Open Thread 155.5

This is the twice-weekly hidden open thread. You can also talk at the SSC subreddit or the SSC Discord server.

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2,209 Responses to Open Thread 155.5

  1. Daniel Friedman says:

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  2. johan_larson says:

    The death star aliens have stolen our cars, our paper, our power plants, and our food. Before this goes any further, how can we rid ourselves of this alien menace? It’s time to cancel the apocalypse.

    • Nick says:

      Send up two guys with a computer virus. We have about a month to put this all together.

    • Jake R says:

      Just all the nukes.

      • johan_larson says:

        Do we really want to destroy one of these ships?

        We are at a severe disadvantage when dealing with these aliens. They can, apparently quite casually, cross interstellar distances in ships we could not begin to construct. We are like the stone-age Polynesians encountering the US Navy in the 1940s. Now imagine the warriors of one of these islands caught the Navy napping and managed to attack and sink (!) a ship. Imagine the severity of the reprisal.

    • Anteros says:

      Torture their representative on earth such that we simply never hear from them again?

      • Pandemic Shmandemic says:

        That was a particularly bad idea when tried with the death-horde Mongolians.

        • Eric T says:

          You’d be hard pressed to find a decision in all of history that backfired for a people more than that one mayor (and later, Shah Muhammad II covering for him). Some of my historian friends argue that might be the moment the balance of power between the middle east and west europe flipped forever.

    • Tatterdemalion says:

      Without our cars, our paper, our power plants and our food, we’re almost certainly nearly all dead.

      So our best bet is probably to hire Michael Keaton to exact revenge by scaring the hell our of them.

    • Pandemic Shmandemic says:

      Somewhere among our paper are the combined writings of 20th century post-modernist thought, trick them into finding and reading it and watch them give up on all purpose over the course of a couple of generations.

      • bullseye says:

        They’ve already given up on all purpose. They’re messing with us out of boredom.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      Tell them to read an article on TV Tropes.

    • bean says:

      Tell them that human custom requires them to complete a manual game of Campaign for North Africa before we can give them anything else. With all the optional rules.

    • Protagoras says:

      If people had listened to me when they were helping us recover wrecked ships, I’m sure we could have rebuilt Yamato into a space battleship with a wave motion gun by now, and could use that to solve our alien problem.

  3. Nick says:

    You’re the leader of a prominent activist group whose leadership in the recent protests has now been recognized by most parties. Mayors as well as state and federal officials have come to you looking to compromise. They ask, “What are your demands? How do you want police reformed?”

    I think this conversation is well served by digging into specifics about what the problems are and why your demands will help. And phrasing it “How do you want police reformed?” is not intended to foreclose answers like abolishing police—but if that’s your answer, then as with other answers, I think we’d all like to hear how that will help. Bonus points if you can provide numbers.

    • Eric T says:

      Here would be mine – mind you I’m a middle-class white dude living in New York, so I might have more specific gripes than the average.

      First, substantially weaken the power and influence of police unions on local politics, either by restricting their donation ability and/or making it mega-illegal to engage in punative police policies (there is a history of Police here in NYC not policing some areas back in the 90s, unclear if its still an issue but I could see it becoming one), and the NYC based PBA has serious lobbying power for a local government force, spending over a million on campaign contributions last election cycle.

      My argument here is a simple one: when police capture local politicians it breaks down their role as an independent non-political peacekeeping force. Meaningful reforms can’t get passed if police can bully or buy politicians out of supporting them, which in turn causes civil unrest. This also causes the NYPD budget to continue to climb precipetously. It’s already at 6 billion, and prior to the protests an attempt to cut it by a meager 1% was … well unsuccessful. New Yorkers are constantly told there is no money in the budget to repair the MTA, fix the sewers, or any other badly needed infrastructure programs, but we spend far to much on a police force that could do the work it does with a third of its budget. In addition, I’m concerned about long term impacts of the police being able to easily influence politicians. They already have an outsized effect due to the fact that barring strange circumstances (like right now) most people tend to like, listen to, and support the police. The Union was able to, merely by showing public displeasure, cow the mayor into doing what they wanted back in 2014. (Not the best link I know but if you search there is a lot about this – it was a big deal)

      Secondly, pass stricter civil forfeiture laws. There was a discussion about policies like Stop-And-Frisk in the previous OT. I think a dimension missing from that discussion is the impact of civil forfeiture, which allows police to retain taken items they deem potentially evidentiary, even without charging the owner with a crime making the NYPD tens of millions in stolen goods every year. NYC has gotten a lot better about this in recent years, but I’d like to see more of the country tackle this practice, which is predatory towards those of lower S/E class simply by its nature. If I get my phone seized, I can buy a new one. If someone living paycheck to paycheck gets their phone seized, it’s a sizable blow to their financial stability.

      Thirdly, end or at least weaken, Qualified Immunity. I understand this will likely increase costs on the police, and so I’m willing to trade this off with the lower budget concern I raised in point one, but I believe both should be possible. In short, police have connections to DA’s offices, investigatory bodies, and politicians that make it less likely they get convicted than I and many others believe they should. There’s a lot of writing on the practicality of QI, so I just want to explain the optics, because I think they do matter. There is a belief, be it right or wrong, on the streets of NYC that the NYPD can effectively get away with anything. The issue is this belief feeds into a distrust between communities and the NYPD, which causes the NYPD to not be able to do their jobs as well. I think ending qualified immunity, even if it would increase lawsuits, would be a huge signal to public communities that the NYPD isn’t invincible, and would be a great first step in restoring trust.

      EDIT: To head off the argument I’ve heard about ending QI causing reducing policing and the like, doctors make it work with malpractice insurance, and I am 100% down for police violence insurance.

      • Scott Alexander says:

        I’ve also heard this, but the caveat is that this is only about illness-treating performance. How nice a doctor is to their patients has a huge correlation with how often s/he is sued and pays for insurance.

        The kind of “police performance” we’re interested in is basically all about how nice they are to people, so it could still work.

        • Controls Freak says:

          People often conflate someone being nice with being actively engaged. “This doctor really seems to care about me,” easily reads as, “…so I know that he’s going to pay close attention to my case. Perhaps he won’t make the right call, but if he makes the wrong call, it won’t be out of negligence.” So the incentive for the doctor is to act nice, and the incentive for the patient is to not damage the career of a doctor who paid close attention to them acted nice to them.

          In policing, many citizens don’t want the police to be actively engaged (with them). The criminals especially do not want active engagement. Police cannot act nice as a substitute for active engagement, because the “customer” doesn’t want the signaled engagement. Worse, if we set up a system that seems like it incentivizes police for acting nice, but it is public and well-known how this incentive system works and how it’s coupled with engagement, those who do not want engagement can claim that the officer was not acting nicely to them. This strategy is intended to reduce active engagement.

          Knowing that this strategy is a subset of possible strategies of the population, police have to consider this when formulating their own strategy. Police can simply reduce their active engagement, or ensure that there are sufficient “friendly” witnesses who will attest that they were Very Nice to the person in question. Some have pinned hopes on things like body cameras, and they’ve probably helped, to some extent.

          None of the above is new; folks have understood this back/forth for a while, but there is a disanalogy from medical malpractice insurance. I suppose we could try to consider a subset of patients who do not want active engagement from their doctor. I imagine there are some psychiatric patients like this, no? Do you think that doctors acting nice is the equilibrium strategy there, or is it something like, “Cultivate trust with fellow staff, so that they’ll argue on your behalf if something goes wrong (akin to forming a buddy-buddy system between cops)… and then write insane amounts of detail on paper to create a complete record (sort of like body cams)”? …do you ever try to skirt engaging with those folks at all?

    • Paul Zrimsek says:

      My starting ask is abolition of the police unions. In the compromise we more likely end up with, the unions stay on, but procedures for internal investigation and discipline are set unilaterally by the employing government and can be changed as necessary; they are no longer a contract item. (The union may still provide representation to its members who are up before the board.)

    • Jake says:

      I agree with everything Eric T said above, as he already covered several points that I was going to make. Another proposal I’ve not seen talked about a lot, but I think would help address a lot of the grievances currently being aired is to split the police department into multiple departments, with various levels of force authorization for each level. If you have a department just for the low-level offenses that almost everyone is guilty of (traffic violations, ordinance enforcement, minor drug possession maybe), but do not give them authorization to investigate beyond their low-level mandate, and do not authorize them to use force, it will result in much safer and less biased everyday interactions with the police for everyone.

      You get less biased policing, because police are no longer incentivized to target their low-level attention to violations that they think may lead to higher-level cases, because their mandate stops at the low level. These are the types of cases that police are accused of racial profiling the most on, and if they don’t lead anywhere, it may take away a lot of the incentive for profiling.

      In terms of safety, these are also the most common encounters with police, so taking away the ability for officers to escalate to force in this type of encounter would greatly increase the safety of most people. Right now, there is a small chance that a random stop for a minor violation may lead to a tragic outcome. Limiting the force allowed for this department would almost eliminate that possibility.

      There would still need to be a department authorized to use force, but I would hope they would be used more like a SWAT team today (and yes, I know those are arguably used to often). A call to the force-using department would need to be authorized by someone (judge/chief/board?) and a level of authorized force granted. Officers in this group would need to be vetted much more thoroughly than officers in the non-force-using department.

      So much of policing doesn’t need to be done at the end of a gun, and even having the gun there, probably makes it less effective. I think that making an unarmed force as the primary interface with the public would go a long way towards making outcomes more fair, and probably would even lead to better overall outcomes.

      • S_J says:

        Another proposal I’ve not seen talked about a lot, but I think would help address a lot of the grievances currently being aired is to split the police department into multiple departments, with various levels of force authorization for each level. If you have a department just for the low-level offenses that almost everyone is guilty of (traffic violations, ordinance enforcement, minor drug possession maybe), but do not give them authorization to investigate beyond their low-level mandate, and do not authorize them to use force, it will result in much safer and less biased everyday interactions with the police for everyone.

        That might work for big-City departments, but I don’t it would work for small town departments that have two to four officers on-shift during most hours.

        Come to think of it, there is a small town I’m aware of which has the reputation of funding their Police Department by issuing speeding tickets to not-local drivers who don’t slow down enough when they enter the town.

        This locality rarely sees a murder, let alone a violent confrontation between a policeman and a non-policeman.

        I wonder what that small town department is thinking now…

        • Jake says:

          Does the small town even need to have a force-authorized police department then, or could they just call in the county unit if they need it? I may be wrong, but I don’t think small towns are where a lot of the problems are coming from, though that may just be an artifact of more people living in bigger towns, so stories get reported more from large towns. If your department is mostly for issuing speeding tickets to out-of-towners, and throwing Bob and Bill in the drunk tank overnight so they don’t drive home drunk, do you really need to have weapons for that?

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            County sheriff deputies have guns because they might have to confront a lawbreaker with a gun: the Second Amendment, you know?
            Look at the Andy Griffith Show for an example of how mass media fiction used to view rural policing: there was no violence in Mayberry, so a deputy carried an empty pistol and made neurotic rants about if he ever needed the bullet he stored separately.

          • Jake says:

            @Le Maistre Chat
            I agree that’s how it is now. Deputies need to have guns because of the risk of escalation with the people they are dealing with. However, would that risk still be there if it was widely known that the deputies were not allowed to escalate like they currently are, did not carry guns, and were wearing always-on cameras that broadcast back to HQ. This may also be combined with much harsher penalties for assaulting an unarmed officer (enforced by the higher-level force-using guys with guns).

            Mayberry is actually the ideal I was looking for. There is no violence, so carrying a weapon doesn’t help. I’m looking to pull the large majority of police interactions into a guaranteed non-violent realm, though the caveat is, if you break that non-violence pact from either side, the law will crack down 10x as hard as before.

          • John Schilling says:

            I agree that’s how it is now. Deputies need to have guns because of the risk of escalation with the people they are dealing with. However, would that risk still be there if it was widely known that the deputies were not allowed to escalate like they currently are, did not carry guns, and were wearing always-on cameras that broadcast back to HQ.

            Deputies, etc, have to carry guns, not just in the United States but in basically every country on Earth that is not the UK and including even the giant gun-free zone that is Japan, because professional criminals have to carry guns. Professional criminals have to carry guns because they can’t count on the police to protect them or the courts to resolve their disputes, and the equilibrium where the entire criminal community avoids that otherwise very profitable arms race is a rare and delicate thing that we’re not going to duplicate here.

            Given that the professional criminals are going to be carrying guns, the temptation to use them to avoid being arrested by an unarmed police force is going to be very high. And that’s going to result in cops getting shot.

            I don’t see how you can avoid that without essentially promising the professional criminals that ordinary cops will not try to arrest them when they find it, and sticking to it. Or that the arrests will be a catch-and-release sort of thing so long as the criminals go along with it. Otherwise, yes, the criminal who resists arrest with a gun is the subject of a manhunt and will probably go to jail in the very near future, but resisting is safe and easy, he won’t be shot, and the criminal who doesn’t resist will definitely be going to jail, right now. Criminals not being big on deferred gratification, they’re going to look at the cop trying to throw them in jail right now, and the gun they have and the cop doesn’t, and some of them are going to shoot the cop.

            If you do robustly implement a policy of ordinary cops not arresting armed criminals when they find them, or of such arrests being basically catch-and-release, then every time some pretty white woman gets killed by a professional criminal then Fox News and even CNN are going to be running the story of the many times he was caught by the police and sent off with a warning because ordinary cops aren’t supposed to stop armed professional criminals. Good luck keeping that policy in force.

      • Controls Freak says:

        If you have a department just for the low-level offenses that almost everyone is guilty of (traffic violations, ordinance enforcement, minor drug possession maybe), but do not give them authorization to investigate beyond their low-level mandate, and do not authorize them to use force

        Suppose you do this, and in response, [content warning: bad] this video starts getting spread to even more people than the ones who know about it now (or other videos like it). Quickly, no one with two brain cells to rub together is willing to apply for positions in your, “Minor crimes, but roulette wheel for certain death with literally no chance to do anything about it” Department. At least that guy had a chance, being armed and authorized to use force. This department has literally zero chance. What next?

        (I think you can convince people to do jobs like meter maids, as 99% of the time, they’ll just be interacting with an empty car, not a person. Thus, a small chance of an encounter with a person being combined with a small chance of that encounter going really really badly is sufficiently small that folks will maybe sign up for it. Asking someone to constantly interact with folks to give them tickets or arrest them for minor offenses ramps up the risk precipitously.)

        • Paul Zrimsek says:

          I don’t see why no one would apply. It’s a steady job, probably with good benefits.

        • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

          Surely there are some people who can correctly assess the risk of doing that job (based on the numbers of police officers currently killed in those kinds of situations, it would be pretty low).

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          There are lots of jobs that involve making strangers unhappy and you don’t need to be armed, or armored, to do them.

          If a grocery store clerk cards someone who doesn’t have ID and they get angry, that could turn out dangerous. And I’m sure some clerks have died. But we haven’t decided that the police must do it.

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      Weakening the police unions is important. I don’t know how that can be done.

      Taking complaints of abuse by the police seriously, and this means firing abusive police early. See above about the unions.

      Enforce policies limiting the use of force– all it would have taken to not kill Eirc Garner and George Floyd would have been to just enforce policies forbidding choke holds.

      Teach de-escalation.

    • LadyJane says:

      1. End the legal doctrine of qualified immunity, which has consistently allowed police officers in the US to get away with excessive use of force and all sorts of abuses of power in general. From now on, police will be held to the same standards as civilians when it comes to using violence in self-defense.

      2. Abolish the grand jury system, or at the very least, stop using grand juries to decide the outcome of police misconduct trials. There’s strong evidence that grand juries unfairly favor the police, and the US is the only country other than Liberia that still uses this antiquated system. Normal randomly-selected civilian juries would probably be a lot more likely to convict police officers.

      Those would be my biggest demands, and I think those two changes alone would do a world of good. But there are some other policies that I also think would help:

      3. Require police officers to wear body cameras at all times, and prohibit them from turning their cameras off, except during special circumstances like undercover investigations. If a police officer turns off their body camera or their camera has a convenient malfunction right before a violent incident occurs, that should be treated as strong evidence of guilt unless there’s other evidence to the contrary.

      4. Demilitarize police forces. Military-grade weapons, equipment, and vehicles should be reserved for SWAT teams with specialized training who are only deployed in extreme emergencies, as they are in virtually every other developed country. Rank-and-file officers shouldn’t be driving around in APVs or walking around with assault weapons.

      5. Have police forces work more closely with community leaders to build trust with local residents and better understand the issues facing the area they’re patrolling. Where possible, have police officers assigned to the same neighborhoods they live in. Police should be a part of the community, not an occupying force above and beyond it.

      6. Give police officers more and better training for dealing with conflicts and other high-stress situations, with an increased emphasis on de-escalation and peaceful resolutions. They should also receive special training for dealing with people who are mentally ill (at present, the mentally ill are killed by police at a higher rate than any racial or ethnic demographic group). Officers working in racially diverse areas should be given racial sensitivity training as well.

      7. Set higher standards for who can become a police officer in the first place, particularly with regard to intellectual, social, and emotional intelligence and psychological stability. (This is probably less feasible in smaller municipalities, but I think it can be implemented in large cities without limiting the size of the police force too much.)

      In addition to the reforms listed above, there are also some perverse incentives that need to be dealt with:

      8. Stop rewarding police officers for making arrests. At present, both individual officers and police forces as a whole stand to profit from a higher arrest rate in the form of promotions, extra work, paid court appearances, increased federal and state funding, and so forth. Not only does this incentivize officers to arrest as many people as possible, it also discourages them from focusing on more serious crimes: An officer will be better served by going after a large number of low-level offenders (drug users, people selling loose cigarettes on the street, etc.), rather than devoting their time to a smaller number of more serious cases that might require a lengthy investigation to actually result in an arrest.

      9. Likewise, stop rewarding police officers for giving out fines. Under the current situation, the amount of money that a municipal government makes in fines has a direct correlation on how much funding the local police force gets, which in turn affects how much individual officers make. Officers are also more likely to get raises and promotions if they give out a lot of tickets. There are supposedly some municipalities in the US where they even get paid a bonus for each ticket they give out (I’m not sure if that’s actually true, but even if it isn’t, there are more than enough indirect incentives to have an effect). Once again, this encourages police to go after a lot of low-level offenders (people driving slightly over the speed limit, people dodging the fare on buses and trains, petty vandals and graffiti artists), and it also fosters a general climate of hostility between the officers and the people they’re supposed to protect and serve.

      10. End the practice of civil asset forfeiture, which likewise encourages police to go after as many people as possible, and has additionally been used to justify outright theft and literal highway robbery. The only assets that law enforcement should be allowed to seize are illicit contraband, stolen goods (which should be returned to the rightful owners where possible), and any objects that are considered to be material evidence in an ongoing investigation or trial (which should be returned to the proper owners when the case ends). The police should not have carte blanche to steal whatever they want from anyone even suspected of being involved in criminal activity.

      Finally, there are some broader political reforms that don’t directly relate to police misconduct, but are closely tied to the issue. These aren’t as necessary as the other reforms, but are still likely to further reduce police misconduct:

      11. Abolish for-profit private prisons, as they create far too many perverse incentives for both law enforcement organizations and the judicial system. Additionally, set a minimum wage for prisoners; their use as a source of extremely cheap labor creates a similar set of perverse incentives, even in government-run prisons.

      12. Set stricter rules governing the use of money collected from tickets and fines. For instance, there could be a provision that fines should only be used for repairs and maintenance costs related to the offense that warranted those fines, with any additional money donated to charity or to a community pot rather than going into city hall’s coffers. Right now, there’s simply too strong of a temptation for municipal governments to rely on fines as a perpetual source of free extra money.

      • bullseye says:

        I don’t think grand juries are actually a problem.

        As I understand it, the grand jury pretty much always provides the result that the prosecutor wants. Typically this means rubber-stamping the case so it moves on to trial. But when the prosecutor doesn’t actually want to prosecute, they deliberately fail to convince the grand jury. If we had those cases go to trial anyway, a prosecutor who doesn’t want to prosecute will just lose the trial.

        The actual problem is that the prosecutor prosecuting the police is the very same person who needs to cooperate with those same police in order to put away regular criminals. The solution is to bring in prosecutors from the outside in the event of police misconduct (e.g., a state prosecutor going after local police).

        • A more radical solution would be to permit private prosecution of criminal offenses. That was the normal procedure in 18th century England, and is still possible in present-day England, although I gather with enough restrictions so that it rarely happens.

          A still more radical solution would be to revive the Appeal of Felony in the common law, an entirely private suit, like a tort action, with criminal penalties. If someone is convicted in a privately prosecuted criminal case the crown in England or equivalent here can still pardon him. If convicted in an Appeal of Felony the crown could not pardon him, just as the crown could not cancel the damages awarded in a tort suit.

          That action still existed in 18th century England but was, for most purposes, no longer of practical use.

          Now I will let the rest of you get back to tinkering with details of the modern system.

      • gbdub says:

        Most of these are pretty good. A couple minor quibbles:
        1. Qualified immunity results in only civil penalties. Criminal penalties are likely to be a better deterrent, and I don’t want to lean to hard on the sort of poor people who tend to interact with police to have to come up with a lawyer good enough to sue and beat the police union’s. So it’s a good idea, but the impact might be overrated.

        Also holding police to the same standards for use of force as civilians is not, I think, feasible or desirable. After all, we expect police to, as a core job function, physically detain people who have a strong motivation to not cooperate. But increasing the standard on use of deadly force clearly needs to move much closer to the civilian rules. No more “he had his hand in the general vicinity of his waistband so I feared for my life!”

        On 4., I also agree but think this is highly overrated – it seems like for the most part the really egregious cases of police brutality are beat cops using their hands, their clubs, and their service pistols. By and large they are not mowing down people with assault rifles or running them over with tanks. Restricting gear to SWAT might even make things worse – SWAT teams are expensive to maintain and local authorities and going to be itchy to justify their existence.

        To me the bigger “police militarization” problem is basically one of attitude. Treating policing like a war against an enemy creates a bad mindset and incentives.

        • Garrett says:

          Civil suits have the impact of not only civil penalties, but also the opportunity for discovery. Going from “mouthy ass gets improperly struck by police officer, pay $5,000” to “here’s a long list of excessive force complaints plus all associated video” which could be released to the public is a useful counterbalance, even if it doesn’t result in more money being handed around.

      • cassander says:

        1. End the legal doctrine of qualified immunity, which has consistently allowed police officers in the US to get away with excessive use of force and all sorts of abuses of power in general. From now on, police will be held to the same standards as civilians when it comes to using violence in self-defense.

        This is meaningless without also stripping them of their unions and civil service protections, which the democrats will never do.

        4. Demilitarize police forces. Military-grade weapons, equipment, and vehicles should be reserved for SWAT teams with specialized training who are only deployed in extreme emergencies, as they are in virtually every other developed country. Rank-and-file officers shouldn’t be driving around in APVs or walking around with assault weapons.

        This requires a much more precise term than assault weapon.

        5. Have police forces work more closely with community leaders to build trust with local residents and better understand the issues facing the area they’re patrolling. Where possible, have police officers assigned to the same neighborhoods they live in. Police should be a part of the community, not an occupying force above and beyond it.

        this sounds like a recipe for cronyism and patronage to me.

        7. Set higher standards for who can become a police officer in the first place, particularly with regard to intellectual, social, and emotional intelligence and psychological stability. (This is probably less feasible in smaller municipalities, but I think it can be implemented in large cities without limiting the size of the police force too much.)

        At what cost?

        8.An officer will be better served by going after a large number of low-level offenders (drug users, people selling loose cigarettes on the street, etc.), rather than devoting their time to a smaller number of more serious cases that might require a lengthy investigation to actually result in an arrest.

        Most cops aren’t detectives and I don’t think that many are rewarded for making arrests. Fines? definitely. but not arrests. And the problem with people getting arrested for selling cigarettes is that that shouldn’t be a crime in the first place, not that too many people are arrested for doing it.

        11. Abolish for-profit private prisons, as they create far too many perverse incentives for both law enforcement organizations and the judicial system. Additionally, set a minimum wage for prisoners; their use as a source of extremely cheap labor creates a similar set of perverse incentives, even in government-run prisons.

        Government run prison guard unions are considerably more powerful in this regard than any private company or group of them. abolishing private prisons makes the incentives WORSE, not better.

        Overall, your suggestions look to largely ineffectual, more a list of things you don’t like and some shibboleths than a look at the incentives faced by law enforcement and attempt to improve them.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          stripping them of their unions and civil service protections

          Having both is bad. But why would having just civil service protections be bad?

          • cassander says:

            I’m saying it won’t be any better. Because if you have those protections, the first thing the unions will do demand that the union or city step in between individual officers and direct liability, either explicitly or through work rules that achieve much the same effect through lengthy process requirements. And this is not hypothetical, it already happens.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Wait, I thought we were talking about only having just civil service protections, no union at all. So there won’t be a union to demand anything.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      Ferguson had a big demographic shift, where a mostly-white community with a mostly-white police force became black. But it takes time for the workers to attrition out. You can’t just fire the white cops for being white.

    • Noah says:

      Gender makeup? My expectation is you’ll have a lot of trouble finding that many women who are willing to be cops.

      • DarkTigger says:

        Idk, in Germany it’s usual for police patrols to be pairs of male/female officers.
        But I admit that there were some incidents the last years, that looked like they needed to change the rules to get enough female recruits.

        Ninja-edit: This should also match the expection of the audience here. If me expect profession joices by different genders/sexes split at a people/things line. Police work looks to me to be about as much in the people as in the things department.

    • salvorhardin says:

      I’m going to outsource my response to Campaign Zero, https://www.joincampaignzero.org/

      I can’t say I’d necessarily agree with 100% of what they want if I dug into the evidence pro and con really carefully, but I don’t have the spare time to do that and they have and did, so “enact their 10 point plan” seems like a pretty good approximation to go with to me.

    • viVI_IViv says:

      stronger affirmative action to ensure the racial and gender makeup of police forces matches that of the communities they serve;

      I’m pretty sure that I’ve read some statistic that the race of the police officer doesn’t correlate with the race of the people they shoot.

      I’d add to this a much stronger preference in favor of hiring from the community itself. This could (a) improve police-community relations, (b) disrupt entrenched department cultures of bad people hiring other bad people, and (c) funnel resources and middle-class jobs into disadvantaged communities.

      This comes with the risk of handing out badges to the local gang members or gang-adjacent thugs.

    • cassander says:

      (b) disrupt entrenched department cultures of bad people hiring other bad people,

      How would it do that?

      and (c) funnel resources and middle-class jobs into disadvantaged communities.

      if the locals had the skills/education/experience to have middle class jobs, they presumably wouldn’t be disadvantaged.

    • zzzzort says:

      I probably agree with Eric T in practice, but if I was trying to design my law enforcement utopia, I would start by completely disbanding the police force as it actually exists. This gets around the current union contracts and turnover problems, and helps reset the culture. Have limits on use of force, stronger civilian oversight, and training in de-escalation and handling stress. Further, reorganize the force so that most people don’t have guns, and roles are more defined to prevent mission creep.

      -gendarmes: people with guns, no more than 10% of the total force, only called if there is a weapon at the scene.
      -detectives: people that investigate crimes like on TV, which modern police forces tend to do a crappy job of
      -peace officers: people who walk beats and deal with most calls, traffic tickets, noise complaints, police reports for insurance purposes; most of the things police spend their time on. Unarmed or just tasers and pepper spray, and localized as much as possible.
      -social workers: people who deal with mental health issues, addiction, and homelessness, and get sent with peace officers to domestic violence calls.

      • John Schilling says:

        -peace officers: people who walk beats and deal with most calls, traffic tickets, noise complaints, police reports for insurance purposes; most of the things police spend their time on. Unarmed or just tasers and pepper spray, and localized as much as possible.

        What happens when these people meet actual armed-and-dangerous type criminals, and there isn’t conveniently a gendarme around the next corner? If the answer is “carry on with your dangerous armed criming, good sir, it’s not my job to intrude upon such things”, I predict public support for this plan is going to fall off real fast.

        • fibio says:

          Meanwhile in Britain…

        • Ketil says:

          What happens when these people meet actual armed-and-dangerous type criminals, and there isn’t conveniently a gendarme around the next corner?

          How often does this happen? That is, that a patrolling officer stumbles upon armed criminals? Probably a lot more often in the US than in UK, but I still think the average burglar, drug dealer, or traffic violator will be unarmed (any statistics on this?)- and certainly not willing to risk killing a cop.

          On the other hand, the Breonna Taylor case started with a drug raid, her boyfriend opened fire on the police, and in the ensuing gunfight, Taylor was killed. Do you send unarmed cops on such raids (which would likely have resulted in dead officers) or do you send the armed ones (the results of which we know). [Edit: Maybe not the best example, if you believe the criticism of the police, Taylor and her boyfriend didn’t know it was cops and thought they were defending themselves from burglars]

          In the George Floyd case, no guns were involved.

          • DarkTigger says:

            As far as I understand it, british cops are/were usually not armed with fireweapons. When they encountered a situation that need fireweapons (i.e. beeing shot at) they retreat to a secure distance and call special “Fire Teams”. Those teams are usually able to react quite fast.
            This has big benefits: For the usual policeofficers more concentration can be lead on training deescalation-techniques, while the armed cops can concentrate their training on fireweapons and tactics.

          • zzzzort says:

            No knock warrants shouldn’t be a thing except in the most exceptional circumstances.

          • John Schilling says:

            How often does this happen? That is, that a patrolling officer stumbles upon armed criminals?

            How many armed criminals have you got?

            The issue is not that the average beat-cop-v-criminal encounter is with an armed or otherwise highly dangerous criminal, it’s that the end of the average highly dangerous criminal’s career involves a random encounter with a beat cop (or traffic cop, or the like). The model where the clever detectives figure out whodunnit and then the SWAT team serves a warrant at their house is very much the exception. Even when the clever detective does figure out whodunnit, the next step is just to put out a warrant and wait for an ordinary cop to stumble across the guy in the course of his ordinary duties. If the clever-detective-and-SWAT-team model is our only way of dealing with armed and/or dangerous criminals, we’re going to have a lot more of that sort of criminal.

            And often the reason we know whodunnit is that a beat cop was close enough to respond to the call while the crime was still in progress, whereas the much rarer detectives and SWAT teams would have arrived too late. Note the already-cited example. At the Stoneman massacre, the only remotely cop-like person in a position to stop it was an ordinary Sheriff’s deputy assigned to school resource officer duty. That’s pretty standard in mass shootings, and lesser but still deadly crimes like armed robberies gone bad. As seen at Stoneman, there is a very strong cultural expectation that if there’s one ordinary cop on the scene, he ought to try and stop the massacre/robbery/whatever even if the criminal does have a gun.

  4. Eric T says:

    A new poll from Gallup shows support for same-sex marriage is at 67% nationwide.

    But only one short lifetime of this young SSC poster ago, opposition was at 68%, and support a meager 27%.

    In my brief 23 years of life the country has basically done a complete 180 on same-sex marriage. So get your predictions in here, in 20 more years what “fringe” idea with under 30% support will be widely popular?

    • Eric T says:

      My completely BS prediction is Animal Ownership. I believe that in about 20 years or so, Americans will be majority opposed to owning pets.

      • TimG says:

        I believe that in about 20 years or so, Americans will be majority opposed to owning pets.

        I consider myself kinda centrist. Not by policy. Just that I tend to lean slightly left of center on social issues and slightly right of center on economic issues.

        I’ve been somewhat surprised to find myself really disliking zoos over the past few years. I’ve started to feel uncomfortable around people that treat their dogs like children (though I’m careful to never mention that.) And then I read things about how cats kill like a billion birds a year and it makes me ever-so-slightly against pet ownership.

        The strange thing is that I eat meat — and enjoy it. I wouldn’t want to outlaw factory farms. (Though I would happily shift to lab-grown-meat when it’s ready.) So I can’t say that my slight-disdain for pets makes any logic sense in combination with the rest of what I believe.

      • Anteros says:

        @Eric T
        Interesting – is that because you have some antipathy (like TimG below) towards animal ownership? I ask because otherwise I’d guess it would be a fairly unlikely thing to come up with.

        • Eric T says:

          Like I said, this is a BS prediction anyway not based on anything but my gut. Here’s my thought process (and no I actually like pets, I want a dog myself once I move somewhere more pet-friendly)

          1. There are a lot of issues with modern pet ownership. Puppy mills, people abandoning pets, people abusing pets etc.
          2. These incidents are, while probably quite rare, very well-publicized. People share videos of like animals being rescued from abusers all the time.
          3. It’s fairly non-political. Everyone loves animals. Dems may lean more on the animal rights stuff, but there are a lot of republican or at least religious, animal shelters, charities, etc. People love animals and care deeply about them.
          4. As our sort of “sphere of compassion” extends, animals have gotten more rights, more protections, and are sometimes treated better than humans by the public zeitgeist. When a Lion gets shot by a dentist it generates nothing but universal revulsion, something that people getting killed doesn’t usually do.
          5. There are already large, well-funded organizations that support this, like PETA. PETA is crazy, but they apparently have infinite money and lots of popular support in some circles.
          6. There are less crazy orgs pushing for greater public care of animal rights generally. Humane League for example.
          7. I think all of this could come to a head very fast if there was some new evidence or at least a couple high-profile animal abuse cases.

          • Anteros says:

            Maybe this is country-specific. I’m a Brit’, and if there was a pet lobby in Britain it would have at least the power of the NRA in the States. And I think that the majority of pets in Britain are treated extremely well, if in a slightly pampered manner.

            I’m be really surprised if feelings about pet ownership changed as much as those about gay marriage, but then that itself, as you say, was an enormous surprise, so who knows..

      • Lodore says:

        I don’t think this prediction will come true, but I would like it to come true. I increasingly find myself slightly appalled at the narcissism that pet owners put on display with respect to their pets. It’s like wanting a friend who never criticises you, always agrees with your plans for what you do together, never snaps back no matter how shitty you are, and who will never dilute their friendship by getting another friend. In fact, it’s like selectively breeding for these traits, as well as a couple of others, at the expense of the health and wellbeing of the friend.

        I can’t see how this is remotely healthy, though I guess smaller families and social networks means pets aren’t going away any time soon.

        • HarmlessFrog says:

          Also: Baby substitutes.

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:

          Maybe dog owners are something like that, but cats set some limits.

          • Anteros says:

            Absolutely – our cats treat us as the pets, and do whatever they please.

          • Lodore says:

            Maybe dog owners are something like that, but cats set some limits.

            It’s probably harder to play that game with cats for sure, but where there’s a will, there’s a way. A colleague of mine is a very intelligent, perspicacious academic, and yet she insists that her cat enjoys the same rich subjectivity as a human being. The result is that the cat is made the centre of a cognitive ecosystem that’s appropriate to a human being, and hence cruel for a cat.

      • Paul Zrimsek says:

        Doubtful. The sort of people who’d ordinarily scold us into that, own like 6 cats apiece.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        I wouldn’t mind too much if pet ownership went away.

        But it won’t. Pet ownership is on the rise as people have less kids. You need to start from a condition where pet ownership is rare in order to make it illegal.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          Pet ownership is on the rise as people have less kids. You need to start from a condition where pet ownership is rare in order to make it illegal.

          Furthermore, there’s a failure to model future processes in any wish to make owning pets illegal.
          I was raised in a working-class neighborhood by parents who had a German Shepherd, a big wolf-like mutt, and guns. Our neighbors on both sides of chain-link fencing had big dogs like Dobermanns our dogs would run with.
          Think about the optics of cops coming to people’s doors for violating a new law that it’s illegal to own pets when they have dogs like this they love and also guns.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            Police (at least in the US) have a history of being rather casual about killing people’s dogs.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @Nancy: This seems very relevant to the current police brutality conversation!
            Yes, US police seem to express callous, deadly cruelty to the dogs of people they try to arrest. The media lets them get away with this. I think the question is, how would they get away with scaling that up to tens of millions of dog-loving working-class families who believe in the Second Amendment?
            The logistical scale of enforcing a newly-passed law against owning pets that requires going to millions of doors where the cops will have to face GSDs, Rottweilers, pit bulls etc etc defending their loving owners who see it as an unjust law to fight would be functionally similar to a major military campaign. A major military campaign of barging in on civilians is a dangerous PITA even if the media is on your side.

      • Lord Nelson says:

        Disagree on animal ownership. I hang out with a fair number of vegetarians, vegans, and animal welfare supporters (and fall firmly into the last category myself). I don’t see anyone arguing against ownership of domesticated animals.

        For something animal welfare related, my guess would be a push towards meat substitutes. This already happened with fur vs faux fur. I wouldn’t be surprised if it happened in the next 10-20 years with meat and dairy products, especially as said substitutes get tastier. I had to cut all eggs and dairy out of my diet for five years due to medical reasons. I was pleasantly surprised to find that some of the vegan options were not just tolerable, but actually good! Some of the others still have a ways to go, but most of the problems were with texture and consistency, not taste.

        Edit : Oops, didn’t see that someone else already mentioned this. Guess that’s what I get for not scrolling down.

      • eric23 says:

        I think people on average are much too attached to their cats and dogs (and steaks and omelettes) to give them up, despite the good arguments that could be advanced for banning them. Supporting gay marriage, in contrast, doesn’t require making any changes to your life.

    • johan_larson says:

      I think meat may be ready for the same sort of quality revolution that coffee went through in the nineties. Right now, eating standard supermarket meat is basically considered ok. Demanding something better is pretty fringe. I expect that to shift, with more demand for higher-quality meat, and more attention paid to how slaughtered animals are kept and fed.

      • HarmlessFrog says:

        This would be great. I’d definitely like to see animals not fed corn and soy, but something more resembling their natural diets.

        Why do you think this will happen?

        • johan_larson says:

          First, there is a lot of room for improvement in how we house and feed food animals. Every time I’ve gone looking, I’ve come away horrified. And second, since the seventies we have found time to improve the quality of foods that are a whole lot less important than the meat we eat. These days it’s easy to find high-quality wine, beer, chocolate, whiskey, and coffee if you care even a little. And people with money do care. Meat looks like an obvious opportunity. Who’s going to be the Starbucks of almost-artisanal meat?

      • eric23 says:

        I don’t think so, because the median person won’t be able to afford that.

      • Spookykou says:

        I am possible confused by what you mean when you say meat quality, but assuming you are using it the way I think you are.

        As a lower middle class American I had access to better meat at my local grocery store than the top 0.1% Chinese people I now occasionally have cause to eat with. I have even eaten at a couple Michelin star restaurants including a steak house in Hong Kong, and I just have no idea what you are talking about. Maybe it is regional, but the meat at my local grocery store in Texas was very good.

    • HarmlessFrog says:

      So get your predictions in here, in 20 more years what “fringe” idea with under 30% support will be widely popular?

      By “popular” you mean “accepted and supported by the majority but practiced only by a small minority”?

      • Eric T says:

        By “popular” you mean “accepted and supported by the majority but practiced only by a small minority”?

        Both my original post and both polls it cites are about the support of the legalization of gay marriage, not the practice of doing it personally. Note that this isn’t just people moving from indifferent to support, the supermajority OPPOSED legalization of gay marriage when I was born. So I’m more asking about that kind of opinion sea-change I guess?

    • Thomas Jorgensen says:

      Since my operating theory is that the massive shift of opinion is due to the fact that things that become manifest and work out well are far more persuasive than any argument…

      Electric Cars. As in, people will love them, and the gasoline engine will be consigned to the scrapheap of history, as far as personal vehicular transit is concerned. Possibly self-driving, too.

      • Paul Zrimsek says:

        As a driver who loves quiet and loves torque, I say the sooner the better. But they’ll have to solve the charging-time issue first. (As an alternative, they could get range up to a full day’s driving– say, 600 highway miles, though 700 would be better. Then when I’m on a cross-country trip, I can let it charge while I’m stopped for the night and who cares if it takes a few hours?)

        • Thomas Jorgensen says:

          No, this is exactly what I mean. I dont expect super fast charging to become common place, I just expect people to utterly stop caring their car spends the entire night charging, because that is not an actual, practical problem. I also do not expect me saying this to sway very many people – only the practical experience that this is in fact not a significant inconvenience will do that.

          • Thomas Jorgensen says:

            If you own a car, you have someplace to park it, or you would not have bothered with the expense at all. Dedicated parking spaces will sprout wall warts, streets with reserved curb side parking will spout little steel poles with outlets on them. This sort of thing is not that expensive to do in job lots – installing just once steel pole? Ouch. Your utility putting up one for every house on the block in one go, no biggy.

          • Tarpitz says:

            The actual, practical problem is the range. Oxford-Edinburgh taking 24 hours instead of 6 is a pretty big deal.

          • Paul Zrimsek says:

            They’re not doing too badly on range nowadays: the longest-range models can take you about as far as a smallish tank of gas. But if it’s a long trip, once you run through that you’re still looking at over half an hour to recharge. Not the end of the world, but enough of a hassle for me to stick with internal combustion for now.

          • AG says:

            People are constantly charging their phones, though, and that doesn’t stop them from continuing to use power-hungry phones. I think that most will simply carry over the “charge at every opportunity” mindset to their cars, and demand infrastructure change to accommodate that demand, the way that plentiful Wifi and electrical outlets are now the norm in airports.

          • Randy M says:

            We seemed to have solved this problem in our AP chem class twenty years ago, so I assume it actually isn’t a solution. But, why not standardize the size of batteries, then simply swap them out at designated recharge stations? In, out, in the time it takes to fill up a tank of gas. Then your old battery is set to recharge.

            It would require a lot of batteries and a lot of power, making it a rather dangerous place requiring a lot of space. How does this compare to keeping massive tanks of flammable liquid underground?

          • baconbits9 says:

            But, why not standardize the size of batteries, then simply swap them out at designated recharge stations? In, out, in the time it takes to fill up a tank of gas. Then your old battery is set to recharge.

            One of the issues I have heard about is that there is a huge gap in the value of a new battery and an older one, so you have to figure out ways to compensate people who end up with older batteries in their new cars.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Battery swap works if you lease the batteries from a company and that company lets you swap them at will.

          • sfoil says:

            @RandyM

            The battery pack in a Tesla Model 3 and the Chevy Bolt both weigh around 1000lbs; the Cybertruck apparently has over 3000 lbs worth of batteries. The Chevy Spark’s batteries weigh only about 470lbs, but it also has a sub-100 mile range.

            Replacing the batteries on these vehicles is much closer to replacing a transmission than to refueling a gas/diesel car. Even if these vehicles were designed for easier battery replacement, you would be looking at moving at least a literal ton of material each time. And of course, different vehicles use different types of batteries.

          • gbdub says:

            Presumably in a “battery swap” world, you would never own your batteries, just rent them from the nearest battery station. Maybe you’d have to have some sort of deposit on hand, or your insurance would cover it. But either way, you wouldn’t care if you got an old battery at this fill up because you’re only going to use it for one charge.

            Maybe you’d pay extra for a “premium” battery with a higher capacity, where “premium” just means a lower cycle count?

          • Randy M says:

            Well, that answers that except for golf cart size cars that aren’t going cross country anyway.
            I should have known it would be >> than a standard car battery, though 1000 lbs still seems very heavy.

          • John Schilling says:

            But either way, you wouldn’t care if you got an old battery at this fill up because you’re only going to use it for one charge.

            Which may be more absolutely true than you were expecting. You spend $60,000 on a new Tesla, drive it two hundred miles, and swap out the battery pack. The next day you drive another two hundred miles, pull into the service station, and the computer goes “Ding!” and says that the battery pack you got from the last station is expired, it no longer meets spec and cannot be safely recharged for one more cycle. So now you’ve got a car that you payed $60,000 for only two days ago, that has no propulsion system. And you’ve got five hundred pounds of hazardous waste, that the service station will not accept in trade for a shiny new battery. And you’re looking at a $20,000 bill for a replacement battery.

            “Oh, my insurance will pay for it”, or “…the battery-leasing company” or whatnot, might be plausible if those are vertically-integrated monopolies run by the same people who sell the cars and run the service stations, but that puts you at a lot of risk when you buy into such a closed ecosystem. Trying to establish such a solution ex nihilo, across a competitive market on a national scale, represents a huge coordination problem that probably isn’t going to coordinate itself any time soon.

          • Evelyn Q. Greene says:

            just expect people to utterly stop caring their car spends the entire night charging, because that is not an actual, practical problem.

            I really wonder how anyone can think this. On a long trip, a less than ten minute stop vs. a 8 hours of charging (and hotel room) is massive inconvenience.

          • Thomas Jorgensen says:

            And as I expected, nobody persuaded.
            Predictions: Electric cars will “standardize” their battery sizes at the upper end of a plausible daily commute + 30%. 300 km range (this is 3 hours of driving at highway speed. If your commute is longer than this, MOVE). thereabouts, with the goal being that as long as you plug it in every day, you will never, in daily use see battery go below 30%. And people will plug it in every day.

            On top of this, the long distance artery highways will get super charger stations with fast food and other minor commerce attached. These will be mostly empty, except for holidays, where they will be straining at the seams because people will prefer to charge at home, because they do not have to drive out of their way or sit twiddling their thumbs to do that. The holiday related thumb twiddling will just be tolerated, much like people put up with the kids going “are we there yet” from the back seat to visit ski resorts. – it is twice a year, and thus just not important enough to outweigh the upsides.

            Cars with longer ranges will also be sold, but the target customer for that amount of More Battery, MORE will be customers who drive for a living, or those who routinely exceed the speed limit. Prices will reflect that.

          • CatCube says:

            I’m also curious what happens when plans change or something fails. This is easy to deal with if filling or charging only takes 10 or 20 minutes, but if it takes many hours that seems very inflexible.

            If I can fill up in 10 minutes, if I decide I want to go a few hundred miles more based on how I’m feeling, I can do that. If I’m near the end of the battery, nope, gotta stop right now. Hopefully you made it to wherever your reservations were.

            Or, what happens if you discover the charge failed overnight (e.g., a power failure)? You get up, eat breakfast, and head out to your car to find that it doesn’t have a full charge. If the gas station you’re at is out of gas, or you can’t fill because there’s no electricity, you can drive to another one and it’ll only take 10 minutes. If it’s a charger, you either can only get a little ways down the road before having to stop again, or spend another night where you are to get a full charge.

            This is one of those things where it won’t go wrong often, but when it goes wrong it’s going to *reeeealy* go wrong.

          • CatCube says:

            @Thomas Jorgensen

            You posted while I was writing, so sorry for the 2x post, but what?! A 185 mile range is what you think everybody will need?!

            Two weeks ago I had to go out for an inspection, and put 220 miles on my car in two days back to back. If I have to stop for hours every 185 miles, I’m never going to get an electric vehicle. I don’t need this range *often* but when I need it, I really need it. There’s pretty significant option value to not being shackled to a piddly little battery range.

          • Evelyn Q. Greene says:

            Do you really only drive more that 300km (round trip) twice a year?

          • baconbits9 says:

            Electric cars will “standardize” their battery sizes at the upper end of a plausible daily commute + 30%

            If they do this they will never occupy more than a niche (barring aggressive government subsidization) in the car market.

          • Garrett says:

            @CatCube:

            > If I can fill up in 10 minutes, if I decide I want to go a few hundred miles more based on how I’m feeling, I can do that.

            Tesla’s superchargers can get something like 80% charge in 30 minutes. It’s certainly not as good as pumping in a few gallons of dino-juice. But I suspect that it’s mostly good enough. For people doing the occasional road trip it’s easy enough to schedule a breakfast/lunch/dinner break around such a charging.

            The bigger issue is that Tesla’s chargers are proprietary and the rest of the auto makers seem to be actively resisting the concept of making electric vehicles easy to own. Even Chevy (I have a Chevy Volt) which put effort into having a lot of its dealers have charging stations didn’t ensure that they were available 24/7 or even *outside*. It’s annoying to have to hand your vehicle over to someone to bring into a service bay to charge if so interested. It’s like getting gas in New Jersey with extra steps.

          • baconbits9 says:

            Tesla’s superchargers can get something like 80% charge in 30 minutes. It’s certainly not as good as pumping in a few gallons of dino-juice. But I suspect that it’s mostly good enough. For people doing the occasional road trip it’s easy enough to schedule a breakfast/lunch/dinner break around such a charging.

            Only as long as Tesla is a niche market, if it (and other electric cars) ever become a significant chunk of the cars on the road then the half hour charging time becomes a serious bottle-neck because that half hour is based on there being a completely open charger when you arrive. If you arrive to find a full charging station, which is not that uncommon with gas stations, your wait is now at least half an hour and for a busy traveling weekend (4th of July etc) it could easily be 3-4 cars ahead of you or a 2-3 hour wait.

            This is a dramatic underselling of the problem because the number of cars ahead of you at any station is going to (partly) be a function of the filling time. You can refill a car in 5 mins or less once you are at the pump without even rushing, but with a half hour charge time you need 6x as many chargers as pumps just to maintain that same number of cars ahead of you when you pull in, and to get it down to a half hour charge for everyone you need ~18x as many chargers as pumps.

            Long story short: the back of the envelope math says that if you pull into a highway gas station that currently has 8 pumps now for them to service half gas cars and half electric they would free up 4 pumps worth of space but need 72 charging stations maintain half hour charging times at peak loads.

          • Matt M says:

            If you arrive to find a full charging station, which is not that uncommon with gas stations

            Is it? The only time in my life I remember having to wait in line for gasoline was at the on-base gas station in the military, and then only during the morning/evening commuting hours, and only because it was significantly cheaper than “off-base” gas (presumably because it was exempted from CA state tax or something).

            But yes, the point remains. I was new car shopping a few years ago when I lived in an urban apartment complex, which provided itself on being hip and trendy. They had two charging-station specific parking spots installed in their garage. Of course, at least two people in the complex already owned Teslas. So the odds of me getting one of those spots were questionable, which made me pretty quickly rule out a Tesla as a likely purchase.

          • Paul Zrimsek says:

            Add to which: the amount of time you have to wait for a charger to come open won’t depend just on how long it takes the current* occupant to finish charging, but on how long it takes them to finish lunch and come back out to see whether they’ve finished charging.

            *Har de har har

          • JayT says:

            The thing is, Supercharger stations aren’t like gas stations where you go to a specific place just to fill up. You don’t need a huge amount of space or capital to build a supercharger, they can be added to pretty much any parking lot for not a huge cost. So, as electric cars become more popular, so will charging stations.

          • ana53294 says:

            Add to which: the amount of time you have to wait for a charger to come open won’t depend just on how long it takes the current* occupant to finish charging,

            AFAIU, Tesla chargers inform your smartphone that your car is charged, and charge you for every minute your car is in the charging spot.

            So people may leisurely eat, but they’ll have to pay for that.

          • baconbits9 says:

            You don’t need a huge amount of space or capital to build a supercharger, they can be added to pretty much any parking lot for not a huge cost. So, as electric cars become more popular, so will charging stations.

            I don’t know what the current numbers are but years ago the super-charging stations cost Tesla ~$150,000 each to install*, for ~4-5 cars each. That is a lot cheaper than a new gas station but an 8 pump station can fill 40x as many cars as a 4 spot supercharger.

            Trickle chargers are cheap and you can put them almost anywhere, but those aren’t super chargers, and unless costs have come down by a factor of 10 they certainly aren’t going to be everywhere.

            *That was with no value assigned to the space they took up, on average something like 400 sq ft for everything.

          • JayT says:

            I would guess that an 8 pump gas station would cost way more than $1.5 million though, so if you get four charging stations for $150K, it’s still cheaper, even if you need to put in ten, heck 20, of them.

          • baconbits9 says:

            I would guess that an 8 pump gas station would cost way more than $1.5 million though, so if you get four charging stations for $150K, it’s still cheaper, even if you need to put in ten, heck 20, of them.

            We already have the gas station infrastructure though, you only need to maintain it plus add a small percentage of the total here and there and not build an equivalent of half the infrastructure all over.

            And the ratio is 40x, not 10x and you need a ton more space which gets very expensive in dense areas.

          • Thomas Jorgensen says:

            You do not need super chargers in dense areas, though. Ever.

            As I have been saying, for day to day – and thus, within-city, driving, people will charge at home. Slowly. Super chargers are only really relevant for long distance highways… which means you can build those stations on the cheapest stretches of dirt you can find along said highways.

          • David W says:

            Fortunately, gas stations are feasible for an individual to build as a small business owner, so information is pretty googleable. It looks like the gasoline tank/pumps/etc themselves are in the range of $500K, not counting land or convenience store. Presumably these parts would be the same or more for a charging station.

          • AG says:

            How much are electric cars utilizing supplementary power generation methods? I remember seeing ads for a hybrid that would recharge batters from braking, and some amount of converting flywheel energy.

            Plus, if wireless charging infrastructure becomes viable, then urban driving could be reducing the rate of power drain constantly (use a transponder to charge vehicle owners for the service).

          • Paul Zrimsek says:

            AFAIU, Tesla chargers inform your smartphone that your car is charged, and charge you for every minute your car is in the charging spot.

            Good system then. If everyone’s quick-chargers standardize on that it will help matters.

            And the ratio is 40x, not 10x and you need a ton more space which gets very expensive in dense areas.

            I expect that nearly all of the gas that’s sold in dense areas today is burned in commuting or short trips around town. In an EV world that will be replaced by overnight charging from home and curbside trickle chargers. Fast charging is mainly for people who are far from home, and little of it should need to be located in the city.

          • JayT says:

            We already have the gas station infrastructure though, you only need to maintain it plus add a small percentage of the total here and there and not build an equivalent of half the infrastructure all over.

            We didn’t always have that infrastructure though, as demand for it increased, the number of fueling stations increased. As the demand for electric cars increase, the number of chargers available will increase.

            And the ratio is 40x, not 10x and you need a ton more space which gets very expensive in dense areas.

            I think your numbers are off. According to this the average time spent at a gas station and its convenience store is 7 minutes 40 seconds. So even if a Supercharger is only charging one car an hour it’s only an 8X difference. Building one supercharger is a lot cheaper than one gas pump, especially since, as I mentioned, you don’t need to actually make any space for it or even own the land it’s on. Restaurants and stores want to have them.

            Fortunately, gas stations are feasible for an individual to build as a small business owner, so information is pretty googleable. It looks like the gasoline tank/pumps/etc themselves are in the range of $500K, not counting land or convenience store. Presumably these parts would be the same or more for a charging station.

            Your link says that building the store costs $500K, but the entire station would be ~$2.5 million. Tesla could put in about 16,000 supercharger (that each can service more than one car) stations for that.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            A quick google says the Tesla has a 100KWh battery. To deliver 80% of that in 30 minutes means pushing 80KWh / 0.5h, or 160Kilowatts for 30 minutes. A house typically averages a bit over 1KW, so you either need a very substantial pipe from the energy company or a lot of local storage.

            . . . Do superchargers have local storage? I can’t find this out.

          • CatCube says:

            @Edward Scizorhands

            I’ve usually seen the things on commercial property, where they probably have a pretty substantial service, and 480V 3-phase to most parts of the property.

            I mean, assuming your 160 kW is correct, that’s still a pretty substantial 300 or so amperes (and IIRC, 100 per phase), but that’s not horrendously far off of the conductors feeding a house, so I could easily believe it’s practical to run it without any sort of local storage if you’re already running 3-phase power.

          • baconbits9 says:

            As I have been saying, for day to day – and thus, within-city, driving, people will charge at home

            Ah yes, and where are these chargers going? Only the wealthy end of dense living people have covered parking, with most people parking in streets. This pretty much eliminates at home charging for several weeks a year during heavy snow years even if you got the city to pay to put in all those chargers, oh and stuff right on the side of the road often gets damaged by snow plows which puts them right out in cities like Boston, Buffalo, Minneapolis etc. This plan also eliminates a bunch of other segments of the population, couples who work different shifts and share a car, people who want to make a long trip after multiple short ones (say a weekend trip with your family where the husband runs some errands while the wife packs up the kids and the husband swings home before they all head out, or one spouse dropping the other at work, running errands all day and then picking them back up).

            These issues would largely be moot if electric cars were generally cheap- lots of people have a nicer family car and a commuter car. If Electric cars were cheap* and had low range then as a commuter car they would probably fare quite well, but with minimum starting prices in the neighborhood of 2X that of a new Hyndai Accent or a Ford Fiesta, and 5x that of a solid used Civic.

            *The Spark appears to be the attempt here and it just didn’t capture market share.

          • Garrett says:

            @baconbits9:

            You don’t need covered parking for charging. All of the plug styles in common use are designed and rated for use in inclement weather. About the worst I can say is that freezing rain overnight makes *unplugging* a bit more of a challenge.

            Parking adjacent to your house (eg. you have a driveway) makes it pretty trivial to install a 50A (12kW) charger which will handle almost any overnight charging needs.

            FWIW, I charge my Volt, parked on the street, using a 110V outlet and a heavy-duty extension cord. I cover where it crosses the sidewalk with a heavy-duty ADA-compliant cord cover. It would not be enough for a pure electric vehicle, but it’s pretty close.

            Also, getting 110 outlets to every parking space in a parking lot isn’t that unreasonable. They were standard pretty much everywhere I grew up in Canada, because you needed an engine block heater to ensure your car would start in the 40-below weather. Adding them retroactively is a pain, but not unmanageable or unreasonable.

          • baconbits9 says:

            You don’t need covered parking for charging. All of the plug styles in common use are designed and rated for use in inclement weather. About the worst I can say is that freezing rain overnight makes *unplugging* a bit more of a challenge.

            Its not the ‘inclement weather’ its that many places when they plow the streets you get a 2-10ft embankment of snow because there is no other* place to put it. This embankment is going to prevent actually using the on the street chargers for days to weeks at a time.

            *reasonably priced. Some places do large scale dumping into rivers etc, but this doesn’t particularly help things as the snow is plowed first and then scooped from the edges.

    • broblawsky says:

      Vegetarian or partially vegetarian diets will be much more popular.

    • Uribe says:

      My prediction, by extrapolating current trends and with the logic that cultural change happens through cohort replacement, is that popular support for freedom of speech will collapse, hate speech laws will be enacted, and the Supreme Court will somehow decide that they don’t violate the First Amendment. Nearly everyone will see this as a great victory for Freedom.

      • Tatterdemalion says:

        Disagree with you about the SCOTUS part.

        My counterprediction is that popular support for anti-hate-speech laws in the US will continue to grow, but that the supreme court will continue to forbid them; however, anti-hate-speech codes will become ubiquitous on mainstream platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

        • Uribe says:

          Your prediction is much more likely to come true. But among “fringe political ideas most likely to go mainstream in 20 years”, this is the horse I would bet on, assuming I can’t just bet on the null hypothesis. For one thing, a number of Western democracies already have hate speech laws on the books, making this an everpresent idea to be copied. Of course, it would require the composition of the SCOTUS to go a certain way.

    • Bobobob says:

      Complete decriminalization (with accompanying state regulation) of *all* drug use.

    • Jacobethan says:

      So get your predictions in here, in 20 more years what “fringe” idea with under 30% support will be widely popular?

      My first thought is, probably a lot of stuff. These are strange times, and things seem to be moving fast.

      I’d say the general area to bet on would be things that somehow piggyback on changes to daily life that happen as a result of whatever long-term disease-control strategy we end up settling on.

      I could see K-12 education becoming more of a flashpoint over the next decade — not just the debates over failing schools that we already have, but much more fundamental questions about where, how, and by whom kids get taught. We’ve just had this massive enforced experiment in universal quasi-homeschooling, and it’s anybody’s guess how that might shift people’s perceptions about the value traditional schools are or aren’t providing. At the same time the in-school experience seems likely to only get weirder once the kids go back — there’s already a substantial constituency among ed folks for ideas that seem logically to point in the direction of e.g. abolishing grades. I suspect you’ll see a wider range of people looking to exit the system in various ways, and a lot of political controversy over the implications of that. I could easily imagine “ban homeschooling” or “everybody should be homeschooled,” or both, becoming much more popular positions than they are today.

      • WayUpstate says:

        Agree that education is overdue for a ‘revolution’ of sorts. The schools have taken on occupying children for 9 months of the year from 9 – 5 with the encouragement of parents and the backlash is coming. I expect we’ll see a focus on acquiring knowledge important to being a functioning member of society: Revolutionary stuff like reading (critically), writing complete sentences without MS Word helping you along, math through basic calculus, history of human civilizations, etc. We’ll drop everything else unless parents want to pay out of pocket for it.

        • cassander says:

          this is, in a word, delusional. Education is run by the state, is ossified by a million separate constituencies, and has been pretty much unchanged for almost 100 years. The idea that such a massive and powerful set of bureaucracies would endorse not just a revolutionary change, but one that reduces their power and importance? Well if you believe that, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you.

          • SamChevre says:

            Education has changed a LOT in the last hundred years–school consolidation hugely increased elite power in schools relative to that of the people, as did the anti-democracy movement of the fifties and sixties.

          • cassander says:

            The system has been massively expanded, and power over it has been centralized at the state level, but the experience for the users has remained remarkably consistent for a long time now. If not for 100 years, at least since ww2. You could drop a 1940s high schooler into a highschool today and he’d know what was going on.

      • cassander says:

        I could easily imagine “ban homeschooling” or “everybody should be homeschooled,”

        based on the experience of every parent I know after 3 months of lockdown, the latter will not happen in 1000 years.

    • Iago the Yerfdog says:

      Three possibilities that come to mind:

      1. Legalization of cocaine for recreational use, or at least expanded medical use. I might actually put money on this one.

      2. Legalization of public nudity. Very low chance: has some of the same dynamics as same-sex marriage but strikes me as unlikely to provide enough value to the side championing it.

      3. Consensus against going to college unless necessary to get licensed in your profession. Between student loans, negative-value degrees, and campus culture wars, I’m surprised this isn’t a popular position on the Right already.

    • viVI_IViv says:

      Western culture and politics will become much more like China: much more authoritarian and bureocratic. Due process, free speech and democratic elections will remain on the books but will become de facto irrelevant.

    • Uribe says:

      Another good candidate would be legal polygamy.

    • Skeptic says:

      Interesting question. I’ll go with:

      A) (pseudo) anonymity on the internet will be at minimum a reason to be unpersoned/fired/blacklisted and more likely illegal. This will be wildly popular

      B) There will be strict laws against speaking heresy. Truth will not be considered a valid defense

      C) We will consider it scandalous that any objective metric/test would be used for admissions to college/grad school or for a professional certification

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        B) There will be strict laws against speaking heresy. Truth will not be considered a valid defense

        Oof. Anyone remember when the Catholic Church’s stated position was that error has no right to freedom of speech?

        • HarmlessFrog says:

          Was that position ever formally repealed?

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            I want to say yes, at Vatican II, more specifically Nostra aetate.
            Alas, I can’t do so right now with intellectual due diligence, because V2 documents are infamous in intra-Catholic arguments for being inscrutable. So with that caveat, my impression is that Vatican II restated the Church’s position toward public error to be compatible with liberalism (= libertarianism, this being the Year of Our Lord 1965), to the extent of dictatorships where Catholicism was the state religion getting a cold shoulder that undermined them.

    • eric23 says:

      Legal and social acceptance of euthanasia for old people with chronic diseases, and possibly also for children with severe disabilities.

    • keaswaran says:

      I looked up the numbers at one point recently and discovered that support for interracial marriage, same-sex marriage, and marijuana legalization all spent a decade or two climbing at 1-1.5% per year. For interracial marriage, it begin in the mid-80s, and it was about 1996 before more Americans approved of my parents’ marriage than disapproved. For gay marriage it began in the mid-90s, and I think marijuana began around that time too (but from a lower starting point, after having fallen moderately during the ’80s). I had somehow convinced myself that the change in support was faster than that, but it turns out that a steady 1-1.5% per year, sustained over a couple decades, really is gigantic.

  5. TimG says:

    I grew up in a blue collar, UAW household in the midwest. I now live and work as a professional in a big city on the East Coast. I’m not ant-union in theory. But I find myself having a lot of dislike for unions — at least how they exist in the US.

    The leftist zeitgeist (am I using that word correctly?) is to be pro-union. But it seems like the police unions are the biggest impediment to the reform protestors are clamoring for.

    How is this going to play out?

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      As might be expected, people are arguing. There are Marxists (possibly an inadequate term) who believe police are oppressors(?) and shouldn’t have unions. I’m not expecting this to get much traction.

      I hope this is short of trolling, but I’ll say “evil union” to a leftist. They say “What?”, and I point out the California prison guard union, which lobbies for longer sentences. This is followed by slinence.

      • Eric T says:

        I mean, presumably I’m allowed to be pro-union generally without supporting every single union? I’m also generally anti-killing, but I’d choke out Henry Kissinger if I could get away with it.

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:

          Eric T, you are certainly free to distinguish between unions, but I see people who make a moral issue of never crossing picket lines.

          • AlphaGamma says:

            I’m wondering how often a normal person would be in the situation to cross a police picket line…

        • Garrett says:

          > without supporting every single union

          It seems reasonable to me to point out that a particular instance (or enumerated instance) of a class is problematic. Eg. Unions are usually good but this *particular* union has problems with corruption, or whatever.

          But how do you go from generally supporting unions to excluding a *category* of unions? What provides a hard cut-of which allows a general category of workers to not be allowed to unionize while at the same time supporting them more broadly.

          • cassander says:

            It’s reasonable, yes, but if you try there’s a very good chance the other unions will say “No, we’d rather you didn’t do that.”

      • Guy in TN says:

        @Nancy Lebovitz
        I mean, this “gotcha” works both ways, right.
        “Oh, you’re anti-union? So what about the pro-democracy Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions that is fighting communist China?”

        A “union” is just a social structure that centralizes and amplifies a group’s power. The “goodness” or “badness” of a union is largely dependent on whose power it is centralizing.

        • Erusian says:

          You realize that the HKCTU is in opposition to the publicly supported unions, the ones that have laws favoring them like US unions? The ones that are the vast majority of unionized workers are in? That those unions are pro-government?

          If you want to say, “voluntary unions with no government support or laws requiring membership who deal in non-governmental sectors are good, unions that get too close to government or have laws favoring them become tools of government control” then you’re basically agreeing with the Republican position.

          • Guy in TN says:

            If you want to say, “voluntary unions with no government support or laws requiring membership who deal in non-governmental sectors are good, unions that get too close to government or have laws favoring them become tools of government control” then you’re basically agreeing with the Republican position.

            And most Republicans shorten this to “anti-union”, and we all know what they mean. If you are nuanced enough of course, the “gotcha” doesn’t work anymore.

            Likewise, Leftists who say they are “pro-union” are actually saying “unions that work to transfer power to workers who are fighting for the interests of the working class are good, unions that work to transfer power to workers who are traitors to the working class (such as the police) are bad”, but we usually shorten this to “pro-union”.

          • Erusian says:

            And most Republicans shorten this to “anti-union”

            Err. No, they don’t. I’m not aware of any significant Republican who wants to outlaw unions. “Right to work”, their main union position, forbids union shops, not unions and they explicitly say this makes them not anti-union.

            Likewise, Leftists who say they are “pro-union” are actually saying “unions that work to transfer power to workers who are fighting for the interests of the working class are good, unions that work to transfer power to workers who are traitors to the working class (such as the police) are bad”, but we usually shorten this to “pro-union”.

            Some do, this boils down to unions that support the “right” positions. As has been extensively critiqued from the left, this is a way to exert control over the working class by legitimizing their movements only when they agree with bourgeois liberalism.

          • Guy in TN says:

            Some do, this boils down to unions that support the “right” positions.

            Correct, just like Republicans support HKCTU because of its “right” positions (the ones you stated above).

          • Erusian says:

            Correct, just like Republicans support HKCTU because of its “right” positions (the ones you stated above).

            It’s a fair and consistent philosophy, if a little more nihilistic than I’m used to hearing.

    • Trofim_Lysenko says:

      “Police Unions are a uniquely bad exception.”

      I’ve had strictly limited success convincing people that the same public interest argument applies to public sector unions.

      • John Schilling says:

        “Police Unions are a uniquely bad exception.”

        What about teachers’ unions, when it’s the month that we’re all convinced our crappy public education system is the biggest impediment to racial equality? And, as you note, this can extend to the civil service unions generally.

        The prospect of delegitimizing teachers’ unions may not be on your radar, but it is always on the teachers’ radar and they’re going to be paying attention to the police as a bellwether and precedent. Now you’re going to have to put together, in a highly polarized nation, a reform coalition that includes the party that’s all in to #BLM, but without any of the civil-service unions and all their supporters and sympathizers. And you’ve already lost a good chunk of the white working class. Good luck getting the numbers to add up.

        • TimG says:

          What about teachers’ unions, when it’s the month that we’re all convinced our crappy public education system is the biggest impediment to racial equality?

          I wonder if, ironically, gutting both the teacher’s union and the police union would be the best thing for the black community.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            They’re both there to make sure that their members get as much as possible out of any reform meant to help the target demographic, so, sure.

            I’m happy doing the cleaving at “private-sector unions acceptable, public-sector unions unacceptable.”

          • Garrett says:

            > I’m happy doing the cleaving at “private-sector unions acceptable, public-sector unions unacceptable.”

            I would love to see that.

          • BlackboardBinaryBook says:

            I’m happy doing the cleaving at “private-sector unions acceptable, public-sector unions unacceptable.”

            I know a lot of self-identified lefty people who (sometimes uncomfortably or reluctantly) hold a similar view, and also am one.

          • cassander says:

            @BlackboardBinaryBook says:

            I know a lot of self-identified lefty people who (sometimes uncomfortably or reluctantly) hold a similar view, and also am one.

            None that work for the democratic party, it seems.

        • m.alex.matt says:

          It’s certainly going to be interesting to see. The teacher’s unions are the Democratic base in a lot of areas.

      • Trofim_Lysenko says:

        To be clear, my quoted sentence is what I think the justification will be for most of the people agitating against police unions to exclude other public sector unions from their rhetoric. I expect an explicit rhetorical fence that of course teacher’s unions are 100% fine and cause no issues at all, ditto AFSCME, and we can focus on police unions confident that they are a totally unique exception to the general unalloyed good effects of unionization. I’d have to go back to be sure, but my personal experience is that arguing against teacher’s unions gets you labeled “right wing/libertarian crank” and dismissed in most liberal and progressive circles when it comes to education reform.

        Are you thinking that the Teacher’s Unions would actually come out in solidarity with Police Unions on this one?

        • Plumber says:

          @Trofim_Lysenko says:

          “…Are you thinking that the Teacher’s Unions would actually come out in solidarity with Police Unions on this one?”

          I’m not @John Schilling but for what it’s worth in my experience public school teachers are very “social justice”/left-ish/pro BLM leaning, while cops are mostly Republicans (some years back the Republican candidate for Governor of California campaigned on a “reduce public employees pensions” platform except for police and fire fighters, where most of the costs actually are, as “they have dangerous jobs” which ticked me off because the most dangerous civilian public employee job is actually garbage collection), so while there’s usually inter-union solidarity I may imagine a cleavage between the two.

          • Garrett says:

            > civilian public employee job is actually garbage collection

            And public sanitation in-general has done more to expand human lifespan and healthspan than just about every other intervention we’ve developed.

            Thanks, Plumber!

          • Plumber says:

            @Garrett,
            You’re very welcome, and thanks to you!

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I was reading about how police unions make it hard to fire brutal police around the same time I was reading the stuff on US vs. Japanese automakers which argued auto unions made it hard to fire incompetent autoworkers, and that was one reason US cars broke so much more often than Japanese ones (although it was a lot more complicated, and Japan avoided unions by having their bosses start off more sympathetic to workers’ concerns, and giving them a lot of what they wanted without them having to unionize).

      I wonder if it’s possible to have unions that fight for higher wages but don’t make rules about who you can and can’t fire. I think the worry is that bosses would then fire their highest-paid workers and replace them with entry-level workers. But presumably this is stupid of them if their highest-paid workers are actually better performers? IDK.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        (although it was a lot more complicated, and Japan avoided unions by having their bosses start off more sympathetic to workers’ concerns, and giving them a lot of what they wanted without them having to unionize).

        Japan was a very homogeneous nation-state that had recently been bombed back to the Iron Age when its automobile firms became big, so this sense of “we’re all in it together; no need for working-class vs. management” isn’t surprising.
        It’s also rather famous that this “we’re all in it together (so work yourself to the bone)” belief had negative social consequences. However, analysis of that usually focuses on salarymen and the sexist way women were employed rather than blue-collar industries, so as far as I know the Japanese auto industry was and is unalloyed good.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        I think the worry is that bosses would then fire their highest-paid workers and replace them with entry-level workers

        When unions fight for wages they aren’t allocating higher wages to better workers or just lifting everyone’s fair market wages by an equal amount. Every single union, while allowing for some variation, has been built on “more wages to more senior people,” and not coincidentally the senior people control the union.

        So this often sets up the exact situation where “fire expensive worker to replace with cheap worker” is in the employer’s interest. A veteran may be paid 2x a newbie, not because they are 2x as good, but because that’s the way the union negotiated.

        Growing up in a Midwest state, I heard “the boss wants to fire the expensive people and replace them with cheaper new workers” constantly. Often with teachers.

      • Erusian says:

        Japan avoided unions by having their bosses start off more sympathetic to workers’ concerns, and giving them a lot of what they wanted without them having to unionize).

        That’s an… interesting theory about why the trade union movement had so little strength in Japan. I’d personally posit it had more to do with a series of anti-union governments that encouraged corporate paternalism. Like, even during the Taisho democracy right to strike laws were not getting passed.

        You can chalk it up to culture… or you can chalk it up to the fact that Japan never had a law protecting trade unions until the US imposed it and even then it was weak.

        • viVI_IViv says:

          I think that Japan is and always was extremely right-wing compared to any Western country.
          There was never any socialist or communist party worth of notice in Japan, and worker rights protests have been small and disorganized.

          • Erusian says:

            I’d argue the significant persecution of outside political ideologies prevented the growth of socialism in Japan in the same periods it grew elsewhere (late 19th/early 20th century). Further, for a long time under Japan’s postwar democracy the socialists were the second biggest party in Japan. So I’m not sure just ascribing the Japanese some inherent conservative characteristic works.

          • viVI_IViv says:

            Japan’s political system is considered a dominant-party system: there are multiple political parties which participate in elections, but the the same party always wins.

            In Japan the right-wing Liberal Democratic Party almost continuously held the government since 1955 to the present day with only two brief exceptions: in the 1993 election after a major scandal the LDP failed to reach a majority while still achieving a plurality. A left-wing coallition established a government, but in less than one year the Japanese Socialist Party switched sides and formed a government with the LDP with a socialist PM, who resigned in 1996 resulting in a snap election which the LDP won. The JSP subsequently changed its name to Social Democratic Party. In the 2009 election the LDP lost to the Democratic Party of Japan (a center-left party different than the SDP). The DPJ cycled three PMs in three years before dissolving the parliament and calling for a snap election in 2012, which restored the LDP to power.

            So yes, Japan doesn’t have any left-wing party that can present a credible alternative to the right. On the rare occasions when the left finds itself to have won an election because the LDP fucked up it immediately collapses and hands the government back to the LDP.

      • original-internet-explorer says:

        Toyota has a different theory of knowledge in mass production to the Americans and that changes how they treat their workers.

        https://www.fastcompany.com/40461624/how-toyota-is-putting-humans-first-in-an-era-of-increasing-automation

        tldr; The robots are not coming.

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:

          Thank you for the link. I hope more people will read it.

          The suggestion is that sufficiently good management makes use of employee intelligence (which is more widely distributed than most people seem to think) to improve production rather than trying to replace people with machines.

          To what extent are other Japanese companies like Toyota?

          • original-internet-explorer says:

            Yes the degree to which humans have the advantage over machines is not widely appreciated. I expect but can’t confirm a similar belief guides some other Japanese firms – and Westerners have written it off as nice-thinking because our philosophy differs. There is a deep appreciation of tacit knowledge in Japanese culture and as I see it the West – or at least the Anglosphere has become detached with information processing and written off the working class as a relic. If you have watched Metropolis you know this not a new theme – Head – Hands – Heart.

            Hans Moravec wrote part of his book Mind Children about why that may be so but I believe it’s overlooked and incredibly the standard textbook by Norvig and Russell I looked at leaves out the topic. The robotics engineers know all about it of course but their voice is drowned out and the commentariat does not visit Rodney Brook’s blog.

            I would hazard the production numbers for Toyota show them beating each competitor but VW into the dust because of this competitive advantage. The Japanese seem to have lots of books on the topic but I suppose it’s a lot like Ningen Dock – Westerners have never heard of a practice ubiquitous somewhere else.

      • LesHapablap says:

        I’m a pilot and part of a the Airline Pilots Association, not for protection from my employer but for the protection from legal action by CAA. ALPA will try very hard to prevent pilots from being fired though, even incompetent ones. I know of one pilot that has crashed more than one airplane that really should not be flying who was protected by ALPA.

        In ALPA’s case, it would really not make sense for them to be trying to weed out the crappy pilots. It would be like you paying a retainer to a lawyer, and then when you run into legal trouble the lawyer deciding that you were actually guilty and so not representing you.

      • NostalgiaForInfinity says:

        I think I’ve seen this suggested as a way to reform police unions – allow them to collectively bargain on wages and benefits but strip them of any right to participate in anything to do with conduct or disciplinary matters.

    • Guy in TN says:

      @TimG

      It’s not too difficult of a conceptual needle to thread, that we should give money/power to good organizations, but not give money/power to bad organizations. We intuitively understand this in many other aspects of policy, and there is no intellectual “tension”. If you can convince people that the Police in the United States are fundamentally a bad group of organizations, the anti-union exception easily makes itself.

      As for how this plays: Less relevant than you might think, as the police unions seem to be a minor focus of the protests.

      • TimG says:

        It’s not too difficult of a conceptual needle to thread, that we should give money/power to good organizations, but not give money/power to bad organizations.

        So you believe the those on the left will be able to have vocal opposition to police unions?

        My thought was that they’d ignore the union issue as much as possible and just focus on reforms or “defunding.” I guess we’ll see.

        • Guy in TN says:

          So you believe the those on the left will be able to have vocal opposition to police unions?

          I think that they will be able to have that position to the extent that the question is even brought up, but I don’t think the power of police unions are going to play a major role in the protests, or whatever reforms are proposed from the protests.

          The union issue just isn’t important enough to paint it on the roads. Not because of any inherent ideological tension, it’s just too niche.

    • Etoile says:

      I think that there’s a general aversion in society to actually say things as they are. That the unions engage in feather-bedding and are anti-meritocratic at times, and gum up the works and make things expensive and inefficient, is true. The question is “how much”, and “is it a worthwhile social cost for the benefits they confer”, and how do we make INCREMENTAL trade-offs instead of all or nothing.

      You kind of have to acknowledge it and decide, or be willing to revise how unions are conceived (e.g. take away the federal protections? Or rewrite them for a post-industrial economy? Revise how public unions function? I don’t know). I’m mixed; I think that employees should be able to form unions of their own accord, and sneaky ways against this by management is bad; I also think that external organizers coming and cajoling employees into union membership, or trying to sway union votes, is also bad. So I don’t know.

    • AG says:

      The last thread already explained why the police union is different, the same reason that the military should not be able to unionize: the people are not allowed an alternative police force, and police/soldiers are uniquely charged with dealing violence. These are conditions that don’t apply to normal labor unions.

  6. Plumber says:

    Its been noted before that the U.S.A.’s birthrate declined after 2007, but unlike previous recession induced drops in births there was no increase after economic recovery.
    Turns out higher rents means fewer babies, and birthrates are falling the fastest where housing prices are rising the most, though with the drop in births among younger women there’s an increase in births among 30+ year-old women (who are more likely to be homeowners), but not enough to offset the lower births among those younger.

    Also other nations governmental “cash for babies” may work, but it takes a lot of cash to work, likely prohibitively too expensive to be implemented in the U.S.A., and I’m reminded of a link provided by @DinoNerd some weeks ago of a “baby boomlet” at a Washington State “Tech” company where the owner substantially (by a lot!) reduced his own pay and raised minimum employee pay.

    • Your second paragraph seems to miss the difference between the effect of cash for babies and the effect of higher incomes. If the government subsidizes having children it is doing it with money taken from someone else, so not raising average incomes. If the government had a way of making everyone better off there would be plenty of reasons to do so aside from the effect on the birth rate.

      One of the costs of having children is that they take up space, so higher rents make children more expensive, so one would expect some negative effect on birth rates.

    • Etoile says:

      EDIT: deleted a huge chunk of my post accidentally; editing to fix it.
      ______

      That’s a compelling story, but I don’t think it’s the dominant effect or the most accurate. High rents are also in the cities which draw the people who want careers and not kids. The people not having kids include the very well-off silicon-valley and finance job holders.

      I personally think that the real dampers are mentality (“waiting until you’re ready”) and student loan debt, NOT the rents. I think if you emerge from college debt-free, or with something you can pay off making $100 payments for five years, you can manage.

      But also, a lot of it is the desire to be Perfectly Prepared and be Ready; if I had waited until everyone finished grad school, then saved $$, then buy a house, then saved more $$, and then start trying — well I’d probably be 40 before having kids.

      Also, something like 40% of all births are paid by Medicaid — suggesting that there’s a lot of babies being born to low-income families; and Medicaid beneficiaries are quite concentrated in the big cities with the high rents.

      • Milo Minderbinder says:

        Isn’t removing the “waiting until you are ready” mentality a coordination problem though? To the extent declining birthrates are a problem, sensible people will want the situation reversed. But since any individual birth has a negligible effect on the overall birthrate, someone contemplating having a child would still want to be maximally prepared.

    • Lord Nelson says:

      I agree that rent is one factor contributing to this.

      Other factors include the lack of full time employment and possibly the Medicaid gap, depending on where you live. I graduated from college in 2011. I had no desire to have kids in my 20s, but even if I’d wanted them, it would have been financially irresponsible. It took me 5 years to find a full time job that paid a living wage. Prior to that, my tradeoff was “work two part time jobs to get above the poverty line, qualify for government insurance, and have no free time” or “work one part time job, where you make too much to qualify for Medicaid but not enough for the government to help with your mandatory ACA costs.” Having a baby is the last thing I want to do when I have no extra time or no extra money.

      And this was with me living in a city with a very low cost of living. I imagine people who live on the coast have it worse.

      • Two McMillion says:

        Other factors include the lack of full time employment and possibly the Medicaid gap, depending on where you live. I graduated from college in 2011. I had no desire to have kids in my 20s, but even if I’d wanted them, it would have been financially irresponsible. It took me 5 years to find a full time job that paid a living wage. Prior to that, my tradeoff was “work two part time jobs to get above the poverty line, qualify for government insurance, and have no free time” or “work one part time job, where you make too much to qualify for Medicaid but not enough for the government to help with your mandatory ACA costs.” Having a baby is the last thing I want to do when I have no extra time or no extra money.

        I have questions about this.

        – What does “it would have been financially irresponsible” mean?
        – What’s a living wage to you?

        • Lord Nelson says:

          Apologies for the super late response. I haven’t had much computer access for the last few days.

          “It would have been financially irresponsible” means exactly what it says? I’m not quite sure what you mean by this question. In short, I barely had enough money to provide for myself, and that was with me pinching pennies in every way I knew how (including skipping meals or eating the same 3 things every day). There’s no way I could have supported a child.

          I define a “living wage” as making enough money to pay for essentials without going into debt or being constantly worried about going into debt. A living wage should cover: taxes, rent, utilities, food and other essential groceries, transportation, other bills (cell phone / internet / insurance), physical and mental health care, and ideally a small amount left over for hobbies because mental health is important. When I was making $12k per year and living without roommates, this was not possible for me, even in a cheap Midwestern city. The break-even point was around $10k per year with a roommate or $16k per year without a roommate, where I live. It wasn’t until I started making $20k per year that I stopped worrying about how I could afford meals.

          Note: all numbers are gross income, not net.

    • eric23 says:

      IIRC, teenagers are having less sex now than in the past. Mostly because they are on social media more. I imagine the same is true of adults, though to a lesser extent.

      How much of the lower birthrate is just a lower number of unplanned births?

      • keaswaran says:

        Here’s some relevant claims:

        TRENDS

        In the United States, the proportion of pregnancies that were unintended increased slightly between 2001 and 2008 (from 48% to 51%), but, by 2011, the proportion decreased to 45%.2,5

        Following a long period of minimal change, the overall unintended pregnancy rate (the number of unintended pregnancies per 1,000 women aged 15–44) decreased substantially from 54 in 2008 to 45 in 2011, a decline of 18%. This is the lowest rate since at least 1981 and is likely due to an overall increase in contraceptive use and the use of highly effective contraceptive methods.2

        Between 1981 and 2008, the unintended pregnancy rate among low-income women rose, while the rate among higher-income women declined steadily. Between 2008 and 2011, however, the rate among women with incomes below poverty dropped from 137 per 1,000 women aged 15–44 to 112 per 1,000—an 18% decline in just three years. The rate among women at or above 200% of poverty decreased 20% between 2008 and 2011.2,5

        The unintended pregnancy rate among adolescents has been declining since the late 1980s. Between 2008 and 2011, the unintended pregnancy rate among women aged 18–19 declined 20%, and the unplanned birth rate declined 21%. Among women aged 15–17, the unintended pregnancy rate declined 44% during the same period, and the unplanned birth rate declined 47%.2

        https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/unintended-pregnancy-united-states

      • Purplehermann says:

        Mostly because they are on social media more

        This is an interesting idea, how did you come to this conclusion?

  7. Bobobob says:

    Fun with the Copernican principle! (This has been discussed on SSC before, but I’ve never quite followed the probabilistic reasoning).

    Here’s the premise, as stated by Richard Gott and various others: Assume humans eventually achieve a Foundation-type galactic empire. Let’s figure a million planets, a billion humans on each planet, so around the year 10,000 or so we’re looking at one quadrillion human beings. Given that immense number, what are the odds that all of us on SSC find ourselves alive and conscious today, occupying the infinitesimal leftmost tail end of the probability distribution? Isn’t it more likely that we are, in fact, right under the peak of the bell curve, and our civilization is about to collapse?

    I have two main problems with this line of reasoning, which I’ve had occasion to ponder over the last few years. First, what does it mean to “find yourself alive” at a given time? Either you are alive, or you aren’t; if you are human, you are a conscious being, and you naturally find yourself alive at the time when, well, you were born and you are alive. Probabilistically speaking, what does the fact of your particular consciousness, at this particular time, have to do with those quadrillion other (existing or eventual) consciousnesses?

    Second, why restrict this argument to human beings? Why not extend it to all entities in the universe possessing (at least) a human level of consciousness, or, for that matter, all animals possessing even a little bit of consciousness? Given that there are exponentially more rats than there are human beings, wouldn’t I, at the present time, be more likely to be a rat? And if another intelligent civilization has colonized a galaxy 50 million light years away, wouldn’t I be more likely to be a conscious member of that species (with its 100 quadrillion inhabitants) than one of the mere seven billion humans on earth?

    I’ve got metaphysical questions, maybe you have metaphysical answers.

    • Friendly AI With Benefits says:

      I also take offense with this line of reasoning, and a story once told by Feynman I think illustrates it well, so I’ll paraphrase it.

      I came home from work today and parked my car. Next to my car, on the right, is parked another car. And I looked at it’s license plate and it read XRW-7072. And I thought, wow, how incredible, that of all the millions of possible license plates, that exact one should be parked next to mine.

      Should I actually be surprised? Sure, there are many other license plates. The probability of XRW-7072 is certainly much much lower than the probability of all “all other license plates but mine”. But it’s no less probable than any other individual license plate, and there had to be _some_ license plate there.
      So should you conclude that some force must have specifically pushed that particular license plate there? Probably not.

      So yea there are many many many other minds that “you” could have been. But each individual was no more likely than the one you got, and _somebody_ had to be here. So you can’t really conclude much.

    • Anatid says:

      I think a version of this reasoning does have some validity and often produces reasonable and intuitive estimates:

      – The current protests in the US have been happening for a week or two. So probably they’ll continue for somewhere between a day and a year.

      – Facebook has been an important company for roughly 10 years, so probably it will continue to be for between 1 and 100 more years.

      – Cars have been in wide use in their present form for about a hundred years. So probably that’ll continue to be true for somewhere between 10 and 1000 years.

      – Islam has been a major religion for about 1000 years, so probably it will continue for somewhere between 100 and 10,000 years.

      – Sharks have existed for about 400 million years, so probably they’ll last another 40 million to 4 billion years.

      – The earth has supported life for about 4 billion years, so probably that will last another 400 million to 40 billion years.

    • LesHapablap says:

      For every process of infinite growth, no matter when you are, you are always right at the beginning. See David Deutch’s Beginnings of Infinity.

    • Spookykou says:

      And the year 12,000 we learn how to make folded techno-babble and the population expands to such a degree that people living in the foundation could come to the same conclusion!

    • b_jonas says:

      No object level comment, but for future searchability, I think this is called “Doomsday argument” (“https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument”).

  8. Pandemic Shmandemic says:

    More reading of early Genesis stories as recording a societal collapse possibly induced by climate adversity and accompanying changes in consciousness.

    Expulsion from paradise

    Adam and Eve eat from the tree of knowledge and literally become self-conscious of their nakedness. Shame is inherently a mind-theoretic construct – not only are you reflecting on what someone else is thinking but on what someone else is thinking of you.

    In response, rather than abandoning them and retreating to heaven God casts Adam and Eve away from himself and a highly hospitable environment and curses them with terrible seemingly new concepts: the sadness that comes from hardship of having to toil for a living, the uncertainty of agricultural yield, the pain of childbirth for women (Halo effect around labour pains reduced as a result of a newly acquired continuity of self ?)

    Cain and Abel

    Cain kills Abel out of jealousy over God’s appreciation of Abel’s gift, jealousy too is a pretty high level mind-theoretic concept as it requires the notions of ego, status, ambition and frustration.
    God then asks Cain if he knows where Abel is and Cain tries to lie about it to God

    Both here and in the paradise story God is modeled via a mind theory of a human, both Adam and Cain expect him not to be aware of things that happen where they think him not to be physically present at the time – far more primitive than the “I am what I am” of YHWH

    The flood

    Definitely some climate adversity going on there, the people who survive can legitimately be called the “sea peoples”.

    Tower of Babel

    Hive-mind consciousness allows for mutual intelligibility and cooperation, ruling class probably already has theory of mind and uses it to embark on colossal vanity projects, food surpluses are strained and an otherwise survivable crop failure spirals out to city-state collapse scattering people to strange lands where they no longer understand the locals.

    Sodom and Gomorrah

    People use their newly acquired theory of mind to consciously be dicks to each other, God does not approve.

  9. Space Hobo from Hobospace says:

    Oh no! You have been bitten by a radioactive stopwatch and developed a superpower. You can now stop things.

    More specifically you can stop a single thing at a time – indefinitely but if you want to stop something else, the previous one must be released. A stopped thing ceases all internal processes and becomes absolutely solid. It can be moved and rotated, it is still somehow affected by gravity and reflects and absorbs light as it was, but no force can move a single its particle in relation to other its particles. It can’t be deformed, it can’t be split and once it released it will still be at the same temperature and continue other similar processes as it was before stopping.

    What exactly constitutes a single “thing” seems to be tied to your intuitive understanding – and you can’t rule lawyer against yourself. However a few things you know:
    – It must fit inside a sphere with diameter of 3 meters, no more
    – Anything that can’t be moved away without damaging it is also part of the same thing (For example, you can’t tie someone up and freeze the rope)
    – You can’t freeze any separate part of a living being, but you can freeze the whole being – so no walking around stopping people’s hearts

    What’s next in your superhero/villain career?

    • Vitor says:

      Well, this seems very versatile[1]. Freeze enemies that you’re fighting, disarm traps safely, make your own traps, create an indestructible shield, prevent a building from collapsing, sell ice cream in the desert, allow someone to survive a fall (or even a trip through outer space).

      So, the obvious next step is to find / assemble a team, because my power is the kind of thing that combos well with other powers, and I’ll need a frontline to protect me if I end up in a fight.

      [1] You didn’t specify the range though, is it on touch? Does the previous object get released instantly regardless how far away it is?

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      What if I stop myself?

    • Erusian says:

      Why be a superhero/supervillain when I can use it for research purposes or something more productive? Imagine how much you could discover about a process by freezing it, thoroughly examining it, and then unfreezing it for a microsecond, and repeat? Think of all the particle physics. Not to mention you could respond to things like meltdowns by giving them more time to contain it. Or create an invincible shield (since what you freeze is effectively invulnerable).

      Less law breaking, more money, etc. Unless I’m particularly drawn to fighting or being evil or something.

    • emiliobumachar says:

      Solving the energy crisis would be better than fighting crime, see https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2305.

      Idea: work with the government. Detonate a nuclear fusion bomb in my temporarily indestructible 3m sphere, with one hole tiny enough (micrometers? nanometers?) that the energy gets out in a manageable stream that can be safely harnessed over hours.

      Go home. Eat, sleep, socialize. Come back to work. Repeat.

      • Space Hobo from Hobospace says:

        I think making a shell violates my second rule. But it’s definitely an idea with a lot of potential.

    • beleester says:

      The fact that the object can still be moved puts a real crimp in most of the obvious tricks. An unbreakable shield sounds great, but without an equally unbreakable arm to hold it, you’ll be crushed. And the requirement that it must be possible to move it away from nearby objects removes tricks like “freeze a door so bad guys can’t open it.” It also means you can’t anchor your shield on anything unless you first freeze it separately.

      The trick of freezing a piece of fishing line to turn it into a cutting edge still works (you could even swing it around like a sword), but that’s too gory for a superhero and I feel like a nearly-invisible blade is an accident waiting to happen.

      I think the easiest use is for medical stasis – prevent someone from dying of their injuries until they get to a hospital.

      Also, you didn’t specify if this was ranged or touch-based. If it has a decent range, then you can take the obvious route of freezing bad guys and calling the police.

    • Dack says:

      If it resumes momentum after you unfreeze it, you could freeze a falling object, rotating it 180 while in stasis, unfreeze it to have it shoot upward at terminal velocity, lather, rinse, repeat. Would this have diminishing returns or would it amount to perpetual motion?

      • rocoulm says:

        It really seems like you should be able to get free energy out of this, but I can’t actually pin down how. If you freeze a falling object and redirect it upward repeatedly, you don’t have free energy; it’s the same situation as a perfectly elastic bounce. If you harvest energy from it, you’ll just get whatever potential energy it had when it was dropped.

        Any better ways to use it?

        • March says:

          If all the particles are perfectly still, the object is perfectly cold, which can be used to generate heat gradients that can be harvested for energy?

          • rocoulm says:

            I thought about that, too, but if it’s “frozen” (in time) it also would be perfectly adiabatically insulated, right? It may technically be “cold”, but any heat being transferred to it would violate its time-frozen-ness, so it’d just be a really, really good insulator.

      • Space Hobo from Hobospace says:

        Freezing only stops internal processes as well as thermal exchange and the like. It will still keep moving and/or will fall on the ground. In fact, you will probably lose energy because what was supposed to turn into heat and deformation now went into some kind of magical dimension that allowed it all to happen.

    • b_jonas says:

      The long term is clear. I would eventually freeze myself. I believe that eventually people will understand the science of my superpower enough that they can force me to unfreeze myself, but that this will only happen when they also have the medical technology that they can cure me of everything and I can become quasi-immortal. This seems like a better option than traditional cryogenics, both because it seems less likely that it damages me in some irreversible way, but also because it’s less likely that I’m killed while frozen because society doesn’t maintain my cooling chamber for long enough.

      In the short term, I’d probably go with something similar to what emiliobumachar and other people suggested, as in explore the rules of this superpower until I can break physics with it and revolutionize the energy sector or gain some similar huge technological win. However, I have to be very careful with this, lest I get threatened to provide a service where I have to hold the freeze indefinitely, or for such a long time that would make freezing myself impossible.

  10. Contra Spoons

    Someone asks me to pick up a car and put it down somewhere else. I respond, accurately, that I can’t. Not being Superman, I’m not strong enough.

    Someone suggests to me, currently lamenting my unemployment, that I take an available job that involves working eight hours a day at something not very interesting. I respond that I can’t, since I would run out of spoons after the second or third hour. I just don’t have enough willpower to do such a job.

    One obvious problem with the claim is that we know that large parts of the human population through most of history have done the equivalent of what I claim I can’t do, many of them much more. None of them could pick up cars. There is no obvious reason why I should be less able to do boring things than they were. Further, it is likely that many, perhaps most, of them would rather have done something else and easier, which suggests a more plausible explanation for my behavior than the one I offered.

    Hence my objection to the way the spoons metaphor gets used. No doubt there is some truth to it. Some things are harder to do than others, and doing something for two hours a day is easier than doing it for eight hours. But there is an important difference between “I don’t want to” and “I can’t.”

    “I can’t” has the virtue, and fault, of providing a reason not to try.

    • Bobobob says:

      I actually had to look up “spoons,” for a moment there I thought you’d gone off your rocker.

      I’m not sure I have anything pertinent to say about your main point, but…why spoons, of all things? “Giving away spoons” isn’t a very intuitive metaphor.

    • Pandemic Shmandemic says:

      ” They won’t ” has the virtue and fault of absolving ourselves from responsibility but not the costs and externalities of having unemployed people.

    • Vitor says:

      Well, it seems to me you’re arguing against a strawman of spoons.

      For me, the core idea that’s expressed with spoons[1] is that there are tasks that don’t even register as requiring effort for some people, but that are quite hard / draining for others, along dimensions that might not be obvious.

      A better example than yours would be a mild physical disability. You might be perfectly able to go to work every day for 8 hours (even put on a smile and joke around with co-workers), but when you get home you’re too exhausted to do anything meaningful beyond fixing dinner and end up binge watching a tv show in bed. You regularly skip nice but non-essential things like keeping in touch with friends or meeting new people.

      Then, when you complain that you’re lonely, it wouldn’t be very useful if someone pointed out that you are technically capable of performing the task of going out to meet new people. This can lead to lots of social friction, specially because others only see you on the days that you do go out of your house to socialize, so almost by definition you’re having one of your rare “good” days.

      The concept of spoons is a useful way to convey the reality of such a situation to others. And trust me, even when people make an effort to understand, even when they think they understand, they very often don’t.

      [1] god I hate the name that this concept has been given.

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      The original idea behind spoon theory was that there are people with disabilities who have a *lot* less capacity than most people, and expecting those people to do “normal” things is unfair and destructive.

      For example, one of my friend’s life was greatly improved when she got a stair elevator. She was up against enough pain that she was organizing her day around minimizing going up and down stairs. Most people don’t think of a flight of stairs as any sort of a big deal. (The smart folks at the stair elevaor business asked her about how much she minimized using the stairs.)

      From memory: the essay which introduced spoon theory to the world was about someone with a disability explaining her situation to a friend She gives the friend a handful of spoons and expalins that various ordinary activities take one or more spoons. And then she takes some of the spoons away because you can’t alway predict how much capacity you’ve got.

      Unsurprisingly, there is both the more casual use of the idea of not having enough spoons, and people complaining that this takes away from clear statements about how bad some problems are.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        I find it fairly weird that I’m explaining social justice concepts to rationalists, at least partly because the concepts are so pervasive where I hang out that I’m surprised they’re unfamiliar to a fair number of active netizens.

        • Erusian says:

          Spoons metaphor type social justice is fairly niche/elite and largely has to be learned through highly inaccessible elite institutions. That is part of why they make such good status symbols. Social justice, to your average person, means NAACP and not Africana studies and its metaphors about basketball.

          • Deiseach says:

            Spoons metaphor type social justice is fairly niche/elite and largely has to be learned through highly inaccessible elite institutions.

            I learned about it on Tumblr which, um, I don’t think is a “highly inaccessible elite institution” (not with how its owners are always trying to offload it on to some other sucker, who then tries offloading it onto another even bigger sucker to try and recover the money thrown down the drain).

            Ditto on the fannishness; I don’t follow any political blogs just fandom ones but these kinds of things keep cropping up!

          • Erusian says:

            I learned about it on Tumblr which, um, I don’t think is a “highly inaccessible elite institution” (not with how its owners are always trying to offload it on to some other sucker, who then tries offloading it onto another even bigger sucker to try and recover the money thrown down the drain).

            Tumblr’s demographics are disproportionately young, white, and from well off backgrounds but not well off themselves. At least last I checked. If so, you have a hugely disproportionate “in relatively nice schools” voice on the site. So you’re right tumblr isn’t highly inaccessible but it’s the equivalent of hanging out at a bar near Trinity College and then claiming Trinity’s cultural morals aren’t elite because you learned them just by being in a place anyone could walk into.

            As for fandom, I’m much less qualified to comment.

        • Lord Nelson says:

          I am also surprised by this. My intro to social justice was not through my liberal, elite college, but through online fandom spaces, of all things.

          I keep thinking “if fandom talks so frequently about SJ stuff, then everyone else must talk about it”, but apparently that’s not the case. Filter bubbles are mysterious. (I found out later that online fandom spaces skew heavily towards people who are disabled, LGBT, or have mental illness, all of which correlate with interest in social justice.)

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            My introduction to Social Justice is also by way of sf fandom. I suppose the next question is “How is fannsih SJ different from other sorts of SJ?”

            Also, there are a lot of disabled fans, so it isn’t sruprising that spoon theory would be well known.

        • SamChevre says:

          You and I probably encountered it in the same place (Making Light), but I was also surprised–I think the common and original versions are not very similar.

    • Vitor says:

      Ok, so I thought of an interesting way to frame the issue. If someone is on unemployment benefits, most people think it’s ok to ask them to be actively looking for a job, and cut their benefits if they were to actually reject a job offer. However, you wouldn’t count an offer to become a prostitute as an actual “job offer” for the above purpose. But would an offer that comes with a 3 hour commute count? Or an offer where you don’t use (and don’t get paid for) your specialized education? There’s clearly a debate on how much discomfort/hardship it is reasonable to impose on others, and what kind of objections (moral? hedonic?) carry weight.

      In this type of social dynamic, people with invisible diseases (almost all mental health issues and surprisingly many physical health issues as well) often draw the short straw, in the sense that their genuine struggle to fulfill the demands of society is not easily legible from the outside. The outcome is that these people often get treated way harsher than intended by others. For example, a person with chronic back pain might reject a job where they can’t have a standing desk, and then their unemployment benefit gets cut. This whole rhetoric about spoons (explained well by Nancy Lebovitz above) is an attempt to remedy this, by helping other people understand and empathize. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

      Luckily, we don’t live in a world were everyone needs to toil 8 hours a day to ensure all our survival. I think many people are in a situation where they could work an 8 hour day of physical labour if their life literally depended on it. But perhaps this would destroy their long-term health and well-being, so it’d be cruel to force them to do this. It’s a great kindness, and a sign of a strong society, that we accommodate such people and show them compassion. But this obviously also invites abuse, so it’s inevitable that you’ll run across lots of stories of people who (try to) bullshit their way to the recipient side of this collective bargain. It’s also inevitable that you’ll have some squabbling about who gets to benefit exactly how much.

    • Lord Nelson says:

      When I run out of spoons, it doesn’t mean I’m literally incapable of doing the thing. If I have no other choice, I will persist. However, if I continue to do something that drains spoons, it leads to very bad consequences.

      For an extreme example, the worst job that I ever had drained so many spoons and caused me so much stress that I was having suicidal thoughts every day. I ended up quitting the job, using the rationale that working one part time job while living off my savings would have fewer negative consequences than working the full time job that made me want to kill myself.

      For a less extreme example, phone calls are hard for me and drain a lot of spoons. Thanks, autism. If I’m already spoon depleted, I’ll sometimes postpone the call to the next day. If the phone call is time sensitive, I can force myself to do it. But it usually has negative consequences, which range from exhaustion and being unable to de-stress for hours afterwards to self-harm.

      In short, I use “I can’t do this because I’m out of spoons” as a shorthand for “if I force myself to do this, it will negatively impact my mental health so much that there will be consequences.” I used to force myself to push through spoon depletion (because you’re right, I technically can do the task) but I’ve been trying to stop that lately because the long term consequences are rarely worth the short term benefits.

    • Deiseach says:

      “Spoons” is not just willpower, though. It’s being physically and mentally able to do the job. That’s part of the problem with disability, in that it often is invisible (if someone is not, say, visibly in a wheelchair then it’s hard for other people to understand why they can’t do Thing for eight hours when they’re able to do Thing for two hours). My father, for instance, got a disabled parking licence even though if you looked at him, he wasn’t visibly disabled: he wasn’t in a wheelchair, he wasn’t using a walker or crutch or walking stick, he looked as if he was well able to walk longer distances than he could, in fact, walk and he did need to be able to park in disabled spaces. In modern parlance, he didn’t have the spoons (energy/ability) to walk more than a certain distance due to ill-health that he had developed later in life, but on the outward surface he looked “if you can walk this far, why can’t you just walk further, why are you using something intended for people who are really ill/disabled?”.

      Like everything else on the Internet, it’s a handy metaphor that got over-extended and used in ways that were not originally intended. If “spoons” has come to be shorthand for “willpower” which in turn is a nicer way of saying “bone idle”, then that’s unfortunate.

    • AlexOfUrals says:

      After reading through all the comments above, I feel like spoons is a uniquely bad metaphor which tries to describe a real problem but does an extremely poor job at it. It captures the side of the issue which is common between the people with and without disabilities – humans get tired of doing things, well what an astonishing piece of news! – and completely fails to highlight the important difference – that disabled people can get exhausted much faster, and even by trivial things. So what a not-sufficiently-charitable audience ends up hearing is “Hey I’m so uniquely special – I can get tired sometimes, especially from work” which non-surprisingly often fails to induce compassion. While in fact the point, as I understand it, is closer to something like “It’s about as hard for me psychologically to get out of bed each morning as for you to do a 2-hour exercise routine, so don’t you tell me about willpower”. Also 100% agree with everyone who complained about the name choice – it’s frankly quite dumb.

      • Lord Nelson says:

        The blog where I learned about spoon theory (widely used to explain the metaphor, though I can’t remember whether the blog author came up with the metaphor or not) takes this into account. Specifically, non-disabled people are described as starting a given day with more spoons than disabled people. A hypothetical disabled person does 3 small things and 2 moderately taxing things and runs out of spoons because that was all they had. A hypothetical non-disabled person does the same 5 things and says “I don’t understand what the problem is. I was able to do all of that and I still have half a drawer full of spoons.”

        People in my social circles (SJ-adjacent) link that post all the time. I’m kind of surprised to hear that the term has lost some of its meaning with the wider audience… though I probably shouldn’t be.

        If you want the link, lmk and I’ll add it when I’m not on mobile.

    • Alejandro says:

      I think that most of the arguments Scott deployed against Caplan on mental illness (1, 2) also apply against your argument here–is there anything that was not covered in those discussions?

    • DinoNerd says:

      *sigh* You are making the obvious assumption that all people have the same abilities. IIRC the person who originally used the spoon metaphor was unhealthy, disabled, or both. (In particular, a chronic condition limiting how much she could accomplish.)

      But you don’t have to be sick or disabled to have different abilities from other people, even the majority of other people. I’m 90% certain that at your age, even given your athletic background, you couldn’t work a full shift at the job my father spent most of my childhood doing – even if you trained and worked up to it gradually. (I couldn’t either, and I’m younger than he was when he retired – though not by much.)

      You probably wouldn’t argue with this claim about physical ability, but seem to believe that everyone has the same amount of willpower, and for that matter that exercising it does not increase it. (And thus people who haven’t ever had to force themselves to do things will be as able at it as those who’ve done so all their lives.)

      I’ve seen enough people with major depression to know differently. Be glad you’ve never experienced it, or seen someone you trust and believe experience it.

      Moreover, the spoon claim has never just been about willpower. Executive dysfunction is also a thing – I had a neice who didn’t grow into the ability to organize and accomplish any kind of project until her late teens … until then, if someone with that skill wasn’t available to tell her what to do next, she’d bog down and accomplish nothing. Until then, she just didn’t and couldn’t get it. (This, and a couple of other things, got her an autistic syndrome diagnosis.)

      This is not to say that some people won’t grab any excuse that’s handy, and dress up their excuse in whatever language they think might get them excused – or might let them convince themselves that they aren’t simply lazy (or ill tempered, or whatever.).

      More than 90% of people have been able to walk. Therefore by your logic the next guy you see with advanced multiple sclerosis, or missing limbs, or various other conditions, should stop malingering and get out of his wheelchair and walk ;-(

    • Spookykou says:

      I never understood road rage. The idea that a person would kill another person because they cut them off in traffic, I couldn’t imagine how a person could do that, or why, and to be clear, I get very mad while driving.

      Then I took some medication that caused me to have an episode of nearly uncontrollable rage. Fortunately I was alone at the time, but I ended up breaking my computer, a table, and several glasses, then literally running around my house until I dropped to the ground exhausted, trying desperately to resolve the furious energy pulsing through my mind, like the blood was going to burst out of my eyes.

      Having never experienced rage, violence always seemed like a moral failing, people obviously could control themselves but preferred not to, but after the experience described above, I became considerably less convinced of the moral failings of violent people.

      • Two McMillion says:

        Your experience should not have changed your judgment of violent people. You have only discovered that being moral is harder than you previously believed.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        I believe a lot more of temperament is metabolic than most people want to believe.

        My generally civil approach has a background belief of “this is a human spirit– do not bend, fold, spindle, or mutilate”. This might be a spectrum thing, but I read insults (unless clearly friendly) as saying “You are bad, you are intrinsically bad, you can never be anything but bad”. What if I insulted someone and they believed it?

        Alternatively, you can get attention with insults, but the attention tends to go to the insult rather than anything else you wanted to convey.

        However, I’ve had occasional brief periods of just not caring about my effect on other people. At that point, the only thing restraining me is that I care about my reputation.

        Concern coming and going like that strikes me as metabolic at least as much as moral.

    • drethelin says:

      I think endurance is a lot better of a word for this than ability or spoons and much less opaque. Everyone understands that endurance is a variable and not purely a matter of “can or can’t” and everyone understands that different people’s endurance for various tasks is different.

      I cannot run a 4 minute mile. I can probably run for a few seconds at that pace, and I can definitely travel over a mile on foot, but this does not mean I “can” run a 4 minute mile, and I don’t think it’s useful to argue that I simply choose not to.

      If the city was on fire, there’s a chance I could run a 4 minute mile. Between adrenaline and desperation, a lot is possible. But on any normal day, if I tried honestly as hard as I could to run a 4 minute mile I would probably sprain my ankle or pass out before I was done, or simple be unable to force my legs to move fast enough for the duration of the 4 minutes.

      However, we know lots of humans CAN run a 4 minute mile! Does this mean that everyone who doesn’t run that fast or that far is being lazy?

      • AG says:

        The spoons analogy gets around any pesky implications that those with a lower spoon capacity can simply exercise and get more endurance.

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:

          AG, I’m not sure what you have in mind, but from what I’ve seen, people with chronic fatigue were told to exercise, and it wasn’t good for them. Their *problem* was that exerting effort exhausted them, and more effort even if it was carefully graded, didn’t help.

          • AG says:

            I agree with you. Using the phrase “pesky implications” was a mistake on my part.

    • b_jonas says:

      I have a complaint about your phrasing, not the main issue.

      > Someone asks me to pick up a car and put it down somewhere else.

      When reading this opening sentence, I assumed that you meant driving the car from one place to another, using some informal expressions. I still think “pick up a car” means this, though “put it down” should perhaps have clued me in. Even after reading the next sentence, it seemed like you were deliberately misinterpreting their request, perhaps because you don’t want to do their request and want them to leave you alone more quickly. The rest of the post clarified this of course. (English is not my first language.)

  11. Nancy Lebovitz says:

    What do you think of Rebel Wisdom? They seem to have some points, but they’re pretty long-winded and I have no idea whether they’re actually living more sensibly (for either the short or in-case-of-disaster long term) than most people.

    • Aftagley says:

      Can you summarize or link to a good overview of their thesis?

      Their about us video on youtube seemed long on foreboding quotes (“The old ways of doing things have totally broken down!”, “Regular media won’t be able to cover the increasing chaos!”) but short on actual ideas. What’s their deal?

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        No, I haven’t seen an overview. I was hoping someone here would know whether there was anything coherent.

  12. original-internet-explorer says:

    #2

    Hello everybody. I have a practical proposal to reduce future violence. This is an alt account for obvious reasons but I’ve been here lurking for years. I’ll repeat this message a few times on open threads so more see it.

    Issue

    CW can become hot.

    The riots are becoming unnerving – there is a propensity for it to spill into physical targeted attacks against X-ists / X-ism. Scapegoating is becoming habit and public complacency is ratcheting an escalation. I believe the time has come to take seriously the possibility that political violence is going to be directed at available targets through moral panics. Today it can be one scapegoat – tomorrow it will be another. There is no real way of knowing who an internet mob will turn on next.

    You’ve seen the script of public opinion flip multiple times just with COVID19 – a few kilobytes of virus – to say nothing for the ever swirling legacy vortexes that are sex, class, race, political orientation. How many of you have looked back at your former selves and thought “what an idiot”. That the line between good and evil runs right through each human heart isn’t an abstraction – the people we need to protect ourselves against include ourselves. Maybe I’m being neurotic but I believe to know it can get bad you only need to be modestly introspective.

    Position

    By us I mean anybody who subscribes to the Slate Star Codex ideal – I describe it as very high tolerance for ideas coupled with a permanent suspicion of ideological monopolization.

    Medicine

    It’s about time some kind of real sanctuary is on offer to modern day witches because I think official channels will react too slowly against the internet mob. There exists the sense formal institutions are not proactive when confronted with big swells from the sea of sentiment.

    I’m capable of offering food and lodging to a target for a short duration in my country and I think many of us at Slatestarcodex will see the necessity too – but it needs to be systematized and well known if it is to do good work.

    My request to you is to reply with an email address. If as I fear things turn for the worse we can work out the steps as the situation develops.

    I expect this to be messy. The advantage we have is that mobs have an intense but short attention span and those who provoke violence most are not so persistent.

    My email is originalinternetexplorer@internet-mail.org

    I can shoot down one objection – the first operation would be a recorded meeting at a police station or notary to cut the risk of a Sanctuary being exploited into an ambush – and then a series of operations to put distance between the mob and the target with fallbacks – risky to be a Witch but when any person faces narrowing options they have to perform that calculation.

    Thanks

    Original IE

    • Eric T says:

      Alright I did my best to allay your fear last OT – I’m just going to say this.

      I think this kind of fearmongering is actively bad for places like SSC. This is a community that extols the virtues of rationality and logical thinking. People do not think rationally if they are worried of an oncoming political violence that doesn’t exist. Stoking fear causes people panic and panic erodes rational thinking.

      I don’t know what country you are in, but I know most of the readership/commentariat is with me in the US. Here’s why you don’t need to worry about a proverbial witch hunt here.

      1. The overwhelming majority of the country, even the ones actively protesting, is opposed to violence. Even looting, which isn’t directly harming people in the way a literal witch hunt would is so unpopular that as someone last OT pointed out 58% of the registered American voters support invoking the Insurrection Act to deal with the protests (including 40% of the liberals and 37% of black people) and this is with looting that it is at least diluted by peaceful protests.

      2. If there’s anyone to be worried about right now it’s certainly not liberals? Like not to play to stereotypes here but when it comes to which Tribe would be able to make an effective armed militia, my money is on the gods guns and monster trucks one. The military, police, and rich/powerful all trend more conservative than the public, so I really doubt any armed uprising would be effective in ANY way if it came from the left.

      3. This has all happened before. Rodney King, BLM 1.0, Ferguson, Charlottesville, the Miami Riots, 1999 woodstock etc. etc. etc. I’ve seen practically nothing that indicates this protest would be a massive break into some kind of political armed movement any more than those don’t. Especially since it’s an election year, so people are probably willing to wait to see if Joe wins.

      Please I understand caution, but try not to stoke the fires of fear any more than they already are.

      • Aftagley says:

        +1

        This is a much nicer response than the one I was in the process of writing.

        @Original IE

        I’d check your information bubble, because you’re clearly diverging from reality here.

        • original-internet-explorer says:

          It might surprise you to know I’ve spent little time in information-world of Twitter, online newspapers and commentary. My habit is to stop using the internet for weeks, months at a time and on occasion dive in to immerse myself as I fortunately did with COVID19 in February.

          • Aftagley says:

            It might help you to expand your apeture somewhat then.

            The real world isn’t as scary as you seem to think it is. Most people are nice, almost everyone means well (even if we disagree on how to be accomplish that) and almost everything just keeps getting better.

          • Eric T says:

            Ok great, the fact that you got a wrong, and I’d argue actively harmful, opinion from the newspaper or your friends, or the thin slice of the country you interact with doesn’t stop it from being wrong and in my honest opinion, actively harmful.

            I have been to 6 protests now here in NYC, and have close friends attending at least a dozen more. I haven’t seen anything to justify your fears. I have tried my best to outline why what you are so afraid of won’t come to pass. Please stop spreading fear into a very civil and friendly discussion forum. Fear is the mind killer.

        • original-internet-explorer says:

          :Aftagley

          I took a personality test recently called HEXACO – a Big Six model.

          I scored with the highest possible score on Openness and moderately on Neuroticism.

          The riots prompted my comment – true – but I’ve had these concerns about the internet and political violence for some time – if a Tinder for matching pairs can exist then a Tinder for matching victims to vigilantes is not an astonishing leap.

          https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/groups-taking-photos-of-homes-with-police-cars-in-driveways/

          • toastengineer says:

            if a Tinder for matching pairs can exist then a Tinder for matching victims to vigilantes is not an astonishing leap.

            Hey, endorsing actual vigilantism is way too far.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        +1. Everything will be fine. Wait a week or two until and everyone will have moved on to the next outrage.

      • Erusian says:

        2. If there’s anyone to be worried about right now it’s certainly not liberals? Like not to play to stereotypes here but when it comes to which Tribe would be able to make an effective armed militia, my money is on the gods guns and monster trucks one. The military, police, and rich/powerful all trend more conservative than the public, so I really doubt any armed uprising would be effective in ANY way if it came from the left.

        I agree with your other points, but not this. The other side sees you as just as encroaching and threatening as you do. They see you as threatening and more likely to launch a coup too. And they’d argue the elite is hugely disproportionately leftist. If you’re interested in de-escalating, arguing your side isn’t as scary as the scary, scary other side is a bad thing to toss in.

        • Eric T says:

          That’s fair. I don’t think either side is remotely likely to launch a coup, but I was just saying that us Leftists would likely be quite bad at it XP

          • Erusian says:

            One day I will write a story about the Spanish Civil War, where a group of libertarian ancaps and a group of anarcho-communists have been placed across from each other in a trench line. Neither side will ever actually attack the other because nobody on either side feels like they have to listen to orders.

      • Wrong Species says:

        I don’t know how you can hold on to such a perspective on current events. Conservatives have been told for years that they were paranoid and that what was happening on campuses would be contained there and yet here we are. None of this looks like a military coup by right wing authoritarians. Trump is too pathetic to do that. He more resembles Louis the sixteenth than Hitler. I don’t know what the endgame here is but it’s going to get worse. Of that, I have no doubt.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          I think Matt Yglesias had a tweet where he admitted he was wrong about that stuff staying on campus, but I can’t find it.

        • Nick says:

          Jesse Singal said on his Blocked and Reported podcast a few days ago that he was wrong about this. He said he had lunch with Haidt once and bet informally that it would never spill out into our institutions like this; if he’d made a formal bet, he said, he would have just lost.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          It is looking nonsensical that moderates sincerely argued that yes, the (only!) ideology taught in higher education is illogical and basically totalitarian, but no one will ever believe it except on-campus.

          • Wrong Species says:

            And yet conservatives will still be called paranoid. I get that people don’t like to admit they are wrong but it’s incredible the extent to which inconvenient things are just forgotten so quickly. Last weekend, they honestly tried to blame the far right for the riots and it may as well have never happened.

        • Eric T says:

          I don’t know how you can hold on to such a perspective on current events.

          Pretty easily actually if you read what my specific perspective is. Look, things may get worse in the abstract, but that was never my argument. I’m arguing things won’t (any time in the foreseeable future) devolve into some kind of mass violence. As I posted above, even among us higher-educated totalitarians or whatever, violence is still very very frowned upon even when its our tribe directed against our hated red tribe. And that’s with all the anger/frustration of COVID, the Economy, and 4 years of Trump all coming to a head. I think you’d be hard-pressed to imagine a worse set of circumstances for an event like this to generate in, to cause people to maybe consider violence, and it still hasn’t devolved to mass violence – even with a police response that has been less than popular shall we say. We’re on week 2 now and if anything the protesters are getting less violent from what I’ve heard.

          Like genuinely what are you afraid the protesters will do? If they tried some kind of armed coup the National Guard would sweep them off the streets. The most likely case is they will continue “cancelling” people on twitter or something largely irrelevant to your day to do lives. No offense, but few of us are important to ever incur a liberal mob large enough to damage our lives in the long run. I understand if you have issues with the long-term effects of leftist thought/politics. That’s not what this thread has been about, its about whether or not there is an imminent risk of mass physical violence. My position is: obviously no.

          • Wrong Species says:

            You talk about the riots like they are a minor hiccup to otherwise peaceful protests but some cities came out looking like a war zone. Are you just unaware of all the damage that they caused? Have you seen any videos/photos of what they’ve done? Do you even know that the rioters have murdered people? It’s just bizarre that you dismiss the risk of mass physical violence when that exactly is what just happened. Do you think it won’t happen again? The next time a white cop kills a black person under controversial circumstances, there’s going to be another riot. Not only that but since every mayor is going to cripple the police in response to the protests it’s going to be even harder to both prevent riots from happening and more difficult to stop them. And in response, people will say that obviously the only way to stop the mob is more appeasement. We’re not talking about twitter wars anymore. It’s honest to god physical violence and it will keep happening.

          • Eric T says:

            Are you just unaware of all the damage that they caused? Have you seen any videos/photos of what they’ve done? It’s just bizarre that you dismiss the risk of mass physical violence when that exactly is what just happened.

            I have not seen the numbers of how many people have been physically harmed by the rioting. We were trying to find them in the previous OT. I suspect it comes nowhere even close to the world the OP of this thread implied would exist. The rioters are slim minority, have been widely denounced, oh and yeah mostly dealt with.

            And if you get to call the riots “mass violence” do I get to call the hundreds of people hurt by police brutality “mass violence”? Should I make a post on the next SSC open thread advising people to email me so we can discuss ways to hide from the oncoming police-lead crackdown against all leftists? Obviously not.

            The next time a white cop kills a black person under controversial circumstances, there’s going to be another riot.

            Will there? This has been a very specific circumstance leading to a very unique response. Eric Garner didn’t kick of nationwide riots, it feels a bit disingenuous to have one data point and declare that its going to happen every time from now on.

            Not only that but since every mayor is going to cripple the police in response to the protests it’s going to be even harder to both prevent riots from happening and more difficult to stop them.

            Again… seems bold to say that every mayor is going to cripple the police when that really hasn’t been the case. The LAPD had a 150mil reduction sure… but they have had a 1billion increase over the last 10 years so not really “crippled” there. The NYPD are at risk of losing around 1% of their budget currently. Yeah Minneapolis is doing some weird shit maybe (MAYBE – just because they say they’ll do it doesn’t mean they can) but if it doesn’t work I really don’t see many mayors following suit. High crime tends to be bad for election chances.

            It’s honest to god physical violence and it will keep happening.

            Look until we get numbers of who has caused more violence: Rioters or Police, we’ll disagree about who is most at risk. But I can sympathize with this sentiment. I worry about an uptick of violence too. But again, please listen to what I’m arguing. I’m not saying their won’t be random angry riots from time to time (I hope there aren’t but I’m not naive). That’s not what this has ever been about, and OP’s weird strategy wouldn’t help against that. This is about whether an organized mob is going to start hunting people down. Considering how unpopular such a thing is among the people who would need to form said mob DESPITE RIOTING HAPPENING – I don’t see how rioting is strong evidence that this will occur.

          • original-internet-explorer says:

            Economy got a once in a century face smack. Printing press goes birr.

            A global pandemic where we are almost over wave 1. The standard textbook model says 2-4 are coming.

            Cities filled with bored unemployed young men. Look! Free masks!

            Race riots in dozens of cities, mass demonstrations in hundreds.

            Trump Election 2 coming up. Unpopular candidate expected to win.

            Neighbourhoods patrolled by civilians with guns.

            It’s true any of these affairs could be reconciled but when you start to look at the combinations this looks like it can become worse.

    • Pandemic Shmandemic says:

      I hope this is some sort of trolling or a phishing attempt, if it isn’t and this post genuinely reflects your feelings and perception of reality you should seek the help of a mental health professional asap.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        Whoever you are, it is easy to find people on the Internet who wish to cause you physical harm. But just because it exists doesn’t mean you have to read it.

        • Pandemic Shmandemic says:

          I don’t know if you meant me or the OP but this is almost completely besides the point.

    • toastengineer says:

      I guess I have to play devil’s advocate here:

      Are you guys unaware of the attempted murder of Cassandra Fairbanks? (Primary source, Breitbart, wish I could give more diverse perspectives but google turned up no non-right-wing sources covering this.) Political violence is absolutely a thing.

      Oh, hell yeah it’s a tail risk, but we are the worry-the-exact-right-amount-about-tail-risks guys. I think maybe putting in a little prep, just in case, is rational. Honestly, I think putting together a “fellow SSCers can crash on my couch for a couple days if you really need to” list is a good idea regardless of the political situation. Community & mutual aid = good thing. Maybe we should let people do good things even if their reasons seem a little silly.

      • A Definite Beta Guy says:

        Yeah, definitely this. You’d think after COVID-19 people might give a little more credence to the possibility that things will NOT be alright.

      • Eric T says:

        I’m fine with community and mutual aid. I’m not fine with making it seem like a massive witch hunt directed at “x-ists” is a real possibility. If @original-internet-explorer wants to create a SSC board for like couch surfing or emergency supplies, or even just a “hey if you aren’t safe and you need a place to crash” then go for it. I’d sign up my apartment for such a list as I mentioned last OT.

        This is explicitly not what they are doing. They are making it seem like there is an imminent wave of violence coming and we need to band together to “escape the mob” and we should prepare ourselves to go live in the woods or something to escape an “ambush”. This isn’t a good way to organize a community resource – see Deiseach’s comment below for plenty of reasons.

        I think this mentality is actively harmful to us as a community for the reasons I expressed above.All of this to say, I think we are way WAY WAY too early to have any reasonable concern for a literal angry mob forming and going around pulling people from their homes, as I believe this commenter implied when they invoked the Rwandan Genocide last OT.

        EDIT: I’ve decided to remove a section on what happened to Fairbanks. I was trying to establish a point about individual violence not equaling mass political violence, but the way I wrote it was crude and made it seem like I thought she had earned the violence in some way. I do not.

        • original-internet-explorer says:

          I mentioned Rwanda because of how radio was used as a communication medium for genocide. A new communication medium seems to always be key for widespread faction violence.

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNbUeLnxQEI

          I understand this isn’t your cup of tea – but I believe most police and soldiers would think the same way I do.

          Do note I didn’t make a specific prediction about who, what, where, when. I do admit – the future with monster trucks sounds cool and we should hold a truce where I am advised to watch March of the Penguins and in return I insist you watch a documentary called The Purge. Then balance will be restored to the universe.

    • Deiseach says:

      No. You do not need to recreate the Underground Railway, and any kind of attempt to set up a sort of commune or utopian-ideal is going to fail in many ways, which we have discussed on here before when analysing why people’s attempts at creating an ideal society fell apart.

      If somebody is in real physical danger then you’re not going to help them by taking them into your house. If somebody is mentally or otherwise struggling due to stress and problems in life, their family or friends should be better support. It would be a very unique case that moving to a stranger’s house for a couple of weeks would do any real good for the person.

      Amateur Witness Protection Programme is a very bad and unworkable idea and not necessary even in these current crazy times. Believe me, times have been this crazy or worse before, the world has survived.

      • original-internet-explorer says:

        I don’t really disagree with any of that Deiseach – but Amateur Witness Protection Programme has been the least worst option in historical civil insurrections

        There is not a strong claim that I know what when and how. This is real X-risk the way volcanos are.

    • John Schilling says:

      Trying to avoid the dogpile by offering something hopefully more constructive. This,

      I’m capable of offering food and lodging to a target for a short duration in my country

      Is not the help anyone is actually going to need. Nobody here is going to be dragged out of their homes and guillotined, and nobody is going to be literally cast out on the street to starve. There’s no support for anything like that. Furthermore, the United States at least is far too polarized for that to ever become the consensus. Long before it reaches the point where either tribe could do that sort of thing, the other tribe would turn against them in a way that would leave them far too busy with each other than worrying about a bunch of freaks like us.

      The danger, to the extent that it exists, is of “cancellation”. Which, again, does not mean literally cast out into the street to starve. It could mean being stuck with nothing but crap jobs that pay for a crappy apartment and food and video games, and being censored from the major social-media platforms, ostracized by your friends and left to play your video games alone in that crappy apartment where nobody will ever care.

      So maybe there’s a need to prepare a collective defense against that. But what is needed is not a priest-hole offering physical security. It’s an economic support network that can provide the cancelled with employment commensurate with their talents and training. It’s a social support network that can provide people with a circle of friends and maybe a surrogate family. And it’s alternate channels of communication to tie these people together and ideally give them some back channel into the public discourse.

      SSC itself could be a small part of that, but it would be a mistake to load too much onto Scott’s public-facing blog. Unfortunately, doing this right would be a much taller order than a mere underground railroad to a place of physical safety. But, if it’s worth thinking about, this is what we need to be thinking about.

      • original-internet-explorer says:

        I like the idea of a safe exit for marginalized groups. A cultural response has a long history with religious groups like Sam’s example.

        The issue for me is the speed at which an internet mob forms. Police reactions are event based but I expect somebody like Cassandra knows they’re about to be attacked but stays in position out of habit and not knowing what to do next. That is the window an assist could be made – by the time gunfire was going off she knows they can get to her – it is too late and we go from zero to 100km where she must call the police or survey the contents of her cutlery drawer. People have an intuition they’re in danger but don’t call the police all the time – but they might call somebody in their tribe who is their emergency contact.

        • Eric T says:

          No. Stop. Please stop advising people to call “a member of their tribe” over the police. If your life is in danger CALL THE POLICE.

          Edit: ESPECIALLY if there are armed assailants. Bring additional untrained people into what could be an armed assault or fight sounds like a recipe to get people hurt/killed.

          • original-internet-explorer says:

            I don’t know what you’re reading but it’s not what I’m writing.

            There exist support groups that are proactive to protect women from abusive spouses. There is a stalking behaviour that happens that the police can’t really deal with because they can’t exist in all times and places.

            Internet mobs can go wrong fast there would be a stalking activity so the victim would have an intuition. Police departments cannot be expected to run on somebody’s hunch.

            If a culture war turns hot the police would be overrun with calls. There have been people attacking ambulances and fire services.

            Meta: You think the system is strong I think it is fragile.

          • Eric T says:

            Alright I’m going to be honest, our conversation often feels like two ships passing in the night to me. I’m not sure I totally understand what you’re advocating for even now, so I’m going to do my best to be super thorough.

            I don’t know what you’re reading but it’s not what I’m writing.

            My understanding is you believe there to be a real chance of violent mobs descending on us like with Ms. Fairbanks. I’ve argued extensively why I think this is monstrously unlikely for the average person, but I won’t just repeat myself.

            My issue is that you seem to think enabling people to have support networks to call upon will help keep them safe. I think said support networks may actually make them, and everyone involved less safe.

            There exist support groups that are proactive to protect women from abusive spouses. There is a stalking behaviour that happens that the police can’t really deal with because they can’t exist in all times and places.

            The difference between this and what you are advocating for is pretty severe. First, an abusive spouse fixates on one person for weeks, months, sometimes years at a time. Angry mobs don’t do that – at least not unless you are so notorious you have a reason to have personally angered a vast amount of the mob. So with a spouse, having an ever-vigilant presence over a long time is helpful, but with a mob you’d just need to be safe temporarily. In such a situation YOU SHOULD CALL THE POLICE. Another difference between angry mobs and spouses are how they react to people, and the general danger level they pose. If I bring in 5 friends to protect me from a spouse, I can be fairly confident said spouse won’t try shit. Not true with an angry mob, if anything the presence of a counter-mob may only make them more violent.

            Internet mobs can go wrong fast there would be a stalking activity so the victim would have an intuition.

            Ok this is an example of what I mean when I say I don’t think I understand you. In the same sentence you say “internet mobs can go wrong fast” and “there would be enough time prior to the mobs arrival that a person could detect them coming” I feel like one of two things is true: Mobs either move quickly upon a person w/ little or no warning, or they don’t.

            If no warning: Unclear how your support network helps. If I have time to call for aid and there is an imminent threat to my life, I should call 911. If 911 can’t get to me, it seems unlikely that someone from an internet forum will, or that their presence would actually be helpful.

            If warning: Here the support network could maybe be useful if the person in question had nowhere else to go (friends, family etc.) but I see two issues. First, if the Mob is this patient the support network presumably can’t hide people forever. And second, if someone has reason to suspect a large group of people are targeting their life, and they go to the police with evidence of said fact, I think the cops would try to keep them safe, and likely do a better job of it than blog readers.

            If a culture war turns hot the police would be overrun with calls. There have been people attacking ambulances and fire services.

            In this world why is the mob targeting you? Presumably they’ve got way bigger fish to fry, and it sounds like they’re dealing with a lot worse right now, probably a bunch of cops shooting at them or something.

          • Matt M says:

            Cassandra did call the police. They told her tough luck, they couldn’t help her.

            I guess you can say that’s really rare and it’s just bad luck and it probably won’t happen to you. But are you willing to bet your life on it?

          • Eric T says:

            I guess you can say that’s really rare and it’s just bad luck and it probably won’t happen to you. But are you willing to bet your life on it?

            Yes. I’m willing to bet my life that: 1) I won’t be on the bottom side of the like 1-in-20 Million chance that I get targeted by an angry mob, that 2) said mob has for some reason stopped the cops from helping me, 3) that there is a nearby ally who can get to me despite the cops being unable to, and 4) they’re actually able to protect against the mob.

            I’m far more likely to die of heart disease, so maybe I should spend the time I would spend building my alliance of allies researching ways to lower my cholesterol, or going on a nice jog.

        • Deiseach says:

          The issue for me is the speed at which an internet mob forms … by the time gunfire was going off she knows they can get to her – it is too late and we go from zero to 100km where she must call the police or survey the contents of her cutlery drawer.

          Are you genuinely saying you are considering online lynch mobs forming and then heading out WITH GUNS A-BLAZING to kill or at least injure or drive out people from/affiliated with SSC?

          Seriously?

          Because that is as bonkers as the people I quoted saying straight up that the police (and white supremacists) are poring over photos of people involved in the protests so they can go after them to kill them.

          If you honestly think “group that includes Fred and Bob are fully prepared to commit murder” then offering to host refugees is no good, you need to call the cops or some form of authority to stop them.

          • original-internet-explorer says:

            It’s not just this digital metapolitics bar – but yes this is possible. It’s not crazy to think some species of rightist would gather information for assassination lists either – and I’m a rightist saying so. The left assassinated Pim Fortuyn for representing views which are just generic rightist positions.

            When CW aggravation escalates anybody who stands out and is accessible can become a scapegoat. Soros for the right or Kissinger for the left but often some pleb with the wrong opinion at the wrong time who is accessible who gets mobbed. Tucker Carlson did a bit on it last week – so this is not a fringe view – at least not for male rightists – I think men don’t talk to women about this.

            I don’t want to mention specific names of people in the SSC noosphere but yes there are different fringe groups who would target them if they became activated in a conflict. Contra-Eric – this is phase 1 of most civil conflicts. The Culture War is like the Cold War and internal conflict is more plausible than state on state.

            The most likely path is for a provoked partisan to post the location of the person representing the wrong sort of politics and then this is forwarded to a different group of people who act as the hands of violence. That group might not even have an objection to the target – probably not spending days and nights figuring out good reasons to be murdering fellow citizens – they just get the order and activate. There’s simple people like that in every faction.

            I posted the link from the police site – the rioters were exhibiting stalking by following police back to their homes – we are not as far from very serious events as we might like to believe. Probably it will be fine – but I say have insurance.

            Elon Musk is not going to Mars because of asteroids I don’t think – I believe his less disclosed motivation is he doesn’t believe we have a lot of time because of human nature. Right at the top of this blog a reference to Turchin – all about cycles of violence in societies.

          • Eric T says:

            Nooooooooooooooo I thought we were done with this!

          • original-internet-explorer says:

            :Eric T

            You’re supposed to be on your jog! It makes you live longer.

            I had a client who died of type 2 – I gave up all refined sugar and went from obese to normal BMI in a year.

            Zubrin gave a talk at the Mars Society echoing my basic complaint about us being murder-y and why that means we should strive for space.

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kaZRGwfK9U

          • Eric T says:

            The left assassinated Pim Fortuyn for representing views which are just generic rightist positions.

            Look – he’s a politician. You’re a commentor on a blog. Politicans by their nature will ALWAYS be in some degree of danger. All public figures are, some assassinated John Lennon for chrissakes. I’m not sweating that Boris Nemtsov was killed, because its functionally not a situation I ever see myself being in. Unless you are running for a high-ranking political office or forming your own populist party, Fortuyn’s assassination is probably the least of your concerns.

            When CW aggravation escalates anybody who stands out and is accessible can become a scapegoat. Soros for the right or Kissinger for the left

            Ah yes, renowned war criminal Henry Kissinger, arguably responsible for millions of deaths. Unless you’re planning something I should be worried about I think you’re going to be fine.

            but often some pleb with the wrong opinion at the wrong time who is accessible who gets mobbed.

            Do they often? I buy this might happen like… once in a while. But often?? Is this a frequent occurrence? I have legitimately tried to google how often this occurs and I have found nothing so I don’t think this is a valid concern, but I just don’t know.

            I don’t want to mention specific names of people in the SSC noosphere but yes there are different fringe groups who would target them if they became activated in a conflict. Contra-Eric – this is phase 1 of most civil conflicts. The Culture War is like the Cold War and internal conflict is more plausible than state on state.

            Uhhhhh I find it harder and harder to really engage with this because I genuinely don’t know where to begin. 1. No offense to any of y’all but I’m pretty politically savvy and I didn’t know ANY of you, so I think you’re low notoriety to be safe.

            2. Why am I even giving credence to that thought? I’ve repeadetly asked someone to tell me how this could happen and gotten no answer. To reiterate:

            Basically all states that descended into mob rule had crippled economies, weak militaries/police forces, and a long buildup of violent civil unrest. The US has a reasonably effective economy, even despite record high unemployment right now, the strongest and best funded military and police in the world, and I mean if you want to call the scattered looting that has basically all but ended “violent and civil unrest” I guess that’s technically correct, but it doesn’t really map onto the examples upthread like Revolutionary France.

            Add onto this fact how deeply unpopular it is for a violent lynch mob to form and another fact: the US government’s monopoly on force is extreme. If a violent lynch mob took control of the streets I’m very confident that if they wanted to the US military could kill all of them in under 30 minutes. Protestors with knives and rifles can’t really withstand trillions of dollars of advanced military vehicles and hardware.

            Probably it will be fine – but I say have insurance.

            As was posted above – your “insurance” is apparently to create a counter mob that can like… fight or hide you from the mob. I’ve gone deeply in detail as to why this won’t work, and will likely make you and your counter-mob LESS safe, even if your worst-case scenario comes to pass. You want insurance? Buy a log cabin deep in the woods and get a hunting rifle. Don’t try to convince people to fight mobs!

            Elon Musk is not going to Mars because of asteroids I don’t think – I believe his less disclosed motivation is he doesn’t believe we have a lot of time because of human nature.

            Wouldn’t moving to like… Australia be easier?

          • Eric T says:

            You’re supposed to be on your jog! It makes you live longer.

            I did actually! Thank you for checking in.

            Zubrin gave a talk at the Mars Society echoing my basic complaint about us being murder-y and why that means we should strive for space.

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kaZRGwfK9U

            You’re gonna make me watch a 30-minute long video of this guy? Really? Can I at least get a timestamp?

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            Zubrin gave a talk at the Mars Society echoing my basic complaint about us being murder-y and why that means we should strive for space.

            This seems parochial of him. He’s saying people should go live on the Moon-and-Mars because we’re murder-y? Why that quadrillion-dollar project and not an alternative like O’Neill habitats? Has he watched Mobile Suit Gundam and is afraid of separatist space colonists gassing the orbital habitats of government loyalists and dropping them on Earth as WMDs?

          • original-internet-explorer says:

            @Eric T

            In 1984 the Ministry of Health had an exercise instructor tell Winston what to do for an hour through the telescreen. Today that’s a Silicon Valley startup. I’m against using gym equipment but for exercise in real environments with trees and rocks. There is a leaping lizard inside your brain that appreciates simple real interaction like a puppy running after a ball. In our age people use their bodies awkwardly and are prone to injuries – probably as people turn their brains off while driving on the freeway.

            Robert Zubrin talks are always worth watching in full but here you go https://youtu.be/8kaZRGwfK9U?t=1385

          • original-internet-explorer says:

            @Le Maistre Chat

            I like the cylinders but there is a critical path in the tech graph I think.

            It’s somewhere in here –

            https://makezine.com/2013/07/06/the-rockwell-integrated-space-plan-vector-redux-version/

            We are behind schedule.

      • Wrong Species says:

        There’s no support for anything like that.

        People say stuff like this but they managed to outlaw Christianity in 18th century France. We don’t know what could happen and you don’t necessarily need that much support to put extreme policies in place.

        • Eric T says:

          To be clear, Dechristianization as a legal function happened mainly in 1793 – 4 years after the start of a massive violent revolution that had taken so many weird turns it resembled nothing of how it began.

          These things don’t come out of nowhere like you are making it seem.

          • BBA says:

            I’m not terribly familiar with the specifics, but I’ve read some discussion of how chaotic the Iranian Revolution was. Many of the revolutionaries were clamoring to replace the Shah with a secular democracy and weren’t pleased with how things turned out. You can retroactively impose a narrative that it was a unified front arguing for a repressive theocracy but that doesn’t reflect what they were thinking while it was happening.

            So when I hear talk of “the lockdowns are meant to repress Christianity” or “Trump is calling in the military to overthrow elected government in blue states” or “the riots and looting are being carried out by [INSERT ANYONE HERE]”, well, that’s how it may all shake out, but we just don’t know anything yet, and maybe we never will.

            There’s no earthly way of knooooowing… which direction we are goooooing…

        • Matt M says:

          Yeah. Pretty much every place where horrible atrocities happened looked relatively normal a few years beforehand. Everyone thought it couldn’t/wouldn’t happen there.

          Remember, Time Magazine made Hitler “man of the year” in 1938…

          The time to worry about and prepare for and try and stop this sort of thing is now. Not “once there is large public support for executing anyone who won’t take the BLM-pledge.” Because once that exists, it’s too late.

          • Eric T says:

            Yeah. Pretty much every place where horrible atrocities happened looked relatively normal a few years beforehand. Everyone thought it couldn’t/wouldn’t happen there.

            That’s just not true. Let’s go over the examples that have been brought up over the course of this thread in chronological order:

            Revolutionary France. 30+ years of unrest, starting arguably with the defeat of the British in the American Revolution, combined with a decades-long taxation scheme so massively unpopular it incited revolts, and a country literally declaring bankruptcy. Add in the fact that 98% of the population was systemically being denied representation through the weakening of the third estate.

            France was for years before the revolution a shadow state, crippled economy and functionally worthless military in the face of a public uprising that was only caused by measures so deeply unpopular they’ve become synonymous with really stupid ideas.

            Nazi Germany. Again, another very weak state in a massive financial crisis, the Weimar republic had little to no measures to prevent the rise of the Nazi Party. With a new, poorly constructed democratic system that had been hastily adapted from a monarchic government, one of the worst financial crises a first-world nation has seen in the last 200 years, and gutted military there was unrest and violence for years before the Nazis ever took power. They literally burned the main government building back in 1933 – last time I checked the white house is still up.

            Again, you have a state with massive financial issues, unrest that hits a cross-section of the population, and functionally weak stability internally.

            Finally Rwanda. I wrote my college capstone on the conditions leading to the Rwandan genocide, so to stop myself from writing 20,000+ words here, let’s just leave it at this. It was a hot fucking mess.

            All these states have several in common. First, very weak or ineffective internal peace-keeping measures. The French Monarchy, Weimar Republic, and Hutu-Controlled Rwanda weren’t exactly ranking high on the “world power” list. Many of them were functionally out of money, couldn’t pay soldiers, or simply lacked high-quality force. The United States, for all of its troubles, has the most powerful military and police forces in the world. Any attempt at mass violence could be destroyed so fast it’d make the 6-day war look like World War I. Even if you don’t buy this, the deep political divides in the US make it unlikely that a majority is able to rise and seize power- ethnic Germans in Weimar, the 98% in France, or the 90% Hutu population in Rwanda. Even if all the Leftists got together and decided to hold a coup, we wouldn’t control a majority stake in the weapons, soldiers, or land of the country – something all of the above coups/uprisings had one of, if not all of.

            Look, I’ll concede that there is always some chance of shit going sideways. But that’s no matter what. If these protests end completely peacefully and life goes back to normal it will still be true. Given that I can’t convince you of that not being the case, by all means live your life ready to fight an armed battle. I think that’s a deeply illogical way to live and living that way will reduce your QoL, but I can’t stop you. What I will ask people to stop, is pushing that these ideas are likely, or even certain, based on one largely isolated incident that is already improving. Look I said it myself in the previous OT – I think there is likely going to be more riots if shit doesn’t change. But I see no path for these scattered riots to lead to, as you say,

            large public support for executing anyone who won’t take the BLM-pledge

            And if there is, I’ll smuggle you out of the country myself.

          • A Definite Beta Guy says:

            The thread creator is borderline paranoid, butI think you are underestimating possible risks. There are always warning signs, but the issue is everyone thinks “well, this is like what happened before” and thinks the warning signs mean nothing.
            And the warning signs and tremors can usually be mitigated by a competent government, and they usually are, until they can’t. France gets an exceptionally good Finance Minister that Littlefingers the budget, until eventually the jig is up and France realizes it has no money. Weimar successfully puts down a loser revolt and co-opts the leader into its political system, until they realize their political system is not robust enough to resist takeover when someone controls the security system. Rwanda looks like a normal shithole with its normal civil wars, until Hutu Power turned out to have just a bit more momentum than anyone planned for. We go through decades of influenza and coronavirus outbreaks, until it turns out this one is adapted just well enough to kill millions of us. All this slavery nonsense really just amounts to a few hundred dead in Kansas over the course of years and an idiot trying to start a slave rebellion in Virginia, until it’s not that anymore.

            Yes, there are always warning signs, the issue is that the warning signs usually end up being dismissed as Not Really That Serious.

            EDIT: First draft was more abrasive than called for so I edited the language. My apologies.

          • Eric T says:

            I guess my post got eaten by the spam filter, which is sad because I liked it a lot. TLDR: I don’t have the energy to keep arguing it, but please just bear in mind that I think 1. it’s not on me to prove the political violence isn’t likely, the burden of proof should be on the person arguing it is, and 2. I think this kind of thought (Leftists are likely, or even definitely, going to hurt us) could partially be a self-fulfilling prophecy as it breaks down the very types of civil discourse that serve as a great barrier to it occurring.

            If I can find the energy to re-write the longer version of this I will, but for now I concede that I can’t convince you said disaster isn’t coming, but I hold fast that trying to convince people it is coming is actively harmful.

            EDIT: Okay this is roughly what I initially said.

            1. I think this future is both statistically unlikely (the vast majority of cases of rioting or civil unrest don’t yield lynch mobs) and doesn’t seem to have a pragmatic path to occurring. I have laid out some, in my opinion, rather serious roadblocks to said Lynch Mobs forming (Financially Stable Country, Strong Military, Lack of Public Support) and I think that it’s not my burden to prove that this time isn’t different, but rather the people advocating it is to at least explain how it actually could. Otherwise we’re just arguing about some incredibly unlikely possibility.

            2. I think the advice in this thread actively puts people in danger. Do not call for friends, armed or otherwise, if a mob is assailing you. I outlined in an above post why it is virtually never going to be helpful, and putting untrained civilians in the middle of a high-stress violent confrontation potentially involving firearms is a recipe for disaster.

            3. This kind of talk, both on SSC and writ-large does damage to the very institutions that help make this type of thing nigh-impossible. When you convince people that Leftists are out to get them, it breaks down trust and communication. When I come on here and see people legitimately discussing how to blunt a Leftist takeover, it makes it really hard for me to discuss openly and constructively with them, because A. I’m starting from a perilous position “We don’t want to kill you” and B. We spend more time discussing this than the things that are actually happening right now. I think putting the idea that this is likely, or even certain as some people have implied upthread, makes fears of violence more likely to come to pass.

          • Matt M says:

            Nobody is saying it’s “likely.” It’s a rare event. Rare events, by their nature, are never going to be “likely.” But “it’s a rare event” does not logically imply “therefore you shouldn’t worry about it.”

            And your point #2 is sounding pretty close to you almost saying that “we have it coming.” I’m going to apply some charity here and assume you don’t really mean it to be taken that way, but “don’t talk about leftists being violent because that makes it more likely leftists will kill you” seems to be a morally suspect position, even if technically accurate. I mean, as a matter of practicality yes, the best way to avoid being killed by the mob is to do your best to join and not offend the mob in any way. But for various reasons, some of us are particularly disinclined to do that, so “what else can we do” is a relevant question.

            The point is that large-scale public violence is like pushing a boulder up a mountain. It moves slowly. It’s hard to get it to the summit. At any give moment when the boulder is below the summit, it’s easy to look at the situation and say “the people on the other side of the mountain are safe, the boulder isn’t at the top yet and getting it there will be hard.” But once you crest the summit, it’s too late. At that point the boulder has momentum, and nothing is going to stop it. The time to worry is before the boulder is at the summit. Preferably a bit before and not “two seconds before it gets there.”

            No, France and Germany and Rwanda didn’t go from “normal peaceful high-functioning society” to “mass public executions” overnight. It did take some time. But my point is that there was no period of months/years when intelligent opinion all recognized that mass public executions were coming soon. It seemed like it happened overnight to most people. Including the people with the most to lose and the highest incentives to be looking out for that sort of thing. The fact that a whole lot of French Aristocracy/Jews/Tutsis didn’t flee during the “good times” should suffice as ample evidence that these things aren’t necessarily easy to see coming…

          • Eric T says:

            And your point #2 is sounding pretty close to you almost saying that “we have it coming.” I’m going to apply some charity here and assume you don’t really mean it to be taken that way, but “don’t talk about leftists being violent because that makes it more likely leftists will kill you” seems to be a morally suspect position, even if technically accurate. I mean, as a matter of practicality yes, the best way to avoid being killed by the mob is to do your best to join and not offend the mob in any way. But for various reasons, some of us are particularly disinclined to do that, so “what else can we do” is a relevant question.

            Ok I know I said I’d stop arguing this but I feel that this point in particular is important to clear up. I’m not saying leftists will attack you if you call them violent, or that you should join the Mob. I think that’s a little uncharitable. What I am saying is when you try to convince people that violence agianst X-ists is coming, and let’s be clear, while some people in this thread have maintained its rarity, others have repeatedly argued that it is in fact coming, you do two things. First you break down trust between both sides. You make Red Tribers think Blue Tribers are going to hurt them, and you make the Blues think the Reds are paranoid. This in turn causes peaceful solutions to fail more often, and I think we can all agree that peaceful solutions succeeding is usually a good way to stop violent “solutions” occurring. Second, you make people panic, and panic is bad for preventing violence. Panicked people make poor choices, most violence is born of poor choices.

            To be clear, this isn’t a left/right issue for me. If someone came into this thread arguing why the Red Tribe is going to start pulling college grads out and killing them Cultural Revolution style, I’d have a real issue with it too. I think lending legitimacy to these thoughts goes past the point of “prepping for the worst’ and enters the point of “contributing to it”

            EDIT: I just wanted to say thank you for your above language edit, I felt a little peeved by being called head-in-the-sand for defending what I still believe to be a quite reasonable position XP

    • SamChevre says:

      I’ll just note that this is generous, but quite dangerous.

      I had a friend who helped someone at serious risk flee the country in a case that the left chose to use as part of their “no, we make shit up and it’s the law–or at least, we can punish you for not acting like it’s the law” campaign: he ended up spending several years in jail.

      • Aftagley says:

        Yeah. Us kooky leftists with our weird stances against parental kidnapping. What will we think of next?!

      • Guy in TN says:

        I had a friend who helped someone at serious risk flee the country in a case that the left chose to use as part of their “no, we make shit up and it’s the law–or at least, we can punish you for not acting like it’s the law” campaign

        Every once in a while, I’ll see a comment on SSC that just leave me floored. Awe-struck at the vast inferential gulfs, bottomless chasms stretching out into the horizon.

        [Ken Miller was found guilty of aiding in the kidnapping of a child, for those of you who are curious]

        • original-internet-explorer says:

          I can guess it comes down to the legitimacy of civil partnerships – something which is very new and their community doesn’t buy in so it’s a conflict between two moral codes and one legal one.

          Looks to be Shiri’s Scissors.

          • Guy in TN says:

            “Lesbian marriage is morally wrong” is a position I can understand why someone believes.

            “Lesbian marriage shouldn’t be legal” is also a position I can understand why someone believes.

            “Lesbian marriage and its associated parental rights isn’t actually the law, just something Leftists made up and are now lawlessly enforcing against innocent people” is currently beyond me.

          • cassander says:

            @Guy in TN

            “Lesbian marriage and its associated parental rights isn’t actually the law, just something Leftists made up and are now lawlessly enforcing against innocent people” is currently beyond me.

            I think the claim is more like ‘the constitution as laid down by the founders clearly states that lesbian marriage is a fundamental human right’ is something Leftists made up and are now lawlessly enforcing against innocent people.

          • Eric T says:

            @cassander – to be fair its the 14th amendment us Leftists usually site to force you innocent people to allow same-sex marriage. Also didn’t that case happen in Vermont, a state that legalized civil unions years before the Supreme Court ever got involved through its democratically elected legislature? The issue was she thought she could avoid this by moving to a state with different laws, despite knowingly entering into said legal arrangement in Vermont. And even the state in question’s own court said that irrespective of SS marriage laws in Virginia, the visitation rights granted by Vermont were still legal and enforceable?

          • cassander says:

            @Eric T

            I think you’re confusing me for someone who’s opposed to same sex marriage. But yes, that’s more or less what happened, but the supremes ruled the opposite way 40 years earlier on more or less the same question, as they have for numerous other rights, like gun permits. So I can understand why people are annoyed at the way the penumbras and emanations always seem to endorse the current left wing cause de jure.

          • John Schilling says:

            But Vermont passed an explicit civil-union law in 2000, in the usual fashion with the state legislature and governor doing their thing. That’s note make-believe law or quasi-law or fake law, that’s straight-up law law. And, per the full faith and credit clause, it’s law in Virginia as well as Vermont, where the child of a Vermont union is concerned.

            It might be a wrong or stupid or unjust law; those are all reasonable things to argue. But I’m not seeing where “they just made shit up and called it law” comes into it, except to the extent that e.g. “no murdering people” is just some shit that people made up once upon a time.

          • ana53294 says:

            I don’t think agreeing or not depends on whether you agree with lesbian marriage or parenting rights by the non-biological mother.

            From what I’ve read in the Wikipedia page, there are accusations of parental abuse in that couple, and many people will support the parent who does everything, even illegal things, against a person who they believe is mistreating their child, even when it’s a heterosexual married couple. Even when it’s not proved in court. The degree of support depends on whether they believe the accusations against the parent.

            In Spain, for example, there was a kidnapping case within a heterosexual couple, and the country more or less split in half, feminist organizations supporting the mother. The case was the following: A Spanish woman married and living in Italy made several allegations of abuse by her husband. After divorcing him, she returns to Spain, where she refuses the father’s requests to see the child. The Italian government launches a case against her for kidnapping.

            Nobody disagreed whether this was a crime according to the law (it was), but many people disagreed on whether it was morally wrong.

            In cases of parental kidnapping, I’m quite skeptical whether we can determine who was right. I believe that in some cases, parental kidnapping may be the morally right thing to do. And the law can be wrong in forcing visitation.

          • Eric T says:

            @ana53294

            Nobody disagreed whether this was a crime according to the law (it was), but many people disagreed on whether it was morally wrong.

            Literally that’s how this conversation started:

            a case that the left chose to use as part of their “no, we make shit up and it’s the law–or at least, we can punish you for not acting like it’s the law”

            Look if you want to argue the Left passes immoral laws, thats one thing. This was an argument over whether the Left “makes shit up and suddenly its the law.”

          • Spookykou says:

            I assumed ana was speaking to the case in their example in the section you quoted.

          • SamChevre says:

            It’s somewhat related to the legitimacy of civil partnerships–but more critically, Virginia law explicitly did not recognize civil partnerships (It even disallowed contracts that looked like civil partnerships.), and had not repealed its sodomy laws (Lawrence is part of the “make shit up and call it law” enterprise). From Br Ken’s perspective, it looked like the courts trying to take a child from her mother to give her to someone completely unrelated, whose past relationship with the mother was illegal under Virginia law.

          • ana53294 says:

            @Eric T

            I was referring to the Spanish case (link in Spanish) when I said it was a crime. It’s also a case where a parental abduction occurred and people disagree on whether it was right or wrong.

            I was trying to say parental abductions are a huge can of worms that’s very complicated even among traditional, married heterosexual couples, and people have vastly differing opinions on whether it’s right or wrong. An sometimes people morally support kidnapping even in those cases, especially when there are accusations of abuse.

            The law is clear; people’s conception of what is right and wrong sometimes differ drastically when it comes to parental abductions.

            The legal status of gay marriage and the biological parentage just adds another complication to an already complicated situation.

          • Aftagley says:

            Also, this wasn’t as if one party member was forced into an agreement against their will/morals. They both agreed to travel to a state where the kind of relationship they wanted was legal and then formalized that relationship contractually with each-other and the state.

            Then one party adjusted her feelings and wanted to keep the parts of the relationship she enjoyed (the child) but not the parts she didn’t (the partner). She also decided that she wouldn’t comply with the visitation rights of her partner as mandated by law.

            So we had one party in this who expected to be treated in accordance with most divorce laws as recognized by pretty much all states and another one who wanted her personal feelings to be held up as more important that law. That person, when confronted by the power of the state, ended up kidnapping a child and fleeing to the third world rather than follow existing law and her previous contracts.

            +1 on what Guy in TN said earlier. This is one of those topics I’m shocked reasonable people can disagree on.

      • original-internet-explorer says:

        I note it – but I don’t know if my plan would work for that. I had to stipulate in my scheme both persons appear at the police station or be known to the police so they can’t have an arrest warrant. This was to protect the householder from the person seeking refugee.

    • Purplehermann says:

      Let’s be rational :p

      I don’t think this is likely at all (at least in the near future..)

      If you’re worried about this I’d get in contact with some preppers, buy a handgun and train with it.

      The SSC culture is probably not as useful for this as preppers.
      Preppers likely won’t care about your other views too much as long as you believe in prepping, so they cover the main advantage of SSC.

      A handgun will give you the ability to stop people from attacking you, assuming you are trained.
      This will a) make you feel safer and b) let you stop a small mob if necessary. Make sure not to risk compensate.

      • original-internet-explorer says:

        Handguns are illegal in my state probably because of sectarian violence. I am though – already a prepper and know the culture.

        SSC culture is very high in openness – and it could be that I am neurotic more than most. I want to believe that a good explorer combines openness with survival traits. Neuroticism exists for a reason. I must admit there are times I would like to turn down the volume but I’m not sure this is possible.

    • Garrett says:

      Bolt-holes are useful, but more in the case where the issue is unexpected. For example, having a place to go in the event of a natural disaster avoids a lot of the stress of the disaster, and allows you to stay somewhere other than a hotel room, freeing up hotel rooms for others. Having a network of social connections and available assistance is really great in these cases.

      If you are worried about social upheaval and persecution, it strikes me that the best thing to do would be to slowly and cautiously look at moving to an area where people like you (for whatever value of ‘like you’ applies) are more well-tolerated and plan your life around moving to such an area. That doesn’t mean picking up in the middle of the evening. That means visiting occasionally, looking for employment in the area, and eventual relocation.

      If I end up facing a situation where People Like Me are being hauled out of their house and summarily executed, I’m not willing to also take in other people who are also weird. I’ve spent a decade convincing my neighbors that I’m quirky-weird not eat-your-pets-weird. I’m certainly not willing to take in randos. Hell, just *looking* to take in a friend of mine for a few months ended up with me spending more money on a lawyer than I thought I was going to need.

  13. metalcrow says:

    I’m inclined to agree that from a deaths-only utilitarian perspective you’re probably correct, but the real crux of the issue is that when push comes to shove, very few people are actually utilitarians. So while you have a point, the problem is, no one outside of the rationalist community (and even some in it), is going to agree with it and will probably view you as an evil robot for suggesting it. I’m not sure what to do about this other than note it.

    Then there is the whole counter proposal that it’s not just deaths but about rights, and the chilling effect on everyone’s QALYs that violations of these rights cost, but i think that’s less relevant.

  14. Le Maistre Chat says:

    So I was just looking up information on the April 1968 violent riots against the Reverend MLK Jr’s assassination, and apparently 40 people were killed, amidst rioting in around 100 cities. Does anyone know how current events compare?

    Loosely related, I’m not looking forward to the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

    • keaswaran says:

      It’s much harder to have police brutality around a convention held on Zoom than it is in the Chicago Convention Center.

  15. MisterA says:

    Just saw a pretty good real life example of the cops being willing to leverage union/labor type tactics to defend their right to flagrantly brutalize citizens.

    The two cops who were suspended after they knocked that old guy down in Buffalo were members of the department’s Emergency Response unit. Now all 57 other members of that unit have also resigned in solidarity with their fellows; not from the police, but from that unit.

    We’ve seen this before – after the city of Baltimore tried to reign in the cops following the death of Freddie Gray the cops basically went on an undeclared strike, and Baltimore saw a massive spike in crime while it was declining essentially everywhere else.

    So it really does seem like the police are committed to the position that you either give them total impunity, or they will withhold their services. I am not sure whether that ultimately leads to total police victory or the “abolish the cops” position starting enjoy broader appeal, but it sure seems like it makes it harder to find a reasonable compromise position.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      If the military did it, we’d call it a coup.

      • Ninety-Three says:

        A coup is when the military seizes new power. When they say “Fine, if you won’t let me do what I want I’m taking my ball and going home”, that’s called going AWOL.

    • Erusian says:

      So it really does seem like the police are committed to the position that you either give them total impunity, or they will withhold their services.

      Have you read the reason they resigned from the horse’s mouth? Or are you just listening to what other people are telling you they’re saying? Because this is not what they’re saying, it’s what other people are saying about them.

      You can choose to disbelieve them, of course.

      • MisterA says:

        Yes.

        “Fifty-seven resigned in disgust because of the treatment of two of their members, who were simply executing orders,” Buffalo Police Benevolent Association president John Evans told WGRZ on Friday.

        https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/05/us/buffalo-police-suspension-shoving-man-trnd/index.html

        • Erusian says:

          I read the article. I didn’t see a link or quote from their statements, just an asked for statement from a radio station talking to someone who didn’t actually resign (but is a supporter). Further, the quote does not explain why they consider the treatment unfair, nor does the article.

          • beleester says:

            The Police Benevolent Association isn’t just “some group that supports the police,” it’s their union. If the president of the PBA is saying something, I would consider that an official statement on what the police think of the situation.

            However, this article has an email from the PBA president with more details, and it looks like there’s another reason which explains why everyone resigned – the PBA said they are not going to risk paying for legal defense related to the protests, and officers are unwilling to work without legal backing.

          • Erusian says:

            I didn’t say they were. I said that they were putting out justifications and that a comment made to a news station that they were treated unfairly doesn’t include why they resigned, something you don’t know unless you read what they actually say. Which you have, revealing the situation is far more complicated than them demanding a right (quoting OP) to “flagrantly brutalize citizens.” or they’ll resign.

    • cassander says:

      the correct response in such a situation is “fine, so be it.” fire every cop in the current PD and bring in the national guard until you can hire a private company security firm to come in and re-build your PD from scratch along whatever lines you want. The police only have power if the politicians let them have it. Most of them prefer to do so, for their own reasons.

      • hash872 says:

        The correct response is to void their union contract and fire the department en-masse, then offer to hire them back- under a new union agreement where the police are at-will employees with no arbitration rights to dispute firings, and disciplinary procedures are carried out by an independent body (i.e. no more ‘Internal Affairs’ where the police investigate the police). Camden New Jersey voided their police union contract this way

        • Eric T says:

          The situation in Camden was so bad that the government basically had no choice but to take drastic action. I volunteered in Camden for years, and trust me I’ve yet to see anywhere as bad as mid 2010s Camden.

          All of this to say the bar probably shouldn’t be “Camden did it so you can to!”

        • cassander says:

          If the rot is that deep, re-hiring everyone will likely just reproduce the same pathologies through different routes. External disciplinary procedures aren’t much use if everyone in the department is perfectly willing to lie for each other.

          • Spookykou says:

            I have worked with large unions for several years, the impression I get is that a lot of people enjoy flaunting the line of what they can do within the confines of the rules. If you can use this fire rehire method to fundamentally change the union agreement, I think this would effectively shift a lot of behavior to the new, worst possible, but ideally not as bad, behavior, and of course if they step over that line back into the old levels of bad, you actually can fire them.

    • A Definite Beta Guy says:

      Yes, blaming the police for all of America’s ills for the last week, declaring your intention to bust their unions, trying to abolish them entirely, threatening to steal their pensions, wanting to put them in jail, etc, in the same week where police officers and even the Secret Service are treated like punching bags by the pro-Corona Virus Street Party….

      Yeah, believe it or not, actions and words have consequences.

      I can tell you in our division, both under old and new structure, if 1/3 of the workforce fires a complaint about something within X hours (corporate HR is very ambiguous), then the Factory Manager and the HR Manager are summarily fired. If you have that level of complaint, it means you really screwed the pooch and torched your credibility with your workforce beyond repair.

      • MisterA says:

        If they had resigned as some sort of general statement, that would be one thing.

        These guys specifically resigned in solidarity with cops who put a 75 year old man in the hospital for no apparent reason. The department first tried bald-faced lying to cover for those officers – then when it turned out the assault occurred on video, and they actually had to suffer consequences, their entire unit resigned in solidarity at the “disgusting treatment.”

        If a suspension is disgusting treatment for putting a non-violent elderly man in the hospital, exactly what level of accountability would you say is called for?

        EDIT – It appears the officers were also arrested and charged with assault, but that was after their unit resigned in protest, so even suspension was too much for them. Of course the same question also applies with their arrest and charges; if the police won’t countenance actual consequences even in a case this cut and dry, exactly what recourse is left on the table?

        Particularly notable is that a bunch of cops protested outside the courthouse in defense of the charged cops. So it really appears to be the view of at least large portions of the Buffalo PD that the cops in that video did nothing wrong.

      • beleester says:

        Does your workplace have a similar level of strictness towards health and safety violations? If a worker’s error put someone else in the hospital, would you let it slide because hey, their co-workers really like them and keeping your credibility with your workforce is more important?

    • Logan says:

      The cops didn’t resign in solidarity, that’s just what the police union wants you to believe.

      The union announced that, after the incident, they would no longer be covering the legal fees of union members charged with brutality during the protests. At least some of the cops decided that they didn’t want to be liable, and so refused to continue policing the protest out of rational self interest. The union then announced “See how much solidarity we have? All these people resigning in solidarity!” Media then repeats the union line because it’s easy and it fits the narrative.

      We can’t know exactly how many of the cops feel solidarity and how many don’t, but this local news piece shows that at least some of the resigning cops feel misrepresented:
      https://www.wkbw.com/news/local-news/exclusive-two-buffalo-police-ert-members-say-resignation-was-not-in-solidarity-with-suspended-officers

      • Matt C says:

        Thanks for posting this. That story makes a lot more sense now.

        • MisterA says:

          Yeah, that is somewhat more reasonable, although it still doesn’t paint a great picture that they can’t conceive of how to do their job without getting criminal charges for brutality.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            If my liability insurance provider said I would no longer be covered for anything on Tuesdays, I would stop going to work on Tuesday.

            “Just don’t do brutality and you have nothing to worry about for being sued” is as wrong as “just don’t break laws and the police will leave you alone.”

          • MisterA says:

            Nobody is suing those cops, the legal charges the union apparently won’t be covering anymore are presumably the criminal defense charges for assault.

            Although now that I have read the actual email from the union rep, it’s really unclear.

      • zzzzort says:

        Treating the union as different from the police is sort of weird. The union exists to be the collective voice of the police. The individual officers didn’t make independent decisions, but it’s not really the case that this is something imposed by an outside force. This is the cops going “we don’t like working protests because we’re too likely to be held to account for something, so we’re not going to”.

        • simon says:

          The union might in theory exist “to be the collective voice of the police” but that doesn’t mean that’s what it is in practice. It’s especially unlikely to properly represent particular workers that are in a different situation than most of the workers in the union.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            In my experience the union represents the senior members of the union at the expense of the junior members of the union, but with the social backing that you better not call the union bosses out.

            The same way colleges can do price discrimination but get treated as running a charity. It’s obvious bullshit but society has decided It’s Actually Good Instead Of Evil.

        • Purplehermann says:

          You’re assuming unions aren’t a seperate agent from the police.
          If this union is like other unions I know of, then you’re off

  16. Aftagley says:

    I know I’ve complained about this before, but what the hell is going on with the market? The S&P is only down ~5% from where it’s all-time high in February. YTD is only down around 1% and we’re up, in total, over 10% from this time last year. The DOW hasn’t done quite as well, but it still follows the same basic trend. This is on top of a pandemic with 100,000 dead, the economy still basically shut down and millions unemployed PLUS the most disruptive social unrest we’ve seen in at least 5 years, debatably in the last couple of decades and an oil market that has been having an absolute roller coaster.

    I’m not exposed right now, so I’m not at risk of losing my shirt, but this continues to absolutely shock me how disconnected to market is from the overall economy. My current guess is that this is just the biggest and longest-lasting dead cat bounce ever… but I freely admit I can’t predict anything with this market anymore.

    • Erusian says:

      The stock markets aren’t meant to match the general pattern of the economy, they’re meant to allocate capital. Why would you think that they’re supposed to match the general state of the economy?

      • Aftagley says:

        Because an asset needs to have some potential for increasing in value for it to be attractive to investment. No one allocates capital into a market that’s collapsing, you need growth and growth correlates strongly to the overall health of the economy.

        If you want me to rephrase my question as, “why are stocks continuing to increase in price absent any kind of discernible tailwind?” fine, but I don’t think that changes the question at all.

        • Erusian says:

          Yes, an asset needs to have a potential for increasing in value, not all assets. Plenty of people allocates capital into a collapsing market. Look at the former Soviet Union, for example. The aggregate of the market can be doing well with a major reallocation meaning specific stocks look very different. Further, you’re asking about aggregate measures, which removes it a step further.

          “why are stocks continuing to increase in price absent any kind of discernible tailwind?”

          Because investors are predicting those assets will increase in value. If you want to ask why they think that, that is a different question.

    • salvorhardin says:

      I had a good long conversation about this a few days ago with a friend whose investment instincts I trust. The points he made were:

      1. If there is actually a full recovery over the next couple of years, the total discounted present value of companies’ expected long-term income streams may not have fallen so much. This is especially true of multinational companies if other parts of the world recover faster and/or better than the US.

      2. There will be some collateral benefits to the post-pandemic economy from the lessons we’ve been forced to learn, e.g. now that we know who really can efficiently work from home, we can get to an efficient mix of from-home and in-office work a lot faster than we would have otherwise. There are some similarities here to the story in Alexander Field’s _A Great Leap Forward_.

      3. If you’re thinking about getting your assets out of the market, you have to understand what other asset class you think will have better returns and is thus more worthy of putting your money in it. In the absence of a clear answer, people might as well leave their money in stocks. Ultimately other asset classes may not be that much safer from any long-term effects on economic performance.

      4. This is especially true if inflation is on the horizon, which would lift nominal stock values and devalue cash.

      • Aftagley says:

        If there is actually a full recovery over the next couple of years, the total discounted present value of companies’ expected long-term income streams may not have fallen so much.

        Right, but isn’t that true in every economic downturn? Why would this be such an early and dramatic factor in this case?

        2. There will be some collateral benefits to the post-pandemic economy from the lessons we’ve been forced to learn,

        Interesting. I need to think about this more. This isn’t a major factor in anyone’s decision making process though, is it? Like, maybe we rebound into being slightly more efficient, but that’s no reason to say, invest in McDonalds (up 40% from the bottom of the crash)

        you’re thinking about getting your assets out of the market, you have to understand what other asset class you think will have better returns and is thus more worthy of putting your money in it.

        Hasn’t the mattress always been an option during a recession?

        4. This is especially true if inflation is on the horizon, which would lift nominal stock values and devalue cash.

        Interesting. What would cause this inflation? (Coughs nervously and looks at the fed’s current balance)

        • John Schilling says:

          Interesting. What would cause this inflation? (Coughs nervously and looks at the fed’s current balance)

          The Fed looking at its current balance, looking at Congress demanding another couple trillion dollars in stimulus funding, and dialing the money printers up to eleven at a time when we haven’t reestablished a corresponding level of production of stuff to buy with all that money.

          • Aftagley says:

            Yeah, that was an attempt at humor.

            On the bright side, I guess where about to find out if money market theory has legs!

        • DarkTigger says:

          Interesting. What would cause this inflation? (Coughs nervously and looks at the fed’s current balance)

          Sorry, if I sound like a broken record. The reason the stock market is up, is “Money Printer goes BRRRRR”.
          Think about why the stock market was falling in March. Because people (and institutional investors) expected companies to go bancrupt. The fed is literally printing money to keep companies afloat.
          Think about where else they put their money. Traditionally the asset for a recession that creates cashflow would be treasury bonds. The fed slashed the interest on those. (And some instituional investors are obliged to keep an balance between bonds and stocks)

          So: Companies won’t go bancrupt, at least right now the corona apocalypse seems to be averted, and investors have cash burning a hole in their pockets. Why shouldn’t the stockmarket rise?

          • Aftagley says:

            Sorry for the delayed post, but I’ve thought about this some more:

            If stock prices are currently being buoyed by the fed (which they clearly are) buying into the market implies you believe one of two things:

            1. That the transition from “market supported by fed spending” to “market driven by fundamentals” will be smooth and not have a precipitous drop-off.

            or

            2. That the fed will continue propping up our businesses forever.

            Is this the case?

          • DarkTigger says:

            Disclaimer: I’m an interessted layman at best.
            I think there are two other reasons:
            3. You follow a saving plan, and buy on the way down, and on the way up.
            4. You expect to be able to sell before the next crash comes.

            Number 3. has the advantage that there is good evidence that retail investors make the most money this way.
            Number 4. has the advantage, that if a trader is able to pull it off, they can make a lot of money buy buying S&P 500 by 75%ATH selling at ATH, and rebuying on 75%ATH.

      • baconbits9 says:

        1. If there is actually a full recovery over the next couple of years, the total discounted present value of companies’ expected long-term income streams may not have fallen so much. This is especially true of multinational companies if other parts of the world recover faster and/or better than the US.

        The underlying assumption here is that the price of the stock market was neutral prior to the pandemic/protests. Stocks were already on the more expensive side historically by trailing and forward looking earnings ratios, and then there is the basic concept that ‘things might turn out to be not so bad’ is an awful situation for what is essentially a best case scenario. The best case scenario in December was WAYYYYY better than that, and the more likely bad case scenarios were mild recessions at a fraction of the size of what we are experiencing.

        4. This is especially true if inflation is on the horizon, which would lift nominal stock values and devalue cash.

        This is roughly as false as a statement as you can make on the stock market. The US has a period of high inflation that we can look at and it was bad for stocks. The S&P 500 didn’t break its 1972 high until 1980 and it spend almost the entire decade of the 70s under the 1968 high, and the S&P didn’t maintain above the 72 and 68 highs until 1982. It was ~14 years of zero nominal returns in the highest inflation environment we have seen since WW2. Inflation (not hyper inflation) is generally bad for stock markets for a variety of reasons*.

        *You can make arguments for specific stocks, such as high inflation in the US weakens the dollar so companies with overseas earnings see a large spike when it is repatriated, but that doesn’t really work well for the broad stock market.

        • Jake R says:

          This is roughly as false as a statement as you can make on the stock market.

          How does this actually work? I appreciate the historical argument and believe it is true, but how does cash outperform anything in an environment defined by cash losing value relative to actual assets?

          • baconbits9 says:

            Stocks are (allegedly) valued on earnings which are revenues minus costs. If inflation causes costs to rise faster than revenues then the cash flow value of the stocks that you own decreases, and earnings can even go negative taking the value of the asset to zero (if they go negative long enough).

          • Christophe Biocca says:

            If inflation causes costs to rise faster than revenues then the cash flow value of the stocks that you own decreases

            Presuming that costs rise faster than revenues is begging the question. There’s no a-priori reason to expect input prices to rise faster than output prices, especially when averaged over the long term.

          • baconbits9 says:

            Presuming that costs rise faster than revenues is begging the question. There’s no a-priori reason to expect input prices to rise faster than output prices, especially when averaged over the long term.

            I didn’t state that there was an a-priori reason for input prices to rise faster, I was ansering the question at hand as to how could the cash value of an asset drop in an environment that people generally associate with rising values of assets compared to cash.

            However there are a-priori reasons to expect higher inflation rates to lead to asset prices. First is risk adjusted returns, which is the standard way of measuring returns. High inflation is unstable so any returns you get under said inflation cannot be as confidently projected forward which allows for situations where even higher earnings can have a flat or lower underlying asset value. As a sub point to this a high inflation rate under a monetary regime that is aiming for lower inflation means a failed regime and that makes policy responses less predictable, and the outcomes of policy responses less predictable, increasing uncertainty to the downside which generally leads to lower asset prices.

            Secondly if you take the definition of inflation to be what most people mean, that is higher measured prices, then there is an assumption of lower earnings. The key here is an increase in inflation, not simply ‘high’ inflation. If prices are stable at one point the system is in equilibrium with changes in demand being met efficiently with changes in supply. If prices are increasing that means there was no (or highly limited) monopoly power for rising prices in the prior period*, if input prices are increasing more slowly than output prices a company should be expanding output to capture this extra profit, restricting price increases (overtime) to output increases. That leaves the only options of

            1. A dislocation that prevents an increase in output that doesn’t also lead to an increase in input prices (ie a highly specific situation).
            2. Input prices that are rising at an equal rate to output prices, which is highly unlikely at disequilibrium and requires special circumstances.
            3. Input prices rising faster than output prices.

            *definitional to monopoly power and demand. If people are willing to pay higher prices plus firms having monopoly power then firms should already have been increasing prices.

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      I’ve heard that money is flowing into the stack market because everything else looks worse. Is this true? Plausible?

      While I’m cheering everyone up, I saw a mention that it’s even harder to be a successful day drader than it used to be (and it was always hard) because the proportion of the market which is hedge funds with lots of quants is larger than it used to be. (I think this was from Coffeezilla– he was saying to put your money into index funds and spend your time on something else.)

      Anyway, from what I’ve read (a book which I think was called The Quants), quants were people who thought they could beat the market without understanding how weird the market can get. Have quants gotten more sensible?

      • Aftagley says:

        money is flowing into the stack

        Uh oh, does that that the money that comes in last will be the first out?

        because the proportion of the market which is hedge funds with lots of quants is larger than it used to be.

        This is one of my pet theories – we’re blind to the systemic risks in a bunch of the market because it’s been so well packaged.

    • Ketil says:

      Yes, this puzzles me. In this oil-dominated economy, oil companies are almost back to previous stock prices, but the price of brent is $40, down from over $60. Surely, when you deduct production cost, this will eat seriously into profits? Even oil service and exploration seems to be back up – and the producers have cut this all they can.

      I wonder: is it possible that although economic activity has slowed down, governments have alleviated the effects by pouring money into the economy and lowering interest rates – so there’s as much or more money flowing around as before, but spending/consumption is down by a lot, so what else to do but increase saving? And the increased saving is what keeps share prices up.

      I don’t even pretend to understand macro economics – but if this is even remotely correct, what will be the consequences – and when? If we can just flush money out into the economy and see no adverse consequences from drastically lower productivity and consumption, I’m going to start believing in MMT after all.

      • Uribe says:

        “Oil companies are almost back to previous stock prices.”

        This is technically true if you are using early March as “previous stock prices” but oil stocks collapsed this year, with Exxon leading the plunge in January and other majors falling off the cliff in February. Most oil Co stock prices are half what they were a year ago, and they are in the process of massive layoffs. Active rig count has collapsed as well.

        • Ketil says:

          Interesting. I’m looking at local (Norwegian) oil companies, dominated by Equinor down -10% since the start of the year. The others seem to be down around 30% still, but now rapidly rising. This still seems a little hopeful to me, but maybe the economy will right itself, and oil demand bring the price back up.

    • broblawsky says:

      Money printer goes *brrr*.

      • rumham says:

        Ha! I said this to my boss today in response to the same question.

        • broblawsky says:

          Look, I’m not saying that Trump should kick Pence off the ticket and put Jay Powell in instead, but I’m not not saying that.

    • keaswaran says:

      What do you mean when you say “the economy still basically shut down”? Perhaps it looks different where you are, but here in Texas, traffic is about what it had been before the pandemic began, and this is presumably with lots of office workers still working from home. Lots of service industries are down, but those are mostly small businesses that aren’t in the stock market at all. Household income is up, because some people still have their same job and pay, some have their same job plus hazard pay, and the ones that are unemployed are on average making more from unemployment than they were from their job. (Which isn’t to say that no individual has less household income – just that most households are up.) Thus, the big national companies you can shop online at are likely making a lot more than they were before, having absorbed local service spending plus increased household income.

      Also, I haven’t looked at the details of the stock market, but how much of the S&P rally is just a few tech companies going way up, making up for a moderate decline in everything else? In any case, the market probably predicts that after a vaccine is available, most industries will recover quite well (with a radical reshuffling of which individual companies are on top).

    • baconbits9 says:

      what the hell is going on with the market?

      The Federal Reserve has explicitly told the markets that it doesn’t want them to value things fairly (correctly whatever term you want to use). The markets are currently arational, and prices don’t matter because they cannot be valued in any meaningful way.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        “The Federal Reserve has explicitly told the markets that it doesn’t want them to value things fairly (correctly whatever term you want to use).”

        Could you be more explicit about this?

        • baconbits9 says:

          When the Fed announced that it would be buying investment grade rated debt (in March) they grandfathered in any company that had been downgraded to junk status* within the prior two (I think it was that stretch of time) weeks. That was the Fed saying that they were going to act as if Covid hadn’t happened as far as assets that it would purchase.

          *The Fed is supposedly not allowed to purchase junk level bonds and had to set up a shell company to get around this, it was a significant action.

    • tg56 says:

      One other thing I didn’t see mentioned above but have heard people considering (no idea how much of an effect this would be). The stock market isn’t a reflection of the totality of US business, only the publicly traded portion. This is highly biased to larger and more established companies. It could be that the stock market is anticipating increased consolidation / reduced competition that will favor large publicly owned companies over smaller private companies. E.g. even if the pie is shrinking the piece represented by the stock market could be increasing.

      I could see the cornavirus shutdowns for ex. being harder on smaller independent restaurants then chain ones. And larger and public entities better able to garner government support or navigate financing options.

  17. Edward Scizorhands says:

    Warning: weird idea

    Has there been any push to have the protestors become cops?

    This pattern-matches to a common asshole argument, which is “how dare you criticize job X when you’ve never done it, you wouldn’t last 5 minutes before breaking down in tears if you became an X.” So I want to be careful to say I’m not making that argument.

    But I’d wager that there are many protestors (as a relative number a small minority, but still many) who are all right with making personal sacrifices to improve the police force. They might think that sacrifice would be “I pay more taxes” or “I have less police at my beck-and-call.” But what about the sacrifice being “I spend the next 20 years being a cop”?

    If we think cops are assholes or racist, we could do human-wave tactics on the job force, and just create lots of good cops.

    • Well... says:

      This is basically “be the good you want to see in the world”. I endorse it.

    • Guy in TN says:

      I think the answer to this idea depends on to what degree you are protesting because you think the police, on an individual-person level, are making bad on-the-ground judgement calls (e.g. such as deciding to shoot a protestor in the face) vs. protesting because you think the police are doing bad things on an institutional level (e.g. being instructed by their supervisors to shoot protestors, with their job on the line for non-compliance).

      My position, if it wasn’t already obvious, is that the police violence problem is an inherently institutional one, not one based off of individual officer’s poor choices. So the question of “why not join the police, in order to reform the police” is sort of like asking “why not join the mob, in order to reform the mob”, or “why not join ISIS, in order to reform ISIS”?

      The problem is that by joining an organization and following their orders, you inherently make that organization more powerful.

      • gbdub says:

        We’re okay with eliminating ISIS or the mob rather than reforming them. But, a few extremists aside, everyone agrees we need police in some form. So reform is the only option.

        The problems of police are institutional, but the institutions are made of people. And many of the problems are due to the police unions – as close to a democratic institution of individual police as you’re going to get.

        So lots of “good people” who won’t demand a lack of accountability becoming cops would be a good thing. If all the good people think the cops are evil, only evil people will become cops.

        • Guy in TN says:

          We’re okay with eliminating ISIS or the mob rather than reforming them. But, a few extremists aside, everyone agrees we need police in some form. So reform is the only option.

          It is important to distinguish “policing” (the social concept) from Police Departments in the United States (the specific organizations, with specific laws that apply to them, and specific cultures). While basically everyone agrees we need to social concept of policing, it is not clear that we need the Police Department to be the ones doing it, and this view is not restricted to extremists (see: the current proposed abolition in Minneapolis).

      • Spookykou says:

        I am a bit confused by your second example, I understood ‘institutional’ to basically be talking about the incentive structures, but your example sounds like an individual officer (I assume police supervisors are largely still also police officers?) making a poor choice.

        Do you think a 100% staff replacement with no other change produces no results? What about just replacing every officer who has a direct report?

        • Guy in TN says:

          @Spookykou

          I am a bit confused by your second example, I understood ‘institutional’ to basically be talking about the incentive structures, but your example sounds like an individual officer (I assume police supervisors are largely still also police officers?) making a poor choice.

          By institutional I mean dictated by the laws/high levels of power. For example, the no-knock raids in enforcement of the War on Drugs. How much discretion does an individual officer have in this? You can’t just say, “no, I don’t want to do no-knock raids, they are too dangerous”, at least not until you get into a very high level of power. And even if you manage to reach a high rank, you are not going to change the fact that you will be forced to enforce the War on Drugs in some sort of manner

          I think much of the police violence we see today, e.g. rubber bullets and pepper spray, is the same way. Officers following orders, because their job is on the lines of they don’t.

          Do you think a 100% staff replacement with no other change produces no results? What about just replacing every officer who has a direct report?

          I think these would be great changes! My concern is over adding more power of the police, not about replacing bad officers with good ones.

          • Jake R says:

            You can’t just say, “no, I don’t want to do no-knock raids, they are too dangerous”, at least not until you get into a very high level of power.

            I’m not sure how relevant this is to the larger point, but I believe most no-knock raids are performed by drug task force or SWAT units that individual officers join on a volunteer basis. Radley Balko used to write about this a lot. It turns out kicking down doors in the middle of the night is a lot of fun. I think there were even cases of officers training on their own time or buying equipment out of pocket in order to participate. This is all based on hazy memory though from before Balko’s column went paywalled.

    • WashedOut says:

      One of the good side-effects of this proposal is that if it were implemented such that it became common knowledge that many ex-protesters were now working as cops, slogans like All Cops Are Bastards have the floor pulled out from under them, along with a general reduction in broad-brush hatred directed at police officers as people.

    • John Schilling says:

      Has there been any push to have the protestors become cops?

      What’s stopping the protesters from becoming cops right now? It’s not a thing that needs to be coordinated or organized even to the limited extent that the protests themselves are such. If you want to become a cop, and you are qualified, you just apply. Are they?

    • TK-421 says:

      Not that weird of an idea – I’m generally supportive of the protests, although I can understand the stress the police must be under, and I decided that the best way I could contribute is by becoming the police. I’ve applied to two major metro departments so far (the Los Angeles police and the New Orleans police) and I’m actively looking for others. Departments often have infrequent hiring windows (which can contribute to a concentrated police culture) but if your city is hiring I’d probably be open to moving there. Who knows, I could be shooting a beanbag at you in a protest next year.

      Joking aside, I’m very serious about this. I’ve been a software engineer for a number of years so my background and age are atypical for a police recruit but I view that as a potential positive. Given my background I could join the FBI (which is often recruiting software engineers) or some other federal department but I want to really understand and serve in a regular department.

      To Guy in TN’s point – this might be a mistake. I think the difference is that I believe the police are a necessary social institution while the mafia or ISIS are not, although organizations like them are inevitable where state capacity fails. Additionally, the sense that I’ve gotten from George Floyd and other incidents of police violence are that a lot of the problems really are individual cops either breaking the rules or pushing them past the point being reasonable. Using a neck restraint doesn’t seem like it was necessary in George Floyd’s case but that doesn’t mean that it might not be for a person who actually is resisting and trying to harm others. The bad cops are the ones who escalate to the maximum allowed at the slightest provocation. There’s obviously a place for institutional reform in all this but I do believe that when we talk about the actions of police we’re generally talking about the actions of individuals. If we view police work as a low status form of work that’s the result we’re going to get.

      I’ll keep everyone informed of my experiences if I do get hired on somewhere.

      • Guy in TN says:

        To Guy in TN’s point – this might be a mistake. I think the difference is that I believe the police are a necessary social institution while the mafia or ISIS are not, although organizations like them are inevitable where state capacity fails.

        Even if “policing” (the social concept) is a necessary institution, is doesn’t necessarily follow that this police organization (the thing we have in the United States) is.

        For example, in 1930’s Germany one could argue that “well, the military is a necessary organization for a nation to have, right? So if you are opposed to the German military’s recent actions, why don’t you you join them and change it from the inside?”

        The logic isn’t wrong per se (one could theoretically be a successful saboteur), but you have to make a trade-off between the amount of good you are doing via internal changes vs. the amount of bad you are doing by giving power to the organization.

        • TK-421 says:

          That’s absolutely true but I do believe that the general structure we have for policing isn’t perfect but it’s good enough, and certainly closer to perfect than it is to the 1930’s German military. I do think the implementation and culture are the major issues. Those are just as much bottom as top driven.

          If we could change police culture strictly by institutional reform we’d already be done. We’ve been trying that since the 1970’s and we’ve made a great deal of progress but I think we’ve gotten about as far as we can with top down solutions. That’s part of the reason this is such a persistent problem.

          I admit I could be wrong. Joining the police is part of finding out.

      • gbdub says:

        Good luck, keep us updated!

    • Aftagley says:

      How would this even work? I here this argument all the time and it never makes sense.

      Let’s say I hate Walmart – I think they’re exploiting underpaid labor and destroying local economies and I’m willing to devote my life to making this organization change its ways for the better. The proper path here wouldn’t be to go take a cashier job at the local Walmart and “be the change I want to see” because I’d have no more ability to make the system better from the inside – less even, because now instead of devoting myself to changing Walmart I have all this ancillary cashier-related work to do.

      • TK-421 says:

        Police, even low level police, have drastically more discretion than a cashier. If you believe that we’re doing a pretty good job as a society of dismantling overt, intentional oppression (Jim Crow laws, redlining, etc.) then a lot of the actual work of oppression is happening at a low level.

        Flooding police departments with people committed to not using that discretion to, say, pin someone by the neck and not bother to check if they were dying seems one way to prevent that from happening.

    • zzzzort says:

      I’ve seen proposals for more minority and female officers (with better data saying that having more female officers reduces violence). This is at least consistent with the idea changing personnel could change outcomes.

    • unreliabletags says:

      The consensus on my Facebook feed is that it’s inherently evil to maintain order in an unjust society, to uphold laws that protect the rich from the poor, etc. You’re taking a mistake-theory view of policing which may be less popular among protestors than you expect.

    • Konstantin says:

      The police hiring process in many cites is broken beyond repair. Here is how it normally goes:
      1. Attend a recruiting event or contact a police recruiter.
      2. Fill out an insanely long application detailing everything you have done during the last 10 years. Residences, jobs, known associates, education, and especially any “contacts” with law enforcement, of any nature whatsoever.
      3. Wait several months. During this time you may be required to take a physical fitness test, a written knowledge test, any number of psychological profiles, attend one or more interviews, and submit to a medical examination. The standards used here are probably outdated, arbitrary, or pseudoscientific. If you are currently employed, you will probably need to take time off multiple times.
      4. Have your application reviewed by a “background detective.” This is a veteran police officer placed on desk duty for some reason, who will review and verify your application, and can reject it for no reason at all with no appeal. This is low status, low priority work, so it is often assigned to the worst officers on the force and can take several more months.
      5. Submit to a scientifically discredited polygraph examination, where you may be asked humiliating questions and again may be arbitrarily removed from the process, even after passing all the previous steps.
      6. Get assigned a slot at the next academy class, assuming it hasn’t been cancelled due to budget cuts and you still want the job, considering it has been more than half a year since you applied.

      • Spookykou says:

        I struggle to imagine a version of the American government where getting a job working for it would not involve jumping through an obscene number of hoops.

      • Dack says:

        You left out the part where they make you pay (non-refundable) $ just to apply, and then decide not to hire anyone in the end.

      • digbyforever says:

        If it makes you feel any better, FBI hiring isn’t substantially more efficient, and something like the State Department is even worse.

        I suspect this is a combination of several factors: genuine disinterest in the “admin crap” part of the job by line officers, perhaps some subtle “feature not bug” where it’s a grueling process to weed out those who aren’t committed (it shouldn’t be as easy as getting a gas station attendant job), some behind-the-scenes bureaucratic/regulatory requirements, and a sense that presumably, they’re not failing totally to recruit enough cops, so it works just well enough.

    • Clutzy says:

      I actually had this discussion with my parents today. One major problem is that almost no normal person can stomach being a police officer in the modern era. I could stomach responding to domestic violence, shootings, rape, burglary, etc as an officer. But that is not what they do most of the time. They mostly have to write chickenshit tickets for traffic violations. This is a soul sucking activity that only the most power hungry in society would agree to engage in.

      • Garrett says:

        > write chickenshit tickets for traffic violations

        Can we at least agree that people who fail to signal before changing lanes should be cited? Sure, there are a lot of stupid laws on the books. And for stupid stuff like “3 mph over the limit”, “discretion” can be used, especially as long as you manage to justify your time. And things like failed-to-signal can be objectively caught on car video without having to deal with annoying questions like “when did you last calibrate your radar gun”?

  18. Belisaurus Rex says:

    Diplomacy:
    It ended in a 3-way tie between Rome (yours truly), Russia, and England. I guess this is as good a time as any to do a write up. I began with a co-consul, Vermillion, but I think that this really does not work well with teams. You need to send out too many messages, and need to keep long term plans. Messaging a teammate, especially in the early turns which have a blistering pace, is too much.

    It began simply enough. England, Germany, and Rome negotiated in the week before the first turn to invade France. It was easy to do with no opposition from the French, because they were AWOL at the time. Once they joined the game and started messaging players, the attack plans faded away but Italy didn’t get the memo. So the first turn is an aggressive move into the Piedmont that probably soured our relations with France for the rest of the game. Such is life.

    We immediately gave up on an invasion of France and moved to defend against Austria. They had been more active diplomatically, and were on good terms with all of their neighbors: Turkey, Russia, and Germany. In Spring 1902 they broke the peace by brutally backstabbing Turkey, and moving into the Tyrolia with German support. We were diplomatically isolated and knew that we had to get Germany’s support. Unfortunately, this was not forthcoming. We settled in for a stalemate at Venice.

    Fall 1902, Austria makes an error. They support Russia’s defense of Moscow, and the same turn they get backstabbed by Russia. They then disband their army deep in Russian territory so that they can defend the homeland. Huge error, and now Germany must retreat. Angry at the Austrians, they finally take my side. With the Russians marching south, the Turks enraged, and the Germans disappointed, there are now plenty of allies for Rome.

    Over the next few years, the Austrian position collapses. I promise them that I will keep them alive, and will support them into Moscow, and all they have to do is let me into Trieste. The Austrians are unwilling to be a vassal of Rome, and by the time they agree, it is too late for them.

    Spring and Fall 1904. A critical year. I have promised the Russians support into both Vienna and Budapest. The French have told me that they will build a fleet in Marseilles and send it north to fight the British. The French have spent the last few turns static, and are not increasing in SCs. I’m worried that they might get antsy and offer to support them into Munich. The French are appalled, and threaten to cut off our alliance right there. “Germany’s integrity is non-negotiable!” But then they make moves to “accidentally” support English ships into German SCs. I smell a rat, but don’t make any hostile moves. I can still get my fleets back to defend Italy, but it will require me to slow down in the Balkans. I stall in the Fall and do not let the Russians into Austria. My fears were proven right–France moves into Tuscany. But, unfortunately for them, at the same time they are backstabbed by England. They quickly apologize to Rome, but the damage is done. The English begin to tear France to pieces.

    The Russians, encouraged by my promised support into Austria that did not materialize, moved into the Black Sea, an act of Aggression against Turkey. My biggest fear in the East was that after Austria was dismantled, that Russia and Turkey would ally against me. I was planning a fait accompli by striking Turkey this turn, but the French fleet discouraged me from making this bold lunge. But at the end of 1904, I had options.

    In 1905, I promised Turkey support, and then backstabbed them. In the space of a few years, I managed to obtain all of the gains from the war, while the Turks even took territory from the Russians. To accomplish this daring task, when the Turkish forces equaled mine in size, I used a combination of deception and misdirection. I continuously reassured the Turks that Russia was the real threat, and offered to give some of my SCs to Turkey. I actually followed up on this promise, but only to encircle and destroy the Turkish forces–it was easier to fight the Turks when their moves were so predictable. By Spring 1908, the Turks were gone–and my ill-fated invasion of Russia would begin. At this point, the Russians were weak. So confident were they in a swift victory in Turkey that they opened up another front against England in Spring 1906. They weren’t exactly wrong, since Turkey fell swiftly, but this was still the second of their major errors, the first being attacking Turkey in the first place.

    /end of part one.

    • Belisaurus Rex says:

      Why did I invade Russia? I could have continued in alliance with them, and probably could have beaten them to London. But I looked at the board, and saw my long line of armies on the Danube, with 3 Russian SCs in easy reach. And I was not even close to worried about England, since they had too many fleets. They could not project power inland, and could not send their fleets too far away from France, who at this point could still be relied on to tie down the bulk of English forces. As one additional point, my co-consul, Vermillion, suggested that I never trust Russia. It may have been this advice that spurred me to make this lunge.

      Russia sent me an ultimatum, saying that if I attacked them, they would throw the game to England. This reassured me–they saw it too. I ran the simulations, and to have a chance of success they would have to throw the game that turn. No one has the nerves of steel necessary to throw the game BEFORE they know that the other player is defecting. Confident, I put in the orders for my invasion. Alea iacta est!

      And it goes perfectly. In 1908 I seize 3 Russian SCs. I can almost taste it. Fall 1909 I am at a crossroads. With French support, I can take Munich, flanking the Russians, opening up Germany, and threatening the English port cities on the Channel coast. France could also, at no cost to themselves, attack Spain, defeating the English fleets and giving me mastery of the Mediterranean. I ask France, and they confirm that they will make these moves. I think that it’s game over. The next year adjudicates and…France did not put in the orders.

      I crash. My lowest moment. Napoleon in Moscow. Two SCs are within my reach–one fewer than I need to win. I lunge for them anyway, but it’s not going to be enough to end the war early. Due to the disappointment of the last turn, I make mistakes. I go for SCs for short term gain, but not for long-term strategic position. My impatience probably adds another few years to the war. I make more mistakes. My fleet sits in Marseilles when it should be attacking. It looks more and more like a 50/50 decision will decide the game. I get an offer for 3-way draw, and take the easy way out. (I was also unsure to what degree Russia and England would cooperate. I was sort of hoping on England being difficult, and being able to take advantage of their lack of cohesion to obtain the majority of Russia’s SCs. There was no such lack of cohesion.)

      I was never in it to destroy any enemies. I just wanted to restore the Roman Empire. Though once lost to history, the Roman Empire has been reborn! When I began, Rome’s borders in the West were the walls of the city itself, and in the East, our neighbor the Adriatic. Through crafty diplomacy and shrewd maneuvering, we restored the bulk of Rome’s territory, most importantly Constantinople. Europe suffered through centuries of darkness, culminating in the 11 bloody years of the Reconquest, but now we enter a new golden age. In ending the war diplomatically instead of waging endless conflict on the barbarians at our frontiers, we have proven ourselves worthy successors to the mantle of civilization. Belisaurus Rex rules the new Imperium Romanorum, and with the legions of Rome will ensure that a new Pax Romanorum will settle over Europe.

      /fin

      • The_Archduke says:

        Germany here. I watched to the end, though I was tied for first eliminated with Austria. In the west the situation was much as Italy stated. Though he didn’t directly participate in the negotiations between England and myself. We both agreed to go after France, who turtled early. I took Denmark and Holland the first year. England took The Channel and Belgium. Russia had moved their army Moscow north to St Petersburg, and I assumed they were going to bounce England out of Norway. They did not, so England and I were at 5 SCs each after the first year. We both said to each other we were going after France, and then we both attacked each other instead, assuming, that we could take France later (correct assumption in England’s case).

        Since I was going to be fighting England, and Russia was allied with England, I struck first against Russia, bouncing them out of Sweden in year one and moving to Silesia. In year, two, I sent another army east, hoping for a build from Warsaw to reinforce my north against English aggression. That was when Austria supported Warsaw and was stabbed by Russia on the same turn. I could have taken Warsaw and built a second fleet so long as Austria merely stayed neutral. The game in the west would have been completely different but for that Russian stab. Russia survived to the draw, so I guess it worked out for him.

        • Seth B says:

          England here:

          I had a great experience with this, my first real game of diplomacy.

          I had read several opening guides, and decided to take the bold strategy of opening to the Channel. Germany seemed happy to split the low countries with me, and an attack on France seemed wise if everyone was going to gang up on them too. When France finally showed up, they agreed to let me into Bel as well.

          Russia I immediately agreed to split Scandinavia with peacefully. This alliance turned out to be the most important of the game, although interrupted by a major Russian backstab later.

          In Spring 1902, Germany and France worked together to kick me out of Bel. So I saw myself now in conflict with both. Given my position in Scandanavia, a joint attack with Russia on Germany made the most sense. Meanwhile, my fleet in the English channel protected my rear and kept France cautious.

          Russia and I proceeded to destroy Germany. I think I dealt with Russia very fairly — despite beating Russia to two SCs (Sweden and Berlin) I let Russia keep these.

          On my other flank, I moved a fleet to the mid atlantic to further constipate France. To my surprise, France then invited me to collaborate with them (around Spring/Fall 1904) in an attack on Italy in the Mediteranian. This was fantastic news for me, because I was worried about further expansion: I had a navy heavy mix, meaning that there was no real reason to fight Russia (I would only contest Ber, Swe, and Stp) and no opportunities on the interior of the continent. While the board might not have shown it, I had to attack France. This invitation to cooperate with them in a backstab on Italy was the perfect time to backstab them. I did, immediately grabbing an undefended Portugal. My naval superiority making me immune to French reprisal.

          This had the unfortunate effect of taking pressure off of Italy while they finished off Turkey. Had I let France finish their attack on Italy, perhaps Italy would not have made it to the draw.

          In Winter 1905, the game reached its antipenultimate stage. I sat at 10 SCs, Russia at 9, and Italy at 6. France and Turkey are being digested by the big 3. With some good tactical decision making on my part, I’m able to make good progress on finishing off France. But Russia takes this opportunity to stab me in Scandanavia and north Germany. I thought I was immune to this: Russia and I fundamentally were well situated to be allies. My naval advantage meant that Russia was poorly suited to contesting these regions. Despite throwing the full force of his armies at me, Russia was only able to grab Nwy, and I was able to take this back from Russia before long. Perhaps Russia felt compelled to attack me because of the following logic — if Russia allied with me, I would win for sure. If so, they did successfully make it to the draw, so I salute them.

          In Spring 1908, I have 10 SCs, Italy has 11, and Russia 9. Russia’s alliance with Italy to destroy Turkey has gained it nothing. Russia’s backstab of me has gained them nothing. Only Italy has grown, and they have grown to 1st place.

          Russia, in my opinion, at this stage makes a mistake in not seeing what comes next. Russia completely retreats all armies from its itallian border to throw at me. Italy uses this opportunity to backstab Russia.

          Russia starts to completely collapse. They immediately reached out to me, and agreed to 100% ally against Italy, even inviting me to take SCs from them if necessary. It was a bit touch and go, but ultimately the two of us were able to create a stalemate line.

          Had a fun time!

          • Belisaurus Rex says:

            Regarding France’s attack on me: I saw it coming, and had enough fleets (or future builds) to protect all my SCs. If France had attacked, I would’ve still been on good terms with Turkey and Russia and even had a plan to ferry Turkish armies into Spain. Maybe it wouldn’t have worked, but there was a plan.

            My biggest question to you is why did you ever build so many fleets? They ended up sitting idle for most of the endgame, and were a huge factor in my decision to attack Russia.

          • Seth B says:

            I leaned hard into fleets for two reasons:

            1) I hoped that by committing to a naval heavy strategy, I would communicate to Russia that they were not my target.

            2) Although not as valuable in the endgame as armies, the fleet advantage is what allowed me to steamroll Germany and then constipate France. So I leaned into what was working for me.

      • metacelsus says:

        Turkey here. The Turks shall never forget your brutal betrayal!

        (I was far too naive in trusting you)

        • Belisaurus Rex says:

          I was just too worried about a Turkey/Russia alliance, and would have to trust you way too much to ferry your armies over to France. Your fleets and armies sitting idle really scared me too. I thought you would steal Greece with them.

      • rlms says:

        Russia here (also the organiser)! Our ultimatum was genuine (possibly we should have said “throw the game to England or cause a stalemate” instead but that’s not as punchy), and I think my reasoning was sound. In the end we did successfully stop you winning, although with perfect tactical play possibly things would have been different (I think there were some mistakes on all sides). And I was considering making slightly more defensive moves that turn, like leaving Ukr/Sev in place to defend Rum, probably I should have explicitly mentioned that. Equally I don’t think it was necessarily a mistake to ignore it, it might have been your best shot of winning.

        My reasoning was that my only possibility of winning was if I was able to trust Italy and fully dedicate my forces to fighting England. If I tried to fight on both fronts I would just get slowly crushed and turning on Italy didn’t seem promising either.

        For our stab of England, the idea was that either us or Italy would end up in Munich and support a campaign in to Kie/Den. I didn’t love the attack (although I didn’t feel as bad as about stabbing Austria, who were a very nice ally, but tactical necessity demanded it) but we felt that sooner or later England would expand into Sweden and it was better to strike first (the move into Den the same turn seems to support this).

        Regarding why I didn’t ally with Turkey after defeating Austria: they demanded that they be allowed to occupy the Black Sea which isn’t really workable in an alliance since it leaves you defenceless against a stab. This was annoying as it would definitely have been the tactically best option from our perspective, as was the way that their moves when we are attacking them with Italy led to Italy taking all their territory rather than a split with us as originally planned.

        • Belisaurus Rex says:

          Thanks for organizing it!

          I was surprised by the lack of real trust this game, and looking over the previous SSC games, there seems to have been grand alliances and people leaving themselves exposed and NOT instantly getting stabbed. Any idea why this game was different?

          Edit: The reason that Turkey had near optimal moves against you was because I was allowing them to take your SCs and promising not to interfere.

        • Doctor Mist says:

          It has been literally 40 years since I played Diplomacy, and I never played with seven people, and we might actually have never finished a game, but I don’t remember anything about stalemates and I don’t see anything in the rules about stalemates.

          What is a stalemate that it could be a credible threat? Did you folks have a prearranged deadline, either in the real world or in Diplomacy years?

          • John Schilling says:

            The standard Diplomacy map has several known “stalemate lines”, behind which the leading power can be contained to <18 supply centers by a defending power or alliance whose position is a provably impregnable static defense so long as they have the right units in the right place at the front and always issue them the right orders.

            Once a stalemate line is recognized as having been established, or clearly soon will be, the game is usually considered a draw for all surviving players. This can be a two-way draw with each side defending a stalemate line with 17 supply centers on its side; more common (as in this game) is a leader with 14-17 supply centers and a defending alliance with the remainder of the board defended behind a stalemate line. Since the leader cannot win unless one of the defenders backstabs the others or otherwise changes their orders to something suboptimal, and since either of those options inevitably results in the leader winning and the suboptimal backstabber losing, the game becomes an unending session of "Can I convince you to commit suicide this turn?" "No." " Pleeeease?".

          • cassander says:

            @john Schilling

            one of the reasons I like this diplomacy variant.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            John,

            Very clear, thanks.

      • Algon33 says:

        France here. I genuinely did err in supporting English ships into a German SC. Call it a beginner’s mistake. As to why we did nothing for a few turns, for some reason I couldn’t submit orders. That was quite frustrating, as I wanted to help Germany regain its SCs, take Holland and strengthen Austria. After all, I wanted to betray everyone at least twice, and that’s hard to do if they’re not their.

        Sadly, I made terrible decisions later on. Namely: trying to invade you at the wrong time, trusting England for a turn, try to attack England when you requested my aid in breaking Munich.

        If I play again, I want to achieve my failed ambition. Once done, I think I’ll switch to a honour based playstyle.

        My main takeaways are that I must pay more attention to minor details my allies give away, never assume any gambit is attractive without thoroughly simulating it and never underestimate my enemies.

        Thanks for the game guys, especially Russia.

    • Belisaurus Rex says:

      I want to add my theory of Diplomacy as well. I made alliances with everyone at every point of the game, and against everyone else as well. Rome and Austria versus Russia; Rome and Turkey versus Russia; Rome and Russia versus Turkey; etc. Keep your options open.

      I never trusted anyone. Maybe I contributed to the lack of stable alliances, but I thought that this was a good move. Trust others to act in their best interest. Maybe this advice needs to shift late-game.

      Armies have inertia. Once you start moving, it is hard to stop, for two reasons. First, since armies disband if you lose SCs, any successful attack turns into a rout. It is basically impossible for a defender to make a fighting retreat (although maybe Russia proved me wrong on this).

      SC count is misleading. Army positioning is far more important than raw SC number, and you can use this overestimation/underestimation to your diplomatic advantage.

    • John Schilling says:

      I see no mention of an Austro-Turkish alliance. I thought there was a rule that when SSC played Diplomacy, there had to be an enduring alliance between the Habsburgs and the Ottoman Sultan.

    • John Schilling says:

      OK, having gone through the recorded game in detail, congratulations to all involved. And some specifics:

      First, I’m not sure the final position is truly a stalemate. It doesn’t match any of the known stalemate lines, and the Italian army in Burgundy is a potential spoiler. It’s going to be difficult for the Northern Allies to actually destroy that army, and it’s got lots of room to retreat in the North, so it can potentially disrupt the perfect defense the Northern Allies have to present in e.g. Spain and Warsaw. I haven’t plotted out all the possibilities, but it might still have been possible for Italy to win the game.

      Second, generally good play by Italy, but I think I know where you lost your shot at victory. Your diplomatic play worked out quite well; in particular your own stabs were decisive and your enemies’ stabs were ineffectual. You had useful allies for all of your attacks in the early and mid-game and your enemies never put together a strong alliance against you until thee endgame. So good work on that front.

      But, Spring ’08, A Ser S Bul – Rum leapt out to me as backwards. Yes, it gets you Rumania and an SC, but so would the reverse (A Bul S Ser – Rum). As is, you had Rumania and an army in Serbia that spent the next two years puttering around in the rear doing nothing decisive. If your “rear” army had been in Bulgaria, your Fall ’09 attack on Sevastapol could have been with an Army convoyed from Bulgaria rather than a fleet. And an Army in Sevastapol can support an attack into Ukraine that I think gets you either Moscow or Warsaw before English reinforcements arrive in the East. 18 SC for the win instead of 17 for the draw.
      You mention being aware that you were grabbing for SCs without thinking far enough ahead; I think this may have been the worst of that.

      England, generally well played. Your stab at Germany was a bit early for my taste, but if you sensed that Germany was planning to stab you anyway, well done. The Anglo-Russian alliance to dismantle Germany was superbly executed on your part, and as you note you were never seriously vulnerable to a Russian stab. The only mistake I see is being a bit too fleet-heavy, which made it difficult for you to finish off France when you needed to and gave Italy a year or two to build an unassailable position. Yes, it’s diplomatically useful to signal “I am not a threat because I do not have an army capable of winning this war”, but if it means that you actually don’t have an army capable of winning the war…

      France was almost doomed by being on the wrong end of an Anglo-German alliance (which fortunately broke early), and definitely doomed by whatever glitch caused her to lose a turn of orders. A couple of other early missteps, though. The army build in Brest should have been a fleet – whether you’re fighting England and Germany both or fighting England with Germany, you absolutely need to keep bouncing the Royal Navy out of the channel (or at least the MAO). And, in 1902, there was a nice opening for your southern forces to move against Italy while Italy was busy with Austria in the east. Instead the fleet on the south coast of Spain went for the easy SC in Portugal – but then was tied down defending that isolated SC, so no net gain. Your actual attack against Italy came a year too late.

      On the other hand, a solid comeback from that turn of missed orders. With three surrounded and isolated armies you held on for five years and even built back up to four armies and marched into Berlin for a brief triumph. Nice.

      Russia, solid campaign in the North, allied with England against Germany until the stab. Which, yes, weak but you did have to try. And nice job responding to Turkish aggression in the south, then making a vulnerable Turkey back your play against Austria. Getting Italy on board for that, and then both of you turning against Turkey at the perfect moment, also good work. Failing to support Bulgaria against an inevitable Turkish attack in Spring ’06 was a costly error, though, and while you recovered it meant Italy getting most of the gains in the southern war. Threatening to “throw the game to England” if Italy then attacked you was the right diplomatic move then, and of course it worked in getting you a seat at the table for the draw.

      Turkey, yeah, you never should have trusted Italy. You can’t win without taking out Italy sooner or later, and they know it. But being on the wrong end of a Russia-Austria alliance at the start puts you in an untenable position; you pretty much have to trust allies you know will betray you in the end. There’s a slim hope that you can anticipate or control the moment of betrayal and strike a deal with the power you were just allied against, but it looks like you weren’t able to pull that off.

      Austria, I always like to see the Balkan gambit succeed as an opening. But there’s a reason Austria is the power most likely to be eliminated first in Diplomacy. I think the problem here was that you made too many alliances in the opening negotiations, but didn’t make yourself indispensable to any of them. When they were all looking for someone to turn against for their next conquests, there you were…

      Germany, fighting against England and Russia, needed a strong Austria to take the heat off the Eastern front, and that just didn’t happen. Alternately, when the Anglo-German attack against France turns into a mutual stab in 1902, you needed to persuade a strong France to join your side of that fight, and that didn’t happen either. So you wound up simply overwhelmed by the numbers.

      Good game by all, and I for one welcome our new Russo-Romano-British overlords.

      • Doctor Mist says:

        Gack. Just when I think, “Yeah, that would be fun, I should make sure I sign on next time it comes around,” a message like this convinces me I am totally not qualified.

  19. Noah says:

    used very unfavorable estimates for his position there

    Not really–a far more unfavorable estimate would be more along the lines that the fallout from the protests includes a 20% increase in the homicide rate because there are far fewer police, or they stay out of black neighborhoods, or whatever else. Then multiply that by however many years you were using.

  20. Jesse E says:

    I think there’s been some questions about how people really feel about the protests, so I’ve done a little legwork in getting the polls I could find.

    1.) There was some polling out there showing 58% of American’s supporting sending in the troops. Well, an unpopular President pressing that idea, plus several more public screw ups, this has actually changed –

    39% of Americans now support President Trump invoking the Insurrection Act, while 52% oppose.

    https://twitter.com/MorningConsult/status/1269654851169906688

    Now, I think this is largely because the looting has largely stopped, but also more importantly, things like the use of tear gas, further violence by cops, etc. has convinced people that they don’t trust Trump sending in the troops.

    2.) In addition, at the start of all of this, there was some belief that perhaps, there’d be a Nixon-like Silent Majority reaction to the protests. Again, Trump has bungled that.

    “The way Trump is handling the response to the death of George Floyd”:
    Approve 32%
    Disapprove 66%

    From an Ipos/ABC National Poll.

    3.) Now, on to the actual changes people want. The realty is, “defunding the police” is a minority position, even among the left. From a YouGov poll (https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2020/06/01/police-reform-america-poll),

    “Two-thirds of Americans (67%) favor a ban on any type of neck restraint, a technique that is permitted by many police forces under certain circumstances. Four in five (80%) Democrats support a ban on neck restraints, as well as most Republicans (58%).

    There is strong bipartisan support for training police officers how to de-escalate conflicts and avoid using force (94% support among Democrats; 83% support among Republicans). A similar number of Democrats (91%) and Republicans (82%) support outfitting all police officers with body cameras.

    Four in five (80%) Americans favor implementing an early warning system to identify problematic officers. This is supported by strong majorities of Democrats (89%) and Republicans (72%), as well as white (81%) and black (88%) Americans.

    Despite calls by activists and protesters to defund police departments, most Americans do not support reducing law enforcement budgets. Close to two-thirds (65%) oppose cutting police force funding. Just 16 percent of Democrats and 15 percent of Republicans support that idea.

    Three in five (61%) Americans say the deaths of black Americans during encounters with police in recent years is a sign of a broader problem — not isolated incidents (39%). Two-thirds (67%) of Americans overall say black and white people do not receive equal treatment from the police. Most Americans (62%) — including white Americans (57%) — now say the criminal justice system treats white Americans better than it treats black Americans. More than nine in 10 black Americans (94%) say the US justice system benefits whites. ”

    4.) On the other hand, while people may not want to directly cut police budgets, they are open to having different people handle aspects that the police currently handle. For instance, in a Data for Progress poll, a majority (53%) of people believe the police use violence when they don’t have too, including 70% of Democrat’s and 67% of African-American’s.

    In addition, 68% of people support both, “creating a new agency of first responders, like EMS or firefighters, to deal with issues of addiction or mental issues that need to be remedied, but do not need police” and “funding community-based programs to train community leaders.”

    5.) Finally, there’s some belief in the idea that white leftists blame the violence on the cops, while many African-American’s mostly blame the protestors. A Morning Consult poll also shows this to be false, as while in polling 45% of people blame the violence on the protestors and 35% blame the police, in the crosstabs, whites blame protestors 52/27 while Hispanics are 31/54 and African-Americans are at 14/68.

    /https://assets.morningconsult.com/wp-uploads/2020/06/05165234/200613_crosstabs_MorningConsult_Adults_v1.pdf

    • Guy in TN says:

      Thanks for the round-up, very informative.

    • 10240 says:

      2.) In addition, at the start of all of this, there was some belief that perhaps, there’d be a Nixon-like Silent Majority reaction to the protests. Again, Trump has bungled that.

      “The way Trump is handling the response to the death of George Floyd”:
      Approve 32%
      Disapprove 66%

      Does disapproval of the way Trump is handling the protests imply support for the protests? I imagine many (most?) people, when asked “Do you approve of the way Trump is handling…”, answer without listening to the rest of the sentence.

      • The original Mr. X says:

        Plus, I’d expect that people who disapprove of Trump’s handling because they think he’s been too soft would still vote for him, on the grounds that Biden would have been even softer.

      • Jesse E says:

        Since all the other polling shows Trump’s general approval at basically the same place it’s been forever (low-to-mid 40’s depending on the poll), and polling of the actual protests and such is still quite positive, the “I disapprove because Trump is being too soft on these damn anarchists” is a relatively small portion of the disapproval rate.

  21. hash872 says:

    The real law enforcement reform that needs to take place, is broadening the power of the FBI and other federal agencies to investigate, charge and punish local police wrongdoing. I know ‘give the big federal government more power’ is not the most popular argument out there, but:

    There are lots of arguments out there for new laws around police behavior. I like most of them, but they’re also meaningless because the police are free to disregard them, without consequences. For example banning chokeholds is one of the ‘8 Can’t Wait’ reforms going around Twitter right now- but, chokeholds were already illegal in New York when Eric Garner was killed with one, and the police faced zero discipline. Frankly, they should’ve been arrested and charged. There has been some absolutely astonishing bad cop behavior out there that resulted in zero consequences- my personal recent favorite is the Baltimore officer who forgot to turn his body camera off while he was planting drugs on an African American man. He was eventually charged, received a suspended sentence, and remains a Baltimore police officer to this day! (The victim was held in prison for six months). In practice, local prosecutors, mayors and judges rarely have the will to charge or seriously punish bad cops. The prosecutors don’t want to prosecute- if they do, the judges will not impose a real sentence. (In New York, for instance, all cases involving officers are routed to a small number of NYPD-friendly judges, who always hand out suspended sentences). A common tactic if there’s a public outcry is the police commissioner announcing that an officer is ‘suspended pending an investigation’. What’s not mentioned is that the officer is suspended with pay, so he’s either behind a desk or playing video games at home, and that he’ll be quietly reinstated once the short American attention span has moved on.

    One of the FBI’s underappreciated focuses is investigating local political corruption- payoffs, pay to play, you want to develop this parking lot and I want a bag of $50,000 handed off to me at a restaurant, etc. (Real estate & alcohol licenses are huge sources of corruption!) The logic is that, if say the case involves crooked New Jersey politicians, local prosecutors are too close to the parties involved to be objective. This is actually a major FBI focus! Remaining a 1st world country means a sustained, never-ending fight against corruption.

    I’d broaden this to local law enforcement. If prosecutors and judges in their home city won’t enforce meaningful consequences, then the feds should. Much of the civil rights laws ‘worked’ because successive presidents sent in military units to the South to enforce Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act. Both Eisenhower and Kennedy federalized National Guard units and sent them to physically keep the doors to schools open- obviously it seems absurd to argue that Congress could simply pass anti-discrimination laws and allow Alabama to enforce them. At its heart this is a rule of law issue- as local police departments increasingly morph into armed gangs that can assault citizens at will, and steal property via ‘asset forfeiture’ without charges, they risk simply becoming militias like in a 3rd world country.

    I’m not sure if Constitutionally a federal bureau can charge assault & battery if the states won’t do it, but I’d strongly argue for taking a hard line with some local police- and quickly. Passing meaningless laws that the cops can laugh off is not going to have much of an effect

    • cassander says:

      Civil servants getting people killed through gross incompetence and not getting fired isn’t limited to cops. If cities and states don’t care that their officers are inept, I’m not sure any amount of federal investigation would make a meaningful amount of difference.

      • MisterA says:

        Also, the FBI have not traditionally been known for their own scrupulous protection of civil liberties.

      • hash872 says:

        I don’t quite understand what you mean. The difference federal investigations would make is that violent cops are arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned (and presumably don’t have a particularly fun prison experience). And then, that future violent cops are deterred by the thought of a prison sentence. The feelings of cities and states are irrelevant here

        • cassander says:

          so someone gets killed. all the officers involve swear it was legitimate, for obvious reasons. the local chief knows that the people involved have had some issues in the past, but he certainly doesn’t want a scandal so he’s not going to say anything. The mayor doesn’t want riots so he’s not going to push. and if the FBI do get involved, what can they do? there’s no forensic evidence to prove otherwise, because none was collected at the time.

          If you have a system that has rotten incentives up and down the line, an outside investigator won’t matter much, because everyone but them will conspire to protect themselves, and since they’re the ones who work with each other day to day, their ability to do so is pretty high. No mayor or chief is ever going to want some FBI agent poking around, because no good will ever come of it for then, so there’s always going to be resistance and cover for said resistance. and if an incident does get out and generate enough energy to force an investigation, then you’re already trying things in the court of public opinion and no one will be happy regardless of the outcome. What you’ve created isn’t better incentives for cops, but a recipe for endless media circuses. You need to consider the incentives of people in the context of the institutions they’re part of and their limits.

          • Spookykou says:

            In some of the many comments on this topic, a common suggestions to address this concern is more ubiquitous bod/dash cam usages by the police, and stiff penalties if they don’t maintain their data. There might be cases where this kind of evidence is not sufficient, but I would think in a decent number of cases it would be.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Those are really good points.

          • cassander says:

            @Spookykou

            I think body cams are not a bad idea, but they’re only useful if there’s an organizational culture where the bodycams going dark for a while is treated as a serious concern and not laughed off. and that’s something that has to be imposed internally.

    • TimG says:

      The real law enforcement reform that needs to take place, is broadening the power of the FBI and other federal agencies to investigate, charge and punish local police wrongdoing.

      I had been chatting about this with my wife. She’s a (non practicing) lawyer. She pointed out that police are a state and local thing and thought that the Feds wouldn’t have a lot of leverage with local police.

      So it occurred to me: the Feds could set up a program that cities/states could “enroll” in — if they want to. What exactly that looks like, I don’t know. One option/example would be: anytime someone dies in a police action, the FBI should do an independent investigation.

      A lot of cities/states would probably consider signing up for that. But the police unions would definitely throw a fit. And they would probably prevent a lot of action on this — at least in normal times. But today, right now, these cities and states could enroll in this program to appease protestors. It would be a great example of protesting achieving something concrete. Unfortunately, our federal government is a bit broken right now 🙁

      • cassander says:

        A lot of cities/states would probably consider signing up for that.

        that seems unlikely at best. How could such investigations benefit the people who run cities? it seems like they could only cause trouble.

        • zzzzort says:

          The people who run cities (or at least the elected leadership) often have an antagonistic relationship with the police department. A lot consent decrees were supported by city leadership, and were more ways for city hall to get leverage over the PD than the DOJ imposing requirements on the city.

          • cassander says:

            The people who run cities (or at least the elected leadership) often have an antagonistic relationship with the police department.

            They have a codependent relationships. Usually, the unions help get the mayors elected, and the mayors cover for the cops and give them their pay raises and autonomy. sometimes they disagree on the details, but on the whole they’re on each other’s side far more than not. and neither benefits from an FBI investigation looking for witches to burn racist cops.

    • Dack says:

      For example banning chokeholds is one of the ‘8 Can’t Wait’ reforms going around Twitter right now- but, chokeholds were already illegal in New York when Eric Garner was killed with one, and the police faced zero discipline.

      This was a few years ago, but I remember reading at the time that the chokehold wasn’t illegal, just against NYPD regulations. And if I recall correctly, the choking officer was eventually fired for it.

  22. salvorhardin says:

    That’s a plausible argument for why perfectly rational protesters who had completely effective control of their emotions would find that the better moral choice was to wait.

    But we go to a protest with the human beings we have, not those we would wish to have. It’s unrealistic to expect that anyone this angry would just press pause on their anger for months rather than vent it now. (This is also of course an argument against extended lockdowns generally.)

  23. Tatterdemalion says:

    It looks to me as though most of the people supporting Trump sending in the military to deal with the protests, and most of the people opposing it, share the assumption that they would generally use more force when doing so than the police are.

    That assumption seems plausible to me, but I’ve seen a few people (e.g. David French, IIRC, or possibly someone he linked) challenge it; what are people’s thoughts on it?

    • mtl1882 says:

      I definitely think it could go either way–I associate the National Guard with sometimes being preferable to local police, where local police are out of control or unable to deal with the situation, and the violence can only escalate. My comment that it could make sense depending on the case caused an unexpected falling out with a friend, who saw the “feds” as only being called in to basically beat down the protestors. I understand the “law and order” rhetoric around it right now plays into that, and many conservatives are calling for it, but it wasn’t my immediate mental association, especially given that the police seem kind of brutal in the area in question, and seem to be at odds with local leaders in a way that might make them unlikely to back down. There are some types of federal forces I’d be more wary of, but I can definitely see a point where it would be wise to send in the NG–possibly not now, due to the feelings that have arisen. It should not have been used as a taunt, and it would definitely be preferable not to have to resort to it.

    • Guy in TN says:

      I’m not sure the assumption is that, in terms of use of force, military>police. But rather military+police>police.

      For example, here’s Tom Cotton’s argument:

      One thing above all else will restore order to our streets: an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers. But local law enforcement in some cities desperately needs backup

      All else equal, I would rather the protestors face the military instead of the police, but that’s not an option anyone is seriously floating.

      • Spookykou says:

        I think one possible reading here is that Cotton is arguing that the show of force reduces the need to use actual force.

        Based only on the quote I have no idea who Tom Cotton is and have not read the source document.

      • keaswaran says:

        I would even more rather the protesters+military face the police, as happened in several states in the wake of Brown v Board of Education. But that seems less likely here in most states (though not out of the question in some, given that the National Guard is often controlled by the state governor).

    • broblawsky says:

      It’s not just a question of force; the US military simply isn’t really trained for riot control. The question isn’t whether they will use too much or too little force, but that this isn’t their area of expertise.

      That being said, my assumption is that they will use too much force. Part of the problem with American policing is police being trained like soldiers – that is, that they are trained to assume that every interaction is a potentially lethal threat.

      • Aftagley says:

        Yeah, this. The only tool the military has access to is force. They’d either be using force, or be doing nothing.

        Look at what happened on the Southwest border when the administration declared an emergency then and sent in the troops – the brass realized that they had a bunch of untrained yahoos coming in and so made every effort to keep them well away from the actual border and had them doing a bunch of non-necessary logistics work to keep them busy.

        • broblawsky says:

          The explanation I saw (from, I think, Myke Cole on Twitter) is that there are three levels of state power.

          Violence: When you run a red light and the police stop you and give you a ticket.
          Force: When you don’t run a red light because you can see a cop car.
          Power: When you don’t run a red light because the cops might give you a ticket, even if you know they aren’t there. Now the cops are inside your head.

          The military has access to violence; if they’re doing their jobs well, they might have force. They never have access to power, because we’re not used to military policing.

          • Aftagley says:

            Hmm, I kinda disagree with that explanation, mostly that giving me a ticket is violence. Maybe something like –

            Violence: Shooting me after a failed to pull over.
            Force: When you run a red light and the police stop you and give you a ticket.
            Power: When you don’t run a red light because you can see a cop car.
            Control: When you don’t run a red light because the cops might give you a ticket, even if you know they aren’t there. Now the cops are inside your head.

            Although I admit the control/power divide is kinda squishy there.

            They never have access to power, because we’re not used to military policing.

            They also have no clue what to do with it. Our misadventures in the Middle East basically come down to our inability to translate violence into power productively. Why would anyone think they’d be better at it here?

        • Controls Freak says:

          The only tool the military has access to is force.

          Frankly, this isn’t really true. It’s pretty well-known that the military is often used in a variety of roles, stretching even to humanitarian roles. Whether or not this is an optimal use of resources is highly debated. Whether or not they’re capable of doing things below the level of “kill people and break stuff”, especially on short notice when other assets are unavailable, isn’t quite so disputed.

          Look at what happened on the Southwest border when the administration declared an emergency then and sent in the troops – the brass realized that they had a bunch of untrained yahoos coming in and so made every effort to keep them well away from the actual border and had them doing a bunch of non-necessary logistics work to keep them busy.

          IIRC, it was actually that there wasn’t sufficient legal justification in that case to have the military operating in an enforcement capacity. So, they were pretty much restricted by law to only helping out with stuff like logistics work. (Of course, whether or not this was actually helpful is sort of immaterial to whether or not Donald was going to press forward with the claim that he’s “sending the military in”.) Here, the discussion is focused on whether or not there would be sufficient legal justification for having them operate in an enforcement capacity. I don’t think that in either case, “untrained yahoos” is likely to be much of a factor.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        My wife is friends with a Marine who says he learned crowd control in Iraq and is aghast at how poorly American cops seem to be at it.

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      Both and neither? I oppose sending in the military to deal with the looters/rioters because the places with the rioting and looting don’t seem to want it to stop. If they wanted the protests/riots/looting to stop they could just….stop protesting, rioting and looting. If this changes and the people in these cities want the military, sure, send them in. In the meantime…democracy is the belief the public knows what they want and deserve to get it, good and hard.

      • cassander says:

        I’m pretty sure the people getting looted want it stopped…

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:

          I don’t know whether this is part of what you had in mind, but there are a lot of people who don’t want their neigborhoods wrecked.

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          I don’t know to what extent, though. I’ve seen social media posts from the owners of small businesses of the form, “don’t worry about us, justice for George Floyd.”

          Here’s the statement from Target about their store that got looted. I don’t see any call from them for the looting or rioting to stop, and they express sympathies with the cause of the protesters. They understand the “unleashing” of “pent-up pain.”

          I don’t know if they all really believe this, but plenty of the people getting looted do not seem overly concerned about it. Already I think the protests themselves do not have merit, and yet people support them. Minneapolis is disbanding their police force? I saw some bizarre pictures of white people who didn’t do anything washing the feet of black people who weren’t victims? I don’t know how to put this charitably, but I think a lot of people right now are out of their minds. “We’re getting looted and that’s okay, don’t send in the military” doesn’t really seem that far-fetched.

          • Paul Zrimsek says:

            The old phrase “Saying nice doggie while looking around for a rock” seems to apply here.

      • The Pachyderminator says:

        This seems to assume that in any city where looting and rioting is taking place, all the people or at least a democratic majority want the looting and rioting to continue. It doesn’t seem plausible that you actually think that, but I don’t know how else to make sense of your comment.

        I haven’t seen any information to suggest that anywhere near a majority of protesters support looting and rioting, let alone a majority of inhabitants of any city.

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          The people protesting provide cover to the looters and rioters by distracting the police. If they wanted the looting and rioting to stop, they could stop attending the “peaceful protests” that either turn into violent riots, or simply provide cover for the rioters and looters. Their revealed preference is for the riots and looting to continue.

          ETA: Also, the elected representatives of the people in places where there is looting and rioting are (I believe) uniformly against the military coming in. So, yeah there doesn’t seem to be popular will to send in the military.

          • Matt M says:

            Yeah, the cries of “I’m not in favor of looting, I’m just opposed to literally any and every thing that might conceivably stop the looting from happening” ring a bit hollow to my ear…

          • SamChevre says:

            they could stop

            Or they could do what every other mass protest does, and either point rioters and looters out to the police, or have their own informal security force to stop them.

          • Viliam says:

            Or they could do what every other mass protest does, and either point rioters and looters out to the police, or have their own informal security force to stop them.

            I didn’t comment on this topic previously, because I don’t know what are the social norms in USA about protests. But it was always on my mind that during my active period in Amnesty International this is exactly how its local branch dealth with potential troublemakers, and there was no trouble. You have a clearly established leadership with a megaphone, so they can declare “these people are not part of our protest; people who came here to join our protest please step away from them” when necessary.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            @Viliam

            That’s eventually what happened here, I think. The initial days of protesting were disorganized, so in addition to peaceful protests you had riots and looting. Once the protestors got organized, the riots and looting ceased.

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          Also, I asked on SSC and couldn’t get a single left-winger/Democrat here to say that the protests/riots were unjustified before or should stop now.

          Perhaps no one but Plumber saw my post before (and I don’t think he answered my question), but the lack of response to that question is one of the reasons I can plausibly believe people aren’t that concerned over the riots. The only people making big noise about stopping the riots in the mainstream culture are Trump-aligned. The opinion editor for the NYT just got sacked for letting a US Senator express his opinion that the military should stop the looting and riots.

          Will you condemn the looting or riots? I know in that question I said “protest/riots” but I think the looting is wrapped up in the riots. Burning cars = rioting and cleaning out Target = looting but it’s the same basic sort of stuff people would want the military to stop, if they thought it was important to stop that sort of thing.

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            I think the protests are justified (though possibly unwise because of coronavirus), and not the rioting or looting.

            From what I can tell, this is pretty typical for the left: here is Vox making the case for peaceful protest only, and here are some Democrats agreeing. There’s also plenty of video of protesters themselves intervening to stop looters.
            Finally, here’s some polling that shows that 70% of Democrats think it is “very important” to protect private property from looting or damage during the protests, and another 20% say “somewhat important”.

          • metalcrow says:

            As a protester i can confirm i think looting and damaging property is bad.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Those are good videos, thanks for sharing. There’s more opposition to looting than I thought. I will update in that direction.

            ETA: There’s something surreal about people making themselves into human shields to protect a Target.

          • Eric T says:

            I’m a pretty active protestor. Fine condemning looting and rioting.

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            Another fun video from DC, in which protesters literally grab a rioter and turn him in to the cops.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            I’ve seen some people on Twitter criticize the protestors for being turncoats and “siding with the cops.” But even on Twitter that was an extreme minority position and most people were saying “nah, fuck him.”

          • Randy M says:

            ETA: There’s something surreal about people making themselves into human shields to protect a Target.

            Would it be in poor taste to wonder if their marketing backfired?

            On point, I think you should always separate your questions about rioting and protesting. While they can blend together and shift into one another, and protesting may be unwise in cases because of that, protesting is an act much easier to justify on the end goal than rioting which has a high cost innocents must pay.

          • John Schilling says:

            I […] couldn’t get a single left-winger/Democrat here to say that the protests/riots were unjustified before or should stop now

            How many right-winger/Republicans can you find here to say that the protests were unjustified before or should stop now?

            Trying to make the protests and the riots into the same thing, is unfair and unlikely to persuade. As noted elsewhere, the riots stopped pretty much on day one – and in large part because even the protesters agreed that the riots were unjustified and should stop.

          • Matt M says:

            I am a right-winger, and I believe the protests (even if entirely peaceful) are unjustified, and should stop. Because they are based on a premise that is factually incorrect.

            I don’t dispute their right to protest peacefully, but they are wrong and should stop promoting things that are wrong.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            As noted elsewhere, the riots stopped pretty much on day one

            No, the riots/looting went on for days. They were still going on early/middle of last week. I thought they were still going on through the weekend but they died down middle/late last week.

            Also, what Matt M said. The protests themselves were never justified because the BLM narrative is factual incorrect.

          • The Pachyderminator says:

            Sure, I think looting and random destruction is wrong and that the minority of leftists who think it’s politically productive are completely up their own ass. If anyone on SSC disagrees, I haven’t seen their posts. I can think of a few people who left or got banned long ago who might say they approve of rioting, but not current commenters. So I’m still confused about why you think approval of the rioting and looting is so widespread.

            I suspect there are a few things going on here:
            – You’re seeing a few social media posts about the riots being good, and not properly discounting them for filtering effects (extremely online leftists tends to be a little crazy, much like extremely online rightists, and the crazy posts are more likely to penetrate a conservative bubble).
            – You’re seeing a much larger number of posts express support for the protests and their cause in general, many of whom are focusing on the protests and not the riots precisely because arguments are soldiers and they don’t want to give you any ammunition, and applying your own assumption that anyone who supports the protests also supports the riots.
            – You’re seeing a few arguments that the rioting is understandable or not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things, compared to the magnitude of the evils being protested, and mistaking this for outright approval.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            If anyone on SSC disagrees, I haven’t seen their posts.

            Guy in TN had plenty of posts justifying rioting and looting. As did, surprisingly enough, John Schilling with

            …we get a bunch of black people and their allies highly motivated to set this right and in a way that reaches far beyond Minnesota. I hope they succeed, and I’ll overlook some broken windows and burnt-out squad cars if that’s what it takes.

            He got several +1s, too.

            So when we’ve got posts like these who are okay with or defending rioting/looting, and nobody responded to my request for leftists to comment on it, and various left-twitter takes, and “riots are the language of the unheard” rhetoric, and celebrities bailing out rioters…perhaps you could cut me a little more slack than:

            It doesn’t seem plausible that you actually think that

            It’s very plausible. Now, I think this week people are a little more calm and we’re getting the more nuanced approaches, but beginning of last week and the week before when tensions were high, there were definitely people willing to defend riots and even looting.

            Maybe not a majority then, and it’s definitely a minority now, but it’s not like I made it up whole cloth.

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            I don’t want to speak for John, who can say what he meant, but I personally wouldn’t read that as justifying rioting. I would say I agree with John’s sentiment, even though I oppose rioting, because I think that a small amount of rioting is an acceptable cost for the protests, even if I would also try and reduce the amount of rioting to zero if possible. But I don’t see how that counts as a defense of rioting. It is an acknowledgment that some rioting may occur anyway, but as long as the amount of rioting is small enough, that won’t convince me not to support the protests.

            I also donated to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, but again, I don’t think this constitutes a defense of rioting: I donated because I believed that many if not a majority of the people arrested were not rioting (for example, they were arrested for curfew violations) and it was an acceptable risk that some of that money might go to help rioters who I consider less deserving.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            But I don’t see how that counts as a defense of rioting.

            “I don’t like riots but if it takes riots to get what we want then riots are okay” is definitely a defense of riots. I don’t see how it can be anything else but that.

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            No one here is saying “if riots are the only way to get what we want, then riots it is”, we’re saying, “it’s unreasonable to demand that protesters guarantee literally zero riots before their protest is justified–if the majority of protesters take reasonable measures to discourage rioting, then any rioting that occurs despite that should be counted as an unfortunate cost of an otherwise beneficial action”.

            To illustrate the difference by way of a hopefully less charged example:
            about a year ago, my city’s NBA team won the championship; in the course of the celebrations, some police cars were smashed up, as well as some buses, bus shelters, etc. I don’t think every person who thinks “it’s okay to celebrate the Raptors winning” is defending rioting just because a minor amount of rioting is an almost inevitable consequence of victory celebrations.

          • Aftagley says:

            Let me try and frame this a different way:

            Let’s say you hypothetically support access to firearms. Greater access to firearms means more people will kill themselves with guns. A small percentage of the overall number, sure but it’s pretty directly correlated.

            Would it be fair of me to then say that you support people shooting themselves? Of course not. You think one thing is good; you accept that there is occasionally some bad that comes with your prime concern, but that doesn’t mean you’re actively supporting the bad.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            I think the way to do that would be to vocally condemn the celebrants who burned the cars, not shrug and say, “if a few burned out cop cars are what it takes so we can party then so be it.” That definitely sounds like a defense of burning cop cars in celebration of the Raptors.

            ETA: Also, that’s not how I read John’s post. Perhaps he can correct me, but I took him to mean that he expected the burned out cop cars to be among the things that made the changes in policing he wants happen.

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            I think the way to do that would be to vocally condemn the celebrants who burned the cars, not shrug and say, “if a few burned out cop cars are what it takes so we can party then so be it.”

            I agree the first part is necessary, but the fact is…the latter is still true, even if it’s impolitic to say it. We do accept a little bit of destruction as an inevitable but unfortunate cost for lots of things, including all sorts of things that are generally benign.

            I also think it’s important that John’s phrasing was that he would overlook the burnt out cop cars, which is why we probably are reading him differently–not that burnt out cop cars are part of what it takes, but that, if they occur as a side effect, he is willing to not hold that against the protests as a whole. But anyway, if John cares he can clarify, and either way, that’s the interpretation of his remark that I’d endorse. I don’t think burnt out cop cars are necessary, but I do think they are probably inevitable, and so long as the majority of protesters are discouraging the burning of cop cars and taking measures to keep the number as low as possible, endorsing protests and accepting the inevitability of burnt cop cars as an inevitable cost shouldn’t count as defending rioting.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            I’m not sure about what counts as a defense of rioting, but I was seeing a lot of “the anger rioters feel is a normal response to being mistreated” and as a counterbalance, a lesser amount of “I’m black and I don’t want my neighborhood wrecked, and that includes the stores I shop at”.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            All right. I just object to being told I couldn’t plausibly believe lots of people approved of the riots, when there were lots of people saying they approved of the riots and few speaking out against them until after the riots were over. It feels a little like gaslighting.

            It’s not like it’s that implausible. I think just about everyone agrees that there is a defense of burning cop cars in extreme circumstances. If the government went full fascist and was rounding up guns, or Jews, or Jews with guns, I would definitely support burning cop cars to stop that. For many other people, that line may be police brutality against blacks or the poor, and many people said just that, and I took them at their word.

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            @Nancy and Conrad

            Yes, I agree there are lots of defenses of rioting, or at least, minimizing the rioting. Anyone who told you there wasn’t was lying, gaslighting, or wrong; I just think there are even more people who approve of the protests and who don’t approve of rioting.

          • John Schilling says:

            I also think it’s important that John’s phrasing was that he would overlook the burnt out cop cars, which is why we probably are reading him differently–not that burnt out cop cars are part of what it takes, but that, if they occur as a side effect, he is willing to not hold that against the protests as a whole. But anyway, if John cares he can clarify

            You’ve got it right. There are cases where I would affirmatively support burning police cars, but this isn’t one of them.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Gotcha. So in “if that’s what it takes,” the antecedent of “it” was the overlooking, not the burning squad cars themselves. Understood. Sorry about that.

          • John Schilling says:

            Right. Burning a few squad cars is an unavoidable consequence of an otherwise-good plan being implemented by actual flawed humans, so I’ll overlook it. Sorry if that was unclear.

          • Matt M says:

            an otherwise-good plan being implemented by actual flawed humans

            Is George Floyd being choked to death also the result of an otherwise-good plan (to disallow people from using counterfeit currency, with force when necessary) implemented by actual flawed humans?

          • John Schilling says:

            You dropped the word “unavoidable” in there. Occasional violence in street protests, is unavoidable outside of pollyanna-land. Policemen murdering unresisting handcuffed suspects in plain view of A: other policemen and B: many independent observers with cameras, I think can be plausibly avoided in the real world.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            I don’t know John. You’re positing perfectly peaceful protests are Pollyanna but perfectly peaceful police are practical…and pickles.

            I don’t think so. You’ve got approximately 700,000 law enforcement officers in the US. The idea that not a one of them is going to be a murderer is unlikely.

          • John Schilling says:

            We don’t need “not one of them is a murderer” to avoid another Floyd. We need not one of them to believe that they will get away with murder committed in front of three other policemen and a bunch of cameras.

            Other, mostly lesser, abuses of police power are inevitable. This one isn’t.

          • Matt M says:

            You dropped the word “unavoidable” in there.

            If you allow the police to use violence to enforce the law, I do think it’s “unavoidable” that at least one person will be killed who probably shouldnt’ have been.

            George Floyd specifically, his death was avoidable. But “zero unjust deaths from policing” is unavoidable, so long as the police have anywhere near the power and legal status the average person expects them to have.

          • John Schilling says:

            But “zero unjust deaths from policing” is unavoidable

            What does that have to do with any claim I or anyone else here has made?

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            I think it’s that John tends to prefer people who abuse their power be more discrete about it. He’s not saying “no murders” but “no flagrantly obvious murders.”

          • The Pachyderminator says:

            @Conrad Honcho

            I just object to being told I couldn’t plausibly believe lots of people approved of the riots, when there were lots of people saying they approved of the riots and few speaking out against them until after the riots were over. It feels a little like gaslighting.

            Sorry about that. FWIW I was actually trying to be charitable. Your comments did seem to be pretty clear that you believed exactly that, but that belief seemed so crazy to me that I still hesitated to impute it to you. In retrospect, I can see how you reached the conclusion you did.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Thanks, no problem man. We’re good 🙂

          • Evelyn Q. Greene says:

            …we get a bunch of black people and their allies highly motivated to set this right and in a way that reaches far beyond Minnesota. I hope they succeed, and I’ll overlook some broken windows and burnt-out squad cars if that’s what it takes.

            This is absolutely a defense of rioting, at least in the sense that “Pinochet would kill less people than Allende” is a defense of Pinochet.
            I say this a someone who would support the protesters attacking local organs of the state, if not random businesses.

            Looting, rioting and other forms of violence are deliberate tools of protest, not some sort of random side effect. I was at both the pro-gun lobby day protests and local anti-lockdown protest, the former of which had tens of thousands of people. No riots, no looting. Defend them or condemn but don’t pretend that this is some sort of random force of nature.

          • Matt M says:

            Yeah, even in the most violent/deplorable “right-wing protest” in recent memory (Charlottesville) there was approximately zero random destruction of private property. Certainly no looting, at all. No buildings being set fire to, at all. There was some street brawling between protesters and counter-protesters, and one dude who drove his car through a crowd, but none of the stuff that we’re now being told is just inevitable whenever a protest happens.

          • I think it’s that John tends to prefer people who abuse their power be more discrete about it.

            It isn’t that he prefers them but that he recognizes that covert misdeeds are harder to prevent than open misdeeds.

          • AG says:

            @Matt M

            Seems like there’s a class component, there. Few to none of the right-wing protesters at Charlottesville would have been living in poverty (especially insofar as they could afford to take days off from their day jobs to travel out of state somewhere), so they have little incentive to opportunistically steal things. Fires are a little harder to justify, but I suspect that fires only started after the police had generated chaos to begin with.
            If the police had decided to disperse Charlottesville the way they have in these protests, I bet opportunistic crime would have occurred.

          • Matt M says:

            If the police had decided to disperse Charlottesville the way they have in these protests

            They absolutely did do this. They broke up pretty much every concentrated right-wing gathering, often forcing them to exit public parks through narrow spaces that were surrounded by left-wing counter-protestors. It’s what led to the large crowds in confined spaces that allowed/enabled the whole “drive the car through the street” scenario to have happened.

            Had the mayor done what a federal judge had ordered him to do, and allowed the legally permitted right-wing protest to proceed, nobody would have died in Charlottesville, I’m absolutely convinced of it. That event would have been far less violent had the local authorities just stood down and allowed the chips to fall where they may (there probably still would have been some street brawling, but it would have been entirely between willing participants with no innocents getting caught up/killed in the crossfire.)

          • AG says:

            I’ll concede that the police did disperse the right wing protests in a poor way, but I don’t recall any reports of tear gas or grenades, which would provide ample cover for people to start smashing things.
            The way the police handled Charlottesville likely escalated the risk of protester/counter-protester violence, but it didn’t make it easy for people to loot places under the guise of protest.

          • Matt M says:

            I’ll concede that the police did disperse the right wing protests in a poor way, but I don’t recall any reports of tear gas or grenades

            Because they didn’t need to. They showed up and said “OK you Nazis, we order you to disperse and leave this park, please exit through this narrowly confined space which your enemies have surrounded and will throw things at you as you move through it” and, by and large, that’s exactly what the right-wing protestors did. There were no instances of large groups of right-wingers violently resisting orders to disperse.

            The main and primary difference between the worst example of a right-wing protest anyone can think of in the modern era and nearly every left-wing protest happening in every city is the behavior of the protesters themselves. And I’m here to tell you, this is not a coincidence.

          • AG says:

            I strongly disagree with this characterization. In case after case after case, which can be verified with video, police employed tear gas and other violent measures without announcing a requirement to disperse.

      • democracy is the belief the public knows what they want and deserve to get it, good and hard.

        HLM

      • JulieK says:

        I’m pretty sure the people whose premises are being looted want the looting to stop, but are powerless to achieve this.

    • Clutzy says:

      My thought is not that the military will use more force, but that they would actually use force when needed, which is not happening in several cities where the riots are ongoing. My city has thankfully calmed quite a bit, but at one point I was on the police radio religiously and was 1-2 blocks away from saying, “we are going or my car has a 50% chance of being burned.”

      Cities that have riots still ongoing have governments that, IMO, are wholly illegitimate and have failed their bargain in the social contract as the monopoly on force.

    • Purplehermann says:

      I thought the looters and rioters will stop once the military gets there, because the military is scary.

      Protesters will also be less likely to go out, again because military is scary (at least in the US).

    • J Mann says:

      My read on the riots and looting is that people inclined to lawbreaking are more likely to do it when they can get away with it. Put more boots on the ground and you will hopefully need less force – people are less likely to throw a brick or loot a store if they know they’ll be arrested and charged.

    • Deiseach says:

      One thing to be careful about getting what you wish if the military are sent in (and I’m not exactly sure is the National Guard or the Army meant here) is that they operate under different rules.

      This happened a lot in Northern Ireland where the British Army was sent in to support the police, but they were operating under military rules. These mean, for instance, that there is no such thing as an “innocent bystander”; if you’re shot because the army is dispersing rioters, too bad, you shouldn’t have been standing on the street trying to get to your home. Controversy is still going on decades later.

      For decades successive British governments have provided immunity to British soldiers from being prosecuted for deaths during the Troubles, most recently Boris Johnson (before Brexit, Coronavirus and pulling down statues in Bristol blew up). You may have some hope of holding the police accountable for what happens during riots, but you have very little to none when it comes to the army.

      The situation may get bad enough to warrant calling in the military, but if protestors and rioters push it that far because they expect to get the police replaced, they and everyone may regret it later.

  24. J.R. says:

    Does anyone else have trouble recalling what their younger selves thought of things? I have a hard time articulating what I’m getting at in a short comment, so I’ll elaborate…

    When I was a teenager, I really enjoyed Dostoevsky. The Brothers Karamazov was the first Serious Literature that I deeply responded to. I continued to work my way through the Russian greats, reading more Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and moved through the 20th Century to Solzhenitsyn.

    I’m revisiting some of those works now, over a decade later. I’m working on War and Peace now and read Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle about a month ago.

    What’s crazy is that my teenage self read these books, but had no clue what was going on. I don’t even remember Tolstoy’s main conclusions from War and Peace, or what any of the characters were for. I vaguely remember liking Prince Andrei, and thinking Natasha was silly, but that’s it. I don’t even remember Pierre’s story arc and he’s the central character of the novel. So what was I doing reading one of the longest novels ever? Why did I waste all that time?

    What’s especially bizarre is I definitely got Dostoevsky as a teenager. My interpretations of Karmazov and Crime and Punishment have held up when I’ve read them as an adult. So it wasn’t like I was a complete idiot.

    My suspicion is that there are two types of art: ones that I respond to and ones that I don’t. Work that you don’t respond to, you digest quickly, so you’ve forgotten it as soon as you’ve finished it. But work that you do respond to, you think about it, it churns inside of you, it changes the way you view the world, so it stays with you.

    But the other thing is – as you age, the things you respond to change and you have more general knowledge to latch onto things. I know way more about military history now, for instance, so I find Tolstoy’s account of the Battle of Austerlitz gripping. I’m sure my younger self was baffled and too lazy to look it up on Wikipedia. Hell, I didn’t even have a smartphone so I could do that from my bed between chapters like I do now.

    • Uribe says:

      I read Anna Karenina when I was 19 and it blew me away. Reread it a few years ago and still loved it, but I didn’t remember much of it. What I did remember was simply the warmth of Tolstoy, how 3-dimensional the characters felt, how Tolstoy seemed to understand what makes people tick and what problems they were going through. Even though my life was nothing like the characters, it felt like Tolstoy understood what I was going through. I still feel that way about Tolstoy. I don’t believe in God, but I wish there were one & I wish He were like Tolstoy.

      I don’t feel like my inability to remember the details of the novel mean I don’t remember who I was. I feel like I remember exactly who I was. Of course, it may be a false memory.

      EDIT: Dostoevsky didn’t do as much for me yet I think I can remember his stories about as well as Tolstoy’s. Perhaps I even remember the big plots in Dostoevsky better if only because they are more straightforward, though I don’t claim to remember much detail.

    • Robin says:

      I read “The Brothers Karamasov” in my twenties and loved it; likewise the “Idiot”. “Crime and Punishment” was so-so, I particularly remember finding the end a bit corny (which was probably due to censorship).

      The best part of the Brothers Karamasov was Ivan’s discussion with the devil. The great inquisitor was a bit disappointing. Now, I might some day read it again.

      One book I reread was “Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance” by Pirsig. I remember that I found it spectacularly enlightening when I was 22. When I recently reread it, I mostly went “meh” and “what’s so great about this”.

    • Viliam says:

      Books are interesting when they somehow deal with issues that are currently important in your life. If you never experienced X, then reading a book that assumes you are familiar with X is a waste of time. On the other hand, if you spent too much time thinking about X, maybe the book doesn’t have anything new to tell you. And things that are interesting are easier to remember.

      • cassander says:

        I’ve made this argument before about why it’s pointless to have teenagers read great books. Can you really appreciate Moby Dick if you haven’t pursued something past the point of sense and suffered for it? Julius Caesar if you’ve never been betrayed by a friend? Romeo and Juliet if you haven’t watched teenagers be idiots, knowing exactly how it will turn out? Sure, maybe some of them will appreciate the aesthetic quality of the writing, but it won’t mean much to them.

        • AG says:

          The short-lived trend of teen movie adaptations of literature show that the stories are fundamentally applicable, though, and that it’s more the aesthetic trappings and prose/dialogue styles that make them less accessible to students.
          I know that Ethan Frome was rendered accessible to me because I recognized some passages of ~longing~ from pining/angst-centered fanfiction, hah.

  25. Eric T says:

    My politics friends and I have a joke that Mitt Romney is going to become a democrat at some point soon. I’ve only ever thought of it as a joke, then this happened. I’ve officially updated my chance from 0.1% to like… 1%.

    • broblawsky says:

      He isn’t going to become a Democrat; he’s planning on running for President again, and he’s betting on a backlash against Trumpism in the Republican party. If it falls through, he’s still fine; he can keep winning Senate elections in Utah until the day he dies.

      This isn’t to say that his convictions on this aren’t sincere; I believe that they are. This is just one of those rare situations where the politically convenient decision and the morally right decision coincide.

      • Nick says:

        Agreed on all points.

      • keaswaran says:

        There are still 77 days before the Republican delegates go to Charlotte to catch coronavirus select the nominee. I believe 77 days ago, San Francisco still permitted events of up to 50 people.

    • Erusian says:

      Despite what was said around the 2012 election, Romney’s always been very moderate and willing to work with Democrats. He ran Massachusetts and implemented universal healthcare there. This doesn’t surprise me at all. I doubt he’ll defect but he’s always been on the liberal wing of the Republican Party, which really is only relevant in New England but does exist.

  26. If humanity ever succeeds in developing a Friendly AI, I expect “Friendly” to come with the addendum “as defined by the Chinese Communist Party.” What will Skynet with Chinese Characteristics be programmed to do?

    • Fingerspitzengefuehl says:

      Ruthless utilitarianism.

    • Viliam says:

      It will print “it doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white so long as it catches mice” and then convert everything to paperclips?

  27. Mark V Anderson says:

    Noah, to his credit, used very unfavorable estimates for his position there.

    Maybe for the Covid deaths. Not for the benefit side. I think the biggest result of the protests will ultimately be a crackdown on crime, after people saw what happened when police didn’t control it. I think this is the opposite direction the protesters are looking for.

    As far as racism is concerned, does he really think this will decrease racism? For anybody that is already a racist, the riots will confirm their beliefs and make them more racist. I suppose that liberal Whites might feel a little more guilty for awhile, if this is how you measure racism. But it will have next to no effect a year from now, as the media is on to future conquests. IT certainly won’t have a fifty year effect.

    • John Schilling says:

      Maybe for the Covid deaths. Not for the benefit side. I think the biggest result of the protests will ultimately be a crackdown on crime, after people saw what happened when police didn’t control it.

      What is it that you think people saw? What I saw was one day of mostly-peaceful protesting with a side order of looting and rioting, the latter causing property damage of the sort most people assume will be covered by insurance, the injuries almost entirely non-lethal confined to the cops/protesters/rioters demographic. Then there was some attention to small business owners saying “hey, we’re part of this community, we’re trying to rebuild, and insurance isn’t going to make us whole”, and community and protest leaders saying to knock off the violence. Then about five more days of protest with the rioting and looting diminishing each night to approximately nothing in the end.

      I was in South-Central Los Angeles for the Rodney King riots; I know what uncontrolled looting etc looks like, and this wasn’t it. And to the extent that there was violence, which there was, I don’t think anyone but the hard-core Trumpists are going to believe it ended because the Long Arm of the Law came down on the rioters like a Ton of Bricks; most everyone else is going to see this as the community deciding it didn’t want violent protests and making it so.

      You’re going to be waiting a long time for that crackdown, I’m afraid.

      • Mark V Anderson says:

        Well it was pretty uncontrolled here in Minneapolis, for at least two days. Folks were mostly looting and burning as they wished. Now we are talking about the national response to this, not just local response of Minneapolis or LA. And my impression was that the news portrayed this criminals gone wild for a few days with little restraint by the cops (which was true in Mpls). And the protesters mostly saying it didn’t much matter in the face of Floyd being killed, and besides it was the cops fault for being mean to us. Right now everyone is highly cowed by the media that the Floyd killing is the only thing that matters, but I think when it comes time to vote, most people want peace and won’t be in favor of those politicians that decided to let criminals run free for a few days and destroy lots of businesses.

  28. Edward Scizorhands says:

    Minneapolis is getting rid of their police department.

    I guess we’re doing this.

    • zero says:

      What does this entail in practice?

      • Iago the Yerfdog says:

        I don’t think anybody can know at this point — though I’m cynical enough to think “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” is the most likely result after the new system is broken in.

        I will say two things in its favor: (a) cities are prima facie a pretty good place for this kind of experimentation to take place, and (b) there are plenty of historical examples of law enforcement systems significantly different from ours, so there’s no a priori reason something new will be worse.

      • theredsheep says:

        My tentative timeline: the city council is in no hurry to actually fire all those officers without having a clear idea of what to replace them with. Meetings and hearings are held. The broader public moves on the next horrible thing that happens, leaving the field to dedicated activists and academics. The academics have some ideas based on models that have worked in Europe and Asia; the activists have some of those, but also some totally new ideas that their friends on social media think would be totally awesome. The academics have learned a lot about this subject; the activists have learned something about this subject, and a lot about making life unpleasant for authority figures.

        A lot of proposals get floated, most of them with hefty price tags attached and requiring the employment of large numbers of people with degrees in social work. Meanwhile, the actual police are white-hot pissed and inclined to obstruct this with lots of legal challenges, which I assume is a thing they can do. Crime levels start to creep up as the police adopt an increasingly strong “I’m not getting shot for these bitches” work ethic. Every weird or impractical idea floated, as well as several outright made-up ones, gets gleefully leaked by right-wing media provocateurs. Second thoughts are head.

        Somewhere around 2022 some watered-down guidelines are released to a very nearly unchanged police force, who may possibly be renamed the Unicorn Snuggle Brigade. Incremental improvements are made, and the hefty sentence handed down to Derek Chauvin in the meantime serves as a strong disincentive to further outright lynching. If we’re really lucky, somebody has made some slight progress in killing qualified immunity, and maybe chipped away some more at asset forfeiture. Hopefully nothing even worse has been invented to take the place of either.

        The Atlantic publishes a “Whatever Happened to Police Reform?” article noting that members of the Minneapolis City Council were caught on tape saying All Lives Matter on at least three separate occasions.

    • MisterA says:

      I am genuinely surprised to see protests have a direct effect this dramatic, and have had to greatly revise my expectations of what it is possible for protests to actually accomplish in terms of tangible results.

      • cassander says:

        I would be very surprised if this actually happened. the department might have its budget cut, or be renamed, or some responsibilities transferred, but they’re not going to lay off 1,100 people.

        • Aftagley says:

          AFAICT they are going to create a new “Public Safety System”

          No clue what that’s going to be… but I bet they’ll have mostly the same membership and uniforms as the old system.

          • Iago the Yerfdog says:

            I see I’m not alone in my cynicism.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @Aftagley
            I think its basically good, and you shouldn’t be too cynical about it. One of the most important moves to reduce police violence would be to transition them to an organization that is legally “Not Police”, meaning they can’t have the multitude of laws/supreme court rulings that apply to the police apply to them.

            This way, if a gang of them burst through my door at night and killed me in my bedroom, instead of opening up the lawbooks for “what happens when the police kill someone”, we open up the same lawbooks for “what happens when a normal citizen kills someone”. A major reason for police violence is that they know they are legally near-untouchable.

            Transferring “policing” powers to an organization that is legally not “The Police” is a massive step. A much greater victory than I could ever have imaged a week ago.

          • Aftagley says:

            Yeah, I didn’t mean that to be as cynical as it came out. I honestly do think the new system with likely be an outgrowth of the old one, but I don’t think that’s inherently negative.

          • cassander says:

            @Guy in TN says:

            I think its basically good, and you shouldn’t be too cynical about it. One of the most important moves to reduce police violence would be to transition them to an organization that is legally “Not Police”, meaning they can’t have the multitude of laws/supreme court rulings that apply to the police apply to them.

            this will not happen, period. We live in a world where the government printing office feels a need to have uniformed security personal with police powers, there is zero chance that the city of Minneapolis will go without them. the name might change but, their powers will not. if anything, they will probably spread as, say, the department of health gets a “mental illness patrol” or whatever.

          • John Schilling says:

            If the organization is legally not “The Police”, then it legally doesn’t have the power it needs to protect the population from the sort of seriously dangerous criminals that are the reason we put up with all the hassles of having the police. If the organization is legally not “The Police”, then it can’t arrest people unless it witnesses them commit a felony in their actual presence, which means that it can’t threaten to arrest people, which means that its negotiating position for all those nice non-violent conflict resolution strategies everybody is in favor of is greatly weakened. If it is not legally “The Police”, the even when we have clearly established by due process in a court of law that Bob is probably a criminal who kidnapped Alice, the “Not-Police” can’t serve a warrant to arrest Bob or search his house.

            So, yay that you’ve found a way to do traffic stops and community outreach with less risk of doing something stupid that leads to a gunfight. But all the problems we really need police for, are left unsolved. And if you’ve got a solution to those problems, I’m not sure we need a separate force dedicated to traffic stops, etc.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @John Schilling

            If it is not legally “The Police”, the even when we have clearly established by due process in a court of law that Bob is probably a criminal who kidnapped Alice, the “Not-Police” can’t serve a warrant to arrest Bob or search his house.

            I’m not saying this new agency should have legal authority identical to an average citizen. Many non-Police enforcement agencies have authorities beyond that of an average citizen, this is normal and legally well-established.

            The government should authorize this new agency to have specific powers such as arresting felons/serving warrants, while making perfectly clear that this is not The Police, and laws and legal precedent that apply to the police do not apply to them.

          • John Schilling says:

            So, it should have the power to arrest people, but it should not be constrained by all the limits that legislatures and courts have put on the power to arrest people? They can just arrest people without constraint or accountability?

            Or is the theory that you’re going to get rid of all the old rules that limit what police can do, and invent a complete new set of rules for the same purpose, and that the new rules you just made up are going to be better than the rules people have been struggling with for decades? And that the courts are going to let you get away with this transparent ruse?

            I’m guessing you’re thinking in terms of getting rid of Qualified Immunity, because QI is Obviously Wrong. But, it’s not going to work. The Supreme Court is going to look at this thing you’ve created, that’s acting almost exactly like a police department, and not be fooled for one nanosecond by the label you put on it saying “We’re calling this the Not-Police and therefore all those pesky Federal court rulings don’t apply”.

            Also, I expect you’re going to throw out an awful lot of baby with that bathwater, and the courts may not rescue the baby for you.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @Guy in TN:

            This way, if a gang of them burst through my door at night and killed me in my bedroom, instead of opening up the lawbooks for “what happens when the police kill someone”, we open up the same lawbooks for “what happens when a normal citizen kills someone”.

            Now you sound like a libertarian.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @John Schilling

            Or is the theory that you’re going to get rid of all the old rules that limit what police can do, and invent a complete new set of rules for the same purpose, and that the new rules you just made up are going to be better than the rules people have been struggling with for decades?

            Yes, the new rules will be better. “Make things better” is the idea behind all reform and social progress, I don’t know why you are mocking it. One contributing factor to why the police are such a terrible organization, is that we’re barely been able to “struggle” with any reforms, due to highly constrained nature of our legal system (full of non-democratic elements, vetos, and a near-unaccountable supreme court). It’s not like the current version of the Minneapolis police underwent rigorous trials and experiments of various laws/arrangements and emerged the victor. There has been very little prior democratic input into the question of what should policing in the United States be like. “Making things better” might be as easy as actually trying for once.

            And that the courts are going to let you get away with this transparent ruse?

            The Supreme Court, if it is so inclined, will have to figure out which people in the new agency qualify as “police” for their purposes and which ones don’t. I look forward to the debate. Seems unlikely that they will deem the entire organization “police” just because a handful of them have arrest and warrant-serving powers.

          • jewelersshop says:

            I can think of a lot of ways that “actually, we’re not the police and you aren’t technically being arrested and this isn’t jail, it’s a therapeutic center” could go wrong.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @John Schilling

            I’m guessing you’re thinking in terms of getting rid of Qualified Immunity, because QI is Obviously Wrong. But, it’s not going to work.

            I don’t see this plan having any effect on Qualified Immunity, since that applies to all government officials.

          • fibio says:

            AFAICT they are going to create a new “Public Safety System”

            Just to be clear, they’re not running it through The Committee of Public Safety, right?

          • Garrett says:

            > and uniforms as the old system

            My guess is that the thing with the least resistance to change will be the name/uniform/stationary. Everybody involved will probably roll their eyes at it but accept that it’s somewhere between “symbolism of our new and improved policing system” and “least-effort way to pretend we’ve fixed things”.

          • A Definite Beta Guy says:

            The Supreme Court is going to look at this thing you’ve created, that’s acting almost exactly like a police department, and not be fooled for one nanosecond by the label you put on it saying “We’re calling this the Not-Police and therefore all those pesky Federal court rulings don’t apply”.

            Before or after the Supreme Court is packed with 20 people who think exactly like the New York Times editorial board?

        • MisterA says:

          My expectation going into this was that it would be like every other protest I have witnessed in my lifetime, and thus would have absolutely no effect of any kind whatsoever.

          The City Council passing a veto-proof vote to dissolve the police department is already a lot more than that, no matter how much or little it actually winds up changing in the end.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I’m delighted by this development. I assume it will go terribly and everyone will learn a Valuable Lesson, but if it doesn’t, then that would be an exciting update to my world model and opportunity for future change.

      (edit after thinking for five seconds: wait, does anyone learn lessons anymore? Is there any level of bad this could go that won’t result in people finding a way to declare it a success? I think we’re still reality-based enough that it’s possible for a very strong failure signal to detected, and even a failure signal weak enough to hide would be an interesting sign that this was less bad than I expected)

      • AlesZiegler says:

        Yeah, exactly

      • Matt M says:

        I had a long reply to this, but deleted it because I think it might be insufficiently charitable to my enemies.

        All I will say is that I think the people loudly cheering this today will be loudly insisting “See! We told you it didn’t go nearly far enough!” as soon as any amount of negative data comes in.

        I think the people celebrating this change today will happily acknowledge the shortcomings of it once they manifest… but their solution at that point definitely won’t be “let’s go back to how things were before…”

      • Oldio says:

        No, no one learns lessons. Right leaning media(not necessarily red tribe- violet tribe media too) in a few years will have a set of lengthy screeds on how this was a horrible idea, and should be undone.
        Blue tribe media in a few years will have a set of lengthy screeds on how every American city needs to copy them.
        Both will be working from the exact same data.

      • viVI_IViv says:

        They’ll learn the wrong lesson: that they didn’t go far enough, that they need fifty Stalins.

      • RalMirrorAd says:

        I recall seeing a moderately prominent twitter handle saying something to the effect of; if the protests result in large number of cases/deaths of covid19 that (unironically) racism ought to be blamed.

        if they go ahead with not having a police force I predict it will either succeed (Hurray) or racism will be blamed for why it didn’t succeed. It’s nice to have one’s priors updated, but those of us who like to have our priors updated are very bad at pushing these kinds of social science experiments in the first place.

    • Purplehermann says:

      Sounds good, let’s check differences in crime statistic trends there compared to other places in a few years. If a few more cities do this even better

    • broblawsky says:

      I think this is essentially a gambit to destroy the Minneapolis police union.

    • BBA says:

      I was looking into what this would entail, and the charter of the city of Minneapolis requires the city to have a police department (section 7.2(a)(11)) and sets a minimum staffing level and dedicated funding stream (section 7.3(c)). In Minnesota, amending a city charter requires either a referendum (which will take a few months at the minimum) or the unanimous approval of the council and mayor – and the mayor has already said he’s against abolition.

      Maybe I’m missing some other operative legislation or judicial precedents (I can’t afford Westlaw), but to me this looks like empty talk.

      • Mark V Anderson says:

        @BBA
        I hope you are right. The one thing that hasn’t been discussed here is that the Minneapolis city council is mostly a bunch of kids that got handed this cool new thing to play with called a city in the last election. I wouldn’t trust them to make even minor changes in a reasonable fashion. It is kind of like having Trump make a radical change in policing; these people simply aren’t very competent. So far I’m mostly heard about some sort of citizen council to replace the police. I suppose BBA is probably right and they are also too incompetent to make any change legally. Although this will end up making the police kind of hate the city government, and maybe its citizens by proxy. That can’t be good. The only good thing that may come out of this is hopefully the voters will think better about electing a bunch of radical kids into office.

  29. Le Maistre Chat says:

    Grover Furr is an American professor of Medieval English literature at Montclair State University who is known for denying crimes of Stalinism.”

    That’s just ridiculous on several levels.

  30. Uribe says:

    Speaking of Pinker, I’m surprised more people aren’t bringing up his story about what happened when the Montreal police went on strike.

    • Tenacious D says:

      From that Wikipedia article:

      The leader of the ‘Operation McGill Français’ protests was ironically a part-time Marxist political science lecturer from Ontario named Stanley Gray who could barely speak French, but who declared that McGill must become a French-language university to end “Anglo-elitism”, rallying support from the Quebec separatist movement.

      He sounds like a character in a skit on a political comedy show (e.g. 22 Minutes)—a bit too on-the-nose to be real.

  31. Dino says:

    Seems like there are folks here into sci-fi, and folks who are writers, so here’s a couple of ideas I had for sci-fi stories – help yourself. I’d like to read any results.
    #1 A social satire/comedy about a world where the social status of food and sex are reversed. The smallest room in every house has a door, and people regularly excuse themselves and go in there and shut the door and eat, and then wash their hands. You can buy food, but it’s discreet, and embarrassing so nobody talks about it. There’s some places in Nevada where you can be fed publicly. Meanwhile there’s gourmet sex media, high end brothels, mom&pop brothels, national chains of brothels at various price points, celebrity sexologists with media platforms, exotic ethnic sex, etc.
    #2 The advanced alien saviors have landed to save the poor earthlings. The earthlings desperately want to be saved because their world is dying from climate change, suffering a pandemic, and wracked by partisan politics. The aliens’ mission is to help because they are part of the Galactic Bureau of Serving Humanoids. But the GBSH has the usual issues of a bureaucracy – dumb inflexible rules, can’t be fired incompetents, etc. Also – this is the captain’s last voyage, he’s about to retire, and the 2 lieutenants are doing office politics against each other trying to succeed him. And the aliens are humanoid enough that the captain falls in love with a beautiful earth maiden and starts acting irrationally. The plot lines converge in the climactic scene where the fate of the earthlings hangs in the balance.

    • Snickering Citadel says:

      There’s a movie “The Phantom of Liberty”, where the social status of eating and pooping is reversed.

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      Not quite the same thing, but Theodore Sturgeon’s “Grannie Doesn’t Knit” has a society which is prudish about food. Eating is done in private and food is acquired at “flower shops”. They’re highly restrictive about sex, too.

    • Kaitian says:

      I read a star trek fanfic years ago that had #1 as its central conceit. The human narrator had a college roommate from an alien society where the sex / food privacy norms were as described.

      I think the narrator was Uhura?

      • Nick says:

        There’s an Enterprise episode where an alien species visiting the Enterprise eat privately. The leader storms off the ship saying to Archer, “You eat like you mate!”

    • ana53294 says:

      #1. It’s in Russian, but in the series of the author Alexei Kalugin, Did you call the Patrol? there is a scene where Earth-people are making an appeal to the inhumane treatment they are receiving from Venusians, because they aren’t even allowed to eat in private, which is an extremely private act by Venusian standards.

      Unfortunately, like most Russian sci-fi, it’s not translated.

      • JulieK says:

        I wonder if Kalugin took that from Heinlein’s Space Cadet, which has a similar scene likewise involving Venerians.

    • Randy M says:

      #1 A social satire/comedy about a world where the social status of food and sex are reversed.

      Kilgore Trout wrote this one.

    • b_jonas says:

      Szathmári Sándor’s sci-fi novel “Kazohinia” (aka “Kazohinio”) features a society that partly matches #1.

      Eating is considered taboo so much that people always do it privately, and schools have small secluded rooms for children where they eat. People rarely talk about eating, and even then in euphemisms, and they rarely openly admit that it is a necessary part of life that everyone does often, instead treating it as a dirty unnatural thing that people sometimes do because they are imperfect. And yes, there exist the equivalent of prostitution where you pay a woman to feed them, with its stigmas. The viewpoint hero, being foreigner who doesn’t understand the culture, gets in trouble where he gives food to a woman, and he is eventually forced to marry that woman, in a brief ceremony conducted by a local priest, to avoid a bigger scandal.

      In contrast, they urinate publicly and show their genitials when doing so. How this society treats sexuality is not described, presumably because describing it could have ran into more taboo problems in our world.

    • b_jonas says:

      As for #2, the closest thing I know of is Asimov’s short story “Blind Alley”. A non-human intelligence species is in decline, and will most likely be extinct within a generation. The last group of specimens lives in a reservation where they are entirely dependent on humans. The buerocrat hero Lodovik Antyook saves the alien race, establishing a future for them, but he has to do that by brilliant individual action against the incompetent bureocracy that governs the entire Empire.

      Elements that don’t match are: 1. the humans are in the other of the two roles, 2. the aliens are in decline and risk of extinction primarily because humans have outcompeted them, and 3. nobody is acting irrationally because they’re in romantic love, especially not in an interspecies one.

    • Dino says:

      Re #1 – seems like I’m guilty of unconscious plagiarism, just like Paul McCartney.

  32. Uribe says:

    I need to find a way to make this comment kind since it may not be true. I believe the protesters mean well. I believe most of them honestly believe they can change things for the better, and I also believe it’s better to have that kind of optimism than the cynicism I have.

    That said. C’mon, let’s get rational. These protests are happening across the country because people have been bored to tears by lockdowns for two months. I’d join them myself if I weren’t still big into social distancing.

    Or rather, the protests are happening because plenty of kindling was set out and then the murder of Floyd was the spark that set the country on fire. Part of the kindling was Donald Trump spending the past 3 years in the White House making it clear he hates liberals, and not only does he hate you but he thinks you’re a loser. But then we’re locked down for 2 months, and the world feels surreal. If you have school age children, you probably feel overwhelmed. If you live alone,you have probably been lonely and bored as shit.

    The murder of Floyd would have caused protests in Minneapolis during normal times, but no way — you are kidding yourselves — if you think these protests would have spread to the whole country were it not for mainly the pandemic but also 3 years of Trump verbally attacking liberals.

    The behavior of cops has little to do with it.

    • cassander says:

      art of the kindling was Donald Trump spending the past 3 years in the White House making it clear he hates liberals, and not only does he hate you but he thinks you’re a loser.

      A loser, sure, but there’s vastly more hate directed at donald trump than coming from him, and let’s not pretend otherwise.

      • The Pachyderminator says:

        It’s far from obvious that this is true, unless you just mean it in the trivial sense that millions of people hate Trump, whereas Trump is just one person. Trump seems to give as good as he gets most of the time.

        • J Mann says:

          I think the quality of the hate directed at Trump is also much more intense than the hate he sends.

          Trump’s messaging tends to veer between occasional complements, even towards his outgroups, and casual bullying – demeaning nicknames, wierd statements, and calling people losers or sad.

          The venom directed *towards* Trump on any given Twitter thread is extraordinary.

          Of course, Trump is president, and most of the people tweeting at him are sad losers (I kid!!!), so if that’s the important variable for you, then I can see going the other way, but the statement is true if you either count the hateful comments or count their intensity.

        • viVI_IViv says:

          There have been people, including blue checkmarks on Twitter, calling for Trump to be deposed, arrested or even assassinated since 2016. Since before he was elected major newspapers called him a racist, a Nazi, literally Hitler, a rapist, a Russian asset, and so on.

          What’s the most hateful thing that Trump did?

          • Nick says:

            There are all sorts of petty and disgusting things Trump has done, from the Rosie O’Donnell comments to “Lock her up” to the recent Joe Scarborough stuff. It’s inexcusable for a president to engage in at all and completely beneath the office, but it’s also not remotely as “hateful” as the vitriol leveled against him, and at least millions of times fewer.

    • Tarpitz says:

      Never mind “the whole country” – they’ve crossed the sodding Atlantic. Bristol had large scale protests. I don’t know when the last time someone was killed by police in Bristol was, but it doesn’t seem to have been in the last fifty years. Not wrongfully killed, mind you – no police killings of any kind, in a metropolitan area with more than 700,000 people.

      • The original Mr. X says:

        The globalisation of US politics has been one of the more negative consequences of globalisation more generally.

      • AlphaGamma says:

        Avon and Somerset Constabulary (which covers Bristol) did shoot and kill someone a couple of years ago near Bristol- I don’t know if the location of the shooting is in the metro area or not. On the other hand, the incident which led to the shooting started some distance away, and also looks like a fairly clear case of suicide by cop by a white man.

        • Tarpitz says:

          It seems the Avon is generally taken as the border on that side, so Portbury is a mile or two outside it, but given that armed police are rare and specialised units I imagine they were probably based in Bristol.

          I wasn’t aiming to exclude the incident on that kind of technicality (I just hadn’t realised how close to Bristol Portbury was), but at the same time while certainly very sad it appears pretty clearly to be in no way indicative of police malfeasance. (Short summary for anyone disinclined to click the link: depressed young man drove around threatening people with what they reported to police as a gun but was in fact an air pistol, police stopped his car and told him to come out with his hands up, he fired on them and they fired back.)

          The broader point that issues with use of force by US police are not replicated in the UK, despite which British protestors have abused and in some cases behaved violently towards British police as if they were the guilty party, I think stands.

      • Matt M says:

        It’s almost as if this isn’t actually about police brutality at all…

      • NostalgiaForInfinity says:

        They haven’t killed anyone but they have had some issues with their conduct with black Bristolians.

        Police killings in the UK are much rarer than in the US, but that doesn’t mean there’s no problem. It might be a bit strange that these protests have been triggered by what’s going on in the US but it’s not weird that there are protests.

        And they did have a statue of a slave trader in the city centre.

        • Tarpitz says:

          I happily accept that Avon and Somerset Police fail to meet the bar of no misconduct ever. I still think it’s pretty daft to think much of the substantive complaints about use of force by or impunity of police in the States apply to Britain. It is very much not just a case of fewer guns leading to fewer deaths but everything else much the same.

    • Aftagley says:

      So, you haven’t been to any protests, presumably haven’t talked to any protesters and don’t have any first-hand experience with them and yet you know they’re secretly just doing this because they’re bored… how exactly?

      • J Mann says:

        That’s his model, and he put it here to be challenged (while conceding he doesn’t know it to be true).

        My intuition is that the protestors are sincere, but that if we hadn’t been paying people to stay home/making them stay home for two and a half months, they’d be smaller. No way to run the counterfactual, though.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          Compromise position: black people protesting are sincere. White people protesting are bored.

      • cassander says:

        Because he’s met people? That’s not the only reason they’re doing it, but I think it’s mad to assume that 3 months of lock-down didn’t have an effect on people’s behavior. the protesters are sincere, and they also all have cabin fever.

        • Matt M says:

          I see no particular evidence that lockdown-induced boredom is a contributing factor here.

          Don’t get me wrong, I understand the logical thought process behind the assumption. It makes sense. I’m not saying it’s definitely wrong. But it doesn’t seem to obviously be the case.

          I guess one test could be something like “are the protests better or worse in areas that locked down more or less severely?” but that itself is probably largely correlated with blue/red tribe in general which also correlates with protest activity, so it’s hard to say. Maybe compare like Colorado to Michigan (both generally blue, but former had much less lockdown than latter) and see how protest intensity measures up?

          • cassander says:

            most people like having parties with lots of other like minded people. for 3 months, those parties have been illegal. Now they’re legal if you’re protesting and nothing else is. that is a strong inducement to protest, on top of other strong inducements like genuine outrage, nice weather, lots of other people doing it, the fading fear of corona (particularly for the young), and others. conditions were ideal for some sort of mass something to break out.

    • keaswaran says:

      The counterfactual seems clear – if we hadn’t been in the pandemic, the protests wouldn’t have caught fire. We have very clear evidence for this based on similar police atrocities at various points over the last six years.

      But I’m not sure exactly what conclusion we are supposed to draw from that. Should we think that the cause is less likely to succeed because of this counterfactual? This seems wrong given how much official response there already has been, from corporations changing their spending patterns to cities beginning specific new policies around policing.

      Should we infer that the people involved aren’t actually sincere about their support? It seems that here it’s hard to distinguish this from the opposite – that in pre-pandemic years, people’s sincerity was hidden, because the veneer of ordinary working life kept them out of the protests, but now they are free to express their “real” opinions. Obviously there’s no particular evidence for this claim, but it seems like it should be just as plausible as the other, unless you define “real” opinions in terms of some concept of normalcy, that allows wage-slavery to count as normalcy but not pandemic protection.

      • Matt M says:

        The counterfactual seems clear – if we hadn’t been in the pandemic, the protests wouldn’t have caught fire. We have very clear evidence for this based on similar police atrocities at various points over the last six years.

        IMO, Trump is more of a confounder here than the lockdowns.

        We had some pretty large scale BLM and occupy protests during the Obama administration. But those were, in a way, limited by the fact that most protesters didn’t want Obama to look bad. Now that Trump is the face of America, no such reservation exists. He can’t plead with them to stop (even if he wanted to, which he doesn’t) because they wouldn’t listen. I think most of them believe their actions are decreasing his likelihood of re-election (whether this is true or not remains up for debate).

        • Some Troll's Serious Discussion Alt says:

          Electionbettingodds.com seems to think so. Since the protests started Trump and Biden have basically switched places, with Trump droppin into the low 40s and Biden breaking 50%

        • keaswaran says:

          But I thought there have been moderate-sized BLM activities that fizzled out even during the Trump era. Wasn’t the whole Kaepernick thing under Trump?

          Although now that I look at it, I do see a lot more recognizable names from 2014, 2015, 2016 than from 2017, 2018, 2019.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Lives_Matter#Timeline_of_notable_US_events_and_demonstrations

          So maybe you’re right that Trump’s presence has kept things quiet, and it’s only become unlocked after the coronavirus.

      • zzzzort says:

        This seems right to me, though I think the protests have been building since ferguson so that a lot of normie white kids have come around to the idea that protesting about police brutality is a good thing.

        The phrase ‘never let a crisis go to waste’ comes to mind. On the other side Trump is using the economic conditions to justify ending a bunch of regulations. Everyone would agree that weakening environmental standards was a goal beforehand and permanently ending regulations doesn’t have much to do with a temporary crisis, but this is a unique chance to make some big changes so he’s taking it.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        “The counterfactual seems clear – if we hadn’t been in the pandemic, the protests wouldn’t have caught fire. We have very clear evidence for this based on similar police atrocities at various points over the last six years.”

        I don’t think it’s clear because the world doesn’t always run in a smooth liniear fashion. It does a lot of the time, but there are also last straws and sudden breaks.

        In the case of filmed police brutality, each new instance is amplified by previous instnaces.

        The lockdown might have adding somewhat, but I don’t think it’s the only thing going on.

        • John Schilling says:

          Yeah, I think protests+riots of at least this magnitude were going to happen sooner or later. Anything less would neither achieve decisive results, nor satisfy the itch to Do Something About It. Exactly which dead black man would be the trigger incident involved an element of chance, and lockdown-induced boredom and aggravation kicked up the odds for Floyd being the trigger enormously, but if not Floyd now, someone eventually.

    • AG says:

      How does this logic not also apply to the behavior of the cops, for dual escalation? Outside of pandemic, many more of the cops would be spending their time policing the rest of the populace that wasn’t at the protests, and wouldn’t be so bored that tear gas happy fun times was a nice diversion.

      • AG says:

        Also relevant: Law Enforcement Seized Masks Meant To Protect Anti-Racist Protesters From COVID-19.

        This on top of the stories of how police have pulled down masks, attacked medics, and kept detained people scrunched up together.

        So the police definitely don’t give a shit about keeping a lid on the pandemic, either, but apparently only for the protests that are against police brutality, whereas the actual anti-lockdown protest all got to quietly get their temperature checked.

        • rumham says:

          So the police definitely don’t give a shit about keeping a lid on the pandemic, either, but apparently only for the protests that are against police brutality, whereas the actual anti-lockdown protest all got to quietly get their temperature checked.

          This is some…interesting framing. I haven’t seen this particular take before. You seem to be saying that the anti-lockdown protesters complying with police (voluntarily!!!) had only to do with what the protest was about? Have none of the BLM protesters been given opportunity to voluntarily comply with the police?

          As sunlight has been shown to be a mitigating factor, how is voluntarily complying with leaving an area at sundown different than temperature checks?

          Also, were the masks seized by the same department that offered temperature checks to the anti-lockdown protesters?

          (an aside, as someone with long-term gripes with police, having policy suggestions I’ve been pushing for years, it is annoying to have to defend them, but I’m mostly defending the anti-lockdown protesters here. They had scorn and vitriol thrown at them from all angles, whereas these protests have been met with overwhelming support.)

          • AG says:

            I am not condemning the anti-lockdown protesters in this case, in fact, their submitting to the checks is to their credit, showing that they aren’t about ignoring the disease entirely, only disagreeing if lockdown is necessary to prevent it.

            Insofar as people are angry about Floyd protesters spreading COVID around, it’s relevant to note the party doing the most exacerbation of dangerous health practices.

            I have seen this kind of take before, where leftists have said that police using tear gas in a time when a very infectious respiratory disease pandemic is going on, is nothing short of lethally irresponsible.

  33. Nancy Lebovitz says:

    Discussion of people finding out as adults that ponies are not baby horses. Nor the intermediate stage between colt and horse.

    Rationalists have made a choice not to mock people for ignorance, but we may be missing out on a lot of fun.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I can’t remember when I found this out, but it doesn’t feel so obvious that we should be surprised people don’t know it. Why is weird to think very small horses might be baby horses?

    • mtl1882 says:

      I don’t think I knew that until I was in my 20s, but I don’t quite remember. I’d never thought about it much. Doesn’t surprise me that people who don’t have a lot of familiarity with horses make this mistake–pop culture seems to give that impression. Most people don’t use the word “foal” very often.

      I forget if I read this here or what, but I remember reading about someone who was in college when she realized unicorns weren’t real. In her mind, she’d just kind of categorized them with zebras and gazelles and never thought about it again, I guess. I can definitely understand how that would happen. We all probably have little things like that, where our initial exposure didn’t quite “take,” and we classified something wrong. I know there are things I’ve done it with.

    • Elephant says:

      Though I’m aware that ponies are not small horses, it seems far from being important or obvious enough to warrant mockery. Less so than, for example, thinking that seaweed is a plant, which I would never mock anyone for. (I’ve interacted with far more seaweed than horses. I don’t think I’ve ever been near a pony.)

      • Kaitian says:

        Things like “seaweed is not a plant” or “the tomato is a berry” are basically matters of definition that don’t affect people’s expectations about the world. So expecting that all ponies will grow up into horses is a different kind of error.

        I guess the pony error is funny to me, because ponies just obviously look like adult animals. But if someone doesn’t really have an internal image of what ponies are like, I guess they could make that mistake. And “not knowing much about horses” is an odd target for mockery that almost smells of snobbery.

        • Elephant says:

          “Seaweed is not a plant” is a matter of definition only in the sense that “whales are not fish” is a matter of definition — in some sense true, I suppose, but that definition carries with it a lot of information about how the world works; it’s not just an arbitrary definition.

          • Wency says:

            I don’t think anyone is saying it’s an arbitrary definition. Just a technical definition, of dubious value to the layman. Someone could know everything of practical significance about seaweed and still think it a plant; some might even argue it technically IS a plant, belonging to a clade whose name means “green plants”.

            “Whales are fish” is different, in that it has a connotation of comparing the whale, an animal with which we seldom interact (especially before Shamu and such), to a superficially similar but actually very different animal with which we interact much more frequently. Such that we doubt someone who has a lot of practical experience with whales would call them a fish.

        • Aftagley says:

          Also – the definition of pony is pretty freaking weird.

          For example – massive thoroughbreds can by “ponies” despite being 15+ hands tall if they are used to play polo.

          Meanwhile, the Icelandic horse (around 13 hands) is still considered a horse because the Icelandic people who like them insist it is. While American Indians call their mustangs ponies.

          I think the definition is fluffy enough to not really be worth getting worked up over it.

      • Tarpitz says:

        Uh… Ponies are small horses. The Wikipedia article for Pony literally starts with the words “A pony is a small horse.”

        They’re just not juvenile large horses.

      • Concavenator says:

        For what matters, seagrasses (which at least look a lot like seaweeds) are actual plants complete with flowers and fruit.

        As for the rest, yeah, it depends a lot from what you mean by “plant”. Diatoms and brown algae such as kelp are plants only in the extremely broad sense of “eukaryotic photosynthetic organism”, but they’re nested among protists, and in an evolutionary sense they’re not any closer to green plants than fungi or animals are. Red and green algae on the other hand do form a clade with land plants — they are Plantae sensu lato but not Plantae sensu strictissimo.

    • LesHapablap says:

      In the universe that I’m from, ponies are young horses and it is BerenSTEIN bears. Come at me

    • ltowel says:

      pretty sure if someone had asked me that 20 minutes ago, I would’ve answered wrong.

    • theredsheep says:

      I once had a pharmacist ask me, “hey, you’re an English major, right? Do you know who invented English?” I said wut, and she clarified that, since Latin was the first language, somebody had to have come along at some point and just up and decided to speak this entirely new language instead. This was not a dumb person–she was a perfectly competent pharmacist, with a doctorate–but it had never been professionally or personally relevant to her to know how languages develop, so she somehow came by this totally erroneous understanding and never had it challenged.

      • Garrett says:

        “Shakespeare. Why else do you think we study his works?”

        • Randy M says:

          Probably more right than any other name.

        • b_jonas says:

          In my twenties, I believed that there was a mediaeval English philosopher called Bacon, who is sometimes stated to be the inventor of the scientific method, though this is probably an exaggeration, and some people think that he wrote Shakespeare’s works.

          I have later (in 2012 or earlier) found out the truth that there are two mediaeval English philosophers called Bacon who are regarded to be early pioneers of science: Roger Bacon from the 13th century and Francis Bacon from the 16th century.

          Ever since that I keep wondering what other pairs of famous historical persons there are that I still mix up. I also wonder how soon this will happen to the brazilian footballer Ronaldo and the portugese footballer Christiano Ronaldo, both from the 20th century.

      • John Schilling says:

        Norman knights trying to pick up Saxon barmaids, wasn’t it?

        Seriously, if I were asked the question, that’s probably where I’d start. Unless I got distracted by the whole “Latin is the first language” bit, because don’t get me started…

        • theredsheep says:

          I told her it wasn’t the first language, she asked me what was, and I told her we don’t know because it was so long ago it’s extinct now. Then I gave her a brief rundown of how languages change over time. Then we had to get back to work because a lot of patients wanted their scripts.

        • b_jonas says:

          As for “the first language”, here’s my answer. Sumerian is the first language that we know existed because there are writings remaining in it. Languages older than that definitely existed, because humans have been speaking languages for thousands of years before anyone invented writing.

          You could say that this is a non-answer because it doesn’t tackle the problem whether “the first language” is even meaningful, but at least it’s informative and specific.

      • matkoniecz says:

        since Latin was the first language, somebody had to have come along at some point and just up and decided to speak this entirely new language instead

        I really like talks starting from something like that – with people interested in learning more about topic and someone willing to explain it can be very interesting.

        Also, it would be hard to even invent this view of language (and I think that “Latin was the first language” is my favorite part – caveman speaking the same Latin as Julius Caesar is an amusing idea)

    • Spookykou says:

      My favorite story like this, is someone in my family who called her mother when she first went to college, because she met Jewish people, and she had always assumed that there were no Jewish people and they were just in the bible like the Philistines. (This was a long time ago to be fair to her)

      • achenx says:

        I had kind of the opposite confusion as a kid. I only went to church until age 8 or so, so I must have been pretty young, but I definitely remember being very confused by church/Biblical references to “Israel”, since I knew that was a real country. E.g. “born is the King of Israel” in “The First Noel”.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        I was in college when I found out that relitious people existed.

        I was a rather unsocial child. It seemed to me that Hebrew school was running on habit. I’d read H.G. Wells(?) and gotten the impression that religious belief was a relic of the past.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        My favorite story like this, is someone in my family who called her mother when she first went to college, because she met Jewish people, and she had always assumed that there were no Jewish people and they were just in the bible like the Philistines.

        Sometimes you can meet Egyptians in college too!

        • Erusian says:

          And plenty of Philistines too.

        • You can also meet Assyrians, although not in college. I believe the people who did some work for us a few years ago, plumbers or the like, were Assyrian.

          Which surprised me.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            You can also meet Assyrians, although not in college.

            Ouch, talk about racial discrimination!

        • bullseye says:

          I once got a catalog full of mystical crap, including something “made by the descendents of the ancient Aztecs”.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            It’s not clear to me why we decided to talk about “the Aztecs.” The capital of the Triple Alliance was Mexico-Tenochtitlan, with the first element referred to the Mexica, a subset of the Nahuatl-speaking ethnic group that had immigrated south en masse some time earlier.
            This alternative would make the connection to Mexicans living today clear.

          • smocc says:

            @Le Maistre Chat

            I have a Mexican friend who, after learning his family’s particular native heritage, likes to say “the only Aztec blood in me is the Aztec blood my ancestors drank!”

          • bullseye says:

            As I understand it, the Aztecs had no general name for themselves (they identified as members of smaller groups such as the Mexica), but they claimed descent from common ancestors called the Aztecs.

    • Urstoff says:

      Given the stereotypes that young girls want ponies and that young girls love baby animals, it’s not a stretch to infer that ponies are baby horses.

    • zzzzort says:

      I remember thinking that dogs and cats were the male and female of the same species. At a younger age then the pony examples, but I still remember thinking it.

      • bullseye says:

        I knew a grown man who thought the same of goats and sheep. Found this out when he got confused by a dirty joke involving a female goat.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        I remember thinking that dogs and cats were the male and female of the same species.

        I have so much experience with adults misgendering dogs because their breeds pattern-match to gender stereotypes, this seems just about logical for a little kid.

  34. unreliabletags says:

    The issue is that public health officials endorsed mass gatherings for blue-tribe reasons (racism, inequality) right after opposing them for red-tribe reasons (prosperity, faith).

    To address the complaint here, it’s not enough to show that the blue-tribe reasons were compelling. He’d also have to show that the red-tribe reasons were not.

    • Le Maistre Chat says:

      The issue is that public health officials endorsed mass gatherings for blue-tribe reasons (racism, inequality) right after opposing them for red-tribe reasons (prosperity, faith).

      If we can disband a police department, why can’t we disband public health officials?

  35. ManyCookies says:

    Silly “How scared are you of the butterfly effect” hypothetical: suppose you’re given a one-time back and forth time travel machine that puts you in a specific period (not of your choice) for three years, with a time travel ruleset that lets you change history (e.g parallel universe). And while we’re in magic hypothetical land, you can place yourself in a position of power/influence like a top 5 tycoon or the head of a strong state (or the super trusted ear of one) if you wish. With your foreknowledge, what periods/events would you feel comfortable messing around with and which ones would you let play out?

    For example, I would be very uncomfortable poking around the mid 20th century; the initial development of nuclear weapons seems like a scary period of civilization development, and “Used twice very early with a very strong stigma since” seems like a very decent outcome all told. A strong intervention in that time period or prior could well lead to the butterfly effect rolling those die once more, and have a Truman nuke Korea early on or a Cuban Missile Crisis boil over. I wouldn’t necessarily let everything play out, I’m preemptively assassinating Hitler if I can (brave statement!), but the sword of Nuclear War would hang over each intervention.

    Whereas I’d slam dunk stop the 9/11 attacks or basically anything post-1995 or so.

    • cassander says:

      We can debate whether or not killing Hitler is wise, but all right thinking people know we should shoot Woodrow Wilson twice.

      • Scott Alexander says:

        I don’t get the hate! Woodrow Wilson was the only person in the Western World who was right about Versailles! If anyone at all had listened to him, we wouldn’t have gotten Hitler, wouldn’t have gotten World War II, and we’d all be living under the benign Franco-Weimar-Progressive-US hegemony forevermore!

        • cassander says:

          He caused Versailles, then wasted all of his power at the conference by through sheer personal arrogance and refusal to understand that other countries also have interests that he couldn’t just wish away. And he did insist on the abolition of austria hungary, the abdication of the kaiser, and refused to let the UK put down the Bolsheviks, all of which laid the groundwork for both fascism and communism.

        • John Schilling says:

          Woodrow Wilson was the only person in the Western World who was right about Versailles!

          There’s a difference between being right and doing right. The half-assed Versailles we got, all but guaranteed a Hitler. Maybe the ideal Versailles that Wilson wanted, would not have. But the standard-issue “let’s just go back to status quo ante and pretend this whole thing never happened” brand of armistice also wouldn’t have given us Hitler.

          Wilson put his weight behind getting the Versailles process irrevocably under way, did the easy stuff that was sufficient for half-assed clusterfuck Versailles, and then when people wouldn’t give him exactly what he wanted, threw up his hands and went home rather than making the compromises necessary for the 90% solution. Being right about what a catastrophe the 50% solution was going to be, makes it worse that he would skip out on the hard, messy work of finishing the job.

          • Scott Alexander says:

            Do you believe status quo ex ante was a serious option? That if Wilson hadn’t been at Versailles, Britain and France would have signed a boring term-less peace treaty without any reparations?

          • John Schilling says:

            They’s probably have gotten some token reparations, but if Wilson had played the “War’s over, we’re going home” card in 1918 the British and French would have been in no position to demand territorial concessions, crippling reparations, or other humiliations. If Wilson stays actively involved, he’d have even more flexibility in setting the terms.

        • BBA says:

          There’s so much else to hate Wilson for – the Federal Reserve, the income tax (both of which were bipartisan ideas in the works during the Taft administration, but no matter), the US entering the war to begin with, and oh god was he ever a racist piece of shit.

      • Fingerspitzengefuehl says:

        Shoot Lenin at Finland Station.

      • Dead Hour Canoe says:

        Great post. I would add that the common belief that Versailles was too harsh looks bizarre when you compare it to the settlement after the Second World War. As a result of that settlement, 75 years later Germany is still occupied by foreign troops. The underlying issue that caused both World Wars wasn’t solved because the Allies were nicer to the Germans after World War Two; it was solved by ethnically cleansing Eastern Europe of Germans. There were a lot of issues with Versailles, but its provisions were neither unreasonable nor excessively onerous.

        • RalMirrorAd says:

          The provisions were strong enough to cause offense but weak enough to not permanently destroy Germany’s war making potential.

        • johan_larson says:

          The provisions were also more severe than the victors were actually willing to enforce. If France and the UK had actually enforced the limits on the size of the German military and how it was equipped, there is no way Germany could have invaded its neighbors the way it eventually did.

          Don’t make laws you aren’t willing to enforce.

        • AlesZiegler says:

          Well the major difference is that Germans were pretty obvious bad guys in WW2, which was not so much the case in WW1. Not saying they were good guys, mind you, but it was far less black vs white situation.

        • matkoniecz says:

          75 years later Germany is still occupied by foreign troops

          I am not convinced that it is a good description of the situation.

          (I base on my claim that German government is able to decide, “please go away” and it would work, unlike say Russian military bases in Poland in 1975)

        • Dead Hour Canoe says:

          Yes, absolutely to all three points. I’d also say that the widespread Western belief in the 1920s and 1930s that Versailles was immoral (which feeds into the lack of interest in enforcing it) is connected to an under-examined cause of the Second World War, which is the Western failure to understand: firstly, that the origins of the First World War were primarily in Eastern Europe; secondly, that deliberately starting the First World War was a reasonable, if immoral, decision for a German state (particularly a Prussian one) to make; thirdly, that for this reason the decision to provoke war had the support of the German people; and fourthly that the reasons why someone concerned only with the well-being of Germans might believe that war in 1914 was a good idea still applied, arguably with even more force, in 1919, 1929 and 1939, as a ruthless empire that saw itself as the guardian of the Slavic peoples grew in wealth and power in the East.

          A lot of the writing in English about the origins of WWI (and WWII) is absurdly focused on the actions, motives and decisions of Western countries, and concludes that the German desire for war in 1914 and 1939 is inexplicable. Which it is, if all you can think about is Western Europe.

        • Dead Hour Canoe says:

          Yes, that’s probably true re: occupation. Occupied in one sense maybe, in that the troops are literally there, but by agreement rather than imposition (though if a German government ever came to power that wanted to remove US forces, it’s possible that its other associated policies would make the occupation a bit less voluntary, and in that instance the German army would not be able to remove the United States Army by force). The occupation was involuntary for at least 44 years after WWII, though, which is a fair while.

        • AlesZiegler says:

          When we are on Eastern European causes of WW1 often overlooked by English speaking people, this is your reminder that war was not started by Germany, but by Austria-Hungary.

        • InvalidUsernameAndWrongPassword says:

          I think it’s much more fruitful to compare Versailles to the 1871 Treaty of Frankfurt. Comparisons with a later treaty make no sense.

        • kaelthas says:

          That is the most non-central example of “Occupation” in history. And germans certainly don’t think of it as “Occupation” (aside from a few contrarians and political fringes). Compare this to the very real Occupation of the Ruhrgebiet in 1923-1925 as a consequence of the versailles treaty.
          And you totally gloss over the different economic consquences:
          Reparations and Hyperinflation vs Marshallplan and Wirtschaftswunder.

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:

          Does anyone happen to have a copy of Tolkien’s letters handy?

          As I recall, I read a collection of his letters, and I was looking forward to celebrating the end of WW1 with him, but he thought the Treaty of Versailles would be a disaster. However, I can’t remember why he thought so.

        • Dead Hour Canoe says:

          Is it really true that Germans don’t think the DDR and BRD were occupied by foreign troops in the period to 1989? How on earth could they think that? And the Wirtschaftswunder began in 1950, five years after the end of the war. In those five years the Allies did exactly what they did after WWI – dismantle as much German industry as they could, and ship it to Allied countries. OK, they kept on doing that for longer after WWI, but that was a result of the the German government refusing to pay despite its ability to do so, even where their efforts to avoid payment caused huge suffering to the German people (see: hyperinflation). After WWII the BRD not only repaid the war debts imposed on it, but restarted repayment of Germany’s WWI debts (which I’ve just found out were finally repaid in 2010!). And again, we’re only talking about the Western situation – in the East, things were incomparably worse post WWII.

          I’m not disagreeing with you that in the popular imagination the terms imposed by the Allies after the Second World War were far more generous than those imposed after the First World War, but that belief is not supported by the facts.

        • Dead Hour Canoe says:

          I think it would be a mistake to compare Versailles to the Treaty of Frankfurt, a treaty signed between two countries after a war that killed less than 200,000 soldiers in total.

          And yes, the war was started by Austria-Hungary as well as/with the support of Germany, but focusing on Germany doesn’t mean you’re over-emphasising the importance of Western Europe, for two reasons: firstly because Germany was genuinely far more powerful and important than Austria-Hungary, and secondly because Germany wasn’t a Western European country. It’s a bit misleading in terms of the total area of the country, but in 1914 Germany stretched as far to the East of Berlin as it did to the West, whereas now Berlin is 50 miles from the Eastern border (and Germany still isn’t a Western European country today).

        • Dead Hour Canoe says:

          But should add (a) I’m sure you already knew that, and (b) of course you’re right, Austria-Hungary’s importance is under-emphasised, particularly given that it was a huge, largely Slavic state, dominated by Germans.

          It’s also the case more generally that states and nations which have disappeared are under-studied and aren’t given their due, I think; the Hellenistic states of the Middle East, for example, or Byzantium. Maybe the growing wealth and power of Eastern European countries in the present day will change the common view in the English-speaking world of the relative importance of Eastern Europe in causing the First and Second World Wars (for those of us who have any views on the matter at all, of course).

        • kaelthas says:

          Is it really true that Germans don’t think the DDR and BRD were occupied by foreign troops in the period to 1989? How on earth could they think that?

          Of course the DRR was occupied! But the american Troops in the BRD served mainly to protect us from the evil soviets. And those soviets showed in 1953 what a real occupation looks like.

          In those five years the Allies did exactly what they did after WWI – dismantle as much German industry as they could

          Ok, i looked this stuff up on wikipedia, and I’m quite surprised about the dismantling. Looks actually worse than versailles. Thats definitely not the narrative going around in (west) germany.

      • cassander says:

        1. is true for almost any historical event.

        2-3. Wilson should have had more influence than he did, he had a much stronger hand going into the conference than any other leader. he wasted it through sheer ineptitude and arrogance.

        4. the 1945 system was implemented by people who were less ambitious and more capable.

        5. campaigning on neutrality and keeping the US out of the war while massively putting your thumb on the scales until there was an incident you could use to get involved in the way you wanted is the definition of perfidious. it was also criminally inept.

        • cassander says:

          Even if so, it still lessens Wilson’s alleged culpability for the Second World War in either case.

          Woodrow Wilson intervened to prevent a victor’s peace, and created a victor’s peace. He has more culpability than almost any other actor.

          Maybe, but I think the fact that the British and French had large armies deployed in the field necessarily gave them a lot of leverage over the final settlement, leverage which they did not use to good effect.

          Large armies that they couldn’t feed or pay without american support. And that was leverage that Wilson used, but largely to accomplish things that were bad, like not strangling Bolshevism in the cradle.

          Sure, but I think Wilson deserves a lot of credit for anticipating and even directly inspiring its makers. (At least if my understanding of Weinberg’s description in A World at Arms is right.)

          You don’t get credit when you inspire by failure. FDR explicitly said to people something to the effect of “I’m not going to let my peace plans go the way wilson’s did.”

          Again, the conditions for neutrality—no unrestricted submarine warfare—under which he ran and won on “keeping us out of war” were exactly the ones that were violated when he got us into war,

          Unrestricted submarine warfare was no more illegal than the British far blockade of Germany.

          the release of the Zimmermann Telegram, in which the Germans proposed an anti-American alliance with Mexico and Japan, severely limited his options.

          The Zimmerman telegram was an excellent CB if you wanted one, but also could have been ignored. the idea of mexico attacking the US was laughable. It could have been sat on.

        • FLWAB says:

          You don’t get credit when you inspire by failure. FDR explicitly said to people something to the effect of “I’m not going to let my peace plans go the way wilson’s did.”

          Hmmm….he may not deserve credit, but it may be a reason not to tamper with the timeline.

          Without the Versailles treaty being a complete disaster, would we have had such an excellent peace after World War II? Or if WWII doesn’t happen in this alternative timeline, after the next really big war? I think the Pax Americana created after WWII is one of the most amazing accomplishments in world history, but without the bad example of WWI would we have bungled it badly, leading to another major war soon after but this time with nuclear weapons?

        • cassander says:

          @FLWAB says:

          Without the Versailles treaty being a complete disaster, would we have had such an excellent peace after World War II? Or if WWII doesn’t happen in this alternative timeline, after the next really big war? I think the Pax Americana created after WWII is one of the most amazing accomplishments in world history, but without the bad example of WWI would we have bungled it badly, leading to another major war soon after but this time with nuclear weapons?

          So let’s take the most plausible scenario, charles evans hughes doesn’t blow of hiram johnson and wins california and thus the 1916 election.

          It’s probably unlikely that he doesn’t get involved at all, but if the US stays out of the war there’s probably a negotiated peace in 1918 after the russians collapse and the french army starts to mutiny, the 1918 offensive fails. Everyone in europe is miserable and angry at everyone over the utterly pointless bloodletting, but they’re also going to be incredibly war weary for a long time, and with no egregious treaty to motivate revanchism. And there’s no way the kaiser lets the Bolsheviks run around after they murder his cousins.

          If he does get involved, he campaigned on war preparedness, so he either gets in earlier or the US is in better shape when Zimmerman begins his reign of idiocy and brings us in. Either way, the US has a stronger hand at the table. He probably comes up with something vaguely 14 points ish, but hughes is one of the most successful diplomats in american history. He almost certainly doesn’t play wilson’s “we’re not on anyone’s side” game, because that alienated everyone eventually. he almost certainly sizes up the conference better than Wilson does, quickly identifies what the French and British and US Senate will not tolerate and hammers out something that everyone can get on board with. Maybe he deals with the Bolsheviks, maybe he doesn’t, but hard to see him preventing others from doing so.

          At the end of the day you have a league with the US in it, clearly the leading country in the world. You have a Germany that is defeated more decisively and is less able to tell itself it was tricked. You have a more reasonable territorial/compensation settlement that the US is committed to enforce. And you might even have no communists. that’s a world in far better shape than what we got.

        • FLWAB says:

          At the end of the day you have a league with the US in it, clearly the leading country in the world.

          I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I do wonder: could the US have held together a Pax Americana without nuclear weapons? The fact that there were only two superpowers remaining after WWII, and that those two superpowers had enough power to completely wipe out literally any other nation if they wanted to, seemed essential to the peace that followed. Without nukes, could America have really kept all the European nations in line and peaceful? Or would it have fallen apart eventually, though perhaps later than WWII?

        • Evelyn Q. Greene says:

          You have a Germany that is defeated more decisively and is less able to tell itself it was tricked

          I’m not sure a negotiated peace in 1918 necessarily leads to this.

        • cassander says:

          @FLWAB

          Without nukes and the threat of Soviet invasion, the US couldn’t have anything like the sway it had in europe post ww2. But the war would still have been devastating, there would still be the post-war anti-war movements, and the hope is that the war weariness lasts long enough for everyone to make nukes then spend several decades glowering at one another menacingly. That world would feel pretty dangerous, but it would look more like the modern US confrontation with china than the cold war, and I think it would be pretty safe, though I personally place a high value on nuclear weapons for certain types of deterrence. Over time, the US would continue to grow more and more economically dominant over europe, and without the ideological strife of the cold war, globalization would continue to make war costly.

          If a war breaks out before there are nukes, you have another war, but it’s hard to imagine it being worse than ww2. The biggest risk is a war breaking out after the invention of nukes but before everyone is properly scared of them. that could get really nasty, but fortunately it’s a brief window.

        • FLWAB says:

          the hope is that the war weariness lasts long enough for everyone to make nukes then spend several decades glowering at one another menacingly.

          I’m not so sure that nukes would be an effective detterence without their demonstrated use on the battlefield. I think we got incredibly lucky (or else we really do live in the best of all possible worlds) that nukes were developed at the end of WWII, after the Germans surrendered, so that they were used twice and (so far) never again. If we had developed them before WWII then I think we would have used many of them, in Germany and Italy and North Africa and Iwo Jima and everywhere else we fought, and our enemies would have used them too if they developed the capability. I don’t think the US having nukes before WWII would have stopped it from happening.

        • cassander says:

          @FLWAB

          The US destroyed 2 cities it was perfectly capable of destroying just fine with fire bombs, I’m skeptical that that focused people’s minds more than their own tests and calculations about what nukes could achieve, especially once you got fusion weapons. Reasonable people, however, can disagree about the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons.

          But nuclear weapons couldn’t have been made and delivered much before ww2, you didn’t have the physics or planes big enough until the late 30s. Any alternate scenarios almost certainly push them further back.

        • FLWAB says:

          But nuclear weapons couldn’t have been made and delivered much before ww2, you didn’t have the physics or planes big enough until the late 30s. Any alternate scenarios almost certainly push them further back.

          I mostly meant, in the alternate history you outlined where you said that at minimum it would have delayed another great war, perhaps we would have developed nukes before that war. Why would alternate scenarios significantly push back their development? Do you think, absent WWII, we wouldn’t have had nukes by, say, the 70s?

        • cassander says:

          @FLWAB says:

          nuclear weapons in actual history were developed in an enormously expensive crash program that basically built up industrial scale production of 4 different methods of producing fissile material at once. It consumed, among other things, 14,000 tons of silver. And the method that people most thought would be lowest risk at first, electromagnetic separation, ended up not working well at all. the potential for nuclear weapons was understood by 1940, but it couldn’t have happened anywhere near so quickly without the US throwing infinite money at the problem. I think there would have been nukes by the 60s at the latest, probably sooner, and once the nukes come out, no European country is going to march on another’s capital. I also think that a less revaunchist germany and a more involve US is enough to prevent a war until then, especially without the communists looming over all.

    • FLWAB says:

      Yeah, I agree: the fact that we haven’t destroyed ourselves with nuclear weapons yet is a genuine miracle, and I’m not going to rock that boat. Seriously: it was inevitable that we would figure out how to make nuclear bombs, and there are a lot of plausible hypothetical where it did not work out as impossibly well as it did in real life.

      9/11 does seem like the best bet: easiest to stop, probably is for the best. How much damage could Saddam do anyway if left in charge? I guess there is a chance that an even worse terrorist attack might occur without us being on high alert, but I can’t think of any likely scenarios worse than the WTC collapsing.

      • cassander says:

        How much damage could Saddam do anyway if left in charge?

        To the US? None. to the 40 million iraqis? A whole hell of a lot.

        • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

          Are you suggesting he might have killed all 40 million, or is the number a misnomer?

          • cassander says:

            Definitely not, but he’d have made most of them suffer a lot.

          • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

            The Iraq war also made a lot of them suffer. What other examples are there of dictators whose rule was sufficiently bad for their subjects that a war was/would have been preferable?

      • Evelyn Q. Greene says:

        I also think that we’ve been really lucky with nukes, but I think they are overrated as both a danger and as an element of Pax Americana. Nuclear wars that would knock out both sides weren’t possible until the 70s and even now a full scale nuclear war wouldn’t destroy civilization, humanity, and probably not even america. And on the other hand there were five or six years after ww2 where we didn’t have enough nukes to stop a soviet drive west, so they aren’t the sole reason for the long peace ether.

        • cassander says:

          We could have had more nukes a lot faster if we’d wanted. But we spent at least 3-4 years after ww2 convinced that Stalin was a reasonable guy who would come around if we were nice to him. That does not seem like the sort of mistake that Kaiser William III would have made.

      • ManyCookies says:

        9/11 does seem like the best bet: easiest to stop, probably is for the best.

        If I was sent back right now with no prep, I’m not sure I’d have enough info to completely stop the attacks. Hopefully the U.S government could spoil the plan if I gave the date+organization+method, but I don’t know the flight numbers by heart or anything. Worst case, I’d advise grounding all flights after the first confirmed hijacking and shoot any hijacked planes down.

  36. edmundgennings says:

    The rise and fall of leaded products probably played a huge role in the upswing and then plummet of crime. Lead exposure leads to among other things lower impulse control and lower iq. Both of these make crime more likely. Also culture is to some extent downstream of biology. The less people are impulsively commit crimes, the less socially acceptable impulsive crime is.

    • Jesse E says:

      Yeah, people don’t want to hear it, because it’s overly simple, but lead abatement + video games + abortion access really seems to be much of how things really changed. Children were no longer being poisoned on the regular, when they got older they were hanging out inside killing people in video games as opposed to thinking of troublesome things to do in real life while bored sitting in a crappy area of town, and Mom didn’t have a couple of extra kids to have to keep track of.

  37. Clutzy says:

    There is one thing I feel like no one has addressed in the last few weeks: The absurd parody of policing in white communities that some blacks and some left wingers appear to believe exists. In this weird alternate-universe, white people in majority white communities do drugs on their front porch and every once in a while a cop will walk by and say, “Sir you’ve dropped your meth pipe” and go on his merry way.

    This is, in fact, the opposite of policing in white communities (at least during my lifetime). What is the actual state of policing there: An extremely aggressive and superbly reactive police force that actively polices minor crimes and non crimes.

    The best way I could describe my High School and College years: The police in these communities treat a gathering of 10 adolescents after 10PM to be de facto illegal. The police respond with multiple cop cars to noise complaints and often engage in illegal searches by barging into a noisy house where the person answering appears to be a youth. Casual drinking outdoors is risky for someone who doesn’t look old enough to be a homeowner. I was tackled by an officer at the age of 19 while standing around a fire pit. A female friend had her arm broken at 22 by an officer grabbing a corona from her, in her own backyard. Not only this, but they sit in swarms around bars and make up random excuses to pull people over who leave them hoping to score a DUI charge. In my youth I personally fought at least 6 different random traffic violations charges and won because the police dashcam showed no reason for the initial stop (not 6 separate occasions, and I never was over the legal limit, just pulled over because they do that). Maybe that’s why white kids “get off”, we are always being illegally arrested.

    And not only those in the classic 15-25 age group are at risk, police enthusiastically respond to requests to break up spontaneous hockey games being played in the street by children, and basketball, and stickball. And if you play football on Sunday Mornings on the unfenced public school’s field? Oh, expect to be told to leave 5-6 times a season. Any group of children under 8 is presumed to be needing a supervisor, and anyone over that is a criminal doing some sort of bicycle terrorism.

    If this is truly the state of affairs, and I assert it is. How is the perception of it so wrong?

    • Le Maistre Chat says:

      If this is truly the state of affairs, and I assert it is. How is the perception of it so wrong?

      The white people who have platforms live in rich neighborhoods where the police don’t hurt them/their bubblemates?

    • Dack says:

      Because you’re not allowed to suggest that the rates of certain behaviors might be different. Therefore, foregone conclusion.

    • brmic says:

      The perception – if still accurate* – might be partly fueled by a lack of complaints about it. The middle class and upper middle class have the political power to change policing, yet this state of affairs – presumably – exists, persists and complaints about it are scarce. The second part is probably that this hassling is restricted to those testing the rules and the young. Which apparently isn’t the case for blacks, and which also explains the lack of action/complaints, because by the time white people can afford to hire a lawyer and write a complaint they no longer have the problem.
      Finally, you describe part of the answer yourself: White people on average have more means (financial, educational, social, political) to fight the worst excesses of this kind of policing. That makes it more of a hassle than a danger. Why – I assume – hasn’t the traffic violation episode made you a campaigner for police reform?

      * Your description matches my experience from my youth, but back then this was backed up by authoritarian parents who stood by the police to the point where they wouldn’t have minded a bit corporal discipline on top. Today’s parents are much more likely to sue if their precious snowflake has been ‘mistreated’. Broadly speaking.

      • Clutzy says:

        I am a campaigner for police reform. From my POV I was the most anti-police person in my social circle (which mostly is upper class white liberals) for a decade. I got no traction. BLM from my POV is a group that could be a potential ally, but fails in many ways because of their focus on things that are (to me) obvious lies.

        For instance, I’ve lived in 3 big multiracial cities in addition to this. The police in those cities dont respond to obviously lame things. One time I was on a walk and a person was throwing bricks at a school. I reported this, gave a statement and that person was never charged. At school, in major cities, the policing is at a minimum an order of magnitude less strict. Probably 2.

        Plus, the lack of complaints doesn’t change reality. One major talking point of BLM and associated groups is that whites get away with all sorts of shit. This is clearly false. In mostly white cities, you get investigated by the police for smelling vaguely of marijuana. In the cities, you can smoke on street corners with police. This isn’t a white only thing, I’ve seen it with whites, blacks, and asians. Cops in mixed race areas are chill by several orders of magnitude compared to other areas.

        Edit: As an addendum. The fact that my experience in fact is 10x (minimum) the “police state” levels of the likely exaggerated media descriptors of what goes on in black communities really disturbs me. If I were to rank levels as I know it would go:

        My EXP >> Blacks Claimed > Experienced Interracial city cops >> Depicted Cops in White areas. That is, I think there is 100+ times enforcement gap.

    • BlackboardBinaryBook says:

      If this is truly the state of affairs, and I assert it is.

      It might be in the communities you’ve lived in, but it’s decidedly not universal. Policing in the US has some pretty extreme variance. As a white person living in majority white communities my whole life I’ve seen the responsiveness you describe but never personally experienced the over-reach. I’m in my mid 30s and have personally interacted with the police only a handful of times, and all of the officers were professional and respectful. I once had the police knock on my door after a particularly rowdy game of badminton. The very polite officer (who was younger than anyone at the party) was amused and suggested we keep the noise down.

      I’m not trying to suggest that white people (especially young and/or poor ones) don’t get hassled by the police. Just pointing out that even if you’re correct about the state of affairs, people tend to base their opinions on personal experience, and that covers a huge range.

      • Aftagley says:

        once had the police knock on my door after a particularly rowdy game of badminton.

        How does a game of Badminton qualify as particularly rowdy?

        • fibio says:

          Someone reported a loose shuttlecock was got misheard.

          • BlackboardBinaryBook says:

            A loose shuttlecock was indeed involved!

            We can’t be certain what prompted the police call, but there are 2 theories:

            1. The more likely theory: It was after dark (maybe 10pm or so), and most of us were pretty inebriated. Someone hit the shuttlecock up onto the roof, so one of the few sober people went up to grab it. This plus the noise of general drunken revelry probably disturbed the neighbors.

            2. My headcannon: Among the various nonsense being shouted, one player proclaimed at the top of his voice that he was “the best badminton player in the world!” In my imagination the little old lady next door was a championship badminton player, and thus was gravely offended.

      • Wency says:

        I generally agree with this. I’ve never in my life seen police overreach, and I even lived in 4 different US cities and regions as a teenager, all of them suburban, white, and quiet.

        But I’ve also always been a nerd, and not really prone to testing the police. I’ll counter your badminton party story with my college LAN party.

        One of the attendees decided to pack up all his computer gear and head home at about 2am, and apparently a neighbor witnessed this and called it in as a burglary. The police were professional but quite befuddled as to what all us nerds were up to, and whether drugs or underage drinking were involved. We invited them in to see the room full of sweaty gamers and all our hardware, showed them the pyramid we had constructed out of Sam’s Choice orange soda cans, and they went on their merry way.

    • A Definite Beta Guy says:

      I think you might be conflating policing of the teenage youth with policing of the standard suburban household. Most of the villages in this area have a pretty strict youth curfew, but as long as you are not outside and not having a raging house party, the police don’t care.
      OTOH, if you ARE outside, the police are going to make every effort to find you and send you home.
      I think the big concern is that the football players caught with pot and alcohol at 11PM by the train tracks usually get their illegal substance charges waived. Which, why not, who cares? I support the police finding my son and bringing him home, but if the police are going to actively try to ruin his life, that’s a different story.

      The biggest irritation I have is when police pull people over for speeding tickets on arterial roads during Rush Hour. If the guy is a total idiot, sure, but trying to make your numbers while the rest of us are trying to get home is really freaking irritating.

      The real difference is that my village has had 2 homicides in the last decade. One was a man who got stabbed by his mentally ill daughter, the other was a home intruder who got lit up by a homeowner. Camden isn’t too much bigger, and they have that many in a month…during a good year.

      • matkoniecz says:

        Most of the villages in this area have a pretty strict youth curfew

        Is it some local oddity or something normal in USA? How old you need to be exempt?

        I have never heard about something like that in Poland.

        • souleater says:

          I’m american, I’ve never heard of a youth curfew.

          • Matt M says:

            IME in a lot of jurisdictions they fall under the same general category of weird/funny/arcane laws like “no washing your horse on saturday” or whatever.

            They’re technically on the books in a lot of places, but go mostly unenforced. At worst they function similar to the “broken taillight” in the sense that they give the cops an excuse to stop and hassle some “youths out late” that they feel like stopping and hassling, but otherwise, they don’t really care.

          • baconbits9 says:

            I was pulled over on my bicycle at 17 and 363 days for violating a youth curfew in an eastern suburb of Cleveland at 3 am. They eventually let me go.

      • Clutzy says:

        The theory that youth get off on drug charges is equally misplaced. They do not. Several kids from my HS were charged. The PD in a neighboring town BRAGGED about a 6 month sting operation that yielded a few grams of meth and 3 dimes of marijuana.

        Also, in the city minorities always hang out outside in large groups doing drugs. They aren’t ever hassled. Police in such areas don’t do anything until they hear a gunshot or a window break.

        • BlackboardBinaryBook says:

          The theory that youth get off on drug charges is equally misplaced. They do not.

          This is another area where my experience differs greatly from yours. I knew many people who got caught by cops with weed and were either not charged or got plea deals for lesser misdemeanors. They were all white. The ones who did get charged were either not white or had some other factor that is associated with worse outcomes in police interactions (for example: they had a record, got caught because they were doing something else wrong, or mouthed off to the police).

          Unfortunately due to the fragmented way policing is done in the US, finding reliable stats on this kind of thing on a large scale can be pretty difficult. It’s believable that the departments with the best records re: racial disparities in policing also have the lowest disparities due to increased attention to the issue and accountability for officers. Looking at the data that does exist could be enlightening for you, though. I don’t have as much time as I’d like to dig into it right now, but this article and its linked sources seem like a good starting point.

    • SamChevre says:

      And it doesn’t stop when you are a grown-up, either. We had the police show up at our house once because someone had reported an unsupervised child–which was our 5-year-old, standing in our front yard watching the garbage trucks.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        My kid did something that got 4 cop cars in front of our house.

        My wife was in tears because what-will-the-neighbors-think but she’s since been medicated and we both laugh at it.

    • J Mann says:

      Not only this, but they sit in swarms around bars and make up random excuses to pull people over who leave them hoping to score a DUI charge.

      I know I’m a bit law and order, but I might phrase that as “hoping to prevent someone driving home drunk” (which isn’t necessarily different, but since MADD, pretty much everybody except the drunk drivers want the drunk drivers off the road.)

      • matkoniecz says:

        Similarly, I am really confused what is wrong with that. Also, why “excuse” is needed?

        • J Mann says:

          It’s a violation of due process if the police pull you over without due cause – not sure if “drove out of a bar” is due cause for a stop or if the cops have to round up to “erratic driving” or something.

          • matkoniecz says:

            Thanks! In Poland either there is no such requirement (police stop checking everyone for drunk driving are considered as normal) or it is utterly unenforced.

            (not sure whatever “Police stopping for random reason and escalating for any possible reason” it is a mythical problem in USA or not. But in Poland police is not escalating/looking for drugs/etc, they are solely making a breathalyzer test and checking for id for match of wanted people.

          • gbdub says:

            Despite this, DUI checkpoints are definitely a thing in a lot of places in the US.

        • Matt M says:

          It also makes you question the true public safety benefit. If drunk driving is frequent and if driving over the legal limit is so inherently unsafe, it should be trivially easy to just drive around and catch erratic (because they’re drunk) drivers.

          The fact that in order to find anyone to arrest, you have to camp outside the bar and specifically follow people around would suggest the problem isn’t as prevalent as we’ve been led to believe.

          • matkoniecz says:

            This is not seeming weird for me. AFAIK drunk driving is

            – relatively rare (less than 1 in 1000 / 10 000 / 20 000 drivers are drunk)
            – not obvious except in extreme cases (noticeably erratic driving is rare except extremely impaired drivers)
            – even in cases without obviously erratic driving the degradation in reaction time leads to unneeded and avoidable deaths of random bystanders

            So camping outside the bar may actually be overall beneficial (assuming that police has right to make random stops).

          • Thomas Jorgensen says:

            Alcohol (and mary jane) are both depressants, and one thing they both do is make your reaction times much, much worse. Which means an affected person can be driving perfectly normal, only if anything surprising happens, they will simply not respond in time. Cue crash.

          • Clutzy says:

            The theoretical benefits of such a program seem, to me, to greatly exceed the real. If you actually wanted to stop drunk driving you would have a sobriety checkpoint at the bar itself, give people free breath tests, and if they are over the limit give them a parking sticker.

            If your goal is to give people a record, a $5000 fine and $5000 in attorneys fees, you would do they system they do.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            My impression is that marijuana slows reaction time, but the net effect on accidents isn’t bad because it also lowers aggression.

            Anyone have actual information?

      • rumham says:

        I know I’m a bit law and order, but I might phrase that as “hoping to prevent someone driving home drunk”

        So they let everyone less than a .12 go home without a DUI? Because there is a fairly large gap where I live between a DUI charge and actually being drunk.

        • Another Throw says:

          No, they charge them with whatever that state’s version of “well, he wasn’t technically drunk, but he is obviously ability impaired otherwise he wouldn’t have been swerving back there” is. Bear in mind that driving too well is also probably cause to get pulled over. And good luck arguing it to a judge that your have a non-zero BAC didn’t make you a God damned menace to society.

          • rumham says:

            I was unclear. It’s set at .08 where I live. There are very few people who swerve at a .1, much less a .08. It’s set far too low. The reason it used to be .12 in most states was because that’s when most people start to swerve.

    • Urstoff says:

      The police in my neighborhood are too busy constantly pulling people over at a speed trap they set up nearby to do anything else.

    • Ouroborobot says:

      I grew up in a small town of around six thousand people, 100% white, and my experience with police was that enforcement was highly variable. If you were seen as one of the “good” kids you might get a pass on some minor illegal activity, while if you were seen as part of the “bad” crowd, you would be subject to extremely strict scrutiny. I was a nerdy type from a middle to upper middle class family, and the chief of police was the father of one of my good friends. I remember multiple occasions where our underage drinking was essentially winked at, and I remember seeing kids from the “burnout” crowd being chased down and tackled by police for the same thing.

      I don’t think this was all necessarily class bias, although I expect that was a factor. A large part of it was that the “good” kids seemed to intuitively know how to manage the time and place and perception of our minor law breaking, and the “bad” ones seemed to always be doing something flagrant or unsafe that couldn’t be ignored, leaving the police no option to let it slide and still maintain the superficial appearance of enforcing the law.

      Stuff like hockey games in the street were routine and never given a second look though, as long as you understood to get the heck out of the way and not be a pain about it.

    • Well... says:

      I divided my formative years between two different suburbs on opposite ends of the same city. One side of the city was overwhelmingly white, the other very mixed but mostly black. In the white suburb, we almost never saw cop cars unless they were there to visit a local politician who lived nearby, or at touch-a-truck-type events. Worth noting these were almost all white cops.

      In the mixed/black suburb, cops were always lurking around and my friends (both black and white) or their older siblings were often hiding or running from them. I never saw it first-hand but I heard a lot about kids being stopped and hassled just for “looking” suspicious. (Some of them were; some were not.) Also worth noting these were a decent mix of white and black cops.

      Others have said policing is very varied, which seems right. I would add that complaints against cops’ conduct in black areas has to do with cops aggressively targeting and harassing black people, and being very aggressive by default when interactions do happen. The claim is that when they police white people in white areas, by default they are respectful or even friendly.

      My hunch is that cops are probably friendly and respectful by default until they experience (or are taught) the slightest reason to be on guard and then, perhaps as an involuntary defensive tactic, they flip all the way into asshole mode.

      • gbdub says:

        To your last paragraph, I was poking around crime stats by zip codes, and it is not unusual for high crime urban zip codes to have 10x the per capita crime rate of the surrounding suburbs. Given that, it should not be surprising that the cops would behave differently / be more suspicious in general in the high crime areas.

        Heck, who among us does not get our guard up when we are in a sketchy part of town? Now that obviously doesn’t excuse bad cop behavior, but I think any solution would need to acknowledge that you’re really fighting human nature.

        • Matt M says:

          Yeah. “Behave the same way in the clearly and obviously safe neighborhood as you would in the clearly and obviously dangerous neighborhood” is just not a reasonable request/demand. Even if you get people to agree to do it, they won’t be able to actually do it…

          • Well... says:

            @gbdub and MattM:

            I don’t disagree with any of that, but from the perspective of people in those neighborhoods who aren’t criminals (which statistically is still the vast majority) you can see why the complaint exists, and hopefully you can see why it’s got a lot of legitimacy.

            Also, I should mention that the two neighborhoods I lived in felt about the same in terms of crime. In fact the white neighborhood was slightly rougher and more working class, while the mixed neighborhood was …leafier??… and a mix of classes from upper-middle to lower-middle.

          • A few years back, when we were visiting my wife’s mother in Cleveland, our daughter got mugged and lost her purse with an iphone and ipad and several other things in it, including a coin purse. One of the Apple machines told us about where it was, so we got in touch with the police and went to the indicated area. It wasn’t obvious exactly where it was, and the (black) policeman warned us that it was a dangerous area for us to walk in. The police were, reasonably enough, not willing to spend a lot of time searching for where the purse and machines had been dumped.

            We went in anyway. All the (black) people we interacted with were friendly. One woman had found the (empty) coin purse and gave it to us. I eventually found the purse with the machines (but not money, passport, and credit cards) in a dumpster.

            My guess is that the same pattern would hold in most high crime black areas. Most of the population, after all, are the victims of crime, not the perpetrators.

          • gbdub says:

            @Welll… I agree, didn’t mean to imply otherwise. That’s what makes this so hard, both sides may be reacting in understandable ways to what they see.

            FWIW my impression is that there is a strain of police training that tends to overemphasize imagining yourself under threat in every situation. And dealing with legitimately violent career criminal types daily probably contributes to having a jaded, even dehumanizing view toward the people you deal with. This doesn’t make it any easier if you’re an innocent person on the receiving end. A vicious cycle.

          • Well... says:

            @gbdub:

            That’s what makes this so hard, both sides may be reacting in understandable ways to what they see.

            Yeah, that was my big realization in a nutshell.

            And, by hunch only, I agree with you about police training, although I know so little about How To Train Policemen that I wouldn’t feel right making any confident assessments or recommendations.

    • Christophe Biocca says:

      Not only this, but they sit in swarms around bars and make up random excuses to pull people over who leave them hoping to score a DUI charge.

      Amateurs. Up here in Canada, we submit you to a breathalyzer test 2 hours after you drive up to the cottage and start drinking, then arrest you for being over the limit.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I grew up in a mostly white community and didn’t do drugs, drink, make excessive noise, play sports, or have suspicious adolescent gatherings. If there are enough people like that, their experience and your experience could both be true.

      My hometown was upper-middle-class, I don’t know if that made a difference.

      • Clutzy says:

        I would estimate that I would have been in the bottom % of doing those things besides sports. Mostly because I was doing so much organized sports. But here’s a great example, for people who were in my HS Graduating class there was legendary party at “Claire’s”. It is legendary solely for the fact that it never got broken up.

    • ana53294 says:

      That thing about being followed in a store has also happened to me. I think it’s quite common, and while black people might be followed a bit more frequently, I think black people also underestimate the base rate, thinking that decent-looking white people don’t get followed in stores.

      • AG says:

        I don’t necessarily disagree with you, but any black person who gets followed sees the customers in the store at the same time that staff chose not to follow instead, unless they were alone in the store at the time. So the counterfactuals are there.

  38. Clutzy says:

    @Kindly

    Sorry I couldn’t respond to your old post, but if you want to learn about academic competitions/math competitions in high school from someone who has won some, I am your guy.

  39. AlesZiegler says:

    Where is that comment searching tool? I´d like to find something from a few threads back.

  40. Vanzetti says:

    Excuse me? Really? The amount of hate any tweet of Trump sends is multiplied by the number of people who read it. There’s no humanly possible way he can receive more hate than he sends.

    • Spookykou says:

      Are you using imperial or metric units of hate?

      • fibio says:

        It’s the US, they wouldn’t be caught dead using metric.

        • Paul Brinkley says:

          One of my favorite quotes from Quora, paraphrased:

          We in the US proudly use both systems of measurement.

          If you don’t believe me, come within ten feet of my front door and I’ll shoot you with my 9mm.

          • John Schilling says:

            A real American would use a .45, like God and John Moses Browning intended. Well, OK, sometimes we also use 9mm, but we’re not exactly proud of it.

          • cassander says:

            like God and John Moses Browning intended.

            why repeat yourself?

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            To be honest I think that’s the best way. Imperial units are the best for human-centered units. Twelve is the right number of inches in a foot because it’s very easy for me to cut that into quarters, thirds, and halves. 100 is the right number of centimeters in a meter because when I need to machine something all I care about is precision and ease of calculating orders of magnitude.

            The right units for the right job. America: the best at everything, in literally all circumstances.

          • beleester says:

            And 5,280 is the right number of feet for a mile because… we can easily divide it into 330ths and 880ths? I’m pretty sure that logic only works for 12 inches in a foot.

          • bullseye says:

            Pet peeve: we do not use imperial units. Imperial units were established by the British Empire in 1824. We use United States customary units.

            Comparison_of_the_imperial_and_US_customary_measurement_systems

          • AlexOfUrals says:

            @beleester
            Not at all! I find it also very convenient to have (not)exactly 7.48052 gallons in a cubic foot so you can easily divide it in go-fuck-yourself-ths parts.

          • AG says:

            Hey, it’s not customary’s fault that some bozo decided that digits should be base 10 like a chump instead of base 12 as God intended.

            Could have lived in a world where orders of magnitude were also nice fractions, but nooooo…

          • b_jonas says:

            And we Europeans use degrees Celsius for temperature, millimeters of mercury for blood pressure and sometimes for atmospheric pressure, kilowatt hours for electric power consumption, kilocalories for food energy. We also use rotations per minute for the frequency of motors, a random choice of minutes and hours and days and weeks and months and years to measure time, and wages or earnings are expressed randomly as unit of currency per hour, per day, per month, or per year. That’s not even counting the units that are supposedly metric but used with power of ten prefixes randomly just to confuse you, and atmospheres to measure tire pressure (it’s so close to 10**5 Pa that for tire pressure it’s effectively a metric unit to measurement error).

            Given that, I don’t understand why it is considered so backwards that Americans measure some lengths in inches and feet and yards and miles and some weights in ounces and pounds. Like, do a few different non-metric units make that much of a difference? Or is a unit especially bad just because it’s “imperial”?

            You could say that one problem with American units is that there are multiple different units called ounces with slightly different values. But in exchange, we here have some products that are measured randomly by weight in kilograms or volume in liters, and for mixing those units can make about as much difference as using the wrong type of ounce. (Somehow this never seems to happen to soft drinks or anything with density close to 1000 kg/m^3: those are always measured in liters.)

          • AG says:

            The time units marginally make sense: the most universal way of measuring it back in the day, the sun-dial, has a round face, so you want to maximize fractional ease. 60, 24, and 12 are great numbers for that.
            Weeks were nominally determined by moon phases, and years were determined by seasons, so that’s out of our hands, but for everything else, nice easy fractions.

          • b_jonas says:

            AG: having all of day, week, month and year for everyday purposes certainly makes sense. There’s similarly a good reason for at least three different time units for salaries. The reason why I’m annoyed about units for salaries or earnings is more a cultural incompatibility: even on SSC people often mention figures in dollars in contexts where an American would assume it’s dollars per year but a European would assume it’s dollars per month, the time period isn’t stated explicitly, and this can cause too much confusion.

            I disagree with you in that “60, 24, and 12 are great numbers” and for that reason we should divide our day to 24 hours rather than decimal units makes sense a priori.

            It is true, however, that hours and minutes and seconds are worth to keep because of tradition and inertia, more so than almost any other conventional unit in Europe or America like meter or mile or kilogram or ounce.

          • Paul Zrimsek says:

            If I had a shilling for every time I’ve seen someone complain about non-decimal units, I’d still have no idea how much it adds up to.

          • AG says:

            What’s the decimal value of a shilling, anyways?

            @b_jonas
            I repeat myself:

            Hey, it’s not customarytime’s fault that some bozo decided that digits should be base 10 like a chump instead of base 12 as God intended.

            Could have lived in a world where orders of magnitude were also nice fractions, but nooooo…

    • Anteros says:

      The OP said there’s more hate directed At Trump than coming from him. Which I think is trivially true.

    • Bobobob says:

      According to the Law of Conservation of Hate, individual hate units are directly proportionate to the amount of power possessed by the hating individual. Ergo, millions of (micro-level) hate-units directed at Donald Trump from around the country are directly balanced, and interconvertible with, the reciprocal amount of (mega-level) hate units emanating from the White House. I will spare you the detailed equations.

      This is very similar to the Law of Conservation of Love, which is expressed succinctly at the end of The Beatles’ Abbey Road and need not be repeated here.

      I hope this clears up any confusion.

      • Tatterdemalion says:

        You’re behind the times – Albert Vader showed that the law of conservation of hatred can be violated, and all that holds is conservation of fear + anger + hatred.

  41. Aapje says:

    Don’t be a sour plum, enjoy some Dutch fixed expressions

    ‘Zuurpruim’ = Sour plum

    Sourpuss.

    ‘In de aap gelogeerd’ = Lodged in the monkey

    Being in trouble. This expression almost certainly comes from an inn with a poor reputation. However, multiple inns have had a (nick)name with the Dutch word for monkey. A popular theory in Amsterdam is that this refers to one of the only two remaining wooden buildings in Amsterdam, ‘t Aepjen (old Dutch for: the monkey), built in 1544. The story goes that this was an inn for sailors, who would bring monkeys from abroad, which the owner of the inn bought as an attraction. However, these were lice-ridden, making a stay there a nightmare. However, this building was actually named long before it became an inn, making it unlikely that this story is true.

    In any case, if you visit Amsterdam, you might want to go to this building, which is currently a ‘brown’ pub and drink a beer or some gin (‘jenever’).

    ‘Bruine kroeg’ = Brown pub

    A traditional pub with a brown wooden interior, poor lighting and lots of stuff on the walls. These started as living room pubs in the 19th century, so women could work while still being able to care for their children. Lots of men worked as day laborers back then, with irregular incomes, so the pub gave a stable additional income. When liquor licenses were instituted & other rules were made, the pubs gradually became more professional, but they kept their living room inspired interiors.

    ‘Kroegtijger’ = Pub tiger

    Barfly. Apparently, Dutch people who spent a lot of time in a bar have a more fierce reputation.

    ‘Ik ben/jij bent toch niet van suiker’ = I’m/your not made of sugar

    Used to justify going out in the rain or to argue that someone else should go out in the rain.

    • DarkTigger says:

      “Kroeg” means pub in Dutch? Interessting Krug means jug in German, but “Dorf Krug” was a common name/describtion for the local pub in a small village.

      Not made from sugar, we use the same expression here in Germany “Ich bin doch nicht aus Zucker”.

      • Aapje says:

        Yes, ‘kroeg’ mean pub. There is the theory that it comes from the Dutch word for jug: ‘kruik,’ although the evidence is not great.

    • Deiseach says:

      First, I accidentally reported this comment, so I apologise to Aapje and please ignore the report!

      Secondly ‘Ik ben/jij bent toch niet van suiker’ = I’m/your not made of sugar Used to justify going out in the rain or to argue that someone else should go out in the rain

      The Irish equivalent of that is “I’m not made of salt, that I’d melt” as a response when someone expresses concern about you going out in the rain.

    • Igon Value says:

      I’m/you’re not made of sugar

      You won’t melt!

      Very common, as others have noted. It also exists in French, in addition to the languages already mentioned.

  42. Ketil says:

    I thought this was interesting. Investigating police after “viral” cases increases homicide and crime, while investigating them without the media storm leads to a reduction. Everybody seems to be in favor of police bodycams, but Twitter and other SM channels are overflowing with such videos, with text loudly decrying all manner of transgressions. Maybe bodycams isn’t such a good idea after all?

    https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/06/policing-the-police.html

    • RalMirrorAd says:

      Well the bodycam footage doesn’t need to be shared to the general public.
      Also, it’s not like in our current universe a totally random sample of negative police interactions go viral. Twitter/FB/Google/Journos know how and when to memory-hole a story that they think will/might incite a certain kind of rioting.

    • herbert herberson says:

      Seems like there’s some very obvious confounds here based on which videos go “viral” and which police departments are willing/able to implement reforms without public pressure.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        The viralness is unpredictable. Random punishment can stop things, but people also overreact a lot to random punishment.

        Cops need better management. If they think they’ll get a fair treatment and positive reinforcement, the good cops will want to stick around.

    • J Mann says:

      Was there a final outcome on Harvard’s MeToo investigation of Roland Fryer?

  43. johan_larson says:

    I have been looking around for a proper IQ test I could take online, and it doesn’t look like such a thing exists. There are lots of online tests, both free and for-fee, that kinda-sort test intelligence, but apparently a proper IQ test has to be administered in person by a psychometrician. Is this true, and if so, why does this have to be so complicated?

    • Kaitian says:

      This is also what I’ve heard, and it’s probably because the tester has to ensure a certain environment for the tests to be meaningful.
      Like, if one person does the test on their phone while feeding their baby with the other hand, and the second person does it fully focused with three reference books next to them, their results will be much less comparable than those of normal IQ tests.

      Or more cynically, it’s because testers want to protect their authority over IQ tests. After all, an IQ test is basically healthcare, and everyone knows you can’t do that through the internet.

    • If you took the SAT, you can probably find a table giving a rough correspondence between SAT results and IQ. It’s not a perfect measure, but it’s a very convenient one.

      • Spookykou says:

        How does wide spread SAT prep effect this, I know somebody who took the SAT twice and saw a 200 point change in their score between tests.

      • johan_larson says:

        I never took the SAT, but I did write the GRE, and I found a site for estimating IQ based on GRE scores. Unfortunately I’m having trouble believing the number it produced. That’s part of why I’d be interested in taking an actual IQ test.

      • Eric T says:

        I’m 100% confident that if I calculated my IQ based on my test scores it’d be ultra mega wrong.

    • Viliam says:

      I have been looking around for a proper IQ test I could take online, and it doesn’t look like such a thing exists.

      Indeed, there is no such thing.

      The reason is that IQ tests are supposed to be administered in similar conditions, because your ability to solve problems is different at late night, or when there is noise, etc. By definition, IQ is “graded on the curve”, so if different people do the tests under different conditions, the results are nonsense.

      Then there is the economical aspect, that IQ tests need to be calibrated, i.e. tested on thousands of randomly selected people, otherwise the results are nonsense. Finding randomly selected people and making them take your test under controlled conditions is difficult, and expensive. If someone spent millions of dollars calibrating the test, would they provide it for free online? There are also paid IQ tests online, but they are all scam (i.e. stuff someone just made up and did no calibration), because that takes less effort and seems the same to the customer.

  44. hash872 says:

    There’s an interesting disconnect between progressives who want to use the current moment to I guess fight racism (not me, personally), and the smaller group of us more focused civil liberties types, who have been talking about police violence and the insane, quasi-fascistic power law enforcement has in the US for a long time now. (I’ve never seen so many conservatives defending public sector unions!) I’m hoping we can use the current energy to break the power of police unions, and open up bad cops to prosecution and imprisonment. If you’re looking for an example- virtually every cop in this thread should, in my opinion, be in prison right now for assault and battery https://twitter.com/greg_doucette/status/1266751520055459847

    I’m also quite skeptical that this will happen, because being pro-law enforcement unions is kind of a bipartisan position, and because the American attention span is very short (does anyone remember the impeachment??) But just wanted to make that distinction- many of us civil liberties folks are less focused on the race angle, and more the ‘police departments are an armed militia who don’t have to follow any laws’ angle

    • hash872 says:

      My personal favorite example is German Bosque- Florida’s worst cop. Arrested three times, fired six times, he keeps getting reinstated as a police officer due to public sector union agreements

      https://reason.com/2018/10/12/fla-worst-cop-german-bosque-reinstated/

    • Deiseach says:

      Well, I’m throwing my hat up at any hope of reasonable, fruitful discussion happening. I have no idea why my own country (including my own city) is having Black Lives Matter marches, as WE ARE NOT AMERICAN.

      And I’ve just seen this today on social media, relevant excerpt below:

      Protesters’ images should only be circulated if they have full facial coverings. The police and white supremacists use these photos to find and kill these folks extrajudicially.

      People are uncritically passing around messages that the police are, to be blunt, acting like South American death squads. If you’re in America and you really, truly believe this then your society is fucked. If this is actually happening and the police are sending out hit squads to murder peaceful protestors, your society is fucked. I think I’d prefer option A just barely, since rampant insane paranoia of that nature isn’t going to do anyone any good, but at least it’s slightly better than “why yes, the police are openly murdering people”.

      I don’t know. Can anyone tell me if sanity is going to prevail anytime soon?

      • cassander says:

        I have no idea why my own country (including my own city) is having Black Lives Matter marches, as WE ARE NOT AMERICAN.

        Is explanation besides “all the cool kids are doing it” necessary?

        I don’t know. Can anyone tell me if sanity is going to prevail anytime soon?

        Has it ever?

      • Nick says:

        Can anyone tell me if sanity is going to prevail anytime soon?

        I can answer that!

        No.

      • keaswaran says:

        Talking about extrajudicial killings here is probably drastic overreaction, but I think it’s true that in general, best practices for publishing photos of individuals at political events is that they probably shouldn’t be recognizable, unless they are the specific newsworthy individuals that you are trying to document.

        • viVI_IViv says:

          , best practices for publishing photos of individuals at political events is that they probably shouldn’t be recognizable, unless they are the specific newsworthy individuals that you are trying to document.

          People in public spaces should be always recognizable. This is especially important in public protests, when there is a high chance the protesters might be involved in acts of violence.

          • keaswaran says:

            This doesn’t seem right, given that cold climates and flu seasons exist. At least sometimes, people should be allowed to cover their face. But perhaps the idea is that they should be expected to wear a nametag?

        • bean says:

          I don’t think that “don’t publish identifiable photos of people at rallies, because their boss might be anti-BLM” is a very different thing from “obscure their faces, or they might get killed by white supremacists”. The first is a fairly reasonable point. The second is conspiracy-mongering on a vast scale, and will just make things worse. (Also, if the conspiracy actually exists, they’ll just take their own photos, and won’t need your public ones.)

          • cassander says:

            Even the first is pretty silly. I keep getting spam emails from various companies, entirely unprompted, telling me how they stand with the protesters. But it’s entirely in keeping with the left’s delusion that they’re brave underdogs standing against the dark tide of reaction.

          • Matt M says:

            The first is a fairly reasonable point.

            Or at least it would be if the overwhelming majority of corporate executives weren’t very publicly pro-BLM.

            Weird how in Charlottesville, the media wasn’t particularly concerned that right-wingers might get fired from their jobs if their faces were published. Instead, it explicitly pursued that angle as a legitimate tactic.

          • Randy M says:

            I’m not sure you gain anything in pointing out this hypocrisy. Is there anyone remaining in journalism who would say that they should merely fairly and objectively cover a white nationalist rally?

          • Matt M says:

            I’m not sure you gain anything in pointing out this hypocrisy.

            It makes me feel good to point out this hypocrisy in one of the few remaining venues in which people will actually agree that it is a hypocrisy and not denounce me as evil for merely pointing it out.

          • albatross11 says:

            Kinda undermines your faith in the media’s ability to accurately report what happened during those protests, no?

          • keaswaran says:

            I’ve assumed that anyone who said the latter is likely confabulating some explanation for why you should obscure faces, after having been given advice something more like the former. There’s lots of good advice people give for bad reasons (just think of what the average person on the street would have said for why you should wash your hands after going to the bathroom, a few months ago, before we were all thinking more explicitly about hand-washing).

        • Randy M says:

          That’s like saying “While homeopathy is pointless, in general people should be drinking more water when ill.”

          Deiseach isn’t objected to advice not to publish people’s photos without their permission, but to spreading a dangerous and baseless accusation.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          Are we obscuring all faces — cops and protestors both — or only the faces of the people were sympathize with?

          Just in the past few days, there was a doxxing mob on Twitter to go after some anti-BLM guy, and Twitter got the wrong guy. And then, having learned they got the wrong guy, they went out and got another wrong guy.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Yeah I’m pretty sure the best practice isn’t “don’t publish recognizable photos from political events” but “don’t publish recognizable photos from political events we support.” Nobody had a problem doxxing and going after the employment of the tiki torch guys.

        • Deiseach says:

          best practices for publishing photos of individuals at political events is that they probably shouldn’t be recognizable

          (1) “Don’t share or publish photos of protestors who can be easily identified, as they might get in trouble at their job” – reasonable level of caution, even if I think if you’re going out to yell in the street in my face, show me your face.

          (2) “Don’t share or publish photos as white supremacist mobs are using these to track the protestors down and murder them” – not reasonable, though there could be one guy or small group of guys who are nutjobs enough to try this.

          (3) “Don’t share or publish photos as the police are using these to track the protestors down and murder them” – this is where I say would you ever go away for yourself. If it genuinely has got to the stage that the police are forming vigilante squads to track down and murder people for protesting, then the problems within the society are much graver than can be solved by merely “disband the cops” and maybe the UN peacekeeping forces should be getting involved.

          No. 2 is bad enough, but No. 3 is something I can’t believe unless hard evidence, rather than college kids larping as heroes of the revolution because they never got over their crush on Marius from Les Mis, is provided.

          • albatross11 says:

            “Don’t publish faces of protesters lest their employers retaliate” seems like an odd standard from people who, ISTM, are pretty-much fine with people on the other side getting fired for their unpopular extracurricular political activities.

          • Matt M says:

            unpopular extracurricular political activities.

            Because right-wing “political activities” have been successfully memed into mapping to “opposing basic human rights.”

            And meanwhile, every company on Earth has corporate policy that says all employees must support “basic human rights.”

          • qwints says:

            No. 3 is a real belief on the left, recently around the deaths of several Ferguson protesters. Two of them are definitively unsolved murders – DeAndre Joshua and Darren Seals were both shot in the head and left in burning cars. Joshua Brown, a witness to Botham Jean’s murder, was also murdered, apparently in connection with a drug deal. While Brown definitely sold marijuana, the facts of the case are very unusual – the killer allegedly drove 300 miles to meet with Brown to buy drugs (or rob him using that pretext) 10 days after Brown had testified.

        • Purplehermann says:

          Why? People who are protesting are acting publicly. They aren’t exactly trying to avoid attention, this seems like de facto permission to publish their faces to me

          • Eric T says:

            Counterpoint: Assume some risk exists (be it violence or firing). People protest despite this risk because they think its worth it. They’d probably still really rather you didn’t go around publishing their faces.

            Like if I run into a burning building to save a child you can’t really say I’m giving de facto permission to have smoke poured into my lungs. If people are willing to take some risks to do things they believe are important, maybe exasperating those risks is not the Moral Option.

          • Purplehermann says:

            This is long winded babble

            The issue with this metaphor is that the metaphorical fire they are jumping into is (partially) the court of public opinion.

            The way I see the situation, it’s closer to people running into a burning building to save a pile of blankets, which either covers a demon, nothing, or a child. And occasionally punching (riots, looting) and often shoving (covid-19 spread) people as they go in. If I think it’s a demon I’ll definitely try getting the heat to go higher, to dissuade this behaviour.
            Even if I’m unsure what it is, if I dislike the way people are going about it I’m liable to dissuade it.

            In the real world I think it’s even more justified, live by the sword die by the sword. You try to use public opinion by protesting, it gets turned on you for protesting.

          • Purplehermann says:

            @Eric T
            This is my actual response.

            The risks exist for a specific reason – because an individual wants to push society in a specific direction, and society might not like that.

            I think that changing society should be difficult and risky to some degree, so power grabs become less worthwhile.
            A social norm that all people who are part of large groups get to be anonymous doesn’t seem great to me.

            A few Qs:
            1. What do you think about protesters publicising their faces en mass so they aren’t picked out by bad luck?

            2. Do you have the same opinion for people protesting gay marriage, BLM, etc..?

            3. What about for White Seperationists and other alt right groups?

          • Eric T says:

            In the real world I think it’s even more justified, live by the sword die by the sword. You try to use public opinion by protesting, it gets turned on you for protesting.

            Right – I think this might be an acceptable principal if public opinion were all you had to worry about. I think the risks are a little more tangible than this, losing your job for example. I don’t think people should lose their jobs for holding political opinions, but based on how much fearmongering I’ve seen on both sides about this, it’s pretty clear that at least some people seem to think they are at risk of it occurring.

            To be clear, go ahead and publish photos of looters or rioters – I’ve never supported them and they’re breaking the law in a meaningful and destructive way.

            I think that changing society should be difficult and risky to some degree, so power grabs become less worthwhile. A social norm that all people who are part of large groups get to be anonymous doesn’t seem great to me.

            People do take serious risk by protesting. Just last week a trigger-happy member of the NYPD thought the area near my head looked like a good place for some rubber bullets to go. Fortunately I was completely unharmed, but certainly the threat of physical violence and arrest constitutes an acceptable amount of risk right? I don’t think the internet needs to escalate it one step further by enforcing some kind of keyboard vigilante justice to try to shame protestors or cause them further conflict in their lives. Especially since, no offense here, I don’t think the fear of the protestors attempting a “power grab” is very founded? Clearly this is just a large group of people making their voices heard and put pressure on their democratically elected politicians. Nobody is trying to start a coup.

            I also worry that these kinds of tactics have a chilling effect on protest. Historically, protests have been an important tool in many countries for critical policy change. I believe issues like climate change likely won’t be solved without some kind of mass action for example, and I worry about the world where we all think its okay to try to get people who protest for things that we disagree with fired or hurt.

            1. What do you think about protesters publicising their faces en mass so they aren’t picked out by bad luck?

            2. Do you have the same opinion for people protesting gay marriage, BLM, etc..?

            3. What about for White Seperationists and other alt right groups?

            1. Protestors can do that if they want. I think its not up to you to decide that’s the strategy they should take to protect themselves. Also as I constantly try to remind people here – people’s feelings do matter. Maybe having their photos not be public doesn’t make them any actually safer, but it makes them feel safer, which does improve their quality of life. Given again I don’t think there’s a very good social reason for any individual protestors’ face to be published, I would defer to letting them just be like slightly happier I guess.

            2. Yep.

            3. Yes, as long as they are peaceful/not advocating for explicit violence. Apply my standard for the rioters and looters above. If you’re a person shouting “I think white people are oppressed” you shouldn’t be fired. If you’re shouting “I think we should kill black people” or driving your car into counter protestors I think that’s where we may have an issue.

            I’m pretty fine with the bright-line being “advocating or practicing violence” regardless of side.

          • Purplehermann says:

            @Eric T
            Not sure I’m convinced, but what you’ve written seems sensible enough.

            I think power grabs in general are something to be worried about, and BLM protests servicing as a power grab doesn’t seem weird to me.

            As far as firings, I’ve only heard of woke Left firing people for views (except maybe one football player), do you have examples of the right doing this?

            Rubber bullets might be enough, yeah

          • John Schilling says:

            People protest despite this risk because they think its worth it. They’d probably still really rather you didn’t go around publishing their faces.

            The police and their supporters would definitely rather you not go around protesting at all. Why are we indulging either side’s preferences?

            The essence of protesting is to demonstrate your support for a cause. If you’re going to simultaneously argue that we should not know who you are that is supporting this cause, that kind of weakens the case for the protest in the first place.

            And if you think the police are going to single out individual peaceful protesters for personal retaliation, what difference do you think it makes whether journalists’ pictures get published? The police have their own cameras. Like, remember the last time this happened, when you all literally demanded that the police have cameras pinned to their chests to record everything that happens around them?

          • Aapje says:

            @Eric T

            The evidence seems to actually suggest that people with your political beliefs are the least ‘chilled’ by various forms of aggression (verbal or physical). For example, they seem to feel safer than any other group and are part of a minority that doesn’t feel silenced by political correctness.

            Note anti-protesting violence also comes from groups like antifa, not just the government.

            PS. It’s not OK for rubber bullets to be fired at heads.

      • viVI_IViv says:

        I have no idea why my own country (including my own city) is having Black Lives Matter marches, as WE ARE NOT AMERICAN.

        Isn’t it funny how the people who constantly complain about American imperialism are the ones that will most diligently conform to anything Americans do, even when they jump from a cliff?

        • Paul Zrimsek says:

          I look on the bright side: Our soft power is so awesome that even our most oppressed and downtrodden can make foreigners jump through hoops.

      • MisterA says:

        We’re only a couple years out from finding out the Chicago PD was running an extrajudicial CIA-style black site where they would take prisoners who were not officially in custody to be tortured off the books.

        And we have repeatedly seen that when cops do injure or kill someone they are absolutely willing to bald-faced lie about it to cover it up at an official, institutional level unless there is incontrovertible public proof.

        So on the one hand, I think the claims of active death squads are probably paranoid. On the other hand, I kind of get it.

        • AG says:

          In Minneapolis, cops recently slashed the tires of all cars at a protest site.
          In 2015, Baltimore cops used the riots as cover to loot pharmacies to sell drugs.
          Just days after Seattle’s mayor and police chief promised a month-long moratorium on using a type of tear gas to disperse protesters, the department used it again during an overnight protest.
          San Diego cops pulled a protester into an unmarked van, and threatened to shoot witnesses if they followed.
          NYC cops are detaining legal observers at peaceful protests. (Legal observers are volunteers tasked with documenting police misconduct. They wore bright green baseball caps that said “National Lawyers Guild Legal Observer” in large print.)

          So, not quite in death squad territory yet, but uh…they’re kind of sprinting towards it.

          • MisterA says:

            To argue against my own position for a minute, I think one thing that probably does need to be kept in mind is there is really no such thing as “the police.” Rather, there are thousands upon thousands of independent organizations of police all operating as distinct bodies with their own policies, institutional culture, practices, etc.

            There are certainly commonalities, cultural similarities, and so forth – but the police departments can be completely different things between the state, county and city cops even in the same geographic area, let alone the next city over.

            So to some extent, we’ve taken thousands and thousands of small groups of heavily armed people (and a fair number of large groups of same), given them largely untrammeled authority to do whatever the hell they want, and decided to run an experiment to see how many abuse it.

            To some extent it’s not surprising that some of them started acting like criminal gangs and/or fascist thugs – that’s probably inevitable. The crazier thing is that until recently, no one was actually engaging in any kind of systemic effort to actually keep track of who did what with this power.

          • albatross11 says:

            Also, a bunch of the people associated with the Ferguson protests have died in the last few years, including two rather overt execution-style murders. (Shot to death and then the body burned in their cars.)

            There are a lot of police departments. Some of them are extremely corrupt and brutal, others aren’t, and you probably can’t actually do much to reform (say) the corrupt and brutal CPD at a national level, so long as members of the CPD can do horrific shit and get away with it. There were stories of CPD members getting away with all kinds of awful crap when I was a kid, and there still are. The local and state authorities are either unwilling or unable to rein them in, and that has included people from both parties. I don’t know how you fix that, but a march in Seattle isn’t going to accomplish anything.

      • I have no idea why my own country (including my own city) is having Black Lives Matter marches

        Obviously about the black Irish.

      • AlphaGamma says:

        People are uncritically passing around messages that the police are, to be blunt, acting like South American death squads. If you’re in America and you really, truly believe this then your society is fucked. If this is actually happening and the police are sending out hit squads to murder peaceful protestors, your society is fucked.

        The origin of the death squad rumours is the untimely deaths of six people who were leaders of the Ferguson protests or who featured heavily in media coverage of them, including Edward Crawford, the subject of the iconic photo of a protester throwing a burning tear gas canister.

        Those deaths seem to fall on a spectrum between ”almost certainly murder” (two of the dead were found with gunshot wounds in burned-out cars) and ”probably suicide”. It’s certainly possible that all six were murdered, but nobody has offered any evidence that the police did it. EDIT: And, of course, if they did, they made the effort to cover their tracks in a way that openly-operating death squads don’t.

      • b_jonas says:

        > I have no idea why my own country (including my own city) is having Black Lives Matter marches, as WE ARE NOT AMERICAN.

        Here in Europe, there has also been Free Tibet marches decades ago, and more recently marches about Tienannen square.

        • Aapje says:

          In 1993, Dutch people sent 1.2 million postcards to the German chancellor with the text ‘I am angry,’ to protest the arson by far-right youths of a house where a Turkish family lived, of which some died. A low point in moralizing smugness, IMO. As if the chancellor or all but a very small minority approved of the arson.

    • Erc says:

      virtually every cop in this thread should, in my opinion, be in prison right now for assault and battery

      If someone trespasses on your property and refuses to leave, should you go to prison for assaulting him? If someone blocks the street and refuses to leave, should the police go to prison for assaulting him? A lot of this libertarian stuff seems to me like freedom for aggression.

  45. disluckyperson says:

    And Noah, to his credit, used very unfavorable estimates for his position there.

    For virus death, he used the most unfavorable estimate. But did you see the whole thing? His calculation is that each life saved from a police killing is worth six times… SIX TIMES… each life saved from a virus death. Obviously, the “analysis” is nothing more than a joke, and only hurts his position.

    • Randy M says:

      Is that just an estimation of life expectancy? If we assume the average age of a victim of police killings is 30, they’ve lost about 45 years. We might adjust that downward a bit with a deep dive in demographics, but that’s liable to be distracting.
      The average age of a Covid victim is… I’m guessing 60 would be erroring on the young side. If you are 60, you have a longer life expectancy than someone 30, but then again, those with complications most vulnerable to Covid might not benefit from that assumption. so let’s say they have 15 years remaining.
      That’s 3x, not 6x. We could get to 6x if we assume average age of Covid deaths is ~68 or so, or discount later years for QoL issues.

      In both cases there are non-lethal cases with complications that are difficult to compare. And obviously this says nothing about sentimentality or productivity (nor am I going to try to make such comparisons!).

      • disluckyperson says:

        His calculation is that people who die of Covid have on average 10 years of life left. People who die of police killings have 44. He also says that because people who die of Covid usually have co-morbidities, their life is worth .75 that of somebody who dies of police killings. Yeah.. I’m not making this up…that’s what he says, you can check the tweet thread. So 4.4*(1.3333) =5.8666

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          QALY is exactly the rational way to compare life-saving techniques on a per-dollar basis.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year

        • disluckyperson says:

          QALY is exactly the rational way to compare life-saving techniques on a per-dollar basis.

          Ok, if he wants to do that, whats the QALY of the average victim of a police shooting compared to the rest of the population? I would give them a .5! That’s besides for the obvious grotesqueness of the idea (in this situation). That’s why I think if his idea gets any significant publicity, it will only hurt the cause of the protests. Most people don’t look favorably upon the idea of sacrificing their grandparents to the QALY god, despite how rational it is. Especially to save a comparably small number of people who have no relation to them, like Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          You can cut down every law in England say rationality is dumb because it leads to short-term conclusions you don’t like. That’s fine. You can be upset and there’s no requirement for you to be on board.

          But there’s a reason other people will continue to discuss QALYs.

        • disluckyperson says:

          And that’s fine for him or any other economist to make QALY calculations and decide the possibility of saving 11,000 young people is worth killing 60,000. He has every right to do that. But I would daresay that if people thought that their public health authorities were making such calculations, to this extent, and basing decisions on them, they would never trust them again.

          And that was the context here, where public health officials were telling everybody just a few weeks ago that their lives had to be completely interrupted indefinitely, and in many cases ruined, to contain the virus. And then those same people made a 180 and said that having large gatherings, even in the middle of a pandemic, is in the interest of public health. Which leads to people questioning whether public health experts can be trusted to be above politics. And comes Noah and says it all makes sense, there’s no inconsistency, because it’s worth killing 60,000 elderly to save 11,000 young.

          I’m saying that beyond a small subset of the population who think like that, it doesn’t help restore trust in public health experts. Quite the opposite.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          Most people would agree that it’s preferable to save a young baby over a senior citizen.

        • disluckyperson says:

          That’s why I said to this extent. I’m pretty sure most people wouldn’t agree it’s preferable to cause the death (not just withhold treatment!) of SIX senior citizens to save one baby. And to cause the death of those six senior citizens now, to save that one baby in fifty years. I think they would find the idea grotesque and horrifying, like I do.

        • baconbits9 says:

          Most people would agree that it’s preferable to save a young baby over a senior citizen.

          Most people agree that if you have one shot of insulin which would save either a baby or a senior you give it to the baby.

          Almost no one agrees that we should harvest the organs of seniors to save babies in such hypotheticals.

  46. Aftagley says:

    I keep seeing references in this thread to rioting and looting as if these are ongoing events. My personal experience and pretty much every source of information I’ve looked at indicates that what rioting and looting did happen occurred between 29 May and 01 June and that pretty much all protests have turned almost entirely peaceful.

    Two questions:
    1. Is this correct? Are there still riots going on across the country and coverage of them has just become partisan?

    2. If not, why are people still talking/acting like it’s a major ongoing concern?

    • Matt M says:

      Maybe a semantics quibble, but I don’t view blocking public streets as “entirely peaceful.”

      As far as I can tell, the remaining protests are “entirely peaceful” so long as the mob remains unopposed. Let the cops start trying to disperse them or let some group with opposing beliefs show up and start expressing them, and the “peace” will be gone real quick…

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        There are lots of protests where there is no violence as long as no one else shows up. Is that a problem?

        There were no injuries and no property damage with the armed Michigan protestors. If someone else had shown up, or the cops had tried to break them up, there could have been violence. But that didn’t happen. Everyone kept their head.

        People don’t have the legal right to block the street. It feels bad that they get away with it when you suspect that you wouldn’t get away with it. Surely we shouldn’t send in the cops just for that, though. I guess we could find after-the-fact someone in the crowd with video and send them a fine, backed up by the police if they don’t pay.

        • Matt M says:

          There are lots of protests where there is no violence as long as no one else shows up. Is that a problem?

          Technically/legally I guess not. But something about it does bug me a bit, as it basically becomes a display of power.

          “We are peaceful, so long as our authority to say and do whatever we want remains unchallenged” doesn’t strike me as particularly peaceful at all. To the extent I watched anti-lockdown protests, I saw plenty of people voluntarily submit to being arrested. I saw occasional counter-protests happen without violence (although a lot of these like the “heroic nurse in mask stands against crazy conspiracy mob” stuff seems to have been staged for PR purposes). And there just didn’t seem to be the implied threat of “If someone who disagrees shows up, we’re going to start shooting.”

          • zzzzort says:

            wait, why were there guns at all then? to me, guns imply the threat of violence much more strongly than jaywalking.

          • Randy M says:

            Protests are shows of force. Weaponry is a force multiplier. All the more so in disciplined hands.

          • baconbits9 says:

            Someone in my facebook feed literally posted that they had protested peacefully against Kavanaugh, peacefully to get Trump’s tax records, since that didn’t work why should they keep protesting peacefully?

          • Matt M says:

            Guns are among the few items that convey a right-wing aesthetic that won’t get you immediately fired from your job for displaying in public (whether that should be the case or not is up for debate, but it is the case).

            You might also ask why people at right wing events wear so much camo. The answer isn’t “so they can blend in with the forest and you won’t be able to see them.”

      • AG says:

        Let the cops start trying to disperse them

        If the protest is otherwise peaceful, that’s infringement on their First Amendment rights.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          They technically don’t have the right to block the street, though.

          I largely agree with “if you don’t break them up there won’t be violence so don’t break them up and we’re all fine.” But I shoudn’t be exempt from laws just because I have a mob large group of people on my side.

          • AG says:

            I mean, some of them have the right to block the street, if they’ve had their permits approved.

      • digbyforever says:

        It’s a good point, I’ve noticed that in TV coverage of the D.C. area protests, the focus is on the marches in the streets, and not on the National Mall, which used to be the traditional spot. With nothing to back this up, it kind of feels like that’s the point, that protesting today has to be more confrontational, and part of that is doing stuff like obstructing traffic (I’m reminded of that protest occupying the Mall of America) and “occupying” and all that, rather than just staying on sidewalks or public parks.

        • cassander says:

          there’s no one on the mall. Everyone is preferring to camp out of Lafayette square, which is closer to the white house.

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      1. Is this correct? Are there still riots going on across the country and coverage of them has just become partisan?

      I haven’t seen anything major since late last week. Maybe June 3rd or 4th at the latest. Just low-level clashes with police and protestors.

      2. If not, why are people still talking/acting like it’s a major ongoing concern?

      I mostly tuned out for the weekend. But I kept seeing people link stuff on SSC on a regular basis, of the “look at the awful thing this cop is doing” variety. So I thought there were still more clashes going on than there actually are?

      Does this mean the riots and looting are officially over and all we’ve got now are peaceful protests? That would be nice if true.

      • Aftagley says:

        Does this mean the riots and looting are officially over and all we’ve got now are peaceful protests? That would be nice if true.

        This is the impression I’ve been under since roughly last Tuesday/Wednesday. I remember being surprised on Tuesday about not seeing any damage, and happy on Wednesday. Since then, I’ve been going out not anticipating violence at all.

      • Randy M says:

        But I kept seeing people link stuff on SSC on a regular basis, of the “look at the awful thing this cop is doing” variety. So I thought there were still more clashes going on than there actually are?

        It’s likely any videos you get linked to occurred at least a day or two ago. But it is possible that rioting has stopped but police are cracking down on non-violent protests regardless, either because they are breaking a law like curfew, because the police now expect violence in that area, or out of pointless exercise of power (though this seems a particularly foolish time for that).

    • Jaskologist says:

      If not, why are people still talking/acting like it’s a major ongoing concern?

      1. When you join a mass protest, the point is to say “I’m with these guys. Look at how many of us there are.” The riots came first. People who are protesting saw Target burned down and thought “Inspiring! I’m with those guys!”

      2. Because we know those are the rules that would be extended in our direction. If the right ever rioted and burned down buildings, you would not describe them as being “mostly peaceful.” This also ties in with the fact that we know the media will downplay and under-report actual violence, most comically illustrated by the MSNBC reporter who declared things mostly peaceful as a building burned behind him. So we can assume that it’s more violent than we’ve being told.

      • Aftagley says:

        That’s kind of not my question.

        My question is – if you read the below threads you can find dozens of people who are talking and apparently acting as if protests and riots are an ongoing and totally present concern. Even if your points are true ( I disagree with them) they don’t constitute an ongoing threat.

        Anyway, your point 1 is incorrect. The sequence went Protest -> riots -> looting -> peaceful protests. People who are protesting are saying, “we support the original protests” you can tell that because they aren’t still burning down Targets

    • Wrong Species says:

      Well, first of all, your timeline is wrong. The video came out either May 25th or May 26th. The riots started either Tuesday or Wednesday the 26th or 27th. Around that time, the people in the media were really uncomfortable and didn’t know how to report it. That’s when you start hearing people say that “riots are the language of the unheard”. Of course, middle class suburbanites don’t like to hear that so they scrambled for something else. That Saturday, the 30th, the media went with the narrative that it was caused by far right groups. It was so transparently stupid that they ditched it on Sunday and went on a policy of radio silence on riots and focusing on a few incidents where cops did something particularly egregious. Of course, that wasn’t hard because the riots peaked Sunday and Monday, which means the mood was tense. After that, it looked like they were reduced in intensity(with pockets of violence in the next couple of days) and the riots as of now no longer seem to be ongoing.(Of course, if they were, they wouldn’t be reported on.)

      I don’t know when this video takes places but it shows the aftermath of the riots and was posted two days ago.

      This was posted three days ago.

      “BREAKING: Tonight[June 3rd] NYPD commissioner says a man in Brooklyn stabbed a police officer in the neck – in an unprovoked attack. He was assigned to an anti looting post. The man then stole the officer’s gun and shot two other officers in the hand. 3 officers in stable condition.”

      “Authorities with the Moody Police Department confirm one of their officers was shot and killed in the line of duty Tuesday evening.”

      Someone started a thread of victims of the riots.

      The worst thing is this video of these guys attacking a woman in the middle of the day.

      If not, why are people still talking/acting like it’s a major ongoing concern?

      Because of the response to it. The reaction to this has been complete acquiescence to the rioters. All the cops present there were arrested. Minneapolis has said they are disbanding their police department. People are getting on their knees begging forgiveness for their white privilege, willing to subject themselves to abject humiliation. Violence as a strategy obviously worked so why wouldn’t we expect it to happen again?

      • Aftagley says:

        Well, first of all, your timeline is wrong. The video came out either May 25th or May 26th. The riots started either Tuesday or Wednesday the 26th or 27th.

        Yes, but only in Minneapolis. It wasn’t a nationwide thing until that later that week. That doesn’t discount the violence, but there wasn’t a sense that it was a nationwide issue that early.

        It was so transparently stupid that they ditched it on Sunday and went on a policy of radio silence on riots and focusing on a few incidents where cops did something particularly egregious.

        This in no way matches my experience of following the news over the past few weeks.

        I don’t know when this video takes places but it shows the aftermath of the riots and was posted two days ago.

        That’s Minneapolis following the riots on the morning of the 28th.

        This was posted three days ago.

        Ok, although your source doesn’t include this detail, if you click through to where the piece was originally linked you can see that this was one protester attacking another. Also, you note that within around 20 seconds, other protester run over and screen the guys getting attacked out.

        “BREAKING: Tonight[June 3rd] NYPD commissioner says a man in Brooklyn stabbed a police officer in the neck – in an unprovoked attack. He was assigned to an anti looting post. The man then stole the officer’s gun and shot two other officers in the hand. 3 officers in stable condition.”

        Ok, but if you click through to the news article you can see that this was nowhere near the protests that were going on that night, and the article itself says it doesn’t appear this was associated. The dude also reportedly shouted Alluh Akbar before attacking… so I’m going to say he had a different ideology.

        “Authorities with the Moody Police Department confirm one of their officers was shot and killed in the line of duty Tuesday evening.”

        I read the article you linked, and two more on this. There’s no indication that this had anything to do with protests. It look like a cop was called to a disturbance at a motel and was shot.

        The worst thing is this video of these guys attacking a woman in the middle of the day.

        … on an empty streetcorner, with no protest anywhere nearby.

        Overall, come on. Twitter isn’t a reliable source for information, especially not context-less videos on twitter.

        • Wrong Species says:

          Overall, come on. Twitter isn’t a reliable source for information, especially not context-less videos on twitter.

          And I’m sure that the those videos you’ve seen on police brutality aren’t taken out of context at all. All your objections are some variation of “but I didn’t see any protests near by”. That’s not what’s I’m saying. It’s a general lawlessness that’s happening. Just because it’s not happening in the general vicinity of the protests doesn’t retroactively make it not part of the riots. It’s not normal for people to just start breaking window fronts and attacking people in the middle of the day. If you don’t see that as abnormal, then there’s really no convincing you.

          This in no way matches my experience of following the news over the past few weeks.

          Yeah, dude, because you’re following CNN, NYT etc or your friends are when they share stuff. They are lying. Constantly. It’s how they stay in business.

          I’m not some redneck, Alex Jones listening, tinfoil-wearing-hat person. I used to just accept what the media said and not think otherwise. I literally don’t know how it’s possible for anyone to get this far and not realize how often they are lied to.

        • Purplehermann says:

          @Aftagley what do you think about the ‘voilence seems to work, let’s use more of it’s issue WS referenced?

          • Aftagley says:

            @Wrong Species

            I think this is the chasm of our disagreement. Maybe it’s because people I know and love work in media, but I don’t think they’re lying. Maybe they’re wrong sometimes, maybe they can chase the most interesting version of a truth instead of the most informative, but I think at the end of the day most of them want to inform, and those that aren’t are eventually found and denounced.

            That being said, I’m sorry for implying you were a “redneck, alex jones listening tinfoil-wearer” I didn’t mean that and I’m sorry I came across that way. I was frustrated with chasing down the provenance of a bunch of twitter vids.

            @Purplehermann

            I’ve been to multiple protests. I’ve seen several turn violent, some as a response to police action, some of their own accord. In each case, they’ve all been remarkably less meaningful or indicative of future change post-violence. Violence tends to warp the story into being about the violence instead of the underlying cause. If you resort to violence, you’ve basically rolling the die on how you’ll be viewed.

            Yeah, the prevailing narrative right now seems to be minimizing protest violence and maximizing police violence. I don’t think that’s a great thing, but I also think that protester violence is being actively reduced by other protesters. If you go to protests now, you’ll see people actively subduing people who try to be violent.

            All in all, I condemn violence, but I don’t think the presence of ancillary violence is enough to negate everything else.

    • SamChevre says:

      At least in Richmond, the rioting and vandalism are ongoing.

      And the rioters have already succeeded in damaging an important historical archive, vandalizing some of the best-known landmarks in the city, destroying a lot of small businesses, setting a house on fire with people in it….

      And my facebook page, which is mostly left-wing, is ecstatic.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        Having said that the violence seemed over, I was wrong. Some parts of Chicago seem really angry, with the limited security being sent to rich areas.

      • albatross11 says:

        I’m guessing the people cheering are not feeling any personal threat that the looters/rioters/vandals will, say, burn down their homes or destroy their property. It’s easy to cheer for chaos that’s happening to someone else….

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:

          I think you’re right, but there’s also the aspect of Social Justice which says it’s immoral for privileged people to care about their own interests, and I think at least a few privileged people take that seriously.

  47. Edward Scizorhands says:

    I think https://thecovidchallenge.org rolled itself into https://1daysooner.org/ . They used to be separate, right? But now they point to the same thing.

    If people want to volunteer for challenge trials but the people in charge won’t let them, it seems the next step is to just volunteer for a normal test, and then go hang out with a bunch of sick people.

    • AlexanderTheGrand says:

      By normal test do you mean normal vaccine trial? If so, this wouldn’t be a good idea. A vaccine is judged by comparing the proportion of people who get sick in and out of the control group. If the vaccine halves your risk of sickness and hanging around the covid ward quadruples your risk, you’re going to make the vaccine look like it increases the risk of disease. And I assume they don’t control for exposure risk after the trial starts, maybe before based on job-description.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        If I gathered up 20 other volunteers to sign up for the test, presumably half of us would be in each group.

      • Dacyn says:

        If the test is double-blind then your risk will be quadrupled due to “hanging around the covid ward” (in your example) whether you’re in the experimental group or the control group, so it won’t look like the vaccine increases the risk of disease.

  48. Anteros says:

    In case you don’t get a reply – if it was my book review contest, I’d say sure, why not, go for it.

  49. John Schilling says:

    Counterpoint: Because the current COVID-19 containment strategy was unsustainable from the start, and because nobody has the balls to implement a new strategy and/or accelerate vaccine development, it does not matter. We always were going to pretend that masking up and locking down was going to save the day, until we gave up and let the disease run out of control and kill everyone who was ever going to die in an uncontrolled pandemic at whatever the mortality rate turns out to be. Then, when all of that was over and done, we’d eventually get a vaccine that would take the edge off future outbreaks.

    Exactly what specific thing trips the transition from “we’re all masked up and locked down” to “meh, don’t care any more”, doesn’t matter, because it’s going to happen anyway. So if there’s a thing worth doing and this is the best argument anyone has against it, meh, go ahead and do it.

    I could make a more nuanced and less blatantly pessimistic version of this take, but I think you’ve already consumed 90% of the recommended daily wordcount for this debate.

    • AlexanderTheGrand says:

      Counter-counterpoint — the world is lucky that it seems as if soft measures (like keeping your distance from strangers, heavy mask-usage, and not shouting into a stranger’s face) may be enough to curb spread. Some people are angry about lockdowns not because they don’t work, but because maybe a lot less pain would work almost exactly as well. If that’s the case, all a city/state/country needs to do is lock down until the epidemic is at an acceptable cases/day, and then keep a steady state with these softer measures. SF is an example of this strategy. But a big social event like a protest can make current-cases jump significantly, putting us in an unacceptable cases/day, and make locking down again necessary.

      Said more succinctly: if soft measures can keep R at 1, then the right strategy is to lock down until we’re at an acceptable number of deaths per week, and then maintain a steady state. A protest which bumps you to an unacceptable deaths per week means you need to go back to lockdown.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        Even if soft measures have an R above 1, if you are starting from a low level and have a long enough doubling time, it becomes a very slow burn in the community.

        I worry the protests have been giant spreader events, which means we are no longer at low levels. We won’t know for another week or two, though.

      • John Schilling says:

        Counter-counterpoint — the world is lucky that it seems as if soft measures (like keeping your distance from strangers, heavy mask-usage, and not shouting into a stranger’s face) may be enough to curb spread.

        Which is why the disease didn’t spread in Sweden, right?

        • Wrong Species says:

          The pattern we see is very similar in almost every country, regardless of policy: the virus starts out exponential until it reaches some critical point(way below herd immunity) where it merely grows linearly and then reduces very gradually. Cases and deaths were still going up but at least the growth rate is decreasing. My guess is that the Coronavirus spreads mainly through super spreader events and if you avoid those, you’ll avoid seeing big spikes. My understanding of Sweden is that they basically didn’t shut down anything until fairly far along. The problem is that the BLM protests are the quintessential super spreader event.

        • Which is why the disease didn’t spread in Sweden, right?

          As of the last time I looked at the figures, the per capita death rate in Sweden was higher than in Denmark or Norway but lower than in the U.S.

        • John Schilling says:

          The pattern we see is very similar in almost every country, regardless of policy: the virus starts out exponential until it reaches some critical point(way below herd immunity) where it merely grows linearly and then reduces very gradually.

          Right, but another thing that is similar in almost every country is that the government imposes lockdowns during the exponential phase. I don’t think you can so easily decouple that from the “and then it grows merely linearly” part. And thus I do think that the part where the country that so conspicuously didn’t have formal lockdowns is the country that had such conspicuously higher rates than its neighbors, is significant.

          As I have said before, I think we are all going to be Sweden in the end, so I don’t much care how we get there. But the narrative that things were going to sort themselves on their own and not get much worse than they are, decreasing growth, no second wave, and that it was uniquely the protests that spoiled this optimistic scenario, is not going to fly.

      • AlesZiegler says:

        We do not know yet whether sustainable soft measures will be sufficient (EDIT: to bring R below 1) or not. Anyone who making confident claims either way is overconfident.

        • LesHapablap says:

          Edit: I meant to post this in response to @John Shilling above

          Sweden has had a transmission rate below 1 for two months or so with voluntary social distancing. Also, every country including Sweden had exponential growth for the first several weeks of infections, even with voluntary social distancing. Any model for how the virus works has to explain both these facts.

          My suspicion is that herd immunity is reached much faster than the initial estimates for a few reasons:
          -estimates of R0 were based on data from the inital stages of spread, where superspreaders dominate. So ‘actual’ R is much less than 3 (I don’t have any data to support this)
          -dispersion factor (heterogeniety of transmission rate among the population) is high and the simple herd immunity threshold formula 1-1/R0 is based on homogeneity link text
          -Voluntary social distancing reduces transmission rates a whole lot

          This explains why Sweden’s cases have been dropping off when they probably only had 10-15% who had had covid in Stockholm. Which is an extremely important thing for any model of covid to explain.

          It also explains why initial growth in every country was completely out of control, sparking lockdowns: superspreaders were over represented at the start of each country’s epidemic.

          As far as strategy goes:
          It means that you’d expect any place that had more than say 10% of their population infected, they can maintain R<1 with lockdowns lifted. Which is an anti-lockdown argument looking at things now.

          What about if you were a country with your first 1000 confirmed cases, what would this model above give as the best strategy? I suppose it would mean an initial very hard lockdown followed by quick reopening once reaching a threshold of lowish case numbers while protecting vulnerable superspreaders. Or a Sweden style strategy with protection for the elderly, anticipating herd immunity at 20% infected. Which of those saves more lives and helps the economy depends on some unknowns. The worst strategy woud be the UK and US strategies with this model, which gives you a punishing lockdown without saving lives.

          Tangentially, I think the estimates for IFR were higher partly for bias reasons but also because initial superspreader events were disproportionally affecting vulnerable groups, that is nursing homes. I don't have any data to support that though.

        • AlesZiegler says:

          I am not sure whether any estimates od Swedish trasmission rates can be trusted. Their testing levels are so low that any conclusions from that country are highly uncertain.

        • LesHapablap says:

          @AlesZiegler,

          I posted a response last night but it disappeared!

          I would never look at confirmed case numbers to assume anything for the reason you describe. Daily deaths shoulud be reliable though:
          sweden numbers

          I haven’t found any country or state without lockdowns that still has exponential growth, they are all either steady or declining deaths. Japan, Florida, Georgia, Singapore, etc. That is not great evidence for the anti-lockdown side because it could mean a few different things. But it needs to be taken into account.

        • AlesZiegler says:

          @LesHapablap

          Singapore has a lockdown, but you have a good point with a number of deaths in Sweden. that is probably somewhat reliable evidence that their R is indeed below 1 for a some time.

    • Oldio says:

      +1

    • LesHapablap says:

      Any model that says that lockdowns are necessary needs to explain why countries and states without lockdowns are almost all seeing declining or steady cases. It’s all well and good for Cochran to say that herd immunity isn’t there yet in these places, but something is causing the cases to drop. Note that that doesn’t necessarily mean that shooting for herd immunity is the best strategy, but I can’t take seriously anyone that says that the lockdowns are preventing exponential growth of the disease.

  50. Eric T says:

    I’d like to just address the idea of “you can just protest in 2 years time”

    This isn’t really how protests work? Protests and mass civil action runs on energy, and energy dissipates over time. Its not reasonable to ask people to put their anger in a cryo-tube and pull it back out in 2 years, humans aren’t rational robots as much as SSC wishes we all were, and even from a rationalist perspective, it seems unlikely that attempts to organize a protest this large and energetic in 2 years wouldn’t fail.

    Not arguing with your broader point, just pushing back on this idea that I’ve seen floating around.

    • Randy M says:

      But if there is not another incident that sparks such anger, then… the protests were not necessary anyways. If there is, then the protests could be renewed in response to that.

      Also, the alternative to be considered is doing the next best thing, not no thing. I’m generally down on the effectiveness of awareness activism, but there should be an election or something that could have bearing on the issue, and I don’t mean just the presidential one.

      Though, that brings to mind an interesting point. Are referenda and ballot initiatives that require X signatures basically impossible now? I assume retail is heavily discouraging solicitations.

    • CatCube says:

      The part that infuriates me about this is that all of this same justification is true for reopening and reopening protests.

      People were desperately unhappy being stuck in their homes, and had forgone religious practice. Businesses were getting smashed flat, and just like your protests, can’t be just put off–many businesses rely on habits, which are now broken and they’re going to have to rebuild their customer base, assuming they can stay open long enough to do so. (I’m probably going to be getting a lot less coffee from the little local coffee shop I used to frequent, just because my consumption habits have changed, for example.) People couldn’t spend time with dying loved ones, or go to their funerals. People in NYC were getting fined for having their religious funerals–where’s their First Amendment rights?!

      Plus, how many excess deaths are you going to have due to the economic contraction this all caused? I don’t mean “deaths of despair” during the lockdown (though you have that too), I mean the deaths due to delays in, say, lifesaving medicine that would have happened earlier without the deferral of investment.

      But anybody who had a problem with that, or saying that there needed to be a closer look at the tradeoffs, was just a heartless grandma-killer.

      However, when these protests came along, all of a sudden these nuances come to the forefront. “Oh, how many people can we save from racism to balance against the lost lives by protesting now, rather than deferring?” Didn’t seem to get much traction when other people were asking for these tradeoffs. <sneer>”Oh, so a haircut is more important to you than saving grandmas?</sneer>

      And I should note that I supported the lockdowns! I trusted that the people recommending them were actually serious about the tradeoffs. It turns out, though, that “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” It’s pretty clear that I was a sucker, and this was just a power-grab.

      • Nick says:

        The best defense for the instantaneous turnaround I have heard is from certain public health officials, who are saying that they actually have been defending nuance and tradeoffs and blah blah blah for months now, and even publishing about it, it’s just been getting ignored. In other words, the issue is the way the media selectively boosted said nuance into the stratosphere the moment a cause came along that they liked, and public health officials have just been used all along.

        Some public health officials absolutely were talking about nuance and mitigation and etc. weeks ago. But it is hard to take this defense seriously when, among others things: 1) some of them are nonetheless cheering the protests on, completely lacking the nuance they claim to have been maintaining all along; 2) they apparently completely failed to protest the selective media distortions, then and now; 3) even now they instead yell at conservatives for Noticing and being really, really pissed off.

        (ETA: Here’s an example of public health experts (Gonsalves and Tufekci) making this argument. You’ll have to scroll up to read the whole thread, of course; I picked a reply at the bottom so the whole thing would be visible.)

      • albatross11 says:

        Some people were consistent, some weren’t. As is common, a lot of blue-checkmark types on Twitter were inconsistent and generally beclowned themselves. That’s what clowns do, nothing for it.

        • Jaskologist says:

          It’s not just some blue checks. Remember “In a word: The South” when the NYT was trying to stir up hatred around Southern states writ large for the crime of driving a mile from their houses? That made it all the way to these comment threads.

        • CatCube says:

          @Jaskologist

          Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice” is another example of how when it’s a right-wing concern about economic collapse there’s no tradeoffs acceptable, just shrieking about killing grandmas, but when left-wing protests erupt there’s a Strange New Respect for nuanced analysis.

      • AlesZiegler says:

        You think that lockdowns were “a power grab”? In what sense?

        • CatCube says:

          <singsong>I. Get. To. Make. You. Stay. In. Your. House. And. Not. Go. To. Church. And. Shut. Down. Your. Business. And. Take. Your. License. If. You. Dare. Defy. Me.</singsong>

        • Eric T says:

          @CatCube
          Alright but like, what’s the endgame? Presumably there will be no lockdown at some point in the near-ish future, and then everything just goes to normal again. I think for something to qualify as a power grab there needs to be a way for the people in power to keep it.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          @Eric T:

          Alright but like, what’s the endgame?

          Totalitarianism. They get to literally make you stay in your house at all times except for approved activities like Leftist protests. They get to abolish Christianity. They get to shut down whichever businesses they want.
          They weren’t voicing a clear plan for or even desire to keep that power permanently, but they were openly discussing whether it was politically viable to keep that level of total power for 18 months or longer: indefinitely because the future of the infectious disease was unknown (when and even if there’d be a vaccine, etc).

        • Matt M says:

          The endgame isn’t “lockdown forever” but “lockdown whenever we want there to be lockdown.”

          The specific test case of “we can take away some of your freedoms for a pandemic” will then be stretched and applied to “we can take away all of your freedoms for anything we say is an emergency.”

          I don’t know what the plan for future lockdowns for different reasons is. I’m not sure they have one. But they want to have that power and they want to know they can exercise it and the public will happily consent and the courts/media will look to the precedent of “well, last time they did it and nobody seemed to mind, so it must be legit.”

        • CatCube says:

          @Eric T

          What was the endgame for Chauvin? He had already effected the arrest of Floyd so he didn’t need to use as much force as he did. He did it because nobody would stop him and he liked having power over people.

        • Eric T says:

          @Le Maistre Chat

          Alright I’m just going to come out and say it. It’s very hard for me to come into a community where I’m told rationality and critical thinking are king and we can guaff at those silly protestors for not thinking critically about this, and then get told that a lockdown that was clearly just a flawed response to a scary pandemic we knew very little about is a secret conspiracy theory by the Left to destroy Christianity. Especially considering lockdowns have occurred in deeply christian states and have been implemented by deeply christian/red state governments, and oh yes most of the Left is christian too! People seem to always forget that fact.

          they were openly discussing whether it was politically viable to keep that level of total power for 18 months or longer: indefinitely because the future of the infectious disease was unknown

          This is an infectious disease that has killed 400k people already, and we know frustratingly little about it. I think its obvious that politicians have a very difficult set of policy decisions to make about how long if at all to keep the lockdown going etc. etc. I’d rather they practice caution. And as we’ve seen from these protests, if the government tried something as blatantly unpopular as abolishing the church, people would simply ignore the quarantine and march en-masse. The reason most of us on the Left were annoyed by the Anti-Lockdown protests was because from our perspective there wasn’t an external thing worth protesting, they were just protesting the quarantine, which was impacting all of our lives fairly equally.

        • Eric T says:

          @MattM

          The specific test case of “we can take away some of your freedoms for a pandemic” will then be stretched and applied to “we can take away all of your freedoms for anything we say is an emergency.”

          Isn’t there a term for this type of thinking? Involving a particularly icy and steep part of a mountain?

          Like clearly COVID-19 was an actual emergency, not something the government just made up right? Here in NYC alone tens of thousands have perished, I mean more people died from COVID than 9/11, and 9/11 gave us the fucking patriot act! And even that didn’t lead to totalitarianism. I can get some fear of the government but I think:

          . But they want to have that power and they want to know they can exercise it and the public will happily consent and the courts/media will look to the precedent of “well, last time they did it and nobody seemed to mind, so it must be legit.”

          Is such a cynical view of what the government is doing, and probably fails Hanlon’s Razor.

        • Eric T says:

          @CatCube

          What was the endgame for Chauvin? He had already effected the arrest of Floyd so he didn’t need to use as much force as he did. He did it because nobody would stop him and he liked having power over people.

          I think its really disingenuous to compare the response of a government to a global pandemic to one guy who decided he would like to crush the windpipe of a black dude.

          But you know what, I’ll take you at face value and just say this. That was an abuse of power, but it certainly wasn’t a “power grab” of any kind.

        • Matt M says:

          a secret conspiracy theory by the Left to destroy Christianity

          It’s not a “secret conspiracy.” It’s right out there in the open. Our public officials are giving press conferences, looking us right in the eye, and saying “Christian churches are banned because they’re dangerous and Jewish funerals are banned because they’re dangerous and baseball is banned because it’s dangerous, but social-justice protests are A-OK because that cause is really important.”

          That’s about as blatant of a power-grab and viewpoint discrimination as can possibly exist, and I don’t know what else to tell you if you can’t see that.

          Isn’t there a term for this type of thinking? Involving a particularly icy and steep part of a mountain?

          The thing about slopes is that they often are, actually slippery. The Patriot Act is a great example of one! I was a neocon back then and totally supported it. The thing that was immediately passed after 9/11 didn’t seem so bad, and after all, it was a national emergency.

          But nobody ever told us what it would lead to. Pointless wars that last decades and will never end. Increasingly tyrannical airport security countermeasures (the Patriot Act itself doesn’t say “you have to take your shoes off at the airport and dump liquids, all that stuff was shoved in later”), CIA rendition, etc.

          I don’t know what of all the horrible war-on-terror related things are legally justified by the Patriot Act and what ones aren’t. But it definitely served to provide political cover and justification for the politicians involved. It sent a message of “the American people are okay with us doing whatever we feel like doing so long as we can say it’s for their own safety.” And it was a bad idea that increased tyranny and didn’t actually make us any safer.

          Just as the lockdowns are. There is little evidence they are making us any safer. But they’re definitely increasing tyranny. Not just now, but if they get away with it, in the future as well.

        • Eric T says:

          It’s not a “secret conspiracy.” It’s right out there in the open. Our public officials are giving press conferences, looking us right in the eye, and saying “Christian churches are banned because they’re dangerous and Jewish funerals are banned because they’re dangerous and baseball is banned because it’s dangerous, but social-justice protests are A-OK because that cause is really important.”

          That’s about as blatant of a power-grab and viewpoint discrimination as can possibly exist, and I don’t know what else to tell you if you can’t see that.

          I will openly concede that viewpoint discrimination is occurring, but the fact that people are inconsistent in their principals=/= the left wants to destroy Christianity. Plenty of secular activities are also being banned, my brother’s nondenominational wedding had to be called off.
          The protests have a kind of unique zeitgeist to them sure, and that probably causes people to not want to speak out against them, but even with that, as statismagician posted downthread, very few actual public health people are signing this pro-protest petition.

          And look, I’m sure if I dug I could find dozens of examples of Republican state governments unfairly benefiting Christian churches over secular organizations. Is this proof the Right wants to abolish atheism?

          Just as the lockdowns are. There is little evidence they are making us any safer. But they’re definitely increasing tyranny. Not just now, but if they get away with it, in the future as well.

          I strongly disagree with this. A key difference between the Patriot Act and the Lockdowns is the Patriot Act’s main impacts occurred “behind the scenes” and didn’t meaningfully impact the average American’s day to day life, so politicians were able to stay in power while being shady as shit in the background.

          But the Lockdowns have basically been a disaster on all fronts. The economy cratered, unemployment skyrocketed, unrest soared, and basically nobody is happy right now. People on both sides are getting fed up with being indoors all the time, and politicians are 100% ending the lockdowns earlier than they think are smart from a public health perspective for political reasons. If I were a politician who wished to remain in office in the future, supporting another lockdown sounds like a great way to lose.
          At the VERY least, they’re controversial and damaging to the things politicians care about enough that to say “we all accept them” seems a bit much.

        • AlesZiegler says:

          So I get that the theory is that alleged pandemic response serves just as a pretext for wannabe totalitarians and Christian haters, who are in charge of large swathes of US government(s), to do a sort of a trial run for a suppresion of Chrisitianity and turning USA into totalitarian state, which I presume is their longterm goal?

        • CatCube says:

          @Eric T

          You asked if there had to be some “endstate” being worked towards here. I offer the comparison as an example that people that enjoy exercising power don’t have to have an endstate beyond the exercise of arbitrary power.

        • Eric T says:

          @CatCube

          Right, in which case even if everything you are saying is true, it’s not a power grab, it’s just a temporary flex of control that will fade imminently and we’ll all go back to life as normal.

          See above for why I think the things everyone is saying here aren’t true irregardless of that fact.

        • Eugene Dawn says:

          Agree with Eric T, this is all incredibly unconvincing. Pakistan had a lockdown, with Pakistani public health experts arguing for the closure of Mosques during Ramadan. Indonesia, Turkey, and Iran shut down their mosques, and Saudi Arabia has been pressuring congregants to pray at home, not at a mosque. I presume everyone here would find it laughable to suggest that COVID was just a pretext for the notoriously secular Iranian government to quash Islam.

          Similarly, the Israeli government had a three-daylockdown specifically targeted at Passover seders, that excluded Arab towns. Is this evidence that the Netanyahu government is anti-Jew and pro-Arab? What’s more, anti-Netanyahu protests
          have continued (legally) during COVID: does the fact that Netanyahu’s government banned Passover while allowing protests against his own government to continue mean that Netanyahu is engaged in an exercise of power over pro-Netanyahu Israeli Jews?

        • Evelyn Q. Greene says:

          @Eric T

          It’s a bit funny for a guy who thinks america is systemically racist to call systemic discrimination against Christians a “secret conspiracy”.

        • Eric T says:

          @Eric T

          It’s a bit funny for a guy who thinks america is systemically racist to call systemic discrimination against Christians a “secret conspiracy”

          That’s a low effort response and you know it. There’s hundreds of years of organized, legal, and violent persecution of black people throughout the history of this country, I can point to hundreds of examples of racist state laws, discriminatory immigration policies, or outright legalized racism over the last 5 generations.

          What we’re discussing here is whether or not this ONE specific response, the lock down, is part of a conspiracy to abolish Christianity.

          For all the reasons I and @Eugene Dawn posted above the answer is an obvious and resounding no. Nobody has cleared even the first hurdle of proving that this a targeted anti-christian effort, when as several people have noted the lockdown has negatively impacted people of all religions fairly evenly. Muslims are also not being allowed to go to Mosques right now.

          Furthermore, a massive amount of Non-Leftist states and governments have employed similar policies. See above for Israel, pretty clear there I think. The UK just went through a major conservative surge – Is Boris Johnson out to destroy christianity? Is the fact that the lockdowns have ended faster in Red Tribe states proof that Donald Trump wants the abolish Atheism?

          Maybe the protests aren’t being given a pass just because they’re Leftist? Maybe its because they’re massive and politicians don’t want to incur the political blowback of opposing them? Maybe politicians are just dumb? Maybe Hanlon’s Razor is applying here. Comparing this as evidence of anti-christian behavior to say… Jim Crow laws as evidence of racist behavior smacks of intellectual dishonesty.

          I have done my best through dozens of posts now to highlight different elements of why I think the country has suffered from, and still suffers from systemic racism. I think that you would ignore all of my arguments and just try to make me seem like a hypocrite genuinely saddens me.

        • AlesZiegler says:

          You asked if there had to be some “endstate” being worked towards here. I offer the comparison as an example that people that enjoy exercising power don’t have to have an endstate beyond the exercise of arbitrary power.

          Oh, I see that I missed another possible explanation, which is that US government officials just really enjoy random acts of oppression against Christians.

        • Randy M says:

          I presume everyone here would find it laughable to suggest that COVID was just a pretext for the notoriously secular Iranian government to quash Islam.

          This would be a good chance for them to crack down on heterodox congregations that don’t submit to the state. But I’m not sure if these countries would feel the need for such pretext.

        • Eric T says:

          @Eric T

          It’s a bit funny for a guy who thinks america is systemically racist to call systemic discrimination against Christians a “secret conspiracy”

          Also hold the phone, not to dogpile but there’s also a pretty big difference between “systemic oppression” (of minorities or Christians mind you) which is simply the idea that systems of power are biased in a pervasive and subtle way, and what LMC and Matt M where advocating for, which is that there is a plan in motion to destroy Christianity, and this is somehow a part of said plan. I am willing to accept with a fairly low evidentiary threshold there is systemic religious oppression. My threshold for secret plans to “Abolish Christianity” or “Instill Totalitarianism” is much higher.

        • Matt M says:

          I should clarify – I don’t think the end goal is necessarily anti-Christian. I think that’s a small piece of it.

          What I would say is that there’s a certain class of people, almost all of which who are blue-tribe (although they don’t necessarily consist a majority of blue-tribe), who want society to be significantly more “ordered.” They want things organized and controlled by technocrats. They don’t want individuals free to make their own decisions, and certainly not free to make the “wrong” decisions.

          Think of the common internet meme “I will not live in the pod and I will not eat bugs.” This is a response to those types of people, who want to plan and organize and centralize everything and don’t give a single whit for individual preferences or utility or anything else.

          I think COVID lockdowns directly serve this class. These are people who see “You can’t go to church” as a minor inconvenience. Whether it’s Catholic or Protestant or Jewish or Muslim. They think that if it’s “best for society” to order “no more church now” (either temporarily, or permanently), then the government can and should do just that. Their endgame isn’t an assault on Christianity specifically. It’s an assault on your freedom of choice generally. They don’t want you to have any meaningful choices. You can choose things that don’t matter. George Carlin had a famous bit about this – the “illusion of choice” wherein you have 200 different breakfast cereals to choose from, but only two political parties.

          This is how totalitarian societies look in common fiction. It’s Orwell and its the Twilight Zone and its the American conception of how the Soviet Union looked like (a KGB agent can stop you on the street and demand your “papers”, which isn’t just your ID, but a document that clarifies why you should be allowed out on the streets at all).

          The endgame is to move the needle towards totalitarianism and away from individual choice. To deny that this is the general direction blue-tribe bureaucrats favor as a matter of principle strikes me as silly.

        • Evelyn Q. Greene says:

          That’s a low effort response and you know it

          It is not and do not. To be clear I do not like Christians, I am a proud asshole atheist, and a bisexual woman who grew up in a conservative church. I have been absolutely shocked by the religious discrimination
          that has been done thought the lockdowns, not just the preferential treatment of the protesters, but in things like shutting down drive-in church services that pose no risk on infection.

          I do not actually think that these of part of a effort to specifically abolish Christianity, rather than tribal conflict, but I am surprised that religious institutions have been so openly attacked .

          Comparing this as evidence of anti-christian behavior to say… Jim Crow laws as evidence of racist behavior smacks of intellectual dishonesty.

          I did not compare it to Jim crow laws I compared it to your much weaker evidence of modern systemic racism.

        • Eric T says:

          I think COVID lockdowns directly serve this class. These are people who see “You can’t go to church” as a minor inconvenience. Whether it’s Catholic or Protestant or Jewish or Muslim. They think that if it’s “best for society” to order “no more church now” (either temporarily, or permanently), then the government can and should do just that. Their endgame isn’t an assault on Christianity specifically. It’s an assault on your freedom of choice generally. They don’t want you to have any meaningful choices. You can choose things that don’t matter. George Carlin had a famous bit about this – the “illusion of choice” wherein you have 200 different breakfast cereals to choose from, but only two political parties.

          Ok, I think the goalposts have been shifted here. Previously the discussion was “Is this an attempt at a Leftist Power Grab” which was why I made such a big deal of the fact that a massive amount of Right-leaning governments ALSO did lockdowns. If the discussion now is “Are Leftists benefiting from the lockdown” I think explained why I don’t buy that argument re: political popularity above w/ my comparison to the Patriot Act, but that’s a much more reasonable stance and one I think we can meaningfully debate.

          The endgame is to move the needle towards totalitarianism and away from individual choice. To deny that this is the general direction blue-tribe bureaucrats favor as a matter of principle strikes me as silly.

          I don’t think I’ve ever done that? There’s a difference between me denying that these lockdowns are part of a plan to invoke Totalitarianism and me denying that Leftists fall lower on the “value individual liberty” scale. I don’t deny that, I downright accept it.

          As for how I continue to hold these beliefs, I mean again I feel like I’ve said a lot about it above and… well I don’t want to just repeat myself. So to summarize:

          -The Lockdowns are done all over regardless of if Lefitsts are in power
          -The Lockdowns are unpopular and damaging to the country in enough of a way that they are unlikely to be attempted again barring similarly extraordinary circumstances
          -The Lockdowns haven’t targeted Christians any more than the fact that they’ve targeted the public broadly and most of the public (including most of the Left!) are Christian.
          -There may be systemic oppression against Christians broadly, I simply lack awareness of this issue – but that was never the topic of the debate. Merely I was taking issue with the categorization of these Lockdowns as some part of a greater Leftist agenda, when the evidence seems to indicate to me they’re a fairly isolated occurrence.

        • Eric T says:

          but in things like shutting down drive-in church services that pose no risk on infection.

          See this is the kind of thing that would be very helpful going forward. This isn’t something I had heard about, and seems to be the first piece of evidence of policies specifically targeted to Christian Churches/Communities presented in this thread. I’ll look in to where and why this happened and get back to you. My frustration came largely from the fact that people were basically saying I was ignorant for believing X instead of Y, and ignoring pretty much all of my arguments for why Y wasn’t true.

          I did not compare it to Jim crow laws I compared it to your much weaker evidence of modern systemic racism.

          I mean, first off the main thrust of my argument throughout this thread has been about historical Racism – see my large first post in TwoMcMillion’s post for how I basically framed my response as: Here is why the country can be systemically racist even if racism no longer exists right now. It’s been the main point of most of my arguments up and down this thread and the last OT, so the fact you were comparing it to modern, and not historical racism was very unclear to me, hence my choice of example.

          Putting this aside for a second, my disdain for your initial response comes mostly off of the fact that I think I’ve at least put in sizable effort (if not an effective one) detailing several reasons why I think it’s a totally cogent view to believe both of those things, and for someone to come in and basically just (from my point of view) poke fun at it without engaging with my points hurt a bit. See my 2nd response to you for why I think this isn’t an instance of me for example being reductive with the term “secret liberal conspiracy” and why I think there is a large gulf between “society can systemically discriminate against Christians” and what the posts I was responding to were actually saying.

          That being said my initial response to you was far more combative than it had any right to be. For this, I apologize.

        • John Schilling says:

          Is this proof the Right wants to abolish atheism?

          Is this a rhetorical question? A huge chunk of the Right does want to abolish atheism, and that’s not exactly a secret conspiracy. If you need more evidence of that, sure, throw this in the mix.

          And on the subject of “low-effort responses”, responding to the claim that X is trying to do Y for reason Z with “that’s just a stupid conspiracy theory” is extremely low-effort. We’ve been through this before, and not every claim of motivated collective behavior is a conspiracy theory.

          What is being posited here is not a conspiracy theory in any normal sense of the word. It isn’t secret, it doesn’t involve active collusion, and it isn’t illegal or nefarious at the level where just about everybody thinks it should be illegal. It’s just straight public choice theory.

          People who wind up in positions of great power in the government, are very disproportionately people who either like the exercise of hard power, or those who believe that hard power is the best way to achieve their goals. Given a problem, they will gravitate towards the hard-power solutions. Given the opportunity to amass more hard power, whether as the explicit goal or just a side effect of a policy, they will favor the policies that give them more hard power to exercise in the future. Given the ability to degrade their opponent’s centers of power, again either as explicit goal or side effect, they will again say “yes please”. If there’s a line to be drawn, they’ll draw it in the place that puts as much hard power as possible on their side and leave as little as possible for the opposition.

          The ability to impose selective lockdowns by executive order is very hard power. It falls somewhere within the plausible solution space for the current(ish) problem. And, yes, to most of the American left, organized Christianity is an opposition power center. The predictable results of this, do not require anyone to meet in smoke-filled rooms and plot conspiracy.

        • Eric T says:

          Is this a rhetorical question? A huge chunk of the Right does want to abolish atheism, and that’s not exactly a secret conspiracy. If you need more evidence of that, sure, throw this in the mix.

          And on the subject of “low-effort responses”, responding to the claim that X is trying to do Y for reason Z with “that’s just a stupid conspiracy theory” is extremely low-effort. We’ve been through this before, and not every claim of motivated collective behavior is a conspiracy theory.

          You have convinced me that I should not refer to this as a conspiracy theory, and apologize for my reductiveness.

          People who wind up in positions of great power in the government, are very disproportionately people who either like the exercise of hard power, or those who believe that hard power is the best way to achieve their goals. Given a problem, they will gravitate towards the hard-power solutions. Given the opportunity to amass more hard power, whether as the explicit goal or just a side effect of a policy, they will favor the policies that give them more hard power to exercise in the future. Given the ability to degrade their opponent’s centers of power, again either as explicit goal or side effect, they will again say “yes please”. If there’s a line to be drawn, they’ll draw it in the place that puts as much hard power as possible on their side and leave as little as possible for the opposition.

          Okay but none of this responds to any of the arguments I’ve actually made about why this A. Isn’t specific to leftists, B. probably won’t lead to anything in the long run, and C. Isn’t specifically targeting one religion over the others.

          Like I can just say “I agree” to everything you just said and still hold that the majority of the points I made upthread are true, and that it’s inaccurate to call these Lockdowns a leftist power grab which was the thing we were disagreeing about to start with.

          The ability to impose selective lockdowns by executive order is very hard power. It falls somewhere within the plausible solution space for the current(ish) problem. And, yes, to most of the American left, organized Christianity is an opposition power center. The predictable results of this, do not require anyone to meet in smoke-filled rooms and plot conspiracy.

          Right but what I’ve asked for is proof that the Leftists are driving this bus – and not say just sort of everyone, which seems to be the case. It may be that Leftists are benefiting this, that’s what I said upthread, but this started about a disagreement over what the purpose of these lockdowns was, what the intent of them was (hence my invokation of Hanlon’s Razor) and I even agreed upthread that it was entirely reasonable the Left may be benefiting from the Lockdowns! If that’s your point, then we’re on the same page and we can stop.

        • Eugene Dawn says:

          Whether or not blue tribe bureaucrats are how you describe them, the fact that the Iranian, Israeli, and Indonesian governments implemented more or less the same COVID measures, this suggests that either blue tribe bureaucrats are a much wider class than most people would recognize, or that the measures blue tribe bureaucrats took to control COVID have little to do with their overarching preference for order.

        • Jaskologist says:

          most of the Left is christian too! People seem to always forget that fact.

          So these governors and mayors couldn’t possible be acting in an anti-Christian manner because they say they are Christians.

          But when it comes to racism, those very same governors and mayors say they are believers in BLM. You still claim they have been perpetuating systematic oppression of black people in spite of all that. Indeed, those people have been administering those systems for decades now, and are most responsible for making them what they are.

          Do you believe in your theory enough to apply it when it might help the outgroup?

        • John Schilling says:

          Okay but none of this responds to any of the arguments I’ve actually made about why this A. Isn’t specific to leftists,

          It isn’t specific to leftists in general. If say Ebola had somehow found a foothold in the United States in 2014, you’d have seen Republican governors ordering lockdowns and leftist protesters condemning this as a racist overreaction.

          It’s mostly the left in this specific case, because of unique circumstances like Donald Trump not seeing the opportunity to pivot from “It’s the (bigly wonderful) economy, stupid!” to “It’s the damn dirty Chinese and their dread plague, stupid”, and the pandemic initially hitting cosmopolitan urbanite strongholds. The next time it will be different. Exactly how, I don’t know, but I’m going to predict that barring idiosyncratic leadership at the top, most of the politicians and bureaucrats everywhere are going to come up with disproportionately hard-power solutions and implement them in ways that favor their own power at the expense of their local opposition.

        • Eric T says:

          Posted this in the wrong place:

          So these governors and mayors couldn’t possible be acting in an anti-Christian manner because they say they are Christians.

          I mean that’s not what I said? I said they’re probably not out to abolish Christianity in the same way that I think those who perpetuate systemic racism aren’t out to say… wipe out Black people. I have now several times openly admitted I think leftist governments may be systemically oppressive to religious institutions (I would like some more evidence on this fact), and I’m actually getting more and more annoyed each time someone seems to ignore that.

          Again I think the issue here is what the post I was taking umbrage with actually said. It didn’t say the Left was going to “pass vaugely anti-christian policies” it said this was an intentional part of a plan to abolish christianity, which I still think is patently ridiculous.

          But when it comes to racism, those very same governors and mayors say they are believers in BLM. You still claim they have been perpetuating systematic oppression of black people in spite of all that. Indeed, those people have been administering those systems for decades now, and are most responsible for making them what they are.

          Do you believe in your theory enough to apply it when it might help the outgroup?

          1. Yes – see above. Also see my second response to Evelyn, I think there is a big difference between “systemic oppression” that I have been arguing exists (ie the lingering impacts of centuries of overtly racist policies that cause socioeconomic damage, stereotypes, and lack of opportunities) and a willful attack on X, Y or Z people.

          2. I mean there’s a difference between saying you support X and being a practicing member of a religion? One requires way more effort than the other. Are you actually implying that most (or at least a very large amount of) Christian Leftists aren’t actual Christians? Why would they lie about that on an anonymous poll?

          3. I would be even more willing if people responded to my points more 😉

        • Eugene Dawn says:

          So these governors and mayors couldn’t possible be acting in an anti-Christian manner because they say they are Christians.

          If that were the only evidence Eric and I are citing, then it would not be enough to rule the possibility out. Combined with the fact that the measures do not exclusively target Christian religious practices, the fact that politicians of every religion and ideology are implementing similar measures all over the world, and a very clear and obvious public health justification as an alternative explanation, I think the burden of proof is very decisively shifted onto those who think this is an anti-Christian clampdown, or even that anti-Christianity is a marginal factor in the lockdowns.

        • Eric T says:

          It isn’t specific to leftists in general. If say Ebola had somehow found a foothold in the United States in 2014, you’d have seen Republican governors ordering lockdowns and leftist protesters condemning this as a racist overreaction.

          Ok so the issues at hand then (if we’re going to ignore the “Leftist” angle and just ask if the current government is using the Lockdowns as a power grab) are:

          1. Have the Lockdowns been an effective means to amass power?
          2. Are they a repeatable means?
          3. Was that actually the intention, or is increased power just a side-effect of the policy?

          For 1:
          I think I’ve expressed why they are not, and the current protests just prove that. The government lacks any meaningful ability to enforce the lockdown that wouldn’t be massively unpopular. See Memorial Day weekend even before the protests for examples of how long people taking the lockdown super-seriously lasted.

          For 2:
          I’ve addressed this extensively upthread. The Lockdowns were a disaster from an “amass power” perspective. The people got angrier/rowdier, the economy cratered, government spending shot up, basically everything you want to have happen when you are in power – the opposite occured. Combined with the fact that nobody really liked being trapped indoors, I don’t see this being a repeatable plan any time in the near future, let alone one politicians will even attempt again. I think the very fact that they were letting the lockdown up so people could go to the beach here in NY is pretty clear evidence of that.

          For 3:
          Considering this whole argument kicked off about what these Lockdowns were really about – ie the initial post said ” this was just a power-grab” all along, the intention here is very important. I’ve invoked Hanlon’s Razor for a reason: I think its a lot smaller pill to swallow that the government just panicked when facing a scary virus and did something they thought may work. Effects coming from it may have been good or bad, but I fundamentally disagree that this all just a power grab.

        • Purplehermann says:

          @Eric T

          I’ve met plenty of people who identify as part of a religion, but hate a lot of the values and don’t much like the organized or mainstream parts of it, so “Christians” having it out for christianity doesn’t seem implausible to me

        • Aftagley says:

          I have now several times openly admitted I think leftist governments may be systemically oppressive to religious institutions (I would like some more evidence on this fact), and I’m actually getting more and more annoyed each time someone seems to ignore that.

          This always annoys me. People on the left largely don’t care about religions in abstraction. Out side of the extreme atheists (and they’ve fallen by the wayside in the past few years) no one on the left lies awake at night just wondering how they can screw over religions. They/we don’t care about religions, a large portion of us are either spiritual or religious.

          That being said, Organized Christians play this game of organizing politically around their faith and then treating any pushback against their politics as attacks on their faith. Me wanting to largely defeat the political goals of explicitly christian political groups doesn’t make me anti-christian.

          But when it comes to racism, those very same governors and mayors say they are believers in BLM. You still claim they have been perpetuating systematic oppression of black people in spite of all that. Indeed, those people have been administering those systems for decades now, and are most responsible for making them what they are.

          This is pretty clearly a false comparison. When BLM advocates call out leaders who have publicly supported BLM it’s for not doing enough to change their historically racist organizations into being more in line with their stated values.

          This isn’t the case with christian leaders. The organizations they run are presumably either historically neutral or positive on Christianity; you’re criticizing them for explicitly taking secret action that contradicts their stated values.

          Not living up to stated ideals =/= taking action that explicitly goes against your stated ideals.

        • Jaskologist says:

          you’re criticizing them for explicitly taking secret action that contradicts their stated values.

          Again, not secret. They’ve been quite open about having separate and unequal rules to apply to their allies vs others, specifically banning the Eucharist, Jewish funerals, etc.

        • Eric T says:

          I’ve met plenty of people who identify as part of a religion, but hate a lot of the values and don’t much like the organized or mainstream parts of it, so “Christians” having it out for christianity doesn’t seem implausible to me

          I’m not sure why this argument which is certainly the weakest of a suite of many arguments I’ve made across this thread is the one getting engagement but two thoughts:

          1. This doesn’t really map onto what we are dicussing. Those “Christians” still like… want to go to church. Usually they are a part of churches that are less involved in the global christian agenda (I am not Christian but my Christian leftist friends assure me this is the case and I believe them absent other evidence) – so banning everyone from going to church still hurts them even if they for example think the Catholics should stop saying Gay Marriage is wrong.

          2. I’m willing to fully and completely concede this point if it means the discussion will move into any of the more interesting and stronger arguments I’ve made.

        • AlesZiegler says:

          @Matt M

          The endgame is to move the needle towards totalitarianism and away from individual choice. To deny that this is the general direction blue-tribe bureaucrats favor as a matter of principle strikes me as silly.

          Count me among the silly (my excuse is that I am not an American and am observing your society from a great distance), but I see approximately zero evidence for this.

          EDIT: Also, as an aside, I have a terminological quibble. Lockdowns were not ordered by “bureaucrats” in conventional sense of the word, but by elected officials.

        • Tatterdemalion says:

          Eric T: thank you very much for saying all this, and keeping going in the face of widespread opposition, much of it pretty unfair. Please don’t give up!

        • I am willing to accept with a fairly low evidentiary threshold there is systemic religious oppression.

          At a possibly relevant tangent.

          What you mean by systemic racism, as I understand it, is a set of institutions, past and present, that result in blacks being on average worse off than whites — no racist intention required. In that sense, I think one can make a good case for systemic anti-religionism.

          Start with the outcome. I think it’s clear that, in the U.S. and most similar societies, religious belief has decline over time, the outcome one would expect if the institutions resulted in religious belief being disfavored.

          Next the institutions. We have a system of compulsory schooling, mostly publicly run and state funded. Separation of church and state is interpreted to mean that the public schools cannot teach that religion is true but can teach that it is false — not quite that explicitly, but by teaching a secular world view inconsistent with at least the stronger forms of religious belief.

          Entry to most of the higher status positions in society is via a university system which tends to push the same secular worldview.

          I grew up within that system — my K-12 school was run by the University of Chicago. I think I was an adult before I realized, emotionally as well as intellectually, that people like me in my world in the present day might seriously believe in a religion. Prior to that, religion was for me an interesting and attractive fantasy world, the world of Narnia and, for the adult version, Out of the Silent Planet.

          Of course, large parts of the authority structure claim to be pro-religion. But then, even larger parts claim to be anti-racist.

        • It’s very hard for me to come into a community where I’m told rationality and critical thinking are king and …

          This is an open forum. Scott has somehow managed to craft an environment where rational argument and civil conversation are unusually common, but that doesn’t mean that there are no exceptions.

          I think viewing the lockdown as intended as an assault on Christianity is implausible. But you may remember Rahm Emanuel’s line, “Never let a serious crisis go to waste.” If you want to change the society you live in, a crisis is a golden opportunity to do so. So I think it is plausible that part of what is happening is people who like exercising government power taking advantage of the pandemic to push a little farther the limits of how much power they are able to exercise, expecting that the precedent set by what is acceptable this time will be of use to them in the future.

          That doesn’t describe all of the blue tribe and does describe some of the red tribe, but I think support for expanded government power is more common in the former.

          For a striking example of the pattern in the past, consider the changes in American institutions made possible by the Great Depression.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          @DavidFriedman:

          I think viewing the lockdown as intended as an assault on Christianity is implausible. But you may remember Rahm Emanuel’s line, “Never let a serious crisis go to waste.” If you want to change the society you live in, a crisis is a golden opportunity to do so. So I think it is plausible that part of what is happening is people who like exercising government power taking advantage of the pandemic to push a little farther the limits of how much power they are able to exercise, expecting that the precedent set by what is acceptable this time will be of use to them in the future.

          This. This is how my comment about totalitarianism and suppressing Christianity should be understood.
          The unelected bureaucrats in public health departments (ministries, for many of our members abroad) don’t sit around all day thinking about how to control everyone’s daily movement and shutter their houses of worship. But they are university-educated, which usually (not always – you were a professor for decades) determines what they want to do. A crisis is a good excuse for the Rulers – elected, entrenched, or whatever type – to do whatever they want, whether that’s impose income tax for the first time (USA, WWI) or what they’re doing now.

        • Eugene Dawn says:

          A crisis is a good excuse for the Rulers – elected, entrenched, or whatever type – to do whatever they want, whether that’s impose income tax for the first time (USA, WWI) or what they’re doing now.

          The income tax remained after the war ended; if churches remain closed after the pandemic ends, this will be a reasonable comparison. If you don’t expect places of worship to remain closed after the end of the pandemic, you’ll have to explain what specific goal is being advanced here.

          And, once again, this does not really grapple with international comparisons: is shutting down mosques what the rulers of Iran really want to do, with COVID only a convenient pretext? How about Saudi Arabia keeping mosques closed throughout Ramadan? Is that also an example of “not letting a crisis go to waste?”

        • AlesZiegler says:

          I just see giant gap in meaning between what DF writes about The Left seeing this crisis as an opportunity to enact some of their preferred policies, which I btw. think is perfectly legitimate (actually, similar quote is attributed to Milton Friedman, if I remember correctly), and what LMC and others are saying about banning churches and instituting totalitarian dystopia.

          To be clear, I am myself on the Left and I see this crisis as an opportunity to push for certain policies like expansion of safety net for the unemployed or more rights for workers in areas like sick leave. But I have zero desire to permanently ban religious services or institute “more orderly society” to use Matt M´s phrasing.

        • Matt M says:

          The income tax remained after the war ended; if churches remain closed after the pandemic ends, this will be a reasonable comparison. If you don’t expect places of worship to remain closed after the end of the pandemic, you’ll have to explain what specific goal is being advanced here.

          The concern is less “they’ll keep the churches closed forever” and more “they’ll now be more likely to close the churches more frequently and for more spurious reasons in the future”

          The problem with saying “The government can do whatever it wants so long as the government declares an emergency” is that, even if you agree that COVID is an emergency, you might disagree with the next thing they decide to call an emergency…

        • Eugene Dawn says:

          This argument only works under the assumption that the current restrictions are not justified by the current emergency: if they are justified then there is no reason they should count as a power grab, and they provide no evidence that a future emergency would result in a power grab.

          The point of the international comparisons is to show that the actions of governments are much better explained by the hypothesis “shutting down in-person religious services is a wise and prudent thing to do” than by any alternative hypothesis; if this is in fact the reason for the restrictions, then we learn nothing about the government’s likelihood of abusing a state of emergency in the future since the current moment does not provide an instance of such.

          To tie up with the other big argument happening ’round these parts, consider the case of a police shooting: it would be quite bizarre to conclude “we should be worried that police unjustly kill people” from a police shooting that was in fact justified. You might believe it for other reasons, but the instance at hand would provide no evidence for the proposition.

        • AlesZiegler says:

          Personally I think that temporary restrictions on civil liberties in the face of huge emergency might in principle be justified.

        • Eric T says:

          @LMC
          I’m curious if you think the NYC government instituting a city-wide curfew in response to riots and Leftist protests was an attempt to harm the Left, or a justified use of power to end the looting?

        • John Schilling says:

          The government lacks any meaningful ability to enforce the lockdown that wouldn’t be massively unpopular.

          The government has had the very meaningful, and until recently very popular, ability to enforce the lockdown by e.g. shutting down a broad range of businesses. Including, yes, by arresting their owners.

          This has substantial indirect effects on everyone else. If you somehow determine that I’ve been spending a lot more of my time at home lately, that’s not because there’s a policeman watching just outside, it’s because most of the places I’d want to go have been compelled to lock their doors.

          But even if that weren’t the case, there’s still a blind spot on the left when it comes to the possibility of state power being abused where the targets aren’t wearing their worker or consumer hat. State power directed against e.g. small business owners, even unto locking them up, isn’t “meaningful”.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          @Eugene Dawn:

          Whether or not blue tribe bureaucrats are how you describe them, the fact that the Iranian, Israeli, and Indonesian governments implemented more or less the same COVID measures, this suggests that either blue tribe bureaucrats are a much wider class than most people would recognize, or that the measures blue tribe bureaucrats took to control COVID have little to do with their overarching preference for order.

          That’s a fair nuance. The example of Iran or quasi-theocratic Muslim countries (the Saudi monarchy, et al) shutting down mosques for disease control isn’t a bureaucratic move to suppress Islam: sharia actually has rules for this. Likewise I initially accepted Catholic churches closing because it has a tradition of scientific response to plague that predates the French Revolution. The problem is that our churches were closed under pressure from State power (the police we’re now supposed to be against) from Rulers who dislike us while simultaneously encouraging huge public gatherings they agree with.
          Similarly, Israel is in an awkward situation where the Prime Minister and parts of government the elected Ruler is allowed to appoint are right-of-center in a liberal nation-state (sort of: 1948 was after the heyday of classical liberalism and a large minority are Arab citizens, but you know what I mean), so the optics of holding protests against the Right to the same standards as other large gatherings would have been fair but illiberal optics.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          @Eric T: I’m not supportive of curfew laws as a general thing. I suppose I can see the imposed-and-now-lifted New York City curfew as an attempt by the Democratic Mayor to suppress people to the left of himself who had gotten out of control lawless.

        • AlesZiegler says:

          @Le Maistre Chat

          If Rulers would be attempting to build totalitarian state, playing favoritism towards demonstrations whose aims are to reduce powers of armed agents of the government charged with maintaining public order would be a rather curious way to do that.

        • Clutzy says:

          @AlesZiegler

          Not at all. Particularly if you see the terror as beneficial to you. The rioters are allied with a majority political group in many areas and a significant player nationally (whether its a majority, plurality, or significantly sized minority is up to your poll of choice). Now, I’m gonna have to draw on a few analogies I don’t want to to illustrate my point (and I don’t want to because they are 99% likely to be too extreme), but Southern Governors did this with the KKK, Mussolini with Blackshirts, Hitler Brownshirts, Lenin’s Red Guards, etc. You create this terror to dismantle government #1 so as to establish government #2.

          If Rulers would be attempting to build totalitarian state, playing favoritism towards demonstrations whose aims are to reduce powers of armed agents of the government charged with maintaining public order would be a rather curious way to do that.

          This is also not that confusing given the rhetoric of the groups. It is the (wrong from my POV as I’ve argued elsewhere) POV of the Democratic elite that police do little to interfere with and harry Republicans. In their narrative Republicans are getting away with all sorts of crimes, while Black Democrats are being unjustly imprisoned. Thus, by shifting enforcement away from police, and into speech monitors, bank regulators, school administration, employment enforcement, etc they can impose their will on other people without guns to a significant extent. Because unlike a burglar, a normal middle class person can have his life ruined simply by freezing his bank accounts.Think “Operation Chokepoint” 2.0.

          The middle class in major Democratic strongholds already complains about such things. They get fines for minor sanitary violations while down the street an unpermitted street truck sells food from a dirty truck, or they get audited when the clearly money laundering shop down the street does not, or their son gets expelled from school for calling his bully a racial slur when you can see his black eye. The regulatory state is, generally, much more oppressive to the average person than the police because they have so much more to lose. In addition, prosecutorial discretion is much greater with these middling offenses. See, e.g. Flynn vs. McCabe on Section 1001, Jussie Smollet, Duke LAX vs, Mattress Girl. The replacements I’ve seen listed by the movement are all similar to already existing, very repressive and totalitarian, parts of government.

        • ana53294 says:

          @AlesZiegler

          I’ve heard the KGB was allied with petty criminals.

          The thing is, in a more modern society, the police can’t go against law abiding citizens. But they can use the mob to go against them. They just pretend they can’t do anything.

        • AlesZiegler says:

          @Clutzy

          You create this terror to dismantle government #1 so as to establish government #2.

          So, let’s accept, for the sake of argument, that “the blue tribe” or whatever you want to call it, has a goal of installing totalitarian government in the United States. What you are describing is a situation when they are insurgents who are currently not in charge and thus want to overthrow established law enforcement apparatus. If they would be rulers already, they would be in charge of the police and if totalitarian state is indeed their goal, they be working to expand its powers. So that means that LMC is wrong about them being rulers.

          Examples of totalitarians fighting against the police you cite are from situations when they were not in charge and were working to overthrow the establishment. There is also a separate situation of power struggles or rivalries within the governing elite of an already totalitarian state, like Stalin´s purges, where police personnel indeed often were victims. But I am not aware of any case where wannabe totalitarians would became rulers of not yet totalitarian country and then proceeded to build totalitarian government via curbing the powers of the police.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          So that means that LMC is wrong about them being rulers.

          For goodness sake, sitting US Senators are out at these protests (which don’t spread COVID-19?). S&P 500 corporations are plastering they support BLM on their websites, and even Sony, a Japanese mega-corporation.
          It’s like a cyberpunk story and the corporate authorities and majority of the political ones are on your side against the President and working-class people who aren’t black activists (a fraction of a 13% minority, by definition).

        • AlesZiegler says:

          @Le Maistre Chat

          If rulers are supporting reduction in the powers of the police, them being simultaneously wannabe totalitarians is pretty implausible.

        • DeWitt says:

          Are we just forgetting about the time the other dudes marched around with guns and it was basically fine? No tear gas, no opposition, no nothing? Really?

        • Faza (TCM) says:

          @AlesZiegler

          If rulers are supporting reduction in the powers of the police, them being simultaneously wannabe totalitarians is pretty implausible.

          You do realize that a coup d’etat differs from a revolution chiefly in that it is undertaken by people who already have some measure of power? (Most often the military.)

          The successful execution of a coup d’etat involves:
          1. Decreasing the power of those portions of the state you do not control,
          2. Increasing the power of those portions of the state that you do control.

          Assuming, arguendo, that there exists a group of wannabe totalitarians that are hoping to seize control, a plausible plan for a takeover would be:
          1. Dismantle or otherwise cripple the existing security force (the police, in this case),
          2. Institute a new security force loyal to the plotters, taking over the duties the existing security force is incapable of performing,
          3. Expansion of the new security force’s mandate and powers to deal with the inevitable breakdown resulting from the power vacuum (old police is gone; new police is new and not very good at its job, yet),
          4. Profit.

          It’s actually easier to do it this way than by leaning on the existing police. The existing police may not share the plotter’s goals. People are naturally wary of expanding police power. The new security force is new and is under less scrutiny, because they aren’t the police.

          There’s nothing implausible about someone plotting a coup wanting to render the existing security apparatus impotent.

          Why would anyone be plotting a coup? One commonly encountered reason is that the existing political process does not allow them to achieve their desired political goals, because they must compromise with those who do not share them.

        • SamChevre says:

          +1 to Clutzy

          That dynamic is very visible in Virginia. The politicians in charge are basically acting like: We think Jews Southerners are evil and oppressive, but they do have legal rights so WE can’t burn down their synagoguesarchives and bulldoze their graveyardsmonuments–but what are we going to do if the populace takes matters into their own hands? And if the Jews protest–well, if it so happens that the counter-protesters have clubs, what were we supposed to do about it?

          But, of course, our protests are completely peaceful (if you ignore the several city blocks burned and vandalized) unlike theirs (where someone trying to get away from counter-protesters ran over one of them.)

          @Dewitt–did the guys who marched around with guns burn down any buildings? Tear down any memorials? Loot any stores?

        • ana53294 says:

          The police’s job has an unpleasant part, which is dealing with criminals and violent people and make them obey the law.

          The police also get to enjoy a power trip when they can start busting ordinary middle class law-abiding citizens for stupid things like walking in the park or driving twenty miles to buy bread. They seem to really enjoy dealing with people who won’t stab them or bite them or kick them, and will obediently follow instructions.

          In a situation where the police don’t have to deal with the actual unpleasant parts of their jobs, dealing with the unpleasant smelly dirty violent agressive and unhinged parts of society, and can 100% dedicate themselves to policing nice, clean, non-aggressive and non-stabby people for bullshit, has their power increased or decreased?

        • AlesZiegler says:

          Um, does anyone else feel that this thread is spiraling into tinfoil hats territory, or am I the one going crazy?

        • Clutzy says:

          Um, does anyone else feel that this thread is spiraling into tinfoil hats territory, or am I the one going crazy?

          It boils down to whether you think the rioters are people without powerful political allies, or that they have political allies in powerful positions. If you don’t think they have allies, then indeed this sounds like a conspiracy theory. If you think they do have powerful allies, the best model of them is as a force projection by those political allies. I think that second model more closely aligns with what I am seeing.

    • Nick says:

      There will be another case in 2 years’ time. Indeed, according to many of the people protesting, these things happen all the time—ubiquity is the very argument for their urgency. You can’t simultaneously maintain that George Floyd’s murder is a once in a lifetime chance and that it is representative of everyday violence against blacks.

      • Eric T says:

        Not at all! I’m merely saying people’s anger isn’t always going to be reflective of reality (for good or for ill) and from a simple organizational perspective, counting on this to just happen again in 2 years is probably a bad plan.

        Again, making no argument about whether you should wait anyway. Probably should have.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        Might not get it on camera, though.

  51. netznutzniesser says:

    Noah Smith has done a utilitarian cost-benefit analysis (of the irresponsible kind) of the protests and comes out in favor:

    https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1269677807853948928

    • actualitems says:

      The summary of his thread is:

      Expected value of incremental covid deaths from protests is 60k. He gets this mainly from others’ math.

      He then says if protests reduce annual police killings by 20% per year, that works out 11k death reduction of protests over 50 years. Then he does some quality of life calculation based on young people being killed by police vs. old people being killed by covid, and gets to a 64k number for death reduction of the protests.

      So 64k > 60k.

      He receives 3 main objections that he responds to after his thread. One, 50 years is a long time and his discount rate on future lives is zero (um, I dunno, a lot can happen in 50 years). Two, 20% is a big reduction, he claims it’s conservative (doesn’t seem that conservative to me). Three, he talks reduction in total police killings not justifiable police killings (this is a weird one, like didn’t those justified killings prevent other deaths or else why were they justified, this seems like a really big flaw in his argument).

      I didn’t see this objection, which would be one I’d add. Even if you take is 20% at face value. Shouldn’t you calculate VARP (Value Over Replacement Protest)? I mean couldn’t you pick a protest method (online, boycott, something else) that didn’t risk 60k covid deaths that was 50% as effective, 75% as effective? If you added a VARP assumption, all his math falls apart.

      • actualitems says:

        Oh wait, someone made my VARP argument

        https://twitter.com/wahoorad/status/1269718556842905603

        And Noah Smith’s response was “sure”

      • oldman says:

        He also assumes 100% chance of success of achieving the 20% savings. Or, alternatively, that the expected reduction of these exact protests is 20%. And that fewer police killings don’t lead to greater non-police killings. And that the protests themselves won’t kill a significant number of people directly. And that international copycat protests either have the same effect (unlikely, due to lower police killings in most other countries) OR won’t cause Coronavirus spikes.

        Overall there are a lot assumptions he’s hidden.

  52. Aftagley says:

    Shouldn’t there be proof of this happening already?

    The symptoms of COVID, unless I’ve been woefully misinformed, mostly show up around 2-14 days after exposure, centered around 4-5 days after, correct? The protests started on May 26th, went national that weekend, 29th or so, and have been ongoing ever since. If the protests truly are a highly-threatening transmission vector, shouldn’t we have seen an uptick in cases starting early-mid last week and continuing to grow since then?

    I’m legitimately curious here, has there been an increase in the number of COVID cases in cities/areas that have seen protests? If not, why not?

    • John Schilling says:

      SARS CoV-2 seems to rarely produce symptomatic infection in the young, particularly at the level likely to require hospitalization and thus reporting. So it wouldn’t be surprising for the short-term effect to be lost in the noise (also note that case reporting and data aggregation does not happen overnight). The real question is whether the protesters will wind up taking home their low-level infections and passing them on to their older relatives, and for that we’ll probably have to wait another couple of weeks to see.

  53. m.alex.matt says:

    What jumps out to me about those death estimates:

    Over several weeks, as each infected person infected just under one other person on average — the current U.S. transmission rate — those infections would in turn lead to 15,000 to 50,000 more,

    The number calculated assumes the total end of social distancing has *no effect on R at all*.

    If it jumps back over one as a result of the protests it’s going to be a lot worse than those estimates.

    The show of total irresponsibility involved with this whole global explosion of protest has really jaded me on what felt a bit like a little glimmer of hope that responsible government was possible. I was happy with what my governor was doing, I was angry about the people and localities that were ignoring stay at home orders, and just generally I was on board with the lockdown effort and subsequent phased, data driven reopenings.

    Then the governor showed up at a protest.

    Depending on who his opponent is next election, I’m either not voting for the governorship or voting against him, just for that alone.

    The whole thing really is an exercise in just blatant partisan or ideological politics with breathtakingly hypocritical viewpoint discrimination. Some business owners who have opened in defiance of shutdown orders have been fined and had licenses revoked after state governors have been outside with protestors violating bans on large groups gathering. I don’t like either, I’m not angry about enforcement of non-essential business shutdown orders, I’m angry about the extremely blatant ideologically selective enforcement. If enforcement of these things isn’t universal it defeats the entire purpose, in which case the business owners being punished are essentially being punished for not being anti-racist protestors. Punished by the state government.

    That’s a bit terrifying.

  54. Two McMillion says:

    Does anyone know of a place where you can ask advocates for social justice questions about their philosophy and get good answers? In particular there are three questions which form major issues I have with the social justice movement:

    1. You often talk about hearing the voices of oppressed or minority groups. You seem to believe that listening to these voices will get us closer to the truth. What proof do you have that being part of a minority group makes you better able to perceive the truth of social matters? To me it seems at least as likely that having membership in such a group would make you less objective, not more.

    2. You often quote statistics showing some disparity between, for example, the life outcomes between black Americans and white Americans, and use these statistics to demonstrate that systemic racism exists. However, I am not convinced that statistical disparities can be used as evidence for racism. What proof do you have that the existence of a statistical disparity constitutes racism?

    3. Related to the above, you sometimes state that such and such a community is underrepresented or overrepresented in something else based on that community’s percentage of the underlying population. How do you know that the community would be represented in proportion to the overall population in the absence of racism or other forms of oppression?

    I’m sure these are simple questions with obvious answers, but I’ve been unable to find clear explanations of any of them.

    Related to that, if anyone knows about some sort of “social justice 101 FAQ” that I could read, I would be really interested in seeing that.

    • metalcrow says:

      While i unfortunately don’t have an easy answer to your question, the best i could do is suggest finding someone in person or talking with an individual one-on-one (and somewhere like IM or slack which allows faster responses, since this would probably have a lot of back and forth) instead of seeing if there is a forum or gathering place to ask these questions, since that seems likely to lead to dog-piling.

      In relation to your first question though, Scott actually has talked about that before in https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/17/caution-on-bias-arguments/

    • Matt M says:

      The “problem” is that SJ is a coalition of the fringes that is rather decentralized. There is no central authority figure who can declare what doctrine is canon and what is apocrypha. So someone could write your “Social Justice 101 FAQ” and you could then refer to it in arguments, only to be told “Who cares? That person doesn’t speak for me!”

      And for fairness sake, I acknowledge that libertarianism has much the same problem. It’s almost impossible to know “what libertarians believe” aside from “that other libertarians are wrong and don’t understand libertarianism properly”

      • In the case of libertarianism, I think most libertarians agree on most of the conclusions. They disagree both on a few hard issues, such as abortion, and, more fundamentally, on the arguments that lead to the conclusions.

    • Eric T says:

      I’m not exactly a Social Justice Warrior, I’m more like a Social Justice Barbarian, but I’ll try my best to give you my/my group’s answers to these questions.

      1. You often talk about hearing the voices of oppressed or minority groups. You seem to believe that listening to these voices will get us closer to the truth. What proof do you have that being part of a minority group makes you better able to perceive the truth of social matters? To me it seems at least as likely that having membership in such a group would make you less objective, not more.

      It’s fair to think that listening to voices will lead to bias, but I think its a common misconception that those of us on the Left only want to listen to black/minority voices to the exclusion of others. Our argument is these voices have been historically underrepresented, and these groups often precluding from getting what they want. Many Leftists, myself including, think that social issues/matters resolve themselves best when everyone has a say at the table so to speak, and with a history of discrimination and more recently, voter suppression, minority voices don’t always get that say. So Leftists signal boost them so they can advocate for the things that are important to their communities, just as we are able to advocate for ourselves. I think the important distinction here is that listen to minorities =/= always do what they say all of the time.

      Usually when us leftists defer to minorities it’s not about policy decisions, its more about intractable things like their lived experiences. I don’t know what it’s like to be a victim of racism, I’m a white dude in the northeast corridor. But I believe my minority friends when they tell me of instances of racism they have dealt with, and I believe the communities that tell me they suffer from these instances. Statistics do show Minority communities have worse outcomes – the eternal war between Left and Right is “why?” I’ll explain why I believe its more racism/history than say genetics below, as it fits in with your other questions, but if you accept that I do fall on that side of the argument, it’s pretty obvious why I choose to listen to people suffering from these conditions.

      I also think its just very hard to, as a member of an external group, really understand the wants and needs of minority communities. Be it cultural differences, or simply different perspectives on how the world works, well-meaning white people tend to fuck up a lot when we try to help out the minority communities on the Left, and so I try not to be the latest fuck up.

      2. You often quote statistics showing some disparity between, for example, the life outcomes between black Americans and white Americans, and use these statistics to demonstrate that systemic racism exists. However, I am not convinced that statistical disparities can be used as evidence for racism. What proof do you have that the existence of a statistical disparity constitutes racism?

      Ahhh the eternal debate. Look we can quibble forever about this. I’m inclined to think that its possible there is a partial genetic or cultural component, but I think there is fairly obvious evidence that minorities would be better off absent racism over the years.

      First remember that explicit legalized racism is only a couple generations old. There are people alive today who’s futures were wrecked by Jim Crow laws, Redlining, Segregated Schools, and the like. The current minority generation that you see out protesting grew up with parents and grandparents who’s futures and ability to succeed where cut off at the knees by racist policies on the state and federal level, and we all know that the largest predictor of being poor at the end of your life is being poor at the start of it.

      Maybe these minorities wouldn’t be as well of as whites absent racism, but they didn’t get the chance to prove/disprove that. Here’s where we hit another foundational disagreement with the right: what now? Let’s assume racism is disappeared by our old friend the genie tomorrow. I’d argue that we should still implement some form of assistive programs for minorities, who even absent current racism, struggle on the aftereffects of historical racism now. Put bluntly, American can’t become a Meritocracy until the starting point is equalized, and its not equal. Through no fault of their own, minority children are more likely to be born in poor, high-crime areas with terrible educational systems than white children. I would very much like to fix that fact.

      3. Related to the above, you sometimes state that such and such a community is underrepresented or overrepresented in something else based on that community’s percentage of the underlying population. How do you know that the community would be represented in proportion to the overall population in the absence of racism or other forms of oppression?

      I don’t know that, but I don’t think I need to prove that in order to prove that there is something fucky going on. First, let’s just all agree that some portion of the country is undeniably racist. That if you run for office as a black man, or try to become a CEO as a Hispanic woman, there will be people who never give you a chance because of the color of your skin. Now we can see that positions of power aren’t just held predominately by a select few races (and men!) In addition, we can see that through modern policies that aren’t explicitly racist, like voter suppression of poorer communities, supreme court decisions that make it very hard to challenge racist sentencing/justice systems (if anyone can remind me of what SC case this was I’d love you forever – I remember everything about it except the name), and some questionable decisions on how police get funding (end civil forfeiture now please) people are prevented from making it to the top of the mountain before they can even encounter actual big “R” racism – Leftists like me simply argue that minorities haven’t been given a fair chance to fail in the first place. Maybe they will fail, but you gotta at least let them try.

      EDIT: I also agree with Metalcrow above, discussion of this on a public forum may lead to dog piling, I’d be happy to answer your questions 1-on-1 if you’d prefer that.

      • Two McMillion says:

        I’d be happy to answer your questions 1-on-1 if you’d prefer that.

        What format would you suggest for this?

      • Jacobethan says:

        supreme court decisions that make it very hard to challenge racist sentencing/justice systems (if anyone can remind me of what SC case this was I’d love you forever – I remember everything about it except the name)

        McCleskey v. Kemp.

        (I’m assuming based on your description)

      • Eric T says:

        Would this include all minority groups, including Asians who (in aggregate) already have higher income and wealth than whites? Would it include wealthy blacks? How would you justify excluding poor whites from programs that assist poor minorities?

        The answer you’ll get here will vary from person to person in the SJ community, here’s my take. I think would should also help poor whites, but poor blacks face specific issues that poor whites do not, (and probably vice-versa). The reason we’ve focused on minority communities, is its fairly easy to point to very specific things we as a society have done that have put them in this situation. Similar examples exist for poor whites, but they aren’t comparatively as clear-cut or sinister in many cases.

        As for assisting Asian Americans, this is actually something of a rift in the SJ community. I’m of the mindset that yes, actually we should give them some recompense in areas where they were discriminated against. Just because they overcame their struggles doesn’t mean it was fair they had to, and maybe they’d be even better off absent racism. If you truly believe different races have different abilities, it seems fair to give them all an even start to display that regardless if they end higher or lower than white people. However, in my opinion, the scale of what they’ve dealt with and the sheer history of it is sizeably smaller than say, african americans, and so any recompense provided to them would be similarly smaller.

        If I had to like… order how much I think people deserve recompense it’d look something like this:

        Poor African Americans/Hispanics/Middle Easterners
        Poor East Asians
        Poor Whites
        Then repeat for middle class people.

        As for whether wealthy black people would get “assistance” barring some policies like Affirmative Action, most of the things we Leftists support won’t help them simply on the basis of them already being quite well off. So for example: housing and criminal justice reforms matter a lot if you live in the ghetto, less so if you live in a nice suburb.

        • If I had to like… order how much I think people deserve recompense it’d look something like this:

          Poor African Americans/Hispanics/Middle Easterners
          Poor East Asians

          That’s an odd ordering. Chinese immigrants to the west coast suffered quite considerable mistreatment in the 19th century — the first serious immigration restrictions were targeted specifically at them. Japanese were put in concentration camps within living memory, and many of them lost their property as a result. I don’t think either Hispanics or Middle Easterners have ever suffered special legal restrictions in the U.S., although I could be mistaken.

          If you truly believe different races have different abilities, it seems fair to give them all an even start to display that regardless if they end higher or lower than white people.

          The underlying principle seems a bit odd. Imagine I am a member of a particularly talented ethnic group that has been discriminated against. Without that discrimination, my group would have an average income twenty percent higher than the rest of the country, but because of the discrimination it’s only ten percent. If I understand you, your claim is that my group should get some sort of special advantages to get back up to twenty percent.

          Next suppose my group has no special talents, but I have special talents, or rich parents, or for some other reason would have an income at twenty percent above if not discriminated against, but only ten percent above due to discrimination. Am I also due compensating advantages? If not, what does the question of group characteristics have to do with my individual desert?

          Next consider a wealthy black. He didn’t deserve whatever happened to him because of his race that made him less wealthy. But he also didn’t deserve to have wealthy parents, or win the lottery, or be born smart, or whatever other characteristics made him wealthy. The net effect of things he didn’t deserve is to make him better off than the white taxpayer (or whoever) who is paying to compensate him for the negative part of things he didn’t deserve.

        • Eric T says:

          @David – I really want to talk more about this, but I have to go to a protest, so I’ll just keep things kind of brief and maybe we can chat about this more tomorrow?

          That’s an odd ordering. Chinese immigrants to the west coast suffered quite considerable mistreatment in the 19th century — the first serious immigration restrictions were targeted specifically at them. Japanese were put in concentration camps within living memory, and many of them lost their property as a result. I don’t think either Hispanics or Middle Easterners have ever suffered special legal restrictions in the U.S., although I could be mistaken.

          Upon reflection, I think you may have a point here. I included Middle Easterners and South Americans that high largely due to the fact that many immigrants had to escape from shitty situations in their home country that are… let’s be frank… probably a significant amount of our fault. Our quest to fight communism left many casualties. But I think this way of thinking may be backwards, and I’m willing to look into the specific legal restrictions facing these groups over the years and update a list accordingly.

          Next suppose my group has no special talents, but I have special talents, or rich parents, or for some other reason would have an income at twenty percent above if not discriminated against, but only ten percent above due to discrimination. Am I also due compensating advantages? If not, what does the question of group characteristics have to do with my individual desert?

          This and your other argument of the wealthy black person I think really come down to a question of implementation. Again, I don’t think “recompense” is as straightforward as giving all black people money. For example, whether or not it would be a good idea, plenty of SJ people like the idea of governments creating grants to assist minority-owned small businesses. It is true that a wealthy black man could take advantage of these grants, but the idea is A. said person is going to be fine in either world, B. presumably we can try to institute policies to ensure poorer blacks get first pick (I don’t think this concedes that say the real issue is class – I think it just concedes that they’re both an issue), and C. I think that for a sufficiently large population, say like an entire minority, this is a fringe issue. Most people aren’t wealthy they’re middle class or below.

          As for the question of Dessert, again I do think the wealthy black man Deserves to have been not discriminated against. I also think the poor White man Deserves to have the chance to be Not Poor. I’m pretty pro wealth redistribution regardless of race, I simply think race adds an additional factor worth strongly considering. It’s why in my hypothetical ordering I put poor whites above even middle class blacks.

        • plenty of SJ people like the idea of governments creating grants to assist minority-owned small businesses.

          That results in assisting those minority-owned small businessmen that have good political contacts, who are probably the less disadvantaged.

          I suggest that a much better tactic would be to abolish restrictions, largely licensing rules, that make it hard for poor people to start businesses. There is no reason why cutting hair should require several hundred hours of classes. No reason why braiding hair should require a license. No adequate reason why, in a world where anyone can invite friends over for dinner, selling food requires permission from the city government which is often not easy to get. Certainly no reason why taking care of other people’s children for them should require a college degree, which I gather in at least one city it does.

          The only organization I know of that litigates against such restrictions is the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm.

        • I would like to raise an issue which isn’t about Social Justice in particular but about widely shared moral intuitions, which seem to me to have a serious problem.

          The intuition is that outcomes should be related to desert, that good things should happen to people who deserve to have good things happen to them.

          The problem is in the definition of desert. Start with the easy case. Black people don’t deserve to be slaves, they don’t even deserve to have employers refuse to hire them or landlords refuse to rent to them for reasons that have nothing to do with characteristics of the individual other than race.

          But what do people deserve? Suppose the employer refuses to hire me because I can’t read, or do arithmetic. That seems entirely reasonable for many jobs. But do I deserve not to know how to read or do arithmetic? Perhaps the reason is that I went to an inner city school which was terrible, my parents neglected me, I never had the opportunity to learn those things. So perhaps I don’t deserve to have the characteristics that make me deserve not to get the job.

          Next suppose that I went to a reasonably good school, and the reason I never learned those things was that I preferred to goof off and make fun of the teacher, while other, better behaved kids, learned and eventually got jobs. It’s tempting to say that now I deserve not to get the job. But the response is that I behaved that way because of characteristics, due to genetics or the accident of my environment, that made me that sort of person, and I didn’t deserve those genetics or that environment, so don’t deserve the outcome.

          It seems to me that you can push this all the way to the case of a sadistic rapist murderer, arguing that he is like that because of factors, genetic or environmental, that he wasn’t responsible for, so although it might be necessary to look him up for the protection of others he doesn’t deserve to be locked up, so his imprisonment should be made as pleasant as possible.

          I think the implicit metaphor in this line of argument is of a person as a soul floating out in the ether to be randomly embodied in a person with specific genetics and environment. The soul doesn’t deserve to be put in that particular body, so doesn’t deserve the things that being that particular person seems to make him deserve.

          Following out this argument, the conclusion seems to be that nobody deserves anything, good or bad.

          The alternative, which makes more sense to me, is to view desert, moral judgement in general, as predicated not of imaginary floating souls but of the actual person as he now is. It would be nice if everyone could have a good life. But if you end up as a horrible person, you don’t deserve to have other people provide you a good life, however much you can argue that how you ended up isn’t your fault. That’s the person you now are, and it is that person we are forming judgements about.

          There is another interesting division in moral entitledment between what Nozick described as “desert” and “entitlement,” but I will leave that for another discussion.

        • Eric T says:

          Geez I leave for a few hours and I have like 13 posts to respond to spread across multiple threads. What have I done, it’s 11:00 here in NYC XP

          @Scoop

          As I understand it, there is very little evidence that individual people of different races are treated differently when you compare outcomes for people of different races after controlling for all factors that are known to affect outcomes for people of the same race: educational achievement, growing up with two married parents, etc., etc

          I’ve seen people say there is, I’ve seen people say there isn’t. I’m not interested in having this debate as much as every time I’ve had it its come down to people circling around the same set of statistics and interpreting them differently. I attempt to resolve this in my above posts by mainly focusing on the (hopefully) much less controversial topic of historical racism we 100% know occurred and how it can impact people still living today even absent current racism.

          The argument is to assume people of all races are equal (in aggregate) and then argue that disparate outcomes can only be the result of active racism or privileges gained via past injustices — even if we can’t conclusively demonstrate all those instances of racism that are holding people down.

          The majority of your post is born from this assumption – and I think its a bit incorrect. Why do I have to assume people of all races are equal in order to hold my positions? Many on the left may believe this, but as I’ve said above I explicitly do not. I’m not sure if I buy a genetic difference between races, but there certainly are cultural differences that play a factor. My argument is simply this – regardless of whether X group would have ended above or below white people, they should still be given a fair chance to reach their potential. If Asian people on aggregate could get to 120% of white people, but racism keeps them at 110%, I’d still say that’s a bad thing. Similarly if Hispanic people could get to 80% and racism keeps them at 65% that’s also bad.

          I think the issue really is this, especially for minorities with long histories of targeted racism, we won’t know for sure whether its 80%, 100%, or 150% because they aren’t given the same chance to succeed as others. I’m not advocating for equal outcomes, I’m advocating for equal opportunities. I think if you accept that, it should resolve most of the issues you bring up in the rest of your post.

        • Jake R says:

          Geez I leave for a few hours and I have like 13 posts to respond to spread across multiple threads.

          Yeah demand around here for smart social justice folks to argue with tends to exceed supply. Traditionally that means you should probably figure out a way to charge for your services 🙂

        • NostalgiaForInfinity says:

          @Scoop

          As I understand it, there is very little evidence that individual people of different races are treated differently when you compare outcomes for people of different races after controlling for all factors that are known to affect outcomes for people of the same race: educational achievement, growing up with two married parents, etc., etc.

          Controlling for those factors won’t capture the whole story if part of the problem with structural/institutional racism (whatever you want to call it) is that you can point to specific policies or societal factors that disproportionally increase their likelihood among minority communities. E.g. historical exclusion from higher education, the war on drugs, exposure to lead and air pollution.

        • Garrett says:

          @ Jake R:

          >Traditionally that means you should probably figure out a way to charge for your services

          Thank you for a good morning laugh!

      • Matt M says:

        Right. The moral validity of a program where Joe Dirt is taxed so that the government can provide financial assistance to Tiger Woods is dubious, to say the least…

        And you can’t just say “Well fine we’ll just add a means test to it” because once you do that, you’re conceding that the issue is poverty generally and not race specifically, and we already have tons of anti-poverty programs, handouts, etc.

        • Eric T says:

          Like I said above, policies that seek to adjust racial bias aren’t literally often “give black people tons of money” and more, “help ensure black people can get to good schools” or ensure they can vote, or make sure they can get high paying jobs.
          Given that wealthy people already have a high ability to get to good schools, vote, and get jobs, I’m willing to potentially bite some wealthy blacks getting unfair benefits on the margins to push for a more equal society.

          Furthermore, I think just because you are wealthy doesn’t mean you weren’t a victim of some kind of injustice deserving recompense. Again, its a comparative, maybe Tiger would have been a billionaire had his grandparents not had to struggle as much due to the color of their skin (idk anything about tiger woods family so save yourself the trouble of informing me they’re actually wealthy silk dealers from Sweden or something).

          Helping Tiger woods is really really really really low on my list of priorities, but if he happens to get helped along the way, so be it.

        • Helping Tiger woods is really really really really low on my list of priorities, but if he happens to get helped along the way, so be it.

          If he happens to get helped at the expense of someone much poorer who is poor not because of his skin color but for some other reason?

          Suppose Tiger Woods has a son who, due to affirmative action, gets into a good college instead of a more qualified candidate who is white and poor.

          So be it?

        • Eric T says:

          Last post:

          If he happens to get helped at the expense of someone much poorer who is poor not because of his skin color but for some other reason?

          Suppose Tiger Woods has a son who, due to affirmative action, gets into a good college instead of a more qualified candidate who is white and poor.

          So be it?

          Kind of? As I said above already, I concede that this is a negative impact of AA, but I argue its fairly marginal. My gut instinct is the number of wealthy black kids, who would not have already been able to get into a good university due to the advantages they get by being rich, but are close enough that AA tips the scales, is probably a very small number. Maybe in the hundreds? Maybe less?

          Certainly I’d argue its outweighed by the average black kid, who is middle to lower middle class, goes to a worse school than the average white kid, and through no fault of their own ends with worse SAT scores. That number is much much bigger. I think government action to correct that does more good than Tiger’s kid getting into Harvard does bad.

        • Clutzy says:

          @Eric T

          I don’t have the stats on that, but when I last looked your impression is kind the opposite of how AA plays out. IIRC some absurd number of African American admittees at elite colleges come from the top 5% of the income distribution. Its basically a program for kids like the Obama girls if he had never made it as a politician and had instead just been a civil rights attorney at the ACLU or something similar.

        • Maybe in the hundreds? Maybe less?

          Certainly I’d argue its outweighed by the average black kid, who is middle to lower middle class, goes to a worse school than the average white kid, and through no fault of their own ends with worse SAT scores.

          I think you are mistaken. As best I can tell, the only black kids in law school who didn’t get accepted by a better school than they would have if they were white, or offered more money, are the tiny minority who are as able as the tiny minority of white kids who get into Stanford, Yale, or the equivalent.

          That’s my conclusion from twenty+ years as a faculty member in a law school that boasted of how “diverse” it was and routinely accepted black students with lower LSAT scores than the white students they accepted. As best I can tell, it wasn’t unusual in that policy. Because law schools want a significant fraction of black students, and because the fraction of the black population interested in going to law school and well qualified is substantially lower than the fraction of the white and Asian population, the top schools admit all the black applicants who really belong there plus some one step down, leaving the schools one step down having to do the equivalent.

          At a slight tangent, it isn’t clear that that policy benefits the black students admitted. On the one hand they get the prestige of graduating from a better law school. But since they are typically going to schools where they are near the bottom of the class they end up getting a worse education than they would get at a school where the classes were aimed at people like them.

          Also, it means that the non-black students observe that the black students in their class are mostly less able than they are and, unless they actually work through and intuit the logic of the sorting problem, reach the obvious conclusion, whether or not they admit it.

          The one group of black students who do unambiguously benefit are the ones who are qualified for the school they go to and get more money than if they were white, because the schools very much want to find able black students and are willing to pay for them.

          I haven’t been part of the undergraduate teaching world for a long time, aside from teaching a few college classes when I was in the law school, so don’t know how the situation plays out there, but Thomas Sowell made essentially the same argument in his book about choosing a college a very long time ago.

        • Mycale says:

          To provide some statistics, I’ll reference a report titled “Harvard Law School Report on the State of Black Alumni 2000-2006.” Available here.

          According to page 38 of that document, when asked about their father’s occupation 71.8% of 471 respondents said their father was involved in “Professional/White collar” work (rather than “Vocational/Blue collar”) work. 81.5% of 403 respondents said the same for their mother’s occupation.

          Obviously Harvard Law School is at the outer edge of the elite, and we could certainly debate the exact extent of inferences justified from this, but I think it’s a reasonable datapoint in favor of affirmative action policies at elite universities (mostly) reinforcing already privileged members of minority groups.

          FWIW, the report itself agrees:

          While this segmentation does not necessarily mean that the Law School and the country should move to a policy of “class not race” as some have suggested, it does mean that it is imperative that the Law School’s admissions policy focus on the importance of class within racial groups in order to ensure that the doors of opportunity to this critical institution remain open for talented black women and men who do not come from professional backgrounds.

          The report also points out that a trend has existed that black students have increasingly come from backgrounds where their parents worked white collar jobs instead of blue collar jobs (see tables 5 and 6 on page 38).

        • Eric T says:

          My low effort response to the specific criticisms of AA are do it but better. Like maybe also make class a factor to?

          I’ll make a higher effort response when I dive a bit more into these statistics y’all have linked, but its late and my brain hates me enough as it is right now 🙂

          I also think Law School is a bad example simply by its nature as a post-graduate program. The fact that you had to make it through undergrad probably filters out a large amount of people of lower S/E classes due to cost. If you are already in student debt (as most of us non rich people are) you probably are far less likely to go to a graduate program like law school. I’ll try to find more data on undergraduate. But to be clear I’m not married to Affirmative Action as a requirement for assisting people of color, and I’m open to being convinced I should focus my effort elsewhere.

        • Clutzy says:

          My low effort response to the specific criticisms of AA are do it but better. Like maybe also make class a factor to?

          That will quickly stop producing the racial balancing that the colleges want. Right now the Black-Asian SAT gap at Harvard is 250. If you half that to 125, then give 125 points for SES, since Asians and Whites beat Blacks and Hispanics on the SAT at every point on the SES scale you are really just halved the black advantage, and probably more than halved the number that meet your floor (because, as we have said, most that make the cut are high income blacks).

      • Two McMillion says:

        One more question. Where’s a good place to find sane social justice people, as opposed to the idiots who populate twitter and tumblr?

        • Eric T says:

          I mean, they’re all around you man. We don’t bite!

          My most intelligent conversations with people advocating Social Justice have been with people i’ve met through college, political action, or personal life – so I can’t really just point you at a good site I’m afraid. I’m sure they exist, but this is where I hang out these days.

      • souleater says:

        @Eric T I really appreciate you explaining your perspective on current events, its a time consuming and thankless job, but you do it well. Your thoughtful and introspective posts help me understand why the SJ community believe what they do

        • Eric T says:

          @Eric T I really appreciate you explaining your perspective on current events, its a time consuming and thankless job, but you do it well. Your thoughtful and introspective posts help me understand why the SJ community believe what they do

          Thank you that means a lot 🙂

        • Ketil says:

          +1.

      • Eric T says:

        As I mentioned to David above, I gotta go in like… 8 minutes so I can’t write as detailed a response. Love to talk about this more tommorow!

        1. It seems to imply that the only racism (or, at least, the only common racism that we need to worry about as a society) is by whites against blacks and Hispanics. This is certainly untrue, and I believe I’ve read of a number of studies indicating that while there are certainly plenty of racist whites out there, whites are actually least likely to be racist. (I would try to provide a link, but there are many terms I don’t like to search because I don’t want Google to think I have political views that it deems unacceptable or that it will deem unacceptable in a few years.)

        Your eyes decieve you friend, no dogs or whistles here. I’m not implying that this is the only racism, just that it’s arguably a longer lasting one who’s impacts have been much greater over the years our country has existed. And the issue of like Hispanic racism on Blacks or vice versa is severe, but one fight at a time is sort of how I approach it.

        2. The last sentence seems to imply that white males (and Asian males, I guess) hold basically all the power, so theirs is the only racism that would matter for career advancement/economic outcomes, and they are the only ones we should worry about discriminating in the workplace.

        I don’t think that’s what I was saying. It’s just that if you look at the results, its clear there is a blockage somewhere that is filtering out certain groups of people from the highest echelons of power. I think hiring decisions is something I don’t know enough about to create a cogent policy proposal for though, so I leave that to those more qualified than I. I think that general policy proposals that assist Black/Hispanic/Middle Eastern people generally will likely translate to them cracking into the top 1% more often though.

      • Scott Alexander says:

        Thanks for answering this, I’m glad this kind of engagement can happen here. I know your position isn’t super popular here and I’m glad you felt comfortable sharing this.

        • Eric T says:

          Thank you! I really appreciate how respectful and kind basically everyone has been thus far, that definitely has contributed to me being this willing/comfortable to engage as much as I have been.

      • original-internet-explorer says:

        If I were to steelman this – “What proof do you have that being part of a minority group makes you better able to perceive the truth of social matters?”

        I would go with the answer that on some dimension being a minority group member would make them less objective – like racial partisanship. You cede ground and then you retake it in the next movement.

        Now you say being a member of a minority gifts that minority with tacit experience.

        That is a linguistic kill shot. With tacit knowledge then good faith is restored. We know it exists. We know now why it is not obvious to articulate.

        The version of this SJ runs with is interpreted as you are not intelligent/empathetic enough to understand my complex inner world – narcissistic and offensive. Tacit experience is neutral.

      • BlackboardBinaryBook says:

        I’m not exactly a Social Justice Warrior, I’m more like a Social Justice Barbarian,

        I identify as more of a SJWizard, and I have a colleague with a “Social Justice Bard” t-shirt. I Also have a RL friend/gaming buddy who lurks here who might have a level dip in SJ Cleric (you reading this, Padre?) – we should party!

      • NostalgiaForInfinity says:

        +1

        I second all of this (as someone also pro-SJ). Except it’s longer, more-detailed and better expressed than I would’ve managed.

    • zzzzort says:

      First response eaten for having too many links, but mostly agree with Eric T on point 1.

      For points 2-3, this is a huge topic, but the evidence that I personally find most compelling is that
      a) representation has been improving steadily in various fields up till now. The trendline for the fraction of e.g. women in law and engineering, or fraction of PhD’s awarded to black students is increasing with no signs of leveling off, so expecting that the current level of representation is the one consistent with zero discrimination seems unlikely. This is consistent with
      b) evidence of racial bias is pretty well documented. I think the most compelling comes from resume surveys where the same resumes get different response rates with white coded names vs. black coded names. I don’t think this captures all extant racism, but it is very well controlled for a study in the real world, and obviously pertains to questions of employment and wealth accumulation.

      • Eric T says:

        evidence of racial bias is pretty well documented. I think the most compelling comes from resume surveys

        I was trying to find this! Add this into my answer to point 3 above.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        RE: Resume surveys. This was one survey pre-replication crisis. I’d like to see it replicated. Obvious confounder, the names chosen code “middle/upper class” and “lower class.” Middle/upper class black people have names like “Clarence Thomas” and “Thomas Sowell.” Middle/upper class black names are largely the same as white names so I’m not sure how to sort that out. Lower class white is easy, though. In addition to seeing how well “Brett” does against “Tyrone,” I’d also like to know how they do against “Cletus” and “Bubba.”

        The names chosen were:

        WF: Allison, Anne, Carrie, Emily, Jill, Laurie, Kristen, Meredith, Sarah

        BF: Aisha, Ebony, Keisha, Kenya, Latonya, Lakisha, Latoya, Tamika, Tanish

        WM: Brad, Brendan, Geoffrey, Greg, Brett, Jay, Matthew, Neil, Todd

        BM: Darnell, Hakim, Jermaine, Kareem, Jamal, Leroy, Rasheed, Tremayne, Tyrone

        • Eric T says:

          Obvious confounder, the names chosen code “middle/upper class” and “lower class.” Middle/upper class black people have names like “Clarence Thomas” and “Thomas Sowell.”

          I don’t know enough about Black names to know if this is true or not, so I’d love some more reading on this if you have it.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            I don’t have anything offhand.

            Also, I’m not saying there’s no such thing as racism in hiring, I’m just saying I don’t think this was a good paper for getting a handle on the problem. I’d also like to see it redone in 2020 to see if there’s still as big a problem as in 2003.

          • A more general point …

            Any paper claiming to produce evidence for something many people want to believe, from any part of the political/ideological/religious spectrum, should be viewed with suspicion. The academic world doesn’t have adequate mechanisms to make sure that research is only published if it is competent and honest, and there are obvious incentives to get results that you, or people who matter to you such as the faculty of the university you teach at, will like.

            There are two solutions to this problem, neither very good. One is to read the paper carefully, looking for ways in which the result might have been rigged. That’s a lot of work, requires skills most people don’t have, and still won’t catch some potential problems, most obviously flat dishonesty in reporting results.

            The other is to wait until other academics, ideally including ones who don’t like the conclusion, have published articles critiquing the first paper, or trying to replicate its results, or testing its conclusions in other ways. That works poorly if there is enough professional or ideological pressure in the relevant field so that scholars will be reluctant to publish such papers. And in sufficiently loaded topics — I’m thinking of things such as the deterrent effect of the death penalty or the effect of permitting concealed carry of handguns — you can still end up with a string of papers arguing back and forth, where it requires considerable statistical expertise to figure out which ones you should believe.

            The situation isn’t entirely hopeless, but figuring out what there is or isn’t good evidence for is a harder problem than most people believe. You can find examples of the problem in various of Scott’s old posts, where he took apart one or more published papers.

          • SamChevre says:

            Not a reading source, but anecdata–my sister’s husband is black: both of them had the immediate response “those names are really ghetto”.

          • gbdub says:

            I notice that a lot of black Americans in the academic and journalism spheres have decidedly “black” names, but they are more obviously “Traditional African” as opposed to, well, “ghetto”. E.g. Ta-Nehisi Coates (Or heck, Barack Obama). Would be interesting if they were to include a few of those, or better yet a separate group. To me anyway, those code “definitely black, but probably upper class / academic”

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            @gbdub

            I thought about that, too. If I encounter someone with an obviously African-from-Africa name, I assume they’re a very high achieving African who can afford to move to the US. I basically expect them to be middle or upper class.

        • zzzzort says:

          Here’s a meta analysis, this sort of experiment has been used a lot.

        • Matt M says:

          I wonder if this sort of thing is about to become either irrelevant, or more explicitly confirmed, as upper class whites abandon traditional naming conventions and increasingly go for “give my kid a unique sounding (or at least uniquely spelled) name for special status bonuses”

          Soon we won’t be comparing Allison and Aisha. We’ll be comparing Kayleeigh and Keisha…

          • You may not have to wait very long. My (white) grandchildren are Tovar, Iselle, and Honor.

          • March says:

            Not sure about Tovar and Honor, but I’d hire Iselle for anything, being the brightest hope the royacy of Chalion has had in four generations and all.

          • @March:

            Does it help if I tell you that Tovar is Tovar Miles?

          • March says:

            Then I assume all your grandkids will be frighteningly competent, if some a bit odder than others.

            (‘Iselle’ was on my shortlist for girl’s names but we ended up going with a different theme.)

          • keaswaran says:

            Has there been a change in this recently? Somehow I ended up following the Baby Name Wizard blog for about a decade or so, because I found the discussion fascinating, even though I am at no risk of needing to name a baby any time soon. But back in 2008, she made this useful observation that creative naming is definitely a red state/low income sort of thing: https://www.babynamewizard.com/archives/2008/9/of-names-and-politics-the-palin-story

            She observes that over the past few decades, as people have access to more resources to find what names are popular, everyone’s been moving towards less common names, so that the most common name now has fewer babies than the 20th most common name a few decades ago. But the top is still things like Oliver and Sophia and Emma and Noah, and those are still mostly upper class whites picking those names, while lower class whites go for Braedyn and Nevaeh.

        • The original Mr. X says:

          RE: Resume surveys. This was one survey pre-replication crisis. I’d like to see it replicated. Obvious confounder, the names chosen code “middle/upper class” and “lower class.” Middle/upper class black people have names like “Clarence Thomas” and “Thomas Sowell.” Middle/upper class black names are largely the same as white names so I’m not sure how to sort that out. Lower class white is easy, though. In addition to seeing how well “Brett” does against “Tyrone,” I’d also like to know how they do against “Cletus” and “Bubba.”

          This sort of thing doesn’t just apply to resume surveys. Much so-called “white privilege” is more like “middle-class privilege”.

          • Mark Z. says:

            Black people are more often lower-class than white people, so black-coded names are also lower-class-coded names. This is not a confounder; it’s part of the mechanism.

          • original-internet-explorer says:

            Old Worlder privilege warning.

            I feel like America discovering class is like teenagers discovering sex. You need to get over it and become normal so everybody else isn’t driven crazy too. Cautionary tale – avoid grimdark Russian phase and overly attached France – bad breakup history.

      • Two McMillion says:

        b) evidence of racial bias is pretty well documented. I think the most compelling comes from resume surveys where the same resumes get different response rates with white coded names vs. black coded names. I don’t think this captures all extant racism, but it is very well controlled for a study in the real world, and obviously pertains to questions of employment and wealth accumulation.

        I have heard of this. This study, however, makes me doubt it:

        https://www.huffpost.com/entry/short-names-lead-to-higher-salaries_n_3223658

        If you examine the study you linked, you’ll find that the African-American names that were used were both longer on average and had a lower variance in length then the white names used. Of course, one study looked at income and the other looked at replies to resumes, but I think the similarities are notable.

        My takeaway from the study I have linked here is not that name length accounts for the results of the study you linked, but that a lot of stupid things make a difference in how well you do in the business world. This is also confirmed by studies finding such things as taller men having higher income, and it matches my personal experience very well. It makes much more sense to me to classify the results of the study you linked as, “Another example of stupid things that make a difference in the business world for some reason” rather than “racism”.

        • Eric T says:

          Wasn’t it the case that in an attempt to end racism in hiring, a state made it illegal to ask if applicants had gone to prison, leading to more discriminatory hiring practices? I swear I remember reading about this, but I can’t find it. I don’t know if this supports or defeats my points – but this conversation is reminding me of it.

          • Matt M says:

            I’ve definitely heard of that as well. I think Scott even used it as an example of relatively innocuous and well-meaning behaviors that we often map to “racism” in the “Against Murderism” post…

          • Aftagley says:

            Yep, from the against murder-ism post:

            Consider some business, let’s say a daycare center, that we know discriminates against black job-seekers. If we ask them why, they say “Because black people are criminal”. This sounds like just about the most typical and obvious example of racism possible.

            But there’s actually a lot of really good scholarship on this exact situation, and it helps provide a different perspective. It starts like this – a while ago, criminal justice reformers realized that mass incarceration was hurting minorities’ ability to get jobs. 4% of white men will spend time in prison, compared to more like 16% of Hispanic men and 28% of black men. Many employers demanded to know whether a potential applicant had a criminal history, then refused to consider them if they did. So (thought the reformers) it should be possible to help minorities have equal opportunities by banning employers from asking about past criminal history.

            The actual effect was the opposite – the ban “decreased probability of being employed by 5.1% for young, low-skilled black men, and 2.9% for young, low-skilled Hispanic men.”

            In retrospect, this makes sense. Daycare companies really want to avoid hiring formerly-imprisoned criminals to take care of the kids. If they can ask whether a certain employee is criminal, this solves their problem. If not, they’re left to guess. And if they’ve got two otherwise equally qualified employees, and one is black and the other’s white, and they know that 28% of black men have been in prison compared to 4% of white men, they’ll shrug and choose the white guy.

          • Two McMillion says:

            It should at least serve as a warning about the unintended consequences of such policy actions, I suppose.

        • zzzzort says:

          That study seems to have been done by a job website, and I can’t find a copy of it. I don’t think it’s an isolated demand for rigor to not take the results too seriously.

          I also struggle to imagine a world where people discriminate more on name length than on race. I certainly make more assumptions about people based on their race than on their name.

          • Matt M says:

            I’d guess that “name commonality” is something a lot people would probably discriminate on. People generally want workers who are “normal guys” and normal guys have names like Jim or John or Paul. They don’t have names like Zecheriah or Dweezil or Rasheed (to use three very culturally different examples of weird names).

            To the extent that blacks are more likely to use uncommon names than whites, that would give us the results we notice, but would not necessarily be reflective of racial animus.

            I’d love to see a similar study that not only includes stereotypically black names, but stereotypically asian names, stereotypically jewish names, stereotypically puritan names, etc.

      • John Schilling says:

        evidence of racial bias is pretty well documented. I think the most compelling comes from resume surveys where the same resumes get different response rates with white coded names vs. black coded names.

        I don’t find that compelling at all, because I don’t think there is such a thing as “white coded names”. What there are, are generically middle-class coded names, which nobody thinks twice about black people using if they are so inclined.

        What I’d like to see is the study with black-coded names, with redneck-coded names, and with the generic middle-class-coded names. If the rednecks come in significantly ahead of the blacks, I’d consider that evidence of racism. Otherwise, I’d consider it evidence that employers look at people whose parents could have given them at least aspirationally middle-class names, instead gave them names that call out their Borderer heritage, and suspect the name might not be the only part of that heritage the parents passed on to their children.

        A bias against hiring from the Borderer culture would be a form of discrimination, but it wouldn’t be racism.

        • zzzzort says:

          You can push it back to class, but then if someone really wants to discriminate based on class, they would end up discriminating based on race because race is generally easy to determine and correlates strongly with class. I don’t buy this model personally (I think people have specific ideas about race separate from class), but it would generally imply the existence of racial discrimination.

          • John Schilling says:

            Class is also easy to determine. Culture is similarly easy to determine, and if you’re looking for something that correlates with culture, culture correlates with culture at 1.0

            And, in the example specifically cited as evidence of racism, names correlate more strongly with culture than with race. Race is strictly hereditary; names are voluntary and aspirational. Usually the parents’ aspiration, but if they aspire to e.g. middle-class generically American culture, they probably aren’t going stop with the name.

          • zzzzort says:

            The majority of blacks are middle class or above

            Broken link

            Similar to the example with arrest records, if your goal as an employer was to exclude poor people, and there were two otherwise identical candidates, you would hire the one that wasn’t black. You could say the “real” reason is class and not race, but that’s pretty cold comfort.

            (Also, this doesn’t really change the conclusion, but class =/= income =/= wealth)

          • Statismagician says:

            It occurs to me that algorithmic and otherwise ‘unbiased’ hiring practices probably make this worse than it would have been in the 19-whatevers from the universe next door where with the same tech progress but vastly reduced overt racism – ACME Corp just wants somebody who won’t screw things up, they don’t care about class or race except insofar as those map to the stuff they really do want to know about but aren’t allowed to ask, like criminal history.

          • Eric T says:

            @Scoop

            Class doesn’t correlate with race as well as many seem to believe. The majority of blacks are middle class or above, and a plurality of poor Americans are white.

            I feel like this is kind of cherry-picking. Of course a plurality of poor Americans are white… the majority of Americans are white. It would be deeply deeply disturbing if a plurality of poor americans weren’t white. You know what is disturbing – that blacks and Hispanics, despite comprising a combined total of only around 31.7% of the country have their poor outnumber poor white Americans. And white Americans make up 76.5% of the country.

            Like yes, it’s not a perfect correlation, but lets not kid ourselves here, if you are Hispanic or black, per capita you are dramatically more likely to be poor. If you are classist, you’re going to hurt minorities at a higher rate than you will hurt white people. Not a higher total mind you, but that’s just what happens when your race makes up 3/4ths of the country.

          • Matt M says:

            Class doesn’t correlate with race as well as many seem to believe.

            Whether or not this is actually true matters less than whether or not most people believe it to be true.

            Joe Biden seemingly believes it to be true.

          • Eric T says:

            I’m all for American exceptionalism, but your figures have an America with more than 100 percent of its own people and you haven’t even included Asian yet.

            White Americans currently make up 62 percent of the country.

            This is why I shouldn’t try to work with numbers at 12:30 at night.

          • John Schilling says:

            I’m all for American exceptionalism, but your figures have an America with more than 100 percent of its own people and you haven’t even included Asian yet.

            Americans are so stunningly exceptional that each one of them counts as 1.08 normal people, and that’s before we factor in the Asians.

            But really, it’s just that Texans count as two ordinary people; the rest of y’alll are just a bit below average.

          • Nick says:

            @John Schilling

            Americans are so stunningly exceptional that each one of them counts as 1.08 normal people

            insert fat joke

      • Aapje says:

        @zzzzort

        This famous resume study replicated with the same set of names, but not with another set of names. This study suggests that both sets of names were properly interpreted as white and black respectively, as intended, but that for the set of names that did find different response rates, the black names were seen as being of substantially lower SES.

        This suggests that the actual discrimination may very well have been of lower class people, not by race.

    • Purplehermann says:

      On 3, I’ve tried getting a fairly intelligent feminist (IRL) to answer this, all answers basically turned on avoiding the thrust of the question and/or asserting that regardless of sexism women should have an equal amount of power.

      There are probably SJ types who are reasonable and mistake theorists, but N=1 it’s all conflict theorists, and they are looking for rationalizations, not reasons, to “redistribute” power.
      Edit: after reading above comments, more like N=4 (Assuming the above count as SJ) there are plenty of conflict theorists over there.

      • Eric T says:

        Gotta do everything we can to raise that N value XP.

        My offer to Two McMillion stands to you as well, if you would like to talk one-on-one, though I’m less of a feminist than I am a SJW when it comes to race – so I don’t know how helpful I’ll be.

      • Apropos of several of these things, how do people feel about the moral status of statistical discrimination?

        Young adult men are charged more for auto insurance than young adult women, because they get in more accidents. Is that morally objectionable?

        If it isn’t, go back to the employment case. A company deciding whether to interview someone has very little information about him. Suppose one of the things the company knows is his race. Further suppose that the company has found that black applicants who they interview are, on average, less well qualified than white applicants. The company concludes that given the choice between interviewing two applicants who are in other respects equal, they should prefer the white one. Is that morally objectionable? Consider the same case for sex, where the company has found that female applicants are on average better qualified than male.

        • Purplehermann says:

          My gut says the first case isn’t an issue, while the second depends.

          Two reasons that come to mind:

          1) the first case seems like the correlation is causation, and relevant for pretty much all young men (lack of experience plus hormones), while black is (mostly at least?) correlation

          2) higher insurance won’t stop young men from having cars clearly, and if it did I’m not sure that’s terrible.
          Jobs are a bit more important, and if people got locked out of better jobs due to statistics on a wide scale that would ve a worse world

          • Adrian says:

            1) the first case seems like the correlation is causation, and relevant for pretty much all young men (lack of experience plus hormones), while black is (mostly at least?) correlation

            a) “lack of experience” applies to young women just as much as to young men, and b) not all young men are completely controlled by their hormones, so you’re arguing for disadvantaging all young men due to the actions of a few young men, while you’re arguing against disadvantaging all black people due to the actions of a few black people.

            2) higher insurance won’t stop young men from having cars clearly, and if it did I’m not sure that’s terrible.

            It will stop some young men from having cars, namely some of the poorer ones. It will also make it harder for them to get a job, which makes it harder to get out of poverty.

            I’m not saying that young men shouldn’t have to pay higher insurance premiums. My point is that your arguments are inconsistent, and I get the feeling that your opinion would be different if it was women who are negatively affected.

          • Purplehermann says:

            @Adrian
            a) inexperience was honestly put there to justify younger people in general having higher insurance rates. That said, it does make sense to care more about inexperience with other factors compounding it.

            b) I would claim that the vast majority of young men are influenced by their emotions to a non-insignificant degree. I believe this is a causal risk factor, and that is the reason for their higher rates, not “punishing them for the actions of others who can be abstractly grouped with them”.

            Notice I’m banking on correlation vs. causation, and punishment isn’t really how I’m looking at this.

            2)
            When you say some, how many? 5, 10 or 15? Sources please.
            If it is a noticeable difference, in that a significant amount of young men who would otherwise get cars don’t, how many of them can’t get a job because of this?

            Seems to me that locking entire demographics out of decent jobs directly is a lot worse than a few people having a harder time. It seems bad enough to me to be an issue while the insurance doesn’t, though you could change my mind if you showed that a lot of peyote really don’t get jobs because of it.

            3) Inconsistent I may be, but your ‘analysis’ of my gut is off base, you strawmanned I think.

            4) You have a bad (as in incorrect) case of Bulverism, if I understood your “feeling” at the end correctly.
            I’m religious, fairly traditional value wise, dislike feminism and lgbtq…

          • I would claim that the vast majority of young men are influenced by their emotions to a non-insignificant degree.

            Also young women. And not-young women. And not-young men.

            Not true of corpses or people in coma. No other exceptions occur to me.

            Seems to me that locking entire demographics out of decent jobs directly is a lot worse than a few people having a harder time.

            If an entire demographic is locked out of decent jobs, there ought to be no members of that demographic with decent jobs. The only demographics I can think of for which that is true are infants and small children.

            If the demographic you are referring to is blacks, I would point out that, in the study of responses to interview requests mentioned above, the result was not that nobody with a black sounding name got invited to interview, only that a smaller proportion did.

            Also, one member of that demographic was recently employed as president of the U.S. It’s not a job I would want, but it pays pretty well.

          • Adrian says:

            When you say some, how many? 5, 10 or 15? Sources please.

            You were first to assert that 0 persons were stopped from having a car due to higher insurance, so I would like to see your sources for that claim first.

            But let’s do a qualitative analysis: Insurance rates of $10 / year would stop 0 young men from having a car. Insurance rates of $100k / year would stop nearly all young men from having a car. So we should assume that in a diverse population of several million young men, for any value between, say, $100 and $10k / year, there are some young men who couldn’t afford a car and some who could.

            4) You have a bad (as in incorrect) case of Bulverism, if I understood your “feeling” at the end correctly.
            I’m religious, fairly traditional value wise, dislike feminism and lgbtq…

            Then I have misjudged you. I apologize.

          • Purplehermann says:

            On the first point, I’d say that the hormones have greater influence/ influence to more risk with young men (I’m taking your word on the other groups as my experience is limited to being a young male).

            For the second, you’re right, my earlier comment

            Jobs are a bit more important, and if people got locked out of better jobs due to statistics on a wide scale that would ve a worse world

            is more accurate

          • Purplehermann says:

            @Adrian
            Apology accepted.

            I didn’t mean that 0 young men were stopped by this, rather that an insignificant amount of young men would be stopped by this.

            I’ll try to justify that:
            If we take the numbers here as representative (first thing I found) https://www.moneyunder30.com/age-car-insurance-rates-go-down
            then the difference between male and female rates is around $130.
            This isn’t nothing, but insurance for young women already costs nearly $1000, add in the car itself, gas, and repairs and I don’t see the $130 often stopping young men from having cars. This goes double if what’s stopping them from having a job is the car.

            I’ve also never heard from anyone I know that the difference in insurance is the issue, despite being a young man and having plenty of friends who have cars, and plenty who don’t because of the cost of the car.

        • ana53294 says:

          Young adult men are charged more for auto insurance than young adult women, because they get in more accidents. Is that morally objectionable?

          That’s banned in the UK, by the way.

          I don’t find it morally objectionable, but I’ve been told by people that it made almost impossible for young men to drive, making it harder for them to find a job. The argument didn’t convince me, since the responsible young men can always use a tracker device to get a more reasonable rate.

    • SamChevre says:

      Just a note of thanks–this was a helpful and enlightening discussion of a difficult topic.

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      I’m more of a Social Justice Switch, I think– I look rather Social Justicy here, I think, and and probably mostly “tolerable but not quite one of us” in more Social Justice spaces. I make some effort to pass.

      Anyway, I’m taking a crack at your first question.

      One valuable aspect of Social Justice for me is giving me an appreciation of the extent of human ignorance.

      You are familiar with your own life. Well, ralatively familiar, considering the biases of memory and such. You know something about the lives of people you associate with.

      The further people are from you socially, the more you’re guessing.

      This isn’t just about status, though it’s plausible that people who are at risk of being mistreated will be keeping better track of how much risk there is and how to avoid it.

      Part of the situation with risk is that the most risk comes from the most dangerous people, not the majority, so the majority might not know how the most dangerous fraction of their group is behaving or might not want to take it seriously because it isn’t affecting them.

      Part of the situation (and part of why I’m a Social Justice Switch) is that Social Justice doesn’t actually give you a remotely complete view of well, anyone. In particular, I’ve been listening to black people who don’t agree with Social Justice.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        For example, I’ve seen a number of complaints here that feminists don’t understand what it’s like to be male, but the men who are saying never seem to consider that they themselves might not understand what it’s like to be female.

        • nkurz says:

          > the men who are saying never seem to consider that they themselves might not understand what it’s like to be female

          I’d guess this is not because they assume they know what it’s like to be female, but because they think it’s obvious to all that they do not. That is, they don’t disclaim to understand what it’s like to be female because they didn’t think anyone would think they claimed to. Do you have any evidence to the contrary, that these men claim to understand women perfectly?

          (sorry for my confusing phrasing here — I couldn’t figure out how to word the double negations any better)

        • Aapje says:

          @Nancy Lebovitz

          There is no singular male or female experience & people can interpret the same experiences quite differently. So in a strict sense, not even a woman can know what it is to be female, nor can a man know what it is to be male.

          My own objection is more how upsides of the female gender role and downsides of the male gender role tend to be denied.

          This doesn’t really involve lived experiences of the person themselves, but the ability and willingness to examine all aspects of the gender roles, rather than just those that fit an agenda.

          For example, to answer the question to what extent women are providing an excess of household labor for men, rather than indulging their own preferences, I see feminists commonly declare that any imbalance benefits men. This is maximally uncharitable to men, regarding a possible imbalance in benefits they get from the relationship and maximally denies agency to women. It doesn’t fit with the observation that I have repeatedly made and that is so commonly believed by others to be a stereotype, that single men don’t tend to put the same effort into the household as women, which is what you’d expect if they’d have the same preference for a neat household, but offload this work to women as much as they can.

          I don’t demand that feminists ‘understand’ men (or women), but rather, that they don’t jump to (maximally) uncharitable conclusions, but seek out and judge by the best available evidence. Preferably of the scientific kind. Furthermore, I ask for consistency & rationality.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            Thanks for explaining.

            The housework thing might be a bit more complex than you’re saying. Is the man doing as much housework as he was for himself? Is the woman crowding him out of doing any homework? What would it look like if a couple wanted to be kind to each other?

            My impression (and I think it’s of you and maybe one other person) is a repeated claim that women are better off than men in all respects these days.

          • Aapje says:

            If you read my comment carefully, you’ll see that I merely objected to jumping to the conclusion that all the extra work that women do is actually desired by their male partner.

            You are correct that there are other questions that can be asked about the disparity, to judge whether it is unfair to men or women, but it was just an example, not an exhaustive analysis.

            I’ve definitely never claimed that women are better off than men in all respects. I’ve always argued that the female role has different upsides and downsides than the female gender role. However, I typically merely focus on countering the dominant narrative.

            The question who is better off on the whole is just too (personally) subjective and subject to ‘grass is greener’ and other fallacies of thought to be very fruitful. It seems much more productive and useful to me to disrupt the claim that men are better off in (nearly) all respects.

          • AG says:

            @Nancy Lebovitz

            Here’s a good perspective on what Aapje is talking about wrt housework.

            “What would it look like if a couple wanted to be kind to each other?” is that the two sit down and negotiate agreed upon standards of cleanliness, and then develop a system of distribution of labor together. Any subsequent complaints about things not being clean enough must then only be about cases that clearly violate the established standards and procedures (though they can renegotiate those, of course). Like getting a 5S system up and running in a workplace.

            The current system runs entirely too much on assumptions, and that illegibility is a feature to some insofar as it’s a means of reinforcing their power, a la the inscrutability of emperors.

          • Aapje says:

            @AG

            That’s what a huge nerd very system-oriented and rational person might prefer, but it’s also something that normal people are not going to do.

            One reason is that people don’t informally negotiate every aspect of their relationship separately, but as a package deal. A better income may make up for doing less in the household. Big tits/nice pecs may make up for having a shitty personality.

            That’s how it goes. If you openly want to negotiate everything, you have to openly address every strength and weakness of your partner. That’s a good way to destroy the relationship in most cases.

          • AG says:

            I wonder how same-sex relationships fare, for this situation. Given the higher rate of domestic abuse among lesbians, it seems that the neurotic female partner trend continues there. But in the case of a gay relationship where one partner has a higher standard of cleanliness than the other, how do they cope?

            But I disagree that negotiating is something normal people are just not going to do. Chore wheels/charts are a thing, which are used not just by dorm roommates, but in child-parent relationships as well, which are even more lopsided in power, but while the parent may not allow changes to the standard, they do allow negotiating as to which child does what chore. The norms are slowly changing.

  55. AG says:

    Does a masterpiece have to hold up over time to maintain that status?

    By definition, a masterpiece should demonstrate that its creators are masters in their field, but if they have since been surpassed, in various ways, is the work still a masterpiece?

    For many physical crafts, I would say no. You can somewhat objectively determine if one piece of jewelry is more intricate than another. An old cloudy piece of glassware is not a masterpiece.

    But when artistic aspects come into play, especially in the realm of storytelling, it’s not so clear. Citizen Kane holds up because even though its cinematic techniques have been “mined out,” the audience still finds the movie compelling to watch. Music seems to work with this, as well, where old songs and such still retain the power to move listeners.
    In contrast, “Seinfeld is Unfunny now” is such a thing that it’s a trope name. Is Seinfeld no longer a masterpiece?

    • a real dog says:

      Is Fritz Lang’s Metropolis a masterpiece?

      I think you need to consider the available toolset to decide, along with any self-imposed limitations.

    • Uribe says:

      The element of surprise is always one key to comedy. For this reason, when a comedy gets mined out and its elements become cliché, it stops being funny.

      Good evidence this is true is that stand up comics (at least good ones) don’t re-use jokes from tour to tour, because it’s not as funny if you’ve heard it before. In contrast, bands are almost condemned to playing their biggest hits forever.

      I think it’s fair to say Seinfeld was a masterpiece for its time, which is the best a sitcom can manage to be.

      • Matt M says:

        I also think “Seinfeld is Unfunny” is really just “It’s popular now it sucks” applied to inter-generational conflict. Kids today don’t like Seinfeld because their parents do like it. See also: How easy it is to find “the Beatles are overrated” takes on social media…

        • Eric T says:

          Kids today

          See I think you are 100% right, but when you say it like that all I can think about is that Simpsons clip about Rock and Roll

          It’ll happen to you!

        • Aftagley says:

          I also think “Seinfeld is Unfunny” is really just “It’s popular now it sucks” applied to inter-generational conflict.

          I think it’s more along the lines that humor ages way worse than most other forms of art. Like, I watch Seinfeld now and just don’t get why people would think it’s funny. Same with standup from the 90s; it’s not bad… but it’s not as funny as the audience clearly thinks it was back then.

          • Urstoff says:

            Perhaps comedy is the genre that requires the most culture-specific knowledge.

          • Uribe says:

            Yeah, cultural specific knowledge is definitely another key. Curb Your Enthusiasm is still funny, at least the new ones, despite the style of the show having not changed, because Larry David adapts to the cultural moment. The kind of humor in both Seinfeld and Curb is also a lot more culture specific than say, Life of Brian, which is still funny. (Also, nobody has successfully mined the Python formula, whereas a million sitcoms that have come and gone stole from Seinfeld. It’s impossible to understand how fresh and original Seinfeld was unless you erase your memory of every comedy you’ve seen since the early 90s.)

          • John Schilling says:

            I watched Seinfeld in the 90s and didn’t think it was terribly funny. It had some really spectacular moments, yes, but a whole lot of bland meh and a whole lot of “look how hip we are that we don’t care about anything”.

          • Spookykou says:

            While I love Seinfeld, and think it is a masterpiece, I wonder about the aging/cultural knowledge problem. I laugh out loud reading P.G. Wodehouse and that is well before my time, but maybe I have a strong enough understanding of the period(Or maybe Jeeves and Wooster is a masterpiece?)? Maybe all the, you had to be a 90s kid memes are true, younger people just don’t understand 90s culture. Also I could just be weird, I really enjoy comedy and seem to laugh a lot more than most other people while consuming it.

          • albatross11 says:

            I also saw Seinfeld now and then when it was on, thought it was overrated and unpleasant then, and still do.

        • Randy M says:

          I rewatched an episode of Seinfeld recently. It was my family’s favorite show growing up, I liked it well enough at the time. I don’t think it held up, though I’d have to watch a season to be fair.
          The biggest thing that got to me was the laugh track. After Arrested Development, that just doesn’t fly anymore.

          • Walter says:

            Yes Minister is still funny, weirdly enough. You got to warn people about the laugh track, but the youth I’ve seen watch it have been won over pretty quick.

        • keaswaran says:

          I don’t think that’s right. I think the kids today watch a lot of Friends, for instance, which is only a couple years later. At the time, I never would have predicted that Friends would age better than Seinfeld.

      • baconbits9 says:

        Good evidence this is true is that stand up comics (at least good ones) don’t re-use jokes from tour to tour, because it’s not as funny if you’ve heard it before

        I think it is the opposite causation. Good comics (ie great ones) are the only ones who can come up with enough new good material to do this. Lots of comics run the same bit over and over again and people come and eat it up for years. One example is Emo Phillips who attempted to distance himself from the caricature he created in the 70s. Eventually he gave in and returned to it in 2010(!). From his Wikipedia page

        Emo only carried this appearance for a few years, retiring it in 2005 and emerging back on the comedy circuit around 2010 with his classic look and persona. He has experienced a considerable resurgence in popularity since then

      • AG says:

        There are old comedies that hold up, though, like A Night at the Opera, His Girl Friday, Gold Rush, or Blazing Saddles.

        • smocc says:

          I have laughed out loud at a Buster Keaton movie and Charlie Chaplin clips.

        • Uribe says:

          The Thin Man is still hilarious. A masterpiece of comedy.

          But these old movies can surprise you in a way that a very influential TV show from 25 years ago just can’t.

    • AKL says:

      Something may be a masterpiece because it defines a new form. In that vein, I disagree that Citizen Kane is a masterpiece because audiences find it compelling; it is a masterpiece because it introduced transformative innovations in visual storytelling. Similarly, the fact that Shakespeare’s works are now hopelessly cliche is evidence that they are masterpieces. To the extent it’s true, Seinfeld is unfunny probably because the show has had such a profound influence on the last few decades of TV. So… definitely a masterpiece.

      Something may also be a masterpiece because it’s the apotheosis of its form. But these seem less likely to hold up over time because their status as masterpieces is dependent on being the best.

      eta: almost by definition “type 1” masterpieces are initially “type 2” masterpieces too, but most lose their “type 2” status over time as derivative works surpass them in technical merit / detail / refinement / whatever.

      • AG says:

        So you can’t think of any examples of movies that were masterpieces when they debuted, but few find artistically compelling today? (I guess this is a hard question to even know, given that long term popularity inherently weeds out potential examples.) But I do feel like there are swaths of “ground-breaking” media out there that people don’t look that fondly upon, mostly in television.

        Do people still find The Jazz Singer or Broadway Melody of 1929 compelling?

        • zzzzort says:

          Birth of a Nation, but it fell out of popularity for different reasons.

          • AG says:

            I’ve seen recent reviews that say that the film is still compelling in a storytelling sense, even if the story that it is telling is abhorrent. So by the definition I stated above, Birth of a Nation is still a film masterpiece.

          • Jacobethan says:

            Yeah, I actually think Birth of a Nation‘s reputation has remained pretty stable over the years. On the one side, its original release sparked massive protests and even rioting. So while the proportion of people who actually agree with its version of history has dropped precipitously, it’s not like there was ever a time when the film’s content wasn’t considered hugely objectionable by many others.

            On the other side, it’s just such a fundamental landmark in the development of the medium’s storytelling techniques that its place in the canon has remained permanently secure on aesthetic and historical grounds. I’m sure nowadays it has to be surrounded by a thicket of trigger warnings to be shown in class, but it’s still universally regarded as a work that has to be reckoned with if you want to understand the classic Hollywood style.

            I think the film that much better fits the niche zzzzort has in mind is Gone With the Wind. That was a ubiquitous cultural touchstone for my parents’ generation: everybody knew the basic storyline, the major characters, could make jokes by alluding to this or that scene, etc. Cineastes never took it all that seriously except as an example of very technically polished middlebrow entertainment. But it tended to make it onto Greatest Films lists by force of sheer popularity as well as its still-striking epic scale. Nowadays my impression is it’s regarded mostly as an embarrassment, or worse.

    • For many physical crafts, I would say no. You can somewhat objectively determine if one piece of jewelry is more intricate than another.

      How about more beautiful than another? Off hand, I can’t think of any later jewelry that surpasses the Sutton Hoo Treasure.

      I find it hard to think of any field, outside math and sciences, where progress means that later works unambiguously surpass older. Even there, Ricardo’s Principles is still a masterwork, because although we know much more about economics than he did, nobody has done a more impressive job of solving the problems he solved with the very limited tools he used to solve them.

      • FLWAB says:

        How about more beautiful than another? Off hand, I can’t think of any later jewelry that surpasses the Sutton Hoo Treasure.

        I find that hard to belie-

        *sees Sutton Hoo Belt Buckle*

        I stand corrected.

      • AG says:

        I think there are plenty of examples in the Palace Museum (for example), though I generally agree that beauty is too subjective a measure.

        But in terms of “this piece demonstrates mastery,” one can determine if something is a masterpiece by how many advanced techniques were used, and the difficulty of producing the piece.

      • Spookykou says:

        In terms of the technical ability to recreate reality with paint and pen there is pretty steady if inconsistent growth in the visual arts to modern day photo realism in paintings/sculpture which is genuinely hard to distinguish from photos/a person standing still. If you use that metric to evaluate visual art, newer works unambiguously surpass older, but few are married to the metric. Holistically your point stands, but might lean a little heavily on the subjective nature of these evaluations, if we have no rigorous measure of what better means then almost tautologically nothing can be unambiguously better than anything else.

        -If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.

        • bullseye says:

          Paintings got more and more realistic, until photographs took over the realism market. Then paintings got weird.

          I don’t think cartoons will get more realistic over time, because we have live-action and CGI for that.

          I suppose future sculpture might be hyperrealistic, even though sculpture in even vaguely realistic color has been out of fashion for centuries.

          • John Schilling says:

            Photographs haven’t completely taken over the realism market, because you can only take photographs of things that exist. For e.g. this, you need a painter. Or you need to pay me quite a bit more than $3450, and wait a few years while I deploy your photographer and model.

        • Jake R says:

          At a tangent, why do people still do photo-realistic painting? I’ll occasionally see some very impressive paintings posted on reddit that are indistinguishable from photographs. This is very impressive, and no doubt took a lot of talent and effort to do, but lots of things are impressive and some of them are useful. What’s the point of perfecting an art form that’s always going to be strictly worse than a camera? At least throw some dinosaurs or aliens in there so we can see something we can’t photograph.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            You just reinvented the concept of Boris Vallejo.

          • Jake R says:

            @LMC

            Those are nifty but I was thinking of stuff like this. If I wasn’t looking for it I would just assume those were photographs. And they clearly had to be made by setting up those objects in real life and staring at them a bunch, or a photograph of them. At that point you’re just a very slow, slightly imperfect camera.

          • Spookykou says:

            An added wrinkle, you don’t actually need a lot of skill to make photo realistic painting, you just paint very slow and very big, a lot of photo realistic artists are in effect manually simulating a dot printer, copying point for point from a blown up image.

          • FLWAB says:

            Those are nifty but I was thinking of stuff like this.

            Funnily enough, I think of those paintings as true masterpieces in the original sense: a piece of work that proves you are a master. Their value lies almost entirely in demonstrating the skill and dedication of the painter. I don’t see any other point to them.

          • Jake R says:

            @FLWAB

            I completely agree but I can’t help being reminded of the first image in this xkcd article. I think about that image a lot actually, it’s a shame it’s not a proper comic for easier linking.

          • FLWAB says:

            Hey, if you ate a bag of pine-cones I’d be impressed. Hard things are impressive. Stupid sometimes, often impractical, but still impressive.

          • AG says:

            A fair share of people say that Jackass is a masterpiece.

          • Nornagest says:

            You just reinvented the concept of Boris Vallejo.

            Boris Vallejo’s good at color and anatomy but terrible at capturing motion or emotion. All his men look and pose like bodybuilders, and all those flawlessly flexed veiny thews just make them look stiff and stale, because if you flex two opposing muscles — try it! — the joint they articulate can’t go anywhere. It isn’t immediately obvious why if you don’t know what to look for, but your eye knows rigid.

            Frazetta’s more impressionistic, but his stuff looks more true-to-life to me — probably because Vallejo was a bodybuilder and Frazetta was an athlete, and they’re painting what they know.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @Nornagest: Huh, good catch. I long knew there was something “off” about his oil painting style despite its high realism, and the bodybuilder rigidity is it.

      • AG says:

        Thinking on this further, what about architecture? There is an element of beauty in the evaluation, but considerations also include things like “how impressive is the strength of the structure for the materials of the time.”
        The grandest hall of the old warlord is just a regular barn today.

    • Randy M says:

      I don’t know if they were considered “Masterpieces” at the time, but Assimov’s fiction is a lot less compelling on rereading decades later than when I devoured it as a teen.

      • Eugene Dawn says:

        A few years ago I tried to reread Nemesis, a book I remember loving as a ~12 year old, and could not get past the first twenty pages it was so bad.

        On the other hand, some of his short stories hold up pretty well; I think the George and Azazel stories are still pretty funny.

        • Randy M says:

          The man wrote a lot of books. I suspect he did not feel the need for editing and revision in the same way a newer author might.

          • FLWAB says:

            He once boasted that he went into a publishers office to turn in a short story, the editor there was a story short and asked him if he could sell them another, and he sat down at a typewriter and banged a story out right then and there. So yeah, doesn’t seem like he was much for editing.

          • Nick says:

            I can’t even write an SSC post without two redrafts and an occasional rewrite. Screw Asimov. >:(

          • ana53294 says:

            Back in the days of the typewriter, you had to write clean if you didn’t want to spend time retyping everything.

            Editing on a computer is so much faster. Sometimes too convenient.

          • bullseye says:

            Asimov once wrote an entire story on live tv. (Though it’s not his best, and he cheated a bit by coming up with the idea ahead of time.)

            I don’t remember the name of it, but I remember the plot: a space station gets equipment shipped from Earth, and they complain that the equipment is always in a thousand pieces and requires a fat instruction manual to assemble. Rnegu fraqf gurz n ebobg gb qb gur nffrzoyl sbe gurz. Bs pbhefr gur ebobg vgfrys vf va n gubhfnaq cvrprf.

      • keaswaran says:

        My boyfriend has been re-reading Dune lately, and in conversations about it, I realized that I think of Asimov as somehow a more canonical classic sci-fi author than Herbert, but no one still reads Asimov the way they still read Dune.

        • Statismagician says:

          I think Asimov has something like the Seinfeld problem – he wrote what was at the time really excellent, groundbreaking stuff which was then done better and to death for the next thirty years or so.

        • FLWAB says:

          I recommend Asimov for young adults. His sparse, straightforward, beige prose is easy to grasp and a good boarding ramp for sci-fi. When I was a teen I read every Asimov book and short story the school library had, but it took me two tries to actually finish Dune. Of course now that I’m older and more well read I prefer Dune, but part of becoming more well read was reading all that Asimov. So I think it’s a similar effect in play.

          • AG says:

            Beige prose is what put me off of Asimov. The premise of Foundation intrigued me, and then I could not care less about any of the characters.

          • MisterA says:

            Argh, sorry, was scrolling and hit Report. I did not mean to report this post for the crime of talking shit about Asimov.

            I mostly agree, although I can tolerate his prose a lot more in short story form.

          • CatCube says:

            Stephen King is another author who’s helped by the short story form. I’ve enjoyed his longer works, but when he doesn’t have room to sprawl he can write a much better story.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            Asimov’s prose served excellently, IMO, in his non-fiction. Back in the 70s and 80s, if you wanted to learn something in science, including broad topics, reading Asimov was one of the easiest ways to do it.

            For example, _Adding A Dimension_ was a series of chapters, each about a different part of the natural world, starting in math, then physics, then chemistry, then biology. I read it when I was about ten, and ended up reading it multiple times.

            Later on, I read his book on the neutrino, and for a while could easily tell the story of how physicists described a subatomic particle purely in theoretical terms, to make their existing conservation principles work, years before they were ever able to detect one… and then they did.

            Years after that, I read his book on limericks, and admitted I didn’t quite know what to make of the guy.

        • Eugene Dawn says:

          I read Dune for the first time only a few years ago, and I wasn’t all that impressed, but I did at least manage to get through it.

        • Nick says:

          n=1, but I read Asimov as a kid and did not read Herbert. And I think I’ve seen Asimov discussed more than Herbert. Hard to say for certain, though.

          I should probably go read Dune.

          • FLWAB says:

            I think Asimov’s prolific output also helps. He just wrote so much stuff that some of it can’t help but be really good. Most of the bad stories he wrote are forgotten, but for every one or two bad ones you get a Foundation or “Nightfall.” If I remember correctly I two of his short stories ended up in our middle school and high school literature textbooks: “The Fun They Had” (always popular with teachers) and “Profession.” With such a wide net, it’s no wonder just about everybody has read him.

          • Nick says:

            @FLWAB
            Yeah, it was the Foundation books I read, plus some of the robot stories (the latter in an anthology, I think). All from my local library. We got the short story “The Feeling of Power” in one of our school textbooks; our class didn’t read it, but things went so interminably slowly that I would always read around in those books.

            @Atlas
            Almost as good as Book of the New Sun is pretty high praise!

          • Nornagest says:

            I reread Dune recently, and I think it still holds up pretty well. I’m noticing all sorts of different things than I did when I was thirteen, though.

            Also, Herbert really does have a fetish for the hard-places-make-hard-men trope, although it’s slightly less in-your-face here than it is in The Dosadi Experiment.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @Nornagest: I recall a side note in Dune’s Deep Lore being that the Sardaukar are Space Israelis, having colonized Planet Israel for the express purpose of becoming Hard Men. Which seems like gilding the Lily on that trope when the Fremen are already central to the plot.

          • Clutzy says:

            I reread Dune recently, and I think it still holds up pretty well. I’m noticing all sorts of different things than I did when I was thirteen, though.

            Also, Herbert really does have a fetish for the hard-places-make-hard-men trope, although it’s slightly less in-your-face here than it is in The Dosadi Experiment.

            I think this is too hard on Herbert. Because the Fremen, while a different culture, really do have access to the same tech as their enemies fundamentally. Its actually more similar to a Blue/Red Tribe conflict in the US today, and in this scenario the Red Tribe also has its own contingent of elite, defecting, blue tribe generals. What army would you bet on in in a US civil war of equal or near equal tech: Blue Tribe led by those in the top 10% of Blue Tribeyness or Red Tribe led by a concert of elite Blue Tribe defectors and elite Red Tribers? I don’t think many people think such a conflict would be very close, particularly when he also takes the convenient step of removing atomics as a MAD option.

        • Randy M says:

          This judgement was made after reading the Robots of Dawn with my twelve year old daughter. She is enjoying it a lot. I find the prose somewhat sparse, the plot to be meandering, the dialogue is fine, and the ideas are mostly interesting, except for a few points that seem foolish to me*. I shouldn’t be thinking “I could do this better” when reading a Sci-fi giant.

          *Mainly that the major political dispute is over colonizing worlds with humaniform robots, but I don’d see “Android vs robot” as meaningful a distinction as “living vs non-living”

          • FLWAB says:

            *Mainly that the major political dispute is over colonizing worlds with humaniform robots, but I don’d see “Android vs robot” as meaningful a distinction as “living vs non-living”

            If I recall correctly, the controversy isn’t that they are androids but instead that they are robots at all. Being an android just makes them superior at colonizing the planet and preparing it for human immigrants. The controversy is that the anti-humaniform faction (conveniently headed by the only man who knows how to make andriods) believes that if they use robots to colonize planets then the Spacers will never struggle or evolve, they’ll just move from one planet where everything is perfectly suited to their needs to an identical one. Without struggle, and with robots keeping people perfectly comfortable, humanity won’t advance.

            Whats silly is the idea that only androids would be capable of terreforming a planet properly. Surely they could have box droids do just as good a job.

          • Randy M says:

            Sorry, I ran out of time on that post I simplified. You are correct that the dispute is between “colonize with humans (including Earthmen)” and “colonize with robots (so we don’t have to use Earthmen).”
            As you say, the part I object to is the fact that having humaniform robots is seen as the factor that will allow them to use robots to colonize distant worlds, to the extent that the “murder” that instigates the plot gains interstellar significance because of it. It seems to be assuming that robots more like us can build a world more suitable to use, both physically and culturally.

            Even if we assume that the robots cannot rely on our programming due to the distances involved, I don’t see why they couldn’t be given a complete specification of humanity to design around. And most of the tools humans use to build things don’t in anyway resemble humans.

            Part of the problem is that “humaniform” is a bit undefined, but it is heavily implied to be largely a physical resemblance.

            (I’ll also add, to soften my previous criticism, that I do plan to follow up with more of his novels)

  56. DinoNerd says:

    It’s hard to have a debate with an amorphous blob – i.e the millions of people online.

    But if I simplify down to the two US political groups, I note that until George Floyd’s death, the people staging protests in spite of Covid-19 tended to be MAGAs and other Republicans/Trump supporters with arguments about the constitution (right of assembly), liberty, etc. and a to me spurious idea that quarantines of anyone who only might be sick were always and everywhere a violation of human rights. (There were also more nuanced arguments. But they weren’t generally coming from Democrats, let alone their more extreme supporters.)

    Now the protestors are on the other side of the political fence, and I strongly suspect the people raising concerns about the spreading of Covid-19 are now on the Republican side of that fence.

    I don’t recall whether or how you responded to the earlier protests, or how you normally align politically. (I’m afraid I only remember those details for a few very prolific posters, and a very few individuals I’ve repeatedly argued with.) But my immediate reaction to this wall of text is to ask what you said when the antilockdown protests happened. (I don’t recall any post this huge, but my memory is far from perfect.)

    Personally, I’m worried, but the reopening that has already begun already had me worried. I specifically shared my worries with the proud parents of a college age protestor who lives with them, but they don’t share my concerns. (They were in fact a little surprised that I was still washing my hands religiously after touching anything that had been touched by someone outside the household within the past 24 hours, unless I’d been able to simply wash that object on its arrival in my house. All of us, except the protestor, are in our early 60s, and we’re all old friends.)

    And I’ve never believed we could keep the lockdown going until an effective vaccine was available for all.

    My best guess is that the protests won’t make things much worse than the reopening was already going to. I suspect a lot more people total went to church yesterday (now that’s permitted in many/most places AFAIK) than attended Sunday’s protests. But I don’t in fact know that – and, sadly, with both happening at the same time, and the continuing lack of contact tracing, we’re unlikely to ever know what the main causes were, so each political tribe will have a different cause to blame for the likely uptick.

    And if the goal of those making decisions is to reach herd immunity as fast as possible without overwhelming hospitals, and they are knowingly reopening fast enough to significantly increase Covid-19 cases (and deaths), they’ll just slow down the reopening a bit to compensate – for protestors of any tribe, as well as scofflaws and specific reopenings that are politically but not medically sensible.

  57. LadyJane says:

    If this were happening in late March or early April, I’d be inclined to agree with you. But honestly, it seems like people had already started ignoring the lockdown even before the protests broke out. I live in NYC, which was hit by COVID-19 harder than almost anywhere else on Earth, and it seemed like people stopped taking the quarantine measures as seriously around early-to-mid-May, 2-3 weeks before the protests started. For a while the subways and train stations in NYC were virtually empty, but then the crowds started coming back; for a while, you’d only see about 1/10 people walking around without a mask, now it’s more like 1/3. The restaurants and bars and nightclubs aren’t open anymore, but that’s due to government fiat; it seems pretty clear that a lot of people would prefer things to go back to normal, or at least mostly-normal.

    Maybe it’s because people started doubting the efficacy of the lockdown, maybe it’s because they stopped thinking of COVID-19 as a serious threat, maybe they just got tired and figured “eh, fuck it, I can’t do this anymore.” Or maybe it’s just because the weather got nice and people wanted to be outside more. At any rate, it wasn’t just because of the protests; if anything, the protest movement was only able to take hold because the lockdown was already starting to fade away.

  58. Matt M says:

    My prediction is that if COVID spikes, most commentators will completely ignore the role the protests may have played and blame Republican governors for re-opening too early. All coverage will focus on potential increases in Texas and Florida and will ignore any second wave that happens in New York or California. It’ll be “we warned them and they didn’t listen to the science” all the way down.

    And if some brave soul dares to ask “What about the protests”, well, they’re already covered as our expert public health advisors have already told us that the protests will, on net, save lives. Implying otherwise will be verboten, and possibly get you banned from social media.

    • AG says:

      And if some brave soul dares to ask “What about the protests,” the response will be that the protesters tried to wear masks and social distance, but the police actively pulled down masks, used spray measures that would further incentivize taking masks off to wash off the chemicals, seized mask shipments to protesters, and herded protesters into unsafe distances, especially in detainment, so it’s on them.

      • Aftagley says:

        Also using chemicals that force those in proximity to start coughing violently.

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      How could you tell the difference between a spike from reopening and a spike from protests? Or, more likely, tell how much of a spike was from what?

      • Matt M says:

        I’m not sure there is a scientifically legitimate way to tell the difference. But I suspect this won’t stop the journalist class from confidently asserting it…

      • Eugene Dawn says:

        You could compare regions that had only one or the other and hopefully extract some meaningful information from that, but obviously it will be messy and contested to try and apply that information elsewhere.

      • AG says:

        People have also said that the timeline for the most recent spikes far better matches people breaking social distancing for Memorial Day Weekend.

  59. Purplehermann says:

    The Monkey’s Paw, Civil Unrest Ed.

    You use the monkey’s paw to wish for

    a) the protests (and riots, looting etc) to stop

    b) the political leaders of the US to all decide to tackle the issues brought to the nation by the protests

    based on your personal preference.

    How does it go very, very wrong?

    Edited to change option b

    • bullseye says:

      Wiping out humanity would accomplish Option A. (It would have also accomplished Option B, before you changed it).

      As for Option B, getting *all* of our political leaders to agree on anything would pretty much require either a purge of dissenters or some sort of mind control.

    • FLWAB says:

      The police unions start taking over American cities directly, mowing protesters down with impunity. The protests stop as everyone brave enough to protest is killed. Politicians all unanimously move to remove the police from power, leading to a mini civil war where the army takes back each city one by one. The nations urban centers become modern battlegrounds, with casualties and devastation to match. The US spends the next few years under martial law, with the police outlawed in favor of military “Law and Order” units.

    • Evan Þ says:

      The political leaders of the United States decide to launch an auto-coup, gun down the protestors, and censor all images of police violence from the Internet.

      You didn’t say how they decided to tackle the issues brought to light.

    • Randy M says:

      Obvious answer for a is that they all catch Covid and are all too sick to go out.

      For b, well, it’s tempting fate to pose it, since I think we are going to get this wish and it probably will go wrong. But let’s hold off on that speculation, assume our malevolent wish granter gets literal, and so we hold nationwide police vs “the community” football games–“Tackle Racism Together!”–to build ties, and the ensuing riots from a questionable call level whole states.

    • baconbits9 says:

      a) the protests (and riots, looting etc) to stop

      Science fiction answer: Some poor guy gets Covid+Ebola at the same time, they combine their genes and release a super bug where 2 weeks after being exposed you start vomiting out your intestines (while being contagious for those two weeks).

      Real world answer: A major riot erupts and dozens to hundreds are killed and Trump mobilizes the armed forces and starts a military occupation in the major cities.

      b) the political leaders of the US to all decide to tackle the issues brought to the nation by the protests

      Sci fi answer: They hire Bruce Willis to fly a space ship to racism and blow it up with nukes, he agrees and after reading to many facebook posts decides the US is racist and just nukes the US.

      Real answer: The politicians put a bunch of words on a piece of paper, sign it and stuff happens.

      • Randy M says:

        Sci fi answer: They hire Bruce Willis to fly a space ship to racism and blow it up with nukes, he agrees and after reading to many facebook posts decides the US is racist and just nukes the US.

        How about we make it an artificial intelligence that is tasked with destroying racism who peruses facebook and twitter and then nukes the country?
        It’d be the perfect scissor statement, splitting people who think the robot realized the truth about us versus those who think social media distorts reality.

    • AG says:

      An enterprising AI decides that this is a great time to release the pro-paperclip hypnodrones.

    • albatross11 says:

      A grand political consensus to address racism emerges, which is based on almost entirely incorrect assumptions about the causes of various social problems. With great energy and vast resources, Congress and the president and each state and local government implements the consesnus policies. These do almost nothing to address the actual problems, but create a whole bunch of new problems in their wake. Because this grand political consensus has now become part of the justifying myth for both parties and the major media outlets, criticizing it is just not acceptable to anyone anywhere near the mainstream, so we keep putting more money and power into doing the same stuff harder to solve the problems caused by the first set of new consensus policies.

      Oh, wait, you were wanting a hypothetical, not a prediction….

      • original-internet-explorer says:

        Sick burn.

        The left, right, liberals – all factions believe they are using first principals to produce their conclusion.

        Isn’t it possible each faction has value and with testing and integration of each thesis we come to utopia?

    • Deiseach says:

      You use the monkey’s paw to wish for a) the protests (and riots, looting etc) to stop b) the political leaders of the US to all decide to tackle the issues brought to the nation by the protests …How does it go very, very wrong?

      Not my personal preference, but Bloody Sunday. Protest turns to rioting turns to army sent in to “Right, let’s settle these damn Paddies down and make them recognise law and order!” turns to what is perceived as massive cover-up by state for decades. Turns into massive recruitment drive for the IRA.

      Alleged intercepted army communications from the time in the immediate aftermath.

      Part of the reason I am so critical of the way all these protests are going is because, yes, it could go the way of Northern Ireland (I am still surprised that didn’t happen because the US had its own little underground movements and bombing campaigns) and you can get paramilitary activity and bombs and guns, but in the end you will still have to come to the negotiating table, put down the guns, and talk about what you want and you (both sides) will have to compromise even when that sticks in your craw in order to get anywhere. The other way just means death.

    • Erc says:

      b) the political leaders of the US to all decide to tackle the issues brought to the nation by the protests

      This kind of vague, non-specific rhetoric is the whole problem. If you have solutions, present them.

  60. anon-e-moose says:

    As a pretty typical red-triber, who’s maybe a bit further than the “normal,” the whipsaw you mention has destroyed my last little bit of trust in “the system.” (meaning well educated, public facing authorities.)

    Up higher, Atlas mentions the letter signed by the Twitterati public health folks–for me, that was the final straw. Arresting pastors and gym owners, but street protests are A-OK? Nope, I’m done. “Blackpilled” as the kids say.

    It’s like in the old Scooby-Doo cartoon, where the the mask it pulled off and ghost was old Mr. Jenkins like we thought all along! I was skeptical of the lockdowns, and it didn’t feel right or effective. But hey, all in this together, and that good stuff. But now, as the mask comes off, all of these “important public health voices” are actually just partisan actors with momentarily-relevant job titles! If the Yellowstone volcano becomes active, I expect we’ll be told about how it’s systemic racism that really causes magma to rise.

    I’m not an epidemiologist, but 5k people shoulder to shoulder will increase transmission risk. No way around it, masks or not. That risk was so unacceptable, just days before, that we overrode at least two articles of the bill of rights for months. But now we have a blue-tribe approved reason to gather, you’re a damn Nazi if you’re not in the streets. It’s all so tiresome.

    I suppose I’m not the only person feeling this way, and that’s the bigger societal issue. It seems like you can either radicalize, or drop out of the political process completely. I suspect hard lefties feel the same way.

    • Statismagician says:

      Just passing by to say that even a casual glance at the signatures pages for that letter will tell you it’s largely students, medical-but-not-actually-epidemiological-experts, and absolutely unrelated activist types signing it.

      A fair number of MPHs and infectious disease physicians too, sure, but this is a lizardman situation, not anything like a representative poll of the field at large.

      Interestingly, I know maybe half a dozen actual trained public health people I wouldn’t have been shocked to find on the list – none of them appear to have signed it, but a couple people I wasn’t expecting did.

      EDIT: Based on a quick skim, I don’t want it to seem like I ran it through a textual analysis program or anything.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        Thanks for that.

        The actual public health people should probably speak out against it, because it’s being reported in the media as authoritative. I foolishly took this at face value because it confirmed my prejudices that “the experts” are experts at advancing their own interests. But for an awful lot of people this is going to be like “public health officials” taking what little social capital they had left and setting it on fire.

      • Matt M says:

        Who counts as an “expert” has always been up to the heavily-biased media to decide, anyway. A few weeks ago right wing meme circles were having a field day because CNN explained that Rand Paul didn’t qualify as an expert, despite being a doctor, because his field was unrelated to epidemiology.

        Then in one of their expert panels, they featured a Swedish high-school dropout, instead.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        The actual letter was from lots of people like students and many signatories were very cautious in their endorsement.

        But NPR — freaking NPR, who I really consider “pretty accurate but slightly biased” — did a headline of

        Dozens of public health and disease experts have signed an open letter in support of the nationwide anti-racism protests.

        “White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19,” they wrote.

        This is typically seen as the peak of the doctors-choosing-sides thing.

  61. baconbits9 says:

    Warning: Nothing but virtue signalling ahead.

    As an outside observer I have a hard time viewing the general white involvement with the anti-racist movement emotions better than disgust. I was never bowled over by Jackie Robinson’s story, but I was fundamentally awed by the people who fought to send their black kids to all white schools where they clearly weren’t wanted*. To me the image of a person protesting to the extent of standing in front of a fire hose for the privileged of sending their kids to a school where they would be further insulted and harassed for years was near insane. As a kid/teenager I could accept that a person would be willing to endure abuse if the exchange on the other side was ‘be a professional baseball player’, but it was very hard to see the ‘suffer abuse so that my children can also suffer abuse’ side. Even as an adult, as a stay at home dad homeschooling 3 kids who clearly is willing to take a little bit of scorn for being an outsider I can’t really see myself with that level of bravery and commitment for a goal as intangible as ‘better education’. That this strategy worked is incomprehensible, but I think it is undeniable that it did as that over the century following the Civil war blacks made massive gains in terms of education, income and overall outcomes against whites while white standards of living were climbing at one of the fastest paces in history.

    The most common racist phrases that I see on a regular basis all come from a specific caste of people, and they more or less translate into ‘these people need our help to overcome your bigotry’. Now as far as racist comments go that is far milder than ‘these people need to be dealt with’, but it is far more frequent afaict, and I have found myself wanting to grab someone by the collar and shake them while yelling ‘you think ‘they’ need your help? Have you and damn clue what their grandparents accomplished without your ‘help’ and without anyone chatting with them about their ‘lived experiences’.

    *by at least a vocal minority if not a vocal majority.

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      Minor point: I read an account by one of the people who’d been among the first to desegregate schools. She didn’t tell her parents how the white students treated her. They might have guessed, but they didn’t have the details.

  62. Edward Scizorhands says:

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/06/08/timeline-trump-church-photo-op/?arc404=true&no_nav=true&p9w22b2p=b2p22p9w00098

    WaPo does a reconstruction of the clearing of the crowd around Lafayette Square, from professional and cell phone video, and captured radio traffic.

    • Deiseach says:

      I notice nothing there that the church, St John’s, had been set on fire – the NYT said something about “partially burned” and the WaPo had a story mentioning that it was one of several places where “fires broke out” when a “fire had been set in the basement”.

      I was unaware of this, I had presumed that it was only graffiti and broken windows. Funny how all this peaceful protesting suddenly resulted in fires mysteriously breaking out! Well, “largely” or “mostly” peaceful, that was the nod made by the papers to acknowledging that some violence was going on.

      Although the protests were largely peaceful in the afternoon and evening, small groups of people began setting fires and smashing windows once darkness fell.

      Shortly after 10 p.m., someone tore down the American flag that hangs outside the butter-yellow church and appeared to toss the flag into a nearby fire. A glass door or window was shattered.

  63. Belisaurus Rex says:

    I predict that if BLM achieves their goal of reducing police activity, that in less than a year the predominant narrative will be that underpolicing in black neighborhoods will be the most destructive example of racism affecting the black community.

    Edited to be less pithy.

    • Guy in TN says:

      If the police are systematically allowing murders to go unsolved in black neighborhoods, then I would contend that the anti-racist Black Lives Matter movement didn’t win, definitionally.

      • viVI_IViv says:

        Black Lives Matter movement didn’t win, definitionally.

        Antifa, social justice, anti-racism, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, …, I see a pattern here.

      • cassander says:

        Given that the current BLM plan seems to be to abolish the police, this feels a little catch-22…

        • metalcrow says:

          I hope this doesn’t come across as sarcastic (it’s not!), but what do you think BLM means when they say they want to abolish the police? From my understanding it’s more of a catchy saying that encompasses the plans described in https://www.mpd150.com/report/future/ and https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/06/03/457251670/how-much-do-we-need-the-police
          That is, changing the police from what we have them today as an all-encompassing organization responsible for both mental heath and bank robberies, to numerous different institutions.

          • CatCube says:

            So like Trump I’m supposed to take them seriously but not literally?

          • cassander says:

            @metalcrow

            I’ve seen a lot of different things, most of which don’t make a lot of sense. Let’s take your first example:

            Most property crime is driven not by malice, but by desperation. A capitalist economy forces each of us to fend for ourselves with little social support or aid. In a time of historically high income inequality, it’s no mystery why some people turn to theft, burglary, and other property crime to provide for themselves. The best way to reduce property crime isn’t to jail everyone who is poor, or try to scare community members into obedience: it’s to invest in communities so that people have less of a need to steal from each other in the first place. When property crime does occur, oftentimes restorative and transformative justice processes produce better outcomes than arrest and incarceration. In addition to the Native communities who have practiced holistic forms of justice in Minnesota for millennia, we have a number of nonprofits doing restorative justice work in Minneapolis, including Restorative Justice Community Action and Seward Longfellow Restorative Justice Partnership. At present, these agencies work closely with the Minneapolis Police Department and the Hennepin County Court System, allowing for alternative responses to incarceration for minor crimes such as shoplifting, theft, and public urination. There’s no reason, however, that restorative and transformative justice groups can’t stand on their own, helping to proactively address conflict in the community without involving the criminal justice system. If we want to reduce property crime, and help heal both perpetrators and victims, we should look to restorative justice rather than police action.

            This is grade A nonsense, and replacing the police with, well, whatever you want to call that is definitely abolishing the police. Sure, you can call this section “alternatives” if you like, and I suppose they are in the most literal sense, but what we have here is effectively abandoning the streets to criminals. And when it doesn’t work the people who published this nonsense definitely won’t be held accountable.

          • metalcrow says:

            @CatCube
            I think that’s an accurate statement, sure. I mean, it’s like any slogan such as ACAB or Make America Great Again. It’s not really a good means of conveying info other then a very limited direction. I agree this phrase is definitely suboptimal, but i don’t get to decide how the memeplex works.

            @cassander
            Can you expand on why you think that’s nonsense? I mean, it sounded decently reasonable to me, especially considering this plan is to take place peace meal over many years.

            replacing the police with, well, whatever you want to call that is definitely abolishing the police

            I mean, if you use that definition, then sure. But the result won’t be “systematically allowing murders to go unsolved in black neighborhoods”, that’s accounted for in the plan.

            effectively abandoning the streets to criminals

            Where do you get this from in those links? Like, the plan isn’t to let criminals go, it’s to divest many of the current roles we have of police into different organizations so police don’t have to deal with everything. I will agree the language is rather flowery, and the quoted section has a number of …SJW coded language elements, but it’s statement “The best way to reduce property crime isn’t to jail everyone who is poor, or try to scare community members into obedience: it’s to invest in communities so that people have less of a need to steal from each other in the first place” seems quite sound! And unless i’m misreading it, it doesn’t state that stopping crime in action is bad or should be ended, just that there are better approaches to take that should be focused on to prevent much of it.

          • cassander says:

            @metalcrow

            I mean, if you use that definition, then sure. But the result won’t be “systematically allowing murders to go unsolved in black neighborhoods”, that’s accounted for in the plan.

            replacing punishment for property crimes with “holistic and restorative justice” is absolutely letting criminals go free. And it’s “accounted for” only in the sense that my plan to conquer world “accounts for” the armed forces of the world by assuming that the unicorns will destroy all who oppose me.

            Where do you get this from in those links?

            It’s from the alternatives section on the right hand bar.

            Like, the plan isn’t to let criminals go, it’s to divest many of the current roles we have of police into different organizations so police don’t have to deal with everything.

            with anything, it seems. As far as I can tell, they want no police, no prisons, and no enforcement, they want to “deal with violence proactively and humanely” and that doesn’t work.

            “The best way to reduce property crime isn’t to jail everyone who is poor, or try to scare community members into obedience: it’s to invest in communities so that people have less of a need to steal from each other in the first place” seems quite sound!

            It’s not sound. People do need to be scared into obedience, and if making people richer was all it took to eliminate crime, there wouldn’t be any given how much richer the poor are today than poor people were 20, 50, or 100 years ago. Criminal behavior is associated with poverty, but it’s not caused by poverty. Rather, poverty and crime are (often) caused by the same thing.

            And unless i’m misreading it, it doesn’t state that stopping crime in action is bad or should be ended,

            It does say that:

            “We can’t discuss how to respond to violence in our communities without acknowledging that police cause violence in our communities – directly, through beatings and shootings, and indirectly, through harassment and criminalization.”

            Again, this is nonsense on stilts.

          • albatross11 says:

            This is making my proposal of “abolish the state” (aka slightly cut taxes and ease off on the victimless-crime-law enforcement) sound a lot better.

          • LesHapablap says:

            There’s an argument that the black family unit has been destroyed by the drug war enforcement, which has caused a lot of poverty and crime in black communities, a cycle.

            The big quote above doesn’t make that argument though and seems to want to blame wealth or income inequality which is a lot less convincing, at least to me.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @metalcrow: There’s a lot to analyze here, so right now I’ll just quote the section of your mpd150 link I want to address as dangerous:

            These days, we live in massive communities where a few people control most of the wealth and power, and the rest of us have to get by on scraps. Of course there’s crime and disorder in our city, given our state, our country, and our world. But the solution to that crime and disorder isn’t locking people up – it’s making sure they have what they need to get by. As Greg Boyle, founder of Homeboy Industries, a community safety agency in Los Angeles put it, “nothing stops a bullet like a job.” Giving our communities the resources they need to thrive will do far more to prevent theft, assault, and murder than “tough on crime” policing ever could.

            This is dangerous nonsense. Pre-industrial states were often close to permanently full employment (~90% in agriculture) – except for seriously disabled people – yet could have violent and property crime rates higher than we do today: see e.g. Pinker 2011. They’re making empirically false emotion-laden truth claims about contemporary economic disparities in order to replace law enforcement with more socialism.

            But stopping crime isn’t even what dominates the time of police officers – writing parking tickets and making traffic stops takes up far more of most officers’ time. It’s 2017 – there are far better ways to give someone a speeding ticket than having someone with a gun pull you over on the highway, putting both of your lives at risk. Let’s find ways of holding each other accountable for common rules in ways that don’t require the threat of violence.

            While this is a reform that might work in conjunction with smaller police forces, you’re going to need (wo)men with guns in cars if you plan to stop drivers who get their licenses suspended by a court for shredding the tickets sent to their home. Otherwise their behavior in response to racking up unpaid tickets and getting their license suspended will be “VROOM!”

            In addition to “preventing crime,” police also enforce the morality of the powerful on everyone else.

            I am skeptical that they fully understand what they’re saying here. Yes, laws can be set up that way – for instance the powerful could pass an unpopular law against “hate speech” and send police to your door for posting anything on the internet that violates it, like the UK – but the point of democracy is attempting to have only laws that reflect the morality of at least 50% +1 adults in the polity. That’s not “the powerful” (Joe Bob’s vote for Trump counted just as much as Mark Zuckerberg’s ballot), and in fact the elites are empirically on this movement’s side.

            Native communities have many age-old transformative justice practices that can serve as examples, and even restorative justice agencies in the Twin Cities that currently work in the criminal justice system could be tasked with addressing community conflict outside of the courtroom. Another model to consider is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that helped South Africa begin to heal from the wounds of Apartheid. One thing is certainly true: we couldn’t design a more inhumane, racist, damaging way to resolve conflict than the United States penal system if we tried.

            This is a mix of vague platitudes and lies. Specifically the last sentence is lying and the preceding ones are left-wing buzzwords that say nothing about how violent and property crimes would be deterred.

          • Jaskologist says:

            The Moynihan Report was published in 1965. The War on Drugs got going in the early 70s.

            The white out of wedlock birth rate now is worse than the black one was then, by the way.

          • metalcrow says:

            @cassander

            replacing punishment for property crimes with “holistic and restorative justice” is absolutely letting criminals go free

            I think we may be having a definition argument here about a very tiny statement in the larger picture. The full sentence states: “When property crime does occur, oftentimes restorative and transformative justice processes produce better outcomes than arrest and incarceration.” So, to expand on what i interpret that as, i would say that if someone breaks into your garage and steals your bike, the proper response isn’t to (after catching them and retrieving your bike through a dedicated organization for non-violent thefts, which is the obvious outcome which should always happen in any justice system) throw them in jail for that. It’s to identify the reasons for the theft, understand what drove them to do it, and connect then with an organization or social worker that addresses those needs as a treatment plan for punishing the crime. That’s what i understand “transformative justice” as. Once the crime victim is made whole, justice must also take steps to get the best outcome for the criminal.

            And it’s “accounted for” only in the sense that my plan to conquer world “accounts for” the armed forces of the world by assuming that the unicorns will destroy all who oppose me.

            Well, i think it’s rather unfair to say this isn’t accounted for after reading the section for “Property Crime”, instead of “Responding to Violence”. Reading that section myself, i will give you it is rather light on details for treating it, but it doesn’t claim, in this section, that the correct approach is to not attempt to stop murders. It says that an effective measure for stopping them before they happen is community investment. And i mean, we want to stop murders before they happen. The correct approach is to prevent murders both through resumes which include people capable of intervening in violence with force, AND through community outreach and social systems which stop the murder before it has the chance to ferment.

            with anything, it seems. As far as I can tell, they want no police, no prisons, and no enforcement, they want to “deal with violence proactively and humanely” and that doesn’t work.

            Well, by no police, that means “no singular organization that would be recognized as the police we see today”, so that’s accurate. Ctrl-Fing through it i only find 1 reference to prisons, which doesn’t mention ending them at all, but i’ll grant you that i would say de-emphasizing them is probably important. And enforcement-wise, i mean, i just don’t see where that comes from. Like, while i can understand how the formulation of the language lends the though that they’ll go soft on crime, i don’t see any policies which state that enforcement is going away. If you’d like, i can ask a friend of mine who is a part of them what exactly the enforcement plans would be.

            Also, can you give examples of cases where societies/states that deal with violence proactively and humanely didn’t work? I’m not anywhere near an expert in history so i’d be interested in examples.

            People do need to be scared into obedience

            I mean, yes, but to how much of a degree? Like, factually, a 100% scared-straight method hasn’t worked for our society, since we seem to be trying our hardest to scare people into not doing crimes, and there are still crimes, and not an insignificant number of them. Like, as a example if you’re of the Locke persuasion, children can raised in different ways to ensure obedience. They can be punished and beaten and abused when they do things wrong, or they can be only punished for the most egregious things, and praised or gently corrected for good or lesser bad things. What the movement wants to do is more more in the second direction, as i read it.

            if making people richer was all it took to eliminate crime, there wouldn’t be any given how much richer the poor are today than poor people were 20, 50, or 100 years ago

            True, but their certainly is a loooot less of it! See Better Angels of Our Nature for the case for that.

            And unless i’m misreading it, it doesn’t state that stopping crime in action is bad or should be ended,

            It does say that:

            “We can’t discuss how to respond to violence in our communities without acknowledging that police cause violence in our communities – directly, through beatings and shootings, and indirectly, through harassment and criminalization.”

            I feel like ships passing in the night here. The statement “police cause violence in our communities – directly, through beatings and shootings, and indirectly, through harassment and criminalization” as i understand it, does not refer to the idealized actions we need to enforce rules. It refers to
            1)beatings and shootings, both of which i think are pretty bad except when you need them to at-the-exact-moment save a life, which i don’t think anyone outside of us insane utilitarians think needs to be said
            2)harassment seems bad by definition
            3)criminalization refers to, in this case, the criminalization of non-violent or victimless crimes like smoking weed or loitering.
            This does not include stopping crime which is universally recognized to be bad anywhere in it.

            (sorry for the late response, lot to write)

          • albatross11 says:

            See, this is just a different set of premises or something. My assumption is that when someone steals my bike, it’s not because he had a hard childhood or saw too many bad images of people like him on TV, it’s because he wants my bike and stealing it is less work than buying it. There’s a straightforward incentive here–he gets my bike, and he can ride it or maybe sell it to someone for today’s dose of opioids or something.

          • metalcrow says:

            Ok, in the time that i spend responding to cassander, Le Maistre Chat also responded, so please forgive me but i really don’t wanna write up another post in response. But really, digging into the particulars of the MPD150 was not my intent in bringing them up. My original posts was in addressing cassander’s statement that “current BLM plan seems to be to abolish the police” which i interpreted as them viewing the police abolition movement as completely getting rid of the police with no replacement, and i wanted to address that and clarify that’s not what the abolition movement is about. Whether MPD150’s goals are good or sound is outside the scope of what i was originally trying to claim, and i apologize for bringing them into the convo.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            My assumption is that when someone steals my bike, it’s not because he had a hard childhood or saw too many bad images of people like him on TV, it’s because he wants my bike and stealing it is less work than buying it. There’s a straightforward incentive here–he gets my bike, and he can ride it or maybe sell it to someone for today’s dose of opioids or something.

            Yes, that sounds like a great deal for Someone if he or she can pull it off.

          • cassander says:

            @metalcrow says:

            So, to expand on what i interpret that as, i would say that if someone breaks into your garage and steals your bike, the proper response isn’t to (after catching them and retrieving your bike through a dedicated organization for non-violent thefts, which is the obvious outcome which should always happen in any justice system) throw them in jail for that. It’s to identify the reasons for the theft, understand what drove them to do it, and connect then with an organization or social worker that addresses those needs as a treatment plan for punishing the crime.

            If that organization is allowed to compel the bike thief, it’s the police. If it’s not, you’ve abandoned the streets to criminals.

            Well, i think it’s rather unfair to say this isn’t accounted for after reading the section for “Property Crime”, instead of “Responding to Violence”.

            I quoted both.

            Reading that section myself, i will give you it is rather light on details for treating it, but it doesn’t claim, in this section, that the correct approach is to not attempt to stop murders. It says that an effective measure for stopping them before they happen is community investment.

            Which isn’t accurate.

            Well, by no police, that means “no singular organization that would be recognized as the police we see today”,

            breaking the cops into multiple organizations doesn’t mean they aren’t cops.

            i don’t see any policies which state that enforcement is going away. If you’d like, i can ask a friend of mine who is a part of them what exactly the enforcement plans would be.

            The part where they outright say that the cops are causing the violence in their communities certainly implies that.

            Also, can you give examples of cases where societies/states that deal with violence proactively and humanely didn’t work? I’m not anywhere near an expert in history so i’d be interested in examples.

            can you name one where it did? such a society would collapse into chaos.

            I mean, yes, but to how much of a degree? Like, factually, a 100% scared-straight method hasn’t worked for our society, since we seem to be trying our hardest to scare people into not doing crimes, and there are still crimes, and not an insignificant number of them.

            We aren’t doing our hardest by any means.

            What the movement wants to do is more more in the second direction, as i read it.

            This has been tried before, and it failed disastrously. See the 1960s and 70s.

            True, but their certainly is a loooot less of it! See Better Angels of Our Nature for the case for that.

            there is dramatically more crime today than there was in the 1950s, when the average incomes were well below the modern poverty line. Again, poverty doesn’t cause crime, at least not in first world societies.

            does not refer to the idealized actions we need to enforce rules. It refers to
            1)beatings and shootings, both of which i think are pretty bad except when you need them to at-the-exact-moment save a life, which i don’t think anyone outside of us insane utilitarians think needs to be said
            2)harassment seems bad by definition
            3)criminalization refers to, in this case, the criminalization of non-violent or victimless crimes like smoking weed or loitering.

            I think you’re bending over backwards to make try to nonsense look reasonable. I think the authors would disagree strenuously with your claim that their definition of criminalization was so limited. There was no campaign to make selling loosies legal after Eric Garner, and there never will be, because that’s not an issue that excites anyone.

          • These days, we live in massive communities where a few people control most of the wealth and power, and the rest of us have to get by on scraps.

            Lets try to put some numbers to this rhetoric. “A few people” should be something under one percent. “Most of the wealth” should be a large majority.

            As of 2019, the top one percent of the population (I’m not sure if individuals or households) held about 32.5% of total net worth. (Source)

            The distribution of income is probably more relevant than the distribution of wealth, and, in a market society, it’s the best measure of economic power. As of 2016, the top ten percent of households had 37.6% of household income. (source — an excel table from here)

            Not an egalitarian society, but enormously less unequal than the rhetoric implies. You might want to worry about conclusions based on the writing of people who are either that far disconnected from reality or that unconcerned with whether what they say is true.

          • cassander says:

            @Le Maistre Chat says:

            It’ll be real easy to pull off once we abolish all the cops and replace them with social workers.

          • metalcrow says:

            @cassander

            If that organization is allowed to compel the bike thief, it’s the police. If it’s not, you’ve abandoned the streets to criminals.

            ok, then this is a semantics argument. The police abolition movement is all about abolishing the police and replacing them with the police.

          • cassander says:

            @metalcrow says:

            That’s sort of my point. If you’re going to have an organization that can go around arresting people, well you can call it the not-police if you like, but you’re not actually changing anything. You’re just dressing things up in flowery, SJW friendly dressing and I’ll make fun of you for it. If you do actually want to abolish the police, you’re ceding the streets to criminals who will hurt most the people you claim to want to help most, and I’ll consider you dangerous to the extent you have any actual power. But nowhere “in abolish the police” is there a respectable policy position that has a chance of improving the lives of anyone other than the people hired to preach about it or implement it.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @DavidFriedman:

            Lets try to put some numbers to this rhetoric. “A few people” should be something under one percent. “Most of the wealth” should be a large majority.

            As of 2019, the top one percent of the population (I’m not sure if individuals or households) held about 32.5% of total net worth. (Source)

            The distribution of income is probably more relevant than the distribution of wealth, and, in a market society, it’s the best measure of economic power. As of 2016, the top ten percent of households had 37.6% of household income. (source — an excel table from here)

            Not an egalitarian society, but enormously less unequal than the rhetoric implies. You might want to worry about conclusions based on the writing of people who are either that far disconnected from reality or that unconcerned with whether what they say is true.

            Exactly. They need to be told the facts in hopes that they change (mistake theory) and if they choose not to care, resisted with everything society has.

          • metalcrow says:

            @cassander
            again, this was entirely my original point. The slogan is bad! Sure yes, they are not “abolishing” the police, there will still be police by that definition of police. But it is such a drastic change in policing that calling it the police seems wrong and is just confusing to the average voter. If you wanna come up with a better <4 word slogan which specifies "The police as we have them today are asked to do to much. They are expected to be mental health consultants and prevent bank robberies. We want to split these tasks up into different organizations better equipped for each while having stronger limits around what each one can do so we don't have the current problem where one organization gets to kick down someone's door to make sure they are feeling ok" the please! tell me! And then it won't matter because no one will use it. All i wanted to do was explain the movement.

            And if you want a respectable policy position that has a chance of improving the lives of anyone other than the people hired to preach about it or implement it, here's one: anything that stops the retaliation of Adrian Schoolcraft from happening. Like, you know, this movement which doesn't want anyone armed to be handling "allegedly" emotionally disturbed people.

          • cassander says:

            @metalcrow says:

            again, this was entirely my original point. The slogan is bad! Sure yes, they are not “abolishing” the police, there will still be police by that definition of police.

            I’m not objecting to the slogan, so much as the movement, for lack of a better word.

            “The police as we have them today are asked to do to much. They are expected to be mental health consultants and prevent bank robberies. We want to split these tasks up into different organizations better equipped for each while having stronger limits around what each one can do so we don’t have the current problem where one organization gets to kick down someone’s door to make sure they are feeling ok” the please! tell me! And then it won’t matter because no one will use it. All i wanted to do was explain the movement.

            well, “Hugs not Harm” would be more accurate, but frankly Again, I don’t think that’s what most people are thinking anything anywhere NEAR that charitable. I think large numbers of people think that the cops are part of an evil, racist system that breeds exploitation and witchcraft on a massive scale that needs to be destroyed, and that by striking it down the world will become a better place.

            anything that stops the retaliation of Adrian Schoolcraft from happening. Like, you know, this movement which doesn’t want anyone armed to be handling “allegedly” emotionally disturbed people

            .

            I can think of a few. Camden did great work in this area. You have all the intrinsic problems of any any government bureaucracy tasked with a complicated task with a lot of tradeoffs, but while you can improve things, you can’t do it with wishful thinking and ludicrous nonsense about native american traditions of conflict resolution.

          • John Schilling says:

            Once the crime victim is made whole, justice must also take steps to get the best outcome for the criminal.

            First, it’s a joke to say that the crime victim is going to be made whole. Nobody on Team Restorative Justice has any credibility where that claim is concerned.

            Second, if the result of stealing a car and getting caught is, you got to tool around town in a nice car for an evening, strip and sell the car, spend the money on hookers and blow, not go to jail, and have a team of elite social workers devote themselves to securing the best outcome for the criminal, that seems like a set of incentives that all line up behind “steal the car already!”

            Have your team of elite social workers devote themselves to securing the best outcome for all the poor underprivileged youth who don’t go around stealing cars, and arrange for the thieves to have decidedly negative outcomes, please.

          • Aftagley says:

            @David Friedman:

            As of 2019, the top one percent of the population (I’m not sure if individuals or households) held about 32.5% of total net worth.

            The distribution of income is probably more relevant than the distribution of wealth, and, in a market society, it’s the best measure of economic power. As of 2016, the top ten percent of households had 37.6% of household income.

            Apples, meet oranges. Oranges, apples. Let’s compare!

            Household income doesn’t correlate to wealth/net worth especially at higher income levels. You’re trust-fund billionaire could have no effective household income and it would be innane to say he has less than an wage slave.

            If you look at wealth – you see that the top 10% of the US controls around 70% of the wealth in america while the bottom 50% controlled only 1%.

          • metalcrow says:

            @cassander
            oh. actually that’s a very reasonable response, thank you. Also “Hugs not Harm” is a very good slogan actually. If we started from a better position of trust in the police, that’d be really good.

            I don’t think that’s what most people are thinking anything anywhere NEAR that charitable. I think large numbers of people think that the cops are part of an evil, racist system that breeds exploitation and witchcraft on a massive scale that needs to be destroyed, and that by striking it down the world will become a better place.

            I think this is a tricky. I 100% agree, that if that is what these people believe, i think the movement is wrong. The issue is, i was introduced to this by an acquaintance of mine who i trust and has regularly demonstrated reason and a knowledge that the existence of some sort of organization to use force is necessary at some times. So i am starting off, from my own personally biases, being charitable to this movement and believing they are recognizing the large scale issues that correct this problem would require without destroying society. Additionally, MPD150 is only 1 organization which is a part of this larger movement. They don’t represent everyone, and this conversation has updated me to respect them as a figurehead less.

            I can think of a few. Camden did great work in this area. You have all the intrinsic problems of any any government bureaucracy tasked with a complicated task with a lot of tradeoffs, but while you can improve things, you can’t do it with wishful thinking and ludicrous nonsense about native american traditions of conflict resolution.

            Very fair. I agree, and i really wish i hadn’t used this org as an intro to the movement.

          • LudwigNagasena says:

            what do you think BLM means when they say they want to abolish the police?

            Literally this.

          • Aapje says:

            @metalcrow

            The issue is, i was introduced to this by an acquaintance of mine who i trust and has regularly demonstrated reason and a knowledge that the existence of some sort of organization to use force is necessary at some times.

            To what extent is that person representative for those in power in the movement?

          • viVI_IViv says:

            So, to expand on what i interpret that as, i would say that if someone breaks into your garage and steals your bike, the proper response isn’t to (after catching them and retrieving your bike through a dedicated organization for non-violent thefts, which is the obvious outcome which should always happen in any justice system)

            I’m sure Karen from the Bureau of Restorative and Holistic Justice will be more than willing and capable of identifying the thief and returning the stolen goods to their legitimate owner, rather than lecturing the owner about the evils of capitalism. /s

            throw them in jail for that. It’s to identify the reasons for the theft, understand what drove them to do it, and connect then with an organization or social worker that addresses those needs as a treatment plan for punishing the crime.

            So, assuming that you catch the thief, you give them a compassionate lecture while apologizing for your privilege, then give them some free stuff as reparation as long as they promises to be a gud boi/girl and not do it again. What can possibly go wrong?

            the Native communities who have practiced holistic forms of justice in Minnesota for millennia

            They’ve also practiced cannibalism for millennia (not sure in Minnesota, but certainly in the US). They still have rates of violent crime higher than any ethnic group, especially violent crime against women. Maybe not the best example to look at when deciding how to restructure the legal system of your society.

          • viVI_IViv says:

            @LesHapablap

            There’s an argument that the black family unit has been destroyed by the drug war enforcement, which has caused a lot of poverty and crime in black communities, a cycle.

            The numbers don’t add up: about 2% of African American men are imprisoned at any given time, and their lifetime chance of being incarcerated is 28%. On the other hand, 77% of African American children are born to unmarried mothers.

          • Household income doesn’t correlate to wealth/net worth especially at higher income levels.

            Which is why I gave figures for both.

            Do you agree that the quote I was responding to vastly exaggerates the inequality in both? Your 10% of the population is not “a few individuals” and 30% of the wealth is not “scraps.”

            On the question of income vs wealth, which do you count as economic power? Suppose I own a million dollars worth of Apple stock. That’s wealth. But Apple isn’t going to do whatever I want, it’s going to try to maximize its profits, because that is the common objective of most of the stockholders. And in maximizing its profits what matters is not the wealth of the customers but how much they spend, which is closely related to their income.

            Do you disagree? If the ten thousand people who among them own 70% of the stock of a publisher like historical novels and the ten million potential customers who among them buy 70% of the books like science fiction, which do you think the publisher will publish more of?

            If that isn’t the relevant question, what does “power” as distinguished from “wealth” mean in the context of the quote? If is, then isn’t the distribution of income the proper measure of economic power?

          • the Native communities who have practiced holistic forms of justice in Minnesota for millennia

            I spend one chapter of my most recent non-fiction book on the legal systems of three of the native American tribes. We have a good deal of information on what it was in the 19th century and some basis for projecting that back, from what people alive in the late 19th century remembered or were told about their past, to the 18th century.
            Anyone who claims to know what the legal system of any tribe in North America was two thousand years ago (“millenia”) is living in a fantasy.

          • albatross11 says:

            One way this might work is to mess up the market for mates for black women. Assume most black women want a black man, and vice versa. If a large fraction of black men are taken out of the pool of potential mates by being in prison during peak mate-finding years, it skews the market so that the remaining men have all the power. From the man’s side, there are plenty of fish in the ocean; from the woman’s side, a good man is hard to find.

            In that market, a lot more women who would rather have a committed relationship settle for no commitment but at least a relationship with some sex and love for now, in hopes of more later. And then, when nature takes its course and there’s a baby on the way, very often the man (who never did make a commitment) decides that there are *still* lots of fish in the ocean.

            Even among women who avoid pregnancy and are looking for a man to settle down with, if 28% of the men have prison records, probably a lot of those men do not look like great husband material–they’ve likely got at most high school diplomas or a prison GED, a not-so-great job with many other jobs out of reach because of their felony record, etc. And the dynamics of the dating market probably mean that many of the women in the market for husbands have kids already (which overall makes them less appealing) and many of the men have child support obligations from previous kids (which makes them less appealing).

            I don’t know for sure how big an impact this has, but I bet it has some impact. And again, as best I can tell, it’s not something you’re going to understand by thinking about structural racism, systems of white supremacy, white privilege, etc.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            My experience with Philly police is that they were lackadaisical about car theft. I didn’t even bother telling them about stolen bicycles.

            So, part of looking at the situation would be whether there’s currently enough enforcement that property crimes would get worse in the absence of police.

            Sidelight: Someone I know on facebook says that, on facebook, he’s saying that “defund the police” doesn’t mean abolishing the police, but on twetter, he’s seeing people say that it does mean abolish the police.

          • My experience with Philly police is that they were lackadaisical about car theft. I didn’t even bother telling them about stolen bicycles.

            When we had a burglary in Chicago twenty some years ago, the police officer made it clear that she assumed the only reason we reported it was to have a record for the insurance company.

            I think she was the one who told us that criminalizing marijuana resulted in decriminalizing burglary, the police having a limited amount of time.

          • Clutzy says:

            When we had a burglary in Chicago twenty some years ago, the police officer made it clear that she assumed the only reason we reported it was to have a record for the insurance company.

            I think she was the one who told us that criminalizing marijuana resulted in decriminalizing burglary, the police having a limited amount of time.

            This sort of thing is why mayors started used broken windows policing and COMSTAT to put police where the crime was going to happen.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            Correcting a typo which affects meaning, and another one that doesn’t.

            *****

            Sidelight: Someone I know on facebook says that, on facebook, he’s seeing that “defund the police” doesn’t mean abolishing the police, but on twitter, he’s seeing people say that it does mean abolish the police.

      • Erc says:

        then I would contend that the anti-racist Black Lives Matter movement didn’t win, definitionally.

        Isn’t this just “the Soviet Union wasn’t true communism, definitionally?” I’m less interested in the lofty goal of the movement than what would actually happen if its demands are met.

        • Guy in TN says:

          My response to OP become a non-sequitur after they edited. The original question did not explicitly address police reduction.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        “If the police are systematically allowing murders to go unsolved in black neighborhoods, then I would contend that the anti-racist Black Lives Matter movement didn’t win, definitionally.”

        Oh, you mean as a *new* pattern.

        If you look at the Innocence Project, you can see that the police and the justice system ido a good bit of ignoring catching actual criminals in favor of imprisoning random people (usually but always black)– this both takes decent people out of the community and leaves the criminals free.

        I think there would be less crime in black neighborhoods if they had competent policing. I have no idea how to reliably get from here to there.

        • AG says:

          Yes, this is something left out in the discussions of how the black population crime rate is 8x of whites. The crime rate itself is skewed by how the police choose to pursue things, and creates very real effects downstream.

          It’s clear that whatever metrics the police currently have for performance evaluation are both thoroughly captured by Goodhart’s Law, and were poor proxies for “benefit to the population” in the first place.

          • JayT says:

            Are you saying that black communities are being policed more than white communities? If that’s the case, are you saying that black communities are being charged for non-crimes, or that white communities are getting away with crimes?

          • cassander says:

            that 8x figure comes from homicides, which are decidedly harder to hide than other crimes.

          • AG says:

            A mixture. The Drug War is a clear case where charges and investigations are pursued against one demographic far more frequently than another, but traffic violations are also a common case where some demographics get let off with warnings and waived fines quite a lot, whereas others get their cars searched at the slightest hint of “backtalk.” See also how stop-and-frisk policies would create a self-fulfilling skewed crime rate.

            In addition, people have noted that the way black culture expresses things verbally can come off as rude or confrontational, so police will escalate their response. This leads to not just a lot of “resisting arrest” charges that stain background checks, but also cases like the justice system ignoring Miranda Rights for talking in a black way.

            All of this pushes people down into poverty and crime (culminating in the homicide rate), because respectable paths up and out are denied to them, when the slightest whiff of trouble is enough for prospective employers or educational institutes to buntz them from the competitive application pool.

          • MisterA says:

            For minor crimes, absolutely. In my home state of Maryland, weed was decriminalized largely on the threat of massive lawsuits when it was shown that black and white residents had roughly the same rate of marijuana use, but black residents were 3 times more likely to be arrested for it.

          • JayT says:

            At the same time though, my experience (that I’m fairly certain the data backs up, but it’s been a while since I looked) is that if you call for a police officer in a black neighborhood, it takes a long time for them to show up (if they show up at all) compared to a white neighborhood. That would give the criminals in the black neighborhood an advantage over criminals in a white neighborhood, no?

          • MisterA says:

            Yes, that is the conventional critique – that black communities are both over- and under-policed, with the police spending an inordinate amount of time going after random black people for low level crimes white people get to commit with relative impunity, while also failing to provide protection from actual professional criminals.

            As someone who was a white pothead in my younger days and had a few encounters with cops who caught me and basically let me go with a stern warning for stuff black people are constantly arrested for, it rings pretty true to me.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @JayT: I had a house I owned burglarized by white homeless people and the cops took forever to show up.
            If you’re working class, it’s common to hear slow police response in the bottom ?% of lower SES neighborhoods as a supporting argument for the Second Amendment.

          • JayT says:

            It kind of seems like a case of trying to have your cake and eat too, right? If you say that whites get away with crimes that blacks wouldn’t, but that crimes aren’t investigated in black neighborhoods, I don’t think that is evidence that the stats that show blacks having a higher crime rate are wrong, especially if you are looking at violent crime.

          • AG says:

            @JayT

            I’m not saying that the crime rate is wrong. As cassander says, the homicide rate is hard to fake.

            I’m saying that the crime rate does not exist in a vacuum, and is shaped by policing practices.
            Going after black people frequently for low level crimes (and escalating out a perception of disrespect) puts many more of them on the path to harsher criminal acts, because respectable society now writes them off for having a record. This pushes them to more serious crime as a living, which is then under-investigated, which further incentivizes criminals to keep doing the more serious crime, instead of trying to go straight.

            Other demographics get let off on the small things with a good amount of forgiveness, so it’s easy for them to get over a one-time mistake without lasting repercussions, and live a straight life afterwards. Meanwhile, those who do get into more serious crime get harsher scrutiny, which also contributes to a lower overall crime rate since a higher chance of getting caught is a better deterrent than harsh penalties.

          • cassander says:

            @AG says:

            Other demographics get let off on the small things with a good amount of forgiveness, so it’s easy for them to get over a one-time mistake without lasting repercussions, and live a straight life afterwards.

            This is commonly asserted, but very difficult to measure. I’m sure that blacks have higher rates of conviction for shoplifting than whites. But do they suffer consequences more often than their true (and unknowable) rate of shoplifting? I think it’s pretty much impossible to say. That’s as hard question to answer even with homicides, to say nothing of a crime that is mostly unnoticed and unreported.

          • AG says:

            I mean, we’ve seen this kind of thing play out outside of the crime context. If a movie starring a majority demographic flops, the director and crew involved won’t really have issues getting new gigs. There are directors and writers with a resume full of flops, even, somehow getting hired again and again and again despite their track record.
            But if a movie starring a minority demographic or made by a minority demographic director flops, well, clearly X demographic just doesn’t sell. Hey, why don’t we let Adam Sandler make another movie?

            So it is with crime, with more serious consequences.

          • Aapje says:

            @AG

            That could be true, or you could be very wrong about what actually makes money, rather than what ‘should’ make money.

            Sandler movies that are the silliest and get panned by critics the most, actually make the most money. His serious movies that get better reviews, always flop.

            Sandler movies have long staying power, being some of the most viewed on NetFlix, not just in the US, but world wide. This means that even if the initial box office is mediocre (which is usually not the case), these movies keep on earning money, which is great for studios.

          • AG says:

            I’ll concede that Sandler’s box office numbers don’t lie. It was a bad example. How about Ron Howard?

    • broblawsky says:

      Less of this, please.

      • Belisaurus Rex says:

        Edited for tone, but already some cops decline to police in districts where politicians do not support them. This apparently gets incumbents voted out of office.

        • Eric T says:

          Edited for tone, but already some cops decline to police in districts where politicians do not support them. This apparently gets incumbents voted out of office.

          This has been an issue in NYC over the years, I’ve brought it up a few times in other threads.

          • Garrett says:

            Why not go on the offensive and bring that kind of thing up at every relevant city council meeting or whatever? Demand reports on police distribution and response times across districts on a regular basis. Hold press conferences. Go to figurative war with the police department over the lack of professionalism.

          • souleater says:

            Reports on response times across districts is a great idea, and I can’t think of a reason why we aren’t already doing this.

    • Wrong Species says:

      I predict the opposite. They’ll say that police reform didn’t go far enough because institutional racism is that entrenched.

    • zzzzort says:

      That’s already been claimed. The question is going to be if there is a better way of policing, and if it’s politically achievable. If your model of the police is they spend their time harassing black people instead of solving crimes, then if you redirect them from harassment to crime-solving both problems will get better (c.f. the end of stop and frisk, with hemming and hawing over what the data actually say). If “defund the police” ends up meaning taking money from the police and and giving it to a new organization that works better, then crime could go down. If you piss off the current police without getting rid of them, then they may do a soft strike as in Baltimore.

      The real interesting confounder is that with the economic situation, cuts are coming regardless of the political environment. I expect a lot of those cuts will be sold as SJ, while real reform would probably mean spending more money in the short term, if only to retool.

    • original-internet-explorer says:

      That is likely – but I also hold the conviction that were black police in full control over the area and were not using Liberal laws then they would expedite corporal punishment on troublemakers. The crime rate would fall off a cliff and after a generation a new normal would exist.

      This is of course anathema to white liberals/conservatives and probably whites wouldn’t be able to stomach the amount of violence. It is not how I want to police society – but I believe most residents would side with the early cure preferred to out of control young men. Liberal paternalism is the dark matter causing social dysfunction. It’s not utopia but I don’t believe most black societies in Africa have the same social problems as American blacks. They are in Valley and it reminds me of the Irish Travelers – most of the problems are the same but with whites.

      This is the general pattern for most dysfunctional activity expressed abroad by non-Western groups. It is when the behaviour is the same in host state and origin state that people should contemplate ceding ground to the right. It is true that the right has a lot of radioactive ideas but it surprises me how often other factions go straight there – instant slide – before looking at ecology in the way they would if the subject were an animal being studied.

      tldr; Diagnosis of being hamstrung.

      • Eric T says:

        I also hold the conviction that were black police in full control over the area and were not using Liberal laws then they would expedite corporal punishment on troublemakers. The crime rate would fall off a cliff and after a generation a new normal would exist.

        Do you have a reason for believing this? Like yes, Black people do use corporal punishment on children more frequently than white people do but I think its a big leap to go from “black people spank their kids more frequently” to “if the cops were majority black they’d be caning people”

        It is when the behaviour is the same in host state and origin state that people should contemplate ceding ground to the right.

        You are aware that “black people” come from a huge cross section of states, many of which have very different issues and cultural behaviors from one another. Go to Mali, then go to the DRC and tell me how similar they are.

        • anon-e-moose says:

          @Eric T

          Link below wrt use of force by black cops vs white cops.
          https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6689929/

          • Eric T says:

            Still reading through but this line seems to imply that there’s not much of a difference?

            Whereas officer race does not typically predict how much force an officer uses (7–11), male and inexperienced officers use more force (7, 8, 10), perhaps due to their use of more aggressive tactics (e.g., initiating more stops; ref. 11).

            Will update when I finish reading this.

            UPDATE: Nothing within this study makes me buy that if the police force was all-black they’d use significantly more force in a way that would cause “the crime rate to fall off a cliff”

          • anon-e-moose says:

            Sorry, I should have wrote more: this is the best resource I could find. Wasn’t a zinger, there’s just not a lot of good data.

        • original-internet-explorer says:

          It’s not quite that – I do think there would be more punishment beatings – and speculate that out of sight from modern newspapers and smartphone videos this was happening in the past – then as America became more progressive this became not cool and social stagnation set in. It’s not about black society – they’re just a canonical example – the thesis would imply the same is happening to lower class whites and other races too.

          It’s about middle class orthodoxy capturing state legibility – promoting uniformity of their ideal and curtailing social processes in other groups with their social prescriptions that don’t work optimally except for them.

          The point I’m really trying to sell you on – is that it is the laws that are preventing social progress. The disciplinarian intuitions of a black community might be correct but this is crude – you only see the full flower of the result if you have black law, black justice and black policing. It’s a trifecta.

          This is reason #231 we need Patri’s Seasteads.

          “You are aware that “black people” come from a huge cross section of states, many of which have very different issues and cultural behaviors from one another. Go to Mali, then go to the DRC and tell me how…”

          I’m more than willing to state I’m not an expert but I don’t believe anybody is. My thesis –

          African societies are all very different but more socially functional – I rank Rwanda and Ethiopia head and shoulders over the more homogeneous African American culture. I’m sure the analysis is too simple but ~20 murders 100,000 p.a in Rwanda and Ethiopia and > 100 murders 100,000 p.a in Detroit and Chicago. 5x says right away to me the socioeconomic and the racialist thesis are not strong enough.

          It is easy to get into the weeds on these topics but I expect everyday conversations with newly arrived Africans would reveal the theme that African-American culture is only superficially connected to origin cultures.

          In Ireland we have a subgroup of whites with the worst stuckness of African American societies. They run foul of the law constantly, violence and homicide, abortion, illiteracy – they live to about 50. It is generally believed a social calamity happened in the distant past that jettisoned most of the social layer.

          I have good news and bad news – the good is that culture is real and the bad is that it might be easier to change biology than culture. I guess now I’m unpopular with everybody.

          • Statismagician says:

            The homicide rate in Chicago is 23.8/100,000 population as of 2016, not anything even vaguely like >100/100,000 population, FYI. Detroit is at 48.2. It’s also absolutely inappropriate to compare urban-area rates to national rates, for reasons which should be obvious.

          • Eric T says:

            The claim that Rwanda is a “more functioning society” than African American culture when we’re less than 30 years out from one of the worst genocides in modern history, has somewhat suspended political rights (or did you think its a coincidence the RPF has been in power since the genocide?) and ranks something like 173rd in GDP/capita seems very… wrong?

      • keaswaran says:

        Incidentally, I think there’s room for a movement arguing that long imprisonment should be replaced by corporal punishment, because the 8th amendment prohibits cruelty, and long imprisonment is substantially more cruel than corporal punishment.

        • FLWAB says:

          +1. If given the choice between 5 years in prison or 40 lashes, I know which one I would pick.

        • Randy M says:

          I simultaneously believe that it would be more humane and a better deterrent. Humane due to not wasting years of life, and deterrence due to the immediacy, basically front loading the pain to make it more relevant.

          But the problem is, as they say, “the optics.”

  64. Nancy Lebovitz says:

    This is from a person I trust, but since it’s about something that happened at work, they want the link redacted.

    A good many people here seem to think that pervasive racism and excessive policing aren’t a problem for black people, or maybe not a serious problem. While there’s a lot of Social Justice I don’t agree with, I think they’ve been pointing out a real and serious problem.

    ******************

    “Interesting discussion @ work this morning. A Mom brought her 16 year old in for an annual eye exam. I took him back, but didn’t do the preliminary testing because I had another patient already. My white co-worker went in the room to do the preliminary testing & she came out afterwards and told me that this boy had a huge wad of cash in his hand when she walked in, but quickly shoved it back into his pocket once she walked in. For me & other black employees, this was insignificant. The white & Jewish employees (all except 3 including the doctor I work for) pretty much assumed that he was a drug dealer. They kept questioning why a 16 year old had that much cash on him. I told them it was none of our business & that I didn’t care that he had cash on him. I didn’t actually see the wad of cash btw, but I don’t care. Then that same co-worker asked me if she should call the police. Call the police? For merely having a wad of cash? Huh? I had to school her tactfully. This is an example of what’s wrong in this country. Some white folks wanna call the police on black folks for nothing. It’s not illegal to carry cash. My co-worker thought the fact that he put it back in his pocket quickly after she walked in the exam room warranted calling the police.

    So, I talked to the brother & basically told my co-worker (playfully) that I’d break her fingers to keep her from calling the police. I know, I know. Whatever. I went in the room before the doctor & talked to him, after bringing his Mom into the room (I refuse to talk to a child w/o their parent present – I don’t do that). Long story & laughter short, he had the cash because he doesn’t have a bank account & needed to buy a money order to pay a bill. He cashed his paycheck yesterday. His Mom is taking him to the bank when they’re done here, and he’s signing up for direct deposit. I swear we need a “mind your business” movement in America. The reason that black boy shoved his cash quickly back into his pocket, is because he was afraid the white employee would assume he was a drug dealer. This has to stop.

    • SamChevre says:

      I’m in the “it’s definitely a problem” camp–I think the BLM movement has mis-diagnosed the core problem.

      A good pointed illustration is from a conversation with a black friend: about my height and age, married with kids, fairly cautious/nerdy, lives near where I used to live (we went to church together for several years). I’ve been stopped by police who had a weapon out twice; he’s been stopped by police who had a weapon out 8 times.

      • Murphy says:

        the one that got to me was levar burton: from reading rainbow and geordi from star trek.

        That as a black guy with a nice car, because he’s a successful actor, he basically constantly gets pulled over by cops, so much so that he has a routine to try to stay safe during such stops. That’s pretty fucked up.

        • markus says:

          This is so sad and strange.

          I live in Europe and I have never seen a cop who has a firearm out. No one has ever told me that they have seen a cop who has a firearm out.

          • johan_larson says:

            I remember seeing rather heavily armed police in European airports. They were walking around with sub machine guns.

          • Blueberry pie says:

            @johan_larson I remember that here (Czechia) it happend a few times amid some terrorist-attack scares, but I think it is actually quite rare. Also, in Czechia, those were always the military (AFAIK only few highly specialized police units carry anything more than a handgun)

          • Lambert says:

            I wonder whether police in busy places like airports, train stations etc. armed with automatic weapons for counterterror purposes always have ammo.
            Giving them unloaded guns some of the time would minimise the risk of accidents but would allow them to keep their guns loaded during times of high risk without either spooking passengers or tipping off terrorists.

          • johan_larson says:

            Literally unloaded guns might be going a bit far. But it is possible to carry a rifle or SMG in a state where it is not ready to fire, and should not fire even if someone pulled the trigger or dropped the gun just right. Generally speaking, if you haven’t charged* the rifle, putting a cartridge in the chamber, a rifle will not fire. There are some SMGs that can fire without having a round in the chamber if you drop them just right. For those you might want a bolt lock, which ensures that won’t happen. But all modern guns have safeties, so “no round in the chamber, and the safety on” should be damn near perfectly safe unless your cops don’t follow instructions.

            Or are you worried about some sort of more active misuse?

            [*] Charged? Cocked? I think “cocked” is the more usual word, but the handle for doing this on the AR-15 family of rifles is called a “charging handle” on most diagrams I’ve been able to find.

          • keaswaran says:

            I would say that I *by far* see guns more often in Europe than in the United States. Nearly every continental European airport seems to have some police around with a machine gun of some sort strapped across their chest. I saw that sort of thing once in the United States when there was an open carry rally about four or five years ago. (I live in Texas and that’s when they were pushing several bills to expand open carry rights, but people don’t usually exercise it so obviously other than in those political moments.) And security in the United States usually has a pistol in a holster that is somewhat discreet, while the European airport security wears them very openly.

            Of course, in the United States, that discreet pistol in a holster is standard for city police and even private security, while in Europe it’s only the fancy airport security people with these guns.

          • Murphy says:

            Living in ireland and the UK I have occasionally seen officers with large guns.

            In Ireland it was a few very rare escorts for some kind of big cash transport. (they may have been army, I think that may be a service the army occasionally provide)

            In the UK it was at the airport the day of the 7/7 bombings and one other similar occasion after a terrorist attack somewhere.

        • rumham says:

          That as a black guy with a nice car, because he’s a successful actor, he basically constantly gets pulled over by cops, so much so that he has a routine to try to stay safe during such stops.

          If you live in the US and you don’t have this already, you really need to have one. I don’t care what color you are.

          • SamChevre says:

            Seconded: I would have thought everyone had thought through exactly how to act if pulled over (don’t get your wallet out until asked, don’t get your papers out of the glovebox until asked and you’ve said what you are doing, keep both hands visible, etc) but apparently not.

          • AG says:

            Some races get a whole lot more leeway in that routine than others, though.

          • Randy M says:

            You should have a plan. If you are pulled over so often it is a routine, that’s a problem on one end or the other. (I don’t know how carefully Lavar chose his words, though).

    • GearRatio says:

      I wonder what a good way of defining “is or isn’t a problem” would be – the story seems to be aimed at disproving an “isn’t” position that reads like this:

      I don’t believe there’s any such thing as racism to any extent whatsoever.

      I think you’d find there’s a very small percentage of people who claim that black people aren’t treated differently at all. I think BLM “wrong” but the part where I think they are wrong isn’t that they think racism exists at all; it’s the part where they claim police are whole-sale unjustified killers to the extent where we need to take drastic, constant action. I think I’m steelmanning here by presenting this as a common BLM standpoint:

      If the lady in the story HAD called the cops, she would be putting the kid’s life in significant danger.

      I don’t believe this; this is the easy-mode of the part where I think BLM is “lying about racism existing”. I don’t think the statistics back it up, and I think it’s actively harmful to tell black people this is how it is, if they end up believing it. And I think it’s evident that a lot of people – black or white – do believe this, despite the fact that the bare statistics show it’s not true in any significant sense.

      My other problem with stories of this kind is that stories that confirm all the biases/views of the teller while simultaneously making them out to be a big-damn-hero are disproportionately untrue; that’s what r/thathappened exists for, for instance. Some of them are likely true (you seem to know this person, for instance) but the bulk of them that aren’t have pretty much made me tune out stories that fit those parameters from any source.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        I’m not sure how much the teenager’s life was in danger. I think there was a pretty good chance of his money being taken and never returned.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        My other problem with stories of this kind is that stories that confirm all the biases/views of the teller while simultaneously making them out to be a big-damn-hero are disproportionately untrue; that’s what r/thathappened exists for, for instance.

        The other meme for this is “and then everyone clapped.”

        • Eric T says:

          The other meme for this is “and then everyone clapped.”

          And that kid who clapped? Albert Einstein.

    • Clutzy says:

      Yep. Old people are always calling the cops on young people all the time.

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      It’s a great skit. I note that Murphy in white makeup has an unnerving resemblance to John Stossel.

      It sounds like police harassment of young white men is underestimated and not publicly noticed. I still think things are worse for black people.

    • original-internet-explorer says:

      I’m confident you are correct about this. I had a black coworker who related a series of work tales with the theme “some Irish people…”. I was able to update them that all of those Irish people were English and a special type at that. He couldn’t tell the difference and didn’t understand one of the cultural layers that exists.

      There is racism – obvious – but there is also the fundamental comprehension gap that exists between Whites and Blacks and it goes both ways. This is true for all sorts of people but the gap for Whites and Blacks is impressive.

      The most common error I think causes trouble is body language and voice tone. I believe it is common that Whites and Blacks are not able to interpret when the other person is angry with them. I’ve seen it in person and there are the notorious videos that make the rounds on worldstar and voat showing escalations between the two where one party is obviously not aware of the temperature. I think if you show these videos to different groups you will find they are like the Blue/Gold dress. As I said – it goes both ways. All the time their gauge is that the other party is more calm or less serious than they are and they’re on the freeway to conflict.

    • Purplehermann says:

      Can confirm, have had the police called on my bday parties by the neighbors yearly (from ages ~9-13).

      There are people who just call the cops for ridiculous reasons.

      The OP situation actually makes a tiny bit of sense, the ‘horrie white person’ thought the kid might be a drug dealer. The story teller seems to think calling the police on a drug dealer is a bad thing. I’m not so sure she’s right.

      • LesHapablap says:

        The storyteller thinks that calling the cops on someone for carrying a wad of cash is a bad thing, and it is. There’s nothing illegal about it and hardly anything suspicious, except for the way he tried to hide it.

        • Purplehermann says:

          (Didn’t mean to report, misclick).

          1. Notice the ‘tiny bit ‘ qualifier.

          2. Not sure why I thought the storyteller was implying that whether the kid is a drug dealer isn’t their business, my bad.

          3. Young people having large amounts of cash and acting guilty is suspicious

          4. I don’t think calling the police on people for things that are suspicious (in the sense that you suspect something illegal) is wrong or bad on principle. The question is at what levels of suspicion, for what issues, etc.

      • fibio says:

        I think the bigger question is what exactly does the caller think is going to happen? Unless the kid is also carrying around a backpack full of drugs the police aren’t going to be able to do anything.

        • DeWitt says:

          They can decide it’s probably drug money, take it in the name of civil asset forfeiture, and buy a new coffee machine with the proceeds.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        “Next time can the fire truck come?!”

      • Purplehermann says:

        My parents would invite them into the yard where the party was and offer them watermelon and hot dogs. It was kind of weird when they didn’t come 🙂

        It would have been cool if firemen came in (they might have come by, we did have bonfires).

    • Lodore says:

      Let’s the say the kid was a drug dealer. So what? Is he slinging rock on the premises? Is he hassling other customers trying to get them to buy drugs? Is he doing anything at all–except carrying around cash–that impinges on anyone present?

      Yeah, drugs are illegal, I get it. But there’s a pretty good case for why they shouldn’t be, and even if you don’t accept this, why would you arbitrarily blight the life of a 16 year old just because you can? The moralising, black-and-white (pun intended) thinking on display here is appalling.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        This story wasn’t about a neighborhood, it was about an opthamologist’s office.

      • Deiseach says:

        why would you arbitrarily blight the life of a 16 year old just because you can?

        Because the little scumbag is blighting the lives of people he’s selling this shit to? Probably other kids his age or younger?

        I have exactly zero sympathy for “poor little Johnny just wanted to buy that pair of expensive new sneakers so to get the cash he hooked up with the local gangsters in order to be their contact in school”, we have enough problems in our country with these fuckers (no apology for the language used) and their war on each other, and our little Johnny is part of this whole organisation even if it’s at a very low level – he’s sourcing his supply from somewhere, and it’s not from a turnip field.

        16 year old little Johnny may even graduate to higher levels of crime and mayhem like this sterling 17 year old example.

        So yeah, if I know that little Johnny is selling drugs, I’m calling the cops even if that does ruin his life, because he put himself on that path in the first place.

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:

          A major point in this discussion is the question of what causes you to think that a young man is dealing drugs. Just having a wad of cash isn’t good evidence.

    • DarkTigger says:

      As a German, from travell tipps about the US I heared, I would have expected this behavior to be almost standard. Like i’m regularly told that cash carrying that would be considered normal in Germany, might get you into contact with the police in the US. Is that wrong?

      Btw: “The white & Jewish employees” *headshake*

      • Aapje says:

        @DarkTigger

        What percentage of shop payments in Germany is cash? In The Netherlands, it was 32% in 2019.

        Any transactions over € 10,000 that paid in cash has to be reported to the government.

        • Medrach says:

          https://www.wirtschaftundschule.de/files/_processed_/2/e/csm_03.-Die-Bargeldnutzung-in-der-Statistik_bd9a9a823d.jpg

          This has been changing quickly but this statistic is from the Bundesbank and its from 2014.
          Left column is number of transactions, right is transaction volume. First row is Cash, Second is debit card, third is credit card.

          Annectotal evidence I know a ton of people under 30 who literally pay for EVERYTHING in cash, have at least 200 euros in their wallet, pick up cash once a month. I even know one or two who have no online banking. German people love their cash.
          There have been a series of Op-Eds about people changing due to Corona. Just before it hit I was making a concious effort to use cash more because I dread it becoming like Denmark or the US where you cannot pay with cash in some places. Now…. not so much.

          • DarkTigger says:

            Thanks I wouldn’t have had a good statisstic for that.

            But yes, I am/was before corona, one of those people who payed most stuff in cash. Everything that I don’t buy online and is below 200€ I’d rather pay in cash. Much easier to keep track of what you spend, and fight impulse buying.

      • souleater says:

        It is not illegal to carry cash in the United States.
        Carrying $100-$200 around in your wallet isn’t really a big deal (In the interest of experimentation I just checked my wallet, and I’m carrying just under $300… I think someone reimbursed me 6 months ago and I never deposited or spent the cash. )

        Carrying a “Wad” of cash is considered a lot weirder. I’m interpreting it to mean $400+ in twenty or fifty dollar bills that are not stored or don’t fit in a wallet. A “Wad” of cash that keeps getting flashed is pretty inconvenient and risky to carry around.

        • DarkTigger says:

          Yeah, I not expected it to be illegal. But stuff like the story in OP, where people call the cops on you if you carry bigger sums of cash on you.

          • souleater says:

            People are weird and they call the cops on each other for silly things all the time. People will call the cops if they see an 8 year old playing at the park. For the most part, cops are just used as the complaint managers of our society, and are often called to referee petty squabbling or concerns.
            We’re told “If you see something, say something”

            I wouldn’t flash large sums of money like that for just this reason, and I would think its weird if a teenager was walking around showing off hundreds of dollars in public.

            Also, people talk about civil asset forfeiture, but despite how often its talked about (and how bad it is that it does happen), I don’t know anyone who’ve actually had that happen to them. I would be surprised if a cop actually confiscated the money of anyone I know. Not saying its impossible, or that it never happens, but its pretty unheard of in my life.

          • DeWitt says:

            Also, people talk about civil asset forfeiture, but despite how often its talked about (and how bad it is that it does happen), I don’t know anyone who’ve actually had that happen to them. I would be surprised if a cop actually confiscated the money of anyone I know. Not saying its impossible, or that it never happens, but its pretty unheard of in my life.

            The SSC commentariat skews very far into the middle/upper class end of society, all things considered. Civil Asset Forfeiture is a policy that hits the poor the most: when you don’t have the means to get your money back, any seized money is effectively gone, and the police know this, targeting people unlikely to get their cash back in specific.

    • Murphy says:

      I suspect there are a couple of layers there.

      There’s the cultural layer, it’s probably way less common for white kids to carry wads of cash for non-nefarious reasons and if you grew up somewhere where the only kids who carried round wads of cash were actually drug dealers it’s not a huge jump to treat it as suspicious.

      And ya, there are a lot of nutjobs who seem to do nothing but call the cops all day and night on everyone around them.

      When I was in the scouts, we used to run occasional evening walks. Just a bunch of kids in scout uniforms walking down the road.

      It got to the point where we would just contact the local police before any such event because without fail some batshit crazy old person would call the police on us.

      I’m not saying Logans Run had the right idea…. but after the 3rd time someone calls the cops over kids *existing* it’s time to go into the carousel for **renewal**

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        Prejuice against chilcren and teenagers is a real thing, and generally underestimated.

    • Aapje says:

      @Nancy Lebovitz

      I see no racism in your story at all, but classism at most. The norm that legitimate big payments are done electronically is a norm for the middle class and up. In this (very large & dominant) subculture, the typical exception is criminal money.

      The person you are quoting fundamentally misunderstands culture, seeming to think that anything that is legal should be considered acceptable and no grounds for investigation. That is and has never been the case, both on a personal and a legal level. As to the latter, it is allowed for the police to investigate things that are sufficiently correlated with criminal behavior, even if those things are themselves legal. Warrants are also issued for such.

      I bet that the person that you quote has norms themselves that are stronger than the law and will not “mind their business” when those norms are violated & that this person doesn’t get that those norms are not always considered reasonable to others.

      The person wants their own culture to be dominant, but then I wonder why? The norm of being intolerant to carrying around (and paying with) lots of cash has a bunch of benefits, like:
      – less opportunity for criminals to spend their gains (so crime pays less)
      – less risk of being involved in robberies (this doesn’t just affect the person carrying the cash, but also bystanders)
      – less opportunity for sales tax fraud
      – less opportunity for tax evasion

      Of course, there are downsides as well, but it is far from obvious that the norm of being intolerant of large amounts of cash is worse than not having that norm. Calling it racist to have different norms (that in themselves are not racial) fundamentally changes the conversation from one where people are allowed to have different preferences, opinions and such, to one where only the (supposed) interests and opinions of one (minority) group count.

      Ironically, if the norm is to always defer to what a black person or group wants, that group actually becomes a threat to non-black people and the logical behavior is to use various racist (personal) policies to defend yourself from that threat (like segregating yourself from them, finding a token black person that you can shield behind, etc).

      Ultimately, when one person/group always wins in a culture clash, that is oppression of those who lose.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        You haven’t seen the other discussion about this since I haven’t made the link available, but it apparently isn’t uncommon for young people to not have bank accounts and to have jobs. Sometimes this means that responsible behavior (having a job) means carrying substantial amounts of cash.

        Also, you’ve conflated calling the police with being intolerant of a behavior– do you think carrying cash is so bad that the cash should be taken away? Person should be put at risk of jail for carrying cash?

        I’ve carried cash myself because of a small away-from-home retail business.

        Is there a logical fallacy of extrapolating a specific situation into unintended much longer implications?

        • Deiseach says:

          Mostly I’m surprised that if it is a large wad of cash then why didn’t his mother keep it in her handbag for him? I’d be more worried that he’d lose it out of his pocket.

        • Aapje says:

          @Nancy Lebovitz

          I still don’t understand why this is apparently such a problem for large groups in the US. In my country, the banks tend to only refuse to deal with you if you are suspected of being a criminal or are a sex worker. Pretty much every lower class person will have a bank account and debit card.

          What is different in the US?

          Also, you’ve conflated calling the police with being intolerant of a behavior– do you think carrying cash is so bad that the cash should be taken away? Person should be put at risk of jail for carrying cash?

          My point was not that it is bad in itself, but that in a large subculture, such behavior is (seen as) correlating strongly with criminal behavior.

          Try talking to random kids on a playground, as a single man with no kid of your own. Technically it’s legal, but realistically, it’s likely to get the police called on you.

          Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter whether you agree whether this is right or wrong (or whether civil forfeiture and such result in police abuses). My point is that this is how the world works and that I doubt that any subculture will accept everything that is technically legal. If so, the argument by the person you know, was probably hypocritical. She could have her rules that go beyond the law, but others could not, when she disagreed with those rules.

          Again, this is just a culture clash, that is then interpreted as racism, because it involves a black subculture and a non-black subculture. However, such conflicts happen between many different clashing cultures, where ethnicity doesn’t have to play a role at all (nerds vs jocks, for example).

          Is there a logical fallacy of extrapolating a specific situation into unintended much longer implications?

          One of my objection to many of the BLM narratives is that many of the complaints are actually not restricted to race, but the greater context is often not examined.

          • bullseye says:

            The cheapest bank account at my bank has a $7 monthly fee. You don’t have to pay the fee if you keep at least $500 in the account, or you get at least $500 direct deposit every month, or you’re at least 62.

            Working full time at minimum wage gets you over $1000 a month, but a 16 year old probably isn’t working full time.

            As for poor adults not having accounts, I don’t know. Maybe the banks don’t have branches in poor neighborhoods?

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            In addition to what bullseye said, lots of people are blacklisted from banking accounts because they are bad credit risks.

          • achenx says:

            Disclaimer that I last worked at a bank almost (wow) two decades ago, so maybe it’s different now.

            lots of people are blacklisted from banking accounts because they are bad credit risks

            Just want to clarify this. Yes you can absolutely be blacklisted from getting a bank account. However that list is unrelated to what people normally call “credit risk” — what you see with your “credit score” and “credit report” and all that. Having a bunch of debt, overdue credit card bills, etc — the stuff that gets you a bad credit score — is not going to affect your ability to get a bank account. You get on that list by passing or depositing bad checks and other things specifically related to bank accounts.

          • Aapje says:

            @bullseye

            That is quite expensive. The typical fee for Dutch banks is close to €20 a year, which is €1.7 a month. However, there is also a free option, from a subsidiary of a major Dutch bank (and they even give a tiny bit of interest, so it earns you money compared to using cash).

            Do your bank accounts include a credit card (which adds an average of ~€22 if you get it from a Dutch bank)?

            PS. Note that my impression of American banking is that it is quite dated, with lots of dependence on checks, credit cards and other inefficient solutions.

          • Lambert says:

            I think the use of credit cards in the US is more about liability.
            If someone steals your debit card, they’re stealing your money. If they steal your credit card, they steal the bank’s money.

          • bullseye says:

            The bank account comes with a debit card; using the debit card means the money comes directly from your account. My credit card has my bank’s name on it, but I had to apply for it separately and it’s run by a different company.

      • a real dog says:

        You have a weird relationship with your tax office if you think of “less opportunity for tax evasion” on the individual level as a benefit.

        I mean, that’s pro-social and all, but it’s still a pretty alien perspective to me. Maybe your social group thinks the taxes are well-spent or something.

        • Thomas Jorgensen says:

          The state collects taxes until it has collected the amount the politicians decided should be collected this year. If taxes are easy to avoid, and other people are better at this game than I am, I will be taxed harder.

          The rich are as a class, far, far better at tax evasion than the average citizen. Thus, the way for the average citizen to pay less taxes is to minimize evasion.

        • Aapje says:

          @a real dog

          More or less what Thomas said. If I pay my proper taxes and others don’t, I will get pay disproportionality for the services I get from the government, either by higher taxes or lesser services.

          Of course, this is from the perspective of one who doesn’t evade taxes and appreciates the services they get. An (aspiring) tax evader would obviously disagree, just like a criminal would like more corrupt police.

    • Deiseach says:

      It’s complicated, if every 16 year old black male is considered to be a drug dealer, that’s not great.

      On the other hand, at the school where I worked a 16 year old with large wad of cash did provoke concern by the principal (and his parents) precisely because he didn’t have a job, there was no legit reason for him getting money from other sources, and it did turn out that he was being coached and coaxed into petty crime which is where he was getting the large wad of cash. Everyone in this story is white.

      So there can be legitimate reasons to wonder why a kid is carrying a huge wad of cash around and why he suddenly hides it when he notices you that are not down to racism.

    • Randy M says:

      First, yeah, people call the cops too dang quick. You need strong evidence for that.
      Second, yeah, it was probably racist.
      But, it is pretty rare (among people I know) to carry lots of cash these days. I almost never have more than a few stray bills. It’s probably different for kids who don’t have a bank account, but then again, kids don’t tend to have wads of cash.
      There was a time when people took “owns a pager” as evidence of being a doctor or a drug dealer.

    • AG says:

      Re: pervasive racism, here are some example where any sort of discussion of black crime rates is irrelevant, and so the bias that persists is hard to attribute to other things. It is, however, still very relevant to why the black poverty rate is so much higher.

      There are glaring disparities in how much Black and non-Black authors are paid for their book advances.

      Ward, a two-time National Book Award winner for 2011’s Salvage the Bones and 2017’s Sing, Unburied Sing, tweeted that even after she won the award for the former book, she had to fight for a $100,000 advance for her next book deal. In contrast, white literary fiction author Lydia Kiesling sold her debut novel, The Golden State, for $200,000; a year and a half after publication, she tweeted, she is still “very far from selling that many books”.

      Rarity of black people in academia causes incidents of unfair assumptions

      “I should have never had to fight to get this person’s resume considered because as it turns out, this person’s publications list was by far better than any member of the faculty’s publication list at a comparable stage,” Brown said. “This should have been, ‘Oh my gosh, do you think we have a shot at getting them?’ Instead I was told by advocating for them, I was ‘engaging in behavior inconsistent with community norms.’ I replied: Ain’t I part of the community?”
      Among the stories Jackson shared was a trip to Stanford University, where he had been invited to speak. When he arrived, he was mistaken for a PhD student coming in for an interview. He also recounted an encounter where he was asked to fix an air conditioner at a campus café and another when someone asked him to make room for the keynote speakers. The person failed to realize Jackson was himself a keynote speaker.

      • albatross11 says:

        From the article, it didn’t sound like anyone had statistics on the differences between white and black authors’ advances, just anecdotes. Is there any data that actually exists that would tell us whether black authors are paid lower advances given their eventual sales than white authors? Where would we look for that? I guess individual publishers have that information, but may not want to publish it if it looks bad for them, and may not even be able to publish individual amounts without violating some kind of privacy agreement.

        I expect that publishers offer the worst deal they can to authors, in hopes of capturing as much of the money from their book as possible. Do black authors do worse overall in that than white authors? I don’t know–it’s possible, and if so, I don’t know quite how you’d fix it.

        There was also a complaint in the Buzzfeed article about how racism impacts book sales. I suspect it’s quite hard to know whether that’s true, but also it’s clear that the publishers can’t be responsible for what the readers decide to buy. If there’s a market for your hard-boiled lesbian private detective fiction and publishers refuse to publish it because it’s ideologically unacceptable to them, that’s a bad thing whose best remedy is probably finding a different publisher; if there’s no market for hard-boiled lesbian private detective fiction and publishers refuse to publish it, I don’t think there’s any kind of remedy. This is a pretty broad complaint, too–it amounts to “the public doesn’t want what I’m selling” and everyone who doesn’t sell enough has it. I’m not convinced we should treat complaints that the public doesn’t like what you sell because it’s “too black” differently than complaints that the public doesn’t like what you sell because it’s “too redneck,” or for that matter that people just aren’t that into epic poetry these days, but that’s what you’re passionate about writing.

        • AG says:

          The person who started the hashtag said that they have someone collecting data from it into a spreadsheet and will be crunching numbers. The hashtag only got started over the weekend, so data collection is still in process. I’ll be quite interested to see the results. However, it’s still notable to see how the very most famous black authors are stacking up against nobodies.

          The listed examples specifically note cases where Black authors with actual sales higher than white counterparts nonetheless got advances lower, which indicates that the publishers incorrectly estimated how well the books would sell. We’ve seen this in other sectors of the entertainment industry, where the executives claim that X demographic doesn’t sell, but actual sales numbers show that those beliefs are incorrect.

          • Statismagician says:

            My takeaway here is that there’s a fortune to be made in better book sales forecasting algorithms.

          • albatross11 says:

            I think there’s not a fortune to be made in any kind of book publishing, but you could probably do better than the existing people at those forecasts.

      • MilesM says:

        I mean, I was once a white (30-something, large, bearded, male) PhD student (with years of prior research experience) and another (minority) PhD student thought I was an undergrad straight out of college.

        Another time, a female (minority) undergrad once thought I might be my boss. (a Hispanic woman with a very obviously female first name, which the student apparently knew)

        And through a comedy of errors, my boss’ former mentor (one of the smartest and kindest academics I know) referred to me by the wrong first name for over a year before it finally got straightened out.

        People (even smart people) do stupid or socially awkward shit all the damn time for reasons other than systematic racism.

    • ana53294 says:

      Reasons why I’ve carried big stacks of cash around:

      A person wants to rent a house. When you add the deposit, advance rent, plus the agency fee, it’s quite a lot of money.

      Buying a second-hand car. For different reasons, checks and bank transfer make things difficult. With cash, you give them the money, they sign the sales agreement and give you the keys and car, all immediate.

      Travelling. I’ve had trouble with cards, despite having 7 between debit and credit cards. I was abroad once, and, after having 6 cards fail on me, he 7th finally worked. It was still a close call. So when I travel, I try to bring quite a bit of cash.

      • Jake R says:

        Not many sixteen-year-olds rent houses, buy cars, or travel abroad alone. If I saw a sixteen-year-old of any race with anything that could reasonably be described as a “wad” of cash, I’d probably assume a drug deal was involved. I’m sure that has a lot to do with my personal bias, I haven’t used cash for anything except haircuts in years. And I would never call the cops on a drug dealing sixteen-year-old.

        • Matt M says:

          Right. The general point is less “there is no possible reason for someone to be holding that much cash” and more “there are few plausible reasons for someone to be holding that much cash, and none of the good ones seem to apply to a kid going to an eye doctor appointment.”

          Whether or not holding a lot of cash is suspicious or not is completely and entirely context-dependent.

        • LesHapablap says:

          The storyteller or the police-caller in the story don’t know how much cash it was, just a ‘huge wad of cash’ that was quickly hidden. It could have been $200 to buy groceries while his mom ran other errands. The mother of the kid was there with him let’s not forget, is she in on the drug dealing?

          My parents always taught me to keep cash hidden, because you never know who is watching that could call someone to say ‘this guy is carrying lots of cash.’

    • cassander says:

      It’s not really relevant, but out of curiosity, how much cash are we talking about here? A grand? 10?

  65. Scott Alexander says:

    Yeah, sure, okay.

  66. Nancy Lebovitz says:

    Does anyone have information about who’s showing up at protests?

    I know a number of older people who’ve been going to protests their whole lives and who aren’t going to the protests now because of fear of infection.

    • Aftagley says:

      Firsthand perspective: Young people. Other than Elizabeth Warren (I got to pet her dog) I haven’t seen anyone over 40 at the protests. It’s people ages 15-30 mostly.

      • original-internet-explorer says:

        More information on this dog! What kind of dog? Of cool character or a yapper?

        • Aftagley says:

          It is this great big floofy (only term to describe it) golden retriever. image His name is bailey and he seemed to be to utterly relaxed even on the fringes of a protest.

          It was a very surreal experience. I saw a dog, I went to pet the dog, I went to chat with the owner, the owner was a senator/democratic primary candidate.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          There will be news headlines that refer to “Elizabeth Warren, her husband, and Bailey.”

          Everyone knows Bailey. Mr. Warren is “Elizabeth Warren’s husband.”

          • Eric T says:

            Everyone knows Bailey. Mr. Warren is “Elizabeth Warren’s husband.”

            This is 100% true. All my Leftist friends know Bailey.
            What a good dog.

        • keaswaran says:

          Apparently Bailey became famous a few days after Super Tuesday (when I was traveling for my last trip and getting mentally absorbed in the world of coronavirus) because he stole a staffer’s burrito, on camera, and wouldn’t let go.

          Two months later, about a month ago, Elizabeth Warren released another video that went viral of Bailey eating a burrito of his own on his birthday.

          Both videos are in this article, though they are in reverse order.

          https://mashable.com/article/elizabeth-warren-dog-bailey-birthday-burrito/

    • keaswaran says:

      Here’s the article from my local newspaper (Bryan, TX) with several dozen photos of protesters: https://www.theeagle.com/news/local/watch-now-more-than-1-000-people-gather-for-demonstration-organized-by-black-lives-matter/article_20636412-a92a-11ea-8710-0bb95e934637.html

      [EDIT: apologies if there’s a paywall – I don’t know if usual means of bypassing paywalls work, or if some of the photos are available anyway.]

      I forget if there’s a paywall, but it helps me refresh what I saw over the weekend. It’s definitely majority people in their 20s and 30s, but this county is fairly young, since it’s dominated by Texas A&M University. Looking back through the photos I see that there were black people of many ages, but the white people were mostly in their 20s. There were definitely at least a few white people in their 40s or 50s. I can’t recall if there was a difference in demographics between the people standing by the side of the road with signs, and the people in the cars driving up and down the main avenue honking in support and holding signs out the window.

      Now that you mention it, the crowd is definitely a lot younger than I remember at the anti-war protests in Berkeley and San Francisco in the mid 2000s, but I don’t know that it’s that different from the crowd that protested on campus at Texas A&M when Richard Spencer spoke a month or so after the Trump election. (That latter crowd was much larger, and included very vocal religious and conservative anti-Spencer groups, as well as the progressive left.)

  67. WoollyAI says:

    Could someone explain to me why the stock price of the NYT is currently trading at $40.73, compared to $13.22 five years ago?

    I’m sure there’s lots of CW answers here but the total market cap is ~6.5 billion, so presumably reasonable investors see something justifying this price.

    The PE ratio is ~48, which is apparently really high, although I freely admit I’m a Vanguard investor and actively cultivate a certain ignorance of investment terms.

    I did read their financial statement a while back and it looks like they’ve successfully made the transition from ad revenue to subscription revenue but that seems like it should stabilize the price, not 4x it. Is anybody expecting the NYT to double in value?

    • zzzzort says:

      I did read their financial statement a while back and it looks like they’ve successfully made the transition from ad revenue to subscription revenue but that seems like it should stabilize the price

      If before the ad to subscription transition, you thought the odds of them making it through were 1 in 4, then after you learn that they did make it through the price should go up by a factor of 4. I don’t think that’s all of the explanation, but it’s definitely some of it.

    • Uribe says:

      They were trading at $50 twenty years ago. My guess is they are one of the few papers in the country to survive the transition to digital and are benefiting at the expense of the losers.

      Used to be all politics was local. These days it’s all national, and the NYT, WaPo and WSJ are our national newspapers.

    • Aftagley says:

      I think the “print” (to include digital, so maybe I should just say written) media will be dominated by one or two established brands and an innumerable swarm of others. Think of it in the same way as cable news – there’s NBC, CNN, MSNBC… and everyone else. Of these, the NYT will almost certainly be on top, barring some kind of major catastrophe. It’ll be them, Wapo, likely the WSJ and… undetermined.

    • DarkTigger says:

      I don’t have exact numbers, but while I often hear traditional investors describe an PE ratio of 48 as “high” , it’s something you see a lot atm. The usual bullish reason given is that the stock market is forward looking and expect earnings to rise over time. The bearish reason given is the stock market is bubbeling up over the last 12 years, on cheap money provided by the banks.

      Decide for your self which reason you like better.

    • NostalgiaForInfinity says:

      Possibly because people don’t think they’ve finished making the transition to subscription revenue and that their subs numbers will continue to grow 20-25% year on year. I don’t know what their cost per acquisition or fixed costs for digital subs are, but I would assume that each additional sub at this point is quite profitable.

  68. inhibition-stabilized says:

    On the subject of the recent nootropics survey: does anyone have any suggestions for dealing with psychosomatic effects?

    I don’t drink coffee or tea, but I recently tried caffeine pills. I took one around 10:00am, so I wouldn’t expect it to have much of an impact on my sleep. However, my body apparently decided that “caffeine=no sleep” and I ended up laying in bed unable to fall asleep for over 4 hours. I often have trouble falling asleep, but it’s never this bad. Does anyone have any experience with this kind of thing, or suggestions for how to convince my body that no, really, the caffeine has definitely left my system by now?

    • Eric T says:

      Was this a one-time thing or has it happened multiple times. Because if it was only once it might be worth trying again just to make sure it wasn’t just a freak coincidence?

      • inhibition-stabilized says:

        I only tried it once–my experience scared me away from trying again. But you’re right, I should probably experiment some more. I’ll just have to find a time when I can afford to go without sleep.

    • Aftagley says:

      Did you drink enough water that day? I don’t know why, but whenever I take caffeine pills I always need to purposefully drink more water than I think I should or else that jittery feeling stays with me for a really long time.

      • inhibition-stabilized says:

        I don’t think I drank any more or less water than usual, but I also didn’t notice feeling jittery–or much of anything, really, except being unable to sleep.

    • Uribe says:

      I’ve read that people metabolize caffeine at very different rates. If I drink too much coffee in the morning, I have trouble sleeping that night.

    • Jake R says:

      I have the same experience. I only drink coffee occasionally, on mornings when I feel like I need it. Maybe once every couple months. I’ll drink one cup, probably less than 12oz, at 8:30 or 9am and I swear it keeps me awake well into the night. I assume this is some sort of placebo effect. Unfortunately I can’t help you. My solution is just to not drink coffee all that often.

      Possibly relevant, I used to drink a ton of soda in high school, and then a lot of soda and coffee in college. Around my sophomore year of college I went cold turkey on both. Now I drink nothing but water and the semi-monthly cup of coffee. Maybe it screwed up my system somehow.

      • inhibition-stabilized says:

        Sorry to hear you’re having this issue as well. I haven’t had many caffeinated drinks in the past, so if that screwed up your system at least it’s not the same problem I’m having. I don’t plan on taking caffeine very often, but as you say it would be nice to have it as a backup in case I need it.

      • keaswaran says:

        I have a similar experience. When I was younger I used to drink a lot of soda at many different hours, and I didn’t feel like it affected my sleep (or even had much noticeable affect on me). But after a period of basically no caffeine in early adulthood, I shifted to one cup of coffee a day, in the morning, and now I notice that basically any caffeine after noon will cause problems for my sleep, except when I’m in a sleep-deprived state, like when I’m at a conference.

        My explanation is that when I was young, I just didn’t get nearly enough sleep. I also do remember that when I was young, it always took me a while to fall asleep, but I just hadn’t connected it to the caffeine.

    • Dog says:

      The half life of caffeine is 3-7 hours. No-Doze is 200mg per pill. Say you’re on the slow end metabolizing it and take a pill at 10:00, you could easily still be at 60mg by the time you’re trying to go to bed. This would be the equivalent of 2 cokes or maybe a small cup of coffee.

      • inhibition-stabilized says:

        Interesting. I took 100mg, which would put me at around 30mg at night. That doesn’t seem like much but I guess that might still do it? I’ll probably have to experiment some more.

  69. proyas says:

    Is there any value to subjecting new doctors to grueling, low-paid residencies?

    Are there countries that produce objectively high-quality doctors without making them do awful residencies?

    • Creutzer says:

      Residencies aren’t about improving the quality of doctors, they’re about regulating the supply of doctors. Scott has discussed this on occasion, but I don’t remember the relevant posts unfortunately.

      • Matt M says:

        Yeah, the last time we had this debate I pretty much ended up in the “this is hazing but since doctors are high-status we don’t call it that” camp.

      • rahien.din says:

        Residencies regulate the supply of doctors.

        How is that proposed to work?

        • John Schilling says:

          How is that proposed to work?

          You basically can’t practice medicine in the United States unless you complete a residency. The medical community makes a finite number of residencies available every year, so only that number of new doctors can start practicing medicine every year. Thus, the supply of doctors is regulated.

          • rahien.din says:

            Okay! This is something I can make more clear.

            The number of residency spots is greater than the number of matriculating med students. In fact, there are lots of residencies that go unfilled.

            There may be a limited number of residencies in highly-select specialties, but this does not prevent anyone from practicing medicine, only from training in their desired specialty.

            Moreover, once you are accepted into medical training, your med school works extremely hard to keep you from quitting or flunking out before you make it to residency. Attrition rates are very low (around 5%).

            The primary filter is med school acceptance.

          • Garrett says:

            > In fact, there are lots of residencies that go unfilled.

            Is there a way to get numbers on this? Other than really weird locations which have just started a program (middle-of-nowhere hospital has set up an EM program for some reason), are there really that many residencies unfilled? Alternatively, doesn’t this mean that some specialties are overpaid?

          • rahien.din says:

            What do you mean by overpaid?

        • sharper13 says:

          As a general rule, anything which makes something more difficult to obtain (in this case, the permission to practice medicine as a doctor) reduces the supply of that thing by increasing the cost.

          For the extreme example to illustrate the point, if anyone could become a doctor in the United States by simply declaring themselves to be one (without all that extra stuff required), it seems most people would agree that the supply of doctors would significantly increase immediately.

          • rahien.din says:

            It seems like my question has added confusion.

            I should have just out and said that the residency match is not much of a filter. Basically everyone matches. There are residency spots that go unfilled.

            The real filter is acceptance into medical school.

      • Blueberry pie says:

        Here in Czechia we do have something like residencies, as you need to get “attestation” to be allowed to practice without supervision of a more senior doctor. Before taking an exam for the attestation you are required to attend courses, practice at given hospital departments and perform a number of specific medical tasks (details depend on your specialization). Those are officially to guarantee quality care and seem to somewhat work in that direction: all my doctor friends tell me they wouldn’t ever want to treat a patient without supervision straight out of school and that they are learning a lot in this process. Also nobody really limits the number of doctors or pre-attestation positions. However, the pre-attestation positions tend to be grueling and low-paid. My impression is that this is driven by supply and demand – if you want to prepare for attestation in surgery at a prestigious hospital in a big city, you are likely to be treated like garbage (because many young doctors want to do this). On the other hand, aiming for attestation as a general practitioner in a small city is AFAIK usually pretty chill and you get a decent pay.

        The point I wanted to make is that removing the cap on the number of residencies might not necessarily make the residencies that much better, especially for more prestigious hospitals/subfields/…

      • 10240 says:

        Many (all?) countries with government-provided healthcare have residencies, e.g. Hungary. In these countries the government wants to keep doctors’ salaries low, and (in Hungary at least) it succeeds. In Hungary there is a shortage of doctors as they leave for better paying countries. So the government has no interest in limiting the number of doctors, yet residency is still required.

    • rahien.din says:

      Structurally, medicine is the same as any other team hierarchical team. The lower-ranking members of any team are going to do the majority of the grinding. This is so the higher-ranking members of the team can focus on big-picture, culture creation, and longer-range vision. Residents are lower-ranking because they don’t fully know how to take care of patients, and thus they need oversight.

      And the money aspect is really not troublesome. No profession pays its trainees or apprentices as much as its full members. Moreover, it’s sort of… invisible. Your loans are deferred through your training, and once you’re out, for most physicians they get paid off without much austerity. There is room for improvement, but trainee pay is neither the problem nor the solution.

      So in principle, there is nothing malevolent about trainees doing grunt work for less pay.

      —-

      “Okay,” you say, “maybe not in principle, but certainly in degree. Does it have to be this hard?” That’s somewhat of an open question. And certainly we need to protect our residents from emotional and physical injury.

      I nearly committed suicide at two points during my residency. I contemplated it not infrequently. My relationships with my wife and children suffered in ways that have taken years to repair. I needed far more help than I asked for or received. I was pushed much too hard. As a profession, we have to do better than that. I am lucky to know how bad it can get, and to be able to look out for my trainees.

      But the reason why we need to do better is not simply to be gentle. It’s so that trainees can push themselves to their limit.

      Implicit in this criticism of physician training is the assumption that the practice of medicine is rather non demanding. That the mental, physical, and emotional work of medicine is comparatively simple. It’s not. While being an attending is better than being a resident (or else, why do it at all…), this is in large part because the difficulty of residency equips you with important skills and tolerances.

      Medicine is hard. We work hard. The difficulties of residency – the isolation, the emotional injury, the physical grind, the mental pressure – do not ever end. (My wife still somewhat thinks of my patients as thieves of our time together.) It would be unethical to thrust people into that without some foreknowledge and preparation.

      Also implicit in this criticism is the assumption that an attending physician has little to learn, other than to keep up with the progress of their field. This is also false. I learned as much in the first few years of my practice as I did in comparable years of my residency. And not simply about diseases and treatments, but about how medical teams operate, and how I operate as an individual. Things I could not have learned without being able to navigate the fundamentals.

      I am still learning. I can only learn these greater concepts to the degree that I have mastered that which comes before them. If residency had not prepared me so well, I would be far behind where I need to be.

      Think in terms of the Pareto principle – people can reliably execute all the way up to 80% of their abilities. Residency is about stretching your 100% farther, so that your 80% level is enough to carry you into the next domain of learning.

      I think back to the desperation of Q4 home call, of leaving my bed once or twice a night to care for patients, and yes, it was utterly miserable. But it was also clarifying. In order to survive, I had to get really, really good. After a year of that grind, I was bulletproof for the routine stuff, and I knew how to think swiftly through the unusual cases. If not for that, I’d be a far worse physician.

      Medicine is no different from any other profession – the difficulty of training must be commensurate to the difficulty of task you are training for. We have to protect our trainees because there is so much difficulty and growth in their future, and they need to push themselves as hard as they can while they are sheltered and while they are mastering the fundamentals.

      • ECD says:

        Maybe I’m reading this wrong, but a lot of the things that seem to make medicine ‘hard’ are a consequence of their being rather too few doctors. Which, at least from an external view, comes from all the stuff we do to train people to deal with the ‘hardness’ of medicine. Seems circular to me as an outsider.

        • rahien.din says:

          It only seems circular if you think medicine isn’t that hard.

          • AG says:

            Part of its hardness appears to be its breadth. Doctors don’t have the time to be researching what might be wrong with any single patient, but if the patient-to-doctor ratio is vastly decreased, that gives any single doctor much more leeway not to have to know so much on one hand. Most all other industries have seen productivity gains through specialization, so it seems that medicine could go further, too.

            Another common reason given for why residencies have such sucky hours is that transitioning between shifts tends to have extremely inefficient information transfer. But again, if the ratio of patients to doctors is improved, then you could do something like more hours per day, but fewer days per week.

            Unrelated, but I wonder if anyone has compared the lives of doctors to chefs? I suppose the latter has lower stakes and more standardized procedures, but otherwise, working the line in a restaurant is also long intense and frenetic hours, with a vast amount of knowledge to absorb.

          • rahien.din says:

            On the one hand, you have definitely identified an alternative to our current medical system that would be feasible to create.

            On the other hand, the alternative you describe – a greater number of doctors that are each more reliant on medical texts and specialists rather than their own knowledge base ; longer resident shifts – are the exact problems that we are trying to solve.

          • AG says:

            Why is it a problem that we’re trying to solve? Is medicine really such a special case that it can’t follow the models of other industries?
            Part of this, of course, is bureaucracy problems. The insurance nonsense involved seems to exponentially increase the more specialists you have to go through. But that’s a problem with the bureaucracy, not the specialist system. Again, follow the models in other industries that have made specializing a productivity gain. Medicine has high stakes, but so is aerospace, and the latter doesn’t require that all engineers do residencies and long shifts.

            And I mentioned how the life of a restaurant cook is similar to that of a resident, but note how the restaurant cook is a very small part of the greater food industry. Perhaps we can’t avoid the life of an ER doctor being hectic and intense, but perhaps we can contain it to the ER.

  70. Uribe says:

    A number of people seem to think that the gains in the stock market may be as much about expected inflation as anything. Other asset classes aren’t really showing that yet: TIPS spreads are at 1.27.Gold, bitcoin, silver ,copper, etc. haven’t risen much but they have risen some, and if you believe the technical analysis theory that new long-term highs after a long dormant period means we’re poised for a huge spike, well, maybe that’s where these markets are.

    But is there a reason to believe TIPS spreads are not a good indicator of expected inflation?

    • Creutzer says:

      TIPS spread is a good measure of inflation only if you believe the CPI is a good measure of inflation, which many people, and in my view quite justifiably, don’t. There are many very odd rules in how the CPI is calculated nowadays which basically serve to keep it artificially low.

      Even if one accepts the notion that the CPI is a reasonable measure o inflation, the theory that the stock market rise is about inflation is, as I understand it, based on looking at the actual money supply, and the most extreme version of the theory is that the stocks going up is the inflation: stocks rise across the board because that’s where the excess money goes, and so you get a kind of local inflation even though consumer goods may not be similarly affected.

    • baconbits9 says:

      Markets often give funny results for binary outcomes. Take a coin flip, if you are going to flip it once then you should have 50% of people betting heads and 50% tails and the market expected outcome would describe an event that cannot happen (ie half a head and half a tail comes up) even though the market is pricing in the odds of either side coming up perfectly.

      In a similar way if half of the market expects 5% deflation and half 5% inflation the the market expectation of 0% inflation is a position that no one actually holds. In this situation you would want to look more at the size of the bets on each side rather than the absolute price to get an idea of people’s opinions. Further TIPs spreads have been bad (in their short history) at predicting large shifts. In mid 2008 the spread (iirc) was predicting 2.5-3% inflation over the next 5 years, and in November 2008 it was predicting -2%. The TIPS spread spent almost no time near the actual inflation rate for the following 5 years between May 2008 and May 2009.

      But is there a reason to believe TIPS spreads are not a good indicator of expected inflation?

      Yes. TIPS are badly designed for this task because they don’t lose value under deflation. At the expiration of the security you get back the larger of the original price or the original price * inflation rate, which means you cant use them or one of their derivatives to hedge against deflation which (along with being a relatively small portion of the treasury) makes them unattractive for expressing your inflation expectations.

  71. Uribe says:

    Criterion Channel movie suggestions?

    I’ve been watching a lot of Kurosawa and my favorite by far is Throne of Blood, which is based on Macbeth.

    Others I recommend are Tarkovsky’s Stalker (for the eerie, surreal visuals), Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage (for the dialogue), Cleo from 5 to 7 (for the visuals, B&W in Paris), Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (a Molliere farce) , & Ashes and Diamonds, a great story with great cinematography set in Poland at the end of WWII, made in the 50s.

    Plus every movie by Kieslowski. His earlier ones are my favorite, his later ones are more popular.

    Other suggestions on Criterion?

    • Aapje says:

      Wild Strawberries
      Belle de Jour
      Metropolis (and Fritz Lang in general)
      Le Silence de la Mer
      The Human Condition I & II & III
      Tristana (Luis Bunuel is very interesting in general)
      Chimes at Midnight (and Orson Welles in general)
      The Wages of Fear
      My Man Godfrey (screwball at its best)
      Ace in the Hole (very relevant to the critiques of the media that we see a lot)
      Sundays and Cybèle (the kind of movie that can’t be made anymore)
      Le Trou
      La Jetée (if you like experimental short film…it worked for me)
      The Betrayal (1966 by Tanaka, about the difference between the rules and what moral code people actually live by. Also has one of the best sword fights ever put to film)
      12 Angry Men
      Harakiri (1962)
      A Man Escaped (1956)
      Sansho the Bailiff (1954)

      Various movies by Eisenstein and Tarkovsky too.

  72. johan_larson says:

    Inspired by @Le Maistre Chat’s reviews of Howard’s original Conan stories, this week I am kicking off a series of reviews of recent science fiction films. These will all be films from the twenty-first century. I’ll be following this list from Rolling Stone in 2017, plus a few more from 2018-2020.

    I plan to publish these reviews on Sundays, starting this Sunday. The first film will be #40 on Rolling Stone’s list, “The One I Love”, starring Elisabeth Moss, who played Peggy Olson in “Mad Men”. If you want to join the discussion, you can find “The One I Love” on iTunes and Prime Video. See you all on Sunday.

  73. sty_silver says:

    I have a very naive question. Do regular people in regular conversations in the USA talk in terms of inches and yards and ounces and stuff? Do you learn the metric system at school? And is it common for stores to sell bottles that hold exactly one liter (and then describe that in terms of ounces)?

    • Garrett says:

      > Do regular people in regular conversations in the USA talk in terms of inches and yards and ounces and stuff?

      Yes, where appropriate.

      > And is it common for stores to sell bottles that hold exactly one liter (and then describe that in terms of ounces)?

      Yes. Most notably, soft drink bottles are typically 2-liter bottles. Everything else is some weird size, likely based on shrinkflation, though.

    • CatCube says:

      It’s far more common to talk in US customary than metric. The only people who use metric are the ones for whom it’s part of their job. If you were to ask somebody how many centimeters tall they were, they’d think you’re a weirdo. I’m a structural engineer, and I’ve used metric exactly one time in my actual job (as opposed to classwork) and that was when working with a product purchased from England. Everything else is in US customary, and I don’t think we even have a concrete design code in metric anywhere in our office. If you were to tell me an unknown material had, say, a 400 MPa design strength, I couldn’t even guess if it was steel or concrete without looking up a conversion, much less be able to guess if it was a strong or weak example of either of those materials.

      There are fields where metric is much more common. If you work on cars, many of the fasteners are in metric, and I think aerospace has entirely switched over. Basic science, of course. More applied science depends a bit on the application. They’re trying to force structural engineering papers to be in metric, but since many of the working engineers don’t use metric day-to-day they still include the conversions, if the paper isn’t actually normally denominated in US customary units with metric as secondary.

      They *do* teach the metric system in school, because since the ’70s they’ve been talking about how we’re going to switch Real Soon Now. Or, I guess in the ’70s through the late ’80s, they did. I don’t recall them even pretending that we were actually going to change over in everything by the time I was in high school in the ’90s, though.

      There are actually a few niches where they sell evenly-metric items. Two-liter and one-liter bottles of pop are called that, but most packaging is round numbers in US customary and discussed using those units. Formally, everything you buy is “officially” denominated in metric, and is printed on the packaging in parentheses after the US customary measurements, but nobody talks about a can of pop that’s a round 12 fluid ounces as a “355 mL can”–again, you’d be a weirdo to ask for that, and nobody would know what you’re talking about as I had to actually look at a can to know the conversion.

      There is a weird niche like what you’re talking about in liquor: the “traditional” way of selling liquor was the “fifth,” or fifth of a gallon. (Which would be 25.6 fl. oz, or 757 mL). That got rounded to a 750 mL bottle, but is still referred to as a “fifth” in common parlance.

      • achenx says:

        This came up the other week in talking about kitchen scales, but one odd thing about labels is that often the US unit will be volume while the metric unit will be mass. E.g. a nutrition label on a bag of flour will say “Serving size 1/4 cup (30 g)”. So if your recipe calls for volume, but you want to weigh your flour, it gives you the conversion.

      • psmith says:

        but nobody talks about a can of pop that’s a round 12 fluid ounces as a “355 mL can”–again, you’d be a weirdo to ask for that,

        “Sir, we don’t have Litera Cola.”

      • sty_silver says:

        Thanks. (And to other replies as well.)

    • johan_larson says:

      The US mostly uses US customary units (inches, feet, pounds), but you can find some metric here and there. Science is done in metric units, and if you take physics or chemistry classes in high school, you have to learn metric. Some packaging is in metric, notably soft drinks, which are sold in 500 ml, 1 L, and 2 L sizes. Drugs are sold in grams and kilograms. Ammunition dimensions are sometimes given in mm. The US military uses meters and kilometers.

      Canada is a couple steps further towards metric in that we are officially metric, with metric being the only system taught in schools. But in practice a lot of imperial measures are used, because America. People talk about their weights in pounds and their heights in feet and inches, for example.

      • j1000000 says:

        Even when I used meters in high school science, they were still completely abstract to me — I never developed any intuition for how big a meter is. It was about a real to me as a mole.

        • achenx says:

          I get that for some measurements, but a meter is “basically a yard”, so that one I thought was easy.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:
        • Eugene Dawn says:

          Reported, as this is an unwarranted personal attack on me 😛

        • Garrett says:

          As someone who grew up in Canada, this, absolutely. Though I’d add interior room temperature to the list of stuff done in Fahrenheit. But that might have just been my house.

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            Although I think of interior temperature in Celsius (because every car I’ve driven has a Celsius climate control), a lot of thermostats here seem to be in Fahrenheit, which might explain it.

            Somewhat related, because I unambiguously think of outdoor temperature in Celsius, it took me a few moments to get the point of the famous forty degree day speech in the Wire–forty degrees is amazing!

    • souleater says:

      Inches, feet, and miles are common, yards are rarer.
      ounces are common in culinary applications, but for anything non-technical you’re more likely to hear pounds, or tons
      as mentioned, Sodas are sold as 2 liter bottles, but milk is sold in Pints, Quarts, or Gallons

      Most of us “learn” the metric system is school, but its not useful or common enough where people think in those terms.

      I’m an engineer, and we learned and used both metric and imperial extensively in college. Personally, I prefer to use imperial when talking about how tall/heavy something is, Fahrenheit when talking about the weather, metric for any application where I might have to convert units.

      As far as how stores market items, they usually use one or the other. I happen to know my morning coffee (iced, black) is advertised as 32 ounces, for example

    • Oldio says:

      Yes. We use inches, gallons, pounds, feet, and miles for measuring things. Most people will use liters as well, but not terribly frequently.
      No one knows what a kilometer is, but most people will understand meters(by assuming they’re the exact same thing as a yard, which is slightly smaller), and kilograms(again, with an inaccurate conversion). People who regularly have to measure very small things are likely to use millimeters, although you’ll still run into fractions of an inch. No one uses centimeters, and degrees celsius might as well be in greek to the average American.
      We learn the metric system in school, but it’s treated as a quaint foreign custom, like bidets.
      One liter containers are usually denominated in liters. One kilogram containers are denominated in pounds. One meter containers are denominated as meters(this also goes for millimeters but not for kilometers or centimeters), although most things sold by length are sold in yards. Degrees centigrade are always converted. Hectares are virtually never used, and the average American is unaware that they exist.
      Expect to see conversions for just about everything in an official context though, except possibly to degrees centigrade.

      • SamChevre says:

        very small things are likely to use millimeters, although you’ll still run into fractions of an inch

        Including thousandths of an inch – “mils” – just to increase the bafflement of people who are used to metric units. (40 mils to the millimeter).

      • achenx says:

        Exception: short and mid-distance running races are mostly in meters/kilometers. The traditional “100-yard dash” has mostly been phased out in favor of the 100m race. Casual runners (such as myself) often run 5k races, though while actually running it I am thinking of it in terms of “3.1 miles” 100% of the time.

        Long-distance races are commonly marathons, which everyone knows as “26.2 miles”, or half-marathons. I’m sure in a technical sense they are “actually” measured in kilometers, but unlike “a 5k race is 3.1 miles”, I have no idea how long a marathon would be in k (without thinking about it and doing the math in my head).

    • Beans says:

      Do regular people in regular conversations in the USA talk in terms of inches and yards and ounces and stuff?

      We do to such an extent that hearing you asking this question is so absurd it’s hilarious (but I certainly don’t blame you for asking.) It makes me think that you’ve got an image in your head of the possibility of some erudite American populace who recognizes the weirdness of our traditional conventions and speaks in metric instead. Absolutely not!

    • MilesM says:

      Let me ask you a somewhat related questions (and sorry if this comes across as snarky):

      Are people in Europe genuinely as clueless/indifferent about Imperial measurements as they seem, or is it in part an act in response to “stupid/arrogant Americans who think everyone else should…”

      For example, I’ve traveled in Europe a bit last year, and reflexively used “pounds” a couple of times in conversation when talking to some (English speaking) locals. And was met with a slightly condescending “You know that weight means absolutely nothing to me” from otherwise very nice people. (we were just talking about random stuff and body weight came up, I didn’t go into a store and ask to buy 2 pounds of flour)

      Like… you’re an adult and you can’t mentally divide by two to get a rough idea? (or don’t know that’s how it works?)

      (To clarify, where I’m coming from: I grew up in a country that exclusively uses metric, was pretty familiar with Imperial measurements by the time I was 10 or 12 (I read a lot of historical fiction), then moved to the US not long after, and now I work in basic science. So I really have no issues using either.)

      Edit: Also, I just realized I assumed you were European, which might not be the case at all.

      • fibio says:

        The issue is less the general understanding and more that people just don’t have the conversions memorized. I couldn’t tell you the Celsius to Fahrenheit conversion, nor Pounds to the Kilo, nor Chains to the Meter or Fluid Ounces to the Litre. I could go and look all these up but no reason to remember them. The only ones that persists in the UK is the occasional use of length and weight, and even then only in specific uses that don’t require conversion to and from very often.

        • beleester says:

          You don’t actually need to know that many conversions. Nobody measures in chains and only soft drink companies measure fluid ounces. But there are some easy conversion factors for common units – 1 yard ~= 1 meter, 1 quart ~= 1 liter, 1 lb ~= 1/2 kg.

          (I will admit that the conversion for temperature is ugly and I still have to look it up.)

          • SamChevre says:

            The rough conversion for temperature is fairly easy: double and add thirty (Celsius to Fahrenheit), subtract thirty and divide in half (Fahrenheit to Celsius).

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            Recipes also use fluid ounces.

      • March says:

        I know a kilo is roughly two pounds (which is inaccurate enough to really matter when it comes to for instance the weight of a person or pet), an inch is roughly 2.5 cm (which is fairly accurate but not a split-second calculation, which I was reminded of today when trying to convert a bra size from cm to inch). I only know that a fluid ounce is about 30 ml because that was on the baby bottles I spent too much time staring at at night, and Fahrenheit is a complete mystery except I think I somehow remember that a healthy adult temp is 100 F? That doesn’t give me enough to go on to know how to dress for 70 degrees and sunny. They say 6 feet is tall but then I’m like ‘isn’t that 1.80m, so only tall for a girl?’ so cultural factors also matter.

        I’m Dutch. We’re tall, it tends to be on the cool side, and we only ever use metric.

        • achenx says:

          Fahrenheit was originally designed so body temperature would be 96. Greater accuracy and slight adjustments to the scale means that now average body temperature is 98.6 (which is a number that everybody learns). 100 is definitely “fever” territory.

          I tried to get an innate sense of Celsius weather temperatures at one point but could never quite do it.

          • Randy M says:

            I remember room temperature is about 25, but I don’t have an intuitive understanding of what uncomfortably warm or cold would be.

          • a real dog says:

            ~30 is a hot summer day, 36.6 is body temperature, 0 is the freezing point of water, everything else in between can be interpolated.

            I’m more confused how you guys have a feeling for Fahrenheit, we at least have an obvious reference point at 0 – once the sidewalk starts getting slippery we crossed that.

            @up: Actually room temperature is usually assumed to be 20 C, heating thermostats are usually set between 20 and 22 C for comfort. For me 22 is T-shirt territory, 20 requires an additional layer to feel cozy indoors.

          • March says:

            @Randy M

            Room temperature is such an interesting fiction. I keep my room at 19 degrees minimum and think 25 is uncomfortably hot for indoors (or hella decadent in winter). In countries where AC rather than heating is the salient feature, I’m sure the intutions are the other way around.

            @achenx

            Well, anything below 0 is literally freezing. Still, some people would probably call that a lovely spring day.

          • Randy M says:

            I’m more confused how you guys have a feeling for Fahrenheit

            Regular usage for forty years in real life, versus chemistry text book problems. I understand it’s arbitrary.
            (Maybe I shouldn’t have said intuitive, rather immediate or ingrained.)

          • MilesM says:

            Still depends on who (and where) you ask, I grew up with 36.6 Celsius as the “normal” body temperature, which is 97.9 Fahrenheit. (98.6 is 37)

          • Alejandro says:

            The easy conversion points I learnt when immigrating to the US were 61 F = 16 C and 82 F = 28 C. From those and freezing = 32 F = 0 C one can extrapolate to other values as needed.

          • souleater says:

            0 is freezing
            10 is not
            20 is cool
            30 is hot

        • MilesM says:

          6 feet is 183cm. 🙂

          (Well, 182.9)

        • Skivverus says:

          Fahrenheit air temperatures are reported everywhere in the US (or at least, everywhere in it I’ve been), which makes it fairly straightforward to get an intuitive sense of about how warm a day is via those numbers, usually rounded to the nearest 10 (e.g., people will talk about a day being in ‘the fifties’, which where I am is t-shirt weather for winter, jacket weather for summer; 70F is a perfect summer day; 80 is unpleasantly warm depending on humidity; 90 is hot, 100 you don’t go in direct sunlight if at all possible).

      • CatCube says:

        In the defense of your European interlocutors, it probably isn’t reasonable to expect that pounds means anything to them.

        As I referenced in my comment above, if you were to give me a steel strength in MPa, I couldn’t tell you where that fits in a “weak steel” or “strong steel” qualitative sense without actually looking up a conversion if you put a gun to my head. Heck, without having looked up that A36 steel is 250 MPa this morning writing that comment, I couldn’t have told you if “250 MPa” would have been steel or concrete, that’s how little sense of metric quantities I have.

        OTOH, I know that there are 5280 feet per mile, and 43,560 square feet in an acre, and 7.48 gallons per cubic foot, and a foot is 0.3048 meters, because I’ve used all those quantities frequently enough that I’ve now got them memorized. Without looking it up, I *think* a pound is 454 grams, but that I don’t use frequently enough to be sure, and I’d have to think for a minute if you gave me kilograms to turn it into pounds.

        For people who literally never use pounds, it’s not unreasonable for them to not have even the slightest idea what the conversion is.

        • MilesM says:

          I guess I just have an unrealistic idea of what units are so basic that a well-rounded person “should” have at least a rough concept of what they mean.

          (as I said, I grew up in a place where no one used pounds or miles either, but my reading habits were definitely atypical)

          It’s funny that you mention MPa values for structural materials – those don’t really mean anything to me either, but Young’s modulus values in KPa for living tissue do.

        • SamChevre says:

          Interestingly, when I studied in France ~20 years ago, “un livre” was a common unit for produce at farmers markets–and was a half-kilo.

      • a real dog says:

        The only reason I know how much a pound weighs is because I read nutrition articles on the internet sometimes. In similar fashion, people brag about their dicks in inches and feet are pretty self-explanatory.

        I remember that a gallon is around 4.5 liters (is that even correct?) because you guys have cheap gasoline and buy it by gallon, and envy is good for memorizing.

        On the other hand I have absolutely no clue how long a yard is, without looking it up. It’s supposed to be based on the length of a human step I think?

        • albatross11 says:

          A yard is a little shorter than a meter–about 90cm.

        • Garrett says:

          > I remember that a gallon is around 4.5 liters

          This one is even funnier. A US gallon is 3.78 liters, but a UK gallon is 4.55 liters. So even between English-speaking countries there can be mix-ups of which gallon people are talking about, especially as it pertains to fuel economy.

          • bullseye says:

            This is why people need to stop calling U.S. units “imperial”. Imperial units belong to the British Empire.

      • MPG says:

        @MilesM

        Where in Europe was that? They still use Pfund for 500g in Germany, for example, and the 10% difference will not matter for round measurements.

        • MilesM says:

          That was in Portugal. (the specific instance I remember was talking about MMA over beer, and me saying some fighter was a big guy, over 200 pounds)

          • DarkTigger says:

            Yeah Pfund is still pretty widely used in Germany, at least for smaller weights (e.g. a pund of flour, or a quater pound of butter). But for bigger weights (i.e. body weight), my gut feeling how much let’s say 184 pounds are, is regularly off.
            But for another example, I can only think of two groups that would be intuetivly be able to think in Zoll (inch). Those would be war gamers (most rule sets still use inches) and plumbers (some pipe measures are still given in Zoll). And of those I thing only the former would have any clue about the lenght of a foot.

          • MilesM says:

            But for another example, I can only think of two groups that would be intuetivly be able to think in Zoll (inch).

            I never really thought of where Polish words for some Imperial units came from, but German makes sense. For example, “funt” and “cal.”

            (Which I kind of had on my mind since the Dutch phrases thread, because that reminded me “zucker” is clearly how we ended up with “cukier” – I wonder how may European languages the “You’re not made of sugar” phrase is used in, Polish has it.)

          • DarkTigger says:

            Measurement units are tools of the state. The Polish state was under German influence or outright German controll for a lot of the last 300 years. It’s no wonder the words are similar.

            The word sugar/Zucker/cukier on the other hand seems to stem from the Arab word sukkar as sugar came from India via the Arab world into the Mediteranian. Would be interessting how far to the south and the east we can follow the phrase.

      • sty_silver says:

        I am European.

        I think they’re clueless, as others have said. I don’t know how many pounds are one kilo — but I certainly wouldn’t have that reaction. If you mentioned something with pounds to me, I would just ask how to convert them and then do the math.

    • Erusian says:

      Do regular people in regular conversations in the USA talk in terms of inches and yards and ounces and stuff? Do you learn the metric system at school? And is it common for stores to sell bottles that hold exactly one liter (and then describe that in terms of ounces)?

      In order: Yes. I did, but it was an international school. I still find it difficult to use imperial units. I’m not entirely sure, but I know plenty of stores sell liter bottles. It’s common for packaging to have both.

    • keaswaran says:

      People in the United States know what yards mean, but it’s not a unit that anyone uses outside a football game (unlike, e.g., the UK, where I hear people give directions in yards!) People know ounces in cooking contexts, but otherwise it’s just used as a synonym for something really small. Pounds, miles, feet, and inches are totally normal and basically understood (though I think most people don’t really know what 1300 feet means or a quarter mile, and wouldn’t recognize that they are basically the same distance – that’s just a distance that’s in between the walking frame of mind that doesn’t go past 100 feet or so, and the driving frame of mind that doesn’t go below a half mile or so).

      Soda is sold in 2 liter bottles and 20 ounce bottles, but not single liter, or anything denominated in cups or pints (though milk is often sold in pints or quarts).

      • Randy M says:

        I think most people don’t really know what 1300 feet means or a quarter mile

        That’s easy, a quarter mile is one time around the track back at middle school. I just have to mentally unwind it and roll it out to compare distance. 😉

        For 1300 feet, at rough glance I’d guess a quarter mile, because a mile is 5000 something, and a quarter of that is between 1 and 2 k.

      • Oldio says:

        IME red tribers are fairly likely to use yards for distances between 100 feet and a thousand or so, but otherwise football, shooting guns, and measuring certain things(cloth, ziplines, boats) are the main contexts.
        An American might not know what 1300 feet is, but “three city blocks” is a much easier picture- and most of us would round 1300 feet to that.

  74. Rock Lobster says:

    Investment portfolio fishing: Has anybody gotten conviction on any unorthodox asset allocations or simple, low-turnover formulas/algorithms that outperform just being all stocks in your portfolio?

    If it’s an asset allocation the focus would probably be on lower volatility with stock-like average returns.

    An algorithm would be something simple like, tilt to 30% bonds in high-multiple markets (variously defined), revert back to 100% stocks after a 15% stock drawdown.

    Also I have access to sell-side stuff and am open to hearing about any of the proprietary sentiment gauges.

    • Chalid says:

      For simple, low-turnover formulas that have a case for beating the market long-term, it seems like you’d want to be looking at smart beta funds.

  75. r321 says:

    Where are the old whimsical blogroll headings gone – can anyone share a record of them for old times’ sake?

    I’ve been away for a while.

    Thank you.

    • Aftagley says:

      I can do you one better:

      Here’s an archive shot from back in February with all the old weirdness preserved:

      Link

    • Elena Yudovina says:

      If the “where” was short for “wherefore”, Scott announced that he was replacing them with more informative groupings in the previous visible open thread.

  76. Two McMillion says:

    Thinking about how to reduce racism, it occurs to me that if you want to eliminate unconscious bias, you need to make people feel like they’re all in this together. To do this, you’ll need to get white and black together in an environment where they can form strong social bonds with each other. But strong social bonds don’t just happen; they can only happen in an environment where white and black participate on terms of equality, and are united in favor of a common goal.

    But we know of exactly such an environment: the military. The military has long experience causing social bonds to form between people from different backgrounds. It’s vital to their work.

    My plan to defeat racism is therefore to require 2 years of mandatory military service in mixed-race units for every American. This is within the Overton Window of things Democracies are allowed to do, and it should be embraced by both Blue Tribe (because it would reduce racism) and by Red Tribe (because go military).

    Obviously there would have to be some other details considered. Your promotion process would have to be scrupulously fair, for example, lest it appear that only white people get promoted. But when I think about long term solutions to racism, this strikes me as something that could work. Also, I won’t deny that I think it would be good for other reasons.

    • cassander says:

      drafting 4 million people a year for two years runs you to at least a trillion dollars a year in direct costs, not counting the cost of equipping a military more than 5 times the size of the current one. Even before you get to the moral problems of conscription, that seems like not the most efficient solution.

      • Two McMillion says:

        As you can likely guess, I don’t see any moral problems with conscription.

        • cassander says:

          I mean, it’s slavery. But I’d think almost anyone would have trouble with spending a trillion bucks a year to get 8 million extra people into uniform with nothing for them to do. for the record, the military in world war 2 topped out at around 12 million, and we’d have 9.5, not counting the additional people needed to process, train, and lead the 8 million newbies.

          • Two McMillion says:

            I mean, it’s slavery.

            You use the same word for both the kidnapping of Africans to labor in a foreign land and the requirement that the sons of a nation render service to that nation. I do not think these things are remotely similar and do not believe that we should use the same word for both.

            The simple fact is that, merely by the accident of being born in a nation, you owe that nation part of your life and energy. This can take many forms, but it is not unreasonable for that nation to require military or civilian service of you. Similarly, merely by the accident of being born into a family, you owe that family things you do not owe others, and merely by the accident of being geographically adjacent to them you owe your neighbors things you do not owe others.

          • John Schilling says:

            You use the same word for both the kidnapping of Africans to labor in a foreign land and the requirement that the sons of a nation render service to that nation. I do not think these things are remotely similar and do not believe that we should use the same word for both.

            I believe the concept, “The whole of your productive labor for a substantial period is mine to command, for the purposes I chose under the terms I choose and I can confine and punish you as necessary to make you serve” to be simple and coherent and important enough to have a word for it. And I’m going to use that word even if the work to which you chose to put your slaves is something you find to be righteous.

          • MilesM says:

            @ Two McMillion

            The simple fact is that, merely by the accident of being born in a nation, you owe that nation part of your life and energy.

            That does sound less like slavery and more like literal fascism…

          • The original Mr. X says:

            That does sound less like slavery and more like literal fascism…

            It sounds like what literally everybody, in literally every society, thought until well within living memory (and still do, in most parts of the world).

          • John Schilling says:

            So, accidentally being born in Syria means owing part of one’s life and energy to the Syrian nation, and if that nation decides to collect by having you fight as a soldier in the Syrian army, it’s morally wrong to say run off to Europe or America and be a refugee instead. We should send those selfish cowards back to do their duty.

          • Erc says:

            The simple fact is that, merely by the accident of being born in a nation, you owe that nation part of your life and energy.

            How would you feel about someone who said the same thing except that they replaced “nation” with “race?” Leftists point out, rightly, that when the red-tribers go on about ‘Mericans, what they’re thinking about is other red tribe whites. Suppose they convince them that all those other people are Americans too. What’s will happen? They might imagine a transference of loyalty to the whole American nation, but what will actually happen is an abandoning of the concept itself. The red-triber doesn’t feel much kinship with the New Yorker named Muhammad, just as the New Yorker named Muhammad doesn’t feel much kinship with him. He’s not going to start feeling it if defeated by lawyerly arguments. He’s going to go to either outright separatism or libertarian individualism, and just as well. That’s the pattern for diverse nations, when’s the last time you heard about Austria-Hungary?

          • cassander says:

            @Two McMillion says:

            You use the same word for both the kidnapping of Africans to labor in a foreign land

            By this logic, we shouldn’t call the antebellum south a slave society because importing slaves was banned in 1808. By 1860 almost anyone who had been kidnapped from foreign land was dead.

            The simple fact is that, merely by the accident of being born in a nation, you owe that nation part of your life and energy. This can take many forms, but it is not unreasonable for that nation to require military or civilian service of you.

            To quote someone more eloquent than I, “I also think there are prices too high to pay to save the United States. Conscription is one of them. Conscription is slavery, and I don’t think that any people or nation has a right to save itself at the price of slavery for anyone, no matter what name it is called. If a country can’t save itself through the voluntary service of its own free people, then I say : Let the damned thing go down the drain!”

          • Tatterdemalion says:

            I believe the concept, “The whole of your productive labor for a substantial period is mine to command, for the purposes I chose under the terms I choose and I can confine and punish you as necessary to make you serve” to be simple and coherent and important enough to have a word for it. And I’m going to use that word even if the work to which you chose to put your slaves is something you find to be righteous.

            Depending on how loosely you choose to define slavery, you might be able to get conscription to fit it.

            But it’s a massively non-central example – the word “slavery” has strong connotations of “I own you as property” and weaker ones of “you have no rights, and have to obey all my orders”, which clearly don’t apply here.

            I think that conscription is a very bad thing, but I don’t think it’s as bad as most forms of slavery, or even very close.

          • John Schilling says:

            “You have to obey my orders”, doesn’t apply to military conscription?

            Also, I’m pretty sure Nazi labor camps count as a central example of “slavery”, and those slaves weren’t anyone’s property except in the fuzzy “property of the whole nation” sense that would seem to apply just as well to conscripts.

            I think you want to define slavery as “That thing that evil antebellum plantation owners did, and other things only to the extent that they are just like that one thing”. In which case, no.

          • nimim.k.m. says:

            I think McMillion’s idea has several possible ways how it would not work, and likewise I disagree with some of framings that involve “owing a life to a nation where one was born”.

            However, calling all forms of conscripted military service “slavery” sounds obviously disingenuous play with words to me, where a settled term is redefined to support some agenda in a way that the important aspects of original meaning is lost. Not unlike calling a phenomena one dislikes as the most extreme phenomena that has any resemblance to the actual one if one squints their eyes. (For example, calling all salaried employment prisons or slavery. Or the classic quip, ownership is theft.)

            First, the classic use of the word.

            Spartans, famously, had many slaves. Not only slaves, but a social system fully based on it even moreso than contemporaneous Athens, where also slaves were used a great deal. (However, the argument works similarly for classical Athens.)

            I believe it is unanimous consensus for all parties concerned at the time that Spartans where the slavers, not slaves themselves. I believe it is no coincidence that the adult, free (sic!) men formed the the armed military force of the state.

            It is not at all given that one should be allowed to exercise rights of a citizen without carrying some, possibly costly, duties that allow the nation have a functional state for themselves. Requiring military service is one of most established form of them. If you want to continue to enjoy the benefits of a state that declares a local monopoly of violence, it is quite natural to assume a honorable citizen in a state with a democratic form of government themselves participates in maintaining the monopoly (and not just pay off some dudes who do not have better career prospects to do it for them).

            I will accept arguments that whether a compulsory military service is a form of involuntary servitude (where comparisons to slavery at least make sense) or a part of deal of being a citizen (where they do not) depends on the characteristics of the system. If the failure to comply is punished with coercive measures (many countries on the “slave camp” side of history have had a death penalty in books), it is not implausible to make such comparisons without the meaning of word “slave” becoming lost; if avoiding the service is met with social ostracizion and loss of some rights as a citizen, especially if the person has also the possibility to leave the country, the comparison is difficult to make.

            Also, obviously the amount of how much the military service bears the likeness of slavery also obviously depends on the details of implementation of coercive measures for those who do not comply. For example, a common punishment in liberal Western democracies for not serving has been a prison term for time that is about as long as the time would be served in military. While I don’t see it as an ideal way of enforcing the social cost (I would rather not see objecting to the set of rights and duties offered by the state treated like a crime), it is an arrangement still a bit unlike the forms of slavery. After suffering a fixed, limited time punishment for failing to render a service, one is free to go. I am not aware of indentured servant (NB, not always understood to be a slave) or serfs being allowed that much leeway of escaping the demands made by their owner.

            edit.

            @John Schilling

            “You have to obey my orders”, doesn’t apply to military conscription?

            As previously often discussed here, it also applies to being employed in a McDonalds restaurant, or being a student who wishes to obtain an academic decree, or suffering a penalty inflicted by an order of a court of law, or being an underage person listening to their parents, and many other things. “Obey” is not the only central part of the concept of slavery. Form of the demand and cost of not complying and other context (let’s specify any previous contracts made) are also necessary information.

            edit2. Moreover, a tangent concerning the “accidentally born in someplace” line of arguments. Is it really an accident of biology that one is born to parents in a particular country? Doesn’t that kind of argument require thinking of people having their souls randomly allocated to their bodies by ineffable will of God, or equivalent philosophical mysticism? A more biologically plausible answer could be that being who you are is not necessarily an accident at all (depending on how the term accident is framed anyway) and nevertheless, determined by genetics of parents, epigenetics, some random chance also involving genetics, and increasingly with increased age, overall history of your life.

          • Garrett says:

            > That does sound less like slavery and more like literal fascism…

            I think it would be closer to feudalism.

          • albatross11 says:

            This is in danger of becoming the worst argument in the world.

            The draft isn’t the same thing as plantation slavery, but it’s still a terrible idea. Grabbing people and putting them into involuntary servitude for a couple years so you can do some extra social engineering of their beliefs sounds amazingly horrible to me.

          • Tatterdemalion says:

            @John Schilling:

            “You have to obey my orders”, doesn’t apply to military conscription?

            Not just no, but hell no. You have to obey my orders within very strict limits, but if I order you to, for example, have sex with me, you’re allowed to disobey (and there are many, many other less extreme examples).

            @Albatross11

            The draft isn’t the same thing as plantation slavery, but it’s still a terrible idea. Grabbing people and putting them into involuntary servitude for a couple years so you can do some extra social engineering of their beliefs sounds amazingly horrible to me.

            Totally agree. Butler v Perry was a bad ruling.

          • Matt M says:

            Not just no, but hell no. You have to obey my orders within very strict limits, but if I order you to, for example, have sex with me, you’re allowed to disobey (and there are many, many other less extreme examples).

            Eh, this is technically true, but becomes pretty tough in the edge cases where the laws and morality surrounding a specific situation is ambiguous to say the least.

            Is “Drop a bomb on that hospital?” a legally valid order? What if what you were ordered was “Drop a bomb on that building that the intelligence guys totally assure us is a military installation” and it just so happens that nope, it’s a hospital.

            Is “Stack these prisoners in a naked pyramid?” a legally valid order? What about “Get them to talk, don’t tell me how you did it.”

            I don’t know, but I do know that if the pilot says “No, I’m not dropping the bomb” or the prison guard says “No, I’m not treating these people in such a demeaning manner” they’re going to get in a lot of trouble, risk their entire career, and quite possibly sit in a prison/brig while the lawyers try and work out the legality of the entire situation.

            The default assumption is that orders are valid and must be obeyed. Only the obviously illegal orders can be disobeyed. And the culture is such that enlisted recruits are not expected to challenge their COs on “actually the war in Iraq is illegal under international law according to the United Nations so I don’t have to deploy” type grounds.

          • I believe it is no coincidence that the adult, free (sic!) men formed the the armed military force of the state.

            (Sparta)

            Were the janissaries in the Ottoman empire slaves? The mamluks?

          • John Schilling says:

            @Tatterdemalion: So if antebellum Virginia had passed a law saying that owners couldn’t have sex with their slaves (and some less extreme examples), we’d all say that Virginia had abolished slavery?

            Lots of slave societies, possibly most of them, have had laws granting certain rights and protections to the slaves. They’re still slaves by every normal definition.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            Two McMillion:

            “The simple fact is that, merely by the accident of being born in a nation, you owe that nation part of your life and energy. ”

            It’s funny how people go directly from “rights come with obligations” or, as in this case “being born comes with obligations”, to announcing exactly what those obligations are.

            Shouldn’t the general principle lead to a step of exploring what those obligations should be?

          • The original Mr. X says:

            @ Matt M:

            “Being asked to do some shady activity, and suffering negative consequences is you refuse” is a possibility in every line of work, so I think this argument proves too much.

          • Matt M says:

            “Being asked to do some shady activity, and suffering negative consequences is you refuse” is a possibility in every line of work, so I think this argument proves too much.

            Except that in the military, if you refuse, you don’t just get fired. You go to prison. In certain contexts in wartime, refusing to follow orders is technically still punishable by death.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            Except that in the military, if you refuse, you don’t just get fired. You go to prison. In certain contexts in wartime, refusing to follow orders is technically still punishable by death.

            If forcing somebody to do what you want is slavery, I don’t think it makes much difference what threats you use.

      • AG says:

        All nations would run into those kinds of percentage problems, though, and there are still nations that run mandatory military service. Of course, most of those drafts are men-only, so Two McMillion’s idea would double the costs.
        However, one can compensate by using the military as the Romans did: have it earn some money back by building infrastructure. There’s no inherent requirement that they sit around doing nothing. Vastly expand the Army Corps of Engineers, let the Corps run study/internship or certification programs.

        • cassander says:

          ancient infrastructure required a lot of labor to move rocks around. Modern infrastructure work requires experienced machinery operators, concrete pourers, welders, etc. There are few problems in America that could be solved with an army of poorly motivated interns, and I pity the people who would be put in charge of trying.

          • AG says:

            Obviously the military in such a situation wouldn’t actually send most of those people out to fight (just as is the case for current nations with mandatory service), which means that entire new departments would spring up to address what these non-professional soldiers are doing. AmeriCorps and Peace Corps could probably be subsumed, non-profits can apply for the military to send volunteer bodies, and corporations can partner with the military to do sponsored training/study programs.

            They could potentially even overlap with high school years, since we’re already holding kids captive from participating in the labor market through compulsory education, and so re-purpose the costs there. (Of course, then you’re getting back to boarding school horror stories.)

    • Christophe Biocca says:

      require 2 years of mandatory military service […]. This is within the Overton Window of things Democracies are allowed to do.

      Your plan to advance civil rights is to roll back one of the biggest wins of the 20th century on that front?
      Doubly ironic given Watts v. United States and the context in which he made his remarks.

    • Matt M says:

      I’m not sure this would work as well as you think. IME while the military is officially diverse and non-segregated, most people inevitably associate among highly racially segregated sub-groups whenever they are allowed to do so.

      A non-trivial amount of the no-kidding white supremacists that actually exist are military veterans. The military can force you to work with someone, but it can’t force you to like them… and if you’re disinclined to like them (for whatever reason) then being forced to associate with them against your will might just make you like them even less…

      • Two McMillion says:

        A non-trivial amount of the no-kidding white supremacists that actually exist are military veterans. The military can force you to work with someone, but it can’t force you to like them… and if you’re disinclined to like them (for whatever reason) then being forced to associate with them against your will might just make you like them even less…

        This is because both white supremacy and joining the military are red tribe things. Conscription would drastically reduce the proportion of white supremacists in the military.

        • Matt M says:

          Sure it would, but that’s beside the point. I’m merely offering you evidence that serving in the military does not necessarily convince people that racism is bad.

        • Wrong Species says:

          You are contradicting yourself. If “white supremacists“ joining mixed race units didn’t make them less racist, then why do you think this policy would work?

          • Matt M says:

            I’m acknowledging your statement that universal conscription would decrease the percentage of military members/veterans who are white supremacists.

            But disputing your idea that this would significantly decrease the amount of white supremacists that exist.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            The existence of white supremacist veterans doesn’t prove that military service has no significant effect on the number of white supremacists. You’d need tofind out how many were white supremacists when they joined up, and then see how many are still white supremacists at discharge.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            You should also check for how many weren’t white supremacists when they joined, and were when they discharged.

          • anon-e-moose says:

            It stands to reason that if racism can be unlearned, it surely can be learned in the same way. More exposure to other races = less racism doesn’t HAVE to be true, just because we want it to be.

          • Wrong Species says:

            The existence of white supremacist veterans doesn’t prove that military service has no significant effect on the number of white supremacists.

            No, but the plan was for mixed race units to eliminate racism and the existence of white supremacist veterans does disprove that.

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:

          I believe joining the military is conscious strategy for at least some white supremicists. They want the training and access to weapons. Some of them are expecting a race war.

          As for whether national service would decrease racism, I’ll give it a maybe. It’s unlikely to have an effect on committed white supremacists, but could make white people who vaguely tiink black people are less competent/reliable have enough counterexamples to shift their views.

          • Matt M says:

            I believe joining the military is conscious strategy for at least some white supremicists. They want the training and access to weapons. Some of them are expecting a race war.

            FWIW, I’ve heard the same about black street gangs and hispanic drug cartels.

    • John Schilling says:

      My plan to defeat racism is therefore to require 2 years of mandatory military service in mixed-race units for every American.

      The military doesn’t want them. The military really, really doesn’t want them. That’s problem #1.

      If the military does use them, it will most likely use them, A: in obviously pointless make-work, or B: to kill a bunch of poor non-white people. So, problem #2A is that everybody learns to associated “racial equality” with “pointless waste of two years of my life imposed by a bunch of liberal do-gooders”, and problem #2B is that the liberal do-gooders with try to retroactively make it not have worked out that way or at least not be their fault.

      Problem #3 is that conscription is morally wrong, an evil akin to slavery, we had riots and protests dwarfing anything you’ve seen lately the last time we tried to do that in the United States, and it will be worse the next time.

      Problem #4 is bone spurs, and that one alone is a deal-breaker.

    • Paul Zrimsek says:

      “Derek Chauvin, the fired police officer charged in a Minneapolis man’s death that sparked protests around the world, spent eight years as a military policeman in the Army Reserve, according to his official service record.” — Stars and Stripes

      • Some Troll's Serious Discussion Alt says:

        The other guy chauvin killed wasn’t black so he may just be a violent loose cannon, which isn’t the problem OP was trying to solve.

        • Paul Zrimsek says:

          I suppose it’s possible that the OP just happened to be musing on ways to reduce racism with no reference to current events intended, but that doesn’t seem like the way to bet.

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      One of my best friends ran a lawn service company, obviously employing people from the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder. He had many black employees, and many white employees, and they refused to ride in the same trucks together because they always fought over the radio. Each group frequently expressed extremely negative feelings about the other group.

      It could be that familiarity breeds contempt.

      • Matt M says:

        Yeah, to the extent that this plan would require upper-class blue-tribe whites to actually meet and interact with lower-class minorities, I’m all in favor of that. I think they’ll be… uh… surprised… at some of the things they see/hear, to say the least.

        • Erusian says:

          And lower class white people. I’d call this a feature, not a bug.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            Pre-modern Europeans didn’t have racial diversity by our standards, but they had a state religion that required the upper and lower classes to go to the same churches, and a sort of “open borders” for fellow Christians (who weren’t runaway serfs, and even they had a mechanism to make leaving their land legal). A famous example is that at the court of Charles VII of France, Jeanne d’Arc’s publicist was a famous Italian woman.

    • Erc says:

      Thinking about how to reduce racism

      Definition please, along with how progress will be measured.

      Your promotion process would have to be scrupulously fair, for example, lest it appear that only white people get promoted

      You’re assuming a scrupulously fair system would not lead to disparities, which is rather difficult to believe.

      Also, I won’t deny that I think it would be good for other reasons.

      Like what? Taking two man-years of real work away from people would have massive economic costs.

    • Eric T says:

      Seems like a way to approach resolving this question would be to ask: Does anyone have any numbers/data/evidence of whether racism among veterans & their families went up/down after Eisenhower desegregated the military?

      • Tatterdemalion says:

        If anyone does this, I’d suggest looking at the difference between change among veterans and their family and change among everyone else, to (at least partially) control for other factors.

      • Statismagician says:

        There are no valid statistics on even modern population-level racism anywhere that I’m aware of; I would be absolutely shocked to find out they existed for the 1950s military.

        • johan_larson says:

          Isn’t Gallup quite reputable? They’ve been polling about support for interracial marriage since 1958.

          https://news.gallup.com/poll/163697/approve-marriage-blacks-whites.aspx

          • Statismagician says:

            That’s fine if you’re interested specifically in whether or not somebody thinks says on a form that interracial marriages are okay, but this doesn’t really map to most of the definitions of racism we’re apparently using these days. Possibly somebody’s done a correlation analysis and it really is representative, but I haven’t seen that.

            Generally survey data need to be taken with a heaping mound of salt, even when collected correctly – Gallup can be relied on to do a pretty good job especially relative to other survey organizations, but they still only have information on the questions they asked, not what we think those questions might correlate with.

            EDIT: Bias acknowledgement; I really hate working with qualitative data and might be underestimating the possibility to getting useful conclusions out of this.

    • Erc says:

      it should be embraced by both Blue Tribe (because it would reduce racism) and by Red Tribe (because go military).

      It’s easy to post antiracist or promilitary memes on facebook, but if you ask people to give up two years of their lives to the cause, they’ll re-analyze how much they really care. I would never consider trading two years of my life to reduce racism.

      I bet a lot of the enthusiasm for opposing racism is because its a problem you can’t do much about.(Dare I say because it doesn’t much exist) If you went on about the problem of poverty in Africa, you’d get asked if you’ve donated any money and have to either put up or shut up.

    • Erusian says:

      Malaysia already does this (only for men, iirc). In their case it’s a more generalized requirement. Basically, they send you off to a training camp that has a proportionate mix of ethnic groups, then you sign up for duties that also have roughly the same proportions, with some exceptions. The idea is generally to make sure people have a lot of inter-ethnic contact. Everyone has to learn basic military stuff but some people rotate into a variety of jobs after that’s through.

      The entire experience is heavy, heavy on pro-Malaysia propaganda (which might not sit as well with the left here). There’s also a program where the government gives special privileges to inter-ethnic partnerships. This includes marriages (mixed race people get special affirmative action) and stuff like businesses (businesses with partners of different ethnic groups get special consideration for loans, for example).

      This isn’t meant to end racism but to prevent a situation where different ethnicities are isolated from each other and more loyal to local identities than national ones. (There’s also a separate program whereby ethnic minority political parties are informally allowed to have local control and national representation.) But it seems similar to what you’re envisioning. The idea is very specifically to create a basic familiarity with other groups and to create intermediate classes of people (mixed race couples, business partners, interethnic friends) on the assumption this will help defuse ethnic tension.

      The main reason I think it won’t work in the US is that nobody wants the draft back, the right wing is allergic to formal legal privileges like Malaysia has, and the left wing would object to a positive, nationalistic vision of America being a centerpiece of the training. Also, Malaysia is much smaller than the US, so there’d be more logistics involved, and race is complicated by geographic differences. A white person from LA is not the same as a white person from Montana. It might, on the whole, be a step in the right direction though.

      (And the main, main reason is that Malaysia isn’t the most democratic state, which lets the ruling party do this kind of thing without paying too much attention to how popular it is.)

      • krvin says:

        @Erusian Wait what??!! Long time lurker, made an account to reply because of how mistaken your post seems to be. Are you sure you didnt’ conflate Singapore with Malaysia? or some other country?

        Malaysia’s National Service was for both men and women, and was more like a summer camp than military conscription, when compared to our neighbor Singapore’s NS. See thewiki page on it.

        I concede there was heavy amount of Malaysian state propaganda involved in the program, but the propaganda was about trying to construct a civic Malaysian identity, from a very ethnocentric society. Which was never going to work when the government that mooted the NS programme itself was coalition dominated by a Malay (the dominant ethnic group in Malaysia) supremacist party together with minor docile Chinese and Indian ethnic parties.

        There’s also a program where the government gives special privileges to inter-ethnic partnerships. This includes marriages (mixed race people get special affirmative action) and stuff like businesses (businesses with partners of different ethnic groups get special consideration for loans, for example).

        There seems to be a bunch of misunderstandings here. Affirmative actions and special considerations are almost all reserved for the majority Malay ethnic group, ranging from university entry quotas to import licenses for importing cars. Regarding marriages, Malay + non-Malay marriages will all end up with the non-Malay spouse having to convert to Islam to marry their partner (as all Malay citizens are officially Muslim by birth, with no legal way to convert out, and Muslims are only allowed to marry Muslims) and their children will almost always be registered as Malay, and be entitled to the same racial privilages as other Malays. Mixed marriages between other ethnicities do not get any special afirmative action.

        Business partnership between people of different ethnicities are treated the same as partnership formed by people of the same ethnicity. The exceptions are certain sectors where government issued licenses are required, which invariably seems to be granted to a Malay person/group whic are politically connected, if not actual politicans themselves. As these rent seekers dont usually have the necessary business expertise, they often form partnership with certain select minority Chinese/Indian businessman who will run the businesses and split the profits. Also common, are situations where minority businesses have to employ politically connected Malays as directors or top executives or sleeping partners, to deal with issues that crops out with the Malay-dominated government bureucracy.

        This isn’t meant to end racism but to prevent a situation where different ethnicities are isolated from each other and more loyal to local identities than national ones.

        Um, while I would agree that the NS programmes was hoped to and promoted as something to foster more contact between the youths of differing ethnicities, it was only a 3 MONTHS programme. How were the same youths supposed to reverse the ethocentrism they were living and taught under for 18 YEARS, which was created and maintained by the same government that for some reason decided to institute this weird summer camp project.

        The idea is very specifically to create a basic familiarity with other groups and to create intermediate classes of people (mixed race couples, business partners, interethnic friends) on the assumption this will help defuse ethnic tension.

        Well…. These interethnic relations are not something created by or encouraged by the government itself, they arise naturally from people of different ethnicities living side by side with each other. Yet these “intermediate classes” are stil too small a percentage to impact the ethnocentric voting patterns of the Malaysian democracy.

        The main reason I think it won’t work in the US is that nobody wants the draft back, the right wing is allergic to formal legal privileges like Malaysia has, and the left wing would object to a positive, nationalistic vision of America being a centerpiece of the training.

        Actually, I think SOME on the American right will have wet dreams of instituting a system of formal legal white privilege like Malaysia has for it’s Malay majority. And funnily while the American left sometimes disdain nationalism as proto-fascism, the liberal secular wing of Malaysian politics would kill to try and propagandize for a positive non- racial nationalistic vision of Malaysia.

        (And the main, main reason is that Malaysia isn’t the most democratic state, which lets the ruling party do this kind of thing without paying too much attention to how popular it is.)

        I’d hate to keep correcting you like this this, but Malaysia has voted out the old Malay- supremacist dominated coalition in 2018, with a new more ethnically balanced coalition in it’s place, helped by defections of prominent ethnonationalist. (unfortunately this new government has fallen due to coalitional infighting in Feb 2020, and replaced by a fragile amalgation of ethnic Malay parties formed from factions of the old ruling Malay party).

        @Erusian Sorry to go on like this, but your post was so wrongheaded from what I’ve lived through, I had to correct you. I am genuinely curious how you came to your picture of what Malaysia was like in your post.

        • Erusian says:

          @Erusian Sorry to go on like this, but your post was so wrongheaded from what I’ve lived through, I had to correct you. I am genuinely curious how you came to your picture of what Malaysia was like in your post.

          From two professors of Southeast Asian Studies at Harvard (though this was five or so years ago). I must admit, I was taking their interpretations on faith. But perhaps I’m just completely wrong then. However, I can tell you this is being taught at some US universities.

          Edit: To clarify, I was not at Harvard. They were professors from Harvard at a non-academic conference.

          • krvin says:

            Oh wow, that is pretty suprising. But maybe not, five years ago was a long time in Malaysian politics… The other stuff, probably some nuances were lost in the retelling, since I can somehow squint and see all the right shapes in the story, they were just turned all on their heads.

          • Erusian says:

            Yes, it’s entirely possible I missed some nuance as well. I’m fairly confident in that I know how the Malaysian economy works and its business environment (especially externally) and tech/research sectors because that’s where my interest is. I’m much less confident in my political interpretations.

    • Aftagley says:

      I have absolutely no idea how common this was, but I met some really racist people in the military and their service didn’t seem to have done much to change anything. Sure, they could work together and I wasn’t worried about them breaking into fistfights or trying to lynch each other, but they didn’t like each-other and weren’t always shy about making their feelings known.

      I think the military works to reduce hate only as an exposure source. If you’ve got some random white kid from Kansas who’s never met a black guy, or a random black kid from Chicago who’s never worked with a white dude – yes, the military can and will solve that problem. But if you come in already exposed to it and with personal hatred… it doesn’t really do anything.

      On that same line though, the military (again, from as far as I can tell) was weirdly good at making people accept homosexuals. Outside of explicitly leftist places, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more positive environment for or higher numbers of gay people than I did while on active duty and they were almost uniformly accepted, even by otherwise arch-conservatives.

      • Bobobob says:

        Clearly what’s needed is a program where white and black soldiers are teamed up in pairs and sent out into the field for jungle reconnaissance, at which point carefully trained personnel enact a mock ambush (with live ammunition, for the sake of authenticity) so that one member of the pair is forced to risk his life to save the other. This shouldn’t be too hard to put into practice.

    • danridge says:

      I believe that this was largely the position on race taken by Theodore Roosevelt, but with two very large differences: one is that he thought it was necessary that men actually be engaged in fighting together for integration to occur, so he was in favor not just of military service but actual war (not solely for this reason, he loved wars for lots of other reasons too); the other is that this was an era when he was trying to get people like the Irish and the Italians to be simply Americans, and he thought the limits of what racial harmony might be achieved in a war stopped well short of successfully integrating black Americans. Speaking on the first point, I think that the Great War pretty symbolically and perhaps literally destroyed men like him, and his romantic notions of war. On the second point, I don’t recall enough to know whether this was something he saw as fundamental, or simply his assessment of how race relations could be altered at the current time by the particular wars which he was actually trying to start. I don’t have too much more to add, it just struck me that this idea has a parallel with that of an earlier and very influential figure.

      • AG says:

        On the other hand, did the World Wars contribute to the creation of the white American identity?

        • danridge says:

          Right, it’s a good point that he may have been entirely right, but wars just got so nasty that you start to look for other ways to create unity.

    • b_jonas says:

      Other places where strong social bonds can form are in school among students, and in workplaces among coworkers. Many people try to make it so that children of various races are mixed up in schools (less segregation). Workplaces and colleges are already required to not discriminate by race of the applicant when they hire people. Some workplaces and colleges actively try to get racial diversity, even using positive discrimination to hire disadvantaged minorities. Sure, a push for gender diversity is more fashionable right now, but both exist.

      Do you have any arguments why conscript military, in particular, would be better for the goal you state, than schools and jobs?

      • AG says:

        School is a means to an end, so various pursuits within school are coded by class and somewhat race.
        There’s much less resume-building for a military conscript, so there’s less incentive to create class conflict, unless supervisors encourage it.

        Where is my Mean Girls parody of a soldier explaining the various military cliques in the cafeteria? Is there such a scene in Cadet Kelly?

    • Le Maistre Chat says:

      But we know of exactly such an environment:

      Yes, Church!

      the military.

      — oh. I see what you’re saying, but people in the military have to lead much more regimented lives than civilians while risking death. Can’t we try my milder idea first?

      This is within the Overton Window of things Democracies are allowed to do, and it should be embraced by both Blue Tribe (because it would reduce racism) and by Red Tribe (because go military).

      Ouch. Well played.

      • AG says:

        Uh, since when has any individual Church really brought people together in a diverse way, as opposed to driving out those who don’t fit the local culture? Arguably, the Church as a broader institution is the closest we have to separate but equal in action.

        • Matt M says:

          The Catholic Church used to do that, when it was more popular. But as it loses its status, its ability to do that sort of thing is greatly diminished…

          Edit: My understanding is that Mormon churches are similarly non-segregating… setting aside that the Mormon faith in general has pretty specific and different demographics from society at large…

          • ana53294 says:

            The Catholic Church also segregated by race. AFAIU, black people weren’t denied in ordinary churches, but it still seems like there was a certain degree of self-segregation.

            While I wouldn’t mind going to a church that is half black, if I’m the only white person there, I’d start feeling uncomfortable. Black people would feel the same, I guess.

            There’s just a tendency to self-segregate, even if you don’t have actual separate churches like the protestants do.

          • Nick says:

            Catholic churches in the US self-segregated strongly along ethnic lines; I think it’s wrong to focus (ETA: purely, to be clear) on racial lines. For example, in the town I went to high school in, there was an Irish parish and a German parish, and only within the last generation have the two parochial schools merged. Not out of any animosity between Irish and Germans, just cultural distance.

            There were other towns with less self segregation. My town originally had Irish and German Catholics, I believe, but only one parish. Later there was significant Italian immigration, but not enough to constitute another parish. So the one I grew up in was quite diverse, at least as far as European people go.

          • Evan Þ says:

            Random anecdote @ana53294 – My mother was, for a long while, the only white person attending her church. She’d originally gone there for the sociological experience, but quickly became a Christian, and stayed.

            She never described it as uncomfortable, and made some very good friends there that she kept in touch with years later, but she has mentioned some awkward experiences.

          • baconbits9 says:

            For example, in the town I went to high school in, there was an Irish parish and a German parish, and only within the last generation have the two parochial schools merged. Not out of any animosity between Irish and Germans, just cultural distance.

            In roughly a 1 sq mile area with less than 10,000 residents where I live there were at least 5 churches with each of them serving a specific ethnic base. I think they were German, Irish, Slovenian, Ukrainian and Polish.

          • Nick says:

            @baconbits9
            Cleveland, right? Yeah.

          • baconbits9 says:

            Cleveland, right? Yeah.

            I grew up in the Cleveland area, but now I live outside of Philadelphia.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          @AG:

          Arguably, the Church as a broader institution is the closest we have to separate but equal in action.

          I know that’s a fair cop when talking about some Protestant churches. There are communions with a repudiated legacy of white racism, which led to black churches with similar theology – pretty blatant “separate but equal”.
          Until ana and Nick brought it up, segregation in the Catholic Church was way outside my experience.
          That reminds me: are you aware of the Anglican schism where mostly-white congregations with a conservative majority tried to put themselves under the authority of Anglican bishops way over in Africa out of fear that the rather white Episcopalian (USA Anglican) bishops would impose lefty heresies on them?

          • ana53294 says:

            To be clear, I don’t think racial segregation happens anymore. I’m just pointing out that when we most needed it and it had the power, the Church did not work as hard on bringing everybody together as it could have. Now, it doesn’t even have the power to make people go to church on a weekly basis, much less help combat racism.

            There are too few regular church goers to make another church for the black regular church goers. They barely fill the pews with the migrants, why would they bother? Especially considering we’ll have to start importing priests sometime soon…

            In the Basque country we have language segregation, but that’s different.

          • ana53294 says:

            I myself became aware of this black brotherhood because the Ku-Klux Klan stole their hats. Or at least the hats in Seville existed way before the Klan did.

            It’s one of the common topics of discussion with tourists in Seville every Easter. Those pointy hats are made in different colors, depending on the brotherhood, and the black brotherhood was the one that used the white pointy hats.

            Proud Sevillian brotherhood members consider it a special insult from the Klan.

          • AG says:

            I think a better wording on my part is that Christianity is pretty close to the Archipelago. People exit the Front of the People and form their own People’s Front on the regular, and we’ve even mostly left behind the days when there would be violence between the two! It’s not just about racial self-segregation, but political self-segregation, as well (though the fact that there is some level of correlation between the two is worth noting). So that’s why the Church cannot function as a means to bring people together. Its flexibility to survive over centuries has been dependent on people getting to leave and live apart.

    • keaswaran says:

      I think the observation of the military as a leading edge for integration has been a common one over past decades.

      The idea of some sort of mandatory national service that allows options other than military has been floated by Vox-types for years, and explicitly by candidates like Pete Buttigieg: https://www.vox.com/2019/7/3/20680963/pete-buttigieg-expand-national-service

      They don’t explicitly frame it around racism, but they do frame it around being involved with others and getting to know aspects of society one doesn’t know.

    • Clutzy says:

      Not only is it impracticable, it wont work. In Vietnam we lowered requirements to be admitted on the military test ASVAB. The new, Project 100,000 recruits were awful and increased fatality rates in their units significantly.

      These draftees—cruelly nicknamed ‘McNamara’s Morons’—were generally capable of completing simple tasks, but even a simple task imperfectly executed can be disastrous in warfare.

      A case study in the book is ‘Jerry’ (not his real name). Jerry was a draftee from the 100,000 who had been assigned guard duty in a camp by the Quan Loi Green Line. Jerry’s task was to challenge anyone approaching the camp by calling: “Halt! Who goes there?” followed by “Advance and be recognized!” once a response had been obtained. This task was minimally demanding due to the clearly visible differences between an American soldier and the average Vietcong guerrilla. But when a well-liked American officer returned to camp, Jerry bungled his instructions. Upon seeing the officer approaching, he yelled “Halt!” and then opened fire, killing the man where he stood. Jerry subsequently disappeared in what was either an act of remorseful abscondence or murder by outraged members of his battalion. In another case described by Gregory, one of the ‘morons’ played a joke on his squadmates by throwing a disarmed hand grenade at them. Despite being beaten up for it, he found this prank so amusing that he repeated it every day until the inevitable happened; he forgot to disarm the grenade, causing the deaths of two soldiers and the grievous wounding of several more.

      What happened to many of the 100,000 (whose actual total exceeded 350,000) is not hard to predict. “To survive in combat you had to be smart,” Gregory writes. “You had to know how to use your rifle effectively and keep it clean and operable, how to navigate through jungles and rice paddies without alerting the enemy, and how to communicate and cooperate with other members of your team.” Fulfilling all or any one of these minimum requirements for survival in a battlefield is contingent upon a certain level of verbal and visuospatial intelligence, which many of McNamara’s draftees did not possess. This ultimately led to their fatality rate in Vietnam exceeding that of other GIs by a factor of three.

      You think this is going to decrease racism? A bunch of people forcibly exposed to a bunch of Jerrys?

      • Beck says:

        +1
        My uncle was a DI in San Diego right at the end of the draft period and he talked about it as if it was worse than Khe Sanh.

  77. Erc says:

    The intelligentsia’s early-COVID narrative of “We must fight the ignorant rubes who question our Scientific lockdown!”

    The lockdowns worked, the rubes were ignorant and needed to be told to stay home and shut the **** up. The only difference now is that many of the ignorant rubes are black and thus according to the Thought Leaders must be coddled and celebrated.

    • The lockdowns worked

      How do you know? We are strikingly short of controlled experiments on the subject. The nearest we have is Sweden, which had no lockdown. Their per capita mortality is a little lower than ours, higher than that of their Scandinavian neighbors. And we still don’t know if that reflects how many people end up dying from Covid or only how soon they die.

      One alternative interpretation of what happened is that people vary a lot in how easily they get the disease, whether for biological or behavioral reasons. At the beginning it spreads largely through the most vulnerable and so increases rapidly. Once most of the most vulnerable are either dead or recovered, the disease is faced with a less vulnerable population and spreads more slowly.

      The mathematical logic of that process is clear. The size of the effect is not.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        We also have less information than would be good about compliance with the lockdown. We can tell easily if restaurants are closed, but not how much people are quranantinging themselves.

  78. Elena Yudovina says:

    It’s been a while since I’ve read horror stories about overflowing hospitals, refrigerated trucks being coopted as traveling morgues, mass burials in public parks, and the likes. Is this because:
    a) I don’t read the news much (i.e. all these things are still happening but I personally don’t know about them);
    b) the reporters have gotten fed up with the straightforward coronavirus stuff and are covering something else (i.e. all these things are still happening but many people don’t know about them);
    c) we’ve successfully flattened the curve (for now, anyway) and aren’t massively exceeding hospital capacity (interpreted expansively, i.e. including equipment, personnel, PPE, etc. — not just hospital beds);
    d) we’ve successfully added hospital capacity and now aren’t exceeding it anymore;
    e) we mostly didn’t need to flatten the curve because most places weren’t going to exceed it in the first place (and there was a misprediction);
    f) something else?

    • Statismagician says:

      As far as I can tell:

      Largely D – what hospitals were able to do in e.g. New York to increase capacity rapidly is legitimately amazing, I think Mount Sinai added something like five hundred ICU beds over a weekend using some fairly brilliant improvisations/repurposed equipment.

      Somewhat C, although I want to stress that this is because of widespread mask use, event cancellations, and social distancing in that order (cf. Sweden), not the rest of the lockdowns per se.

      Maybe 55% D, 35% C, and then the rest is distributed mostly between B and E depending on local factors.

    • tgb says:

      I get the reports from the hospital system that my work is associated with, but I don’t work anywhere close to covid response. In my city, patients on ventilators has now dropped to less than a third it was at the peak and continues to fall. Extra beds were set up in stadiums, etc. in case they were needed and I believe exactly one was used. So things are looking quite good but it seems like our hospitals weren’t far from being at their original capacity at the peak. I therefore think (c) is the most likely answer with a little bit of misprediction that this has been modestly less severe than worried about but not egregiously so. One actual change is that it now seems like more patients than originally believed do not require ventilation. Hence that bottleneck is less of a concern even if there’s a second peak.

    • Tatterdemalion says:

      My understanding is that total covid numbers for the US as a whole are falling slowly, but that that average change comprises faster falls in some of the worst-hit places with slow growth in lots of other places, so the strain placed on any one place is a lot less than it was.

      • Paul Zrimsek says:

        That’s exactly it. I’ve been tracking the numbers here in Massachusetts, where 7-day running totals for new confirmed cases are down 84% from the late-April peak, while deaths are down 74%. In Texas, I gather that it’s just peaking now. It’s hard to make any sense of what’s happening in the US by treating it as a single outbreak.

      • Elena Yudovina says:

        Are these things still happening outside the US?

      • albatross11 says:

        I very strongly suspect that outbreaks anywhere other than NYC (or maybe a few other places like DC or LA) will be a lot less visible, and a lot less important to major decisionmakers. An outbreak in the middle of Ohio that’s equally awful will get about 5% of the press coverage as the outbreak in NYC, where like half the media in the country are based.

    • bottlerocket says:

      We definitely managed to get the needed capacity and then some. I read a story in NPR about the military tearing down field hospitals they had built in anticipation of a surge that (thankfully) ended up not being needed. I’m not sure of the holding costs of said hospitals, but the act of actively reducing capacity is a pretty strong indicator we managed to ramp up to what was needed.

      • Matt M says:

        Isn’t the fact that the vast majority of these “extra capacity” hospital were torn down without seeing any patients good evidence that we didn’t actually need it at all?

        • Statismagician says:

          We turned out not to have needed them so far. That doesn’t mean we mightn’t have, and it doesn’t mean we might not at some point in the future, although I do think that last is unlikely.

          • Matt M says:

            and it doesn’t mean we might not at some point in the future

            If we do, then we’re screwed. Because they literally tore them down, packed them up, and demobilized the people who built/staffed them.

            They were built. They sat there unused for two months. And then they were taken down.

          • Statismagician says:

            Nope – the critical parts are trained staff (who can be given a quick refresher course and brought back much more quickly than they were the first time around) and extra medical equipment (which is in storage, and which we turn out to need much less of than initially feared). Buildings, even positive-pressure rooms/wards if you don’t care too much about aesthetics, are really quite easy to run up in a hurry if it does in fact turn out we need them next winter or something.

    • keaswaran says:

      My understanding is that all these news stories of overflowing hospitals, refrigerated truck morgues, etc. basically happened (so far) in four or five places – Wuhan, Qom, Lombardy, New York, and possibly a couple places around New Orleans or Michigan. Wuhan fully locked down and got everything fixed. Lombardy and New York partially locked down and got things under control. No one reports on humanitarian suffering in Iran (particularly when the Ayatollah doesn’t want the reporting to happen).

      Everywhere else got some amount of measures in place before they reached these peaks. But there’s definitely growing evidence that Ecuador, Brazil, and Russia might have these effects soon. And many parts of the United States are on upwards trajectories too. (I’m just thinking of my own county, Brazos County, TX, where we had fewer than 10 new cases a day while the students were still around, but have regularly been having 30 or 40 new cases a day in the past week. Hospitalizations have only briefly peaked at a dozen or two at a time though.)

      • albatross11 says:

        I think there have also been a lot of cases and a lot of deaths among American Indians in reservations in the Western US.

      • FLWAB says:

        Even in New York I recall hearing that some of the headlines were overblown. In particular, there was some headline piece about “Mass Burials on Hart Island” which implied that it was a mass burial of Coronavirus victims. In actuality, all unclaimed bodies go to Hart Island and the various morgues around NYC, expecting an influx of bodies since Coronavirus cases were going up, cleared out their unclaimed bodies all around the same time to make space, leading to a massive burial.

      • Gerry Quinn says:

        ‘Cases’ and ‘hospitalisations with severe disease’ are not quite orthogonal, but may not be strongly linked.

  79. gbdub says:

    “Defund/Abolish the Police” seems at first like exactly the sort of motte-and-bailey concept that Scott introduced to this blog in his post “Social Justice and Words, Words, Words”. The motte is a bunch of reasonable sounding reforms, some perhaps arguable, but most being things that a majority of people would likely support. The bailey is, well, do what it says on the tin and abolish the police.

    I find this incredibly frustrating for two reasons. First, and most importantly, the motte is a really good motte. No seriously, there is a lot of good stuff in there, things that would be useful, meaningful reforms, some of which might actually work to solve some serious problems that most people agree exist. Unlike concepts like “privilege” the motte is not some banal truisms that are unobjectionable but also unactionable. The motte sits atop a treasure vault. Let’s all do the motte.

    But naming this thing “Abolish/Defund Police” actively turns off people who would otherwise defend the motte. Ergo it makes the accomplishment of the useful motte things less likely, and I am frustrated.

    Frustration two is what the hell is useful about the bailey? As far as I can tell it is incredibly sparsely populated. Outside of a few radicals, nobody seems to seriously believe in actually eliminating police. The closest reasonably mainstream thing you can find support for is more like “remove and replace” a la Camden, or “replace some police officers with what amount to social workers with arrest authority”, or “reallocate a small portion of the police budget to some other cause related somehow to social justice”.

    And unlike “privilege” or “racism” the bailey definition is not some useful rhetorical weapon you can use for strategic equivocation to shut down people who disagree with you. Calling someone “not a police abolitionist” is not some career ending takedown (heck, Joe Biden is openly against “defund the police”).

    So if “Abolish the Police” turns off needed allies, and you don’t actually want to abolish the police, and it’s not even a good weapon for rhetorical combat, why the hell call it that and not “Reform the Police” or “De-Escalate the Police” or whatever?

    Four reasons I can think of, roughly from most to least charitable:
    1) People who say “Defund/Abolish the Police” honestly believe their punchy but misleading slogan will win them more attention, and this will be a net positive.

    2) The fringe who legitimately believes in “abolishing the police” is bigger (or maybe just more sympathetic) than I imagine, and the slogan is really just a way for cooler heads to mollify this fringe while advocating for more reasonable reforms. At the same time, to the skeptical public it makes the people yelling “FUCK THE POLICE” a little more palatable (they don’t actually want the police fucked you see, they just want [MOTTE]).
    (I note that “ACAB” and “FUCK 12” are pretty damn common graffiti / chants. And there was a group that interrupted and split up a racial justice march in Ann Arbor because said march was allowing the local police to march in solidarity with their cause – in all their messaging, this group referred to their members as “abolitionists”. To the extent that the fringe of “actual police abolitionists” is made up of young and/or low income black people, I can see why you would not want to be seen to be alienating or directly contradicting their stated goals)

    3) I underestimate the attraction of the bailey… Either the literal definition is a more popular position than I give it credit, and/or lots of people just like dipping their toes in the radicalism to signal how truly dedicated to the cause they are

    4) The people that use “Defund/Abolish the Police” like that the term is confusing because they really like making and sharing smug statements “Voxsplaining” (sorry, I warned you this part was the least charitable) why it doesn’t mean what it literally means and what kind of dense rube wouldn’t understand that its just shorthand for a bunch of common sense reforms every good thinking person ought to agree with (again, sorry, this is the uncharitable one).

    So which is it? Or what am I missing?

    • Matt M says:

      A libertarian thinker I respect recently posited that the end-goal here is to fully federalize the police power.

      Which strikes me as entirely plausible, despite there being a lack of direct evidence for it (i.e. few to no protesters who are currently saying this is the goal).

      • gbdub says:

        I highly doubt Democratic governors or state legislators actually want this. I’m sure they think Trump will lose, but I have a hard time believing they’d voluntarily cede their monopoly on the use of force within their state to a friendly president, let alone a possibly Republican one.

        • Matt M says:

          I highly doubt Democratic governors or state legislators actually want this.

          They probably don’t.

          But they want to be called racist even less. And if this is what they think they have to accept to get people to stop calling them racist, then, well, like the mayor of Minneapolis, they’re probably going to accept it.

      • RalMirrorAd says:

        I don’t think they will or have to be federalized. Just have the state or municipal government break up the existing police unions (Which has some positives) and replace them with ideological loyalists. (Which has serious negatives)

        What’s most important is that “Police” has a moral texture. The people saying ‘Defund the police’ probably don’t conceptualize police as whichever group of people is armed and empowered to enforce written or unwritten laws; the violent arm of the state.

        So whichever group replaces the police will not be called, nor be conceived of as being police even if they 1. have the guns 2. enforce the [new] rules

        • cassander says:

          I don’t think they will or have to be federalized. Just have the state or municipal government break up the existing police unions (Which has some positives) and replace them with ideological loyalists. (Which has serious negatives)

          There’s little chance of either of those things happening. The first, because the local police unions are powerful political actors, especially in the democratic party that controls most of the big cities and half the states. The second because (A) even if they did break up the unions there’s not going to be a mass firing of cops and (B) How? The mayors of decent sized cities don’t have hundreds of unemployed loyalists standing around itching to be cops and patrolmen. Sure, a lot of idiot brothers in law will get some nice sinecures, but there’s already plenty of room for that, and I don’t think it changes much in the long run once the process gets re-bureaucratized.

          • RalMirrorAd says:

            Well if the unions can’t be broken up then the police will never be de funded and the question is moot. As for who i expect the replacements will be, those officers willing to make diversity statements plus former activists willing to do legwork.

          • Clutzy says:

            One of the studies I saw about the “Newark example” is they did all the things a Republican would have done: They fired the entire police force to break the union, then they hired almost double the number of officers and deployed most of the excess as beat cops in high crime areas using COMSTAT or an equivalent.

      • Garrett says:

        > the end-goal here is to fully federalize the police power.

        This won’t result in everybody having the Secret Service for police services. Instead, they’ll get the TSA.

    • Randy M says:

      Frustration two is what the hell is useful about the bailey?

      It captures the maximum territory possible to take.

      • gbdub says:

        But holding territory is expensive, not something you do unless the territory is valuable. Especially if it makes you less likely to hold your motte.

        • Randy M says:

          But maybe the better analogy is an opening bid in a negotiation than an actual conquest.

          • gbdub says:

            You don’t make a strong opening bid and then immediately undermine it by saying you don’t actually want the thing you just said you want.

          • Randy M says:

            They might not actually be good at this.
            Probably because “they” are a large and unorganized group with similar sentiment but differing goals.

          • Matt M says:

            You don’t make a strong opening bid and then immediately undermine it by saying you don’t actually want the thing you just said you want.

            I dunno, I feel like we’ve been seeing more and more of this lately. Reminds me of AOC’s green new deal “draft” that was published, then when it got pushed back against, declared to be a leak/mistake, and then when pressured to bring it up for a vote, was declared to be a right-wing smear campaign.

            You seed the public conversation with “X is a legitimate and serious policy proposal” and it implants X as a meme in people’s heads. Then if it looks like X is actually unpopular, you back down from it and insist you never really wanted X in the first place. But overall, you’ve still probably increased the total amount of people willing to publicly support X. And as soon as that number becomes high enough that backing it is no longer embarrassing, you come right out and say “See, I supported X long ago!”

          • Wrong Species says:

            See also “Abolish ICE”.

        • Tenacious D says:

          Politics would be better if more people were (metaphorically) playing Go and fewer playing Poker.

        • Gerry Quinn says:

          Yeah, the original bailey was fertile land that you wanted to work on an ongoing basis, even if you had to retreat to a tower when attacked.

    • cassander says:

      the core motive for left wing politics is tearing down oppressive hierarchies. “abolish the police” is a stupid idea, but it directly tickles the left wing lizard brain the same way this the tickles the right wing. as such, it’s useful for organizing people. And in politics, getting a core of highly motivated supports is more important than mass appeal, at least in certain contexts.

      • Eric T says:

        This may also be a partial negotiation tactic right? If I want the police to have 50% less money, then starting by saying get rid of all their money might help ensure I actually get what I want?

        • gbdub says:

          See above, you can’t use this as a negotiating position if you immediately undermine it before the negotiation gets started in earnest. Everyone knows you’re bluffing. A strong opening bid needs to be something you actually want, even if you’re willing to settle for less.

        • cassander says:

          But it’s not an offer, it’s a slogan that bubbled up memetically based on what appealed, not rational calculation.

      • zzzzort says:

        The more obvious equivalent on the right would probably be abolish the IRS.

        • Two McMillion says:

          Does the left believe that taxes are necessary to run a society in the same sense that the right believes police are necessary? That would be an interesting cultural difference.

          • cassander says:

            I’d take it one step further. I’d argue that the left believes taxes are capital G Good in a very similar way that the right feels about cops and the military. That however unpleasant they are for individuals, they are the price of civilization and should be supported and applauded.

          • Aftagley says:

            I think you’re off base here.

            People on the left strongly think that a central government is capital G good. We also think that we need to pay for this central government somehow. Thus, we support taxes. If you could find a way to build roads, educate, police, etc. without paying taxes you might see some drop off in this support.

          • zzzzort says:

            I think generating revenue for the central government and enforcing laws are both required for a good society. I think both slogans conflate the specific institutions that perform those functions with the functions themselves. If you have police but no taxes, presumably the police are financing themselves through fines and have become stationary bandits.

          • cassander says:

            @Aftagley says:

            Sure, the terminal value for the left isn’t taxes for their own sake, just like the terminal value for the right isn’t cops and soldiers for their sake. Both are means, but that rounds off to “Cops/Taxes are Good(TM)” in practice.

          • Aftagley says:

            he terminal value for the right isn’t cops and soldiers for their sake.

            Really? I think your discounting how much the right favors cops and soldiers for their own sake. When I’m in right-dominated areas I see countless bumper stickers that say stuff like, “Support our Troops!” and “Blue Lives matter!” I don’t see a corresponding enthusiasm for IRS agents when I drive through blue areas.

            I bet that if I went up to people who have those bumper stickers and said, “do you personally support cops or the overall societal goals they represent” I’d be told pretty explicitly that they support individual cops.

          • Randy M says:

            People on the left strongly think that a central government is capital G good. We also think that we need to pay for this central government somehow. Thus, we support taxes. If you could find a way to build roads, educate, police, etc. without paying taxes you might see some drop off in this support.

            For sure, some. But not all. Part of the use of taxes is to reduce wealth inequality. See the California “Board of equalization.”

          • Wency says:

            I do think many in the left think that taking money away from the rich is good for its own sake, and in some less numerate circles I’ve heard rhetoric suggesting that low taxes CAUSE income inequality.

            But I also know there’s a thought deep in my lizard brain “COPS GOOD, CROOKS BAD” and I’m sure I’m not the only one. Seeing bad guys punished is a source of endorphins all its own, and possibly older than the notion that punishing bad guys leads to a better society.

          • cassander says:

            @Aftagley says:

            Really? I think your discounting how much the right favors cops and soldiers for their own sake.

            As someone on the right, I’d have to disagree. “I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.” is a sentiment that will be universally nodded to, and then not thought about much as we wave our flags and guns.

            >I bet that if I went up to people who have those bumper stickers and said, “do you personally support cops or the overall societal goals they represent” I’d be told pretty explicitly that they support individual cops

            At roughly the same rates you’d get people on the left saying they support higher taxes on the rich, I’d bet.

            @Wency says:

            I do think many in the left think that taking money away from the rich is good for its own sake, and in some less numerate circles I’ve heard rhetoric suggesting that low taxes CAUSE income inequality.

            I don’t think that, I know that. Because I’ve asked that question, and gotten that answer.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @Wency

            in some less numerate circles I’ve heard rhetoric suggesting that low taxes CAUSE income inequality.

            This seems plainly correct to me. Care to explain?

            A total derailment of the point of the thread, I’m aware.

          • Aftagley says:

            At roughly the same rates you’d get people on the left saying they support higher taxes on the rich, I’d bet.

            Oh, sure. But that doesn’t mean that the left thinks taxing the rich is the capital G good. If you asked follow up-questions you’d almost certainly hear a mix of
            A) The rich pay too little now and should have to pay their fair share.
            B) We need more public spending, and the only way to finance that is by taxing the rich
            C) economic disparity needs to be reduced and taxing is a mechanism for doing so.

            Overall what I’m seeing from this argument is that my assumption of “the right thinks soldiers and cops are a great” was a not-particularly nuanced assumption about my out group that doesn’t capture the complexity or underlying concerns of the right. I think you might be doing the same for the left and taxes here.

          • RalMirrorAd says:

            @Guy in TN

            Obviously a cause of post-tax equalization to the extent people are honest about their sources of income/consumption.

            The pre-tax inequality argument is a bit more sophisticated in the sense that, if taxes on high income are high to begin with people won’t negotiate for them in salaries and so forth.

            Super-big brain take is that despite the change in income inequality it doesn’t necessarily reduce consumption inequality [standard of living] or wealth inequality [peace of mind/security]

          • cassander says:

            @Aftagley says:

            Oh, sure. But that doesn’t mean that the left thinks taxing the rich is the capital G good. If you asked follow up-questions you’d almost certainly hear a mix of

            And if you ask people why they support the cops/military you’d get because they protect us from bad guys, because they’re brave, because it’s a dangerous world, and so on. I’m not seeing much daylight here between the two.

            Overall what I’m seeing from this argument is that my assumption of “the right thinks soldiers and cops are a great” was a not-particularly nuanced assumption about my out group that doesn’t capture the complexity or underlying concerns of the right.

            I don’t think most people have complex or nuanced political views about most subjects. Sure, if you drill down on them you can get them to get more nuanced, but most people don’t do that on their own, especially when it comes to the knee jerk reaction and rounded of reasoning I’m talking about.

          • zzzzort says:

            I think there’s a cultural affinity for police (beyond just the right) that is not purely instrumental. There’s no IRS equivalent of Paw Patrol, tax collecting procedurals aren’t a thing, people don’t give money to IRS affiliated charities.

          • baconbits9 says:

            There’s no IRS equivalent of Paw Patrol

            Oh yeah? What do you call Irwin R Schister?

          • achenx says:

            I think there’s a cultural affinity for police (beyond just the right) that is not purely instrumental. There’s no IRS equivalent of Paw Patrol, tax collecting procedurals aren’t a thing, people don’t give money to IRS affiliated charities.

            When my son was in kindergarten he did a thing at school once about “I want to be a police officer”. As a libertarian who had long followed, e.g., Radley Balko, I was a bit chagrined there. When you asked him about it though it was essentially “I want to fly the police helicopter”.

            Maybe the auditors need to fly in on a helicopter, is what I’m saying. (Well, or not, I don’t really want to encourage the IRS to seem cool either…)

          • Baeraad says:

            tax collecting procedurals aren’t a thing

            For the record, I’d totally watch one! Though I will grant you I don’t think most other people would.

            I’d take it one step further. I’d argue that the left believes taxes are capital G Good in a very similar way that the right feels about cops and the military. That however unpleasant they are for individuals, they are the price of civilization and should be supported and applauded.

            … yes, pretty much. Though as usual I have to add the disclaimer that I’m in many ways a walking-talking liberal strawman, and that I sincerely believe a number of things that mainstream liberals probably don’t.

      • Two McMillion says:

        Not gonna lie, that youtube video was pretty awesome. More of that please.

    • Tatterdemalion says:

      I think that it’s precisely the opposite of a motte-and-bailey, and I’m not sure I’ve seen anything like it before.

      “Motte-and-bailey” usually refers to the situation where the same slogan refers to a minimalist and a a maximalist position; the defensibility of the minimalist one being used to capture the territory covered by the maximalist one.

      Here, I think that most people using the slogan “defund the police” really do genuinely intend more minimalist interpretations by it – they only want to capture the motte, and I don’t understand the function of the bailey at all.

      I share your frustration.

      • Randy M says:

        No, that’s what Motte and Bailey means. Territory outside the castle that you want, territory inside the castle that you can more easily retreat to (because it’s easier to defend).

        • Tatterdemalion says:

          Hang on, I’m arguing that in this case they don’t want territory outside the castle. I think your response would apply if I was arguing the opposite?

          • Randy M says:

            Yes, I missed that point. Which, since it was your only point, is not a trivial issue with my response.

            I suspect there is a not insignificant fraction that would take “abolish police” if offered, though.

          • Tatterdemalion says:

            Yes, I missed that point. Which, since it was your only point, is not a trivial issue with my response.

            I am going to remember this line, and treasure it. Thank you.

      • gbdub says:

        So Scott’s original examples were “white/male privilege” and “structural racism”. I would argue that both of these sound objectionable, or at least kind of argumentative, at face value. Not as extreme as “abolish the police”, sure, but I think it still fits the paradigm. It just doesn’t make tactical sense.

    • John Schilling says:

      Nobody ever won a war with the battle cry, “We need to implement modest changes in the behavior of our opponents!”. If you need motivated people who can stand up to even rubber bullets, you really need something in the “Destroy the Enemy!” line.

      • qwints says:

        Exactly. The main alternative demand coming out of the police brutality protests is Campaign Zero’s 8 Can’t Wait. Our local city council almost instantly moved to adopt all of those changes, which they wouldn’t have done if there weren’t thousands of people in the street. Having a radicals make radical demands makes passing more moderate reforms easier not harder. As in other social movements, the most likely outcome is that eventually enough moderates get satisfied by reform that the radicals get isolated and lose power. Alternatively, those in power can refuse to grant concessions which fuels the radicals and lead to heightened conflict until either the social movement is repressed or the establishment is overthrown.

      • gbdub says:

        But you also don’t win battles by alienating key allies, or stranding them on indefensible terrain. You generally try to avoid delivering powerful weapons into the hands of your enemies.

        I think that might be what is happening here – the sorts of Democrats actually positioned to implement the required changes are being forced to give awkward non-answers to “do you support defunding the police” and Trump is campaigning against the extreme rhetoric by simply taking the slogan at face value. See e.g. Chris Cillizza of CNN saying basically the same thing here.

        • qwints says:

          From my perspective as a socialist, Donald Trump’s vocal opposition to a policy is the best way to motivate moderate Democrats to support that policy. Leftists already know there’s zero hope of passing meaningful reforms in areas controlled by the right, but we can extract concessions in cities and states controlled by moderate pro-business Democrats.

    • Nick says:

      It seems a little premature to say this is all a horrible strategy that will backfire completely when it’s just getting started.

    • zzzzort says:

      One explanation I’ve seen is that it’s about making a credible threat to police unions. If ‘abolish the police’ is an unpopular position, then it’s a costly the signal that politicians are willing to spend political capital on police reform, and that if the police unions don’t play along they could just be destroyed.

      That said, as overton windon shifting it doesn’t look bad.

    • Guy in TN says:

      @gbdub
      The public’s perception of “what is the police” is different from the technical/academic definition of “police”. Many people are trying to be cute about it and say something along the lines of “a-ha, but don’t you know that giving your peace officers the legal authority to serve warrants technically makes them a “police” under common law, therefore…” which doesn’t actually matter.

      It is not a motte-and-bailey to argue for abolishing the police, as the police are currently understood by the public. One way to think about it, is “Abolish the Police [Department]”, instead of “Abolish the social role of policing”. If you want to fault them for the ambiguity that’s fine, but is a slogan after all, not an exhaustive policy prescription.

      As others have pointed out: The best strategy in any negotiation is to demand more than you are expecting to get. If the protestors try to workshop and audience-test their slogans too much, reducing their demands to the lowest common denominator, they will surely get even less.

      • gbdub says:

        This is exactly the sort of academic rhetorical game that Scott was complaining about in Words x3 and I was pointing at in my point 4). Take some words that have a strong emotional punch and a common, well understood meaning (e.g. police, abolish, racism, patriarchy) and redefine them in an idiosyncratic way used/understood only by academics and subject matter experts. This makes your position literally unarguable because accepting your definition cedes the whole argument. Then, take advantage of the ambiguity to abuse the emotional punch associated with the commonly understood meaning for fun and profit and retreat to your motte if you get called on it.

        If you mean “abolish the police”, then say that. If you really mean “Reconsider how we structure the various responsibilities and achieve the goals currently assigned to the social concept of policing/public safety” then say that. Well don’t say that, it’s a terrible slogan, but find a punchy way to say the same thing without using a phrase that clearly means something very different (and much more objectionable). Maybe “Reimagine Policing” or “Police Should Stick to Policing” or something like that, I don’t know.

        • Guy in TN says:

          @gbdub

          Take some words that have a strong emotional punch and a common, well understood meaning (e.g. police, abolish, racism, patriarchy) and redefine them in an idiosyncratic way used/understood only by academics and subject matter experts. This makes your position literally unarguable because accepting your definition cedes the whole argument. Then, take advantage of the ambiguity to abuse the emotional punch associated with the commonly understood meaning for fun and profit and retreat to your motte if you get called on it.

          You’ve got who is being “academic” and playing a “rhetorical game” backwards here. “The Police” have a well understood meaning common meaning in the United States, and it’s not “a person with the authority to serve a warrant and make arrests”.

          When we say “Abolish the Police”, most people understand what this means, and their understanding is correct. The Police as you know and understand it in American society will not exist. It’s only people who try to be technical/academic, by equating The Police with “someone who performs the social act of policing”, who are trying to rhetorically trick Police Abolition advocates into inarguable positions.

          • Randy M says:

            What do police do that another type of warrant-server/arrest-maker would not?
            “Police” means “law enforcement” to me, and all attendant actions that ensue when someone resists that enforcement.

          • baconbits9 says:

            “The Police” have a well understood meaning common meaning in the United States, and it’s not “a person with the authority to serve a warrant and make arrests”.

            It is? I’ve lived in the US for 35 years and I would say that prior to a month ago I never engaged anyone who has used a different definition and I am an ancap who has argued for the abolition of the ‘police’.

          • Guy in TN says:

            What do police do that another type of warrant-server/arrest-maker would not?

            I don’t think you are quite getting my specific argument here.

            There’s an easy answer to your question, and that is that the Police Departments in the US have extended their reach into a vast array of positions that do not require warrant serving/arresting as part of their job capabilities (e.g., traffic patrol, drug investigations, domestic disputes), and thus many of jobs we have given to people who we call “Police” do not actually need to have all the powers that would qualify as “policing” under a technical/academic definition.

            But that doesn’t hit at the heart of it. My take is that “The Police” in the United States refers to a specific set of institutions, with certain norms and laws, and most people understand that when you say “Abolish the Police”, you are referring to this.

            If I say: “fire all officers, eliminate their positions, sell all the patrol cars and precinct buildings, reduce their funding to zero, and create a new, highly reduced agency, that only carries guns when they are specifically called out for and only makes arrests in the most extreme circumstances”

            I think most people would understand this as “I have abolished the Police”, since the new organization resembles nothing like the police are understood to be in the in the United States. Only people being pedantic/point-scoring would say “a-ha! But don’t you know the new organization has policing powers and therefore technically qualify as the police, and therefore you have technically failed completely in your goals…(I am so smart!)”

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            When conservatives said “Repeal Obamacare” it was irresponsible and dangerous because they didn’t have a single coherent plan to replace it with.

            When some dude held up a “Government out of my Medicare” sign at a Tea Party protest it was a sign that the movement had no idea what was going on.

            When Trump said “LIBERATE MICHIGAN” it was a sign that he wanted armed protestors to succeed and there’s no need to read anything else into it. Can you believe these people who try to apologize for the verbal diarrhea Trump produces? Just read the words for themselves!

            However, when someone says “Abolish the Police” we need to listen to John Oliver explain what the black people meant.

          • baconbits9 says:

            I think most people would understand this as “I have abolished the Police”, since the new organization resembles nothing like the police are understood to be in the in the United States. Only people being pedantic/point-scoring would say “a-ha! But don’t you know the new organization has policing powers and therefore technically qualify as the police, and therefore you have technically failed completely in your goals…(I am so smart!)”

            If I told someone ‘the police in England don’t carry guns except in extreme circumstances’ I don’t think I would ever get the retort ‘well they aren’t really police then’, similarly if I were to get a parking ticket and mutter ‘effing cops’ under my breath I wouldn’t consider myself to be wrong even if I knew that township outsourced the metermaids to a private company.

            The very first time that your ‘non-police’ get in a violent confrontation with a citizen a bunch of angry people are going to yell about how you said you were going to abolish the police and yet here they doing X, Y and Z again.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @Edward Scizorhands

            However, when someone says “Abolish the Police” we need to listen to John Oliver explain what the black people meant.

            Slogans are a bad way to understand anyone’s political position, no matter what side of the isle you are on.

            So if someone has a slogan that seems on-its-face preposterous, and you genuinely want to understand what they want, you should ask them to explain what they mean (although you should probably specifically not ask John Oliver, in this case).

          • baconbits9 says:

            Slogans are a bad way to understand anyone’s political position, no matter what side of the isle you are on.

            If you are going to chant ‘abolish the police’ and then argue that you really mean this super nuanced interpretation of ‘police’ that people will agree with you on only after a long conversation then you are being misleading. Slogans like ‘my body, my choice’ don’t get the nuance through but they aren’t misleading on their face.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @baconbits

            If I told someone ‘the police in England don’t carry guns except in extreme circumstances’ I don’t think I would ever get the retort ‘well they aren’t really police then’

            I didn’t attempt to give an exhaustive list of all the proposed changes. And just changing one aspect, in isolation, would not be enough. If you are trying to answer the question of “what is the defining aspect of someone who is police vs. non-police, that translates across all countries and contexts”, you have already gone astray.

            The very first time that your ‘non-police’ get in a violent confrontation with a citizen a bunch of angry people are going to yell about how you said you were going to abolish the police and yet here they doing X, Y and Z again.

            And that’s fine. I will promise, on my honor, I will let them dunk of me over my slogan. They will say: “You fired all the corrupt cops, broke the police unions, and drastically reduced incarceration rates and police shootings, but you didn’t actually abolish policing-as-a-concept like I was made to believe!”

            And I will be so owned. I will totally let you own me over this.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @baconbits9

            If you are going to chant ‘abolish the police’ and then argue that you really mean this super nuanced interpretation of ‘police’ that people will agree with you on only after a long conversation then you are being misleading.

            There’s no way to solve this question. You think that I’m being pedantic and super-nuanced in regards to this slogan, but I think that you are the one being pedantic and super-nuanced.

            You think that we are having to have a long, complicated conversation because I’m using an academic/technical definition, but I think the same about you.

            No way out.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            There’s a motte-and-bailey where you tell people “defund the police” or “abolish the police” doesn’t really mean that, get them to support it, and then when someone starts defunding or abolishing the police they say “what, you agreed with it!”

            It’s the same mushmouth jibber-jabber than makes engaging with the current President impossible and frustrating. I get some people see how it benefits Trump because he can’t be nailed down to anything besides damage to his opponents, but it also makes progress on any actual policies difficult because the words change day-by-day.

            Joe Biden is getting forced into saying he doesn’t want to defund the police. And just like I get insane unfalsifiable 4d-chess explanations about how nearly anything stupid Trump does is amazing, I’m getting fed some bullshit that this slogan is some amazing strategy. Amazing strategies don’t need hundreds of thinkpieces explaining how they are really a good strategy, you just don’t understand. We are witnessing an internecine war, where lots of African-Americans demand and deserve better police, but unquestionably do not want cops gone from their neighborhood. But some very privileged radicals are trying to hijack it.

            Nothing’s wrong with “fuck the police.” Go with the classics if you can’t make them better.

            *EDIT* You want it from the horse’s mouth? Here it is:

            https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/08/us/politics/biden-defund-the-police.html

            On Monday, Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina — who is now the highest-ranking black member of Congress but, in his youth, was jailed during protests — complained on a private conference call with other lawmakers about those trying to “hijack” the swelling movement with calls to defund the police.

          • baconbits9 says:

            but you didn’t actually abolish policing-as-a-concept like I was made to believe!”

            So in other words everyone doesn’t share your definition of police like you claim?

            I didn’t attempt to give an exhaustive list of all the proposed changes. And just changing one aspect, in isolation, would not be enough

            There are potentially dozens of differences between english and american cops, listing them all won’t end up getting a neutral observer to say ‘they aren’t really police then’.

          • baconbits9 says:

            There’s no way to solve this question. You think that I’m being pedantic and super-nuanced in regards to this slogan, but I think that you are the one being pedantic and super-nuanced.

            You think that we are having to have a long, complicated conversation because I’m using an academic/technical definition, but I think the same about you

            Except this isn’t what is happening. You are making the statement that there is a near universally accepted real definition of police that makes the slogan work, and I am claiming that as an American citizen who has had arguments where I am in favor of abolishing the police I have never once used your definition and nor has anyone I have argued with. Our arguments are not mirrored because I have never claimed that no one could ever hold your position, and my argument doesn’t hinge on such an assumption.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @baconbits9

            So in other words everyone doesn’t share your definition of police like you claim?

            Where did I claim this? I said it’s a definition most people share, not literally everyone to-a-tee. For any given political statement, someone is going to be misled, because language is naturally nebulous and all communication imperfect.

            There are potentially dozens of differences between english and american cops, listing them all won’t end up getting a neutral observer to say ‘they aren’t really police then’.

            Confused why you are using English cops as a baseline…?

          • gbdub says:

            @Guy in TN believe we may just have incompatible understandings of what “most people” think. I really do think most people consider any civilian agent of the government with the authority to physically detain them (EDIT: or even write them a ticket) on suspicion of criminal activity to be “police” whether their jackets say “NYPD” or “FBI” or “BATFE” or “FDA” or “EPA” or “NPS” or this new friendlier thing you propose.

            I will grant that your proposal sounds reasonably close to something that might honestly be called “abolish the police”. But to be honest I’ve not heard anything as extreme as your proposal from the people in my sphere of influence who make favorable noises about abolishing or defunding the police. Simultaneously it seems less extreme than what I hear from the sort of people (actual anarchists, fringier campus African American groups) who more or less sincerely want the police gone, full stop.

            So your seeming assertion that , upon hearing the phrase “abolish the police”, anything like a majority of people are going to imagine something like your proposal is not in my mind well founded. But I could certainly be wrong.

          • Randy M says:

            @Guy in TN Thanks for the response.

            FWIW, I think a lot of the attendant badness of police has to do with them being required to put people in places they don’t want to be (courts, prisons) for violating the will of the city council, state legislature, congress, etc.

            So if there are laws, there will be unpopular police action (or those are not de facto laws).

            But granted that a lot of practices and policies develop to make cops lives easier that unduly burden the citizens (or even culprits) and should be frequently scrutinized.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @gbdub

            I really do think most people consider any civilian agent of the government with the authority to physically detain them on suspicion of criminal activity to be “police” whether their jackets say “NYPD” or “FBI” or “BATFE” or “FDA” or “EPA” or “NPS” or this new friendlier thing you propose.

            As a counter-anecdote: I had never even considered that EPA officials could be considered “police” until this moment.

            I wonder how many people think “Abolish the Police” includes, for example National Park Service rangers? I’m guessing surely a tiny fraction, but again, it’s just my anecdotes/intuitions against yours without actual polling.

          • John Schilling says:

            There’s an easy answer to your question, and that is that the Police Departments in the US have extended their reach into a vast array of positions that do not require warrant serving/arresting as part of their job capabilities (e.g., traffic patrol, drug investigations, domestic disputes)

            True but irrelevant to the question at hand. If you ask someone for a one-sentence description of the police, it will almost always be some variation of “the guys who arrest people”, not “the people who respond to domestic disputes”. The police are culturally, legally, and literally defined by their exercise of law enforcement power, with arrests as the central example of that power.

            What police do when there isn’t a criminal at hand to arrest, is negotiable. If you want to argue that we shouldn’t send people whose core job description is arresting criminals to try and resolve a domestic dispute, that’s a reasonable proposition. If you want to say it was a mistake to have them spend so much time giving out traffic tickets and investigating victimless drug crimes, great.

            But when you’re finished unbundling all those tasks, you’re still going to have a bunch of people whose job is to enforce the law by arrresting criminals. And everybody is going to look at the multitude of agencies you’ve created, ignore the names and the uniforms, point at the law-enforcing criminal-arresters and say “those guys are the police”. I’m not sure what you hope to gain by calling them anything different.

          • Erc says:

            “The Police” have a well understood meaning common meaning in the United States, and it’s not “a person with the authority to serve a warrant and make arrests”.

            There comes a point in which you just have to say: I think you’re being disingenuous.

            that do not require warrant serving/arresting as part of their job capabilities (e.g., traffic patrol, drug investigations, domestic disputes)

            The Left made domestic violence a mandatory arrest offense in many states. What this means is that the police have discretion to make arrests in ordinary assault cases, but not in domestic violence cases. Do you disagree with it or are you ignorant of it? I’m pretty sure this undoing this isn’t what the BLM movement is thinking of. The Left seems to understand the power of force and punishment quite well so long as its seen as being in pursuit of its ideological goals.

            If I say: “fire all officers, eliminate their positions, sell all the patrol cars and precinct buildings, reduce their funding to zero, and create a new, highly reduced agency, that only carries guns when they are specifically called out for and only makes arrests in the most extreme circumstances”

            I think most people would understand this as “I have abolished the Police”,

            I think most people would laugh at the notion of this group of people making arrests without squad cars.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            The Left seems to understand the power of force and punishment quite well so long as its seen as being in pursuit of its ideological goals.

            Exactly. So “abolish the police!” slogans make no sense in context.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @John Schilling

            The police are culturally, legally, and literally defined by their exercise of law enforcement power, with arrests as the central example of that power.

            I contend that you are conflating the “police” with “law enforcement”. The average Joe does not put the EPA, National Park Rangers, and the Police Department in the same idea-bucket.

            So no, not “cultural defined”. “Legally defined”-maybe, but not particularly relevant.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @Erc

            There comes a point in which you just have to say: I think you’re being disingenuous.

            Ditto for everyone who thinks the “Abolish the Police” must mean “Abolish the government’s ability to enforce laws”.

            A good rule of thumb is: If you think your opponent’s positions have blatant logical contradictions that even a small child could notice (“So you are opposed to arresting people, and yet you want to arrest George Floyd’s killer? Hmmm, ever thought of that???”), you are probably wildly misunderstanding them.

          • cassander says:

            @Guy in TN says:

            Ditto for everyone who thinks the “Abolish the Police” must mean “Abolish the government’s ability to enforce laws”.

            Except I am seeing people arguing that

            A good rule of thumb is: If you think your opponent’s positions have blatant logical contradictions that even a small child could notice you are probably wildly misunderstanding them.

            That’s not a bad rule. of course, some positions do have blatant logical contradictions, and we’re currently seeing that on full display.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @cassander
            He doesn’t say or imply that in the link provided.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @cassander: This guy is getting roasted in Twitter replies, though, so “abolish all law enforcement” is empirically not the new hegemonic belief.

          • ECD says:

            @Cassander

            Oh, come on. If I click your link, the man’s very next tweet is:

            “Welcome cynics and conservative trolls! Glad you’re dropping by. While you’re here, please take a gander as to what abolishing the police actually looks like. Spoiler Alert: it doesn’t mean absolutely no police anymore!”

          • cassander says:

            @Guy in TN says:

            He literally says replace the police with social workers.

            @Le Maistre Chat says:

            I didn’t claim everyone actually thought that, I said I’m seeing a lot of that.

            @ECD says:

            I did take a look at what he said abolishing police looks like, and he said it looks like replacing the cops with social workers and affordable healthcare. Those aren’t my words, those are his. that doing so is idiotic is my point.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @cassander

            He literally says replace the police with social workers.

            I don’t think that was intended to be an exhaustive list. Twitter only has so many characters, you know.

          • Guy in TN says:

            Inferring positive claims from the absence of claims is always a risky move.

            A: “I support black people, Hispanic people, and white people to live in harmony together!”
            Headline: “Person A says Native Americans Are Excluded From Harmonious Living”

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @Guy in TN:

            A: “I support black people, Hispanic people, and white people to live in harmony together!”

            Always. I want to be with them.
            And make believe with them.
            And live in harmony, harmony

            Headline: “Person A says Native Americans Are Excluded From Harmonious Living”

            … OH. 🙁

          • John Schilling says:

            The average Joe does not put the EPA, National Park Rangers, and the Police Department in the same idea-bucket.

            I’m pretty sure that if you show the “Average Joe” a picture of the kind of Park Ranger that wears badge, uniform, and gun, or the kind of EPA agent who wears a badge, uniform, and gun, and ask “is this a kind of policeman?”, the answer is going to be “yes”. If you show them in the act of arresting someone, I’m now very sure.

          • Erc says:

            “A good rule of thumb is: If you think your opponent’s positions have blatant logical contradictions that even a small child could notice (“So you are opposed to arresting people, and yet you want to arrest George Floyd’s killer? Hmmm, ever thought of that???”), you are probably wildly misunderstanding them.”

            I don’t know. If I look at the person you cited, so you can’t accuse me of weak manning here, saying “while you’re here, please take a gander as to what abolishing the police actually looks like. Spoiler Alert: it doesn’t mean absolutely no police anymore!” Imagine that being said about, say, slavery or taxation. Maybe they should say “reducing the responsibility of the police.”

            Reminds me of a conversation I was having with a feminist who was going on about how it was outrageous that anyone would suggest the state should be able to tell women what they can and cant do with their bodies. I asked her if she thought prostitution should be legal. She said no, of course not. When I told her that seemed contradictory, she just rolled her eyes and said I didn’t “get it.” Is there a contradiction there? Well, she holds the belief, and I think she does so honestly IMO, wasn’t like she was trolling. And she could say that I was “misinformed” about her position, which on the surface is her ‘s saying X, but what she really means is X plus a laundry list of exceptions and if I point out the exceptions conflict with X, well, I don’t “get” it. It reminds me, too, of the IHR:

            “The question [of whether the IHR denies the Holocaust] appears to turn on IHR’s Humpty-Dumpty word game with the word Holocaust. According to Mark Weber, associate editor of the IHR’s Journal of Historical Review [now Director of the IHR], “If by the ‘Holocaust’ you mean the political persecution of Jews, some scattered killings, if you mean a cruel thing that happened, no one denies that. But if one says that the ‘Holocaust’ means the systematic extermination of six to eight million Jews in concentration camps, that’s what we think there’s not evidence for.” That is, IHR doesn’t deny that the Holocaust happened; they just deny that the word ‘Holocaust’ means what people customarily use it for.”

            What you’re doing here is going a step further and asserting that everyone else accepts your humpty-dumpty definition of “police.” And I’m not accusing you of honestly holding this belief. I am accusing you of lying.

          • CatCube says:

            @Guy in TN, @ECD

            *Sigh.* Okay, I really hesitate to bring in another commenter who hasn’t participated in the thread, but this is such a perfect, jewel-like example I can’t let it pass.

            If you’ve ever looked at a @Conrad Honcho post and wondered, “How could he possibly defend Trump over this?!” I want you to get up from your computer, walk into the bathroom, turn on the lights, and gaze into the mirror.

            Because this, right here, is how Trump supporters twist themselves into pretzels about how whatever Tweet he just farted out isn’t nearly as facile as it seems.

            Whatever emotions you’re feeling right now are exactly what they feel, because “Abolish the Police” is profoundly stupid. It is not a defensible statement. Demanding that we spend all this time trying to read nuance and subtlety into an unnuanced and unsubtle statement is a fool’s errand. You’re spending untold numbers of bits to “Well, ackshually…” why a stupid statement isn’t stupid. It’s not going to sound any more convincing to people who aren’t already drinking that particular flavor of Kool-Aid than the latest defense of the President. You have already spent more time thinking through this statement than whatever idiot babbled this out and got it picked up by Twitter.

            Come up with a better slogan that describes your objectives (Reform the Police, for example), and stop participating in the workshop trying to rescue this one.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @Erc

            And I’m not accusing you of honestly holding this belief. I am accusing you of lying.

            What’s even my angle here? Its like: “I’m gonna secretly confuse everybody with a slogan most people will misunderstand, making my position seem much more radical than it actually is, thus ruining the momentum of the movement I support” Hell yeah, the perfect troll

          • Guy in TN says:

            @CatCube
            “Abolish the Police” is a pretty good slogan. It resonates because it is decidedly anti-police and captures the anger people feel right now. It doesn’t give much wiggle-room, unlike “reform the police” and “defund the police”. “Reform” could be a meaningless as making them watch anti-racism training videos. And “defund” could be interpreted as a 5% budget cut.

            “Abolish the Police” sends the message: The police in the United States are a menace and must be stopped. We want to radically change law enforcement in our society.

            I’m not sure it matters, really, as the protests are in the process of fizzling out as we speak. But I honestly think its is pretty good and I’m struggling to think of something else that captures the anger and the policy to such an extent.

          • nkurz says:

            @Guy in TN:
            > “Abolish the Police” is a pretty good slogan.

            You didn’t call it out, but I think the echoes of “Abolition of Slavery” and “Abolitionist” as applied to the American Civil War help make it an appropriate slogan. It’s a rare word in other contexts, and closely associated with these issues when it is now used. I think its literal meaning is terribly misleading, but I agree with you that it’s a catchy phrasing and seems to be working well

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            I just saw Rebecca Solnit on facebook making just that comparison.

            “Abolish slavery is such strong language, and it’s sure to offend and alienate people, especially slaveowners, so those abolitionists should find language that everyone is comfortable with like “subtly adjust the peculiar institution at some point.” Or “make lifestyle improvements in perpetual debt bondage.” And really, sweeping change is impossible, as the historical record shows: we are never going to abolish slavery, anyway, and how can you picture the American economy without it? Be realistic and have a nice day, everyone, and happy 1847 out there.”

            https://www.facebook.com/rebecca.solnit/posts/10158135727980552

          • baconbits9 says:

            Abolish police! Well we don’t mean abolish law enforcement, just reform it but do it dramatically.

            Abolish slavery! Yes abolish it, don’t replace it with a different form of slavery, don’t replace it with Jim Crow.

            When people said ‘Abolish Slavery’ they meant get rid of it, not get rid of the more brutal aspects of slavery but keep the general concept around.

          • Aapje says:

            @Guy in TN

            It’s a good slogan in the sense that it appeals to worst parts of human nature. Just don’t come complaining to me when Trump or anyone else you disagree with, does something similar.

          • A Definite Beta Guy says:

            “Abolish slavery” really was incendiary language, incendiary enough that it sparked a Civil War. Granted, we have the privilege of calling it a Good War (along with WW2 and the Revolution), because none of us Living Folk had to actually fight and die in it.

            Does the meme brigade really want to fight a civil war?

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            If you’ve ever looked at a @Conrad Honcho post and wondered, “How could he possibly defend Trump over this?!” I want you to get up from your computer, walk into the bathroom, turn on the lights, and gaze into the mirror.

            I agree that ECD and Guy in TN are handsome and wise.

          • Lambert says:

            Plenty of other countries abolished it peacefully.

          • John Schilling says:

            You didn’t call it out, but I think the echoes of “Abolition of Slavery” and “Abolitionist” as applied to the American Civil War help make it an appropriate slogan

            Except for the bit where that slogan started a literal civil war that killed more than half a million Americans.

            If the idea is to echo “Abolish Slavery”, note that the goal of those abolitionists was to, yes, abolish slavery. To create a situation in which there were literally no slaves anywhere in the United States, and no “indentured servants” or anything that one might reasonably believe was a slave by another name. This was such a highly contentious position that a lot of people were willing to fight a war over it.

            The United States could have avoided a whole lot of violent unpleasantness in the 1860s if we’d told the Southerners that what we really wanted was for them to have 20% fewer black people doing forced labor on their plantations and call them “indentured servants” rather than “slaves”. And we can avoid a whole lot of unpleasantness now if we decide we’re going to have somewhat fewer and reformed police, and renamed if the guy from Tennessee really wants, rather than literally no police by any name.

            But if you chose your slogan to deliberately echo the one used by your heroes who back in the day really literally absolutely wanted to abolish the whole thing without exception, yeah, that’s going to fire up your base real good. And it’s going to fire up the opposition even more, if they start taking you literally as well as seriously, and you’ll see how many Americans really, really want men with badges and guns and uniforms to be in the business of arresting dangerous criminals.

          • albatross11 says:

            Catcube:

            +1

            Lots of people have repeated the line about how Trump’s supporters take him seriously but not literally, and this is an example of BLM-aligned protesters tossing around a slogan that is intended to be taken seriously but not literally by some of them.

            But then there are others who honestly seem to want to abolish the police department. The Minneapolis city councilwoman who announced their plan to abolish the police department (link) didn’t seem to have a coherent answer, but it seemed pretty clear she wasn’t thinking in terms of making the police smaller and more focused or real crime, or more accountable, but just getting rid of them.

            And this also echoes the Trump thing. Trump will say some horrible thing or propose some terrible policy, and most of his supporters will find a way to see it in some kind of non-crazy, non-horrible light. But some of his supporters will also like the crazy/terrible policy. They’ll think “yeah, let’s call in the military and crush all the protests,” or “yeah, let’s ban Muslims from immigrating” or whatever. Maybe Trump didn’t mean it literally (it’s hard to say what he really thinks, given how all-over-the-place his public statements tend to be), but some of his supporters want that actual law. Some of them may even try to implement the literal thing he said rather than the much less awful thing he eventually comes to support.

          • albatross11 says:

            Yeah, mainstream liberal voices saying “abolish the police” is like running a massive re-elect Trump campaign.

          • Matt M says:

            “yeah, let’s call in the military and crush all the protests,” or “yeah, let’s ban Muslims from immigrating”

            Just to be clear though – both of these things are significantly more plausible, would be less disruptive to regular life, and are almost certainly more generally popular than “let’s abolish the police and not replace them with something almost exactly similar”

    • Skivverus says:

      I’m not sure that this is a motte-and-bailey scenario; I think it is instead a toxoplasmic one, of the sloganeering subtype.
      There are definitely analogous elements between a motte-and-bailey and a toxoplasmic scenario – there’s the dichotomy between what gets said (loudest) and what is reasonable/actually-meant/feasible/etc – but I don’t think there’s enough coherence in the reasonable proposals to count them as a motte so much as the quiet vegetarians facepalming at PETA.

    • JohnNV says:

      I think #3 comes the closest. When people are in a group of like-minded individuals who believe strongly about a topic, nobody wants to be the one to signal that their belief isn’t as strong as the others’. (I’m referring to left-wing protestors here, but I’m sure the dynamic applies in other contexts.) So the proposals get more and more radical as everybody tries to one-up each other and nobody is willing to stop to say “Maybe we’ve gone too far” even if they do believe it. “Biological sex isn’t real” is another example. I think the number of people who literally honestly believe that there is no physical difference between human males and human females is tiny, but anybody who says so in a community of trans activists will immediately be suspect. Therefore you have the organization espousing positions that very few people actually believe – and can be actively harmful to the group achieving its goals. I’m trying to think of right-wing equivalents. I’m sure there are better examples but the best one I can come up with on the fly is “These tax cuts will pay for themselves”. I doubt even the most hard-core supply-siders thinks that’s literally the case. But going in with a message of “These cuts could improve the economy, but they will reduce government revenue and require hard decisions on spending cuts” marks you as not a True Believer.

      • Aapje says:

        There do seem to be people that think that we are so far right on the laffer curve that tax cuts will increase tax revenue, as they will result in so much economic growth, that the reduced tax rates are more than offset by taxing a larger amount of economic activity at a lower rate.

        • Ibn Khaldun, among others.

          Although he was looking at it from the other side, arguing that increases beyond the Koranic tax eventually reduced revenue.

    • Clutzy says:

      One of the things I don’t understand about proposals along this line is whether there is a reasonable way to think dis-aggregating ticket writing from first responders to violent engagements will reduce costs. Perhaps there is, but as someone who thinks we spend too much on law enforcement (largely because of having ticker writers writing so many tickets). But I feel like we just gonna spend more money for no benefit.

  80. proyas says:

    How true is this statement? 

    “Not all juvenile delinquents grow up to be psychopaths, but all psychopaths were once juvenile delinquents.”

    • Protagoras says:

      For various reason, children have some difficulty avoiding getting themselves into trouble (poor impulse control, lack of understanding of consequences). For a slightly different set of reasons, psychopaths also have some difficulty avoiding getting themselves into trouble. So while I don’t know of any specific research, it would be pretty shocking if people who are both children and psychopaths didn’t have exceptional difficulty avoiding getting themselves into trouble.

    • Blueberry pie says:

      For 5 prominent people I would consider psychopaths I could quickly think of, 3 have no reports of juvenile delinquency on their wiki pages:
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pol_Pot#Early_life
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong#Early_life
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Goebbels#Early_life
      (The other two, Hitler and Stalin have some reports in that direction)

      • FLWAB says:

        I don’t think any of those people were psychopaths, just ordinary humans like you and me who chose a path of evil, one step at a time.

        I think we might have a tendency to call everyone evil a psychopath, because if we can pathologize them we don’t have to worry about our own evil tendencies and our own capacity to do evil.

        • Gerry Quinn says:

          I’ve not made a study of any of them, but from what I know of the history surrounding them, I think Pol Pot could likely be described as a psychopath, but I doubt whether Goebbels or particularly Mao could. At least psychopathy in the extreme sense – they were all political leaders who played free and easy with the lives of others, which can in some sense be described as psychopathy, but then we would have to say the same of many or most political leaders.

    • Two McMillion says:

      Given that juvenile delinquency is one of the things asked about on the O’Hare psychopathy checklist, it wouldn’t be surprising if there was a lot of overlap.

    • Wency says:

      Might depend on your definition of “delinquent”.

      For “psychopath”, we have a tendency to use “serial killer” as a proxy, which might distort your results, but it’s the easiest way to do it.

      That said, I think Dahmer might have the least delinquent childhood on record among the most famous American serial killers. He also seems to have come from one of the happiest homes. He dissected and dismembered roadkill in ways that was troubling but probably not illegal. Not so much record of torturing live animals. He said he planned to ambush and rape a male jogger as a teen but didn’t actually do it. He apparently drank a lot in high school, and I have to imagine he was stealing all that booze, but I haven’t seen that confirmed anywhere.

      • FLWAB says:

        I read a very intersting book once, My Friend Dahmer which was written by someone who knew him in high school. His opinion was that Dahmer’s parents should have noticed there was something wrong with Dahmer and gotten him help, and that authority figures in Dahmer’s life dropped the ball when there were warning signs everywhere. Its a sympathetic book: the author really believes that if Dahmer was not a psychopath, and that his desire to kill people and do unspeakable things to their bodies caused Dahmer great mental anguish in his youth, at least. He believes that Dahmer knew his desires were wrong and that he didn’t want to hurt people but felt deeply compelled to. He also noted that Dahmer drank a frightening amount of beer during high school, and he believes that his constant inebriation was an attempt to self-medicate and get away from his strange and dark desires.

        Of course, who knows what Dahmer really felt inside, though I think it’s telling that his last words were (to his killer) “I don’t care if I live or die. Go ahead and kill me.” So I think it plausible that he might not have been a psychopath, though he certainly had other extreme psychological problems.

    • fibio says:

      Almost certainly falsifiable as it contains an absolute. Psychopathy is a complex condition and how it manifests depends greatly on the environment in which a psychopathic child grows up in. A large percentage of psychopaths live mostly normal lives with no criminal behavior.

  81. TimG says:

    I found this thread interesting. For me the most unnerving part is a few tweets down.

    According to some poll (I think only in PA) the trust in medical experts dropped significantly across the board during this shutdown. For Republicans it went from 87% to 35%. For Dems a less dramatic 99% to 91%. For independents, though, a still significant 88% to 66%.

    This seems to reflect the skepticism a lot of people on this board showed toward the “expert” response to the protests in light of Coronavirus.

    I’m someone who thinks Climate Change is a real and significant problem. I’m also someone who thinks the way it is often reported on (with the backing of scientists, to be honest) is worse than it actually is. (For example, I don’t think it will cause the end of civilization.) And I doubt I’m the only one that thinks that way.

    I’m actually concerned that the “anti-science” bent you see in the US (and elsewhere) is going to continue to gain legs the more things like this happen. And it really worries me.

    We don’t need more anti-vaxers or flat-earthers. But I think that’s what we are about to get.

    • Two McMillion says:

      My confidence in “experts” has decreased because it has become clear they are liars.

      First it was the masks thing. “Oh no don’t buy masks they won’t help you”- when it was obvious to everyone with half a brain that they would.

      Then it was a number of them endorsing these protests, which cannot help but spread COVID-19.

      I had previously believed that global warming was the victim of slight exaggerations on the part of experts, but this experience has caused me to revise my expectation upward.

      • Tatterdemalion says:

        First it was the masks thing. “Oh no don’t buy masks they won’t help you”- when it was obvious to everyone with half a brain that they would.

        “obvious to everyone with half a brain” is no substitute for “we have enough evidence to justify confidence”. Right now, my understanding is that the best guess is that wearing a mask doesn’t provide any protection to the person wearing it, but probably does slightly reduce the risk of spreading it to others. But good evidence is sparse, and it’s still very much an open question.

        Then it was a number of them endorsing these protests, which cannot help but spread COVID-19.

        Yes, and no-one has denied that; those epidemiologists who support the protests have completely open about the fact that they do so in spite of the fact that they will spread covid, not because they think they won’t.

        • Wrong Species says:

          Do you seriously need someone else to tell you that a disease that is spread by coughing and talking can be prevented from spreading by covering your mouth?

          • Aftagley says:

            To cover my mouth? No. Not since I learned that in preschool, that is. Someone had to tell me back then though.

            To institute a society-wide major shift in PPE usage in a manner of weeks? Yes, I need an expert to tell me that. I’ve been sick before and walked around during flu season for my entire life and never worn a mask and it’s never been an issue before.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            To institute a society-wide major shift in PPE usage

            Bosh. I see a budding pandemic. I think, “I should have some masks.” The experts say, “No, you shouldn’t.”

            The experts should not be thinking about “instituting society-wide shifts”. They should be giving me expert advice that I can use in making decisions. Instead, they lied to me.

        • Eric T says:

          This ^

          I’m confident that scientists, like everyone are biased. I’m not sure about the claim that they’re a pack of liars.

        • John Schilling says:

          Right now, my understanding is that the best guess is that wearing a mask doesn’t provide any protection to the person wearing it, but probably does slightly reduce the risk of spreading it to others.

          Almost every study of the subject says that masks do provide protection to the person wearing it. The level of protection is small for the sort of cloth masks most people are wearing, and it may be overshadowed by the risks of handling and reusing contaminated masks – but none of the studies are quantitatively addressing that risk. So it’s clearly not the intra-expert consensus that “wearing a mask doesn’t provide any protection to the person wearing it”

          Furthermore, the studies I’ve seen that cover both, find that the protection to the wearer is greater than the protection to others. Again, absolute numbers are small and maybe overshadowed by mask-handling issues.

          The January/February expert take of “masks provide zero protection to the wearer, so knock it off”, was obviously and correctly interpreted as stupid propagandizing, and hurt the credibility of the experts. Saying “small protection, not worth the bother and please save them for the medical workers” would have been a more honest assessment, but I saw too much literally-zero messaging.

          The reversal from “did we say literally zero protection? We meant that masks provide absolutely vital protection, just in a way that we didn’t bother to mention before but now everybody should wear masks”, was another blow to expert credibility.

          • Garrett says:

            > just in a way that we didn’t bother to mention before but now everybody should wear masks

            And, if I understand correctly, there haven’t been any trials of significance done since then. So the “wearing masks means you’re stupid and paranoid” and “not wearing masks is genocide” statements are both supported by the same sparse evidence.

          • Matt M says:

            And, if I understand correctly, there haven’t been any trials of significance done since then.

            This is really the most egregious part. They did a complete 180 on their position despite the complete and total absence of any new evidence whatsoever. Everything we know about masks today, we also knew last year.

            It was completely and entirely a reaction to them “losing their grip” on the narrative. People just didn’t believe them, so they figured they’d switch to the more believable “masks work” side.

          • Aftagley says:

            The reversal from “did we say literally zero protection? We meant that masks provide absolutely vital protection, just in a way that we didn’t bother to mention before but now everybody should wear masks”, was another blow to expert credibility.

            Have I fallen down the memory hole? I seem to distinctly remember the process going something like,

            1. There aren’t any known cases of public transmission of COVID in america but there is a shortage of masks. Please don’t horde masks if you’re healthy, leave them for medical professionals and the immuno-compromised.

            followed by

            2. Uh oh, looks like there are some instances of community spread now. Time for masks.

            They did a complete 180 on their position despite the complete and total absence of any new evidence whatsoever. Everything we know about masks today, we also knew last year.

            Right, but we weren’t wearing masks last year because there wasn’t a known infection vector. Now there is; when that switch flipped is fuzzy but it makes sense that public instruction on mask wearing flipped when it did.

          • DarkTigger says:

            @Aftagley
            Can’t say for your neck of the woods. But around here it was pretty clearly: “Please don’t wear masks, as there is no evidence that they would provide any protection to you”. Which even in this pretty mild form was balantly not true. Which was in line with what the WHO said, who just changed their public opinion about that last week.
            I mean I agree, that the “please leave them to the professionals who need them”, was the important part of the message, but claiming the first part wasn’t there, is simply bull.

          • Aftagley says:

            @DarkTigger

            I should be clear: I’m not trying to lay out a competing narrative, I’m saying that my memory of events has no recollection of anyone saying stuff like this.

            I’m fully accepting of the possibility that experts were saying masks were useless back in February/early March and my brain just absolutely discarded and memory of it, but if so that’s kind of odd/scary.

            That being said, it’s apparently in line with what the WHO was saying. Hmm, I need to research this.

          • Matt M says:

            The official/expert position was “masks don’t work” well into late March and early April.

          • Aftagley says:

            Ok did some research:

            1. My memory was incomplete. I fully did not remember that various experts, including the CDC, WHO and other public health officials, were challenging the efficacy of masks.

            ETA: I’m thinking more about this and getting more concerned that I had no memory of any of this. It implies that either back then I wasn’t paying very close attention to what turned into likely the most important thing that would happen all year OR that the switch to “everyone wear masks now” was so total that my brain dumped the previous arguments. This is going to stick with me.

            2. I was correct that the restricted supply of surgical and N95 masks was a concern. There was the added concern at the time that public health officials were worried that sick people would feel like they could go out in public if they wore a masks and that healthy people might take more risks if they were wearing a mask. I don’t have a good feel for the quality of these arguments.

            3. That being said, if you trust the CDC, they claim that they only changed their official position on wearing cloth masks after they learned more about COVID, specifically the number of asymptomatic carriers the disease tends to have. Quote:

            We now know from recent studies that a significant portion of individuals with coronavirus lack symptoms (“asymptomatic”) and that even those who eventually develop symptoms (“pre-symptomatic”) can transmit the virus to others before showing symptoms. This means that the virus can spread between people interacting in close proximity—for example, speaking, coughing, or sneezing—even if those people are not exhibiting symptoms.

            In light of this new evidence, CDC recommends wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain (e.g., grocery stores and pharmacies) especially in areas of significant community-based transmission.

            (Source – Dated April 3

            I’m going to admit that my original position was not 100% accurate, but I also don’t think it’s fair to say that experts were duplicitous here. It looks like they got new evidence and updated recommendations accordingly.

          • DarkTigger says:

            @Aftagley
            Well fair enough, I can’t tell you what you recall or not.
            Would you beliefe what our esteemed hosts wrote, 3 months ago, what the official experts opinion about masks was at that time?
            https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/23/face-masks-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/

            Your own post said it better.
            BTW I never questioned that the restriced access to masks was an concern. I would even wager it was a major concern. But that gets close to conspirancy theory territory.

          • Randy M says:

            If it were, “the CDC would have recommended it years ago,” he says. “It doesn’t, because it makes science-based recommendations.”

            Oh man, that’s some pretty insular thinking. “Listen to me, I’m a scientist, and I say: ‘Listen to those guys, they are scientists.'”
            Can we cut out all the middle men and just get the primary sources on the record, or at least people willing to read them? It makes things a lot easier to double check for those who remember that science is built on challenging assumptions.

          • albatross11 says:

            The received wisdom in the medical community in the US before C19 was that masks for the public were a waste of time. This wasn’t a reaction to a shortage of masks. My understanding is that the consensus view in the medical community in Asia was quite different.

            Also, despite that consensus wisdom, every doctors’ office had surgical masks for anyone with flu symptoms during flu season, chemotherapy patients were told to wear masks in public, etc.

            I don’t know for sure, but I suspect the consensus arose by political/social means other than any one person or committee sitting down and carefully examining/weighing the evidence.

          • gbdub says:

            Part of the problem is that “The CDC does not recommend that the public wear masks” and “The CDC recommends that the public do not wear masks” technically mean two very different things, but practically have the same outcome (nobody wears masks). The CDC took too long to switch from “cautious scientist mode” to “proactive pandemic fighters mode”.

          • Viliam says:

            @Garrett

            And, if I understand correctly, there haven’t been any trials of significance done since then.

            Face Masks Considerably Reduce COVID-19 Cases in Germany

            We use the synthetic control method to analyze the effect of face masks on the spread of Covid-19 in Germany. Our identification approach exploits regional variation in the point in time when face masks became compulsory. Depending on the region we analyse, we find that face masks reduced the cumulative number of registered Covid-19 cases between 2.3% and 13% over a period of 10 days after they became compulsory. Assessing the credibility of the various estimates, we conclude that face masks reduce the daily growth rate of reported infections by around 40%.

        • Two McMillion says:

          “obvious to everyone with half a brain” is no substitute for “we have enough evidence to justify confidence”.

          If a person makes a statement that turns out to be incorrect, there are only two possibilities.

          1. They are ignorant.
          2. They are lying.

          I do not believe that the experts were ignorant.

          • albatross11 says:

            I heard this same notion (masks aren’t helpful for the public) on TWIV in the months before C19 was known to be in the US. The TWIV hosts were talking to a tiny niche audience that mostly has medical or biological training (it’s an academic virology podcast). No way were they trying to conserve masks. They were repeating received wisdom, probably without thinking much about it.

        • gbdub says:

          Yes, and no-one has denied that; those epidemiologists who support the protests have completely open about the fact that they do so in spite of the fact that they will spread covid, not because they think they won’t.

          The willingness of the experts to suborn their actual area of expertise to the political cause du jour as soon as (but not before) one comes along that they are sympathetic to, and indeed to use their position of expertise to argue things that are probably not true in order to support that cause, is a definite mark against their trustworthiness, no?

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            +1
            Either support onerous lockdowns because they will save lives, or don’t. I called the lockdowns basically totalitarian in another thread, but these guys are epidemiologists. No one’s going to blame you for having a narrow rather than holistic view! You do your thing, and not seeing the big picture isn’t morally culpable, OK?
            Then suddenly they had a holistic view of society and lockdowns shouldn’t apply to protests they approve of for political reasons unrelated to their field, but which were drilled into them in college.

          • Randy M says:

            Yes. The best response is something like “As an epidemiologist, it is my duty to inform you based on X that activities of this nature (specifics here) increase the chance of catching and spreading this respiratory illness. If one were to engage in such activities, the risk can partially be mitigated by blah blah blah.” With any opinion on whether the activities are therefore worth the risk neither asked for nor given, because that’s not the purview of science.

          • albatross11 says:

            But then maybe make the same recommendations w.r.t. going to church services or funerals, both of which are, I assure you, very important in the lives of many people who have refrained from attending them to avoid spreading C19.

          • Tatterdemalion says:

            The willingness of the experts to suborn their actual area of expertise to the political cause du jour as soon as (but not before) one comes along that they are sympathetic to, and indeed to use their position of expertise to argue things that are probably not true in order to support that cause, is a definite mark against their trustworthiness, no?

            What “things that are probably not true” are you referring to? I kind of suspect you may be conflating “value judgements different to the ones I would make” to “false claims of fact about matters with objective correct answers”.

            If you can find examples of experts making the latter then yes, that’s absolutely a serious strike against them. I haven’t seen any of that, though, and the former isn’t.

          • Randy M says:

            I was trying to go for an “anti-recommendation”; straight reporting of facts with no implied judgement.

            It’s hard, because scientists are also citizens with interests in the various issues and ideas about how society should be run. But if they want to continue to be seen as arbiters of truth, they need to be scrupulous about sticking to just the facts.

          • gbdub says:

            @Tatterdemalion –

            In this moment the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus.

            – Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo

            Nuzzo is a fairly prominent epidemiologist (Johns Hopkins prof, associate editor of a health security journal, has a Wikipedia page and a blue check on Twitter). Do you believe that statement is factually true? Do you believe it would stand up to even the lightest rational scrutiny that Dr. Nuzzo would normally expect from fellow epidemiologist asserting facts in their area of expertise?

            What is the point of turning to “experts” if they are giving us “value judgements” and not facts?

    • Tenacious D says:

      My views on climate change are in the same ballpark as yours.

      One memorable phrase I’ve seen on Instapundit with respect to climate change is “I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people telling me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis”. At the start of the Covid19 shutdowns, there was such alignment in behaviour: people that were early to sound the alarm also took costly personal actions like cancelling in-person conferences or moving to a hotel away from their families in the case of some front-line medical staff. Unfortunately the message sent by experts’ actions has gotten more muddled as the crisis has dragged on.

      It’s not so much about hypocrisy as it is about the actions of people in a position to be well-informed as a reasonable heuristic for gauging the true seriousness they assign to an issue.

      • Matt M says:

        Right. This is something I’ve been saying for quite some time.

        People supported lockdowns when the governor appeared to be staying home himself. They won’t when the governor is out protesting in a giant mob of thousands for social justice.

        Similarly, I might listen to Al Gore lecture me on climate change when he sells his mansion and his private jet. But not a moment before.

      • FLWAB says:

        Yeah: I realized I could dismiss the Green New Deal as soon as I saw that memo stately clearly that nuclear power was out of the question. If this was a big a crisis as you claim, then you wouldn’t be throwing out one of our most powerful tools to stop it.

        • TimG says:

          Yeah: I realized I could dismiss the Green New Deal as soon as I saw that memo stately clearly that nuclear power was out of the question.

          This is one of those things that is so painfully obvious to me that it makes me worry not everyone else sees things the same.

        • Wency says:

          I’ve had the exact same thought. Nuclear power is under a quasi-religious purity taboo. When all your fanciful solutions to a problem happen to align 100% with your purity taboos, and you’ll have nothing to do with the one obvious solution that violates them, then from where I’m standing all I can hear is proselytization to join your religion.

          It’s as if scientists started telling us that wild hogs will surely consume all our food and wipe us out unless we start praying towards Mecca five times a day. All the chanting has some sort of weird effect on the hogs’ brains. We’re a bit skeptical, so some of us start suggesting that we just kill and eat the hogs — proven technology — and we are told “IT IS FORBIDDEN.”

          • toastengineer says:

            I don’t think there’s anything “quasi-religious” about it. Average folks think “nucular = big explod!” and all us nerds telling each other that nuclear reactors are actually safer than the alternatives won’t reach them.

      • Simultan says:

        Timothy Morton has written about climate change (and other phenomena) as hyperobjects, things that are intangible and so distributed in time and space that they become sort of invisible to us. That may be a useful model, or it may not. In any case, it’s absolutely possible for a thing to have severe detrimental effects 50-100 years from now and not cause a panic now. With climate change it’s especially tricky as (assuming here that the basic claims of most climate scientists are correct) action needs to be taken years before most effects are seen. Humans don’t really operate on that timescale.

        I think the pandemic is an unfair comparison as it poses a threat to you and your loved ones this year. It would be more fair if the pandemic necessitated social distancing this year but caused deaths & disease only in the year 2100, but I guess we’ll never know how many of the virus believers would distance in that scenario.

      • AG says:

        I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people telling me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis

        Futures markets are closely trending with climate models

        • baconbits9 says:

          Futures markets are closely trending with climate models

          But not actual temperature differences.

        • Matt M says:

          I see you that, and raise you Barack Obama spending $12M to purchase property on the coastline.

          Does this seem like logical behavior from someone significantly concerned about sea-level rise?

          • Eric T says:

            Does this seem like logical behavior from someone significantly concerned about sea-level rise?

            Obama is nearly 60. Statistically speaking he’ll be dead in 25 years, probably long before that property is under da sea.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            If the Federal government is backing his mortgage against flooding — and, without looking, it probably is — then buying the land is indeed a good idea. Enjoy it, let it get flooded, and make all your money back!

          • Matt M says:

            Obama is nearly 60. Statistically speaking he’ll be dead in 25 years, probably long before that property is under da sea.

            He has kids. Probably hopes for grandkids. Isn’t it a bad investment? Won’t the property slowly lose value (at least relative to similarly nicer landlocked properties) as the seas rise and it becomes more obvious/evident he will soon be underwater?

            Could he really not have found anywhere nice to live that wasn’t directly on the coastline?

          • Eric T says:

            Could he really not have found anywhere nice to live that wasn’t directly on the coastline?

            I don’t know man, maybe Obama just misses the Hawaiin coastline. Maybe he doesn’t spend all day thinking of climate change? Maybe it’s an insurance scheme? Maybe he, like all of us is a human being, who are notoriously bad at putting our long term health and happiness over our short term goals, which is why the Climate Change issue is such a threat because honestly the policy proposals required to change the course of our carbon emissions were frankly non-intrusive but every year we put it off it gets harder and harder and probably by the time its a Real and Imminent enough threat that the general public and politicians take it seriously it’s going to be incredibly difficult for us to deal with it?

            Or maybe he’s got family there.

          • Randy M says:

            Thing is, in Obama’s case, merely him owning the property is probably enough to increase it’s value until it is literally six feet underwater, and given the pace of climate chance, his descendants will have plenty of time to cash out before that happens.

          • gbdub says:

            Forget about where it is, that’s a stupid amount of consumption from anyone that cares about carbon footprints.

          • AG says:

            The charitable take is that Obama is also funding plenty of climate change mitigation initiatives, and supporting climate change mitigation policies.

          • Looking at the picture, I doubt it is within a meter of sea level, so probably safe for the rest of this century, judging by the projections in the fifth IPCC report.

          • CatCube says:

            @AG

            So most of us have to shiver in the dark, but if you bought an indulgence you can partake in climate sin?

            Or, since we’ve beaten the indulgence metaphor to death here, you can be drafted to fight in the Civil War, unless you’ve paid the $300 ($50,000 today) commutation fee that exempts you from it?

          • AG says:

            @CatCube

            No, it’s more like you can live in the world you create. And Obama is trying to create a world where climate change is mitigated enough that it doesn’t wreck coastal residences. It doesn’t mean that Obama secretly doesn’t believe in climate change.

            You can be drafted to fight in the Civil War, but you can also negotiate a ceasefire/peace treaty between the participating factions.

            Or, you can comply with COVID lockdowns, but also vote against any pro-lockdown politicians.

          • 205guy says:

            Fact check people:

            This property is not oceanfront, it borders a saltwater pond or lagoon.

            While the pond is at sea level, it is separated from the ocean by a sand dune.

            This dune is artificially breached to maintain fish stocks. Otherwise it forms naturally.

            While the pond may be equally affected by sea level rise, the sand dune and pond protect the shoreline from wave erosion and storm surges.

            As pointed out in another comment, Martha’s Vineyard is not flat, and this area has about 10 feet of elevation—though I’m not exactly sure which house is involved and how high it actually is. Furthermore, I believe the island is hard rock and not sand that can be washed away like an atoll.

            In other words, if you wanted to purchase an exclusive waterfront property that is Fairly well protected against sea level rise, this would be a good example.

            Thus I believe the point you are trying to make is perfectly undermined by the example you provide. An own goal if you will.

            Sources:

            https://www.google.com/maps/place/Turkeyland+Cove+Rd,+Edgartown,+MA+02539/@41.362484,-70.5470978,1156m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x89e52e6da5d55435:0xc9ac674a5214fd7!8m2!3d41.366232!4d-70.541144!5m1!1e4?hl=en-us

            https://mvmagazine.com/news/2014/07/01/how-it-works-opening-great-pond

            https://www.topozone.com/massachusetts/dukes-ma/island/marthas-vineyard/

        • ana53294 says:

          So that’s what Barbra Streisand was trying to do!

        • Juanita del Valle says:

          The link claims that weather derivatives reflect climate models. It does not imply at all that the futures markets are anticipating a climate-induced crisis.

      • tossrock says:

        I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people telling me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis

        This is pretty clearly false, because when Greta Thunberg took a boat instead of a plane, the climate skeptic response was not, “Oh wow, she’s really serious, maybe I should take this more seriously”, it was “Pff, just another manipulative media stunt by a stupid girl”. Actually it was much, much worse than that, but this is perhaps the steelman version of the response.

        • Eric T says:

          Actually it was much, much worse than that

          Oh god I’m remembering that now. I actually saw someone who had that drawing of her being… well you know… on their car.

          ehhhehheheduhedueufnujgtujftifrkemvc

          I need mindbleach.

        • Statismagician says:

          Greta Thunberg is just a random Swedish teenager whose international relevance is 1,000% a manipulative media stunt, is the problem with that line of argument – if CNN or somebody starts using boats over planes for its official travel purposes, that would be a real substantive signal, but they haven’t.

        • anon-e-moose says:

          The pushback came when it was revealed that her boat trip required four additional support flights in order to happen. So it was a media stunt by definition-if she’d just flown directly, she would have contributed less carbon than she did using the yacht + support team.

        • souleater says:

          Greta Thunberg was a 9th grader who decided to protest climate change in August 2018, which generated such an upswell of support that she visted the UN 4 months later to give a speech calling the world leaders present immature. She was later nominated for a nobel peace prize.

          I think everything about Greta Thunberg is a publcity stunt.

          Her rise to fame is so odd and out of place that I suspect shes a character in an Orson Scott Card novel. +1 to simulation theorists I guess..

          • Nick says:

            I don’t see how there’s anything odd or out of place about it. You just have to consider who has the ability to produce an “upswell of support” around her.

        • ana53294 says:

          Because two crewmembers had to fly to take the boat back. It was calculated that her boat trip produced more CO2 than if she’d flown.

          Taking it seriously means making serious, calculated decisions rather than making performative stunts.

          Like not allowing people to go to a beach in Florida while sending sick people back to care homes.

    • Erusian says:

      It doesn’t surprise me. The wages of politicizing a profession is that the political opponents will discount everything they say. A political monoculture that produces evidence that always bends towards one party and is hugely disproportionately different from the general population is going to create populism. Not necessarily right wing populism, but populism.

      For example: You know why so many people deny climate science? They think the experts are lying to them (or fooling themselves) in pursuit of a political agenda. They are objectively correct. Not that climate change doesn’t exist but that the experts are lying to them or self-deceived in pursuit of specific policy goals. Why is it that the solutions are inevitably what the Democratic Party would want regardless of whether climate change is real? Why is it they inevitably involve giving more funding and power to the class making the predictions? If you think it’s because those are the objectively best policies and there are no good alternatives, you have a rather parochial view of policy.

      To be clear, I absolutely believe global warming is a real thing with real effects that we should fight. I think government action is probably needed and that we can benefit in net from fairly substantial investments in fighting climate change. But I don’t necessarily agree with all the solutions proposed.

      This is a real physician, heal thyself scenario. The scientific profession has no inherent right or privilege to be believed. Academics sitting around making snarky comments in cushy, posh bubbles as they take big institutional money makes the problem worse. They are making a series of unforced errors because they are walking around with one eye blind and have no intermediaries to explain the mistakes or retain trust among the majority of the population.

      • albatross11 says:

        This.

        If you want science, journalism, history, police reports, etc., to be taken at face value as the best available picture of the world, you can’t also tolerate activism using the labels and prestige of science, journalism, etc., to spread social truths that aren’t literally true or to suppress facts that might give the proles the wrong ideas. Once you start down that road, you’re a propagandist, not a scientist, and it now becomes very hard for anyone on the other side to believe you.

        This is one reason why it’s disastrous for us as a society to have politicized science and media to the point where people can and do visibly have their careers ended for crossing some ideological line, even when making a totally defensible factual statement. Every time you do that, you make it harder to buy the things some other scientist tells me that goes against my political goals or ideas, because I know full well that there are a bunch of people in various areas of science who dare not publish some true things, or who dare not investigate some important questions, or who must always make some kind of obeisance to a political dogma in their public statements/writings to avoid being purged.

    • Purplehermann says:

      Maybe science will focus more on… doing science instead of political activism if this happens?

      Maybe we’ll see a lot more replication studies, because people decide to check personally if the scientists are lying again?

      • Aftagley says:

        I don’t get this. If I do science, and my results find that political action is necessary… why should I be proscribed from taking that action?

        Dumb example: If I’m an astronomer and my research uncovers that aliens are coming to kill us, shouldn’t I take political action to unite against the extraterrestrial menace?

        Less dumb example: If I’m a marine biologist, and my science uncovers that fish stocks are depleting and will collapse unless we impose bans on fishing, shouldn’t I take political action to make those bans happen?

        Climate change example: If I”m a climatologist, and my science leads me to believe that we’re on track for a catastrophe, shouldn’t I take political action to avert that disaster?

        ETA: Fixed the homonym. TY Erusian !

        • Erusian says:

          why should I be prescribed from taking that action?

          Pedantic, but proscribed. Proscribed means forbidden, condemned, or punished. Prescribed is what you do with medicine. Sorry, that specific mix up is a pet peeve.

          Climate change example: If I”m a climatologist, and my science leads me to believe that we’re on track for a catastrophe, shouldn’t I take political action to avert that disaster?

          My response to this is yes. But you should expect, and not act like you’re too good for, political responses. That’s sort of where my disconnect is: if climate scientists want to make political change they should expect to have to engage in the political process, which is messy and includes making concessions and doesn’t include automatic unquestioning buying of their premises or beliefs. Likewise, they should expect they have just made themselves a legitimate political target. Why shouldn’t they?

          • Matt M says:

            Right, it takes some serious gall to show up at the door of Congress and say “my science requires political action” and then become indignant that some people who disagree with your proposed action have “politicized the science.”

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          Science can give advice about the risks of going to church, or going to protests. That is good. It should do that!

          Science cannot tell how to order different goals.

          • J.R. says:

            +1. See this article for a good summary.

            Science, as we are often told, has its special authority precisely because it is ruthlessly indifferent to the dictates of politics, religion, and brute preference. Paradoxically, this makes science a powerful political ally. But its power depends on public trust, and this trust is poisoned by the way science has become weaponized in political debates.

            A key feature of these debates is that they invoke science not just to bolster the political legitimacy of one side but also to deny the political legitimacy of the other. Succeed in attaching one of the labels anti-science, denialism, paranoid, irrational, or culture of fear to your opponent, and you elevate yourself as calm and rational while tarring your foe as a troglodyte whose opinions do not even deserve a hearing in enlightened company. This invocation of science reduces it to an instrument of political power—the very abuse this rhetoric claims to combat.

            More significant than the erosion of scientific trust, the weaponization of science is profoundly illiberal, and so undermines the political process itself. It betrays a cynicism about the capacity of open debate to secure proper resolution of political disputes. What gradually takes the place of open debate is a power play to exclude our opponents as legitimate participants in the political process, usually by labeling them foes of reason.

        • Purplehermann says:

          You can take political action. However this will distract from your efforts to advance your science, and puts your science at risk of not being trusted. The more you do this, and the less checkable your claims the more risk.

          All it takes is incongruence from a few members of the people pushing this to create distrust.

          I think it generally better to leave politics to politicians, activism to activists, and science to scientists

        • gbdub says:

          Science can identify problems that need a political solutions. It can estimate the impact of various proposed solutions. But there is a wide gulf between, “in order to reduce global temperature rise below X degrees you must cut carbon emissions by Y%” and, “You must pass this particular set of multi-trillion dollar proposals to effect said reduction in carbon”. The farther you stray down the path of “you must take this Political action at this Time”, the more you are doing “political activism” and the less you are doing “science”. If nothing else, politics involves a lot of trade offs between multiple issues at any given time and your expertise almost certainly doesn’t cover all of them.

          Which is not to say scientists should not be allowed or encouraged to engage in political activism. But what they absolutely should not do, but I think often do, is accuse people who disagree with their politics of being “anti-science”.

        • albatross11 says:

          There’s nothing wrong with taking political action, but there’s a whole lot wrong with letting your political goals override your commitment to the truth.

        • John Schilling says:

          I don’t get this. If I do science, and my results find that political action is necessary…

          Then you are mistaken. Scientific results can never find that political action is necessary, because “necessary” involves value judgements and other people have different values than yours. Reconciling different values is what politics is for and science is not.

          Scientific results can make predictions about the consequences of actions, or of inaction. But even if your scientific results predict that the consequence of inaction will be a thing you see as a catastrophe and the consequence of a particular countermeasure would be to avert that catastrophe, then

          A: To people with different values, the “catastrophe” may not actually be catastrophic

          B: To people with different values, the cost of your proposed countermeasure may constitute a greater catastrophe

          C: You haven’t considered all the other possible countermeasures with their own tradeoffs.

          As a scientist, you can legitimately say “The consequence of X will be Y”. When you say “It is necessary that we do Z to avoid catastrophe”, you’re taking off your scientist hat and you ought to make it clear you’re taking off your scientist hat.

        • J Mann says:

          If I do science, and my results find that political action is necessary… why should I be proscribed from taking that action?

          I’d say at a minimum, science requires you to show your work.

          If an epidemiologist said “my model shows that the protests will result in the loss of 7,512 lives from coronavirus and 57 lives from violence, plus $1.3 million in property damage and police over time, but it will save 12,014 lives by reducing systemic racism, here is the model and the data,” then I agree that the epidemiologist tried to do science.

          Alternatively, if the epidemiologist said the first part, then said “whether to protest is a policy decision that depends on your assumptions about the probability of the protests doing more good by reducing systemic racism,” that’s OK too.

          But when epidemiologists just declare, on the basis of being epidemiologists, that their intuitions about which protests are OK have priority, they’re not IMHO doing science.

          At most, they’re arguing from authority. (Which isn’t nothing from a Bayesian perspective, but it’s not IMHO science).

    • souleater says:

      I was always a global warming skeptic, but trusted the medical community’s advice when it came to Covid.

      I don’t have a medical background, and while the expert’s claim that we shouldn’t wear masks, and that wearing a mask was harmful, seemed obviously wrong to me, I trusted the expertise of experts instead of my own judgment.

      I feel like a fool for trusting our medical community and not buying masks when I had the chance. In the future, I’ll be going with my gut, and common sense over the advice of the “experts”. I would greatly prefer for our society to have highly trained, trustworthy, and apolitical experts to rely on. But it seems obvious to me that they knowingly misrepresented the mask situation in order to preserve medical supplies for themselves, at the expense of people who trusted them. I am still very angry that they abused my trust in them.

      Fool me once shame on them.

    • I’m more skeptical on climate change, mainly the consequences rather than the climate science part, than you are. But I think the fundamental problem is analogous to the problem that if you set up a measure for something you want to target you end up targeting the measure (teaching to the text) rather than the thing it measures.

      You start with a scientific establishment that is reasonably objective and reliable. So people take “prominent scientist, or scientific organization, says X” as good evidence that X is true. Now there are people who want some X to be believed. As a first step, they find individual scientists who agree with them and report the story as
      “scientists say.” Further along, if there are enough people on their side, they get scientists who agree with them to volunteer for positions within scientific organizations that let them speak for the organization. Still further, they try to make sure that the journals they control don’t publish anything offering evidence against X, and do their best to pressure journals they don’t control. They try to make it easier to get jobs in the field if you agree with X, harder if you disagree.

      By the time the process has run all the way, the scientific establishment is no longer objective and reliable when it comes to anything related to X.

      For the specific case of climate, one sign is that when, rarely, someone publishes a paper weakening some part of the climate catastrophist story, he is almost always careful to include something making it clear that he still thinks climate change is a serious problem.

  82. Eric T says:

    But a few Days after I proclaimed my love for the Falcon 9 in the last OT, Elon is at it again, this time pushing for SpaceX to focus on the next generation of rocket.

    I am dubious about some of the Starship claims, especially this one:

    SpaceX is developing Starship with the goal of launching as many as 100 people at a time on missions to the moon and Mars.

    Maybe launching 100 people at once to the Moon is possible, but certainly we should at least succeed in sending ONE dude to Mars before we try to send 100 at the same time?

    However as I have established in the past, SpaceX has beaten my skepticism routinely. I’m not sure if this means I should update my preference here though, because every fiber of my being says this is absurd.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      If you want to launch 100 people at once to Mars, you have to start that process very early, before all the prerequisite technologies are complete and fully tested.

      There are a lot of things we need for a Mars mission, like in-situ resource production, methane engine, and super-heavy lift. We are capable of working on more than one of them at a time, and need to if we are going to get it done in the next 40 years.

    • Purplehermann says:

      I assume it will go through an insane anount of testing before even 1 person is sent.

      If anyone dies on his rocket that could set him back a lot

    • gbdub says:

      I have long maintained that Falcon 9 was a good idea that was going to work, eventually (just not on Elon’s constantly insanely optimistic timetables or meeting his grandiose claims about basically just paying for the cost of fuel like an airliner). It was “incrementally radical” basically tacking a few key innovations onto a basically conservative, proven design philosophy. It served an obvious market need. Now that most of the kinks are worked out, SpaceX can print money by launching them at a quick pace and low cost relative to the competition, even if the pace and cost aren’t as radically different as Elon once claimed.

      But I’m really skeptical of Starship. For one, it doesn’t really seem to have a market outside Elon’s PowerPoints. Nobody needs that much capacity for anything, if anything the launch market seems over saturated. For another, it seems to rely on tech that is simply not ready for prime time. They’ve blown up 4 of them already, all seemingly failures of the very technology (welded stainless steel tanks/structures) that are supposed to enable the whole thing. Maybe I’m completely wrong and Starship really will fly and be a game changer (but if it does, I’d bet heavily on more like a 10 year timeline than the usual “test flights next year” that seems to be Elon’s default claim for everything). But I don’t think we can rule out the possibility that Starship is Elon’s Spruce Goose.

      • Thomas Jorgensen says:

        It probably will work… Once they stop trying to weld them and go to someone with a licence to forge nuclear pressure vessels. – What Musk wants is something steel can do, but the applicable parallels all shun welding like the plague, and where it cant be avoided, follow the welder around with an x-ray machine.

        • gbdub says:

          Right, but if you can’t weld it you probably can’t meet the cost and performance goals that the program counts on to make any sense.

          • keaswaran says:

            This sounds structurally a lot like Hyperloop and Boring, where something is promised to have certain cost and performance advantages, but in order to do what is claimed, it doesn’t seem plausible that it can have those advantages.

        • gbdub says:

          I’d also add that Falcon 9 was a useful, marketable rocket even before the crazy stuff like a reusable first stage, super chilled propellants, etc. worked. It doesn’t really matter that Dragon got too heavy to soft-land, because ocean landing was a workable option. The goofy fairing catcher ship probably won’t ever be really reliable, but who cares.

          Starship seems much more all-or-nothing – if any of it doesn’t work, the whole thing falls apart.

      • tossrock says:

        For one, it doesn’t really seem to have a market outside Elon’s PowerPoints. Nobody needs that much capacity for anything, if anything the launch market seems over saturated.

        There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.

        – Ken Olson, maybe

        Nobody needs that much capacity today, for launching communications satellites. But revolutionary products create their own markets. If access to space is an order of magnitude cheaper, new markets (like space tourism, space manufacturing, etc) may appear. They also may not! But as Thiel said, “never bet against Elon”.

    • Aftagley says:

      IMO the correct perspective on Musk should be cautious optimism that around 1/2 of the things his companies set out to do will be successful while ignoring everything he says publicly. This kind of bridges that policy, so I’m going to err on “ignore it until I see a prototype.”

    • cassander says:

      the cost of sending 100 people is considerably less than 100x the cost of sending 1, and the capability of sending 100 is considerably more valuable than that of sending 1. I’m not sure where the optimal point is, but 100 doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable.

      • Eric T says:

        the cost of sending 100 people is considerably less than 100x the cost of sending 1, and the capability of sending 100 is considerably more valuable than that of sending 1. I’m not sure where the optimal point is, but 100 doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable.

        I totally agree, but this seems like quite the jump. How many did Challenger have, 7 right? The leap to be able to put 14x as many people in space at once while also trying to be able to perform the first manned spaceflight to Mars seems like maybe too many balls being juggled at a time.

    • Etoile says:

      I remain cautiously optimistic at seeing Mars within Musk’s lifetime (absent some kind of catastrophe) because honestly, someone just saying “I will make private space flight, including of people” and then doing it is enough of a resume to at least award some benefit of the doubt.
      One can probably ignore the marketing and timetables though.

    • DarkTigger says:

      I know nothing about SpaceX plans, but the old claim “if you are in orbit you are half way to anywhere”, is still true.
      If you are able to shoot up 100 people at a time up there, bringing parts to construct an spaceship large enough to bring them to Mars is also possible. Also if you bring 100 people at once, it probably gets easier to bring specialists + backup for most expected problems. But I think the first If in this paragraph carries a lot of load.

      • Eric T says:

        I know nothing about SpaceX plans, but the old claim “if you are in orbit you are half way to anywhere”, is still true.
        If you are able to shoot up 100 people at a time up there, bringing parts to construct an spaceship large enough to bring them to Mars is also possible. Also if you bring 100 people at once, it probably gets easier to bring specialists + backup for most expected problems. But I think the first If in this paragraph carries a lot of load.

        Not true for manned spaceflight – you do have to get off of Mars too! Unlike the (comparatively) easily escapable moon, launching back from Mars is going to be rather tricky no? Especially if you need to launch a rocket larger than any that has ever been launched here on Earth?

        • DarkTigger says:

          Well on the one hand the Musky-Boy does not seem to really want the people to get back, isn’t he?
          On an more serious hand. You can send 100 people to a Mars orbit, and just send 5 – 10 down. You would still have the advantage to have a big crew in oribt, that can react a lot faster if something goes wrong, but don’t have to pull all of them back from Mars gravity well.

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          you do have to get off of Mars too!

          Do you?

        • gbdub says:

          The moon is less easily escapable than you think. It’s easier (in terms of energy) to get to the orbit of Mars, or land on one of its moons, than to land on Luna. Actually it is easier to land on Mars because you can do most of the deceleration with aerobraking.

          Getting off Mars is hard, but only a bit more than twice as hard as getting off the moon.

          • Wrong Species says:

            Isn’t it hard enough that you need to send supplies ahead of time?

          • gbdub says:

            It might be a good idea, but it’s not strictly required. It’s all the tyranny of the rocket equation.

            Practically speaking, sure, it might be better to send a diaposable craft ahead filled with gas so your crew vehicle only needs enough fuel to land and can gas up for the return trip. Otherwise you need even more fuel to land the fuel you need to fly your big rocket home.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          Unless you are dealing with something too small for humans, any craft landing on Mars intended to later launch Mars is likely to produce its fuel using in-situ resource production.

          There are some things about this that make it riskier — if your in-situ resource production fails, your mission fails.

          But there are things that make it safer — you can verify that you have a fully-fueled return craft waiting for you on Mars before you launch.

    • John Schilling says:

      Maybe launching 100 people at once to the Moon is possible, but certainly we should at least succeed in sending ONE dude to Mars before we try to send 100 at the same time?

      Disclaimer: I think Elon is smoking the good stuff when he says Starship can carry people to Mars 100 at a time. I’m only about 50-50 on Starship working at all, ever, but if it does work its maximum passenger capacity to Mars will be double digits at best, and for useful capacity (i.e. with enough equipment and supplies to do anything but say “we made it”) the first digit will probably be a one.

      But:

      Columbus had eighty-nine people on his first expedition, of which about half stayed in the New World to establish a mini-colony. And Werner von Braun’s first proposal for a manned Mars mission, as published in Colliers IIRC, was for seventy men.

      The only reason to send one or two or six people to “explore” a strange new world, is if the thing you’re really after is the status points from getting there six months before the other guy. See also Peary at the North Pole and Amundsen at the South. And the historical track record of this sort of expedition is, fifty years later the place is still an uninhabited wasteland that you haven’t done anything with.

      If the plan is to settle, colonize, or develop a world (which for SpaceX it definitely is), you need a transportation system that can carry hundreds of people even if not all on one vehicle. That’s going to have almost no overlap with a bare-bones kludge of transportation system designed to carry half a dozen people. And the things you’ll need to learn are not “will my transportation system deliver the crew alive?”; you should know that with fairly high confidence before you send any number of people.

      What you need to learn is how to transport large numbers of people and material economically and sustainability. How to live on the world for long periods, which almost certainly means figuring out what local resources you can use and how, what construction techniques are appropriate, what crops to grow, etc, etc. And what you can profitably sell to the Earthlings who will be building your rocket ships for you. Half a dozen people aren’t going to figure out enough of that to make a difference. Odds are, they’re going to spend most of their time dealing with your highly specialized half-a-dozen-poeple-only systems.

      And picking a lot of low-hanging scientific fruit, which can be useful in its own right. But it isn’t enough.

      If I were designing a permanent lunar base or colony, almost everything I would want to know is either, A: stuff we knew before Neil Armstrong took his small step, B: stuff we’ve learned since without going past Earth orbit, and C: stuff we still don’t know because twelve men spending a few days each on the Moon didn’t even scratch the surface. So if I see someone spending $bignum on the very specialized systems needed to put a couple of astronauts on Mars, I’m going to conclude that they’re mostly interested in flags and footprints, that the scientific community will go along for the virtual ride and be happy with their low-hanging fruit but then move on to the next-easiest target, and that nothing of substance will come of it.

      Go big or stay home.

    • @Eric T

      Maybe launching 100 people at once to the Moon is possible, but certainly we should at least succeed in sending ONE dude to Mars before we try to send 100 at the same time?

      I wonder why we don’t entirely focus on Moon bases to begin with. Mars isn’t greatly more hospitable than the Moon. On both Mars and the Moon, you need to live inside enclosed and pressurized capsules with breathable air, and although Mars has higher surface gravity, it’s still a fraction of Earth’s. I don’t think we’ll make a self-sufficient base for a long time, so we should use space bases as an experiment like we do with the ISS. In that vein, it makes way more sense to colonize the Moon first, because neither Mars nor Lunar bases will be self-sufficient for a long time, but the Moon has the distinct advantage of being much closer if things go wrong.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        Maybe neither celestial body has any economic value other than science, or tourism when Earth gets far far wealthier, but the scientists who colonize Mars will terraform a breathable atmosphere by planting traditional academic foliage like ivy and hemp, which the Moon can’t support.

        • Lambert says:

          It’s probably much easier to make realistic red brick from martian regolith than lunar.

      • Lambert says:

        Moon dust sucks. There’s no atmosphere to erode it so it’s incredibly sharp and it’s havily affected by static electricity and it’s probably awful for your lungs and it wears down any moving parts it gets into. And there’s no atmosphere to stop it flying hundreds of metres on a ballistic trajectory when a rocket plume inpinges on it.

        Also Mars’ atmosphere and hydrosphere are useful, even though they’re much less than what Earth has. You can do ISRU and make oxygen and water for life support much more easily than on the moon.

        • AG says:

          Doesn’t that make training on the moon even more useful, then? If it can survive on the moon, then Mars will be a cakewalk.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            We can’t have “start with the Moon because it’s easier” and then, when we find it to be harder, say, “exactly, start with the Moon because it’s harder!”

            A lot of the big challenges we learn from colonizing the Moon will not be useful for Mars. We won’t need to figure out how to recycle carbon at 100%, or how to survive micrometeorites, or how to efficiently strip oxygen from the lunar regolith, or how to survive a 2-week night at -150 Celsius and a 2-week day at +120 Celsius, or how to handle direct exposure to cosmic rays long-term, or how to make sure everyone must have a solar storm shelter within a few hours available at all times to not suffer likely prompt death.

          • AG says:

            Going to the moon is logistically easier. Surviving on the moon is technologically harder.

            I’ll concede your other points, though arguably those things are useful for the trip to Mars (even stripping oxygen from regolith, since that opens up some resource replenishing via asteroids or something on the way).

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        There are lots of things that make Mars more hospitable than the Moon, besides gravity.

        – Day/night cycle like Earth’s.
        – Much easier temperature ranges.
        – Carbon and probably nitrogen available locally.
        – Oxygen much easier to extract than ripping it out of rocks.
        – Local water.
        – Atmosphere provides protection against micrometeorites and radiation.

        You can fix some of the above by going for the lunar poles.

        The energy to get to the Moon is about the same as the energy to get to Mars. The launch windows for getting to/from the Moon are more frequent.

      • bullseye says:

        One advantage of the Moon is travel time; if things go sideways they can get home or we can send help a lot faster.

  83. Beans says:

    I am now seeing a screed going around, that universities I am affiliated with are taking seriously enough to acknowledge, demanding a halt to academic activity. Evidently this will somehow do something about racism.

    Predictably, the institutional response is to not actually shut themselves down, but keep going as normal and throw in some perfunctory words about taking some time to remember to not be racist. I think this is an appropriate response, since halting all academic and research activity benefits precisely nobody. Of course, those systems have problems of their own, but that’s not what this is about. Maybe if you’re tenured you can just stop what you’re doing for awhile and feel self-righteous about it, but for the multitude of students and non-tenured researchers whose livelihood depends on continuing to do what they do, stopping everything for ill-defined, politicized reasons will just ruin people’s lives/careers and do nothing to stop racism.

    In the aforementioned screed, there is a particular sentence that highlights one of my primary disagreements with the current cultural climate in educated liberal bubbles: “Unless you engage directly with eliminating racism, you are perpetuating it.” This can be generalized to the statement “Unless you engage directly with eliminating X, you are perpetuating X.”. This is obviously absurd. Just because I am not actively working to, for instance, lower the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of mars, does not mean that I am contributing to that amount.

    In general, I want to take actions that I have some reasonable evidence will actually have a desired effect, not take dramatic steps without some consideration of their consequences. We need to think about our actions and figure out what their consequences are, and certainly, some of our actions are bad and contribute to bad systems! But if we want a world that works, randomly shutting things down out of emotional fervor will not help our progress. Unfortunately, the purity spiral that seems to drive much recent activity in social justice is not friendly to cautioned action. Unless you’re all-in, no questions asked, you’re the enemy. Thus, even though I am entirely in favor of fair, kind, and reasonable treatment of people, the fact that I do not immediately purge from my life all thoughts and actions that do not directly benefit Social Justice makes me an enemy of the people.

    If that’s the way we’re going to do this, then fine: I’m an enemy of the people. враг народа!

    • Aftagley says:

      “Unless you engage directly with eliminating racism, you are perpetuating it.” This can be generalized to the statement “Unless you engage directly with eliminating X, you are perpetuating X.”. This is obviously absurd. Just because I am not actively working to, for instance, lower the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of mars, does not mean that I am contributing to that amount.

      This statement only obviously fails for systems you are clearly not a part of. For example, your mars counterexample works because you are not on mars and have nothing to do with it’s CO2 count. But if we change mars to earth, well, now you are contributing to the total amount; in a minute way, sure, but you’re a factor. A better version of the argument would be “If you are in a system that includes X, unless you engage directly with eliminating X, you are perpetuating X.”

      So the crux of this argument is – do you think you’re part of a system that has some inherent systemic racism?

      • Beans says:

        This is all reasonable, and for me personally, my answer is: Yes!, and therefore, I want to figure out which of my interactions with the system are having good and bad consequences, and I want to be able to actually discuss and debate the facts in order to determine what the best next steps are. But I don’t want to jump headfirst into grandiose rhetoric that I’m not allowed to question, but that is a lot of what I feel like I am getting from the people around me, these days.

      • SamChevre says:

        +1

      • zzzzort says:

        Would you disagree that academia is a system? Or an academic department? Certainly there are obligations (peer review, sitting on grant review committees), and methods of feedback (every faculty serves on some sort of committee, hiring decisions are often subject to a vote) much stronger than a city.

        • Eric T says:

          But I’d assume that most people don’t think their individual departments are perpetuating racism

          This right here is the point though. Us SJ types argue that yeah, you don’t think it’s happening but it is so it would be helpful for you to take a day, examine your biases a bit, and move on from there.

          We all have subconscious biases we are unaware of. I was told interrogating them and trying to challenge them was a core principal of the Rationalist community no? ;P

        • zzzzort says:

          If most people think that other departments perpetuate racism, but not their own, then it seems like they should figure out what’s going on, because that isn’t logically consistent.

        • Eric T says:

          I don’t know about that. I think other people commit murder but that I (and people so close to me that I’m morally responsible to police their actions) do not, and I’m pretty sure I’m correct.

          I would counter that it’s a lot easier to know if you committed murder than if you are engaging in any behaviors that are actually X-ist (this thinking can apply to class or sex too, not just race!). If you think you are always perfectly aware of whether or not you’re not being “X-ist” I think you have a much higher opinion of your own self-awareness than the average person should.

          Similarly if it were the case that people could somewhat unknowingly commit murder, I’d probably support a strike where everyone stops to figure out if they’ve murdered people.

        • Eric T says:

          I liked this meta-analysis personally. I found its definition of Implicit Bias very fair, and thought its inclusion criteria was good. I hope you appreciate it because it actually argues AGAINST my point – it purports that is very hard to change implicit bias through conscious effort.

          In particular I liked the simple way they broke down implicit/explicit bias.

          Measures were considered implicit if they did not require the target association to be actively brought to mind. For example, the Black/White good/bad IAT requires participants to categorize Black faces, White faces, positive words, and negative words, but it does not require them to introspect about their feelings about Black people relative to White people.
          Measures were considered explicit if they required the target association to be actively brought to mind. For example, a survey item asking “How warm do you feel toward Black people?” requires participants to actively assess their personal feelings about Black people

        • Beans says:

          I would counter that it’s a lot easier to know if you committed murder than if you are engaging in any behaviors that are actually X-ist (this thinking can apply to class or sex too, not just race!). If you think you are always perfectly aware of whether or not you’re not being “X-ist” I think you have a much higher opinion of your own self-awareness than the average person should.

          Once overt racism has been shown to be absent from a given context, but very subtle covert racism is being argued to still be active, I become suspicious. Not because it can’t be happening: it can, we are certainly unaware of our biases in all sorts of contexts. But this gets tricky.

          Being accused of being racist is serious, in the present context, but when the alleged racism is so subtle, it is very hard to prove its existence one way or the other. The problem is that in these cases, people who seem to have some personal interest in finding racism assume by default, axiomatically, that if overt racism is absent, there must be some covert racism still lurking. Hence an infinite string of committee meetings and money thrown around to try and root out the racism. The HR people hosting the racism workshops are presumably getting paid for this, but it’s hard to see who else benefits.

          This reminds me of how the concept of god as sold to modern people is often something really abstract and unfalsifiable, whereas in the past, the god-claims were much bolder and totally falsifiable, but we’ve learned that they were wrong, so those with an investment in maintaining the notion of god in the present make him subtle enough to be un-probe-able by direct analysis.

          I’m sure subtle racism exists and so on. But when it gets this subtle, how sure are we that it is concretely responsible for a given problem X or Y or Z? Seems to me that we absolutely aren’t and could get along fine discussing it much less with little lost.

          Occasional self-reflection and all that is good and reasonable, though, we should always keep examining our biases as a general rule.

        • I think one issue in the “perpetuating racism” claim is the difference between causing a problem and not helping to fix a problem. From one angle they seem the same, but to most people in most contexts they are not.

          The Institute for Justice is a libertarian public interest law firm that litigates against things such as civil forfeiture and restrictive licensing. I will assume that Eric opposes civil forfeiture but doesn’t donate to IJ.

          Is then fair to accuse him of “perpetuating civil forfeiture”?

          I think most people would say not, would distinguish between acting to promote something and failing to act to prevent it. But a lot of the SJ “perpetuating racism” rhetoric appears to treat the two as equivalent.

        • Eric T says:

          The Institute for Justice is a libertarian public interest law firm that litigates against things such as civil forfeiture and restrictive licensing. I will assume that Eric opposes civil forfeiture but doesn’t donate to IJ.

          Is then fair to accuse him of “perpetuating civil forfeiture”?

          I’d actually say that it is in fact fair (however as you may have guessed from how many times I’ve brought up Civil Forfeiture in this very thread, I’ve got issues with it, and I’ve been taking other actions against that one like protesting, among other things, hell arguably just yelling about it here is “fighting it”) – so maybe the wrong example XP

          I’m actually a big believer there is no action/inaction distinction – if you don’t fight X or Y thing, you’re contributing to it or at least a tiny bit responsible for it. I am indeed a Bad Man because instead of donating $15 to like the AMF or MIRI or whatever EAs think is great these days, I bought a cheeseburger. (My actual view is a bit more nuanced than that – but I think it’s helpful to understand it comes from that angle)

          I think this feeds into a slightly more interesting discussion – what do you have to do to be considered “fighting” something. I think a common issue with the SJ people I see is that they have a very narrow description of that.

      • albatross11 says:

        I will admit I have a knee-jerk negative reaction to coerced expressions of political, social, religious, etc., belief, as a way of demonstrating your innocence or atoning for some kind of alleged sin.

      • AlexOfUrals says:

        If you are in a system that includes X, unless you engage directly with eliminating X, you are perpetuating X.

        That doesn’t help a bit. We are all parts of the systems that include racism, sexism, homophobia, poverty, war, deadly diseases and a million of other awful things including death as a phenomenon and the end of human civilization. Not in some cosmic sense, we pay money to the governments and companies that – deliberately or not, either through action or failure to act – perpetuate all of it and much more. Can you, or anyone, honestly say that you engage directly in eliminating all of these Xs? And if no, I don’t think everyone should constantly feel guilty about it. And if you think they should why isolate the demand for virtue to one particular cause?

    • DarkTigger says:

      Are you the Battleship Beans? Why don’t you have the link to your blog in the name?

      I think this is complicated. On the one hand all “if you’re not part of the solution you are part of the problem”, claims make me inherently distrustful. On the other hand systematic racism in it’s Motte meaning obviously lives from nobody trying to change it.

      • Beans says:

        And so I say, let’s try to change it, but let’s think about how to do it right. The current mob is not thinking that clearly, and it actively discourages clear thinking, so I cannot trust it.

        (No, I’m not that guy! Coincidence.)

      • j1000000 says:

        The battleship commenter is bean, singular

    • metalcrow says:

      Gonna strongly +1 this. A lot of the more radical statements coming out of this movement, especially “If you’re not with us, you’re against us”, is freaking me the hell out and seems pretty blatantly bad for both the movement and anyone around it (i.e. everyone). I take comfort in the fact that i don’t think anyone reasonable actually agrees with this, and the hyper-woke who are espousing it will naturally just get so radical they start their own separate movement.

      • Beans says:

        I also think that most reasonable people don’t agree with this, but I’m freaked out by the fact that many intelligent people I know are happy to advocate for it anyway. Things are clearly dramatic enough that either 1. people actually agree with this nonsense or 2. they’re scared enough of becoming a dissident that they proclaim things they don’t really believe, which is miserable.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        Ben Stein writes:

        I got a call from my friend Myra, a woman of about 60 whose parents had survived the Holocaust. She had come down to look at real estate in the desert, then come over to our club to cadge a swim in our pool. Her hotel pool is closed because of COVID.

        Our house is 30 seconds from the front gate, but she managed to get very lost and called me 10 times to cry and complain. Finally, the club security took her to our house.

        She cried some more and then told us about her ordeal leaving Westwood, a fairly good neighborhood in L.A. where UCLA is and where she lives.

        “The protesters were blocking the 405 [freeway],” she said. “They wouldn’t let me through unless I shouted ‘black lives matter,’ so I did that and then they wanted me to make a sign that said ‘black lives matter,’ and I had some poster board and a magic marker in my front seat so I made one, and they applauded, and let me through.”

        She cried a lot more and added, “And then I tore it up and I threw up.”

        • Matt M says:

          Logistical question – are Apple/Google maps routing people around known protest/blocked roads… or does forcing people into them without warning count as part of their very-public commitment to fighting for racial equality or whatever?

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Unless they specifically programmed it otherwise, I would think protest-heavy areas would show up as congestion and they’d route around.

        • Well... says:

          Does it set off red flags for anyone that this woman happened to be driving around with posterboard and markers in her front seat when she was ostensibly on her way to the desert to look at property?

          Ben Stein also writes:

          You have to be a black leftist, white-hating white, or some other form of maniac to get along in today’s world.

          Hear that whooshing sound? I like Ben Stein as an actor/game show host/Republican-in-Hollywood — he’s endearing as hell — but that’s the sound of his credibility on this topic blowing out the window under high pressure.

          • Erusian says:

            Does it set off red flags for anyone that this woman happened to be driving around with posterboard and markers in her front seat when she was ostensibly on her way to the desert to look at property?

            No, because it’s very common for real estate, especially rural real estate, to make do with handmade signs. I’ve seen lots of rural property, including in the west, using such signs. Hell, I once saw an abandoned amusement park with one of those large posterboards I used in middle school stapled to the ticket booth specifying the price, acreage, and who to contact.

            I’m not sure I agree with the whole framing but this doesn’t set off any alarm bells. And I don’t think it would to anyone who commonly deals in rural property.

          • Eric T says:

            My respect for Ben Stein went out the window when he wrote:

            The idea of calling this poor young man unarmed when he was 6’4″, 300 pounds, full of muscles, apparently, according to what I read in The New York Times, on marijuana. To call him unarmed is like calling Sonny Liston unarmed or Cassius Clay unarmed. He wasn’t unarmed. He was armed with his incredibly strong, scary self.

            about Michael Brown. Like.. come on man.

          • FLWAB says:

            My respect for Ben Stein went out the window when he wrote:…about Michael Brown. Like.. come on man.

            What is there to lose respect about? As far as the best experts can tell (re, the FBI, the US Department of Justice, and the grand jury that declined to indict him) Wilson was telling the truth when he said that Brown first tried to take his gun, and then later turned and charged him. Given that, you don’t think a 6’4″ 300 pound man charging at you is a danger to your life?

          • albatross11 says:

            It’s maybe worth remembering that both the grand jury investigation of Darren Wilson (the policeman who shot Brown) and the justice department’s independent investigation found no wrongdoing on the part of Wilson. The available physical evidence supported Wilson’s testimony, as did some but not all of the (contradictory) eyewitness testimony. And while I have little interest in Ben Stein or other talking heads on TV, it’s also worth remembering that the initial coverage of the shooting definitely did not convey the idea that Brown was a big, physically imposing guy who might plausibly have looked like a serious threat to Wilson. And this followed much the same pattern as the shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman.

            The way it looks to me, US media outlets really want to tell a certain kind of story about police and race. And the result is that that story gets told, and facts inconvenient to that story either don’t get reported, or are at least de-emphasized. (Quick: what race was the policeman who shot Philando Castille?)

          • Well... says:

            @Erusian:

            I thought this woman was looking to buy some real estate in the desert, not advertise that she was selling some. Maybe I read it wrong and got confused?

            @Scoop:

            You don’t have to be a black leftist or a self-hating white or “any other kind of maniac” to decide that “the degree to which white racists currently cause disparities for black people” is not an appropriate workplace conversation topic. Point being, anyone can get along just fine if they know the basics of getting along!

            In a nutshell, Ben Stein was trying to say that the Overton window has shifted much farther to the left than it really has. I suspect he has forgotten that the circles he moves in (in Hollywood for example) are not representative of most of the rest of the country.

          • Erusian says:

            I thought this woman was looking to buy some real estate in the desert, not advertise that she was selling some. Maybe I read it wrong and got confused?

            Regardless of whether she was buying or selling, it’s a tool of the trade. It’s a little like looking at a locksmith who’s going to open a safe and then saying, “Isn’t it suspicious they just happen to have a set of lockpicks for opening house doors? Obviously they were planning a robbery!” I know at least one real estate agent that made a tidy bundle selling a convenient bag for carrying around signs, paper, markers, etc. It’s that common.

        • keaswaran says:

          Westwood is definitely not Bel Air or Brentwood or Beverly Hills. But it’s fancier than Palms or Koreatown. Probably somewhere between Culver City and Santa Monica, if you don’t mind students. By the standards of west side LA, “fairly good” actually seems about right.

      • Ketil says:

        especially “If you’re not with us, you’re against us”

        I think it is a deliberate attempt to alienate the outgroup, and that this is a common tactic for political movements of all stripes.

    • Eric T says:

      This is obviously absurd. Just because I am not actively working to, for instance, lower the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of mars, does not mean that I am contributing to that amount.

      Notice that you had to specify Mars – but you very much are contributing to the CO2 here on Earth. Like Aftagley said above, SJ people like meself would argue this is much more the CO2 on earth situation.

      But if we want a world that works, randomly shutting things down out of emotional fervor will not help our progress. Unfortunately, the purity spiral that seems to drive much recent activity in social justice is not friendly to cautioned action. Unless you’re all-in, no questions asked, you’re the enemy.

      Is this actually true? I’ve seen a lot of this rhetoric here in SSC (having flashbacks to a certain conversation about Leftist Lynch mobs) and I think its a bit hyperbolic. There are absolutely 100% people pushing whatever their Zeitgeist is at the time, and the extreme edges of the SJ community can be… vocal. But the idea that cautious support = you are the enemy just doesn’t match up with what my experience online, in person, at protests, or at university has been. I was very much a cautious supporter for a while, and I was welcomed in with open arms, and have since made the blood pledge to full SJW willingly (obviously this is partially facetious – but I really did find myself once thinking more in the “cautious support” category as you do).

      I have said this before and I’ll say it again, I caution against painting the Left with this brush of generalized intolerance that has become the like go-to on most of the Right-leaning places I interact with. I don’t think its accurate, rather born out of a low-number of high-profile incidents, but even if it is slightly accurate the way its discussed here I think is doing more harm to attempts to reach across the isle and engage productively than not.

      “Unless you engage directly with eliminating racism, you are perpetuating it.”

      For many of us SJ types, this line isn’t supposed to be some kind of purity-test thing. Rather I hope you’ll do me the charity of believing it’s more about how inaction is what allows injustice to foment.

      • Beans says:

        But the idea that cautious support = you are the enemy just doesn’t match up with what my experience online, in person, at protests, or at university has been.

        It matches enough of my experience to freak me out. If I’m exaggerating, then the onus will be on me for making that mistake.

        Rather I hope you’ll do me the charity of believing it’s more about how inaction is what allows injustice to foment.

        If one has the presence of mind to actually discuss things in more detail, as you have done here, than I am completely happy to extend that charity.

        From many others, in contrast, I feel an attempt to control, emotionally manipulate, and to polarize. I am by no means right-leaning and “social justice” in the general sense is something I want. But I don’t know how to digest a lot of what’s coming at me, these days.

        • Eric T says:

          It matches enough of my experience to freak me out.

          I am genuinely sad to hear that. I will never deny that the SJ movement needs to do a better job reaching out to moderate/ non-SJ types, and it disappoints me to see that we have failed again here. It is my firm belief these people are almost certainly just venting a long-building anger and frustration targeted at the system writ-large, not you specifically, and much of this anger is Hot Air, which will go away in time.

          From many others, in contrast, I feel an attempt to control, emotionally manipulate, and to polarize. I am by no means right-leaning and “social justice” in the general sense is something I want. But I don’t know how to digest a lot of what’s coming at me, these days.

          I would be more than happy to discuss anything further if you would like, either here or 1-on-1 (I posted my email somewhere in the OT, but to save you searching for it – ericjtannenbaum at gmail)

          I hope that, if I can do nothing else, I can help put your fears at ease.

          • Beans says:

            I would be more than happy to discuss anything further if you would like, either here or 1-on-1 (I posted my email somewhere in the OT, but to save you searching for it – ericjtannenbaum at gmail)

            Your openness is appreciated.

            I would probably be won over by groups with social justice goals but that have concrete evidence-based ideas and do not appeal to emotion to get support. Those must exist, but they also are likely to be drowned out by the large volume of hot air in recent years.

          • Eric T says:

            I would probably be won over by groups with social justice goals but that have concrete evidence-based ideas and do not appeal to emotion to get support.

            I’ll have to do my best to step up then.

        • keaswaran says:

          > I feel an attempt to control, emotionally manipulate, and to polarize

          And that exists all across the political and non-political spectrums. It would be nice to have some movement that didn’t have that element within it. But advocating purges of unwanted voices doesn’t sound like a good thing to be doing in this context.

          • Beans says:

            And that exists all across the political and non-political spectrums.

            And its not a coincidence how uncomfortable I feel in all sorts of them.

            But advocating purges of unwanted voices doesn’t sound like a good thing to be doing in this context.

            Who is doing that? I’d say let’s keep the voices, but encourage more thinking and less lemming-like behavior in the brains that control the voices.

      • anon-e-moose says:

        First and foremost, I (and others I’m sure) greatly appreciate more leftist/SJ/non-red representation. Truly. It’s very valuable.

        That said, I would like to anecdotally push back on:

        it’s more about how inaction is what allows injustice to foment.

        My interests overlap with some very, very lefty social groups (tiny houses/homesteading) and this sentiment is absolutely the northstar in these groups. To the point where if you don’t actively support BLM, you’re ostracized. This is bifurcating communities based on politics and leading to siloing.

        Ironically, this has been a boon for me personally, as it’s exposed me to folks more aligned with my social values. But this bifurcation is absolutely not creating more tolerance, but less. My prior tiny-house friends who didn’t split are now talking more with hard lefties, and the new folks I talk with have a lot more guns than the old group.

        • Eric T says:

          this sentiment is absolutely the northstar in these groups. To the point where if you don’t actively support BLM, you’re ostracized.

          It sounds like the groups you interact with are very very left indeed, based on my own interaction with the leftists who like the homesteading position. I hope if these protests have demonstrated everything, it’s that there is widespread leftist support for Social Justice among people who don’t fall on the extreme end of the spectrum. Sadly, all too often for both Leftists and Rightists (Is Rightists correct? It doesn’t sound correct) the vocal minority does a good job shouting down what the larger public believes.

          The vast majority of my SJ friends have at least “little c” conservative friends and none of them ostracize people for not actively supporting BLM. My best mate Nick was a card-carrying republican until last election cycle, and he’s a big part of our friend group that is 95% SJ-types. In college and in my debate league, while the group skewed left for sure, there were plenty of moderate lefts, grey-tribers, and the like.

          In the same way that I don’t legitimately believe the alt-right represents y’all I hope y’all won’t believe the whackos on twitter represent me.

    • zzzzort says:

      disclaimer, I personally know the organizers of the academic strike, and will be striking myself.

      stopping everything for ill-defined, politicized reasons will just ruin people’s lives/careers and do nothing to stop racism

      It’s a one day strike. At a time when most universities are shut down, out of term, or both. The advice to students (assuming we’re talking about the same strike, as there are two semi-independent ones) is “you should not do something that jeopardizes your grade or standing at your institution”

      We need to think about our actions and figure out what their consequences are, and certainly, some of our actions are bad and contribute to bad systems

      Tomorrow seems like a good day to do stop and do some serious thinking about how to make the system better.

      This is obviously absurd. Just because I am not actively working to, for instance, lower the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of mars

      You don’t live on mars, but if you work in academia then you contribute to the climate of academia, and imo you have some responsibility for making that climate better.

      Unless you’re all-in, no questions asked, you’re the enemy.

      If you don’t join the strike, I promise you won’t be the enemy of the people (if you proudly proclaim yourself to be an enemy of the people, that might be a different story). If you work from home as most of us do these days then literally no one will know either way. But even if you work publicly no one will hate you, the purpose of the strike is about taking time to make academia better for black people, not about shaming non-black people.

      • Two McMillion says:

        If you don’t join the strike, I promise you won’t be the enemy of the people (if you proudly proclaim yourself to be an enemy of the people, that might be a different story).

        Am I the enemy of the people if I loudly proclaim that I am not participating in the strike?

        • keaswaran says:

          If someone asks you to do a thing, and you loudly and publicly proclaim that you are not doing that thing, then yes, you have declared that there is an enemy relation between the two of you (though only people who believe that one of you two speaks for “the people” will believe that one of the two of you is an “enemy of the people”).

      • Beans says:

        I took the general concept as a jumping off-point for the airing of other, related grievances, which I continue to stand by. But if I misinterpreted the intention behind this specific academia-related strike, my fault. My reading of what I was linked about this recently did not specify in a way that I was able to absorb that the intention is for a single day. An occasional pause to evaluate one’s actions and circumstances is certainly a good thing.

      • but if you work in academia then you contribute to the climate of academia, and imo you have some responsibility for making that climate better.

        Sounds like a fine sentiment.

        My daughter attended Oberlin for two years. She found it to be a political monoculture. The general assumption was that if you disagreed you were either ignorant or evil. One result was that the only people who openly disagreed with left wing orthodoxy were the sort of people who liked exchanging insults right against left, the sort of people who make political parts of FB such a cesspool.

        That strikes me as a fault in the culture of academia — Oberlin may be an extreme example, but I have observed similar patterns elsewhere — that clashes with the claimed goals and principles of academia far more than anything to do with race.

        To be fair to Oberlin, what I am describing is the student culture. The faculty, by my daughter’s observation, had similar political views but were less intolerant.

        (If I am misreporting her experience, I expect she will correct me here)

        Do you disagree? If not, what are you doing, supposing that you work in academia, to make that climate better?

        • Rebecca Friedman says:

          Stupid or evil. “Ignorant” would be giving people who disagreed with them too much credit – you had to be really stupid to not immediately see they were right as soon as you encountered one of their arguments, was my impression. And the (eight, I think) people in the Libertarians And Republicans club weren’t, mostly, nasty, like most of the political internet today; they could write careful, reasonable arguments for their point of view, and did. They didn’t think everyone on the other side was either stupid or evil (they hardly could, there were eight* of them and they presumably knew people outside the club). They just liked getting into fights, had no problem with people yelling at them. Which worried me.

          The faculty were mostly fine; the one person who most notably wasn’t handled it extremely well when it was pointed out to him (by I suspect one of the top students in his class. In tears. But he did take it well) that there were problems with making constant anti-non-leftists jokes. (The person who less notably wasn’t was my first year, and I didn’t dare say anything.) But the students were toxic to anyone who wasn’t loudly One Of Them, or so it felt to me.

          *It might have been seven, I forget whether the number I have memorized was counting or not counting me.

        • zzzzort says:

          I agree in principle, though I think it’s less of a problem at the graduate+ level and outside of small schools (for the obvious reason that large schools will have student bodies more representative of the polarized public)

          I’d push back on saying this is more of a fundamental threat to the principles of academia though. A political ideology is much more of a choice than race, and one that many people form during their college years, so arguing for and against political positions is much more a core activity, even if the standards what constitute an argument are often lacking.

          Also, academia has often been a source of political organizing, e.g. tienanmin square, Korea’s April revolution, the velvet revolution, the anti-vietnam protests, etc. Honest question, should political organizing by students be considered a principle of academia or just a common feature?

          • I’d push back on saying this is more of a fundamental threat to the principles of academia though.

            Academia is supposed to be about finding and teaching truth. An environment where only one set of views is present, people are taught that only those views are defensible, and there is strong social pressure against anyone who argues for a different set of views, is not consistent with that goal.

            What fraction of those students do you think could do a halfway competent job of presenting the arguments against their positions?

            The problem isn’t people arguing for political views. I spent my freshman year writing up one or two page defenses of my views, taping them to the inside wall of the freshman union, and standing around arguing with people.

            The problem is that, with rare exceptions, only one set of political views is being argued for. Badly.

            As one would expect in such an environment.

    • Randy M says:

      Honestly, though, given that this:

      “Unless you engage directly with eliminating COVID-19, you are perpetuating it.”

      is pretty much literally true, your post has made me more open to the other version, manipulative as it is.
      I don’t really think racism is analogous to an infectious disease, though.

    • zzzzort says:

      The clear alternative to marches are stay at home protests like strikes!

    • Marlowe says:

      I agree. I look at what’s happening with a mix of bewilderment and sadness. I’m a STEM professor, and I know some signers of the petition. There’s a weird mix of complaints in this “Shutdown STEM” call for Wednesday that I don’t think accomplish anything. I could go on and on, but what bothers me the most is the not-so-implicit idea that the small number of African Americans in STEM is due to bias in academia. I’ve served on lots of hiring committees, which in general are falling over themselves to try to hire people from under-represented groups. These are liberal professors (including me), who would yearn for chances to further diversity. The issue, which is obvious if you’re on any committee, is that the candidates are *very* few; not uncommonly zero out of a hundred. The problems arise not at the “Ivory tower” level, but far earlier; if you want more African American scientists, work with K-12 students, insist on high math/science standards in all schools, etc.

      I do, in fact, work hands-on with underrepresented K-12 students. The signers of this statement that I know don’t do this. (Though I’m sure some do.) Instead, they like to view all these issues through a lens of “structural” issues orchestrated by cabals of old men who don’t exist. This then spreads to other pronouncements on structural racism: you shouldn’t use exams to evaluate people, because exams are racist; a miasma of unfalsifiable “implicit bias” drives all our thoughts; etc. The tone throughout is very much that of a if-you’re-not-with-us-you’re-racist witch hunt.

      Striking causes harm. The work I do is valuable; the students I interact with benefit from the interaction. (We’ve got classes in session.) If I’m going to strike, I need a far better justification than this sanctimonious, naive letter.

      I fully expect that my lack of participation in this strike, despite my actual work on equity and access, will mark me as one of the bad people.

      • Beans says:

        The issue, which is obvious if you’re on any committee, is that the candidates are *very* few; not uncommonly zero out of a hundred. The problems arise not at the “Ivory tower” level, but far earlier; if you want more African American scientists, work with K-12 students, insist on high math/science standards in all schools, etc.

        Absolutely. In my field, it’s clearly exactly the same. There is definitely a problem, but it doesn’t start where common rhetoric claims that it does.

    • Mark V Anderson says:

      “Unless you engage directly with eliminating racism, you are perpetuating it.”

      IMO, most of those who consider themselves to be actively fighting racism are instead enhancing it. The best way to be against racism is to try to be racially blind. This is hard because people are visual creatures and I think we are genetically wired to make quick decisions on what we see, including first impressions of other people’s appearance.

      Most of those fighting racism are bound and determined to make everything about race. Half the time when I hear an accusation of racism relating to some activity I am involved with, I hadn’t even noticed the race of the other people until racism was mentioned. These “anti-racists” make it very hard to be racially blind. This makes racism worse. This group Beans complains about is one of those groups causing racism.

      • cassander says:

        +1

      • DinoNerd says:

        The worst example I recall was an individual whose participation in an online group was criticized. I don’t recall their handle, but given the group, the chance of it being their real name was negligible. And it didn’t scream “this person is black” to the person who told me the story.

        At any rate, their reaction to this criticism was to howl that people were picking on them becase they were black. Much surprise was expressed – mostly about how they expected people to have reached through the internet and discovered this detail.

      • Randy M says:

        The best way to be against racism is to try to be racially blind.

        I agree with you, but the progressive side has moved so far beyond this that it is a bone fide scissor statement.

        • brmic says:

          Consider the numbers: Say 95 of 100 people are acting race-blind, and you have 5 people with various degrees of racial animus. Consider, how over a whole society 5 percentage points more of people work against the interests of a particular group and how that affects outcomes for the group. Consider – this is easiest with antisemitism – that there is small fraction of the population which will nonetheless over your lifetime remind you repeatedly, that they’d like to send you and your family to the ovens, and how that would affect you. Consider, that while 95% believe they act race-blind, only a fraction of them do, and the really race-blind are between 50 and 90% of the population.
          I’m sure you can see _why_ people argue ‘everybody giving themselves a pass’ is not sufficient. You don’t have to agree, but it should be obvious why people hold that opinion.

          • albatross11 says:

            brmic:

            It’s notable that both Jews and Asians in the US have indeed faced some fraction of the population hating them, and yet have done pretty well in society, including both having a higher average income and lower crime rate than Gentile whites, and disproportionately occupying positions of power and influence. A large fraction of the people at the top of media and finance and law are Jewish; a large fraction of professors in STEM subjects, doctors, and highly-paid STEM workers are Asian.

            That doesn’t mean they don’t run into prejudice, even really vile nasty prejudice by people who want them and their families dead. But it does make the model that says “things are worse for blacks than whites because of those 5-10% of racist people looking to screw them over” a lot less plausible.

          • baconbits9 says:

            Consider the numbers:

            How about we consider the actual numbers and not hypotheticals? How about we consider the number of people who were actively racist and actively tried to keep blacks down from 1860 through 2020. Is this the period with the most or the fewest realtive to overall population? Are the actual tools being used now more powerful than literal whips and chains, fire hoses, legal segregation, lynchings etc?

            I’m sure you can see _why_ people argue ‘everybody giving themselves a pass’ is not sufficient.

            In what way is it actually expected to make an impact?

          • Mark V Anderson says:

            @brmic
            I don’t understand what you are getting at. Yes, there will always be those that will not be racially blind, and some in the atrocious ways you indicate. Certainly we should denounce such people. In fact if we succeeded in making 95% of the people racially blind then in fact the 5% would feel very left out. Maybe some of them would even try out being racially blind to fit in with the crowd? If most people are moral, then conformity with the masses can be a good thing.

        • original-internet-explorer says:

          In theory the Left believes this and I expect the old Left still does.

          The rightist dark enlightenment and the liberal intellectual dark web claim the Left used entryism on the institutions. I think they did too – but the results look less like Marxism and more to be a hybridization of liberal and leftist doctrines. So much hybridization has occurred that people claiming to be right wingers are claiming they stand for equality of opportunity – which should be a horrible idea to them.

          Listening to the podcasts of Red Scare and Steve Bannon – same species different camo. We’re just a temporal shift from recognizing they’re the same animal. Pure partisans are endangered and their pedigree should be protected.

          This then is why the Culture War is getting worse – we’ve become too similar and are competing for the same niche.

          Bring back the extremists!

          • The original Mr. X says:

            In theory the Left believes this and I expect the old Left still does.

            I don’t know if you’ve seen the Pyramid of White Supremacy graphic which has been doing the rounds of social media, but “Colourblindness” is explicitly listed on it as an example of covert white supremacy. Of course, one graphic isn’t “the left”, but at least amongst the young, educated leftists I know, I don’t think that people believe the statement even in theory.

      • Ketil says:

        The best way to be against racism is to try to be racially blind.

        This works only against explicit individual racism, MLK style. The progressives and identitarians have long since left this viewpoint, since it doesn’t help at all with “systemic” or “structural” racism – i.e. the observable differences in outcome between ethnic (and other kinds of) groups.

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:

          “The progressives and identitarians have long since left this viewpoint, since it doesn’t help at all with “systemic” or “structural” racism – i.e. the observable differences in outcome between ethnic (and other kinds of) groups.”

          I wonder if we could have gotten farther if efforts had been made to teach people to see the people around them accurately rather than focusing on irrelevent factors.

        • Mark V Anderson says:

          The progressives and identitarians have long since left this viewpoint

          Yes and to the extent this is true they are enhancing racism. I have been trying for decades to make sense of the concept of systemic or structural racism and I still don’t get it. Upthread some folks seem to be defining it as Blacks being disadvantaged because of a history or racism.

          If that is truly the definition then I am all the more convinced that being racially blind is the best way to fix racism and those that bring racism into every issue inevitably make it worse. We can’t fix the past, only try to give people the best opportunities we can in the present. Think of all the possible disadvantages people have had in the past that negatively affects their present: being physically disabled, having bad parents, being disfigured in a fire, growing up in Appalachia, having terrible acne on the face, being autistic, born in a third world country, being very short, having mental illness, being deaf, going to jail for a trumped-up crime, low intellectual skills. All of these things will result in most people having problems today. I suspect many of the groups I mentioned have worse lives on average than the average Black. But most of these attributes we can’t change , and for none of them we can change the past. And I don’t think the best way to help people do better is to dwell on the past, but to give them opportunities in the present. Do the best you can to help disadvantaged people pull themselves up, and don’t be prejudiced against them in the present. That’s the way to a better world.

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            But most of these attributes we can’t change , and for none of them we can change the past. And I don’t think the best way to help people do better is to dwell on the past, but to give them opportunities in the present.

            I don’t disagree with any of this, but taking one of your other groups, say, “people who went to jail for a trumped up crime”–it seems weird to say that being “people who went to jail for a trumped-up crime”-blind would help give them opportunities; rather, we’d want to identify those who went to jail for a trumped up crime, and tailor the opportunities to them and their specific situation.

  84. FLWAB says:

    So James Bennet, the editor at the New York Times who approved the now infamous Tom Cotton opinion piece has now resigned. If there is any doubt that he chose to resign instead of being fired, it can be mostly put to rest by the comments of NYT publisher Sulzberger who wrote the following in a note to staff:

    Last week we saw a significant breakdown in our editing processes, not the first we’ve experienced in recent years. James and I agreed that it would take a new team to lead the department through a period of considerable change.

    In my general experience when a person resigns and their boss says that they agreed things needed to move in a new direction, it means they were fired but given the chance to keep their dignity by resigning.

    Personally, what little respect I had left for the New York Times is gone. They’ve made it clear that publishing opinion pieces that are unpopular with their staff is a firable offence, and that their staff is highly left wing. “All the news that’s fit to print” has been replaced with “What we see fit to print.”

    • Eric T says:

      Counterpoint: If you were the publisher at a major publication and you had been convinced, either through your staff or the general public, that an opinion piece you had let run actively put people’s lives in danger, it seems reasonable to maybe let go the person responsible for that.

      Before you push back on whether said opinion piece does or not – I believe it didn’t. However, last OT (I think, maybe this one? It all blends together) I read a couple of arguments that didn’t convince me, but certainly I think could have convinced a reasonable person.

      • souleater says:

        You have a lot of credibility with me so please let me know if I’m misrepresenting you, my understanding of your thesis is as follows:

        A reasonable person could believe that running a news article that puts peoples lives in danger should be a punishable/fireable offense

        I would agree with this thesis. I think many reasonable people might believe something if they haven’t put much thought into it. but if I could modify it slightly…

        A reasonable journalist could believe that running a news article that puts peoples lives in danger should be a punishable/fireable offense after carefully considering it

        I would completely disagree. Information that puts peoples lives in danger is a category so broad as to be meaningless, and by necessity only be enforced against policies that are disfavored by the NYT
        Depending on who decides what information is dangerous the new rule could include prohibitions on such things as:
        Advocating going to war with Iran
        Advocating in favor of the death penalty
        Advocating for increased firearms ownership
        Advocating for reducing firearms ownership
        Advocating in favor of the war on drugs
        Advocating in favor of ending the war on drugs
        Advocating for abortion
        Advocating for the protests despite Covid concerns
        Advocating against the protests due to Covid concerns

        If the New York Times is truly committing to no longer print information that could conceivably harm someone, then they simply can no longer be called a news organization by any definition of the word.

        • Eric T says:

          You have a lot of credibility with me so please let me know if I’m misrepresenting you, my understanding of your thesis is as follows:

          Aww thanks 🙂

          A reasonable journalist could believe that running a news article that puts peoples lives in danger should be a punishable/fireable offense after carefully considering it

          I would completely disagree. Information that puts peoples lives in danger is a category so broad as to be meaningless, and by necessity only be enforced against policies that are disfavored by the NYT

          So first, I think adding to this discussion the dimension Aftagley mentioned below (which partially in said discussion I referenced). It was a bad article, and part of the reason it was dangerous was it misrepresented the facts on the ground.

          I agree that perhaps “causes harm” is too weak a brightline, maybe updating to “incite violence” would be a better one? I think newspapers do have SOME responsibility not to cause undue harm to people in their quest for the truth (And the Supreme Court agrees with me if my understanding of the Pentagon Papers case is correct). Take when they published the Snowden Report – they did everything in their power to excise information that would put American soldiers at risk. No such caution was taken here.

          Lastly, this is an opinion piece, not some groundbreaking truth-bombshell. I think the standard for opinion pieces should be higher simply on the grounds that unlike newsreporting, there isn’t a duty of the paper to present some truth the public is unaware of, they are legitimately just boosting a person’s opinion.

          • Guy in TN says:

            How about: Newspapers should not publish pieces that advocate for things that they strongly think will do more harm than good.

            It is reasonable to have a staff-revolt over being asked to assist in making the world net worse-off.

          • gbdub says:

            Proves too much – That would preclude running basically any political opinion contrary to the majority view of the newsroom. I suspect that is actually something a lot of people on the staff want, but I think it IS a fundamental shift in the NYT’s vision of its ideal self.

          • souleater says:

            So first, I think adding to this discussion the dimension Aftagley mentioned below (which partially in said discussion I referenced). It was a bad article, and part of the reason it was dangerous was it misrepresented the facts on the ground.

            If the guy just bungled fundamental portions of his job, then I have no issue with firing him.
            I’m not clear on how the article misrepresented the facts. the Poynter.org (I’ve never heard of them before) linked above says that he factually wrong in 2 ways.
            1) Antifa being present
            2) The police bore the brunt of the violence

            But these things strike me as normal things to say in an op-ed piece. Antifa is an ideology/distributed organization.. I don’t know what evidence anyone could want that some members were there at this massive protest. That the police bore the brunt of the violence I think is a matter of an opinion. I don’t really know how you could quantitatively measure who bore the “brunt” of the violence in a balanced way.

            It was also pointed out that Cotton didn’t mention that George HW bush sent the national guard at the request of California’s governor. But it doesn’t seem deceptive for Cotton not to include that.

            These all seem to me like isolated demands for rigor. Maybe they don’t seem that way to you.

            I agree that perhaps “causes harm” is too weak a brightline, maybe updating to “incite violence” would be a better one?

            Can you clarify what you mean by “incite violence”? I think of inciting violence to mean ginning up a lynch mob against someone, which is very different to me from advocating for the national guard to enforce the law.

            I don’t want to tiptoe around, or make you guess at my real frustration here.
            1. I think that conservative ideas and liberal ideas are treated differently by the NYT
            2. That the firing wouldn’t have taken place if the op-ed was more popular with the left.
            3. That the NYT would be perfectly fine with a senator writing an op-ed advocating bringing the national guard in to quell for example Tea Party riots.

            ETA:
            Aftagley beat me to it, even down to the point about isolated demands for rigor. Unless you feel like I made a point they didn’t please don’t feel the need to repeat yourself here.

          • Randy M says:

            Is using “Inciting violence” to refer to advocacy for government actions that are violent (either to lawbreakers, or generally) a new usage of the phrase? As opposed to an attempt to rouse a mob for extra-judicial beatings/lynching, etc. It seems like a way to make certain, formerly acceptable opinions beyond the pale.
            For example, arguing for capital punishment is “inciting violence” under this new usage. As is advocating for any war or military action. Involuntary commitment for any reason, too. And one step removed from that, any law whatsoever that is actually enforced, be it taxation or quarantine is advocating violence.

            This is particularly an unfair rhetorical trick when we are also deciding to call words that hurt feelings violence as well.

          • Eric T says:

            @ Randy M

            I think Guy in TN’s “More Harm than Good” standard probably better captures my thoughts on the matter while dodging the rhetorical issues.

            I’m not married to any specific brightline, as I said in my response. I am however fine with there being a line. However as I already posted, I’ve mostly bowed out of this argument as I have been convinced that this was the Wrong Move elsewhere.

          • Nick says:

            @Guy in TN
            That’s a very interesting policy, but that is not the policy the NYT actually has. They have social media guidelines for news staff, which their revolt flagrantly violated. There were no consequences for violating these guidelines; instead, editors caved:

            • In social media posts, our journalists must not express partisan opinions, promote political views, endorse candidates, make offensive comments or do anything else that undercuts The Times’s journalistic reputation.

            • Our journalists should be especially mindful of appearing to take sides on issues that The Times is seeking to cover objectively.

            This is one of the reasons I have a hard time believing the “but there were factual errors and the New York Times takes its reputation very seriously!” argument—it’s obvious the rules are already being selectively enforced.

          • John Schilling says:

            I agree that perhaps “causes harm” is too weak a brightline, maybe updating to “incite violence” would be a better one?

            That seems like an invitation to the heckler’s veto, though. If I write a private letter to the editor of the NYT saying that I’ll get so mad that I’ll run out and kill someone if I see one more editorial promoting abortion or gun control or immigration or feminism or whatnot, does it become unethical for the NYT to publish such editorials? If not, how many like-minded friends do I need to gather, and how many people do we have to kill to prove we’re serious?

            But then, the bit where you retract your own editorials because your junior staff threaten to strike and the blue-checkmark twiteratti call you unspeakable names is just another form of the heckler’s veto. Possibly an improvement in that it doesn’t have a “kill people to prove we’re serious” step, but then if you extend the peaceful version of the heckler’s veto only to the left, that also incites violence because now it’s rational for the right to go for the violent heckler’s veto.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @Nick

            What the NYT’s official policies and employee guidelines are has no bearing on what I think they should/should not publish, or how I think their employees ought to behave.

          • Nick says:

            @Guy in TN
            I must have misunderstood you then. Sorry about that.

        • keaswaran says:

          I think your comment here runs together opinion pieces and news pieces. There’s no reason that a news organization needs to run opinion pieces at all, in order to be called a news organization. Someone might decide to accept a rule of the relevant sort on opinion pieces, observe that all the opinion pieces you mention would violate it, and therefore decide that their news organization doesn’t publish opinion pieces. (I don’t think this distinction is particularly relevant for the topic under discussion, since we can all agree that the NYTimes wants to run some opinion pieces, and only opinion pieces are under discussion here.)

          In any case, I don’t think the line has to be exactly where EricT put it, in order for us to agree that it makes sense for there to be a line. If it’s 1931, and Adolf Hitler contacts the Times with the suggestion of an op-ed piece advocating for the extermination of all Jews, it seems quite reasonable for the Times to decide that this is not the sort of opinion piece that should be run. If the opinions editor ran it anyway, the publisher might naturally fire the opinion editor for running it.

          There’s a version of the argument that says that any newsworthy opinion should be published, even in that sort of case. But I don’t think a news agency with an opinions section has any particular obligation to stick with that. So the question would be whether there is some reasonable line that the Cotton piece crosses. (Perhaps one thinks that it’s, ironically, a first-amendment sort of line, saying that an opinion piece should never advocate the use of the military to put down mostly peaceful protests, even if some physical and verbal violence is being advocated by some of the protesters.)

          • souleater says:

            I think your comment here runs together opinion pieces and news pieces. There’s no reason that a news organization needs to run opinion pieces at all, in order to be called a news organization.

            Yup, You’re right about this. I shouldn’t have conflated the two.

            In any case, I don’t think the line has to be exactly where EricT put it, in order for us to agree that it makes sense for there to be a line. If it’s 1931, and Adolf Hitler contacts the Times with the suggestion of an op-ed piece advocating for the extermination of all Jews, it seems quite reasonable for the Times to decide that this is not the sort of opinion piece that should be run. If the opinions editor ran it anyway, the publisher might naturally fire the opinion editor for running it.

            Also fair. My quibble was with were the line was drawn. Refusing to print the genocidal opinions of a hostile foreign power doesn’t bother me. I do not expect the NYT to be neutral in geopolitics. refusing to print the opinions of a popular US senator does. Tom Cottons opinion is not that of a fringe minority.

            Look, NYT has a right to refuse to print common, mainstream, rightwing opinions, but they can’t refuse to print those opinions and still claim to be politically neutral.

    • zzzzort says:

      I think MattM made an observation last open thread with respect to the Buffalo cops resigning that if a significantly large fraction of the employees disagree with a decision, then the manager is presumptively fired. Whether or not publishing the Cotton piece was a good idea, when half of your staff is in public revolt it calls into question your effectiveness as a manger.

      • Matt M says:

        This definitely wasn’t me.

      • RalMirrorAd says:

        The problem is that it, intentionally or not, treats the disposition of the employees as a given. I.E. Not something that can in any way be hedged or protected against in a manner that doesn’t require selective and incremental acquiescence.

      • ltowel says:

        I don’t think half of his employees disagreed with him? It seemed to me like a bunch of the newsroom employees (a different division) were demanding he get fired. There’s supposed to be a wall between news and sales – i’d think there should be a similar wall between news and opeds as well.

      • A Definite Beta Guy says:

        That was me and it definitely applies in this case just as much as it applies anywhere else. You hired these employees because you think they are essential to your organization, their goodwill and opinions matter a great deal.

    • Aftagley says:

      I’m annoyed because Bennet needed to go, but now his departure is going to be seen only in light of this larger issue. His negligence put the times in this bad position.

      The NYT originally reached out to Cotton to ask him to write this opinion piece. That’s not entirely unusual, after all, if you waited only for unsolicited opinion pieces, you’d have way less opinion pieces, but for something like this… well, they knew the dangerous waters they were wading into. They should have been as careful as possible with this piece.

      But they weren’t. In a rush to get this out the door as fast as possible, they didn’t follow established practices. They rushed the editing, allowed factual errors to slip through and generally did nothing to arrive at the best piece possible. Bennett admits that he never even read the piece before publishing it. It looks like the editing process was run by a 25 year old staffer who’d previously worked with Cotton and was approved for print by an unrelated editor on the masthead. It’s unclear if the 25-year old was empowered to push back on Cotton’s opinion piece at all, although reading between the lines, it sounds like he wasn’t.

      Overall, Bennett has failed one too many times at his job here. He’s clearly lost the support of his staff and the trust of his bosses. Him leaving was the only sensible outcome.

      • FLWAB says:

        Can you point out the “factual errors” that keep being talked about? So far I haven’t seen anybody actually present any. Has the NYT run an official correction laying out these errors?

        • Aftagley says:

          Not to be a dick here, but from the piece you linked in your original post:

          But the counter-argument: Cotton’s op-ed makes claims and assertions to back up his case that simply are not true. He wrote, “nihilist criminals are simply out for loot and the thrill of destruction, with cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa infiltrating protest marches to exploit Floyd’s death for their own anarchic purposes.” Yet there is no proof antifa is involved.

          Cotton also asserted police have “bore the brunt of the violence,” yet that, too, cannot be proven.

          And, as New York Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote, “Cotton notes that President George H.W. Bush sent federal troops into Los Angeles in 1992 to quell the riots that broke out after the police who beat Rodney King were acquitted. But he doesn’t tell readers that Bush did so at the invitation of California’s governor.

          “That’s very different from the federal government overriding local elected authorities and occupying their states and cities, which seems to be what Cotton is proposing. It’s an idea that appalls many military leaders.”

          In other words, it would appear Cotton’s opinion — and his case for convincing readers his opinion has merit — is not based on truth or fairness.

          • albatross11 says:

            Any chance those same standards are going to be used on op-eds that support the prejudices of the NYT staff in the future? For example, no doubt the next op-ed to talk about women making 60% of what men make will be told they need to correct that to account for hours worked and experience, right? And the next time someone writes an op-ed about Trump’s ties to the far-right, that will also be allowed only when solid proof is shown? Because otherwise, this looks like a very isolated demand for rigor.

            Now, I don’t have much of a dog in this fight. I don’t get much news from the NYT, and don’t have a great deal of trust that they will try to get the facts straight in any culture-war-associated story. (That’s bad for the country, because they still have a lot of mainstream credibility, but that’s much more of a problem for their factual reporting than their editorials and op-eds.). I haven’t sought much opinion journalism from mainstream newspapers since the advent of blogs. I think Cotton’s proposal was a terrible idea and Trumpism is a disaster for the country. But let’s not pretend this is some kind of demand that would be made if the writer were saying things that the staff of the NYT agreed with. My guess is that if you looked at the most recent 20 op-eds in the NYT, you would find multiple problems at least as large as those pointed out for Cotton’s op-ed. But since those didn’t offend anyone important, who cares?

            The NYT basically just said out loud that the views of some large fraction of the country (probably not half but probably more than a third) are unpublishable in their newspaper. In what world does that lead to the people in that subset of Americans to trust anything else they say?

          • Eric T says:

            Any chance those same standards are going to be used on op-eds that support the prejudices of the NYT staff in the future?

            I know people in media, the NYT’s standard’s are legendarily strict according to writers. I’m not sure they will – but if any of the major Liberal news outlets will, it would be them over WaPo or CNN any day of the week.

          • FLWAB says:

            Those are not factual errors: those are differences of opinion, and I dismissed them as such when I first read the article.

            Supposed error 1: “left-wing radicals like antifa infiltrating protest marches”
            Tom Cotton certainly believes there are, and since it’s an opinion piece that’s what matters. Given that Antifa has a history of wearing masks and attacking people during protests, and given that there are many “bad apple” troublemakers who have been wearing masks and attacking people at these protests, it’s not at all unreasonable to say Antifa is there. Given that Antifa has no larger organization and that anyone who says they are Antifa is, essentially, Antifa, it would be hard to believe that there has been no Antifa presence at the protests.

            Supposed factual error 2: “Police have borne the brunt of the violence.”
            Again, this is an obvious statement of opinion by a man who clearly believes it, in a clearly labeled opinion piece. Notice the didn’t say “500 cops have been attacked, and only 100 protesters!” If opinions like this have no place in an opinion piece than I don’t know what does.

            Supposed factual error 3: Cotton says (factually!) that Bush sent troops into La in 1992, but didn’t mention that the governor asked for them.
            How is this a factual error? Tom Cotton is advocating for sending in federal troops. He notes a factual occurrence where federal troops were sent in and he believes they helped. How is it a factual error for him to not mention something that is irrelevant to the point he’s trying to make in an opinion piece?

            Just because you don’t like someone’s opinion, or you think that it is “not based on truth or fairness” doesn’t mean it is wrong to print it: if you’re going to print any opinion pieces at all, some people will thing they’re not based on truth or fairness.

          • Eric T says:

            @FLAWB
            Can we at least all agree that him saying “left-wing radicals like antifa infiltrating protests” despite having no evidence of that fact is at the VERY least the kind of thing that a competent editor should have noticed and probably asked him to change his wording on slightly?

          • FLWAB says:

            Can we at least all agree that him saying “left-wing radicals like antifa infiltrating protests” despite having no evidence of that fact is at the VERY least the kind of thing that a competent editor should have noticed and probably asked him to change his wording on slightly?

            I can agree on that.

          • Eric T says:

            @FLWAB
            Okay. And can we also agree that, at least in part because of Bennett’s choices (whether or not they were mistakes), the Times faced a massive public backlash, probably lost some readership, and faced internal conflicts that probably hurt their reputation with their primary readership? (I think you can probably predict where I’m going with this)

          • FLWAB says:

            Do you think if an editor had asked Cotton to “change his wording slightly” on the Antifa bit that it would have prevented the things you mentioned? I’m also not convinced there was a massive public backlash. If anything the public backlash against them retracting the column has likely been larger, and seems more likely to have lost them readership. There were definitely internal conflicts though, and I don’t for one second believe that they’re based on little quibbles about misleading lines, and instead had everything to do with the general position of the piece itself.

          • Eric T says:

            If anything the public backlash against them retracting the column has likely been larger, and seems more likely to have lost them readership.

            My suspicion is that backlash is more likely to be among people not paying for a Times Subscription. The Times readership definitely skews left.

            Do you think if an editor had asked Cotton to “change his wording slightly” on the Antifa bit that it would have prevented the things you mentioned?

            Nope, but as you probably guessed, that doesn’t mean Bennett’s mistakes were forgivable. Because it was such a controversial essay, the mistakes and shoddy work were dragged out in the public. Imagine you are a car manufacturer, and your plant manager sometimes does a shit job making sure the breaks work. A prominent celebratory buys one of your cars, crashes it and dies. It may be very likely it wasn’t the fault of the brakes, but you know damn well the second the news comes out about the faulty brakes it’ll be very very bad for you, so you sack the guy. Every company does things like this when they face public backlash, they find someone who fucked up and make them the scapegoat, then go back to largely doing what they did before. I guess I’m not sure why this time a major company goes to “Plan 5 on the PR disaster playbook” we have to have an issue with it.

          • Nick says:

            I hopped over to the Times and took a look at columnist Michelle Goldberg’s latest. Here’s a paragraph from it:

            Engel’s district, New York’s 16th, encompasses parts of Westchester, some quite wealthy, and of the Bronx. As Bowman told me, if it were a country it would be one of the most unequal in the world. Though it’s majority-minority, affluent white people tend to vote in primaries at higher rates than poorer people of color, and the suburbanites in the New York 16th are probably not as left-leaning as the young gentrifiers who helped elect Ocasio-Cortez. Engel seemed safe.

            Where is Michelle’s citations? No map or chart, and no evidence whatsoever for the claims about white voters or suburbanites. Is that a claim Bowman is making and not her? At the very least, that’s something a competent editor should have caught and asked to be clarified. This piece was run on June 8th, after Katie Kingsbury took over for Baquet on the 7th. Did she read the piece? If not, why not? I think it’s time for Kingsbury to step down.

            And let’s not forget, the original claim was that the piece was endangering black staffers. Putting a note at the top saying it has “factual errors” does nothing to stop staffers from being murdered by the military. And that is, of course, the basis for the loss of faith in Bennet, not the purported factual errors, which were only discovered well after the original complaints. This whole argument is being made in bad faith ETA: strategy by the Times is being done in bad faith—did not intend to accuse any of you of bad faith.

          • they didn’t follow established practices. They rushed the editing, allowed factual errors to slip through and generally did nothing to arrive at the best piece possible.

            Do you assume that when a paper runs an op-ed the paper first edits and fact checks it? I would assume that that’s the business of the author of the Op-ed.

            If what it says isn’t true, that provides material for another op-ed on the other side.

          • Nick says:

            @DavidFriedman
            Cotton’s office claims that the editor, Rubenstein, went over the piece with them line by line, the same as with their prior op-eds.

          • Matt M says:

            @Nick

            I guess it proves the old saying, if journalists didn’t have isolated demands for rigor, they wouldn’t have any demands for rigor at all 😉

          • Can we at least all agree that him saying “left-wing radicals like antifa infiltrating protests” despite having no evidence of that fact is at the VERY least the kind of thing that a competent editor should have noticed and probably asked him to change his wording on slightly?

            No.

            A competent editor should see if he can get someone good to write an op-ed responding to Tom Cotton’s.

            Beyond that, I don’t see what’s especially objectionable about that claim in the context of a signed opinion piece. Everyone agrees that there were some people in some demonstrations throwing stuff at cops and some people who took the demonstrations as an opportunity for looting and vandalism.

            Cotton thinks those people were “left-wing radicals like antifa infiltrating protest marches to exploit Floyd’s death for their own anarchic purposes.” He obviously can’t know if that’s true, you can’t know it isn’t true, an he is entitled to state his opinion.

          • Eric T says:

            Hmm I think I’ll bow out of this one, I’ve been shifted back towards my previous position of This Was the Wrong Move by y’all, but I don’t have much of a dog in this fight.

            I do think though this isn’t weird at all. When PR nightmares happen, someone gets sacked as a scapegoat. It happened at the charter school network I work for, it happened at my the comm. firm my dad works for, it happened at my mom’s hospital. Sometimes the scapegoat probably didn’t have it coming, but if my thoughts on the opinion piece are an Isolated Demand for Rigor, this thread feels like an Isolated Demand for Fairness on the part of the NYT for doing something that feels like a Standard Company Move.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            My suspicion is that backlash is more likely to be among people not paying for a Times Subscription. The Times readership definitely skews left.

            It’s about 50/50. https://twitter.com/wordpower2018/status/1270072397564121089 The NYT audience skews left, but they also skew “adults with jobs who are used to paying for things and who are comfortable with, and even eager to pay for, the idea of reading conflicting opinions.”

            If you want a primary source, you can read the letters page:

            https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/08/opinion/letters/james-bennet-tom-cotton-op-ed.html

            1.

            I read the Tom Cotton Op-Ed and survived. It was a poor piece of writing with a ridiculous premise. But it was written by a U.S. senator who was making a newsworthy claim that was completely different in tone from the other editorial pieces that day. To claim that it put in danger the lives of protesters because it incited violence is ludicrous.

            2.

            I was glad to see the resignation of James Bennet over the publication of “Send In the Troops,” by Tom Cotton. Senator Cotton has a right to his authoritarian, fascist, un-American views, although it is a shame that he holds them. But The Times need not lower its reputation and standing by publicizing those views.

            3.

            As a dutiful Times reader for more than half a century, I was very saddened that James Bennet resigned as opinion editor. In his years as editor, he has been a stalwart voice for social justice and for eloquent dialogue about the deep problems that roil America. . . . While the decision to publish the Cotton Op-Ed had drawbacks, the dialogue it produced and the vigorous outcry against his positions it spurred, which would have never occurred had it not been printed, are testaments to the journalism that Mr. Bennet championed.

            4.

            While I deplore the views of Senator Tom Cotton, I am dismayed at viewpoint censorship on the opinion page of my daily source of news. As a retired editor of the opinion page of a national newspaper, I labored (albeit sometimes with gritted teeth) to make sure that my pages were used as an honest platform and not a selective method of indoctrination.

            5.

            I detest what Senator Cotton stands for and disagree totally with what he espouses in his Op-Ed, and I have zero respect for Ms. Owens’s grandstanding statement. But we should be reminded of George Orwell’s observation that “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

            6.

            As the saying goes, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” In Donald Trump’s world, there is even more reason to defend it.

            So, among people who wrote letters, it looks like about 1-in-6 defending his firing, and most not liking Cotton’s words but being even more scared of a world where they wouldn’t be available to them.

          • Randy M says:

            So, among people who wrote letters, it looks like about 1-in-6 defending his firing

            I don’t know it to be the case in this point, but just as selecting which story to feature on the front page is an example of a media filter (whether conscious agenda or unconscious bias or attempt to be fair but having limited resources), so too are what letters appear in the letters page.
            You can have decent faith that someone holds those particular positions, but I wouldn’t trust any conclusions drawn about the ratios.

            (Of course, in this case one might expect the times to favor letters that supported their decision. Which suggests they were trying to be fair to opposing viewpoints)

          • Nick says:

            @Eric T
            For the record, as the person who broke the Times story on SSC the other day, it’s not about fairness toward conservatives in my view. It’s about whether we can trust the Times as a useful newspaper. If they don’t want to publish conservative opinion pieces anymore, or want to hemorrhage good journalists whenever this happens, so be it; it’s their loss. It’s all our loss, too, of course, but that can’t be helped.

            But I have no compunction about criticizing them for their mistakes. And they have made a multitude. First they hired staffers who shriek hysterically at opinion pieces; then they caved to their demands, but offered a fig leaf justification that it had “factual errors.” Then the junior editor’s name was leaked, which is blatant scapegoating. Then they all but retracted the op-ed, with a lengthy note prepended. In the meanwhile staffers were lying shamelessly about it, saying that the op-ed called for “military force against protestors” and the like, even in the news section of their own paper, and they stealth-edited the lies afterwards. (There’s your legendary strictness at work!) This is such a comedy of errors that it is impossible not to criticize them.

          • Briefling says:

            @Aftagley:
            I can’t possibly scream “double standard” loud enough to express how ridiculous your position is.

            @Eric T:
            The NYT’s foundational principle is supposed to be journalistic fairness. When a mob called for their editor’s head because he published a Republican op-ed, they found a pretext to fire him. Do you really not see how that undermines what they stand for?

          • Erc says:

            Yet there is no proof antifa is involved.

            I guess all those antifa symbols seen on the rioters could just be a conspiracy by some other group. But this is just isolated demand for rigor.

            And, as New York Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote, “Cotton notes that President George H.W. Bush sent federal troops into Los Angeles in 1992 to quell the riots that broke out after the police who beat Rodney King were acquitted. But he doesn’t tell readers that Bush did so at the invitation of California’s governor.

            Not including info you think needs to be included is not a factual error.

            Your comment is report-worthy IMO.

          • Nick says:

            @Briefling

            I can’t possibly scream “double standard” loud enough to express how ridiculous your position is.

            The least you can do if you’re going to say that is show everyone the double standard.

          • Eric T says:

            I mean I’ve said I agree with you all so everyone responding to me is probably wasting their time. I appreciate the perspectives though!

            @erc

            Your comment is report-worthy IMO.

            I mean literally all he did was quote an article the person above had posted, in response to being asked to show the evidence. You may think the evidence is flimsy, but merely presenting it can’t possibly be report worthy no?

            This thread got like weirdly hostile weirdly fast.

          • Briefling says:

            @Nick:
            No. Sometimes you just have to say the sky is blue. Anybody who’s read more than two op-eds in their life knows that Cotton wasn’t particularly egregious in his treatment of the truth, by the standards of the medium. But Aftagley wants to use Cotton’s ostensible inaccuracies to justify the firing of the editor who published him.

            It is a completely indefensible position.

            You are welcome to do a deep dive if you like — I encourage it. But for as long as I’m discussing this particular point, I’m not going to let more than two sentences go by without saying “anybody who really believes Aftagley’s position is a lunatic.”

          • Eric T says:

            I’m not going to let more than two sentences go by without saying “anybody who really believes Aftagley’s position is a lunatic.”

            In this OT I’ve seen people argue a variety of beliefs I thought were beyond reason, from believing there is an imminent threat of leftist lynch mobs to arguing that pushing a 75-year old unarmed protestor to the ground was the right call. I have managed to avoid calling any of them lunatics. You can do the same.

            Less of this please.

          • Gerry Quinn says:

            I’m confused as to how you get from “something that cannot be proven” to “factual error”.

          • Briefling says:

            Okay, okay, I’ll address the claimed inaccuracies. Cotton’s putative falsehoods are taken from Aftagley’s quote of the Times.

            [Cotton] wrote, “nihilist criminals are simply out for loot and the thrill of destruction, with cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa infiltrating protest marches to exploit Floyd’s death for their own anarchic purposes.”

            Cotton’s claim here is weak enough that it is probably literally true.

            Cotton also asserted police have “bore the brunt of the violence,” yet that, too, cannot be proven.

            If you think “police have borne the brunt of the violence” is grounds for firing the editor who allowed it to be published, you’re a lunatic. As I’ve already said.

            And, as New York Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote, “Cotton notes that President George H.W. Bush sent federal troops into Los Angeles in 1992 to quell the riots that broke out after the police who beat Rodney King were acquitted. But he doesn’t tell readers that Bush did so at the invitation of California’s governor.

            And again, Cotton’s claim is literally true.

            ***

            Conclusion: if you want to fire the editor on the basis of these supposed “falsehoods,” you probably have to fire every editor who’s ever published an op-ed, anywhere. That’s what I meant when I said there was a double standard.

            ***

            And we’re done! But now you can see why I didn’t want to analyze Aftagley’s stance. First you read his post and it’s obviously ridiculous. Then you read it again in blockquote form and… it’s still obviously ridiculous. But now you’ve spent several paragraphs straying from the central point, which is: anybody who would really make this argument is a nutjob.

          • Eric T says:

            @Briefling

            I don’t think this comment isn’t True – it is. But I don’t think it is Necessary (as pretty much all of this has been said already upthread, in a much nicer tone as well!) and it certainly isn’t Kind. Stop calling people lunatics and nutjobs because they hold beliefs you think, or are even 100% certain, are Wrong.

            This seems to pretty clearly violate the comment policy. Please chill out.

          • LesHapablap says:

            Reported Brieflings posts. You’re not wrong Briefling but there’s no place here for calling people lunatics or calling posts ridiculous

          • Briefling says:

            My comments are clearly true and clearly necessary. But ok.

          • Eric T says:

            My comments are clearly true and clearly necessary. But ok.

            True? Oh almost certainly.

            Necessary? Ok let’s have an actual conversation about this.

            Your first post is a partial response to me (this part is probably fine) and calling out Aftglay for having a double standard. I agree with Nick that you probably should have elaborated – especially because your later posts morphed away from “double standard” to “crazy idea” which are two different things. But ultimately I didn’t have any issue w/ this post hence why I didn’t respond to it.

            Your second point is where I think you lose the “clearly necessary” credibility. In it you: make a point already made plenty of times in this thread (that these supposed errors weren’t very strong) and then incorrectly attribute this argument to Aftagley, when in actuality all he did was present a quote from OP’s own article at the request of the OP asking for evidence. You then proceeded to call them a lunatic. Not sure what point of this post was necessary.

            The main thrust of your third post – that the NYT response that Aftagley posted isn’t true – had been made by several people already. FLWAB in particular already had a detailed response pretty much outlining everything you said, so it wasn’t like you were added a needed new dimension to the conversation. Nick had already pointed out that this was an Isolated Demand for Rigor, so the whole double standard thing wasn’t really new either. They also managed to do it without insulting Aftagley I would add. You then follow up by calling the post ridiculous, calling him a nutjob, and smugly adding “so you can see why I didn’t want to analyze it”

            What part of that was necessary? Every conversation I’ve been a part of these last few days on SSC has been substantially less vitriolic than the one I just witnessed – if you were taking down an unchallenged opinion maybe I’d accept it was needed. But you didn’t you hopped on a fairly large dogpile of people already pointing out that the NYT’s “issues” with cotton’s opinion piece were bogus.

          • Briefling says:

            Look, we all agree that Aftagley’s post was an unreasonable and indefensible attack, made against a journalist who just got thrown to the wolves for trying to uphold his profession’s most sacred principles.

            The question is, was it so bad that it justifies me using the word “lunatic” twice and “nutjob” once?

            On SSC that’s an extraordinarily high bar… but my position is that yes, it was that bad, and I’m not interested in walking my comments back.

          • souleater says:

            The question is, was it so bad that it justifies me using the word “lunatic” twice and “nutjob” once?

            We don’t do that here

            In a different forum it would not be unusual to see people call each other “nutjob” or “lunatic” but thats not the kind of discourse we have here.

            I happen to agree with your points, and what you’re saying here. but name calling nd personal attacks is simply not what we do here. For a few reasons.

            1) Its not nice to call people names.
            2) Self interest. Despite how it looks, This is actually not a right wing space. This is one of the few spaces that tolerates non-conformity, lets not ruin it.
            3) Despite the fact that this is a blue tribe space, there are very few members of the blue tribe here. I like talking to people I disagree with, so lets take the 3 or 4 leftist here and treat them as the valuable, precious commodity that they are, and not insult them when they say something we think is wrong. and especially don’t dogpile on them.

            I don’t love the idea of crowning myself the word police here, and if the situation was different I wouldn’t inject myself, but it shouldn’t just fall to the 3 leftists to circle the wagons for each other.

          • Randy M says:

            Look, we all agree that Aftagley’s post was an unreasonable and indefensible attack

            Also, it’d rather rude to put words into other peoples mouths, and not terribly convincing when you tell everyone that they agree with you.

          • nkurz says:

            @Briefling:
            > Sometimes you just have to say the sky is blue
            > anybody who would really make this argument is a nutjob.
            > I’m not interested in walking my comments back.

            I agree with you on the color of the sky, but if insults like this were to become the norm, this forum would be much worse for it. Aftagley might be wrong here, but he’s entitled to his opinion, and his recent posts on the protests have been fantastic. Driving him off would be a big loss. As it stands, despite your logic, for the good of the community I feel you need to be banned. Please take some time to reconsider your stance and apologize before this happens.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            +1 to “don’t speak for everybody”. Even if I do agree with you on a dry assessment of the facts.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            We need a punchy term for “contrapositive Voltaire” now.

            “I agree with everything you say, but will defend to the death your having no right to say it…”

    • Guy in TN says:

      “All the news that’s fit to print” has been replaced with “What we see fit to print.”

      Does this not describe literally every news outlet with an opinion section? Doesn’t every content curator necessarily have to decide what content they are going to allow, and what they aren’t?

      It seems really weird to me that anyone was ever under the impression that newspapers published without bias or favored ideology. I suspect this is because many people in the US mistake liberal centrism for being “non-ideological”.

      If you want to ditch the NYT for shifting their content outside of your ideological comfort zone, that’s perfectly reasonable. But I just can’t understand people who are angry at the NYT, because now that the left is (supposedly) in charge instead of the center, they are publishing with “bias” and have become “ideological”.

      • FLWAB says:

        It seems really weird to me that anyone was ever under the impression that newspapers published without bias or favored ideology.

        We got that impression from the fact that they put slogans like “All the News That’s Fit to Print” on their mastheads, and proclaimed publicly time and again that they were neutral parties pursing a journalistic ideal. They claimed they were unbiased, and while I never believed them you can’t say the claim was never made. Just last year NYT Executive Editor Dean Baquet said in a BBC interview

        I make it very clear when I hire, I make it very clear when I talk to the staff, I’ve said it repeatedly, that we are not supposed to be the leaders of the resistance to Donald Trump. That is an untenable, nonjournalistic, immoral position for the New York Times. If I was the editor of Mother Jones, I would say otherwise.

        Yes, it’s true that no source is unbiased. But the NYT in particular has claimed to be unbiased and to just report the facts. They set the standard that they are failing to live up to.

        • Eric T says:

          Again though – this wasn’t a factual report it was an opinion piece. Does the NYT have any obligation to run ANY opinion pieces? I buy they have an obligation to report factual news, not sure if I buy that obligation extends to their opinion section.

          • Briefling says:

            Nobody’s saying they’re obligated to run Cotton’s op-ed.

            But they are obligated to not fire the editor for running that op-ed.

      • Jacobethan says:

        It seems really weird to me that anyone was ever under the impression that newspapers published without bias or favored ideology. I suspect this is because many people in the US mistake liberal centrism for being “non-ideological”.

        This is a fair point. And, indeed, to conservatives the NYT has always been seen as a left-leaning paper to some degree, though not necessarily uniformly across all issues. Moreover, you’re certainly right that even the view from the “center” is still a view from somewhere.

        I think a large part of the issue now is this. American politics is organized by the divide between two broad, numerically-roughly-equal factions. In the past, virtually any opinion issued by a nationally prominent politician representing one of the two major parties, and enjoying wide popular support within that party (not to mention support across party lines) would have been seen as presumptively appropriate for the Times to print. They might have chosen not to in a particular case, because it struck them as boring or badly argued or whatever, but the notion of “this idea that’s mainstream within [GOP/Dem] circles is too barbarous to be entertained by civilized people” would have been extraordinarily, to the point of vanishingly, unusual.

        That fact, that virtually the whole of American electoral politics lay within the paper’s Overton Window, was absolutely crucial to the NYT’s status as “the paper of record” and everything that went with it. It’s the whole reason why the NYT’s reputation, its prestige, its reach aren’t just like that of Mother Jones or First Things or Reason , or any other publication that’s always more selectively overlapped the American ideological mainstream.

        There isn’t any great deontological, first-principles reason why the Times can’t just decide to slink away and become The Nation. It’s just that it’s a really big story if they do. And if what the Times actually wants — as seems obvious — is to have their cake and eat it too, by retaining their legacy “arbiter of the national discourse” status while simultaneously narrowing their ideological gauge (relative to the American two-party system, not in some absolute philosophical sense), then it’s fair to ask if that amounts to an attempt to kick one faction out of the discourse entirely, and what the consequences of that might be.

      • “All the news that’s fit to print” has been replaced with “What we see fit to print.”

        The older version of that complaint was:

        “All the news that fits we print.”

    • Bobobob says:

      I’ve known various people at the NY Times throughout my professional life, and believe me, they are (were) all miserable. Satisfaction (and job security) is evanescent at that utmost peak of the journalism biz.

      • Well... says:

        Isn’t that how it is throughout the journalism biz, or any other part of the entertainment industry?

        • Bobobob says:

          The way it used to work at the Times (I don’t know if it’s still the case) is that you literally had to work your way up to even being *considered* for employment–10 years as a beat reporter at a podunk paper, another 10 years as a bureau chief at a slightly-less podunk paper, then, just maybe, they will consider you. It really is considered the pinnacle of journalism–once you’ve been employed at the Times, you do not want to go back to another paper. So I’m not sure the extent to which that’s analogous to the entertainment industry.

          • Well... says:

            I was supposing it was analogous in the sense that satisfaction (especially in terms of pay, perhaps, and visibility of upward career mobility) and job security are very low.

    • Well... says:

      Personally, what little respect I had left for the New York Times is gone. They’ve made it clear that publishing opinion pieces that are unpopular with their staff is a firable offence, and that their staff is highly left wing. “All the news that’s fit to print” has been replaced with “What we see fit to print.”

      Why did you have respect for the NYT, or any other news organization, in the first place?

      I know lots of people do/did have respect for news organizations, but I’ve never directly asked anyone and I want to know why, so I’m asking you since you said it. I’m genuinely curious.

      • FLWAB says:

        I’m a sentimental traditionalist, and the Gray Lady is an old and storied institution. It’s been the paper of record since time immemorial (ie, before I was born and I’ve never bothered to find out how long before). I respect things that are old and storied. It’s a personal quirk of mine.

    • AlesZiegler says:

      I do not think that newspapers having what is sometimes called an editorial line is bad. If National Review would fire somebody for publishing far left opinion piece, my level of respect for them would not be changed.

      • Paul Zrimsek says:

        NR is an advocacy journal, not part of the mainstream press. The whole idea of the op-ed page in a mainstream paper is to provide a range of opinion which doesn’t necessarily line up with the paper’s editorial line. If the Times is no longer going to publish op-eds which fall outside its staffers’ Overton peephole, it’s taking a big step in the direction of the advocacy press.

        • AlesZiegler says:

          I think that what you call mainstream press never in fact existed, and it was always advocacy press all along.

          • Statismagician says:

            Yes – this essay by Paul Graham is about economics, but it’s also true of journalism; the era of a few centrist organizations dominating all discourse that lasted from ~1940-2001 was really really weird, without historical precedent, and will not be coming back.

          • Paul Zrimsek says:

            I think there’s still a useful distinction to be drawn between a paper which tries to be neutral and fails, and one which doesn’t try. The fact that the Times found it necessary to lie about why the op-ed was removed suggests that they still subscribe to the mainstream ideal even if they’ve abandoned any thought of trying to live up to it.

          • AlesZiegler says:

            @Paul Zrimsek

            True neutrality of newspapers is imho a fiction. Blogging platform might be neutral, but not medium like NYT. People far more knowledgeable about the matter are pointing out in this thread that what is in fact happening is that NYT is moving from an editorial line of establishment centrism (which is also a viewpoint) to something more on the left. That is unsurprising, since establishment centrism in the US is gradually losing political ground.

  85. anton says:

    So, someone mentioned piracy on the comments in the paywalls article, so I wanted to share my personal perspective and ask a question.

    I pirate stuff without compunction, but then again, I grew up next to a library. To me the pirate websites looked like online libraries, and as I used libraries since before I had memory I felt and feel no moral scruples.
    Now that I think about the matter again, however, I am instead surprised at brick-and-mortar libraries.
    A naive guess would be that these should be ruinous to writers.
    If I compare the cost of what I read if I were to buy it, say, from amazon, against the library subscription fee I see they have a couple of orders of magnitude of difference. Some of this can be explained in several ways, e.g. this is no doubt publicly subsidized and I read more than average so in some sense I was a free rider to those who read less, but I don’t think all those factors and more along those lines would be enough to explain the entire difference, unless I’m seriously underestimating them.

    Has anyone done the legwork of figuring out the economic impact of libraries to the publishing industry? (and ideally written about it for the layman?)

    Put more provocatively, are or were libraries preventing some sort of renaissance?

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      Libraries don’t buy 1 copy of JK Rowling’s book and create 10,000 copies for people to read on opening day. If you want to read that 1 copy, you need to wait your turn, and books get lost, and stolen, and worn out. The waitlist and the lost copies create pressure for the library to buy more copies.

      Small authors I’ve spoken to love when their books get into libraries and they say it’s economically beneficial for them. I don’t know if they’re lying but they seemed content. If someone loves book one from an author, they probably do not want to wait for the library to get out the next copy.

      Getting a book from a library is inferior in most ways to owning it yourself. The people waiting months to read a book really are waiting months to read it.

      • AG says:

        Libraries buying a book can be a far larger number than individuals buying the book in the first year, for a small author.

      • Well... says:

        Getting a book from a library is inferior in most ways to owning it yourself.

        I think that’s only true for a relatively small number of books that end up being very special to you. For all the other books, aside from the fact of not having to pay anything to hold them in your hands and take a few weeks to read them, another nice thing about borrowing from the library is at the end you drop the book in a box and it’s gone again; you don’t have to find a way to get rid of it and feel like you’re throwing your money away.

        I have many books that I first borrowed from the library, read, and then bought my own copy because I wanted to own it myself. But there are orders of magnitude more books I borrowed from the library, read, and then never thought much about again.

        • cassander says:

          I take great pleasure in owning my books and displaying them on my wall. I read most of my books digitally and try to buy cheap used copies for the bragging wall bookshelves.

          • Well... says:

            I never read books digitally but I agree about the pleasure of owning and displaying books. I probably stand in front of my bookshelf admiring my collection at least once every few days. But this is still a relatively small number of books compared to those I read.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          (I have clutter in my house, and the ability for a book to go away without my thinking about how to responsibly dispose of it was what I was going for in the phrase “in most ways.” Someone taking a book of my hands is a service! But I think I am unusual in this and lot of people just toss the book in the trash or whatever if they don’t want it.)

    • Matt M says:

      My rough sense is that libraries are generally used by people lower-class enough that if the library wasn’t around, they’d either go without, or try and find bargain used books… they wouldn’t be paying full hardcover/kindle price on Amazon.

      And conversely, the type of people who like to buy brand new hardcover books within weeks of their release generally don’t go to libraries much at all.

      In marketing terms, these are dramatically different customer groups, so there really isn’t any “cannibalization” going on at all…

      • ana53294 says:

        I would never waste my limited shelf space on a new hardcover of an untested author.

        And, while I’m willing to pay under 6$ for an ebook, anything over that seems extortionate to me.

        I can afford and do buy new books of authors I really like and whose books I’m waiting for. However, I have only five such authors. For most others, I’ll pick it up in the library if it’s available, or buy the ebook if it’s not overpriced, or buy a second hand book.

        • The Pachyderminator says:

          And, while I’m willing to pay under 6$ for an ebook, anything over that seems extortionate to me.

          You may be overestimating how much of the price of a new book represents the cost of printing, manufacturing, warehousing, etc., vs. how much represents editorial costs, acquisition, royalties, and so on. Ebooks are somewhat cheaper to produce than print, of course, but not so much that you should expect to pay only 25% as much for a new ebook as a new hardcover.

          • ana53294 says:

            I think you’re also underestimating how much the whole dinosaur of the publishing industry, the bookshops, the returs system, and warehousing represents.

            Just the simplification of the accounting system, where you don’t have to hold all earnings against returns save a lot of money.

            You know editing is notorious for being a low paid job, right?

            I’ve published a book on Amazon, both in paperback and ebook form. In order to earn 1$ from each, I had to make the paperback worth double the ebook. Yes, POD is more expensive, but then POD doesn’t require warehousing, or accounting for returns, etc.

            And a hardcover costs even more than Amazon’s trade paperback to print.

            So yes, ebooks should be much half as cheap as paperbacks which should be half the price of hardbacks.

          • Ebooks are somewhat cheaper to produce than print, of course, but not so much that you should expect to pay only 25% as much for a new ebook as a new hardcover.

            When I self-publish my books, as both print and kindle, I set the price at a level that doesn’t give me a very large royalty, since I’m mostly writing to spread ideas. Checking a couple of them, the paperback costs about three times as much as the kindle.

          • The Pachyderminator says:

            I think you’re also underestimating how much the whole dinosaur of the publishing industry, the bookshops, the returs system, and warehousing represents.

            Just the simplification of the accounting system, where you don’t have to hold all earnings against returns save a lot of money.

            I’m aware of all of those things. The fact remains, they’re a relatively small part of the total cost of publishing a book.

            The economics of a self-published book on Amazon are completely different from those of a traditional publisher. How much did you spend on editing, typesetting, cover design, and marketing? Presumably you didn’t have to buy the rights to your own book from yourself or give yourself an advance?

            Yes, this system is archaic and convoluted. Do you know why it’s convoluted? Because producing a good book is actually a lot of work requiring many different kinds of skilled labor, and if you neglect any of them, consumers can tell the difference. Most of the self-published books out there are badly edited and badly designed. (Obviously I’m not saying anything about yours in particular, which I haven’t seen.) A consumer who couldn’t say much about book design if asked can still sense the lack of quality control in an amateurish product. That does affect the decision to buy or not to buy, and all the hoopla about how anyone can throw up an ebook on Amazon and therefore publishers are obsolete is just not reality.

          • Evan Þ says:

            On the other hand, Kindle self-publishing for physical books is Print On Demand, which incurs higher incremental costs than a normal print run to get lower up-front costs. So, when you compare incremental costs between ebooks and paperbacks, the PoD cost should be an upper limit for paperbacks but nothing more.

      • MPG says:

        @MattM

        That’s in my experience untrue for children’s books, for libraries in university towns, or (of course) for academic libraries. But children and academics can both go through a great many books quickly, in the latter case often things out of print and not yet out of copyright (and so not on Google Books or Internet Archive). While municipal library buying patterns might suggest lower-class interests, I’m not at all sure: all kinds of people no doubt are interested in dieting books, for example. Perhaps by “lower class” you just mean “relatively poor”? That would cover a lot of academic families, for example.

        EDIT: Not to suggest that online access is as good as print access. Each is preferable for different purposes, and lockdowns make one realize that an all-digital readership is scarcely desirable. I mean only that there just is no alternative to print in many cases.

    • LT says:

      I don’t remember if libraries specifically are discussed, but for much more along the lines of your questions, check out the book Against Intellectual Monopoly. (Which I originally found through Kaj Sotala’s “Books that have had the biggest impact on my life” page)

    • AlphaGamma says:

      The UK and some other (mostly European) countries have a Public Lending Right system, where the government pays authors for each time one of their books is borrowed from a public library.

      In the UK, they get around 8-9p per loan with a maximum payment of £6,600 per year- though the vast majority of authors get less than £100 from this scheme each year.

      • Evan Þ says:

        The vast majority of authors already get very small amounts of money per year through all systems.

    • keaswaran says:

      I wonder if libraries are sort of like insurance. A library will buy one copy of many books, including ones that wouldn’t have gotten any buyers in the community, and ones that would have gotten several buyers in the community. This smooths out the number of purchases across communities, and helps each author avoid the risk of zero sales while losing out on the chance of getting many sales.

  86. lambiguo says:

    Can anybody point me in the direction of books (or articles) of people advocating for the removal of privacy?

    I’ve been interested in this after hearing some of Daniel Schmachtenberger’s ideas in a “The portal” episode and had little luck in finding any resources (might be my lack of searching skills and relevant background). Note: the episode has little overlap with what I’m asking.

    The general idea I’d give is: most of humanity’s time has been spent in a group roughly the size of the Dunbar number. In such a setting, there’s very little place for privacy and anonymity: everybody knows everybody else. Thus, there’s very little possibility of displaying truly selfish behavior at the expense of one’s peers. Could we exploit this in some way in the modern world?

    One example I’ve thought of, would be removing financial privacy from citizens in places that suffer from chronic corruption problems. For example, southern Italian’s mafiosos would have a much harder time doing anything if all assets over €500 had to be registered in a public ledger. Simply not registering one’s assets can be disincentivized. For instance, give anyone the ability to summon authorities and gain possession on anything that is not on the ledger by paying a €500.

    In fact, privacy is currently being taken from everybody in a way that benefits big businesses and makes central governments stronger. Is a way of doing the same but in a truly public way possible? I think the crypto space might have something to say about this, but discussion there seems to think privacy is sacred.

    But this is just me rambling, has anybody given serious attention to this idea?

    • johan_larson says:

      David Brin believes that with improving surveillance technology, privacy as we know it will increasingly become impossible. It will simply be too easy to have cameras everywhere filming all the time. He believes that what we should fight for is not the ability to maintain privacy, but equal access to the gathered information.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society

      • Randy M says:

        I remember reading him discuss that several years ago. I wonder if the rise of the volunteer thought police has given him cause to reconsider.

      • Matt M says:

        Yeah. I don’t “advocate” for the abolition of privacy, but I think it is basically inevitable.

        Someone else here (I can’t recall who) once made the prediction that future generations will view our obsession with privacy similar to how we view past societies obsession with “honor.” They’ll have a rough sense of what it means, but caring a lot about it will seem to be an entirely out of date and primitive notion…

        • keaswaran says:

          One important analogy here is that what counts as “privacy” is extremely culturally variable. Some people think privacy requires having opaque hedges and fences around your backyard but don’t worry about their financial transactions being tracked, while others think it’s more about keeping transactions private and don’t mind having public view of their yard.

    • Christophe Biocca says:

      Aren’t your ideas basically in place already? In the United States:

      – Almost every financial transaction (or cash transaction done at a financial institution) is recorded with automatic reporting requirements for various kinds of suspicious activity. Structuring (the act of shaping your transactions to avoid hitting the reporting thresholds) is a crime even the underlying transactions were legal and not associated with criminal activity.
      – American companies doing business with overseas businesses over a certain amount require forms declaring what kind of taxable category the beneficial owner belongs to.
      Third party doctrine means any record you provide to third parties, or any record the third parties collect about you legally, is fair game to be obtained without a warrant (except in Utah, apparently?).
      – Political donations are generally public. Want to get a coworker in trouble over supporting/opposing some ballot measure in California? It’s pretty trivial to find out what they gave to in the last 2 decades.

    • Dragor says:

      I recall reading a longform article about this ex mormon guy who was running for congressman who had had a pseudoreligious conversion to, among other things, polyamory and the fact that everyone should have access to everyone’s information all the time. I think he was livestreaming his life as part of his election campaign. I remember that he gave his interviewer the password to his email and bank account, and the interviewer ultimately felt that even though the man had given her permission to read his email, his romantic liaisons hadn’t, which made it morally wrong for her to do so.

  87. Purplehermann says:

    @Bean you mentioned below that god(s) used to be falsifiable, and seem to think this changed once they were falsified.

    How far back do you think the old religions were falsified? Christianity seems kind of abstract, and maimonides (1138 a.d.) considered those who believed in a god with a body to be blasphemers.

    • Beans says:

      So, my comment there was intended as an existential rather than a universal, which is to say: Clearly, given all the different strands of religious thought, not everybody who was a theist in previous millennia believed in a literal walkin’ talkin’ body-havin’ thunderbolt-throwin’ deity. But I am under the impression that a) there did exist plenty of people who did, and b) modern westerners pretty much don’t, since we know so much about the world now, but more subtle concepts of transcendental gods still stick in our heads. (Please leave the veracity of god proposals aside, not debating (a)theism here.) I am not an authority on this topic.

      • theredsheep says:

        It’s not clear to me that even Greek myths were very committed to the idea of mostly-corporeal gods. When you consider that Apollo was supposed to spend every day driving a chariot around the sky, but all his other myths have him running around after nymphs and boys, having music contests, showing up to scold heroes, etc. in broad daylight, it becomes debatable to what extent these bodies are just vehicles for the divine nature we think of as Apollo.

        I don’t think it’s that people used to think of Gods as physical and now they don’t; it’s that people had a bunch of different conceptions of any given deity, and weren’t terribly bothered about making them compatible with each other or any given conception of the natural order.

        • danridge says:

          I think that generally the god who drives the chariot of the sun, Helios, is not necessarily identified with Apollo, although they both share the epithet Phoebus and Apollo is a sun god; sometimes the two are conflated though.

        • Jake R says:

          In chapter 10 of Miracles by CS Lewis he gets into this in some depth. He argues that it’s not quite right to think of the ancients as believing in physical gods and then later believing in spiritual gods. His claim is that the entire distinction between physical and spiritual reality was not something that would have occurred to people in ancient times. This makes some sense to me. The idea of a god “living in the clouds” no doubt means something very different in a time before airplanes or knowledge of what clouds are made of.

          • Jake R says:

            Apparently CS Lewis’s works have passed into the public domain…in Canada. The ethics of stealing a work of theology are left as an exercise for the reader. His best known work of non-fiction is probably Mere Christianity but I find the arguments laid out in Miracles to be a much more thorough apologia.

        • MisterA says:

          I think people who spend a lot of time thinking about theology might be surprised how many modern believers still think God is a literal bearded man who lives in Heaven, an actual literal place, and not a fuzzy philosophical concept.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            Look, Michelangelo’s art is so great I don’t care if it confuses some Christians into believing God the Father is a flying bearded man. 😛

          • Gerry Quinn says:

            People who spend a lot of time thinking about theology are as committed to rationality, in their way, as people who spend a lot of time thinking about atoms. For others, ontological distinctions between spiritual metaphor and reality may not be all that much more significant to modern believers than Jake R suggests they were to the ancients (they probably are a little).

        • m.alex.matt says:

          It’s not clear to me that even Greek myths were very committed to the idea of mostly-corporeal gods.

          It’s complicated.

          First of all, they certainly believe their gods were physical beings: They literally believed their gods inhabited to statues and figurines they made for them to live in.

          At the same exact time, they had no problem at all believing their gods could be in multiple places at once. Many different temples to the same god could exist in many different places and the god would be present in all of them.

          These different statues would usually have an epithet, an additional name appended to the god’s normal name as a way of distinguishing them. And this distinction could go pretty far, too: while, in some sense, they were all the same god that doesn’t mean they were exactly the same.

          Greek paganism didn’t have a formal theology (they spent a lot of time inventing the discipline, but never really established an orthodox interpretation), so the sense involved here is vague and not really easy to grasp without access to individual believers to talk to it about.

  88. Uribe says:

    So what was that 75 year old man trying to scan? Was he just acting weird? He looked like someone scanning tickets at a stadium entrance. Is he from the future?

    • Eric T says:

      Not to hijack this thread or anything but for some reason I find the fact that I know exactly who you are talking about with 0 context quite cool.

      • The Pachyderminator says:

        I didn’t, but I guessed it had something to do with the old man who was pushed and fell over backwards at a rally in Buffalo, and Googling “75 year old man scanning” seems to confirm this.

        Buffalo protester shoved by Police could be an ANTIFA provocateur. 75 year old Martin Gugino was pushed away after appearing to scan police communications in order to black out the equipment. @OANN I watched, he fell harder than was pushed. Was aiming scanner. Could be a set up?
        — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 9, 2020

        I can’t be sure of what he was up to, he could have been scanning police radio or communicating with Johan Larson’s alien friends for all I know, but that does not look like a controlled fall. The theory that he took a dive in order to “set up” the police seems far-fetched.

        • Murphy says:

          To me it looked like he was recording badge numbers with his phone.

          his head gets smashed against the ground, within seconds there’s a very significant pool of blood and someone is shouting “he’s bleeding out of his ear” and “he’s rigid” and he very much looks like decerebrate rigidity.

          He’s definitely been fucked up quite badly with some major head trauma.

          • To me it looked like he was recording badge numbers with his phone.

            That explains it. I once got arrested for merely being the accomplice of someone else asking a policeman for his badge number.

    • Nick says:

      My God, his tweet about this was disgusting. He’s apparently trying to top my comments last week about his Scarborough tweets.

      • CatCube says:

        To add a ladle of stupid to it, there’s a huge leftist intramural slapfight about “Abolish the Police” that this will suck oxygen from. Napoleon’s dictum about it being rude to interrupt your enemy while he’s making a mistake would apply even if if it was 100% slam-dunk truth that the guy was up to something nefarious.

        • Murphy says:

          Ya, I’m sorta cringing at that one.

          “demilitarise the police” would be a way way better call to action, particularly when there’s a thousand clips of cops turning up with military gear and looking like they’re finally getting to act out a childhood dream of being an action hero by acting like soldiers in a combat zone.

          “Abolish the Police” seems like too close to a scissors statement to split the idealists from the pragmatists on the left. Any discussion of it turns into a fight with one side arguing that, “ya we still need police.” which is perfect for splitting a group protesting police behaviour.

          While I can’t rule out the random stupidity of the internet throwing up such a thing in the middle of things it’s almost too perfect for splitting the left. It feels like something crafted by a PR firm.

          • AG says:

            “De-militarize the police” has been tried as a slogan in previous years, and every time, got de-fanged in compromise or just ignored as not enough impact.
            So as per below discussion about negotiation tactics, I think that the activists are trying from the exaggerated starting point to bargain down to de-militarized police. We’ve already seen the actual bills introduced come down to “significantly defund the police,” and there will be further reductions in order to get past the Senate.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          To add a ladle of stupid to it, there’s a huge leftist intramural slapfight about “Abolish the Police” that this will suck oxygen from. Napoleon’s dictum about it being rude to interrupt your enemy while he’s making a mistake would apply

          I believe in individual rights. If Twitter banned the President of the United States because its CEO and most employees hate his speech, I’d see it as a red flag of the end of “liberal democracy” or whatever we should call our system of government.
          So I’d like to see President Trump take his own Twitter account away.

    • Bobobob says:

      “I watched, he fell harder than was pushed. Was aiming scanner. Could be a set up?”

      Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.

      I don’t even know what to say anymore. Would anyone here like to provide a steelman argument (I hope I’m using that phrase correctly) about Trump’s motivation for constantly tweeting this kind of nonsense?

      • Aftagley says:

        This was one of the few public disagreements he wasn’t involved in and he wanted to change it?

        He’s done pretty well so far by following a strategy of explicitly making everything that happens turn into a referendum on him. Maybe he truly thinks the best way forward is to always be at the center of every discussion and this was the fastest way to get there.

        • Bobobob says:

          You know who else inserted himself into every conversation? Hitler!

          Just kidding, but I am growing increasingly anxious/afraid/despondent about how Donald Trump continues to lower the standard of public discourse. He is the president, part of his job is to say well-reasoned things that calm people down. I sometimes feel like I am on a runaway train heading over a bombed-out bridge.

          • cassander says:

            Say what you will about Hitler and Goebbels, but I think they’d have been pretty great at twitter.

          • Bobobob says:

            I just flashed back on a Monty Python sketch. “I am not an anti-semite! But…und, this is a big ‘but’…”

          • Eric T says:

            Say what you will about Hitler and Goebbels, but I think they’d have been pretty great at twitter.

            The sheer amount of what the average person believes about Nazi Germany that actually comes from Triumph of the Will or other Nazi propaganda makes me believe Goebbels would have been a force of nature on twitter.

          • keaswaran says:

            Now I’m trying to imagine what Leni Riefenstahl’s TikTok channel would have looked like.

          • Witness says:

            Say what you will about Hitler, but well… he did kill Hitler!

            (shamelessly stolen from an episode of QI)

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            [Trump] is the president, part of his job is to say well-reasoned things that calm people down. I sometimes feel like I am on a runaway train heading over a bombed-out bridge.

            I think a lot of people think Presidents have been failing to say well-reasoned things that calm people down since the invention of political parties, so they’re wondering why you’re only getting despondent now. Since political parties are presumably older than you, you should have long since factored this in – about as soon as you internalized the concept of a political party.

            For them, the train has been running away since about 1796, the bridge site has been taken over by old-growth forest, and they’ve muddled along by not being on the train in the first place, and are wondering why other people are so obsessed with climbing back on board.

      • original-internet-explorer says:

        If this is about the old man who got pushed backward and cracked his skull – then it might be the rumour the man had a blood bag on the back of his head for the camera.

        Don’t ask.

      • gbdub says:

        No steel man for Trump getting involved. Nothing good will come of it, if he wants to push the Antifa angle there are almost certainly better cases to highlight that don’t involve an old man getting his head busted. Needlessly divisive and a conversation that needs the nuance that Twitter lacks.

        Steel man for the opinion is 1) old man really did seem to be doing something weird to the cops with his phone 2) he does seem to be a rather active and uh, outspoken protester 3) dedicated protester provoking a cop reaction is hardly a far fetched scenario

        I don’t think either side planned for him to fall as hard as he did, but “old man trips and hurts himself after being shoved” is again not a scenario that requires a nefarious explanation.

        EDIT: to be clear I definitely don’t think the guy “took a dive”. I do think he may have intentionally provoked a reaction.

      • broblawsky says:

        Steelman attempt: conspiracy theorists are more likely to suffer epistemic closure, and people who have suffered epistemic closure are less elastic voters (e.g., less likely to change who they’re voting for). Promoting these kinds of ideas might help turn regular Republicans into conspiracy theorists, thereby securing Trump’s base.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        I mean…because wasn’t the guy a left-wing agitator trying to provoke a response? His entire purpose of doing that thing while being filmed so he could “prove” how violent the police are, right? Is there any likely explanation for this that isn’t a set-up? Like, was he asking for directions or something and got attacked for no reason?

        • broblawsky says:

          He’s an unarmed 75-year-old. Left or right, his motives are irrelevant; they had a lot of options beyond knocking him down. They did it because they thought there would be no consequences for their violence.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Or they did it because he sure looked like he was grabbing at their equipment or weapons. His goal was to provoke a response and he got the one he wanted. I would wager he’s very happy about how everything went down.

          • Eric T says:

            @ Conrad

            That seems a little beyond the pale, he was seriously hurt. I doubt that was his intention.

          • Murphy says:

            From his age, the way his body went and the bleeding from his ears, if he’s happy then he’ll be happy to not have some brain damage.

          • broblawsky says:

            Or they did it because he sure looked like he was grabbing at their equipment or weapons.

            If that was their justification for attacking him, why did the Buffalo PD’s initial statement omit any mention of any attempt by Gugino to seize their weapons? Instead, they claimed that he “tripped & fell”. Why wouldn’t they shore up their position by charging him if they actually had hard evidence of illegal activity? Even Trump hasn’t claimed that Gugino tried to take their weapons.

            His goal was to provoke a response and he got the one he wanted. I would wager he’s very happy about how everything went down.

            Even if that’s true, that doesn’t justify the imbecilic brutality of the Buffalo PD.

            With all due respect, it seems to me that you’re trying to cast aspersions on Gugino’s character and actions in order to justify Buffalo PD’s response, regardless of whether reality or the available evidence support those aspersions.

          • Erc says:

            He’s an unarmed

            In the actual moment, they rarely know for certain if an individual is unarmed, just that they don’t see a weapon. You’d know this if you thought about it for five seconds.

            they had a lot of options beyond knocking him down. They did it because they thought there would be no consequences for their violence.

            I went and bought a chocolate bar because I thought there’d be no consequences, that isn’t an argument the course of action is immoral. They had to be thinking not just of his situation but the entire situation. Constructing a Rube Goldberg machine to avoid doing violence to someone breaking the law, and thus making themselves temporarily unable to address other possible lawbreakers in the area, is not something they were required to do. I really don’t lose much sleep over it. What do we do in war? We try to win as quickly as possible, not spare the lives of those who attack us. Live by the sword, fall down and get a concussion.

          • Eric T says:

            What do we do in war? We try to win as quickly as possible, not spare the lives of those who attack us. Live by the sword, fall down and get a concussion.

            Jesus christ he’s an unarmed protestor not an enemy combatant! He was by no means “living by the sword”

            Peaceful protest is a constitutionally protected right, and the hoops you are jumping through to justify two cops giving an old man a concussion for exercising that right makes me more than a little uncomfortable.

            In the actual moment, they rarely know for certain if an individual is unarmed, just that they don’t see a weapon. You’d know this if you thought about it for five seconds.

            This logic basically justifies an unlimited use of force of police on any unarmed person any time. If someone is at all uncooperative, if there is any chance they are armed, should the police just give them head trauma? I think the discussion below about reasonable expectations of force are a lot more nuanced than you are giving them credit for.

            This is before we launch into the coverup. You don’t generally cover something up if you think it was the right or legal thing to do.

          • broblawsky says:

            What do we do in war? We try to win as quickly as possible, not spare the lives of those who attack us. Live by the sword, fall down and get a concussion.

            @Eric T made my point far more eloquently than I could have, but I just have to address this: the police are not at war with the civilian population. They are servants of that population. This kind of “warrior cop” mentality is exactly what leads police officers to kill civilians.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Just because someone is dangling bait in front of you doesn’t mean you take it.

            Olds are rare in these protests. If someone looks like they might fall over, spare 1 officer to grab him by the arm and frog-march him out.

          • Guy in TN says:

            What do we do in war? We try to win as quickly as possible, not spare the lives of those who attack us.

            Meta commentary: “it’s okay to kill protestors, we are at war with them”, and its inverse (too dangerous to say online, even under a pseudonym) are probably more widely held positions than people are usually willing to reveal in civil discourse.

            [Personal note: I want to leave this country and never come back.]

          • Eric T says:

            Meta commentary: “it’s okay to kill protestors, we are at war with them”, and its inverse (too dangerous to say online, even under a pseudonym) are probably more widely held positions than people are usually willing to reveal in civil discourse.

            I have no way to know if that is true, but I think we still are obligated to push back against them. If rightists (again – is that even the correct term? It sounds incorrect) hold people calling to kill protestors to the fire, and Leftists hold people who want to kill cops to the fire than hopefully we will at least make people marginally less likely to believe they should act on those opinions.

            And while you may not want to name the inverse – in my never-ending crusade against fear I will. Yes some leftists are advocating killing cops. They’re fucked in the head and I have as much an issue with them as anyone advocating killing peaceful protestors.

          • albatross11 says:

            If any substantial number of policemen believe they’re at war with people protesting (which is a right they’re guaranteed under the US constitution), then we really do need to abolish the police force and replace them with people who understand that their job is to protect the public, not to bash them, even when they’re protesting the cops.

            Indeed, we expect the police to be able to stand up to annoying and provocative behavior without bashing people who are obviously no threat. Every police department expects that on paper, even if some get a little shaky about enforcement. This jackass knocked over a senior citizen and left him bleeding on the pavement when the whole world was watching. What do you imagine he does when nobody’s watching and some kid mouths off to him, or some little old lady calls him an asshole for giving her a traffic ticket? The question answers itself, no?

            This person should never work in law enforcement again. He has demonstrated his unsuitability for the job.

          • John Schilling says:

            What do we do in war?

            Step one: Check whether we are ourselves United States citizens.

            Step two: Consider whether the people we are at war with, say a group of United States citizens exercising their first-amendment right to speak freely and petition the government for redress of grievances, might be considered a manifestation of the United States.

            Step three: Read Article III section 3 of the United States Constitution and ponder whether we might have made a teeny tiny mistake with this “war” thing and start looking for the list of countries the US doesn’t have an extradition treaty with.

          • Erc says:

            “it’s okay to kill protestors”

            I’ve never said it’s okay to kill protestors. Many people in this thread don’t seem to understand the notion of an anaology.

            “@Eric T made my point far more eloquently than I could have, but I just have to address this: the police are not at war with the civilian population. They are servants of that population. This kind of “warrior cop” mentality is exactly what leads police officers to kill civilians.”

            What leads police to kill civilians is civilians attacking the police. I have more more sympathy with some Iraqi grunt who was forced to serve and indoctrinated to hate Americans than a “civilian” who attacks a cop. Cops shouldn’t think they’re at war with civilians, but it’s fine by me to have a mentality that they are at war with the criminals.

            “If any substantial number of policemen believe they’re at war with people protesting (which is a right they’re guaranteed under the US constitution)”

            Freedom of religion doesn’t give al-quaeda the right to go for the high score, freedom of protest is not a licsence to violate the law.

            “Step two: Consider whether the people we are at war with, say a group of United States citizens exercising their first-amendment right to speak freely and petition the government for redress of grievances, might be considered a manifestation of the United States.”

            That would imply any crime against Americans citizens is an act of treason. My ancestors fought for this country. I won’t be leaving.

            “[Personal note: I want to leave this country and never come back.]”

            Gee, as if we haven’t heard this before. *eyeroll*

          • broblawsky says:

            What leads police to kill civilians is civilians attacking the police. I have more more sympathy with some Iraqi grunt who was forced to serve and indoctrinated to hate Americans than a “civilian” who attacks a cop. Cops shouldn’t think they’re at war with civilians, but it’s fine by me to have a mentality that they are at war with the criminals.

            Sean Monterrosa didn’t attack any cops. He was shot while trying to surrender. Are you fine with that?

          • freedom of protest is not a licsence to violate the law.

            In what way was that particular protester violating the law?

          • Ketil says:

            He’s an unarmed 75-year-old. Left or right, his motives are irrelevant; they had a lot of options beyond knocking him down.

            the imbecilic brutality of the Buffalo PD.

            two cops giving an old man a concussion for exercising that right

            Cops regularly move people out of an area, even quite fragile people, without smashing their heads open.

            It looks to me as if he at least was breaking the curfew, and obstructing the police in their enforcing it. The video clearly shows him swiping his phone over the police officers. The police responded by pushing him in the chest, while you can call it “assault” if you like, I’m curious what those other options would be. They didn’t punch him, pepper spray him, throw him to the ground, or hit him with clubs.

            The fight is ostensibly about the motte of racially motivated excessive violence, but what the crowds fight for is the bailey of holding police responsible for unintended consequences of otherwise reasonable actions. And yes, pushing him off is a reasonable thing to do.

            The optics of this is bad, and the important bits are showing close-ups of an old man lying with bleeding from his head. This gets everybody enraged, and nobody cares about the actual circumstances.

            In what way was that particular protester violating the law?

            Breaking curfew? I don’t know the laws in detail, but I would imagine that it is illegal to interfere with or obstruct police. Obviously, if police are required to have protestors meddle with them as they please, and/or people over a certain age are considered untouchable, any advancing police picket can trivially be stopped by a couple of old guys. I would have said this is an untenable position, but it seems that this is what the majority wants.

          • Murphy says:

            Meta commentary: “it’s okay to kill protestors, we are at war with them”, and its inverse (too dangerous to say online, even under a pseudonym)

            Honestly I’m sometimes shocked that this isn’t more of an issue.

            In a country where so many are armed to the teeth, it seems remarkable that events like the D.C. sniper attacks are, in real terms, so insanely rare.

            Particularly when there’s such extreme partisanship, it’s remarkable to me that we don’t see extreme escalation.

            In theory the justice system is supposed to defuse that, no need for a blood feud if the murderer from the “other side” is going to get proper punishment. But with the trend of one side getting let off scott free for even the most straightforward cases of murder, and more importantly, the perception/knowledge of that being the case, it’s remarkable to me that we don’t see more people inflicting tit for tat vigilante “justice”.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            “The police responded by pushing him in the chest, while you can call it “assault” if you like, I’m curious what those other options would be. ”

            Having better judgement about how hard to push him, if it was necessary to push him at all.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            99+% of cops’ behavior can be modeled as trying to teach people a lesson.

            That’s understandable in many ways, because the cops are part of government’s way of enforcing its laws. Pushing the guy was intended to be a punishment. He won’t like it, so he’ll stop doing whatever it was that they didn’t like.

            But the cops aren’t supposed to be the ones meting out justice. It’s the judicial system. The guy wasn’t found guilty of anything.

            “The process is the punishment” is a real thing.

            If you need to move someone out of the way, pushing them backwards is the worst way to do it safely. You start with verbal orders, and then lay hands on him to turn him around so he’s pointing in the right direction, and keep him moving.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            I think the vast majority of this subthread is sorely lacking in information from anyone with current experience as an LEO and serving riot or protest control duty. We could really use an Effort Post from such a person. Otherwise, there seems to be a great deal of “simulated LEO” going on.

            I’m thinking about reaching out to two friends of mine who are LEOs at this point, although it’d take a lot of my (and their) time.

      • Ninety-Three says:

        Steelman: Observe the behaviour of Conrad and Erc above. Trump successfully polarized an issue where the cops looked terrible and rallied some of his supporters to a position of condemning the septuagenarian.

        More broadly, if Trump has a base of dedicated partisans who will support him no matter what (and it seems hard to otherwise explain his 80-90% Republican approval ratings), why not explore the vast possibility space of “no matter what”?

        • Erc says:

          “More broadly, if Trump has a base of dedicated partisans who will support him no matter what (and it seems hard to otherwise explain his 80-90% Republican approval ratings), why not explore the vast possibility space of “no matter what”?”

          I’m not supporting Trump no matter what. I stopped supporting him due to his empowerment of the warmongerers.

        • cassander says:

          More broadly, if Trump has a base of dedicated partisans who will support him no matter what (and it seems hard to otherwise explain his 80-90% Republican approval ratings), why not explore the vast possibility space of “no matter what”?

          Are you claiming trump is different in this regard than other politicians? Because I’m pretty sure most presidents have a loyal base. I don’t recall obama’s followers abandoning him over all the skysassination, or bush’s when he went from a “humble but strong” foreign policy with no nation building to occupying iraq for a decade.

          • Ninety-Three says:

            Regardless of whether Trump’s base is actually more loyal, there has been a longstanding belief that you can’t just act like Trump and get away with it. Trump was acting Trumpy from day 1 of his campaign, so by the time he got elected he had thoroughly disproved the conventional wisdom, at which point to answer Bobobob’s question, why wouldn’t he keep tweeting this kind of nonsense? It’s not like his base is going to vote Democrat to punish him.

        • Bobobob says:

          It’s the vast possibility space of “no matter what” that scares the crap out of me.

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          Uh, it wasn’t Trump that made me “condemn” the septuagenarian, it was the actions of septuagenarian that made me…I don’t even know, “not care?” I’m not even condemning him, I’m just shrugging. “What did you expect would happen?” There is a reason I don’t go running up to people and screaming in their faces, because they might hit me, and it would hurt. You’d really think by the time somebody reaches 75 they’d have figured this out already.

        • gbdub says:

          I think the issue was already polarized, Trump just picked a side. I mean, you’ve got Trump supporting one extremely unrealistic version of events, but the other side isn’t much closer to reality – reading the anti-cop narrative you’d think the police came out of nowhere and beat a helpless old man to within an inch of his life for no reason at all.

          Can we just not do context or nuance any more? Seriously, watch the video, it’s not that long, and neither narrative really holds up. It’s clear that:
          1. Gugino intentionally went up to the cops to impede and maybe deliberately antagonize them. He got right up in their faces, was doing weird stuff with his hands and phone, almost but not quite touching them.
          2. Gugino might be old, but he’s a very tall guy and hardly looks decrepit. Plus he had a mask on. “He’s a 75 year old man” really should not be the salient fact here, and yet it’s in every headline (currently the top result for “75 year old man”!)
          3. The officer shoved him straight back pretty hard in the chest, but that’s it. He doesn’t drive him to the ground, he doesn’t fall on him, he doesn’t even touch him after the initial contact. It hardly seems likely that the officer intended to injure Gugino or even make him fall.
          4. Gugino really does fall hard – you can hear him hit the ground, and that’s exactly the sort of fall you’d expect to result in cracking the back of your head. It seems very obvious he’s not “faking” or “taking a dive”.
          5. The police do immediately call for a medic once they realize that Gugino is hurt.
          6. Toward the end of the video you see the police arrest another guy who refused to move out of the way and got in among them, but they just grab and cuff him after ordering him to move repeatedly and maybe shoving him a bit. So they were clearly forcibly clearing an area, but they weren’t being particularly brutal about it.

          So to be clear, I think punishing the police in some way is appropriate, they really did cause serious injury, even if unintentional. And it’s reasonable to hold them to a standard of better judgement in cases like this. And those who participated in the lying about the incident should definitely be punished (maybe more severely!). But reversed stupidity is not intelligence, and the extreme anti-cop narrative in this incident is not the truth either. And that narrative was live and being promulgated before Trump got involved.

      • Matt M says:

        Easy. Every part of this statement is at least plausible.

        Anyone who has watched sports understands the concept of “flopping” or “diving” wherein someone receives very light physical contact, but throws themselves to the ground, hoping the other guy will be punished severely. Trump’s read of the video is that this is what happened here. Given that this is a thing that we know can happen, it’s really just a matter of subjective opinion. Trump believes the fall was more dramatic than the push warranted. Perhaps you disagree, but he’s not obviously wrong.

        I don’t know about a “scanner” specifically but the guy was clearly doing something kinda weird with his phone. Maybe it was completely innocuous, but given his general non-compliance with the police, it’s reasonable to suspect he may have been up to something.

        And given that the guy has a long history of being an extreme protestor, it’s entirely reasonable to speculate that this was a “set up”, particularly if you go back to point #1 (that he exaggerated the force of the push) combined with the fact that someone was convienently nearby to take video, and that said video was edited for maximum anti-police impact and quickly made the rounds of all the typical anti-police media.

        I’m not saying that any of the above is obviously true. But it’s not obviously untrue either. And the fact that Trump is President doesn’t mean he is not allowed to express his personal opinion on subjective issues being debated in the public square. Literally every President did this. Obama expressed not-obviously-true opinions on every public scandal that ever happened. It was never considered “beyond the pale” until Trump started doing it (because Trump’s opinions, unlike those of all of his predecessors, are not filtered for maximum political correctness).

        • Bobobob says:

          And the fact that Trump is President doesn’t mean he is not allowed to express his personal opinion on subjective issues being debated in the public square

          This used to be done with televised speeches, or press conferences, or offhand comments to the media, not with exponentially shared Twitter bait aimed at millions of followers. It is the way Trump expresses his “personal opinion” that has (hopefully not irrevocably) degraded the national conversation about important issues.

          • Matt M says:

            A non-trivial reason of why certain people liked Trump was his willingness to do this. Not just to give clearer and more direct messages, but to give them quickly and directly to the people, and not channel them through media organizations who hate us.

            Once again, you may not like it, but it’s not clearly and obviously bad that Trump communicates to his supporters directly rather than through intermediary organizations.

          • Jaskologist says:

            Note, for example, the NYT thread, discussing the current media consensus that they should not publish opinions by politicians they dislike.

            The problem with Trump’s tweets is the content, not that fact that he doesn’t run things by a NYT censor.

    • Dragor says:

      What I really appreciate about that incident was that the two officers were suspended and charged. It seems like we might be entering an era where police officers who commit assault etc on video are promptly suspended and charged…like a normal person would be when they are filmed appearing to commit a crime.

      • MisterA says:

        The fact that the department initially issued a false statement to try to cover for them does seem to indicate this only applies if the crime is actually recorded on video, though, which isn’t great.

        Particularly when you consider that this particular crime happened in clear view of a large number of other cops on an otherwise clear and empty sidewalk, in broad daylight. And yet until the news went public with the video, the department was happy to report that this guy was caught up in a fight with imaginary protesters, and innocently tripped and fell.

        • gbdub says:

          Yeah this seems like the worse part. Shoving a guy out of frustration is bad but maybe understandable. Covering it up is just bad.

        • Am I the only person who is reminded of David Brin’s Transparent Society?

          Bring argued that improved surveillance technology was moving us towards a society where everything was recorded, stored, and findable. He didn’t think the change could be stopped, but thought the bad effects could be ameliorated by transparency in both directions. The cops could watch us but we could watch the cops.

          I was unconvinced, in part because the context was video cameras on poles in England, feeding to the police. I figured that with an expanded version of such a system, the police could make sure that the camera in the room where they were beating up a suspect was pointed in the wrong direction or turned off.

          But as it has turned out, the relevant surveillance is by individuals with smart phones, not under the control of the police, so Brin was more nearly correct than I thought.

          • MisterA says:

            Yeah, I think you are definitely on to something here. Part of all this is the social upheaval resulting from sousveillance becoming a real thing.

          • Eric T says:

            I haven’t read it – would you recommend it?

          • would you recommend it?

            I thought the first chapter or two were quite interesting, and have turned out to be more nearly correct than I thought at the time. My memory is that the rest of it was less good.

            But I may be biased, because I don’t like the author for other reasons.

          • Ketil says:

            The most interesting thing about the panopticon we have turned the world into, is that there is such a wide interpretation of the facts. Several reasons:

            – careful editing: we don’t get to see the raw material, only clips selected for impact. Social media is horrible about this, mainstream media is (IMO) doing an OK job of objective reporting
            – selection bias: There have been two weeks with protests in a hundred cities, in DC alone there were hundreds of thousands of people out protesting. Yet, a handful of incidents are taken as representative of police violence or violent riots and looting.
            – confirmation bias: if you hold a belief with sufficient fervor, everything you see is taken as evidence in favor of it. I.e. any rough handling by police is evidence of police brutality (or racism, if the colors align), any thrown object or car on fire is evidence of the violent behavior of the protestors.

            If anything, this whole mess has reduced my faith in transparency as a means to justice.

            One interesting thing about this particular case, is that it seems to reflect “systemic” racism in that what matters isn’t intent or causes or reasonably expected consequences, but the final outcome. The fact that an elderly man was hurt is sufficient to condemn the police, just like the fact that black people do worse on average is sufficient to condemn white people (or at least, society as created or governed by white people).

            If you want to blame somebody for this incident, my finger would point at the mayor or other political leadership of Buffalo, who chose to enact a curfew, ordered police to enforce it, yet now wash their hands by condemning subordinates.

          • MisterA says:

            @Ketil

            I have the same question for you as I had for Erc. If the cops did nothing wrong with that old man, why did they concoct a fictional scenario from whole cloth to explain how he got hurt and issue it through an official spokesman?

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            +1 Ketil

            @MisterA: Can you link me to the original statement by the Buffalo PD? Not a news article that summarizes it, but the actual statement?

            I’m not saying it didn’t happen, I have no idea, but I think people’s biases cause them to editorialize things and I’d like to see the source document before agreeing it doesn’t match the events as seen.

          • Fahundo says:

            The fact that an elderly man was hurt is sufficient to condemn the police, just like the fact that black people do worse on average is sufficient to condemn white people (or at least, society as created or governed by white people).

            Just going to register here my opinion that if you have video evidence of an individual somehow pushing all of black people down, causing them to do worse on average, I think it’s fine to condemn him for it.

          • MisterA says:

            @Conrad

            I am not able to find any public statement venue for the Buffalo police to have issued this directly to the public; it’s not on their website or twitter feed that I can find. As near as I can figure, it looks like they issued a press release that went to local news affiliates.

            The most complete version I could find is here, from WBFO, the Buffalo NPR station – https://news.wbfo.org/post/graphic-video-two-buffalo-police-officers-suspended-after-elderly-man-shoved-and-injured

            A Buffalo Police spokesman issued a statement at 8:50 p.m. Thursday saying “a 5th person was arrested during a skirmish with other protestors and also charged with disorderly conduct. During that skirmish involving protestors, one person was injured when he tripped & fell.”

            WBFO posted video of the incident on Twitter at 9:13 p.m. Following that posting, department officials said a full Internal Affairs investigation was underway and that Police Commissioner Byron Lockwood had ordered the immediate suspension of the two officers involved, without pay. The officers have not been formally identified, but the name plate of one is visible in the video.

      • Erc says:

        The police were told to clear the square. There was nothing about not using force, nothing about only clearing those over or under a certain age. That is not a crime. The local police are behind them and hopefully action will be taken to assure the charges are dropped.

        • Eric T says:

          Ah yes, the Nuremburg defense! I wonder how that worked out for the people its named after?

          • Erc says:

            Extermination of Jews is a criminal order. Clearing the square is not a criminal order. It is a routine. And even if it was a criminal order, in Nuremberg those who gave the orders were prosecuted to the extent possible.(You can’t prosecute Hitler’s corpse.) There are no calls to prosecute those who gave the order, thus, I conclude that this is entirely due to people being ignorant of the realities of policing. It’s an attempt to scapegoat the grunts for what was ordered by the higher-ups. My hope is that action will be taken by the police union to remedy the situation.

          • Murphy says:

            @Erc

            There’s typically a concept of reasonable force.

            If you’re a cop and I’m your commander and I order you to clear a square and you do it by machine gunning everyone in it, then it wasn’t an illegal order but how you went about it would be utterly unreasonable to the point that you could not reasonably hide behind “following orders”

            If you are ordered to clear people out of the square and you could do so without seriously maiming anyone, but you start cracking heads and maim some citizens anyway, then the same applies.

            Cops regularly move people out of an area, even quite fragile people, without smashing their heads open.

          • albatross11 says:

            It worked fine for everyone on the winning side, alas.

          • Eric T says:

            It worked fine for everyone on the winning side, alas.

            I know what you mean, but it took me 2 reads to realize you weren’t lamenting the Nazis being found guilty.

          • AG says:

            Clearing the square can be an unconstitutional order, though.

        • MisterA says:

          If they didn’t do anything wrong, why did the department lie about it?

        • redoctober says:

          It seems like what we actually need to do here is carve, in flaming letters 100 feet high, Asimov’s 3 Laws of Robotics Policing into the facade of every precinct in the land:

          First Law
          A robot police officer may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
          Second Law
          A robot police officer must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
          Third Law
          A robot police officer must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

          • Noah says:

            One of Asimov’s stories, called “Evidence”, makes a point out of the fact that the three laws are also largely how a morally upstanding human would behave.

          • Murphy says:

            >also largely how a morally upstanding human would behave.

            Do whatever anyone orders you to do unless it will kill or maim someone?

            I’m not so sure.

          • AG says:

            I mean, they are supposed to be servants of the people.

            (The longer answer is that the will of the people is translated through democratic processes, so the robot/police only following the orders of its/their chain of command to an elected official satisfies the requirement.)

          • Evan Þ says:

            @Murphy, IIRC it didn’t come up in “Evidence,” but that was a minor point in Asimov’s other story “Bicentennial Man.”

          • Witness says:

            There are nine, when it comes to policing:

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles

          • Garrett says:

            > There are nine, when it comes to policing

            “the public are the police”

            I’ll believe that just as soon as all of the laws granting special privileges to police officers are revoked.
            Hell, I’d love to see a UK citizen show up at a police department and ask for their sidearm as a member of the police (yes, I know most British police aren’t armed … use whatever local terminology would be appropriate.

    • broblawsky says:

      Here’s a good rundown of the source for that particular insane conspiracy theory.

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      I went to bed last night and this subthread blew up, so I’m moving my response out here for clarity.

      I’m increasingly feeling like I’m adjudicating a fight between my 5 and 7 year old. She comes crying into the room, “he hit me!” “No, she fell!” “Because he pushed me!” “I didn’t mean too! And she started it, she called me a poopy-head!.” Okay, time out for everybody. You: no calling people poopy-heads. You: just because somebody called you name, you don’t get to push them. They could fall down and get hurt.

      A racist wants to “prove” BLM and black people are violent, so he wears a klan costume to a BLM event, runs up to a black guy and starts screaming the n-word in his face and gesticulating wildly. The black guy shoves him off, he falls down and busts his head open on the concrete, and his buddies got it all on video. They show it to you. Is your response, “wow, that guy was just expressing his first amendment guaranteed freedom of expression and the violent black guy attacked him. I guess he was right, black people can’t control themselves.” Or is it, “wow, what a jerk. He was looking for a response and I guess he got one.”

      I don’t know about you, but mine is the latter, and it doesn’t change because it’s an old man and a cop instead of a racist and a black guy. People are more like shaved wookies than protocol droids. We can’t all act perfectly all the time, and the lizard brain part of you does “stop threat” and not “do maximally diplomatic action.” A 75-year-old really ought to know better.

      The message I seem to be getting now is “we want to be able to behave in extremely anti-social ways, going up to and over the line of criminality while receiving only perfectly measured and even responses. If any response at all.”

      Going all the way back to George Floyd, no, he shouldn’t have died. Chauvin should not have kneeled on his neck. The other cops shouldn’t have let him. We all agree this should never happen again. But ya know, I can’t help but notice there’s another way to help prevent this from happening again, which is to not be high on drugs in public trying to defraud shopkeepers with fake $20 bills. That’s pretty anti-social behavior. I don’t want old men pushed by cops cracking their skulls on pavement. Should never happen again. But I can’t help notice there’s another way to prevent this from happening again, which is to not be running up to cops and screaming in their faces while flailing your arms around. That’s pretty anti-social behavior.

      Perhaps some two-way civility could help the situation. As is it seems like a pretty one-sided demand, and I find myself getting less and less sympathetic to the “peaceful protestors” as this continues to draw out.

      • Randy M says:

        it doesn’t change because it’s an old man and a cop

        I would absolutely tell my kids or friends that it’s the same with a cop–don’t provoke them, because provoked people will often respond, and when your head hits the concrete, you’re the one who has to lie in a hospital bed.

        However, it being a cop does change how we as third party observers judge the situation. Representing the state and enforcing the law requires greater discipline than being Joe blow hanging out when a provocation erupts. Cops are there to keep the peace, and if that means taking disrespect*, so be it. In return, we grant cops a greater measure of deference–but only in return.

        *(I don’t have an opinion on the extent to which this cop was in fact)

      • MisterA says:

        Conrad, same question to you as Ketil above. If there was nothing wrong with what went down in Buffalo, why did the department lie and make up a fake story to explain the man’s injury?

        Remember, they didn’t just say he tripped and fell. They said he tripped and fell because he got too close to “a skirmish involving protesters” which we can plainly see is total fabrication.

        Why fabricate events if the real ones are fine?

        • Faza (TCM) says:

          Why fabricate events if the real ones are fine?

          Because the real ones clearly aren’t fine, at least in the court of public opinion.

          Having seen the video, I’ve updated my assesment to “play stupid games, win stupid prizes”. I am in the minority.

          • keaswaran says:

            In this case, the “stupid game” is agreeing to be a public servant, which requires being subject to the court of public opinion.

          • Eric T says:

            I agree to some extent that he provoked a response and that he should have expected something – I think the far more interesting and relevant question is “are we cool with cops responding like this?” Like yes maybe he should have expected that, but do we want to live in a society where that is the expected response?

            Like, he was being a bit disruptive sure, and doing something with his phone, looks like recording to me but who knows? And for that he gets his head busted open? Like maybe cops should:
            A. Have thicker skin and not reacted like this. I worked in retail for two years and got all manner of abuse thrown at me, I never cracked any heads open.
            B. Have better ways of removing people from a place not involving shoving them? I buy the cops didn’t intend to seriously hurt them – doesn’t mean it wasn’t a move that introduced that risk and there were way less dangerous options available (as discussed in this thread, cops manage to move people from places all the time without this kind of force)

            I’m also not sure if I’m entirely willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the cops, just based on my own personal experiences trying to peacefully record the NYPD.

          • Fahundo says:

            he was being a bit disruptive sure, and doing something with his phone

            I see this thrown around a lot, and could have conceivably brought this up in a lot of threads, so I’m not intending to pick on you.

            What exactly is waving a phone around supposed to change in the police’s assessment of how to handle this guy? I could maybe see it if they had mistaken it for a weapon, but no one seems to have claimed they did, and the video makes that seem implausible. Filming the police is legal, so what else is the phone supposed to mean, and why is it relevant? If there’s something sinister or dangerous he could have been doing with the phone, what exactly is it?

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Like yes maybe he should have expected that, but do we want to live in a society where that is the expected response?

            I’d like to know what the society looks like where this sort of thing is prevented from ever happening. Are there any humans in it?

            A lot of this is getting back to the issue of selective…I’m not sure what the word is. Cherry picking, kind of? How many peaceful protests have we had over the last two weeks? Hundreds, across the country? With probably hundreds of thousands of protestors and police. And we’re freaking out about the handful of times something goes wrong?

            It would nice we could put some numbers on this, so I’m going to make some up, but if we’ve had 100,000 police/public interactions over the last two weeks, and in 99,950 of them the police behaved appropriately, shouldn’t be saying “wow, what a great job, 99.95% success rate, we sure do have great police in this country!” and not “they screwed up .05% of the time! Abolish the police!”

            Which ties in nicely with the innumeracy around the entire killing of unarmed (black) people thing. It’s really, really, really, really rare. I did the math before for the overall killings, with 41 killings of unarmed people out of ~55,000,000 police interactions (lowball average of the recent numbers on the BJS website) and figure the police are getting it right 99.99993% of the time, and yet the rhetoric is that the police are hunting blacks for sport in the street.

            I don’t know where you’re going to find the automatons who are going to close out those last .00007% errors, so it’s hard for me to imagine the society you want to live in. I don’t think there’s humans in it.

          • metalcrow says:

            @Conrad Honcho

            I’d like to know what the society looks like where this sort of thing is prevented from ever happening. Are there any humans in it?

            Any other first world country? I’m open to being wrong, but my understand is that this stuff (brutality seen in the video with the older man) doesn’t happen in other first world countries outside the US (UK, Australia, Scandinavian countries, etc). Yes the counter to this is that those countries are different, but really, i think a fundamental difference may be that i truly believe the US CAN get it much much better.

            And i mean, the other part of the claim is just that because they still happen doesn’t mean we shouldn’t punish them. Murder happens in every society and will continue to happen, but it’s still not ok and we try and stop it.

          • Fahundo says:

            I’d like to know what the society looks like where this sort of thing is prevented from ever happening.

            I can only speak for myself here, but preventing this from ever happening is obviously unrealistic. I think the relevant issue here is not “police violence sometimes happens, and it shouldn’t ever”, but rather “there doesn’t seem to be much of an effort to hold people accountable, unless the incident happens to be caught on video.”

          • Jake R says:

            I am generally predisposed against the police. I think many police departments systemically disregard civil rights, and many officers are unusually prone to escalate situations when their perceived authority is challenged.

            After reading about this story for the last day I just watched the video, and while there are no heroes here I find myself agreeing more with the police.

            There’s a term poker players like to throw around called “results-oriented thinking.” The idea is that in poker you can play your hand perfectly and still get beat by the guy who played terribly but got lucky. In this situation it would be a mistake to change the way you play in response to this result.

            Watching the video of Gugino falling I can’t but think there’s a nearby universe where he just stumbled back a step or two and nobody ever hears about him. We can debate the wrongness of a cop shoving a guy who got in his face. It would be a better world if it never happened. But in a world with 800,000 cops interacting with hundreds of millions of civilians, it seems unreasonable to expect nobody to ever get shoved by a cop the way Martin Gugino was.

            What strikes me most about this is what a terrible example this is to raise a standard around. We live in a world where whole counties treat the fourth amendment as a troublesome suggestion, where by-the-book procedure is to break down doors, handcuff everyone, throw them on the ground face down, and point loaded weapons at their heads. If you want to reform law enforcement, I’m with you, but we’ve got to get better at PR than this.

          • Eric T says:

            And we’re freaking out about the handful of times something goes wrong?

            300+ times isn’t a handful

            People have lost eyes.

            10,000+ people have been arrested.

            Please come down from up there and look at reality – some police are attacking protestors and trying to quash protests using a variety of means.

            They’ve attacked reporters

            repeatedly

            And as others have pointed out, other WLDs don’t seem to have this problem, so maybe it’s not as absurd a fix as you posit. Maybe it’s even easy? Maybe we just need to make sure we don’t give people who commit unneeded assault on camera a pass as a start? Seems fairly low cost to try.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Any other first world country? I’m open to being wrong, but my understand is that this stuff (brutality seen in the video with the older man) doesn’t happen in other first world countries outside the US (UK, Australia, Scandinavian countries, etc).

            Is that true or not, that police in other countries don’t ever get into altercations with peaceful protestors? I don’t think I’ve seen anyone claim or refute that yet, so I’d be curious to know if other countries’ riot police are better than ours.

            If you’re talking about police killings in general, we did the math on that one, too and the US is not uniquely bad. From the various wikipedia* pages (you can look them up yourself or I can link them), there were 6 police killings in 2018 (ETA: IN SWEDEN. WHOOPS). In the US there were 1004 in 2019. So per capita, the US police kill about 5 times as many people as Sweden. However, by gun homicide rate, the US is about 10x more dangerous than Sweden (4.46 per 100k vs .43 per 100k). You’d think if the US was 10x more dangerous, we’d be killing 10x as many people, but we’re not, it’s only five. Be thankful we don’t have the Swedish police, we wouldn’t have 1,000 dead a year we’d have 2,000. If the Swedes had police as competent and restrained as our boys in blue, they’d only have 3 killings instead of 6. Perhaps the Swedes are a little trigger happy given the country they’re policing is 10 times safer than the US.

            So, no, I don’t think the US is particularity bad. I think everyone is doing pretty well.

            * since we did that calculation last week it looks like the Wikipedia page on police killings has been updated a dozen times. I guess there’s something of a war going on over the page with everyone referring to it to demonize or exonerate the police in their online debates. They’ve upped the US number from 1,004 to ~1,500, but that’s not what we’ve got in the WaPo database.

            Depending on which countries and which years you pick you can probably say the US is the same, twice as good, or twice as bad as everybody else in the western world. But you have to factor in how much more dangerous the US is than those places or else you’re not comparing apples to apples.

            It would probably be worth doing a multi-year average to figure out just how good or bad police are by various metrics. I don’t want to be like, “Hey, Scott Alexander, please do this statistical analysis for me,” but, um, “Hey Scott Alexander, please do this statistical analysis for me!”

          • Fahundo says:

            But in a world with 800,000 cops interacting with hundreds of millions of civilians, it seems unreasonable to expect nobody to ever get shoved by a cop the way Martin Gugino was.

            I agree with this, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that at the very least the cops are instructed not to shove an old man who is outnumbered and presents no threat to anyone.

            To be clear, to me there is a very significant difference between “this is against the rules, but every now and then an individual cop breaks the rules anyway” and “the department was going to pretend it didn’t happen until a video surfaced”

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            300+ times isn’t a handful

            We’re talking about peaceful protests and you’re moving the goalposts to police clearing out riots.

            Yes, I am absolutely not surprised police are using teargas and rubber bullets against rioters, and that occasionally the “peaceful protestors” acting as their human shields get gassed too.

          • metalcrow says:

            @Conrad Honcho

            If you’re talking about police killings in general, we did the math on that one, too and the US is not uniquely bad.

            That argument is very reasonable and sound, and i’m not about to challenge it. But what i specifically was referring to was cases of brutality, not just killings. Do cases like that happen at the rate we are seeing in the US in other countries? If they do i haven’t heard of any outcry about them from those countries, so it would surprise me.

          • MilesM says:

            @metalcrow

            Any other first world country? I’m open to being wrong, but my understand is that this stuff (brutality seen in the video with the older man) doesn’t happen in other first world countries outside the US (UK, Australia, Scandinavian countries, etc).

            I’m sorry, but… you cannot be serious.

            https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/12/police-must-end-use-of-excessive-force-against-protesters-and-high-school-children-in-france/

            https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/10/12/spain-police-used-excessive-force-catalonia

          • metalcrow says:

            @MilesM
            I was not aware of these, thank you! In that case, this raises the broader question; instead of “Why are the US so bad and how can we fix it” to “Why are police in general so prone to brutality and how can we fix it”

          • I haven’t seen the video, but it sounds from the discussion here as though what the police did was not “break his head,” which to me requires hitting his head. What they did was to shove him, which is a pretty normal thing to do to someone who isn’t moving back when he is supposed to be — I gather they were clearing the area, and a curfew was on.

            He then fell and hurt his head badly enough to bleed.

            If that’s a correct account, the reaction seems much exaggerated. And the initial police statement sounds more like “we don’t know exactly what happened, but he ended up falling over and hurting himself” than like a deliberate lie.

          • Garrett says:

            > hurt his head badly enough to bleed

            There’s “I scraped my scalp and now I’m bleeding. Whaa!” and then there’s this dude. He went down *hard*.

            I’ve dealt with patients who’ve (presumably) died from far less serious injuries. I wonder how he did.

          • Aapje says:

            I think that the cop was used to people either pushing into him or paying attention to him, while he wanted to clear them. Those would presumably handle a push much better than this guy, who was acting very peculiar.

            I also think that most people would be quite willing to give someone a push if they wanted someone to move. I do think it is bad police behavior, but also something that is not very obviously bad (unless you have a bad outcome and then reason back).

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          Same response in case you didn’t see it above, can you link me the original statement that you believe was false? I haven’t seen it so I don’t know, but in this polarized climate I’m finding people’s perceptions of events don’t always agree, so I’d like to make my own assessment before agreeing with yours.

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          Okay I saw your post in the other thread but I’ll respond here because clutter.

          This is what I’m talking about with the editorializing I don’t trust. The BPD claim:

          “a 5th person was arrested during a skirmish with other protestors and also charged with disorderly conduct. During that skirmish involving protestors, one person was injured when he tripped & fell.”

          But you called this:

          Remember, they didn’t just say he tripped and fell. They said he tripped and fell because he got too close to “a skirmish involving protesters” which we can plainly see is total fabrication.

          Your alleged fabrication is a fabrication. I’m not saying you did this intentionally, I think people have a tendency to bias their interpretations of events against their outgroup (oddly enough I seem to be the only human who sees Reality As It Is. I’m pretty amazing that way, being perfectly unbiased in every way and all). Anyway, you claim they claim he fell because “he got too close” to a skirmish involving protestors. No, they don’t say anything about “getting too close.” They claim:

          1) There was a skirmish with protestors.

          2) During that skirmish, one person was injured when he tripped and fell.

          There was indeed a skirmish with protestors. The police were clearing them out and they arrested several people. During the time that the skirmish was going on, the man tripped and fell.

          This is true. The worst you can say is they lied by omission by leaving out that they shoved him as part of the skirmish. That they skirmished, and during the skirmish the guy tripped and fell is…really just leaving out a detail of the exact nature of the skirmish.

          Yeah, they should have put in a more detailed description, but this is hardly a grand conspiracy.

          • Eric T says:

            That they skirmished, and during the skirmish the guy tripped and fell is…really just leaving out a detail of the exact nature of the skirmish.

            I think the average reasonable person sees a big difference between “he tripped” and “he was pushed”

            Or at least my mom did when I was a kid and I tried to get out of trouble for pushing my brothers.

          • MisterA says:

            There was indeed a skirmish with protestors.

            This is so divorced from plain reality that I genuinely don’t believe that you actually believe it. There is a single person in that video surrounded by cops. There are no other protesters. There is no skirmish with protesters. There is no conceivable world in which that is an accurate description of reality, and frankly there is no way a reasonable person could conclude that it is.

            This isn’t like the last video where I could sort of see where you’re coming from. I literally don’t think it is possible to view that video and come to the conclusion you are claiming to have come to here based on it.

            (And given that the police commissioner pulled a 180 and suspended the cops in question within the hour of the video becoming public, I don’t think I’m alone in this.)

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            @Eric T

            I doubt the people upset by this would have liked any description the police used that described Gugino’s actions leading up to the event.

            “During the skirmish, one man accosted officers in a threatening manner. Officers responded by pushing the man away from them. The man subsequently tripped and fell.”

            Would that be reasonable, or would you object because Gugino was just expressing his constitutionally protected first amendment rights to peaceful protest?

            If they’re going to say they shoved the guy, they’d need to give a reason why, and since that reason will almost certainly not be acceptable to their critics, it’s probably better just to leave out the details rather than editorialize.

          • Fahundo says:

            in a threatening manner.

            Threatening them with what? Accosted, sure, but threatening? How?

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            This is so divorced from plain reality that I genuinely don’t believe that you actually believe it.

            Come on man, if you want an explanation for how I could think that just ask for one.

            There is literally a single person in that video surrounded by cops. There are no other protesters.

            They’re off camera. We know this because they were clearing the square. What were they clearing the square of? The other protestors. They arrested five people. I don’t see five people in that video, but five people got arrested. Where are they? Off frame. Or are we now claiming they lied about how many people they arrested?

            That little clip wasn’t the (ETA “entire”) skirmish. The skirmish was the entire confrontation involved in clearing the square and arresting several people. During that larger skirmish, this guy accosted the officers, was shoved away, tripped and fell.

            ETA:

            Threatening them with what? Accosted, sure, but threatening? How?

            The yelling and the shoving of his hands in weird ways. I would feel threatened if someone did that to me, wouldn’t you?

            Then again, we can probably leave that part out anyway because I’m not sure it’s possible to “accost” someone in a non-threatening manner. It’s kind of baked in.

          • MisterA says:

            That little clip wasn’t the skirmish. The skirmish was the entire confrontation involved in clearing the square and arresting several people.

            Which all occurred after Mr. Gugino was already on the ground bleeding from his ears, which means attributing the injury to the skirmish is a lie.

          • Fahundo says:

            The yelling and the shoving of his hands in weird ways. I would feel threatened if someone did that to me, wouldn’t you?

            No. Double no when the guy doing it is a lanky fuck with thinning white hair. Triple no when I’m armed and in armor and he’s not.

            I’m not sure it’s possible to “accost” someone in a non-threatening manner. It’s kind of baked in.

            It is possible, and it’s not baked in. You can accost someone by bombarding them with questions, for instance.

          • metalcrow says:

            @Conrad Honcho

            The yelling and the shoving of his hands in weird ways. I would feel threatened if someone did that to me, wouldn’t you?

            I agree i would feel, uh unnerved, threatened is a bit strong. But the proper response to someone yelling (which i didn’t see or hear him do in the video) or moving their hands strangely (i didn’t see him physically touch any of the officers, so not shoving) is NOT to shove him backwards so hard he falls over. Especially if i have both a less-lethal weapon and a gun on my person AND backup surrounding me. The action they took was disproportional to the threat, caused far more harm then necessary, and most importantly, wasn’t in good faith. If i was the policeman, i simply would not have shoved him. Lay my hands on him, move him backwards more carefully, march him away? Sure! But the action they took lead to permanent damage to that man for the crime of walking up to them. That is an unacceptable level of response.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            @MisterA

            Which all occurred after Mr. Gugino was already on the ground bleeding from his ears, which means attributing the injury to the skirmish is a lie.

            The confrontation with Gugino was part of the larger skirmish of clearing the square. During the skirmish, the police fought with people, including Gugino. During the fight with Gugino, Gugino tripped and fell and was injured, after being shoved by the police.

            @metalcrow

            Lay my hands on him, move him backwards more carefully, march him away? Sure! But the action they took lead to permanent damage to that man for the crime of walking up to them. That is an unacceptable level of response.

            “The crime of walking up to them?” Don’t you think it was a little more the yelling and the gesticulating and not the walking up?

            I get it, I get. “We get to behave like animals indiscriminately but the police must behave like robots 100% of the time.” This is not reasonable and I am not sympathetic.

          • metalcrow says:

            @Conrad Honcho

            “The crime of walking up to them?” Don’t you think it was a little more the yelling and the gesticulating and not the walking up?

            Honestly? No. If someone did that to me i would be in the wrong to push them.

            We get to behave like animals but the police must behave like robots

            While this is hyperbole, i think it’s not that far from the truth. The police must behave substantially better than the average citizen. Otherwise, why are they the police? How can we trust them? How do we know, if they’re not better then average, they won’t freely murder, kill, and be bad?

          • Fahundo says:

            Don’t you think it was a little more the yelling and the gesticulating and not the walking up?

            Since when is this a justification for shoving someone?

            “We get to behave like animals indiscriminately but the police must behave like robots 100% of the time.”

            So the standard for behaving like an animal is yelling and waving your hands, and the standard for being a robot is refraining from cracking open someone’s skull?

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Otherwise, why are they the police? How can we trust them? How do we know, if they’re not better then average, they won’t freely murder, kill, and be bad?

            The police are there to enforce the law and keep the peace, not act as your therapy screaming dummies.

          • metalcrow says:

            @Conrad Honcho
            I really don’t understand how you got that this guy was screaming at the police. But frankly it doesn’t matter. If you are screamed at, you cannot use violence to make the other person stop. Full stop. That is the argument behind https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/
            That is the argument behind rationality
            That is the argument behind democracy and non-violent civilizations as a whole
            And if this had happened between a civilian and another civilian, it would still be wrong for the most basic reasons behind anti-violence and utilitarianism.

          • Fahundo says:

            The police are there to enforce the law and keep the peace

            So we’re agreed that they’re not there to start fights and injure people.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            @metalcrow

            But frankly it doesn’t matter. If you are screamed at, you cannot use violence to make the other person stop.

            Sure, but because you provoked someone into a barely violent response with your completely unreasonable screaming behavior doesn’t mean they’re a bad person and the class of people to whom they belong are bad people.

            The racist in the klan outfit who gets laid out by the black guy for screaming the n-word at him doesn’t prove that particular black guy or all black guys are bad.

            The agitator who gets shoved for screaming at the cops and reaching at him in weird ways doesn’t prove that cop is bad or that all cops or most cops are bad.

            “If I get in the face of enough X-people* and scream at them enough, one of them will shove me” is true for nearly all X-people. And is therefore really not worth discussing.

            And linking the niceness and civilization post? Isn’t that kind of my whole point that you seem to think that niceness and civilization is only a one-way thing? You really want to talk about rationalism in defense of a guy screaming at police? I don’t think “screaming at people” is how the Rationalist project works. I haven’t read the Sequences so I dunno.

            * Le Maistre Chat do not make an X-Men joke.

          • Fahundo says:

            The agitator who gets shoved for screaming at the cops and reaching at him in weird ways doesn’t prove that cop is bad or that all cops or most cops are bad.

            The fact that one cop shoved him proves that, at least, he was caught on a bad day. The fact that the department attempted to obscure what happened with “he tripped” proves that there were several bad cops involved, even if we don’t know exactly who.

            “If I get in the face of enough X-people* and scream at them enough, one of them will shove me” is true for nearly all X-people. And is therefore really not worth discussing.

            Normally we can recognize that something is an inevitablity without condoning it. The fact that various people are condoning or attempting to cover this up are what make it worth discussing.

            I believe that if I leave my apartment door unlocked every day while I’m at work, eventually something will be stolen from my place. That doesn’t change the fact that whoever took my shit would be a thief.

          • metalcrow says:

            @Conrad Honcho

            provoked someone into a barely violent response with your completely unreasonable screaming behavior doesn’t mean they’re a bad person

            I agree that it does not made you a bad person. It it is, however, a bad act, and frequent bad acts make you a bad person. So we need to punish people who do bad acts to prevent them from becoming bad people.

            class of people to whom they belong are bad people.

            Bad may be used rather loosely here, but i think the group of other cops who stood around, let this happen, the didn’t immediately try to help him after he fell are also performing bad acts and are bad people in the moment.

            Isn’t that kind of my whole point that you seem to think that niceness and civilization is only a one-way thing? You really want to talk about rationalism in defense of a guy screaming at police

            Ok, did we read the same post? Scott says in it “The respectful way to rebut Andrew’s argument would be to spread malicious lies about Andrew to a couple of media outlets, fan the flames, and wait for them to destroy his reputation. Then if the stress ends up bursting an aneurysm in his brain, I can dance on his grave, singing. I’m not going to do that.” The explicit statement here is that, because one person is screaming at you and stating harmful things, you are not justified when you respond by silencing them or using violence against them.
            If the police officer screams back, while that STILL goes against the principals of the post, i wouldn’t even object

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            Conrad Honcho:

            “a barely violent response”. Enough force to knock a basically healthy person down hard is beyond barely violent.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            @metalcrow

            Ok, did we read the same post?

            Yes. I’m noticing that you’re lobbing the complaint about not doing the Rationalist thing only at the cop and not at the agitator. “Rationalism for thee but not for me.” “We get to act like animals, you must act like robots.”

            It is not a reciprocal relationship. If you wanted to say “Gugino’s behavior was inappropriate, so was the officer’s” I’d be more sympathetic to your claim to virtue. But it seems as though you demand your opponents live up to the highest ideals of civilized discourse but not your allies, they can get dirty. I dunno man. This doesn’t look like a good deal.

            @Nancy

            “a barely violent response”. Enough force to knock a basically healthy person down hard is beyond barely violent.

            I don’t think the shove was that hard. I don’t think a reasonable person would have expected him to fall down and crack his head. It was a reasonable use of force with an unfortunate outcome.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            I’m finding this discussion useful to watch, but some comments are over-the-top.

          • metalcrow says:

            @Conrad Honcho
            I can give that some credence. I’ll say that Gugino’s behavior was inappropriate, and so was the officer’s. However, the officer’s was significantly worse then Gugino’s.
            And again, i told you what i think about “We get to act like animals, you must act like robots” before! For the people that carry guns and get the right to murder and arrest, you don’t have to be robots, but you gotta be much better than the normal citizen. We give you more power, you get more responsibility.

          • metalcrow says:

            @Edward Scizorhands
            Just in case, if that is addressed to me, please do call me out. I sincerely apologize if I have been overly aggressive or uncharitable.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            I’m finding this discussion useful to watch, but some comments are over-the-top.

            Aww man I don’t wanna get banned! Is there anything I can edit? You can’t say that without pointing out what we need “less of, please.”

            ETA: metalcrow, I thought you were fine and I was enjoying our discussion, although I think we’ve basically wrung this one out and are just repeating ourselves at this point.

          • metalcrow says:

            @Conrad Honcho
            Same to you. Good discussion, thank you for your time and energy.

          • Mark V Anderson says:

            Wow what a long discussion, not getting anywhere. I do want to register that I mostly agree with Conrad, so not everyone is in the other camp. What I saw in the video was a cop shoving the guy to get him out of the way (not all that hard). The guy then tripped and fell. As Conrad says, it is a bit suspicious there was someone carefully videotaping the whole incident. It probably was a set-up, though presumably the guy wasn’t expecting to crack his head when he fell. Maybe the shover didn’t even realize he caused the guy to fall. It then appeared to me that the guy who fell just lay there for some reason I couldn’t tell — it looked to me like he was doing it for dramatic reasons, like the soccer players who take a knee. I have since heard there was blood around him, so apparently not fake. The whole incident appears to me one of those accidental events that the anti-cop side way way over states because they are looking so hard for evidence.

      • Witness says:

        This may be the best, or the worst, place to put this. I dunno yet.

        The biggest problem with this take is that it excuses fundamentally bad policing. I say this because the fundamentals of good policing are at least 200 years old, and they are good ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles

        Your basic argument does hold some water: sometimes idiot thieves try to break into our favorite coffee shop and hold a w- I mean, hold Sergeant Angua hostage. If the officers list the resulting injuries as “self-inflicted”, I’m not going to be too upset.

        This is different enough to at least warrant some disciplinary action towards the officers involved.

  89. Clutzy says:

    In response to a few things said by a lot of people here, I’d like to remind people that Slippery Slope is a logical fallacy, but logical fallacies do not govern in political discussions.

    I’d go further, the slippery slope is more often correct than not in political discussion, unless the person arguing that its merely a fallacy has explicitly indicated a limiting principle wherein passing that line violates that person’s own core political beliefs.

    • Faza (TCM) says:

      Slippery Slope is a logical fallacy

      A commonly held misconception.

      A properly constructed Slippery Slope is nothing but a chain of modus ponens:

      1. If A then B
      2. A
      3. Therefore B (1, 2)
      4. If B then C
      5. Therefore C (3, 4)
      6. If C then D
      7. Therefore D (5, 6)
      etc.

      We can question the truth of the premises (does B, in fact, lead to C, for example), but formally the argument is valid.

      • Nick says:

        +1. Slippery slope arguments can be dubious, but they are indeed valid. Eugene Volokh has actually written in defense of them. Scott also wrote years back on one way to halt a slide down a slippery slope, which he called a Schelling fence, adapting the concept of a Schelling point to the spectrum of positions on a question.

      • Eric T says:

        My understanding is the difference between a Slippery Slope and a chain of Modus Ponens is the argument A then B is used as a justification for B then C: (Ie – If we can go from 12 to 13% income tax, than we will in the future go from 13 to 14!)

        • Faza (TCM) says:

          To the extent that our acceptance of the premises should be justified, I see nothing wrong here.

          Suppose we hear Great Leader Jones say “Read my lips: no new taxes!” and we assume this to mean that taxes will not be raised, but later Great Leader Jones signs a bill that raises the income tax from 12% to 13% and reconciles the two positions by saying “Technically it’s not a new tax. It’s an old tax, but higher.”

          Prior to the tax hike, we could reasonably assume that “no new taxes” meant taxes won’t be raised. Post tax hike, we can no longer use the “no new taxes” claim as a rebuttal against the suggestion that Great Leader Jones will raise taxes in the future, because we’ve already seen that the claim does not preclude it.

          It doesn’t make the claim that taxes will be raised in the future more plausible, in and of itself, but it makes it less implausible. (Yes, it’s the same thing in terms of changing probabilities, but it’s worth being explicit about what we’re doing here.)

          All of the foregoing aside, people seldom construct formal logical arguments in day-to-day conversation, so few slippery slope arguments encountered in the wild will have a valid form. Same as with every other kind of argument.

  90. SamChevre says:

    This is a top-level note of thanks to Eric T and Aftagley, both of whom have articulated a position I don’t share, that’s not popular here, helpfully. Thank you both.

    • Well... says:

      +1, also to anyone else SamChevre missed but to whom this note of thanks applies. Well-articulated positions most people in a given context don’t share, articulated by people who are patient and willing, are immensely valuable.

    • Statismagician says:

      Well done both of you, and anyone else doing similar things. We only work so well because we have people of diverse opinions willing to defend them eloquently.

    • Eric T says:

      To slightly hijack this – I wanted to thank everyone who took me up on my offer downthread and actually took the time to email and chat with me today about SJ issues, I enjoyed being able to answer your questions and concerns, and am delighted that several people were so open and willing to have extended conversations about a difficult and often uncomfortable topic. It gives me hope that we’re not all doomed to see such willingness to learn and challenge and discuss. ETA: And I too learned from many of you! I don’t think I made that clear enough 🙂

    • Erusian says:

      +1

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      For both their patience and eyes on the ground reporting. Hear, hear.

    • J Mann says:

      Agreed – I thought that was a very helpful discussion on all sides and learned a lot!

  91. lambda_calculus says:

    https://www.wkbw.com/news/local-news/all-officers-in-the-buffalo-police-emergency-response-team-resign-from-special-unit-positions

    Two Buffalo police officers were suspended by their superiors. Their compatriots (sort of) resigned in protest. Unfortunately, no news stations ran the headline “Buffalo police police police Buffalo police; Buffalo police buffalo Buffalo police police.”

    • Phigment says:

      I chuckled.

      More of this.

    • smocc says:

      I am astounded because I made almost exactly this joke to annoy my wife several months back. I had to invent a contrived hypothetical scenario to justify the headline, and now here we are in real life.

    • Urstoff says:

      *gif of Charles Foster Kane clapping*

  92. BBA says:

    Re abolishing the police – are there any reasonably populated parts of the world today that don’t have police, or something resembling a modern police force?

    I’m aware that 200 years ago most of the world didn’t have police, but then we didn’t have electricity or running water either. Anywhere with 1820 levels of development could probably get by with 1820 levels of law (non-)enforcement. “Ungovernable tribal regions” aren’t what I’m looking for here.

    • Jake R says:

      My first thought was one of those remote Alaskan villages that are inaccessible for days at a time. Some googling turned up the “city” of Nulato, AK, population ~250. In 2016 a drunk snowmobiler crashed into an Iditarod sled dog team, killing one dog and wounding 2 others a few miles outside of Nulato. The article says the suspect “has been identified by a Nulato village police officer” so no luck there, although everything after that is handled by Alaska State Troopers. It’s unclear to what extent village police were involved.

      McMurdo Station is the largest research station in Antarctica. In addition to being remote, the antarctic treaty makes everyone there subject to their home jurisdiction. The station chief of McMurdo is “a special deputy United States marshal, with training in evidence protection and the power to arrest Americans for offenses committed against other Americans” (NYT Article). It sounds like it’s just him though for a population of up to 1000. Not sure if that counts or not.

      • Nick says:

        McMurdo Station is a cool almost-example. There was actually a 2009 slasher movie, Whiteout, about the US marshal stationed at Amundsen–Scott Station.

        • RogetOfHentzau says:

          I don’t know about the film, but the pair of Greg Rucka comics (Whiteout, Whiteout: Melt) it is loosely based on are pretty good.

      • Aftagley says:

        I know I’m late to this conversation; but I was once in a bar in McMurdo and saw someone get arrested. The nearby airforce base helps out in prisoner detention/removal.

    • I’m aware that 200 years ago most of the world didn’t have police, but then we didn’t have electricity or running water either

      Electricity I’ll give you, but running water goes back a good deal farther than that.

      • achenx says:

        Unevenly distributed of course; my grandmother didn’t have running water somewhat less than a century ago (Appalachia).

        Apparently the White House first got running water in 1833, so almost 200 years but not quite.

        • SamChevre says:

          I grew up in Appalachia: there were still a few people living in dwellings without running water then (~30 years ago). (Obvious-ish, but given other topcis in this open thread…–they were all white.)

      • keaswaran says:

        Running water and (more importantly) sewage disposal did exist in some places going back many thousands of years. But I don’t think either of them was standard across most of the developed nations of the time until the late 19th century.

      • Ventrue Capital says:

        Nu, David, what’s your reaction to hearing all the people saying “abolish the police”?

        Me, I’m just farklempt and grinning from ear to ear.

        • Doctor Mist says:

          There are a lot of kinds of anarchy and most of them are not as good as David’s. If I thought any of the CHAZ nuts had even heard of him, I might be guardedly optimistic.

          • Ventrue Capital says:

            Good point!

            Are you interested in playing in my anarcho-capitalist D&D game?

          • Doctor Mist says:

            Kind of you to offer, and certainly an intriguing thought, but I don’t really have time.

        • Mostly amused by their lack of the background knowledge needed to make their proposal make any sense.

    • I don’t think you’ll find a system without modern policing.

      One of the problems with this is that it’s hard to tell whether pre-1820s policing systems were universally more brutal in themselves, or whether there were big confounding factors like the level of technology, and the particulars of the moral philosophies of the time. It might be that you could take some elements of previous systems and modernize them as an alternative. It may be telling that we don’t see any examples of policing systems that significantly deviate from each other across developed nations, but on the other hand, developed nations share so many ideological characteristics that this may not be the case for entirely functional reasons. I’d lean 99% towards modern police structure being inherently better, but we’re not able to compare them to older systems in a vacuum, so there’s some tiny measure of doubt.

      The idea of “no police” is kind of similar to the idea of “no state”, in that although these things didn’t exist in the forms we are familiar with, there has always been some kind of mechanism in which force was used to ensure compliance. Considering that the idea behind abolishing the police is that without police there can be no brutality, any plausible replacement to the police would still need to apply force to criminals, and then we are back to having to worry about specific practices and not the existence of enforcement mechanisms in of themselves.

      In the medieval period, soldiers, officials, and community associations variously acted as the equivalent of the police depending on the region and time period. In England they used to have a system called tithings, which was a sort of organizational unit of households, which held collective responsibility for criminals, and they could actually be fined if a criminal escaped.

      So not having the police would still mean people going about and tackling criminals for violating the law. It’s similar to how a state may be specifically defined as involving a bureaucratic distance beyond the dunbar level, but this doesn’t mean that stateless tribes operate on the basis of voluntarism and pacifism. They have very high levels of violence, in fact.

      Since “abolishing the police” is very close to left-wing anarchism, we can assume that the replacement involves something less bureaucratic and more community oriented and decentralized. The model of tithings may be applicable. Whether this would result in the outcomes they seem to want I don’t know, but it seems to be the closest fit to abolishing the police under those ideological constraints, in the sense that anarchistic abolition of the state also doesn’t literally mean that there is no structure of rules, but that there is more direct democracy.

      • cassander says:

        we can assume that the replacement involves something less bureaucratic and more community oriented and decentralized.

        when has the modern left in the US seriously pursued a solution to any problem that wasn’t bureaucratic or centralized?

      • Oh no, I mean that’s what left wing anarchists want. They’ve never truly got what they want because it seems like their model for society does not work, but hypothetically they want a directly democratic police force, even if they stop calling it “the police”.

    • Tatterdemalion says:

      I’ve seen Camden, NJ, cited by some people as a model; I haven’t looked into it myself.

      • Clutzy says:

        They fired the cops to bust the union, then hired even more. Its not the model they think it is.

      • J Mann says:

        Is Camden better than other similarly sized cities on the relevant data? (Crime activity, disproportionate stops, overall satisfaction with the PD, etc.) If so, union busting may be an area that’s worth looking into in other cities.

        The news stories show individual incidents of Camden cops grilling hot dogs at community events, but I think most police departments do at least some of that.

        • Noah says:

          From what I recall, Camden is still a very high-crime city (not sure about the other metrics).

          So what they did may be useful if you have insanely high crime and police malfeasance and want to get down to merely very high crime rate and somewhat less abysmal police-public relations.

        • baconbits9 says:

          I think that undersells their success. Camdem’s peak crime year was either 2011 or 2012 (2011 for total crimes and 2012 for peak murders). Major crime is down over 50% from the peak and has decreased every year since the 2011 peak.

        • J Mann says:

          That’s my understanding – Camden had an exceptionally challenged police force. Busting the union let them raise the number of police from 175 to over 400, which predictably lowered the rate of crime and increased the clearance rate on crimes.

          My question, though, is whether Camden’s reforms moved them above the national average on the principal BLM issues. Is there a sense in Camden that African Americans aren’t hassled to the extent they are in an average city of that size, and do the data support that sense. (If so, great!)

        • Eugene Dawn says:

          Apparently Camden has seen a 95% drop in reports of excessive force; this is the Department’s own statistic, so there may be reasons not to trust this. Still, combined with a decline in crime, this seems promising.

        • Garrett says:

          > Busting the union let them raise the number of police from 175 to over 400

          How did one lead to the other? Did they just start paying less?

      • Controls Freak says:

        Make sure to ask whether they consider the massive investment in increased surveillance to be “acceptable”.

    • original-internet-explorer says:

      The world did not have police but it was policed by militia organizations and reputation and if this failed then the King sent his pro guys in. Large standing armies are new too.

    • actinide meta says:

      Cruise ships (not the most popular example today, I know) are basically floating cities, and as far as I know all law enforcement at sea is entirely private.

    • keaswaran says:

      I’m not sure why you’d think that 50 states is anywhere near enough to have one with the relevant policies. Urbanists who want a relaxation of zoning don’t have any models in the United States to point to (some Pennsylvania jurisdictions experimented with a land-value tax, but no loosening of zoning; Houston has no zoning, but still has extensive parking regulation and deed restrictions everywhere). Environmentalists have a bit more options to point to with local regulation of pollution, though even there most examples for most relevant policies are relatively recent. 50 states and a few hundred medium-to-large cities isn’t really enough to explore the logical space of municipal regulations, when there’s so much correlation among the cultures sustaining all of those governments.

    • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

      The optics of the 2011 UK riots were completely different. Although the initial cause of the riots was protests about a police killing that the protestors believed to be unjustified, that very swiftly ceased to be a relevant part of it. There was essentially no-one justifying the majority of the rioting as anything like righteous indignation.

      To the extent that current British BLM protests are about police killings in the UK (I think this extent is actually very small), they’re obviously silly. Three people were killed by the British police in 2019, one of which was the London Bridge terrorist (and the other two appear to have been drug dealers during raids).

  93. Phigment says:

    So, I think I’ve figured out something about modern U.S.A. politics, which clarifies a few things that are otherwise inexplicable about the current state of the government and the economy.

    I hesitate to post it here, but it’s a culture-war-OK thread, so I’m going to take the plunge.

    Donald Trump has access to a magical genie.

    To expand, at some point in the past, President Trump discovered a magical lamp, probably ostentatiously decorated in gold, and rubbed it, whereupon a genie popped out and offered to grant him three wishes. It’s possible this genie is Melania Trump, hiding in plain sight.

    Mr. Trump wished to be the President of the United States. This wish was granted, and events lined up to get him elected despite the predictions and efforts of every member of the current political, social, and journalistic elite.

    Then, knowing that the state of the economy is often more critical to a President’s popularity and re-election chances than any actual policy he attempts, Trump wished for the best economy ever. This wish has also been granted, and is why the stock market is so high even in the face of pandemic and rioting, and generally why it has grown so much over the course of his Presidency no matter what he or anyone else does or does not do.

    The major question now is whether Mr. Trump has already used his third wish, or it is still outstanding, and if so, what he will wish for next.

    • baconbits9 says:

      The major question now is whether Mr. Trump has already used his third wish, or it is still outstanding, and if so, what he will wish for next.

      He wished for a second term which is why Biden is the Democratic nominee.

    • b_jonas says:

      I find this theory inelegant because it has so many variables that it can explain anything, so it has no predictive power. Trump is hard to predict, he could wish for just about anything, even for something that you would consider stupid. A genie could do basically anything.

      I prefer Scott’s theory in the Epilogue of the 2017 article “A Modern Myth” “https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/27/a-modern-myth/”. Note that I’m talking about just the Epilogue, which you can consider almost independently, without the rest of the blog post. This is more specific, because it doesn’t let Trump wish specifically for good economy or whatever other observation it is that you want to explain. It explains why Trump became President, and a little else.

    • Fahundo says:

      His third wish was that jar of only red Starburst.

  94. I’m thinking about the idea of a Dyson Swarm or Dyson Bubble (not the rigid shell type that is impossible with any possible materials), and sometimes it’s portrayed as a swarm of colonies, whereas other times it is portrayed as a mechanism for collecting power to then beam elsewhere, but then I wonder whether wireless power transfer would really be worthwhile. When I’ve seen speculation on this topic, I’ve never seen anything on what the collection method would be like. If the solar collectors are transferring power to colonies, isn’t that not ideal since you should have the colonies be attached and use the power directly? I suppose the idea is to transfer power to Earth or Mars… I guess.

    • keaswaran says:

      I assume the idea is that the sort of structure that can have an orbit that is part of a power-collecting swarm isn’t necessarily the best sort of structure for living on, and sometimes the losses of transfer are made up for by the convenience of having specialized locations for energy gathering that are separate from specialized locations for residence and commerce. I think this isn’t totally obvious for all energy-gathering technologies, though it is for some. It used to be that most people lived on farms, where energy was gathered, but now farms are a specialized industrial resource and most settlements are elsewhere. I think very few homes were ever attached to coal-fired power plants. With solar power, there seems to be quite a back-and-forth between the advantages of rooftop residential solar and the advantages of massive centralized solar plants that send electricity to residences.

    • John Schilling says:

      Solar power collection is typically a low-density affair, whereas you consume power at much higher densities. So you need to get the power from the solar collectors to the concentrated use location somehow.

      One way to do that is to put concentrated clusters of power-users at the center of every solar collector and run wires to them. But that’s not necessarily where the power-users want to be. Among other things, they’re scattered across a couple astronomical units of space, with up to half an hour of latency if they want to talk or tweet or twitch-game with one another. And wires suffer resistive losses that increase with distance, unless you use superconductors that have to be actively cooled.

      Microwave power transmission is close to 90% efficient end-to end, works across vast distances if you’ve got at least one big antenna (and, hello, Dyson shell speaking), and it lets your power-users be wherever they want to be; maybe a nice tight cluster of habitats or a ginormous hollowed-out moon all in one place.

      • Paul Brinkley says:

        And the usual objection I hear to microwave transmission is that it’s also easily used as a weapon. John would know better than I what the physical engineering obstacles are to solar power in space, but I can at least guess that whatever they are, weaponization concerns are slowing the rate of clearing those obstacles (and perhaps speeding the rate of researching them…).

    • AlexOfUrals says:

      If you redirect a significant percentage of total solar energy output to Earth and Mars, you’ll not just toast, but melt everything on the surface and then the surface itself pretty soon, so that’s definitely not the answer.

      One use other than colonies which can require massive amounts of energy is powering – i.e. accelerating and decelerating – starships. You can either power arrays of giant lasers pushing on light sails, or just focus the light on the sails directly (with the obvious upsides and downsides of each approach). And of course if you have the technology to work with antimatter and use it as a fuel, its production will require insane amounts of energy as well. Then there may be other energy demanding manufacturing processes – if e.g. you want to convert Mars or Venus entire mass into rotating habitats to maximize the living surface, then you likely want to melt the entire thing (the part which is not molten yet, that is), and perhaps take it down atom-by-atom depending on the technologies involved. There’s also some theoretical concepts for harvesting the matter from the Sun itself, which also takes tons of energy (very literally) since you’re pulling it out of quite a deep gravity well.

      Or maybe you want to power colonies or facilities located very far out – Uranus, Neptune or far beyond that. There may be a number of reasons to do that, at the very least that even if all you want is to convert the material there to colonies located at a comfortable distance from the Sun, you need first to harvest that material and bring it in. At this distance collecting the energy closer to the Sun and then transmitting it over a tight beam will almost certainly be more efficient than attaching the solar panels directly to the consumers.

  95. original-internet-explorer says:

    I know plenty of people here have Jewish ancestry. I have an awkward complaint to make. I’m sure it is not novel but it bugs me.

    I don’t have a rant about Jews – but I do have one about what happens if I mention the word Jew(s) in conversation. The word Jew is so loaded it is insane and even with current events Black is less loaded where I am than Jew. There is the urge to use “Jewish people” but the Geiger counter keeps chirping. Maybe this is because nobody knows any.

    The context or who you’re with doesn’t really matter – we could be talking about New York bagel production numbers. Whatever. This sounds like a Larry David skit but it’s real. Something like this happens – eyes are averted, I hear the brakes squealing on the topic was. I’m reading ohgodohgodohgodohgodohgodgetmeoutofhere from body signals. It is as if the rant about – I mean take your pick from the tropes – is auto implied. I even feel bad myself and I haven’t done anything wrong. Forcing down the compulsion to mention something cringe about “my Black Jewish friend” as preemptive defense. Am I supposed to go through the world forever without mentioning Jews just in case antisemitism is summoned? How do you get your head around this? I don’t want to give up words.

    tldr; Help how not to become a Curb Your Enthusiasm character

    • souleater says:

      This is not just you, I was talking to my fiance about the book of exodus, and at one point she stops me to ask me not to say “jew”, and instead say “jewish people”. I was discussing biblical history, and wasn’t saying anything antisemetic. Its odd that our society seems to have decided that the actual, demonym for for a people group is considered a slur, and I wonder if it will have some weird unintended consequences.

      I later asked a (atheist if it matters) jewish friend about it, and he said he doesn’t think its a slur.

      Thats just the way of the world, I guess.

      • original-internet-explorer says:

        There has to be a way to short circuit the bullshit.

        Often with humour it works out – right? With friends you joke around with stereotypes for laughs. I have high confidence there exist Jews in Israel blaming the Jews for everything just as blue collar guys joke about our white privilege and extra bank accounts. This could be nostalgia but it seems that sticks were not always so firmly up in our butts – Eddie Murphy even ran a segment on SNL as Mr White https://youtu.be/l_LeJfn_qW0

        I wonder more often today if we could ban all news media – if the world would be a lot better. All the time there is reference to fringe organizations and websites but I believe a real analysis of where conflict gets generated would show up most major newspapers. There was a podcast talking about how the site Stormfront is most likely to visit is the New York Times. This is not surprising to me. Most trolls I know used to live in the comment areas of the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian. We are used to connecting racial aggravations to society but maybe it’s mostly not – the other idea proffered is they serve as a lightening rod as violent cinema does for crime – but lightening is not addicted to lightening rods so a figleaf?

        Think of the lower blood pressure! What is the worst thing that could happen if the press was muted for a month?

    • Murphy says:

      I kinda get this.

      “Jew” and “jewish” aren’t insults or slurs in their own right, but any mention can attract a crazy amount of hate online.

      I remember with one of those GPT-2 chatbots experimenting to see what it would produce from various prompts, it turned out to be pretty hard to get it going on racist rants.

      Then I tried feeding it some jokes. Almost joke with the word jew in it, in almost any format seemed to quickly trigger a seague into talk about jewish conspiracy. I tried feeding it the same jokes with the group changed a few dozen times and it didn’t do the same seagues.

      Of course that’s very weak evidence.

      But it does sort of imply from the dataset of millions of web pages and chat logs there is a somewhat strongly weighted connection between any mention of jews and batshit conspiracy talk.

      I suspect “jew” has gotten loaded down with so much negative effect that it’s well on the way to being fully considered a straightforward slur.

      • Etoile says:

        So do you think the hate is decreased by saying “Jewish people”? I figure the haters will keep up with any terminology! The fact that there exist lots of sites talking about Jews in an unflattering way is why GPT-2, which I guess learns from whatever is out there on the internet (is my understanding correct?) can also give you the results you saw.
        But if you put in anything else referencing Jewish People into it, wouldn’t you get a similar result?

        • keaswaran says:

          I think one of the points is that people who specifically care not to be seen as haters will follow arbitrary preferred terminology, people who specifically care to be seen as haters will do the opposite, and people who don’t specifically care will fall a bit behind. The changing terminology doesn’t do anything on its own, other than reveal the amount to which the people care, which is useful.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            It can take a lot of spoons to keep up with a euphemism treadmill.

          • baconbits9 says:

            other than reveal the amount to which the people care, which is useful.

            Proper language has long been used to distinguish classes of people. It isn’t about showing who cares its about showing that you are a certain type of person. If the next wave of euphemisms is developed on college campuses (as many of the previous ones were) then recent college grads and college professors will appear to care a heck of a lot more than non college grads.

            Euphemisms are, and always has been, about showing how with it you are language wise to differentiate yourself from some other group who doesn’t ‘get it’ and isn’t close enough to the place where euphemisms spontaneously generate.

    • Bobobob says:

      Yes, for some reason, the word “Jew,” as opposed to “Jewish,” raises my hackles. “He is a Jew” sounds much more ominous than “he is Jewish.” I’m not sure why, maybe because the noun is objectifying?

      • Erusian says:

        Because using the noun instead of the adjective puts the emphasis on the group instead of the individual. “Bobobob is Jewish” means “Bobobob has the trait of Judaism.” whereas “Bobobob is a Jew” means “Bobobob is a member of a group called Jews.”

        Neither of these are inherently good or bad (“He is a Spaniard” doesn’t have the same effect.) But there’s good historical reasons for Jews to be wary of people referring to them as their group, especially as their primary characteristic.

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:

          As far as I can tell, this edginess around the word Jew is a recent phenomenon and a side effect of people-first terminology.

          Something I read long ago and might have been old then– that in Russian, if you wanted to be polite, you’d say “of Hebrew ancestry” rather than “Jew”. Anyone know whether this was ever correct?

          • bullseye says:

            If it’s recent, it’s a revival.

            Footnote from a 19th century translation of 1001 Nights:

            Arab. “Yahudi” which is less polite than “Banu Israil” =Children of Israel., So in Christendom “Israelite” when in favour and “Jew” (with an adjective or participle) when nothing is wanted of him.

            Page 210 here.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            Probably not very recent, but my guess is pre-Russian revolution, but not by a huge amount.

          • Noah says:

            I can’t really help you on whether this was ever correct. For at least the last hundred years, you had the words “zhid” (which I think used to be the normal word in the 19th century and earlier, now is pretty clearly a slur) and “evrey” which is the standard/normative/PC word (the latter does come from the same root as “Hebrew”, if that is what you’re thinking of).

            I have heard of the phrase “people of Hebrew nationality” used in a context that was described to me as a well-known antisemite was denying being an antisemite, but couldn’t bring himself to use the word “evrey”.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            I’m fairly sure if was “of Hebrew ancestry” or “of Hebrew descent”. Would it have been normal to refer to Jewishness as a nationality?

          • original-internet-explorer says:

            We’ll be using Chocolate-Americans unironically by the end of the decade.

            Worthy of note are Tamler and David – friends who run the Very Bad Wizards podcast and they trample over all this with no mercy. It’s the running joke they have it in for each other – Dave’s supposed signs of leaning into fascism and plotting by Tamler just coming so naturally – the in-jokes won’t come across in an internet comment but their good humour is infectious. It doesn’t solve the nonsense but it’s a tonic and much funnier than the professional comedians. I haven’t laughed at comedians in years and I’m beginning to believe it’s a problem with them and not me.

            That’s what is missing – to use the ideal of Tolkien – common human fellowship is noticeable by the lack. I don’t know Twitter would be that attractive if people had more friends to prescribe them a ribbing to get out of their heads. Elon Musk and Donald Trump – lonely and Twitter addicted /cautionarytale!

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            I think there’s a lot of variation– I have friends and we don’t to identity teasing with each other.

          • AlexOfUrals says:

            @Nancy Lebovitz
            Assuming “Hebrew” corresponds to the Russian word “evrey” (еврей) – because there may be alternatives, but they make less sense in the context – I’d agree with everything Noah said, and add that “a person of Hebrew nationality/descent” is not so much more polite but rather more formal and officious. Some media might use this wording, but to me it sounds like something coming from Soviet TV or newspapers. I can’t remember ever hearing it used straight (as a means to actually increase politeness) in conversation. If anything it sounds borderline sarcastic because of how officious it is, and I’ve seen it used as such.

          • original-internet-explorer says:

            @Nancy

            It could be a male bonding thing. With foreign friends it is common to explain something by being a few pints short – talk of the potato shortage threat and general concern with potato based activities is high fun, your American friend is stirring his drink with a gun, the Lithuanian is suicidal – everybody’s happy.

        • SamChevre says:

          I remember around a decade ago, someone noted that “Jews” was often appropriate, but “the Jews” was so frequently part of anti-Semitic rants that it put comments into moderation.

        • Paul Brinkley says:

          It might be because one connotes a rigid property (“he’s a Jew”), while the other connotes a non-rigid one (“he’s Jewish”), to borrow terminology from metaphysics.

          You say “he’s a Spaniard” doesn’t have the same effect, but I disagree somewhat: I think that phrase is still has a stronger effect than “he’s Spanish”.

          Consider:
          “he’s cheap” vs. “he’s a cheapskate”
          “he’s male” vs. “he’s a man”
          “he’s Caucasian” vs. “he’s a Cauc”

          Each of these might have different baseline levels of offense, but the latter is always greater than the former (at least, to me). Even a normally positive attribution sounds more aggressive: “you’re only human” vs. “you’re a human being”.

          In the philosophy I’ve studied, the rigidity of a property is itself a rigid metaproperty, determined by its actual meaning – “person” is rigid, “living person” is not, etc. You can’t change a property’s rigidity by merely phrasing it as a noun rather than an adjective. However, you can offend people (or amplify offense) by phrasing a property they have as necessary when they believe it’s not. “You’re being ungrateful!” vs. “you’re an ingrate!”. Or, in general, by phrasing a property as more necessary than they believe it is. “You did this because you’re Jewish!” vs. “you did this because you’re a Jew!”.

          It’s a very abstruse, nerdy way of putting it, but I have a feeling this is nevertheless a part of everyone’s instinct.

        • Ventrue Capital says:

          Yes, David Gerrold once mentioned that if you want to dehumanize, or at least stereotype, someone you call them *a(n)* X using the noun form: a Jew, a Japanese, a Chinese, a Black, a Cossack, a Goy.

          Instead, he decided to train himself to think in the adjectival form: so-and-so is Jewish/Japanese/Chinese/Black/Cossack/Goyish.

    • bullseye says:

      I think maybe it’s a regional thing. Half my family and some of my friends are Jewish, and I’ve never heard any of them object to the word “Jew”; I’ve even heard one of them be baffled that anyone would find it offensive. On the other hand, this isn’t the first time I’ve heard about it being offensive.

      • Paul Brinkley says:

        It’s almost certainly regional. Or perhaps more accurately, an outgroup / fargroup thing.

        I grew up in rural Texas, and met zero Jews AFAIK until college. My exposure to Jews was through Jewish jokes and as the (usually) protagonists of the Old Testament. The jokes made little sense to me unless I simulated the idea that someone who was good at money was somehow a bad person. (It’s possible I would have internalized “Jews bad!” more if I wasn’t good at numbers myself.)

        If I had been around Jewish strangers long enough to see what strike me as the central examples that drive irritation – e.g. one of them behaving like a Shylock, or, from the other side, seeing a Jew being accused of behaving that way – that sensitivity to calling them “Jews” might be in me as well. Instead, the term “Jew” sounds merely descriptive to me; I’m sensitive to it only because of other people expressing sensitivity to it, and I simulate it, just as I simulate the notion that it’s bad to be careful with money.

    • Eugene Dawn says:

      I’m Jewish, and I have more or less no objections to the word “Jew”–“the Jews” can sound a bit weird especially depending on context, and I think “he’s Jewish” sounds better than “he’s a Jew”, but I think you are being a bit oversensitive. I think substituting “Jewish people” for “Jews” in a sentence like, “Jews keep kosher” is unnecessary.

    • broblawsky says:

      “Jew” can be used as a verb, invariably in an offensive way. You can’t do the same thing with “Jewish”.

      Speaking more broadly, the hardness and monosyllabic nature of the word “Jew” just makes it hit harder, draw more attention. The “-ish” modifier attenuates it, makes it go down smoother for listeners. You rarely use the word “Jew” unless you’re trying to make it the centerpiece of whatever sentence you’re constructing, e.g. Shylock’s big speech in The Merchant of Venice.

      • AG says:

        I think a lot of people underestimate how much phonaesthestics influence word usage and our connotations for any particular word.
        Like if you take Charlie Chaplin’s Hitler parody speech from The Great Dictator, and replaced every instance of “Juden” with “bubbies”, it doesn’t sound nearly as harsh.

        Even “homo” is a fairly soft word, which is why the more popular slurs were the likes of gay, dyke, queer, etc., which are more satisfying to spit out.

    • Simultan says:

      Maybe it’s because racists have an all-too popular word other than “black” to refer to black people in a derogatory way. There isn’t really a popular equivalent for Jews, so all the anti-Semites will use the word “Jew” (but of course with that special emphasis that’s so easy to recognise), impregnating that word with all of their hatred, whereas anti-black hatred is partly “diverted” to the n-words. Nazi literature and propaganda mainly used the word “Juden”, for instance. Just a theory …

      • bullseye says:

        Anti-semites do have a word other than “Jew” to refer to Jews in a derogatory way. I guess it’s less well-known than the n-word, but I assumed most people did know it.

        • Logan says:

          I can never remember which one’s for jews and which one’s for lesbians though. As slurs go it’s not great.

          For example “fag” gets a lot of play in queer punk, obviously the n-word is popular in black music, but I can’t imagine Matisyahu or Y-Love or Moshiach Oi using “kike” as an emotional beat. Speaking as a gay jew, for reference.

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      I’ve been feeling it myself– a reflex to say “Jewish people”, and then a thought of “What’s wrong with “Jew”?”

    • j1000000 says:

      Louis CK and Always Sunny in Philadelphia have both discussed this.

    • Erusian says:

      As an anecdote, I used to refer to basically everyone this way. Ie, “He is a Chinese.” It was, as far as I can tell, an ESL habit I picked up through contact. Some people found this offensive (though not usually members of the group) and I adjusted.

      I suspect the wider trend is just the treadmill of euphemisms. Certain Hugo Boss wearing political movements shout very loudly about the Jews, so having a word to signal that you’re not one of them is probably part of the point. You can also get into deconstructive philosophies about the Jews as the eternal other and its relation to whiteness if you want to get into critical theory.

    • keaswaran says:

      I think this is just something to get used to. Any demographic group has various nouns and adjectives that are used to refer to them, and somehow some of them develop more negative feels than others, for no particular reason. The phrase “gays and lesbians” sounds fine, but somehow referring to someone as “a gay” in the singular sounds really weird, but using the adjective “gay” is perfectly fine. With some nationalities, using it as an adjective is fine but as a noun is weird (“Chinese”), while with others, both are fine (“Italian”). Everyone’s familiar with the spectrum of terms for Black people, with “Black” and “African-American” being just fine, “Colored” and “Negro” being at best weird and old-fashioned, and of course worse ones. I have a hard time thinking of a demographic group where using the word as a noun is fine but the adjective sounds weird, but “Democrat” has something of this force (It’s fine to say “Harry Reid is a Democrat”, but it weirdly sounds like an attack to say “Harry Reid was a Democrat senator”, even though “Harry Reid was a Democratic senator” is great).

      There are some phrases in a language that are just always on some sort of euphemistic treadmill. In the past century, this has occurred most commonly with terms for demographic categories, but in the previous century there was clearly a proliferation of terms for the place you go for excretion, with different English-speaking countries settling on different rankings of weirdness and rudeness among the words “toilet”, “water closet”, “washroom”, “restroom”, “bathroom”, “powder room”, “ladies’/men’s room”. A few millennia ago, in the far north, there was a similar taboo on saying the name of certain dangerous animals – although Latin/Greek/Sanskrit speakers kept the Indo-European word ursus/arktos/raksha for bear, the Germanic word “bear” comes from “the brown one”, while the Baltic word “lacis” means “the licker”, and the Slavic word “medved” means “the honey eater”.

      https://www.pitt.edu/~votruba/qsonhist/bearetymologyslovakenglishwelsh.html

      Some people might think it’s a sign of healthier concern for others to care more about euphemism for demographic groups than for excretion or dangerous animals, though I can see why someone might think that taking any care with one’s words is a bad sign.

    • Uribe says:

      “He’s a black” sounds a lot worse than “He’s black.”

      “The blacks” sounds worse than “black people “.

      So not buying the premise.

      • Randy M says:

        I do think this is part of it. One rings reductive, one descriptive. Even if not usually meant any differently.

      • gbdub says:

        Whaddya mean, “Jew people”?

      • original-internet-explorer says:

        The problem doesn’t go away if I replace the Jews or Jew(s) with Jewish people – people of Jewish origin, Hebrews. I never hear Jewish-American as I do Irish-American or Italian-American. The line-up is the terrible, the bad and the ugly – we are going into the same place as asking people their preferred pronouns.

        Saying Israelis works great but I can’t refer to Americans Jews by saying Israeli-American it’s absurd. Judaic-Americans? I could use Ashkenazim but it’s like using Latin taxonomy to make yourself sound intellectual.

        Jewish-American seems to be the least loaded or ugly of the bunch and probably I’ll start using that unless somebody has a better idea.

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:

          My better idea is to alternate “Jews” and “Jewish people”, but I have no idea whether it’s a good enough idea.

          “Jewish-American” has a high risk of tripping you up because a lot of Jews aren’t Americans.

          Speaking only for myself: I think having a culture where “Jew” isn’t a slur is an achievement*, and I hate to see it thrown away.

          *yes, a very sad thing to say

          • original-internet-explorer says:

            Yes it’s no good. People suck.

            I think it was the same day GF was murdered that SpaceX launched the manned mission – strong juxtaposition. The culture has taken a pessimistic turn for some time but it’s not justifiable – I don’t mean economically or technologically – in terms of social relations this spiteful focus on the negative. The lists of positive contributions from Jews are long and sublime. This civilization is the greatest this planet produced – and people want to qualify the positives but not the negatives – about time there was pushback.

        • Eugene Dawn says:

          Jewish Americans is not uncommon in my experience.

          Not all Jews are Ashkenazim, so you also risk being incorrect if you use that as a synonym.

          I’d say “Jew” is fine except in the case of “a Jew” or “the Jews”; and you won’t be alone referring to “Jewish Americans” if you really don’t like “Jew”.

        • bullseye says:

          I’ve seen “Jewish-American”, and it bothers me, because it breaks the pattern established by “African-American”, “Irish-American”, etc. African-Americans aren’t African; they are Americans whose ancestors were African. But Jewish Americans are both Jews and Americans.

    • Etoile says:

      So I am Jewish, but I am from another country which had actual anti-semitism, with quotas and everything, and so didn’t grow up in the American Jewish community, and it’s harder for me to sympathize with their travails maybe, I don’t know. I see people doing this, not about the word “Jew” but about lots of other similar things, e.g. being wished Merry Christmas– and I don’t understand it.

      In the short term, for OP, Jewish people vs. Jews isn’t that big a deal — it’s not as egregious as “pregnant people” instead of “pregnant women”.

      But I see other people doing this assigning antisemitism – as well as other racist/sexist/prejudicial intent – to innocuous words and interactions. And it gives me such a deep, deep sense of foreboding and, honestly, disgust. When you pick out an innocuous phrase, and then unilaterally decide that it’s BAD, and then start treating people who use it as though they MEANT the bad thing — you INVEST the word with the bad meaning. And along the way you will turn a fraction of people who were not anti-Semitic into anti-Semites. It’s like when you’re in a fight with a significant other, and you’ve already resolved THIS issue, but then – on your way up to the bedroom for makeup sex – you dredge up something from a year ago. (I’ve done this and it never leads anywhere good.)

      And people rightly bristle at this: it’s not about the right to offend, or be mean. It’s about a minority of people having unilateral and arbitrary say, at any time they choose, over the language that you use (hey that rhymes), and the ability to dress you down when you transgress.

      Anyway, that’s my piece on it. I think only Jews can stop this sort of thing (when it’s with regards to antisemitism – I don’t mean other examples of the word policing). I don’t know what to do about it.

      • keaswaran says:

        I think this arbitrariness might be the point. If there’s a very minor token that you ask someone to do on your behalf, then whether or not they do it can reveal whether or not they are motivated to do a minor thing on your behalf. There’s no point in doing this at a time of major strife, but in a calmer time, but when there’s still some question about who cares about you and who doesn’t, these minor symbols can be helpful.

        It’s the same with all sorts of arbitrary cultural rules, like saluting the flag, or taking your hat off when you go indoors, to help reveal whether or not someone is willing to go along with the more important norms that don’t get called on as often.

        • Etoile says:

          I think you’re absolutely right. But it’s a motte-and-bailey to claim that it’s “do this one-time minor thing” for me, when this one word-change is put in context of all the other word-changes that come out of the same place, at accelerating rates.

          In JUST the space of what is anti-semitic: people have been criticizing Mr. Soros for funding the likes of MoveOn.Org back in the 2000s, and it wasn’t considered antisemitic then. On an advice blog, someone complained of antisemitism because their colleague referred to a neighborhood as “Jew-town”. But it’s not limited to that. There’s lots of words in the racial and gender and LGBTQ dialogue which also went this way, SUPER-quickly. (E.g., “All Lives Matter”, for one.) When I see people called out for really old tweets, their offenses are SO MILQUETOAST, it’s almost funny…. except it’s not. It’s a concerted effort to change a broad range of previously accepted mores and behaviors — telling off-color jokes, using ugly language in private, etc.

          And that concerted effort really bothers me; now I see all these “small polite requests” as part of an agenda; and they might not be, but this is as hard to unsee as e.g. unconscious sexism is, once someone convinces it exists. (Don’t wanna debate whether it does or not — some claimed aspects do, some don’t. But still, some of the incidents where people claim to have been victims of __-based discrimination, the impression is false.)

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        I don’t think this situation is especially caused by Jews– it’s caused by non-Jews who are so jittery about being accused of prejudice that they’re over-reacting to harmless things.

    • Purplehermann says:

      Jew here. (Kipa, tzitzit and all.)

      I was unaware of this being an issue until I read your comment.
      I’m not sure I believe it is outside some specific circles.

  96. I am seeing news stories about a recent increase in Covid cases. So far, not one of the ones I read even mentioned the possibility of a connection to the demonstrations.