

      Wait, we have the right to public assembly again?

    • I wonder if anyone can, or should, take legal action against this? If the circumstances are as you describe, is there any basis for a civil suit?

      If the U.S. had private prosecution of crime, as England used to, the cops could be charged with assault, although I don’t think it is likely that a jury would convict.

      • Trofim_Lysenko says:

        IANAL but it seems like it’s worth a shot, at the very least. I think a lot is going to depend on A) the specifics of laws around DC, and B) whether DC has the sort of “time place and manner” restrictions that some cities do where protests are expected to be organized and apply for licenses or the city reserves the right to shut them down. Then again, who knows, maybe this would be a lever to challenge that sort of regime. But again, IANAL and don’t know the specifics around DC.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          I don’t know if a lawsuit would “win” in the sense of getting a monetary judgement, but a lawsuit might uncover the chain-of-command decisions that led to this.

          • aristides says:

            Any monetary judgement would likely me nominal, but it’d be a good pro bono case

          • AG says:

            Could it set precedent, though, that Presidents or other leadership figures could not give out such commands in the future, or that law enforcement could choose to refuse such orders without fear of reprisal?

  10. ana53294 says:

    I asked before about the flimsiness of doors in the US. I was quite surprised with these protests to see how unprotected stores are (other than fire alarms).

    In Spain, even in not-bad areas of town, many shops have metallic doors like this? It wouldn’t protect the big stores, but it would require something more than a brick to break into. Determined thieves still do it, breaking into jewelery stores and whatnot, but again, it would require some more preparation.

    • baconbits9 says:

      There are lots of reinforced store fronts being broken into in the US, see the Philly riots for evidence (1:45 at this video, and this video). The first link also shows a store front that clearly had a roll down metal door which was rolled up (and every untouched store on the street also has one down) and then the windows smashed, which is probably the case for a fair number of images that you see.

      • ana53294 says:

        I didn’t see those videos. There are so many on the web.

        I thought at first this protests were quite disorganized. But it seems like the looting at least is quite organized? Because breaking into a metal door requires some degree of organization.

        • baconbits9 says:

          I think one aspect is simply that smashed glass is one of the more photogenic images from a riot and that is what is focused on. A moderately bent metal cage doesn’t have the same visual impact.

        • baconbits9 says:

          I thought at first this protests were quite disorganized. But it seems like the looting at least is quite organized? Because breaking into a metal door requires some degree of organization.

          It does appear that the looting is semi-organized in areas. Some reports are of multiple trucks showing up to the same store to haul away items in bulk, and it is hard to say how organized some of the looting is, google the louis vuitton portland looting video and it looks semi organized (to my eyes), but it could just be that was the store which was broken into first, or people individually decided to target a high end store.

    • johan_larson says:

      I have seen barriers like those in Canada, but not often. Not a lot of stores have them. They are standard equipment in indoor malls, though, probably because stores on malls when in operation are fully open to the interior walkways, as though a wall was missing. The option of locking their doors when closed simply isn’t there; they need some more significant barrier that can be put in place when the mall is open but the store is closed.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      Those metal doors are standard in urban areas with any significant crime.

      But we are seeing looting in areas that haven’t had to bother with that stuff.

      Philadelphia, in particular, seems to have become lawless, with criminals fearlessly breaking into cop cars in broad daylight.
      https://twitter.com/NumbersMuncher/status/1267199491435892737

  11. AlexOfUrals says:

    So that’s probably a dumb question, but I’m going to ask it anyway. What’s the [measurable] goal of the George Floyd protests? Or the people peacefully demanding something to be done? Do they demand anything more specific than “change”? The guy who did it is already under investigation and I can’t imagine any way for him to get out lightly. And I don’t think there’s a way to change regulations for the police to prevent it from happening again, since strangling someone to death because you don’t like him is most likely already against those regulations. So, is there any specific act the government or the police should do to make the protesters say “ok, our joib is done here, let’s go home”?

    • Uribe says:

      What’s the goal of a volcanic eruption?

      You can analyze the mechanical forces leading up to an eruption, but the goal of an eruption is a non-sensical concept.

      The protesters, looters, and arsonists are not members of an organization that gives them direction in pursuit of an objective. They are a mass of people reacting to the physics of social forces.

    • Guy in TN says:

      The protestors aren’t a monolith. But some simple demands are:

      1. Bring appropriate charges against those involved in the murder (which no, does not include the absurd third degree murder charges for strangling an unarmed person to death).

      2. Abolition of qualified immunity.

      3. Bring charges against those who lied and protected the violent police, in the Minnesota case and in many others.

      4. De-funding and disarming the police.

      So there you have it. Do these things, and I’ll call off my friends who are out in the streets.

      • Skeptic says:

        I think a fair number just want to smash and grab stuff.

        What % ?

        • Guy in TN says:

          While certainly the oppression brought about by our economic system is throwing some fuel on the fire, clearly these protests are primarily police-violence motivated. Otherwise they would have began before Floyd’s murder.

          • Deiseach says:

            clearly these protests are primarily police-violence motivated

            Yeah, but there are a ton of people jumping on the bandwagon to show off their pet causes and how woke they are. I’m not going to quote the more blood-pressure raising ones, because the entire feckin’ thing is a dumpster fire (one of ’em is an “and then everybody clapped” story about How I Used My White Privilege To Protect A Black Person From The Police which is exactly as bad as you think it is), but I have seen a post about “hey great that everyone wants to contribute to bail funds, here’s a list of community bail funds nationally that always need contributions” and they include

            Haitian Immigrant Bond Assistance Project (immigration)
            LGBTQ Freedom Fund (immigration)

            Is this really the time to associate gay trans Haitian immigrants in the public mind with people burning down police stations, looting, rioting, and mobs kicking the living daylights out of people? Really?
            Then again, the presumed audience is already eating up IT IS ALL THE FAULT OF WHITE PRIVILEGE THE POLICE ARE THE ONES BURNING DOWN BUILDINGS with a spoon, so maybe they know better than I what will fly.

            That’s why I say it’s all showing off and virtue signalling because if you had half a brain you’d think about repercussions.

          • Guy in TN says:

            Whenever someone uses the phrase “virtue signaling”, I immediately mentally check out. It’s unfalsifiable meaninglessness.

            I don’t know how to respond to “you don’t actually believe the things you do”, other than with “I do”. There’s nothing to chew on.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Floyd’s murder, while heinous, is not particularly more heinous than Eric Garner’s or Walter Scott’s.

            But people have been cooped up for months, have a lot of free time, and don’t need to worry about getting fired for not showing up late for work.

            (Also, thanks in part to the work of people who want to do police reform, we are incredibly more aware of these things.)

          • AlexOfUrals says:

            @Guy in TN

            Whenever someone uses the phrase “virtue signaling”, I immediately mentally check out. It’s unfalsifiable meaninglessness. There’s nothing to chew on.

            Of course there is. It usually implies that the course of actions you’re taking is suboptimal for your stated goals and optimal for visibility. E.g. donating your time for low-skilled work instead of money, while being a highly paid white collar worker.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @AlexOfUrals

            It usually implies that the course of actions you’re taking is suboptimal for your stated goals and optimal for visibility.

            The normal word for this is “hypocrisy”. But perhaps more importantly, this doesn’t appear to be how Deiseach is using it in this context. What is the value that the protestors believe, that they are failing to uphold here, exactly?

            I mean, she says that the protestors appear to be pro-immigrant and pro-LGBT, while simultaneously saying that you should donate money to pro-immigrant and pro-LGBT causes? Is this the “gotcha”?

          • ltowel says:

            I’m pretty sure asking for donations to a cause at the time when the cause is super visible is super straight forwardly the right thing to do.
            The fact that some people posting these things are the same people defending looting one minute and claiming it’s agent provocateurs the other minute tells you more about those people the protests or protesters themselves. Most people will see people protesting something they consider an injustice and donate – including targeted bail funds there costs literally nothing.

        • My guess is that, although the immediate cause is this incident, part of the reason that it resulted in such an extreme reaction this time is the lockdown. A lot of people are feeling angry and oppressed, hence more willing to take extreme actions in response to something.

          • rumham says:

            Not only that, it seems to be the only way to go out in many of the cities without reporters mass descending and shaming people for not social distancing. Quite a few videos I’ve seen after dark are a lot of people just drinking and dancing.

          • baconbits9 says:

            As anecdotal potential (if it holds up) evidence of this two people charged with setting fire to a NYC police car are allegedly furloughed attorneys, with one of them being a NYU and Princeton graduate.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            There’s a lot of white people using this as their chance to break shit.

            Some people think they are radical left. Some people think they are radical right. Some people think they just want to break shit.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            There’s a lot of white people using this as their chance to break shit.

            Some people think they are radical left. Some people think they are radical right. Some people think they just want to break shit.

            The whitest man of all just wants to watch the world burn.

      • John Schilling says:

        So there you have it. Do these things, and I’ll call off my friends who are out in the streets.

        The problem is, first, you don’t actually have the power to call off your friends who are out in the streets. And second, nobody in e.g. the Long Beach Police Department has the power to do the things you are asking for. So if there’s a bunch of rioters tearing up downtown Long Beach with a decidedly anti-cop messages, and the Long Beach police would like this to stop, what are their options?

        They could have their police chief come out and speak in solidarity with all of the people seeking justice for George Floyd, but they did that three days ago. They could have the local police union come out and condemn the Minnesota cops who killed Floyd, but A: it would be basically unprecedented for any police union to speak out against any cop anywhere, and B: they did that anyway, well before the local rioting started, and the rioting started nonetheless. They could all get in their squad cars for a road trip to Minnesota to arrest some Minnesota cops, except no, Long Beach cops can’t actually do that. Or they can say that since nothing else worked, breaking out the tear gas and busting the heads of the people who are tearing up their city might work. Which, looking at the local news this morning, it did.

        If you want rioting to accomplish anything beyond “look at this prime bling I scored in the looting”, you need to have something resembling specific demands that are actually within reach of the targets of the rioting and looting. Something like, oh, this, most of which could be implemented locally by the Long Beach Police. Then, if you’re paying attention, you can stop rioting in Long Beach if and when you get what you want in Long Beach.

        Unfortunately, #BLM seems to have briefly floated that plan five years ago and forgotten it, and now they’re just in “It feels good to complain and smash stuff and steal stuff” mode. And last night, they felt it was OK for them to smash some stuff and steal some stuff and so they did so. Maybe now they’ll go back to complaining ineffectually, and we can hope that someone smarter will take up the cause of justice for George Floyd and reform of the MPD.

        • Deiseach says:

          we can hope that someone smarter will take up the cause of justice for George Floyd and reform of the MPD.

          One thing I hate is how US-style activism has spread globally, when what are the problems, conditions and solutions within an American context have next, nigh or nothing to do with the same in another country’s context. Quoting you a couple of news headlines right now:

          (1) My own country and what the hell business is this of ours? No, just an excuse for the activists/college wannabes to pretend like they’re doing something relevant and useful – Dozens gather in Dublin for peaceful protests against US police brutality (at least it’s only “dozens”, we haven’t all taken leave of our senses yet)

          (2) New Zealand – they have their own racial tensions, why are they copying US down to the “Colin Kaepernick taking a knee” tactics?

          All the news stories I am seeing now are calling the whole thing “anti-racism” protests, they’ve moved on from the particular case of Floyd, and they’re soft-pedalling – I like this headline, “Unrest overshaodws peaceful US protests”. Oh, it’s only a bit of unrest overshadowing, not violence and destruction, gotcha!

          • salvorhardin says:

            My theory is that the international protesters believe:

            (a) if the US unravels either into civil war or full-on authoritarian right-wing dictatorship, it is going to be very bad for the freedom and safety of the rest of the world, and

            (b) the rising threat of such an unraveling is the fault of Trump and his supporters, very much including the sort of police who murder civilians who pose no threat to them;

            (c) so showing solidarity with the protesters and opposition to Trump helps buck up a cause on which ultimately the future of the whole world depends.

            I think (a) is pretty clearly true: whether or not you believe the stuff after the “if” is likely to happen, it would be very bad for the whole world if it did. (b) is arguable, but if you buy it, (c) follows logically enough from (a) and (b).

        • Guy in TN says:

          @John Schilling

          And second, nobody in e.g. the Long Beach Police Department has the power to do the things you are asking for.

          This is not true, particularly on demands 3 and 4. The LAPD kills unarmed people.

          So if there’s a bunch of rioters tearing up downtown Long Beach with a decidedly anti-cop messages, and the Long Beach police would like this to stop, what are their options?

          The police can vote, or try to convince the protestors using words. You know, the same legal options that are given to the general public.

          If you understand why these two options are generally unsatisfying for the police, and they instead resort to violence and property destruction to achieve their demands, then you should also understand why the same applies to protestors.

          If you want rioting to accomplish anything beyond “look at this prime bling I scored in the looting”, you need to have something resembling specific demands that are actually within reach of the targets of the rioting and looting.

          But I do have specific demands. I gave you a list. What exactly are you asking for here, a list that satisfies the demands of literally all the participants? Don’t be ridiculous. That’s not how any protest works, and not having such a list in no way precludes that protest from being successful (e.g. Occupy, Ferguson)

          • Aftagley says:

            That’s not how any protest works, and not having such a list in no way precludes that protest from being successful (e.g. Occupy,

            I constantly like your perspectives and find myself agreeing with around 75% of your statements and around 90% what I assess to be your perspective… but I’m curious about this.

            I wasn’t very plugged in during occupy, but my observation of it was that it didn’t really accomplish much, was strongly hampered by it’s inability to present a united message and eventually collapsed under its own weight. You don’t seem to share this impression, and I’d be really interested to hear from someone who thinks occupy was successful. What did it accomplish that leads you to remember it as having been successful?

          • Guy in TN says:

            @Aftagley
            Thank you for the kind words, by the way.

            The success of Occupy was largely in shifting the economic political views of the US public. If seen as primarily a public awareness campaign, I would say Occupy was wildly successful. You can draw a straight line from the emerging socialist left in the US (AOC, Sanders, DSA) to the rhetoric and ideas that were seeded during 2011. Hardly anyone was talking about economic inequality before then, and socialism was relegated to to the college activist-fringe.

            To put it in a somewhat cringe phrasing: Occupy was what initiated the “national conversation” on economic inequality, which the Democrats (particularly the young socialist left) have kept up ever since.

            While it’s true that Occupy hasn’t resulted in any direct policy changes, if the Left ever implements meaningful economic policy changes in the future (i.e., if Millennials start voting), the ideological seeds of Occupy should be seen as part of what paved the way.

          • baconbits9 says:

            Inequality got a little extra play after OWS started but the real change in rhetoric came with the release of Piketty’s book in 2013, which more or less made it an acceptable intellectual discussion.

          • John Schilling says:

            This is not true, particularly on demands 3 and 4. The LAPD kills unarmed people.

            What does that have to do with the riots in Long Beach, which is not in the jurisdiction of the LAPD?

            W/re your demand 3, what is the name of the Long Beach police officer who needs to be arrested for his crimes?

            But I do have specific demands. I gave you a list. What exactly are you asking for here, a list that satisfies the demands of literally all the participants?

            I’m asking for a list of demands that the Long Beach Police Department, or city council, can meet. What can Long Beach do, to end the riots in their city that as far as I can tell are motivated entirely by the behavior of A: police in places that are Not Long Beach and B: bored people who want to break shit and imagine they are doing good works?

          • Guy in TN says:

            @John Schilling
            I am “Guy in TN”, not “Guy in Long Beach”. I cannot give you the names of every police officer who has killed an unarmed person in every US city. But it would be exceedingly remarkable if the people of Long Beach had not been victimized by the police department in various ways.

            far as I can tell are motivated entirely by the behavior of A: police in places that are Not Long Beach and B: bored people who want to break shit and imagine they are doing good works?

            I strongly suspect this is not true, and that the people protesting have been victimized by their local police as well. I know we certainly have here in Tennessee. Have you ever actually asked your local protestors what their motivations are, rather than just making cynical assumptions?

          • Controls Freak says:

            The police can vote, or try to convince the protestors using words. You know, the same legal options that are given to the general public.

            If you understand why these two options are generally unsatisfying for the police, and they instead resort to violence and property destruction to achieve their demands, then you should also understand why the same applies to protestors.

            Not gonna lie, I didn’t think you could do it again. But wow, you did. Can you please distinguish the reasoning?

            If the government wants to achieve more wealth equality, they can engage in market transactions, or try to convince people to commit acts of charity. You know, the same legal options that are given to the general public.

            If you understand why these two options are generally unsatisfying for the government, and they instead resort to violence and taxation to achieve their demands, then you should should also understand why the same applies to, uh, let’s go with me. I have now levied a tax on you. 10%. Pay me. Something something kneecaps. Good thing the only thing the police can do to stop me is vote or try to convince me otherwise using words.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @ControlsFreak
            I think you may misunderstand me. My argument is not that violence to achieve your political goals is wrong. But rather, what superficially appears to be mindless violence is quite often has a political component.

            John Schilling understand this perfectly well when applied to the police. The law is slow or redundant, and “talking it out” only gets you so far. Sometimes, to get what you want, you have blind someone by shooting a canister in their eye, slash tires of cars, and mace kids in the face. It’s not mindless violence, but violence to serve a political cause.

            But I don’t know why he refuses to apply this same logic to the protestors, and instead assumes the looting and burning is just mindless expressions of rage, devoid of political context.

          • John Schilling says:

            When the police fire a tear gas cannister, it’s usually immediately obvious what the police want, and it’s something the rioters can actually deliver so that the tear-gassing will stop. On the off chance that the rioters haven’t figured it out, there’s usually a cop with a loudspeaker stating it explicitly.

            Protesters have not traditionally had difficulty finding someone with a loudspeaker to make their demands. They need to put some thought into what they are going to demand, and from whom. “We’re pissed off and we’re going to hurt people and break stuff until we’re not pissed off any more, you figure it out” is not an acceptable response from either side.

          • Controls Freak says:

            Ah, yes, but you see, I think you may misunderstand me. My argument is not that taxation to achieve your political goals is wrong. I just don’t understand why you refuse to apply the same logic to me that you apply to the government.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @ControlsFreak
            So this is just completely off-topic derailment, trying to resurrect a debate we had over a year ago?

          • I just don’t understand why you refuse to apply the same logic to me that you apply to the government.

            Practically nobody applies the same moral rules to governments as to individuals — indeed, that’s pretty close to my definition of a government as an organization that can do things that would be seen as rights violations if done by individuals without provoking the sort of response that things perceived as rights violations normally provoke.

            Those of us who don’t believe that special moral rules apply to governments conclude that governments routinely act wrongly and mostly call ourselves anarchists.

          • ana53294 says:

            @Guy in TN

            But rather, what superficially appears to be mindless violence is quite often has a political component.

            I’m quite skeptical of the ability to reach your political goals through violent means. I spent my youth watching the Basque movement accomplish nothing through violence.

            Violence only works if it is organized. You’ll only pay the mafia after they promise to burn your shop if you know that once you pay, they won’t burn your shop. If you know that the mafia boss who’s saying “pay up or else” has no ability whatsoever to control his underlings, and the likelihood of them burning your shop doesn’t change after you pay up, why would you pay? You’d be an idiot.

            There are organized violence groups that work, and achieve their goals. In Spain, the only political group I’ve seen achieve some political objectives through violence are unions. National unions have been able to achieve things through sometimes not so peaceful acts. But unions run a tight shop: even on a national, country-wide strike, they keep protests peaceful, because they don’t need to actually commit violent acts for the government to know it could happen.

            Police also achieve their goals, because the police follow orders. If the government orders them to stop teargassing people and shooting rubber balls at them, they will. So people can negotiate with the government and know that it can keep its promise. I wouldn’t trust the government more than the mafia boss, but I’ll trust the government has more control over the police than BLM has over the rioters.

            Mindless violence cannot be controlled. You can’t promise it will stop if political objectives A, B and C will be achieved.

            It’s the reason the yellow vest movement achieved nothing of significance other than rolling back a fuel tax: they had no leaders that could negotiate on their behalf in exchange for peace.

            These riots will also achieve nothing.

          • Controls Freak says:

            So this is just completely off-topic derailment, trying to resurrect a debate we had over a year ago?

            Nope. I’m directly pointing out that there seems to be a massive problem with how you conceptualize the difference between the government and private citizens. This problem results in you making statements in this conversation that are not only nonsensical, but in violent contrast with the rest of your expressed worldview. You are trying to avoid talking about your conceptualization, because you can tell that there is a massive problem. You can clear this all up by just explaining why you refuse to apply the same logic to me that you apply to the government. I know there’s a reason why, and I have a hunch what it might be, but it seems like you’re struggling to admit it to yourself, much less the rest of the class.

          • baconbits9 says:

            Violence only works if it is organized.

            Yep. Organization is power because without organization there is no bargaining.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @ControlsFreak

            You are trying to avoid talking about your conceptualization, because you can tell that there is a massive problem. You can clear this all up by just explaining why you refuse to apply the same logic to me that you apply to the government. I know there’s a reason why, and I have a hunch what it might be, but it seems like you’re struggling to admit it to yourself, much less the rest of the class.

            Your method of writing is so densely layered in snark and hinted insinuations, that whatever meaning you are trying to convey is lost to me. You are three posts in, clearly hyped up about something I said, but I’m not quite sure what.

            I think the “violent contradiction” you are talking about, is that I think governments should be able to levy taxation, while I don’t necessarily think that private citizens should be able to implement the same system (i.e., steal from one another)? You know, just basic statism that 90% of the public agrees with.

            Is this correct?

          • Controls Freak says:

            I explicitly asked why. There is a reason why you think there is a difference between private citizens and the state when it comes to taxation.

            This is in response to your statement that you just had absolutely no clue why someone would make a distinction between private citizens and the state in another area (which was coupled with an absurdly nonsensical statement), so it is critical for you to explain the grounds on which you do/do not make such distinctions. Or would you be satisfied with a response to

            The police can vote, or try to convince the protestors using words. You know, the same legal options that are given to the general public.

            If you understand why these two options are generally unsatisfying for the police, and they instead resort to violence and property destruction to achieve their demands, then you should also understand why the same applies to protestors.

            being, “No. The distinction is basic statism that 90% of the public agrees with”?

          • Guy in TN says:

            @ControlsFreak

            This is in response to your statement that you just had absolutely no clue why someone would make a distinction between private citizens and the state in another area

            When did I say this? Where? If you think I was implying this in my response to John Schilling, you have misunderstood me. In that portion of the response, I was merely trying to show that the protests are not mindless apolitical violence, but rather serves to advance their values, in the same way that John Schilling understands police violence to serve their values.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @ControlsFreak
            I was not arguing something as childish as “well, if the police can fire tear gas at the protestors, why can’t the protestors fire tear gas at the police??”

          • Controls Freak says:

            Be serious. Here’s how it went down:

            So if there’s a bunch of rioters tearing up downtown Long Beach with a decidedly anti-cop messages, and the Long Beach police would like this to stop, what are their options?

            The police can vote, or try to convince the protestors using words. You know, the same legal options that are given to the general public.

            Basic questions. Like, “Why would the police like this to stop?” Probably not, “This is just a political opinion, so it’s something they should vote on.” Probably, “They’re agents of the state, which has been charged with powers to maintain civil order.” Or basic questions like, “You say they can vote…. for what?! Can they vote to give the government the authority to stop rioters?”

            Ya know… basic statism that 90% of the public agrees with.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @Controls Freak

            Basic questions. Like, “Why would the police like this to stop?” Probably not, “This is just a political opinion, so it’s something they should vote on.” Probably, “They’re agents of the state, which has been charged with powers to maintain civil order.” Or basic questions like, “You say they can vote…. for what?! Can they vote to give the government the authority to stop rioters?”

            I have literally no idea what you are trying to ask here. The bizarre grammar structure and lack of complete sentences make this unreadable.

          • Controls Freak says:

            I didn’t think we’d come to feigning like you don’t understand English. Fine, then. Let’s play this out in slow motion.

            John said, “the Long Beach police would like this to stop, what are their options?”

            Question to you: Why do the police want this to stop? Is their desire more like an abstract political opinion, or more because they’ve been charged by the state with maintaining civil order?

            In response to John, you said that one of their options was, “The police can vote”.

            Question to you: Can the police vote to give the government the authority to stop rioters?

            Question to you that you’ve continued to skip: Why do you think there is a difference between private citizens and the state when it comes to taxation? (Since we’re going slow, I’ll wait for your response before asking whether your criteria allows one to not make a distinction here.)

            Please answer the questions. They’re really really basic English.

          • AG says:

            @Controls Freak

            Please stop with the personal attacks on Guy in TN’s reading comprehension. I don’t understand your argument, either. The government is largely composed of elected officials. Their options for changing wealth inequality are vetted by the voting populace, as people who institute policies that are unpopular enough get voted out, or the populace directly votes for policies via ballot initiatives. The government has to convince enough of the populace to commit to taxation, and when enough people don’t feel like their voices are being heard, well, taxation without representation and all that.

            Similarly, the police currently have the authority shoot unarmed people and mostly get acquitted for those shootings because they successfully convinced much of the voting populace to revere their authority, and the populace in turn voted in government figures who enacted policies to enable them to shoot unarmed people without fear of reprisal (on grounds of fearing for their own lives at the time, etc.).

            The (hypothetically sincere) rioters are currently at the point where they believe that the democratic process is compromised such that they are unable to vote in government figures who will revoke those policies (because even the lesser evil candidates are toothless about the issue, as is the case here, where all politicians in the area are already Democrats, and a good number of them even Black). Authoritarianism without representation.

          • Controls Freak says:

            the police currently have the authority shoot unarmed people

            I had asked:

            Why do the police want this to stop? Is their desire more like an abstract political opinion, or more because they’ve been charged by the state with maintaining civil order?

            where “this” refers to rioting in Long Beach, from John’s comment. I’m really not sure why this is so difficult to understand. Perhaps I’m missing something, but the question is literally right there, and you just answered a different question. I’m not sure which of my questions you were trying to answer. Could you quote which of my questions you were trying to answer?

            EDIT:

            The government is largely composed of elected officials. Their options for changing wealth inequality are vetted by the voting populace, as people who institute policies that are unpopular enough get voted out, or the populace directly votes for policies via ballot initiatives.

            Ok, so, government authority to tax is based in the legitimacy of the democratic process. Does this also apply to riot control? If the people vote for elected officials and policies are made which authorize the police to stop riots, is that legitimate?

            The (hypothetically sincere) rioters are currently at the point where they believe that the democratic process is compromised such that they are unable to vote in government figures who will revoke those policies

            That’s all well and good, but it probably gets you about as far as, “Maybe I think the democratic process is compromised such that I am unable to vote in government figures who will let me tax Guy.” Sure, that’s fine as an explanation of what I want and why I’m doing what I’m doing. It’s not fine as an explanation of why society generally approves of government taxation and not Controls Freak Taxation.

          • Guy in TN says:

            I’d like to tag two additional thoughts onto AG’s post which I largely agree with:

            First, there is the gulf between actual democratic consent, and the system the US government has today, which contains many non-democratic elements. It is not inherently contradictory to be a supporter of democracy, while simultaneously opposing the laws of the of the US government. The gulf is particularly stark when it comes to black people and immigrants, when you factor in felon disenfranchisement, lack of immigrant voting rights, lack of DC/territory statehood, ect.

            And secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it has always been my position that democracy itself should be subservient to the higher purpose of producing the most well-being in a society. I see democracy as on average the best system, and the system we should be seeking to build. But I have never claimed that every given democratic law is inherently superior to non-democratic resistance. The white-majority slave states of the US south come to mind.

            I am a Supporter Of Democracy in the sense that I think we should be trying to build a democratic society that produces good outcomes, not in the sense that every democratic outcome must inherently be good.

          • Controls Freak says:

            Ok. So, what it comes down to is that you have decided that there is no longer democratic consent in one particular domain. However, remember, John spoke about Long Beach. Felons can vote in California. DC’s status is irrelevant for Long Beach. Do you have some basis on which you stake the loss of democratic legitimacy other than the fact that noncitizens can’t vote? Not only does that sound pretty ridiculous to 90% of the statists out there, it also seems to kill democratic legitimacy for all policies, including taxation.

            EDIT: A quick scan of Long Beach’s City Officials shows a white mayor, but a full third of the city council being black. Wikipedia gives the 2010 census saying they were 13.5% black, in comparison. If anything, it appears hispanics have the proportional representation claim (if you think that actually impinges on democratic legitimacy; this may be revised down according to stated noncitizen concerns). Are you saying you’d like us to enact policies that makes Long Beach officials more proportional in their race representation?

            (because even the lesser evil candidates are toothless about the issue, as is the case here, where all politicians in the area are already Democrats, and a good number of them even Black). Authoritarianism without representation.

            How does this follow? Even the lesser evil candidates aren’t on board with Controls Freak Taxation. That means (lack of Controls Freak) taxation without representation? No, it means, “Controls Freak got outvoted.”

          • Controls Freak says:

            FYI: “We’ve lost democratic legitimacy,” was the lede. You buried the hell out of the lede. Should have skipped the talk about police voting (boy that makes no sense if we’ve lost democratic legitimacy). You should probably start most threads from here on out with, “We’ve lost democratic legitimacy.” Maybe in all caps. That’s a massive massive massive deal. It’s also controversial, so if you’re going to hinge such things on it, you really need to state it outright and go to great lengths to justify it.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @Controls Freak

            Ok. So, what it comes down to is that you have decided that there is no longer democratic consent in one particular domain.

            This is decidedly not “what it comes down to”, as I indicated in the second paragraph that I thought the other point was the more important one. But the first point is still relevant (I did bring it up, after all), so I’ll answer your questions about it.

            Do you have some basis on which you stake the loss of democratic legitimacy other than the fact that noncitizens can’t vote?

            Sure. There’s also the electoral college, the unaccountability of the Supreme Court, the non-democratic US Senate. The fact that people of Long Beach are governed under federal law (not just local law) means you still have to factor in lack of felon voting rights and DC/Territory statehood, for the question of “is this law democratic?”.

            Are you saying you’d like us to enact policies that makes Long Beach officials more proportional in their race representation?

            It is not racial representation, but ideological representation that is the problem. Blacks and Hispanics, like whites, have a diverse array of political opinions. The question at hand is: If the democratic will-to-policy pipeline wasn’t blocked, what would our policies be? No one has a crystal ball of course. But the fact that so many of our racial minorities are systematically disenfranchised, and these very minorities are clamoring for changes to our legal system, should give pause to anyone making the argument of “now now protestors, don’t you know the laws we have are the democratic will of the people?”

          • I’m not sure if this is still relevant, but I think I understand Control Freak’s argument. He interprets Guy’s comment re Long Beach police as “if they want to change things, they should do it the same way ordinary citizens do.”

            CF’s response is “in the context of taxation, you don’t believe that government agents only have the right to do things other people have the right to do. Yet in the context of government police repressing a riot (or controlling a demonstration — I’ve lost track of the details) you do think so. What is the basis for your view in the case of taxation, and why doesn’t it apply in the case of police?

            I hope that helps. I must confess that I found CF somewhat confusing when I was arguing with him, but the CF/Guy argument seems pretty clear and simple.

            I, of course, take the position neither of the two do — that the government doesn’t have any special rights, so taxation and conscription and the like are all rights violations. I don’t know what the Long Beach police were doing, but I think ordinary citizens have the right to use force against people who are smashing windows, looting, etc., so the police have that right as well.

          • Controls Freak says:

            The second paragraph is obviously the motte. It is utterly uncontroversial; I can’t imagine anyone disagreeing with it; it also doesn’t demonstrate what you would like. I skipped it because of these features, but I suppose I should have spelled that out.

            On the other hand, claiming that we have lost democratic legitimacy is obviously the bailey. It is highly controversial and immensely consequential. It also would almost demonstrate what you would like. Thus, I identified this as, “What it comes down to.”

            To that end, you have identified anti-majoritarian components of our federal system, yes. Much ink has been spilled on these things, for centuries. And often, the argument for these components is exactly along the lines of things that you want – the Supreme Court has very often been a strong protector of minority rights; the Senate was part of legitimating the State in the counter-intuitive service of freedom; etc. This thread would need to blow up into an absurdly long and thorough thread in order to do any portion of this question justice. In addition to my prior suggestion that you start with this important claim first, perhaps you can start a series of top-level comments in future open threads. Along the lines of, “Loss of Democratic Legitimacy Thread: Today’s Topic – The Supreme Court”. There will be much more space and engagement in order to help establish whether or not your claims get much traction.

            In any event, I don’t think you can simply appeal to federal law as a way out of this. The police powers are reserved to the state. The police department controlled by the city. This is one of the reasons why we have federalism. It is all well and good to organize toward federal policy goals, too, but the actual thing that seems to be in question is as close to purely a state matter as you can get. If accepted, the conclusion is that basically no state policy can be considered legitimate until we’ve met your threshold for federal legitimacy.

            It is not racial representation, but ideological representation that is the problem. Blacks and Hispanics, like whites, have a diverse array of political opinions.

            Absolutely correct. That’s why we have a highly-democratic system in order to sift through those political opinions. Is there any barrier to your ideology being represented in the Long Beach City Council (other than that perhaps not enough people in Long Beach agree with your ideology)?

            The question at hand is: If the democratic will-to-policy pipeline wasn’t blocked, what would our policies be?

            I dispute the premise of this question. You have shown precisely zero things that are blocking the will-to-policy pipeline for Long Beach’s policing policy. Except, of course, that people of a diverse array of political opinions might not agree with you.

            But the fact that so many of our racial minorities are systematically disenfranchised

            I question this “fact” and request evidence.

            Finally, in the second paragraph, I said that this would almost demonstrate what you would like. If it’s true that we’ve lost democratic legitimacy, it would indicate why the state should not be different for purposes of riot policing. However, it would not show why the state should be different for purposes of taxation. You’ve still refused to answer this, except to say, “Basic statism that 90% of the public agrees with.” Yet riot control sure seems to also be, “Basic statism that 90% of the public agrees with.” You seem to think that this loss of democratic legitimacy topples the latter somehow, but have not explained why it does not topple the former, as well. Note particularly that taxation is actually performed directly at the federal level, which makes it more vulnerable to your claims.

          • AG says:

            The police have indeed been charged by the state with maintaining civil order, but protests against police brutality aren’t about simply being charged by the state with maintaining civil order. The protests are claiming that the police have overstepped their bounds, and their actions no longer maintain civil order, as evidenced by how they escalate violence. The people perceive that the police have become vigilantes, insofar as they are doing unlawful things, so the people respond with their own vigilante justice. Their perception is that the police violated the rule of law first.

            People accept the actions of the IRS and the government to enforce taxation, but only within acceptable bounds. If they perceived that tax collection was being enforced in an unacceptable way, beyond the tax policies they voted for, and voting for alternative politicians has failed to prevent continued unacceptable tax policies getting enacted, then they can resort to non-democratic responses to non-democratic policy.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @Controls Freak

            However, it would not show why the state should be different for purposes of taxation. You’ve still refused to answer this

            If you have a non-democratic system, then no aspect of that system’s economic institutions (including private property claims or market transactions) contains democratic legitimacy. I don’t know why you are focusing on taxation as if it was the only economic institution that would be lose democratic legitimacy. I presume it is because you are trying to craft some sort of conclusion where the collapse of state legitimacy logically leads to something like libertarian capitalism, exposing the contradictions in my worldview.

            In addition to my prior suggestion that you start with this important claim first, perhaps you can start a series of top-level comments in future open threads. Along the lines of, “Loss of Democratic Legitimacy Thread: Today’s Topic – The Supreme Court”.

            This thread was about the Floyd protests. It was you who insisted it on turning it into a “gotcha” in relation to my views on taxation. I shouldn’t even have played along, but I entertained you just to see where you were going with it.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @DavidFriendman

            I understand Control Freak’s argument. He interprets Guy’s comment re Long Beach police as “if they want to change things, they should do it the same way ordinary citizens do.”

            My response in question was purposefully written in the descriptive sense, not the normative sense. “These are the options the police are allowed” was meant to be taken literally- not as “These is what the police should do”.

          • Controls Freak says:

            I don’t know why you are focusing on taxation as if it was the only economic institution that would be lose democratic legitimacy.

            I focused on it, because I was very confident that this was one area in which you understood and affirmed a difference between the state and private actors. This is not to make a point on that topic. It is definitely not to argue for any sort of libertarian capitalism (you really need to stop seeing ghosts literally everywhere). It is that I saw your stances, noticed that they conflicted, and inquired about the conflict. I used an example where I was very confident about your object-level position, so that there would be little chance that you’d say, “Well, actually, I think that taxation is illegitimate.”

            If you have a non-democratic system, then no aspect of that systme’s economic institutions (including private property claims or market transactions) contains democratic legitimacy.

            …but I guess I was wrong. You have apparently taken the option, “Actually, I think our system has lost democratic legitimacy, and therefore taxation is no longer legitimate (along with other things, of course, as you point out).” I look forward to your future posts focused on this incredibly consequential thesis. Thank you for clearing up your position. I apologize for making the mistake of thinking that you still believed the state was legitimate for purposes of things like taxation.

            EDIT: I am, of course, still interested somewhat on this particular topic. For example, I am still very interested to know if there are any barriers you can identify to your ideology being represented in the Long Beach City Council.

      • metacelsus says:

        Third-degree murder is the appropriate charge in Minnesota law. (I spent the first 21.5 years of my life in Minneapolis.) First-degree requires premeditated intent which is impossible to prove here, and second-degree is only applicable in narrow circumstances. He can still get 25 years in prison.

        • Guy in TN says:

          If one of the protestors strangled a cop over the course of nine minutes, killing him, do you think it would also be “impossible to prove” premeditated intent?

          I don’t know how the court normally establishes intent since IANAL, but I’m pretty sure that if I walked up to a random on the street and killed him, they would somehow find a way.

          If your point is that the legal system is set up such that cops are essentially immune from first-degree murder charges, that’s probably true. Hence why the protestors are targeting courthouses and other legal structures, not just police precincts.

          • baconbits9 says:

            If it was part of his job to restrain cops on a regular basis it would be a heck of a lot harder to demonstrate intent.

          • Guy in TN says:

            He was strangled for nine minutes. Is this a normal part of the cops day-to-day job?

            This is like saying it’s harder to prosecute a meat butcher for a knife killing.

          • baconbits9 says:

            He was strangled for nine minutes

            No he wasn’t, the preliminary autopsy report finds

            The full
            report of the ME is pending but the ME has made the following preliminary findings. The autopsy revealed no physical findings that support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation. Mr. Floyd had underlying health conditions including coronary artery disease and hypertensive heart disease. The combined effects of Mr. Floyd being restrained by the police, his underlying health conditions and any potential intoxicants in his system likely contributed to his death.
            The defendant had his knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds in total. Two minutes and 53 seconds of this was after Mr. Floyd was non-responsive. Police are trained that this type of restraint with a subject in a prone position is inherently dangerous.

            Is this a normal part of the cops day-to-day job?

            Restraining suspects is a routine part of a cops job, that this officer did it in an inappropriate and dangerous manner makes this murder, and it should be a slam dunk case for 3rd degree murder. Demonstrating that he restrained him in that manner with the purpose of killing him is going to be much, much harder to demonstrate.

            This is like saying it’s harder to prosecute a meat butcher for a knife killing.

            It is much harder to prosecute 1st degree murder with a knife if that person starts out in a room where there are normally knives. It is a lot easier if that person brings the knife with him. So yeah, its a lot harder to prosecute a butcher for first degree murder if the murder occurs in the butchers shop while the butcher would normally be holding a knife.

          • Guy in TN says:

            No he wasn’t, the preliminary autopsy report finds

            The cognitive dissonance necessary to say “the autopsy revealed no physical findings that support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation”, followed one sentence later with “the combined effects of Mr. Floyd being restrained by the police…” is absolutely *chef’s kiss*

            If I push an elderly man off a cliff and he shatters his bones and dies, would one normally say “it was not being pushed off a cliff that killed him, but his advanced age, rendering him more in danger of a fall that a younger man would have survived?”

            This report is making a mockery of the very concept of causality.

          • Guy in TN says:

            They should go all the way, and say that it wasn’t the police who were the cause of him being restrained, but his decision to break the law.

          • baconbits9 says:

            The cognitive dissonance necessary to say “the autopsy revealed no physical findings that support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation”, followed one sentence later with “the combined effects of Mr. Floyd being restrained by the police…” is absolutely *chef’s kiss*

            And what does that one sentence in between say?

            This is such a childish and pathetic attempt at cherry-picking, and the only part surprising is that I quoted the whole thing thinking that you couldn’t be so obviously biased and blinded that you would attempt to cherry pick if the whole wall of text was right there. I’m sorry I overestimated your intellectual integrity, won’t happen again.

          • JayT says:

            I don’t see the cognitive dissonance there. They are saying the cop killed him, but not by asphyxiation. If someone knocked an old guy over a cliff and everyone thought he died from the broken bones, but it turned out he had a heart attack from the shock of being pushed, the guy that did the pushing is still a murderer, just not in the way people first thought. I don’t see that autopsy trying to exonerate the cop.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @baconbits9

            And what does that one sentence in between say?

            This is such a childish and pathetic attempt at cherry-picking, and the only part surprising is that I quoted the whole thing thinking that you couldn’t be so obviously biased and blinded that you would attempt to cherry pick if the whole wall of text was right there. I’m sorry I overestimated your intellectual integrity, won’t happen again.

            “A young person would have survived the push off the cliff. Therefore, it was the man’s advanced age, not the push off the cliff, that killed him”

            ^This is the autopsy, the police, and apparently you right now

          • Guy in TN says:

            @JayT

            I don’t see that autopsy trying to exonerate the cop.

            The autopsy is absolutely being used to exonerate the cop of first degree murder. It’s what baconbits9 is doing with it right now.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            I’d like to ask us all to take a breath and calm down.

          • baconbits9 says:

            “A young person would have survived the push off the cliff. Therefore, it was the man’s advanced age, not the push off the cliff, that killed him”

            Quick, double down on your untenable position, that will get you out of it. Let’s play your game

            ‘He threw him off a cliff and broke all his bones, killing him’

            ‘The autopsy report says he didn’t have any broken bones’

            ‘I have X-ray vision, I know his bones were broken when he landed, are you trying to say that you can’t break bones from falling off a cliff?

            It’s a fun game. Another round? I’m guessing yes.

          • baconbits9 says:

            The autopsy is absolutely being used to exonerate the cop of first degree murder. It’s what baconbits9 is doing with it right now.

            How dare I use evidence to attempt to reach a conclusion! Outrageous of me!

          • Guy in TN says:

            The autopsy says being “restrained by the police” is what killed him. Could we flesh that out a bit more? In what way, exactly, were they restraining him? (Which, again, even the autopsy admits was a factor)

            Is there any common-English word for the particular method of restraint employed by the police, where you crush someone’s neck for nine minutes?

          • JayT says:

            The autopsy is absolutely being used to exonerate the cop of first degree murder. It’s what baconbits9 is doing with it right now.

            I don’t see how that could be used to get him out of first degree murder when it says

            The combined effects of Mr. Floyd being restrained by the police, his underlying health conditions and any potential intoxicants in his system likely contributed to his death.

            That’s literally saying the cops actions were responsible. My understanding is that he’s not being tried for first degree because it would be really hard to prove premeditated intention in a case like this, whether the guy died by asphyxiation or not.

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:

            I’m not going to join in on this subthread’s discussion directly, but I think that when discussing what type of charge is appropriate and how the autopsy report plays into that, an understanding of exactly what the difference between ” first degree murder” and “third degree murder” IS. To that end, Undredd’s post in OT155 is both relevant and helpful.

          • ECD says:

            @Baconbits9

            Fortunately, the preliminary autopsy is not the only available evidence. And the separate autopsy concludes:

            “The evidence is consistent with mechanical asphyxia as the cause of death and homicide as the manner of death.”

            I have no medical background at all, so I cannot evaluate any of the claims being made, but I’m also pretty sure that this isn’t standard practice, what with all the cops coming out to say, this isn’t standard, or acceptable practice.

      • Erusian says:

        1. Bring appropriate charges against those involved in the murder (which no, does not include the absurd third degree murder charges for strangling an unarmed person to death).

        Totally with you on the first part, not the second part. The definition of “appropriate” tends to change with passions and you don’t want justice subordinated to the loudest voices. The judicial system is purposefully insulated for this purpose and I think it’s better for that.

        2. Abolition of qualified immunity.

        Absolutely.

        3. Bring charges against those who lied and protected the violent police, in the Minnesota case and in many others.

        So long as you don’t spill over into violating the rights of the accused, absolutely. I think there should be some mechanism for this, one much better than the much vaunted but ultimately pretty anodyne internal affairs.

        4. De-funding and disarming the police.

        I think the police should be demilitarized except for specialized units meant to deal with high threats (like a few guys with machine guns). I think funding actually needs to be increased unless you want to abolish the police altogether, in which case what sort of enforcement mechanism do you want? Vigilantism? Better to have a well funded and better trained force that is under more local control and less trigger happy.

        So there you have it. Do these things, and I’ll call off my friends who are out in the streets.

        Yeah, this is the part where you really lose me. I agree with you on most of what you want but this badly overestimates the rioter’s actual bargaining position. There is no real chance of this succeeding as a rebellion. If this turns into a straight fight, the protestors are going to lose. Even the act of rioting like this has (in the past) virtually always created a conservative counterreaction. Likewise, the damage is primarily being done to urban communities and Democratic politicians/communities. There’s virtually no chance of that creating a movement leftward. The victims will move rightward and the primary conservative base gets its prejudices confirmed.

        Don’t forget that the unrest of the 1960s and 1970s led to some of the most right wing Democrats we’ve ever seen. By the 1990s they had virtually completely conceded the idea of policing and disproportionate arrests and were competing with Republicans to be more anti-crime.

        I’m reminded of what Talleyrand said about an impolitick assassination: “It is worse than a crime: it is a mistake.”

        • Guy in TN says:

          @Erusian

          Yeah, this is the part where you really lose me. I agree with you on most of what you want but this badly overestimates the rioter’s actual bargaining position. There is no real chance of this succeeding as a rebellion. If this turns into a straight fight, the protestors are going to lose.

          To be clear, the question at hand was “what are your demands?”, not “do you think you will be successful in getting the police/gov’t to agree to those demands?” I do not expect many demands of the protestors to be met. The protests will probably end when the protestors are exhausted, or stop for fear for their lives. In direct confrontation they will be crushed, and the only reason they had early victories was their initial intensity caught the gov’t off guard.

          It is important not to confuse the demands of the protestors with the goals of the protest.

          There’s virtually no chance of that creating a movement leftward.

          I disagree with your suggestion that protests are largely counter-productive. I consider Ferguson, Occupy, and the Floyd protests to have been largely successful, at least compared to the outcomes of not protesting at all. Occupy was the birth of the modern socialist Left, Ferguson resulted in body cameras, and the Floyd protestors burned down a police precinct. Three successes, with minimal backlash.

          While the faux-pragmatic “everything you do has the opposite intended effect” narrative is very trendy these days, the actual evidence shows the effects of riots are more complicated than this simple story, and they can move people leftward as well.

          • Erusian says:

            To be clear, the question at hand was “what are your demands?”, not “do you think you will be successful in getting the police/gov’t to agree to those demands?”

            Fair cop, my mistake.

            I disagree with your suggestion that protests are largely counter-productive. I consider Ferguson, Occupy, and the Floyd protests to have been largely successful, at least compared to the outcomes of not protesting at all.

            Protests certainly aren’t. But violence is, at least in this scenario.

            Even in the paper you cited, it pointed out that only 17% of whites and 35% of African Americans considered the violence justified. They’re also very, very careful to point out this is a unique and local phenomenon that is out of step with other cases and the theoretical literature and doesn’t apply nationally, though they want further investigations.

            But that isn’t the current case. Note that in both cases you cite as successful riots that moved things leftward, they were locally contained riots in areas where the minority is the majority. This is largely in line with my model but that isn’t the case for these riots. It is a mistake, not because I abhor violence (though I do), but because it’s the wrong tactic.

        • LesHapablap says:

          What really needs to change though (in addition to all the things Guy in TN mentioned) is the culture of the police. It’s a massive organization of what, 300k people. How do you change a culture that large that sees itself as a bunch of badass warriors fighting a pitched battle to protect a bunch of weakling sheep?

          Maybe by pointing out that they are less likely to be murdered on the job than taxi drivers? That the war on cops is sham?

          @Guy in TN, I agree with @Erusion that the protests will end up being counterproductive due to the riots. But then what’s the strategy to affect change? Funding Institute for Justice or ACLU?

          Also, have things gotten worse or better in the last five years?

          • Erusian says:

            It’s a massive organization of what, 300k people.

            An issue is that it isn’t a massive organization. There are tens of thousands of little police organizations, each of which is answerable only to its local government. The US manages the culture of much larger organizations pretty well (see: the US military) but the police are decentralized by design.

          • gbdub says:

            I believe the FOP (largest police union) has something like 300k members, and that’s where the cultural change needs to happen, because they are the ones that make it very hard to fire, or even find out about, bad cops. Their executive director believes it should be illegal to record cell phone footage of cops, even supporting an Illinois law that made it a 15 year felony, so sadly I don’t think it is going to change anytime soon.

          • Erusian says:

            I believe the FOP (largest police union) has something like 300k members, and that’s where the cultural change needs to happen, because they are the ones that make it very hard to fire, or even find out about, bad cops. Their executive director believes it should be illegal to record cell phone footage of cops, even supporting an Illinois law that made it a 15 year felony, so sadly I don’t think it is going to change anytime soon.

            So you want to change the culture of a union to advocate not for their member’s immediate interests but to make their members more subject to review, discipline, and firing by management? Has any union ever done that? It seems like there are basically structural reasons they won’t go that direction.

            Further, culture is much more firm level. This is like claiming Ford and GM have the same culture because they both have UAW shops.

          • gbdub says:

            I don’t expect them to, no. But I would hope they’d be willing to look a bit more big picture / long term and realize they don’t want members who are going to be shitty cops that make the profession look bad and make everyone’s job harder and more dangerous. My impression is that unions / guilds used to be better about policing bad members to protect the profession rather than being “close ranks at all costs”

            The alternative is that people start demanding legislative action to limit the scope of union contracts (or suppress them altogether), which would ALSO be bad for the union.

            I get that there is a locality aspect to culture, but that is easier for local leaders and voters to address (by e.g. canning the police chief). But they can’t fix the policies demanded by the national union.

          • Erusian says:

            I don’t expect them to, no. But I would hope they’d be willing to look a bit more big picture / long term and realize they don’t want members who are going to be shitty cops that make the profession look bad and make everyone’s job harder and more dangerous. My impression is that unions / guilds used to be better about policing bad members to protect the profession rather than being “close ranks at all costs”

            The alternative is that people start demanding legislative action to limit the scope of union contracts (or suppress them altogether), which would ALSO be bad for the union.

            Do… uh, you have much experience with unions or their place in the Democratic Party? I’ve seen unions make sacrifices for the long term health of the company but never for the long term health of management or the shareholders (ie, politicians and voters). They explicitly are arrayed to prevent exploitation or mistreatment of their members by those parties. Mistreatment they feel very comfortable defining for themselves. And the Democratic Party is completely in support of this, especially public unions: the Republicans are the union busters.

            If you think there’s even a snowball’s chance in hell the Democratic Party is going to pass anti-union legislation, you’ve got another thing coming. I genuinely think it’s more likely that a Republican gets into power and busts the union, which is almost impossible too.

          • albatross11 says:

            +1

            To a first approximation, every interaction you will ever have with the police will be city, county, or state police. That’s thousands of different cities and counties and 50 states (each with a few different police agencies–maybe highway patrol + state bureau of investigation + some kind of park rangers + maybe a couple others) and a few territories / districts / tribal reservations, etc., with their own police forces.

            It’s entirely possible for the NYPD to be a bastion of professionalism and competence and honesty, and the LAPD to be a bastion of corruption and unaccountable violence, or the other way around. There are national-level things we might do to make local policing better, but it’s overwhelmingly local.

          • Funding Institute for Justice or ACLU?

            IJ in my case. It’s the only charity I routinely donate to.

      • Purplehermann says:

        Could we settle for 1 and 3 straight off and a serious national discussion about 2 in the next while?

        4 seems like it could be counter productive to me.

        • Guy in TN says:

          In all seriousness, if they actually did “3” and brought brought en masse various accessory to murder chargers against the people who lied or assisted in the Minnesota case, the police who turned off their body cameras in Louisville, and dozens of other cases, the protests would be over in a day and be replaced by street celebrations.

          And I don’t even think it would take that. The government just need a big media blitz of “doing something” to show that they are on the protestor’s side. I feel like it would take so little. If Trump or Congress would do even the most performative and shallow gestures towards acknowledging that the protestors have a point, say “Washington has heard you, and we are going to change policing in this country!” this whole thing would be over.

          • baconbits9 says:

            And I don’t even think it would take that. The government just need a big media blitz of “doing something” to show that they are on the protestor’s side

            The fired all 4 and charged one, and the FBI started an investigation. There isn’t a clear line they could cross to placate once the initial outrage sank in.

            In all seriousness, if they actually did “3” and brought brought en masse various accessory to murder chargers against the people who lied about the content of the Minnesota video

            Do you know who those people are and have evidence against them? Because just charging everyone you think lied without an investigation will mean having to drop some charges and/or have some acquittals which has lead to angry responses in the past. The system is not set up for fast enforcement of cover up/accessory after the fact style crimes.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @baconbits9

            The fired all 4 and charged one, and the FBI started an investigation. There isn’t a clear line they could cross to placate once the initial outrage sank in.

            I never said there was a clear line. I said they have to find a way to show the protestors that they are on “their side”. Has Trump condemned the recent murder in Louisville? Has he talked about bringing the accomplices to justice in Minnesota? Has congress even hinted at passing changes to the laws that protect the police? To the extent that there has been a “media blitz” at all from the gov’t, it is to embrace and praise the police and condemn to protestors.

            Because just charging everyone you think lied without an investigation will mean having to drop some charges and/or have some acquittals which has lead to angry responses in the past. The system is not set up for fast enforcement of cover up/accessory after the fact style crimes.

            Angry responses to the justice system’s failure to deliver justice are good. We need more of these angry responses, not less. It is not merely that the system is not set up to be “fast”, the system is set to protect the police at the expense of their victims.

            I predict that, as this case develops, the third degree murder charges will be dropped for some lesser charge, which will be followed by more entirely-justified rioting and looting.

          • To the extent that there has been a “media blitz” at all from the gov’t, it is to embrace and praise the police and condemn to protestors.

            My guess is that Trump believes that is the approach that gets him votes, and he may well be correct. That may be true even if it is also the approach that results in more demonstrations and more violence. Even more true in that situation.

            While it doesn’t fit the polls, I’ve suspected for a while that Trump had correctly decided that getting identified both with ending lockdowns and suppressing riots will get him more votes come November than the alternative, that that’s his tactic for winning.

            If I were a little more cynical than I am, I would add that you can’t suppress riots unless there are riots to suppress.

          • DeWitt says:

            Other people do share your cynicism. The most succinct way I’ve seen someone put it was that Trump didn’t have heads busted for the sake of a photo op, he had a photo op for the sake of busting heads.

    • AG says:

      There’s a measure of Hong Kong-like escalation here, isn’t there? In the early days, the protests were muted because the authorities were indeed taking the appropriate actions. However, then you had disproportionate police reaction to the protests, and that set off the chain reaction of protests elsewhere. Looting and rioting didn’t happen in the initial protests. More unarmed people have been injured since by the police, including journalists. There are also reports from several of those that had their property damaged that the police and fire departments didn’t respond, because they were so busy chasing down protesters, instead of responding to actual property damage happening just slightly away from the protest sites, indicating the priorities of law enforcement.

      So Floyd is just the rallying point now for broader issues with police. The more police react with riot gear and tear gas, the more they provide additional points of demand. Suburb areas where police prioritized guarding property at risk of looting have received much more community support.

      There was a report this morning on the radio recounting how just a few years ago, there was another case in Minneapolis of a police shooting an unarmed black man, and protests there included and 18 day occupation in front of government buildings. That, obviously, did not set off the same kind of chain reaction of protests everywhere else, and my guess is that that was because a) the regular news cycle was in full churn mode, with no pandemic dampening other things happening, but also b) the police reaction likely wasn’t as severe (the protest took place during winter, including a blizzard).

      • baconbits9 says:

        I don’t think this fits the actual timeline. Tuesday was the first day of protests and if you google for news on that day you get claims of clashes with police with some participation from the protesters side (bricks thrown level), and Wednesday you have looting and significant property destruction.

        Tactically police are not going to send large numbers of small responses out during a major protest for the fear that those officers will be surrounded if it escalates into a riot. That is a recipe for deadly force being deployed and/or cops being killed. If you look at reports from Wednesday you see only responses to the most serious situations: such as protecting the firefighters at the auto zone fire (reported 40 firefighters responded), read an account like this and it should be fairly clear how the police are always going to be effectively triaging calls in this situation.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          There are lots of different cities with different pre-existing tensions and different levels of escalation or de-escalation by local or state officials.

          I also think the people who are out to break shit are one step ahead of the protestors. They aren’t organizing the protests, but they are rooting them along so they can be used as human shields.

          • albatross11 says:

            Remember: You will see *way less* media coverage of places where the protests were peaceful and police/protesters behaved themselves, than you will coverage of places where there was rioting, looting, and burning, or where the police waded in to bust some heads.

      • rumham says:

        Looting and rioting didn’t happen in the initial protests.

        I’ll grant you the looting on day one, but rioting didn’t happen? I’m about as pro-police reform as you can get, but throwing smokebombs, rocks, trashing cop cars and tearing down the fence as you storm the precinct would seem to fall into the definition of rioting. All that appeared to happen before the first CS canister was fired.

        Subsequent protests in other states have gotten violent the same day. I suppose it’s possible that every police department in every city that got violent is at fault, but it seems rather unlikely, given that it didn’t appear to happen that way in Minneapolis. Unless it ends up being police agent provocateurs, I don’t think this framing works.

        Honestly, it probably comes down to what is considered a protest. Is it a protest during the defined time, and then over? If so, then at least here in Houston, from all the reporting I’ve seen, the protesters were not treated poorly. If not, and it lasts until everyone leaves the area, than the protests here can not be said to be non-violent.

        The thing is, I have seen successful protests very recently. Perhaps you have as well. The anti-lockdown protests. No property damage, and no violence (despite much of the media declaring otherwise). When the Michigan statehouse was supposedly “stormed” they waited in line and submitted to temperature checks! And everyone left when rally was officially over.

        I think that last part is the key. All over social media in Houston, when the protest was officially over, it was announced successful and peaceful. If that’s the end of the protest, then it was indeed mostly non-violent. It also means that the police reactions later were solely restricted to dealing with rioting, and not with a protest.

        the more they provide additional points of demand

        I don’t see many points of demand. I want police unions abolished and a blacklist created for cops fired for cause. I haven’t seen anyone on any news channel or social media feed even suggesting reforms. (Well, there has been de-fund and de-arm the police, but that seems a little premature when protesters are cutting the hoses of responding fire departments.)

        Are am I completely off base here and you are referring to the Hong Kong protests only? If so I apologize for misinterpreting you.

        • AG says:

          I recall several days of people, say, protesting outside of the police officer’s house and the DA’s house (I remember a bit about dumping red paint on the lawn), before the officer was arrested, with no reports of accompanying looting.

          By providing additional points of demand, I am mostly referring to Hong Kong. The initial HK protests were about the Beijing edicts, but they immediately added on points about addressing police brutality in response to the protests, amnesty for protesters, etc.

          As you say, we’ve seen what peaceful protests in the US look like. Seemed like they were happening every day before the pandemic, such as for various Supreme Court decisions. Few of those were responded to with tear gas and pepper bombs. However, Aftagley’s account does clarify that people were directly attacking the police in ways that wouldn’t apply to the other protests (including the anti-lockdown ones), but the police’s response caught so many people in the crossfire that the narrative hasn’t gone their way at all.

          • rumham says:

            By providing additional points of demand, I am mostly referring to Hong Kong.

            Understood. Apologies.

            I recall several days of people, say, protesting outside of the police officer’s house and the DA’s house (I remember a bit about dumping red paint on the lawn), before the officer was arrested, with no reports of accompanying looting.

            He died on the 25th. First protest on the 26th when the precinct was stormed. Looting on the 27th. Are you sure there were several days of peaceful protest? Or just no looting at the cop and DA’s house? In which case that would be expected, as retail stores are far more tempting targets.

            but the police’s response caught so many people in the crossfire that the narrative hasn’t gone their way at all.

            Agreed. And what El Presidente pulled Sunday might put a nail in that coffin for good.

          • AG says:

            I stand corrected on the timeline. My memory was probably thinking of another shooting case.

    • I’ve seen this Campaign Zero material floating around on facebook and left-tube. It has 10 categories of goals/demands. Hard to say what percentage of the protesters would support it, or how many would want change to be even more radical.

      • rumham says:

        Thanks for that.

        After going over them briefly, they mostly look good. Gotta throw out the pseudo-science implicit bias mess, and the representation that relies solely on color, and I agree with pretty much all the rest.

        They largely hit the two most important (to my mind) reforms, unions and a conduct blacklist.

  12. Richard S says:

    Can anyone recommend a psychiatrist in Australia, preferably in Sydney but I may be able to work with someone in Brisbane or Melbourne as well, and preferably with expertise in sleep?

  13. Loriot says:

    I just got an alert on my phone for a curfew in San Jose starting at 8:30 (received alert at 7:36).

    This morning, I saw a post on Facebook from one of my friends back in Atlanta complaining about how they declared the curfew with little or no notice, with some people not getting the notifications until after the curfew started, which, combined with the shutdown of public transportation, meant that innocent people were likely to get stranded downtown and caught up in the police arrests.

    Obviously, the San Jose one went out with a little more notice than that, but I’m still wondering why they give so little notice. Why can’t they send the alerts out hours in advance so people have more time to plan?

    • Erusian says:

      Our curfew was declared in several places beforehand and the universal alert system (the mandatory notifications on your phone etc) was used about two hours before it started and when it started. So no idea. The tone was a little imperious but otherwise I felt well informed despite not being highly engaged with local news or postings.

    • Trofim_Lysenko says:

      Curfew was announced around 6 hours prior here in the Columbus area.

    • Plumber says:

      The e-mail I received just under four hours ago:

      “Mandatory Citywide Curfew Tonight, 8 p.m. – 5 a.m.

      Due to incidents of vandalism and violence that occurred last night in San Francisco, Mayor London Breed, in consultation with the City’s public safety partners, has implemented a mandatory citywide curfew beginning Sunday, May 31, 2020, at 8 p.m until 5 a.m. 

      Exempt from the curfew are first responders, essential workers, disaster service workers, people seeking medical attention, credentialed media, and people experiencing homelessness. Exempt employees must travel with their city-issued employee identification. Please call 311 if you have any questions.”

    • Jaskologist says:

      They have their ruling, but did they enforce it?

  14. Aftagley says:

    I’ve got a close friend who’s a journalist and also a small female. Occasionally when she is out doing stuff that might not be best for a small female to be doing, I tag along to help her stay safe. One of the things she was tasked to do was cover protests as they happened this weekend so decided to help out and take pictures.

    I spent around 5 hours in a protest and watched it turn from chanting behind barricades to people actively fighting with the cops and setting shit on fire. I was shot with pepper balls, got slightly burned when a mis-thrown firecracker exploded around a yard away from me and was present as tear gas was being used. Here are some takeaways, in no particular order:

    – It kind of reminded me of a kind of battlefield. Cops are in a line and all have shields; they want hold their ground. Right in front of them is a line of protesters screaming at them, but not actually doing any damage. Behind the initial line of protestors is the people throwing stuff. It started out just being water bottles, then escalated to bricks and impromptu-explosives as the night went on. Occasionally the peaceful front line of protestors stops being peaceful and either tears down a barricade or tries to push the cops. At this point, the cops directly being attacked would just hold them off with their shields while cops behind the line would launch tear gas and cops from the side would start clubbing/shooting until the protesters would back off; only for the (now peaceful, again) front line to reform a few minutes later. This is happening all up and down a long line continuously for hours.

    – A good portion of the damage is either done, or at least incited by a small group of people. Most people just want to protest, but some people want to just cause chaos. I’d put it initially at ~5% of people being there for violence t the start, increasing as the night went on as tempers started to flare.

    – I only saw a couple of cops go down, both of them after getting pegged with a rock or a brick. I saw far more protesters go down; some of them were wounded by the cops, more injured by other protesters missing with their projectiles. Mis-thrown bricks, fireworks and bottles were a big risk.

    – Always bring PPE to a protest. I went in a military-grade gas mask, had hearing protection and wore and padded vest. I didn’t feel totally safe in that, and definitely wouldn’t have wanted to wear any less. That being said, I saw people half my size out there wearing just a sports bra and bandanna, so maybe I’m just a wimp.

    – There were some looters, but many blocks away from where the protesters were. I finally get why the argument of “why don’t the protesters stop the looters” doesn’t work. A few blocks during a protest is really far, especially once the cops start herding you in. I only learned about it because I saw them starting after I slipped past the police line and made my way home.

    – Antifa was there but weren’t very numerous and generally weren’t the ones starting trouble. I get that some of you aren’t going to believe this, but the people decked out in full black with the communist/anarchist gear on were mostly the ones acting as medics and breaking up fights that broke up amongst the protesters. I saw two MAGA people who tried to counter-protest, both were causing tension within the crowd and it looked like it might get ugly until the black bloc folks would swarm in, isolate the counter protest and get them out of there. They were also the ones who were most aware of where the police were and what they were doing and keeping paths open for people who wanted to leave. That being said, every time the front line turned violent, there were also some antifa looking people there, so I wouldn’t say they were entirely a force for peace.

    – Most of the people I saw starting the violence were male teenagers (all races). Something about being 18 and having a license to do violence must be appealing.

    – Improvised weapons were really common; I saw multiple home-made flamethrowers.

    – Speaking of flamethrowers, there was a lot of fire. Cars, dumpsters, signs, a building… basically if it was nearby and vaguely flammable, it got lit up.

    – I was pretty impressed by the cops. They were pretty well controlled and didn’t cause too many injuries. Despite going crazy on the gas, they were pretty restrained in their use of pepper spray. I also only saw around a half-dozen people get seriously injured by their clubs, which, given the size of the protest and the truly vile things some of the protesters were screaming at them… seemed reasonable.

    EDIT:

    Another group that really amazed me were the street medics. These were people who showed up in full protest gear decked out with red crosses. When the gas came out, they’d run in, help people who couldn’t see get out safely and spray them down with neutralizing agent. When people got sprayed, they broke out the milk jugs. When the cops beat people down or someone got hit with a brick, they were there to take them out and get them bandaged up.

    I saw one medic run into a stampede of people running away from something the cops did to pick up a woman who had been pushed over and looked at risk for getting trampled. Really impressive group of people overall.

    • JayT says:

      Thanks for the description. Do you feel like there is anything the cops could have done to alleviate tensions? Is there anything the 95% or protestors that weren’t there to cause problems could have done? If you don’t mind saying, what city was this?

      • Aftagley says:

        Do you feel like there is anything the cops could have done to alleviate tensions?

        Yes, but I’m also not an expert in crowd control, so maybe my ideas would have been stupid. At the beginning of the protest there were these metal fences in front of the crowd and the cops were around 20 feet back from the fences. Any protester got in that no-mans land would be hit with pepper balls until they backed off, but other than that the cops were just blocking the occasional water bottle.

        Eventually though, the protectors tore down the metal fence and threw it back into the street. When this happened, the cops charged forward to where the fence had been. There was now basically no space between the line of protesters and the line of cops, which imo, incited more violence. If they’d either pre-staged less flimsy fences or had some way of reimposing distance between the crowds and the cops, I think you would have seen less interactions.

        Is there anything the 95% or protestors that weren’t there to cause problems could have done?

        They, or at least some of them tried. People were on loudspeakers saying “stop burning stuff” and “Stop throwing stuff.” I saw and personally took part in trying to stop people who were tearing up bricks. The coolest thing I saw all night was one dude spin-kick a flamethrower out of someone else’s hand who was trying to ignite a pile of clothes. It was good, but most of the 95% are just there to protest. They didn’t sign up to fight with the cops OR fight with violent protesters so they just rubbernecked.

        The issue is, it’s really hard to isolate out the bad actors. It looks like a group of “normal” protesters until suddenly they’ve all got bricks. Then, they’ve thrown the bricks. Now they’re scattering so the cops can’t hit them with whatever, only to re-converge later.

        If there had been leadership to the protest, maybe something different would have happened, but this was headless so there wasn’t any way to control the worst elements.

        If you don’t mind saying, what city was this?

        DC. All of this was happening at the park right in front of the white house.

        • Trofim_Lysenko says:

          The issue is, it’s really hard to isolate out the bad actors. It looks like a group of “normal” protesters until suddenly they’ve all got bricks. Then, they’ve thrown the bricks. Now they’re scattering so the cops can’t hit them with whatever, only to re-converge later.

          This is the core of the issue, and why my own $0.02 cents is that there is basically no solution for the problem of “How do we control and contain protests without some %-age of ‘innocent’ protesters getting caught between the ‘bad’ protesters and the cops?”. Bottom line, if you are standing in massed group of people, and some of those people are violently chucking things at another group of people, and you are physically interposing yourself between that second group and the chuckers, you are aiding and abetting said violent individuals. You are helping them do what they do. It may not be what you intend to do, but it is what you are doing.

          The only way to NOT aid and abet them is either:

          A) police their behavior yourself. As noted, there is maybe some of that, but for most part the protesters either came to fight no one or to fight cops, no one really wants to get into fights with other protesters.

          OR

          B) Get out of the way and/or actively try to offer up the offending members to the police. But in a mass crowd, getting out of the way is going to be difficult or even impossible for a lot of individuals. Furthermore, getting out of the way means breaking up and weakening the protest, abandoning/weakening the cause, etc etc. The whole purpose and leverage of a protest is to provide a united front, to present yourselves as a monolith. For similar reasons, aiding and abetting police efforts to single out and remove the bad actors is something that rarely happens. More often even in protests where it’s practical for the cops to sally a force into the main body of the protest, find the rock/brick/etc chuckers, subdue and cuff them, then drag them out of that body and away, the protesters are more apt to physically block and interfere with the police or swarm them, not to get out of the way and go “It’s him, Officers! The guy with white khakhis, black hoodie, and keffiyeh neckerchief! He’s the one throwing bricks! Arrest him!”.

          As for

          If they’d either pre-staged less flimsy fences or had some way of reimposing distance between the crowds and the cops,

          A barrier that is both temporary and immune to the combined power of several hundred pissed off people is a fairly tall order. They exist, but they tend to run along the lines of Hesco barrier/concertainer construction. Fencing in protesters behind a 6-10′ tall, 3′ wide earthen wall isn’t the sort of thing you can throw up on a whim, and starts to push the definition of “temporary”.

          • Imagine you are in the U.S. military fighting a heated battle in Fallujah. You see a fellow soldier next to you do something that is clearly against the rules of engagement. Do you say to your other fellow soldiers, “Let’s get him!” and run over and detain your misbehaving soldier? No. I guarantee you that something like that is never done in the U.S. military, or any military. In the heat of the moment, you let it slide because it would be absolutely awful for morale and organization to “cop-jacket” a member of your side, even if their actions seem really quite heinous. Note that there occasionally are some liberal protesters who will try to “cop-jacket” violent protesters, and usually it does NOT go over well with the other protesters (as in, the liberal will be swarmed and vigorously escorted away), unless the protest is EXTREMELY liberal-oriented and there are only like 1 or 2 protesters who are in a more aggressive mood. Unless non-violent liberals have these overwhelming numbers, most liberals will let it slide.

            Now, that said, in the U.S. military I’m sure there would be after-action reports and courts-martialling where a soldier would later on be held accountable. This is difficult for protests to do because of anonymity, unless it is some extremely discipline tankie (i.e. Stalinist or Maoist) cell whose members are willing to undergo “self-criticism” sessions afterwards for their bad calls or bad spur-of-the-moment impulses during the protest.

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:

            In the military you also have the advantage of an entire hierarchical organization and institutional culture that is, on the whole, dedicated to enforcing the laws of land warfare. So what generally happens is that the relevant authority (whether NCO or officer) intervenes to stop the behavior and there is an investigation and possible punishment after the fact. Of course, this can break down, most often when the one going bad IS a NCO or officer and takes his subordinates with him (for an example of what that looks like, see SSG Gibbs and company in Afghanistan in 2009), but as you said outside of maybe a really regimented sort of protest group, there’s no sort of structure to even try and enforce internal discipline.

          • baconbits9 says:

            This is the core of the issue, and why my own $0.02 cents is that there is basically no solution for the problem of “How do we control and contain protests without some %-age of ‘innocent’ protesters getting caught between the ‘bad’ protesters and the cops?”

            This is the major issue and the logic works both ways. When good cops close ranks to defend bad cops they are no longer good cops. When a protest starts getting violent you either leave or are part of a violent protest.

          • Evelyn Q. Greene says:

            I guarantee you that something like that is never done in the U.S. military, or any military.

            Then you clearly have no idea what you’re talking about.

            Anyways, all this talk about how protesters are incapable of policing their own completely ignores how, whenever you have large groups of armed protesters, and thus a real incentive not to escalate, this doesn’t happen.

          • Keep in mind too that a protest can be extremely confusing, figuring out who is on which side, especially if you suspect that there might be plainclothes officers or counter-protesters or agent provocateurs in your midst. One reason it matters is, plainclothes cops have been known to try to snatch leaders or otherwise important vocal individuals out of protests via several plainclothes officers swarming the target and quickly manhandling them out of the crowd to police lines before the rest of the protesters even understand what is going on.

            So the protesters can suddenly find themselves in a game of mafia/werewolf where they have about all of 2 seconds to suddenly consensually decide who is friend or foe. If you try to cop-jacket someone, unless the protest has the atmosphere of a Sunday picnic, you are liable to cause a panic, misunderstandings, unintentional injuries between protesters because people might think YOU are a plainclothes officer, until you can explain otherwise. At a BLM protest yesterday I witnessed protesters bolt like a herd of animals the other day over something that ended up being nothing, and which I thought was nothing at the time, and it took every ounce of willpower to not give in to the urge to bolt as well. That thing that causes some people to bolt and which gets the avalanche rolling could be as simple as suddenly yelling, “He’s a cop!” which I’m sure some agent provocateur has done at some point just to mess with protesters and disrupt them. And in the meantime, the protest phalanx is broken and who knows how many protesters the police may be able to peel off into their paddywagons. And even if you just try to lecture them to not be violent, know-it-all SJW-style, unless they know you they might think you are still a plainclothes officer who is trying to sow confusion and dissension in the protesters’ ranks…or they might just blow you off as some naive liberal.

            Another reason that protest cohesion is important is, there is often a turning point (i.e. when it stops having the atmosphere of a Sunday picnic) where a protester can sense that it is no longer safe to leave a protest alone, and where it has to be carefully managed. Fascists may be lurking to beat up protesters (probably rare, but still a salient possibility in people’s minds), and police will try to round up stragglers as they leave the protest to go to their car/subway/bike, whatever. You might think that you’ve been picture-perfectly-peaceful during the whole thing and thus have nothing to fear, but you know that the police don’t know that. They can’t keep track of who has done what in a protest. So it is quite common to round up stragglers as they try to leave and see if any other officers have evidence against them, have witnessed something, can find something on you, etc. And even if they can’t prove anything (and keep in mind that you could be innocent but an officer could be honestly mistaken and think that it was you doing something earlier in the protest, and now it’s your word against his), you still might have to languish in jail for who knows however long. So, protester cohesion is doubly-important for this reason.

            These sorts of non-Sunday picnic protests can be incredibly stressful, but also there are some people who really get off on it. There is definitely a subculture of “riotp0rn” people who love to watch riotp0rn and/or participate in it themselves, but its influence is definitely over-stated (and this group sometimes overlaps with anti-fascists, but sometimes not. There can be more soberly-disciplined anti-fascists, and some loners not really affiliated with any political grouping who just get off on the excitement and intrigue). I think what is alarming a lot of people right now is the realization that concurrent protests are happening in so many cities in the country, even in small towns that don’t have a “tradition” of riotpr0n, that they know it can’t possibly all be due to a merry band of career-miscreants causing everything (although that hasn’t stopped some of the media from trying to emphasize that narrative…)

          • Aftagley says:

            Bottom line, if you are standing in massed group of people, and some of those people are violently chucking things at another group of people, and you are physically interposing yourself between that second group and the chuckers, you are aiding and abetting said violent individuals. You are helping them do what they do. It may not be what you intend to do, but it is what you are doing.

            Yeah, I saw this being weilded “offensively” a bunch if this makes sense:
            -Someone gets violent with cops
            -cops respond with violence
            -dozens of people swarm forward with their hands up going “hands up, don’t shoot”
            -people who did violence on cops get away.

            Yes, they didn’t do anything violent, but their actions at worst contributed to more violence and at best revealed that the only violence they care about is the violence going towards the cops, not coming from them.

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:

            EDIT to respond to Aftagley, who responded while I was writing this comment:

            Exactly the sort of dynamic I had in mind, yes, though even people who are just doing their “peaceful protest” thing and are straight-up oblivious to the rock-throwing are still providing top cover. It’s one of the reasons I personally will never attend a demonstration for any cause, no matter how much I personally care about said cause. At least, not unless it is a protest organized and run under tight discipline by a group I trust and am a part of.

            @BaconBits9

            I tend to agree. It’s the reason I tend to be very much for things like widespread adoption of body cams and against things like police unions. OTOH I don’t think “good cops closing ranks to protect bad cops” Is AS prevalent as some people claim, and that in cases where it does happen it’s generally localized to specific departments or even precincts/units within specific departments rather than a national epidemic. But that’s getting back to the top-level discussion rather than the specific topic of how police and groups of mass protesters interact.

            @Evelyn Q. Greene

            I don’t think Citizencokane said that it’s impossible, just that it is unlikely to happen given the dynamics within protests as they exist. I certainly haven’t said it’s impossible. You can absolutely have a very controlled and disciplined protest: Passive Resistance/Non-violent confrontation tactics basically require organizational and individual discipline. But a protest that is planned and organized by a disciplined group is distinctly different from these types of mass protests in several respects.

            As far as the armed protesters go, I think there are several factors going on there:

            1) So far, armed protesters are actually a minority at most protests, including the anti-lockdown ones. For every one armed protestor you have several more who are unarmed.

            2) Armed protesters from the “Red Tribe” coded protests (e.g. Anti-Lockdown, Gun Rights stuff, etc) are coming from a gun culture that generally emphasizes conscientiousness and individual responsibility due to the legal requirements involved in firearm ownership and general cultural mores. This is especially true of concealed carry holders.

            3) as you noted, the stakes ARE higher.

            I think all these factors that combine to make the chance of losing control LOWER. But I don’t think it lowers it to zero. There were several people wounded by someone with a firearm in Louisville, Kentucky a day or two ago in one of the associated protests for example. Personally, I think that 1) and 2) are the most important factors that have prevented any ugly incidents. But that’s only “so far”. I think that if you get a sufficiently large number of armed protesters together without institutional and organizational discipline, then sooner or later reversion to the mean will come along to bite everyone in the ass.

          • Yair says:

            This is the major issue and the logic works both ways. When good cops close ranks to defend bad cops they are no longer good cops. When a protest starts getting violent you either leave or are part of a violent protest.

            While this makes sense, the parallel is not appropriate. Police are trained professionals doing a job, and so are soldiers. We can expect and demand from those two groups much higher standards than we expect and demand from protestors (who are not trained, may not know each other etc. etc.).

          • baconbits9 says:

            OTOH I don’t think “good cops closing ranks to protect bad cops” Is AS prevalent as some people claim

            I have no idea how prevalent it is, I bring it up as an example because I think it cuts across the statements that we should let peaceful protesters be when there are only a few bad protesters in the mix. A police department only works in free society if they have the trust of the public, and a peaceful protest only remains a peaceful protest if it is 99.9x% peaceful.

          • baconbits9 says:

            While this makes sense, the parallel is not appropriate. Police are trained professionals doing a job, and so are soldiers. We can expect and demand from those two groups much higher standards than we expect and demand from protestors (who are not trained, may not know each other etc. etc.).

            The point is not that protesters should be policing each other, its that the definition of ‘good cop’ switches to ‘bad cop’ very easily, and ‘peaceful protest’ can switch to ‘violent protest’. The actions of one bad cop endangers the whole department’s reputation (as it should) and the actions of a few protesters changes the definition of the entire protest.

          • The best time to get a protest all on the same page with regards to assertiveness level would probably be before the protest really gets going. Of course, if you give a briefing in public about this, the police may use your unwillingness to be assertive to your disadvantage and box your protest into a really ineffectual corner. You also have to have leaders that people are willing to follow. And you have to make sure new protesters don’t trickle-in after the briefing, which would usually require a leader to have some sort of arrangement with police marshals beforehand. That sort of thing is common in permitted marches, but not with these sorts of spontaneous protests.

            And that’s an important thing about these protests: they aren’t “normal” protests staged by an organization and its members. They are much more leaderless and spontaneous than usual (which has its pros and cons. It certainly keeps the police guessing because there’s no leadership they can really communicate with to agree to quid-pro-quo truces that can be enforced). Sure, some of them might say that they are led by “BlackLivesMatter,” but in reality BLM at that protest will be a guy with a megaphone and 4 other guys he knows. The rest might flock to the BLM banner, but they are not dues-paying members who are accountable to any sort of organizational discipline…at least, not yet. That may change. The protest in Springfield, MO yesterday had more people actually following the lead of the guy with the megaphone than I’ve seen elsewhere.

          • If you are curious about how anti-fascists talk about street protests among themselves, here’s an article from cosmonaut blog that just came out from a guy who was involved in the Arab Spring protests in Egypt.

            And here’s an oldie from the GWB years discussing the last days of the Weimar Republic, whose continual street violence still dwarfs anything we’ve seen in the U.S. so far.

          • CatCube says:

            @citizencokane

            What is “cop-jacketing?” I can’t find it with a DDG search or looking on Urbandictionary. I also can’t figure it out from context, since your comments regarding it being something you wouldn’t expect military to do to stop violence on the part of their personnel. A basic infantry attack requires tight control of fires to prevent fratricide, so orders to cease fire are typical and expected to immediately be obeyed and passed down the line–the doctrinal signal in the US military is to wave your hand in front of your face, palm-out, while shouting “cease fire”, and if that didn’t work, I’d absolutely expect somebody to put hands on the guy. About the only thing that comes to mind that’s left would be shooting him, and that doesn’t seem to fit what you mean either.

          • Aftagley says:

            X-Jacketing is a term, mostly used in far-left circles(?) to accuse someone of being affliated with group X.

            Common X values are “snitch” “cop” “fed” “prison guard” or whatever. I thing the general term is “bad jacketing”

          • “Cop-jacketing” means a protester trying to forcibly turn over a fellow protester to the police for taking actions that the first protester doesn’t agree with. It involves first restraining the reckless protester and then handing the protester over to police lines during a protest. It is a bit of an obscure activist term.

            Edit: Actually, there may be several inter-related concepts going by the term “cop-jacketing,” or maybe my memory is foggy. On one Occupy Movement website I found this definition of cop-jacketing: “accusing people, usually strangers of being police and even harassing them out the park. While it is certainly true that there were undercover police officers in the park, and informants, etc., it is absolutely not alright to publicly accuse people of being police officers if there is no evidence that they are.”

            The two concepts can intertwine in the scenario where someone’s aggressive vandalism ignites fears that they are actually an agent provocateur cop such that some people may feel tempted to restrain and push out of the protest such individuals.

            2nd edit: here’s an article that uses the term “cop-jacketing” in the original sense that I meant it, as an act of bringing police to bear on fellow protesters/activists with whom one has a disagreement.

          • RalMirrorAd says:

            @Baconbits

            This is the major issue and the logic works both ways. When good cops close ranks to defend bad cops they are no longer good cops. When a protest starts getting violent you either leave or are part of a violent protest.

            I say this as someone who thinks BLM’s claims (about racial bias in policing in general, not the specifics of this case) are mostly false:

            I understand the reasoning but the premise that “if there’s violence at your protest you forfeit the right to protest” inspires Counterprotestors who don’t get charged with criminal conspiracy to use this to basically censor anyone they don’t agree with at will. Instigate fights at the protests, get some of the other guys arrested, and maybe your own people get a slap on the wrist by a judge.

            A protest has no power to exclude or filter anyone. Police departments have more control over their members particularly given the individual in question who is presumed responsible for Georges death had a history of misconduct.

            As far as responsibilities of the protester is concerned, I do think there’s a responsibility to be aware of the fact that the officer in question was already arrested and the plans are to charge them with 3rd degree murder. If I were an otherwise lawabiding BLM protestor I would be pissed if the officer in question was being shielded by the cops and the events I wanted to attend were being canceled because of looters; but that doesn’t appear to be the case here.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            A protest has no power to exclude or filter anyone.

            They sort of do and they don’t? A few years back on SSC we talked about left-wing political organization training/tactics. Particularly I think someone (Matt M?) was interested in things right-wing protestors could learn from left-wing organizing strategies, since they have so much more experience with it.

            One of the things was absolutely about gatekeeping/internal policing. It’s not like agent provocateurs are a new thing to left-wing protests. So, an organized protest would have “muscle,” to shove out anyone who wasn’t following the rules of engagement.

            Not doing this is I think what doomed Richard Spencer’s NPI. One could be super charitable and take them at their word that they were “pro-white” rather than “anti-other” (nazis, kkk). But at the Unite the Right rally there was a guy flying a nazi flag unmolested. That guy could have been serious about nazism, or a provocateur wanting to make everyone look bad. Regardless, if the NPI wanted to be taken seriously that they weren’t just nazis with a different name, they should have had burly dudes lay hands on that guy and eject him from the rally.

            Note: I am not alt-right, nor left-wing, and generally think protests are silly, but this seems like an obvious place where the far left has their act together better than the far right.

            I also understand the current protests are not well-organized. That seems like a failing of BLM. This is the sort of thing they should be organizing. It is possible to have peaceful protests/marches of this kind, because they’ve done it before.

          • AlexSpark says:

            For similar reasons, aiding and abetting police efforts to single out and remove the bad actors is something that rarely happens.

            @Trofim_Lysenko

            Unlikely at the best of times, obviously unthinkable when the issue people are out to protest is not trusting the police to arrest people without killing them.

            Policing requires so much public trust. If they’ve lost public trust, and the average guy on the street doesn’t want to call them for fear they’ll murder someone when they turn up, it undermines law and order.

            Policing protests is a difficult thing that the best of times, doubly hard when what people are protesting is the police.

            @Aftagley What did the police objectives seem to be?

            The small amount of protest experience I got during the october rebellion seemed to show that the objectives police had (keeping order vs. reclaiming/clearing a space) had a huge impact on how volatile interactions were. Obviously a very different situation – police presence there wasn’t inherently antagonistic in the same way.

            I think there’s a tendency towards objectives that aren’t achievable/don’t make sense when the police feel pressured/not in control, and that can make things spiral out of control.

          • RalMirrorAd says:

            @ConradHoncho:

            I don’t see how you keep agent provocateurs out of public spaces. The only thing i can think of that has the best chance of working is a flash mob where you tell a select a finite number of people about an an event that is done very quickly and ended very quickly.

            But AFAICT as soon as you announce to the world that something is going to happen, anyone can show up and you have no power to exclude them.

          • Aftagley says:

            the objectives police had (keeping order vs. reclaiming/clearing a space) had a huge impact on how volatile interactions were.

            Yeah, I saw this as well.

            Approximately 50 yards from the where protesters were actively fighting with the armored-up police who were holding the line there were a few cop cars with un-armored cops just kind of standing around. As far as I could tell, they never got seriously hassled or attacked.

            @Aftagley What did the police objectives seem to be?

            Don’t let the protesters burn down the white house. The protest was happening at the park around 1/4 mile north of the white house (Lafeyette). The SS/Park police/National Guard made a line preventing people from entering the park and were preventing anyone from crossing that line.

            Eventually (circa midnight) DC metro police showed up and used numbers to clear out everyone – but the main objective was just “Don’t let the angry people near the president”

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            anyone can show up and you have no power to exclude them.

            And yet they do. They at least have the deniability that when a critic says “this wasn’t a peaceful protest, somebody threw a rock!” the protestors or protesting organization can say, “that guy wasn’t one of us, see, here we are forcibly ejecting him from the group and chasing him off.”

          • baconbits9 says:

            But AFAICT as soon as you announce to the world that something is going to happen, anyone can show up and you have no power to exclude them.

            This is only partly true, but it is also true that protests work better with large numbers. If you are trying to play the ‘we demand to be heard, look how many of us there are’ game then you can’t (earnestly) disavow yourself from the actions of the mass of people. Either you commit to policing them, you leave when it gets violent or you are party to their actions.

          • ana53294 says:

            Here is a video of an organized protest.

            If you see, you’ll see people in blue jackets with a ribbon in their hand. They’re keeping the protest organized, so they stay within the confines, don’t go out and, importantly, don’t interact with the police.

            In the front of the protest march (where most clashes happen), in an organized protest, you’ll only have vetted people and an exclusion (0:41) zone which is kept empty by your people. And yes, if somebody doesn’t follow the rules of engagement, the organizers kick them out.

            It’s possible to keep undesirables out. It’s done. There just doesn’t seem to be any organization in the protests. Are BLM organizing the protests? I somehow get the feeling that there is no organization.

          • viVI_IViv says:

            Most protests all over the Western world are paceful. Typically, these protests are done in predefined areas, usually but not always agreed upon with the city government, and as ana53294 pointed out, they have staff who make sure to maintain separation from the police, prevent the protest from straying from the predetermined path and kick out any misbehaving protester.

            Typical riots are much less organized: just people throwing rocks, smashing windows and setting things on fire.

            And then you have the no global/black bloc/antifa rallies, which are organized riots. These people specifically plan their clashes with the police, they prepare batons, shields and Molotov cocktails, they even practice shield wall formations as if they were the Spartans in 300 or something.
            The people who actively fight are actually a minority, but the rest of the protesters act as their human shields protecting them from the police and trying to provide plausible deniability for their actions. These are the people who later post pictures of their bloodied faces on social media: “The fascist police shot a tear gas canister in my eye while I was standing pacefully with my hands held high”. Yes darling, but you forgot to mention that you were providing cover for the masked guy behind you throwing bricks.

          • szopeno says:

            In Poland we have huge annual nationalist march (“Independence March”). Until 2014 or so it was almost accompanied by a violence, and while vast majority of participants (including someoof my friends) were there just to manifest peacefully and swore they had seen no violent or trouble-making hools, without doubts there were always some burned cars etc. Organizers blamed police provocations and antifas trying to provoke the fights.

            Then two things happened. First, change of government; second, organizers got better and better with policing demonstration themselves. Ignoring occasional faults (like when march guards prevented black block to insert themselves into front of the march, but couldn’t prevent them from getting into march later on) guards did their job and since 2015 there were no major incidents.

            When manifestation has experienced organizers, policing is manageable, even if hard.

        • baconbits9 says:

          If they’d either pre-staged less flimsy fences or had some way of reimposing distance between the crowds and the cops, I think you would have seen less interactions.

          Not really possible, anything that keeps the protesters away from the police also keeps the police away from the protesters. If there is a fight or a fire in the crowd the police can no longer move forward and intervene at all if you have a solid barrier there, and the purpose of the barrier is literally so there is a line that the police know when it is crossed.

          • Aftagley says:

            . If there is a fight or a fire in the crowd the police can no longer move forward and intervene at all if you have a solid barrier there

            I’m not sure if either my protest was atypical or if I don’t understand you. The cops were doing precisely nothing to break up fights that didn’t directly involve them and were unconcerned about fire expect when it was being thrown at them. Mind you, I’m not saying they should have broken ranks to tend to this stuff, but they were not going past their lines.

            the purpose of the barrier is literally so there is a line that the police know when it is crossed.

            Yep, this makes sense. I’ll retract my original point then. In a purely hypothetical world, something that could ensure the cops and protesters stay at least a couple yards away from each other would be great, but it’s just not feasible.

          • baconbits9 says:

            I’m not sure if either my protest was atypical or if I don’t understand you. The cops were doing precisely nothing to break up fights that didn’t directly involve them and were unconcerned about fire expect when it was being thrown at them. Mind you, I’m not saying they should have broken ranks to tend to this stuff, but they were not going past their lines.

            No, they won’t be attending to everything, but a barrier that prevents the protesters getting closer basically means they can’t attend to anything.

    • Plumber says:

      @Aftagley,
      Thanks for the report. Sounds like a very unpleasant experience, hope you and your friend weren’t injure.

      • Aftagley says:

        I walked away with some bruises and a minor burn on my hand. She’s fine. Thanks for the concern, friend.

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      Thanks for the report. Very interesting. And yeah those street medics sound awesome.

      P.S. Also glad you and your friend are okay.

    • Nick says:

      Thanks for the writeup. Good to hear you and your friend are okay.

    • Dragor says:

      Can I repost this on Facebook? I have seen a lot of posts making the rounds and this is the first writeup I’ve seen that seems like it would be helpful if it were shared around.

    • CatCube says:

      This is an excellent post, and thank you for making it.

    • elspeth artemis says:

      somehow, this reminds me of the border ceremonies between india and pakistan.

    • rumham says:

      @Aftagley

      Thank you for this. Glad to hear you got out with only minor injuries. A question, did you experience the dynamic described here?

      (In brief, after 10:30pm, it appears that police accidentally boxed in protesters with the only remaining exit on fire near Lafayette Square)

      • Aftagley says:

        Thank you for this. Glad to hear you got out with only minor injuries. A question, did you experience the dynamic described here?

        Yeah, I got caught in it, although by my recollection it didn’t start in earnest until around 2300-2330, not 2230. Either way, it was the dumbest thing I did all night.

        I had just started to leave and was outside the protest zone when I saw the DC metro police starting to form the lines described in the article. I wanted some pics/video so I climbed a wall and started filming. This was all approximately 1 block north of Lafayette.

        Thing is, I didn’t pay attention to the new police line that was forming behind me until they’d solidified and now I was caught back inside the protest zone. I didn’t want to get hit with more pepper bullets while I was on a wall so I had to scramble down. At that point, the only way not blocked by police or, you know, fire was back towards Lafayette park and the main protest line. I’d also made the great decision to take off my PPE since I thought I was out of it by then, so going back through the gas was not great. Fortunately, some street activists were already herding traffic. Vermont ave was still open and they were directing people who wanted out that way.

        I find myself shocked to say this, but I agree with that Reason article. At that time, the people the cops were blocking off were mostly people who just wanted out of there. The DC cops were also way freer with the batons than the ones at the park, although that might be the difference between holding an established line and trying to clear large spaces.

      • baconbits9 says:

        My (complete amateur) speculation would be that the cops were preventing themselves from being surrounded.

    • No One In Particular says:

      That being said, I saw people half my size out there wearing just a sports bra and bandanna, so maybe I’m just a wimp.

      Nothing else? How were they wearing the bandanna?

    • Doesntliketocomment says:

      Thanks for this great account from the ground.

      I’d like to add as a comment from a DC resident that the level of destruction in DC has been way overhyped. I was downtown on June 2nd, and except for the plywood sheathing that had enveloped every storefront (all closed for coronavirus anyway) you would be hard pressed to know there had been a disturbance. I saw a half dozen tags, a couple broken windows, and a single burnt trashcan. the only people around were relaxed looking cops, casual walkers and joggers, and the workmen putting up the aforementioned plywood everywhere. I’m pretty sure more stuff was broken when the Caps won the cup. There is just no comparison to the riots of the 60s that left huge swaths of the city burned and abandoned.

  15. Deiseach says:

    Honestly, this Dion Fortune book is great entertainment. It was published in 1930 and has a marvellous attitude of “British stiff upper lip” on show, it’s also hilarious that she was training in Freudian psychology around the same time that she was serving as an occult initiate (there’s a vampire story which is something else).

    This is less exciting but serves as a good example of the breezily down-to-earth tone of her anecdotes (don’t try this at home, kids, apparently Air Rituals are notorious for evoking quarrels and being destructive):

    The ceremony went exceptionally badly even for an Air Ritual. Two of the principal officers, husband and wife, helped to maintain its reputation as a contentious element by having a family jar in the middle of the proceedings, and the usual upsets and smashings occurred on a generous scale.

    For the next fortnight I lived in the midst of a cataclysm of crockery. I smashed my way through two entire tea-sets and all the mantelpiece ornaments. The ornaments just fell off the mantelpiece one by one of their own accord. I actually saw two of them do it. I did not know at the time that the Element of Air had this sinister reputation. I realised that something queer was afoot, however, and asked my teacher about it. She was much amused, but I was not, because it was my crockery that was supplying the raw material for the phenomena.

    • Orion says:

      Thank you for the implicit recommendation. I will definitely set about tracking these down.

      • Deiseach says:

        It’s the contrast between, to quote Wikipedia (when she would have been in her early 20s):

        To recover from her experience at Studley, Fortune began studying psychotherapy. Her initial interest was in the work of Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler, though she later moved on to that of Carl Jung. She studied psychology and psychoanalysis under John Flügel at the University of London, before gaining employment at a psychological clinic in London’s Brunswick Square, which was likely run under the jurisdiction of the London School of Medicine for Women.

        The above, which she mentions herself:

        When psycho-analysis was first introduced into England I took up the subject, and became a student, and eventually a lecturer at a clinic that was founded in London. …At the same place, in the course of my psycho-analytical work, I came across a number of cases where a morbid attachment existed between two people …We found it necessary to insist upon a separation if a cure were to be effected, and the separation invariably disagreed very actively with the dominant partner.

        At that time I explained everything in terms of the Freudian psychology, but even so, I could not help being struck by the curious effect a separation had upon the person who was not supposed to be ill, and that as the one went uphill, the other went down.

        And then in the next paragraph she’s describing “one of these cases turned out to be necrophiliac vampirism contracted in the trenches during the First World War” and you’re left going “huh?”

        At that time I was doing the tutorials in abnormal psychology at the clinic I have spoken of, and supervising the work of the other students; one of them took counsel with me concerning a case that had come to her in private practice, the case of a youth in the late ‘teens, one of those degenerate but intellectual and socially presentable types that not infrequently crop up in old families whose blood is too blue to be wholesome.

        …The boy, whom we will call D., was in the habit of going to sit with a cousin who had been invalided home from France suffering from alleged shell-shock. This young man was another scion of a worn-out stock, and it transpired that he had been caught red-handed in that unpleasant perversion called necrophilia. According to the story elicited from the parents of D., this vice was not uncommon on certain sections of the Front, as were also attacks on wounded men. The authorities were taking drastic steps to put it down. Owing to family influence the cousin of D. was able to escape incarceration in a military prison, and was placed in the care of his family as a mental case, and they put him in the charge of a male nurse. It was while the male nurse was off duty that the unfortunate young D. was misguidedly employed to sit with him. It also came out that the relations between D. and his cousin were of a vicious nature, and on one occasion he bit the boy on the neck, just under the ear, actually drawing blood.

        D. had always been under the impression that some “ghost” attacked him during his crises, but had not dared to say so for fear of being thought mad.

        …What may have been the exact percentages of neurotic taint, vice, and psychic attack, it is difficult to say, nor is it easy to decide which was the predisposing cause that opened the door to all the trouble, but one thing stood out clearly to all beholders, that with the dispatch of the psychic visitant, not only did D.’s condition clear up immediately, but after a short, sharp upheaval the cousin also recovered.

        So it’s this wonderful blend of “I think Freud was definitely on to something, but of course his lack of knowledge of occult matters meant that he didn’t quite get it all the way right about the Oedipus complex” which is, frankly, hugely amusing to read because it is all being treated in the reasonable air of “Science is making great strides and psychology and occultism are equally sciences” which, um, some people might well agree with but not for the same reasons 🙂

        Also, the brisk medical tone of “well, necrophilia during wartime, it happens unfortunately” is something to experience.

        The only caveat I would have for readers who may be sensitive on such issues is that the attitudes to race are very much of their time, so besides the above “Vampirism? In my Allied Forces? It’s more likely than you think! Have you any Magyars mingling with the troops under your command?”, we get the simple, artless peoples are susceptible to seeing things because they are nearer to nature and more sensitive:

        To perceive a “haunting” one needs, as a general rule, to be slightly psychic; it is for this reason that children, Celts and the coloured races suffer severely from such interferences, and the stolid Nordic type is comparatively immune, and, to a lesser extent, the lively, materialistic and sceptical Latin.

        Yes, we Irish are but simple peasants which is why we’re all away with the fairies 😀

  16. Loriot says:

    Yesterday, I asked for advice about cooking with yogurt since it is so messy and hard to deal with. All the responses I got were just “get a kitchen scale”. Coincidentally, my roommate just got one, but I don’t really see how it answers the question at all.

    Could anyone explain how you use the scale to avoid the problems with yogurt getting all over measuring cups and spoons and the like? I’m guessing you just spoon it into the bowl until the weight reaches the desired amount, but this seems like it would take forever. I already tried just spooning yogurt into a 1/2 cup, and even that takes much longer than I’d care for.

    Also any tips for scale use and baking with weight measures in general?

    • matkoniecz says:

      For recipes that I have I was always able to add yogurt by weight to a container where it will end anyway.

      So I would put container on an electronic scale, reset weight (to measure just what will be added) and add yogurt with a spoon of appropriate size.

      In case of unfortunate recipes not using weight I would convert such measures to weight or number of spoons.

    • SamChevre says:

      Use a big spoon – a serving spoon or the like – and just spoon the yogurt into the bowl, then rinse the spoon off. Don’t use an eating spoon.

      In my opinion, the real killer app for scales is solid fats (lard and so on) which are really messy to measure otherwise.

      • AG says:

        The previous thread also recommended using a silicone spatula, which I second. Those (in conjunction with a regular spoon) are great for getting every last bit transferred between containers. You’ll need to get a few sizes, since a larger spatula is useless to scrape smaller containers.

        But if you watch videos of cooking by professionals, there’s just a lot of waste. They simply discard all that extra yogurt left on the measuring cups and spoons.

    • viVI_IViv says:

      Put the mixing bowl on the scale, make sure it sits correctly on the moving part, then calibrate the scale and add the ingredients.

    • Thomas Jorgensen says:

      Kitchen scales are the universal answer to all things baking, in full generality. Measuring anything other than by weight just.. is not accurate enough. Use a large steel bowl, pour things in until you get close to desired weight, then pour slowly, reset between ingredients. for things which cant be poured, large spoon. It helps to think of baking as a subset of chemistry more than of cooking – mix well, get the ingredients, temperature and timing right, good and consistent results.

      • No One In Particular says:

        Measuring anything other than by weight just.. is not accurate enough.

        So the correct amount of stuff always just happens to come out to an even quantity? How am I able to make decent meals without measuring anything at all?

        • Thomas Jorgensen says:

          If you are cooking – that is, standing at a stove – you are using your senses to adjust things constantly. This does not work very well for baking. Baking, you mix things before hand, shove it in the oven, and use a timer – if there is not enough butter in the mix, too bad, that batch is now going to suck. This means the way to get consistent and good results is iterative attempts, adjusting after each failed, or not-good-enough batch. Or you can find a recipie by someone who has done this work for you.
          … and no, this does not usually come to even amounts. This is, in fact, a good first pass to guess at whether a given recipie of the internet is even worth bothering with. “Add 230 grams of sugar” is a much better sign someone put effort into this than “Add 3 deciliters”.
          Highly rated recipies that do not have a gazillion comments about how to adjust it is also a good sign.

  17. metacelsus says:

    I noticed the Blogroll has been purged. I miss the old naming system based on Borges.

    • Lambert says:

      +1

      • AG says:

        I liked it insofar as it was a nice meme to riff on elsewhere. Now those jokes won’t make any sense.

    • alchemy29 says:

      I like the change. The old scheme was opaque and weird to newcomers.

      • matkoniecz says:

        +1 It always seemed unnecessarily weird to me, without being funny/interesting/useful.

      • The Pachyderminator says:

        I can’t picture the newcomer who could handle everything else on the site, but was put off by the blogroll.

        • acymetric says:

          I don’t think it is a matter of putting people off, so much as that people just didn’t understand it (for example, I never understood it). It didn’t bother me, and I’m not likely to start reading any of the linked blogs regardless of the titles, but I sure didn’t get what they meant or what they were referencing.

          • Loriot says:

            > It didn’t bother me, and I’m not likely to start reading any of the linked blogs regardless of the titles, but I sure didn’t get what they meant or what they were referencing.

            That was my experience as well.

      • Wrong Species says:

        It’s supposed to be opaque to newcomers.

        • Opaque to me too, and my blog is one of the ones linked.

          And if my blog doesn’t have a lot of activity, that’s Scott’s fault, for making this a more interesting place for me to post.

          • Lambert says:

            Your blog was amongst the other anarchists’, was it not?

            ‘The flower vase’ referring to the state’s monopoly on violence or something.

          • Aftagley says:

            Wait, it was about anarchists? I 100% thought that was a Matrix reference.

          • AnteriorMotive says:

            @Aftagley

            Well, Zvi at least was there for the pun, and not any particular anarchism.

            (His blog is titled “Don’t Worry About the Vase”)

    • Nick says:

      I liked the old scheme, too, and so I’m sorry to see it go. I do wonder why he did it. One explanation is that after removing a bunch of old/defunct? blogs Scott found he couldn’t retain all the old categories, so he just switched to something simpler. But the explanation I prefer is that he needs those Weirdness Points for an upcoming post.

    • Derannimer says:

      I also miss it. = (

    • DinoNerd says:

      I enjoyed the old names, but what’s really bothering me is not the change to the headers text in the blogroll – it’s the “improvement” to the layout that results in various elements of this blog displaying on top of each other in Safari 11.0.1.

      I would very much have preferred that our host not “fix” something that hadn’t previously been broken.

      At any rate, I don’t see the blogroll any more, or (more problematically) the list of recent posts (so as to know when a new OT is posted). It’s hidden behind a symbol when the page loads (no text label, of course). When you click on the symbol, what used to be a side bar displays much wider than it used to be, covering up the beginning of the post/comments. All in all, the kind of improvement I’ve come to expect from tech companies, that make their cell phone/tablet experience harder and harder for newcomers to learn, every year – and their desktop experience more and like their phone and tablet experience.

      Fortunately, I’m familiar with the particular hieroglyph chosen, and was able to find the missing sidebar. (Real tech companies generally use brand new symbols, to maximize user confusion, when modernizing their UIs; Scott’s a piker compared to Apple or Google, though he’s got the essential element of having neither always-present text nor tooltips.)

      And of course this part may not have been Scott’s conscious doing; it’s possible he merely updated to a more recent “modernized” version of the blogging platform, perhaps to pick up security fixes unavailable without the UI “improvements”.

      It’s also possible my “preferences” got changed for the site, via some even less clearly labelled UI element. Until I noticed the change to the blogroll (thanks everyone), that’s what I’d presumed. But this looks like a partial site reskinning, no better than they usually are.

      I also considered that it may be some issue involving moving advertisements, or changing the technology used to display them – leading to my ad block software doing something new when it tries to make use of the space previously containing ads. I now see zero advertisements on this site, with only a header for them (on the right). Previously I used to see ads. But my ad block software is claiming to have blocked zero ads today, so it’s more likely that the site is also failing to serve the usual ads.

  18. BlindKungFuMaster says:

    Probably interesting to many here: OpenAI has scaled GPT-2 a hundred-fold –> GPT-3.
    Now it is possible to give examples of a task + the task as input and get a solution to the task as output.
    It also can do basic arithmetic.

    https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.14165.pdf

  19. yodelyak says:

    Say I’m newly persuaded that nuclear power is really, really damn important for fighting climate change. What’s the best way to support it? Who’s being most effective in leading the good fight?

    Bonus: say I have really high scrupulosity, such that e.g. Michael Shellenberger / Breakthrough Institute seems to me like money-grubbing controversy bots, not like principled advocates. Who can I work with where I won’t feel grimy?

    • Loriot says:

      I suppose it might be worth trying to find out if any of your government representatives are holding town halls or the like. (Of course, they probably won’t be now, or at least not physical ones)

    • James Hansen is a prominent climate change figure who is pro-nuclear. No idea if there is a practical way of “working with” him.

    • Uribe says:

      You are newly persuaded. What took you so long? What persuaded you?

      Your journey is probably more insightful about what would persuade others than those of us who always thought the anti-nuclear position was misguided.

      • Anteros says:

        +1 Especially the ‘What persuaded you?’

        Funnily enough, for George Monbiot, mentioned below, what persuaded him was the Fukushima nuclear accident.

    • Watchman says:

      George Monbiot is another example.

    • matkoniecz says:

      What’s the best way to support it?

      Probably not the best, but easiest for start – do not support politicians/organizations that are stupid about it?

  20. Another Throw says:

    The fact that prices are denominated in data rather than dollars does not change anything.

    If the government gives Twitter the data they request in exchange for publishing the government’s communications, Twitter is obliged to treat it no differently than if the government had paid in dollars. For that matter, if Google uses its monopoly position to demand ever more intrusive data from its users there is no difference, legally or morally, than any other monopolistic price fixing scheme.

    You can denominate your price in anything you want, including peppercorns, and it changes neither the nature of the transaction, how binding the contractual terms are, nor the application of the law.

    • WashedOut says:

      PSA: When you hit “reply” to a post without being logged in, then you go through the login prompts in order to reply, your message will not automatically be tagged to the post you wanted to reply to. You have to navigate back to the post and hit “reply” again.

    • Dragor says:

      This almost worked as a stand alone post; it just didn’t end with the intended topic for discussion.

  21. Le Maistre Chat says:

    “From my perspective, the Jedi are evil!” the villain falsely said to his mentor who had a lifelong habit of deceiving socially vulnerable children and young adults and using his religion to literally hypnotize people.

    • Belisaurus Rex says:

      Guess Obi Wan should’ve left Anakin in slavery then. Obi Wan had a hard life.

      • Deiseach says:

        Jar-Jar should have eaten the obnoxious little brat, killed two birds with one stone (Anakin was so poisonous he’d have killed Jar-Jar).

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        “It’s over, Anakin! I have the moral high ground!”

        Yeah, you’re right that Obi-Wan was a good guy to Anakin. Though the “hey let’s buy a slave’s freedom” subplot mostly raised questions about why it was so easy for the evil Empire to annex Tatooine and enforce modern laws but not the good Republic.

        • bullseye says:

          I don’t think the Republic was interested in conquering anybody. There wasn’t even an Army of the Republic until they commissioned the clones. I get the impression the Republic was more like the U.N. than a state.

        • Orion says:

          why it was so easy for the evil Empire to annex Tatooine and enforce modern laws

          Do we actually know that the Empire abolished slavery on Tatooine, or do you just assume they did because we don’t explicitly see slaves in the original movies?

          • AG says:

            They did not abolish slavery on Tatooine, unless you think all those people in Jabba’s palace during RotJ were paid employees.

          • bullseye says:

            Just because Jabba does it doesn’t mean it’s legal. But I think the Empire probably doesn’t outlaw slavery because I’ve never seen a Star Wars villain who opposes slavery.

        • ECD says:

          Did they? I always assumed the stormtroopers we saw on the surface had come down from the Star Destroyer specifically to find the escaped droids. I saw it as more ‘search and destroy’ then ‘this is our territory.’

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            No one tried to stop them or seemed particularly surprised by stormtroopers setting up cordons around the spaceport. I think we were meant to believe that the Empire ruled the entire galaxy. It wasn’t until the prequels that they started talking about planets outside the Republic, which maybe implies the Empire didn’t rule the entire galaxy.

          • ECD says:

            No one tried to stop them or seemed particularly surprised by stormtroopers setting up cordons around the spaceport. I think we were meant to believe that the Empire ruled the entire galaxy. It wasn’t until the prequels that they started talking about planets outside the Republic, which maybe implies the Empire didn’t rule the entire galaxy.

            I can see that interpretation, but my assumption was the reverse. No one tried to stop them because that’s just inviting death and by the time we see storm troopers, they’ve been in the city for a while (Star Wars timelines are always screwy).

            Thinking about it, I guess a lot of that is because otherwise the Empire looks pretty incompetent for being totally unable to find the droids, or lock down the port. Now that’s not impossible, they’re certainly plenty incompetent a lot of the time (cough, Death Star, cough) but basically a marine detachment operating on foreign soil without any real time to make local contacts made more sense to me.

          • viVI_IViv says:

            I think I’ve read somewhere that the Empire did maintain a garrison of stormtroopers on Tatooine, mostly to prevent the Rebel Alliance from setting up a stronghold there, but generally left the local planetary government, which was really a proxy for the Hutt crime lords, largely free do do their thing.

          • bullseye says:

            I got the impression from Phantom Menace that the Hutts openly rule Tatooine in the Republic era. When Watto tries to renege on his bet with Qui-Gon, Qui-Gon threatens to take the dispute to the Hutts, which only makes sense if the actual justice system is made of Hutts. Also, during the race, Jabba puts in an appearance and everyone cheers, which makes more sense for a king or lord than a crime boss.

        • viVI_IViv says:

          The Republic and the Jedi didn’t object with using an army of brainwashed child slave clone soldiers to fight their civil war to prevent the secession of the Confederacy over tax policies. And when it blew up in their face they proceeded to blame an obscure persecuted religious minority.

    • broblawsky says:

      Something that always bothered me about the whole “Jedi are forbidden to love” thing: what could the order have actually done to Anakin as a punishment? It’s not like they can take his powers or his training away. Even kicking him out of the Jedi Order does nothing more than condemn him to live the life of the kept man of a beautiful, rich, and powerful woman.

      • Trofim_Lysenko says:

        I can’t remember if there was an EU answer to this pre-Disney, but I always figured that the Jedi tended to police their own (set a thief, etc, plus preserving their independence from any other form of oversight), and so either had their own methods for imprisoning rogue/fallen Jedi, or straight up executed wayward members.

        • EU Jedi could block someone from accessing the Force.

          Sever Force

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:

            True, but I think Vergere is the only example of the technique in late Republic era. Most of the other examples are from the Dark Horse Tales Of The Jedi stuff or KOTOR (set a loooong time before the prequels). And Vergere has her…own issues, having been retconned due to editorial and authorial disputes.

      • Watchman says:

        And gives her a powerful, unchecked, tool for say changing the outcome of trade negotiations.

      • bullseye says:

        The Jedi Order is a surrogate family. (Anakin is unusual in that he remembers his birth mother.) Expulsion from the Order amounts to expulsion from your family. It also means giving up your high social status; a Jedi outranks a Senator’s spouse, especially a spouse as politically inept as Anakin. Given Anakin’s exceptional power and ties to the Chancellor he’d probably still fight alongside his Jedi and clone friends (as Ahsoka does in Season 7), but the Jedi made their rules long before they knew they’d be soldiers.

        Who does leave the Order? Ahsoka, after she feels the Order no longer welcomes her. Count Dooku, after he inherits that title (and I wouldn’t be surprised if his family had the clout to stay in touch with him during his time as a Jedi). Anakin, after his new father figure demands it. Ben, who thinks his master Luke tried to kill him. Luke, after he’s the only one left.

      • Lambert says:

        There’s only one thing coarse and rough and irratating enough to dissuade him from following the path of the dark side: sand.

      • viVI_IViv says:

        Even kicking him out of the Jedi Order does nothing more than condemn him to live the life of the kept man of a beautiful, rich, and powerful woman.

        If he wanted to live the life of the husband of a beautiful, rich, and powerful woman, he could have just quit the Jedi Order and married Padme. He didn’t because he liked the power and status he enjoyed as a Jedi. In fact his main griveance with the Jedi Order is that they wouldn’t raise him to the rank of master.

        Even if the Jedi couldn’t take away his training and his connection to the Force, they could take away his legal sanction to use it offensively, which is something that Anakin clearly enjoys doing (e.g. the massacre of the Tusken Raiders, the summary execution of Count Dooku), while Obi Wan and Yoda pretend not to notice because they are fighting a war and he such a strong soldier.

    • J Mann says:

      “From my perspective, the Jedi are evil!” the villain falsely said to his mentor who had a lifelong habit of deceiving socially vulnerable children and young adults and using his religion to literally hypnotize people.

      I read this five times looking for the Tom Swiftie. 🙂

      There are definitely some valid perspectives to criticize the Jedi. (If I could rewrite the prequels, I’d build Anakin’s resentment over the Jedi saving him and leaving his mother and all the other slaves in place).

      On the other hand, Anakin’s perspective (that Palpatine is better than the Jedi because Palpatine promises him that the dark arts will let him defeat death), is selfish and IMHO wrong.

      Also, how did Obi-Wan deceive socially vulnerable children? (Lastly, hypnotizing is usually a preferable alternative to violence – if they used hypnotism for Lulz I blame the writers).

      • viVI_IViv says:

        Also, how did Obi-Wan deceive socially vulnerable children?

        Luke wasn’t exactly a child, but he was still a young adult who has recently lost all his family when Obi Wan lied to him about his father and lied by omission about his sister in order to persuade him join him in a violent struggle that could have easily got him killed or turned to the Dark Side of the Force.

  22. thisheavenlyconjugation says:

    What does SSC think about Umbrella Man?

    • Plumber says:

      @thisheavenlyconjugation,
      The your post and reading the link you posted are the first I’ve learned anything about “umbrella man”, my guess is he’s some disturbed young man, I’ve no other speculation.

    • toastengineer says:

      Sorry to act like a bot here, but – three day rule?

      • John Schilling says:

        Umbrella Man has been wreaking havoc in the shadowy margins of American politics for over half a century. I suspect he may be Enoch Root’s evil twin, and it’s long past time we puzzled out his dark agenda.

    • viVI_IViv says:

      He’s probably a Russian bot trying to make the paceful protest look bad.

  23. edmundgennings says:

    My sense is that in international treaties between two states, if one party breaches the treaty considerably, then the other effects become void or at least other state may choose to make void the other parts of the treaty, or at least the parts of the treaty that are closely tied to the other states commitment.
    Ie two countries both agree to permit citizens of the other to fish in their waters. One of the counties then revokes the access of the other’s citizens, then innocent country would be free to forbid the breaching country’s citizens access.

    Is this correct?

    • Lambert says:

      It’s realpolitik all the way down.

      Both states can do what they want but the one that breaches the treaty first suddenly looks a lot less trustworthy in front of everyone else.

  24. Eric T says:

    I’ve had to step out of the Rationalist/LW community and sort of the internet more broadly due to an insane work/study schedule over the last 2-3 months. Have I missed anything particularly good/important in this corner of the online world?

  25. Deiseach says:

    Along the same lines as the alchemical exposition of “My Immortal”, I’m currently reading Dion Fortune (née Violet Mary Firth)’s “Psychic Self-Defence” for a bit of light reading, and it would seem that the members of the British occult community during the First World War were made of stern stuff 🙂

    It was in the early days of my interest in occultism, when I was still buying my experience by the expensive but effectual method of running my head into obstacles, I made the acquaintance of a woman who was interested in psychic matters. …At the time I knew her she was verging on a breakdown which was alleged to be due to overwork, and she was very anxious to get away from cities and back to nature. I was just leaving London to take up my residence at an occult college which was hidden away in the sandy fastnesses of the Hampshire barrens. In the innocence of my heart I suggested that she might come down there and help with the domestic duties.

    … These nightmares continued, on and off for the next few days, to afflict different members of the community. They were vague and nebulous, and there was nothing we could pitch upon for diagnostic purposes, and we put it down to indigestion caused by the village baker’s version of war bread.

    Then one day I had a quarrel with Miss L. She had conceived a “crush” for me; I have a constitutional repulsion for crushes and give them scant politeness, and she complained bitterly of my lack of responsiveness. What ever may be the rights and wrongs of the case, I had roused her resentment in good earnest. That night I was afflicted with the most violent nightmare I have ever had in my life, waking from sleep with the terrible sense of oppression on my chest, as if someone were holding me down, or lying upon me. I saw distinctly the head of Miss L., reduced to the size of an orange, floating in the air at the foot of my bed, and snapping its teeth at me. It was the most malignant thing I have ever seen.

    Still not attaching any psychic significance to my experiences, and being firmly convinced that the local baker was responsible, I told no one of my dream, thinking it one of those things that are better kept to oneself; but when the members of the community came to talk matters over in the light of subsequent events, we found that two other people had had similar experiences.

    …Next morning, however, the storm broke. Miss L. and I were peacefully at work in the kitchen when she suddenly caught up a carving-knife and started after me, as mad as a March hare. Fortunately for me I had in my hands a large saucepan full of freshly boiled greens, and I used this as a weapon of defence, and we danced round the kitchen table, slopping hot cabbage-water in all directions. We neither of us made a sound; I fended her off with the hot and sooty saucepan, and she slashed at me with an unpleasantly large carving-knife.

    At a psychological moment in walked the head of the community. He took in the situation at a glance, and handled it by the tactful method of scolding us both impartially for making so much noise and telling us to get on with our work. Miss L. finished whatever she was doing with the carver, I dished up the cabbage, and the incident passed off quietly.

    After lunch Miss L. experienced the reaction from her excitement and went to her room completely prostrated with exhaustion. I was somewhat perturbed. Although used to mental cases, and therefore not as disturbed by the recent fracas as anyone else might have been, I did not relish the prospect of being the housemate of a dangerous lunatic who was under no sort of control. The head of the community, however, said there was no cause for alarm, he would soon have the case in hand. He went up to the bath room, filled a soap-dish with water from the tap, made certain passes over it, and dipping his finger in the water, proceeded to draw a five-pointed star upon the threshold of Miss L.’s room.

    And this is only the third chapter, I haven’t gotten to the good parts yet! 😀

    • SamChevre says:

      Are you familiar with John Michael Greer (blogs at Ecosophia, used to write “The Archdruid Report”?) He’s an admirer of Dion Fortune and comments about her and her work occasionally.

    • Dino says:

      “Psychic Self-Defence” is one of her better books. I also suggest her novels “Sea Priestess” and “Moon Magic”, tho you do have to get past the dated-ness (e.g. “her well-turned ankle”).

      • Deiseach says:

        Hey, as someone with chunky ankles myself I appreciate a neat pair of ankles or wrists, don’t worry about the datedness on my behalf! 😀

        (There’s an unfortunate but tellingly descriptive phrase in Ireland, beef to the heels like a Mullingar heifer, that applies to a lot of us country girls who are built low to the ground and for comfort not speed).

        I’ve read and enjoyed her Doctor Taverner stories, I tend to like those kind of “psychic detective” tales of the Edwardian era.

    • Dino says:

      Piling on with the Rosicrucians, Freemasons, occultists etc….
      I recently learned from a new biography of Aleister Crowley that he invented the V for victory during WWII. He may have been the “world’s wickedest man” but he was also very much a British imperialist. He tried to get the powers that be to let him help with propaganda during WWI but (not surprisingly) they weren’t interested. He did some freelance double-ops anyway. During WWII he thought there needed to be something to counter the Nazi’s use of the swastika as a sigil, and came up with the V idea. He knew it would be tainted if anyone connected him with the idea, and so got someone at the BBC to propagate it.

    • yodelyak says:

      Beating a random number generator with known seeds, but with 5.5m plus or minus a few hundred thousand iterations, in the middle of a speed run of Zelda? We live in a brighter timeline than I realized.

    • Controls Freak says:

      That’s super cool. Thanks for sharing!

    • Andrew Hunter says:

      That was fucking amazing.

      That said (note: not a speedrunner, have never played Wind Waker) I think that the part where they try to narrow the initial distribution based on how long speedruns take is…mostly unimportant? I’d wager that even if you started with a fully uninformative prior over ~10M positions, say, you’d do well. As the video stated your posterior on the first board would be dead flat, sure, but again after even a few hits/misses we’d be able to restrict to a few dozen positions. (And again, for the second board, we’d be start with a plenty-tight prior.)

      About the only hard part here is your heatmap calculator needing to rapidly average over a much larger set of boards, but I claim that this is a tractable calculation.

      • eyeballfrog says:

        Keep in mind that 10M ~ 2^23 and you only get 24 shots. Since misses give less than 1 bit of information, and you still need enough shots left over after you’ve determined your board to complete the game, you won’t have enough information to narrow it down unless you luck into early hits. The nonuniform prior from RNG tracking is needed to provide this missing information.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      Wow, I think about this minigame periodically.

      My general strategy was to hit it with diagonal lines to find the squid and hope to get lucky.

      People have done amazing things to reverse-engineer the Pokemon RNGs such that they could figure out, within a few frames (24 per second) exactly when to do something to pop a shiny. Some later games had very tuneable RNGs and you could force lots of specific Pokemon stats.

      • Loriot says:

        At least in Gen 1, I’ve heard that it’s possible to manipulate the RNG just by walking with certain timings so that you can e.g. hit a wild Clefairy on your first step into Mt. Moon.

        I assumed the later gens were much less manipulable in such a manner.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          There was a peak as games had more individual minigames / events, or bonuses with their own separately manipulatable RNG, or gave more opportunity to determine the RNG state. A strong desktop could brute-force where you were faster than the game could generate.

          I suspect Game Freak got sick of people “hacking” up near-perfect shiny Pokemon and went with some kind of cryptographically secure PRNG. It would be easy enough to drop in.

  26. Lambert says:

    Crew Dragon demo 2: the first crewed launch from American soil since the shuttle programme ended is currently at T-50 minutes.

    Weather currently green, but may change.

    • Eric T says:

      My friend and I were going to drive to florida for the launch but backed out because the chance of launch was only 50%. Kicking myself now.

    • CatCube says:

      I’ve not watched any SpaceX launches live before now. Have they always had this high-density journalism-style non-stop nattering? These people just cannot shut the fuck up, and a solid majority of what they’re saying isn’t needed at all. There’s some things where they have a commentator telling me details I don’t know regarding the equipment, and that’s alright, but even there a lot of that talks over actual communication with the capsule. But whoever this is that they have as their anchor–and I’m not kidding with that, if you told me she was slurped up from The View or something, it wouldn’t surprise me at all–keeps talking about how her heart is pounding, etc. I’m not tuning in to hear about the emotional state of the commentators.

      Maybe it’s just because they don’t show a bunch of it in highlight videos for watching later, since those focus on the last few minutes, and this will all go away as they get close to launch.

      ETA: And whenever they cut to somebody like their commentator at Houston, they stop overlaying the countdown. Holy hell, do any of you understand that I’m just watching you talk at a camera as something to do while I wait for that clock to tick down?! And at that, there’s no reason whatsover to cut away from LC-39. I can hear your voice just fine, and don’t care about your face.

      ETA further: OK, yeah, it apparently *is* just something they do up until about 10 minutes prior to launch. This is much better, though the guy still needs to avoid talking over actual communications. At least most of the explanations are also much more focused about what they’re doing and why.

      • Deiseach says:

        I noticed one of the reporters/commenters on one news station was named “Miles O’Brien”.

        They must have done that on purpose 🙂

  27. anonymousskimmer says:

    Thanks viVI_IViv for the comment, untitled was a great read (I think I read it before, but it has been a while).

    One thought on Scott Aaronson’s post #171, though.

    I might react icily to the claim—for which I’ve seen not a shred of statistical evidence—that women are being kept out of science by the privileged, entitled culture of shy male nerds, which is worse than the culture of male doctors or male filmmakers or the males of any other profession.

    I agree that people other than “shy male nerds” in the sciences are likely a far larger part of the problem, if the female representation in certain disciplines is indeed a problem caused by the actions or culture of some males. That said, if it is sensitive “shy male nerds” such as Scott Aaronson who are most drawn to these sciences, then wouldn’t it also be sensitive “shy female nerds” who are also drawn disproportionately to those sciences, and wouldn’t those “shy female nerds” have just as many overt sensitivity issues as the “shy male nerds”?

    It’s possible those “shy female nerds” who avoid these sciences with a ten-foot pole avoid the disciplines where male doctors and male filmmakers congregate like the plague. And this avoidance probably isn’t the fault of those “shy male nerds”, but it would still be a hypersensitivity every bit as acute as that of the “shy male nerds”. A hypersensitivity that would be reinforced every time you get a James Damore who blames the representation on the inherent biology (parallel to “entitlement”) of “shy female nerds”, and would be especially reinforced when the not-so-shy non-nerds make television shows or movies about people who externally look like “shy male nerds” behaving sophomorically (from The Nutty Professor to SNL to the Big Bang Theory), which have audiences who claim to be “shy male nerds” who claim to enjoy the show.

    Just as “shy male nerds” are ill-served by sexual-harassment training meant to tackle rape-culture, aren’t these “shy female nerds” ill-served by discussions attributing representation and culture to inherent biology (or even formative experiences)?

    I know someone must have made an observation like mine somewhere when Scott Aaronson’s comment came out, can anyone point me to the resulting discussion?

    • viVI_IViv says:

      A hypersensitivity that would be reinforced every time you get a James Damore who blames the representation on the inherent biology (parallel to “entitlement”) of “shy female nerds”,

      James Damore wrote his memo explicitely as a response to a request for feedback for his employer’s diversity program.
      Alessandro Strumia gave his talk that got him banned from CERN at a workshop on gender in physics.

      See, if you don’t want people to keep talking about inconvenient facts that might upset the feelings of some people, then maybe don’t support discriminatory policies based on falsehoods that these facts refute.

      and would be especially reinforced when the not-so-shy non-nerds make television shows or movies about people who externally look like “shy male nerds” behaving sophomorically (from The Nutty Professor to SNL to the Big Bang Theory), which have audiences who claim to be “shy male nerds” who claim to enjoy the show.

      AFAIK, most “shy male nerds” think these shows are the nerd equivalent of blackface. They laugh at you, not laugh with you.

      • anonymousskimmer says:

        James Damore wrote his memo explicitely as a response to a request for feedback for his employer’s diversity program.

        How does that make the lumping of “shy female nerds” into a general “woman” category any better?

        AFAIK, most “shy male nerds” think these shows are the nerd equivalent of blackface. They laugh at you, not laugh with you.

        Oh, I know and agree. It’s a sad fact that not all “nerds” are “shy nerds”.

        But then you get Robert Frost’s Quora answer (unfortunately the most [I believe] viewed answer for “What do nerds think of The Big Bang Theory?”): https://www.quora.com/What-do-nerds-think-of-The-Big-Bang-Theory?share=1

        The Big Bang Theory is about the subset of people that are both Geeks and Nerds. While the show has fans from across the spectrum, it has been my observation that the [Geek+Nerd] subset gets the show and loves it and individuals that are only [Geek] or only [Nerd] are more likely to object to the show.

        For me – it is the best sitcom since Seinfeld. I laugh out loud during every episode.

        Whereas Mira Kim’s less viewed answer is far, far better in all respects.

        • Matt M says:

          Honestly I feel like the Big Bang Theory gets a lot of undeserved hate and criticism. Yes it does occasionally make some cheap low-effort jabs at nerds and nerd culture.

          But the overall message of the show is that nerds are good people who deserve not just your respect and friendship, but the romantic love of relatively normal people as well.

          By the end of the show, three of the four guys are married, and none of their wives are nerds (although Amy is a bit weird, in her own way). And other than Howard having his occasional moments, none of them are really weird/creepy guys that hit on women too much or bully they out of the sciences.

          The main takeaway is always “These are people, just like you, and you have far more in common with them than you might have differences.”

          • viVI_IViv says:

            I’m not sure about that.

            Jonathan McIntosh got much better from his time with Anita, though he still had to include a snipe at GG.

            But yes, he makes sense. One of the recurring comedic themes of Big Bang Theory is that male nerds really are as creepy and misogynist as the worst radfem stereotypes of men, in part because they are sexually frustrated and in part because they just lack the social intelligence to understand that such behaviors are inappropriate, but it’s all played for laughs because they are too weak and effeminate to pose any real threat to women.

            This plays directly into the hostile stereotype of the Nice Guy™ that Scott talks about in Radicalizing the Romanceless and is also at the heart of Aaronson’s comment #171 and the reaction it got from the Marcottes of the world: that awkward guy who is sad that he never gets the girl might look nice, but in reality his mind is as dirty as Howard’s or Raj’s, or as casually misogynistic as Sheldon’s, so it’s fine to belittle and even bully him.

          • Lord Nelson says:

            I’m happy to see someone else defending Big Bang Theory. I’ve always enjoyed it. The characters may be over-exaggerated versions of real life nerds, but exaggeration is to be expected in any sitcom. The main cast and their shenanigans remind me of my own nerdy friend group in college. Good times, good times.

            It’s also nice to see socially awkward nerds portrayed as the protagonists for once. The closest thing I saw to that, growing up with 90s TV shows, was the socially awkward nerd (usually an outcast) who was sometimes permitted to join the main group, but only if they dialed down the nerdiness.

            And then there’s Sheldon, who is coded as on the autism spectrum. Using him as an example can be useful when trying to explain autistic peoples’ experiences and thought patterns to NT people.

          • AG says:

            I feel like any sort of creepy actions on the part of the BBT characters isn’t attributed to their nerddom, though. Their schemes aren’t any different from the kinds of schemes you got from swaths of teen movies, even those that weren’t overtly sex comedies. The implication, then, is not that nerds are creepy because they’re nerds, they’re creepy because they’re developmentally stunted, stuck in perpetual adolescent horniness. There are other comedies with similarly stunted characters who are not nerds. In fact, lady-led comedy films have largely picked up the “do dubious schemes to perv on male object of affection” torch.

          • John Schilling says:

            The implication, then, is not that nerds are creepy because they’re nerds, they’re creepy because they’re developmentally stunted, stuck in perpetual adolescent horniness.

            I’m not seeing the distinction you are trying to make here. Why are they “stuck in perpetual adolescent horniness”? If your story shows a bunch of nerds as being socially immature creepy horny adolescents and a bunch of non-nerds as having age-appropriate social development, it kind of seems to me that you are saying that nerds are inherently creepy. It doesn’t really help that you append “because they are socially immature horny adolescents” as your explanation.

            It also doesn’t really help to make the most extra-nerdy character effectively a socially immature preadolescent who hasn’t developed a sex drive yet, or a theory of mind for anything resembling a neurotypical mind.

          • AG says:

            The distinction I’m making is that the nerdiness is coincidental. The primary comedy here is “people do stupid shit because they’re horny,” and that’s something that occurs across all sorts of media. The same BBT scripts can be easily rejiggered to another sitcom with the same creepy schemes to be executed by non-nerd characters.

            Socially immature horny like-adolescents is a common character type.

          • John Schilling says:

            The same BBT scripts can be easily rejiggered to another sitcom with the same creepy schemes to be executed by non-nerd characters.

            As you correctly observed in your earlier post, in other media that is mostly associated with adolescent non-nerd characters.

            And yes, it could be done with non-nerdy adult characters. Take the most racist comedy imaginable, the one where all the black characters are stupid/impulsive/horny/whatever and the comedy is about how everyone else has to deal with these idiots. Or the most sexist comedy imaginable where every female character is a dumb blonde stereotype, etc. Either of those could be done with stupid white male characters, so it’s OK if you do it with just the black people or just the women in your version being the stupid ones?

            The distinction I’m making is that the nerdiness is coincidental.

            BBT has a mix of nerdy and non-nerdy characters; that’s a big part of its appeal. Do you really believe it is a coincidence that the socially-inept “creepy” horniness normally associated with teen sex comedies, is so precisely and uniquely associated with the nerdy characters? If you rank the characters by A: nerdiness, B: social retardedness, or C: creepiness, it’s basically the same ranking. That’s not coincidence.

          • AG says:

            @John Schilling:
            I concede your points. Argument withdrawn.

        • viVI_IViv says:

          How does that make the lumping of “shy female nerds” into a general “woman” category any better?

          Did Damore write about “shy female nerds”? Do diversity programs consider “shy female nerds” as a separate protected group? No.

    • anonymousskimmer says:

      In comment #92 Scott Aaronson goes on to state:

      MIT’s main concern is that it no longer wants any of this to happen under its auspices, given Lewin’s past use of the learning communities that form around his lectures to find targets.

      Personally, I think it would’ve been fine for OCW to continue to host the lectures, after the world had been duly warned about Lewin’s behavior.

      This wouldn’t stop Lewin from using the OCW learning communities to find targets and harass them, it would merely make it more difficult and greatly increase the likelihood of nipping his harassment fairly early on (assuming he refrains from using a pseudonym). But he could still find targets, and find their contact info to harass them.

      So we’ve got a minor form of the Omelas scenario, with Scott Aaronson stating that he would not be one of those who walk away from Omelas. (Hmm: If a child is to be tortured, is it not best that the maximum number of people benefit?)

      (Note that I agree in general with a lot of what Scott Aaronson wrote in post #171. These are what I consider the important nitpick critiques.)

      Edit: Given comment #95, this is a somewhat unfair attack on Scott Aaronson. But given other comments about the community (which can exist independent of OCW), I’ll leave it.

      My understanding is that OCW doesn’t have discussion boards, but that EdX does, and that those (along with other online discussion groups) were the problem.

    • Creutzer says:

      if it is sensitive “shy male nerds” such as Scott Aaronson who are most drawn to these sciences, then wouldn’t it also be sensitive “shy female nerds” who are also drawn disproportionately to those sciences, and wouldn’t those “shy female nerds” have just as many overt sensitivity issues as the “shy male nerds”?

      I’m not sure I understand you quite right, but it’s not clear to me that you can just assume that female versions of the “shy male nerd”, with the same kind of shyness and the same sensitivity, even exist in appreciable numbers – and do the extent that they do exist, how do you know that a good percentage of the very much non-zero number of women in science aren’t them?

    • No One In Particular says:

      I might react icily to the claim—for which I’ve seen not a shred of statistical evidence—that women are being kept out of science by the privileged, entitled culture of shy male nerds, which is worse than the culture of male doctors or male filmmakers or the males of any other profession.

      Presumably, he meant “I might react icily to the claim—for which I’ve seen not a shred of statistical evidence—that women are being kept out of science by the privileged, entitled culture of shy male nerds that is worse than the culture of male doctors or male filmmakers or the males of any other profession.”

      A hypersensitivity that would be reinforced every time you get a James Damore who blames the representation on the inherent biology (parallel to “entitlement”) of “shy female nerds”

      That is a wildly inaccurate characterization of Damore. He said there was a slight difference in the means of some metrics over the entire population (not among “shy female nerds”), and that this may be one factor. Also, “attributes” would be a much less emotionally charged term than “blames”.

  28. roflc0ptic says:

    I was served a subpoena that included a request for “… any documents evidencing a financial agreement between you and so and so”. I am a non-party to the litigation – a divorce proceeding.

    I have a document which is responsive. It is a google doc spreadsheet. I am the “owner” of this spreadsheet.

    The issue I’m running into is, the person who issued the subpoena modified the spreadsheet after litigation began to support a fraudulent position. They are essentially using this subpoena to get me to submit falsified evidence to support their fraud.

    My intent is to object to the subpoena in such a way as to maximally harm them in the eyes of the court. I’m happy to provide the documents, but his behavior has been consistently atrocious and he needs to be repeatedly hit with a stick, so to speak. I have chat records where they admit to systematically lying about financial issues, and will include those.

    I feel like using a subpoena like this has to be illegal, over and above the fraud and falsifying evidence, but the only term I’ve found, “abuse of process”, doesn’t quite cover it.

    I’m in Florida, so the basis for objecting to a subpoena is whether or not it’s “reasonable”.

    Anybody have any suggestions for relevant legal sounding words?

    • Mycale says:

      Do you have the ability to pull up prior versions of the spreadsheet and provide those as well? If so, you could include those in any documents you produce.

      You’re also free to talk to the attorney for the opposing party (not the bad actor who subpoenaed you, but the person you think they’re trying to harm through this conduct) and explain your view on the situation. Realistically, I expect the attorney for the other party in that case would be happy to work with you to maximize the impact of your document production. That attorney is also almost certain to have a better sense of the strategic actions that would increase the chance of consequences for the bad conduct of the party who subpoenaed you.

    • Lambert says:

      file > version history > see version history

      Make sure the documents you send in include the entire version history and metadata relating to whom made the edits. IANAL. go find a lawyer.

    • James Miller says:

      Please talk to a lawyer before doing anything other than directly complying with the subpoena. You don’t want to get sued because even if the suit is groundless it could still be expensive in terms of time and money for you to handle it.

    • Deiseach says:

      My intent is to object to the subpoena in such a way as to maximally harm them in the eyes of the court.

      If you haven’t already done so, lawyer up immediately and get professional advice before you even blink, much less decide to play silly buggers with a court case, because you could get yourself into ten tons of deep shit without even knowing.

      You may think you are providing the rope to let the other guy hang himself, while his lawyer rubs his hands in glee that you are now a convenient distraction from his client and have admitted you were party to the fraud.

    • CatCube says:

      You need an attorney. Do not assume you can outsmart the attorney issuing this subpoena without expert advice, and trying to be “cute” in what you send will either a) not work or b) run a severe risk of running afoul of some bizarre rule you didn’t know that could be destructive to: i) the party you like ii) your pocketbook, or iii) your freedom

      If you can afford it, front the money for a quick consult with your own attorney. If you absolutely cannot afford your own, I suppose you could try contacting the attorney opposing the one who sent you, but be advised: they are not your attorney, and their job is to get the best outcome for their client, and if that makes your life worse or costs you money, oh, well.

    • anonymousskimmer says:

      Everyone telling roflc0ptic to pay money to get an attorney: Given the facts of the matter, is there anything wrong with contacting the actual JUDGE about the matter?

      • roflc0ptic says:

        Yeah, I’m going to investigate this option. I am also going to consult with a lawyer.

        The wife in the divorce – who is my girlfriend – is currently representing herself pro-se. She has been consulting with a lawyer, who she has now decided to retain.

        I do have access to the edit history – that’s how I know definitively that this guy edited it.

        The more I think about it, the more it looks like this subpoena is ordering me to do something illegal: knowingly submit falsified evidence to the court. If I submit the doctored information without some kind of CYA maneuver, this would be identical to someone acting in bad faith trying to perpetrate fraud.

        Not currently employed, but probably just need to bite the bullet and pay to figure out how to protect myself here.

        Update: talked to a lawyer friend. They said hire a lawyer. I’m hiring a lawyer. They also said “as a rule, you can never contact the judge. that is true here.”

        • Deiseach says:

          The wife in the divorce – who is my girlfriend

          Then your lawyer friend definitely gave you good advice, because you are not a neutral third party in all this, you are stuck in the mire with them.

          Get a lawyer fast and don’t even breathe without them directly telling you to do so. Do not talk to anybody else involved in this mess, especially not judges or lawyers for any other parties, and sure as hell do not send any documents to anybody, good bad or indifferent.

        • CatCube says:

          OK, it’s great to see that you’ve hired a lawyer, but just as a point of “how to ask questions”: you reeeeeally buried the lede by leaving out that bit about this being your girlfriend’s husband subpoenaing you. If you had stated upfront, “Oh, BTW, I’m fucking one of the parties in this dispute,” my post would have just been, “LAWYER. LAWYER. LAWYER. LAWYER. LAWYER. LAWYER.”

          I’m sure your attorney told you this, but just in case: don’t post about this here (or anywhere else on the internet) anymore. It will only hurt you, and can’t possibly help, now that you have counsel.

          Honestly, it’s more likely that the husband told his lawyer that he had this super-great evidence that his wife is hiding money, and made all these edits without his lawyer’s knowledge. You can find plenty of stories of attorneys waylaid by clients lying to them or mangling evidence (before Popehat lost his mind, he was a great read for stuff like this–still is, if you can wade through the “lost his mind” tweets), and it’s likely that the ex-husband’s attorney is going to be super mad at his client.

          However, it’s not always obvious how or under what circumstances you’re allowed to bring in particular evidence for or against this, so the husband’s lawyer may have been able to hide the evidence you had from the court with superior knowledge of process. That’s why you need your own professional guidance.

          Edit: I see that I misread you, in that you’re going to get an attorney, not that you already have one. In that case, he’s going to tell you to stop posting here. Take his advice in advance.

    • No One In Particular says:

      If the person who submitted the subpoena is able to access the document, why are they submitting a subpoena?

  29. proyas says:

    If the U.S. Civil War had started earlier or later than it did, how would the balance of power (and hence, likelihood of victory/defeat) have been different between the Union and Confederacy?

    For example, consider that the Union’s more extensive railroad network gave it economic and military advantages during the Civil War. However, had the War occurred in the 1830s, this advantage would have been much smaller since both sides has far fewer railroads.
    https://youtu.be/pc1zkF_ff50

    What window of time would have given the Confederates the highest odds of winning?

    • broblawsky says:

      The technology available in the 1830s is different enough that I don’t think the war looks anything like it did; there are no machine guns and substantially worse artillery.

      • RMECola says:

        I don’t believe machines played a critical role in any civil war battle. The Gattling Gun was still relatively recent and in either case was never a game changer. Probably the biggest military innovation I can think of that would have mattered would be the minie-ball and mass produced rifling, which greatly extended the effective range of muskets and their propensity to shatter limbs and cause amputations. But had the war started earlier, I’d still think you’d see generally the same tactics used, but perhaps to less deadly effect.

        • Lambert says:

          IIRC, there was a definite change between Napoleonic musketry and ACW rifles.

          1815 offensive tactics against 1860s minie balls would have been suicide.

          • RMECola says:

            I sort of thought that’s why some of the civil war battles were so deadly. Commanders hadn’t adapted to the new technology and were using older tactics with far deadlier results. But i would be interested to know what doctrinally changed in the US between 1815 and 1860.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            IIRC, there was a definite change between Napoleonic musketry and ACW rifles.

            But not in the ACW itself, because neither side had proper marksmanship training for the majority of their soldier, meaning that effective engagement ranges weren’t much longer than those in the Napoleonic Wars (and were much shorter than in contemporary European wars, where an average infantry regiment might open fire at between 600-800 yards as opposed to the 100-200 common in the ACW).

          • cassander says:

            @The original Mr. X s

            Bad marksmen with rifles are presumably still more accurate and lethal than bad marksmen with smoothbores.

        • cassander says:

          Railroads made a big difference. There were also substantial numbers of repeating rifles issued to union cavalry. Plus, the societal wealth that made it possible for the north to raise a 2 million man army.

    • SamChevre says:

      Basically, the earlier the better from the perspective of the South–both because the North is growing faster and industrializing, but (more importantly) the British hostility to slavery grows over time. The British Navy keeping Southern ports open would probably have made it possible for them to win even in 1860. (ETA) And anti-slavery sentiment was a very significant reason for Britain effectively siding with the North when their financial interests would have had them side with the South.

      • John Schilling says:

        Also, earlier means the Egyptian cotton industry is smaller, and the British cannot so easily divorce their textile industry (significant fraction of British GDP in that era) from Southern cotton.

        But too early would mean Britain is still smarting from their defeat insufficiently glorious victory in the War of 1812, looking for a bit of payback that might not be confined north of the Mason-Dixon line if e.g. New Orleans looks like easy pickings.

        Maybe split the difference and go with 1838? That also gives the Confederacy the Republic of Texas as a possible independent ally, the Union doesn’t get California etc, and Mexico is too busy fighting the French to cause serious trouble.

      • baconbits9 says:

        To early and you don’t have the cotton price boom which really got underway ~1840 without which its hard to finance the army though.

    • ottomanflush says:

      I would think the earlier the better. The north’s economic base was industrial whereas the south’s was agricultural. The further back you go the less industrialization there is and the more power that agricultural base represents. The north also grows in population much more than the south does in the first century of the United States. E.g. see here. Virginia was the biggest state in 1790, but only the 7th largest in 1860. Virginia’s population doubles in that time period, while New York’s increases by more than 10x. So I think the South’s best bet is to leave as soon after the Revolution as possible, but not so soon that they get squashed by the Brits.

      • bullseye says:

        Another advantage was that the North had the Midwest. The Union army was better fed, despite being larger, because they had more land devoted to food crops. It wasn’t industry vs. agriculture; it was industry AND agriculture vs. agriculture that becomes useless when you can’t export. So seceding before the Midwest was settled would have been helpful to the Southern cause.

        Come to think of it, the easiest time to secede would probably have been before the 1789 Constitution strengthened the federal government.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          Maybe split the difference and go with 1838?

          Come to think of it, the easiest time to secede would probably have been before the 1789 Constitution strengthened the federal government.

          I feel like we’re approaching a reductio where someone suggests the Natives get a crystal ball and invent the South before the Spanish and English governments show up.

  30. ana53294 says:

    What will happen if all 3 million Hong Kongers who now qualify move to the UK?

    How long would it take to build enough housing for them? For them to get jobs? What is the timescale at which having 3 million people move into a country with a population of 68 million is realistic?

    I say you’d need at least 10 years if Hong Kongers don’t want their material circumstances to be massively affected. Sure, since they’re used to live in shoeboxes, they’ll do with smaller housing, but I’m pretty sure some of the housing that is legal in Hong Kong would be legal in the UK. Minimum sizes, all that.

    And the issue is, Hong Kongers, being urbanites, will probably prefer the big cities, which have even more issues with building new housing.

    • baconbits9 says:

      I don’t think it would take 10 years, unless all 3 million are trying to live specifically in London in which case it would be roughly N+3 years where N is the number of years it takes to improve the approval process for new units.

      As an intermediate stage there are probably a few hundred thousand empty hotel rooms in the UK right now that could be used as temporary lodging, and relocating a massive number of Hong Kongers could save the hospitality industry simultaneously.

      • Lambert says:

        Are you assuming the UK will be able to fix its housing regulation within 7 years?
        that’s optimistic.

        It might be instructive to look at parallels with the expulsion of the Ugandan Indians. A lot of them ended up in places like Coventry and Leicsester. From what I hear, there was a definite class divide in where they were settled.

        • baconbits9 says:

          I am saying if almost all the migrants from Hong Kong want to live in London then being able to build enough housing for them without major reforms will be a very long process and will take ~ 3 years after major reforms to satiate that level of demand. If they spread out to a much greater extent then it would be less than 10 years, probably 4-5 without major reforms.

      • No One In Particular says:

        Plus, higher demand will push out residents: current residents will be motivated to leave, and people who otherwise would have moved there will not.

    • Pandemic Shmandemic says:

      China won’t let it happen simply by restricting emigration, and the UK won’t fight it and use the special status HKers have that is distinct from ordinary UK citizenship to save face as having basically capitulated the rights of its citizens.

    • Tarpitz says:

      Where are you getting 3 million from? My impression is that what has been discussed so far (and may well happen, but is far from confirmed) is offering citizenship or at least residence rights to 300,000 holders of British National (Overseas) passports, not to Hong Kong citizens more generally, and one assumes that even if this offer is made not everyone entitled will take it up.

      Personally I’m in favour of a much broader offer to Hong Kongers in general along the lines you appear to be suggesting, but as far as I can tell such a thing is not within the current Overton window in Britain, much less a fait accompli.

      • 10240 says:

        Apparently the offer is for people eligible for British National (Overseas) passports, not only for current passport holders; the rest is mostly people who had the passport before but didn’t renew it.

    • Matt M says:

      *vote for Brexit because you want less immigration*

      *first thing independent UK does is import the entire population of hong kong*

      For the working class Brit, their political system might be about as disappointing and underachieving as their international soccer team 🙂

      • baconbits9 says:

        Seeing as the average HK resident earns somewhere between 15 and 30% more than the average UK citizen I don’t think it will carry those political complications.

        • Lambert says:

          IDK i’ve heard (self proclaimed) racists up South Yorkshire way complaining about Asians ‘getting all the good jobs’.

        • RalMirrorAd says:

          Anti-immigration sentiment can take one of two flavors. The immigrants can constitute a visible underclass or a a visible elite.

          Also any Policies aimed at increasing non-native-british representation in the economy might illicit even [comparatively] more anger if the groups who benefit from them predominantly are ones that would have outcompeted the native british in the first place.

          • baconbits9 says:

            HK migrants are more likely to form an invisible elite rather than a visible one.

            Significant immigration from HK would likely help to alleviate three major issues the UK is having.

            1. Threats of lower property prices
            2. Lower tax revenues
            3. A struggling/dying hospitality industry

            Australia managed to avoid a technical recession in 2008 by admitting a large number of wealthy immigrants, overall this could be a massive and obvious enough boom that the number of long term complainers would be low.

          • RalMirrorAd says:

            @Baconbits

            Lower property prices? If prices are falling in certain areas of the country it’s likely because there’s basically no ‘economy’ and hence no reason to live there. If large numbers of people come to the UK, my default assumption is they will take the path of least resistance and move where the jobs are, i.e. the dense metros, which is where people are likely already competing for living space.

            I can’t disagree about tax revenues and I’m unclear about what #3 refers to.

          • Lambert says:

            Maybe we should set up work visas that are not valid within 50 miles of London.

          • RalMirrorAd says:

            @Lambert:

            Well it’s about where you live, not where you work.

            Now consider the optics of telling a large number of Chinese, who are arguably refugees in a certain sense, that they are not permitted to live in a certain area.

          • Loriot says:

            A lot of countries already have programs which make it easier to get visas/citizenship/whatever if you promise to live in and/or invest in impoverished areas.

      • Anteros says:

        Sounds like you’re more informed about our culture than we are about yours..

      • Tarpitz says:

        While there certainly is a constituency for opposition to immigration tout court, it is much, much smaller than the constituency for Brexit (and indeed the constituency for more selective immigration controls). Even within the group who have strongly objected to immigration policy in recent decades, most care a lot about who exactly is immigrating. I think Hong Kong residents fleeing Chinese oppression will be viewed a lot more positively on multiple axes than the median immigrant.

      • zzzzort says:

        I was reliably informed by any number of people that brexit was about sovereignty, and had nothing to do with anti immigrant sentiment.

      • Watchman says:

        You know the vote to leave was about sovereignty, which includes control of immigration, not immigration alone? Despite repeated attempts by the majority of the media to characterise people who voted to leave as anti-immigration (or old, or uneducated, or whatever), which is generally an attempt by people who wanted to remain to characterise the other side’s voters, ultimately the leave vote was such a broad coalition of everyone from outright racists to liberal believers in free movement from anywhere on the globe that you can’t take the referendum as a guide to attitudes about anything than the EU. Unless you want to believe the remain campaign were all a metropolitan elite determined to do away with national identity…

        I say this as a pro-immigration leave voter, who has met more fellow leave voters that agree with this position than are opposed to it, and who would probably on most issues line up alongside the bulk of remain supporters.

    • In the years just before and after WWI, the U.S. was accepting about a million immigrants a year into a population of about a hundred million. What you are describing is equivalent to about five years of that immigration rate.

      • ana53294 says:

        The US was much better at building stuff then than modern UK. The UK was probably also better at building stuff.

        Besides, Hong Kongers, despite being used to living in shoeboxes, aren’t going to live in shantytowns…

        I’m not sure the modern US would be able to settle three million immigrants a year.

  31. johan_larson says:

    The UK has floated the idea of a D10 alliance of democratic countries:

    The United Kingdom is pursuing an alliance of ten democracies in order to create an alternative pool of 5G equipment and technologies to avoid reliance on China and especially its telecom giant Huawei, reported UK daily The Times.

    Dubbed as the D10 alliance, it would include India, Australia, and South Korea, in addition to G7 countries, France, Canada, Germany, Japan, Italy, the US, and the UK.

    • Thomas Jorgensen says:

      Given what the UK just did with its EU membership.. “Ha.” Also. “No”.

      • Watchman says:

        Erm, you are aware that the issue there was a drive for political union was never popular in the UK? Do of course the UK blocked things: its government represented it’s people who were sceptical of the EU.

        The comparator here might better be NATO, where the UK”s role has been much more positive. An alliance with defined scope and minimal mission creep is generally either to accept than one that however you look at it is taking increasing control over national affairs.

        • DeWitt says:

          The question isn’t whether or not the UK wants this to be a thing; obviously the government does, because otherwise they wouldn’t float the idea. The question is whether or not all the other countries do, or whether they’ll do the sensible thing and tell the Brits to pound sand.

    • cassander says:

      I’d rather they push a CANZUK union.

  32. eloise says:

    It will be interesting to see if there’s a spike in covid hospitalizations a few weeks after the riots. I’ve been wondering if being masked and outdoors is sufficient to prevent most transmission, as that would allow a lot of things to be back to normalish in nice weather, and this a great test of that because people are otherwise doing high-risk behaviors like yelling and crowding together in large gatherings. (In most photos I’ve seen most people are still wearing masks, and I’m aware of organizers specifically asking people to be masked, so I think mask compliance here is decent.)

    • Watchman says:

      Isn’t rioting traditionally an occupation undertaken whilst wearing a mask anyway?

      In all honesty I think the numbers involved are too small to have a detectable impact. If loads of people go out on non-riot activities and observe proper distancing 98% of the time, that’s probably still far more close contact than the small population of rioters can provide.

  33. baconbits9 says:

    Re:Protests, Riots and the 3 day moratorium.

    How are we going to approach discussions of the current situation as protests and riots have occurred across several cities now and don’t appear to be slowing. Reports of violence and deaths are coming out (reports out of Oakland are that two federal officers were shot last night with one dying). It seems difficult or impossible to discuss the events as they happen without referencing the worst outcomes and it is also unlikely that we are going to wait for 3 days after the situation de-escalates.

  34. Mark V Anderson says:

    I read this great fluff piece about the Netherlands prime minister in the New York Times, and now I want to know about this guy. he sounded great, but of course that’s just the impression the writer wanted to give. I’d love to hear from all the Dutch people we’ve had in SSC recently tell me all the rotten stuff about him. Or at least the truth.

    You probably can’t get to the article because the New York Times paywalls it. Sorry about that, but I just wanted to explain where I got this from. I read this on hard copy.

    And especially fun to read this because they included two Dutch phrases in the article! The Dutch really are into this. And I don’t think either have been on Aajpe’s extensive posts. I may have to go back to hard copy to find them.

    • 10240 says:

      You probably can’t get to the article because the New York Times paywalls it.

      It doesn’t if you haven’t read more than some number of articles this month. If it does, you can read it by disabling Javascript (or, I presume, using private browsing or deleting cookies).

      • Nick says:

        Private browsing doesn’t work on the NYTimes site. Disabling javascript with uBlock Origin does, though.

        There’s a trick I’ve been using lately of putting a period after .com but that appears to have been patched.

    • 10240 says:

      nor does he worry about keeping a politically crafted image, people close to him say.

      Well yeah, or not worrying about keeping a politically crafted image is part of his politically crafted image. If there are articles like this about him in the Dutch press, it works out for him.

    • silver_swift says:

      I actually kind of like Rutte as a prime minister. Sure, the guy is pathologically boring, but I think that is a good quality in a national leader.

      I think that’s also the general consensus over here, at least inside my bubble. Most of the criticism I hear about Rutte is about him wanting us to be “Het braafste jongetje van de klas” (the most obedient boy in class) when it comes to international agreements, which I don’t really have a problem with. If anything, having a bias towards not defecting in prisoners dilemmas is a good thing.

      Edit: By the way, the way the article claims his name is pronounced is weird. It’s closer to RUT-uh than ROOT-uh. The first syllable (sort of) rhymes with gut.

      • Watchman says:

        Wouldn’t that be a reasonable approximation with a US accent? My Dutch is pretty poor (and mostly practiced with Flemings) but I think your objection relates more to received pronunciation UK English (and the normal Dutch pronunciation of English which is often ‘better’ than the actual English one). [ru:t] seems a plausible pronunciation for US

        • silver_swift says:

          Wouldn’t that be a reasonable approximation with a US accent?

          Is it? To me the vowels in gut and root sound completely different, but I am Dutch so I would have the Dutch pronunciation of English that you mentioned.

          • Loriot says:

            I’m American and gut and root sound completely different to me as well.

          • nkurz says:

            I think the confusion is that there are two distinct pronunciations of “root” in the US: one rhymes with “foot”, and the other with “boot”. Both are equally correct regional variations, and if you say the wrong one for the region you are in you will be correctly considered an outsider. I think the “rhymes with foot” pronunciation is usually considered more rural and less cultured. “Rhymes with boot” is more common and formal.

            I couldn’t find a map showing where the different variants are most common, but here’s an thread talking about “rhymes with foot” as the Western pronunciation: https://www.waywordradio.org/discussion/topics/western-pronunciation-of-root-and-roof/.

            The Wikipedia article on North-Central American English (talking about upper Midwestern speech patterns) says “The words roof and root may be variously pronounced with either /ʊ/ or /u/; that is, with the vowel of foot or boot, respectively. This is highly variable, however, and these words are pronounced both ways in other parts of the country.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North-Central_American_English)

          • Loriot says:

            I can’t recall ever hearing the “rhymes with foot” pronunciation before. I’ve never even heard of it.

          • JayT says:

            I grew up in Illinois and would use the “oo” sound from foot for both root and roof, not the “oo” sound from boot. Looking around a little bit though, I’m not seeing where that comes from, so I don’t know where I picked it up.
            As I’ve gotten older I’ve picked up the “boot” pronunciation for both, but now it just kind of switches back and forth.

      • Lambert says:

        Rutter is a family name in English.
        Rhymes with ‘nutter’. Could also, I suppose, be used to denote a deer that locks antlers with other deer in order to impress does.

  35. ltowel says:

    Well, someone at that viral pool party tested positive for coronavirus. We now have a dumb, american experiment on how much social distancing matters outdoors. Anyone want to look like an idiot in a month venture a guess about how this impacts Missouri? They’re currently at 12,700 with 100-200 cases a day.

    • 10240 says:

      viral pool party

      Pun intended?

    • CatCube says:

      We’ve got way more dumb American experiments than that. There didn’t seem to be a lot of social distancing during the riots over the last few nights.

      Very few reporters peeing their pants over that fact, either, come to think of it.

  36. ranttila1 says:

    Most nonfiction authors like making big statements about little subjects, or small statements about big subjects. I’m looking for those that make big statements about huge topics, and change your whole viewpoint on life.

    A few examples to make my point clearer: Rene Girard, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell (The Power of Myth), Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens), Nassim Taleb (The Black Swan), Robert Greene, Michel Foucault, Matt Ridley, Jared Diamond, Freidrich Nietzsche, David Graeber (Debt: A 5,000 Year History), and Julian Jaynes (The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind).

    These people have totally flipped my worldview, and I want to be amazed again. Do you have any recommendations for authors that make huge statements about grand topics?

    (Note: I posted this question on the subreddit but am hoping for some more answers here. You never know when you will hit an obscure but standout book!)

    • Bobobob says:

      David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality

      Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science (just kidding on this one, but if you email Wolfram that reading this book totally changed your world view he might deign to take note of your pitiful low-IQ existence and send you a free copy of Mathematica)

      Hasn’t Julian Jaynes been pretty much discredited? (It’s a fascinating theory, though.)

      • ranttila1 says:

        I’m not sure about Julian Jaynes. He has a whole society with his name on it (https://www.julianjaynes.org/) which claims to have evidence supporting his theory. There have also been more recent books expounding upon it. If you know of any books that are an argument against The Bicameral Mind theory, then let me know.

        • Jaskologist says:

          Bicameral Mind is not the null hypothesis. It’s an extraordinary claim bordering on fantastical. He needs some extraordinary evidence to even get his theory into play, and it doesn’t seem like he has it.

      • LesHapablap says:

        David Deutsch’s Beginning of Infinity was like this for me though parts of it were a slog. Definitely changed the way I view the world. Haven’t read Fabric of Reality.

      • James Miller says:

        I read Julian Jaynes Bicameral book and considered it silly until I learned that some people can actually see things in their mind’s eye even when they are not dreaming.

        • Dino says:

          I think seeing things in your mind’s eye is called visualization, and is pretty common. I can do it, and it’s a skill that can be developed.
          I’d like to see our host Scott take on the Jaynes book. From what I’ve read it’s not clear there is a consensus of opinion.

    • Statismagician says:

      Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto.
      Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics; yes, really.
      Paul Graham, essay corpus.

      Could you say more about what you liked from Jared Diamond? Perhaps I didn’t give him enough credit, but I thought his work was fairly pedestrian when I read it.

      • ranttila1 says:

        Diamond gave me a new way about thinking of civilizations, but I do admit that he may not be up to the level of quality as some of the other authors I mentioned.

        What is so special about Aristotle’s book? I’m skeptical!

        • Statismagician says:

          It’s a very neat resolution of the apparent contradictions between our desires for instant gratification and long-term human flourishing on the one hand and between what counts as socially and individually meritorious conduct on the other, all delivered in an eminently practicable way – it’s in the top tier of virtue-ethics texts intellectually and stylistically (Meditations and Confessions are the main competitors, for me), plus not only can you just read book, follow instructions, be better, but you will want to after reading it.

      • LesHapablap says:

        Atul Gawande’s Better was like this for me, particularly this chapter, which you can read in full here: New Yorker (the bell curve).

        It is required reading if you have any kind of input into your how your company operates.

      • Jaskologist says:

        Consolation of Philosophy, by Boethius. It does a great job of laying out the Neoplatonic answer to the Problem of Evil, and will probably get you thinking along a number of lines you wouldn’t be used to as a 21st century western materialist.

      • On the subject of Jared Diamond …

        We all face the problem of evaluating sources of information. One of the ways I do it is by finding somewhere that a source overlaps with something I know something about and judging it by that.

        Diamond published an essay on saga period Iceland in the form of a review of several books on the subject. His central factual claim, which for all I know was correct, was that Iceland looked a lot like Norway but had a much more fragile ecology, with the result that settlers, treating it like Norway, largely destroyed it for agriculture or timber.

        His theme, however, was an attack on the semi-anarchic political institutions of the Commonwealth. He doesn’t seem to notice that the two issues are unrelated. Nobody knew the relevant ecological facts, so things would have gone equally badly, assuming his account is correct, if Iceland had been under the Norwegian crown.

        On one particular issue, related to the legal/political institutions, he makes an argument without noting that one of the books he is supposed to be reviewing makes precisely the opposite claim. And he lists, among the Icelandic failures, the successful pirate raids and abductions of 1627 without, as best I remember — I’m working off memory, since I don’t have a copy of the essay ready to hand — mentioning that this was more than three centuries after the end of the Commonwealth had left Iceland under the rule of the Norwegian (and then joint Norwegian-Danish) crown.

        I concluded that what he wrote could not be trusted.

        You should, of course, discount that judgement to take account of the fact that he was arguing for a conclusion I disagreed with. If sufficiently interested I expect you can find his essay somewhere online and see if I have misrepresented it.

        I apply the same tactic in other contexts, including here. Prussian recently pointed me at a forceful and persuasive post of his having to do with the dangers of Islam, in particular Islamic immigration. I know very little about the situation of Muslim immigrants to Europe but a good deal about Islamic law and history, so I have been pressing him on things he said in his post about that in order to get some measure of how much I should rely on what he says on the subjects I don’t know much about.

    • Econymous says:

      The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz changed the way I think about a lot of things. It is admittedly not as far-reaching as your “big statements about huge topics,” but years after reading it I still find myself frequently thinking about some of its claims – it very convincingly argues that increased choice can make a person worse-off, which has massive implications for modern society and technology.

      • Matt M says:

        Agreed – it’s definitely a book that I frequently cite in my day to day life and is applicable to all sorts of topics in ways you might not normally expect.

    • SamChevre says:

      N T Wright, Simply Christian: a really great “what makes sense about the world from the perspective of Christian thinking”. Honorable mentions on the same general topic: Dorothy Sayers (especially the chapter on the two meanings of law), Joseph Ratzinger (particularly Jesus of Nazareth), C S Lewis.

      • No One In Particular says:

        Mere Christianity is a litany of logical fallacies, and is disturbingly tolerant of violent religious extremism.

    • Uribe says:

      Milan Kundera’s three non-fiction books on literature and art:

      The Art of the Novel
      Testaments Betrayed
      The Curtain

      The primary subject in each is the novel, but the subject of the novel is human existence. They could potentially change your viewpoint on life.

    • Le Maistre Chat says:

      These people have totally flipped my worldview, and I want to be amazed again. Do you have any recommendations for authors that make huge statements about grand topics?

      So, circa the early 1920s, the Western reading public commonly considered the most mind-blowing author after Einstein to be Oswald Spengler, for his two-volume history The Decline of the West. The Decline challenged the Whig model shared by liberals and Marxists in favor of what he called “the Copernican model of history” where “we” are not the center of everything. Instead of history being a series of epochs leading up to the present generation of Western Men and an imagined future better by their standards, past cultures are re-framed as having been born and organically developing their potential entirely for their own sakes according to incommensurate ideals before dying of old age. Each of these cultures (Ancient Mesopotamian, A. Egyptian, Mesoamerican, Hindu, Chinese, Hellenic, “Magian” and Western) is described as an independent unit inspired by a belief system incomprehensible to others that inspired its own politics, arts and science. Yes, science: Spengler flirts with being the first postmodernist, though he doesn’t really go as far as saying it’s not objectively true, but just truth claims like it’s only Western Man’s longing for infinite space that makes an infinite universe and the idea of developing starships interesting (and previously inspired Gothic cathedral architecture: our stuff is all conceptually connected and ignores other cultures’s stuff, which in turn is all deeply connected within a given “organism”). He shows that each of these cultures started with many polities and turned into a “universal state”, which could have an “Augustan Age” flourit but then achieved a fixed form where farmers, craftsmen, and ossified elites would never do anything new, a phase that lasts about 400 years before losing even the old-age vigor that lets it survive rebellions or steppe invaders.
      Spengler’s big claims had such a wide scope that nobody’s sure how much one should apply the Gell-Mann amnesia heuristic to him. The more popular line of criticism was to simply denounce Spengler as a fatalist who denied that we had the free will to keep progressing forever or ruin our civilization ahead of schedule.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        I feel like I didn’t elucidate this enough, so here’s a light sampling of the sort of questions The Decline of the West raises:

        Is Western culture changing so fast (circa 1922) because other cultures are just somehow less dynamic? (he says no, let me clarify when in the past their belief systems, politics, and art were in constant flux)
        Is the reason 16th century European Christians who rejected Papal authority came up with a wide array of new theologies rather than go engage with the Eastern Orthodox who agreed about that because their minds were in a Western bubble that needed to experiment with its own potential, while the EO were incomprehensibly Eastern?
        Does a Western atheist have the same worldview as, eg, an Indian atheist, or is it thoroughly shaped by the Christianity he doesn’t believe in?
        Why did our culture advance some arts, like music, so much while our artists’ big idea of how to make great statues was “just copy the Greeks”?
        Why the heck does Spengler say “Magian civilization” (monotheistic Middle Eastern) was in its hazy heroic legendary period until the Sassanids and their contemporary Roman Emperors? The Achaemenids were literate Zoroastrians! (read the Persian national epic Shahnama where Darius III and Alexander are legendary heroes and Darius I don’t real and find out)
        If different groups have different mindsets, does this have anything to do with biological race? (Spengler says something like “No: go find the set of all humans whose male children daydream about being knights. That’s a Western socially constructed experience.”)

        It would be naive to just endorse his truth claims, but they’re huge interesting ones to evaluate.

    • J.R. says:

      René Girard is the last guy to do this for me.

      Read Deceit, Desire, and the Novel if you’ve read some Cervantes/Stendhal/Flaubert/Proust/Dostoevsky. The concept of “triangular desire” was a framework that crystallized a ton of thoughts I had regarding worldly desire, virtue, restraint, and the nature of narrative itself.

      I haven’t read it, but I’ve heard Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World is his magnum opus.

      Also, Tyler Cowen calls these types of books “quake reads”. His partial list here also endorses Girard.

    • chrisminor0008 says:

      Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene. Totally flipped my perspective on evolution from being species/organism-centric to being gene-centric. It’s hard for me to even have conversations with people on evolutionary topics now if they don’t understand that book — too much inferential distance.

      • albatross11 says:

        Yeah, The Selfish Gene and also The Extended Phenotype made a lot of stuff in evolution and biology make more sense to me.

    • Brassfjord says:

      And related; what SSC post did change your world view? The one that first comes to my mind is “5-HTTLPR: A POINTED REVIEW“. It really changed my prior in trusting medical studies.

    • Deiseach says:

      Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence. Came out in 2000 and it’s a big, fun read! (At least I found it so, I honestly laughed in places at the more Puddleglum the Marshwiggle moments). I didn’t agree with everything he was saying, particularly the conclusions he was drawing, but if he had lived to revise it for our current times (he died in 2012 at the age of 104, so well done Jacques) I might be more in agreement with his general take.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        It was funny watching Barzun cover Western history from 1500-2000, starting with bold type headers for obviously correct major figures like Martin Luther and Rabelais, then as he gets closer to his own lifetime and consensus of who the most important non-politician figures were breaks down, we get Dorothy Sayers as possibly the most important person of her time.

        • Nick says:

          Well, he was a fan of detective stories!

          It seems to me that any big-history book like your Spengler or Deiseach’s Barzun qualifies—provided it was reasonably convincing, of course. Turchin or James C. Scott could be placed here, too, to take recent SSC reads.

        • RogetOfHentzau says:

          [Time to step out of the shadows, I suppose.]

          I don’t believe SSC sees much discussion of Dorothy L Sayers, so if what I’m about to write is as gauche and clumsy as “Actually, old boy, I-think-you’ll-find that CS Lewis wrote much more than Narnia,” my apologies.

          Now, obviously Sayers was no Martin Luther. But she had fingers enough in the high- and low-culture pies of the early and mid twentieth century to place her in a fairly high weight class.

          The Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries are justly famous, and I don’t believe they’ve ever been out of print.

          Early in life, Sayers worked in advertising (Miss Meteyard in Murder must Advertise is perhaps a self-portrait). You will likely know one of her creations, the Guinness Toucan.

          She would eventually move from detective stories to different media. Sayers wrote a number of plays. Her first was for the Canterbury Festival (same place Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral made its debut); this is called The Zeal of thy House and is about the architect of Canterbury Cathedral. Other plays would follow, but more famous is her work for radio.

          The Man Born to be King is a play cycle about the life of Jesus, broadcast during the Second World War. It was hugely popular and generated a certain amount of controversy (The Lord’s Day Observance Society blamed the fall of Singapore on it) for the reason that it was written in Modern English.

          Radio is a mass medium, and I believe that the cycle was broadcast in the colonies, as well as on the World Service. I’m not sure if it made it to Irish and US broadcasters, but it would not be so strange to me if it had. It was remade within Sayers’s own lifetime, and afterwards. BBC Radio 4 Extra (formerly Radio 7) broadcast repeats of it in the 21st century, though not recently.

          Apart from her religious plays, she as also something of an essayist. Some of these are collected in Unpopular Opinions (1946) or in Creed or Chaos? (1947). Theological essays include the titular ‘Creed or Chaos?’, ‘The Dogma is the Drama’ and ‘A Vote of Thanks to Cyrus’. Political essays include ‘Are Women Human?’ (which tells us why men’s braces are hideous and indecent) and ‘They tried to be Good’. Critical essays include a discussion of Aristotle on Detective fiction and why Dr Watson’s middle name is Hamish. The stand-out of her non-fiction is likely a book called The Mind of the Maker (1941), which discusses the creative process and the Trinity.

          Later in life she would produce translations of Dante’s Divine Comedy (uncompleted upon her death) and The Song of Roland for Penguin Books*. Her Dante is notably for maintaining the rhyme scheme from the Italian, hence the beginning of Canto III goes as follows:

          Through me the road to the city of desolation,
          Through me the road to sorrows diuturnal,
          Through me the road among the lost creation.

          Justice moved my great maker: God Eternal
          Wrought me: the power and the unsearchably
          High wisdom, and the primal love supernal.

          Nothing ere I was made was made to be
          Save things eterne, and I eterne abide,
          Lay down all hope, you that go in by me.

          (Bold in the original).

          Umberto Eco apparently approved.

          ***
          So, what’s all this in aid of? Well, I don’t know what Jacques Barzun says about Sayers – though I may have to read From Dawn to Decadence and find out. If you were to say to me that Dorothy L Sayers was the greatest mind of the twentieth century, I would pause (I don’t know who I’d nominate in her place).

          If you were to say to me “[Respected public intellectual] has appeared on a television programme called Great Minds of the Twentieth Century and nominated Dorothy L Sayers as her pick for Greatest Mind.” I would say “Certainly, I can see why someone would say that.”

          The National Portrait Galley has a number of pictures of Sayers, including one of her feeding porcupines.

          *These were first published in the colour-coded L-Series of Penguin Classics, which I am rather fond of:
          The First Hundred
          The Inferno
          Roland

        • RogetOfHentzau says:

          [Time to emerge from the shadows…again. My first version of this was lost.]

          I don’t believe Dorothy L Sayers has had that much discussion on SSC, so I apologise if this is as gauche and clumsy as “Well, old boy, I-think-you’ll-find that CS Lewis wrote far more than Narnia.”

          Anyway, while Sayers was clearly no Martin Luther, she had her fingers in numerous pies. I think she can be placed in a fairly advanced weight class from her writing in both high and popular culture.

          The Lord Peter Wimsey books are perhaps her best known work, and I don’t believe they’ve ever been out of print. They have been adapted for radio and television.

          Sayers worked in advertising in her early life; you are perhaps familiar with one of her creations – the Guinness Toucan. Miss Meteyard in Murder must Advertise is sometimes held to be a loose self-portrait.

          She went on to write plays; her first being The Zeal of thy House. This was written for the Canterbury Festival (same as TS Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral) and is about the architect of Canterbury Cathedral and the nature of work.

          More famous, however, may be her work for radio. She wrote a play cycle in 1941 called The Man born to be King, about the life of Jesus. This was very popular at the time of its broadcast on the BBC and controversial (it was accused of having caused the Fall of Singapore) for its use of modern language. It was repeated and remade in Sayers’s own lifetime. I believe it was broadcast in the colonies and on the World Service; I do not know if it was broadcast in Ireland or the US. BBC Radio 4 Extra (formerly Radio 7) repeated it in the 21st century – though it was a few years back.

          Sayers also wrote essays, some of which have been collected in Unpopular Opinions (1946) and Creed of Chaos? (1947). These include theological essays such as the titular (and redoubtable) ‘Creed or Chaos?’, ‘The Dogma is the Drama’ and ‘A Vote of Thanks to Cyrus’. Political essays include ‘Are Women Human?’ (1938), (Which tells us why men’s braces are hideous and indecent) and ‘They Tried to be Good’ (1943). Critical essays include a discussion of Aristotle on Detective Fiction and why Dr Watson’s middle name is Hamish.

          Her stand-out long-form non-fiction work is The Mind of the Maker (1941), which discusses the process of creation and the Holy Trinity.

          In later life, she would turn her hand to translation, translating (and commenting on) Dante’s Divine Comedy and The Song of Roland for Penguin Books*. I believe both translations are still in use.

          Her translation of Dante retains the rhyme scheme from the Italian. Hence Canto Three begins as follows:

          Through me the road to the city of desolation,
          Through me the road to sorrows diuturnal,
          Through me the road among the lost creation.

          Justice moved my great maker; God Eternal
          Wrought me: the power and the unsearchably
          High wisdom, and the primal love supernal.

          Nothing ere I was made was made to be
          Save things eterne, and I eterne abide;
          Lay down all hope, you that go in by me.

          (Bold in the original; Cf. Longfellow)

          Apparently Umberto Eco approved.

          ***
          So what is all this to say? [EDIT: I’ve not read Barzun, and don’t know what he says. I may have to.] Well, if someone were to say to me that Dorothy L Sayers was the greatest mind of the twentieth century, I should be surprised and not think it quite write.
          But if someone were to say to me that “[Respected public intellectual] has named Dorothy L Sayers as her choice on a television programme called The Greatest Minds of the Twentieth Century”, I would say “Yes, I can see why she would do so.”.

          ***
          Incidentally, The National Portrait Gallery has a number of pictures of Sayers. I’m very fond of the oil painting, but there are also a few pictures of her feeding porcupines.

          *First published in the lovely colour-coded L Series.
          No. 0-99, Inferno, Roland

          • Just a note to say that I too am an admirer of Sayers, both for the Wimsey books, of which the later ones are very good, and for The Mind of the Maker.

          • Nick says:

            I’ve been reading the Wimsey books this past year (I’m in the middle of Busman’s Honeymoon right now) and was just reading The Mind of the Maker. You’re forgetting a couple of neat anecdotes. First, she’s credited with inventing the slogan “It pays to advertise!” Second, her detective fiction was regarded at the time as the most literary of the Golden Age writers; even reviewers who trashed her books, like Edmund Wilson, said as much.

      • Nick says:

        It’s a shame we never got a second edition, since Barzun was writing up until his death.

    • Radu Floricica says:

      HPMOR should be here for general principles. For the non-fiction version, the Sequences are being re-edited as books.

    • Doctor Mist says:

      Maps of Time by David Christian. A history book that starts with the origin of the universe and actually draws useful parallels between that era and the development of civilization. It has an introduction by William McNeill.

    • AG says:

      Eh, I feel like those kind of apparently big statements either have less influence than we think, or are “broken clock right twice a day” situations, because who has actually leveraged those statements to big benefit? How many of those statements paid rent?

      True big statements about huge topics become self-evident background noise, and if I don’t already know about the people who said them, they didn’t do much with them.

      • Jaskologist says:

        I worry that OP is selecting for “insight porn,” a common enough temptation for people like us. It super-stimulates parts of your brain to trick you into thinking you’re getting insights, while frustrating the ultimate purpose.

        What works would be “insight sex” instead?

        • Radu Floricica says:

          I’ll be a bit more optimistic and say that what we have here is higher than average capability of changing one’s mind. Sure, insight porn is a problem, one I’m well aware of, but it can also be that one book can cause real, lasting progress. I have quite a few examples. Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan was momentous for me – in great part because of the context and timing, but still, the effect was real. I suspect btw that most such books have subjective effects. I found Sapiens to be good but utterly unmemorable, probably because I was already familiar with most concepts. I similarly find Jared Diamond on my personal list simply because it happened to introduce me to those concepts first, even though I think Sapiens is probably the objectively better book.

          • AG says:

            Again, I have to ask, what rent has that concept paid? What real, lasting progress have you made from reading that book?

          • Radu Floricica says:

            @AG

            Like I said here, biggest change was the realization that good books exist. That lead to a lasting change in my habits, and ultimately changed me to a degree where mere “paying rent” doesn’t even cover it.

            But that was, admittedly, my ignorant young ass making contact with the wider world. What Taleb’s book did in particular was to present a perfect first contact, given that his books are part on-topic, part autobiographical and part random thoughts. Could hardly have better proof that it’s not just that I found good book, but that I had my head buried deep in the sand.

            As for Jared Diamond, there were actually three books that set the foundations for my image of the human race and its place in the world: The Third Chimpanzee for ancient evolutionary perspective, Guns, Germs and Steel for how the relatively modern landscape came to happen, and Collapse for how we can go wrong.

            I think I’ve touched this in the previous comment, but my opinion is that it’s not just the book per se that counts, but the particular encounter between the book and the reader. Ideas are rarely new – they’re usually new to you.

          • AG says:

            You say that they changed your image of the world, but what actions did you take in this reality that you would not have in the world you did not encounter those ideas, and can you say that you are so much better off for taking those actions?

          • Radu Floricica says:

            @AG

            I keep circling the concept but.. let me put it this way. There are definitely things I have done differently, but beyond/before that: I am a different person. A very different one, because of those books.

            And, at least for me, what I do is the journey to what I am. So not just they paid rent, they directly moved my utility function upwards.

          • AG says:

            I suppose my point is a little about horseshoe theory. There are case where you can see that people have landed on opposite sides of the object level, but are not actually that different on the meta level, and for want of a nail, their places would be switched, with little change otherwise in the world. Scott’s postings on how little nurture (outside of abuse) seems to influence long term outcomes supports this.
            My sense is these concepts have largely done just lateral shuffles between people who took those statements to heart vs. the people who didn’t. Are you that confident that you moved longitudinally?

          • Radu Floricica says:

            @AG

            Well, I am here, aren’t I? That at the very least suggest I have a certain set of interests, which yes, have been shaped by whatever information I consumed.

            I think I have a version of your doubt, which I tend to express as such: this and that book was interesting, but they don’t really apply in my day to day actions – how often do you get to use the fact that you read “Wisdom of crowds”, for example? Huh. Now that I put it like that, it’s pretty much exactly your point…

            And my answer, for many years, has been that a quantitative change in what you know leads a qualitative change at some point. What we’re reading in those books, and what I’m consciously and eagerly collecting, is concepts. Which, in time, tend to gather into toolsets – and wider the toolbox, wider the range of problems you can apply them to.

            To give an example: you don’t use very often Steelmanning in office conversation. But add another 10-50 concepts, get some practice at using them, and you know Rhetoric. And that is useful pretty much everywhere.

            This is in itself a concept btw: mindware, studied by Nisbett. For what’s worth, he’s pretty sure having such a toolbox is really helping. He’s including much simpler concepts, too.

        • Lambert says:

          Selfish Gene? (in more ways than one)

    • Radu Floricica says:

      Too late to edit my comment, and have time to look through my library. This makes me realize how many unread books have piled up… I need a holiday.

      It’s pretty hard to point any one book since it seems like everything they do fits your profile, so I’m just going to name drop: Roy F. Baumeister for psychology and Herbert Simon for… uh, everything.

      Keith Stanovich – Robot’s Rebellion. Think of it of a followup to Selfish Gene. Updated and, if I remember well, better rounded.

      Shapiro and Varian – Information Rules. Economics book – best introductory text I ever found in information economy.

      On Jared Diamond – make sure you check Ian Morris’s Why the West Rules. It’s pretty much a sequel to Guns, Germs and Steel (he says as much in the first chapter, I think). The surprising thing is how well it succeeds.

    • AlexOfUrals says:

      Surprised Elephant in the Brain by Robin Hanson wasn’t mentioned yet. It’s probably the best and most worldview-changing non-fiction book I’ve ever read (not counting the Sequences because I’ve read them before it was a book).

      Also Scott reviewed Surfing Uncertainty so you’re probably aware of it, but in case you’re not it’s also great and fits your description nicely.

    • DinoNerd says:

      Having read this thread: I want my libraries back! I _don’t_ want to buy books based on whether someone I don’t know liked them, but I want to check out all of the books here I haven’t read. (Quite a few, as it happens.) Thanks for starting this thread; my “check out this book” list now has 15 more entries, some listign authors rather than specific books.

      • Evan Þ says:

        Does your local library offer ebooks? Mine does, and I’ve been making great use of them during these months.

        Sadly, I’m still waiting impatiently for a number of titles only available in hard copy.

        • DinoNerd says:

          Mine does offer ebooks, but I strongly prefer the experience of physical books.

          If I totally run out of reading matter during the lockdown, I’ll see about figuring out how to access the library’s e-books. If I’m really lucky, it’ll be possible to read them on my elderly black and white kindle. (Reading on a computer monitor or tablet is tiring, and I do more than enough of that ;-()

      • ranttila1 says:

        Hey, here’s some more recommendations. I compiled everything (authors + books) I’ve been recommended from this thread and reddit onto a goodreads list. Here is the link: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/92436923?shelf=0-a-grand-reddit-reads

      • Radu Floricica says:

        I _don’t_ want to buy books based on whether someone I don’t know liked them

        Speaking of big life changes. What Black Swan did for me at the tender age of 27 was to hit me on the head, HARD, with the idea that there are good books out there that are well worth reading. The first major decision I took after that was to never ever judge a book through its price, and only by my willingness to put in the time to read it. That was well before I could afford to do so, btw. It was also probably the best decision I ever made.

        This is a good time to say that recommendations here are pretty damn good, both fiction and non fiction. I’m currently on volume 17 of the Foreigner series.

    • Concavenator says:

      As we seem to enjoy Diamond, Morris, and Turchin, I’ll submit Marvin Harris’ Cannibals and Kings, an “ecological” interpretation of the evolution of human cultures (i.e. one that ultimately traces it to the way populations capture energy from the environment). Admittedly it’s a bit old (1977), but it scratches much the same itches as Guns, Germs, and Disease (the different availability of domestic animals in the Old and New World is a key point in both, for example).
      Harris’ energy-and-populations interpretation covers the Mesolithic and Neolithic revolutions, tribal demographics, infanticide, gender hierarchies, marriage customs, internal and external warfare, the origin of agriculture, the rise of states, human sacrifice, cannibalism, food taboos (in particular pigs in the Near East and cows in India), Axial Age religions, dynastic cycles, and the Industrial Revolution.

      I also heartily second The Selfish Gene and Maps of Time.

    • albatross11 says:

      Thomas Sowell’s book _Knowledge and Decisions_ and his _Cultures and {Migration, Race, Conquest}_ series had a big impact on my understanding of the world.

    • AlexanderRM says:

      I think it’s good to be skeptical of people who make totally revolutionary claims in a single book, but some of the biggest ones I’ve read in the past few years were “The Third Chimpanzee” and “The World Until Yesterday”, both by Jared Diamond. I was already familiar on an intellectual with the basic claims- very roughly “Humans are animals” and “Most humans throughout history have lived in societies very different from modern western societies, and we can learn a lot about ourselves by studying these societies”- and had seen a lot of rationalist blogs and the like discussing a lot of ideas in this vein, but I was still encountering new and surprising information *every couple* pages throughout both books.

      I mostly recommend them for the sheer amount of knowledge but I came away with strongly changed worldviews in certain respects, especially after The Third Chimpanzee- for example a very strong sense that many animals are a lot more human-like than we think; I also remember being struck after spending so long in descriptions of the New Guinea Highlands and other diverse areas by how relatively homogenous my area was, that I could drive dozens of miles and see chimpmunks rather than some totally novel animal. It gave me a really strong gut feeling for the value of diversity, largely imparted by the fact that he kept citing rare and obscure species doing surprising or interesting things which tell us more about life in general, and The World Until Yesterday gives a similar sense of the value of human cultural diversity.

  37. proyas says:

    I’m interested in reviewing movie or play scripts for plot holes, inconsistencies, and to improve character dialog. I’ll do it for free. Does anyone need help?

    • Aftagley says:

      So I just don’t get the motivation of your character. He wants to review something… but only movie or play scripts? Why would he limit himself to that instead of also including the obviously more popular books into his list of things he’s willing to review? It’s just not clear and it leaves the audience really confused as to what his overall deal is.

      As for the dialog, it starts out pretty good, but the ending is kind of too staccato. After the long sentence before it, the relative sharpness of “I’ll do it for free.” is a bit jarring. Maybe have him say, “Does anyone need any help? I’ll do it for free.” and keep it as one flowing idea.

      • Well... says:

        Scripts for movies and plays take about as long to read as to perform (about 1 page per minute for screenplays), so maybe the motivation is wanting to have a solid estimate of time commitment.

    • Bobobob says:

      Can you travel back in time and run an edit on Interstellar?

  38. I have been reading A Practical Guide to Evil, a web serial that someone here recommended. While it has some faults, it’s on the whole entertaining and I am currently on Chapter 56.

    I am struck, however, by the contrast between the implied cultural views and implied political views. Both homosexuality and bisexuality are entirely taken for granted — the protagonist is casually bisexual, several other major characters homosexual. Characters complain about racism towards orcs, although orcs are not race of humans but a different species, strikingly different from humans both physically and behaviorally — among other things they are cannibals — at least as different as the most rabid racist believes blacks are from whites. Pretty clearly the author and his intended audience are modern progressives.

    The political theme, however, is that villains are sometimes the good guys, that someone who does horrible things, kills thousands of innocent people, in order to get the power needed to do good things is behaving in a correct, indeed admirable, way.

    Which makes me wonder if it has occurred to any of them that the clearest recent real-world example of such a person is Augusto Pinochet, not someone progressives generally approve of. Chile was much more prosperous when he left power than when he took power, and the usual charge against him is that he got and held power by murdering a lot of innocent people.

    • Le Maistre Chat says:

      Tangential, but I really hope you’ve watched Spice and Wolf, the medieval fantasy anime about microeconomics.

      • Nick says:

        This has come up before, mostly because David was looking for short stories that illustrate economic principles for his most recent book. See e.g. here, here. It sounds like he only watched one episode. 🙁

      • Loriot says:

        In case anyone out there is thinking about watching it, it might be a good idea to skip the first episode, since it is full of nudity and not representative of the rest of the series.

      • anon-e-moose says:

        I hate to “read the books” on you, but that awful cliffhanger does get resolved in the light novels, and the remainder of the story is extremely cute. The LNs were translated to english, and it’s…clunky sometimes, be advised. I believe they can be torrented.

      • It’s supposed to be on Funimation. I just tried creating an account and got error messages both with my credit card and with PayPal. Possibly something wrong with the site.

        • Radu Floricica says:

          I happen to come from a background of not paying for media. I compensate as possible, right now by having a number of netflix-like accounts I’m mostly not watching, but I still know where to look. Plus yeah, for japanese stuff it’s usually complicated.

          As for Spice&Wolf, yeah, it’s damn cute. A bit light in content, or lighter than I’d want. Absolutely love the OST.

          • Thanks. I watched the first episode, didn’t see anything much about economics.

          • CatCube says:

            @DavidFriedman

            I just started watching based on this thread. The possible economics seems to start in the third episode, hitting it’s stride in the fourth. It seems like some currency devaluation scheme/Gresham’s Law thing is a major plot arc, but I’ve not watched beyond the fourth episode to see where it goes, or if it’s actually plausible economics vs. some superficial Hollywood nonsense.

            Edit: This is a bit of a weird observation, and it’s been a while since I read your book so maybe I’m a little off-base, but I find similarities to your own Salamander after watching the 5th episode. The center of this episode is a complicated financial transaction to get out of the kidnapping that occurred in the last episode, where I find the characters just a bit too rational and willing to deal. I was thinking while watching this go down, “The merchant could agree to this proposal, sure, but he could also just murder the protagonist, who’s sitting alone in a room surrounded by his men, and save himself the trouble.” It’s not so inexplicable as to be a plot hole–murder can cause as many problems as it solves, after all–but they haven’t given enough backstory for the merchant for the audience to know that he won’t take the easy (murdery) way out.

          • Phigment says:

            I’ve watched the show, and my recollection is that it does a lot of orbiting around economic issues, but it doesn’t really try to explain economics in any depth.

            Like, one of the main characters is a travelling merchant. A number of episodes involve him trying to cut favorable deals via arbitrage, or getting caught up in currency manipulation schemes, or trying to get his Ye Olde Travelinge Merchante Guilde to keep working with him even though he’s flagrantly travelling around the countryside with an attractive woman who he is not married to and thereby inviting public scandal.

            But if you don’t already know something about coin debasement, you’re not going to get an understanding of it by watching the show.

          • CatCube says:

            @Phigment

            I’d say that’s a good assessment. The “currency debasement” arc turned out to be a bit smaller than I thought it would, so I finished it last night.

            If after seeing the first two or maybe three episodes, you go “Ehh, I don’t care what happens to these people,” I don’t think anybody should feel obligated to stick around. I’m going to at least finish the first season, which is free, and see if there’s other Funimation shows I’d be interested in watching to make an account worthwhile, as unless there’s a sharp decrease in quality I’d like to continue.

        • AG says:

          You shouldn’t need to create an account or pay anything to watch the subtitled episodes. The website deceptively tries to make you click through to dubbed episodes, so make sure to specify original JP language in one of the menu options.
          (I’ve also used NoScript to watch episodes that should be paywalled, which also gets rid of ads. Though sometimes it causes the video player interface to lose some features.)

          But Spice and Wolf was originally a series of light novels, so you could try reading those instead of watching the show.

    • Aftagley says:

      I don’t think Pinochet fits this definition.

      To get the “did evil for good” historical perspective all of your evils need to somehow have directly contributed to the eventual goodness you brought about OR the net result needs to be so good that everyone kind of forgets about your evil. Pinochet fails this test, imo, because his benefit of better-than-average economic growth didn’t really match up against the whole mass murder and torture aspects of his reign.

      A better example, I think, would be Attaturk. No one talks about the great Fire of Smyrna because it seems like history has decided that,on the whole, revamping the vestiges of the ottoman empire into a modern state was good enough to cover up a bit a genocide.

      • Jaskologist says:

        The argument for Pinochet usually rests on what would have happened if the Communists took over the country instead.

        • qwints says:

          I feel compelled to point out that Allende was a democratically elected socialist.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            >50% of the people voting in a ruler who would turn a market economy into a command economy that produces a lot less stuff (such as food) and send dissenters to gulags doesn’t make it ethical.

          • Mark V Anderson says:

            50% of the people voting in a ruler

            Actually Allende only got 36.3%, but above everyone else. That was one of the issues against him I believe.

            But it is extremely hard to know what the counter-factuals would have been if Allende had stayed on. It’s possible that he would have ruled much like Chavez, in which case to me it is clear that Pinochet was an improvement. But maybe he would have been more like the left wing governments of France and Italy in those days, which had some bad policies, but didn’t prevent these countries from becoming strong market economies today.

          • I think you are understating the positive side. Chile didn’t just avoid catastrophe, it became one of the richest, possibly the richest, country in Latin America.

          • RalMirrorAd says:

            @DavidFriedman:

            Are you familiar with Psuedoerasmus’ post on Chile? He argues that Chile’s economic performance was ‘normal/average’ for a post-communist country.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @Mark:

            Actually Allende only got 36.3%, but above everyone else. That was one of the issues against him I believe.

            Good catch. Not getting a majority, he could only become President by the consent of Congress.
            The idea that democratic elections give a ruler so elected the authority to kill or starve citizens (or strip certain people of citizenship and then… etc.) is a conundrum in mainstream political philosophy going back to Rousseau. And there’s a blatant double standard with the Allende-Pinochet case vs. the 1933 German elections. No one but the tiny number of Neo-Nazis would say a 43.9% plurality gave the National Socialist government the authority to expropriate so much as a mark of Outgroup property or throw anyone in their gulag equivalents (concentration camps in the then-existing meaning).

          • RalMirrorAd says:

            The idea that democratic elections give a ruler so elected the authority to kill or starve citizens (or strip certain people of citizenship and then… etc.)

            I wasn’t aware Allende was guilty of such a thing. The only charges I am familiar with are poor economic performance and corruption.

          • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

            I think you are understating the positive side. Chile didn’t just avoid catastrophe, it became one of the richest, possibly the richest, country in Latin America.

            Is that actually true though? As far as I can tell, Chile went from being an approximately average Latin American country (poorer than Argentina and Uruguay) in 1973 to being an approximately average Latin American country (poorer than Argentina and Uruguay). It’s done great since 1990 though, i.e. after the military dictatorship. Doesn’t really seem like the torture camps were worth it.

            @Le Maistre Chat

            >50% of the people voting in a ruler who would turn a market economy into a command economy that produces a lot less stuff (such as food) and send dissenters to gulags doesn’t make it ethical.

            What is your basis for claiming Allende would have done that if he’d remained in power? For a contrast with your claim about things Allende *might* have done if he’d remained in power, I’ll present some quotes from Wikipedia’s page on “Human rights violations in Pinochet’s Chile” giving examples of things he *did* do:

            At Villa Grimaldi, DINA forced non-compliant prisoners to lie down on the ground. The captors ran over their legs with a large vehicle, and crushed the prisoners’ bones.

            Women (and occasionally men) reported that spiders and live rats were often implanted on their genitals.

            The Valech Commission Report describes the testimony of a man who experienced waterboarding in September 1973:
            They put cotton on both eyes, then taped them and tightened a hood around my neck. They tied my hands and legs, submerged me in a 250-liter tank that had ammonia, urine, excrement, and seawater. They submerged me until I could not breathe anymore.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            What is your basis for claiming Allende would have done that if he’d remained in power?

            Allende said his platform was to dismantle capitalism on the Cuban model. I don’t have sources off the top of my head for what the Cuban Revolution did to food production, but we can predict the probability of Allende putting people in gulags from A) the general data set of Marxist-Leninist states and B) his cited model had Soviet-style concentration camps run by Che Guevara.

          • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

            @Le Maistre Chat
            Why would we need to “predict the probability” in that way when we could just look at what he did during his 3 years in power? But, grant for the sake of argument that Allende about to suddenly set up a load of labour camps (again, I’m not aware of any evidence for this). Why do you think that would have been worse than Pinochet’s regime? Obviously being in a labour camp for a few years (the UMAPs were only around for three) is bad, but it is much less bad than being tortured. In total, 35,000 people were put in labour camps in Cuba, in comparison Pinochet is estimated to have tortured around 40,000.

          • cassander says:

            @thisheavenlyconjugation says:

            Why would we need to “predict the probability” in that way when we could just look at what he did during his 3 years in power?

            he started nationalizing the economy and driving it into the ground

            Why do you think that would have been worse than Pinochet’s regime?

            Because unlike unlike pinochet’s, allende’s economic policies would have only produced disaster, so you’d have gotten tyranny and poverty. and each would have fed on the other, like it is in venezuela today.

            Obviously being in a labour camp for a few years (the UMAPs were only around for three) is bad, but it is much less bad than being tortured. In total, 35,000 people were put in labour camps in Cuba, in comparison Pinochet is estimated to have tortured around 40,000.

            First, I don’t think that’s obviously true. Second, cuba is the best cast for this sort of thing. It was the least bad socialist revolution, assuming it would only be as bad as cuba and not modern venezuela is optimistic.

          • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

            @cassander

            driving it into the ground

            Source? As far as I know the main thing he did were nationalising copper and coal. Unless you think the UK in the 70s (with British Coal and British Steel), or indeed Pinochet’s dictatorship (where copper was still nationalised) was basically Venezuela, I don’t know what your argument is.

            First, I don’t think that’s obviously true.

            Yeah, it is. Or are you seriously saying you’d rather have live rats implanted on your genitals than be put in a labour camp for a couple of years?

          • cassander says:

            @thisheavenlyconjugation says:

            Source?

            real wages fell by ~3/4, among other things, with precipitous declines in GDP and hyperinflation. the land re-distribution programs were starting, and Castro was touring the country and speaking well of what he saw.

            Unless you think the UK in the 70s (with British Coal and British Steel),

            It wasn’t venezuela, but british post-war economic policy was terrible. In 1950, the UK was richer than France and Germany and most of the other western european countries. By 1970, that had been reversed, despite the UK getting far more post-war aid than any other country. They literally couldn’t keep the lights on by the 70s

            Yeah, it is. Or are you seriously saying you’d rather have live rats implanted on your genitals than be put in a labour camp for a couple of years?

            There’s an awful lot I’d endure rather than lose a few years of my life, my career, and presumably most of my possessions. Maybe not that particular torture, but I doubt that was done to all 40,000 people. I’m quite certain that I’d rather spend a couple months in a cell than a couple years in a camp.

      • tg56 says:

        Deng Xiaoping might be another candidate? He certainly did a few ruthless things along the way, but prob. also the reason behind a lot of modern China’s success.

        • AG says:

          And before that, Qin Shi Huang himself.

          In general, there’s something to be said for how many modern nations’ prosperity is usually rooted in getting unified at some point in history from a bunch of warring tribes.

          • cassander says:

            right, but the ended of that warring usually involves a lot of warring itself. this is akin to claiming mao did a good thing by ending the chinese civil war. Sure, he did end the war, but he was also generating half of that war for like 20 years.

          • Radu Floricica says:

            @cassander

            Tokugawa Ieyasu is a better example? He didn’t start the fight, didn’t even properly dominate it (that would be Nobunaga) but he definitely ended it, for like three centuries.

            Anyways, my first though went to South Korea’s Park Chung-hee. Modern ruthless dictator, but managed to put the country on a solid upward trajectory.

          • AG says:

            @cassander
            Yeah, the problem is that everyone thinks that they’ll be the final unifying force, and then aren’t, up until someone finally is. There are all sorts of factors independent from the leader who does it that make it possible for them. Kind of like the very spotty track record of trying to change a nation over to democracy.

      • cassander says:

        Pinochet executed a couple thousand people, spared his country from undergoing what venezuela is doing today, and set it on the path to becoming the richest country in latin america. that’s a pretty good record, all things considered.

        • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

          He tortured tens of thousands of people. Call me excessively deontological but I struggle to say that someone who ordered people to be “raped and sexually assaulted with trained dogs and with live rats” had a “pretty good record”. And that’s granting that Chile’s performance under his dictatorship was actually impressive, which I don’t see much evidence for. Chile’s wealth relative to the rest of Latin America didn’t change much from 1973 to 1990. The fact that it increased a lot *after* he left seems like a point against him, not one in his favour.

          • cassander says:

            “Pretty good record for a tyrant”

            Pinochet arranged for a stable transition to democratic government and his economic policies didn’t simply vanish when he left office. the economy started growing far faster than the surrounding countries in the late 70s, there’s a brief recession in 82-3, and then growth resumes thereafter. It took a while to get past the richer countries nearby, but there’s no discontinuity around 1990, previous trends continued.

          • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

            This graph seems to show “almost exactly the same speed as surrounding countries, if not slightly slower” (taking Uruguay as the nearest comparable one) during the late 70s not “far faster”. And it looks to me like growth did accelerate slightly around 1990, but more importantly to its status as richest Latin American country (as in, putting it ahead of Uruguay) it didn’t suffer the same recession as Uruguay and Argentina in the early 2000s. I hardly think Pinochet can take credit for that.

          • TheAncientGeeksTAG says:

            Pinochet arranged for a stable transition to democratic government

            After being told to by the US. Saying someone is a great guy for ceasing to do something he should never have been doing is dubious enough, but in theis case it wasn’t even his idea.

          • cassander says:

            @thisheavenlyconjugation

            your graph shows Chile starting poorer than Uruguay and ended up richer, and yes, better weathering recessions should be attributed to better economic policy, at least in part.

      • a real dog says:

        Tito, from Yugoslavia, seems like a good example. Sure, he was a totalitarian dictator, but the entire region seemed to mostly hold itself together while not being aligned with any major power during the cold war. Everything went to shit pretty much right after he died.

      • Radu Floricica says:

        Any left-leaning dictators could be added on this list? I’m hoping for a couple of examples to calibrate my biases. Tito qualifies… but only barely – Yugoslavia was the least socialist of the eastern bloc.

        • Yugoslavia was the least socialist, but my impression is that Tito did a lot of killing in the civil war that ended with him in power, so he still fits. Indeed, he fits the pattern — tyrant who did bad things to produce good consequences — better as a result of establishing a relatively decentralized version of socialism. And he also looks better after we have seen the consequences when the breakup of Yugoslavia unleashed ethnic conflicts that he had been successfully keeping down.

          So I think he is a plausible candidate.

        • JayT says:

          Deng Xiaoping would have to be far and away the winner for this, right? Though he dismantled a lot of the left-wing policies that were holding China back, I would say that he was still overall left-leaning.

        • Radu Floricica says:

          So both would be more towards a (relatively) free market, while keeping a left… what exactly? I think we’re onto something here. If we set the economic dimension to free market, and it’s already clear that both authoritarian and democratic systems can potentially work, whatever remains and is left-leaning in China/Yugoslavia is another potential dimension on which human society can slide and still thrive. How would you describe this dimension? How is China left of early South Korea, or Yugoslavia left of Chile?

    • GearRatio says:

      You’d probably be wigged out by Wuxia novels. They go a step further than normal anti-hero or “end-justify-the-means” villains who are not quite evil if you look at it from a utility perspective.

      As a for-instance, it’s not at all unusual for a main character to kill somebody or massacre a group/village/planet of sentient beings, often humans or human-acting humanoids because they have something they want, usually something that helps them surmount a minor difficulty in their training. These aren’t always/usually people they dislike; sometimes they just need to kill 10000 people to get a special prize.

      If the main character wants to give somebody shit/disrespect them/fuck with them, it’s a fun display of his power and the other guy should deal; if the other guy doesn’t take it, it’s OK to kill him. If somebody disrespects the main character, it’s either OK to kill him or the main character can’t kill him currently, and will wait until he’s strong enough to. The only exception to this is if someone is vastly stronger than the main character in a way where he’s not going to catch up for a long time – then it’s only right that the stronger party is mistreating him; it’s natural.

      So you end up with a guy who at least to some extent is hypersensitive to disrespect who demands active shows of respect but considers it good any time he can disrespect or lord over anyone who isn’t a close friend, and will often kill if one or the other is against his preference. He considers often people who steal from him scum, but steals/murders for gain pretty often – and is still considered by others to be a moral straight-shooter. It’s a situation where if there’s a local tyrant who abuses everyone he doesn’t like, the main character will train very diligently to depose him so that he can be the local tyrant and abuse everyone he doesn’t like.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        As a for-instance, it’s not at all unusual for a [Wuxia] main character to kill somebody or massacre a group/village/planet of sentient beings, often humans or human-acting humanoids because they have something they want,

        Wait, what? I thought I knew the genre: I have a nice illustrated translation of Water Margin and have read a few of the 20th century classics like any Louis Cha* novel that gets translated, and was under the impression that going to other planets was outside the scope of the wuxia genre.

        *AKA Jin Yong, the less English Chinese name being his pen name. It’s a Hong Kong thing.

        • GearRatio says:

          I should definitely have specified but I forgot how to spell it: there’s a subgenre called Xianxia where I spend most of my time. I inaccurately often forget that “proper” Wuxia exists.

      • Deiseach says:

        So you end up with a guy who at least to some extent is hypersensitive to disrespect who demands active shows of respect but considers it good any time he can disrespect or lord over anyone who isn’t a close friend, and will often kill if one or the other is against his preference.

        Which is the same energy motivating the stand-off between Achilles and Agamemnon at the start of the Iliad: this is an honour society, where social grades of distinction are very carefully and minutely calibrated, and things like ‘refusing a toast at a banquet’ will kick off a clan feud. To an outside view, this is a trivial and even meaningless thing to fight over, but within the culture it has to do with codes of behaviour that describe and delimit social roles and all that goes along with those, and it very much matters who is seen as the social superior or inferior.

        They’re not really fighting over a slavegirl, they’re fighting over status, leadership, and their places within the society that they belong to, where reputation is all and whoever backs down first in this dispute will lose face (to borrow the Chinese concept) which will in turn have a huge effect on their rank, how they are treated, and what other people will now think they can get away with doing in relation to them. It’s politics as much as anything else (because in this culture, the personal is the political) and will have ripple effects outside the personal relationships: if Achilles backs down, that puts him (and by extension) his forces under the hegemony of Agamemnon rather than being there on equal terms as one of the commanders where Agamemnon is “first among equals”, and even perhaps extending to the rule of his home city (as his father’s heir).

      • AG says:

        People have noted how different the paradigms are in the Old Testament. You have several cases of “hooray for murdering the women and children of the enemy,” the infamous “exit pursued by Elisha’s bears,” and the Battle at Gibeah almost destroying the tribe of Benjamin, among other things.

    • hilitai says:

      “I am struck, however, by the contrast between the implied cultural views and implied political views.”

      It’s not clear to me why you think there is a contrast in views here. Modern “progressive” social viewpoints on hot-button issues like sexuality and racism, combined with ends-justify-the-means views of violence and destruction, seem pretty common these days. I’d be willing to wager a lot of last night’s rioters and looters would be horrified if you got their pronouns wrong.

      • AG says:

        Less of this, please.

      • Paul Zrimsek says:

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        — Our genial host, here .

      • Watchman says:

        I’d bet you’d be wrong about the pronouns. The set of people who are concerned by pronouns and riot over police violence is probably a very small portion of the pronoun-concerned population or the pool of rioters. This seems to be a view that all your (preumably) political opponents are an amorphous mass rather than a diverse group with different and non-intersecting views.

    • beleester says:

      Well, first off, this feels like a contentless dunk – “This book is progressive in some ways, but reactionary in others, and we all know that people are only ever one or the other.” But I do think there’s some interesting themes to talk about and it gives me an excuse to gush about this story, so I’ll leave your last paragraph aside and talk theme (Spoilers, obviously):

      I think the central theme isn’t simply “Good guys sometimes have to do terrible things to gain power.” After all, the Lone Swordsman did a lot of terrible things in the name of freeing Callow, and Catherine stomped on his head for doing it. Other heroes wind up in the antagonist role for similar reasons. The theme is more like “Power corrupts” – or perhaps “Taking power means integrating yourself into a system which can push you into doing terrible things.”

      For example, Cordelia Hasenbach is definitely one of the good guys, she claims power because she believes (correctly) that Procer needs to unite against real threats like the Dead King… but she also calls a crusade against Callow because she needs a way to secure her power base and deal with some problematic underlings. Catherine mentions that she can understand the logic that led to it, even if she’s still furious that her homeland was invaded.

      And another recurring motif is that becoming Named, whether as a hero or villain, means you’re constrained by the force of the narrative, giving you power when you play into the role of a classic villain and yanking it away if you try to be reasonable. One of the long-term antagonists is the Wandering Bard, who has a unique ability to manipulate Named to her advantage and seems to mainly exist to maintain the status quo of this system.

      The new villains (The Calamities and the Woe) are unique in that they try to understand these broader forces that drive conflict and stop them at the root. Amadeus discovers that the reason Praes has such a long tradition of villainy and conquest is because it literally can’t sustain itself without grain from Callow. And his solution to that is to break the broader pattern by making Callow permanently aligned with Praes. Catherine similarly believes that Callow is being destroyed by the cycle of conquest and rebellion, and the Liesse Accords are a similar but broader attempt to create a new pattern for heroes and villains that will be less destructive.

      So while you can definitely read it in a conservative way – “Hard men/women succeed by making hard decisions,” you can also read it in a more progressive way – “True success comes from understanding the root causes of grievances rather than crushing people with overwhelming force because you’re convinced of your own righteousness.”

      (Also, while I don’t think you’ve read that far, a recurring theme from Book 4 onwards is people calling out Catherine for getting innocents killed in the first few books.)

    • Algon33 says:

      Your analysis seems plausible, but you’ve skipped over major aspects of the series e.g. Good vs Evil, why its not good vs evil, narrative forces, freedom and contractual worship vs obedience and supplicatory worship, cultural and moral evolution etc. Whatever themes there may be, they must account for this.

      But to touch on what you’ve said:
      Your political analysis seems to be missing the fact that co-operation is repeatedly shown to outmatch defection. The Calamities brought in a new age because the Wasteland could not unite. The Lone Swordsman became a major threat once he joined forces with others. Triumphant, representing the pinnacle of power, was undone by her lessers uniting. Villains may have virtue, every madman might have the seeds of greatness within them, but their strength is fragile. Their approach to things ultimately doesn’t scale. Catherine learns the hard way she needs to co-operate with her rivals if she wants to get things done.

      Hence the political theme is not that “…the villians are sometimes the good guys….”. Rather, villianous virtues can be useful in particular instances, but they are insufficient over longer time scales. Perhaps Dread Emperor Benevolent is a good example of this. Good and Evil (not the same as good and evil) are both useful tools echoing the idea of memetic evolution of morals.

      As to social themes, orcs and goblins and so forth have strikingly different cultures which the protagonists admire. Of course this reflects the progressive perspective. But repeatedly we see younger members of these races admitting their people have flaws as they languished for millenia. Hakram states his goal is to change his people. Pickler reviles toxic goblin politics whilst Robber resents the oppresive matriarch and so forth. As such, the is a progressive but not a modern one.

      ——————————————————————————————————————————————–
      Your question is a little tough to answer because for some rebellions the dust hasn’t settled, for others the dust settled and its all a mess, and yet others its been a sucess but the means were peaceful. On top of that, we’re outside observors and what consequences horrify us may thrill most of those affected.

      But to attempt this anyhow: Attaturk, M. A. G. Osmani from a Bungladeshi pespective, Hafez al-Assad, Castro according to some and Lenin. There’s also Stalin according to that one guy who comments here.

  39. Silverlock says:

    I seem to remember a post mentioning a leftist revolutionary group calmly discussing what to do with the quarter or so of the US who would not be on board even after their planned revolution succeeded, the upshot being that those people would have to be reeducated or interned or whatever. I thought it was in one of Scott’s posts that mentioned Days of Rage, but I cannot find it.

    Does anyone recall this or have any suggestions for how I might search? Googling for “days of rage” and “reeducation” on SSC has not led me to it, and searches for terms like “revolution,” “leftist,” and “kill” would likely result in a deluge of chaff.

    • Nick says:

      Was it a Twitter thread? I’ve definitely seen a Twitter thread like that.

      • Silverlock says:

        I hope not. I gave up Twitter months ago and life has been markedly better. I have no desire to root around in the cesspool again.

      • Silverlock says:

        No, I remember that. The quote I was thinking of was much more horrifying. I think it was from an informant, though, so I don’t know about its credibility. That was one of the things I was wanting to check.

    • Econymous says:

      There was this article on the days of rage that I believe was linked to in links post – maybe it’s in the comments there?

    • Crazed Slumgullion says:

      I’m pretty sure you’re thinking of _Prairie Fire_, the manifesto of the Weather Underground.

      At the end of the linked article above, there’s a quote from Larry Grathwohl:

      I bought up the subject of what’s going to happen after we take over the government. We, we become responsible, then, for administrating, you know, 250 million people.

      And there was no answers. No one had given any thought to economics; how are you going to clothe and feed these people.

      The only thing that I could get, was that they expected that the Cubans and the North Vietnamese and Chinese and the Russians would all want to occupy different portions of the United States.

      They also believed that their immediate responsibility would be to protect against what they called the counter-revolution. And they felt that this counter-revolution could best be guarded against by creating and establishing re-education centers in the southwest, where we would take all the people who needed to be re-educated into the new way of thinking and teach them… how things were going to be.

      I asked, well, what’s going to happen to those people that we can’t re-educate; that are die-hard capitalists. And the reply was that they’d have to be eliminated. And when I pursued this further, they estimated that they would have to eliminate 25 million people in these re-education centers. And when I say eliminate, I mean kill. 25 million people.

      I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of which have graduate degrees from Columbia and other well known educational centers, and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people.

      And they were dead serious.”

  40. viVI_IViv says:

    I’m currently playing Kerbal Space Program and watching the Expanse, so I think it’s a good time for yet another argument about stealth in space.

    Let’s say the bad guys want to bomb Earth. They have managed to sneak some missiles covered in radar-absorbing paint far in the outer Solar system, without being detected (or while being detected but not raising suspicion e.g. because they have a legitimate station on some Trojan asteroid to use as a front). They launch these missiles from their base while the view from Earth is occluded by the asteroid (let’s assume that Earth doesn’t have any satellite further away that can observe the launch). Now the missiles are coasting on a Hohmann transfer orbit that takes them directly on a collision course with Earth. If they need to do any correction burn they can use cold gas thrusters. How does Earth detect them?

    They only thing I can think of is that as the missiles come closer to the Sun, they are heated by sunlight, becoming visible in the IR spectrum. Sure, if you know where to look and point an IR telescope at them, but if you don’t know where to look can a broad field of view IR camera looking at the sky see something let’s say the size of an ICBM at ~100C before it gets too close to intercept?

    • rumham says:

      Would they never cross in front of stars from an orbital observatory perspective? Seems like a regular telescope might work, provided you’re looking in the right place.

      • matkoniecz says:

        Would they never cross in front of stars from an orbital observatory perspective?

        Sounds like something unpractical and not distinguishable from noise.

        • rumham says:

          Even in a future where we have space stations all over the solar system? Couldn’t something like that be aided with more computing power? Or am I missing something fundamental here?

        • Lambert says:

          Occultation’s a technique that’s already in use to detect and characterise asteroids.

          • matkoniecz says:

            I assume that missiles are very small making it hard to apply, but maybe with some progress also here…

    • John Schilling says:

      How does Earth detect them?

      By observing the astronomically bright rocket exhaust plumes that were created when the missiles were launched, using one of the many Earthican sensor platforms that are not actually on Earth and whose view was thus not blocked by the asteroid.

      You’ve read the primary reference, right?

      • viVI_IViv says:

        You’ve read the primary reference, right?

        I’ve read it again now.

        “If the Oscar’s crew was shivering at the freezing point, the maximum detection range of the frigid submarine would be 13.4 * sqrt(1510) * 2732 = 38,800,000 kilometers, about one hundred times the distance between the Earth and the Moon, or about 129 light-seconds. If the crew had a more comfortable room temperature, the Oscar could be seen from even farther away.”

        So I guess that even if the thing is unmanned and somehow they managed to hide the exhaust plumes, or launch using a rail gun or something, solar heating would still give it away, unless of course it is extremely fast in which case it wouldn’t be impossible to intercept even if detected.

        • John Schilling says:

          Solar heating would probably also give it away yes. But note that, even back in the late 20th century, the way you knew your country(*) was under long-range missile attack was from a long-range infrared sensor detecting the exhaust plume, and the infrared sensors were located on remote space platforms, carefully positioned to have overlapping and unobstructed views of every place that a missile could plausibly be launched from. Anybody who is remotely interested in space warfighting is going to retain that capability, and they are going to deploy new sensor platforms as it becomes plausible to launch missiles from new locations.

          Also, they are going to anticipate the “what if I shoot the sensor platforms first?” strategy, but that rapidly moves in a direction where we’re not talking about it outside a SCIF.

          * If your country was the United States or Russia, at least.

    • broblawsky says:

      If they have computer systems capable of making corrections, they’re generating heat. Also, residual heat from the missile launch might give them away.

    • beleester says:

      A Hohmann transfer from Pluto to Earth takes several decades (53 years right now, but you could do a little better if you’re willing to wait a hundred years or so for the planets to be in the right spot). That means that you need to predict the political situation 53 years in advance – otherwise you might drop missiles on someone you aren’t at war with. You also need to include enough propellant on your missiles that if something does change, you can abort the mission and move the missiles into a safe orbit.

      Even if you sneak your missiles all the way to Jupiter (maybe Ganymede is fighting for independence or something), it’s still a two-year journey. A lot can change in two years.

      • Lambert says:

        A hohmann trajectory is minimal Δv. (actually for pluto a bi-elliptic transfer might be more efficient)
        If you have more fuel, you can get to pluto a lot quicker.

        If you want hard numbers you could probably plug real solar system numbers into AlexMoon’s KSP transfer window planner.

  41. Nancy Lebovitz says:

    Human beings aren’t good at reliably moral behavior. Human beings are good at making wonderful things.

    This may partly be because it takes smaller subsets to make wonderful things.

    In any case, there’s a good bit of sf and speculation about people being not good enough for aliens to contact or aliens trying to improve us.

    What if there were aliens who don’t care about how people treat each other so long as the flow of wonderful things continues? For purposes of this discussion, “things” includes performances, art, mathematics and such, not just material objects.

    What are the best circumstances for high quality creation? Is there anything aliens can do to increase the flow of wonderful things? Assume the aliens want both fine expressions of tradition and excellent new forms. Assume their taste isn’t too different from human taste.

    What might the effect on people be? Would people say “well, there’s no hope of treating each other better” or would they say “that’s quite an insult, we’ll show those aliens we can treat each other better”?

    • Randy M says:

      What if there were aliens who don’t care about how people treat each other so long as the flow of wonderful things continues?

      This pretty much describes real world trade, so I don’t see why interstellar would necessarily be different.

      Obviously at times trade or warfare have been used for humanitarian reasons, and that may trend more so as a species develops technologically, but it might also be an idiosyncratic human (or even just Western) view.

      The bigger question is, why would an alien capable of interstellar travel find our things wonderful? We’re more likely to be valued for curiosity’s sake than our craftsmanship, let alone our performance art appealing to ET sensibilities.

      • Nick says:

        I don’t know about performance art, but I would want to see alien architecture for sure. Especially if it developed on a world with substantially different gravity than ours, for instance. Or with different building materials.

      • matkoniecz says:

        The bigger question is, why would an alien capable of interstellar travel find our things wonderful?

        Technology? Science? Unlikely.

        But art, literature – why not?

        • Randy M says:

          Right. As curiosities, and to see how our unique biology and geology compares with other worlds.

          But mostly, I suspect Earth products to be faddish trinkets or oddities, kitsch-y, like Tiki torches or tribal masks decorating the bar in the suburban garage. Probably paid good arcturian squiloons for, until they start producing cheap knock-offs for the rubes on Andromeda prime.

      • mitv150 says:

        This pretty much describes real world trade, so I don’t see why interstellar would necessarily be different.

        Real world trade is between humans. Nancy posits that the aliens are morally superior to humans and thus have distaste for dealing with them. If this is so, unlike humans, their profit motive may not overcome their “don’t contact or trade with the savages” taboo.

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:

          No, I’m contrasting the aliens in my question against the usual morally superior aliens.

          *My* aliens might actually be morally superior because they aren’t imposing impossible standards.

      • The bigger question is, why would an alien capable of interstellar travel find our things wonderful?

        Western countries found some things from China and Japan wonderful at a point at which those countries were technologically well behind the west.

    • noyann says:

      Not really an answer, but you may find it entertaining: The Festival in Singularity Sky — ‘a technologically advanced alien or posthuman race that rewards its hosts for “entertaining” them by granting whatever the entertainer wishes, including the Festival’s own technology’.

    • valleyofthekings says:

      The aliens can get money by selling stuff, I assume?

      The aliens just have to get a Patreon account (or, presumably, some equivalent that takes less of a percentage cut) and pay good money to anyone who makes art they like.

      The world is full of people who want to make art but can’t quit their day job. Just pay them.

      • Watchman says:

        There’s a good story in there: humanity as a kind o isolated producer if prestige art for aliens that are never seen and only contact us through a Patreon-style arrangement. The economic effects and social implications could be interesting.

  42. salvorhardin says:

    I have seen people on my social media feeds juxtaposing photos of the police response to the Minneapolis protests against the killing of George Floyd (which has apparently involved considerable use of tear gas, rubber bullets, and flash-bang grenades) and police response to angry, scuffling anti-lockdown protesters elsewhere, including armed protesters e.g. in Michigan (which, at least in the instances they highlight, has not involved those things), and saying “why are these different?” with the implication that it must be either incompetence or racism or both on the part of the Minneapolis police.

    And I can well believe it may be those things, but don’t know enough to have an informed opinion. Folks who are more familiar with the logistics of police response to protests: what other considerations, if any, might produce the different responses? Size of crowd? Specific behaviors of crowd? Other things?

    • FLWAB says:

      Were the anti-lockdown protesters rioting, looting, and burning down buildings? I think that might explain the difference.

      • Matt M says:

        I’m particularly fond of this framing by MSNBC…

      • salvorhardin says:

        Protests aren’t monoliths, though, and the complaint is (AFAICT) that the Mpls police used a monolithic response which hit the subset of protesters who weren’t looting or burning at least as hard– perhaps harder– than the subset who were.

        • GearRatio says:

          Is this right, though? I’m thinking of it like this:

          Target is on fire. Soon, other things might be on fire. This is no longer a peaceful protest; I need to control it.

          Since I can’t effectively keep people in a large group from hiding amongst each other, I have to either establish lines or disperse the crowd. There’s no individual action I can take unless I catch the arsonist while he’s setting autozone on fire.

          if there’s an effective way to control bad actors intermixed with a thousands deep crowd, then I’m wrong on this, but is there? Cause if there’s not the group has to be dealt with as a group.

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:

            If a protest is small enough that the PD has a good ratio of force and can confidently control the situation, they will sometimes try to grab individual rock throwers, etc OUT of the crowd, cuff them and remove them. However, past a certain crowd size that rapidly becomes impractical.

        • Trofim_Lysenko says:

          So, it depends on a department’s ROE, and sometimes in some gatherings if you have isolated bad actors it may be practical to pull them out and cuff them individually, but past a certain point it no longer makes sense to try and filter the “Bad” protesters from the “good” ones. A good rule of thumb is that when it comes to protests, they ARE monolithic as long as they are in the same geographic location, and past a certain point is both impractical and unsafe to treat them in any other way.

          Now, to be clear, when I say “same geographic location” means a discrete mass gathering. If you have 200 people in one neighborhood, and 500 people in another neighborhood 3 miles away, it’s a lot more reasonable to treat them as two distinct protests. And of course, the qualifier to THAT is that if there is any sort of coordination or communication between those two separate protests, it may be smarter to treat them as one monolithic group when it comes to needing to control them…

        • baconbits9 says:

          Protests aren’t monoliths, though, and the complaint is (AFAICT) that the Mpls police used a monolithic response which hit the subset of protesters who weren’t looting or burning at least as hard– perhaps harder– than the subset who were.

          Protesters aren’t monoliths but (from the law enforcement POV) the bad actors are more or less using the good actors as shields. If a few dozen out of a few thousand protesters are throwing rocks then the only way to get to those throwing rocks is to push the whole crowd out of the way. That leaves more or less 3 options, one is to try to disperse the crowd, two is to stand your ground and defend a line but take the general abuse, and three is to retreat and give up the ground.

          • salvorhardin says:

            If all they’re doing is throwing rocks, arguably option 2 is more consistent with the values of a free society than option 1.

          • baconbits9 says:

            If all they’re doing is throwing rocks, arguably option 2 is more consistent with the values of a free society than option 1.

            I don’t see that argument, there is nothing about a free society that requires the police to accept physical abuse, and I think throwing rocks is clearly on the wrong side of ‘peaceable assembly’.

          • salvorhardin says:

            If a few dozen out of a few thousand are throwing rocks, penalizing the entire crowd for the actions of those few dozen is a greater evil than requiring the police to stand there and take it.

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:

            @Salvorhardin

            A thrown rock is potentially lethal force, and at the very least risks severe injury. So between that, and the fact that the entire point of a mass protest is to leverage the power of numbers as a unified bloc, I don’t think your argument makes any kind of sense. My advice to protesters who don’t want to get lumped in with the people chucking rocks, tearing down fences, and vandalizing police cars….is don’t stand with/next to the people doing that.

            As I said upthread, police departments DO try to isolate out individual bad actors when it’s practical to do so, but past a certain point it is illogical, impractical, and unsafe to do so, and your assertion that police should just stand there and take it strikes me as on its face unreasonable.

          • yodelyak says:

            Edit: deleted. I noticed that 3-day rule should apply, at least to me since I *just* learned about this and was effectively offering a hot take. We’ll know a lot more about this in 3 days.

        • viVI_IViv says:

          What are the “good actors” demanding, exactly?

          The four cops got fired, there are two investigation going on and the cop doing the kneeling has already been arrested and charged. What else is the government supposed to do?

          • DeWitt says:

            What else is the government supposed to do?

            They are supposed to fire the people who tried to cover up the murder by firing them as well, and by putting them on trial for Floyd’s murder.

          • salvorhardin says:

            Most of that hadn’t happened when the protests started, though, and given how things have gone in the past it was reasonable for protesters to worry they might not happen and to come out to demand they happen.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            They are supposed to fire the people who tried to cover up the murder by firing them as well, and by putting them on trial for Floyd’s murder.

            That seems unreasonable without any sort of investigation to see if they did anything like that.

            Errr, wait, is that the point? We’re not going to bother with an investigation and trial and just do mob justice?

          • DeWitt says:

            That seems unreasonable without any sort of investigation to see if they did anything like that.

            The police report, as confirmed by the department, stated that Floyd died by a medical accident. The officers in question wore body cams, so ignorance is no excuse here. If they had performed an autopsy, determined it was a freak heart attack, that’d be one thing. If they had suspended the murderer while conducting an internal investigation, it’d be one thing. Instead, they immediately released a report stating that it was all a big accident and tried to leave it behind them. It is criminally negligent at the very least and very much grounds for termination of whichever figure did not even think to look into the facts of a person in custody outright dying.

            Errr, wait, is that the point? We’re not going to bother with an investigation and trial and just do mob justice?

            Man, screw you. This is the third time I’ve made this point and you keep insisting on misrepresenting me. Just stop.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Edit: You know, that’s fine. I’m just going to bow out of this whole topic. I don’t have a dog in this hunt. I don’t live in Minneapolis, it’s not my city, it’s not my police department, if the people feel like they should burn it down, it’s really no skin off my back.

          • DeWitt says:

            Really not necessary.

            No, you.

            The state was around very, very quickly to shut down what peaceful protesters were around prior to any looting and burning. It may want to be a bit quicker with figuring what evil’s been done if it’s very interested in preventing that from spreading further.

          • A Definite Beta Guy says:

            The fact that everyone agreed the officers needed to be fired right away but not necessarily anyone else suggests there is a substantial possibility that you are, possibly, wrong, possibly for reasons you do not understand, and should consider alternative political expressions to “riot.”

            There’s also the whole Michael Brown being a gentle giant narrative being wrong, the cop on Eric Garner not even being indicted, the Freddie Gray cops being acquitted…you know, there’s a long history of the justice system finding the mob’s interpretation being wrong an awful, awful, awful lot.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @ADBG: Conversely, the pro-cop narrative could embody the existence of more consent of the governed to be governed by homicidal cops than our ancestors had, leading to our David Friedman including anecdotes about private citizens charging law enforcement personnel and magistrates with murder under the Anglo-American legal system in a book titled Legal Systems Very Different From Our Own (!).

          • The Pachyderminator says:

            @A Definite Beta Guy

            Thank you for correctly pointing out that there’s a long history of the justice system declining to do anything to cops who brutalize people and cause unnecessary deaths.

          • zzzzort says:

            Another reason to protest is not to demand specific action now, but to punish bad action in the past, and so deter similar bad action in the future. The main cop in question had an extremely checkered history in the police, including involvement in multiple suspicious killings. The Minneapolis PD could and should have prevented this by firing/desking the guy. If you’re an elected official or police chief and you want to avoid these sorts of protests you should get your bad apples off the street now.

          • DeWitt says:

            The fact that everyone agreed the officers needed to be fired right away but not necessarily anyone else suggests there is a substantial possibility that you are, possibly, wrong, possibly for reasons you do not understand, and should consider alternative political expressions to “riot.”

            Everyone did not agree the officers should be fired right away, since the department tried to cover for the murderers amongst them by lying to the public. They fired them only when it turned out that the murder was caught on video. I agree that I might be wrong – if I were absolutely certain I’d advocate for the death by strangulation of all people responsible. Fortunately, firing them all and trying them for their crimes is both viable and reversible, and this has not yet happened to my knowledge.

          • A Definite Beta Guy says:

            Thank you for correctly pointing out that there’s a long history of the justice system declining to do anything to cops who brutalize people and cause unnecessary deaths.

            You ever sit on a jury? Because a lot of these guys and gals that are supposedly horrendous and unlawful monsters faced juries and were acquitted. Juries might be wrong, but these cases weren’t tried in the 60s, these were tried 5-10 years ago.

            To you, have you considered the possibility that you are, perhaps, wrong, and the violent mob torching buildings is also, perhaps, wrong?

            Everyone did not agree the officers should be fired right away, since the department tried to cover for the murderers amongst them by lying to the public. They fired them only when it turned out that the murder was caught on video. I agree that I might be wrong – if I were absolutely certain I’d advocate for the death by strangulation of all people responsible. Fortunately, firing them all and trying them for their crimes is both viable and reversible, and this has not yet happened to my knowledge.

            Video footage has now spread beyond the immediate department to people who might nominally be sympathetic. I was probably unclear, because you’re right, the department itself is quite corrupt, but to my knowledge the people who are in a position to investigate and have more knowledge than me are not asking for what you are asking for.
            Firing people non-chalantly is pretty cavalier.

          • DeWitt says:

            Firing people non-chalantly is pretty cavalier.

            Would you say that it is more or less cavalier than executing them out of hand is?

          • Lambert says:

            The police are too good at pursuading juries.
            Or perhaps juries are too deferent to police.

          • viVI_IViv says:

            The main cop in question had an extremely checkered history in the police, including involvement in multiple suspicious killings. The Minneapolis PD could and should have prevented this by firing/desking the guy.

            This is the only reasonable complaint that the protesters may have. The accusation of a coverup seems far fetched.

          • Ketil says:

            The main cop in question had an extremely checkered history in the police, including involvement in multiple suspicious killings. The Minneapolis PD could and should have prevented this by firing/desking the guy.

            This is the only reasonable complaint that the protesters may have. The accusation of a coverup seems far fetched.

            He had apparently 18 complaints in his 19 year career, and two reprimands. Two cases of firing a gun. It is hard to say whether he should have been fired for any of this, what is the base rate for complaints against police officers, and does it really warrant the label “extremely checkered”? Some of these are his word against the victims (e.g. Ira Toles), and I don’t think it is unreasonable that the officer is given the benefit of the doubt here – Toles was armed and also likely to be violent (the call was domestic abuse). In any case, that was 14 years ago.

            https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-05-29/chauvin-shootings-complaints-minneapolis-floyd

            (BTW, I think a reasonable complaint could be that the cops were needlessly violent when pinning him down.)

          • Thomas Jorgensen says:

            That is a rhetorical question with an actual answer!
            https://bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/ccpuf.pdf

            For municipal police, one in ten per year, thereabouts, so the theoretical average cop with twenty years would have two. Having one complaint against you for every year of service means you are an really extreme outlier, and if they were independent complaints, well, letting that go on is just incompetent management. Two firearm discharges on top of that is no longer a red flag, his employee record folder is just fire engine red at that point.

          • Ketil says:

            That is a rhetorical question with an actual answer!

            Why did you think it was rhetorical?

            For municipal police, one in ten per year, thereabouts, so the theoretical average cop with twenty years would have two.

            A couple of things:

            This details the number of complaints, but each complaint may involve more than one officer. Most of the examples given do.

            The number is only complaints on use of force, this may be the most common complaint, but I don’t think we know that all 18 complaints concern violence. Of the listed cases, one was a chased car that crashed into another (no violence?), another was one of Chavin’s colleagues opening fire on an armed suspect (violence, but not by Chavin). Mostly we don’t know.

            The distribution is likely to be skewed. County police has 30% the number of complaints of Municipal, there could be internal differences related to precinct or type of service. The rate for officers responding to calls seems to be 50% higher than for (presumably) those with desk jobs.

            Number of complaints also scale with agency size. If Minneapolice PD is large, there would statistically be a higher rate.

            TL;DR: I don’t think we have quite enough data to conclude that Chauvin was “excessive”.

            Two firearm discharges on top of that is no longer a red flag, his employee record folder is just fire engine red at that point.

            In both cases, the target was armed and known to be violent.
            To quote LA Times:

            Anyone can file a complaint against an officer, whether or not it’s valid

            Do you really want a society where all it takes is a series of unproven accusations to get a cop fired?

          • viVI_IViv says:

            According to Wikipedia: “Derek Michael Chauvin, a 44-year-old white man, had been an officer in the Minneapolis Police Department since around 2001.[30] Chauvin had 18 complaints on his official record, two of which ended in discipline from the department including official letters of reprimand.[31] ”

            If they had to reprimand him twice, then there was more to it than “a series of unproven accusations”. What is the median number of official letters of reprimand that a cop gets throughout their career? I guess it’s zero. After the second one the police department should really have considered at least desking him.

            The protesters are right that such person should not have been policing the streets. This doesn’t justify the looting and burning, of course.

          • The Pachyderminator says:

            Because a lot of these guys and gals that are supposedly horrendous and unlawful monsters faced juries and were acquitted. Juries might be wrong, but these cases weren’t tried in the 60s, these were tried 5-10 years ago.

            I don’t share your faith in the impartiality of juries. Grand juries are routinely reluctant to indict cops, and trial juries to convict them. That doesn’t give me particularly strong evidence that the cops did nothing wrong. Certainly not in a case like Eric Garner’s, where I can see for myself that the jury’s decision made no sense.

            To you, have you considered the possibility that you are, perhaps, wrong, and the violent mob torching buildings is also, perhaps, wrong?

            Please note that I’m not defending the burning of buildings. I don’t see any reason to suppose that the protesters are wrong about what happened to George Floyd, no.

          • zzzzort says:

            Beyond parsing one cop’s record (though in the case of Ira Toles, Toles wasn’t armed, he allegedly reached for an officer’s gun, which is a completely unfalsifiable claim) there is the fact that every other developed country manages to have a police forces that kill a lot fewer citizens. Protestors have some ideas about how to change that, but eventually it’s up to police department and governments to get cops to stop killing so many people.

          • Loriot says:

            The obvious confounder is that the other developed countries also have a lot less guns. And for better or worse, that’s not something that is going to change about the US any time soon.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @Loriot: It’s notable that the Second Amendment is coded Red, while the rioting is black and therefore supported by Blue things like the non-FOX news channels.
            (checks statement) Wait, now the Governor of Minnesota is saying he suspects there are white supremacist rioters?

          • edmundgennings says:

            The US also has just much higher levels of murders for a variety of reasons, probably rooted in our history. Given a higher level of murders, that we have higher level of fatal law enforcement, is not surprising.

            Cynically, the Minnesota Governor wants to isolate the looters. If the protestors feel the looters are not misguided allies, but enemies, it becomes a lot easier to stop the looters. If there is a shred of evidence that the looters contain white supremacists who are trying to radicalize their support base then the goveneror has every reason to mention it. And the looting is possibly the best thing that has happened so far this year for an extreme white supremacists so it is not absurd to think some might try to encourage looting. The more looting, the more support white supremacists get from their potential allies. Also free TVs.

          • zzzzort says:

            Loriot, you say confounder, but it’s just another policy choice.

            Lechat, there was already the story of a group of police using a similar protest to loot pharmacies for drugs to sell. White supremacists honestly seem less far fetched.

          • Loriot says:

            > Loriot, you say confounder, but it’s just another policy choice.

            It’s not a “policy choice” that anyone can realistically do anything about, and even if they did, change would happen on the order of decades, not months or years.

            The second amendment is a “policy choice” in the same sense that the EU having dozens of languages and a lack of shared cultural identification is a “policy choice”.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @zzzzort: … so, OK, over-the-shoulder reading just happened in my house, and I was asked the epistemic status that this really happened in 2010s Baltimore and not the Wild West.

          • Ketil says:

            though in the case of Ira Toles, Toles wasn’t armed, he allegedly reached for an officer’s gun, which is a completely unfalsifiable claim

            Right, thanks for the correction. LA Times wrote “When Toles reached for his gun…” which can be interpreted both ways, but your reading sound much more likely (and presumably other sources make it clear).

            Toles’ statement isn’t particularly credible to me, I can imagine a cop beating a guy who abuses his girlfriend, and it may have been a false accusation (re the birdwatcher case), but shooting him seems most likely if there was a struggle.

        • Beck says:

          I saw a couple hours of video filmed from a helicopter Wednesday, and there was basically no effort made to stop the looting. The police were surrounded and stayed in a small area near the police station. There was never any question of controlling the looting; protecting the station seemed to be the main concern (it was set on fire the next night, so it seems to have been a legitimate concern).

          The rioting/looting was happening concurrently across the street and within the next few blocks. There looked to be no police presence in the surrounding areas until buildings were set on fire and someone was shot that evening looting a pawn shop.

          The protests and the riots could almost be treated as separate events for most of Wednesday, at least. Less so on Thursday.

          Edit: Link if anyone wants to try to get a line on what happened with the police response. It’s pretty hard to see, though.
          Video is down at the bottom of the page and is a little over 2 hours long.

          • baconbits9 says:

            There are definitely versions of the confrontation that makes it very difficult to come up with a resolution (which is often the case when two bad actors get into it). If there is looting and a separate protest that is effectively blocking the police from addressing the looting what is the solution? Considering the station was burned after being abandoned by the police makes it even more difficult in hindsight to propose a serious solution that could be enacted in real time.

      • JonathanD says:

        At least according to some of the people who were there, the causation went the other way. The police started in with the tear gas and rubber bullets, and then the rioting and looting started.

        • salvorhardin says:

          Yeah, this has been the narrative I’ve seen too, sometimes with the suggestion that the police intended to provoke the looting and rioting by escalating their response to at-first-peaceful crowds of protesters, so that they’d retrospectively have an excuse for that escalation, e.g.

          https://twitter.com/AmandaMarcotte/status/1265968478542082051

          • rumham says:

            After calling the lockdown protesters terrorists, she really has no other tack to take on this.

            According to this timeline, tear gas didn’t start till they started going after the cars and ripping down the precint fence. I have yet to see anyone preaching the provocation excuse present an alternate timeline.

            The only way I can see this framing working is if it comes out that there were police agent provocateurs in the crowd setting stuff on fire and attacking cop cars.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Amanda Marcotte was calling the Duke players rapists after everyone knew the prosecution was crooked. Ignore completely and forever.

          • viVI_IViv says:

            I fail to see how being hit by tear gas and rubber bullets can somehow make looting and burning a retail store a justified response.

            Amanda Marcotte kept on calling the Duke players rapists after everyone knew the prosecution was crooked.

            Also known for trying to bully Scott Aaronson over Comment #171, prompting our Scott to write Untitled.

          • JonathanD says:

            This was the quote on my feed. It came from a page called The Other 98%.

            “Just so people are clear about what happened in Minneapolis last night. Police did not unload on the protesters to stop looting. That was happening way off in the distance. Police were unloading on everyone protesting in front of Precinct 3. The arson and widespread looting down the lake street, only happened after loads of us were hurt from volley after volley of tear gas, mace, concussion grenades, and sponge rounds. It was completely indiscriminate I was hit in the butt while walking in the street away from the precinct. A CS canister hit me square in the forehead knocking me to the ground and blinding me for an hour while I was simply kneeling in a grassy area some ways from the police. Police weren’t ‘responding’ to an ongoing riot they CAUSED it. First with their murder of George Floyd and refusal to prosecute the criminals, and second through their massive repression against protesters who never crossed a police line or endangered any cop. The photos your all seeing is the righteous fury of a people denied justice by their city.
            Thanks to Matthew Hainer”

          • viVI_IViv says:

            A CS canister hit me square in the forehead knocking me to the ground and blinding me for an hour while I was simply kneeling in a grassy area some ways from the police.

            So let’s loot the Target store then?

          • Aftagley says:

            You’re conflating two separate groups. Per this information there’s one group of people trying to protest and another group of people who see a bunch of people protesting and think, “hmm, great time to go loot Target.”

            Thinking about it this way may seem like I’m trying to absolve the protesters of all guilt in this, but thinking about it your way tarnishes everyone in this group by the worst actions of someone they probably wouldn’t even include in their number.

          • rumham says:

            @JohnathanD

            If you look at some of the videos at that link I posted upthread, it appears that protesters were throwing rocks and smoke bombs 30 minutes before the teargas came out. Did the facebook post provide a timeline? I can see it being a legitimate mistake if his vison was blocked. He might have thought that the smoke bombs were gas canisters from the cops.

          • Matt M says:

            You’re conflating two separate groups. Per this information there’s one group of people trying to protest and another group of people who see a bunch of people protesting and think, “hmm, great time to go loot Target.”

            Then why don’t the protesters stop the looters from going into Target in order to protect their own public image?

            Or, even if they don’t want to risk a physical confrontation by physically stopping them, why don’t they publicly and unequivocally denounce the looting?

          • Aftagley says:

            because they’re too busy protesting?

          • salvorhardin says:

            Sure, Marcotte is not a trustworthy source. But neither is any Fox news property, and the people I do trust who have local knowledge tell a story closer to Marcotte’s than Fox’s. I hope there is an independent investigation that gets to the timeline question, since it is indeed key.

          • rumham says:

            @salvorhardin

            It’s not my preferred choice, but they’re the only ones bringing receipts, so to speak.

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:

            Police were unloading on everyone protesting in front of Precinct 3.

            So that would be the precinct where at least some members of the protesting crowd were chucking rocks and other objects, and had torn down the fencing around the motor pool and were starting to attack police vehicles where equipment to include firearms were secured?

            ….yeah, no, see my comment above. At that point it is entirely reasonable to start “unloading” as the complainants put it with tear gas and baton rounds to control and disperse the crowd, so if that’s the area where people are alleging inappropriate use of force, my sympathy for the protesters caught up in the police response pretty much just evaporated.

          • AliceToBob says:

            Echoing what others have said: I think Amanda Marcotte has zero credibility, and *if* she’s the best source for that narrative, I’m inclined to treat it as fiction.

        • Trofim_Lysenko says:

          That’s certainly an…interesting and bold claim. At this point my question is which narrative has better uncut/unedited video footage of the point at which the police started using tear gas and baton/beanbag rounds to disperse rather than contain.

        • Mark V Anderson says:

          I live in Minneapolis, and the initial incident happened about 1/2 mile from my house. Although the rioting is a few miles away, because all the good stuff to loot is there (and the police precinct building).

          I’ve heard a lot of contradictory stuff about the police using rubber bullets, tear gas etc. either in response to the rioting, or on peaceful protesters causing the riot. As has been discussed, it makes no sense that police violence will cause looting and destruction of all retail, so I certainly don’t buy that second narrative. And I did hear about destruction happening well before police violence, as well as looting and violence far away from the police building, so obviously not caused by the police actions.

          And there was only that initial phase of police action. I have heard that the mayor has instructed the police to not arrest anyone, and to do no more than tell folks to move along. And the mayor even had them abandon the precinct building, which is why it was fired. Now the looting and destruction has spread to other parts of the city, and to St Paul and the suburbs. This is what happens when you ignore public vandalism and destruction, it gets bigger. I assume at some point the mayor will get religion and realize that yes the cops are necessary to maintain order, even when they did a bad thing.

          There is much discussion about the looters and vandals being completely separate people from the protesters. I think this may be correct for the most part. There are some folks out there that really do like to cause destruction (anarchists, antifa), and some professional thieves who go in with trucks and take lots of stuff from stores. There are plenty of others that will follow along and grab some items from the stores and add to the general mayhem of destroying stores, but the initiative I think is mostly a few people that care not a bit about the excuse for the looting and destruction (the police killing in this case). The cops need to stop these people, or they will destroy a lot of the city, even if the peaceful ones are the majority. And in fact the peaceful ones now have a lot of notice of what’s going on, they need to get out of the riot areas, or it is their own fault.

          • johan_larson says:

            The part that surprises me about this incident is that it happened in Minneapolis. Minneapolis has a reputation as one of the nice liberal parts of the country, a place that has its shit together, more Switzerland and less Brazil. I’ve heard it called the best city in America that doesn’t have a coastline. Is that reputation not entirely deserved?

          • viVI_IViv says:

            I’ve seen reports, unconfirmed so far, that many rioters and looters might be not be residents of Minneapolis.

          • John Schilling says:

            Minneapolis has a reputation as one of the nice liberal parts of the country, a place that has its shit together, more Switzerland and less Brazil.

            In some corners, maybe. Probably not so much in Australia. And no matter how “nice” you think Minneapolis is, this is the third time in four years that the Minneapolis police(*) killed someone who clearly did not need to be killed in a way that the local DA at least thought constituted literal murder. Even the stereotypically nice liberal people of Minnesota, might get a bit peeved about that.

            *Twice the literal MPD, once the police of nearby suburb.

          • Mark V Anderson says:

            Minneapolis has a reputation as one of the nice liberal parts of the country

            Yes they sometimes call us the Canada of the US. I presume the niceness of Canada is way over-stated also?

            I think part of the issue with Minneapolis is that until a few decades ago we were very homogenously White. A lot of Blacks have now moved to the city. There has been lots of discussion about how the racial gap in education, income, etc. is higher in Minnesota than other states. This actually makes sense to me because being new residents will likely bring down the average education and income, so add that to the Black disadvantage and you get a large racial gap. But it definitely makes for a lot of resentment by Blacks. I think added to that is the very blue region (Omar Ilhan is our Rep) in my opinion makes racial resentments much higher by constantly encouraging such stuff.

            This is very much like what I’ve heard the issues being in Stockholm. I am waiting for racial riots to happen there.

          • DeWitt says:

            I presume the niceness of Canada is way over-stated also?

            It is.

    • baconbits9 says:

      One major difference is that the armed militia members are often keenly aware of the line between legal and illegal actions, especially with regard to the exact type of gun they are allowed to own and carry in public in these situations. There is also the likelihood that if they start throwing rocks/bottles etc at the cops while holding weapons the response is more likely to escalate beyond rubber bullets and tear gas which is the standard response in the US for unarmed protests that get unruly.

      • albatross11 says:

        Yeah, if the protesters are all armed, I think everyone understands that the stakes around starting some violence (tossing bricks or Molotov cocktails, using tear gas, etc.) are much, much higher. Sufficiently so that probably if one of the protesters looks like he’s about to heave a brick, he’s going to have the other protesters stopping him.

    • Jaskologist says:

      All the 2A people think the answer is extremely obvious.

      • JonathanD says:

        I’ve always thought the difference between the Standing Rock thing the Bundy thing was instructive. A lot of people in my bubbles framed it as white privilege, and that’s probably part of it, but I wonder what would have happened had the water-protectors shown up with AR-15s and told the authorities to go pound sand. Was it really Bundy’s whiteness that let (lets? is he still there and not paying his fees?) him flout the law, or his guns and willingness to kill (or at least threaten to kill) law enforcement?

      • Matt M says:

        Yeah, the whole “lol assault rifles won’t help you against the government” logic looks kinda weak the day after a crowd of people basically took over a large major metro with nothing more than rocks and maybe a few homemade molotovs?

        • RalMirrorAd says:

          Assault Rifles won’t help against a sufficiently determined government with the stomach to use lethal force. This is true but only in a trivial/meaningless sense.

          In certain instances not having firearms weapons might make it harder for the police to justify violently defending their buildings and such.

          That’s not to say disarming yourself would make you more effective at resisting the government.

          • baconbits9 says:

            Small arms greatly increase the baseline of ‘sufficiently determined’ though. When your weapons are rocks and bottles a sufficiently determined government only has to stomach tear gas, rubber bullets and a small number of casualties.

          • RalMirrorAd says:

            @Baconbits

            Yeah, I won’t deny that firearms are a force multiplier.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      Depends on the framing.

      Framing 1:

      The cops didn’t take action against masked, armed, white people. They still choked out a black guy on the street.

      Framing 2:

      The cops didn’t take action against people peacefully protesting. They failed to handle people who were burning down a Target and a police station.

    • My favorite framing I’ve seen on social media is comparing the Minneapolis looting with the Boston Tea Party.

    • ECD says:

      Has SSC just given up on the three day rule?

      • rumham says:

        The riots started on the 26th.

        • ECD says:

          That does not seem in accord with the Wikipedia article which suggest some vandalism and minor incidents, nothing like what’s actually being discussed.

          However, you are arguably technically correct.

          • rumham says:

            That does not seem in accord with the Wikipedia article which suggest some vandalism and minor incidents, nothing like what’s actually being discussed.

            The OP and virtually all subsequent discussion has revolved around the first day of the protests. Not arguable technically correct. Just correct. Though I do welcome any and all futurama links.

          • ECD says:

            The OP and virtually all subsequent discussion has revolved around the first day of the protests. Not arguable technically correct. Just correct. Though I do welcome any and all futurama links.

            As far as I can tell none of the fires or looting occurred the first night, though the initial posting arguably might have been as it was focused on police response.

          • rumham says:

            @ECD

            Going back through the videos I can find, I think you’re right about the fires. It was raining, and even though there’s a bunch of smoke, they were throwing a lot of smoke bombs.

            Ironically, the Wikipedia article agrees with earlier me, though I no longer believe it.

            After Floyd’s death, demonstrations and protests in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul area were initially peaceful on May 26, but later that day turned destructive as windows were smashed at a police precinct, two stores were set on fire, and many stores were looted and damaged.

            I followed the sources and it looks like the fires were on the 27th.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        Also, everybody’s being civil, and…I mean, to be honest there’s extremely little disagreement going on. So, no harm, no foul?

        • Randy M says:

          I think the point of the 3 day rule, in addition to perhaps allowing tempers to cool, is to make sure we are working on more accurate information.

          When there is a mass shooting, we often get media misreporting some important detail of the suspect, and his agenda and demographics will be speculated on after each corrected report in an unhelpful and unseemly manner.

  43. Loriot says:

    I just tried making a muffin recipe which called for yogurt, and now I’m wondering – how do you measure yogurt out for baking without making a huge mess? Unlike milk, you can’t really pour it, and scooping results in it getting all over the outside and handle of the cup and hence the counter top. Also, it’s not homogenous like milk – I wasn’t sure whether I should stir it first and if so, what the best way to do so is.

    I’ve heard that yogurt is a popular ingredient in baked goods, so surely people have solved these problems. Does anyone know how to bake with yogurt properly?

    • Beans says:

      This isn’t going to be a helpful comment, but really, just carefully spoon it into the measuring cup. It’ll glorp together to fill it in well enough, and it’s really not that hard to avoid a mess if you don’t rush.

    • Aftagley says:

      If you measure by weight it’s easy – just tare out your scale and spoon the requisite about into the bowl.

      If you go by volume, well, that’s trickier, but a spoon is still your best bet. Just transfer it into the measuring cup, smooth it out then dump it in.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      I have some plain yogurt and if the container is still at least half-full I can scoop out, say, a half-cup with one go, with barely any sticking to the metal measuring cup.

    • JayT says:

      I go by weight on ingredients like that. Someone on the internet can tell you how much a cup of yogurt weighs, I’m sure.

    • achenx says:

      Yes stir it, yes weigh it. The nutrition label should translate volume to mass somewhere: “Serving size 8 fl oz (200 g)” or something. Figure out your volume in the right units, translate to grams based on that, weigh it.

      If you don’t have a scale, then what Beans said: just glorp it in there.

      • Loriot says:

        Unfortunately, I don’t have a scale. I’m pretty new to the baking thing, and weighing ingredients is more of a European thing anyway.

        • JayT says:

          You should definitely get a scale. It’s extremely helpful when baking, and you can get a fine one for less than $20. I basically never use measuring cups, and it means less cleanup because you can add an ingredient to the bowl, zero it out, and add the next one.

          • Statismagician says:

            Seconded. I used to be a volume-measurer, but I’ve been thoroughly converted over the last couple of years. It’s just so much easier.

          • ana53294 says:

            My life was changed when I bought measuring cups and spoons. Baking became so much easier now that I don’t have to weight things…

            I guess it depends from your starting point.

            My mother also loved it when I bought her measuring cups. She prefers them to the scale for all kinds of baking, but she still uses the scales for making marmelade.

          • SamChevre says:

            Also seconded: I’ve had my 7-kg capacity digital scale for 13 years, and weighted everything from infants to ingredients. I got it from Old Will Knott scales.

        • achenx says:

          I know some baking items are in short supply now, but a scale makes things much easier and more accurate, so it’s something I’d highly recommend looking for if you think baking is something you’ll stick with. I use mine for other types of cooking as well.

          Wirecutter has an article: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-kitchen-scale/ with some inexpensive options.

    • Andrew Hunter says:

      Weight. Put your mixing bowl on your kitchen scale–You do have a kitchen scale, don’t you?–and spoon it in. Bob’s your uncle.

    • Gerry Quinn says:

      Use a scale instead of a measuring cup? Yoghurt’s density is similar to water, one gram per cubic centimeter.

  44. proyas says:

    Why doesn’t Venezuela build an oil refinery to turn its own oil into gasoline instead of importing gasoline all the way from Iran?

    • Lambert says:

      Private investors won’t due to the risk of expropriation and other forces majeures.

      The maduro regime either doesn’t have the resources, the capacity or the will to do so.
      Mineral wealth is a great thing for dictators because they only have to keep the military/police and the people running the mines/wells happy. If you want to set up an oil refinery, you need a lot more skilled tradesmen/welders and highly skilled chemical engineers, taught by university faculties.

      That’s a lot of hard-to-replace middle class people who you now rely on.

      Also oil is stupidly cheap to ship around, which means that there’s little natural reason to refine the oil near the wells.
      NZ has wells and a refinery but it exports its light sweet domestic oil while importing medium sour crude for the refinery. It just works out more efficiently that way.

    • John Schilling says:

      Because “Venezuela” doesn’t know how to build an oil refinery.

      For the past twenty years Venezuelan government policy has been that anyone who insists on getting paid serious money to build or even operate oil infrastructure, while the poor are suffering, is an Enemy of the People who must be taxed into oblivion and purged if they object to the taxed-into-oblivion part. Since the set “people who insist on getting paid serious money to build oil infrastructure” strongly overlaps the set “people who actually know how to build oil infrastructure”, and since they’re serious about the purges, there’s basically no one left in Venezuela who might know how to actually build an oil refinery.

      No, they can’t hire people who know how to build oil refineries to come to their country to build refineries for them, or even teach them how to build oil refineries for themselves, because they’re pretty much out of money and they have a twenty-year track record of purging anyone fool enough to actually insist on getting paid or that sort of work. No, they can’t have a bunch of regime loyalists read the “Building Oil Refineries for Dummies” book and build an oil refinery, because the resulting collection of impressive-looking junk would be about as likely to refine oil as a Melanesian cargo-cultist’s airport is to become an international transit hub.

    • broblawsky says:

      Venezuela has unusually difficult to refine oil (lots of impurities, especially sulfur). I actually don’t think they have the technical expertise anymore, if they ever did.

      • anon-e-moose says:

        This is a great answer. VZ could import the expertise from Russia if needed. But the issue is the VZ’s crude is particularly unsuitable for use, and required more refining that oil from Saudi Arabia, for example. Additionally, VZ’s reserves are geologically deep and expensive to tap.

        • Matt M says:

          Yeah. I’m not an expert on this, but my general understanding was that all else equal, VZ’s crude is among the most undesirable in the world. In an era of falling oil prices (due to supply vastly exceeding demand), they’re the first ones to no longer be worth the hassle.

        • broblawsky says:

          Venezuelan oil is more expensive to tap than most Middle Eastern/North African oil, but less expensive than most Russian, Canadian, or American oil. AFAIK, it’s the refining cost that really hurts them.

    • A Definite Beta Guy says:

      I asked our Venezuelan engineers if they wanted to move back to Venezuela to help them build an oil refinery. They said “hell no.”

      Also the Turkish engineer also volunteered that he sure is hell not going back to Turkey.

      Also the Balkan machinists volunteered they do not want to go back to the Disneyland of Ethnic Cleansing.

      Actually basically all of our engineers, machinists, and mechanics are from countries that were not well-run.

      Theoretically we could build a factory there, but we did that once, and then it got Worker Counciled, so Chavez and his cronies get to try to run it now. Looks like they got Galt’d.

    • Aftagley says:

      A couple of reasons:

      1. Building a refinery doesn’t get you gasoline. It gets you a massive up-front cost that will, hopefully one day result in you getting gasoline. Venezuela doesn’t need another massive public works project that will hopefully make things better someday, they need gas now. It’s the same reason you don’t plant some wheat when you want bread.

      2. One of the hallmarks of the Chavista mindset (and arguably most past Venezuelan governments), at least economically, has always been “if we need something, we can just import it.” For most of these people’s proffesional lives they’ve say on massive cash reserves that let them buy what they need. When your government is structured around buying off your populace, it’s really hard to shake the habit of buying off your populace.

      3. Like everyone else said – there are enough uncertainties around working with Venezuela that most reputable foreign powers would balk at working with the Maduro regime no matter the cost. They also purged everyone inside PVDSA years ago who could have done something like this internally.

      • John Schilling says:

        Like everyone else said – there are enough uncertainties around working with Venezuela

        I’m not sure there’s even really any uncertainty at this point. If you go to Venezuela to build an oil refinery, as a lone specialist or an international conglomerate with a full organization, it’s now quite certain that you’re not going to get paid in anything resembling real money. I suppose there’s some uncertainty in where exactly the line between “fled the country empty-handed” and “got lynched for making too much fuss about not getting paid” is drawn.

  45. Chalid says:

    As we all know, Twitter and Facebook and the like are hard to dislodge because of network effects. There might be a technically better site than Twitter, but if everyone you want to interact with is already on Twitter, then there will be nobody to talk to on the new site, and it’s too hard to coordinate everyone moving.

    Trump is unhappy with Twitter now. It seems like he’s one of very few people who could coordinate a move to a new social network – if he declared he was switching to using a Twitter alternative he would get a significant number of people to at least read the new site, including a lot of influential people.

    Is there a decent Twitter alternative he could go to? Do you think he’d be able to make it viable?

    • Thomas Jorgensen says:

      … He would instantly make twitter slightly more viable if he tried it, and where-ever he tried to move to a sewer. Not by the power of his own postings, but.. consider exactly who would choose to move to a new social media platform specifically because Trump is using it.

      • Chalid says:

        Running online sewers is a perfectly viable business.

      • toastengineer says:

        Considering the kinds of people who populate radical free-speech communications systems now, I think an influx of Trump supporters would be a massive improvement.

      • Matt M says:

        Uh… mostly journalists I guess?

        And I mean, sure, *I* agree that Gab would get much worse if all the blue-check journos started going there. But I’m guessing that’s not quite what *you* meant…

      • ana53294 says:

        There are probably quite a few people who hate-follow and hate-respond to Trump. They would follow him to whichever platform he’ll go to, as long as he’s POTUS, to continue hate-following him. Then there are the real followers, of course.

        But whenever I look at the responses to Trump’s tweets, the top ones are always negative ones.

        • silver_swift says:

          So you get rid of Trump followers and the Trump hate-followers in one move?

          Sounds like an excellent plan to me.

      • Skeptical Wolf says:

        consider exactly who would choose to move to a new social media platform specifically because Trump is using it.

        I can think of quite a few:
        – People who have been looking for a viable twitter alternative for years and think POTUS plugging one might just make it viable.
        – People who are already juggling half a dozen social media platforms and consider adding one more to be a low cost.
        – People from Minnesota’s fifth congressional district that are concerned about political censorship (likely to be mostly Republicans, because they’re on the losing end of this particular action).
        – People who have curtailed their social media participation due to concerns about the sort of harassment campaigns that twitter has become known for.
        – People who are tired of having any platform that isn’t actively hostile to them called a “sewer”.

        Your comment actually provides an excellent example of why a lot of people might be inclined to move. Writing off half the country as undesirables that your platform is better off without would not be a good way to maintain a monopoly, even if it were true.

        • Lambert says:

          > People who are tired of having any platform that isn’t actively hostile to them called a “sewer”.

          It’s not that. The problem is that even if the people that you mention are superbly principled effortposters making up a majority of the userbase, a minority of trolls will out-shitpost them till it’s a sewer.

          • Skeptical Wolf says:

            The problem is that even if the people that you mention are superbly principled effortposters making up a majority of the userbase, a minority of trolls will out-shitpost them till it’s a sewer.

            How would this be different from Twitter? Community moderation is hard and I don’t know many people who think Twitter has solved it already.

            Are you assuming that anywhere Trump would move would be less moderated, not just differently moderated?

          • Thomas Jorgensen says:

            That, and “The swarm of trolls following Trump” would make up a terrifyingly high percentage of their total userbase following the move. Because all the potential candidates currently have quite small user bases.

    • ana53294 says:

      I don’t think Trump would move from Twitter, because it would be like admitting defeat.

      He also has the constraint of using an American platform. He can’t move to TikTok, can he? And even Telegram is probably out… And American social media platforms are made in Silicon Valley, and most of them will lean left.

    • broblawsky says:

      Mastodon is probably the only viable option, but I don’t think Trump would like it; it seems specifically designed to limit growth of new members.

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      Is there a decent Twitter alternative he could go to?

      Trump should just start using the emergency alert system to push his tweets to everyone’s phones.

    • Controls Freak says:

      I’m starting to think that he can just compel them to stop. The Second Circuit said that Trump’s tweets are “government speech”, and that

      Under the government speech doctrine, “[t]he Free Speech Clause does not require government to maintain viewpoint neutrality when its officers and employees speak” about governmental endeavors. For example, when the government wishes to promote a war effort, it is not required by the First Amendment to also distribute messages discouraging that effort.

      Cornell Law School says:

      A central issue prompted by the government speech doctrine is determining when speech is that of the government, which can be difficult when the government utilizes or relies on private parties to relay a particular message. In Johanns v. Livestock Marketing Association, the Court held that the First Amendment did not prohibit the compelled subsidization of advertisements promoting the sale of beef because the underlying message of the advertisements was “effectively controlled” by the government.

      It seems to me that this implies that if a printing company generally provides printing services to the public, and the government put in an order with them to print up pamphlets with government speech (promoting a war effort or whatever), and they said, “Not unless we get to put on a disclaimer that says we don’t like it,” the gov’t could just flatly compel them. I don’t think, “You don’t understand, we don’t let this content through unaltered for any of our customers; we don’t sell “printing services”, we sell “content augmentation and printing services” is going to fly. You’d probably have to get into Masterpiece Cakeshop land and assert a personal religious/philosophical objection that is significantly heftier than, “I take it upon myself to do good in the world, and I think that includes correcting misinformation or whatever.”

      [EDIT: Note that the Second Circuit crucially distinguished between the tweets, themselves, which it determined were government speech, and the interactive features that allow the public to respond, which is a public forum. I think the gov’t can argue that if Twitter wants to engage in the public forum, they can do so via a regular account, just like everyone else. They can’t force their pamphlet to be an attachment to the government’s pamphlet.

      Further thinking: The interesting conclusion here is that if Twitter had tried to do this when Trump was a candidate, they might have gotten away with it. It’s only after he became president, and the Second Circuit agreed that his tweets are government speech that they became unable. Seems almost symmetric and fair: he loses the right to ban people; Twitter loses the right to “correct” him.

      Revisited: I was worried for a second, but I’mma go with it. Let me know what you think. I think the prior compelled speech cases can be distinguished. Miami Herald (no “fairness doctrine” for newspapers) rested on the fact that newspapers “are a finite endeavor”, which isn’t going to fly for Twitter. Wooley has to be interpreted in light of Walker. I think that it would imply that Twitter can’t be forced to carry Trump’s tweet at all (perhaps they could just delete it), but if they do carry it, they can’t force their message into his government speech.]

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        Can the government order Scott to publish Trump messages on his blog?

        • Controls Freak says:

          I don’t think it’s at all plausible that they could force Scott to post blog posts. That’s core speech that is clearly controlled by Scott. But suppose Trump made a commenting account here…

          Someone else can write the XKCD-style What-If? How the site traffic would explode, how Scott would respond, how much attention Trump would pay to any responses to responses (or follow-up articles), and all the glorious fallout from the shitshow that would result. Make this extra funny.

          Legally speaking, the more I read, the more I think these are actually super hard cases. I think the closest to on-point cases concerning Twitter are two cases about license plates and one about recruiting people join the Army. Yeah. It’s that bad. I’ve said before that my greatest hope for a Trump administration is to get interesting SCOTUS cases that illuminate interesting parts of the law, and this would certainly be it. A variety of thoughts:

          Wooley has the broadest worded statement that would restrict the government:

          We are thus faced with the question of whether the State may constitutionally require an individual to participate in the dissemination of an ideological message by displaying it on his private property in a manner and for the express purpose that it be observed and read by the public. We hold that the State may not do so.

          Individual” cuts a bit against Twitter, and a bit toward Scott. “Participate in the dissemination” sounds extremely broad, but if we loose it from its qualifier, we basically open it up to where ISPs could say they have a right to refuse to carry Trump’s tweets (or the right to alter them or amend them or whatever; also, this would seem to Constitutionalize anti-net-neutrality, because the gov’t couldn’t force them to carry other people’s ideological messages, either). The qualifier “by displaying it on his private property” is absolute bait for the digital/physical distinction. Is it the physical server? Twitter probably owns their servers. Scott probably doesn’t. Is it the domain? I mean, maybe? That screws over people who host their blog actually on WordPress.com. Is it the physical device on which the tweet is actually displayed? That would screw over both Scott and everyone else (so they won’t pick that option).

          Since we can’t just ignore the qualifier “by displaying it on his private property” (lest we Constitutionalize ISP-based censorship) and it might be a nightmare to apply a property analysis (paging Justice Gorsuch, though), I sort of think that the Court will be have to tread new ground beyond Wooley alone.

          So, then, there’s Walker. From Texas; not a ranger. Texas allowed individuals to design their own license plates, but some Confederates submitted a design they didn’t like. Key quote:

          But here, compelled private speech is not at issue. And just as Texas cannot require SCV to convey “the State’s ideological message,” SCV cannot force Texas to include a Confederate battle flag on its specialty license plates.

          It’s a Breyer opinion, so naturally I can’t understand it (I kid). But, basically, when people see license plates, they think it’s the government speaking; they think it’s something that the government endorses; therefore, it’s “government speech”. So Texas got to refuse an outside party’s attempt to, uh, help them craft that speech.

          Finally, there’s Rumsfeld v. FAIR. The gov’t required equal access to law school campuses for DOD recruiters as was given to other recruiters. To totally bastardize an analogy, the court treated the physical conduct of recruiting like a platform.

          The Solomon Amendment neither limits what law schools may say nor requires them to say anything. Law schools remain free under the statute to express whatever views they may have on the military’s congressionally mandated employment policy, all the while retaining eligibility for federal funds. See Tr. of Oral Arg. 25 (Solicitor General acknowledging that law schools “could put signs on the bulletin board next to the door, they could engage in speech, they could help organize student protests”). As a general matter, the Solomon Amendment regulates conduct, not speech. It affects what law schools must do—afford equal access to military recruiters—not what they may or may not say.

          That parenthetical is important, because it’s perhaps the closest actual thing. But what’s really interesting is that this same argument was tried in Wooley – the dissent said:

          As found by the New Hampshire Supreme Court in Hoskin, there is nothing in state law which precludes appellees from displaying their disagreement with the state motto as long as the methods used do not obscure the license plates. Thus appellees could place on their bumper a conspicuous bumper sticker explaining in no uncertain terms that they do not profess the motto “Live Free or Die” and that they violently disagree with the connotations of that motto. Since any implication that they affirm the motto can be so easily displaced, I cannot agree that the state statutory system for motor vehicle identification and tourist promotion may be invalidated under the fiction that appellees are unconstitutionally forced to affirm, or profess belief in, the state motto.

          But that was the dissent. It lost. So, why did it win in FAIR? And what are the bounds for which type of options for dissent are sufficient? This is part of why I quoted the bit from the Second Circuit about, “when the government wishes to promote a war effort, it is not required by the First Amendment to also distribute messages discouraging that effort.” So, who is doing what here? Trump’s tweet is “government speech”. It’s indicated that it’s Trump’s, with a blue check and everything. Can Twitter (or even an ISP) jump into the tweet, itself, and attach their own message to it? Is this like a car owner trying to jump in and attach his confederate message to the government’s license plate speech? Is the tweet more like their private property that the gov’t is forcing them to display their message on? What if they want to just ban him? Maybe they can/can’t do that on equal terms to how they treat other recruiters users on their campus platform, and can’t nose themselves into the individual conversations? Or would banning him be like trying to ban a license plate from your car altogether? The role of the counter-speech and the mechanism by which it’s applied is super unclear.

          So, I sort of keep coming back to the Second Circuit, talking about how they have to look at the nature of how the “property” (tech) works and the practices. I think they rely a fair amount on local norms, but that’s not entirely controlling (he can’t ban folks, while that’s a normal feature of the tech that others use). They’re trying to make “corrections” a part of the local norm, but wew lad, can you imagine reduxing Walker with a hypothetical Confederate-owned Twitter jumping in with, “Learn the facts about the glorious Confederate battle flag”? Delivered as part of the “government speech”? Going back to the top line, whatever else is the case, I don’t think Trump can force Scott to let him post blog posts (or if Twitter had a company blog). I have basically no clue if folks could ban him. Given Scott’s tools/norms, I don’t think he could jump in and add to Trump’s comments here, but he could certainly reply with a comment of his own.

          I’m going to have to buy so much popcorn for opinion days in June 2021.

      • anonymousskimmer says:

        1) No one is paying Twitter to tweet, despite each tweet costing Twitter a minuscule amount to host and deliver.
        2) Twitter provides a forum that has to deal with every response to each tweet. This has further costs, especially if a particular tweet gets a lot of back and forth.

        I don’t know what precedence and arguments were used in the case, but Johanns v. Livestock Marketing Association seems far more akin to Union shop fees than to mandating that a publisher itself be compelled to freely print a statement unrelated to its core business.

        Now if the government wants to compel Twitter to start tweeting about the benefits of free and truly unbiased social media, your argument may fly.

        Just my opinion.

        • Controls Freak says:

          1) No one is paying Twitter to tweet

          I’m not sure why that matters.

          …despite each tweet costing Twitter a minuscule amount to host and deliver.

          2) Twitter provides a forum that has to deal with every response to each tweet. This has further costs, especially if a particular tweet gets a lot of back and forth.

          I’m interpreting this point and a half to conceptually amount to, “It costs them.” Sure, that was part of the deal in Miami Herald. Newspapers are pretty limited. The Court called them a “finite endeavor”. There, the idea that for every additional thing you put in, you have to take something out is actually sort of meaningful. Removing ads – stupid expensive. Adding pages – stupid expensive. Or you have to actually cut other stuff out. Nobody thinks the de minimis costs of additional hosting is remotely similar than the financial costs to newspapers (and frankly, even if they decided to ban all accounts from any government entity, I don’t think the cost savings would be significant enough for the Justices to even bat an eye at the difference). In fact, lots of folks argue that in Twitter’s model, the customers are the product; you provide them value by using their service. And to the extent that (2) comes into play, if they gain value from people interacting with Twitter, Trump may be their most valuable user. Additionally, there is no sense in which the idea that “if Trump puts content in, they’re required to cut other content” is anything but laughable.

          Re: Johanns v. LMA, I think you’re right. Except, I think printing statements unrelated to their core business is their core business. Similar to how ISPs transmitting statements that aren’t about the glory of burying cables in the ground is part of their core business.

          Just my opinion.

          It’s all any of us have. Except SCOTUS. They have The Opinion (…sometimes they’ll have two or more, but they at least try to point more intently at one of them).

          • anonymousskimmer says:

            It’s all any of us have. Except SCOTUS. They have The Opinion (…sometimes they’ll have two or more, but they at least try to point more intently at one of them).

            They do a good job of not giving any opinion if they can’t point more intently at one of them.

            I’m a constitutional textualist. The 1st amendment effectively grants citizens free speech toward their government. Nothing in the US constitution grants the government any power of speech (read literally) whatsoever. All of these SCOTUS rulings are thus rulings on subordinate federal laws, other constitutional powers such as the right to tax (taxation is limited to money, I believe, as conscription is not considered taxation), or are narrow rulings stating that the government obviously has the right to speak if said speech is a de facto requirement for the exercise of a power granted to the government.

            I’m quite sure SCOTUS would disagree with me here, but philosophically that’s where I would argue this issue from.

            Obscuring license plates is an issue not because the license plate is government speech, but because the government cannot function without seeing the license plate.

            Having looked at the mail-in ballot tweet, I believe that Twitter’s alteration of it does realistically look like Trump made the fact-check link about mail-in ballots. They should have put a door up, not apparently modified his tweet. I can see a real argument against what they did. If they had put a door up (like they do for “sensitive content”, I would see no problem.

          • beleester says:

            1) No one is paying Twitter to tweet

            I’m not sure why that matters.

            Your original post gave the example of a print shop – you pay them to print what you wrote, not to print it with a bit of editorializing on whatever you wrote. And the case you’re citing is about a livestock company being compelled to contribute to a government-run advertising program. In both cases, the government is paying for the speech it’s producing – either directly or by taxation.

            But you don’t pay Twitter for anything. Advertisers pay Twitter, and Twitter lets you post so that you’ll view the ads. You don’t give Twitter anything except a 140-character piece of your mind. And I don’t buy the argument that, simply because the government has said something to you, that you’re compelled to distribute that statement in the manner that they wanted.

          • Controls Freak says:

            Nothing in the US constitution grants the government any power of speech (read literally) whatsoever. All of these SCOTUS rulings are thus rulings on subordinate federal laws, other constitutional powers such as the right to tax (taxation is limited to money, I believe, as conscription is not considered taxation), or are narrow rulings stating that the government obviously has the right to speak if said speech is a de facto requirement for the exercise of a power granted to the government.

            Fair. I actually meant to mention this at some point. I wanted to discuss how my biggest uncertainty would be the mechanism by which they could affirmatively assert something. I’d amend my initial statement to be that I think he could just compel them to do it first amendment notwithstanding. I know there are other free-floating grants of power to government to demand services (we saw the DPA recently), and I’d be curious if there are any tucked away old laws that basically say some form of, “If you offer services to the public, you can’t uniquely discriminate against the government on terms that aren’t applied to others [or maybe are on a list of particular exceptions].” We’ll see if there are any lawyers in the White House clever enough to think of something like this, and then we’ll all turn to debating whether or not Twitter actually satisfies the details of that law. People will still discuss 1A, but I’m less convinced now than I was a week ago that 1A would prohibit the gov’t from compelling Twitter.

            Obscuring license plates is an issue not because the license plate is government speech, but because the government cannot function without seeing the license plate.

            Consider the FAIR case for a slightly different analogy to license plates. The law school argued that it was being compelled to speak, because they needed to do things like sending emails and distributing flyers about the presence of military recruiters. Roberts wrote:

            This sort of recruiting assistance, however, is a far cry from the compelled speech in Barnette and Wooley. The Solomon Amendment, unlike the laws at issue in those cases, does not dictate the content of the speech at all, which is only “compelled” if, and to the extent, the school provides such speech for other recruiters. There is nothing in this case approaching a Government-mandated pledge or motto that the school must endorse.

            I don’t think he would be amused if the law school turned around and circumvented this by “altering” their regular services. Maybe, they put up flyers that said, “NO BLOOD FOR OIL” in gigantic print and, “Military recruiter will be in Room 110 at 3p on Sunday,” in imperceptibly tiny print. But as before, that would again probably end up going back to the text of the statute and determining whether it was impermissible according to the statute. And if the gov’t said, “No, you can’t do that; you can put up a flyer next to it, though,” I don’t think 1A would prohibit it. That’s a compromise more similar to, “You can’t amend his tweet, but you can write a reply tweet.”

          • Controls Freak says:

            But you don’t pay Twitter for anything. Advertisers pay Twitter, and Twitter lets you post so that you’ll view the ads. You don’t give Twitter anything except a 140-character piece of your mind. And I don’t buy the argument that, simply because the government has said something to you, that you’re compelled to distribute that statement in the manner that they wanted.

            I think Matt or Conrad (I can’t remember which; sorry guys that you get lumped in as “the Trumpies” and I don’t always remember who said what) has been here beating the “fraud” drum. Basically, they say they’re offering a service. In that service, they take your tweet and distribute it to your followers. They’ve continued to perform this service reliably for a very many people for a very long time. Long enough that the Second Circuit has established that the first part of the process is “government speech” and that the subsequent part (replies, etc.) is a “public forum”. The Second Circuit basically said to Trump, “Since you established it that way by your past practice, you can’t change the terms of the deal now.” Twitter is trying to say, “I have altered the deal; pray I do not alter it further.” And they’re doing it selectively; not for all of their users. (I know, I know, they’re going to say, “Actually, we reserve the right to fact check all of our users,” as if a company saying, “Actually, we reserve the right to refuse service to all of our customers,” legitimates them singling out black people.)

            And that, well… in an idealized setting, I see why they should be able to do that, kinda. I can also see why folks like Matt/Conrad want to say, “No, we didn’t explicitly pay you money, but we all know that our using the system compensated you, and we did so under these expectations.” I’m not sure I can think of an analogy at all, because services-not-directly-compensated is quite a weird phenomenon.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            I think Matt or Conrad (I can’t remember which; sorry guys that you get lumped in as “the Trumpies” and I don’t always remember who said what)

            That’s Matt’s line. I don’t necessarily disagree, but I also don’t care. I’m not a libertarian and don’t have a moral objection to government regulation, so I don’t need a “no fraud” violation of the NAP to be all right with telling private companies to shape up. Also, Matt’s not really a Trumpist. I think he supports Trump because Trump sticks it to his enemies, but isn’t really aligned with many of Trump’s policies, per se.

            ETA: Just my attempt to take the Matt M Ideological Turing Test. Not intended to actually speak for Matt M.

          • Controls Freak says:

            Thanks for the clarification!

      • Chalid says:

        IANAL but this seems crazy to me. I can understand a case for compelling publication of official government business – e.g. if the DOJ had a Twitter account that it used for official announcements and where the tweets underwent some sort of process. And Trump announcing a policy decision on Twitter seems like government speech.

        But Trump accusing Joe Scarborough of murdering an intern isn’t government speech. Trump launching personal attacks on political opponents isn’t government speech, or at least, it shouldn’t be.

        • Matt M says:

          Didn’t the courts already rule that Trump’s personal Twitter is government speech when they ruled that he isn’t allowed to block people?

          • Chalid says:

            IANAL, again, but it doesn’t seem to me that that implies that *everything* on his Twitter is government speech.

          • Controls Freak says:

            Matt, yes. This is what I’m riffing off of. A longer quote from the Second Circuit:

            Under the government speech doctrine, “[t]he Free Speech Clause does not require government to maintain viewpoint neutrality when its officers and employees speak” about governmental endeavors. For example, when the government wishes to promote a war effort, it is not required by the First Amendment to also distribute messages discouraging that effort.

            It is clear that if President Trump were engaging in government speech when he blocked the Individual Plaintiffs, he would not have been violating the First Amendment. Everyone concedes that the President’s initial tweets (meaning those that he produces himself) are government speech. But this case does not turn on the President’s initial tweets; it turns on his supervision of the interactive features of the Account. The government has conceded that the Account “is generally accessible to the public at large without regard to political affiliation or any other limiting criteria,” and the President has not attempted to limit the Account’s interactive feature to his own speech.

            Considering the interactive features, the speech in question is that of multiple individuals, not just the President or that of the government. When a Twitter user posts a reply to one of the President’s tweets, the message is identified as coming from that user, not from the President. There is no record evidence, and the government does not argue, that the President has attempted to exercise any control over the messages of others, except to the extent he has blocked some persons expressing viewpoints he finds distasteful. The contents of retweets, replies, likes, and mentions are controlled by the user who generates them and not by the President, except to the extent he attempts to do so by blocking. Accordingly, while the President’s tweets can accurately be described as government speech, the retweets, replies, and likes of other users in response to his tweets are not government speech under any formulation. The Supreme Court has described the government speech doctrine as “susceptible to dangerous misuse.” It has urged “great caution” to prevent the government from “silenc[ing] or muffl[ing] the expression of disfavored viewpoints” under the guise of the government speech doctrine. Extension of the doctrine in the way urged by President Trump would produce precisely that result.

            Chalid, notice the only qualifier the Second Circuit put on what was government speech was the tweets “he produces himself”. This is because they need the proper scoping unit to be the Account, and not each individual tweet. They needed this in order to say that the Account was considered a public forum. As soon as you cut to a smaller scoping unit, I have no idea what would occur.

          • Chalid says:

            Sure, it makes sense to me that the account settings are controlled as if it was a government account, because a substantial fraction of the account’s contents are government speech.

      • 10240 says:

        You are arguing that the 1st Amendment may not prohibit Trump from ordering Twitter to publish his tweets without fact checks. But does he have any grounds for ordering it, without a new law at the minimum?

        Also, that the 1st Amendment doesn’t require government speech to be viewpoint neutral is a different question from whether ordering Twitter to display the tweets without fact checks infringes on Twitter’s freedom of speech, isn’t it?

        • Controls Freak says:

          does he have any grounds for ordering it, without a new law at the minimum?

          I spoke a little about that here. Nothing comes to my mind, right now.

          that the 1st Amendment doesn’t require government speech to be viewpoint neutral is a different question from whether ordering Twitter to display the tweets without fact checks infringes on Twitter’s freedom of speech, isn’t it?

          Yes. But once the government speech is established (even if not viewpoint neutral), then it may alter the question of how Twitter’s freedom of speech works. One of those, “You can counter-speak, but you can’t disrupt my freedom of speech,” type deals. Once the government gets to speak with license plates or flyers announcing recruiting, it somewhat limits the types of things you can do to disrupt that speech.

    • Well... says:

      Twitter non-user here. I use basic text messaging and email to send short messages to people. Works great. Perfectly viable, and everyone with a Twitter account already has email and almost certainly has SMS too.

      When I want to broadcast my ideas to the internet I write blog posts. Also works great and is perfectly viable. If I had a smartphone I could do it just as easily as sending a Tweet is (in my second-hand understanding).

  46. Belisaurus Rex says:

    Are the Forms real or are they Maya too?

  47. Le Maistre Chat says:

    How plague can ruin your schooling:
    Nostradamus entered the University of Avignon at age 14 but was forced to leave after a year because the university shut down in response to bubonic plague. 15-year-old Michel learned apothecary skills and supported himself trying to heal people. It wasn’t until the age of 25 that he got the opportunity to enter the University of Montpellier, where he planned to study for a doctorate in medicine. He was expelled by the student procurator, Guillaume Rondelet, when it was discovered that he had been an apothecary, a manual trade expressly banned by the university statutes.

    Unrelated fun fact: it’s popularly assumed that Nostradamus had to fear the Inquisition for composing predictive quatrains. In fact, he was a devout Catholic – he shunned the Protestant Reformation raging in France during his lifetime – and astrology was so far from being a crime that there were professionals such as Laurens Videl who denounced him for incompetent astrology.

    • Bobobob says:

      As a teenager, I was creeped out by this Nostradamus quatrain ostensibly about Henry II:

      The young lion will overcome the older one,
      On the field of combat in a single battle;
      He will pierce his eyes through a golden cage,
      Two wounds made one, then he dies a cruel death.

      …but the source failed to mention that (according to the few seconds of research I just conducted) it only appeared in print 50 years after the event.

      I was also fascinated by Erich von Daniken’s oeuvre, if that counts for anything.

  48. GearRatio says:

    So I bought a bass, practice amp, cable, gig bag and strap for ~$100, new, from a budget internet-only brand. To put this into some perspective, Fender’s budget brand equivilent would be this squier kit,, at three times the price; they generally of Chinese make and have a mixed reputation. My hopes were limited to “have a bass for my son to learn on and me to mess around on”. For reference, I’ve been playing bass since I was 16, but not much in the last 4-5 years. I’ve had nice basses and shitty basses during that time; I’m fairly familiar with what makes a good, playable electric instrument.

    Surprisingly the bass is fine, bordering on pretty damn good; the fit and finish are great, there are no glaring problems with the woodwork or assembly, and it’s overall very workable. Fretboards are usually the easiest thing to be fucked up in this process in my experience, and the frets are all cut and fit well.

    The only two flaws with the bass that I can find are that it was completely unshielded, which is/was fixable in about a half hour with some copper tape and a soldering iron and that the setup was pretty abysmal. I don’t know enough about Squiers to know if they are generally well shielded, but I’ve played enough at guitar stores over the years to know they aren’t generally set up any better than a Walmart bicycle at Christmas.

    What’s interesting here to me is that it seems a lot like the Fender name/coolness factor is, even diminished by the “first instrument” line status applied to Squier, worth somewhat over 200% of the actual cost of a similar instrument. Once you discount that, you can cut the cost of seeing if you really want to learn guitar/bass down by 2/3rds; if you wanted to supply a school with ten such setups you could do so for <$1200, which seems like a pretty good value on charity for an art-minded person.

    This might not be as interesting to someone else, but I'm struck by it; when I got my first bass and amp at 16, it was around $180-200 for a lesser quality setup(and those are 2001 dollars). I was just barely able to talk my dad into it at that alredy-pretty low I can see a plausible world where if A. It becomes known that budget-instrument prices are potentially down to a day's minimum wage pay and B. Those same savings end up transferring over to more complex instruments/difficult to build instruments (violins, drums) we end up in a world with slightly more discovered music talent. I'm a fan.

    • SolenoidEntity says:

      This is very true. When I was growing up and learning violin I remember it being the case that even a ‘cheap’ violin cost many hundreds of dollars, and was likely to be so terrible it would need to be replaced with a more expensive one as soon as the student was proficient enough to hit the limitations of the cheap instrument.

      Now around 20 years after I was first learning, you can buy very cheap violins online for students that are actually not bad at all. The tone isn’t amazing but it’s completely fine. Just another thing to add to Gwern’s list of things that are getting better.

      • GearRatio says:

        The same company actually sells violins and electric violins, and I have to admit I’m tempted. Problem being I don’t know the difference between good and bad on violins, so I’d have no idea if it was holding me back or not.

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      What’s the name of the brand? Link? I’ve been thinking about buying a bass. I play banjo, and I’ve been sort of learning electric guitar along with my son who’s taking lessons, and I thought it would be neat to learn a bit on the bass to accompany him. It would probably be easier to find good music to do that with on a bass than my banjo.

      Also, does anyone have a good recommendation for an online bass course? For a lot of my banjo arrangements I subscribe to Banjo Ben Clark. Is there anybody like that for bass?

      • GearRatio says:

        The name of the brand is Glarry. Ignore the terrible writing, they are pretty good.

        If it were me (and it was!) I’d opt for a p-bass type instead of a j-bass type – it’s a rounder/bassier sound and there’s less moving parts if you decide to do upgrades later.

        I mentioned this a bit in my post before, but this deal is a LOT better if you are able to do basic set-up tasks – truss rod adjustments, bridge adjustments/intonation, shielding. It’s playable out the of the box, but much better if it’s well adjusted. This is true of basically every budget brand, so if you can’t do that stuff you might consider getting it set up professionally. It’s pretty simple to learn how to do, anyway.

      • Aftagley says:

        Similar question: how difficult is learning to play bass? I already play piano/synth and drums so I can read music and pretend to keep a beat.

        • GearRatio says:

          I think the only right answer for this is that it’s probably the easiest instrument to learn to an acceptable beginner level, and then the sky is the limit for difficulty.

          Using rock/pop as an example:

          Say someone’s playing a 1-3-5 progression in Gmaj; Two measures on Gmaj, one on Bm, and one on Dmaj. The very, very basic method here is just to stay on the root note – you could literally do a whole note G, whole note G, whole note B, whole note D and it would sound OK. It wouldn’t be very interesting, but OK sounding none-the-less. The audience might not be wowed, but it won’t sound “wrong”. You could realistically learn to do this in ten minutes.

          Then you have complexity that can be added in. During each of those chords, every note within the key of Gmaj is potentially OK to play (usually still starting with the root on the 1 beat and moving on from there. Similarly, every note within each of the corresponding keys to each chord is potentially fine, especially the arpeggio notes. Choosing what notes work where is a matter of taste and experience.

          And then those rules can be stretched or broken – it’s not at all unusual to see out-of-key notes or chromatic runs in blues bass, for instance. But you have to know what’s right to do what’s wrong correctly, if that makes sense. Look up “Victor Wooten playing the wrong notes” for an example of this done at a master level.

          On the rhythmic side, you are also interacting with the drummer as the intermediary between him and the rest of the band; you translate for him > band, and also for rhythm > audience. Sometimes this is easy – basic punk is just eighth note root notes, for instance. Sometimes, say in funk, this is really complex; you have to fill up the space in the beat that’s yours in such a way that it accents everyone else while also being in large part the most important part of how the band sounds to the audience (funk being a bass heavy genre). Again, experience and taste drive this; there’s only so far knowledge takes you, if that makes sense.

          The good news here is you can take it as far as you want to – the barrier for entry is very low, improvements up to the intermediate level are pretty easy to get, and the advanced stuff is incredibly fun. Definitely watch some videos on good technique first – efficiency goes a long way, and it’s a big instrument so making sure your hands are right is vital if you don’t want to get bogged down.

          • Aftagley says:

            look up “Victor Wooten playing the wrong notes” for an example of this done at a master level.

            Wow that was cool. I’m worried you just sent me down a rabbit hole looking up videos from that guy.

            the barrier for entry is very low, improvements up to the intermediate level are pretty easy to get, and the advanced stuff is incredibly fun.

            Thanks for your serious answer, in retrospect I should have asked this question in a more nuanced way than “is it easy.” Maybe, “How wide is the skill gap between picking it up and having fun?”

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Ha, I love that you mention Victor Wooten. He’s the bassist for Bela Fleck and the Flecktones. Bela is the world’s greatest banjo player, and the one who inspired me to start playing banjo 20-odd years ago.

            Also, fun fact, Bela holds the record for most Grammy nominations in different genres.

            ETA: Link to a recent Flecktones concert. Also, my favorite solo of Bela’s.

          • GearRatio says:

            Wow that was cool. I’m worried you just sent me down a rabbit hole looking up videos from that guy.

            This is legitmately a worthy use of time even if a person didn’t like music; he’s just a master of what he does and it’s rewarding to watch.

            Thanks for your serious answer, in retrospect I should have asked this question in a more nuanced way than “is it easy.” Maybe, “How wide is the skill gap between picking it up and having fun?”

            Old bass joke time!

            A 12-year-old boy expresses an interest in music to his father. His dad takes him to the music store and buys him a bass, an amp, and a certificate for 10 bass lessons. On monday, the boy goes to his first lesson.

            When he comes home, the dad asks him how it went. “Great, dad! I learned the first five notes on the “E” string!. He goes on Tuesday, comes home, the dad asks again, the kid goes “Great, dad! I learned the first five notes on the “A” string!”

            The next day the child does not return home from his bass lesson. The dad calls the cops, they look, nothing. Finally, at 4 AM, the kid stumbles in smelling of booze, cheap women and cigarettes. “How did your bass lesson go, son?” the father asks. “Sorry, pops – had to blow that off. I had a gig!”.

            One nice thing about bass is that this isn’t 100% implausible – I’ve read multiple stories from famous bass players where their bass journey started with something like “my uncle had a jazz band and the bass player left, and he needed somebody for that night, so he got me up to speed real quick and I never stopped playing after that”. Which is great!

            As for the gap between picking it up and having fun, that’s exactly why God invented the smoke on the water bassline.

          • GearRatio says:

            Ha, I love that you mention Victor Wooten. He’s the bassist for Bela Fleck and the Flecktones. Bela is the world’s greatest banjo player, and the one who inspired me to start playing banjo 20-odd years ago.

            It’s interesting that we are opposites on this – I know and like Bela because of Wooten, who I in turn know mostly as a bass soloist.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Thanks for the information. I think I’ll buy a bass. Although I’ll go to my local music store because, ya know, buy local stuff because of plague.

          • Dino says:

            I heard that joke as Little Johnny takes tuba lessons, the first lesson he learns the note F, the 2nd he learns C, then he’s gigging.
            What I’ve actually seen is that the ratio of demand to supply is greatest for bass players (at least for classical, rock and folk, would expect similar for other genres). Flute players and guitarists are a dime a dozen, bass players are a quarter each. 😉

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Can confirm. Just got home from the music store with my new bass guitar, watched a youtube video on “best bass lines for beginners,” booked three gigs.

            Seriously, though, it’s pretty cool. The time between “first pick up a bass” and “can play something that sounds like a rock song” is about 15 minutes.

            I think I have a shielding issue, though, so I need to fix that.

          • GearRatio says:

            Don’t leave me in suspense, brother – what did you get?

            Let me know if you need help on the shielding – I’ve been real deep on setup stuff for the last couple weeks, including shielding, so it’s all very fresh in my mind.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            I bought an Ibanez GSR200B. And a Fender Rumble LT25 amp. Looks sweet, sounds good. Just that there’s a hum that goes away when I touch a string. So I have to figure out what to do about shielding, right? Got any advice for me? What do I need to buy/do?

          • GearRatio says:

            So the gsr200b has a couple interesting things about it you want to consider before you start shielding:

            1.

            It’s a two pickup bass with two different pickups, one of which is a single coil. Single coil pickups buzz all by themselves, especially if they are cheaply made (which all pickups at the general 0-500 range sort of are).

            So the first thing you want to do is dial out the bridge pickup and see if it’s still buzzing as much.
            Some of the buzz that goes away when you dial out this pickup is a separate problem shielding won’t fix.

            Since you said it goes away when you touch it, this is probably not going to go away just because that pickup is off; single coil buzz is an “always on” problem whether or not you are touching the bass.

            2.

            If I’m reading this correctly, your bass is equipped with active electronics; this makes the job a little bit more of a pain in the ass.

            What you probably have is four distinct cavities: a battery holder cavity, an electronics cavity, and two cavities in which the pickups sit. You can shield any combination of these, but to do it “complete” is a little more work than it would be on mine, where there’s just one big cavity up front. Any shielding is better than non-shielding, so how much you do is up to you.

            Instructions

            So to shield this, you have two official options: copper tape, or shielding paint. Copper tape works better/is cheaper, so I’d recommend that. I bought this., which is probably 2x-3x how much you need for this job.

            What you are trying to do is tape the entire inside of every cavity and bring all the tape back to ground. The adhesive is conductive, so anywhere the tape overlaps is continuous.

            Specific instructions for your bass:

            You have four cavities. Starting up front, you have two pickup cavities; gently and carefully unscrew the pickups, which will lift out still connected to their wires. You would then cut strips of tape to fit the cavities. Once the tape is in place, you’d either

            A. cut into the ground from the pickups and ground each cavity to that

            or B. Run a jumper from the tape to the main control cavity around the back. I’d do B, since it avoids potentially fucking the pickups.

            Now moving around the back, you’d shield the battery cavity – I don’t think you have to do anything besides remove the battery cover to get to it. You are taping both the inside of the cover and the cavity here. Lay the tape in such a way that the tape coming from the cavity and the tape on the inside side of the battery cavity cover will overlap when it’s screwed back on; this makes a electronically continuous bubble around the entire cavity.

            Run a jumper from the copper tape to the main cavity or to the 9v connector ground; you might actually be able to just cram it in between the battery ground and the connector if you feel lazy here.

            Now in the main cavity, I’m assuming you are going to open it up and find there’s a circuit board encased in hot-glue which is in turn connected to the knobs(by wire and probably by glue), the output jack(by wire), and the pickups (by wire).

            We are praying this is not actually glued to the body. If it is, we can still shield everything it’s not covering, or we can try to remove it somehow, but these are judgement calls you’d need to make. Some shielding is a lot better than none shielding.

            What you’d do here is first remove the knob-covers; they are either slide on (I.E. pull-off) or have an allen screw clamping them on, which you’d be able to see on the side of each knob. Loosen the screw if present, pull off the covers.

            You are now looking at four metal posts. At the base of each post is a nut. Remove the nut. The knobs should now be freed.

            If the output jack is glued to the circuit board, you need to remove that; there’s a set nut on it, likely. Remove that; that should be all you have to do. If it’s still not free, there might be a plate that needs to be unscrewed.

            Now we (fucking gently) lift the circuit board and can tape underneath it. Don’t force anything. As before, tape the inside of this in such a way that the tape you’ve lined the cavity cover with is continuous with the tape inside the cavity.

            At this point, you have as many as 3 jumpers coming from various cavities to the main cavity. Solder them to the copper tape in the cavity. This connects all the taped areas. Now solder the main cavity tape to ground.

            Reassemble bass.

            Advanced options:

            If you don’t want to run a jumper, you could make a tube out of tape roughly the size of the tunnels going from each cavity to the next, cut a slot in it so you can get it around the wires, and run it from cavity to cavity. Make sure it’s well-adhered to the tape on both cavity walls to ensure continuity. This has the added bonus of shielding those tunnels and the wires in them as well.

            The bridge is also (probably) connected to a wire that goes back (probably) to the main electronics cavity. You could run a copper tube up that from the cavity —> bridge direction without removing the bridge, if you wanted to.

            One final note: The pickups on that bass are relatively budget-friendly, so they probably aren’t themselves the best shielded ever. Shielding everything else might only do 90% of the job; it would be a ton better, in any case, but if you’ve done everything else here and there’s still some (minor) buzz remaining, it might be something you’d just live with at that point.

            Sorry if this got long. Your bass has a lot more steps to shield than my bass, which is “remove pickguard; shield cavity and pickguard and ground”. If you want a much simpler version of this, I’d start out just shielding the main electronics cavity and see if that doesn’t fix it before moving on to the other cavities.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Amazing, thank you so much! One question, when you say things like:

            or B. Run a jumper from the tape to the main control cavity around the back. I’d do B, since it avoids potentially fucking the pickups.

            What kind of jumper to do you mean? Like, a piece of the copper tape, or something more specific..?

            ETA: Any idea why they don’t just do this at the factory? I mean, I get that it’s a cheap bass, but still, some copper tape costs pennies…

          • GearRatio says:

            What kind of jumper to do you mean? Like, a piece of the copper tape, or something more specific..?

            The best version of this would be to roll the copper tape around an allen wrench or screw driver of the appropriate size, cut a slit length-ways down the tube so it can slip over the wire, and put it through the tunnel – best only because it shields that length of wire. Then you’d use a bit of copper tape to tape it down to the other copper tape.

            Edit: If you were good enough with an iron to de-solder the pickup wires, there’s really no reason you couldn’t just directly wrap the wires themselves and stick them back through. I’m not generally good enough that I try to solder if I don’t have to, though.

            Second best and potentially easier/more stable if you are any good with a soldering iron would be any copper wire you have laying around. It’s going to do just as good of a job connecting the two areas, it’s just not providing 360 protection to the other wire.

            ETA: Any idea why they don’t just do this at the factory? I mean, I get that it’s a cheap bass, but still, some copper tape costs pennies…

            I don’t know how true this is is today, but I think when I was a kid even Fender’s nicer stuff only used the shielding paint at the factory, which is slightly-to-noticeably-worse than the tape. This indicates to me that it’s probably an issue of labor; I guess that makes sense since you’d have to paint the body, wait, and paint it again before you could send it down the line.

            Another thing is that cheap pickups tend to be themselves poorly shielded, so it’s probably not going to solve 100% of the hum like I said before. Maybe at that point it’s not considered with the effort? It’s my understanding you can take them apart and shield them, but I haven’t done it.

            The last possibility is that they did do this, but for some reason it’s not working well; like maybe they did the wood but not the plastic covers. Or maybe the bridge-ground isn’t making incredible contact, something like that.

            My current experience with electric instruments is that 95% of everything you need them to be is cheap – it has a neck and body and electronics that all work pretty well and it’s usable for 100-400 bucks, new. That last 5% is nice, but it’s super expensive – want your pickups and electronics to sound 10% better? Seymour Duncan has you covered for the entire purchase price of the bass you just bought. The best bridge ever made by the hands of a man helps your sustain only slightly, but it’s $80.

            So it’s possible that shielding is something that makes your instrument sound better and is held back as one of those premium options – like, Fender ultimately wants you to buy a MIA instrument for $1500; they have to have things to hold back to make that seem worth it to us. Maybe this is one of those?

            By the way, and I didn’t say this before, I think you made a good decision on Ibanez. While for some arbitrary stupid reason I’ve never loved how they look, objectively they look fine and are significantly more bass than fender at a similar price point.

  49. Uribe says:

    Is there an agreed upon root unit energy storage metric? Can we say x units of storage capacity cost $y_0 in 2015 but $y_4 in 2019?

    • Vitor says:

      I vaguely believe this would typically be expressed in MWh (Megawatt hours).

      • Anteros says:

        Or KWh if you’re referring to one of Musk’s powerwalls. GWh is appropriate for the energy stored in a typical hydro plant, and TWh is used for the needs of large cities and countries.

      • Garrett says:

        If it’s to be metric it should be megajoules or gigajoules.

        • John Schilling says:

          MBMBAMs. Millibar-millibarn-attometers.

        • Lambert says:

          +1 I hate multiplying stuff by 3.6

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Why? 3.6 is not great, but it’s not terrible.

          • smocc says:

            Disagree. If all the questions you have are about how many hours a battery will last in a certain circuit, or how much total energy you will need to last a certain number of hours then MWh is the correct unit and it will be Joules that has you multiplying by 3.6.

          • Lambert says:

            Hours are so slow. I like things that dump all their energy in seconds.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            D I G I T O P O L I S


            5 Miles
            1600 Rods
            8800 Yards
            26400 Feet
            316800 Inches
            633600 Half Inches

            “Let’s travel by miles,” advised the Humbug. “It’s shorter.”

            “Let’s travel by half inches,” suggested Milo. “It’s quicker.”

        • Anteros says:

          Fair point. And as Vaclav Smil is fond of joules, they’re probably good enough for me.

    • Anteros says:

      @Uribe

      In answer to your second question, yes. Solar and wind enthusiasts will also enthuse about how the price of batteries is plummeting, and therefore the intermittency of their cherished renewables is at the point of, very nearly, and just about to be solved. The only problem is the three orders of magnitude difference between battery capacities and the storage required to keep an electricity grid functioning if it is run on renewable energy. And I don’t think this is going to be solved any decade soon with any battery technology existing or proposed.

      • broblawsky says:

        It’s viable with the technologies we have now; we just need to scale up battery production.

        • Anteros says:

          A bit surprised your link was from seven years ago – and it was somewhat fanciful (and for one geographic location) even then. Have there been more recent studies (apart from the Jacobsen type imaginings)?

          I really can’t see batteries filling more than niche applications anytime soon. Pumped storage where it’s applicable can be a real boon to renewables but the topographic opportunities are few and far between, to say the least.

          • broblawsky says:

            A bit surprised your link was from seven years ago – and it was somewhat fanciful

            Regarding that paper’s supposed fancifulness: I’m going to need a citation. What makes this scenario impossible?

            Here’s a more recent review paper on 100% RE pathways.

      • Belisaurus Rex says:

        Batteries are also disposable, so wouldn’t we just be switching from non-renewable energy sources to non-renewable storage?

  50. Uribe says:

    Music separates generations. There’s what music was popular when you were 14 1/2, but there’s also the older music you got into, which also seems to be generational. I got really into jazz as a teenager, and then got into classical music when I was about 30. I lost interest in much new pop in my early 20’s ,although there were a few exceptions like Beck and Amy Winehouse.

    I’d love to see a graph of when tastes for various old music falls off, by age and by country.

    I’m a snob who thinks, in general, classical and jazz music are better than pop, and the increase in pop musiice fandom at the expsense of love of classical represents a decline in culture, a preference for ugliness over beauty.

    An interesting thing about this argument is it’s not a culture war. Conservatives used to stake a claim for high culture but if anything this has been reversed in recent decades.

    • GearRatio says:

      I’m a snob who thinks, in general, classical and jazz music are better than pop, and the increase in pop musiice fandom at the expsense of love of classical represents a decline in culture, a preference for ugliness over beauty.

      I think this last bolded section is what you would want to focus on if you were trying to find the flaw in your motivations. There’s certainly good and bad pop music; at the same time, there’s shitty classical even among the stuff that managed to survive the centuries. If you want to find shitty Jazz, it’s not hard; 90% of fusion fits that bill (I say this at the same time as having being a pretty big Jaco fan, when I still listened to appreciable amounts of music).

      It’s pretty uncharitable to say something like you did – it’s essentially accusing people who enjoy pop all of having shitty taste, or of pretending to like something they don’t enjoy for unknown reasons. But that’s a huge amount of people to accuse of having bad taste or being liars – is it more likely to think most of everybody listening to music has bad taste, or that you have unusual niche taste? Is it more likely that world class musicians and engineers with good equipment and budgets are making bad music, or that you’ve zeroed in on one quality of music (likely complexity) as the only worthwhile value to be found in an entire art form?

    • Bobobob says:

      I had terrible taste when I was 14 1/2. How do you think Emerson, Lake & Palmer sold so many LPs?

      However, I still think Jethro Tull was great and I resent their perpetual non-inclusion in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

      • Well... says:

        I was thinking about this today. My taste at 14 was slightly different from now (I’m well over twice that age) but only because I’ve discovered a lot more. There’s nothing I liked then that I would now be mortified to admit having liked, even if some of my favorite stuff from then is no longer my favorite now. Some of my favorite CDs are the ones I’ve had the longest.

    • alchemy29 says:

      I’ve had the opposite evolution. I listened almost exclusively to classical (though more Romantic, Impressionist and early 20th century) in my teens and slowly grew to appreciate modern music more. First modern contemporary, but now more modern electronic music.

      Hot take, but I think that snobs who think classical is “better” than modern music don’t really understand modern music at all. Classical music is based off harmonic complexity. The interactions between notes create the structure of the music. But modern music is based off of complexity in timbre. Whereas 19th century composers had a limited set of instruments to work with, modern composers can create a much wider variety of sounds. And they can layer them to a much greater extent than was previously possible. The two types of complexity create effects that the other can’t replicate but neither is superior, merely different. Take for instance Eruption. If you turned that into a piano piece, it would lose all of the nuances that Van Halen creates by changing the parameters of his electric guitar. It’s because of timbal complexity that you have one of the most famous guitars solos ever.

      • AG says:

        Classical is also Western-centric. None of the operas or ballets I’ve been listening to have the kinds of rhythms that you get from Africa or South America unless they’re explicitly influenced by them, and that’s a huge paucity. Even modern operas with (modern) jazz influences will never be funky.

        In fact, most people would say that contemporary classical far more values ugliness over beauty, the way much of modern abstract art defines itself by how it “challenges” notions of what is beauty. Contemporary classical has commonly gone up its ass about concepts around repetition and space and such, while EDM and hip-hop explore those same concepts just fine without losing accessibility to the layman.

        And more damningly, any binary of quality constructed around classical vs. non-classical seems to be only on the part of supposed classical listeners. Actual classical composers and musicians/artists are often all about exploring and praising other genres. There is no “at the expense of love of classical,” other than self-inflicted wounds by classical music culture, which is why the most lucrative gigs for orchestras now are often about playing film and video game music to enthusiastic crowds that are far different from their usual audiences, owning music libraries spanning all genres.

    • DinoNerd says:

      I’m an outlier, but I’ve preferred classical since I was a child in Canada, and am now 62 and living in the US. I also liked some folk music (less so in adulthood), and most electronic music (still).

      At a more nuanced level, my tastes do not correlate very strongly with the way music is categorized. I have encountered something I liked in just about any genre, but the chances of me finding e.g. a rock piece that I like are much lower than the chances of me finding an electronic or classical piece I like.

      Current ways of delivering music leave me with access only to classical – I preferred having a good source of classical music to a more generic music source, and also figured that one music streaming services was enough.

    • anonymousskimmer says:

      Not for children’s play songs. Those can span a hundred years or more, easily.

    • Brassfjord says:

      Not many listen to jazz in their teens. That’s when you learn the basics of music, and that’s easier with the simple (catchy) melodies and harmonies of pop music. To appreciate jazz, you need to understand how it plays with and deviates from the basic. Classical music is between pop and jazz in complexity, and the natural progression should be to expand from pop/rock to classical to jazz.

  51. Le Maistre Chat says:

    “God” in Sanskrit Philosophy: Defining the Terms.
    Copied from a conversation I had elsewhere online.

    1a) Brahman, the Supreme Being (Saguna Brahman) or impersonal ground of being (Nirguna Brahman).
    1b) Brahma, a person who created the universe.
    2) Bhagvan, a personal God, actually used in colloquial speech (most commonly understood by the speaker as Vishnu OR Shiva). The etymology is an Indo-European root, Bhag-, cognate to Common Slavic Bog, used for Slavic Pagan gods.
    3) Ishvara, the Supreme Being (see 1a), a personal God, used in philosophy texts debating Indian atheists and pantheists. Also has connotations of “Lord” or “king”… just like English “Lord”. Asserting the logic of belief in Ishvara would form the philosophical justification for choosing a personal God, commonly Vishnu or Shiva (who is then identified as Ishvara, Brahman, while the other… isn’t).

    Note that the Upanishads, post-Bronze Age philosophical appendices to the Vedas, four Bronze Age collections of hymns, purport that Atman, a term meaning one’s real Self as opposed to a purported identity error like “I am this body”, is Brahman. Accepting the authority of the Upanishads and the rest of the Vedas is a non-negotiable part of Hinduism. However, Hindus can be monotheists or atheists rather than pantheists. Meanwhile a key Buddhist truth claim is anatman.

  52. zenojjones says:

    In 1921 the Hatfields fought someone who weren’t McCoy’s, trenches were dug, homemade bombs were dropped from airplanes and trains were fitted with machine guns against American citizens in West Virginia in what would be eventually known as the Coal Wars.
    Dark as a Dungeon – The Coal Wars
    I’m continuing my project of looking up and putting together the most interesting bits I can find about Appalachian Mining communities. Though I try to focus on my home state of Kentucky, this time we slide over into West Virginia because it’s impossible to skip the Coal Wars. The Battle of Blair mountain remains the largest armed insurrection and battle that has taken place on American soil since the Civil war. This is just the tip of the iceberg, there is a lot to find about the Coal Wars and other uprisings around this time.

    • Incurian says:

      Thanks!

    • Aftagley says:

      Did you read the article?

      His summary overstates the Hatfield-centrism of this conflict. It was more “a conflict that kicked off and happened to involve a Hatfield” and less one driven by Hatfield.

      • zenojjones says:

        Right. The main battle is to avenge a Hatfield and the preceding one was pacified by a different Hatfield, but they aren’t really the center of the story. It’s just a fun coincidence.

        • Aftagley says:

          Really fun article by the way. I don’t know if I’ve told you before, but I’ve loved every one of these. Thanks for writing it!

      • zenojjones says:

        Thanks for reading! I’m glad you enjoy them. I still have notes to organize that will make the final post about the period called “Bloody Harlan”.

    • The original Hatfield-McCoy feud wasn’t massive — that’s mostly newspaper hype.

      Three McCoys got in a fight with Ellison Hatfield at an election-day party, shooting and stabbing him. His kinsmen siezed the three, waited to see if the injured man would die, and when he did executed the three.

      Five years passed with no further violence between the families. Then a new governor of Kentucky was elected who was a friend of Perry Cline, a distant relative of Ranel McCoy who had a grudge against Anse Hatfield over a lawsuit some years earlier. He persuaded the governor to announce rewards for the Hatfields responsible for the killing. While the governor of West Virginia, where the Hatfields were, was still considering the request for extradition, a Kentucky posse crossed into West Virginia and captured one of the people on the Hatfield side (whose name happened to be McCoy — it wasn’t as straightforward a family vs family conflict as the usual story makes it sound). That set off the second round of conflict. Two McCoys were killed by Hatfield supporters. The rest of the conflict was basically West Virginia posses vs Kentucky posses, most of the people having no connection with either family. The conflict eventually reached the Supreme Court, which held that the initial crossing into West Virginia and capture thereafter of various people was illegal but that there was no remedy, since once they were in Kentucky a Kentucky court could try them.

      Altogether, four people were killed in the original conflict. After it was revived by the state of Kentucky, two more were killed in conflict between members of the families, two people, one a Hatfield, were killed by Kentucky posses and one Hatfield condemned to hang by a Kentucky Court.

      • zenojjones says:

        I know, nothing is like you think it is!! That’s a pretty effective, succinct overview. Though I’ve read that the initial conflict was over a civil war grudge, where one member fought for the north and the other the south? I bet the real cause is lost to legend now.
        Public obsession and it’s growth into something much much larger might be the most interesting element of the Hatfields and McCoys.

        • One member of one family fought for the north, was invalided back home, and killed. Most of both families supported the south, and it was never determined who did the killing.

    • anon-e-moose says:

      I’ve been enjoying these greatly, thank you for the effort!

      • zenojjones says:

        Thank you! It’s nice to hear that people enjoy them. I’d do them regardless, but when I hear people like them it makes it easier to put out the next one a bit faster.

        Here is an article that I really enjoyed when I was researching, goes a lot into the use of planes over Blair Mountain and is a bit more polished than my series.

  53. Filareta says:

    So, what about hydroxychloroquine?

    Questions raised over hydroxychloroquine study which caused WHO to halt trials for Covid-19

    “Guardian Australia also contacted the health departments of Australia’s two most populous states, New South Wales and Victoria, which have had by far the largest number of Covid-19 infections between them. Of the Australian deaths reported by 21 April, 14 were in Victoria and 26 in NSW.

    Victoria’s department confirmed the study’s results relating to the Australian data did not reconcile with the state’s coronavirus data, including hospital admissions and deaths. The NSW Department of Health also confirmed it did not provide the researchers with the data for its databases.”

    • Cheese says:

      To be honest they should never have started trials based on the data they had at the time. If the concern is over scientific rigour that is where the most grevious error has been made.

      The way the error has been made in that study is actually likely to push the data more in favour of the against column if it does change anything, although the n change is so small it’s unlikley to do anything. The error is interesting in that it’s the hospital that’s self reported it’s location incorrectly, but an argument could be made the error is on the database side for the rather ambiguous ‘Australasia’ designator. Not the most ideal source, as they point out, but likely one of the best if speed is one of the major concerns.

  54. Silverlock says:

    I have seen the term “Deep State” tossed around a couple of times lately, including in at least one thread below. In general, I despise politics and seldom delve too deeply into its terminology, but I am curious about this one. What does “Deep State” represent? Is it the idea that there is a shadow conspiracy that runs the country, as a modern-day Illuminati or something?

    • RMECola says:

      I think in the least conspiracy way it simply refers to the un-elected bureaucratic infrastructure that modern government can’t function without.

      • Well... says:

        the un-elected bureaucratic infrastructure

        The surprisingly large, expansive, and mostly invisible un-elected bureaucratic infrastructure, to be specific, and it tends to refer to the infrastructure that supports the federal government rather than that which supports the lower levels. A clerk at your local sewer and water department is not part of the deep state, but a clerk at your local EPA office is.

    • FLWAB says:

      Deep State is typically used to refer to the bureaucrats who staff Federal agencies and remain in place from administration to administration. The idea is that we elect the State (Congress, President, etc) but that most of the actual running of government is done by career bureaucrats and that these people have a lot of power even though they were never elected. So if someone says the Deep State is opposing Trump, they mean that the bureaucracy is opposed to Trump. Like individual FBI agents and management, or the FDA or whatever.

      • mitv150 says:

        Taking it one step further – rank and file bureaucracy of many (most?) federal agencies tends to lean heavily democratic.

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          And the part that doesn’t tends to run establishment Republican.

          @Silverlock

          The Deep State is not generally self-aware, although I do think it’s become significantly more self-aware since Trump’s election.

          The Deep State is six guys/gals with 20+ year careers in a State Department basement with Ph.D.s in Elbonian Studies arguing pointedly about whether the right amount of foreign aid to give to Elbonia is $300M or $350M a year, and the President’s job is to sagely decide it shall be $325M (congress approving, etc etc). But then Trump comes in and says “why the hell are we giving money to Elbonia? Give them $0!” This is unsettling to the Deep State because Trump is not doing his job.

    • John Schilling says:

      The “Deep State” is Sir Humphrey Appleby and all his kin.

      OK, the long version, starting with the unambiguously true part. Most of what the government actually does, in every modern democracy, is done by career civil servants who expect to serve under multiple separate Democratic and Republican (or whatever) administrations and don’t much care. They have collectively developed a strong and coherent understanding of what their job is and how it ought to be done, and they’re going to do just that. They basically can’t be fired or punished, because we’ve learned that if you let politicians fire civil servants you find they’re all replaced by incompetent political appointees. If you tell them to do things any differently, they’ll point to some obscure statute that says what you want them to do is illegal, and you’re not asking them to break the law, are you? All the stuff they think they ought to do and actually do is just as illegal, with some obscure federal statute prohibiting it, but the guys in charge of enforcing that statute are part of the same old-boy network and they’ve all agreed on which laws will be ignored as long as things are done the way the Deep State thinks they ought to be. The “Deep State” is inherently conservative in the literal, apolitical sense of the term, because they know a way that works and they are skeptical that anyone’s preferred different way will work – modern democratic states are complicated.

      Somewhat more controversially, the elected officials have what looks like steering wheel for the ship of state, but it was disconnected years ago, and the “Deep State” basically just keeps the ship on a steady course. If the elected officials know how the system works, and are willing to make the effort, they can negotiate or even force a course change – but it’s not easy. If the elected officials need to appease their electoral base by posturing about Taxing the Rich or Regulating Twitter or some other damn fool thing, they can give the orders in a high-profile manner and the “Deep State” will translate them into something harmless.

      Then there’s the full-on conspiratorial version, where the “Deep State” is made up of partisan liberal activists who meet in smoke-filled rooms to secretly rule the world. They work eagerly with Democratic presidents to translate their liberal agenda into policy, they tolerate RINO cuckservative Republican presidents and allow them just enough success that they can dominate the Republican party, and they deliberately actively throw monkey wrenches into anything a Real Republican(tm) might do so as to ensure that Cthulhu’s relentless leftward swim is unhindered by Real Republicans(tm). That version does get into Illuminati territory.

      • Tatterdemalion says:

        All the stuff they think they ought to do and actually do is just as illegal, with some obscure federal statute prohibiting it, but the guys in charge of enforcing that statute are part of the same old-boy network and they’ve all agreed on which laws will be ignored as long as things are done the way the Deep State thinks they ought to be.

        I think your definition of “unambiguously true” may be slightly different to mine…

      • SamChevre says:

        I’m accustomed to hearing “deep state” specifically in the context of law enforcement/intelligence bureaucracies, not the federal civil service as a whole.

    • BBA says:

      The term was coined in 20th century Turkey, where coups were commonplace and everyone knew the military and intelligence services had their own agendas separate from the elected government. The Turkish Deep State is no more thanks to Erdogan’s purges, and it was much stronger and had a much more coherent ideology than anything you could point to in the West and call a Deep State.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        Nailed it.
        I’ve felt gaslighted being told that “Deep State” is a conspiracy theory with the standard connotations of falseness et al since 2016, when I first encountered the term in the Turkish context more than 15 years ago as a precociously-studying minor.

        • Eugene Dawn says:

          I think the point is, the conspiracy theory is the belief that the US has a Deep state that compares in any way to Turkey’s, not the belief that there is such a thing as a Deep State somewhere in the world.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            I think the point is, the conspiracy theory is the belief that the US has a Deep state that compares in any way to Turkey’s, not the belief that there is such a thing as a Deep State somewhere in the world.

            Something that existed in other times and places can be a conspiracy theory if people are claiming it exists in the here and now.

            This is true, but it’s not the social media-level version of the conversation. Since I don’t want to weakman, let’s see what less hysterical sources say.

            “In the field of political science, the normative pop culture concept of the deep state is studied within the literature on the state. Within this literature, the state is understood as both venue (a set of rules under which others act and interact) as well as actor (with its own agenda). Under this dual understanding, the conspiratorial version of the deep state concept would be one version of the ‘state as actor’ while the non-conspiratorial version would be another version of the ‘state as actor.'”

            Well that’s clear as mud. However La Wik does correctly elucidate that it’s a real thing in some times and places and was used in academia based on the Central Example of the secular Republic of Turkey.

        • Aftagley says:

          Something that existed in other times and places can be a conspiracy theory if people are claiming it exists in the here and now.

        • broblawsky says:

          The weak version of the Deep State isn’t a conspiracy theory; I feel that the strong version of it is. The problem is that many people complaining about the Deep State employ motte-and-bailey tactics, using the strong version of the theory to advance their positions and retreating to the weak version whenever they’re called out on it.

          • Aftagley says:

            The weak version of the Deep State isn’t a conspiracy theory

            I disagree. Any version of the deep state which makes a more controversial claim than “People want to do the jobs for which they were hired and are paid” falls apart.

          • broblawsky says:

            I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say something along the lines of: “the Federal government has a bunch of long-term bureaucrats who want to conduct their jobs in a certain way regardless of what elected officials want.” That’s what I mean by “the weak version”.

          • cassander says:

            I disagree. Any version of the deep state which makes a more controversial claim than “People want to do the jobs for which they were hired and are paid” falls apart.

            what about John Schilling’s claim “most of the time, civil servants are not effectively controllable by elected officials, their ideas about how to run the country sometimes differ from their elected officials, and they often have the power/knowledge to get their way.”

          • Aftagley says:

            The normal process of our bureaucracy is as follows:

            1. President has a vision for some kind of policy change.
            2. President identifies and appoints qualified appointees to work at the various departments and agencies to carry out this vision.
            3. Political Appointees work with senior civil staff to transform the president’s vision into policy.
            4. Senior civil staff transform policy into actionable programs.
            5. Bureaucrats enact those programs. Once step 5 is enacted, it pretty much continues indefinitely.

            Now, if step one happens, but steps 2-4 don’t, nothing changes. This has nothing to do with the preference of the bureaucrats to keep doing their jobs a certain way, and everything to do with the fact that you only really change what you’re doing if your boss tells you to… and their bosses haven’t.

          • cassander says:

            @Aftagley

            The normal process of our bureaucracy is as follows:

            that is not the normal process of bureaucracy. that’s the ideal of how it’s supposed to work, but it doesn’t ever work that way in any bureaucracy, particularly in the federal government where the civil servants are largely unfirable, congress always has its say, and the bureaucrats and have far more tools at their disposal to frustrate their bosses than in the private sector.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Any version of the deep state which makes a more controversial claim than “People want to do the jobs for which they were hired and are paid” falls apart.

            Ehhhhhh I don’t know about that. What about people like Peter Strzok, who nobody hired to pick the next president?

            “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” Page texted Strzok.

            “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it,” Strzok responded.

            And then he set about doing shady lawfare stuff nobody hired him to do in an attempt to stop it.

            I would prefer a different meme for this other than “Deep State.” I like the “Deep State” concept for the technocracy, or the entrenched bureaucracy. I think it’s a little more involved than “want to do jobs for which they were hired.” I think it’s more like “people who think their job is to set the boundaries on potential policies elected officials may choose instead of implementing the policies decided by elected officials.” But beyond that, I think there is a conspiracy by small groups of unelected officials (Brennan, Clapper, Strzok, Page, probably Comey, etc) who abuse their power to advance the class interests of the Deep State in favor of those friendly to the Deep State (establishment Democrats and Republicans) and against those who oppose it (Trump, tea partiers, etc).

            I think there’s fairly uncontroversially a Deep State, but the existence of self-aware members of the Deep State conspiring in its interests remains controversial.

            ETA: Just read the next posts. Aftagley, I agree with cassander, I think your idea of how things work may be slightly naive. I think an awful lot of government bureaucrats are not interested in implementing Trump’s agenda, and think he should be taking their advice rather than giving them orders.

          • Aftagley says:

            Well, let’s use Peter Strozk as a case example:

            He doesn’t exactly fit the definition of a standard government bureaucrat, but it’s close enough for government work (ha). Strozk was civil servant who was found to have committed wrongdoing. Putting aside, for now, the issue of whether or not your allowed to think the guy whom your investigating for crimes is a criminal, he said/did some stuff that good judgement should have prevented him from saying/doing. After his behavior was identified it was thoroughly investigated, he was removed from his position, and then was eventually fired. In the meantime, his former work was reviewed and tested to make sure he didn’t corrupt it. That’s at least one data point against the “you can’t fire/discipline a civil servant.”

            Anyway, I’m not trying to say that my above-mentioned definition of bureaucracy is perfectly executed, I’ll even contend that if you staff an agency with ideologues, you constrain what kind of advice that agency can give you and future administration (for example – the EPA will likely never recommend oil drilling no matter what changes you try to make) but most of those kinds of problems have iterative solutions that can be implemented by bringing in smart and capable political appointees, keeping them in the loop and empowering them to execute your vision.

            These problems can’t be solved by complaining about a Deep State or Technocracy of whatever on Twitter. All complaining about it publicly does is just cast a stigma on a collection of people who are mostly just doing their job.

          • cassander says:

            @Aftagley says:

            That’s at least one data point against the “you can’t fire/discipline a civil servant.”

            And I’ll raise you the DC metro employee who, when a fire killed a bunch of people and he got caught faking his maintenance records and literally not doing his job, he sued the city about it arguing that it was true he didn’t do his job and lied, but so did everyone else so it wasn’t fair to fire just him. And he won and got his job back.

            federal rules are only slightly less absurd, and protect the vast majority of employees from any meaningful accountability except in extraordinary circumstances.

            but most of those kinds of problems have iterative solutions that can be implemented by bringing in smart and capable political appointees, keeping them in the loop and empowering them to execute your vision.

            That’s not an option. It takes years to get those appointments filled, and even when they are, the people in the positions almost by definition have less knowledge than civil service who have been there for years. And those appointees can’t fire, dock the pay, or otherwise remove GS employees that dodge their mandates and try to wait them out. and even if they could, there’s always congress, with it’s own agenda, and a budget cycles that means it’s a minimum of almost two years to accomplish almost any meaningful change.

            These problems can’t be solved by complaining about a Deep State or Technocracy of whatever on Twitter.

            obviously. when has complaining on twitter ever solved anything? What’s your point

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            (for example – the EPA will likely never recommend oil drilling no matter what changes you try to make) but most of those kinds of problems have iterative solutions that can be implemented by bringing in smart and capable political appointees, keeping them in the loop and empowering them to execute your vision.

            Okay, but that’s sort of the problem with the weak-ish version of the Deep State.

            Who gets to decide whether or not we have oil drilling? It should be the voters, right? I mean, ideally it should be whoever owns the land the oil is on but that’s sort of a different argument, especially if we’re talking about offshore drilling. Anyway, if the voters elect the guy who says “yes oiling drilling,” and then he goes to the EPA and says “approve oil drilling” and they…well, they don’t exactly say “no,” but they fight against him, or slow-walk all the paperwork and assessments and “lose” the permit applications and leak damaging stuff (true or not) to the press about what the administration is doing to turn public sentiment against them and invite lawsuits and all that to prevent the oil drilling from happening (maybe holding out for the next election or an impeachment?)…who is really in charge here? Is it the voters and their elected official, or is it a bunch of unelected and barely accountable careerists? Is that how this should work?

            I don’t think it should, I prefer the thing where I get the stuff I vote for, good and hard.

            And do you see how this example flies in the face of how you said the bureaucracy works? They’re not attempting to implement the policies of the elected officials, they’re attempting to set the policies themselves.

            I still think it’s pretty obvious this exists or else “The Resistance” wouldn’t be thing. That’s the whole point…they Resist what the President attempts to do instead of implementing what the President attempts to do.

            Still, though, I called this the “weak-ish” version of the Deep State. I think the true weak version of the Deep State, and the context in which I first heard the term, is when this is all invisible and amicable. Like, I don’t think much of what the Obama administration did came from Obama. I think he was a technocrat’s technocrat. If you believe in government by experts, he was your guy. I’m pretty sure most of his policies were brought to him by the experts and he approved them.

            I’m not saying that as a bad thing, I think a lot of people like that.

            These problems can’t be solved by complaining about a Deep State or Technocracy of whatever on Twitter. All complaining about it publicly does is just cast a stigma on a collection of people who are mostly just doing their job.

            Does that apply to people complaining about police conduct on the internet? Vast, vast, vast majority of cops are not out murdering unarmed black people and are just doing their job. Why bother complaining about it and stigmatizing them?

            Still, slight difference between the police and the technocrats, an awful lot of the people “just doing their jobs” are doing jobs I don’t want them to do. I’m remembering now the State Department people during the impeachment trial, like Vindman, who kept going on and on about how wonderful the Ukrainian people are and how “important” their work helping them is. Some of these people I think had basically “gone native.” It was like they thought their job was to represent Ukrainian interests in the US instead of US interests in the Ukraine. Which makes sense: they care enough about Ukraine to go to work in the Ukraine division of the State Department, and if they can get more money for Ukraine from the US they get invited to all the finest cocktail parties in Kiev. Their status and prestige goes up.

            But I don’t actually want them doing that job. I’m paying people so they can finagle how to extract still more resources from me to give to other people I don’t know. This is not in my interests, I do not think this is good, and I would like them to stop.

            What I want, as Steve Bannon put it at CPAC 2017 is “the dismantlement of the administrative state.”

            And as for the strong-ish version of the Deep State, I’m guessing you agree, since you agree that’s what Strzok was up to? There are definitely conspirators in the civil service / bureaucracy knowingly attempting to manipulate the democratic process. The only question is how many and how effective they are. For further evidence, I point to the existence of The Resistance.

            So, no, a version of the Deep State stronger than the weak version does not “fall apart.” Definitely exists.

          • JonathanD says:

            @Conrad Honcho,

            I think it’s ironic to include, even as a maybe, Comey on that list, since he literally chose your guy to be the next president.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Yeah, I don’t think he wanted to do that, he had to do that. If he had wanted to hurt Hillary, he would have recommended indicting her for the email server.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            like Vindman, who kept going on and on about how wonderful the Ukrainian people are and how “important” their work helping them is.

            In an alternate universe where our policy is to extract mineral resources from the Ukrainians until we have them all, and then harvest their organs, the public words the United States ambassadors use would still be the same. “Oh, they are our friends, it is so important we help them.”

          • ECD says:

            @Aftagley

            And I’ll raise you the DC metro employee who, when a fire killed a bunch of people and he got caught faking his maintenance records and literally not doing his job, he sued the city about it arguing that it was true he didn’t do his job and lied, but so did everyone else so it wasn’t fair to fire just him. And he won and got his job back.

            I’ll point out that your own link states that the reason for the decision was the arbitration decision and the inability of the court to override it. This has more to do with longstanding issues with arbitration than it does the protections for federal employees.

            In my, admittedly limited, experience it is hard to fire federal employees, but it is in no way impossible.

            On the general question, I think everyone involved in this back and forth radically underestimates how seriously most federal employees take their oath and their responsibility to follow the policies laid out by the administration, the laws promulgated by congress and the regulations established by their predecessors.

          • Aftagley says:

            @ECD

            I agree with you; did you mean to point this at Conrad Honcho or cassander ?

          • JayT says:

            On the general question, I think everyone involved in this back and forth radically underestimates how seriously most federal employees take their oath and their responsibility to follow the policies laid out by the administration, the laws promulgated by congress and the regulations established by their predecessors.

            That is not at all my experience. The federal employees I’ve worked with or known usually fall into the “happy to have a job for life and try to do as little work as possible” category.

          • ECD says:

            @Aftagley

            Yep, sorry that should have been at Cassander, quoted then somehow took the fact that they were responding to you as a sign that you’d made the comment.

            @JayT

            Okay. I work for the federal government and have worked fairly closely with about 30-50 people over the last few years and would say 1 falls into the category you suggest. She ended up resigning before she could be terminated.

          • cassander says:

            @ecd

            In my, admittedly limited, experience it is hard to fire federal employees, but it is in no way impossible.

            the federal firing rate for people in service for more than 2 years is about 2 tens of one percent, and only drops from there. federal workers are virtually never fired.

            On the general question, I think everyone involved in this back and forth radically underestimates how seriously most federal employees take their oath and their responsibility to follow the policies laid out by the administration, the laws promulgated by congress and the regulations established by their predecessors.

            None of that makes them good at their job or obedient to their temporary political masters.

          • ECD says:

            None of that makes them good at their job or obedient to their temporary political masters

            Leaving aside the first part, to which I think we’re just going to disagree on (it remains my position that we will get exactly as efficient a civil service as we choose to nurture), ‘obedient to their temporary political masters’ is in fact part of the job duty, within the limits of the law and constitution.

            I may be overly idealistic, but I and the people I work with do take those responsibilities seriously. There have been plenty of times I’ve received orders I disagreed with. I explained my disagreement and my predicted bad consequences of the proposed actions and then did what I was told. That is dead standard, at least with the folks I’ve worked with.

            Now, it’s fairly common for senior people (generally outside the agency) not to understand what’s happening on the ground, not to ask and then to demand ‘fix it,’ with no other instruction. I’m sure the part where I say ‘no, seriously, there’s these fifteen laws which we have to comply with, we can’t just ‘fix it,’ at least not without a specific legal exemption (talk to congress) or a big pile of money (talk to congress and my superiors) and time (and even then we may well be sued and this may take years to be resolved through the courts),’ sounds identical to ‘no the deep state denies you this thing you want,’ but it just isn’t.

            On the question of firing. I don’t believe those numbers are accurate. The only source I can find in the minimal digging I can find gives numbers twice as high, but does say that the numbers are three times lower than private industry. However, those are limited to removal for performance or conduct. Based on that description, I don’t think it would include those terminated within their probationary period (most of the problem folks I’ve met can’t hide it for a year), nor would it capture the standard solution, which is the conversation which explains the performance issues, followed by resignation.

            Now there are certainly problems in federal employee management and labor relations. The current system is fucking ridiculous. Back in law school my employment law professor literally said words to the effect of ‘skip the procedural section on any federal employee case, it will be too complicated to explain in this class and is only relevant for federal employees.’

            But to fix it is going to require either absolute control by one party (in which case I would not really trust whatever fix they came up with) or both parties working together (which doesn’t seem likely to happen anytime in the career I’ve literally just started) so we’re pretty stuck at this point. I agree the system is bad, but you can actually make it work, I’ve seen it done. Mostly from a distance, as I am not the labor counselor (thank god).

          • cassander says:

            I may be overly idealistic, but I and the people I work with do take those responsibilities seriously.

            They do. But that doesn’t mean that democratic civil servants are going to leap to obey the wishes of republican appointees with all their enthusiasm. And it’s silly to pretend that they will. Hell, I work in the private sector, and when my boss tells me to do something stupid, I have all manner of ways of ignoring it or working around it. As do the people that work for me, as she does vis-a-vis her boss. All bureaucracies work this way, and it works more that way the less accountable the employees are.

            I don’t think it would include those terminated within their probationary period (most of the problem folks I’ve met can’t hide it for a year),

            nor should it.

            Now there are certainly problems in federal employee management and labor relations. The current system is fucking ridiculous.

            and yet you think this has no impact on performance?

          • ECD says:

            @Cassander

            Hell, I work in the private sector, and when my boss tells me to do something stupid, I have all manner of ways of ignoring it or working around it.

            And do you? Or document you disagreed, then do your best to make the stupid thing work and hope you’re wrong about it being stupid?

            I don’t think it would include those terminated within their probationary period (most of the problem folks I’ve met can’t hide it for a year),

            nor should it.

            Right, but it means that both the denominator and the numerator of your percentage calculation are wrong.

            and yet you think this has no impact on performance?

            No, I think it has a negative impact, which, at least in my experience is counterbalanced by other things.

            The one which I think tends to get overlooked in everyone’s rush to demonstrate how ‘knowledgeable’ and cynical they are is the sense of duty that comes with solemnly swearing or affirming the oath of office. But there are others. For instance the fact that I can’t be fired for saying ‘I think this is foolish and will have bad consequences,’ to my boss has positive impacts on the workforce.

          • cassander says:

            ECD says:

            And do you? Or document you disagreed, then do your best to make the stupid thing work and hope you’re wrong about it being stupid?

            Yes, I have.

            For instance the fact that I can’t be fired for saying ‘I think this is foolish and will have bad consequences,’ to my boss has positive impacts on the workforce.

            No sane workplace would ever fire someone for saying that. But we live in a world where egregiously terrible behavior is routinely met with indifference, and termination rates far below that of the private sector.

          • ECD says:

            @Cassander

            Yes, I have.

            Sorry, given the way you quoted I can’t tell if you’re saying yes, you did decide to sabotage a job you were given by your superior, or yes you didn’t. But I’m assuming the former given the context. Given that, may I suggest that your conclusion that this is standard is simply typical minding.

            But we live in a world where egregiously terrible behavior is routinely met with indifference, and termination rates far below that of the private sector.

            This is your belief, supported by a single anecdote. Mine, based on my experience is that this belief is incorrect (not the termination rates, that we can check, but is explicable in any number of ways). I think we’re going to have to agree to disagree.

          • cassander says:

            ECD says:

            Sorry, given the way you quoted I can’t tell if you’re saying yes, you did decide to sabotage a job you were given by your superior, or yes you didn’t. But I’m assuming the former given the context. Given that, may I suggest that your conclusion that this is standard is simply typical minding.

            When we’re asked to do something we think is a bad idea there are a number of options available. You can argue the case, you can put the task at the bottom of your priorities, you can insist that it can’t be done without additional resources, you can implement it in the laziest way possible, you can dress up other efforts to look like compliance, you can delay by bringing in stakeholders to argue about how it should be done. And if you do all of those in sequence, you can probably wait out your senate confirmed boss who’s going to be in his job for an average of 2 years.

            This is behavior that can be observed every day in every organization. I doubt there’s a person over the age of 30 on this forum who hasn’t done most of the things on that list. If you tell me that you leap to enthusiastically do things your boss tells you to do that you think are terrible, I’ll call you a liar. the last time that happened was 1170.

            This is your belief, supported by a single anecdote. Mine, based on my experience is that this belief is incorrect (not the termination rates, that we can check, but is explicable in any number of ways). I think we’re going to have to agree to disagree.

            No, it’s based on a lifetime of studying organization theory in general, of the performance of government bureaucracies in particular, living and working in a world full of people who have different ideas than their bosses about what’s important to their job. And it’s backed up by vast amounts of evidence.

          • ECD says:

            @Cassander

            I’m going to disengage at this point because I have no desire to engage in this rather insulting and condescending exercise in goalpost moving any further, but as a last shot, because I can’t resist:

            1) I am in fact over 30.
            2) Enthusiasm is not required, professionalism is.
            3) Your appeal to ‘I know because I’ve studied it’ and ‘I know because I’m older’ and ‘I know because human nature’ is noted and rejected based on my own experiences.

            Have a nice day.

          • cassander says:

            @ECD says:

            I’ve not moved any goalposts, I wasn’t implying that I was older or more inexperienced than you, and I was responding to your rather insulting claim that “This is your belief, supported by a single anecdote.” So pot, this is kettle. You might want to look in the mirror.

          • Paul Zrimsek says:

            Now, it’s fairly common for senior people (generally outside the agency) not to understand what’s happening on the ground, not to ask and then to demand ‘fix it,’ with no other instruction.

            I think this functions better as an explanation of how the permanent bureaucracy is able to thwart the will of its nominal bosses, than it does as evidence that they don’t. If political appointees (and a fortiori the general public) can’t tell whether the things they want done aren’t being done because the people on the ground don’t want to do them or because they can’t be done, then there’s simply no way of holding Sir Humphrey to account– and he’d be more than human if he didn’t sometimes turn that fact to his own ends.

          • ECD says:

            @Paul Zrimsek

            I think this functions better as an explanation of how the permanent bureaucracy is able to thwart the will of its nominal bosses, than it does as evidence that they don’t.

            Maybe. It’s probably very hard to tell from the outside. But for those tasks where I’ve been on the inside, the issue isn’t that people aren’t willing, but that what’s being requested is going to take time and money.

            For all the talk of things being blocked, there aren’t really a lot of examples given. The obvious counter-example would be the Border Wall and Keystone Pipeline for this administration and DAPL for the last (though litigation has interfered with all three).

          • Loriot says:

            I feel like the discussion has retreated to a motte so general as to not be particularly meaningful. The tendency of workers to drag their feet when their boss tells them to do something stupid fits every company I’ve ever worked at, not just the government. If anything, I’d expect it to be less true in government, since government is the ultimate bureaucracy, and bureaucracy means following the rules even when they’re stupid with comparatively less room for human judgement.

            I also think there’s a bit of a double standard in the arguments. When government employees are enthusiastic and engaged, they take initiative, which is evil because it means they’re actually trying to help rather than blindly following $Dear Leader’s orders.
            When government employees are disengaged and just following orders without care for the consequences, that’s also evil because it means they’re not implementing $Dear Leader’s vision as efficiently as they could be if they really tried. It seems like the only way the government can “win” by your standards is if it is a literal hivemind with $Dear Leader at the helm.

            If all the “deep state” boils down to is that the government is not a hivemind maximally devoted to carrying out the leadership’s every whim, that’s not a very interesting argument.

          • cassander says:

            @Loriot says:

            I’d expect it to be less true in government, since government is the ultimate bureaucracy, and bureaucracy means following the rules even when they’re stupid with comparatively less room for human judgement.

            the claim under discussion is that civil service workers have more considerably more scope for this behavior than private sector workers. And that is unquestionably true.

            It seems like the only way the government can “win” by your standards is if it is a literal hivemind with $Dear Leader at the helm

            It’s not about winning, it’s about accurately describing reality. Civil servants are harder to fire or reward, bosses (at the appointed level) that have far shorter tenure and usually far less knowledge than they do, they have access to far more procedural tools that can be used as excuses, and an institutional environment with more checks.
            They are more free to take more initiative, or foot drag, in support of their bosses will, or opposed to it. And to expect them not to take more advantage of this for their own purposes (however defined) they would have to not be human.

            These shouldn’t be controversial statements.

          • Loriot says:

            > It’s not about winning, it’s about accurately describing reality. Civil servants are harder to fire or reward, bosses (at the appointed level) that have far shorter tenure and usually far less knowledge than they do, they have access to far more procedural tools that can be used as excuses, and an institutional environment with more checks.
            They are more free to take more initiative, or foot drag, in support of their bosses will, or opposed to it.

            As I mentioned before, a lot of those things could cause effects in either direction, and it’s unclear to me a priori what the sign would be. The factors you mentioned are also by no means unique to government, although the degree and combination of them may be.

            > And to expect them not to take more advantage of this for their own purposes

            It seems to me like the motte has now devolved into “principle-agent problems exist”.

          • Paul Zrimsek says:

            For one reason or another, I find the possibility of a Deep State more worrisome than the possibility of a Deep Accounts Payable Department somewhere in the private sector, even if the latter were more likely.

          • Loriot says:

            I suppose the solution to that is to outsource more government functions to the private sector. Fortunately, a number of large tech companies seem to have stumbled into a quasi-governmental role, so we’re already making good progress on that front.

          • cassander says:

            @Loriot says:

            As I mentioned before, a lot of those things could cause effects in either direction, and it’s unclear to me a priori what the sign would be. The factors you mentioned are also by no means unique to government, although the degree and combination of them may be.

            they can go either way in the sense of “doing more” or “doing less.” they can’t go both ways in “obedience to their political masters”. People who have less incentive to do something will do less of it, and civil servants have far less incentive to do what their bosses want than private sector workers.

            It seems to me like the motte has now devolved into “principle-agent problems exist”.

            No, it’s “principle agent problems exist, and they are demonstrably worse with civil servants than in the private sector.”

            I suppose the solution to that is to outsource more government functions to the private sector. Fortunately, a number of large tech companies seem to have stumbled into a quasi-governmental role, so we’re already making good progress on that front.

            In practice, results here are mixed. It can work moderately well when there is a large existing market for the good/service in question. That makes it possible/easy for the government to switch providers. For things that are largely government provided (e.g. military procurement) you tend to substitute one set of minimally accountable workers for another, while keeping most of the structural problems (the inflexibility of law & budget, congress, short tenure of senior officials) in place.

      • cassander says:

        The Turkish Deep State is no more thanks to Erdogan’s purges, and it was much stronger and had a much more coherent ideology than anything you could point to in the West and call a Deep State.

        It also underwent a far longer and more powerful assault than anything possible in any western state.

      • Tenacious D says:

        Yeah, I also heard the term in the Turkish context far before it was applied to the US. Basically it was about efforts to preserve Ataturk’s vision regardless of whether it conflicted with the will of the people. You can consider a strong (actual conspiring in smoke-filled rooms) and weak (convergence of interests in the national security establishment) versions of the theory. The Wikipedia article is a good primer.
        If you really want to go down a rabbit hole, read up on the Gulenists…

    • If you have seen “Yes Minister,” which is an old British television show, it’s in part about the deep state, although it doesn’t use the term. The central figures are a government minister and the permanent secretary of his department, a career civil servant. In the typical episode, the minister gets excited about some problem and wants to take action against it. The secretary agrees and then maneuvers the minister into doing more or less the opposite of what he proposed, supporting the corruption the minister wanted to deal with or something along those lines. The secretary is obviously smarter and less naive than the minister, probably also less public spirited, committed more to the welfare of the bureaucracy he is part of than to the public good.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        It is one of two shows that everyone emerging from college should be forced to watch to learn that how much the actual workings of the world deviate from the theoretical workings of the world.

        You think it would be misleading to replace high school civics with it, then?

        • Nornagest says:

          I haven’t watched Yes Minister, but I probably learned more about government watching The Wire than I did in high school civics.

          I didn’t accept it immediately and uncritically, of course, because only a fool believes what TV tells him without doing his homework. But it mostly held up.

      • Silverlock says:

        I am indeed familiar with Yes, Minister (and Yes, Prime Minister) — I just didn’t realize that one of the meanings of “Deep State” was Sir Humphrey et al. Reading through all of the responses to my question — thanks folks! — it is apparently one of those terms that has multiple meanings depending on context and speaker/listener.

        Also, I love that both John W. Schilling and David Friedman responded with YM as the premier (heh) example.

    • BBA says:

      A side note – Deep State is used loosely and doesn’t always mean career civil service. Rod Rosenstein is sometimes considered a Deep State figure, even though he was appointed to the office of Deputy AG by Trump himself. Likewise other presidential appointees who clashed with Trump after their appointment.

      In a broad sense, it can mean all the people who’ve worked in DC long enough to think like everyone else in DC does, whether they work for the government, political campaigns, think tanks, contractors, lobbyists, the media, or bounce around among all of the above as swamp creatures are wont to do. And these people are the only ones who know enough about how the system works to function well in it, so they’re the ones the party calls on whenever they need to fill a position like, say, Deputy Attorney General. This obviously serves to frustrate any effort at real change or reform.

      Of course, it doesn’t help that Trump has a, shall we say, unique management style and isn’t the easiest person to get along with. Just ask Rex Tillerson. Is he part of the Deep State, considering he never even worked in politics before Trump hired him? Who knows.

      • JonathanD says:

        I think you’re getting at the related but somewhat different idea of the Establishment.

        • BBA says:

          The distinction is meaningless. People think too precisely around here. All that matters is, they “should be” working for Trump, and instead they’re in his way.

  55. NostalgiaForInfinity says:

    Vox gets on board with moving Hong Kong to the US

    The UK has also moved a little bit towards allowing BNOs to move here (not as much as some would like). Somewhat surprisingly, the Home Secretary – who is usually anti-immigration – is apparently in favour of allowing them to move here.

    It will be interesting to see how much further the UK government moves on this. There seems to be a lot of backbench pressure on the government to do something about it.

    • salvorhardin says:

      See also:
      https://twitter.com/iingwen/status/1265600680804270088

      Tsai Ing-Wen makes preparations to welcome HKers to Taiwan. One of the most striking examples I’ve seen recently of a time where the right thing to do and the politically self-interested thing to do (hey, you think HK refugees might be disproportionately inclined to support the more anti-China party in Taiwan?) coincide.

      • NostalgiaForInfinity says:

        That’s interesting. I don’t know that much about Taiwanese politics but I would’ve assumed that was a bit antagonistic. Good news for HKers though if it adds to the governments competing to get them to settle there.

        • broblawsky says:

          If anything, the current governing party of Taiwan (the Democratic Progressive Party) seems to be more anti-CCP than the Kuomintang.

    • salvorhardin says:

      It also occurs to me, re the Vox article, that this presents a conundrum for Trump that it would not have for “establishment” Republican presidents, namely that he would have to overcome his aversion to immigrants in order to act constructively on his antipathy to China. The parallel others have pointed out is the Cuban emigres fleeing Castro, and at the time they were emigrating the Republicans were much more pro-immigrant than today so there was no tension between that and their anti-Communism, and they got a new loyal Republican constituency out of it. There’s every reason to believe that HK refugees would be similarly loyal Republicans if the Republican Party were still that pro-immigrant, but as it is, they’re unlikely to be.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        namely that he would have to overcome his aversion to immigrants in order to act constructively on his antipathy to China.

        But Trump doesn’t have an aversion to immigrants. He has great antipathy for illegal immigrants, and some for those from shithole countries, but he likes the good ones. He married a super hot one, and says things like he wants immigration in “the largest numbers ever.” I don’t see evidence he’s anti-good-immigration, so it all comes down to whether or not Hong Kong(…ers? ians? What’s the correct term for people from Hong Kong?) count as good immigrants. I think it would be pretty easy to make the case people from Hong Kong with skills and the money to flee Hong Kong would be a net positive. Plus he gets to stick it to the communist Chinese and prove he’s Super Not Racist. I could definitely see him doing this.

        I’m not sure what to think personally. I’m more anti-immigration than Trump is, because I care about both economics and culture and I think he’s only interested in the economics. But I kind of think “people fleeing communists” are probably pretty good on the culture metric, like Cubans. I would give a plan to welcome HK immigrants a modest approval.

        • Loriot says:

          But Trump doesn’t have an aversion to immigrants. He has great antipathy for illegal immigrants, and some for those from shithole countries, but he likes the good ones. He married a super hot one, and says things like he wants immigration in “the largest numbers ever.”

          I assume this is tongue in cheek, but I figured I should point out for the benefit of anyone else lurking that the Trump administration has repeatedly pushed policies to limit legal immigration as well as illegal immigration.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Uh, no it was not tongue in cheek. And I think you agreed with me. Trump wants to eliminate illegal immigration, and limit legal immigration to “good” immigration, which means taking steps to eliminate “bad” immigration, like impoverished refugees, the diversity lottery, and family reunification. So he has pushed to limit legal immigration he doesn’t think helps us economically, and has stated he wants to increase the sorts of immigration he thinks would help the economy. Hong Kong citizens would probably fall in that second bucket.

          • For different reasons than Conrad’s, I think Trump is more likely to back the idea than most presidents would be. It’s a dramatic gesture and one that looks like a way of successfully attacking China at no risk to ourselves.

            Trump isn’t an ideologue, he’s an egotist.

        • beleester says:

          I don’t see evidence he’s anti-good-immigration

          This is circular. “Good immigration” is not defined beyond “The sort of people Donald Trump likes,” so obviously Donald Trump will never be anti-good-immigration. The argument is that Trump’s idea of “good immigrants” is so narrowly constrained compared to the pool of potential immigrants that it’s anti-immigration for all practical purposes.

          As you say, Trump married an immigrant, but being pro-immigration for hot people willing to marry you does not count as being pro-immigration.

          (It’s possible that “pro-immigration that hurts China” will turn out to be one of the narrow categories of immigration that Trump is pro-, but that only underlines how mercurial his positions are.)

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            This is circular. “Good immigration” is not defined beyond “The sort of people Donald Trump likes,”

            Yes, it’s defined as “the sorts of people Donald Trump thinks will make the US better on net rather than worse.”

            So, better would be educated wealthy people; fit women.

            Worse would be impoverished refugees, random diversity quotas, family reunification (i.e., frequently old people).

            I’m pretty sure we can clearly articulate a differentiation between people Trump thinks would make things better and who he thinks would make things worse. Again, I’m more skeptical of all of this than I think Trump is, but I don’t think his ideas of “good” and “bad” when it comes to immigration are inscrutable.

      • RalMirrorAd says:

        First generation perhaps. Second and beyond I doubt you would see much difference between an HK American and a mainland chinese american.

    • A Definite Beta Guy says:

      Vox is onboard with a very specific form of refugee flow where Hong Kongers all move to dying Rust Belt cities and are legally expected to stay there for 5 years (and socially expected to stay there afterwards).

      Also, wtf?

      If it went well, it could be a model for a broader philosophical rethink of how America approaches competition with China — one that emphasizes deliberately increasing the US population to try to neutralize the massive advantage in scale that China currently enjoys

      America has enough people and enough wealth to manage competition with China. There are also a lot of people around China that are not fond of the Chinese. Managing strategic relationships is more important than desperately trying to increase the population, unless China gets REALLY wealthy, and then we get to have discussions about letting grandma die so we can buy more submarines and buy off some African warlords in the Great Kenya Civil War of 2060.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        If China can meet a GDP half of America’s they’ll be twice as rich as us.

        I see Yglesias is working on a book called “One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger.”
        How does Vox feel about pro-natalist policies?

  56. baconbits9 says:

    In an attempt to get recognized by Scott for comment of the week better understand CPI and how it is measured and the near term implications here is another post. Please note this is specifically about CPI as a measure alone and not about higher (or lower) arguments about the money supply or what the real inflation rate is etc.

    Recent recessions have been ‘deflationary’ or at least that is the common conception of them. More careful observers use the term ‘dis-inflationary’ to denote lower than expected inflation as compared to outright deflation. One point rarely made is that the 2007-2009 recession was slightly inflationary and not deflationary by many metrics. Using CPI we can see that the lowest reading during the official recession (Dec 2008) was higher at 211.398 than the highest pre recession reading (Nov 2007, 210.834) and the final reading (214.790) was about 1% higher than the pre recession reading.

    Now there was a deflationary period, specifically the 3 months from September to December 2008 where the CPI index dropped from 218.877 to 211.398, for about a 14% annualized rate, but that was partially offset by the rise from May-July of 2008 which had CPI running at a ~9.5% annualized rate. The first 4 months and the final 6 months had annualized inflation rates of ~3.5%.

    The 2001 recession was also not clearly deflationary, the official recession ran from March to November of 2001 and from March to September annualized inflation ran at ~2.3% an it was only the two months after September that we got ~2% annualized deflation in the CPI*.

    This makes correlations hard to see. There are significant events in September of 2001 and 2008 that correlate to the beginning of the deflationary period, but there are no strong correlations for the end. One might guess that based on the narrative of rising unemployment causing people to reduce spending and drive down prices that there might be a correlation there between CPI and UE, but there isn’t. New UE claims rose through the end of March 2008, hitting a peak ~15% higher than the highest Dec 2008 reading, and the total UE rate kept rising until November 2009, 11 months after deflation had ceased and inflation had returned. The UE peak in 2001 does hit the CPI bottom, but UE flat-lines there and then even climbs in the recovery (the infamous ‘jobless recovery’).

    What actually drove the decline in CPI from September – December 2008? If you guess housing because there was a housing bust and home prices fell from 2006 to 2012 well you guessed wrong. The annualized decline in the housing portion of CPI for the 3 months ending in December 2008 was -0.7%, and for the 12 months ending in December 2008 it was +2.4%, and even within the -0.7% reading it was lodging away from home declining each of the 3 months, while rent and OER were increasing. In fact both rent of primary residence and OER rose pretty close to on trend for the duration of the recession and only became a drag right near the end.

    Amazingly while home prices declined by ~28%, and mortgage rates dropped from 6.7% to under 4% from 2006 to 2012 rents increased by almost 15% during this period and OER increased by over 10%. The driving factors for deflation in terms of CPI during both the 2001 and 2008 recessions were energy and apparel, and specifically gasoline, which is similar to the recent decline in CPI which was heavily gasoline/apparel related.

    to be continued…

    *There was actually 3 months of price declines with a very small decline in December 2001 which comes after the official end of the recession.

    • Cliff says:

      I think it’s important to remember that inflation is an increase in the overall price level, and changes in relative prices do not contribute to inflation. The fact that oil gets more or less expensive doesn’t cause inflation to increase or decrease. If money supply is balanced against demand so that there is no inflation, one good becoming more expensive will only result in other prices becoming relatively lower.

      Think about a barter economy. Inflation is impossible in a barter economy because inflation is a monetary phenomenon. But of course different goods can still go up or down in price in a barter economy by quite a bit. But by necessity if something becomes much more valuable (think food in a famine) other things have to become relatively cheaper (you can trade less food to get more of anything else).

      So I don’t think it’s useful to look at things that went up or down in price and draw conclusions about what “caused” inflation or deflation- since inflation and deflation are always caused by the relative supply and demand for money. It may be interesting to see what changed in value but it’s not relevant to inflation measures.

      • baconbits9 says:

        I think it’s important to remember that inflation is an increase in the overall price level, and changes in relative prices do not contribute to inflation. The fact that oil gets more or less expensive doesn’t cause inflation to increase or decrease. If money supply is balanced against demand so that there is no inflation, one good becoming more expensive will only result in other prices becoming relatively lower.

        You keep responding to my posts on CPI with this, it is irrelevant. CPI is a measurement and this is a post about CPI and how it is measured.

        If money supply is balanced against demand so that there is no inflation, one good becoming more expensive will only result in other prices becoming relatively lower.

        This is a completely meaningless statement, its a tautology based on the definition you are using. Obviously if you assume there is no inflation then there can’t be inflation.

        • Cliff says:

          CPI is a measurement and this is a post about CPI and how it is measured.

          Is it? You seemed to be making some arguments about what was contributing to inflation or deflation, that’s why I had the response that I had.

          CPI is a measure of inflation but it’s a mistake to believe that the CPI is causally affected by the price changes of its components. I think that’s a common mistake that people make.

          This is a completely meaningless statement, its a tautology based on the definition you are using. Obviously if you assume there is no inflation then there can’t be inflation.

          I don’t think it’s a tautology that inflation is dictated by the money supply and not by relative changes in prices. I think people very often lose sight of the fact that price increases do not result in inflation- more the other way around.

        • baconbits9 says:

          Is it?

          Yes it is.

          You seemed to be making some arguments about what was contributing to inflation or deflation, that’s why I had the response that I had.

          Seeing as this is the 2nd line in the post

          Please note this is specifically about CPI as a measure alone and not about higher (or lower) arguments about the money supply or what the real inflation rate is etc.

          I can only assume that you have simply not actually read it.

          CPI is a measure of inflation but it’s a mistake to believe that the CPI is causally affected by the price changes of its components. I think that’s a common mistake that people make.

          No, you are absolute incorrect here. CPI is literally a defined metric and you can look up its components if you want to. The BLS takes multiple individual price changes and combines them (with weights) to produce the outcome. They do not start with a measure of inflation and then break it up into components as your statement implies.

          I don’t think it’s a tautology that inflation is dictated by the money supply and not by relative changes in prices.

          This is what you actually said that I was responding to:

          If money supply is balanced against demand so that there is no inflation, one good becoming more expensive will only result in other prices becoming relatively lower.

          This statement is a tautological, you have started from the assumption that there is no inflation and then come to the conclusion that one price going up must mean another declines to offset it. The bolded portion prevents any knowledge from being gleaned from the statement while making it definition-ally true.

          Edited because I put the wrong quote in the 2nd quote box.

          • Christophe Biocca says:

            I think the issue here is that saying “CPI decreased because gasoline and apparel prices decreased” is implicitly comparing to a world where those things did not drop in price, and all other prices changed in the same way.

            But then it’s just as valid to say that “CPI decreased because housing only increased 2.4%”, implicitly comparing to a world where housing prices increased (2.4 + X)%, and all other prices changed in the same way. Or to do so for any component or combination of components.

            Picking the components that happen to have the biggest swing in the same direction as the overall CPI doesn’t have special explanatory power. Otherwise you most volatile components always end up being blamed for all CPI changes.

          • baconbits9 says:

            I think the issue here is that saying “CPI decreased because gasoline and apparel prices decreased” is implicitly comparing to a world where those things did not drop in price, and all other prices changed in the same way.

            I understand that, but the point is CPI doesn’t actually work this way. CPI does not reflect every price change across a region, if you follow the second post I put up on housing it shows how you can get a positive reading for a CPI component with decreasing costs. OER (which is the largest sub-component of CPI) does not reflect the price paid for a house or the total costs of owning a house but instead reflects how much a homeowner could expect to rent the house out for at the prevailing market rate.

            The criticism only holds if there is some known price level that goods are sold for and then we dis-aggregate them to discover how they moved relative to one another but this is not the case. What occurs is the opposite, many ‘measures’ are taken and then aggregated together to give us the ‘price level’, and as the housing example shows this price level does not directly reflect the actual prices paid in a period (it does/should for some things) but instead uses an intentionally smoothed proxy that doesn’t behave the same way in recessions and expansions.

    • baconbits9 says:

      So the obvious question that my above post presents is how can you have 6 years of declining home prices and declining interest rates (interest rates are a significant cost of home-ownership) and have rising housing costs as a component of CPI. The first point I want to make before wading in here is that there isn’t an obvious correlation between the rental vacancy rate and the slope of rental increases. This directly undercuts an argument that I have seen multiple times, that monetary tightening cut our production of housing below where it needed to be to meet supply and so rental prices continued to rise. Neither does there seem to be a relationship with delinquency rates and rental vacancies.

      In theory this sounds crazy because declining cost of ownership should lead to declining rents. How so? Well the Case/Shiller home price index was around 184 in 2006 and declined to about 134 in 2012 while mortgage rates fell from 6.7% to 4.0%. A 30 year, $184,000 mortgage at 6.7% has a monthly payment of almost $1,200 a month (no pmi/insurance/taxes) while a $134,000 mortgage at 4.0% has a payment of $640. That leaves a lot of room for a person who was foreclosed on and forced out to come back and rent that exact same house for significantly less than they were paying as an owner. This ought to cause significant downward pressure on rents, and combined with essentially flat vacancy rates from 2004 to 2010 you have a substantial conundrum.

      This is a stab at the answer, but without hard data. In general I think this is an artifact of the way that rent is calculated for the CPI, which uses the prices of transactions and not actually prices paid. What do I mean by this? Well if you ordered a hamburger for $10 then the transaction would be recorded as a $10 hamburger, but if you ordered a hamburger for $10 and then skipped out on the bill the transaction would not be recorded at $0. If the number of people skipping out on their checks increases the headline price of hamburgers is likely to rise and while the average price actually paid per hamburger could stay flat the average price recorded would go up. Likewise if you sign a lease for a place at $1,200 a month and get evicted due to missed rent payments then the* price of rent in your area will not be decreased based on the average you actually paid. This imposes a large cost onto landlords, missed payments are significant for real estate and puts upward pressure on prices. Why? Simply put landlords who can’t cover their expenses are at risk of bankruptcy, if you own 5 units and one stops paying (or is vacant) and drops your cash flow below your obligations then one possible way out is to raise the price of the other 4 units.

      This speculation fits with some of the data, rents stopped increasing at the end of the 2008 recession as job losses slowed and delinquencies stop accelerating**.

      *I believe not I can prove for sure

      **Does not line up perfectly though.

      • Cliff says:

        Wouldn’t the straightforward explanation be that new housing production was way down, many people were foreclosed on and switched to renting, so rental demand increased and rental supply did not keep pace? Usually it’s not possible to increase your rents just because you want to, because one of your units is vacant.

        there isn’t an obvious correlation between the rental vacancy rate and the slope of rental increases. This directly undercuts an argument that I have seen multiple times, that monetary tightening cut our production of housing below where it needed to be to meet supply and so rental prices continued to rise

        How does it undercut that argument and what does it mean that there is not an obvious correlation?

        • baconbits9 says:

          Wouldn’t the straightforward explanation be that new housing production was way down, many people were foreclosed on and switched to renting, so rental demand increased and rental supply did not keep pace?</blockquote

          What happens to the houses that people moved out of and switched to renting? Why did rental vacancy rates hit their peak just after the recession and not fall with all these people moving from owing to renting?

          Usually it’s not possible to increase your rents just because you want to, because one of your units is vacant.

          That is correct, usually it is not possible, but recessions are unusual times and the market clearing mechanisms function differently.

          How does it undercut that argument

          If there is a ‘shortage’ of housing why would there also be a near record high in rental vacancies, as well as a record high for empty housing?

          what does it mean that there is not an obvious correlation?

          It means that the rental vacancy rate going up/down/sideways doesn’t mean that you see a consistent move in the rent price. Higher vacancies don’t always mean lower rents.

    • m.alex.matt says:

      This makes correlations hard to see. There are significant events in September of 2001 and 2008 that correlate to the beginning of the deflationary period, but there are no strong correlations for the end.

      It would not be a bad idea to approach things like this, not by amateur speculation, but by actual study of the existing work on the subject.

      You’re much more likely to find yourself wandering down a path of either re-treading already long trodden ground or developing weird, idiosyncratic, and ultimately incorrect beliefs than you are to stumble on new truths.

      • baconbits9 says:

        You have made the assumption that I am unfamiliar with any of the academic literature, in my opinion it is basically worthless*, for every paper you read you have to pick apart both their stated and implicit assumptions going in, and then wait 20-30 years to see if future events validate or invalidate their conclusions. The Phillips curve is the classic example here where 15 years after the initial paper the correlation between inflation and employment completely broke down, invalidating a large body of work based on the (seen as accurately measured) observations.

        Recessions are too rare and different from each other for regression analysis to be effective, any real correlation is going to have to be eye-poppingly obvious or it is suspect.

        *worthless here means nearly impossible to tell if correct or incorrect or informative/not informative.

  57. viVI_IViv says:

    Via Robin Hanson’s tweet, a NY Times opinion piece about Harry Potter as an allegory for modern liberalism as an ideology centered around the authority of the elite academia.

    Thus the Potterverse, as Toad writes, is about “the legitimacy of authority that comes from schools” — Ivy League schools, elite schools, U.S. News & World Report top 100 schools. And because “contemporary liberalism is the ideology of imperial academia, funneled through media and nonprofits and governmental agencies but responsible ultimately only to itself,” a story about a wizarding academy is the perfect fantasy story for the liberal meritocracy to tell about itself.

    • Nick says:

      I was going to comment about the trope of the Millennial progressive who’s only read one thing, namely Harry Potter, and hence has no other interpretative lens for current events. But reading the linked piece, Ross is humorously subverting it, and quite successfully.

      (Incidentally, here’s a link that gets you past the paywall.)

    • Lambert says:

      It’s not even allegory.
      Hogwarts is just Eton with more wizards: part of the ruling-class pipeline.

      And the school tie is older than neoliberalism.

  58. Bobobob says:

    Contest! What will Trump’s “executive order” about social media look like? It’s supposedly due by the end of the day. File your predictions now. The winner gets…I don’t know, a whole bunch of plus-ones?

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      Does the EO fall in the “wait 3 days before discussing a tragedy” rule?

      • Bobobob says:

        I wasn’t even aware of the three-day rule, so let me take this opportunity to apologize for posting about Amy Cooper in the last thread. Though it did generate a ton of interesting discussion.

    • Matt M says:

      I’m predicting a complete and total nothingburger.

      Specifically, it’ll say something like “the DOJ is directed to begin an investigation as to whether or not big social media companies are violating Americans civil rights by engaging in political censorship.”

      Most likely, the DOJ will drag its feet and not really get into the meat of any such investigation until after November, in which case President Biden will quietly shutter it. In the unlikely event they move more quickly and/or Trump is re-elected, they’ll have a cursory investigation that concludes “no, they aren’t, everything they’re doing is fine” and that’ll be that.

      • Ninety-Three says:

        They don’t even need to drag their feet: is anything stopping them from starting by conducting an investigation, reporting that they found nothing wrong with the status quo, and changing nothing?

        A cynic might say that Trump is politely asking the Deep State to trigger the libs for him. I don’t think that’s going to work out the way he wants.

    • Nick says:

      Eugene Volokh says he has no idea, since §230 can’t be touched by executive order.

      My best guess is that Trump wants to pardon his Twitter account.

    • nkurz says:

      [SPOILER]

      A draft of the executive order has been leaked/published: https://kateklonick.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/DRAFT-EO-Preventing-Online-Censorship.pdf

      From a quick skim, the goal is a slightly more restrictive interpretation of the types of editing a provider can perform without losing the protection from civil liability provided by Section 230. The text of the current law provides protection if the provider acts in “good faith” to restrict access to content it considers to be “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable”. The order seems to say that “otherwise objectionable” should be defined as (something like) ‘against the provider’s terms of service’, such that any editing of posts that do not explicitly violate the terms of service causes the provider to be a “publisher” without additional protection from civil liability.

      As a non-expert who hasn’t read this closely, this sounds superficially reasonable. If I didn’t know in advance that this was Trump’s executive order, I don’t think I couldn’t reliably identify which political party would be in support of or against this clarification. It would be nice to see some expert opinion on whether this is a good change, particularly if the experts were able to divorce their pro- or anti-Trump bias from the consideration of the change.

      • Bobobob says:

        That sounds way too reasonable to come directly from Trump. I wonder if saner minds in his administration jumped the gun and leaked the draft of a “nice” executive order to somehow prevent the issuing of a less-nice executive order.

        • Aftagley says:

          Or it’s the expectation that no one will read it (Trump included?)

          He gets to say he made an executive order against Twitter, the media runs with the narrative that Twitter and Trump are feuding, but the order is reasonable-enough on it’s face to be unchallenge-able in court. Eventually, you’ll see the national review or WSJ write some think piece about what a reasonable piece of executive legislation this was and how the media’s response to it was completely indicative of their lack of perspective.

          God I’m sick of this.

      • Ninety-Three says:

        That sounds like it won’t actually fix Trump’s problem with Twitter. All they have to do is amend their terms of service with something like “Don’t post misinformation”, and they can fact-check as many Trump Tweets as they like. It’s already common practice for TOS to reserve sole discretion for what constitutes [stuff they don’t like] and ban or downrank accordingly.

        • viVI_IViv says:

          Then they’ll also have to ban all misinformation that is posted, or risk to be challenged in court when they do it selectively.

          • Ninety-Three says:

            The leaked order repeatedly emphasizes that 230 should not apply to moderation that is “deceptive, pretextual, or inconsistent with a provider’s terms of service”. Write up something anodyne about reserving the right to moderate content that Twitter deems against its values and they can be as partisan as they like without it being anything the executive order targets.

          • Matt M says:

            Shadowbanning, as a technique, would certainly qualify as “deceptive,” regardless of what the original offense actually was

            (and yes, I know the official position of Twitter/FB is that such a thing doesn’t exist and is just a crazy conspiracy theory… I don’t believe them)

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Even with the proposed re-write, it doesn’t look like there is any requirement to be even-handed.

            Being “deceptive” was already within review of the FTC. It’s probably “deceptive” if they say they are reviewing an appeal and don’t do anything with it for a year so if that stops, great. I won’t necessarily mind them having to stop lying about what they’re doing, but it’s hardly any huge dunk.

        • keaswaran says:

          Hasn’t Trump explicitly violated their terms of service in many ways already? My understanding was that they simply refuse to apply any of their rules to him, because he’s by far their biggest brand.

          • Randy M says:

            It seems useful as an opinion piece or rebuttal, but “fact check” carries the connotation that the press is impartially investigating a claim, and a negative verdict used as proof of a lie. I don’t think it’s fair to use the same vehicle for a mere counter argument, at least to the extent anyone buys into the media’s impartiality.

          • Loriot says:

            Did they actually say “fact check”? From what I heard, I thought they just included a link saying “Get the facts about mail in voting” or something like that, which doesn’t even directly imply disagreement with the tweet.

          • Randy M says:

            My comment was misplaced. Somewhere on this thread there’s a discussion about fact checking prospective statements where it belongs (but still probably doesn’t provide anything interesting).
            We apologize for the confusion. Those responsible have been sacked.

      • viVI_IViv says:

        The text of the current law provides protection if the provider acts in “good faith” to restrict access to content it considers to be “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable”.

        IANAL, but how does the text of the current law stands in spite of the constitutional vagueness doctrine?

        The doctrine has already been used to void laws that banned “obscene”, “vulgar”, “profane”, and “indecent” content on the basis that these terms are too ill defined. And the term “otherwise objectionable” is clearly open ended. It is not possible for an “average person of common intelligence” to determine which behaviors are allowed and which are prohibited by this law, therefore the law should be declared “void for vagueness”.

        • Christophe Biocca says:

          Not a lawyer either, but the fact that section 230 is a protection from liability, rather than a criminal law, might make the difference.

          Or maybe no one has tried to get section 230 protection stripped from a provider on that basis, so the courts have never had to arbitrate this topic.

          • viVI_IViv says:

            My understanding is that the doctrine doesn’t apply just to criminal law, but to any statute.

            You’re probably right that it has never been tested in court. Maybe it’s about time.

          • Christophe Biocca says:

            Wikipedia says:

            The “void for vagueness” doctrine applies only to criminal or penal laws (or quasi-criminal laws, for example laws that carry civil penalties), and laws that potentially limit constitutional rights.

            As I understand it, because the law in question shields specific parties from liability in civil suits, this doesn’t apply.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Section 230 doesn’t give end-users rights. They have no standing to sue.

            If Voat tried to hide behind Section 230 but President Biden ordered his DOJ to prosecute them because Voat wanted to use the “otherwise objectionable” and Biden’s DOJ said it didn’t work, then Voat might have grounds to complain.

            Otherwise, how do you argue “this granting of protection is too vague”?

        • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

          Wikipedia (IANAL either) seems pretty clear that vagueness doctrine only applies to “criminal or penal laws” which this isn’t.

          But regardless of that, I don’t think it is vague. FCC vs Fox says that the law “you can’t publish obscene stuff” is vague, but in this case the law would be “you can’t publish stuff you consider to be obscene”. It seems pretty clear what that means.

        • At a slight tangent …

          Some time back, Facebook blocked all links to my web site, by me or anyone else. If you tried to link to it, you got a message saying that the page violated Facebook’s community standards. I followed the links for telling them that they were mistaken repeatedly, but never got any response, and eventually they stopped blocking it.

          It occurred to me that although they had a right to block the links, claiming that the page violated their community standards when they had little reason to believe it did and were ignoring my response was arguably defamation, and that pointing that out might at least get them to change the claim from “violates our community standards” to “may violate our community standards,” which would more accurately describe the actual situation.

          • Matt M says:

            Yes. I’ve made this point before. That in a certain sense, if they are saying “our moderation policies are X” but carrying out different policies than X, they are engaging in fraud.

            And no, some blanket fine print that says “Actually, our policy is that we can do whatever we want” does not magically make this logic go away.

          • anonymousskimmer says:

            I wonder if they auto-blocked your site because it was proportionately linked to by some flagged sites (certain alt-right or whatever sites) compared to non-flagged sites. Then after a while your site was linked by enough non-flagged sites to change this proportion?

    • Matt M says:

      Something I’d like to see eliminated is the “no evidence” fact check. You know the kind I mean… the one where someone (nearly always a Republican) makes a claim that X will lead to Y, and our friendly fact checkers chime in to insist that there is “no evidence” such a sequence of events will occur. Of course, “no evidence X will happen” is not necessarily evidence that X won’t happen.

      Often this is technically true, but I find it incredibly deceptive. Based on the recent Coronalinks topic, I think one could reasonably suggest there is “no evidence” that lockdowns decrease the transmission of COVID-19. And yet, no factchecker has dared to slap that alongside anyone’s claim that they do. Or, for a less immediately CW example, back when the outrage of the day was Trump wanting to withdraw from Syria, I was inundated with claims from mainstream sources that this would certainly lead to a “brutal massacre of our allies, the Kurds.” Of course, this was complete speculation. It may be reasonable speculation. There may be a solid argument for it. But there was never any evidence of it. And yet, the “no evidence” fact-check was never deployed.

      These types of fact-checks are deployed only in specific cases and only against specific arguments/people. I’d like to see them gone. I don’t know how you’d phrase an EO to get rid of them specifically, I just find them incredibly inconsistent/annoying.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        I agree that predictions about the future are the stupidest things to fact-check.

        Just staple “maybe this will happen and maybe it won’t” to every Tweet.

      • keaswaran says:

        Isn’t this still a useful sort of fact check? I mean, they shouldn’t give it a “false” or a “pants on fire”, but just giving it a “no evidence for or against” should be reasonable.

        • Doctor Mist says:

          It is a bloody rare assertion for which you can actually claim that there is literally no evidence for or against. Teapot orbiting the Earth, perhaps, but it’s hard to imagine one that is interesting enough that a public official would bother to state it.

          • Another Throw says:

            Teapot orbiting the Earth

            Not to be a spoilsport, but you might want to update your reference. The Space Surveillance Network identifies and tracks orbital objects down to 10 cm in size, which makes it increasingly hard to hide a teapot. I dare say mine is larger than that.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            Noted. Will do.

          • Another Throw says:

            Since I was curious, I went and looked up what Russell said himself. Turns out it doesn’t suffer from this particular problem, but is far less punchy: “between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit”.

          • Garrett says:

            Are you sure Musk didn’t stash one in his car?

    • toastengineer says:

      I’m gonna stake an “I told you so” on this actually mattering. This isn’t a stable situation, something is gonna change soon.

      I mean, if someone came on here and said “I’m gonna start a tech company and use my position as a platform to manipulate politics,” you guys would be all about how that would never work and the government would get wise and stop it.

      • Loriot says:

        I do sometimes get concerned about the quasi-governmental role that large companies have stumbled into (and worried about it for many years before Trump was even a thing, so it’s not a partisan concern). But it’s hard to know what to do about it, or even if there is anything we should do about it.

        But that’s all beside the point, since Trump isn’t going to do anything meaningfully to Twitter. It’s just part of a long history of “keyfabe” where he pretends to fight the media to win points with his base and the media pretends to fight him to win points with their base.

  59. johan_larson says:

    The extradition proceedings against Meng Wanzhou, the CFO of Huawei, ticked forward yesterday, when a B.C. Supreme Court judge ruled that the actions Ms. Meng is accused of constitute a crime in both Canada and the United States, and she therefore qualifies for extradition. There will be a further ruling later this summer on a defense motion that Ms. Meng’s rights were violated during her arrest. And presumably the matter will be appealed, so this could be in the courts for years.

    Meanwhile, the Chinese have arrested two Canadians, and are threatening various economic consequences for all of this.

    Canada-China relations are certainly suffering. Here’s an excerpt from yesterday’s editorial in the Globe & Mail, one of Canada’s national newspapers:

    But when it comes to the big picture, of Canada’s relationship with China and Canada’s challenge of dealing with the nature of the regime that runs China, nothing has changed.

    The problem of how to manage a relationship with an aggressive superpower remains. That would be so even if Ms. Meng had never been arrested in pursuit of a U.S. extradition request. It will be so whether she is eventually sent to the United States to face trial.

    The damage is already done. Or rather, Canada’s veil of China illusions has already been ripped off. Illusions, like disposable medical masks, cannot be reapplied.

    Last year, we suggested four principles Canada must keep in mind when dealing with China. The issue is of course not China itself, but the regime that runs the country. However, given that the regime isn’t changing, we believe these principles still hold and will for some time.

    – China is more of a threat than opportunity.
    – China is not our enemy, but neither is it our friend.
    – To counterbalance China, we need allies.
    – We must continue to trade with China while avoiding becoming dependent on it.

    Regardless of how the Meng case is resolved, our China challenge will remain. Her situation, and that of the Michaels, are symptoms with a deeper cause. Canada’s long-term problem is bigger than one extradition request for one telecom executive.

    • John Schilling says:

      Principle #5: Canada is America’s Bitch, so if POTUS decides China needs to be taken down a notch by having one of its VIPs arrested but doesn’t want American(*) citizens to be subject to retaliation, Canada’s just going to have to suck it up, make the arrest on Canadian soil, and accept that some Canadians aren’t coming home from China in retaliation.

      It would be quite expensive for Canada to graduate to Nobody’s Bitch standards, probably cutting in to the nice social welfare state that Canadians are so fond of. Somewhat cheaper would be Canada deciding to shift from being America’s Bitch to China’s Bitch. And, decidedly unpleasant for the United States to have a Chinese protectorate on its northern border, which is something the US should keep in mind as it plays the “We’re America, Bitch” card with reckless abandon.

      But for now, I think we’ve got a stable equilibrium, and Canada will suck it up and sacrifice a few of its citizens to Chinese jails to keep it so. If the United States is smart about it, they’ll want Meng sitting in a Canadian holding cell for as long as possible, rather than actually extradited to the United States. I expect Canada will eventually be able to unload that hot potato on the US, at least.

      * You know, real American

      • johan_larson says:

        The best result for Canada is probably having the whole matter stretch into a hypothetical Biden administration, and the Canadian courts then deciding not to extradite Meng. This would go some distance toward satisfying the Chinese, who probably only care about the final resolution of the matter. (The fact that we arrested one of their VIPs is damage already done, and which can’t be undone.) The Americans wouldn’t be happy to see Meng released, but they have independent courts just as we do, so I think they would understand. I’d be very surprised to see any sort of retaliation from the US in that scenario, particularly under a less belligerent Biden administration.

        • Incurian says:

          Sorry this is off topic, but is Biden less belligerent? I don’t follow politics too closely but every time I manage to see something about him, he is being sort of belligerent.

      • J Mann says:

        John, are you implying that you think the Canadian court decision was caused by US pressure?

        I’m enough of a formalist that if a Canadian court rules that there’s credible evidence that she committed a crime under both US and Canadian law and that the relevant treaty requires extradition, and assuming the ruling is correct, then extradition should be the outcome even if China announces they now have a policy of arresting Canadians.

        If it’s a stupid law, then the solution is for Canada to fix its stupid laws, not to enforce them for everyone but politically connected Chinese citizens.

        On the other hand, if the court ruling is legally wrong and the result of US pressure, then the whole system is corrupt and I agree with your analysis. 🙂

        • johan_larson says:

          There is some reason to think the arrest of Meng is part of a campaign by the US government to gain economic advantage for its companies by aggressive use of its court system. Here’s an article in the South China Morning Post, based on the book The American Trap by Frederic Pierucci. Pierrucci is one of several executives of foreign companies who have been arrested by the US DOJ over the years for various corruption charges. The claim is that these prosecutions are notably lopsided, pursued aggressively against foreign companies, but much less so against American companies. Is that true? Seems plausible, at least. I don’t think the Americans are beyond using some shenanigans to keep their computer/internet/telecom industry from going the way of their auto industry.

          But on the Canadian side, as far as I understand from the Canadian press, we are simply scrupulously honoring a fully legal request under a longstanding treaty, while giving the target of that request the full benefit of the protections of our legal system.

          • John Schilling says:

            Any undue influence is almost certainly being applied through executive rather than judicial channels. Canadian judges aren’t going to change their rulings just because the US (or even Canadian) state department tells them to, and they’ll probably bend over backwards to avoid the appearance of that sort of impropriety if it came to that.

            But Canadian courts cannot investigate the facts of the case any more than US courts could; for that they are dependent on whatever facts the RCMP brings to the table and almost certainly with a strong bias towards “our cops don’t lie”. And the RCMP has always worked closely with the FBI in cross-border affairs. If the US wants to sway a Canadian judge’s rulings, they’ll almost certainly do it by working with the RCMP to give that judge a carefully cherrypicked subset of the relevant facts.

      • Tenacious D says:

        Somewhat cheaper would be Canada deciding to shift from being America’s Bitch to China’s Bitch.

        More likely, in my view, is Canada getting caught in the middle as one of the theatres where US-China rivalry plays out. Hopefully it only goes as far as espionage and competition for buying up strategic infrastructure and resources. Both of which are already happening.

  60. NostalgiaForInfinity says:

    The FT finds provisional evidence that lockdowns work in the short term.

    The graph at the bottom shows a strong relationship between the current number of excess deaths and how large the outbreak was at the time the lockdown started. This came up in a previous OT and suggests that when evaluating the efficacy of lockdowns, the timing of them is important and there’s more to it than “these countries locked down but still have terrible outbreaks”.

    They do something a bit funny with Sweden (which didn’t lock down, and instead they pick “transit usage is 50% down” as their “day of lockdown”) but the relationship holds regardless.

    • JayT says:

      Two interesting things there.
      1) The US only has about ~65,000 excess deaths, but ~100,000 COVID19 deaths. Does that just mean that the lockdowns have “saved” ~35,000 people from things like the flu, car accidents, etc?

      2) That graph of deaths to lockdowns has some really crazy scaling going on. I’m having a hard time getting any information out of it.

      • NostalgiaForInfinity says:

        That is odd. I’m not familiar with the US numbers at all. The excess deaths thing has been studied a fair bit in the UK because the actual Covid testing numbers are so obviously undercounting the true numbers.

        The graph has changed since I posted that link this morning, which is unhelpful. The new version is weird, the old version was a bit more comprehensible and showed a much tighter relationship. I don’t know what they’re doing to the x axis now but it was total cases before, not axes per million and they hadn’t warped it all over the place. I don’t even think it’s a log scale?

        I’m glad I said provisional when I first posted this because I’m much less confident in it now.

      • keaswaran says:

        I’m not sure where specifically you’re getting the 65,000 number from, but the CDC is the most common source. They only currently have numbers up to May 9, so the thousand or so deaths a day since then aren’t up yet. They also note that their “excess deaths” calculation is done with provisional data and that recent weeks are likely to have additional deaths added (presumably lots of low-priority deaths that just haven’t been tabulated yet). Furthermore, the “excess deaths” calculation appears to measure the difference between observed deaths in a week and a threshold that is about 2,000 greater than the predicted deaths in that week. So our best guess should be that over an eight week period, the “excess deaths” number undercounts the actual excess deaths by about 16,000.

        https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

        • JayT says:

          I was responding to the article in the top post. The second graph shows the US around ~65,000 excess deaths, updated May 27th. That does not match up with what the CDC link you shared is saying, so I’m going to guess that the Financial Times is looking at something different.

  61. Deiseach says:

    In “There’s One Born Every Minute” news, this latest blossoming of the entrepreneurial spirit.

    A USB drive costing $416 that claims to emit a shield that blocks “electric fog” caused by 5G was found to be a $6 drive covered with a shiny sticker.

    IT security firm Pen Test Partners purchased and analysed the 5GBioShield and found it was “virtually identical” to a popular USB drive available from wholesalers in China for around $6 (£5).

    Business Insider found a number of three-pack USB drives which resemble the $416 product, including on the Alibaba-operated marketplace Aliexpress, on Etsy, and on Wish.

    Those products also all come in the same three colors as those marketed by 5GBioShield: gold, rose gold, and silver.

    In the report, published on Thursday, Pen Test Partners said the sole difference between the wholesale items and the 5GBioShield product was the addition of a sticker.

    Ken Munro, owner of Pen Test Partners, wrote: “In our opinion the 5G Bioshield is nothing more than a £5 USB key with a sticker on it. Whether or not the sticker provides £300 pounds worth of quantum holographic catalyzer technology we’ll leave you to decide.”

    He also told the BBC that the sticker “looks remarkably like one available in sheets from stationery suppliers for less than a penny.”

    On the one hand, it’s nice to see that even in a time of global lockdown, China can still provide cheap goods for us thirsty consumers in the West. On the other hand, it’s depressing that a combination of fearful ignorance and sprinkling techy-sounding buzzwords will enable scammers, fraudsters, and the Del Boys to pluck pigeons in abundance.

    And in “I’m appalled but also secretly delighted – I’m feeling so conflicted” news, this just in.

    I think it’s a bad precedent to set, but Twitter starting playing politics first and it was Obama who led the way with “I’ve got a phone and a pen” – as we conservatives kept saying when those delighted by his daring leadership were in transports of bliss, be careful what powers you abrogate because you won’t always be the ones in power, and those powers will remain when your opponents take over, and you can’t expect them not to be used against you.

    You shouldn’t dare Donald Trump because he will take that dare. I’m not saying this is a good thing, I’m saying this is how the guy operates, and frankly if Twitter are going to do the “I’m shocked, shocked!” bit, they haven’t a leg to stand on. This is reminding me of a discussion we had ages ago in the middle of that thread about Borderers and Albion’s Seed, where one lot of us were saying “If you tell someone Make me, you are asking for a punch in the snoot and can’t be surprised when you get one” because when verbal provocation gets to a certain point, everyone understands that it’s going to evoke physical retaliation, and the other lot were horrified because that’s only verbal arguing, you aren’t supposed to take it to the point of physical retaliation, that’s barbaric!

    In this case, Twitter said “Make me” and Trump is now punching them in the snoot.

    • Matt M says:

      My personal favorite are all the conservatives who, 99% of the time, are quite clear to loudly declare that they are not libertarians, and that government regulation of private business is just and proper in order to ensure fairness and prevent exploitation and keep in check the obvious and predictable evils of “unfettered capitalism.”

      But the second Trump says something bad about big tech, all of a sudden they’re first amendment absolutists who are shocked and horrified that the government might presume to regulate a private business, which is clearly unconstitutional and would lead to all sorts of nightmare socialist scenarios.

      I struggle to recognize a coherent philosophy that justifies, say, the minimum wage, but sees “no you cannot censor people based on their political views” as unacceptable totalitarianism.

      • Garrett says:

        A better description might be “only the Left is allowed to regulate businesses” because they certainly aren’t willing to fight the culture war on their behalf, standing on principle against regulation supporting ideals supported by the Right, but unwilling to repeal the mandates imposed by the Left.

        There’s a reason why there are new terms for such politicians such as c*ckservatives.

    • broblawsky says:

      it was Obama who led the way with “I’ve got a phone and a pen”

      This seems like, to me, a false equivalency. Executive orders are a well-established part of the powers of the executive branch; using the power of the FTC and the FCC to intimidate the media into giving you an unchecked propaganda channel is not. This is a dangerous overreach of executive power, and one that, if not met by a swift pushback by conservatives, may well end up being used by Democratic administrations to silence conservative voices.

      • Matt M says:

        may well end up being used by Democratic administrations to silence conservative voices.

        lol

        Conservative voices are already being silenced by Twitter and Facebook and Google. That’s the whole complaint. A potential Democratic administration wouldn’t have to do anything at all to censor conservatives other than give a wink in the direction of Silicon Valley promising them that the feds won’t come after them for the behavior they’ve already been getting away with.

        The modern conservative finds itself in a pretty awkward position. On the one hand, they have strong philosophical objections to federal power. On the other hand, the federal government is probably the only powerful institution in all of society that even pretends to give a single **** about red tribe people and their preferences at all.

        If the current board of directors of Twitter/Facebook/whatever was replaced with a panel of such people appointed by Congress, there would almost certainly be more red tribe representation/sympathy on it, (even during times when Dems control all branches of government) than there is today.

        • broblawsky says:

          I recognize that your personal media bubble might prevent you from perceiving this, but liberals also feel that they are being silenced by Twitter. In reality, I believe that Twitter is just incapable of (or uninterested in) fully enforcing its terms of service. It’s only the highest-profile violators, like Alex Jones (on the right) or the Krassenstein brothers (on the left), that actually get punished. However, the conservative media seems to have enshrined their “unfair treatment” by tech giants as a shibboleth.

          Unfortunately, Trump is using this as an excuse to try to harass private entities into giving him special treatment and immunity from punishment; in reality, he probably should’ve been perma-banned some time ago. I’m disappointed that you don’t seem to have a problem with this overreach of Federal power.

          • MilesM says:

            As some members of the blue tribe are so fond of pointing out:

            When you’ve become used to a life of privilege, you perceive fair treatment (or even treatment that favors you, just not as much as you’re used to) as discrimination.

          • Garrett says:

            I used to work for one of those tech giants. They are deeply (both in terms of strength as well as HR reporting tree) left-wing supporters. It’s really only some of the C-suite folks who understand the political and social implications who hold back at all.

          • broblawsky says:

            I used to work for one of those tech giants. They are deeply (both in terms of strength as well as HR reporting tree) left-wing supporters. It’s really only some of the C-suite folks who understand the political and social implications who hold back at all.

            So? That doesn’t prove that these companies are engaged in unfair suppression of right-wing voices. If you feel that it does, it kind of sounds like, to me, that you feel that it’s impossible for anyone with left-wing political views to fairly treat someone with right-wing political views.

          • Matt M says:

            So? That doesn’t prove that these companies are engaged in unfair suppression of right-wing voices.

          • broblawsky says:

            If you’re trying to make a point here, I’m not getting it.

          • Nick says:

            @broblawsky
            Matt M has a weird issue where when he goes to blockquote something it posts instead. I think he’s probably editing in his actual reply right now.

          • Matt M says:

            Sorry, having some weird browser issue. What I meant to reply was that my original reply was specifically addressing the notion that granting political bodies control over social media moderation policies might somehow “backfire” on conservatives, leaving them more censored than they are right now.

            And yes, establishing that 90% of Twitter/FB employees are very liberal, whereas, even during times of liberal ascendency, roughly 40% of Congress is always at least nominally conservative, would go a long way into confirming this.

            My point is less trying to convince you that Twitter/FB are or aren’t horribly biased against conservatives right now. My point is more that the notion that conservatives should fear an outcome where this somehow gets worse is absurd, given that the government will virtually never be more radically opposed to conservatism than the default silicon valley staffing pool is.

          • profgerm says:

            If you feel that it does, it kind of sounds like, to me, that you feel that it’s impossible for anyone with left-wing political views to fairly treat someone with right-wing political views.

            I think it’s relatively rare for anyone to treat anyone they disagree with fairly, and tech employees are not magical saints that are above this kind of bias or above taking advantage of the power that has fallen into their laps.

            I would, however, expect people with more experience (the C-suiters in the example) to be a little more cautious and strategic, in general, when compared to the passionate intensity of youthful zealots. It is coincidentally left-wing, rather than inherently.

            See also: the points of history where the Moral Majority was American Protestant instead of Bay Area Progressive. Similar efforts, from the other side.

          • broblawsky says:

            The argument that “it can’t get worse than this” rings false when there’s so many prominent conservatives who remain quite unpunished from Twitter, even when they break the rules.

            Bear in mind, it won’t be a representative sampling of congress-critters who are in charge of some hypothetical Department of Social Media Monitoring. It’ll be bureaucrats appointed by the executive branch. These people, unlike Twitter’s current staffing pool, will be more interested in pleasing their boss than making sure that Twitter continues to exist. If that means massive-scale banning of conservatives, it will happen, and there won’t be much Congress can do about it if they don’t take a stand now.

          • Matt M says:

            The argument that “it can’t get worse than this” rings false when there’s so many prominent conservatives who remain quite unpunished from Twitter, even when they break the rules.

            Name a few. Besides Trump, who everyone seemingly concedes is immune only because he is literally President. I mean come on man, Prager U has been almost thoroughly demonetized and shadowbanned. They are as milquetoast and mainstream as it gets. And they get content blocked routinely.

            It’ll be bureaucrats appointed by the executive branch.

            Who want to keep their jobs even if the party of the President changes. And who are generally older moderates and, by nature of being government employees, are obligated to at least pretend that free speech is still a cultural value worth upholding. Which is more than we can say about the silicon valley professional class, many of whom believe that “hate speech doesn’t count as free speech” is already literally the law and will argue with you if you try and suggest otherwise.

            I’m not saying that it’s impossible that Twitter could be worse on conservatives. I am saying that turning moderation responsibilities over to the government is incredibly unlikely to lead to a worse outcome (and quite reasonably likely to lead to a better one). At least there’s a chance that Republicans will occasionally win elections. The odds that a true socially conservative red-tribe republican would win a majority of seats on Twitter’s board of directors, or Twitter’s “trust and safety council” is approximately zero.

          • broblawsky says:

            Name a few.

            Michelle Malkin. Karl Rove. Andy Ngo. Newt Gingrich. I could go on. Or are none of them conservative by your standards?

            Who want to keep their jobs even if the party of the President changes. And who are generally older moderates and, by nature of being government employees, are obligated to at least pretend that free speech is still a cultural value worth upholding. Which is more than we can say about the silicon valley professional class, many of whom believe that “hate speech doesn’t count as free speech” is already literally the law and will argue with you if you try and suggest otherwise.

            I’m not saying that it’s impossible that Twitter could be worse on conservatives. I am saying that turning moderation responsibilities over to the government is incredibly unlikely to lead to a worse outcome (and quite reasonably likely to lead to a better one). At least there’s a chance that Republicans will occasionally win elections. The odds that a true socially conservative red-tribe republican would win a majority of seats on Twitter’s board of directors, or Twitter’s “trust and safety council” is approximately zero.

            The argument that we can trust the state with the power to regulate free speech over the conscience of private individuals (and the power of the free market) seems like an odd one for a conservative to make, but maybe this just shows that I still don’t understand modern conservatives very well.

          • Garrett says:

            > maybe this just shows that I still don’t understand modern conservatives very well

            I’m not a conservative, though I get the feeling that the disconnect is in the “principle” vs. “culture war” dynamic. As a principle, they’d prefer businesses to completely self-regulate. But in culture war terms, they recognize that the government is already allowed to mandate significant left-wing HR and industry policies. So in that case they should insist on any action which disproportionately helps their side, even if it’s a net negative. Because conflict theory, culture war, etc.

          • souleater says:

            I don’t think Matt M is making an argument that this falls in line with conservative principles, I think hes steel manning why a group of people who are generally opposed to state coercion are suddenly okay with it.

            This is kinda an example of “The ideology is not the movement” and the red tribe seems open to sacrificing its own sacred cows in the name of self preservation. In the age of Trump, it often takes the form of “Make them play by their own rules” or, “I prefer small government that doesn’t oppress anyone, but if we can’t have that I would rather be the oppressor than the oppressed.”

            I too get the sense that twitter suppresses the right

          • broblawsky says:

            @Matt M should feel free to correct me if he feels I’m misinterpreting him, but the position he’s arguing doesn’t sound like a steelman of something he disagrees with – it feels like that’s his actual position on the level of power the state should have in regulation of the media.

            In the age of Trump, it often takes the form of “Make them play by their own rules” or, “I prefer small government that doesn’t oppress anyone, but if we can’t have that I would rather be the oppressor than the oppressed.”

            In this case, the government isn’t oppressing anyone; Twitter is not the state. A private enterprise is applying its own rules as it sees fit, and Trump is trying to use the state to harass them into changing those rules in such a way that would benefit him and his followers (as he sees it).

            Also, IMO, if you abandon your principles the instant they become inconvenient, you never actually had any.

          • The argument that we can trust the state with the power to regulate free speech over the conscience of private individuals (and the power of the free market) seems like an odd one for a conservative to make, but maybe this just shows that I still don’t understand modern conservatives very well.

            The argument, as I interpret it, is that the question is to what degree social media companies should be free to determine their own policies, to what degree constrained by the government. If you believe, as I think Matt does, that the companies are considerably farther left than even a Democratic administration, then leaving them free will result in their being more anti-conservative than constraining them, even if the constraint is done by Democrats. So constraining them produces a benefit for conservatives, even if Biden wins the election.

            That isn’t, of course, an argument on principle but on consequences.

            The one weakness in the argument, suggested by the references to the C-suite, is that the behavior of the companies is to some degree constrained by market forces. To take the most obvious example, even if they would like to ban Trump from Twitter, and even if they believe that there is nothing Trump could do to stop them, banning him would result in a lot fewer tweets and so cost them money.

            So it’s possible that a company whose employees were five points to the left would only act two points to the left, and could be pushed farther by a Democratic administration that was three. Also, if companies are free to do as they like and choose to block a lot of popular conservatives, that might lead to the rise of competitors that specialized in conservatives, parallel to what happened with news media, a change that could be blocked by sufficiently powerful regulators.

        • sharper13 says:

          So here’s my belated fact-check. 🙂

          For the category of “remain quite unpunished from Twitter, even when they break the rules.” @broblawsky nominated “Michelle Malkin. Karl Rove. Andy Ngo. Newt Gingrich.”

          Nothing exhausting, but I spent a few minutes googling away to see if Twitter had punished any of them.

          I found nothing for Malkin except a video she appeared in (not her tweet) which Trump retweeted and then Twitter removed, this one hour or so vanishing for Karl Rove, Andy Ngo suspended, and so much media noise about Newt being suspended by Fox News that there was no hope to tell anything related to twitter using the search terms I mentally pre-committed myself to (Twitter suspends account “name”).

          So probably not “quite unpunished” in all cases.

          • Matt M says:

            I don’t dispute that those people are conservatives. I dispute that they somehow regularly and flagrantly “violate the rules.” I’d be interested in seeing examples of what rules they supposedly violate.

            Andy Gno is a particularly interesting example to bring up. About half the Tweets of his I actually see* are him posting screenshots of literal, not at all subtle, death threats he receives from antifa accounts, which always go unpunished.

            *I don’t see most of his tweets because he is shadowbanned Twitter’s proprietary algorithm, that is certainly completely apolitical, has decided I probably wouldn’t be interested in what he has to say (even though I reply and like and interact with his tweets frequently)

          • RalMirrorAd says:

            I think you mean Andy Ngo

      • cassander says:

        This seems like, to me, a false equivalency. Executive orders are a well-established part of the powers of the executive branch; using the power of the FTC and the FCC to intimidate the media into giving you an unchecked propaganda channel is not.

        I’m not sure I’d call twitter “the media”, but the previous administration was caught using the IRS and FBI to intimidate their political opponents, which seems much worse. But, of course I would, which is why I’m generally wary of anyone going “this is unprecedented!”

        • broblawsky says:

          That’s classic whataboutism. Less of this, please.

          • cassander says:

            no, whataboutism is bringing up IRRELEVENT comparisons. you can’t say “this is unprecedented” and then label as inadmissible any attempt to say “what about these precedents right over here….”

            That goes double when I’m explicitly casting doubt on all claims of unprecedentary, not just yours.

          • broblawsky says:

            We’re talking about federal control of social media. Bringing up ancient pseudo-scandals unrelated to that topic so you don’t have to talk about actions you can’t defend is, in fact, whataboutism.

          • cassander says:

            @broblawsky

            First, you were responding to a critique made about the Obama administration’s behavior, so talking about its actions is hardly “ancient scandals”, especially when one of them is currently in the news.

            Second, my point was not “Obama did it so Trump is fine.” it was “claims of X being unprecedented in politics are usually wrong.”

          • broblawsky says:

            I definitely didn’t get the point you were trying to make; in the future, I’d appreciate it if you would try to make that argument more directly rather than burying it at the bottom of your post. That would probably make it easier for the rest of us to understand your position.

          • cassander says:

            @broblawsky

            It was a 2 sentence post.

          • broblawsky says:

            “Don’t bury the lede” applies to even short arguments, I think.

        • Tatterdemalion says:

          I’m not sure I’d call twitter “the media”, but the previous administration was caught using the IRS and FBI to intimidate their political opponents, which seems much worse.

          That’s not a fair or accurate characterisation of the IRS targetting controversy.

          While it’s probably true that some IRS agents did subject some right-wing organisations trying to claim tax-exempt status to a disproportionately high standard of scrutiny, for whatever reason*, Obama didn’t even know about it, let alone instigate it.

          That’s not remotely comparable to Trump deliberately abusing his own power.

          * It wouldn’t surprise me if groups with anti-tax political views tried to play fast and loose with how much tax they owed more often than those with pro-tax political views, but to be fair it also wouldn’t surprise me if IRS agents abused their powers to promote their own political agenda, and even if they do I think the IRS probably shouldn’t act on that knowledge.

          • cassander says:

            Obama didn’t even know about it, let alone instigate it.

            That he didn’t have to instigate it is more problematic than if he did. If some of MAGA hat wearing officials in the bureau of whatever decided to start harassing anti-trump organizations, I don’t think you’d be calmed by the fact that trump didn’t actually order them to do it, especially if no one involved was actually punished in a meaningful way.

            It wouldn’t surprise me if groups with anti-tax political views tried to play fast and loose with how much tax they owed more often than those with pro-tax political views,

            Would you also surprise you if people who believe in more entitlement spending were more likely to abuse the welfare system?

          • Tatterdemalion says:

            That he didn’t have to instigate it is more problematic than if he did. If some of MAGA hat wearing officials in the bureau of whatever decided to start harassing anti-trump organizations, I don’t think you’d be calmed by the fact that trump didn’t actually order them to do it, especially if no one involved was actually punished in a meaningful way.

            If Trump were to appoint people who subsequently abused their positions without his knowledge, I would probably blame him for that.

            If government officials were to abuse their positions at his incitement but without his knowledge, I would probably blame him for that.

            If people appointed under a previous, Democratic president (the policy in question dated back to 2004), a long way down the ladder (micromanaging the Determinations unit of the Cincinnatti office of the IRS is not traditionally viewed as being the president’s responsibility) did so, in direct opposition to the values and principles he’d promoted, I would not.

            Would you also surprise you if people who believe in more entitlement spending were more likely to abuse the welfare system?

            No, but not for the reasons you think.

            I think that the strongest correlate with “likely to abuse the welfare system” is “desperately needs to use the welfare system”, which will obviously in turn correlate with supporting it.

            But if you were to control for need, my guess is that people who believe that the welfare system is a good thing are less likely to abuse it than people who think it’s a bad one and therefore don’t feel guilty about taking advantage of it.

          • Obama didn’t even know about it, let alone instigate it.

            How can you possibly know whether that is true?

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        That’s kind of the thing. There’s nothing wrong with executive orders. Those are pretty much how the executive wields his authorized power. The problem is EOs that wield unauthorized power, like Obama’s DAPA.

        We’ll have to wait to see Trump’s EO to determine whether or not the power he’s wielding is authorized or unauthorized, but to my knowledge, to date none of his EOs have been found to be illegitimate by the courts, so maybe this will be the first.

        • zzzzort says:

          It would be far from the first (including possibly ending DACA, actually), and most famously muslim ban 1.0.

          link text

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Your link isn’t loading for me, but the travel ban was upheld by the Supreme Court. So is the link just all the times a left-leaning lower court judge issued a power-grab universal injunction that eventually got overturned?

            The right-wing meme for this is “President Hawaiian Judge.”

          • AlexanderTheGrand says:

            As I understand they held up the newest version but not 1.0, which is the version zzzzort specified.

            (liberally-biased but accurate) source

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Eh, but version 1.0 never made it to the Supreme Court, so I’m not sure that counts. That the ACLU was able to find a lower court judge to block it is meaningless since they do that with everything (hence, “President Hawaiian Judge”).

          • zzzzort says:

            Muslim ban 1.0 was injunctified, lost several times in court, then the administration watered it down significantly with 2.0, and only then did Hawaii get involved. The injunction was partially over turned, but the order was still watered down somewhat. Then came 3.0, the supreme court case, and the ruling to uphold. But 1.0 was killed by the courts, and probably would have lost at the supreme court, imo.

          • anonymousskimmer says:

            From that link, here’s one the Supreme court blocked:

            The Supreme Court ruled against Trump on his asylum ban in December 2018, siding with a federal judge who blocked the administration’s efforts to bar migrants from claiming asylum if they crossed the border illegally.

            and another:

            Putting a citizenship question on the 2020 census: Blocked

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Conceded. Trump has lost in court.

      • John Schilling says:

        This seems like, to me, a false equivalency. Executive orders are a well-established part of the powers of the executive branch;

        Which are mostly used to direct executive-branch agencies to do something within their general sphere of influence but which they wouldn’t have done in the ordinary course of events.

        using the power of the FTC and the FCC to intimidate the media into giving you an unchecked propaganda channel is not.

        And the way executive-branch agencies normally work is by suggesting that life will become unpleasant for anyone who doesn’t go along with the new agenda, rather than actually implementing enforcement actions against everyone who does things the old way. So, I’m only seeing a difference at the level of the specific target and goal.

        If the defense is, “It is well-established that left-leaning Presidents use executive orders to direct federal agencies to intimidate people into supporting left-wing goals; doing that to different people to support right-wing goals is not”, then meh, not caring much that it’s your sacred ox being gored this time.

        So this time the FCC writes a “dear colleague” letter to the CEOs of social media companies, instead of the Education Department to college and university administrators. I’m not a big fan of either, but I don’t consider the one worse than the other. And the one used up enough of my finite supply of outrage that I have less to spare for the victims of the other. The bit where Obama had the sense to arrange that quietly behind the scenes while Trump is trumpeting his moves as usual, doesn’t really change anything.

    • Gerry Quinn says:

      To be fair, I don’t think it has been established that the anti-5G pen drives are selling in abundance. One would not have to sell very many to make a profit.

  62. Chevalier Mal Fet says:

    I get that it can be annoying when people plug their blogs here, but as this Wednesday coincides with the 40th anniversary of the fall of Gwangju to the armed forces of Korean dictator Chun Doo-hwan, I thought it might be apropos to mention that I’ve been writing a history of the Gwangju Democratic Uprising on my own blog.

    It’s a surprisingly little known event in the West, considering it was a major massacre taking place on the territory of an important US ally. In a nutshell, in May, 1980, Chun, who was new in power and feeling a bit insecure, declared martial law over the whole Republic of Korea, which provoked a series of increasingly bloody clashes between students and paratroopers in the southern city of Gwangju. One thing led to another and the citizens of Gwangju seized weapons from police and national guard armories all around the region and drove the soldiers out of the city, making Gwangju the only self-governing city on the Korean peninsula for a few days. On May 27, after blockading the city and cutting off all news, the government forces launched a counteroffensive and crushed the uprising in a few hours. Between 200 (according to government sources) and 2,000 (according to various victim advocacy groups) people were killed in the fighting, which places the uprising on the same scale as Tiananmen, which is a much better known massacre.

    Gwangju is my home city and memories of the massacre are everywhere, along with a large amount of civic pride in Gwangju’s resistance to the dictator. Many Gwangju citizens claim that it was their example that inspired Korea’s democratization movement, which succeeded 7 years later in ending the military dictatorship.

    • Lambert says:

      You have to wonder whether the UNC were really the good guys.

      In retrospect, things turned out much better for the ROK, but at the time…

      • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

        Well, as bad as Rhee and Park were, they rarely resorted to outright murder. Usually, the most prominent critics of the regime would be arrested, roughed up a bit, in the worst cases held for a few months or even exiled, but Park tried to quietly kill the standouts only on a handful of occasions – there were no gulags. The US wouldn’t allow such a naked dictatorship, so instead the ROK was a sham democracy with rigged elections, strict censorship, harassment of the opposition by the authorities, etc.

        NK, on the other hand, was full-blown Stalinist dictatorship. Lots of Southerners got a taste of that during the few months the North occupied most of the country and wanted no part of it. That’s partially why the regimes were so often able to clamp down on criticism – they’d say any ‘instability’ would lead to a northern invasion and so for the security of all they’d just have to declare martial law and ‘take charge’ for a while. Park and Chun Doo-hwan did this a lot.

        To say nothing of the much freer economy in the ROK vs. the DPRK…

    • mrjeremyfade says:

      That’s a fascinating story.

      I’ve always wondered why the ROK didn’t transition to democracy in the 60’s or 70’s. And I guess I assumed that rapidly rising living standards made the issue less urgent. But I’d be interested in what you have to say on the matter.

      • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

        They sort of moved in that direction through Park’s dictatorship – I’ve seen suggestions that Park’s first election, in 1963, after his coup, was more or less legitimate. He bribed and intidimated officials, ran strong government-backed propaganda, and constantly harassed and intimidated the opposition to keep them from organizing, but the vote totals weren’t total fabrications in 67 and 71, either.

        The election of 71 was so close, though, that Park worried he actually might lose power if another election were held, no matter how much he bribed or beat people, so he declared a state of emergency, threw out the Third Republic, and instituted the Yushin constitution, which more or less made him President for life – the President was now elected by an Electoral College, and the Electors were chosen by the President and the Assembly…and 1/3 of the Assembly was hand-picked by the President.

        Most Koreans went along with this because times were good – the Parks are still revered in large parts of the country even today. His daughter was elected president from 2013-2017 (before toppling in a massive corruption scandal). You had opposition, but it was mostly regionally concentrated, and tied up in ineffective protests, mostly by college students. Usually a bit of tear gas and some good old fashioned billy clubs kept those from getting out of hand (before Gwangju).

        Chun Doo-hwan and Gwangju escalating into each other was a big part of why Korea ultimately did transition to democracy in the late ’80s – early ’90s, and I’ll get there in a few weeks.

    • edmundgennings says:

      The political instability of the ROK is quite surprising given its growth. I am not sure if betting markets would have had odds over 75% on “The next 3 ROK transitions of power will happen clearly accord with the law” until 2000.

    • anonymousskimmer says:

      It’s horrible when people who are directly responsible for many deaths (to prop up themselves) are pardoned of the death penalty.

      Chun Doo-hwan should not be alive today. He certainly shouldn’t be living free.

      I’d heard about this before from a Korean movie about a crazy person who believed the uprising was currently happening during an anniversary celebration of the uprising. I can’t remember the name of the movie.

      • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

        I agree that the fact that he is currently not only free but living off his ill-gotten gains is a grotesque failure of justice; however, I don’t agree with the death penalty. It’s not like Richard Nixon being pardoned by Gerald Ford, who was Nixon’s political ally at the time.

        Chun was pardoned by Kim Young-Sam and Kim Dae-jung, the two most prominent critics of the military regime (and two of the men directly involved in the 1980 crisis). I think it was an important step in reconciliation in the country, and showed that they were willing to forgive the sins of the past so Korea could move forward with a democratic future. I think measures of grace like that are important for stabilizing divided and turbulent nations – I’d point also to Grant’s generous peace terms for defeated Confederates.

        As for the man you mentioned in the movie, I haven’t seen it, but it sounds like it’s based on a real case. One prominent fellow in the uprising, Kim [something, my books are elsewhere so I’ll look up his first name later] was badly injured in the final battle, and suffered a bit of brain damage. He famously wound up in an asylum, where he still talks to his comrades killed during the uprising as if they were still alive and with him.

        EDIT: Found the guy. From Laying Claim to the Memory of May:

        Another of those who survived the final assault was Kim Yŏngch’ŏl. Kim, thirty-two years old, married, and the father of three young children, was a political activist before 5.18; he worked with the urban poor through the YWCA credit union movement. When the new leadership was organized on May 25 as the Citizens and Students Struggle Committee, he was appointed planning director, and he was in the Provincial Office Building at dawn on May 27. In the final assault, he suffered contusions on his head and shoulders and while in detention at Sangmudae attempted suicide. Sentenced to twelve years in prison for his role in the uprising, in December 1981 his wife found him at 3 a.m., wandering outside his house, partially paralyzed and mentally deranged. 3 She struggled for several years to keep him at home, but he required constant supervision. He banged his head on the floor and walls, ran naked through the neighborhood, was caught shoplifting, and suffered from delusions. He still imagines that his comrades-in-arms from 1980 are alive and talks about meeting them. Finally, he had to be institutionalized.

        It’s unclear how he came to be outside her house after prison – tortured and then released? The book has lots of good information but also frustrating gaps like that.

        There IS a good movie about the uprising, A Taxi Driver, which is VERY loosely based on a true story. Worth a watch if you’re interested.

        • anonymousskimmer says:

          I think it was an important step in reconciliation in the country, and showed that they were willing to forgive the sins of the past so Korea could move forward with a democratic future.

          This is true. It was important in South Africa reconciliation.

          I’m ambivalent on the death penalty. I desperately hate it though when the more power and responsibility you have the more likely you are to have disproportionately lesser punishment.

          I’ve bookmarked A Taxi Driver.

  63. hash872 says:

    In this first installment of ‘Cool Tech That We Had In Past Decades (And Maybe Could Again?)’, I present the ‘land train’. A manufacturer in the 50s created a series of offroad arctic exploration vehicles for the Army, consisting of interlinked crane or excavator-sized trucks with an engine cab in the front- that (through some kind of diesel to electric generator process?) sent power to all of the wheels of all of the attached vehicles. Hence, a cousin to the train, without tracks. Later versions had multiple cabs with engines, one version with up to four of them.

    Unfortunately, it appears that advances in heavy-lift helicopters made them less practical, but it still seems like an interesting idea for future usage (off Earth, for instance?)

    https://www.thedrive.com/news/33645/the-incredible-story-of-the-us-armys-earth-shaking-off-road-land-trains

    • Leafhopper says:

      I will support this idea if we also get a sea train.

    • DarkTigger says:

      I think the concept is still quite common in a certain kind of (retro-futur) SciFi.

    • tgb says:

      I’m definitely in favor of cool tech but I gotta say this one got replaced by an even cooler tech so I will shed no tears here.

    • Dack says:

      Looking at the map…most of the radar stations are on the coast. Why didn’t they send what they needed in an icebreaker ship? 500 tons is practically nothing by sea.

      • Aftagley says:

        Lack of infrastructure up there to unload and transport the cargo, I’d imagine.

        Even if you could have gotten the stuff up there (doubtful, icebreaking back in the 50s was pretty bad), how do you get it from the hold of your icebreaker (which can only get within a mile or so of shore) to the site where you want your radar station built?

        That being said, even getting the cargo vessel up there would have been a challenge. To break that kind of ice you need a dedicated icebreaker, and dedicated icebreakers can’t carry cargo. Maybe you could run a McMurdo-style operation and have icebreaking escorts for this ship, but that would cost an ungodly amount.

    • SamChevre says:

      The related vehicles with only one engine with drive wheels in front is a Michigan B Train.

    • Radu Floricica says:

      There are decreasing marginal benefits after a point. I can’t find a source now, but I remember reading that the largest truck in the world is far from being a commercial success.

  64. MisterA says:

    Several tech-savvy folks around here – I am fresh out of ideas, figured I’d bounce it off people here to see if anyone has any thoughts.

    Myself and everyone in my family have been receiving a ton of spam via text message. These always take the same form – an email address that is clearly mass-generated (ie, name37737373@gmail.com) sends an email to 20 sequentially generated strings of seven digits, each with @vzwpix.com added to the end. Ie, 5557473001@vzwpix.com; 5557473002@vzwpix.com; 5557473003@vzwpix.com, and so forth.

    If you do a Google search for VZWPix, nearly every result that comes back is from people who have been receiving spam text messages like this. A search for “vzwpix” on Twitter turns up the same thing – just person after person tweeting at Verizon Support for help stopping this, with no luck. This has been going on for years, with no hint of a fix.

    I have spoken with Verizon Tech Support about this a few times myself, both by chat and phone. They have generally been polite and seemed to genuinely try to help, but have no idea what VZWPix actually is, let alone how to stop emails sent to it from generating text messages on my phone. I spent an hour on the phone with a tech support rep who tried all sorts of stuff and even checked with his supervisor, but were stumped and unable to figure out what VZWPix.com was, since going to the website just says it’s an invalid site.

    I think I figured out why.

    Searching old articles and sites, it appears that the functionality to send an email to [phone number]@vzwpix.com and have it sent to your phone as a text message was a feature of Pix Place, a picture hosting service Verizon used to offer. The Pix Place website is picture.vzw.com (and also used to be accessible from VZWPix.com, although that URL is now defunct); go there, and you get this message:

    The Pix Place Online Album was discontinued on October 1st. For information about setting up a free account on the Verizon Cloud remote storage service, please visit http://www.vzw.com/mmupdate from your computer.

    Researching a bit more, apparently that was October 1st, 2014. Pix Place has been dead and gone for six years, so no wonder that Verizon tech support staff aren’t getting training or resources about it or how to change any settings for it.

    The problem is, Pix Place may be gone, but clearly nobody ever turned off the email to text forwarding that was part of the service – and nobody I’ve talked to at Verizon seems to have the faintest idea what I’m talking about. Spammers have realized Verizon left a backdoor open to send unblockable spam to anyone with a Verizon number, via what appears to be a sort of zombie service that you can’t log into anymore to change settings, but is still active for every Verizon cell phone account.

    I am 100% sure there is a person or person working at Verizon who knows what is up with this, and how to fix it. But I am also pretty sure that no interaction with Verizon Customer Support is ever going to actually get this problem on that person’s radar.

    But I figured I’d post it here on the off chance anyone has any clever ideas.

    • Christophe Biocca says:

      One thing to try first, have you tried emailing to YOURNUMBER@vzwpix.com and seeing if the forwarding happens then? A trivially exploitable flaw will get more attention than one that only is exploitable by some particular thing only the spammer knows how to do.

      Two paths that might get a resolution:

      1. Reach the Administrative/Technical contacts for that domain. Unfortunately whois doesn’t give you a direct contact email, just “Select Request Email Form at https://domains.markmonitor.com/whois/vzwpix.com“, but it’s still worth going through the process and seeing if you can reach someone there. Explain the situation. In theory, if they remove the MX records for the domain it would stop any spam-forwarding (bit of a blunt instrument, especially if they use actual addresses on the same domain).
      2. The MX records say the mailservers are hosted on cloudfilter.net, which is a domain that redirects to cloudmark.com which provides various email/text messaging “security” services. They might be more responsive given the risk of a reputational hit if they’re the ones forwarding spam. If not they might have a way to reach the right people.

      Let me know if you hit more roadblocks.

      • Purplehermann says:

        If you can do this, and find the cell number of higher ups in horizon, maybe spam them until they close it?

        • Anthony says:

          Spam them with images which explain what’s going on and how to fix it.

        • CatCube says:

          I’d be cautious with this. Depending on how the relevant laws read, this might be equivalent to “Walk into somebody’s house in the dead of night and wake them by tickling their ear to demonstrate they’ve left their front door unlocked.” While you’ll absolutely get the door locked, you *might* not enjoy the legal consequences, and in this metaphor, you’re *absolutely 100%* guilty of trespassing so it’ll be trivially easy to charge you.

      • Mycale says:

        I’m a Verizon customer, and I just confirmed that that approach works (even using an email address that is otherwise not associated with my Verizon account). Crazy. I’m honestly kind of surprised that (a) Verizon hasn’t closed this obvious loophole and (b) no one has bothered to spam every Verizon customer in the country endlessly (thereby forcing Verizon to close the loophole). It’s not like sending out spam via email is a novel idea . . . .

        • MisterA says:

          Based on the number of people complaining about it online (and my own experience), spammers seem to be making a good faith effort to do just that.

      • MisterA says:

        To echo Mycale, this definitely works. Send an email to any Verizon phone number @VZWpix.com, and that person gets a text.

        It also appears to bypass all the usual spam blocking rules Verizon allows you to set up, based on my experimentation in settings and then texting myself through this method.

    • Christophe Biocca says:

      Upon further research this unfortunately looks like a well known “feature” of messaging networks:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS_gateway#Email_clients

      The domain used in spamming you is the MMS Gateway domain for Verizon. And it being abused is also documented.

      • MisterA says:

        Yeah, after researching it some more and reading more online, it seems that the ‘VZWPix’ branding was related to Pix Palace, but otherwise this has nothing to do with that, it’s just that they are still using it as their MMS Gateway.

        And unfortunately, they just have no spam protection of any kind on their MMS Gateway, so if someone feels like putting ‘@VZWPix.com’ after a zillion strings of seven digit numbers and sending them spam emails, there is basically no way to block constant text message spam.

        Cool feature, Verizon!

  65. proyas says:

    It’s commonly argued that today’s rich countries are only rich because they extracted wealth from ex-colonies in the past. However, are there any ex-imperial countries whose present wealth almost certainly doesn’t derive from that source?

    For example, consider the former Axis Powers, Germany, Italy and Japan.

    Germany and Italy were late to the game, and could only conquer poor parts of the world. (What riches were there in Eritrea and Togo?) I don’t have economic figures at hand, but I doubt either made much money off of their empires during their relatively brief lives.

    WWII saw all three of them lose their empires and have their economies obliterated. Is it fair to say that whatever wealth they might have gained from their colonies was erased, and that everything they have now owes to their labors since 1945, plus donations they received from friendly countries?

    • Belisaurus Rex says:

      Aren’t those donations coming from ex imperial countries?

      • proyas says:

        That’s a dangerous point to make because if you go down that rabbit hole, we have to ask whether currently poor, ex-colonized countries have now been repaid thanks to wealth they’ve gained through trade with and donations from ex-colonizer countries.

    • WoollyAI says:

      The preeminent example are probably the Irish. They were a brutally treated British colony for hundreds of years and their suffering, most famously in the potato famine, is general knowledge. Their growth is extremely recent; the Celtic Tiger thing occurred long after imperialism was a thing.

      I’m no expert in South Korean history, but I would be surprised to find colonial holdings in their past, given their historical situation between the Chinese, Japanese, and steppe horsemen. They also have, at the very least, a horrific history of colonial oppression under the Japanese.

      Other contenders:
      I’m unaware of the Swiss ever having colonial holdings.
      I’ve heard of powerful Swedes, plus there’s the whole Viking thing, but I don’t think the Norwegians ever had significant holdings. On this point, probably the Finns as well. I think there’s a small indigenous group called the Sami in northern Sweden/Norway that might be oppressed but I don’t think they get as far south as Finland.
      Poland is doing okay and I can’t imagine them holding any imperial possessions in the 19th-20th century. Quite the other way.
      Several small states such as Lichtenstien probably technically count but only on technicalities.

      • but I don’t think the Norwegians ever had significant holdings

        Iceland.

      • proyas says:

        Should Taiwan also be on this list? I know it was treated as a backwater while part of the Chinese Empire, so it probably received no additional wealth from that.

        If the Japanese built up parts of Taiwan’s economy during their imperial rule of the island, are today’s Taiwanese somehow morally complicit with colonialism since they’re still enjoying some of its benefits?

        I’m sure many of the Nationalists who fled to Taiwan up to 1949 were rich people from the mainland who brought some of their dishonestly-earned wealth with them, but many Nationalists abandoned all their assets and fled to the island with only the clothes on their backs. Do the two groups cancel each other out when deciding whether Taiwan has benefited from colonialism?

        • WoollyAI says:

          I would avoid Taiwan because there is a native Taiwanese population that is…Chinese but not Han Chinese (ethnicity is odd in China) and was not treated terribly well.

          I tried to avoid any country that had a minority native population that was ill-treated in any way, since I’m assuming a bit of bad-faith behind the real people using this argument. I just can’t understand how someone could look at Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany and think they’re clearly a world power because of their colonial possessions.

    • RalMirrorAd says:

      If you look at the biggest “colonizers” over the period of say 1400 to 1940 then rank them, say, by GDP per capita or PPP or something close to that, I am doubtful you’d find any relationship between the two.

      And that’s important because if a non-imperial country like Switzerland is beating a heavily imperial country like the UK then you’d have to argue that in a just world the UK ought to be even poorer than it is now, at least relative to Switzerland.

      In fact the only commodity I think you could steal from a country that would be noticeable in the data would be Oil, since it’s one of the only commodities that has any explanatory power for GDP.

      [The other two big ones being national IQ and whether or not you were a former [or are in NK’s case] communist country]

      If we’re talking about a situation where you either kill or displace the previous inhabitants (if the area wasn’t uninhabited before) and literally ‘settle’ the land yourself, then you can theoretically chock up 100% of the newly formed countries wealth to colonialism but that’s 100% ‘Horizontally’ — you don’t get very far by simply sitting on land you’ve taken, you still have to put it to good use. And a lot of those countries [US and Commonwealth] end up matching or surpassing the economy of their mother country.

    • Anthony says:

      However, are there any ex-imperial countries whose present wealth almost certainly doesn’t derive from that source?

      All of them.

      For the colonizing powers, colonies were a money sink. Aside from the extraction of gold and silver from the Americas, any money made by the imperial powers net of their costs of conquest and ruling were gains from trade, which would have occurred without conquest. And Spain was famously economically damaged by the enormous flows of gold and silver into its economy – Spain was not rich when Napoleon put his brother on the throne leading to the loss of its empire. What wealth Spain has is from industrializing beginning shortly before they lost the rest of their empire to the US.

      • viVI_IViv says:

        Indeed, you could argue that the influx of gold, silver and other valuable raw materials from the colonies damaged Spain and Portugal in the long term. They just used these natural resources to buy manufactured goods from other European countries and neglected to develop their own industrial sector, they became extractive economies not unlike the modern oil countries, so when the stream of natural resources ran dry they were left undeveloped and poor.

        The UK was in a somewhat better position because their colonies provided materials, such as cotton, that required substantial industrial processing to be valuable, so this promoted early industrialization, although they became complacent and let their industry eventually lag at a relatively medium technological level.

        In contrast, Germany and the (Northen) US had less access to cheap resources, so they industrialized later but went directly into high tech (e.g. cars, electricity, radio), which eventually paid off.

    • cassander says:

      The bigger problem is causality. Let’s take for the sake of argument that extraction makes you rich. If so, how did the colonizers get rich enough to sail across oceans and conquer colonies in the first place? I mean, maybe you can make a case for Spain massively lucking out, but if so, they should have gone on to conquer the whole damned world. Instead they got picked apart by the English, dutch, and french. empire is a consequence of wealth and power, not a cause.

      • Simulated Knave says:

        …the Spanish DID conquer a huge part of the world, and tried to conquer even more of it. Have you read European history at all? There’s about 200 straight years of EVERYONE fighting the Spanish, and the Spanish coming extremely close to winning.

        • cassander says:

          I should have been more precise. the spanish luck into an empire. And then they lose it to their neighbors, all of whom are richer than they are by the 1600s despite the enormous influx of wealth into Spain that empire provided.

        • ana53294 says:

          There were multiple reasons why Spain was rich before the conquest of America.

          Spain has very productive agricultural lands; Spain is the natural entry point for trade between the Americas and Europe; Spain controls the Gibraltar strait, a natural choke point for the Mediterranean trade; Spain is relatively isolated from its neighbours* by the Pyrenees (not as good as the British moat, but better than the French eastern border); Spain has, after the Reconquista, remained a religiously and ethnically homogeneous country, except for a few Jews and Moors here and there.

          And despite all those advantages, Spain remained poor. All those wars against other European countries were financed with American silver. I wouldn’t even say that American silver benefitted the Spanish Crown, because, until the War of Spanish Succession, there were nine bankruptcies of the Crown in what should have been the richest period of the Empire: 1557, 1575, 1596, 1607, 1627, 1647, 1652, 1662, and 1666.

          The plentiful American silver meant they could engage in all those wasteful wars, keep the Spanish economy from developing, and keep their power despite all their mismanagement.

          *Portugal doesn’t count. It never stood a chance of winning a serious war with Spain, other than an independence war.

        • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

          There’s about 200 straight years of EVERYONE fighting the Spanish, and the Spanish coming extremely close to winning.

          Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube

          Spain really only ‘won’ in the 16th century – by the end of Philip II’s reign she was clearly on the downhill. And most of the Spanish possessions in Europe in that time (hell, Spain itself as the union of Aragon and Castile) came about via marriage, not via American-gold-powered conquest. Most notable, of course, is Charles/Carlos V, who united all Austrian and Spanish possessions under one crown for a few decades.

      • NostalgiaForInfinity says:

        Why would countries seek empires if not to acquire more wealth and power? You need some minimum level of wealth to gain an empire, but that doesn’t mean you don’t get richer once you have one. Being wealthy and powerful also doesn’t mean you can’t squander an empire once you’ve acquired one, if you make poor decisions and your rivals make better ones.

        • cassander says:

          (A) that they seek to acquire more wealth (which is not the same thing as more power) does not mean that they actually do.

          (B) foreign reach expands with grasp, not the other way around. Today, Micronesia does not aspire to be global hegemon, because they know they can’t. But if tomorrow they were magically transformed into the most powerful country on earth, they’d start to become more interested in the idea.

          (C) but spain never got that wealthy. The Spanish crown had an enormous font of free money, but the english, dutch, and french societies all got richer, and eventually even their monarchs had more money at their disposal than the spanish, despite the free money from the americas.

          • NostalgiaForInfinity says:

            A) Yes, definitely true. But I think it’s safe to say that countries wouldn’t do it if it was a bad idea.

            B) Again, agreed. But I still think that’s compatible with there being a threshold – some ways in which countries can acquire more wealth are dependent on you having some minimum amount to start with.

            C) My grasp of this part of history but my understanding was basically that Spain bungled their empire and squandered their opportunity to become a long lasting hegemonic power. Empire doesn’t guarantee success. The other three powers you mentioned also did have their own empires.

          • cassander says:

            C) My grasp of this part of history but my understanding was basically that Spain bungled their empire and squandered their opportunity to become a long lasting hegemonic power. Empire doesn’t guarantee success. The other three powers you mentioned also did have their own empires.

            First, those countries acquired their empires, in large part, by nabbing bits of the Spanish empire, which meant they somehow got powerful enough to beat spain without having much of an empire.

            Second, I’m not sure I’d say that spain squandered her empire any more than any other fallen empire did. Spain certainly could have made better choices, but that’s always the case.

          • Anthony says:

            @cassander – the Caribbean possessions may have been nabbed from Spain, but the English and French and Dutch and Swedish colonies in North America weren’t. Likewise the various colonies and treaty ports in Africa and India.

          • cassander says:

            @Anthony

            The settler colonies produced very little revenue for their respective crowns. the money came from further south, which is why far more effort was spent fighting over the south and east. And, fwiw, the dutch colonies were largely grabbed at the expense of the Portuguese, who were part of the Spanish empire at the time.

        • Thomas Jorgensen says:

          Colonialism was very frequently very effective at concentrating wealth.

          The cost of maintaining the empire in lives and treasure was borne by the tax payer, while the profits of having a monopoly on the nutmeg trade, or whatever, mysteriously accrued to the pockets of politically influential individuals, and this was far easier to get away with in the exotic abroad than similar schemes in the metropole, which would be fought tooth and nail by people ministers of government might actually listen to.

        • anonymousskimmer says:

          Why would countries seek empires if not to acquire more wealth and power?

          Convenient effort sinks for second sons of the nobility and the gentry.

        • WoollyAI says:

          Why would countries seek empires if not to acquire more wealth and power?

          You can acquire marginally more power through colonies without that being a significant source of wealth or power. The UK might have a giant empire, and might profit by it, but it’s main source of power was always it’s domestic industry and military.

          This is why a major colonial power like the UK, upon which the sun never set, could have inferior industrial and military might compared to the Germans or Soviets in the World Wars, neither of which had extensive empires. You can get money and prestige from ruling India, and I wouldn’t turn it down, but I’d take Bavaria over India any day.

        • Anthony says:

          Power and wealth don’t auto-correlate.

          Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_civilatrice

    • zzzzort says:

      I think taiwan and south korea are probably the best examples here. Spillover effects mean we probably can’t treat Europe as a bunch of separate experiments (otherwise it would be really unlikely that they all got relatively rich near the same time).

    • sharper13 says:

      As the richest country in the world (by the first definition I found when googling. :), which ex-colonies in the past did the United States get wealthy by extracting from? I can’t seem to think of any U.S. colony which had any real impact on the wealth of the United States.

      • Lambert says:

        Louisiana, california, texas, new mexico?
        Depending on your exact definition of ‘Empire’.

        • Eugene Dawn says:

          This is clearly the correct answer. The US did not acquire very many overseas colonies, and most of its colonies were eventually incorporated as states, losing their colonial status, but territorial expansion was absolutely a part of the United States growth and development strategy. I will not claim that the wealth of the United States owes entirely, or even mostly to territorial expansion, but I think there is almost no doubt that westward expansion attracted immigrants, and played a role in growing the US population, which surely contributed something to America’s economic development.

          • Anthony says:

            This depends on confusion between two definitions of “colony”. The US was a settler colony, and its expansion was effectively settler colonies that ended up incorporated into the metropole.

            But the stupid Marxist argument that colonies made European countries rich is mostly about imperial colonies, where the colonizing power was ruling other nations, not settling those nations in a significant way.

            About the only major impact of an imperial colony on the metropole of the US was California gold providing the North with enough capital to afford to completely overwhelm the Confederacy.

    • Ketil says:

      It’s commonly argued that today’s rich countries are only rich because they extracted wealth from ex-colonies in the past.

      It should be pretty obvious that large fraction and probably the majority of global economic growth has taken place in countries not having any colonies (Japan, S. Korea, Taiwan, arguably the US, Russia, China, Canada, and so on), that most of the economic growth in colony countries have occurred after colonies were freed (i.e. 20th and 21st century), and that there is no obvious relationship between colony overlords and other nations when it comes to national wealth.

      What is the evidence to the contrary? If anybody makes this claim, my assumption will be that they are regurgitating some ideological dogma, and not much interested in facts. Would anybody care to steelman?

  66. GearRatio says:

    Semi-interesting-mostly-depressing unemployment thing/rant:

    Arizona never has the best Department of Economic Security staffing levels; I’ve gotten to physical locations before they opened for the day and been their until after closing time in the past. But Covid unemployment claims have run them absolutely ragged; they don’t have anywhere near the staff to keep up with the claims.

    The practical upshot of this is that I have eight weeks of pending claims and as near as I can tell they haven’t even looked at the file yet, much less approved anything. I’m lucky in that I had more money than usual going into this current crisis, so I’m only running out of money now, but I can’t imagine what it’s like for somebody who got fired at the beginning of the crisis who was depending on their next check.

    One thing that’s particularly infuriating/annoying about it is that you can’t actually talk to them about this; if you call in, they tell you the call queue is full and won’t even let you be on hold – this automated message starts immediately after the phone lines “open” until they “close”. It’s so bad that I’ve seen people speculating they aren’t taking calls at all – this isn’t the case, I’m sure, but it seems like it from the perspective of someone trying to reach them. They also don’t answer emails.

    • Evan Þ says:

      /r/CoronavirusWA has been talking for months about the same thing here in Washington State. We even got a couple claims processors chiming in explaining that, yes, it’s just that they don’t have anywhere near enough people.

      At least, from what I hear, we let people be on hold.

      Hang in there.

      • Lambert says:

        If only there were a pool of unemployed people who they could hire to process the extremely large number of unemployment claims.

        • Deiseach says:

          Civil service and public service is tricky, though; at the time of our austerity budgets to deal with the aftermath of the 2008 collapse, the Croake Park agreement set about reducing the public sector wages bill by a recruitment embargo, so that numbers would be reduced by natural attrition (people retiring or leaving) and would not be replaced, even if the volume of work increased.

          This, as you are seeing here, can be a problem.

          You can’t really take in and then offload temp workers because (a) it’s government employment, be that at state or national level, so there are conditions and protections (b) training them to handle cases like processing unemployment claims or other claims involves more than merely “enter the data from the form into the system” because there are always tricky parts and edge cases, and this takes time and effort that the permanent staff don’t have time to give when overwhelmed with new work (c) there may be a legal agreement in place, as with the various agreements in Ireland, that no new staff will be taken on. Though by the state jobs board, they are looking for people as temporary staff, so that should help.

          When you want to cut public sector expenses and costs, reducing staff is one way of doing it. But service provision suffers, and you’re seeing it here in action. Remember this the next time you hear someone complaining that the public sector is over-staffed with drones who do nothing because they know they can’t be fired and it should be run like a business, lean and mean! 🙂

          • Garrett says:

            Businesses are also happy to surge with temp workers and are frequently satisfied with 95% success understanding that 5% of people will be screwed over and might end up going to competitors, which they try to mitigate by improving process, requirements, etc.

            But the government stops itself from being able to do that in many, many ways.

          • Anthony says:

            I’d hope that if the state’s unemployment system is actually still entering data by had, they could hire temps or a contractor to do *all* the data entry and other routine processing (verification letters to employers, etc), then have their regular staff handle all the tricky parts and edge cases. (I think California does most of the fully routine stuff by computer.)

            But it’s *hard* to hire new people or temps or a contract. If a state figured out they’d need to do that, it would be a near-miracle if a contractor could start within 90 days of the state deciding to do that, between advertising for contractors, selecting one or more, writing contracts, etc.

        • Randy M says:

          But how would this department manage to get that list?

  67. littskad says:

    Does anyone know of good online versions of heavily annotated classic literature? I’m not looking for Project Gutenberg throw-the-out-of-copyright-text-online type stuff, which is everywhere, but things more like Power Moby-Dick and Digital Dante.

  68. I hope it’s true.

    But I thought that was also supposed to correlate with being male, and men appear substantially more likely to die of C-19 than women, which would suggest the opposite result.

    • Kaitian says:

      They only composed finger ratios among men, so women’s fingers are irrelevant here.

      • My point was that the finger ratio signals the mix of hormones in the womb the person was incubated in, with the longer ring finger corresponding to a mix less like that in a womb containing a female fetus. So a male with a longer ring finger is, arguably, “more male” than one with a shorter ring finger, as supposedly shown by things like relative performance on math tests vs verbal tests.

        Since males are more likely to die of Covid than females, one might expect that “more male” males would be more likely to die than “less male” males, which is the opposite of the reported result.

        • broblawsky says:

          My point was that the finger ratio signals the mix of hormones in the womb the person was incubated in, with the longer ring finger corresponding to a mix less like that in a womb containing a female fetus.

          This assumption does not appear to be correct, AFAICT. The sex chromosomes you have appear to strongly influence how you respond to any given mix of hormones.

        • Cheese says:

          >Since males are more likely to die of Covid than females, one might expect that “more male” males would be more likely to die than “less male” males, which is the opposite of the reported result.

          Biology is a damn sight more complex than that. I would caution anyone against applying that kind of simplistic logic to any kind of medical data. You’re just as likely to be wrong in a variety of unexpected ways as right.

        • Aftagley says:

          Since males are more likely to die of Covid than females, one might expect that “more male” males would be more likely to die than “less male” males, which is the opposite of the reported result.

          Aren’t males just in general more likely to die of everything? Except maybe childbirth?

          Honest question – my prior is that nearly everything is worse if you’ve got a Y chromosome.

        • DinoNerd says:

          @Aftagley

          my prior is that nearly everything is worse if you’ve got a Y chromosome

          While I share your overall impression, I suspect the real dividing line is not the presence of a Y chromosome, but the absence of a second X chromosome.

          I.e. those rare people who are XXY (males with Klinefelter syndrome) or X (females with Turner syndrome) rather than X or XY, might statistically have experiences more like the opposite sex (same X status) rather than the same sex (same Y status) – except it would be hard to tell, because they also have their own specific problems.

        • Garrett says:

          @DinoNerd:

          When this is over, I really hope that someone does an analysis of XXY folks to see if one factor over another can be determined.

  69. theredsheep says:

    So, there are two big outrage stories in the news right now.

    In the first, two Manhattanites got into an altercation into a park because one of them, a white woman, wasn’t leashing her dog. She refused to leash it, the (black, gay) man argued and tried to lure her dog away with snacks, and the woman freaked out and called the cops in a racially inflammatory manner, emphasizing how African-American the man threatening her was. The man caught it on his smartphone, and now the lady is fired, the dog confiscated, and the guy has had to go on air telling people to stop sending this woman death threats.

    The other outrage story also involves a black guy, George Floyd. The cops got called in on a forgery beef, and wound up knocking Floyd to the ground and literally kneeling on his neck for several minutes while he struggled and complained that he couldn’t breathe. This, too, was caught on camera, in broad daylight, while bystanders repeatedly urged the officers to let him go because he was being strangled. The officers did not get off the man’s neck until EMS arrived. Floyd died shortly after arriving at the hospital. All officers involved have been fired and the matter has been reported to the FBI.

    The weird thing is, my FB feed seems to be on fire because of the first incident, which caused no physical harm to anyone. The second seems to have effectively given a horribly painful form of summary execution to a suspect for a totally nonviolent offense, but there’s a lot less heat over it. The outrage is disproportionately weighted towards the much less alarming incident. Is this anybody else’s experience, and if so, why do you think this is?

    My guess is that it’s because the second incident is totally indefensible. Even people who are totally in the cops’ corner for most things have a hard time defending them putting their weight on a man’s neck for almost eight minutes while he lay on the ground, and events were caught on camera and can’t even be disputed. This means it can’t feed internet drama, though there apparently has been at least one riot about it. In the first incident, by contrast, both parties were acting kind of obnoxious and it just got out of hand, so you can have a protracted argument about white privilege versus oppression olympics and blah blah blah.

    Is there a less depressing take on it?

    • gbdub says:

      Depends on your feed I guess. Mine had only a couple posts about the Cooper incident, much more about George Floyd.

      (Although, lest you get too much of your faith restored in humanity, the posts about Floyd are at least 50% about how the mostly black protesters are getting harsher treatment than the mostly white anti lockdown protesters, rather than the death of Floyd itself, which I have yet to see anyone seriously defend. Scott has written previously about how controversial events always tend to stoke more outrage than things that are more heinous, but for precisely that reason, less likely to stoke culture warring)

      • theredsheep says:

        Yeah, immediately after I posted this I saw two people share a meme sarcastically comparing cop-kneeling-on-throat to Colin Kaepernick. A third complained about how white shutdown protesters get nicer treatment, like you said. It’s really fucking annoying how everything gets reinterpreted through culture war as opposed to “I think that cop just violated half the Bill of Rights in one act.”

      • Trofim_Lysenko says:

        Err, correct me if I’m wrong, because I will be the first to admit I haven’t been following this closely, but I was under the impression that events in Minneapolis had already spiraled past “mass protests” and were rapidly escalating towards “riots”, with at least a few isolated (so far) incidents of arson (an Autozone) and looting (a Target) already. That would seem to explain at least some of the difference in response.

        • gbdub says:

          Well yes. That’s why it makes for better controversy. You can post pictures of sympathetic looking protesters in the aftermath of a tear gassing while ignoring the context of smashed cop car windows and looted Targets, then contrast with pictures of angry looking lockdown protesters yelling while having guns (or flip that around, as your narrative prefers).

    • quanta413 says:

      I wish I had a more positive take, but I think you nailed it.

      It sounds like the local response to the second incident may have been stronger. If that’s true, that might be sort of ideal. The national reach some stories of nasty behavior have is definitely not ideal.

    • mtl1882 says:

      I think your take is the right one. Scott wrote a good post on something I’d say is pretty close to this dynamic.

      Because of this, I avoid following these these controversies as much as possible—they derange everything. So I can’t speak to how these specific incidents compare, but my past experience indicates this is very much the case.

      Of course, some of these incidents actually matter and shouldn’t be ignored, but level of social media outrage is not at all well-correlated with the worthiness of the cause, or even true public opinion. And it’s clear a lot of people make money or otherwise benefit from using them to escalate outrage, and that the rest of us waste our time trying to reason through something fundamentally unreasonable by standards other than maximizing outrage.

      • theredsheep says:

        Ironically, that post ends with a remark about nobody hating bird-watchers yet. The black guy in the park fight was a bird-watcher. He was irritated because the white lady wasn’t leashing her dog in the special bird preserve part of the park. So just wait for it. Soon enough bird-watching shall be progressive while walking dogs shall be the exclusive domain of privileged white Karens.

        • quanta413 says:

          Given the altercation took place in NYC I think it’s more likely that the woman would have identified as progressive than the opposite. Although no particular political self-identification whatsoever may be the most likely.

          Not that she would have much luck identifying as progressive now if she ever did.

    • ana53294 says:

      I was going to write something, but then I realized the Floyd case happened yesterday. Shouldn’t we keep the three-day rule?

      • theredsheep says:

        Oh, snap, I forgot that. Does it help that I’m arguing that it should be depoliticized? Maybe?

        • ana53294 says:

          I’m pretty sure it won’t change anything (the video evidence is quite horrible), but we’ll know for sure when the body cam footage gets released.

          I can’t imagine anything that would justify this, but I still think trying to get the facts before discussing it is one of the reasons why the SSC community works.

          • MisterA says:

            Did they have body cams? If so, that makes this much worse on an institutional level, because before the video from bystanders hit social media, the department issued a statement describing the official version of the incident that we know now is an absolute fabrication:

            “After he got out, he physically resisted officers,” police spokesman John Elder told reporters early Tuesday. “Officers were able to get the suspect into handcuffs and officers noticed that the man was going into medical distress.”

            https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2020/05/26/george-floyd-man-dies-after-being-arrested-by-minneapolis-police-fbi-called-to-investigate/

            Now, if all they had to go on was the reports of the officers, who are clearly going to lie, and then once the video came out they fired them and started an investigation – fair enough.

            On the other hand, if they had body cam footage, that means that the police department leadership knew it was a murder and actively tried to cover it up, and only changed tactics once the video came out.

          • theredsheep says:

            I think she’s right, and we probably shouldn’t discuss the facts of the case just yet. I’d taken a bit of a hiatus from SSC commentary until recently, and totally forgotten the three-day rule. Sorry.

          • Ninety-Three says:

            officers noticed that the man was going into medical distress

            I mean this part’s not a fabrication, it’s just omitting that officers also caused and declined to alleviate his distress.

          • Garrett says:

            > I can’t imagine anything that would justify this

            Disclaimer: I haven’t watched the videos. I’ve purposefully not read anything about this yet.

            However, as someone in EMS I’ve occasionally dealt with people who’ve decided to encounter medical complaints right about the time they they are being arrested. In my case, it usually involves women shoplifting who are suddenly worried about miscarrying. But I digress.

            If people resisting arrest discovered that yelling “I can’t breathe” was a way to get themselves leverage to once again attempt to flee, you can imagine that the police would start to ignore such complaints even if this particular person was being honest because the police wouldn’t have any way to separate the two in the moment.

          • ana53294 says:

            @MisterA

            Yes, there were body cams, and the footage was released today. So it does seem like the police report lied.

            @Garrett

            I’ve been in self-defense classes. While I was taught a few tricks to get out of a choke or squiggle out of being below somebody, there is pretty much nothing a person laying on their belly with their hands handcuffed behind them can do to somebody applying weight to their back. Not even a strong man like George Floyd.

            If the officers were applying weight to Floyd’s back, and he started yelling he couldn’t breathe, not believing him would be understandable. But he was saying he couldn’t breathe while they were applying pressure to his airways. A reasonable person would release his airway.

            I’m not even saying the police shoudn’t choke people. There might be situations when a choke might be the best way to pacify a violently unreasonable person. But once that person is laying on their belly with their hands handcuffed, not even a strong man like George Floyd can do much. Not against one, much less four, officers.

          • MisterA says:

            However, as someone in EMS I’ve occasionally dealt with people who’ve decided to encounter medical complaints right about the time they they are being arrested.

            The point is, he didn’t die because he suddenly developed a medical complaint – that was (apparently) a lie on the behalf of the police department. Then a bunch of videos from passersby came out, and it turned out the “medical condition” that developed was a cop kneeling on his throat until he choked to death, while he was putting up no resistance no more severe than begging for his life.

          • Ketil says:

            But he was saying he couldn’t breathe while they were applying pressure to his airways.

            To the airways? From the videos, it looks like he is lying side/face down against the car, and the kne is applied to the neck behind his ear. While I’m sure it is uncomfortable and probably¹ unnecessarily brutal, I wouldn’t expect him to choke or otherwise suffer permanent harm from it. Maybe if the officer did a knee drop to his neck, he could break or otherwise damage the spinal cord? I’m curious what the autopsy will say.

            ¹ I couldn’t find any video showing exactly how he ended up on the ground. Anyone? From other videos, he seems to be passively resisting the cops trying to get him out of the car, and there’s an incident where he is walked towards a car by the cops and suddenly drops to the ground for no apparent reason – this could be a stroke or more passive resistance.

            The point is, he didn’t die because he suddenly developed a medical complaint

            You can’t know that.

            A reasonable person would release his airway.

            Agreed.

          • Jaskologist says:

            @Garrett

            Since you have EMS experience, maybe you can clear up a few things for me.

            Is somebody being able to say “I can’t breathe” evidence that they can in fact breathe, since it takes air to speak? Or is there some dangerous point where you can speak, but not get enough oxygen for the brain?

            How easy is it to accidentally choke somebody to death? I used to think it was hard, and assumed the guy they killed for selling cigarettes had some other underlying issues going on, but this more recent guys looks like he was pretty healthy.

          • anonymousskimmer says:

            @Jaskologist

            I’m not an EMT, but people typically don’t exhale the last of their breath before inhaling. It seems intuitive that it’s muscularly easier to expel that last breath over an obstruction to speak than to inhale air over the same obstruction to breathe.

          • anon-e-moose says:

            @Jaskologist

            Not an EMT, but I can answer your questions:
            1. If you can talk, you must have breathed at some point relatively recently. You don’t exhale 100% of your intake (reserve capacity in lungs.) It’s absolutely possible to talk briefly without being able to breathe–you’re just exhaling stored air over your vocal cords. But not for long, unless you have great lung capacity.

            2. If you know what you’re doing, and have a compliant subject, not difficult at all. If you don’t know where to place pressure, of if the subject is fighting back, it’s much more difficult if not impossible. Necks are pretty strong, but the carotid is relatively close to the surface and accessible. HOWEVER, you have to keep the choke on once the person passes out. If you release the choke right after, typically the body can figure the rest out and pull oxygen in (anecdotally).

          • Ketil says:

            I couldn’t find any video showing exactly how he ended up on the ground.

            From the security footage:
            https://youtu.be/SHOUnTrTM2k?t=112
            you can see Floyd is being escorted towards a car by two officers, he walks unsteadily, falters, and then collapses. I can’t see any action by the cops that could have caused it, so I think he actually did suffere a stroke or other sudden medical issue.

            This doesn’t excuse the rough treatment, of course.

    • albatross11 says:

      I think this is right. And it’s not just clickbait–nobody is having a discussion about whether the cops should kneel on your throat till you die–there’s not much controversy, just everyone agreeing that it’s really hard to imagine a justification for this and that’s probably why the cop who did it got fired.

      The bird watcher/dog walker conflict has at least some ambiguity and so points of discussion.

      Back when ISIS was a going concern, they would periodically release a video where they murdered a captive in some horrible way. There was similarly not much juice in discussing this, because it’s hard to find anyone who thinks beheading your helpless, pleading captives with a knife is anything other than barbaric and evil.

    • edmundgennings says:

      I was coming here to make the same point. The case in Florida where someone charges a guy with a gun and gets shot after engaging in suspicious and quasi criminal activity. There was clearly some overactive use of citizens arrest etc, but fundamentally guy charges someone with a gun and unsurprisingly gets shot. That generates a lot of news.
      Police should be charged to a grand jury with among other things, manslaughter and maybe murder(the lack of motive makes this seem more like manslaughter) and we should let the courts handle it. We get almost nothing. I am considering pretending to believe it is because the media want to ensure an impartial jury.

      • chrisminor0008 says:

        Felony murder is first degree murder. George died while the officer was assaulting him, a felony, so I hope all the officers present will be charged with first degree murder.

        • edmundgennings says:

          Most states have a merger doctrine that ends up meaning the felony needs to be distinct from the putative murder. This primarily means that assault can not be be the felony that grounds felony murder charges. This can lead to weird conclusions
          but not having also leads to weird conclusions.
          Not sure about what the relevant Minnesota law- jurisprudence is or if there is a way to get some non merging charge to amount to a felony. Further investigation into motive might turn up a non merging felony, like this being part of a broader extortion racket.
          Looking at Minnesota law specifically they are one of the few states that has third degree murder, which seems apt here. “09.195 MURDER IN THE THIRD DEGREE.
          (a) Whoever, without intent to effect the death of any person, causes the death of another by perpetrating an act eminently dangerous to others and evincing a depraved mind, without regard for human life, is guilty of murder in the third degree and may be sentenced to imprisonment for not more than 25 years.”

          But ultimately this seems like a question for the Minnesota court system and jury to handle.

          • chrisminor0008 says:

            Thanks for clarifying. I didn’t know that. 25 years seems about right. More wouldn’t be just.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            I think that’s the maximum. Sentencing guidelines are a thing, and nobody gets the maximum unless they’re something like a 6 time felon and there’s aggravating circumstances. I have no idea what the Minnesota guidelines say, but if I had to pull a number from my rectum it would be something like 6-8 years for someone with no previous record, like a cop.

    • Ninety-Three says:

      Is there a less depressing take on it?

      My slightly more optimistic take is that it might be because one is totally indefensible but in a different way. Rather than Toxoplasmosa of Rage explanation, the second incident is like children dying of malaria: it’s so obviously terrible that everyone already agrees it is. Shouting “CHILDREN DYING IS BAD” won’t change anyone’s mind because they already agree with you, so there’s no point. The first one on the other hand has just enough grey in it that your Facebook feed sees it and thinks “Someone out there might not agree with me on this. I need to shout at them until they do!” There doesn’t need to actually be disagreement about whether the incident was bad, merely the possibility of disagreement is enough to generate preemptive condemnation. Is your feed actually arguing about it, or just being loudly upset?

      • gbdub says:

        That IS the toxoplasma of rage explanation!

        • Ninety-Three says:

          The Toxoplasmosa explanation posits that a thing takes over your Facebook feed because disagreement actually occurs, keeping the issue bouncing back and forth between political sides like a ping pong ball. I’m proposing that the right issue can get one side rattling their sabers and shouting at no one in particular while the other side stays home because they don’t disagree.

          • gbdub says:

            That’s possible, but according to the OP, that’s not what they see… the controversial case is getting more play.

            Or in my case, I’m seeing more George Floyd, but it’s focusing on the most controversial areas (defending the peaceful(?) protesters and arguing they are treated worse than violent(?) white protesters, trotting out the usual “white people need to feel really bad about this because the shithead cop shared a skin color with them” stuff that is bound to create Rage)

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            I know SSC isn’t representative, but when we discussed the bird watcher/dog walker event last OT, the only major points of contention were the severity of her punishment and what if any culpability the bird watcher had for instigating the confrontation and messing with her dog. And general grumbling about social media mobs meting out “justice.” Nobody thought what she did was good, right, or smart.

            Is that the same sort of thing people are seeing on their FB feeds?

          • gbdub says:

            Well, as I said I didn’t get a ton of posts about the Cooper affair. The only ones I really saw were a couple of memes that basically reduced it to “Racist Karen calls cops on man for bird-watching while black”. So not so good there. But those were the “militant lefties”. The generally left-liberal crowd didn’t post anything about it. FWIW I read Jesse Singal and his take was pretty moderate and echoed what you saw here. I think a lot of liberals who actually looked at the issue in any meaningful way reached similar conclusions.

            On Floyd, the left-liberal crowd is more t“this is really sad, #blacklivesmatter”, the FB warriors are the ones posting the “police are racists in their handling of the protests” stuff.

    • A Definite Beta Guy says:

      Not sure I agree with the premise. The video of the Bird Watcher and the Dog Owner never made it to my feed, only some vaguebook comments about how great and noble it is that racists lose their jobs.

      The image of the Minnesota death is definitely spreading, and rapidly, because it has been paired with a picture of the former SF QB also kneeling, which is quite memeable.

      I am personally excited, because this is another opportunity to explain why that particular QB is a crappy, low-skill QB, which is why he can’t get hired in a glut market where Andy Dalton is a backup and Super Bowl MVP, Heisman-winner Cam Newton can’t get a contract (injury related, to be sure, but if you are hurting that bad for a QB, you would take a chance on him, if there weren’t other options available).

      • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

        I am personally excited, because this is another opportunity to explain why that particular QB is a crappy, low-skill QB, which is why he can’t get hired in a glut market where Andy Dalton is a backup and Super Bowl MVP, Heisman-winner Cam Newton can’t get a contract (injury related, to be sure, but if you are hurting that bad for a QB, you would take a chance on him, if there weren’t other options available).

        It’s crazy how many – if not amazing – at least talented QBs are out there now. For like the first time in recent memory, it feels like every team at least thinks it has an answer at what is possibly the most difficult position to play well in all of sports. Some of them are almost certainly wrong (I feel the Chargers will regret drafting Herbert, and it’s not like Tyrod Taylor’s gonna be the guy), but the fact that the Raiders have Marcus Mariota as a backup is insane.

        Did Kap not get hired because of his politics? Well, maybe. But it’s more a case of his politics making a fringe QB unemployable – the straw that breaks the camel’s back ‘coz he’s otherwise nothing special. If he’d been Patrick Mahomes or even Dak Prescott he’d almost certainly be a starter, kneeling or no. Antonio Brown got a job last season, for goodness’ sake.

    • Bobobob says:

      I am exposed to the Facebook feeds of black friends of friends, and let me assure you, the George Floyd story is getting plenty of play there. Though I think you’re right, for some reason the Central Park incident is catching fire among white liberals in a way the George Floyd story isn’t.

      • Matt M says:

        Toxoplasma of rage. Central Park is relatively controversial with enough grey area to generate a legitimate debate. George Floyd is pretty cut and dry. Even Stefan Molyneux of all people is saying “yeah this was pretty clearly unjustified murder.”

      • baconbits9 says:

        Not in my feed, I haven’t seen anything on the central park story at all, plenty on the protests since at least Wednesday, and mostly white liberals in my feed.

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      What I’m seeing on my FB page is plenty of both. I have a moderate number of black friends, and my page tends blue/moderate SJW.

      The George Floyd murder amplifies the dog walker story.

      Some of the George Floyd material isn’t so much controversy as linking to professionals saying that knee-on-neck is unacceptable endangerment.

      I’ve seen very little about the protests, which is actually kind of surprising.

      • Beck says:

        There looked to be enough looting and recreational arson that people may be a little hesitant to show footage from it, since it could be taken as criticism of the protesters (I realize there’s only partial or maybe no overlap between the protesters and looters).

        This story has a video at the bottom of the article with a couple hours of drone or helicopter footage. I just skipped through it, but it’s pretty bad. Much worse than my impression of things based on news articles I’d read up until now.
        Note that the background noise is really annoying.

        • Anthony says:

          I saw *lots* of video of the riots in Minneapolis Wednesday and Thursday nights.

          In general I disapprove, but I’d have a hard time convicting someone black for vandalizing or burning the police stations, even though I wouldn’t have qualms about convicting people for burning down Target.

          • Matt M says:

            This. I’d be willing to “look the other way” on violence that specifically targeted the government. But not anything that targeted anyone else.

          • That seems like a pretty strong version of respondeat superior.

          • Anthony says:

            David – in the particular case of the Minneapolis Chauvinist, the department has allowed him to get away with excessive force over and over for over a decade. (For details, look up that bullshit article about Klobiuchar). At that point, it’s the department’s fault for keeping him on.

      • A Definite Beta Guy says:

        Talk about the protests just popped up today. In the following order:
        1. The protests are being unfairly and brutally suppressed, unlike white people protesting COVID who are privilged.
        2. The protests turning into riots are because of the city’s poor behavior.
        3. People of Color is an insensitive term, you must use the term BIPOC for Black, Indigenous People of Color. This is news to me, learn something new everyday!
        4. Amusingly, POC being used as an adjective is in fact insensitive. You cannot say “POC Bloggers,” but you must say “bloggers of color.” It is obviously nonsensical to use the terms “bloggers of black, indigenous, of color,” so it is permissible to use BIPOC as an adjective even though POC is insensitive to use an adjective.

        Plus throwing in how COVID is all Trump’s fault.

        The libertarians are saying that you should obviously protest armed, the cops are obviously not your friends, and you obviously should not be burning shit down unless you intend to actually water the tree of liberty.

        • AG says:

          I saw only points 1 and 2 on Tumblr. Definitely did not see points 3 through 5.
          One point not mentioned above is that part of “white people protesting COVID who are privileged” that I’m seeing is “White people protesting COVID and carried weapons were not treated by the police as dangerous, compared to how they justified their attacks on the unarmed Floyd protesters as feeling in danger.”

          • A Definite Beta Guy says:

            My IRL/FB Friends might be weird even by Tumblr standards. There are some where the husbands take the wives names and some who take “no such thing as gender” so seriously they do gender reveal parties where gender is revealed as a construct.

            Libertarians come from my college days, where I hung out with a LOT of libertarians, both IRL and online. These are not “GOP-lite” libertarians. These are very Molon Labe, Don’t Tread On Me, Fuck the Cops Libertarians.

        • Etoile says:

          Goodness, I just saw “BIPOC” in the comments of an advice blog I read. :/

    • zzzzort says:

      I think the less depressing take is that twitter is not real life. The meatspace response to the second incident has been much stronger; in addition to Minneapolis there was a sizable protest in LA. The even more depressing take is that the only way to make sure something gets on people’s feeds is to respond strongly enough that it gets polarized again.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        The even more depressing take is that the only way to make sure something gets on people’s feeds is to respond strongly enough that it gets polarized again.

        I’m not sure what you’re saying here. Why is it important for Floyd’s case to get on people’s feeds? Immediately after the event happened the officers were fired, and they’re being investigated (including by the FBI and DOJ at the personal request of the President of the United States), and will probably be charged with some type of murder. The wheels of justice appear to be turning just fine.

        • albatross11 says:

          Yeah, this is actually the formal response you want–some policemen kill someone by their visible misbehavior or incompetence, and then they get fired and formally investigated by someone other than the local police/prosecutor.

    • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

      Anyone want to make predictions of if/how the cops in the Floyd case will be punished?

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        This may take more knowledge of the specific laws of Minnesota than most people want to acquire to answer well.

        They’ve already been fired, so there’s that. Beyond that, I think the guy with his knee on Floyd’s neck will be charged with and convicted of third degree murder as described by edmundgennings, 85%. I don’t have a prediction for the other three officers.

        • DeWitt says:

          If what is written above is true, the police department’s officials tried covering up the murder by pretending it was just a medical issue, an accident, that got Floyd killed. I think the people responsible ought to be charged with abetting Floyd’s murder for sure.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Is there any evidence they knew and covered it up? If they simply believed the officers until proven otherwise I’m not sure that’s a crime. The DoJ is investigating so hopefully they’ll let us know.

          • Ketil says:

            Without results from the autopsy, I don’t think there is evidence that Floyd didn’t die from some medical issue.

            The knee to the neck appears to be applied with force, but I don’t see how it can choke the arteries or windpipe from that position. Agonal breathing can be due to
            cardiac arrest, but Floyd was young and appear fairly healthy – so maybe a ruptured aneurism? Or if caused by the knee, perhaps damage to the spinal cord, or head trauma from hitting the asphalt, car, or nightstick.

            AFAIK, we don’t see the actual takedown or how he ended up against the car, and the earlier fall was a couple of seconds from far away – so we don’t know if he simply stumbled, fainted from the alleged condition, or was knocked down by one of the cops.

            https://www.healthline.com/health/agonal-breathing#causes

          • noyann says:

            If Floyd lay prone and the cop was kneeling or sitting with most of his weight on Floyd’s back it would have made Floyd unable to inhale deep enough to maintain sufficient pO2 for survival, while still being able to gasp for relief.

          • DeWitt says:

            Is there any evidence they knew and covered it up? If they simply believed the officers until proven otherwise I’m not sure that’s a crime. The DoJ is investigating so hopefully they’ll let us know.

            The officers were wearing body cams, so that is a point in favor of the cover-up having been in fact a cover-up. The investigation by the DoJ only came after bystander videos were released, so it appears to me that the police department had footage of what went down and declined to even conduct an internal investigation.

          • Ketil says:

            If Floyd lay prone and the cop was kneeling or sitting with most of his weight on Floyd’s back it would have made Floyd unable to inhale deep enough

            Doesn’t sound very plausible to me – in martial arts, you get this situation a lot, and it doesn’t tend to stop people from breathing. Instead, you try to get a chokehold, constraining the throat. OTOH, from the videos it looks like there were several cops weighing him down, and Floyd was probably nowhere near MA shape.

            This looks very similar to Eric Garner, who apparently died from a severe asthma attack (arguably) triggered by a chokehold. The cop was not punished in court, but lost his job five years later because of the incident, IIRC.

          • noyann says:

            Doesn’t sound very plausible to me – in martial arts, you get this situation a lot

            Kneeling or sitting with most of one’s weight, not just one’s upper body, on the opponent’s back while his arms are barred from pushing up?

            Another explanation would be a reflectory cardiac arrest because the cop’s knee pressed on the sinus caroticus. Doesn’t explain “I can’t breathe”, though.

          • Mark V Anderson says:

            Floyd was young

            Actually he was 57. I don’t think that is young.

      • Some Troll's Serious Discussion Alt says:

        I predict the volatile political environment will lead to the officers being charged with more than what the evidence can actually demonstrate, leading to a not guilty verdict and a second round of protests and maybe riots.

      • zzzzort says:

        I predict probability anyone is convicted of murder or manslaughter is less than 10%, the probability they are charged with something as 60%, the probability that everyone feels justified in their priors, 90%.

        • InvalidUsernameAndWrongPassword says:

          10% chance anyone is convicted of manslaughter, with the video evidence we know of? Can you explain your reasoning here?

          • zzzzort says:

            General pessimism, long history of police not being convicted (this is the third suspicious killing by this officer, and he’s just now been fired), the fact the police was on duty and restraining someone suspected of a crime, and the fact the prosecutor already seems to be tempering expectations. I expect an argument that he didn’t mean to kill Floyd, that he feared for his life, that he made a tactical decision in a tense moment, that the crowd was distracting/threatening, that the victim was resisting arrest, that the act of resisting was what caused the damage that killed him, that there was some underlying medical issue that played a role…

            The clearest parallel is probably the Garner case, which was charged (though we don’t know for what), but not indicted; fired, but the cop is suing for his job back. I hope I’m wrong, though.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Public sector unions are insane. It would not be too surprising to see him retain his job in some fashion.

            There is little rhyme or reason here. The cop who really did kill Eric Garner got off, but the cop who was falsely accused of killing Michael Brown quit and had to go into hiding.

          • zzzzort says:

            the cop who was falsely accused of killing Michael Brown

            I mean, he did really kill michael brown

          • InvalidUsernameAndWrongPassword says:

            I expect an argument that he didn’t mean to kill Floyd

            I don’t expect such an argument to be made, because who believes otherwise? The suggestion that the officer intended to kill Floyd is just ludicrous.

          • DeWitt says:

            I’m not sure if ignorance is going to be a very viable defence. “What did you think was going on while you choked this man of breath until he died with your knee on his neck?” is one hell of a line.

          • zzzzort says:

            I don’t expect such an argument to be made, because who believes otherwise?

            Certainly, just noting that it’s required to make the argument that what he was doing was a reasonable use of force. He wasn’t intending to kill him, just restrain him. Restraining can be a required part of police work. There is a legal/cultural idea that anything the police do in in the course of police work is legal, or at worst something like misconduct in office.

            “What did you think was going on while you choked this man of breath until he died with your knee on his neck?” is one hell of a line.

            And yet eric garner.

          • DeWitt says:

            And yet eric garner.

            Yeah. Yeah, the amount of people who will acquit officers of anything seems scary levels of high.

      • Ketil says:

        I think it depends on the cause of death? If the autopsy reveals that the CoD was injury caused by the cops, I belive (and hope!) the cop or cops will be convicted of causing his death – but probably not murder. If it turns out that Floyd suffered a stroke and died while in custody, I think the chances of any conviction is smaller.

  70. keaswaran says:

    I can’t quite tell from this story if they actually studied the digit ratio for the men who survived/died. It appears that they just did a regression analysis of nation-level fatality rate against nation-level digit ratio. If the fatality rate differences based on digit ratio are driving the fatality rate differences by nation, then the fatality rate differences based on digit ratio would have to be huge in order to show up at the national level, given that the single standard deviation interval of digit ratio in each country is heavily overlapping.

  71. bean says:

    The time has come to get a new phone, and I figured this might be a good place to get info.

    Parameters:
    Phone must be Android. This isn’t negotiable, as I’m in the Android ecosystem, and I don’t want to hand control of my digital life to Steve Job’s ghost.
    I don’t need a high-end phone. I mostly use it for web browsing, reading, and Pokemon Go. (Blame Lord Nelson for that, but it’s a requirement.) But I’m also not into paying high-end prices. I’d rather not go much over $300 or so.
    I’d prefer something that will last at least 2 years. My current phone is that old, and it’s doing OK, but the battery is starting to go. Definitely don’t want something that will die on me unexpectedly. (That’s happened before. It’s not fun.)

    My current phone is a Motoroloa of some sort, and barring anything else, I’ll probably go with them.

    Advice?

    • cassander says:

      I got a Motorola power G7 a year ago, and I’m very happy with it. It was cheap, it has enormous battery life, has an audio jack, and does everything else you’d expect. the only issue was a relatively small hard drive, but the power g8 fixed that.

    • salvorhardin says:

      I am very happy with my Pixel 3a.

      • drunkfish says:

        Seconding pixel 3a.

        Phenomenal battery life and a top of the line camera. Can’t speak to 2 years, but i’ve had it for 10 months and am still perfectly happy with it (though I think I need to replace the charger, which has gotten finicky).

        • drunkfish says:

          Correction: I have the 3a XL. It’s a bit more expensive, but I like bigger phones so I went with it.

      • ltowel says:

        When I last bought a phone, the Pixel 3 was on sale for the same cost as the pixel 3a, and the salesperson said it was slightly better (though not in ways that might justify higher cost). I really like my pixel 3, and would imagine the 3a is also excellent.

        Edit: It looks like the pixel 3a is on sale for 279, while the pixel 3 is still slightly above 400. At that cost, 3a all the way.

      • DinoNerd says:

        Count me as another happy owner of a pixel 3a. I selected it for size – I wanted a phone that was physically fairly small – but I’ve also been incredibly happy with its battery life. (I easily get more than 2 days on a charge, which I wouldn’t believe if I didn’t regularly see it.)

      • Jake R says:

        I bought a pixel 3 right when the pixel 4 came out and have been very happy with it. My biggest complaint is a minor, seemingly known issue with the brightness adjust. When it’s in automatic the screen brightness will change for seemingly no reason, brightening or dimming without any change in the phone’s position or the ambient lighting. This only happens occasionally though and you can always turn off the feature and adjust brightness manually.

    • SamChevre says:

      My wife and I both have Samsung Galaxy phones and have been very happy with them. (J7s on Cricket, for both of us.)

      • Deiseach says:

        Same here, went back to Samsung and new phone is Samsung Galaxy A10 (on Android 10). Samsung A series are the budget phones, the S series is the good stuff seemingly 🙂

        Seems to be cheap enough on Amazon, I don’t use it for much beyond the basics and am happy with it (apart from the ton of installed software that comes pre-installed and that I won’t use and have to delete, but you get that with all of them).

    • Lord Nelson says:

      Also looking to get a new phone. Same requirements, with one addition : I’d like something with a decent camera since I dislike hauling actual cameras around when I go on vacation.

      My current phone is an iPhone 7 that I got under duress. The camera is fine, but I hate everything else about it and will never buy an iPhone again.

      • J Mann says:

        Oh, there’s a poster with that name! I though Bean was making some obscure naval allusion!

        • bean says:

          No, she’s my wife. Yes, the name was chosen in reference to the British Admiral (who isn’t particularly obscure), but that’s a different matter.

          • John Schilling says:

            The way to most men’s hearts is through their stomachs, but in some cases it runs through the naval-history lobe of their prefrontal cortex.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            Traditionally a woman takes her husband’s name and 0% vice versa, but in the name of opposing sexism, we should say this marriage makes bean a half Nelson.

          • Should Bean be posting as Lady Hamilton?

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @DavidFriedman: Not Fanny Nelson? You’re making a dishonest woman of him.

          • J Mann says:

            I had no idea! (By obscure, I meant why one could blame the actual Lord Nelson for you playing Pokemon Go, and imagined some tale about his life that would be relevant, such as him charging the decks of a Spanish warship in order to acquire a rare Absol)

            Random Pokemon story: Several years ago, we were having a get together in our house, with all the familes’ kids playing downstairs. We were shocked to hear our 8 year old daughter yelling a curse word at the top of her lungs, but when I went down to investigate, she explained that she was yelling the name of a Pokemon. I googled it, and that’s why I’m familiar with Absol.

          • Lord Nelson says:

            Wait, what word did you think she was yelling?

            Absol is a special pokemon in this household. Bean hatched a shiny one on the morning of our wedding.

          • anonymousskimmer says:

            @Lord Nelson

            Pronounce Absol without the b.

    • Kaitian says:

      My current phone is a Huawei P9 light. I got it in late 2016 and it’s still going strong, even the battery still easily lasts all day. It also takes nice pictures I don’t remember the exact price, but it was under 400. So I can certainly recommend a low-end Huawei phone, with the caveat that I’m not sure what the current situation is with Google not supporting them. Maybe this has been resolved? Another caveat is that, if you’re very concerned about Chinese tech stealing your data, this is probably not the brand for you.

    • C_B says:

      I had basically the exact same requirements two years ago and ended up with a Moto G5 (the non-Plus international version), which I’ve been quite happy with. It looks like newer versions have come out since then, up to G8, and they seem mostly well-reviewed, but I can’t vouch for them personally.

    • Ketil says:

      Motorola G something: cheap, lots of phone for the money, pretty much standard Android.
      Huawei Mate 20 Pro: slighly expensive, great camera and screen, slightly annoying UI even after resetting as much as I could, no audio jack, and I don’t like the curved edges.

      In general, you can get good phones at low cost if you’re willing to compromise a little on screen (LCD instead of AMOLED) and camera.

      BTW: we’ve had OLED TVs and mobile phones, but no computer screens. Why?

  72. Aapje says:

    @Scoop

    I judge any study involving index finger length as extremely suspect. So many have seemed to fail to replicate, which in turn means that those who persist with it tend to be bottom of the barrel scientists.

    In other news, my newspaper explained that quality control around COVID studies is rather poor, with a glut of papers by scientists who chase the one ring to rule them all thing that people care about, while the actual experts are often very busy, so reviews can be lacking (and journals also chase fame, so they too are incentivized to cut corners).

    • AlphaGamma says:

      In other news, my newspaper explained that quality control around COVID studies is rather poor, with a glut of papers by scientists who chase the one ring to rule them all thing that people care about, while the actual experts are often very busy, so reviews can be lacking (and journals also chase fame, so they too are incentivized to cut corners).

      In my field (bionanotechnology), I have noticed a lot more papers recently about the protein corona of nanoparticles. This has nothing to do with coronavirus, but somebody is clearly thinking that the word ”corona” will get more people to look at papers.

  73. Bobobob says:

    Is this one of those “if your hand is bigger than your face, you probably have cancer” things?

    FWIW, my index and ring fingers are almost exactly the same length.

  74. broblawsky says:

    Low 2D:4D ratio = higher androgen exposure = resistance to heart disease (?) = resistance to COVID fatality.

  75. albatross11 says:

    I think digit ratio correlates with a bunch of stuff–I have no idea why.

  76. Christophe Biocca says:

    SpaceX crew demo 2 streaming right now, launch is about 2 hours away. Going smoothly so far. Probability of weather actually being a go has hovered between 50% and 60% all day.

    • mfm32 says:

      Predictive nominative determinism? SpaceX’s COO’s name is Shotwell.

      • Bobobob says:

        Per Kurt Vonnegut, maybe they should load it with semen and call it the Big Space Fuck.

    • gbdub says:

      Am I the only one who thinks the SpaceX space suits look incredibly lame?

      • Another Throw says:

        No, you’re not the only one.

      • Spookykou says:

        I really enjoy a sort of ‘working man’ aesthetic in my sci fi, so the iconic nasa orange space suits always looked nice to me.

        • AlphaGamma says:

          I wonder to what extent International Orange was chosen to make it easier to find the astronauts if they ended up in the sea. I remember people pointing this out as an issue when Boeing unveiled the blue suits for Starliner crew.

      • Lambert says:

        They look like the costume designers from some unsucessful star trek series tried to make Top Gear’s The Stig.

        • Deiseach says:

          They look like the costume designers from some unsucessful star trek series tried to make Top Gear’s The Stig.

          I noticed watching that that one of them carried out the Picard Manoeuvre 🙂

      • gbdub says:

        I think the problem is clearly that someone came up with something that looked super sleek as a concept on a svelte manikin, and it doesn’t translate well to a functional suit on an actual human.

        When it first came out people were ogling over how all the buttons and connectors are incorporated smoothly into the suit (such as the umbilical connector panel and the release buttons for the helmet). Which looks nice but isn’t that dangerous? Like, you want the functional components to be big and obvious in case you or somebody else needs to operate them in an emergency, right? And there are clearly lots of things that are “design elements” rather than functional.

        I’m sure NASA got happy with the tests that were done on them to verify their safety, but if I were strapping in I’d feel some vague unease that the desire for a cool form had somehow compromised the function.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      They just scrubbed.

    • Christophe Biocca says:

      Scrubbed due to weather. Next launch windows are on the 30th and 31st.

  77. johan_larson says:

    As far as I can tell, either no one has written and published a novel named “Trigonometry”, or someone has and it is really obscure*. Let’s fix that. Who should we hire to write a novel with that title, and what should it be about?

    [*] I was able to find a short story named “Spherical Trigonometry”, by Ken Asamatsu, in the collection “Cthulhu’s Reign”, but nothing named just “Trigonometry”.

    • Kaitian says:

      Some aliens have developed advanced spacefaring tech but have not solved the problems of trigonometry. They contact some earth scientists, who can easily help them out with that. Then some other aliens get wind of their cooperation and destroy the universe in response by folding it into a sinus wave.

    • Bobobob says:

      What should it be about?

      The marital problems of a young couple who have to cosine a mortgage loan.

    • Evan Þ says:

      The challenges of an Age of Sail navigator who gets isekai’d to a flat world and needs to reestablish the art of navigation there.

    • Algirdas Vėlyvis says:

      It’s a sequel to Anathem, set in Hylaean Theoric World.

    • Eric Rall says:

      or someone has and it is really obscure

      There’s a trilogy of mathematics study guides written in the form of fantasy novels. Here’s the one for Trigonometry, the other two being Algebra and Calculus.

    • Noah says:

      It’s a sequel to Flatland. We follow a narrow-pointed triangle who suffers from the injustices of being judged inferior based on his angle measurements. Eventually, he joins a revolutionary group that seeks to overthrows the existing social order, and establish a more just one. They succeed, and at the end we see what the new just society is your station is determined by your perimeter.

      Speaking of mathematical titles, I recently read David Brin’s Existence and wish he wrote a sequel titled Uniqueness. If he wanted to, he could also write Continuity to round off the Well-posedness Trilogy

    • keaswaran says:

      It’s a boring John Updike novel about some male math professor who is unhappy in his marriage and fantasizing about some attractive female student. He is constantly obsessing about the ratios of the measurements of everyone in this love triangle (particularly the women’s breast sizes but maybe his own penis size too).

      Also, this reminds me of the classic Tom Lehrer bit:

      I am never forget the day my first book is published.
      Every chapter I stole from somewhere else.
      Index I copy from old Vladivostok telephone directory.
      This book was sensational!
      Pravda – well, Pravda – Pravda said: (Russian double-talk)
      It stinks.
      But Izvestia! Izvestia said: (Russian double-talk)
      It stinks.
      Metro-Goldwyn-Moskva buys movie rights for six million rubles,
      Changing title to “The Eternal Triangle”,
      With Brigitte Bardot playing part of hypotenuse.
      And who deserves the credit?
      And who deserves the blame?
      Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky is his name

    • Paul Zrimsek says:

      This time the Thermians from Galaxy Quest have intercepted, but not quite understood, a religious broadcast, and are going to save humanity by taking away the sines of the world.

    • Dack says:

      Our friends with the moon-sized spaceships have disappeared everything shaped like a triangle on planet Earth…

  78. Aapje says:

    Dutch fixed expressions go down the chute like Jelle’s marbles

    ‘Baas boven baas’ = Boss above boss

    There is always someone better (like there is always a superior to the boss you are dealing with).

    ‘In z’n hemd gezet’ = Being put in his undershirt

    Being put to shame.

    ‘Hij sloeg de plank mis’ = he missed batting the plank

    He got it wrong.

    ‘Dat sloeg in als een bom’ = That struck like a bomb

    It was a very unpleasant surprise.

    ‘De bom is gebarsten’ = The bomb burst

    All the frustrations are being vented that were bottled up before now.

    ‘Hoog water’ = high water

    Pants are too short (so it looks like the person pulled them up to wade through water).

    ‘Washandje’ = Wash(ing) hand

    Washing mitt.

  79. John Schilling says:

    Suicide in the Plague Year.

    Kind of hoping for some input from Scott on this, because it’s something he might have firsthand knowledge about. Obviously there are going to be mental health effects due to both the coronavirus itself and the lockdown reaction to same, and this will include some finite number of suicides. Until yesterday, I had thought that this could be no more than a minor second-order effect, because if it were serious, it would be blatantly obvious.

    But then I see this, alleging a year’s worth of suicide attempts in four weeks. OK, that’s one local doctor’s take, and presumably cherrypicked by The National Review for best supporting their preferred narrative. But there’s also the San Francisco Examiner, claiming a pre-coronavirus week’s worth of high-risk calls to suicide hotlines every day. I’m pretty sure the Examiner and the Review have very different preferred narratives re coronavirus and lockdown, but they’re both coming up with a roughly order of magnitude increase in suicides. Both focused on the Bay Area, so not clear whether this is a local thing or a global effect that was just noticed first in SF.

    If it’s a thing at all. Obviously, if it were real it would have to show up in the statistics, right? But, per US News & World Report, “Suicide data is also notoriously slow to materialize, meaning it will likely be years before hard numbers are available on the number of deaths by suicide during the early months of COVID-19”. And I can’t find anything better. We’d expect an order of magnitude increase in suicides to show up in overall mortality statistics, but looking at those there’s excess mortality well beyond official COVID-19 deaths which everybody seems to assume are just undiagnosed COVID-19.

    I’m very skeptical that there’s been an order of magnitude increase in suicide rates that has gone mostly unnoticed until now. But I’m also skeptical that a world that can give daily updates on COVID-19 deaths in every country on Earth, can’t get out at least a rough count of suicides in less than two years. So, A: is there anyplace where any sort of vaguely hard-ish data on this, and B: what is the boots-on-the-ground view from the Bay Area psychiatric community on what is actually happening?

    • Matt M says:

      Alex Berenson (trigger warning: prominent anti-lockdown person) just had a Tweet about this that deals with SF specifically. I have not attempted to verify the accuracy myself.

    • Bobobob says:

      I’d be curious to know, to what extent do calls to suicide hotlines correlate with actual suicides?

      • edmundgennings says:

        I would suspect calls to suicide hotlines per suicide to go up as we are doing more of life remotely and the in person friend suicide prevention conversations are likely not happening.

        • John Schilling says:

          That’s a good, and somewhat hopeful, point.

          • Matt M says:

            Is it?

            Aren’t in-person by friends or family interventions much more successful than suicide hotlines or whatever?

            If people aren’t around friends and family (or even coworkers) as much, there are less opportunities for bystanders to intervene.

          • Randy M says:

            It’s bad that there aren’t as many in person meetings to comfort people. It’s good if this means that there aren’t actually dramatically more suicidal people.

            Reality is worse than the past but better than what the data suggests without considering confounders. (statement out of context would also be a good rationalism/reactionary synthesis, heh)

          • Ninety-Three says:

            @Matt M It’s not great, but better than the naive hypothesis that a doubling of suicide hotline calls represents a doubling of overall suicidality.

        • Lord Nelson says:

          I’m also curious about this, from a slightly different angle. Perhaps my ingroup is just abnormal, but I used to have frequent suicidal thoughts, and many of my friends used to have frequent suicidal thoughts, and we would never have dreamed of calling a hotline.

          The unspoken rule was to only call a hotline as the very last resort, because we’d heard too many horror stories of hotlines / 911 / etc making things worse.

        • keaswaran says:

          Pollsters have reported much greater willingness of people to talk on the phone to strangers during this weird period. It would not surprise me if anyone who has considered calling a suicide hotline might be pushed over the edge (of calling the hotline) by this effect, even if their suicidal issues haven’t changed.

  80. rocoulm says:

    Can you guys “feel” your own pulse? I don’t mean take your pulse by feeling your wrist/neck/whatever, but just notice your pulse as a sensation throughout your whole body if you pay attention to it?

    I’ve always felt this, but a conversation recently made me think maybe not everyone could, and I wondered if it was unusual or not.

    • Brassfjord says:

      I could – before I started taking medicine to keep my blood pressure down.

      • rocoulm says:

        It also made me wonder about blood pressure, but mine’s been consistently good for several years of checkups.

    • Erusian says:

      I can if I focus on it. It’s something I have to put out of mind while meditating. Also when it’s high. Otherwise I’m aware of it but in a subconscious way, the same way I’m aware of my breathing.

      • Radu Floricica says:

        Huh, just realize I can if I focus on it. Didn’t expect that. It’s more like ghost feeling than something concrete, but it fits the actual pulse.

        Normally I don’t, except on certain occasions. Often when I’m lying down before sleeping.

        • quanta413 says:

          Me too. I’ve never tried before, and it takes some time to focus on it though which is probably why I never noticed before.

      • raw says:

        I can feel it as well in different parts of my body. Sometimes I use it to count my breathing while meditating (e.g. 4 in 8 out). My blood pressure is on the lower side. I would argue that your resting hear rate is more important. If it is lower your heart is usually stronger and presumably the strokes should be stronger.

    • nkurz says:

      @rocoulm:
      > Can you guys “feel” your own pulse?

      Yes, but usually only if either relaxed and attentive, or shortly after heavy exertion. I think I’ve always been aware of the “exertion” case, but it wasn’t until I started doing some competitive target shooting in high school that learned to notice my pulse on demand.

      For accurate target shooting (especially in prone — that is, laying on one’s stomach) it’s essential to time your shot relative to your heartbeat. If using a scope, you see see a regular one-to-two ring bounce, and you need to time your shot to go off between heartbeats while you are in the middle of the target. Here’s on article illustrating the phenomena: https://www.scatt.com/article-pulse-technique. Biathlon (which combines shooting and skiing) is a sport that particularly emphasizes this connection: https://www.popsci.com/olympic-biathlon-shoot-between-heartbeats/.

    • mustacheion says:

      I think I can, but it would be a little difficult for me to actual measure my heart-rate that way. I’ve also always had a terrible time trying to feel my pulse the old fashioned way. And sometimes I can feel some sort of rhythmic tremor that I can mistake for my heart-rate except that it beats ~5 times faster, at a time when I am pretty sure my actual heart isn’t going that fast.

    • Anthony says:

      I generally can’t feel it unless I have someplace with arteries near the surface pressed against something. It doesn’t take much pressure if I pay attention. I have generally ok blood pressure.

    • AlesZiegler says:

      I cannot.

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      Yes, I’ve made a minor hobby of increasing how much of my body I can feel it in.

    • albatross11 says:

      There’s a place in my lower lip where I can feel my pulse with my tongue.

    • A1987dM says:

      Most of the time I can’t. I can if I stay quiet for a moment after a physical effort.

      Hell, if I have been at rest for a while I can’t even feel it by feeling my wrist.

    • Usually not, I think occasionally yes. I’m not sure what the difference is.

    • Concavenator says:

      After exertion, I can feel my pulse in my eyes — if I keep my sight still, I can actually see my vision blur very slightly in time with it (from the blood vessels of the retina, I guess?)
      Actually, I think sometimes I can see the pulse in my chest when I’m lying very still.

      • Dynme says:

        I can sometimes see it in my chest, too, with no real difference in my experience between standing and lying. I’ve also seen my vision jitter in time with my pulse if I’m lying on my back in such a way that my pulse going across the back of my neck/head moves my head slightly.

      • I also sometimes see in my vision.

    • Lambert says:

      A small proportion of people can feel their pulse all the time.
      I only can when I excersise.

      • j1000000 says:

        I also can only feel it during exercise.

        Sometimes I take my pulse after exercising and I still press on my wrist because for some reason I refuse to believe that the pulse I can feel everywhere is actually my pulse.

    • Silverlock says:

      I could feel my own pulse back when I was in good shape. Now that I am in, well, more of a spherical shape, I cannot. I assume it has something to do with the amount of fat present acting as a buffer.

    • Kuiperdolin says:

      Relatedly a former colleague of my mother had a heart attack and afterwards he said your heart beatings are very loud once you’ve heard the world without them, it’s just that you always tune it out – like your brain removes your nose from your sight until/unless it happens to look unusual.

    • noyann says:

      I can. Also with a kind of noise that feels as if it were in the back of the throat, upper neck and occiput, but I live in a (at most times) very quiet place. Blood pressure is low to normal.

    • Gerry Quinn says:

      I’ve had the experience, but not that often.

  81. waterthrower says:

    Looking for blogs or podcasts that are rationalist or rationalist-adjacent and also Christian or Christian-adjacent. Something that exists in that space. Sorry if this is vague, I’m not exactly certain what I’m looking for either.

    • rocoulm says:

      I’m…not sure that exists? Maybe I’m wrong, but I associate rationalism so strongly with atheism/agnosticism, it doesn’t seem like a likely combo.

      However, if there is one, I’d definitely be interested.

      • Erusian says:

        There is such a thing as Christian rationalism. It has roots going back far further than secular rationalism since there’s a long standing tension in Abrahamic religions between what can be roughly termed mysticism and rationalism. It’s less prominent these days because the main religious divide in the Christian community isn’t along these lines but instead is defined by the 20th century fundamentalist-modernist split. Baptists tend to be more mystical and Catholics more rational but they’re both fundamentalists (in the fundamentalist-modernist sense). Episcopalalians are rationalist but modernist while Quakers are mystical but modernist. (As with all things, they have their heretics that are on the other side of each divide.)

        However, it’s largely not been welcomed by the rationalist community, which is a theologically a child of the modernist side of that debate and tends to enforce a rather atheist worldview.

        • eigenmoon says:

          Baptists tend to be more mystical and Catholics more rational
          What do you mean by that? Google can give you lots of Catholic mystics describing weird visions and doing weird stuff. Catholics regularly do that transsubstantiation thing which is as mystical as it can get. Baptists don’t seem to have anything like that.

          • FLWAB says:

            Erusian is probably thinking of Pentecostal or other Charismatic churches. I didn’t grow up Baptist but my own denomination (Christian Churches and Churches of Christ, not to be confused with the Churches of Christ or the Christian Church (Diciples of Christ) of course) was very similar to Baptist churches and we generally were like “Yes, the Bible is true and miraculous healing and speaking in tongues is a real thing. It’s just not a thing we personally ever do, and we’d all feel kind of awkward and embarrassed if somebody started to do it.” Meanwhile the Charismatics are going into spasms, speaking tongues as a matter of course, and walking around prophesying about each other and calling on the Holy Spirit.

            We never really knew what to think about them. Either they were hotbeds of charlatans and their gullible marks, or they were far more empowered by the Holy Spirit than we were and either option was awkward for us.

          • Randy M says:

            We never really knew what to think about them. Either they were hotbeds of charlatans and their gullible marks, or they were far more empowered by the Holy Spirit than we were and either option was awkward for us.

            …For what it’s worth, one may face the same dilemma as a member for such a church.

          • Erusian says:

            Tend to being the key word. A good hint is whether they emphasize the presence of the holy spirit/inner light/etc or have a highly developed theology that’s pretty strictly seen as important. My point is not that Catholics don’t believe in visions or the holy spirit, it’s that the religion tends to be opposed to things like quietism which focus more on things like FLWAB describes. It doesn’t mean they don’t have people focused on that or that it’s fully compatible with secular rationalism.

      • AlesZiegler says:

        I for one would be very interested in an explanation of how someone reconciles their Christian faith with their rationalism.

        • Erusian says:

          The idea they need to be reconciled is itself the wrong framing. Seeing faith as in conflict with rationality is a smuggled assumption.

          • AlesZiegler says:

            I do not find it difficult to understand how someone reconciles Christianity with rationality. OP as well as me referred to rationalism. Those are different things.

          • Erusian says:

            I do not find it difficult to understand how someone reconciles Christianity with rationality. OP as well as me referred to rationalism. Those are different things.

            I see. Could you still explain the contradiction? I still don’t see it inherently, though I’m familiar with how in practice there’s a lot of atheism in the community.

          • Nick says:

            It’s easy to reconcile Christianity and rationality, it’s hard to reconcile Christianity and utilitarianism, transhumanism, Bayesianism, (ETA: reductionism,) and whatever else is central to Less Wrong–style rationalism. Not impossible, but you actually have to do the work.

          • waterthrower says:

            I was talking about Rationalism the movement associated with the Bay Area and Less Wrong, not per se the philosophical school associated with Descartes and contrasted with Empiricism. I understand that the philosophical school of rationalism can be squared with Christianity in various ways.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            My husband has used the name “Trad Rat” (pronounced like “trade rat” with the first vowel different) for our belief in Descartes/Leibniz truth claims rather than Yud ones.

        • FLWAB says:

          I for one would be very interested in an explanation of how someone reconciles their Christian faith with their rationalism.

          Can you explain the contradiction?

          • AlesZiegler says:

            Um, do I really need to? I think that some basic assumptions of Christianity are not well supported by an empirical evidence. But you are probably familiar with the arguments of both sides, as am I, and I am not interested in replaying that Debate for an umpteenth time. What I would find interesting would be to read some Christian rationalist explaining how he or she looks at those things from a personal side.

            cc @Erusian

          • Erusian says:

            Um, do I really need to? I think that some basic assumptions of Christianity are not well supported by an empirical evidence. But you are probably familiar with the arguments of both sides, as am I, and I am not interested in replaying that Debate for an umpteenth time. What I would find interesting would be to read some Christian rationalist explaining how he or she looks at those things from a personal side.

            Yes. If you want to smuggle an assumption in, one that we do not agree on, then you need to defend it. Of course, you’re free not to if you find it tiring. (That’s not sarcasm, you get to choose whether to engage or not.)

          • cassander says:

            transubstantiation has always been tough for me to swallow, no pun intended.

          • edmundgennings says:

            Cassander
            Why?

          • FLWAB says:

            I think that some basic assumptions of Christianity are not well supported by an empirical evidence.

            Does rationalism necessitate empiricism? As in, we can only know something is true based on whether we can directly sense it (see it, touch it, weigh it, etc)? Or do you mean something else?

          • cassander says:

            @edmundgennings

            Because it’s obviously still bread, and twisting Aristotle into knots in order to justify claiming a miracle is happening is more than I can stomach. I could believe that god sent his son to earth, he died, and rose again after 3 days, I wasn’t there. But bread and wine are not body and blood, and I’m going to trust my lying eyes no matter how fancy a robe of the person telling me different.

          • Deiseach says:

            cassander is no worse than some of the original disciples, see the Bread of Life discourse:

            5 Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst. 36 But I said to you that you have seen me and yet do not believe. 37 All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out. 38 For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me. 39 And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. 40 For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.”

            41 So the Jews grumbled about him, because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” 42 They said, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” 43 Jesus answered them, “Do not grumble among yourselves. 44 No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day. 45 It is written in the Prophets, ‘And they will all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me— 46 not that anyone has seen the Father except he who is from God; he has seen the Father. 47 Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life. 48 I am the bread of life. 49 Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. 50 This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. 51 I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

            52 The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” 53 So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. 54 Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. 55 For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. 56 Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. 57 As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever feeds on me, he also will live because of me. 58 This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like the bread the fathers ate, and died. Whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.” 59 Jesus said these things in the synagogue, as he taught at Capernaum.

            60 When many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?” 61 But Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples were grumbling about this, said to them, “Do you take offense at this? 62 Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? 63 It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. 64 But there are some of you who do not believe.” (For Jesus knew from the beginning who those were who did not believe, and who it was who would betray him.) 65 And he said, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father.”

            66 After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him.

            Because it’s obviously still bread, and twisting Aristotle into knots in order to justify claiming a miracle is happening is more than I can stomach.

            “Twisting Aristotle” is a way to satisfy the intellectual demand as to “how can this be?” but the ultimate answer is that this is a mystery. Now, many people get really irritated by that, as they consider it a dodge and a fudge: ‘oh you’re trying to excuse your crazy beliefs by saying they are above human understanding!’ and then those people run back to science, but in the end, when it comes to the supernatural there are going to be things you just have to suck it up and accept. For myself, if I accept the existence of a personal God who created the entire universe ex nihilo, the rest of it comes easily. To balk at that would indeed be to strain a gnat and swallow a camel.

            People who can’t take that and leave it, it is no disgrace to them if they are honest. Besides, during the Reformation, Protestants were very rude indeed about the Roman Catholic view of the Eucharist (Cranmer wrote of “worshipping a god made of bread” and developed his own understanding of the sacrament) and yet they would have claimed they were fully accepting the mysterious and supernatural in Christianity 🙂

          • cassander says:

            @Deiseach

            A pity we don’t have signature blocks here. I’d be proud to wear the appellation “‘as good as an apostle’ – Deiseach”

          • AlesZiegler says:

            @Erusian

            you want to smuggle an assumption in, one that we do not agree on, then you need to defend it. Of course, you’re free not to if you find it tiring. (That’s not sarcasm, you get to choose whether to engage or not.)

            Unfortunately I really do not have a time to get into giant “What I think is wrong with Christianity” discussion right now.

          • Deiseach says:

            cassander, with the caveat that “Judas was also one of the Twelve” 😀

        • Evan Þ says:

          Aaron Wall, a practicing physicist, committed Christian, and occasional commenter here, has a good blog where he intermittently posts on scientific method and theological method.

          As a Christian myself, I second Erusian’s question: why would they need to be reconciled? In past discussions with atheists, I’ve seen the questions largely come down either to different premises (a Bayesian would say different prior probabilities), different conceptions of evidence (e.g. historical events can’t be put through scientific studies), or arguments about specific doctrines and their alleged observable consequences (where, often, we have different interpretations of the doctrines.)

          • AlesZiegler says:

            Thanks for a source! As for your second paragraph, please see my reply above, today I am not really interested in repeating that discussion.

          • waterthrower says:

            Thanks, this is very helpful.

        • rocoulm says:

          I mean, rationalists certainly do spend a lot of time thinking about a certain set of topics that aren’t exactly mainstream, and have little/nothing to do with religion.

          Someone who’s really interested in, say, decision theory, AGIs, Bayesian probabilities and the like might well be called “rationalist-adjacent”…by someone who’s more removed than they are from the rationalist community, at least.

        • Bobobob says:

          I asked this exact question a few weeks ago in an open thread, and Nick was especially responsive (though I have to admit, I didn’t quite follow his argument, probably because we were starting from very different premises).

          Count me as another person who doesn’t understand how the rational can accommodate the supernatural.

          • AKL says:

            I was getting all fired up to post a comment somewhere else and skimmed this re: rationalism vs. empiricism.

            So based on that extensive knowledge base, I’ll try to gesture at a response.

            The rational can accommodate the supernatural to the extent that you grant supernatural claims as a premise.

            To me that might seem like begging the question in the worst way, but I can at least understand why others disagree.

            Consider the claims:
            – The measles vaccine is 95% effective at preventing measles
            – Suffering is bad
            – God exists

            It’s rational to generally grant the first claim because we have reams of empirical data and experience to support it, and a justified (though imperfect) set of rules for evaluating claims based on that data.

            And while it seems safe to say that nearly all rationalists grant the second claim, it’s not at all clear that it rests on any firmer foundation than the third.

            We don’t require the rationalist who earns-to-give to reconcile their rationalism with their belief that suffering is bad. We grant their premise that suffering is bad and applaud them for living so consistently with their values.

            Do we have any grounds to claim that the missionary is objectively less rational?

            Does anyone know of a reason we should privilege the premise “suffering is bad” over the premise “God exists?”

          • quanta413 says:

            To me claims 2 and 3 aren’t even the same type of truth claim so I find it weird you’d think that claim 2 has to be justified in the same manner or to the same extent as 3.

            For most rationalists, I’d imagine claim 2 is a normative claim.

            Most Christians I’ve known would not accept claim 3 as merely normative. Normative truths don’t raise people from the dead.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            To me claims 2 and 3 aren’t even the same type of truth claim so I find it weird you’d think that claim 2 has to be justified in the same manner or to the same extent as 3.

            For most rationalists, I’d imagine claim 2 is a normative claim.

            Most Christians I’ve known would not accept claim 3 as merely normative. Normative truths don’t raise people from the dead.

            “God exists” doesn’t necessarily raise people from the dead either. Any Catholic philosopher will give you a long essay on the logical ground to be covered between “God exists” and inferences about a particular historical human being the Incarnation, the value of verbal factual claims depending on the nature of the speaker, and Jesus raising other people from the dead.

            In the Western tradition, “God” in a philosophy context is commonly defined as “the Good”. “The Good exists” has something of the nature of a normative claim. Any normative claim like “Suffering is bad” raises ontological questions: “What is bad? What is good?” For Western philosophers, “God exists” answers the latter question with “Good is objective and potent.”
            Now what’s Bad and why is suffering in the set of bad things?

          • quanta413 says:

            “God exists” doesn’t necessarily raise people from the dead either. Any Catholic philosopher will give you a long essay on the logical ground to be covered between “God exists” and inferences about a particular historical human being the Incarnation, the value of verbal factual claims depending on the nature of the speaker, and Jesus raising other people from the dead.

            In the Western tradition, “God” in a philosophy context is commonly defined as “the Good”. “The Good exists” has something of the nature of a normative claim.

            I understand this, but Catholicism does not end with “God” is “the Good” and neither do most sects. If you believed literally nothing else than that “good exists” when you say “god exists”, that might be a normative claim. But that wouldn’t be Christianity without a lot of other things added in. And in the context of a missionary (which is the original hypothetical), that makes no sense.

            Who is our hypothetical missionary? A heretic Jesuit?

            For Western philosophers, “God exists” answers the latter question with “Good is objective and potent.”

            For certain Western philosophers.

          • Count me as another person who doesn’t understand how the rational can accommodate the supernatural.

            We are pretty confident of some facts from Quantum Mechanics and Relativity that feel supernatural — inconsistent with strongly held beliefs about what the world is like. Quantum mechanical tunneling or an electron going through both slits and interfering with itself, or velocities not adding, would be examples. Are religious claims that you label “supernatural” more obviously false, or is it just that we don’t have as good evidence for them?

          • Jaskologist says:

            Count me as another person who doesn’t understand how the rational can accommodate the supernatural.

            First, define “supernatural.”

          • Apogee says:

            @AKL
            The difference between the second and third claims is that “God exists” is a statement about the territory. “Suffering is bad”, like any other use of “good” or “bad”, is a value judgment – ultimately, an opinion. To the extent that it makes any claims about the territory, it is because it is implicitly using the speaker’s personal utility function as a referent (i.e. it’s a statement about Apogee::badness as opposed to badness). I don’t want to put words in anyone else’s mouth, but I suspect that any temptation a rationalist feels to treat “suffering is bad” as an objective claim comes more from an extant belief that most other humans agree with them than it does from some greater universal truth.

            @DavidFriedman
            I wouldn’t classify QM as “supernatural” based solely on it feeling counter-intuitive. In fact, I would claim the opposite: most things in the “supernatural” bucket (e.g. Thor and witches) stick in human consciousness precisely because they are more intuitive than reality. To me, QM feeling as weird as it does only further drives home the point that it is natural – would we have ever come up with the associated equations and theories, without empirical observations to guide us there?

          • Nick says:

            @Apogee

            I wouldn’t classify QM as “supernatural” based solely on it feeling counter-intuitive. In fact, I would claim the opposite: most things in the “supernatural” bucket (e.g. Thor and witches) stick in human consciousness precisely because they are more intuitive than reality. To me, QM feeling as weird as it does only further drives home the point that it is natural – would we have ever come up with the associated equations and theories, without empirical observations to guide us there?

            Then you would love the Trinity, Christology, and the theology of heaven and hell.

          • Jaskologist says:

            To me, QM feeling as weird as it does only further drives home the point that it is natural – would we have ever come up with the associated equations and theories, without empirical observations to guide us there?

            “I believe because it is absurd.” – QM Physicist Tertullian

        • Doctor Mist says:

          Can’t speak for them, but I can try to steelman.

          I gather a religious person feels the presence of God as unambiguously as I feel the presence of my Self, or my Free Will. (And might be just as curious/uncertain whether that is a real thing or an epiphenomenon of how evolution has constructed us, but in the end is just not capable of acting as if that feeling is false.) Granting that axiom, there is plenty of room to use the tools of rationalism, both for unrelated questions and to explore what follows from that axiom.

          • FLWAB says:

            I gather a religious person feels the presence of God as unambiguously as I feel the presence of my Self, or my Free Will.

            Speaking as a religious person, I don’t. I have felt what I might consider to possibly be the presence of God on five occasions in my life, but never with anything near the certainty of the presence of my Self or Will.

          • The Pachyderminator says:

            I gather a religious person feels the presence of God as unambiguously as I feel the presence of my Self, or my Free Will.

            Ha ha, I wish. Maybe some people do, but they’re exceptionally blessed. In fact, a lot of great religious art is about the ways this isn’t true.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            I gather a religious person feels the presence of God as unambiguously as I feel the presence of my Self,

            … and if you’re Hindu, you’re supposed to feel the presence of your Self as unambiguously as the presence of your Self!
            (There’s more to it than that, but “Self” is the standard English translation of “Atman”, the real you in contrast to the “self”/ego. The obvious meaning of the Upanishads is that Atman = Brahman, with “Brahman” meaning “God, maybe or maybe not a person”. Despite accepting the Upanishads being a non-negotiable point of Hinduism, there are versions of it that are monotheist in the Western sense and versions that are atheist.)

          • Deiseach says:

            I gather a religious person feels the presence of God as unambiguously as I feel the presence of my Self, or my Free Will.

            Some may do, I’m not going to get into the weeds of theology and Protestantism 🙂

            I don’t feel that presence myself, but on the other hand, when I have tried not believing in God (and I have done, for the sake of the experiment to be fair about “do I just believe this because this is how I was raised?”), it just does not make sense to me, I can’t make it fit, I come back to “No, God exists”.

            As mentioned in other comments, that is only the beginning of the whole question then 🙂

    • profgerm says:

      There used to a Tumblr blogger (Lambdaphage) that was rationalist-adjacent and Christian-adjacent, but it looks like the blog doesn’t exist anymore. You might be able to track down archives.

      Could you try to narrow down what rationalist-adjacent traits you’re looking specifically? I assume you do mean rationalist as in “Bay Area Rationalist” and not the older philosophical school; BAR is pretty Christian-hostile outside of Scott’s strange accumulation of Christian and often traditionalist fans. Narrowing down a bit might help ease the search.

      • Erusian says:

        I can tell you very specifically what turned me off to the rationalist space was anti-Christian bigotry. A bunch of people who’d never read a page of theology lecturing me about what I believed and calling me stupid and disagreeing when I pointed out they were incorrect about what the religious set believed got very, very tiring after two meetings.

        You shouldn’t be surprised that a space that actively repels a group doesn’t have many representatives of that group.

        • Evan Þ says:

          This is why I never commented on Less Wrong.

          Fortunately, Slate Star Codex has been much freer of this.

        • profgerm says:

          Oh, I’m not surprised BAR actively repels religious people. In this case, it quite literally goes with the territory. It’s part of why I don’t consider myself a rationalist, and instead an interested observer.

          I’m just somewhat surprised that Scott has managed to accumulate a following with a relatively high concentration of them when all his fellow-travelers chase them off.

          Ozy’s post about religion and EA comes to mind, but at least they were self-aware enough to put on a header that the post would be specifically offensive to religious people. I get their attitude towards World Vision but I also think it’s one of the most effective charities that doesn’t fall under “EA-approved” (and that may well also be due to the general bias).

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            I’m just somewhat surprised that Scott has managed to accumulate a following with a relatively high concentration of them when all his fellow-travelers chase them off.

            The first thing I ever encountered by him was the post (essay?) with the line “Even Origen would say you’re going to Hell”. Having even that much knowledge of ancient Christianity made him the only Less Wronger who seemed interesting. His LW screen name being a Knight of the Round Table did not help clear up the matter of atheism.

          • Erusian says:

            I’m just somewhat surprised that Scott has managed to accumulate a following with a relatively high concentration of them when all his fellow-travelers chase them off.

            It’s because he doesn’t. Scott doesn’t casually drop anti-religious signals into his writing, so it doesn’t drive the religious away. It really is that easy, but people can’t resist flashing their badge most of the time.

          • Nick says:

            Historically, Scott also engaged with bloggers like Leah Libresco and by extension writers like Ed Feser or Alasdair MacIntyre. Leah was how I learned about his Livejournal (though I lurked on LessWrong and had probably already seen posts by Yvain at the time). Some of Scott’s harder to shake off religious readers date from that era.

          • 205guy says:

            This whole thread is fascinating to me, because as a relatively recent lurker and even more recent poster, I’ve been too embarrassed to start a thread about why what I thought was a rationalist-adjacent blog has so many religiously-motivated discussions. I’m happy to now learn some of the backstory.

          • Deiseach says:

            I’m just somewhat surprised that Scott has managed to accumulate a following with a relatively high concentration of them when all his fellow-travelers chase them off.

            Because he’s genuinely tolerant. He never made and does not make a big deal out of “Smart People Only welcome here, that means you smelly religionists Stay Out” and he doesn’t interfere when some of us start discussing things like the Eucharist, Universalism, baptism and engaging in Biblical exegesis.

            That is remarkably even-handed and I’d be hard-pushed to find a corresponding religion blogger that extended so much leeway to non-believers having a rousing discussion about statistics down in a comment thread 🙂

        • Deiseach says:

          A bunch of people who’d never read a page of theology lecturing me about what I believed and calling me stupid and disagreeing when I pointed out they were incorrect

          To be fair to rationalists, they’re not the only ones who do this (I’ve had some fruitless arguments online trying to tell people who are not Catholics what it is that I, a Catholic, believe and getting back “no you don’t believe that, this is what you believe” with their weird mangling of doctrines). There’s someone over on the sub-reddit at TheMotte who talked about “the communion of saints” and well, let me just say they’re not getting it right.

          The rationalist/atheist shared space can be pretty bad about this, though.

          • Nick says:

            The communion of saints is when the priest turns the bread into saints, right?

            😀

          • Deiseach says:

            Now, now, Nick *wags finger in your direction*

            Mistaken comment:

            The Roman Catholic Church has a peculiar belief called the communion of saints. The basic idea seems to be that saints who score above 100% on the entrance exam to Heaven are able to transfer extra credits to other people in order to get more people into Heaven. This doctrine doesn’t get talked about much, though, especially not in the way I am describing it.

            My long-winded explanation (I can’t post this over on TheMotte because I’m permabanned):

            There seems to be a conflation of two ideas here: the Communion of Saints and the Treasury of Merits. Also, please scrap the notion of “scor(ing) above 100% on the entrance exam to Heaven”, Dante writing his epic poem at the tail end of the 13th century/beginning of the 14th century could correctly state that there is no difference in the bliss of Heaven enjoyed by the saved, no matter if they were a great saint or just scraped in. In the 21st century with easy access to sources online, there’s no excuse for this kind of ignorance.

            Communion of Saints – develops on from the idea of the Mystical Body of Christ, namely, all the baptised and members of the Church are the Body of Christ. Pace Wikipedia, which has a good if brief definition:

            The communion of saints (communio sanctorum), when referred to persons, is the spiritual union of the members of the Christian Church, living and the dead, excluding therefore the damned. They are all part of a single “mystical body”, with Christ as the head, in which each member contributes to the good of all and shares in the welfare of all.

            Therefore you and I, if we are baptised Christians, are part of the Communion of Saints while alive together with the souls in Purgatory (if you’re Catholic) and the blessed in Heaven. It’s got nothing to do with extra marks on the entrance exam, it’s more like “You, me, José, Arjun and George Washington are all American citizens”.

            The Treasury of Merits is reliant upon the saving merits of Christ won by His sacrificial death on the cross. We by our good deeds can add to it, but that’s like pouring a cup of water into the ocean. Human merit has little to do with it except insofar as it is all part of the idea of the faithful as a family, linked together by our baptism, and the love we should have for one another. By analogy, suppose you need help paying the rent this month for one reason or another, you might ask your rich brother Joe to help you because he has the cash to spare and he’s your brother. Family members help one another. The saints love us and want to help us because we’re all one family (see Communion of Saints above). Thus, since complete conformity to the will of God and saving faith enable us to perform miracles (look up the Gospels for yourselves on this one) they act as agents of God to help us when we ask through intercessionary prayer for aid, but this is all based on the power of God, not human power alone.

            Mainly, I was irked by that part of their larger comment because somebody who has no idea what Catholic beliefs are is going to read that, then go off with a false idea in their head about “Catholics think that you can socre higher than 100% on the exam to get into Heaven” 😠

          • bullseye says:

            My understanding is that everybody, even saints, fails the exam to get into heaven, because the exam is “Are you totally without sin?”. But you can still get in through Christ.

      • Nick says:

        The user was actually named lambdaphagy, and the blog still exists.

        • Randy M says:

          And from this I discovered that Scott’s tumblr is no longer hidden. Between the two, there goes today’s productivity.

        • profgerm says:

          That would likely explain why I couldn’t find it, though merely being off by one letter does deepen my disappointment in google or at least my google-fu. Thank you!

      • waterthrower says:

        I want to keep this broad because I know the odds of finding anything is low from the start. Yeah, by rationalism I mean Bay Area or LW rationalism, not the philosophical school where the mind is the basis of human knowledge and constitution. Some traits could be: 1. Has read the Sequences, 2. Frequently comments or posts in rationalist spaces, 3. Interest in cognitive biases and avoiding them, not just object-level research, 4. Grey tribe would be an okay but low-resolution proxy, 5. Interest in memetics.

    • Matt M says:

      This probably isn’t exactly what you’re looking for, but Bob Murphy is an Austrian Economist and Libertarian political theorist who is also very explicitly Christian. His podcast intro describes him as “A Christian and Economist.”

      He’s not explicitly rationalist, but might count as “adjacent” in the sense that I know him to be a regular reader of SSC and generally approving of it.

      Look for “The Bob Murphy Show” in your favorite podcast app and give a few episodes a try?

      • Wency says:

        I haven’t looked at his stuff for a while, but I took a look years ago and concluded that his material doesn’t have too much to offer unless you’re really devoted to the Austrian/libertarian angle, as he is. I’m not — I was just looking for intelligent Christian writers.

        Funny enough, I didn’t realize until thinking about it that I actually met him in real life and chatted for a bit at one point, without knowing who he was. I think he must have been pretty fresh out of grad school at the time. Seemed like a nice and personable enough fellow.

    • lejuletre says:

      i am christian and aspiring-rationalist and i’d also be interested in a blog/podcast on the subject. while my christian beliefs are very nontraditional, and probably more in line with unitarian universalist beliefs than the average* views of the methodist and UCC churches I attend. however, as far as I’m aware there are not many views I don’t share with the minister of the methodist church; as such, i don’t find a contradiction between my views and labelling them as Christian if they are shared, even only 90%, which someone who went to seminary and is about to retire after 39 of ministry. i’m open to more questions about this if people are curious.
      *while the minister and I almost always see theologically eye-to-eye, the same cannot be said of me and the other churchgoers.
      i have a rat-adj tumblr tamartia.tumblr.com tho i don’t post a ton of religious stuff. but if you want to DM me that’s a good place to go.

    • Wency says:

      Obviously he’s super well-known, but I wonder if Douthat counts as rationalist-adjacent as he quoted Scott in his latest book, which I’m currently reading.

    • mrjeremyfade says:

      My Hanging With History podcast certainly is rationalist-adjacent and Christian-adjacent, although it is not specifically about either of those things. SSC gets mentioned quite a bit.

      The Magna Carta episode (episode 11) coming out this weekend has a long tribute to the It Was You Who Made By Brown Eyes Blue essay.

      But it is not specifically about cognitive biases or Christianity, or reconciling them, if that’s what you are trying to find.

    • Plumber says:

      You had some good suggestions upthread @waterthrower, but my first thought was “If only @Nick had his own blog, that would do the trick!” (and I would gladly read it as well).

    • Not a blog or podcast, but one could argue that G.K. Chesterton qualifies.

    • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

      I’m not sure Leah Libresco counts as rat-adj any more but she definitely did in the past.

    • Soy Lecithin says:

      Commenter Jeremiah is a Latter-day Saint and blogs at wearenotsaved.com

  82. SystematizedLoser says:

    On a whim, I reinstalled Knights of the Old Republic last night and was struck by how poorly it has aged. The game came at a transition point for Bioware, between its early systems-heavy RPGs and later “cinematic experiences”. At first glance, KotOR seems to share the downsides of both. Like Baldur’s Gate, there’s a lot of low-risk combat and endless collecting of vendor trash. Like the Mass Effects, you’re pretty limited in what you can do, and the combat is never all that interesting/challenging. Baldur’s Gate at least committed to the party-based experience and had reasonably-fun tactical gameplay. The Mass Effects have better conversations and framing and are more willing to let companions break the rules.

    When it came out KotOR was a huge critical and audience darling. So am I being unfair to an old classic, or has it really just been superseded?

    • broblawsky says:

      Certain elements have definitely aged poorly, but I wouldn’t say that vendor trash collection is fully superceded in modern game design. Modern loot shooters like Borderlands or Destiny rely on the constant generation of sub-par equipment as a component of the game’s economy.

      • SystematizedLoser says:

        It wasn’t my intention to suggest that modern gaming has ditched vendor trash, only that later Bioware games mostly did. I haven’t played Inquisition or Andromeda, much less Anthem, so this might just be an overly specific generalization.

    • pilord says:

      I had a similar experience replaying the game recently, but I think you’re missing part of KoTOR’s initial appeal: the story. The story was amazing, or at least I thought so as a kid. While it’s easy to compare gameplay across time, it’s harder to do so for stories, because you only experience the story for the first time once. Now that you know how it all turns out, it’s less interesting. Since that was a driving part of my interest in the game, replaying the game in 2020 just simply cannot be as much – there is no surprise or mystery anymore.

      That is, I think your issue with KotOR might be replayability, rather than playability per se,

      • SystematizedLoser says:

        As a counterpoint, good story-heavy games can reward replay by letting you see alternative sides of the story. That was a major selling point of KotOR, with its light and dark side paths. KotOR does have a super infamous twist, so maybe that was a bigger driving point behind its acclaim than I realized.

      • Matt M says:

        Agreed. And let’s keep the context in mind here. In the years before KOTOR, cinematic-style story-heavy western games really didn’t exist. If you wanted heavy story in your video games, you had to play a JRPG, which were sort of culturally distinct and had all kinds of eccentricities of their own.

        KOTOR is sort of a stepping off point. You don’t get from Final Fantasy and Baldur’s Gate to Mass Effect without something like it in the middle, serving as the bridge.

      • AlesZiegler says:

        Yup.

    • MilesM says:

      The reason I love KotOR is because it’s one of the few works of Star Wars fiction (outside of the original trilogy) that actually feels like real Star Wars.

      When I think of Star Wars, I think of the original trilogy, the Thrawn trilogy, and KotOR.

      I still remember playing it, and being elated because the thrill that was Star Wars – that I thought the prequels and adulthood had managed to kill completely – was still there after all.

      The combat gameplay hasn’t aged particularly well (and even at the time, it wasn’t really anything extraordinary), but the story really drew me in.

      And as far as other Bioware games go, I think in many ways it represented a high point in their ability to deliver character-driven roleplaying. Their later efforts (despite moments of brilliance like ME2) got far more formulaic, and even at their best tended to have this really awkward division between combat and everything else. You’d either be in the dating simulator / exploration mode, or killing waves of enemies with minimal interaction with the world or other characters.

      • Belisaurus Rex says:

        I both read Thrawn and played KotoR for the first time within the last year (so no nostalgia). I did it to rinse the bad taste of Rise of Skywalker out of my mouth. The Thrawn trilogy has some glaring plot holes (Vader’s age is all messed up, and as a result the twist in the second book doesn’t make sense), but it and Kotor felt like Star Wars. They are miles better than the prequels or sequels. What were Disney and George Lucas thinking?

        • cassander says:

          It’s a damned shame. the thrawn stuff would have made for wonderful movies. And think of the delightful possibilities of casting thrawn!

          • bullseye says:

            Could still happen. He’s in the new canon (in the Rebels tv show, and also he’s got a new series of novels). They’re taking a break from making movies, but there’ll be more in a few years.

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            Did you read the new Thrawn novels? I finished the third a few weeks ago. They don’t stand up to my memory of the original ones, but I thought they were plenty enjoyable.

          • bullseye says:

            I read the first half of the first new Thrawn novel. I didn’t like it. Boring perfect Thrawn smugly outwits everyone, but it doesn’t really feel clever because he’s using information the reader doesn’t have. He’s much better as an antagonist in the tv show.

            I haven’t read the old novels, and I’m not really familiar with the old EU in general.

          • MilesM says:

            @bullseye

            To be fair, he has the same problem (he’s a genius, but the writer isn’t so there is no way for him to “show his work” to the reader – it’s an issue as old as Sherlock Holmes) in the original novels as well, but he is the antagonist there.

            Of course, Luke, Leia and Han (with some assists from Lando and a few new character that fit in well) somehow always manage to at least partially foil his plans. And Zahn is good at making it feel like they really are the same characters you know and love. (Some of the characterization “tricks” he employs aren’t especially subtle, but they work. Far better than anything in the sequels…)

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            @ Bullseye,
            I agree; though I enjoyed the books, as I said, the biggest downside to me compared to the original Thrawn trilogy was the switch from Thrawn as villain who needs to be outwitted (challenging and difficult for our plucky protagonists!) to the hero, who continuously outwits all his foes (no challenge whatsoever). It sounds like I might enjoy Rebels, though.

        • Simulated Knave says:

          Remember that the Thrawn books predate the original trilogy, so Vader’s age isn’t that off. I always assumed Vader had Luke and Leia late in life, and the reason he looked so damn old was because he WAS fairly old. I mean, the actor in Jedi was 78.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Oddly enough I just sort of realized the ages of the characters in Star Wars almost make sense, while trying to demonstrate the opposite:

            When filming Revenge of the Sith, Ewan McGregor would have been about 33 or so. A New Hope takes place when Luke and Leia are 19, so Obi-Wan Kenobi should have looked about like 52-year-old Ewan McGregor. Now I always thought Alec Guinness looked way older than that, but at the time of filming ANH, Guinness was 63. A pretty rough looking 63 I think, but whatever. I guess I can believe spending 19 years as a desert hermit can age you an extra 11 years. So, not perfect, but not as bad as I thought.

          • Simulated Knave says:

            Take a look at pictures of him in Lawrence of Arabia or The Quiller Memorandum – he’s about 50-something there, and I’d say he looks about the same as he does ten years later.

            Frankly, that aspect of the timeline has always been a little off. For a new regime, the Empire’s presented as something much more big and sweeping than it really is.

          • bullseye says:

            I always thought Leia looked older than Luke, to the point I thought it was a plot hole that they turn out to be twins. But I looked it up just now and Hamill was six years older than Fisher! Looking back, Hamill did a really good job at acting like a teenager, and Leia seems older than she is because of her self-confidence.

          • Matt M says:

            the Empire’s presented as something much more big and sweeping than it really is.

            Well, the Empire was basically just the old Galactic Republic, only “under new management” and with a more foreboding aesthetic…

          • bullseye says:

            Plus the Empire conquered some planets that had not been part of the Republic, e.g. Tatooine.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            I mean, it’s probably not like Tatooine put up much resistance, or even noticed…

        • MilesM says:

          I don’t know, but hopefully someone eventually writes a tell-all of how someone in charge of a beloved multi-billion-dollar property looked at the plans for the future and went “Eh. Let’s just wing it.”

    • danpeverley says:

      I’ll agree that as far as gameplay goes, KOTOR doesn’t have a lot of depth. It’s a pretty standard d20 system, so if you know how to min-max that, you can blow through even the hardest fights. When you’re badly optimized difficulty doesn’t really kick in until you’re off Taris (The second Calo Nord fight was a notorious newb check). When I played it when I was young, it was still plenty invigorating to me even if I could roll over most of the trash mobs, because of the narrative. Straightforward and easy fights aren’t really a problem if you buy into the context. I like some very mechanically intensive games, but in a certain frame of mind it’s nice to play something simpler and just enjoy the story. I revisited the game as an adult and still had a good time, the writing held up.

      I’m really more of a KotOR II guy myself. I think the dialogue and writing in that game can stand up to anything else, and there’s a bit more room and demand for min-maxing. I’ve replayed the sequel maybe five times, it’s one that I keep returning to every once in a while. Just make sure to use the Restored Content mod!

      • Nornagest says:

        KOTOR II was eighty percent of an amazing game, but that last act is just not there at all.

        • SmilingJack says:

          Everyone says this, but I’ve simply never felt it. The game concluded its major plots and its central character relationship in a way that felt like a logical step from the NPC’s described points of view.

      • Tenacious D says:

        @danpeverley:

        Can you recommend a generic strategy guide for min-maxing d20? I’ve been thinking about a Kotor replay but for the story, not to get bogged down in combat.

        • souleater says:

          I can’t recommend any generic d20 guides because the details in the system matter a lot, but , or specific KOTOR guides because I haven’t played it in 5 years or so.

          but a few general rules of thumb for min-maxing D20 systems include:
          Build a character that is only dependent on one ability score – Ability points are a very limited commodity
          Build a combat character – Thieves or diplomats are cool, but poor games create EXP walls in combat situations, not social or stealth situations.
          Understand Kiting and if its feasible – Ranged characters often use a strategy called “Kiting” where they attack while staying out of melee range of their enemies. Its a really effective strategy, but sometimes Game designers inflict big penalties to ranged users to compensate.
          Focus on being able to do a lot of damage to one person, not a little damage to a lot of people – people die fighting sith, not stormtroopers
          Your Main Character should always get the best gear for combat.
          Make sure your character can survive on their own – games where you build a party often end up separating you from your party in the third act. If you want to ‘cheat’ by researching in advance, your strategy might change.
          Don’t make a Glass Cannon – Glass Cannons are good if your hero can be protected, but its hard to survive on your own
          Wizards are Glass Cannons – They can get really powerful, but they don’t have the endurance to survive without their party.
          Make sure Your Protagonist can heal ( a little) – a little bit of healing goes a long way for survive-ability.

          Also, Specific to KOTOR:
          Blasters are a trap. Do not use them. ever.
          You absolutely need a ranged attack for your main character. If you don’t get one you can’t finish the game.

          • Fahundo says:

            You absolutely need a ranged attack for your main character. If you don’t get one you can’t finish the game.

            I don’t remember this and I played through it as a melee character.

          • souleater says:

            Vs V erpnyy pbeerpgyl, Gur svany svtug jurer lbh svtug Znynx unf uvz qenva yvsr bhg bs obqvrf nebhaq gur crevcurel ebbz, Lbh arrq gb qrfgebl gur obqvrf be ur jvyy xrrc qenvavat yvsr sebz gurz. ohg lbh pna bayl qb vg vs lbh unir n enatrq nggnpx. V fnirq evtug orsber gur svtug jvgu uvz, naq qvqa’g rira unir npprff gb gur yvtugfnore guebj, naq ab jnl gb trg vg.

            V arire svavfurq gur tnzr.

          • Fahundo says:

            cerggl fher lbh pbhyq qrfgebl gurz jvgu zryrr

    • bullseye says:

      I’m surprised you didn’t find the combat challenging. I picked it up a few years ago and didn’t finish because it was too hard.

      I got to the part where you can choose which planet you go to. I was surprised that, with the game system based on leveling up, there was no indication of which planet was appropriate for my level. I guess I picked the wrong one, because I banged my head on an unwinnable fight. I could have gone back and tried one of the other planets, but then I would have lost the thread of the storyline of the one I was on and I wasn’t enjoying the game enough for it to be worth it.

      If it matters, I was playing a melee fighter because I suspected I was going to turn out to be a Jedi.

      Also the graphics were sometimes pretty janky sometimes. I think it was because I was running it on a much newer machine than it was meant for.

      I’ve really enjoyed the MMO.

      • SmilingJack says:

        I think the game used level scaling to keep the challenge (roughly) appropriate. I think any planet should be acceptable. It might be worth revisiting sometime in the future. I do think newer graphics cards have trouble displaying some effects, especially AMD cards.

  83. First post.

    I will be doing an online SSC meetup on Mozilla Hubs again this Saturday, starting at 1P.M. Pacific time. Everyone welcome — last Saturday we had people from Czechia, Scandinavia, California, … . I’m hoping to make this into a regular event. No special topic, no talk, just conversation.

    • Purplehermann says:

      Could you do one on a Sunday at some point please?

    • PedroS says:

      i tried to attend but at the time i got there (10 30 pm gmt) i found nobody. was it over or was that a tevhnical issue from my side?

    • Dragor says:

      How does one go about joining the meeting? My wife and I are interested, but I don’t recall what platform you use or what the protocol is for joining.

      • This is the web page where I announce the meetups. It currently has the date for the first one, but I plan to do them every Saturday until further notice. People are also welcome to come on Sunday at 1:00 if they like to talk to each other, but I don’t guarantee that I will be there — one meetup a week is all I feel like actively hosting.

        To learn about Mozilla Hubs, click on the link on the page labelled “Mozilla Hubs.” To go to the meetup, click on the link labelled “meetup site.” All it takes is a browser, although if you happen to have an Oculus Quest or the equivalent, you can go the same site in VR instead of on a screen.

        For some reason, my attempts to put the link to the site in posts here sometimes doesn’t work, so I’m using a link to my page instead.