Open Thread 155.75

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2,510 Responses to Open Thread 155.75

  1. Vitor says:

    I’m looking for English fixed expressions / idioms of the form “foo or bar”, such as “dead or alive”. This has turned out surprisingly hard to google for, as I mostly found shallow resources for complete beginners, with very bad search capabilities.

    The reason I want this is that I’m thinking about the design for a card game where you run missions. The players can choose to fulfill some of those missions in one of two possible ways (basically there’s an OR condition printed on the card), and I want some clever names for this type of card.

    • andrewflicker says:

      Not many of these in wide use, I think. Obviously you can come up with thousands if you just take random pairings that are sometimes used, but in terms of actual fixed expressions, not nearly as many.

      Some thoughts:
      “more or less”
      You could pull all the ones from weddings- “in sickness or in health” (usually and, but sometimes or), “for richer or poorer”, “for better or worse”, etc.
      “love it or hate it”
      “happy or not” (and variations)
      “up or out”
      “swim or sink”

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      win or lose, do or die, ride or die, fish or cut bait, sh*t or get off the pot, sink or swim, hell or high water.

    • SamChevre says:

      Just quickly, off the top of my head:
      By hook or by crook – in any way you can
      The devil or the deep blue sea (more commonly, “between the devil and the deep blue sea”) – a situation with no good options
      With a live boy or a dead girl (Impossible in normal circumstances–from a very powerful machine politician who said he would only lose his seat if caught in bed with one of the two.)

    • achenx says:

      Live free or die?

    • souleater says:

      shit or get off the pot
      Fight or Flight

      Not English, but common enough that I could see it in a game:
      Plata O Plomo

      • bullseye says:

        Plata O Plomo

        I believe the English would be “your money or your life”.

        • Erusian says:

          I’ve heard “paid up or paid back” used. Or for a more silly version, trick or treat is kind of a threat.

        • souleater says:

          I actually don’t think Plata O Plomo and your money or your life are the same thing, The first one is offering a bribe, and a threat, and the second option is making a demand and a threat.

          “Your money or your life” is something a thief would say to intimidate me into giving him my wallet

          “Plata O Plomo” is something someone would say if they are trying to bribe you

          Also
          The easy way or the hard way

          • albatross11 says:

            “Silver or lead” sounds pretty much like a demand for money in exchange for not shooting you. That’s how I’ve always understood “plata o plomo” to be used, but I’m not a native Spanish speaker so maybe I’m missing something.

          • SamChevre says:

            “Silver or lead” to me indicates an offer to a government official to either accept a bribe or be shot

          • Erusian says:

            It’s contextual. It’s a threat in all cases, but it can mean “take the bribe or die” or it can mean “give me money or die”. That said, people worth bribing tend to write more books so that’s the meaning that’s more broadly understood.

            (And minor note: plata is a general term for “money” in the area the slang originated. So plata o plomo would sound like someone saying… I don’t know, bucks or buckshot. The pun is obvious but it’s not an archaic or criminal way to say ‘money’.)

          • anon-e-moose says:

            Plata o plomo is simply saying “I’ll give you silver, or lead.” i.e. “take the bribe or I’ll kill you, and bribe your replacement”

    • Fahundo says:

      soup or salad

    • johan_larson says:

      Love it or leave it.

    • Randy M says:

      Now or Later
      Hit or Miss
      In or Out
      Plate or Platter

      • Fahundo says:

        Hit or Miss

        I have it on good authority that they never miss.

      • Nick says:

        In or Out

        I thought it was called In-N-Out.

        • Randy M says:

          The restaurant is indeed so, but picture a heist movie or something, and Reluctant Guy is wondering if he should join up. Then, Pushy Guy turns to him as says, “All right, enough bullshit, are you in or out?”

    • Noah says:

      publish or perish
      heads or tails
      double or nothing

    • mendax says:

      Most EDIT: Some of these would work.

      • Tarpitz says:

        Hard disagree: the Aftermath cards are all “X to Y”, the older Ravnica ones are mostly “X and Y” and the GRN/RNA ones aren’t fixed expressions at all at all.

        You could have “boom or bust”, but that’s about it.

      • Jake R says:

        That was my first thought too but I don’t think it works. Most of these were meant to be joined by “and.” The newer ones from Amonkhet were “to”, and the latest ones just share a first syllable.

        Edit: Ninjad by Tarpitz, didn’t mean to pile on.
        Edited again: There are some magic cards that work though. Some that I don’t think I’ve seen here yet:

        Bend or Break
        Fact or Fiction
        Stand or Fall
        Truth or Tale

    • JayT says:

      Give me liberty or give me death is a pretty famous one.

    • J Mann says:

      Guns or butter

      Fish nor fowl

      Rain or shine

    • bullseye says:

      Right or Wrong
      Paper or Plastic
      A Gun in Your Pocket or Just Happy to See Me

      • albatross11 says:

        Sooner or later
        feast or famine
        for better or worse
        rain or shine
        come hell or high water

        • Noah says:

          for better or worse

          I think I’ve usually seen it as “for better or for worse”

          • Nick says:

            In the US this is the name of a newspaper comic, and I swear more often than not it was misspelled “for better of for worse.”

    • steb says:

      I used Antidote, a language software that includes dictionaries, and got the following list of 58 entries, not all of which are relevant:
      more or less
      sooner or later
      win or lose
      once or twice
      make or break
      rightly or wrongly
      do or die
      now or never
      hit or miss
      trick or treat
      sink or swim
      plus or minus
      come hell or high water
      feast or famine
      kill or cure
      put up or shut up
      sale or return
      Publish or perish.
      Shape up or ship out!
      come rain or shine
      whether or not
      by hook or by crook
      give or take
      without rhyme or reason
      Are you a man or a mouse?
      Funny weird or funny ha-ha?
      I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry
      Keeper or Master of the Rolls and Records of the Chancery of England
      a […] or two
      a thing or two
      all or nothing
      beg, borrow or steal
      by fair means or foul
      double or quits
      fish or cut bait
      for better or for worse
      friend or foe
      in any way, shape or form
      like it or lump it
      neck or nought
      not know whether to laugh or cry
      one […] or another
      shit or get off the pot
      some way or other
      something or other
      use it or lose it
      with no ifs, ands or buts
      without any let or hindrance
      without fear or favor
      ride or die
      double or nothing
      without rhyme or reason
      use it or lose it
      be no good to man or beast
      be of no use to man or beast
      matter of life or death
      not for love or money
      neck or nothing

    • thasvaddef says:

      Rhyme or reason
      True or false
      With this shield or upon it
      Put up or shut up
      Your place or mine?

    • sidereal says:

      You should ask the english stack exchange community

    • AG says:

      to be or not to be
      FMK
      take it or leave it
      ready or not

      Alternatively, you could have a “false binary” category and all of the choices are based on common “foo and bar” expressions. Salt and pepper, cats and dogs, swords and sandals, rock and roll, sweet and sour, etc.

    • William James Kirk says:

      Hang together or hang separately

      • Gerry Quinn says:

        Life or death
        Truth or dare
        Kiss, marry or kill (that’s three if you pick two)

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      So, what did you wind up picking?

  2. Vermillion says:

    Calling @John Schilling and other rocket nerds, I recently watched this video from Isaac Arthur on Power Satellites, and it made me think, is that going to be Space X’s next thing after Starlink? I imagine they’d want the Starship or something up and running to give them more heavy lift capacity, but is that a logical evolution of their business model?

    More fundamentally, is space generated solar power as potentially revolutionary as Isaac (and me now) suspect?

    • Filareta says:

      China already has a plan to do it.

    • Eric T says:

      My understanding is they will be working on Starlink for a long, long time.

      They’ve pulled off about 10 launches in a year. Let’s be charitable and say Musk gets really good at deploying satellites, and is able to get that number up to 50 a year, an impressive feat – and probably possible as they already are planning 24 next year. That would get them 3000 in space every year at their current 60/rocket capacity.

      Even at that breakneck pace they’re going to be launching satellites for 10 years at least.

      By then, who the hell knows how much money SpaceX will have for new proects? I think it really hinges on if Starship is a success or not – that seems to be the big thing right now.

      • Eric Rall says:

        My understanding is they will be working on Starlink for a long, long time.

        I strongly suspect that’s the main point of Starlink. It gives SpaceX a large steady stream of launch missions that should last for years, making the business case much easier for building out launch capacity to exploit economies of scale. Starlink missions are also probably fairly flexible in terms of when they need to go up, so SpaceX can schedule them for launch slots that would otherwise go idle, or even for filling up unsold payload capacity on an existing mission.

    • tossrock says:

      Space-based solar with microwave transmission to ground stations has been speculated about for quite some time – one of the highest tiers of power plant in Sim City 2000 was a microwave receiving station. However, I don’t think the better power generation properties in space are going to overcome the dramatically increased cost and complexity of putting said objects into space in the near (2 decades) future. Ground based solar and storage is just way, way simpler. The guy in the video even says that he’s thinking more on 100 year time scales than 10 year time scales. So, no, I don’t expect SpaceX to get into power beaming any time soon.

    • Thomas Jorgensen says:

      https://newatlas.com/lightest-thinnest-solar-cells-mit/42092/ 6 watt per gram of solar thin-film cell.

      I am going to handwave really, really hard, and assume that since this is manufactured in vacuum chambers, and vacuum is one thing space has in abundance, you can just launch the raw materials, and manufacture the film in-situ, which makes all sorts of problems with deployment and packaging go away.

      This needs to be at geostationary altitude because it has to be stationary with relation to the ground, or power beaming becomes a nightmare. (also, the enormous surface-to-weight ratio means it needs to be very, very high to not get deorbited by the exo-atmosphere anyway). Since the array is more or less a solar sail, it does not have to be in actual geo-stationary orbit – you can offset it a lot and use light-pressure to station-keep.

      Further, assume 30 percent of an orbital arrays mass is wires and micro-wave antenna.

      This means one ariane 6 launch gets you just about 42 megawatts of solar satellite. Assuming 50% beam efficiency, 21 megawatts at the ground station.

      The ariane needs 181 tonnes of lox + hydrogen and another 575 tonnes of solid rocket propellant.

      The hydrogen and lox will cost 941 MWH to produce (and a good chunk more to chill)
      The solid rocket fuel is 19 percent alunimum by weight : 1365 MWH.
      The remainder is ammonium perchlorate and binder. The ammonium perchlorate is also just basically electricity, though I cant find a good reference for how much the total synthesis runs per tonne, and the binder is not quite as amenable to brute electro-chemistry.
      I am going to take a wild stab and call it twice the electric input of ammonia synthesis: 20 mwh/tonne; 9000 and change mwhs.

      So, grand total of roughly 11500 mwh, or 22 days of sattelite output. That is pretty good.

      Of course, this all depends on the piece of lab-wizardry I just linked working. Actually currently existing solar cells weigh in at 400 times that much per power output, which makes it 25 years to energy break even.

      • JayT says:

        Wouldn’t that get torn apart by all the micrometeoroids flying around space?

        • Thomas Jorgensen says:

          Holed. I would not expect the film cell to have the structural integrity to propagate an impact – this is basically a cling film threaded with copper wire (to collect current) anything hitting it will just go right through.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      I recall that the power receiving antennae on the ground could only pull in about 2x or 4x the energy of an equivalent square-footage of really good solar cells. They require a large area because you are transmitting from geocentric orbit. But I don’t remember the math well enough to spot-check.

      • John Schilling says:

        The ground antenna is also more akin to a big field of old-style TV antennas than solar panels. Much cheaper, and not opaque so you can put them on poles and use the land beneath for at least some other purposes.

    • John Schilling says:

      Sorry to come late to the party, actually busy building spaceships today. Well, looking over the shoulder of other people building spaceships and saying “No, you fools!”. Not solar power satellites, unfortunately.

      So, this is an idea that has been around since the 1970s, and it’s as valid now as it was in the 1970s. I’m not going to watch 20+ minutes of youtube on it, but assuming Arthur is giving the standard presentation, it should work about as advertised. Cheap, clean, abundant energy for the human race, and incidentally the economic basis for cities in the sky.

      The problem is, it only reallly works at scale. The satellites basically have to be in geostationary orbit, or they’ll spend most of their time in places where there’s no receiving antenna to accept their beam – particularly in the early stages where only one nation is building the things. The mathematics of microwave beaming mean that if you’re in GEO, your antennas in space and on the ground have to have kilometer-plus dimensions, which makes the whole thing wasteful if you’re not also deploying many square kilometers of solar cells on orbit. So, a structure the size of a small city and the mass of a large battleship, generating billions of watts of power. And a whole lot of specialized infrastructure and technology development that’s kind of wasted if you build just one.

      Particularly if you build just one entirely on the ground and try to launch and assemble it in pieces, so you really want a whole lot of in-space resource assembly infrastructure and preferably also mining and processing and some manufacturing. You don’t need to have all of that in place for your very first powersat, but you want some of it in place and the rest being demonstrated by serious proof-of-concept testbeds.

      So, probably a hundred billion dollars in startup costs if you don’t want to be stuck with the sort of unprofitable white elephant that will convince everyone that solar power satellites are a bad idea. Elon Musk doesn’t have a hundred billion dollars (and some of the billions he does have are tied up in a ground-based solar firm that he’s not going to want to put out of business).

      The suits who run the electric power industry have always had the ability to raise a hundred billion dollars for something like this, and there’s always been the hope that they will recognize that this is their best path forward. But there’s always been less costly, less risky paths for them to take instead. Or, if not actually less risky, perceived as less risky by people who have little understanding of literal rocket science but extensive expertise in other sorts of power generation.

      So it keeps not happening, and is likely to keep not happening for some time to come.

      There’s been some tinkering with concepts that wouldn’t have quite the startup costs, like small low-altitude powersats optimized for delivering power to forward operating bases in Afghanistan (ridiculously inefficient but so are most of the alternatives there). But they’re all pretty marginal.

      There’s the persistent hope, as Filareta notes, that someone like the Chinese will do it and then we’ll have to do it or we’ll look bad, but that also keeps not happening and isn’t likely to happen any time soon. Note in particular: nine times out of ten, “China has a plan” means about as much as “The Cylons have a plan”. Really some ministry talking head says “we have this plan and we’re going to do it”, but he doesn’t have the budget for it and his hope that the publicity will force Beijing to cough up the money isn’t going to happen. For something of this scale, unless it is literally Xi Jinping saying “this is our plan and we’re going to do it”, it isn’t really their plan.

      There’s also a political/PR problem similar to the one facing nuclear power. The Greens aren’t going to like it because it means lots of concentrated heavy industry, and that’s not what they’re about. Lots of other people aren’t going to like it because they’re afraid the big microwave power beam will be used as a Death Ray(tm). That’s as physically implausible as nuclear reactors blowing up like atomic bombs, but if people believe it then you’ve got a big problem. And lots of people will encourage each other to believe it.

      So, good idea, fingers crossed, but very unlikely to happen any time soon.

      • Eric T says:

        I did not know you worked with spaceships John, I am immensely jealous. To this day I occasionally regret wimping out of STEM and pursuing teaching/law. Space is my one true love.

    • cakins says:

      The latest USAF secret mission is supposed to have hosted an experiment in beamed power for drone applications: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/33339

      • John Schilling says:

        The “for drone applications” part, at least, appears to be the invention of the drive article’s author, and he’s citing what seems to be a random list of factoids that you’d get if you googled “beamed power” and “drone” and didn’t bother trying to understand any of them. The inclusion of Leik Myrabo’s lightcraft pretty much destroys his credibility in my eyes; that’s a completely different application using completely different technology.

        • bean says:

          That does seem atypically bad for The Drive, which is usually pretty solid. I’d also point out that it’s a Navy experiment, and the navy operates platforms which are more of a scale with beamed power receivers.

  3. mlafayette says:

    At a LW meetup about a year ago, I was talking to somebody about a way of structuring Kickstarter-esque fundraising and coordination in such a way where you can avoid free riders and better incentivize projects actually getting completed.

    I’ve since forgotten the name of the concept and exactly how it worked (something about payouts to early backers if a project isn’t completed). Sorry to be so vague, but does anybody happen to know the name of the idea I’m talking about?

    • jamierumbelow says:

      I think you’re thinking of ‘dominant assurance contracts‘, from Alex Tabarrock at Marginal Revolution / GMU.

    • Erusian says:

      I’ve never been to a LW meetup but I’ve thought about this idea. The problem is that crowdfunding incentives are backloaded. Imagine you are the first investor in three projects. One doesn’t get funded, you get your money back, which is actually a negative transaction. You definitionally valued the project more than your investment (and lost the utility of the money while it was invested). The other one meets its goal exactly. You get your item, usually at a discount, which is an alright but not amazing outcome. The last project gets 10x the funding it needs, you get the item plus a bunch of bonus goodies plus prestige all for much less than most people paid. This is the best outcome.

      So the best outcome is done by being an early backer in projects that will go on to be successful. Which means it’s a prediction game. It also creates a huge collective action problem, as you can easily see from the coordination parts.

      My thought for an ecosystem would be a platform where refunds go backwards. If a project fails, everyone doesn’t get their money back: the first backers get more money back than they put in and the last investors get less. For example, imagine a project that needs $10k. The person who gives the first dollar will get a message that says, “If this project doesn’t get funded, you’ll get $10 back.” or something. This incentivizes them to bring in more people, something I’d encourage through some sort of affiliate functionality. I’d add in time gated rewards (you have to do it by the first week to get X, by the second week to get Y, etc) to leverage FOMO and people waiting to the last minute to sign up. And boom, you have something where people are more incentivized to sign up early than late (but signing up late is less risky and is rewarded by increased return on investment over less time).

      • Doctor Mist says:

        Where does the $10 come from?

        • Erusian says:

          Other people who’ll get less, with maybe a seed amount the latest giver gets. For example, let’s say the seed is $10 and 6 people give and it doesn’t get funded:

          Person 1 Gives $10
          Person 2 Gives $20
          Person 3 Gives $10
          Person 4 Gives $50
          Person 5 Gives $40
          Person 6 Gives $20
          Total: $150

          The goal isn’t met. Person 6 gets $10 (the seed) plus $0. Person 5 gets $4 back (1/36th). Person 4 gets $8.30 back (1/18th). Person 3 gets $17 back (1/9th). Person 2 gets $50 back (1/3rd). Person 1 gets $70 back (the remainder). Or something like this. So the latest people lose money but the early backers actually gain money, incentivizing becoming an early backer (and then getting people in the queue behind you).

          • Jake R says:

            Maybe I’m misunderstanding but how does this incentivize getting people in the queue behind me? I’m literally getting paid if the project is not funded.

          • Erusian says:

            No, you’re getting paid if the project isn’t funded and there are more people behind you than in front of you. This means it’s always in the interest of half the people (who are the most recent sign ups) to get more people into queue. There are three states: project funded, in which case you get the reward. Project funded and you’re in the first half, in which case you get paid. Project funded and you’re in the second half, in which case you lose money.

          • AG says:

            Isn’t this a pyramid scheme mechanism?

          • Erusian says:

            Isn’t this a pyramid scheme mechanism?

            The incentives are similar, though legally, practically, and morally it isn’t. The biggest difference is that you’re not tricking people into giving money so it can be redistributed to you: in an ideal case, nobody gets any money back. They get the product that’s being crowdfunded. There are others as well in terms of organizational structure.

          • Gerry Quinn says:

            Crowd-funding’s rep is iffy enough without the MLM factor…

  4. Well... says:

    I’ve been using the free version of ProtonVPN on my Macbook and it’s really slow and unstable. Can anyone recommend a better free VPN?

  5. J Mann says:

    What do we currently know about Sweden and Japan regarding Covid?

    (1) If I recall correctly, Sweden now has a much per capita death total than Finland, Norway, and Denmark. Is it continuing to pull away? My understanding of exponential growth is that we thought that uncontrolled spread meant that all countries were just a few weeks from being Lombardy, but Sweden seems to be “somewhat worse than its neighbors.”

    Possibilities: (a) Sweden’s lesser lockdown have slowed the rate of increase, but it’s still likely that either Sweden will change its practices or the spread between Sweden and the rest of the Nordic countries (and eventually the rest of Europe) will continue to increase, or (b) there’s something else going on.

    (2) Japan seems close to beating the virus with a much smaller lockdown than most countries. Some credit public cooperation and/or masks – do we know anything else?

    • Tarpitz says:

      It just doesn’t look like sustained exponential growth is a thing, anywhere. SSC’s favourite neuroscientist posits a large population who are – for reasons unknown – not susceptible to CoViD-19 despite not having antibodies.

      • Aftagley says:

        To be clear, having read that article, he’s positing that 50-80% of the populace isn’t susceptible to it.

        How possible is that theory? Are there any other examples of diseases that just randomly don’t touch huge swaths of the population?

        • Anteros says:

          Are there any other examples of diseases that just randomly don’t touch huge swaths of the population?

          It seems more appropriate to ask if there are any diseases that do infect most of the population. I often hear people talking as if unchecked, Covid would infect essentially everybody in the world. If that were likely, why did Spanish Flu only infect a quarter of the population? Why did Swine Flu only manage 10%? Seasonal Flu less than 5%?

          I don’t know the reasons why infectious diseases don’t infect large proportions of populations, but surely the starting point should be that they don’t.

          • Loriot says:

            The various diseases the Spanish brought over are estimated to have wiped out 95% of the native population.

          • Randy M says:

            Yes, but isn’t being “various diseases” a big difference than looking at one?

            For that matter, how many old world diseases did the sailors and settlers bring over with them? I can only name small pox off hand but surely there were many, right?

          • FLWAB says:

            For that matter, how many old world diseases did the sailors and settlers bring over with them?

            Off the top of my head: smallpox, diphtheria, typhoid, tuberculosis and….maybe cholera? Probably not cholera.

          • Clutzy says:

            The various diseases the Spanish brought over are estimated to have wiped out 95% of the native population.

            Only by the most extreme estimations. The 95% figure creates a big problem because its pretty clear that given their agricultural practices (and lack thereof), such a large population would starve to death immediately.

            See, e.g. https://sci-hub.tw/10.7183/0002-7316.75.4.707

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            And measles.

            ” The most deadly were smallpox, malaria, viral influenza, yellow fever, measles, typhus, bubonic plague, typhoid fever, cholera, and pertussis (whooping cough). Among these, half appeared in epidemic form in Oregon during the first century of contact, from the late 1700s through the mid-1800s. ”

            https://oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/disease_epidemics_1770s-1850s/#.XuE-MGhKhPY

          • IIRC chickenpox affects virtually everybody who doesn’t get vaccinated at some point or other, and usually causes significant, unpleasant, though not usually serious symptoms (and remains latent ever after, occasionally flaring up in later life as shingles).

        • Purplehermann says:

          Similar to asymptomatic, but the body kills the virus off before they become contagious?

      • Scott Alexander says:

        It was a thing in Wuhan and Milan.

        My guess is that voluntary social distancing plus summer decreases R0 by a lot, so that after the first round of cities were clobbered, nowhere else was able to get that bad.

        Brazil and India have been growing exponentially recently though, still have to look into how and why.

        • AG says:

          I don’t know about India, but Brazil would be in winter now, right?

          • Lillian says:

            The majority of Brazil is in the tropics, with the only exception being the three states of the South Region (Parana, Santa Catarina, Rio Grande do Sul), which account for 13.8% of the population. Just a bit further north, the temperature highs in Sao Paolo over the next few days are in the low 80s, then on Sunday the high drops to 67, but it climbs back up to 80 degrees by next Wednesday. Rio de Janeiro is similar but running about five degrees hotter. Those two are the most densely populated metropolises in the country, and together with their eponymous states account for 30% of Brazil’s population. The remaining half of the population is further north, and thus around the Equator. So to the extent that Brazil is in winter, I do not think it makes much of a difference.

      • JayT says:

        I’ve been wondering if there is a biological reasons that certain ethnicities seem to get hit harder than others, but I’ve had a hard time squaring that with the fact that African Americans have been hit particularly hard, while Africans have (so far) seemed to fair pretty well.

        • Eric T says:

          How much of that might be because of lower population densities and a lack of testing though?

          • JayT says:

            I’m sure this is part of it, but a place like Lagos has comparable density to Western big cities, and, I would assume, a lower quality healthcare system. If they really were having a big outbreak I think people would notice.
            Age is obviously another factor too. African countries tend to skew younger. Again though, it sure seems like you’d still be seeing a lot more problems.

        • Scott Alexander says:

          Vitamin D would do this. Black people have black skin to block UV, because they’re from Africa where there’s too much UV and if you block most of it you still get enough Vitamin D. African-Americans have the same skin color in an environment with much less UV, and so are at high risk of Vitamin D deficiency.

          • FLWAB says:

            If that’s the case, we might expect more northerly counties to also be hit harder, though perhaps not the the same magnitude. Alaska has high rates of vitamin D deficiency, for instance, though it looks like Covid hasn’t taken root there yet to any significant extent.

        • Lambert says:

          I’m not convinced that studies on the effect of ethnicity on COVID-19 are good enough at controling for SES and urban-ness.

          The study I saw in the UK used a rural-urban classification scheme that made no attempt to differentiate between a medium-sized town and inner-city London.

          Not that I think vitamin D or some other factor is prima-facie implausible.

        • The same question applies to the fact that males seem to be hit about twice as hard as females, at least in the figures I’ve seen.

          • Clutzy says:

            Perhaps that is because in the population that is being severely hit (last stat I heard is the average age of death is 82), males are already generally closer to death.

    • Loriot says:

      It’s not like people in Sweden are doing nothing. Everybody knows about how the virus works now, and that wearing masks is important, and to maintain social distancing, etc. They may not be following the rules strictly, or have strict rules in the first place, but they’re still doing something. I don’t think there’s anywhere in the developed world now which is as susceptible to spread as Lombardy was in February.

    • Purplehermann says:

      Exponential growth is only big picture.

      If Alice is part of group X and only group X, she doesn’t help the disease spread nearly as much (unless superspreader event) as Bob or Carl, who are part of X,Y and X,Z respectively (,who aren’t as much an issue as Dimitri, who is part of S,T,U,V,W, and X).

      Once someone in X gets it, it should spread exponentially inside the group until the group realizes.
      Exponential growth (if I’m not being stupid) simplified is
      Infections = Base × Rate ^ Cycles.

      Let’s assume no one except Bob and Carl are connected to Y or Z.

      Group X gets fully infected after a few cycles. Now Bob and Carl each start the infection cycle anew.
      Base doesn’t equal |X|, it equals 1 for each of these new groups.

      As people become more careful the virus spreads through X slower, X may be functionally smaller, and people are on the lookout, raising the likelyhood that X finds out before Bob or Carl become contagious, or hang out with the other group after becoming contagious. (And maybe Dimitri left X)

      If schools are closed, then that’s like closing group “=/” that usually brings a TON of people into course quarters indoors for long periods of time, who all have other groups, and a bunch of them might otherwise be very far away group-overlap-wize

    • LesHapablap says:

      I’ll just copy and paste my post on Sweden from the last open thread:

      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 (Judith Curry analysis,
      -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 would 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.

  6. johan_larson says:

    The Globe and Mail, a major Canadian national newspaper, is calling for body cameras for police and having most police work without guns, following the British model.

    https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/article-fewer-guns-more-cameras-better-police/

    • TimG says:

      Does the “British model” make as much sense in a country with a legal system that includes something like our Second Amendment?

      • johan_larson says:

        There are probably some police duties that can realistically be done by police without firearms, even in the US. I could see myself as a US traffic cop without a sidearm. I don’t think I would want to investigate a reported break-in or a domestic disturbance without a firearm.

        • I think one change that might improve things a little would be to separate the job of traffic cop from the rest of policing, as I think is done in parts of Europe. As a driver, my instinctive reaction to seeing a cop car is negative — it’s there to find me doing something wrong and give me a ticket. That’s not the reaction I should have to cops more generally, since they are more likely to be protecting me than harming me, although the latter is not impossible.

          • Matt M says:

            I had this thought a few OTs back. Why not have two separate services, the “violent cops” and the “non-violent cops.” And I mean completely and entirely separate, they report up two entirely different chains of command all the way up to the mayor or city council or whoever. There is no cross between them.

            For any given situation, we evaluate whether violence is likely to be needed or not, and if not, we send the non-violent cops. Perhaps in situations where the answer is “we’re not really sure” we send a partner-pair of one violent and one non-violent cop, and the working plan is “non violent cop starts out non-violent but the violent cop is there to provide quick backup if needed.”

            The notion that the same general people who hand out parking tickets are also the ones who kick down doors and shoot drug dealers seems absurd to me. These are entirely different skillsets and should fall under entirely different organizations.

          • Christophe Biocca says:

            I think the biggest “downside” of this policy or Matt M’s variant, is that there’s a pipeline from traffic-stops-and-petty-law-breaking to drug-and-other-victimless-felony-arrests, which would disappear.

            Which sounds great to us libertarians but is probably a non-starter politically?

      • Filareta says:

        For most of history of “British model” there was less gun control in UK then USA.

    • MilesM says:

      Does anyone know of a good source comparing violence inflicted on the police in various countries?

      It’s something all the talk of changing how the US police operate made me think about.

      I tried to see if I could dig up some stats for the UK and US myself, and after back-of-envelope calculations based on official sources (Home Office and the FBI) ended up with a UK rate of “assault of an officer resulting in injury” 3-4 times higher than the US one. With no breakdown by type or severity of injury. (I compared the reported number of assaults per year to number of officers, assaults not resulting in injury followed the same pattern and accounted for ~ 2/3rd of reported assaults in both countries.)

      I don’t have extremely high confidence in this estimate, mind you.

      • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

        Assuming the UK list of police killings is accurate, I get the US rate being 2-3 orders of magnitude higher.

        • MilesM says:

          That seems… completely wrong.

          And also not really what I was talking about, since I wasn’t looking at police killed but police assaulted/injured. (Or are you talking about shootings by the police?)

          The UK seems to average 2-3 cops killed a year directly as a result of crime, and has ~ 1/5th the number of cops. (and also roughly 1/5th the population)

          Most US sources list ~150 cops killed in the line of duty per year, but that’s including everything – traffic accidents, heart attacks, 9/11 related cancers, etc. Cops actually killed by criminals are maybe 1/3rd of that?

          Not even in the neighborhood of 2-3 orders of magnitude.

          • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

            Yes sorry, didn’t read your comment properly. I meant killings by the police.

  7. JayT says:

    Way back in March everyone was going on and on about how great Governor Cuomo was doing, and how they wished he was running for president, etc. Even at the time I thought it was weird because to my eye Newsom in California was taking it seriously earlier than Cuomo.

    Obviously, the talk of Cuomo’s great job has died down quite a bit since New York did far worse than any other state. That said, what could he have realistically done to not be in the position he’s currently in?

    New York shut down March 22nd, compared to California’s March 20th shutdown. Surely two extra days open doesn’t explain the 13 fold difference in deaths/million, does it? Did Cuomo make some major errors that lead to New York’s current predicament, or was it just luck of the draw that he was in the densest cold-weather city in the country?

    • albatross11 says:

      Yes, Cuomo and DeBlasio made some disastrous calls relative to Newsome and Breed, and the result is likely measured in thousands of deaths[1]. Along with minimizing the risks from C19 while it was spreading, Cuomo also implemented a policy to force nursing homes to take C19-positive patients back from the hospital, basically ensuring that there would be huge numbers of additional cases among the most vulnerable people.

      This article from pro publica gives a nice description of what went on. Neither Cuomo nor DeBlasio come out looking at all good here.

      [1] Though it’s possible this will just mean those deaths are moved later, if we simply can’t get it together enough to get on top of C19 even given several months of headstart via a super-expensive lockdown.

      • John Schilling says:

        At least according to Steve Sailer, Cuomo made such use of nursing homes because all the experts were telling him at the time that a spike was coming that would overwhelm the hospitals.

        I’m not clear on how this was supposed to work. Was the plan that the people who became severely ill in the nursing homes would be left to die there without ever seeing the inside of a hospital?

        If so, that’s trolley-problem level consequentialist efficiency, but not something you’re going to want to let the other 95% of the population hear about.

        Otherwise, the “coming spike” is just going to be multiplied by infection within the target-rich nursing home environment, and the resulting super-spike sent back to the hospitals to even more thoroughly overwhelm them.

        I don’t think either of these are really very good plans.

    • SamChevre says:

      Requiring nursing homes to take COVID patients seems to have been a significant contributor to the death toll in New York-see the mention of the March 25 order in this article.

    • Well... says:

      Not about New York state but New York City and others: I wonder if some cities showed increased rates of infection/death/etc. because of a boiling-off effect where the people who would have been most able to stay and shelter in place largely overlapped with those who were able to just leave and go somewhere else.

    • TimG says:

      One thing I remember:

      The first known case in Manhattan was from a woman who’d just flown in from Iran. The two leaders promised they’d contact-trace the people who were on the flight with her. Instead, they did nothing.

      In retrospect, the virus had already been running wild. But at the time, we didn’t know that. And these two did literally nothing.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      People were talking about how great Cuomo was doing long after New York had obviously bungled their response and was having lots of surplus COVID deaths. I think it was just mass psychosis or something. I’m glad to hear people have stopped doing that – that’s more self-correction than I expected.

      I agree that differences in Cuomo/de Blasio’s bad policies and eg California’s good policies were not responsible for the majority of death toll difference between New York and California. I still think New York’s policies were very bad and made things worse along the margins. The most notable missteps were failing to shut down NYC more quickly, de Blasio actively encouraging people to go out and do things to show some kind of civic pride and non-panickedness, and Cuomo’s requirement that nursing homes accept COVID patients. These probably only changed the death toll by a few percent, but they were monumentally stupid and easy to avoid, so I think it’s fair to blame them.

  8. Freddie deBoer says:

    Yesterday I posted this excerpt from my forthcoming book on the SSC subreddit and I thought I’d do so here as well. Excited to see what the SSC community thinks of the book when it comes out.

    https://medium.com/@freddiedeboer/the-educational-standardization-trap-25aca6c0121

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      That all seems reasonable.

      And I think the world would be better place if more people knew something about statistics, though that may be missing your point.

    • albatross11 says:

      It seems like there’s an underlying question there of what a high school or college degree should mean. If the goal is that basically everyone who is somewhere within a standard deviation or so of the average should be able to get through high school by showing up to class every day and doing their homework, then it makes sense to set a lower bar for getting through high school than mastery of algebra.

      At some level, you can imagine trying to set the percent of people you want to graduate given reasonable dilligence in doing their work[1]. Should graduating from high school be something we expect of the top 50% of kids, or 80%, or 90%, or 99%? Each of those answers gives you a different set of requirements. But if you make a high school diploma something available to the top 99%, then you’re also making it not very meaningful for signaling ability or education to employers or colleges.

      My not-very-informed impression is that high school graduation criteria got less meaningful between, say, 1940 and now, and that this is one thing that has led to the requirement for a college degree to get entry level positions that used to require a high school diploma. If the high school diploma just means you weren’t so dumb or disabled or lazy or nonfunctional that you ended up in the bottom 1% of students (or even 10%), then it’s probably not much good for an employer to use to screen whether or not you’re a reasonably bright and dilligent person who can do the work of a file clerk or whatever.

      [1] Obviously, people with a little less ability can graduate by working harder, and even brilliant people may not graduate if they won’t do any work.

      • Freddie deBoer says:

        Yes, what these degrees are meant to signal is something I get into a little bit in the book. One core argument is that a college degree’s value is dependent in part on its rarity – BLS data from 2006 showed that the college wage premium in the 20th century was mostly the product of a simple ratio between number of jobs requiring a college degree and number of people with that degree. (And, I mean, duh, right?) So if the ed reformers get their way and everyone gets a college diploma, the economic value of the diploma will drop to near zero.

    • Uribe says:

      The excerpt is well-written and well-argued.

    • Walter says:

      I feel like you need to address the obvious counterpoint.

      Like, the stuff you say tracks. Students struggle with some stuff, and if that stuff is mandatory, then students who can’t do it will struggle to graduate. Students who graduate experience better life outcomes, therefore (because we value student life outcomes) we should remove the stuff they struggle with from the mandatory graduation requirements.

      But, like, you are turning the engine off to save fuel, yeah? Like, the reason students who graduate experience better life outcomes is that they are trusted by employers. Employers trust them because they have a piece of paper saying that they are smart enough to do hard stuff. If you fix the problem of students being humiliated by being too dumb to do hard stuff by making the piece of paper no longer mean that a student is smart enough to do hard stuff then what is going to happen is not what you want to happen.

      You want the dumb kids to get the better life outcomes of the smart ones, because they’ll be treated like they are smart by employers. After all, they have the same piece of paper. But it will work in precisely the opposite direction from how you want it to, because the employers incentive is getting smart workers, not being double fair. You won’t lift the dumb kids up, you will pull the smart ones down, because the employers will no longer be able to trust the piece of paper, and they’ll just fall back on another signal.

      I feel like this is probably just a subcase of the fight you had with the commentariat in the targetting meritocracy post, so you’ve heard this before, and you answered by calling the poster a motherfucker, so I expect I’m in for it. But what can I do? It’s the actual answer. If you got your way it would go just like did when they stopped employers from asking about jail times.

      • Freddie deBoer says:

        This is all well-taken. But in the context of the book it’s a bit tangential because the last third of the book is about how to mitigate harm to those who can’t succeed in the academic arms race.

        The employers will no longer be able to trust the piece of paper, and they’ll just fall back on another signal

        True. I have some sympathy towards those who advocate for badging systems where, in addition to the one aggregate piece of paper (the diploma), you give badges for much more specific and limited skill sets that students have acquired. I also think that abstract math skills are not meaningful to employers looking only for a high school diploma – those employers are typically looking for the degree in order to see if the applicant has at least minimal dedication to getting out of bed, doing work they don’t want to, comporting themselves with some social decorum, etc. Does that make sense?

        • JayT says:

          I also think that abstract math skills are not meaningful to employers looking only for a high school diploma – those employers are typically looking for the degree in order to see if the applicant has at least minimal dedication to getting out of bed, doing work they don’t want to, comporting themselves with some social decorum, etc.

          Wouldn’t removing the math requirement make it easier to get a high school diploma, and therefore lessen the signal that the person with the diploma has minimal dedication to doing work they don’t want to?

        • Walter says:

          Hrrm, you have a point here that I didn’t see at first. Sorry about that.

          You are right that jobs that ask for degrees almost never want you to do calculus. They (we) are using it as a proxy for ‘will you be here on time, can you not get stoned when you have to’, and that kind of thing.

          I guess, in my mind, people who can answer yes to that stuff can also pass algebra. Like, both questions (‘will you be here’, and ‘can you pass this algebra test’) are really asking the deep question ‘can you do what grown ups tell you?’. If the answer to that is yes, then you read the stuff, study the stuff, spit it back up onto the paper and collect your credential. If it isn’t, then you goof off and fail.

          I didn’t realize that I was thinking that way until you said that, though. I guess, in the light of that, you must not share that assumption? Like, you think that there are people who are able to follow directions, but not able to learn to do algebra.

          If you are right about that, then the rest of what you say tracks to me. Even if someone can’t learn algebra, if they have the rest of the ‘do what you are told’ skill, then they can do almost every job. I don’t use algebra, trig, geometry or calculus in my white collar job, and I don’t know anyone else who does. We ask for degrees though, when we are hiring, because having one means they are sometimes not stoned.

          (If, on the other hand, you share my belief, but just want to help people who don’t take directions out anyway, because you roll mad benevolent, then I suspect we part ways here. I don’t think that there’s a way to help those who won’t/can’t help themselves, and I expect that fire will burn up all the money anyone can shovel at it.)

          I’m skeptical that you are right about our disagreement, mind. I think people who fail algebra mostly do it because we aren’t their real dad. But if you are correct about disciplined people who can’t do algebra being numerous enough to bother about then I expect no great harm would come from letting them earn degrees.

        • Hoopdawg says:

          I have some sympathy towards those who advocate for badging systems where, in addition to the one aggregate piece of paper (the diploma), you give badges for much more specific and limited skill sets that students have acquired.

          Ooh, I was not aware of those people, could you point me towards some of them?

          (I’m hardly an education expert, more of an education hater in fact, constantly finding myself arguing against its current institutionalized form. This forces me to keep thinking about ways to reform or replace it, and I’ve essentially settled at “skill trees, like in video games” as my preferred alternative to the current stilted grading structure. Finding like-minded experts and insiders would be a windfall.)

      • Christophe Biocca says:

        Signalling theory of education, to the extent that it is true, does predict that making it easier to graduate will simply cause employer’s degree expectations to increase. Hence why we have ever-increasing demand for credentials for occupations that didn’t require them before. Next thing you know you need a PhD to work as a bartender.

        On a side note I’d highly recommend Caplan’s “The case against education”, even though his recommendations are drastically different, just because it tackles questions like “as a weaker student considering going to university, how does the risk of failing out affect the expected ROI”.

        But there’s ways to help those people who wouldn’t graduate under the current system, even if the returns to education are 80% signalling:

        – More granular signalling: Having something for completing 10th grade splits high school completion into two parts. This is important because there’s a massive sheepskin effect (completing grade 12 is worth ~2x as much as completing one of the other 3 high school years, because it comes with a credential). Associate degrees would also be helpful for much the same reason (especially if people automatically earned them while on the Bachelor track, making it easier to gauge what they mean).
        – Make graduation AND skipping grades both easier. This is just another variant of more granularity, with the advantage that letting strong students graduate faster saves resources that can be spent on the remainder.
        – Vocational education has a smaller percentage of signalling than traditional, so ensuring people can finish enough high school to transition into such programs (and encouraging them to do so) actually raises total skill, avoiding credential inflation concerns.

        • Purplehermann says:

          Why not make high school way harder to finish.
          Tenth grade diplomas very easy to get.

          College stops becoming a necessary signal.

          At all levels actual learning gets more focus (9-10 because everyone who shows up passes, you just have to worry about teaching kids who aren’t going to get more education.
          11-12 because you’re making it hard to pass on purpose anyway, might as well teach at what is now college level or similar.)

          College because you’ve already proved yourself

          • Christophe Biocca says:

            Why not make high school way harder to finish. Tenth grade diplomas very easy to get.

            There’s value in that one assuming people who are struggling after 10th grade:

            – Can legally drop out.
            – Can legally work full time.

            At all levels actual learning gets more focus

            It’s not clear that you automatically get that. We don’t have a good understanding of why, but attempts to measure them say that skill acquisition and (especially) retention from school subject are very low.

    • AG says:

      Will the book be examining how rates compare in other nations, and what those nations are doing differently, in education and outcomes?

    • MPG says:

      It certainly sounds like an interesting book. To push back against one aspect of your case, however: I really doubt that offering a course in Excel would be a meaningful replacement for study either of algebra or of statistics. Both of those are valid mathematical subjects and need to be studied. I’d still regret omission of algebra, as it will mean that some students are unable to pursue a career in any scientific or engineering subject, which is unlikely to be the right outcome for all of them. It’s not just a matter of having failed to jump through one hoop, either. If you haven’t done algebra, you can’t even understand the language by which those subjects work. Biology might remain possible, but only if you aren’t required to do any classical physics or chemistry–in other words, if you study biology without context. Remedial college instruction will help, but you don’t want those who got improperly strained out by some miscalibrated screening mechanism in ninth grade to face further obstacles to advanced study later on. That’s a practical matter, however, which can be solved (one hopes!) through better curricula and screening measures, and your point that many students simply aren’t passing algebra and so need something else is well-taken.

      Study of Excel, by contrast, will only teach students to … use Excel. That’s not a bad thing, but it’s no more a replacement for study of an actual mathematical subject than a course on the rest of the MS Office suite is a replacement for study of English composition. Are you proposing, then, to replace post-8th grade mathematical study, for many students, with purely vocational training on vaguely math-related subjects? Too many people bemoan the uselessness of their study of algebra and the like for me to exclude the idea off-hand, but I’d be worried that, without some theoretical understanding of the math involved, students would really only be learning tricks to make a particular program work. Woe betide them if Excel is ever phased out.

      • SamChevre says:

        Are you proposing, then, to replace post-8th grade mathematical study, for many students, with purely vocational training on vaguely math-related subjects?

        This is relatively close to what I did. I didn’t attend school after 8th grade,and worked as a fine carpenter and in construction–so all the math I learned was vocational. When I went back to school in my 20’s, all the algebra I knew was that the same letter represented the same number within the problem: that was enough to get me placed into pre-calculus algebra, which was among the classes in college I struggled with most.

        I graduated in 4 years with a math minor, and have worked in a math-heavy field since.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        MPG, is there a point where it’s reasonable to tell a student that they’re not doing well enough in a subject for some career paths, but they can and should be learning other things? Perhaps at some point, if they care a lot, they should take another crack at the subject.

      • as it will mean that some students are unable to pursue a career in any scientific or engineering subject, which is unlikely to be the right outcome for all of them.

        Whatever you choose to teach, in the limited space of K-12, there are going to be things you don’t teach that are essential to some careers that some people might end up with. The best you can do is to steer the people who seem likely to end up with those careers — in this case, people reasonably good at math — into learning those things.

        You will miss some but those, like SamChevre, can discover what they need to learn and learn it at some later point in their life.

        • Matt M says:

          What percentage of the population in general has a career in scientific or engineering subjects? It can’t be more than 10%, right?

          “The vast majority of students are unsuited for careers in science and engineering and should be discouraged from pursuing such” seems literally true, as far as I can tell.

          The median American high-school student is quite likely to be a low-skilled service industry employee or gig economy worker. So what’s the point in making everyone at-or-below median suffer through a bunch of science and algebra courses that they’re literally never going to use…

        • MPG says:

          @David Friedman

          I actually agree. I was something fairly close to unschooled as a child, and went to college early. I’m certainly not hidebound to the ordinary American K-12 schooling model, and I’m well aware that bright children will study all kinds of things in and out of school. What I worry about is that some number of students will be suited to mathematical study, be shunted out of it at a decisive point, and lack either the opportunities SamChevre had to do serious work in a productive trade (with what must have been a good deal of practical mathematics) or, on the other hand, opportunities like the ones I had. Those students could well end up seriously wasting time in high school, and not being able due to other responsibilities to make up for it later. I know, lots of people do so already, but at least a system that feigns to impose a higher bar on everyone will in fact (EDIT: well, at least pretend to) give every particular person a higher bar to clear.

          That’s only an attempt to identify a downside to a reasonable policy that is just a variation on what one inevitably does anyway. (So I think that answers your question, Nancy Lebovitz). My main point was that replacing mathematical instruction with instruction in a specific computer program is a bad idea. I’d stand behind that one, too, unless the instruction was part of some vocational training with a job at the other end. But why not, in that case, just do it as an apprenticeship? The German half of me is dubious.

          @Matt M

          My objection applies only to those shunted out of a math-and-science track who should not have been.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I’m surprised you consider this an argument for lower standards. It seems like, if anything, it’s an argument for not having standards at all.

      Suppose only 60% of students pass their algebra requirement. We can argue that this does a disservice to the remaining 40% of the students who may be good hard-working people but just not skilled at math.

      If we replace it with an easier statistics requirement that 80% of students can pass – then it still seems equally unfair to the 20% who can’t.

      It seems like either we should have maximally easy requirements that 100% of students can meet (in which case, what’s the point of calling it a “requirement”?) or we’re just looking at this totally the wrong way.

      As other commenters have pointed out, it seems like the problem is we’re combining high school degree as generic coming-of-age ritual and social validation as an acceptable person, and high school degree as certification that you have attained some specific level of proficiency which not everyone is able to attain.

      Maybe graduate everyone from high school, but some people graduate with As in advanced algebra, and other people graduate with Fs in remedial math, and that’s okay? I feel bad about that, because that’s making “graduation” into a meaningless signal, but maybe it’s better than introducing an artificial cutoff point that we know people are going to use to say “this group is okay, this other group is a failure”.

      • Freddie deBoer says:

        This is (sort of) addressed in the book – the last third is about how to lower the stakes of failing in school to the point that minimal harm is done to those who do. In other words, maybe not eliminating all standards but reducing the costs of failing to meet them to as little as possible.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        It seems like either we should have maximally easy requirements that 100% of students can meet

        Assuming away the mentally retarded students,

        I can imagine a curriculum that everyone can pass. That does not mean everyone will pass. If you refuse to show up and do the work, you do not pass.

        Say we required everyone to walk 8 miles, and they could take all day to do it. Again assuming away the handicapped, everyone can meet that requirement. But not everyone will.

        I don’t know if this is the goal. It would also be hard to establish and maintain that threshold, because lots of teenagers are lazy and will work to push the threshold of success down. I also don’t know if we’d be able to hold the threshold against “well, we all agreed already that some people just don’t have the smarts for algebra; now, isn’t it obvious that some people just don’t have the conscientiousness to do the work?”

        • Purplehermann says:

          Doing work is what highschool is selecting for.

          College is necessary to show you have maths too

    • Doctor Mist says:

      I keep hearing about how algebra is this big hurdle. My memory of high-school algebra is that it’s what lets me say, “This recipe calls for a cup of pasta and 2/3 of a cup of onion, but I have a cup and two-thirds of pasta and hungry guests; how much onion should I use?” Is that what you’re talking about, or has high school algebra changed since my day? If the former, is that really so hard for somebody to master?

      I gotta say, I’m not sanguine about the life prospects of somebody who cannot.

      • Freddie deBoer says:

        I’m afraid my perception of the degree of the algebra problem is largely dependent on Andrew Hacker. His book is quite persuasive.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        Knowing some algebra is useful, but a lot of people (maybe a large majority) seem to manage well enough without it.

        • Matt M says:

          The amount of algebra that is useful for the average person to know is essentially what is covered in the first 1-2 weeks of a standard high-school Algebra 1 course. Everything beyond that is basically superfluous.

          Understanding intuitively how to set up a basic linear equation is sometimes useful in day to day life. Not often, but occasionally. Quadratic factoring isn’t.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          You need to be able to solve

          30x + 20 = 340

          Like, “I have 340 square feet of wall to paint. 20 square feet are already painted. One can of paint covers 30 square feet. How many cans of paint do I need?”

          Being able to multiply (10x + 2) times (5x - 10) is not needed for most adults.

        • Randy M says:

          You guys are probably right. I bet you could get a couple semesters of coursework by taking the most universally useful portions of algebra, geometry, statistics, and maybe trigonometry, and letting most students bypass the advanced parts or focus on them later.

          • Matt M says:

            I’m not sure there are any universally useful parts of geometry and trig at all. Not for the average person at least.

            Very basic statistics. Teach people what a standard deviation is and what it means. Nothing beyond that is really needed.

          • AG says:

            Not universally, but geometry and trig are arguably more useful in blue collar work than white collar.

          • Plumber says:

            @AG,
            I never took a trigonometry class in High School but n old steamfitter taught me trig for one of my plumbing apprenticeship classes ’cause it was useful in estimating needed pipe lengths, most of the older plumbers and steamfitters had “cheat books” that were pages of “If dimension A is x, and dimension y than dimension y will be….”.

          • AG says:

            I mean, all sin/cos/tan/h tables are technically cheat books.

      • It’s surprising to me that you have that reaction. My primary intellectual specialization is in mathematics, so I’ve long since mastered high-school algebra. But I remember what a struggle it was to learn, and it seems entirely natural to me that people would have trouble learning it, especially if they have less of a keen interest in the subject than me.

    • What is your view of unschooling, which takes the approach you are suggesting much farther? I’ve argued for a long time that very few of the things in the K-12 curriculum are things everyone should learn, and that there are many more things that some people should learn that are not included in that curriculum.

      • Freddie deBoer says:

        I think in the abstract it’s intriguing and worthy of further exploration; in the specific I think any conclusions we would want to draw right now would be hopelessly confounded by the fact that a very specific sort of parent would unschool their kid right now.

        • What specific sort of parent is that? Are you including unschooling in a school, such as Sudbury Valley, as well as at home?

          And what are the sorts of conclusions you can’t draw? You won’t be able to conclude that it works well for everyone, since it’s a small and nonrandom sample, but there can be a lot of useful conclusions short of that, such as that it does (or doesn’t) work well for certain sorts of kids.

      • Matt M says:

        I’ve argued for a long time that very few of the things in the K-12 curriculum are things everyone should learn, and that there are many more things that some people should learn that are not included in that curriculum.

        I agree with the first part of this, but not so much the second. Which is why I’m generally fine with unschooling. I think the vast majority of things you attempt to teach children will be quickly forgotten unless you continually drill/refresh them on it, or unless they happen to be particularly interested in the topic.

        If this is true, the vast majority of education is a giant waste of time. So if it doesn’t do any particular good anyway, why not just let the kids frolic in a field or play baseball or play video games all day? Why not let them have fun and enjoy life more?

        • or unless they happen to be particularly interested in the topic.

          That is why, educationally speaking, it isn’t a waste of time. Kids can quite easily get interested in things — but not always the things adults tell them to get interested in.

          • Matt M says:

            Right… but in the average public school, what percentage of time would you estimate is spent on “things the kids themselves picked that they’re interested in” versus “things the adults tell them they should be interested in?”

          • Very little. That’s part of the reason I’m arguing for unschooling, where that is practically all kids spend time on.

          • axiomsofdominion says:

            Unschooling is basically the Polgar method right? I think that is viable with very smart parents and/or small class sizes but the percentage of parents/teachers who can handle unschooling is super low.

          • I don’t think it’s the Polgar method. Polgar, as I understand it, decided that his daughters should learn to be chess players.

            Unschooling, as we practiced it, meant the kids were free to spend their time as they liked. We encouraged them to get interested in things, tried to help them pursue things they were interested in. Both of them read a lot, did stuff online a lot, largely things like WoW and Starcraft, talked with us a lot.

            There were no classes, hence no class size, when we did it at home, occasional classes when the kids asked for them earlier, when they were in a Sudbury style school.

            They were very bright kids, but I gather the Sudbury people claim to have had success with a fairly wide range of kids.

            I’ve discussed the subject at some length on my blog, if you are interested.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @DavidFriedman: “Unschooling” makes it sound like the children are allowed to remain illiterate and innumerate if they don’t show interest. I don’t believe that’s how it actually works… but the name perhaps scares people.
            The more conventional homeschooling movement has overlapping Venn circles with conservative Christians, and a commonly reported pattern is that Mom stays home with the children while Dad works and they get the children literate by age 4 at the latest, using stepping stones like Dr Seuss -> Aesop -> the Little House books. Numeracy is achieved somewhat later through dependence on various publishers’s textbooks.

          • “Unschooling” makes it sound like the children are allowed to remain illiterate and innumerate if they don’t show interest.

            Not impossible, but more likely if you send them to school. Kids like to read, and sensible parents help them to learn.

            As I said, we encouraged them to get interested in things. That would have included reading if they hadn’t shown an interest in it for themselves.

          • axiomsofdominion says:

            Polgar picked chess as a test because it was a relatively easy skill to measure talent in. As far as I am aware they didn’t really “force” anything and their daughters reported not feeling forced. They were highly intelligent adults with other skills.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      Minor editing problem, but the footnote links don’t work right. You don’t have the same names (at least the footnote I tested) in the links as in the anchors.

  9. albatross11 says:

    Random media comment/speculation:

    Opinion and factual reporting journalism don’t have much natural connection. There is no reason to think that an organization or individual that’s a good source for one is a good source for the other, and the economics of producing them is so different that there’s not much natural overlap. It’s just a historical accident that newspapers routinely came to do both.

    Since the advent of blogs, I’ve rarely been interested in newspaper columnists’ opinions as written in editorials or op-eds. They were inferior to stuff I could find on the internet. That’s largely still true, though sometimes the prestige news sources hired the bloggers to write columns for them–think of Radley Balko and Megan McArdle as examples.

    I rather suspect that the most valuable services provided by news sources are the least glamorous and least profitable. Probably the most important kind of news for actually making the world better is good accurate reporting on what the local government is up to; that’s mostly died off because it’s economically unsustainable. And so all kinds of local corruption probably goes on with nobody watching. In general, national-level politics seems to swamp local-level politics, even though most of us have no realistic say in what happens at a national level. (I live in Maryland. There is zero chance that our state will be sending its electors to put Trump back into office in 2020. Yet that will be like 90%+ of all the news coverage available even locally, and far more than 90% of the political discussion around the water cooler or on Facebook among local friends. Perhaps I’ll hear a couple people commenting on the decisions of the county council or the school board, but probably not–that stuff is mostly boring and unsexy, even though my vote might actually have an impact there, and even though the quality of my local government matters way more in most ways for my family’s well-being than the quality of the federal government. (Note the different trajectories of California and New York w.r.t. C19–same inept federal response, but very different state/local responses. Most issues are much *more* local than that.)

    I have no idea how to fix this, but having nobody watching allows local government to get up to endless mischief, both in terms of waste and fraud and in terms of goofy policies nobody really likes but somehow nobody hears about until they’re underway.

    • Aftagley says:

      I have no idea how to fix this, but having nobody watching allows local government to get up to endless mischie

      What you hear all the time is “buy a subscription to your local paper.” They are really the only organization that could possibly have the incentive structures in place to monitor your local government. I’m not sure how true this advice is anymore. I think if everyone had done it 10 years ago, we might be in better shape, but I think most local news is pretty close to dead at this point.

      Maybe crowd-source local independent journalism? Set up patreon-esque arrangements where towns will all collectively chip in to pay for reporters to write about their local issues without all the overhead of printing and publishing physical copy?

      • albatross11 says:

        Our local (free) paper went out of business a decade ago. It wasn’t great, but it was *something.* Various online sites have tried to colonize the local-news niche, but don’t seem to have gotten very far. For big news stories, we get coverage by DC or Baltimore media, or by a couple more local radio stations that still have some journalists on staff, but that doesn’t seem to extend to figuring out where the money from some boondoggle project of the county school board wound up, or what’s going on with the local speeding/red light cameras, or….

      • Eric T says:

        Maybe crowd-source local independent journalism? Set up patreon-esque arrangements where towns will all collectively chip in to pay for reporters to write about their local issues without all the overhead of printing and publishing physical copy?

        I mean if all of us spent the time we spend quibbling with each other over the internet doing investigative journalism, the SSC comments may have won a Pulitzer by now!

        Serious response: I like the idea of supporting local independent journalism, but there is definitely a major barrier to entry we need to crest. Journalism is a low-paying, low-demand career and few people are very excited by the prospect of doing local stories for a pittance. We would need to raise enough money not just to fund journalist, but to entice good ones. Source: my ex is now a senior staff writer and has been in journalism since college.

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:

          And if we want good coverage for local journalism, there are a lot of localities.

    • Randy M says:

      Opinion and factual reporting journalism don’t have much natural connection.

      Presumably the editors of a newspaper are very well informed, so there’s that. They also have a platform where they can promote their views at cost. Alternatively, if opinion pages are popular and sell papers, it may be subsidizing the more costly investigation.

      That said, like you I prefer to get opinion pieces from specific individuals I can know about, and free on-line, rather than the back page of the paper.

    • Well... says:

      I rather suspect that the most valuable services provided by news sources are the least glamorous and least profitable.

      I’ve said before that, leaving aside the matter of how worthwhile it actually is for any given person to be “informed” about the kinds of things the news tends to cover, the more universally momentous (“important”) a news story is the less likely it is that any audience member will be able to practically use the information in it. At the other end, news stories about local Christmas tree stands being low on inventory would be pretty useful (“valuable”) to someone who’s thinking about going out and buying a Christmas tree this weekend.

      But still, the more valuable information actually is to you, the more likely you are to get it directly from the source.

    • mtl1882 says:

      Opinion and factual reporting journalism don’t have much natural connection. There is no reason to think that an organization or individual that’s a good source for one is a good source for the other, and the economics of producing them is so different that there’s not much natural overlap. It’s just a historical accident that newspapers routinely came to do both.

      Sort of, but originally they weren’t considered separate. Basic facts (rainfall, crops, town meetings) didn’t require anyone with editorial talent—your local officials or whoever could take care of that and post it in the town center. If you were going to pay for wider, more socially-relevant information, you needed some level of context and judgement in the selection. There are definitely different ways to do it, and yes, local journalism is key to doing it more functionally—national concentration has degraded all coverage. But people who know how to root it the most relevant factual information often are able to provide the best commentary as well, because they know the context. I think there’s a connection there. It’s just now no one is really getting to the bottom of anything—everything is sort of surface-y and decoupled from concrete, immediate interests. In the early days, it was common for one editor to author the entire edition of his own paper.

    • John Schilling says:

      Since the advent of blogs, I’ve rarely been interested in newspaper columnists’ opinions as written in editorials or op-eds. They were inferior to stuff I could find on the internet. That’s largely still true, though sometimes the prestige news sources hired the bloggers to write columns for them–think of Radley Balko and Megan McArdle as examples.

      That’s rapidly ceasing to be true, as “blogs” become as much of an anachronism as “usenet”. The fat lady hasn’t sung yet, but the golden age of blogging is past and the discourse is moving towards Reddit and Twitter and the rest of social media. I do hope our host manages to keep this garden well-cultivated for many years to come, but I do not think we can expect bloggers to replace newspapers in this area.

      Indeed, I think newspapers (albeit mostly online) will largely outlast blogs, and the model of the most esteemed bloggers becoming newspaper columnists may be the best we can hope for in preserving what was good about the blogosphere in any influential way.

      • AG says:

        Nonsense, unless you stipulate that blogs must be primarily text based. Instagram and Tumblr still count as blogs, even if they favor image formats.

        • John Schilling says:

          If we’re expecting blogs to be the replacement for newspaper op-eds (and even more so for newspaper journalism), the I stipulate that they must be primarily text-based. And that is the context at hand.

          The kind of information and argument we are concerned with here, is poorly suited to image-based formats, and it’s not what I’m seeing on Instagram and Tumblr.

  10. Matt M says:

    I apologize in advance, this is gonna be a bit longer than my typical CW post, but this has me really upset to the point where I’m losing sleep over it, so I just have to get it out of my system…

    The one thing about all of these protests (and similar such protests in the past) that bothers me the most is the destruction/defacement/removal of historical monuments. The media focuses in on “confederate monuments” which seem to be the most egregious offenders, but nobody is immune. Monuments to northern founding fathers have been vandalized. I’m seeing accounts that Belgium has removed a statue of a former King, and a statue of Winston Churchill in London has been continually defaced. The current zeitgeist on the left seems to be that pretty much any white person born before 1960 was almost certainly despicably evil and does not deserve to be honored in any way.

    Putting aside how odd this is in general (most societies tend to revere and worship their ancestors, not vilify them), the destruction of cultural monuments (many of which have artistic merits) just seems like it should be considered beyond the pale. Even if we concede that the thing being “honored” doesn’t necessarily measure up to current moral standards.

    I remember the first time I really thought about this… it was back in like 2001 and it was when the news push was regarding how we had to go into Afghanistan and remove the Taliban. The Taliban was accused of all sorts of evils: torture, oppression, murder, sexism, and the destruction of ancient Buddhist statues and relics. And everyone agreed that the last one was a very very bad thing that only very very evil people would do. Ancient works of art need to be protected. Even if you didn’t believe in Buddhism yourself. Even if you thought Buddhists committed a lot of crimes. Even if you accept that in Islam, making a giant gold statue of a man you worship as a Godlike figure is the epitome of blasphemy. This was still wrong, and all right-thinking people acknowledged it was wrong.

    This is the most egregious example that maybe we’re most familiar with, but it’s hardly the only one. Anyone who has visited eastern Europe and marveled at the beautiful frescos, only to be annoyed that Jesus’ eyes were gouged out by iconoclasts, has felt the same sort of anger or disappointment. Why did they have to do that? A momentary and immediate act of religious fervor (which may well be entirely justified depending on your interpretation of the Bible) damaged something that would eventually be considered to be a priceless work of art and valuable cultural memento of a bygone era. We can’t really “restore” them. It’s gone forever. I also remember touring Munich, and how the guides would constantly tell me about beautiful buildings that used to exist, but were destroyed in the allied bombing campaign of WW2. You could see the looks on the faces – disappointment from the Americans, and “I’m disappointed but I’m probably not allowed to look like I am” on the faces of the Germans. We can be disappointed these buildings were destroyed without siding with the Nazis in WW2. We can say “This is tragic and I wish they could have found another way.”

    And on the other side of the coin, we can appreciate all the examples of this not happening. I’m really glad that the Pyramids and Stonehenge and Chicen Itza and the Mona Lisa all still exist for me to view and experience. Not just me, countless millions of people have derived great satisfaction from getting to see these cultural monuments (putting aside the academic benefit they provide to historians and anthropologists). I’m really glad that it seemingly never occurred to William the Conqueror or any of the Tudors to knock down what was clearly and obviously a Pagan worship site. I’m really glad that for whatever reason, 8th century Muslims didn’t decide to disassemble the Pyramids or deface the Sphinx or pull down the statues of the pagan God-King Rameses at Abu Simbel. I’m really glad that the Spanish didn’t see the need to tear apart a pyramid whose primary and express purpose was to provide a location for ritual human sacrifice (I don’t know what bad opinion Winston Churchill is alleged to have held, but can we all not agree it’s surely less offensive than ripping out a person’s still-beating heart?). I’m really glad that the French revolutionaries and the Italian fascists didn’t take it upon themselves to burn every renaissance painting located in Paris or Rome. Even though all of those people disagreed strongly with the cultural values those monuments and objects expressed. Even though their personal religions and belief systems would have justified it. They still had a certain level of respect for what came before.

    And look, I get it. A statue of Robert E. Lee erected in the 1960s isn’t ancient. But the only way things get to become ancient is if you don’t destroy them when they’re modern. And a lot of these statues aren’t “artistic” in the sense that they provide a simple and realistic depiction of a man. And they aren’t particularly momentous in terms of being difficult or costly for society to erect the way that the Pyramids or Notre Dame are. But they’re still cultural monuments, and we should still keep them. Not even in spite of the fact that they don’t reflect our current values, but maybe even because they don’t reflect our current values. You want today’s schoolchildren to understand that at one point, people fought a war to keep slaves and that as recently as the 1960s, many people thought the people who did so were worthy of honor and respect? Take them to see a statue of Robert E. Lee. Tell them he was evil if you want, but leave the damn statue alone. It’s a part of our history and a part of our culture. For better or for worse.

    This sounds a little icky and awkward to say, but the destruction of cultural monuments might outrage me even more than actual murder. I know I’m supposed to value “people” above “things,” but every person dies. The average person lives less than 100 years. And while a life unnecessarily being cut short is tragic…. Part of me feels like this is more tragic. A momentary impulse, based in anger and hatred, can destroy something that could have lasted for hundreds or thousands of years, bringing great joy to many. There aren’t any Mayans anymore, but Chichen Itza still stands. It is through their cultural monuments that they’re still relevant, still with us, and in a certain sense, their legacy lives on. Maybe 1,000 years from now there won’t be any white southerners anymore. Maybe Borderer culture will be completely and entirely extinct, and maybe we will look upon slaveowning societies much how today we look on human-sacrifice societies. But that doesn’t mean the entire culture needs to be wiped out. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still have a few monuments to remember them by.

    I feel so passionately about this that I’m willing to change my previously held positions about statues and other monuments dedicated to people I consider tyrants and mass-murderers. Seattle can keep its statue of Lenin. Berlin can keep KarlMarxStrasse. If China ever democratizes, I hope they don’t destroy and burn every last portrait of Mao or little red book. These things are monuments to modern society, and modern culture. Some for the better, some for the worse. And just as we can look on Chichen Itza today without personally endorsing ritual human sacrifice, surely our descendants 500 years from now could look at a statue of George Washington without personally endorsing owning slaves.

    OK, that’s about all I have here… my one request is that you please don’t reply with something like “yeah it’s outgroup vs fargroup.” I know that’s what’s driving a lot of this. The question is – does anyone else here feel the same about this as I do, and if so, what can we do about it?

    • SamChevre says:

      I am beyond furious at the destruction of memorials to the Confederate leaders.

    • Eric T says:

      I agree with you in principal: but as you pointed out, some of these statues were built during reconstruction or the civil rights era with the express intention to intimidate people of color or show support for the KKK. I think I am fine with removing these statues and these statues alone. They make up a small minority of the damage however, so your anger is 100% justified. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I value statues over people, but know that this lefty largely agrees with you.

      • AG says:

        I would stipulate that “removing” doesn’t mean destruction.

        Art in the public space is no longer just art, the choice of what art is allowed in the public space is political. So when the public no longer supports the ideal that the public art represents, move it out of the public.
        Architecture is a more difficult issue, but in that it has a function outside of art, it is much more easily moved to a neutral association. People of all sorts of ideologies have lived in the White House, for example. Much easier to claim that “this building is ours, now” than a direct artistic representation of the enemy. This is why the Pyramids and Stone Henge and even grand cathedrals don’t carry the same kinds of political association as a statue.

        • Matt M says:

          Fair and true enough. I’m still somewhat libertarian, so yes, I acknowledge there are practical concerns with the notion that if I erect a statue of Robert E. Lee in location X, that statue must remain there for all time and can never be removed for any reason.

          If local authorities want to remove these statues, I’d be okay with it if they sold the statue to a private buyer (under the condition it not be defaced or destroyed), re-located to a different location (even if it’s way out in the middle of nowhere), or donated to a museum (so long as the museum agrees to display it occasionally, it can’t just sit in the warehouse forever).

          If I had a billion dollars, I’d probably start some sort of “cancelled statues museum” out in the middle of nowhere. I would buy up all of these things and put them in a giant field in Nebraska to preserve them, let people come view them if they want, etc. And I’d be totally viewpoint neutral. I’d buy the Robert E. Lee statues and the Stalin statues.

          • Randy M says:

            Maybe you could put it next to the “banned books library” to get traffic from both sides.

          • achenx says:

            Hungary has a park of removed communist-era statues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_Park

            “This park is about dictatorship. And at the same time, because it can be talked about, described, built, this park is about democracy. After all, only democracy is able to give the opportunity to let us think freely about dictatorship.”

          • Eric T says:

            Hungary has a park of removed communist-era statues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_Park

            “This park is about dictatorship. And at the same time, because it can be talked about, described, built, this park is about democracy. After all, only democracy is able to give the opportunity to let us think freely about dictatorship.”

            I love the idea but I’m not sure Hungary is the best example of a democracy right now.

          • albatross11 says:

            Call it the rogues gallery museum and I bet you’d even get a substantial number of tourists coming to visit it. “Get your picture taken with Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and Mao all on the same day!”

          • achenx says:

            I love the idea but I’m not sure Hungary is the best example of a democracy right now.

            Well, yeah, but the park’s been there awhile.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            “cancelled statues museum”

            That would actually be pretty awesome. Can we do that?

            After all, only democracy is able to give the opportunity to let us think freely about dictatorship.”

            I love the idea but I’m not sure Hungary is the best example of a democracy right now.

            I guess they thought too hard about it?

          • AG says:

            If I had a billion dollars, I would start a museum of such statues, but attach googly eyes and glorious handlebar mustaches to every one, and run “fabulous accessory of the week” bid wars per statue.

      • Eric Rall says:

        In addition, a lot of the 1960-era statues were mass produced. I’m completely fine with removing the vast majority of those from public display, since each individual statue of this type has little or no unique artistic or historical value. And if a run of statues has significant artistic or historical value, then I’d expect at least a few people to be willing to put their money where their mouth is (or take up a collection) and outbid scrap-metal merchants to buy up one or two of them for preservation in private collections.

        • Jiro says:

          Statues have value as part of the commons. Expecting people to buy discarded statues is like expecting people to pay companies not to pollute; most of the benefits of the statue existing won’t go to the purchaser.

          • Aftagley says:

            Unless the statues are commemorating a person/idea that has minority support from the public. In this case the majority gets 0 utility out of the statue either way, but now at least the minority gets to have a statue at all.

      • SamChevre says:

        Note:I don’t think any statues of Confederate leaders were put up DURING the military occupation of the South (“Reconstruction”)–all those I can think of were put up post-Redemption.

        It’s kind of like a statue in Ireland commemorating James Connolly–it gets put up after the British aren’t ruling anymore. (I put the Redeemers in the same anti-colonialist category as Sinn Fein.)

        • Eric T says:

          I think I meant to write Post-Reconstruction because this sounds correct to me and also was what I was thinking.

    • MisterA says:

      Belgium has removed a statue of a former King

      It’s unclear if you aware of this, but the king in question is arguably in the running for having committed the greatest genocide in human history – at high estimates the guy is Double Hitler.

      And I know you say you’re in favor of even keeping the statues of the bad guys, but do you bite that bullet? Should Germany have kept its Hitler statues? Because it’s really hard to argue for a coherent position where you keep King Leopold II’s monuments but you don’t keep Hitler’s.

      And if there’s some threshold of ‘too bad to keep the statues’ then now we’re just dickering about where the line is.

      • Eric T says:

        Counterpoint: Leave them up, let people draw rude/funny things on them.

        • Randy M says:

          Counter-counter point–now you just have an ugly public square.

          • Eric T says:

            Counter-counter-counter point: Having an ugly public square will make people stay at home, reducing the spread of disease and carbon emissions.

          • Matt M says:

            Agreed. But I’m the guy who thinks “lots of the Berlin wall is still there just covered in horrible graffiti” is a major downgrade. I get the symbolism, but it’s ugly as hell…

          • Randy M says:

            C^4: Nah, people are all too busy on their phones to notice the semi-destroyed monuments anyway.

          • Simultan says:

            @Matt M, nearly all of the 185 kms of wall have been torn down. I wasn’t able to find any numbers for how much remains, but I don’t think it’s more than some 5 km in toto. East Side Gallery is around 1 km. And not all of what remains is covered in graffiti. (In parts, rows of cobblestone have been put down to mark the places where it used to stand – one such line runs just outside my apartment.) I find it difficult to see how the graffitied remnants are in any way a major downgrade to the cityscape – you’d really have to seek them out to be annoyed by them!

      • Matt M says:

        I’ll bite your bullet and say yes. We should have allowed some non-zero amount of statues of Hitler to remain. As a reminder.

        At the very least it should be acknowledged that the context in which they were removed was following a military defeat, in which Germany had literally been conquered by foreign invaders. If we can agree that tearing down monuments is a behavior normally attributed to conquering foreign armies, and anyone engaging in tearing down monuments should be identified and treated as such, then fine.

        • MisterA says:

          So in your mind, there’s no threshold at which a society can decide “Wow, we really fucked up, we shouldn’t be honoring those people anymore?” Put another way – if the Allies hadn’t torn down the Hitler statues, do you really think modern day Germans would still want those statues standing in the public square? And if they don’t, who are we to tell them they have to keep them?

          And if it’s OK for Germans to decide they’re not actually cool with Nazi imagery, what principle says that is an OK choice for them to make, but Belgians have to continue honoring their own nation’s greatest genocidal sociopath?

          • Eric T says:

            Ok I’ll try to hit a more nuanced view here:

            I think it’s fine if society wants to collectively decide to remove a historical monument. If there’s a referendum or if its just polling insanely highly, go for it!

            I think where I have an issue, and I don’t want to speak for him, but what I read out Matt M’s post may be his issue too – protestors who aren’t necessarily representative of their society destroying monuments isn’t good.

            I also prefer storage over destruction but I’m a history nerd who likes old stuff.

          • Fahundo says:

            I lack context on the Belgian example maybe. Generally when I hear of statues being taken down I assume an angry mob complained or vandalized it enough to get it moved. I dislike that, but would be fine with some poll of the community or something resulting in it being moved off public land.

          • Aftagley says:

            @Eric T

            OK, but what defines your definition of society?

            My hometown has a confederate statue. Over the last few decades, the town transformed into a strong blue-tribe area with a significant minority population. We want the statue gone. We’ve had several referendums on getting rid of it; the local paper has done polling – a vast majority of us want it gone.

            But, the state government had a law that made it impossible for a city to remove such a statue – that had to be done by the state government or (more likely) not at all. Since confederate statues poll well in the rest of the state, should we have to keep it?

          • Matt M says:

            I lack context on the Belgian example maybe. Generally when I hear of statues being taken down I assume an angry mob complained or vandalized it enough to get it moved.

            And that’s exactly how it goes in 99% of these cases. The statue of Leopold was removed a few days ago. We didn’t learn anything new about Leopold in the last week. The only thing that changed was that a violent and angry mob assembled and demanded it be removed. So it was.

            This is categorically different from a normal process of societal debate wherein we decide that actually, this space should be used for a different purpose that’s more useful for current citizens.

          • MisterA says:

            Sure, I am all for putting it in a museum if a museum wants it. Or a private gallery or whatever.

            Much what is going on right now is indeed the proper authorities, though. The statue of Robert E. Lee is coming down because the democratically elected government of the state has decided it should maybe not be honoring a traitor who fought for the right to keep humans as chattel, not because antifa dynamited it. And they aren’t planning to destroy it, so if the voters of Virginia disagree, there’s a clear way to express that and get the decision reversed.

          • Matt M says:

            The statue of Robert E. Lee is coming down because the democratically elected government of the state has decided it should maybe not be honoring a traitor who fought for the right to keep humans as chattel, not because antifa dynamited it.

            And you think the fact that they made this decision this week, rather than six months ago, has nothing to do with the fact that Antifa dynamited it?

            What a remarkable coincidence that all around the world, during the middle of violent mobs forming in every major city, local officials are suddenly updating their priors regarding Robert E. Lee, King Leopold, and Winston Churchill! What are the odds?

          • MisterA says:

            Of course it’s not a coincidence. But the fact that the government is responding to the situation doesn’t mean it’s not still the actual local government deciding what to do about it.

            There’s a pretty big difference in my mind between protesters pulling down a statue, and the government of the state looking at the protests and deciding it may be a bad idea to keep a place of honor for statues that were explicitly erected to send a message to black people that they better stay in their place.

          • Eric T says:

            all around the world, during the middle of violent mobs forming in every major city

            Man I was on your side and everything! That’s not even close to the truth, most cities didn’t have violent mobs in America, let alone the rest of the world!

          • J.R. says:

            @Eric T

            I think it’s fine if society wants to collectively decide to remove a historical monument. If there’s a referendum or if its just polling insanely highly, go for it!

            I think where I have an issue, and I don’t want to speak for him, but what I read out Matt M’s post may be his issue too – protestors who aren’t necessarily representative of their society destroying monuments isn’t good.

            Let’s say the removal question gets put to a municipal referendum. Since local elections have very low turnout, it’s likely that the angry mob will win since removing a statue of Man on the Wrong Side of History is an easy thing to gin up support for. And it’s hard for me to oppose democracy here – surely Berliners can decide for themselves whether they want a statue of Hitler in front of the Bundestag.

            You might answer that that is settled, then – if it gets put to a vote, and the mob wins, then the mob wins. Case closed. If the Statue Remainers wanted the statue to stay so badly, they should have organized and voted, the conventional thinking goes.

            But what I’m interested in interrogating is why I instinctively think the mob would win. The fact is that angry mobs in local politics are a cliche. (Parks and Rec was a popular TV show that got lots of comedic mileage out of the types of cranks and oddballs that get super invested in local politics) The fact is, though, that these calls to remove these monuments didn’t gain traction in the past but they are now. So why now?

            I think two things about our culture play a role:

            1. The ubiquity of the politics of negation (much easier to be against something than for something). See also Martin Gurri’s Revolt of the Public (blog post here)

            2. Lack of appreciation for historical context

            ETA: I don’t have time to fully flesh this out, but may do so in a future OT

          • Since confederate statues poll well in the rest of the state, should we have to keep it?

            Would state law prevent you from putting a high wall around it?

          • Aftagley says:

            Would state law prevent you from putting a high wall around it?

            I think we’re not allowed to modify it in any way; and it’s in a pretty awkward spot for a random 40 foot wall.

          • Garrett says:

            @Aftagley:

            Why did you (and the other folks) move to an area with something you dislike so much? This seems to be a continual pattern of blue tribe/red-tribe problems. Blue-tribe people move into a red-tribe space and then complain about all of the things that the red-tribe likes and works to get rid of them.

            This also includes other things like subdivisions getting built next to a pig farm or shooting range and then attempting to get rid of the pre-existing operations shut-down because of the smell or noise.

      • Fahundo says:

        I’ll be the one to go ahead and say I’d prefer if we kept even the statues of double-hitlers around.

      • AlesZiegler says:

        When I visited Brussels I was surprised that they have a statue of him in the centre of the city.

    • Noah says:

      ETA: MisterA beat me to the point.

      Belgium has removed a statue of a former King

      I think this is burying the lede somewhat. Assuming this is Leopold II, I would put him on my shortlist of history’s greatest villains alongside Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, and Genghis Khan. He ruled the Congo as his personal domain and was incredibly brutal (the figure I recall is 10 million dead due to his rule in a population of 20 million, though estimates vary widely).

      Of course, what to do about statues to evil people is a separate question.

      • Matt M says:

        Several statues of Stalin still remain in Eastern Europe. I got a cool photo of myself giving the finger to one outside of a Stalin museum located in Georgia. I’m glad it was there so I could express my disapproval of his actions to a giant facsimile of him rather than just to a gravestone or whatever.

        Edit: And there are countless American restaurants directly named after Genghis Khan, and nobody bats an eye… I’m pretty sure ideology plays a major role in which of these genocidal maniacs need to be made totally taboo, and which can be used for marketing purposes if we feel like it.

    • Aftagley says:

      Do you also object to moving statues out of positions of prominence? Take the statue of Robert E Lee in Richmond – it’s not set to get dynamited; the governor’s plan calls for it to be taken out of it’s current, incredibly prominent location and put into storage. What has happened previously when this was done is that, eventually, some private group will take ownership of the statue and re-erect it on private land.

      To me, this seems perfectly fine. The citizenry that has to look at the stupid thing every day gets it’s will recognized in having the statue be removed from a position of state-acknowledged respect while the people who care about preserving it have the option to do so.

      • Matt M says:

        What has happened previously when this was done is that, eventually, some private group will take ownership of the statue and re-erect it on private land.

        I am OK with this solution if that indeed is what happens. That said, up to the moment where the proper government authority actually removes the statue, it should be protected from vandalism and defacement.

    • Anteros says:

      @Matt M

      I was thinking something similar earlier today, perhaps without quite the same emotional involvement. And I specifically had in mind the Buddhist statues in Afghanistan.

      Surely it’s like the free speech thing – it’s only worth something if people are free to say something that infuriates you.

      The reason I started thinking about it was because a mob in Bristol (UK) tore down a statue and threw it in the harbor. The stature was of an MP and public benefactor who made some of his money from the slave trade. My problem with this is that at the time afaik there were a total of zero MPs who were anti-slave. It would be similar to destroying the statues of any eugenicists from the 20s – that would include a large number of left wing establishment figures. Soon enough there would be no statues of anybody.

    • Chalid says:

      I condemn unlawful destruction of property.

      That out of the way, there has to be a process to get rid of old stuff that we don’t want anymore. At the extreme you get cities designating every building as being of historical significance and no one getting to build anything new. On statues, they are taking up visible and valuable public space; we shouldn’t feel bound to continue to use the center of a town square for the things that people who have been dead for generations decided were important. Ship confederate statues off to the Museum of the Confederacy; send the statue of King Leopold to a genocide museum, etc.

      And yes, if the community doesn’t want a statue and no one will take it off their hands and pay for its upkeep, then it should be lawfully destroyed. It’s better than having it be maintained at the public’s expense in public places against the public’s wishes.

      • Randy M says:

        This seems reasonable to me, although I would hope that there’s a bias for preserving older things on the chance the current whims were fads, you do have to allow the present to take ownership.

      • SamChevre says:

        here has to be a process to get rid of old stuff that we don’t want anymore.

        I don’t disagree, but I don’t think this applies well in the cases where I’m most familiar. I do not think that “51% of us, mostly new arrivals, don’t want it anymore” translates well to “we don’t want it anymore.”

        If 95% of us don’t want it, it’s an easier call than if 20% really value it, 20% hate it, and the other 60% is split between “I don’t mind the status quo” and “I wouldn’t mind change.”

        • StableTrace says:

          What exactly do you mean by “new arrivals”? Why is this at all relevant to anything?

          • SamChevre says:

            Basically (and this is vague), if “people from here” want to continue to commemorate their local history, but “people who just moved here from somewhere else” find that history irrelevant–I think there’s some extra weight that goes to the “people from here”. This is true whether it’s Southerners and Northerners, Tibetans and Han, or Navajo and whites.

          • StableTrace says:

            Sorry, I’m asking because if the line isn’t drawn very carefully for something like this, it can lead to extremely sketchy situations.

            In particular, the “just moved here” seems really important. Otherwise you get things like people being treated as second-class citizens for something completely out of their control and underserved: their ancestry in a location not being deep enough. You can also get a situation where people are frozen into the location they grew up in since they’ll never be able to truly become part of anywhere else.

        • SamChevre says:

          moved to reply

      • ana53294 says:

        Some places declare the dirt on their historical building or statues as valuable. See the controversy about the black madonna (NYT).

      • Matt M says:

        I suspect that at various points in history, Victorian England may well have voted to tear down Stonehenge. I’m much more confident that Taliban-era Afghanistan would have voted to blow up the Bhuddist statues.

        Does that make it okay? Is that what we were really mad about regarding the Taliban? That they didn’t bother to hold a vote on whether or not to destroy the priceless ancient religious works of art?

        • Eric T says:

          Does that make it okay? Is that what we were really mad about regarding the Taliban? That they didn’t bother to hold a vote on whether or not to destroy the priceless ancient religious works of art?

          I mean had the Taliban been open to holding votes about things they probably wouldn’t have looked so much like the Taliban right?

          I don’t think comparing functioning democratic states to the Taliban is the most charitable way to approach this argument?

          • Matt M says:

            Well, if “functioning Democratic states” don’t want me comparing them to the Taliban, maybe they should stop engaging in Taliban-like behaviors (such as destroying cultural monuments solely because they are blasphemous to the majority-dominant religion.)

            That’s kind of my point here. In this specific instance, western states are looking very much like the Taliban from my point of view… and the biggest problem with the Taliban wasn’t “not enough voting.” If there’s one thing we should have learned from all of our recent middle-eastern adventurism, it’s that a lot of these countries with tyrannical Islamists governments had them because that’s the type of government those people wanted to have.

          • albatross11 says:

            Or at least, that’s the kind of government that can get a stable coalition of men with guns behind it. Even if most of the population hates it, if the Taliban can get the guys with guns to support them and the rest of the population can’t, then the Taliban wins the “who gets to rule Afghanistan” sweepstakes.

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:

          Victorians put up small fake ruins for the fun of it.

          Why do you think they would have voted to tear down Stonehenge?

        • Chalid says:

          A couple differences.

          I think there is a difference between art that’s out in the middle of nowhere vs art which is in the middle of a city. You should be constantly reevaluating your art and indeed all your land use in a city – if you don’t get rid of stuff in cities you’ll eventually be unable to build anything new. (Historic preservation arguments are a major tool of NIMBYs in some cities.) There is a high opportunity cost to keeping a large piece of public art around (and often direct costs too, people need to maintain these statues, which means taxes). And in the city you may be forced to see the art whether you want to or not. This doesn’t really apply in the countryside.

          Culturally, I don’t know much about the Buddha statues, but my understanding is that they were pretty unique? Whereas there are lots and lots of confederate statues.

          I also want to comment that our reverence for old art is partly based on the fact that the vast majority of old art did not survive. Old art that did survive exceptionally good in some way, because people made more of an effort to preserve good stuff than bad stuff. And it is likely to be more unique.

    • ECD says:

      I’m tempted to say something unkind about how the market has spoken, but putting that aside, for the most part, I’m not sure how based on libertarian principles you can get to a solution. On my principles, some sort of protection for cultural or historical resources is certainly possible, but the problem is you have to define what that is, or else you end up unable to do anything, or unable to protect anything.

      After all, whose to say that the suburb you want to rebuild won’t be as important to future generations as those lost buildings in Munich?

      The current standards for the federal government depend on a couple of points, the Visual Artist Rights Act might provide some right for the creator (or maybe their heirs, don’t know haven’t investigated) to have some right to prevent mutilation or destruction of their work.

      The other main one is the National Historic Preservation Act, which does not actually preserve anything, but does require you to evaluate your effects and try to find ways to mitigate or avoid them, if you can. However, to the best of my knowledge, the actual actions most of the owners of the relevant statues are taking is removing and not exhibiting them further, which is unlikely to be viewed as problematic under either, nor am I convinced it should be.

      As I work with the NHPA all the time, it has its issues, but it does a fairly good job of protecting national historic landmarks. (ETA: Which is a much narrower category than just historic properties, hence my slightly sarcastic comment about it not preserving anything, above).

      I’m sympathetic, but at the same time, no we can’t preserve everything, especially not on public display and no, confederate monuments put up in the 1960s in an effort to oppress and intimidate American citizens would not make my list, at least not without a much bigger statue of Ulysses Grant or Fredrick Douglass right next to them, giving them the finger.

      • SamChevre says:

        It seems like on libertarian principles, something like the Monument Avenue statues–initially privately funded, on previously private land, deeded to the state to “guard and protect”–is about as clean as you can get for historical preservation.

    • Nick says:

      I think one way to understand cases like Leopold II or the relatively recent Confederate memorials is that it’s a sign of the strength and power of liberal democracy that it can tolerate such things. By the same token, it is a sign of weakness that lately everyone feels the need to tear them down.

      The one that really got my blood boiling earlier was this. “Tell people how to cause irreversible damage to works of art” should be on a shortlist of things a museum curator never fucking does.

      • Matt M says:

        I heard that in Nashville, in the process of trying to destroy a federal courthouse, rioters smashed a plaque that was in honor of a bunch of black students who engaged in a sit-in to protest for civil rights in the 1960s.

        Almost surely an accident, but still, maybe let this serve as a reminder to actually think and look before you just break stuff?

        • SamChevre says:

          In Boston, the protesters defaced the memorial to the Robert Gould Shaw 54th Massachusetts Regiment – the second black regiment in the Union Army.

    • TimG says:

      I’m a bit annoyed by this myself. I think it makes sense to remove statues in some (maybe even most) cases. I just don’t think that sort of thing should be done by a mob.

      One thought that crossed my mind: Had anyone ever asked MLK if he was pro-gay-marriage (or even gay rights.) As a minister — particularly at the time he had been active — I’d guess that he wasn’t (but I have no idea.)

      In that case, I don’t think anyone would approve of tearing down MLK statues during gay-rights protests.

      • Eugene Dawn says:

        An obvious difference is that MLK is not famous mostly for his opposition to gay marriage; indeed, as you say, you have no idea what his opinion on the matter was.
        In contrast, Confederate generals and Leopold II are famous entirely because of their rebellion in defense of slavery, and monstrous genocide in the Congo respectively.

        A harder case is someone like Columbus: famous for more than his crimes, but his crimes were serious enough to attract attention even in his own day, to the point of being recalled as governor, investigated by the new governor, and briefly incarcerated.

        • Tenacious D says:

          And then there’s statues of Churchill and former Canadian PM John A MacDonald that some people want to tear down. They both were involved in harmful treatment of people of other races, but are famous for other reasons.

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            Yes, those are more like Columbus. John A especially is a tricky one since he is literally the founder of the nation, a status that usually deserves some recognition.
            About two years ago I visited the Royal Chapel in Granada, the burial place of Ferdinand and Isabella, the monarchs who basically founded modern Spain, but who are also responsible for the expulsion of the Jews and the Spanish Inquisition. I was annoyed that I could not find any acknowledgment of the terrible things they had done; all the plaques and posters were very positive about their legacy. On the other hand, I think it would be insane to tear down a historical monument like that.
            I think in cases like that, history is best served by leaving the monument up, but at the same time making sure a record of the person’s crimes is put up prominently, to avoid the monument being a whitewash.

          • Matt M says:

            Eugene,

            I think I disagree with your assertion. At the time the statue of Robert E. Lee was erected, I’d say he was best known as an excellent general who fought well and honorably in a war that most people viewed as rather complex, to the extent they thought about “what it was for” at all (which wasn’t much). He wasn’t viewed as “a guy who fought for slavery” by himself, by his contemporaries, or even by his enemies. Presidents as liberal and as recent as FDR and JFK gave speeches declaring their personal opinion as such.

            What someone is known for can change, and it can change based on mob mentality and continuous propaganda. You’re right that today MLK is known as a civil rights hero that maybe happened to be a fundamentalist Christian also. But who’s to say that 30 years from now he won’t be known as a fundamentalist Christian who opposed gay rights oh and maybe also he did some civil rights stuff but who really cares?

            If red-tribe were to start a campaign to constantly emphasize MLK’s faults and ignore his virtues, and if it worked such that decades from now, people saw him as mostly bad and not mostly good, would that justify tearing down his statues? Removing his holiday and celebrating “victims of Christian oppression of gays” instead?

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            But who’s to say that 30 years from now he won’t be known as a fundamentalist Christian who opposed gay rights oh and maybe also he did some civil rights stuff but who really cares?

            I will consider this point if you find me evidence that MLK opposed gay rights; I will concede it if you find me evidence that MLK opposed gay marriage with anything even approaching the dedication with which he devoted himself to the cause of Civil Rights.

            If your argument is that under an assault of lies and propaganda, people might come to believe something false about MLK, then sure, but the relevant question is then: is it false to believe that Robert E Lee is most famous for his service to a pro-slavery rebellion? If anything, the view of Lee that prevailed in the time of FDR is the view that is a result of propaganda and dishonesty.

          • @Eugene Dawn:

            I will consider this point if you find me evidence that MLK

            (did various bad things currently unpopular with the left)

            Does evidence that he plagiarized his PhD thesis qualify?

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            I don’t understand your question: are you asking if MLK plagiarising his thesis is evidence that he was anti-gay?

          • The Pachyderminator says:

            Point of order. I don’t know MLK Jr.’s opinions on gay rights, but he was unambiguously not a fundamentalist or anything remotely akin to one. His theological views were very liberal, calling into question things like the literal truth of the Resurrection, the virgin birth, Biblical inerrancy, etc. He criticized Fundamentalists for not being open to social change. In fact, among actual Fundamentalists, there’s some debate about whether he should be counted as a Christian at all.

          • MisterA says:

            At the time the statue of Robert E. Lee was erected, I’d say he was best known as an excellent general who fought well and honorably in a war that most people viewed as rather complex, to the extent they thought about “what it was for” at all (which wasn’t much). He wasn’t viewed as “a guy who fought for slavery” by himself, by his contemporaries, or even by his enemies.

            Oh, come now – this old canard? Are we going to start calling it the War of Northern Aggression, too?

            The leaders of the confederacy wrote at great, detailed length on the fact that the reason for the rebellion was in solely in defense of slavery and of the superiority of the white race; these quotes are regurgitated on command so often online it’s become a cliche, so I’m not going to recapitulate it here like someone having an old creationism vs. evolution argument, but a ten second Googling can find them all.

            The statues were put up in honor of the values of the Confederacy – the supremacy of the white race and the oppression of the black one being the primary value on behalf of which they fought, a fact which they themselves proclaimed at great length.

            This particular statue being erected in 1890 does put it on somewhat better footing than most Confederate statues, which were erected in the 1960s specifically to advance the cause of segregation. But to say that they didn’t know exactly what Lee stood for in 1890 is ridiculous.

            It’s one thing to say we should keep the statues even of our monsters; it’s something else to try to claim they weren’t monsters.

          • Jaskologist says:

            Me Too would have some beefs with MLK.

            The article, based on FBI reports summarizing the bureau’s audio surveillance of King, makes for uncomfortable reading, to say the least.

            The most shocking claim Garrow relates is that King was present in a hotel room when a friend of his, Baltimore pastor Logan Kearse, raped a woman who resisted participating in unspecified sexual acts. The FBI agent who surveilled the room asserted that King “looked on, laughed and offered advice.”

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @MisterA: The Confederates fought for a liberal representative democracy with black letter Constitutional law to check and balance states’s power vs. the central government… where the voters were white men and black people were slaves.
            What bothers me is when the Left treats that as functionally identical to the Nazis.
            The CSA deservedly lost to Evangelical Protestants who wanted to kill and die for the freedom of souls in black bodies, but people need to maintain perspective.

          • MisterA says:

            What bothers me is when the Left treats that as functionally identical to the Nazis.

            Yeah. Pretty much. I’ll count myself in that camp – I really do consider the Confederacy to be about on par with the Nazis, morally speaking. The fact that the Confederacy was a pseudo-democracy (everyone gets to vote except those who disagree with the state!) and Nazi Germany was a totalitarian state is interesting but does not make me rate the confederates any higher morally.

            It also doesn’t change what they were fighting on behalf of. The secession documents, the speeches, the letters, they all keep saying over and over again, “We are seceding because we want to keep our slaves.” The democracy part doesn’t even get a mention.

            (Well, except for one of the states’ declaration of secession, where they were mad that the North let black people participate in democracy, which they considered a crime against the law of God.)

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @MisterA: I feel like the SJ tribe has different ontological categories from everyone else. I understand “Jews can be elected to the Senate by universal white male suffrage or appointed to the elected President’s cabinet” as a big ontological difference from “Jews gets crowded into unsanitary conditions as a bureaucratic procedure before gassing them.”

          • MisterA says:

            “Lack of access to high public office” seems to rather understate the Confederate position on the status of black people.

            Whether eternal consignment to the status of livestock for a whole race is better or worse than their summary extermination is a difficult question – I’m not sure of the answer. But the fact that it’s a difficult question is sort of the point. I’m honestly not sure which of the two is worse, they are both so bad it breaks the scale, so I am comfortable rounding off to “unspeakable atrocity” for both and deciding we probably shouldn’t be honoring the legacy of either.

            And the fact that white people in the Confederacy got to vote about other matters of law elevates the moral status of their nation not one whit. If the Germans had remained a democracy after electing Hitler, but still committed all the same atrocities, would they have been a more moral nation?

          • Noah says:

            Since the Nazi comparison has been made here, I’ve been thinking about how I would react to statues of German WWII generals, since the Holocaust feels much more personal to me than slavery. I think I would be mostly fine with them as long as they weren’t themselves overly involved in various war crimes (e.g. Rommel).

          • I don’t understand your question

            Sorry if I was unclear.

            My point was that you were assuming that the only reason MLK could go from being seen as a hero to being seen as a villain was if he had violated current left wing norms.

            He in fact did at least two other things that violated norms strongly held by some people at present, norms that could conceivably be more widespread at some time in the future. He plagiarized his doctoral thesis, copied sizable chunks of it without credit from the earlier doctoral thesis of another student of the same professor. And he was extensively unfaithful to his wife.

            King was an impressive orator and his overall effect on the world, as best I can tell, was positive. But I am not comfortable with people having the status of “official hero, can do no wrong.”

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            My point was that you were assuming that the only reason MLK could go from being seen as a hero to being seen as a villain was if he had violated current left wing norms

            What? No, this is a misunderstanding. Matt M asked, what if in the future people decide MLK is a villian because the focus on some other aspect of him; he’s the one who chose a left-wing norm.

            The point I am making is that, regardless of what bad things someone has done, whether things that would annoy the left, the right, or both (see Jaskologist’s post for an MLK-relevant example), it would not change the reason why a public figure is notable.

            There is basically no world where an MLK statue is reasonably regarded as “a statue to a guy most notable for plagiarising a thesis”, or “a statue to a guy most famous for laughing while his friend committed a rape”–even the most committed King opponents understand that the reason MLK is notable is that he led the movement that ended segregation and gave black people voting rights in Amerca.

            The point is not to decide whether he is a hero or a villain, it is to decide what he is notable for.

          • albatross11 says:

            Next, do Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Winston Churchill.

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            @albatross

            Is this directed at me? You can see my thoughts on Churchill and John A MacDonald at the start of the thread; I think pretty similar considerations apply to Washington and Jefferson.

          • albatross11 says:

            Eugene:

            I’m sorry, that comment was a lot more “checkmate, fundies” than useful. I’d delete it if the time hadn’t already expired.

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            No worries, I think it’s a fair question.

          • The point is not to decide whether he is a hero or a villain, it is to decide what he is notable for.

            I don’t think that works for statues people actually want torn down. Columbus is notable for discovering America, not for mistreating the people he found there. Lee is notable mostly for being a brilliant commander in a difficult military situation, not for which side he was fighting on.

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            This conversation started with me making that exact point about Columbus.

      • NostalgiaForInfinity says:

        Bayard Rustin helped found the SCLC with MLK and was openly gay. He thinks MLK was /would be sympathetic and Coretta Scott King agreed.

    • ana53294 says:

      I get it, but I think society should be able to move on.

      While I don’t think statues should be destroyed, and moving bones seems like a silly idea, I think we have to acknowledge that cities have limited space for memorials nowadays.

      I really don’t mind the Spanish Valley of the Fallen, even though it’s a fucking ugly concrete monstrosity built with convict labor. Thankfully, it’s in the middle of nowhere and the only people who see it are the people who seek it.

      But I firmly believe that the Red Square in Moscow would be much improved by removing the mummy. Put a memorial to all the victims of the oppression, add some flowers, but just get rid of the ugly thing. All the buildings around it are much older and beautiful, and the mausoleum is just plain wrong. I’m not even saying it should be destroyed; just move it out of the very center of the historical city, and put it somewhere near the brutalist ugly buildings where it belongs.

      Also, there are still just so many statues of Lenin in Russia (and Pushkin, but he’s a nice chap). It’s annoying. Sure, keep some of them, the ones with artistic significance, but sell the rest of them. If somebody wants them, they can outbid the scrap metal price.

      My understanding is that the US has a lot of statues of Robert E. Lee, a lot of them mass manufactured and with no artistic value.

      For the naming of the streets, I don’t see why we should have people living in streets named after mass murderers if they don’t want to. I think the people living in a street (not even the city) should get to decide whether to rename it.

      My personal policy is, other than the significance of the thing, a very important question is: Is it beautiful? If it is, we can keep it. If it’s an eyesore, and it has all that undertone, put it in a museum or sell it.

      • Matt M says:

        I think we have to acknowledge that cities have limited space for memorials nowadays.

        Sure. But “not enough space” has absolutely nothing to do with the huge surge in monument removals that are happening this week, and let’s not pretend otherwise…

        These things are being removed because an angry mob has declared that they are blasphemous. That’s the literal only reason. If there was any other reason, it wouldn’t be happening right now, at this exact moment in time.

      • albatross11 says:

        Street names, who’s on the currency, who gets holidays, whose statues are in the park–those are all ultimately symbolic, and it’s inevitable that someone’s going to choose the symbols based on their values. I share Matt’s dislike for airbrushing people out of history and horror at destroying art for symbolic reasons, but I also think the current residents of the city should be able to get rid of a statue they don’t like in the park and replace it with one they like better, whether that’s a statue of Jefferson Davis or Vladimir Lenin or Mickey Mouse. Similarly, they should be able to rename Jefferson Davis Boulevard to Martin Luther King Drive or something. It’s symbolic, and these are their symbols.

      • Noah says:

        but he’s a nice chap

        On the contrary, Pushkin was a huge jerk, including (probably) sleeping with the governor’s wife while writing and publicizing verses mocking said governor, and constantly provoking duels. A lot of society let him get away with this behavior because he was a great poet, until someone didn’t and he got killed in a duel.

        This is not to say that any of this has any bearing on whether he deserves statues; he undoubtedly does, but he wasn’t a “nice chap”.

        • ana53294 says:

          Compared to everybody else who gets statues in Russia, he’s as nice as it gets. I struggle coming up with a name of a Russian who’d get statues who would be less controversial than Pushkin.

          • albatross11 says:

            To quote Malcolm Reynolds in Firefly:

            It’s my estimation that every man ever got a statue made of him was one kind of sommbitch or another.

    • FLWAB says:

      I’m really glad that for whatever reason, 8th century Muslims didn’t decide to disassemble the Pyramids

      One of them did! And he tried his best. But it turns out that pyramids, being organized piles of heavy stones, are just about as hard to destroy as they are to build. Al-Malek al-Aziz Othman ben Yusuf, one of Saladin’s sons, decided to destroy all the pyramids at giza and stared with the Pyramid of Menkaure. His men spent a lot of time and effort and only managed to put a vertical gash into one side before they all decided it was a waste of time and money and gave up.

      The moral of the story: if you want something that will last, build a pyramid.

      • Jake R says:

        The moral of the story: if you want something that will last, build a pyramid.

        That’s true as far as it goes, but 8th century Muslims didn’t have ANFO.

        • FLWAB says:

          That leads to the question: if you wanted to build a monument today that would be the biggest pain in the ass to remove or destroy, what would your design be?

          • achenx says:

            The Pioneer plaque?

          • albatross11 says:

            Build your re-enforced concrete cask sealing tons of nuclear waste, but shape it into some statue of a figure likely to be cancelled in the future.

          • FLWAB says:

            The Pioneer plaque?

            Very hard to destroy, but I’d say it has effectively removed itself.

          • Lambert says:

            Imagine being a 27th century archaeologist excavating Yucca Mountain and discovering a Terracotta Army of vitrified, transuranic Robert E. Lees.

          • Eric T says:

            You could carve it into a giant piece of granite.

            Stone Mountain has to be the stupidest name for a mountain I’ve ever seen. Can we destroy Stone Mountain entirely for its crime against decent naming schemes?

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            Imagine being a 27th century archaeologist excavating Yucca Mountain and discovering a Terracotta Army of vitrified, transuranic Robert E. Lees.

            OK y’all: would this work better as a horror movie or a video game?

      • Eric T says:

        The moral of the story: if you want something that will last, build a pyramid.

        Better plan: send it to space! One day in the future when we decide that Elon Musk was E.V.I.L it’s going to be really hard to track down that damn car…

        • FLWAB says:

          On the other hand, nobody has to look at it on their daily commute. I smell a perfect compromise: send all controversial monuments into space!

          • Randy M says:

            Maybe we could recreate them instead.

            And thus was born our practice of designing satellites to resemble our most contraversial figures.

            Man those aliens are going to be confused.

      • Matt M says:

        I added the parts about the Sphinx and Abu Simbel anticipating this exact objection!

        And it seems to me that the Pharaohs probably considered this too. “Nobody will be able to get rid of this” was almost certainly a huge point in favor of constructing a large and elaborate (but structurally sound) tomb.

    • Etoile says:

      I also feel a visceral anger about this sort of thing — it’s brazen narrative-rewriting; it’s erasing the past, tampering with archives, in real time. I feel the same when I read little language-policing comments on the internet – “can we please stop referring to ‘cat-fights’? It’s too gendered.” Netflix using “life’s a dick” instead of “life’s a bitch”. I mean, these are tiny things; I don’t have any particular love for the word “bitch” or “catfight”, or John C. Calhoun (though I do for Churchill). It makes me want to homeschool and never touch public school again. It makes me want to throw something at someone. It makes me truly, viscerally angry when I see people do that.

      It’s like, this feeling of being brazenly left off, bamboozled, and you’re powerless to stop it.

      So you’re not alone.

    • FLWAB says:

      It’s funny, because I should agree with you.

      I’m a traditionalist, I’m a sentimentalist, I’m a romantic. I like old things, I like art, I like history. Logically I should be on your side.

      And yet when I really ask myself whether I think it’s wrong to tear down statues of evil men, my heart loudly yells back “Yes! 100 times yes!”

      When I first read about the Lenin statue in Seattle, I burned with rage. Even after I found out that it’s the most innocuous statue of Lenin you could have: bought by an art dealer from the former Soviet Union in the hopes of flipping it for a profit, currently sitting on private property in front of a shopping center. And yet my heart still burned. I applaud the people who regularly paint the statue’s hands red. If a mob threw ropes around it and toppled it, I would join them. And I approve of the fact that the US Army destroyed all the Nazi symbols they could find, even chiseling them out of the architecture. I’m proud that we did it! And my heart sings with joy whenever I see footage of newly freed people pulling down statues of Stalin, or Hussein, or any other dictator who is toppled.

      My mind tells me that I should really disapprove of these things, but my heart just isn’t in it. The fact is, I am angry when people want to take down statues of people I like, and I’m happy when they pull down statues of people I think are evil. The only reason I’m cautious about confederate statues is that I’m worried the mob will come for statues I like next.

      It’s funny when your head and heart disagree.

    • How do you feel about the destruction of statues of Stalin in eastern European countries after the fall of the Soviet Union?

    • One pope had his predecessor’s body dug up in order to mistreat it.

      I don’t think we’ve done that. Yet.

      • Deiseach says:

        One pope had his predecessor’s body dug up in order to mistreat it.

        The Corpse Synod of Pope Formosus!

        On the other necromantic hand, we have the romantic if unsettlingly obsessive story of Inês de Castro:

        Some sources say that after Peter became king of Portugal, he had Inês’ body exhumed from her grave and forced the entire court to swear allegiance to their new queen: “The king [Peter] caused the body of his beloved Inês to be disinterred, and placed on a throne, adorned with the diadem and royal robes. and required all the nobility of the kingdom to approach and kiss the hem of her garment, rendering her when dead that homage which she had not received in her life…” Some modern sources characterize the story of the Inês’ post-mortem coronation is a “legend.” and it is most likely a myth, since the story only appeared in 1577 in Jerónimo Bermúdez’ play Nise Laureada. She was later buried at the Monastery of Alcobaça where her coffin can still be seen, opposite Peter’s so that, according to the legend, at the Last Judgment Peter and Inês can look at each other as they rise from their graves. Both marble coffins are exquisitely sculpted with scenes from their lives and a promise by Peter that they would be together até ao fim do mundo (until the end of the world).

        And the equally romantic but not as disturbing impetus behind the Eleanor Crosses:

        King Edward turned his attention to Scotland. The King wrote to his Queen asking her to join him in the north, but she was taken ill on the journey. Eleanor died in the little village of Harby, Nottinghamshire, around 7 miles from Lincoln, on 28 November 1290, aged 48.

        Edward was desolate. He rushed back south and ordered that Eleanor’s body should travel back to London for burial in Westminster Abbey. She was first taken to St Catherine’s Priory, Lincoln for embalming and her viscera were buried in Lincoln Cathedral. It was also Eleanor’s wish that her heart be buried at Blackfriars Monastery in London (now under the station).

        Eleanor’s embalmed body was borne in great state on the long journey from Lincoln to Westminster Abbey, accompanied by Edward and a substantial cortege of mourners. In a devastatingly romantic gesture Edward soon gave orders that a beautiful memorial cross be erected at the site of each overnight stop of the funeral procession. The purpose of the crosses was to remind passers-by to stop and pray for the soul of the dead person.

    • It occurs to me that part of what bother me about these cases is that the dead are helpless, cannot defend themselves. So attacking a dead man feels wrong.

    • rahien.din says:

      The statue of Lee is particularly interesting. Lee would have welcomed its removal. He utterly opposed any monuments commemorating the civil war. For instance, he was invited to participate in the efforts to preserve the Gettysburg battlefield. He declined, writing “I think it well, moreover, not to keep open the sores of war, but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife and to commit to oblivion the feelings it engendered.” He opposed a memorial to Stonewall Jackson. When a woman showed him the artillery-battered remains of a tree in her Lexington yard, Lee’s response was “Cut it down, my dear Madam, and forget it.”

      Lee’s belief was that commemorating that strife would perpetuate it. I feel he was correct. Moreover, we must consider who is being reminded of what. Permanence is not itself a virtue – it only amplifies the virtue/evil inherent in the thing. I would not erect a statue of Sherman in Atlanta, and I would listen carefully when black people say they want these statues torn down.

      And they are only old bronzes. Nothing about these statues is as profound as the Mona Lisa, nor as ingenious as the pyramids, nor as beguiling as Stonehenge. The only value they have is in their resemblance to their subjects, and few people alive can even discern that. Cut them down, my dear Sir, and forget them.

      • Matt M says:

        Thanks for this reply. I find the argument compelling. So much so that you’ve probably already convinced me that “no new monuments celebrating wars or soldiers” is a good idea. That said, I’m not sure it justifies tearing down such monuments that already exist. Or if it does, it might apply to more than you think. Should we tear down the giant statues of Ramses? Michelangelo’s David? Should Saving Private Ryan be removed from HBO ala Gone With The Wind?

        Nor am I sure how this particular example relates to a statue of Thomas Jefferson, or Winston Churchill, or Christopher Columbus.

        • mtl1882 says:

          So much so that you’ve probably already convinced me that “no new monuments celebrating wars or soldiers” is a good idea.

          I agree with this, although it seems impossible to prevent people from erecting them.

          Personally, I don’t have strong feelings about statues/monuments and therefore would be fine with leaving them up, especially for the historical interest. But on a societal level, they seem to be divisive in various ways, and distracting. We talk more about the Lee statutes than about Lee. (Also aggravating but unsurprising is the lengths people will go to in order to preserve the exterior of houses of famous people, while taking no interest in the papers or possessions of these people that might shed more light on them). And they become targets for selfie-takers and general tourism in a way that really detracts from their purpose. People also fight over what the statue should look like, who should pay for it, who should be included, etc. This isn’t an issue for most war memorials, but it’s always seemed a problem to me that it’s harder to make commanding statues of people that aren’t very physically fit men, which makes them more associated with discriminatory history. It’s possible to find someone to pull off something like the Lincoln memorial, but rare. So women rarely get memorialized, etc.

          It reminds me of how Charles Sumner and other abolitionists argued against having battle-flags on uniforms after the Civil War, which understandably upset some Union veterans. But poor Sumner, of all people, being denounced as pro-Confederacy and opposed to Massachusetts’ interests. The infighting is nothing new, nor the urge to “cancel” someone for something done ten years earlier and ignored.

          In December 1872, he introduced a Senate resolution providing that Civil War battle names should not appear as “battle honors” on the regimental flags of the U.S. Army. The proposal was not new: Sumner had offered a similar resolution on May 8, 1862, and in 1865 he had proposed that no painting hanging in the Capitol portray scenes from the Civil War, because, as he saw it, keeping alive the memories of a war between a people was barbarous. His proposal did not affect the vast majority of battle-flags, as nearly all the regiments that fought had been state regiments, and these were not covered. But Sumner’s idea was that any United States regiment, that would in the future enlist southerners as well as northerners, should not carry on its ensigns any insult to those who joined it. His resolution had no chance of passing, but its presentation offended Union army veterans. The Massachusetts legislature censured Sumner for giving “an insult to the loyal soldiery of the nation” and as “meeting the unqualified condemnation of the people of the Commonwealth.” Poet John Greenleaf Whittier led an effort to rescind that censure the following year. He succeeded early in 1874 with the help of abolitionist Joshua Bowen Smith, who happened to be serving in the legislature that year.Sumner was able to hear the rescinding resolution presented to the Senate on the last day he was there. He died the following afternoon.

        • rahien.din says:

          Hi Matt M,

          That’s very kind of you to say, and I am humbled.

          Your guess is as good as mine regarding these other artworks. I would preserve Ramses and David, as they are magnificent in their own right, and not themselves bones of contention. (But then, I am not a Hittite.)

          I suspect that Saving Private Ryan is a keeper, but I’m not sure what to do with Gone With The Wind. And the comparison between those two is interesting.

          • Matt M says:

            but I’m not sure what to do with Gone With The Wind.

            I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Our betters have already decided for us.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @Matt M: The HBO Max launch was a bad joke on non-ideological levels.
            T still looks like a high and safe dividend stock but what I’d really like to do is buy it the day before they get a new CEO.

          • rahien.din says:

            You should be more cynical. HBO outsourced the decision to the market.

            If DVD copies of Gone With The Wind increase in value, it reveals a preference that we keep that artwork. And HBO will decide whether to put it back. If DVD copies of Gone With The Wind do not increase in value, the HBO absolutely made the correct decision.

            There are other ways to assess this response. So maybe it’s a short-term advantageous political statement that comes with a market research consultation.

            I have to ask : HBO is a private enterprise and free to do as they wish. Why denigrate them as “our betters”?

          • AG says:

            If there is any decrease in access to Gone With The Wind, the problem is the consolidation of the entertainment industry into massive blocks, which should be trustbusted with great prejudice, and also an indictment of IP/copyright law.

          • Matt M says:

            I don’t see how trust-busting would help. Unless you’re proposing of eliminating IP entirely, there would still be one company (whether it’s a big one or a small one doesn’t seem relevant) who owns the rights to Gone With the Wind and who can decide that people are no longer allowed to watch it because it’s “problematic.”

            In theory you might say that if there were more companies, there would be more diversity when it comes to viewpoints about how this sort of thing works. But recent events would seem to prove this obviously wrong. AT&T isn’t any more woke than Comcast or Verizon or CBS or Netflix or anyone else. On social issues, every company is the same. They all agree. This is how/why Milo gets banned from five different social media platforms within the span of 12-hours. It wouldn’t matter if there was one more – they’d ban him too. It wouldn’t matter if the rights to Gone With The Wind were owned by Amazon Prime, they’d ban it too.

          • AG says:

            Trustbusting helps because smaller companies can appeal to smaller customer bases. Bluechecks can yell at Classic Problematic Movies Company all they want, and if DVD sales are good enough, CPMC can ignore them.

            The ridiculously large companies that exist today have to pander to the mainstream. Or China. Small AntiPolice Movies Company can make as many pro-Hong Kong films as they want, as long as the ticket and DVD sales within America are enough to cover their costs. Disney, on the other hand is licking those boots as hard as they can. The more theater and DVD-making companies there are out there, the less likely it is that the mob can make every single one of them leave money on the table.

            Smaller companies accept smaller offers. It’s easier for someone to buy the rights to GWTW from a small company who is gatekeeping it.

          • Matt M says:

            Bluechecks can yell at Classic Problematic Movies Company all they want, and if DVD sales are good enough, CPMC can ignore them.

            So where’s the social media network that’s itching to gain a competitive advantage by allowing Alex Jones and Milo and Nick Fuentes?

            Where’s the fast food joint that says “Nah, we’re not going to fire someone just because they went to a right-wing protest and a lot of blue-checks complained?”

          • Fahundo says:

            Where’s the fast food joint that says “Nah, we’re not going to fire someone just because they went to a right-wing protest and a lot of blue-checks complained?”

            Chick-fil-A?

          • rahien.din says:

            So where’s the social media network that’s itching to gain a competitive advantage by allowing Alex Jones and Milo and Nick Fuentes?

            Prima facie, there is no competitive advantage to be had by hosting them. This is simply the market at work.

          • AG says:

            Milo and Alex and Nick are not products being sold the way Gone With the Wind is, and neither are social media networks. I am only responding to the specific case of “Wow, this corporation gatekeeping this movie from streaming sure sucks!”

            In fact, Milo and Alex and Nick and buy servers to host videos, create the Archive of The Right’s Own (AORTO), and if they can still make a living by selling T-shirt merch, good for them. I am against banks and PayPal and Patreon and such gatekeeping financial transactions. But hey, if financial institutions were much smaller and plentiful, etc. etc.

          • Matt M says:

            Milo and Alex and Nick are not products being sold the way Gone With the Wind is, and neither are social media networks.

            Not as directly, but in a certain way they sort of are.

            Twitter makes money selling ads. The amount of money it can charge for ads is proportional to the amount of users on its site. The amount of users on its site depends heavily on network effects, such as “my favorite political commentators post to that site.” By removing such people, they decrease their appeal to users, which therefore decreases their appeal to advertisers.

            There are also more direct examples. Prager U (as standard, boring, mainstream as conservatism gets) tried to buy ads on Twitter, and was denied.

          • AG says:

            The indirectness of the transaction in the case of free social media warps the incentives, which is why solutions that would work for Gone With the Wind do not necessarily apply to social media.

            But hey, if we went back to the days where one signed up for a myriad of smaller forums instead of allowing consolidation to a centralized 5 networks…

      • Jiro says:

        In a monument version of ‘your rules fairly’, it’s perfectly consistent to believe “no monuments” > “monuments for everyone” > “monuments for one side”. So you can’t really conclude that because Lee disliked monuments in general, he would be okay with tearing down these monuments, since it is not part of a plan to tear down monuments in general.

    • John Schilling says:

      I see tearing down statues as roughly equivalent to book-burning. It’s not as specifically offensive to nerdy grey-tribers, because we’re mostly bibliophiles or bibliophile-adjacent whereas statues are aimed at a more neurotypical audience.

      And you can argue that the reason book-burning is such a heinous crime is that it destroys precious information, but people don’t burn books to deny scholars the ability to read [X] in the original. They do it for the sheer joy of destroying that which is precious to their enemy, and the hope that this will weaken the cohesion of their enemy’s culture.

      Carefully removing statues and putting them in warehouses, is akin to systematically removing books from library shelves. And should be viewed with the same level of suspicion.

      • FLWAB says:

        It’s funny: when I learned about how the United States pulped a lot of Nazi books and propaganda in West Germany after the war, the fact the books were pulped instead of burned made all the difference in the world in how I felt about it. Of course, in a classic book burning you would have a whole get together with the community throwing in the books in question so that’s probably why pulping feels less bad.

        I suppose the US Army pulping Nazi books also seems less bad because it was the army doing it in a systematic fashion. On the other hand, the fact that it was the army doing it kind of makes it worse. Over 30,000 book titles were banned, confiscated, and pulped, with possession of banned books a punishable offence. Its really not at all different from what the Nazi’s did (regarding books). The main difference (besides the severity of punishment, I assume) is that I genuinely believe that Nazi books are evil.

        • John Schilling says:

          Having it done invisibly by a bureaucracy at least takes away the part where one side is visibly celebrating the destruction of the other’s culture; I agree that this will make a difference in how it will likely be perceived.

          It also helps that we had everyone we thought might be a Nazi locked up in a prison camp(*) on “we think you’re probably a Nazi and we don’t care about that ‘due process’ crap over here” grounds. We skipped that step when we e.g. pulled down all the statues of Saddam Hussein, and spent the next decade paying for it.

          * Or building rockets in Alabama

          • Matt M says:

            Having it done invisibly by a bureaucracy at least takes away the part where one side is visibly celebrating the destruction of the other’s culture; I agree that this will make a difference in how it will likely be perceived.

            It’s not just a bureaucracy, it’s literally a conquering army. As I said previously, regarding Hitler statues, if we’re willing to admit that the relationship between the mobs of protesters in the streets and the regular red tribe folks who like confederate statues is similar to a conquering foreign army… that they have defeated us and are partaking in their allowable victory dance and enjoying their rightfully-earned spoils of conquest and we better shut up and tolerate it or they’ll make it a whole lot worse… then fine. I think that’s mostly true. Ask Steve Sailer about his “defeated peoples” theory the next time he’s around…

          • John Schilling says:

            It’s not just a bureaucracy, it’s literally a conquering army.

            These are not mutually exclusive, and that does matter.

    • BBA says:

      Funny, I’ve moved in the opposite direction. There is nobody good enough to be commemorated with a statue. We should tear them all down.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        What then? Are we Jews any better off? No, not at all. For we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin, as it is written: “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands

        — Romans 3:9-10

        Welcome to Christianity, BBA. We have cookies.

  11. Loriot says:

    I recently tried roasting broccoli (tossed in oil and vinegar), and while it wasn’t offensive, it didn’t really taste *good* either. It pretty much didn’t taste like anything except the salt I sprinkled on it afterwards. I was surprised since I saw references to the florets caramelizing online, so I thought there would be some sweetness or the like.

    Is this expected? What are the best practices for cooking broccoli?

    • herbert herberson says:

      Dice the more stemmy parts into small bits. Saute those with garlic, onion, and (a generous amount of) olive oil. Keep the garlic separate until the last few minutes, it doesn’t need as long as the stems and unlike onion can be pretty easily burned/overcooked. Add salt somewhere along the line (don’t think it matters when). Then blanch (cook a couple minutes on a high boil then rinse with cold water) the florettes. Toss the florettes with the rest, and serve.

      You could probably roast broccoli and/or include vinegar as an ingredient if you really knew what you were doing, because that’s absolutely the way to go for a lot of its cousins, but imo it doesn’t lend itself to that flavor profile as much as, say, brussel sprouts or kale

    • achenx says:

      I only tolerate broccoli at most. IMO the best practice is to roast brussels sprouts instead.

    • albatross11 says:

      My technique is to roast it with olive oil, spices, and a bit of lemon juice for about 30 minutes in a 350 degree (F) oven or 20 minutes in a 400 degree (F) one. Broccoli is easy to overcook, and also if mixed with other vegetables tends to make a kind of oil-and-spice-sponge that soaks up a lot of seasoning, so you may want to coat it last.

      I’m only roasting the florets and a little of the stem, I don’t like the big stems much.

      ETA: Brussels sprouts are great when prepared this way. Just cut off the stem and peel off the loose leaves, coat, and roast.

    • Clutzy says:

      I’d say its expected. The purpose of broccoli is as a sauce delivery mechanism.

    • Dog says:

      It’s possible to get the caramelizing effect you’re talking about by roasting, but frying the broccoli works better and more consistently. Also caramelizing isn’t really right, it gets a sort of nutty roasted flavor, not sweet. The broccoli needs to be pretty aggressively browned to get the proper flavor. It should look about like this (this is maybe a bit farther than I would take it): https://i2.wp.com/gimmedelicious.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/10-Minute-Crispy-Air-Fryer-Broccoli-2.jpg

      To fry, separate the broccoli into florets, then cut each floret length-wise into quarters. Fill a pan with maybe 1-2 mm of oil, and heat it on medium high. When it’s hot, put in the broccoli and spread it out evenly so it’s sitting flat in the pan. A full head will probably require 2 batches. Then just let it sit (important – don’t stir) until the bottoms of the pieces are quite brown but not black. Tip them up periodically to check. Once they are brown, flip them and wait again for the other side to brown. Once brown, stab them with a fork or something to see if they’re soft enough, if not turn down the heat and now start stirring a bit until they’re soft. Add salt and spices near the end of the process and stir to coat. If you fry the spices the whole time they’ll loose their flavor. I usually spice with some turmeric or cumin or black pepper. You could add lemon juice at the end if you use cumin or pepper.

    • SamChevre says:

      I love cabbage-family vegetables, but I do not like them roasted–to me, they taste like burnt matches smell when roasted.

      Three good ways to cook broccoli:
      Steam or boil it in florets until bright green, then chill. Serve with salad dressing/dip (ranch is good, blue cheese is great, aioli is nice, even good-quality mayo is quite good.)
      Steam or boil until tender, serve with hollandaise sauce, white sauce with mushrooms, cheese sauce, butter, or olive oil
      Stir-fry: either in olive oil with garlic and black pepper, or in neutral oil with a bit of sesame oil with some soy sauce and/or oyster sauce. Add water a bit at a time so it steams rather than browning.

    • Deiseach says:

      What are the best practices for cooking broccoli?

      Adapt the Dr Johnson quote about cucumbers to broccoli (since I like cucumbers):

      It has been a common saying of physicians in England, that a cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing.

    • Lord Nelson says:

      I just steam it in the microwave and add salt. Best thing ever.

      Either that or I’m insane. (bean, care to weigh in?)

      • bean says:

        I can confirm that she does seriously believe that broccoli is the best thing ever. More than that, I cannot say.

    • CatCube says:

      I’ve never tried roasting broccoli, but I really like to flash-boil it (I always just used the directions on the package of store-brand frozen broccoli).

      Of course, I have very Finnish(-American?) tastes, and will always order my meals at a Thai place as “mild”, so calibrate my recommendations accordingly.

    • AG says:

      No one mentioned tempura in this thread yet. So here’s a comment that batter-fried broccoli is some good shit.

    • Gerry Quinn says:

      I think I like it best raw, or close to raw. It adds a nice crunch to a stir-fry.

    • Eric T says:

      Put some broccoli in with your steak the next time you pan-sear it. Don’t forget to add plenty of butter.

      Broccoli also makes a great addition to chicken parm if you’re trying to cut carbs. Have it as a side/under the dish instead of pasta.

  12. AG says:

    Imagine a world where sound bites are banned.

    The policy is that all quotes or clips must include a minimum time or word count from the person being quoted/excerpted. Say, 3 minutes for audio and video, and 500 words for text. (Interviews count under audio/video, unless it was, like a text chat or email exchange.)
    Unless the thing being quoted is the very first or very last thing the person said, the quote must also be centered within that time.

    Let us hand-wave the fact that getting such a policy passed and enforced would require an extremely authoritarian government. Let us also hand-wave outright defiance of the policy. Journalists can develop tricks to try and point people towards the bit they really want to focus on, but don’t just openly flaunt the rule.

    What kind of effects does this have on society?
    For one big one, the length of any given news story inherently increases, which reduces the number of stories that can be reported on per day, for audio-visual formats. There would be large IP law consequences to be wrestled with. Does a search engine blurb count as a quote? Are hot takes less compelling when they’re constantly interrupted by huge paragraphs of quote or chunks of audio/visual excerpt? Do people finally just read the original AP Reuters release? What sort of tricks would writers and pundits develop in response?
    And should the policy apply to demonetized/unmonetized productions? (Let us once again hand-wave enforcement if it does.)

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      Modification: either the quote is complete or at least as long as your minimum.

      • AG says:

        Yes. If the speech was less than 3 minutes total, the clip is allowed to be the length of the speech. However, in the case of an interview, “speech” is not bounded by questions. If the answer to a single question is less than 3 minutes, the clip must include the partial answers and questions surrounding the pull quote. And let’s add one more interview format stipulation that any included questions and answers must contain the full question and answer. So if the pull quote is in the middle and less than 3 minutes, then the quote must include the entirety of the preceding and following questions and answers.

    • Aftagley says:

      For one big one, the length of any given news story inherently increases, which reduces the number of stories that can be reported on per day, for audio-visual formats.

      Hard disagree – news media would just pivot more towards summaries or restatements of what was said rather than the actual quote itself. Ex:

      “In a speech today, Hillary Clinton alleged that a large base of Donald Trump’s supporters are awful people.”

      “During a private event, Govenor Romney revealed that he believes almost half of his opponent’s base only” votes for him because they want handouts from the government.”

      If people care, they can look the actual quotes up themselves.

      • AG says:

        Does such a format still have credibility? The fact-checker sites would have a field day over how all paraphrases are “mostly false.”

        • Aftagley says:

          I mean, I’m sure norms would develop pretty quickly around how to paraphrase accurately. And if that’s the only way of getting bite-sized news snippets I think we’d all manage.

          • AG says:

            The question is if the market would support it. Would people still flock to the few outlets who are putting out the longer quotes, or would they really be content with only hearing the paraphrase?

    • TimG says:

      Imagine a world where sound[s]… are banned.

      That’s just silly on it’s face. I didn’t bother reading the rest.

    • Etoile says:

      Man, imagine the amount of new case law around whether a video with the same clip on loop for 5 minutes violates teh ban. What about 10 hours of Gandalf head-banging to techno music?

      • AG says:

        Hence the last question about whether or not the policy should only apply to monetized content. If so, then sites can simply not run ads on videos with such loops. (However, this might incentivize hosting sites to have TOSs penalizing such parasitic content, then, which in turn creates more of an ecosystem where people own their own servers develop more distributed-hosting software.)

        Music sampling, on the other hand…

  13. AlesZiegler says:

    I´d like to return to this thread, from which I gathered an impression that many regular commenters here sincerely believe that “the blue tribe” (or something roughly similar, nomenclature is not settled) is attempting to turn USA into a totalitarian country. Personally I find this hypothesis rather wild, which has been reflected in my last rather uncharitable comment about tinfoil hats. I temporarily lost my balance and know I wish to apologize. Unfortunately I cannot delete that comment since window for that has passed.

    You are invited to state your best arguments for that proposition here.

    (yes I am very well aware that this might end very badly, but it is nagging me so much that I am not willing that go).

    • rocoulm says:

      Take, for example, a few of what I would consider typical “Blue Tribe” talking points:
      1) Gun control
      2) Anti-hate speech legislation
      3) Larger welfare state
      The first two are, to me, clearly restrictions on personal liberty. The third could be described as either “too much taxation” or “government-mandated charity”, both of which can also be viewed as anti-liberty. So clearly, Blue Tribe-ism has an interest in expanding government power.

      Beyond that, the leap from “the left wants more government” to “the left wants an autocratic dictatorship” is probably partly an uncharitable strawman of your opponent’s views and partly genuine worry about a slippery slope that’ll never end.

      • Space Hobo from Hobospace says:

        Are autocratic and totalitarian synonyms? Autocracy implies existence of one person in charge, like a king, right. I think bureaucracy-powered welfare totalitarianism can be thing.

        • rocoulm says:

          Probably not, but when I think of the accusation @AlesZiegler is talking about, it’s been directed at the presidency. “King Obama” and whatnot.

        • Randy M says:

          How I understand it is that autocratic means you have no say in the government. Totalitarian means you have no say in your life.
          But it’s a spectrum.

        • 10240 says:

          Totalitarianism is usually used to describe a subset of dictatorships, specifically the harshest ones. Describing things like increased bureaucracy or limited restrictions on liberty in a democracy as totalitarianism are simply attempts to use the strong negative affect associated with totalitarian dictatorships to tar policies most people find orders of magnitude less objectionable (if objectionable at all) when described in neutral terms.

          • Bergil says:

            Maybe I’m using the word wrong, but I’ve always viewed totalitarianism as a trait of ideologies, rather than governments- specifically ideologies that place stringent limitations on even the smallest detail of how someone lives their life (I.E., they demand total obedience). As such, a literal Puritan society would be totalitarian even if it was a democracy and Puritanism was enforced entirely through social pressure, such as “cancelling”

            I tend to distinguish this from Absolutism, which is where the ruler holds all the power. I admit that the two concepts are very entangled in the common understanding, possibly because the 20th Century’s two big baddies were totalitarian absolutist polities. Or maybe this is just a distinction unique to me.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @Bergil:

            Maybe I’m using the word wrong, but I’ve always viewed totalitarianism as a trait of ideologies, rather than governments- specifically ideologies that place stringent limitations on even the smallest detail of how someone lives their life (I.E., they demand total obedience).

            And “we will use law enforcement to stop you leaving your home for unauthorized reasons” plus “Silence is not an option” appear to add up to a totalitarian ideology.

        • Garrett says:

          > Are autocratic and totalitarian synonyms?

          No. As others have noted, autocratic means rule by a single person. But this could be anything from an enlightened philosopher-king to Stalin.

          Then you need to separate authoritarian from totalitarian.

          Authoritarian regimes are ones where the main goal is the preservation of the existing authority. They don’t care what you do as long as you don’t speak up against the authority itself. So they may be apathetic to the religion, commercial activities or hobbies of the general population, so long as there is no challenge to them remaining in power. Saddam Hussein’s regime was a go-to example here.

          Totalitarian regimes are ones which impose not only a particular authority, but an all-encompassing ideology. The Italian Fascist party was a classic example, but the current North Korean regime is probably another good one. In these cases, almost every element of daily life is substantially impacted by state control and ideology. The control the totality of your life.

      • Aftagley says:

        Take, for example, a few of what I would consider typical “Red Tribe” talking points:
        1) Drug Prohibition
        2) Immigration Control
        3) Larger Corporate Welfare State
        The first two are, to me, clearly restrictions on personal liberty. The third could be described as either “too little taxation” or “government-mandated charity”, both of which can also be viewed as anti-liberty. So clearly, Red Tribe-ism has an interest in expanding government power.

        Beyond that, the leap from “the right wants more government” to “the right wants an theocratic dictatorship” is probably partly an uncharitable strawman of your opponent’s views and partly genuine worry about a slippery slope that’ll never end.

        • rocoulm says:

          Don’t worry, I’m not here to defend Republicans.

        • Erusian says:

          1) Drug Prohibition
          2) Immigration Control
          3) Larger Corporate Welfare State

          I’ll grant you the first two, but I don’t think corporate welfare is a right wing thing. It wasn’t Republicans that put in place the Agricultural Adjustment Act or other New Deal policies.

          • Aftagley says:

            Eh, I’m still pissed about Citizens United and Trump’s tax cuts. At best, both sides are way too guilty of this.

            That being said, I’ll grant that it wasn’t the best fit, but I wanted something that mirrored the structure of the original post.

          • achenx says:

            Citizen’s United was fine IMO but as far as “corporate welfare” I still haven’t gotten over Kelo v New London..

          • You are arguing that having low taxes is the same thing as having a welfare state? I would have said that they correlate negatively. The Scandinavian welfare states have much higher taxes than the U.S., and the modern U.S. much higher than the 19th century U.S. or Britain, which were much farther from being welfare states.

            Citizens United has nothing to do with a welfare state.

            You are definitely far agley on these ones.

          • Anteros says:

            You are definitely far agley on these ones.

            It took me a while to parse that, but 😀

          • Aftagley says:

            You are definitely far agley on these ones.

            Hey, someone finally got this!

            You are arguing that having low taxes is the same thing as having a welfare state?

            What? No. I’m saying it’s an example of Corporate welfare. Am I misusing that term? Basic google-ing seems to back up my usage.

          • JayT says:

            I don’t think lower taxes can be considered corporate welfare. It’s just…lower taxes. Corporate welfare would be stuff like farm subsidies or bailouts, where it’s direct payments to a specific corporation. Tax breaks for a specific business or sector could probably fall under this banner, but across the board lower taxes shouldn’t be considered corporate welfare. It’s just…lower taxes.

          • Aftagley says:

            Sure, if you cut taxes X percent across the board it’s just cutting taxes. But if you cut taxes X percent for most individuals and 5X for corporations, I’d call that taking action that disproportionately benefits the corporations.

          • I’d call that taking action that disproportionately benefits the corporations.

            So you would argue that if tax rates are cut for low income taxpayers, that counts as welfare? Currently the bottom half of the income distribution pays close to zero federal income tax — does that make the U.S. a welfare state?

            Corporations are legal persons but not real persons, so they can’t pay taxes by reducing how much they eat or how nice their clothes are. The tax is ultimately paid by human beings, some mix of customers, employees, and stockholders.

          • Etoile says:

            I would take issue with #2. Unless it’s restrictions on Emigration, i.e. leaving the country, or Internal Migration, i.e. moving cities or states (both things the USSR did), I don’t see preventing the ability of new people to settle permanently – or even restricting access of newcomers to citizenship -as infringing the liberty of citizens or those already under protection of the government. I think it’s implicit that in protecting liberties, or rights, or well-being, a country is responsible first to its citizens and (perhaps) permanent residents, and then – if the citizens choose – contribute something towards the well-being of others.

          • Aftagley says:

            So you would argue that if tax rates are cut for low income taxpayers, that counts as welfare?

            No, because like you say, cutting taxes on an entity that already pays little to no taxes will have little to no effect on the amount of money they have access to. That’s why we focus on giving resources to the poor instead of cutting taxes, since we want them to have access to more money/food/whatever.

            On the other hand, if an entity does pay a semi-substantial amount in taxes then yes, I’d argue that cutting their taxes could be considered giving them welfare since, as a result of state action, they will now have more money.

            The tax is ultimately paid by human beings, some mix of customers, employees, and stockholders.

            Fine, but they are doing so in the form of a corporation. I’m equally fine with “this mix of customers, employees and stockholders” paying more in taxes, but my way of saying it seems quicker.

          • So you would argue that if tax rates are cut for low income taxpayers, that counts as welfare?

            No, because like you say, cutting taxes on an entity that already pays little to no taxes will have little to no effect on the amount of money they have access to.

            So in your view, when the tax code was changed in the way that resulted in the bottom half of the income distribution paying almost no federal income tax, that was welfare to low income taxpayers?

            If so, isn’t continuing to keep it low the continuation of such welfare?

        • Fahundo says:

          Not sure this is how you intended it to be taken, but it is my unironic belief that both tribes want to turn the country into slightly different totalitarian hellholes and only selectively bring up issues like personal liberty when they think they’re losing on a particular front.

          • Aftagley says:

            Yeah, that was my point.

          • DinoNerd says:

            This. There’s a lot of desire to force bad People (TM) to do what you believe to be right, regardless of what they believe. Many people reach for whatever stick is handy to accomplish this self-evidentally worthy goal, and the government stick sure is handy – at least for whichever group currently holds power in that particular government.

            Some people believe that when this is taken too far, particularly with the technologies we now have, some kind of hell hole inevitably results. But then we disagree on how far is too far.

            Most of us – except perhaps extreme anarchists and libertarians – believe that there are some things so bad that they should be prevented or punished by any sane society. And AFAICT, this has been true as long as there have been human societies, long before anything like government existed.

            Human nature means that many people who can’t wield the government stick at a particular time/place/issue, find themselves defending a much broader idea of “taken too far” than most of those who can.

          • Most of us – except perhaps extreme anarchists and libertarians – believe that there are some things so bad that they should be prevented or punished by any sane society.

            Why do you consider anarchists and libertarians an exception to that?

          • DinoNerd says:

            Why do you consider anarchists and libertarians an exception to that?

            I don’t know whether any of them are, but I’ve seen enough ideology-motivated posts that go beyond my idea of common sense, that I’d be unsurprised to read a post claiming that “anything goes” from somewhere in that viewpoint, and would not immediately assume the poster was an agent provacateur trolling.

        • I don’t think the right is more supportive of drug prohibition than the left. If you look at something like the Drug Policy Alliance, you see people identified with both right and left. On both sides, most people are for prohibition, a minority against. The only group consistently against are libertarians, some of whom are red tribe, some blue. Personally, I think I am purple. Or, better, grey.

          On immigration, the right is currently much more against it than the left, but I don’t think that has been generally true.

          And on the welfare state, if I understand you correctly, you have it backwards. It’s the left that admires the Scandinavian welfare states, the right that criticizes them.

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            Democrats are quite a bit more likely to support legalizing marijuana, a trend that has held for at least 20 years. For harder drugs, 69% of Democrats favour decriminalization, as compared to 40% of Republicans.
            I can’t find partisan breakdown of polling on legalizing hard drugs; there is a Vox/Morning Consult poll that I can’t seem to get access to, but I see no reason why it should differ from the trend above.

          • Noah says:

            I think the correct parsing of Aftagley’s third point is Larger ((Corporate Welfare) State).

            “corporate welfare” as a concept is distinct form “welfare” as a concept.

        • AlexOfUrals says:

          2) Immigration Control

          How’s that a restriction on personal liberty? None seriously believes that the guarantees of the constitution or the obligations of the state are equally applied to foreigners as well as citizens. You can’t be blamed for taking away a liberty that you didn’t guarantee in the first place, and was never expected to guarantee by literally anyone (speaking as an immigrant here). Emigration control is definitely a totalitarian trait, but luckily it’s way outside the Overtone window in the US and nobody’s hasting to bring it in.

          • Randy M says:

            None seriously believes that the guarantees of the constitution or the obligations of the state are equally applied to foreigners as well as citizens.

            Careful there with absolutes. I’m pretty sure what “everyone” believes will be beyond the pale in a generation.

      • AlesZiegler says:

        It is not an uncharitable strawman since people in that thread are literally using T word. I found it rather surprising and startling.

        • rocoulm says:

          It is not an uncharitable strawman since people in that thread are literally using T word

          I meant that some people using the T-word are strawmanning the Blue Tribe. Not necessarily the people in the thread you linked, just people in the larger Culture War generally.

      • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

        If your hypothesised outcome resembles Berlin in 2020 much more than Berlin in 1980 or 1940 then it is very silly to call it totalitarian.

    • Randy M says:

      I didn’t really participate in that thread and wouldn’t agree with a straight reading of your thesis.
      What I would say is that blue tribe is the one more comfortable with centralization of power, deference to technocratic authority. They will look more favorably on precedents that expand federal power. Whereas the right/red tribe is more in favor of an emergent order and suspicious of people in power having unique competence. Who the current occupant of the white house or governors office is may shift this but these are trends.

      In general, just as the left is going to be more sensitive to matters of minority injustice (perhaps over sensitive, at times) the right is more sensitive to matters of expanding federal/governmental power. Well, except for all the grifters, hypocrites, or simply non-ideological party members who get into power and enjoy it’s expansion, or appreciate a state that occasionally steps on the toes of their foes.

      In the current crisis (no, the other one), I think the widely held goal minimizing death and suffering exists in some law-makers/enforcers along with a bias that “if we let the people do what they want, they are going to do stupid stuff.” Which, sure, is true in some cases, but that assumption colors their estimation of the value of the trade-offs.

    • Loriot says:

      I don’t think either party is against “expanding federal government”. They just want it to do different things.

      Republicans often complain about “government overreach”, but their actual actions in power belie that concern.

      • Randy M says:

        This may be a case where a “tribe”/”party” distinction is useful.

        • Loriot says:

          I don’t believe there *is* a “tribe/party distinction”. Nobody seems to agree on what exactly the tribes mean anyway, and in practice, they’re just used as an esoteric stand in for “my side’s supporters” and “the other side’s supporters”.

          • Randy M says:

            But there is a difference between what the supporters want and what the elected officials do in office, for both parties.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @Loriot:

            I don’t believe there *is* a “tribe/party distinction”. Nobody seems to agree on what exactly the tribes mean anyway, and in practice, they’re just used as an esoteric stand in for “my side’s supporters” and “the other side’s supporters”.

            Hopefully this will help clarify:

            Ted Turner is a (rich) Southern white man. That codes Red tribe (regardless of income). He’s a Democrat who found “being famous for speaking in favor of Communist regimes” attractive in a wife. He made things in the entertainment industry that code as both Red tribe (WCW pro rasslin’) and Blue tribe (Captain Planet).
            His politics didn’t change every time he code switched between Blue and Red mannerisms or entertainment.

            Bill Clinton was also a master of this. Jimmy Carter got heckled by the media for not being a master of code switching into their culture.

    • cassander says:

      I would argue that the there is a core aspiration of blue tribe that can be charitably described as “ordered liberty”, and uncharitably described as “anything not approved should be forbidden.” I think this tendency is dangerous, and I think that there are plenty of people out there pushing visions that would lead to, if not outright totalitarianism, at least deeply oppressive and unpleasant regimes.

      I don’t think that means most people pushing those ideas are looking forward to setting up death squads. I just think they’re wrong about how people work or grabbing for power without really considering the long run consequences. That doesn’t mean they are less dangerous, however.

      • Aftagley says:

        People in the blue tribe have these same fear of people on the right. The only difference is that when it’s stuff your tribe wants, you don’t see it as a dangerous expansion and march towards totalitarianism.

        • Jacobethan says:

          In terms of the argument from symmetry of sides (which is generally a form of argument I like), I’d see it as a series of layers:

          1. There’s the age-old eternal hypocrisy where parties are formalists (power-limiting) when out of power and pragmatists (power-expanding) when in it. No party can claim a shred of virtue in this regard.

          2. At present, polarization, distrust, media silo-ing, etc., have increased incentives to defect against traditional rules and limiting principles. Again, goes for both sides. I would argue for various sociological reasons (e.g., age) that the right’s long-term status-quo-bias might be slightly higher, though admittedly this is somewhat belied by Trump.

          3. But the left controls many more of the relevant non-governmental institutions (media, academia, tech), particularly those responsible for the formation and gatekeeping of elites. If either side wanted to try for a major restructuring of the rules of engagement, it’s much easier to imagine the avenues by which the left could actually pull it off.

          • Wency says:

            All good points. I especially emphasize the third point — when the left is in charge of the government, it really controls all the levers of power (note, also, the left-leaning nature of the bureaucracy). When the right is in charge, it probably doesn’t even control
            half the levers of power.

            One one other point I’d add is that all Republican politics is conducted under a sense of doom amidst the evident inevitability of the emerging Democratic majority. Yes, some people try to say “it never emerged”, but it did: thanks to demographic change, the Democrats do have an apparently permanent and growing majority of the popular vote. We’re currently in the late stages of a transitional period where the non-majoritarian features of the Constitution (and the possibility of uneven turnout) make Republican wins in Congress and the Electoral College narrowly possible.

            As long as American democracy remains healthy, at some point after perhaps 10-20 years of total defeat, the Republicans will re-organize into a viable second party, or a new party will emerge. It happened before. Maybe the Republicans can even organize into a viable form before that happens.

            But with all the breakdown in our system at this point, we can also easily imagine the Democratic Party becoming a permanent “party of power”, like United Russia, Fidesz, the PRI, etc., with consequent breakdown in democratic norms and liberties.

      • Loriot says:

        @cassander

        I don’t think that tendency is correlated to political affiliation. At best, it just manifests in different policy preferences on any particular issue based on where that happens to fall on the partisan divide.

      • cassander says:

        @Aftagley & Loriot

        I think, objectively, they’re wrong. The old joke goes “Fear the libertarian conspiracy, they’re going to take over the world and then leave everyone alone!” Red tribe is not libertarian, or even close to it, but their aspirations are more limited than that of blue tribe, which makes them less dangerous. Ask yourself, if we picked a god emperor, who would change things more, McConnell or Pelosi? Or to quote Ambrose Bierce, “CONSERVATIVE, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils of the world, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.”

        But then, I think the world we have is pretty good, and that there are a lot more ways to make it worse than better, so of course I’d think that.

        • Jake R says:

          As a libertarian, I’d rather have the world the Republicans say they want than the world the Democrats say they want. If you made me actually pick one for God-Emperor though, it would be a much tougher choice.

      • Eric Rall says:

        I would argue that the there is a core aspiration of blue tribe that can be charitably described as “ordered liberty”, and uncharitably described as “anything not approved should be forbidden.”

        I had a hard time wrapping my head around the concept of “ordered liberty” as the term was used in Albion’s Seed, but it eventually clicked when I put together the formulation “Liberty is a condition which a society has when its rules are fair and equitable and its leaders are virtuous”. The same formulation seems to describe much of the modern Blue Tribe’s attitudes as well, with the important caveat that “fair”, “equitable”, and “virtuous” mean radically different things to modern Blue Tribers than to 17th Century Puritans.

        I expect my formulation still needs a bit of work to pass an Ideological Turing Test: in particular, I don’t think “virtuous” quite the right term a modern Blue Triber would use to describe their ideal political leader.

        • cassander says:

          H.L. Mencken described puritanism as the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, might be happy. But loathe as I am to disagree with the sage of Baltimore, but what haunts puritans isn’t a fear of happiness, it’s a fear that someone might be enjoying something sinful. The definition of sin has shifted over time, but not the attitude towards stamping it out.

    • AlexOfUrals says:

      You can’t by freaking contact lenses without a prescription, how’s that not totalitarian?!

      More seriously though, at least for me what gives most of the totalitarian feel is that certain opinions and ideas are not allowed to be even hinted on. Yes it’s not the government’s action, but nobody’s seriously claiming that the US is totalitarian – just that it’s where the left wants it to go. And if they are committed to only using public shaming against wrongspeech, and never put it in law even given a chance, they definitely don’t show any signs of such commitment.

      Not further than the last open thread Eric T (sorry for possible misinterpretation but that was my reading) mentioned the fact that cautious supporters of SJ ideas are not usually considered as enemies by the SJW crowd as evidence for the left being tolerant to other ideas. When the range of permitted opinions varies between “furious up-to-11 support of our cause” and “cautious support of our cause” and that fact is quoted as a sign of tolerance, that’s very much totalitarian on my book.

      Another example, my girlfriend is a PhD of political sciences in a . She told how when she attended a workshop about teaching, they spoke about what to do if there’s a person in the class who makes everyone (!) feel uncomfortable. What was an example of such a person the tutor used? A Republican. Again, if making someone who supports a major, perfectly legal, widely popular political party into such an example is considered a-OK when you’re teaching a workshop on bloody inclusion, that doesn’t exactly signal your willingness to tolerate political opposition, does it? And a government unwilling to tolerate a political opposition is what people call totalitarian.

      • Eric T says:

        Not further than the last open thread Eric T (sorry for possible misinterpretation but that was my reading) mentioned the fact that cautious supporters of SJ ideas are not usually considered as enemies by the SJW crowd as evidence for the left being tolerant to other ideas. When the range of permitted opinions varies between “furious up-to-11 support of our cause” and “cautious support of our cause” and that fact is quoted as a sign of tolerance, that’s very much totalitarian on my book.

        That I think is an uncharitable reading of what I said – context was important. There are certainly extremists who view anything less than total support as intolerance, but I’ve consistently maintained they are a vocal minority – I’ve run into many of the “God King Trump” types, and I don’t think that the Right is structurally intolerant. I’ve literally seen people I respect be put on a “traitors to america list” for supporting BLM, soooooo….

        Also please remember what Guy in TN said last OT

        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”

        The fact I didn’t also mention conservative views was because Beans’s thread wasn’t about them.

        Within the same OT I commented on how I and most of my friends have conservative friends, and how even my actual best friend in the world is a conservative. I know this is kind of the inverse of the “I have a black friend argument” but it still feels like you took me out of context here.

        • AlexOfUrals says:

          Yeah I definitely took your words out of context and apologize for that. To my defense, I was using them as a graphic illustration of my experience, rather than a proof of anything. Also, my point wasn’t about extremists, it was about “non-extremists” who think that it’s OK to agree with us just moderately – as long as you don’t actually disagree with us.

          E.g. in our startup, someone posted just today a link to an article about ShutDownSTEM and ShutDownAcademia (not with implication that we should shut down ourselves, but still as something definitely positive). Not a single person out of a dozen in the team mentioned anything about that you know, large parts of academia and STEM are working on problems more important and urgent than mistreatment of black people in the US (not to mention those who work on the problems of said US black people), and maybe it’s not such a great idea to shut down them? And no the article wasn’t making any exception for them, I checked, it only excluded COVID-related work. Did it not occur to anyone but me? Or were they just like myself not willing to check just how tolerant to contrary opinions our company is? No idea, but neither option feels good to me.

          Just flip it around and imagine that there were anti-immigration protests across the country and you would feel unsafe to say at your workplace that yeah sure we need less immigrants here, but maybe there’s sooome downsides to having less of them? Would you feel a bit totaletarian-ish in such an environment? Would it help if people told you that hey, you don’t have to vocally advocate for deporting every single non-American, if you just cautiously support more immigration restrictions that’s also fine? Or imagine after Obama’s election the employees of one of the top-3 largest US companies were all invited to hug and cry on each other’s shoulder on their monthly meeting, to help them cope with this horrible event (referring to a somewhat-famous episode at Google after Trump election). Would you feel that the right-leaning leadership of that company is very committed to the ideals of democracy? And mind that my examples come from the tech companies, which (in the real world) are absolutely hated by the left and considered to be the den of prejudice and bigotry.

          people I respect be put on a “traitors to america list”

          Did it damage their career or public image, or was it someone’s personal (or online community’s) list?

          Inferring positive claims from the absence of claims is always a risky move.

          Not sure what this refers to, but my words about the left “not showing signs of commitment” etc were a figure of speech. I actually think they show plenty of signs of determination to use political power to limit their opponents’ right to speak where possible.

          • BlackboardBinaryBook says:

            Not a single person out of a dozen in the team mentioned anything about that you know, large parts of academia and STEM are working on problems more important and urgent than mistreatment of black people in the US (not to mention those who work on the problems of said US black people), and maybe it’s not such a great idea to shut down them?

            I work in an intensely SJW department of an intensely SJW university in an intensely SJW city. We had this conversation (although no one said “our work is more important than the mistreatment of black people”) and almost all of us stayed at work. I think maybe it’s because I don’t do Twitter or Facebook, but sometimes it seems like I live in a different reality than the other commenters here when it comes to the ubiquity & power of the SJW WrongThink Police. To be clear, I don’t mean to dismiss your fear, just explain why it’s hard for me to grasp.

      • AlesZiegler says:

        I cannot resist pointing out that I can and regularly do buy contact lenses without a prescription. But I live in Czechia.

        • AlexOfUrals says:

          That’s exactly my point. A bought a supply for the next 1-2 years on my visit to Russia.

        • MilesM says:

          Another completely tangential comment: Do you actually like the name “Czechia?”

          (I’m not under the illusion that my opinion matters, but something about it sets my teeth of edge.)

          • AlesZiegler says:

            Yes, I do. “Czech republic” sounds awful.

          • Wency says:

            I agree that it’s somewhat cacophonic to English ears, but still better than Czech Republic. I feel like we should have called it Bohemia, which is alike to calling the Netherlands “Holland”. Technically wrong or misleading, but it has a historical basis and sounds good. If the Czechs had been consistently independent for a longer span of history, this is almost surely what we would be calling the country.

          • Evan Þ says:

            @Wency, as I understand it, some variant of “Czechia” was always the local name used in Czech; “Bohemia” was the exonym given by the Romans that persisted in medieval Latin.

            (AlesZiegler, feel free to correct me if I’m misunderstanding.)

          • Wency says:

            @Evan:
            My understanding is you are correct that it’s an exonym, but we prominently call next-door Germany by an exonym. We would probably call the Czech lands by one too, if the name had evolved in English more naturally.

          • AlesZiegler says:

            @Evan Þ

            You are correct that Czech variant of Czechia has been in use long before its internationaly announced pseudofficial translation, but it is NOT a historic name – it developed after the division of Czechoslovakia and was somewhat controversial.

            But there is no realistic alternative. Bohemia is a nonstarter as a name of the whole country since almost half of it is not historic Bohemia and many Moravians would be offended if they would get etymologically annexed like that.

          • BBA says:

            To my American ears “Czechland” sounds slightly better but maybe it’s too Germanic for the Czechs.

    • I don’t think members of the blue tribe believe they are trying to turn America into a totalitarian country. I do think the changes many of them support could lead in that direction by strengthening the power of government, weakening private institutions.

    • Erusian says:

      Personally, my model is that there is a small-to-maybe-midsized group mostly on the right who care about democracy qua democracy and the Constitution qua the Constitution. And that these are the only people who care: nobody on the left does and the vast majority of people on the right don’t either. Everyone else just has policy preferences and is willing to accept broad abridgments of the constitutional order to get them. (These Constitutionalists are not necessarily good people, by the way. There is a good argument to be made against privileging procedure, though I don’t find it ultimately convincing.)

      I’d argue the mainstream left is “closer” to totalitarianism because it has more elite and institutional support. (It’s also closer than radical leftism, like Sanders, who has more institutional barriers than right or left. Though Sanders in turn is closer than a radical far rightist like someone who openly declares themselves a Fascist.) This means it would meet less resistance, while the right would have to basically deconstruct or subvert the majority of major American institutions to get to a totalitarian state. But this is incidental to the ideology itself. You could equally well imagine a conservative order that was closer, it’s just not the current situation.

      But do I think it’s an active goal of the Democratic Party? No. I could see a future where we stumble into dictatorship as the Democrats and Republicans increasingly compromise rights in order to make short term policy or electoral goals. Or I could see a future where polarization gets so extreme that neither side is willing to accept even minor defeats and one of them tries to do something dramatic. But I don’t think either side has a leadership that sits around thinking, “Soon, soon we will do away with this sham called democracy and put a bullet in my colleague over there!”

      • John Schilling says:

        Personally, my model is that there is a small-to-maybe-midsized group mostly on the right who care about democracy qua democracy and the Constitution qua the Constitution. And that these are the only people who care: nobody on the left does and the vast majority of people on the right don’t either.

        This is about right. There used to also be a strong contingent of civil libertarians mostly on the left, and that made for a much more robust coalition, but it’s fading fast.

        But another significant factor is that the right is less confident that it will always be in power, and is therefore more cautious about power that will likely be used against them when the other side is in power. Which,

        I’d argue the mainstream left is “closer” to totalitarianism because it has more elite and institutional support.

        Factors into this correct observation. If your coalition’s power is based on voters and elected officials, then what is yours today is the other side’s tomorrow. But if you’re an Elite or a Bureaucrat, you’ll still be an Elite or a Bureaucrat five years from now when the other side has elected a new batch of politicians. So if you can solve the problem du jour by increasing your power locally, that power is both useful for solving the problem du jour and yours to use in the future. What’s not to love?

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          Factors into this correct observation. If your coalition’s power is based on voters and elected officials, then what is yours today is the other side’s tomorrow. But if you’re an Elite or a Bureaucrat, you’ll still be an Elite or a Bureaucrat five years from now when the other side has elected a new batch of politicians. So if you can solve the problem du jour by increasing your power locally, that power is both useful for solving the problem du jour and yours to use in the future. What’s not to love?

          I have this idea that in a democracy it would be possible to fire all the bureaucrats when your side wins federal elections: every single unelected federal employee and the administrators of public universities.
          That would leave the corporate Elites who hate you, but a Communist Revolution by ballot box would be pants-on-head irrational given the historical record. Oh well.

          • zero says:

            Something like the spoils system in 19th century America?

          • John Schilling says:

            We tried that; it resulted in horribly corrupt and incompetent political appointees staffing all the federal agencies and trying desperately to exploit their power for all it was worth while they had it. With effectively no accountability because their fellow party hacks weren’t going to turn against them while it was their collective turn in office, and they’re damned the moment the other side wins even if you were scrupulously honest all the while.

            It was barely tolerably bad with the weak sort of government we had in the 19th century; I do not want to try it in the 21st.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @John Schilling: But then the faction that succeeded in making the bureaucracy an ideological monoculture is the permanent ruling class. Under such a government, universal suffrage elections happen but accomplish nothing. So why not have the bureaucracy under a monarch?
            Calling such a system democracy is a Lie, and Zoroaster says we have an ethical duty to combat the Lie.

          • John Schilling says:

            The bureaucracy does not wield absolute power; Jim Hacker managed to win a round every once in a while, and the elected government still controls the budget. And appoints the judges.

            So a permanent bureaucracy under a congress or a parliament, is almost strictly superior to a permanent bureaucracy under a king.

          • Christophe Biocca says:

            But then the faction that succeeded in making the bureaucracy an ideological monoculture is the permanent ruling class.

            Only to the extent that the other side isn’t willing to use legislative measures to shrink/abolish the bureaucracy. As I understand it all of these protections only really bind the executive. If the republicans are worried about the EPA being a cesspool of hippies they can legislate the entire thing out of existence with one bill, and bring back a smaller/different workforce into an agency with a more narrow focus with another bill the next day.

            The fact that congress has lost most of its control is largely due to its own willingness to give it up/delegate it and never ask for it back.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            Only to the extent that the other side isn’t willing to use legislative measures to shrink/abolish the bureaucracy. As I understand it all of these protections only really bind the executive. If the republicans are worried about the EPA being a cesspool of hippies they can legislate the entire thing out of existence with one bill, and bring back a smaller/different workforce into an agency with a more narrow focus with another bill the next day.

            Thank you, that sounds wonderful. So the constructive way to address this issue of lack of democracy would be to join a movement that supports legislative majorities abolishing government agencies in order of how hostile their staffs are.

          • Jaskologist says:

            The actual constructive way appears to be rioting.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @Jaskologist: Could you unpack that?
            “We riot until you abolish the police [who kill people]” being a rational strategy doesn’t mean “We riot until you abolish the bureaucrats [who are enormously bigoted against us but not homicidal]” would constitute the art of winning.

    • Trofim_Lysenko says:

      I don’t think most of you/them actively want a totalitarian dictatorship. Just:

      -Robust and pervasive policing and criminalization of vaguely defined categories of speech.

      -A disarmed populace.

      -A strong central government who can get grand plans implemented quickly, without all the petty partisan bickering. You know, like China. C.F. “Why Can’t We Be More Like China” thinkpieces.

      -Indefinite One Ideology/One Party rule via a permanent Democratic Party majority shored up by changing demographics.

      -Radical reform to the military and police to dismantle their (currently strongly red tribe at the enlisted/beat cop level) cultures and bring them more in line.

      Or, when you add all of those up, a powerful central government with effective one-party (or at least one ideology) rule, an ideologically loyal and biddable military and police, a disarmed public, and laws to control the public dissemination of ideas and criminalize speech the state decides shouldn’t be protected.

      Again, I don’t think this is deliberate for the most part, for all the “Man isn’t China’s ability to make sweeping government programs happen quickly COOL?!” and idolization of Lenin, Che, etc. I think there’s just a fundamental disconnect where most of the people arguing for these various changes A) don’t see how they dovetail with one another and B) know they PERSONALLY aren’t about to put on jackboots and go kicking in doors to drag the counter-revolutionary elements away for re-education, so obviously such a system as they invision won’t have any problems with abuse of power or slippery slopes. The OTHER side has all the bad actors, after all! More power in the hands of good people is always good, less power in the hands of bad people is always bad, and we know our people are good people, so there’s no problem with more power as long as we make sure they hold the reins.

      EDIT: I think another factor is that most genuinely believe they have a robust majority, or would if they could just get control of the narrative, and that once they have that permanent majority, it legitimizes anything and everything done in its name. If the majority supports it, it can’t be tyranny!

      • Eric T says:

        -Indefinite One Ideology/One Party rule via a permanent Democratic Party majority shored up by changing demographics.

        This is an interesting way to say “we would like more people to vote for us”

        As a whole I think your post while getting at a real issue among leftist politics hits kind of aggressive/reductive for my tastes.

        • Trofim_Lysenko says:

          I may have gotten a bit overly snarky, and to be fair I think that the American Left being more guilty of this than the right at this moment in history is almost exclusively a function of current cultural momentum and not innate virtue or lack thereof. As I said, I don’t think there is deliberate yearning for an authoritarian state on the part of most people. The Democratic campaign worker talking about re-education camps is the outlier here.

          However, that said, I think your reframing my bullet point about indefinite one party rule and ideological unoty as “we want people to vote for us more” is incorrect. I meant exactly what I said: long term one party, one ideology rule. There is a powerful theme in left wing discourse on electoral demographics that basically sums up as “Once we have enough people in office and control enough to block the Republicans efforts at partisan redistricting and voter suppression, Conservatism will be be relegated to the dustbin of history. We can soon anticipate the day the last Republican ever is elected, and look forward to a future where the only question is between Democrats and a true Left alternative.”

          I’m at work on my phone ATM, but if you’d like when I get home I can try and provide examples of this sort of “end of political history”/”triumphalist” thinking.

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            If the Democrats are actually right about Republicans being more prone to partisan redistricting and voter suppression, then it rather suggests that there is a party illegitimately aiming for one-party rule, but…

            “If we had fair elections, we would win them” might not be true, but it’s not an expression of a desire for one-party rule unless “fair elections” is being defined in a bad way. If it’s being defined reasonably, then the lack of fair elections functions more as an indictment of the other party.

          • Desrbwb says:

            A lot of that just sounds like what every political party or movement ultimately hopes for though. Nobody ever goes ‘great we got elected this time, but maybe we should lose the next election’.

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:

            The key point is “once we have the right kind of electoral process, we win forever“. The narrative is that it’s only illegitimate Republican tactics preventing a neverending blue majority.

            I find it grimly amusing that your response is “yeah, so?”

            Edit: When I’m back at a keyboard I apparently need to explain why high ideological conformity and one party rule is a bad thing and heavily indicative of a slide towards authoritarian governance.

          • Wency says:

            Nobody ever goes ‘great we got elected this time, but maybe we should lose the next election’.

            The difference here seems to be that Republican politicians never tried very hard to resist the demographic change that is abolishing their party from existence. This is really where a lot of angst exists, and is partly why Trump is President. We can debate why this is the case, but a large part of the reason seems to be that the corporate side of the Republican coalition likes immigration, and restricting it causes an intra-party debate.

            Restricting people from voting doesn’t actually cause an intra-party debate, because although it looks ugly to Democrats, to Republicans it looks enough like law and order (tougher requirements to prevent fraud, and banning criminals from having a say on their punishments) that cognitive dissonance doesn’t really come into play.

            The Democrats once had an anti-immigration faction, known as organized labor, but it’s toast. Plus Democrats are better at coordinating ideological uniformity, perhaps due to their control of culture. And possibly just due to the way that leftism works and its psychological raison d’etre.

          • baconbits9 says:

            The difference here seems to be that Republican politicians never tried very hard to resist the demographic change that is abolishing their party from existence.

            The party being abolished from existence that in the last 6 years has 4 years of control of the White House, 6 years of control of the senate and 4 years of control of the HoR?

    • Jacobethan says:

      So, I am very much in the “starting to get very scared” camp — Tribe Tinfoil — I guess. I go back and forth on my assessment of how rational those fears are, but the “totalitarian” word has definitely come to my lips over the last week.

      There’s a lot I could say to try to contextualize where that fear is coming from for those who feel bewildered by it. But for now on that front I’ll just point out as a very general background condition that we’ve just witnessed an extraordinary episode of norm-violation — in the sense of civil unrest and in-the-streets political violence of a kind unprecedented within most of our lifetimes. And such an event is, I think, naturally going to widen the margin of uncertainty about just how committed others are to the established rules of engagement, just how far they might be willing to go. If distrust is already high and lines of communication already frayed, it may be very hard to get a clear sense of what kind of limiting principles you can be absolutely sure your opponents will abide by.

      That uncertainty then combines with three further developments that are fairly well documented. (1) A generational shift on the left away from civil libertarianism and toward an explicit embrace of speech-restrictive policies, generally of an ideologically-weighted kind. (2) An increasing tendency — visible, to be sure, on both sides — to present the opposing political party’s policies and rhetoric as not rationally misguided but rather fundamentally illegitimate, i.e., just the sort of thing a speech ban might prohibit. (3) A rapid consolidation of left-liberal control within prestige media, academia, major industry, tech, etc., such that a left inclined to impose a truly mandatory ideological monoculture would have very few barriers to doing so at the commanding heights of the culture.

      All three of these trends are very much on display in the recent blow-up at the NYT over the Cotton op-ed. The issue here is not the merits of the op-ed itself so much as the realization — terrifying, to some of us — of how rapidly a basic philosophical approach to the social control of expression previously associated mainly with college campuses had acquired veto power over the nation’s most important press organ. In that light, we might add to the three I’d mentioned another factor: (4) the fact that in every case the trend is far more pronounced among the young, leading to the concern that cohort replacement will only continue to accelerate it.

      I’m not sure if you’ll find any of that persuasive, but keep it in mind when we turn to a more concrete example of something that’s just happened in the protests’ wake.

      This is an ordinance proposed a couple days ago by the City of Newark:
      https://newark.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=4555294&GUID=772B0D6D-03DD-4C53-801A-51B546A7D3D8&FullText=1

      A news article explaining the proposal is here:
      https://www.nj.com/essex/2020/06/nj-city-to-outlaw-white-supremacy-groups.html

      Under our current legal regime, such a law is patently unconstitutional. Indeed, it’s apparent from the Newark officials’ comments (“have the courage to take on the legal challenges an ordinance such as this will attract”) that they know it’s unconstitutional, but see an opening to start moving the legal and cultural goalposts in a quite overt way. “You can’t enjoy free speech when you can’t breathe,” says the city’s counsel.

      So we know what it is they’re willing to sacrifice. To what end, exactly? The ordinance’s ostensible purpose is to address the so-far-as-I-can-tell-nonexistent problem of Klan violence in Newark. To the extent we can agree that “present-day activity by the literal KKK” is at most a trivial contributor to black oppression, the expected gains to black welfare from achieving the ordinance’s nominal aims should be approximately zero. But what, in service of that goal, does the ordinance actually do?

      We see that the city is going to establish an Office of Violence Prevention, to be headed by the Violence Prevention Coordinator. The VPC will be responsible for unilaterally determining a list of groups which, being judged to express “hostility” toward “members of a race, ethnicity, nation, gender, gender identity, or sexual orientation,” are legally banned from existing in Newark in any form. Note that, under a not-implausible reading of some of Black Lives Matter’s assertions about whites, BLM itself could be considered an illicit hate group under this standard. Note also that the Republican Party, under an interpretation of its rhetoric and policies sincerely held by many liberals, could also be put on the banned list. These determinations are to be made by a single unelected bureaucrat, with no procedural protections and no provisions for appeal. The right to coordinate one’s entirely nonviolent expressions of opinion through an organized group in the city of Newark would exist entirely at the pleasure of the Office of Violence Prevention.

      What else does the Violence Prevention Coordinator do? See the following section:

      2:5-24.5. Anti-Violence Policies.

      a. All employees of the City of Newark have a duty to immediately intervene and report the following acts to the Violence Prevention Coordinator:

      1. When they are a witness to wrongful conduct by fellow employees;

      2. When they are a witness to blatant civil rights violations being committed by other employees.

      b. All acts of racism or racial discrimination by City of Newark employees will not be tolerated, and will result in automatic termination; said employee shall be prohibited from working for the City of Newark in any capacity.

      c. All employees who fail to take action in subsection (a) above will result in automatic termination and said employee shall be prohibited from working for the City of Newark in any capacity.

      So essentially the Violence Prevention Coordinator will be able to summarily fire any City employee found to have engaged in “acts of racism.” Given the extraordinarily wide variation in belief in the country today about what sorts of action or expression should count as racist even in principle, to say nothing of the now-ubiquitous phenomenon of public disagreement over whether racism was or was not a motivating factor in a particular interaction, it is virtually impossible to anticipate in any concrete way what types of conduct might actually be proscribed. Nonetheless, employees would need to police themselves constantly in any activity with even the remotest bearing on race, in light of the drastic risks of being judged unfavorably by the Violence Prevention Coordinator. It is far from clear to me that this would result on net in improved provision of City services for black citizens. What is unequivocally clear is that it represents a drastic expansion of administrative, bureaucratic power over a huge portion of Newark’s workforce.

      (Note that the Violence Prevention Coordinator’s powers are enormous in scope, but have only the most tenuous and incidental relationship to actual violence.)

      Actually, it’s worse than that, since the ordinance combines a nebulous, endlessly-subject-to-interpretation standard with an unlimited third-party duty to report violations of that standard. In fact, third parties who fail to make such reports are treated as just as guilty as the actual offenders! Take a second to imagine what it would be like to work in such a place.

      Say you’re in the cafeteria and you overhear a snatch of somebody else’s conversation. The little bit you catch sounds — well, it’s hard to tell out of context, it sounds like maybe the sort of thing a reasonable person might consider racist, but it’s ambiguous given that you didn’t hear the whole conversation; maybe it’s not obvious whether the person is speaking for himself or summarizing something another person said, or maybe you just can’t quite parse his tone. What do you do? What if somebody else was listening in, heard the whole exchange, and it turns out it was racist as heck and they reported it to the VPC? Are you willing to risk being held accountable as a witness who failed to report (remember, that means automatic termination)? Or do you go ahead and report your co-worker based on an interpretation that you yourself aren’t really sure of, knowing it might well get him fired? And how does it affect your own conversations to know that same dynamic might be playing out with other people overhearing you?

      This, to me, is a terrible law. And under our present constitutional regime it has essentially zero chance of being upheld by the courts. But I suspect that’s not really the point; this is something to run up the flagpole and see who salutes. And I fear that there will be a lot of liberals who’ll do so, coming out in favor of this censorious approach out of a misguided sense that that’s what “support Black Lives Matter” is all about. I also fear that there will be other spaces — in the corporate world, or in academia — where similar kinds of things will be tried, where there’s more legal leeway to do so.

      That’s the best concrete example I can give you, from where I sit, of what the “totalitarianism” anxiety is all about.

      • Jake R says:

        +1
        I think this is very well-written while doing a good job of keeping a tense topic civil.

      • Eric T says:

        Hmm I respect this take a lot. I have a big effort-post in the moderation queue that hopefully gets approved about racism broadly so I’m pretty wiped rn, but I’ll have to try to write up another one that’s been on my mind about “Fear”

        My understanding is that this isn’t super different from what we have gone through a hundred times before – people have been complaining about terms and ideas being censored for as long as we’ve had freedom of speech. Usually new terms and ideas just rise to take their place. Society’s norms and mores change and whatnot.

        I’m not confident enough in this take to argue it right now, as I’m still compiling research for said “against fear” post – but thank you for the read. It definitely will help me organize my thoughts.

        • Randy M says:

          … we have a moderation queue? Are you sure your post just didn’t get eaten for using the wrong terms?

          • Eric T says:

            Maybe? Idk man it says its awaiting moderation, I’m fairly new here.

            ETA: I assume its because it has like 25 links and 4000 words or something of that nature. I looked at the comment policy and I don’t think I used any of the banned words?

          • Nick says:

            For the future, always, always save what you wrote before posting. You never know when you post is going to be lost.

          • Eric T says:

            @Nick – I did! It’s on my computer as a word document rn.

          • Eric T says:

            I think having a lot of links is more likely to be an issue than having banned words, but I’m not 100% sure.

            And here I thought the link per word count was on the low end! I wasn’t aware that was a site rule or something, I genuinely just wanted to make sure all my points were backed by evidence hahaha. I guess that makes sense though – link dumps aren’t great for forums.

          • Nick says:

            I don’t think it’s down to site rules; I think it’s automatic spam detection. Those systems are just awesome, especially when they’re unaccountable.

        • CatCube says:

          Oooof. I hope you have a copy of that post. There’s not necessarily a “moderation queue” here.

          Things that have too many links get queued until Scott gets around to releasing them. Things that use a banned term disappear into the aether with no chance of recovery. I don’t think you can tell which one you fall into from what happens when you clicked “Post Comment”

          • Eric T says:

            I do but I don’t want to just try reposting it and end up getting banned for spamming or something.

            I think its in the queue. I can still see it and it says “this post is awaiting moderation”

          • SamChevre says:

            Calling Scott Alexander – I want to see that post.

          • Eric T says:

            I broke it up into pieces and just posted the damn thing. I promise you Scott I’ll stop posting for a while, pls no ban for spam XD

          • CatCube says:

            @Eric T

            We have a long tradition here of effortposts that get broken up across posts. I was doing a series on structural engineering that I should probably resurrect, and I often had to break them up in to two or three.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        +1, thank you for this effortpost. This is exactly the kind of totalitarianism I am worried about.

        I feel like we desperately need truth and reconciliation out of the Democratic Party and BLM right now. We need to clear the air with factual statements of belief like:

        1) Do you believe hate speech laws violate the First Amendment and that the First Amendment is sacrosanct rather than an obstacle to a state you consider more just?
        (We could go further with “If the government punishing speech is Unconstitutional, isn’t it Unconstitutional for publicly-funded universities to punish insufficiently progressive speech?”)
        2) Do you believe in property rights? If yes, have you been speaking out against looting in conjunction with your movement’s protests?
        3) Do you reject violence as a way to achieve your policy goals? If not, have you been condemning your side’s assaults et al?
        4) Does the government have extremely broad legitimate powers to control individual movement during an infectious disease crisis? If yes, do you support churches being closed while Democrats in office encourage your protests?
        5) Do you support the right of corporate employers to fire employees for espousing Republican views at work? What about progressive views at work? Fired for social media posts off the clock ditto?

        • Eric T says:

          I mean I don’t speak for the entire Democratic Party but I’ll take a whack at this if you want!

          1) Do you believe hate speech laws violate the First Amendment and that the First Amendment is sacrosanct rather than an obstacle to a state you consider more just?

          When done well, no. I think plenty of modern states have had hate speech laws for a while and maintain very free platforms of speech, though maybe that’s my inner German Exceptionalist coming out? Certainly the SC has, for decades, argued fairly convincingly that the 1st Amendment isn’t 100% “all free speech all the time” [ETA: My bad english had me write “legitimate” here, and that gave a SUPER bad impression]. When I think of “hate speech” I’m not thinking of “I would like to have guns” though I’m thinking of “I think we should round up the black people” or “Hispanics should all get run out of america” – as I’ve said before I am fine drawing the bright line at calls for violence or making threats – and I’m fairly certain that historically the SC has agreed with me on that.

          I personally don’t think anything is “sacrosanct” – I consider myself something of a pragmatic guy. I think that laws and rules are very valuable, but there are exceptional times, which themselves call for exceptional measures. Suspending 1st Amendment rights in a broad way would be such an exceptional measure I suspect I wouldn’t support it save like… an Alien Invasion. Or World War 3.

          Furthermore I think the 1st Amendment rightfully only applies to the Federal Government (and I guess State Governments if you fancy the incorporation doctrine). Private, or even semi-public institutions like Twitter, Colleges, and companies are under no obligation to follow it, save that I think they have an obligation to do Good Things, and usually Free Speech is a Good Thing.

          2) Do you believe in property rights? If yes, have you been speaking out against looting in conjunction with your movement’s protests?

          Yes, several times on this site too in fact. I do however value property rights and property damage lower than some do, as I’m not very materialistic. I’d rather the protestors burn 20 targets to the ground than kill a cop. I mean I’d rather they do neither but, ya know, I’m making a point here not writing policy.

          Do you reject violence as a way to achieve your policy goals? If not, have you been condemning your side’s assaults et al?

          I do, and as long as we also condemn what has been flagrant police assaults on peaceful protestors and the Media I hope we will keep the small portion of maniacs who use violence to hijack our politics on both sides in check. No Isolated Demands for Rigor/Fairness/Peace right, both sides need some degree of de-escalation. Fortunately it seems like its happening.

          Does the government have extremely broad legitimate powers to control individual movement during an infectious disease crisis?

          Yes

          If yes, do you support churches being closed while Democrats in office encourage your protests?

          Churches should have been closed. Protests shouldn’t have been encouraged. Violent force should not have been used to enforce either order unless it was absolutely necessary.

          • John Schilling says:

            Churches should have been closed. Protests shouldn’t have been encouraged. Violent force should not have been used to enforce either order unless it was absolutely necessary.

            What do you mean “either order”? I only see one order here, and a giant double standard.

            Churches were closed, in the sense of men with guns coming to shut them down (but they won’t use the guns unless absolutely necessary so that’s OK). They were closed absolutely even if they implemented social distancing protocols that made the most disciplined protests look like an orgy pit.

            And, if I understand you correctly, the orgy pits protests “shouldn’t have been encouraged”. You’re not even willing to say “should have been discouraged”; it’s the full three-monkey treatment.

            If you’ve got content-neutral social distancing requirements like “no singing, shouting, or chanting in organized public gatherings”, uniformly enforced, fine. If churches are being shut down across the board because someone’s impression of the modal church is that lots of people sing, and protests are being tolerated even when lots of people are clearly shouting, not fine.

            On the subject at hand, if I’m planning to impose authoritarian rule but don’t want to use the standard-issue early 20th century authoritarian toolkit that everyone is on guard against, this sort of selective enforcement is my friend. I can shut down Other Tribe’s gathering places, and leave my own in place, on vague “public health and safety” grounds belied by the adversely selective enforcement.

            This works particularly well because I don’t even have to meet anyone in a smoke-filled room and say “this is how we’re going to defeat the Other Tribe”. All I have to do is not hold the meeting where I order that it not be done this way. Or hold that meeting and let my body language slip that I don’t really care that much. For anyone in the position to decide which gathering places to be shut down, and without scrupulous attention to fairness, “This must be done by mechanistic content-neutral rules” is always going to lose out to “I shall exercise my best judgement”. And it again takes implausible commitment to fairness for that “best judgement” to be applied fairly to ingroup and outgroup.

            You’re one of the most scrupulously fair proponents of Social Justice we’ve seen in this generally tolerant and thoughtful community, and even you carelessly slipped up on this one. So, yeah, we’re going to assume the bureaucracy is consistently going to “slip up” in approximately the same way and approximately the same direction.

          • m.alex.matt says:

            Private, or even semi-public institutions like Twitter, Colleges, and companies are under no obligation to follow it, save that I think they have an obligation to do Good Things, and usually Free Speech is a Good Thing.

            It has been ruled several times that colleges which take Federal money are subject to the First Amendment, public or private.

            It makes sense. Otherwise the entire panoply of rights could be side stepped by just outsourcing government functions.

          • AlesZiegler says:

            @John Schilling

            From what I have read, indoor gatherings are far more dangerous than outdoor gatherings, given the same number of participants. Banning large indoor gatherings while allowing outdoor activities of all kinds is not necessarily a hypocrisy, it might be a reasonable tradeoff.

            Also of course religious rituals involving specially close contact between people are extremely dangerous.

            I genuinely do not know whether outdoor religious services were banned in the US during lockdowns.

          • Eric T says:

            What do you mean “either order”? I only see one order here, and a giant double standard.

            I mean here in NYC there was a curfew that was very forcefully enforced by dudes with guns, so I don’t actually think it was that much of a double standard.

            And, if I understand you correctly, the orgy pits protests “shouldn’t have been encouraged”. You’re not even willing to say “should have been discouraged”; it’s the full three-monkey treatment.

            I… said it that way because that’s the way the question was asked?

            If yes, do you support churches being closed while Democrats in office encourage your protests?

            Like the question was literally Do you Support X and Y and my response was I support X and Not Y, and apparently this is proof of some broader issue with my line of thinking? In case you are curious I absolutely think the government of NYC should have issued a “hey don’t protest order”

            I also think, as I mentioned above, neither protestors or anyone breaking the church close down should have been violently ejected. If peaceful means (de-escalaltion of protests or moving pastors/congregations out of churches) wouldn’t have worked I’d rather the police just not beat people up to enforce a quarantine order designed to keep them safe.

            Other Tribe’s gathering places, and leave my own in place, on vague “public health and safety” grounds belied by the adversely selective enforcement.

            I think this is a bit much. Liberal/leftist gathering places were also shut down. Libraries, Colleges, and Starbucks all got shutdown too. The protests were probably just allowed out of simple rational calculus: ie do you want to be to politician who pisses off millions of angry protestors calling for mass change? Whether or not its a good thing that they’re giving into the protestors is a very fair debate, I don’t think claiming that they’re closing Red Tribe meeting spots but not Blue Tribe is accurate.

          • Theodoric says:

            @AlesZiegler

            Outdoor religious funeral services have been shut down in NYC, and they mayor has made statements indicating he will treat the BLM protests more leniently than other large outdoor events.

          • SamChevre says:

            @AlesZiegler

            I genuinely do not know whether outdoor religious services were banned in the US during lockdowns.

            They were: even Adoration where all the participants stayed in their cars were banned at my church in Massachusetts (admittedly, by the Bishop, but it was his interpretation of state guidelines) and there was a lawsuit over a ban on outdoor services with people in their cars in Louisville.

          • John Schilling says:

            Drive-in church services, not merely outdoors but with the participants further isolated by being in separate automobiles, were explicitly banned in parts of Mississippi, South Carolina, Georgia, Nevada and Kentucky. At least until federal judges intervened.

            And I don’t know of any church-lockdown order that distinguished between indoor and outdoor services; those are just the ones where local officials noticed people holding outdoor drive-in services and said “No, we really explicitly meant to ban those as well”.

            Also, this whole “indoor gatherings are far more dangerous” thing looks a lot like a retcon invented to justify the double standard. Indoor v. outdoor is clearly only one of several variables, and I’m skeptical of anyone who claims that a quiet indoor church service with proper social distancing is more dangerous than a typical street protest just because the latter is outdoors. And I note that outdoor farmers’ markets were and often still are closed even though indoor grocery stores have been open (and often crowded) from the start. Among other things. “Indoor bad, outdoor good” seems to be very selectively applied.

        • Orion says:

          I’m a non-religious person who tends to end up defending the party-line Democrat position on SSC, so I feel like I should come out here and say I think it’s absurd that churches are still closed by legal order in so much of the country. I think there was probably a degree of emergency that would have justified ordering churches to close for about two weeks in March, but we should have immediately started set to work developing recommendations for safer worship. Any office-holder who works harder to re-open restaurants than churches is betraying their constitutional oaths.

      • Uribe says:

        Newark. Where’s Philip Roth when you need him?

    • Clutzy says:

      I was mostly arguing tactics in that thread. But from my POV, much of the current proposals of my Democratic Mayor and Governor are, more or less, akin to criminalizing normal life. Obviously since such things can’t be uniformly enforced (because we’d all be fined every day), I see this as a massive opportunity for selective enforcement. And that is the basis for a soft tyranny.

    • AlesZiegler says:

      I just want to say that this is going far better than I expected. Thank you all for reasonable arguments.

    • WoollyAI says:

      Alright, here’s a steelman to the “soft totalitarianism” you hear Dreher et al talk about.

      For the right, California is a totalitarian state. This might seem mad unless you’ve lived in a totalitarian state. We have this mental image of totalitarianism as an active, horrific dystopia but there are numerous totalitarian states with large expat communities where American and other foreign nationals work and live: China, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, arguably Singapore, etc. I’ll use China as my reference, since that’s where I have the most experience. Daily life in China is not a dystopia, by and large everyone goes to work, pays taxes, plays video games, and otherwise lives life. It’s not until you begin to take political action or ask awkward questions that you could even notice that you’re in an undemocratic state. This isn’t to ignore that the Chinese government can take more extreme action against dissidents, and does, but that these actions are rare and mostly unknown to urban educated workers and others.

      So let us compare California to China, not at the extremes of a totalitarian state, but for the normal daily life of the average “red triber”.

      In both California and China the red triber has no political power. Technically, in China, he could become a citizen and a party member and then vote for an alternative to the Communist Party (they kind of exist) or reform the party from within but these aren’t very realistic. In California, there’s a supermajority of Democrats and the demographic trends make any electoral success highly unlikely. There will not be another Reagan coming from California and it’s unclear in what way the red triber’s vote matters.

      In China, you can discuss anything except Taiwan, Tibet, and Tiananmen. The red triber in California has a similar list of verboten topics.

      In China, you can’t really trust the news or official reports; there’s an obvious bias. Comparisons to US/CA media from a red triber’s perspective are trivial.

      In China, high-level positions are bared for people without ties to the party. Red tribers have similar beliefs about high-level positions in California and would point to Brendan Eich et al as examples of prominent people purged for voicing “wrong beliefs” or point to the overwhelming liberal bent of government, academia, media, and tech.

      In China, there are real social consequences to being disruptive and not supporting government positions, see the social credit system. In California, and leftist spaces in general, there severe and ever changing consequences to unpopular opinions, including the loss of your job and widespread social shaming.

      The guts of this is that while harsh totalitarian crackdowns draw attention and a clear dividing line between free/totalitarian systems, the levers of totalitarian control extend far beyond that and the smart totalitarians, like the Chinese, are moving away from harsh repression to “soft” controls like political dis-empowerment and economic/social consequences. At this “soft” level it’s harder to draw clear distinctions between the systems, especially for people who aren’t active radicals. After all, anyone can keep their head down, do their job, keep their mouth shut, and follow the law in order the live a quiet life; the point is you can do that in totalitarian systems and free systems. The daily life for the average person who just isn’t that political is the same in either system.

      And if that doesn’t sound representative of America as a whole, it’s worth remembering that most of these writers are in deep “blue” areas or fields: tech, journalism, education. Moldbug is/was a programmer in the Bay, Dreher is a lifelong journalist, etc. Their experiences are not representative of the average American. But I think when you hear “leftist totalitarians”, at least among the smart right, you should probably think of how the average “red triber” feels in San Francisco: their vote doesn’t matter, their opinions are “evil”, and numerous people above them would shun/fire them if they learned the truth. And while we might quibble over whether that’s “totalitarian”, I don’t think there’s any surprise “red tribers” want to avoid that fate.

      • Matt M says:

        +1

        An excellent point, and well written…

      • AlesZiegler says:

        I do not think that current China is a totalitarian state. It has an oppresive and awful regime, that however does not have a degree of control over society which I associate with the T-word.

        Also, I was born in communist Czechoslovakia, and that really was a totalitarian country.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        + 1.

        Also, when non-conforming political actors come to California, like Milo Y at Berkley or a Trump rally in San Jose they can reliably expect threats, harassment, and physical assault from those aligned with the power structure, but those conducting the violence will be almost entirely ignored by the authorities. The party doesn’t have an official Red Guard, but it’s outsourced and even less accountable.

        • Matt M says:

          The party doesn’t have an official Red Guard, but it’s outsourced and even less accountable.

      • MilesM says:

        I grew up in a totalitarian state.

        It struck me recently that I once again find myself living in a world where publicly repeating things my (not really red tribe, but definitely anti-blue tribe) parents say at the dinner table would be a very, very bad idea.

        The stakes are definitely not as high, especially on the far end – the chances of getting killed or jailed are essentially zero – but the median outcomes (loss of livelihood, social shaming) would be disturbingly similar.

      • Clutzy says:

        What is really important to note, is that the average person in a place like America has so much to lose. This means the government has lots of ways to threaten them, and they can do so loudly or quietly. How many people can come out unscathed after their bank account was frozen for 3 months?

        • Matt M says:

          What is really important to note, is that the average person in a place like America has so much to lose.

          I think this is really important and is the primary answer to “Why we haven’t/won’t have a civil war anytime soon.”

          It’s a common meme on the right to say something like “The founding fathers rebelled over less tyranny than we face today.” And I think that’s quite literally true.

          So why aren’t people rebelling today? Why am *I* not rebelling today? Because my life is so comfortable! Even after putting up with all the various tyrannies that I think I’m subject to, I’m still super comfortable. I can eat an endless variety of tasty food whenever I want. I live in a large house that is kept at a constant comfortable temperature. All forms of entertainment are available in huge variety at a moment’s notice. I can afford to take trips all around the world. And I reasonably expect to live another 40+ years in similar such comfort (if not better, thanks to technological advancements). That’s a lot to give up. And it’s not worth risking in exchange for 30-round magazines or the right to yell racial slurs without consequence or whatever else the government does that is technically infringing on my freedom.

          Contrast this to the typical soldier as recently as 200 years ago…. life for them was, to borrow a phrase, “nasty brutish and short.” They lived a meager existence of hard labor and virtually zero access to luxuries, with little to no prospect that things would ever improve. If they didn’t die in a war, they might very well die of some disease in short order. George Washington himself nearly died of malaria already, before the fighting even started. Oh, and they also nearly universally believed that if you died fighting for a just cause, your Earthly suffering would end and you’d spend the rest of your days in eternal paradise.

          Is it any wonder they were much more willing to fight and die?

          There’s still a lot of room left for the government to oppress me further such that “risk my life by picking up a rifle” looks like a winning option.

      • 10240 says:

        In both California and China the red triber has no political power.

        He does. In a democracy, policy tends largely towards the median of the voters’ preferences. If right-wingers were removed from California, the median would shift further left.

        In your view, what could California be like if it was to not be totalitarian (for the right), as long as the right (by nationwide standards) is a minority, far from the median views?

        In China, you can’t really trust the news or official reports; there’s an obvious bias. Comparisons to US/CA media from a red triber’s perspective are trivial.

        They aren’t. In the US/CA, media of all sorts of political alignments exist legally. That the left-wing media are slanted towards the left is not especially remarkable.

      • Aftagley says:

        Just so I’m reading you correctly, you’re basic statement is that since your personal beliefs don’t align with the part of the country you’ve chosen to live, that means that the entire left side of the political spectrum is equivilent to communist China?

        Just for the sake of comparison, let’s imagine a liberal that lives in a random conservative stronghold. You’ll also have no ability to affect the overall vote, your local news will be heavily skewed and if you start talking about stuff like trans rights people are definitely going to think you’re evil. Same amount of job risks or social shaming if you rock the boat.

        I just find this limited perspective so annoying and I see it all the time on this board. If you’re a conservative living in a liberal bubble – that doesn’t mean you’re not still in a bubble. Your perspective on what’s wrong and what needs to change and what the risks are still just as limited as everyone elses. Just ’cause you’re constantly the opposition doesn’t mean you’ve got a better take on anything.

        • WoollyAI says:

          I just find this limited perspective so annoying and I see it all the time on this board. If you’re a conservative living in a liberal bubble – that doesn’t mean you’re not still in a bubble. Your perspective on what’s wrong and what needs to change and what the risks are still just as limited as everyone elses. Just ’cause you’re constantly the opposition doesn’t mean you’ve got a better take on anything.

          Yeah, I basically agree with this.

          The main issue with what I wrote above is that it generalizes to most minority groups. Most minority groups have little political power, have few positions within elite institutions, and would have severe socioeconomic punishment for openly voicing their honestly held political beliefs. “Red tribers” are a minority in California but it’s hard to distinguish between…I wish I had a better phrase, “real oppression” and the normal travails of minority status. There’s a lot of truth to the “blue tribe” saying that a loss of privilege feels like discrimination to the privileged.

          EDIT: There’s a deeper point on legal/social protections for minorities, which definitely vary between cultures and nations, but this would be very hard to quantify.

          Just for the sake of comparison, let’s imagine a liberal that lives in a random conservative stronghold. You’ll also have no ability to affect the overall vote, your local news will be heavily skewed and if you start talking about stuff like trans rights people are definitely going to think you’re evil. Same amount of job risks or social shaming if you rock the boat.

          Yes, and that’s bad. People being fired for their political opinions is bad, be it in China, San Francisco, or Alabama. We all agree, yes? I don’t think that one person’s pain or fear diminishes another’s and each can be suffering.

          I don’t think “soft totalitarianism” is an accurate representation of America, anymore than “ACAB” is an accurate description of all police officers, but I can empathize with the subjective viewpoint of people in that situation. It’s their daily “lived experience”, even if it’s not representative of the general public. So yea, I see a small minority group without legal or social protection constantly complaining of discrimination and that sounds about right and I see people with power over them dismissing their complaints and even doubling down on it and that also sounds about right.

        • oldman says:

          I’ve been an outsider in “red tribe” space (or it’s UK equivalent) – when working on a power plant, and an outsider in “blue tribe” space (or it’s UK equivalent) when working in the city of London. On the power plant people thought it was odd that I thought trans rights are a good idea, but I never worried about voicing it. In blue tribe space there are definitely things I couldn’t say.

          It’s really hard for me to prove this to strangers on the internet, but my experience of having both “red” and “blue” beliefs in “blue” and “red” spaces is that “blue” spaces are much much more oppressive.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Canceling people is sport. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/case-for-liberalism-tom-cotton-new-york-times-james-bennet.html

            tldr: Highly respected African-American researcher does analysis of protests in the 1960s, finds that violence protests create pushback. Jewish Social Democrat alumni of Obama campaign tweets excerpt. Jewish guy gets fired with a literal “come get your boy” tweeted to his boss from a 🌹account.

            I mean, I get it. Smashing other people is fun. Destroying some guy’s career who tries to apologize for doing nothing wrong just because you can is fun. Hunting down a black jogger with your rifles and pick-up trucks as he runs for his life is fun. The power-rush is exhilarating. Holy shit, the abhorrent things that human being will do for fun could fill a library. We build up society to say, “no, stop having fun like that, stop destroying other people.”

            EDIT: To both-sides a bit, https://www.sacbee.com/community/folsom-el-dorado/article243339696.html, black people tour a white neighborhood, white people freak out because black people.

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            The pollster getting fired seems much more on employer than on the rose-emoji account: “come get your boy” seems pretty innocuous, all things considered; it’s the employer who has the responsibility to ignore stuff like that.

            FWIW, that one seems unpopular even among the SJ crowd.

      • rahien.din says:

        This is liberal boilerplate with the names changed!

      • Uribe says:

        I’m not seeing how this is so different from being a blue triber in a deep red state.

        • Clutzy says:

          Most the stuff they want to do they can pretty easily do unmolested no? The right also doesn’t have cancel power at most employers in red states.

    • rahien.din says:

      My impressions :

      The red tribe seem to think of action concretely. They rely on what they can accomplish themselves by concrete action. Similar concrete actions by others are similarly permissible. EG : I have a gun which I use for the purpose of self-defense. Other people should be able to do the same. If the mugger uses a gun, the problem is not that he is taking that specific concrete action, it is that he is a mugger. Furthermore, I would be justified taking concrete action against him – shooting him. The military and the police take similar concrete actions, so they are doing a good job, too.

      This also seems to manifest in the distinction between action and inaction. The red tribe seem to feel that these are totally different things. I get this impression because it is invariably the red triber who says “We shouldn’t do that because we don’t know the long-term consequences” – just as you must always know what is downrange of your bullet, you must understand the nature of the concrete action before you perform it. But inaction is not subject to the same standards, because it is a totally different thing. If you are not going to shoot a gun, the term “downrange” has no meaning. This even emerges in discussion of ethics among Christians. My conservative Christian friends claim that to lie is specifically to speak untruths, but that to omit truths is not to lie – even if the intent of the omission is to induce untrue beliefs.

      My intuition is that these beliefs regarding action and inaction inform the red tribe’s relationship to the state. To the red tribe, the state’s primary purpose is to reduce the number of available concrete actions, usually for some abstract reason. For some actions, this is okay, as by their very nature those actions are abhorrent. But for the most part, the state’s primary function is philosophically intolerable. So naturally, almost any activity by the state would drive toward totalitarianism.

      Moreover, the absence of the state is the absence of the state’s concrete actions – a nonexistence cannot take concrete action, and in the absence of the state, there is no thing to perform those adverse concrete actions. Thus the bad things that happen due to the state are on a different footing from the bad things that happen in the absence of the state.

      It is thus very different for a red triber to accuse the state of totalitarianism than for the blue triber to accuse the state of various -ocracies.

      (Certainly, the blue tribe have some similar platforms regarding the state’s pruning of available actions. But philosophically this seems to come from a very different place.)

    • Wrong Species says:

      Do people on the left think we don’t understand the way they talk about us? They think we are literal Nazis. Pure evil. Anything we say is just beyond the pale. How exactly did you guys think this messaging was going to be interpreted?

      • Uribe says:

        Seems reductive. Not sure all of us Sleepy Joe liberals think conservatives are “literal Nazis”.

        • Wrong Species says:

          Maybe not, but I’ve never heard a “Sleep Joe Liberal” admonish someone on the left for calling us Nazis.

          • Aftagley says:

            Yeah, and I’ve never heard a low-energy Jeb supporter admonish someone on the right for calling us communists. Maybe this is less an indictment of the left and more just evidence that people don’t like calling out ideological allies?

          • Clutzy says:

            What? Communist (sadly) isn’t 1/10th the slur that Facsist/Nazi is. And people on the right do call out the far right for their extreme rhetoric. Or do you think Milo Yiabopolis actually spoke at that one CPAC?

          • Wrong Species says:

            Oh please, that’s barely even an insult today. Would you be afraid of losing your job if someone accused you of being a communist?

          • MilesM says:

            @Aftagley

            Are you sure leftists really want or need Jeb Bush’s supporters defending them from charges of being communists?

            It might jeopardize their chances of getting tenure.

          • Aftagley says:

            ok, cool.

            It’s nice to know that when you and your ingroup are being insulted it’s a travesty, but when it’s happening to me and mine it’s totally normal, not even slightly a problem and likely helpful to our future careers.

            I guess we’re done here?

          • Wrong Species says:

            @Aftagley

            You really don’t know what it’s like from our side. Being accused of being a communist is funny, almost quaint. I can’t honestly imagined you would be that insulted. Being accused of racism is a potential career killer, it’s definitely a status killer, and everyone to the right of Obama has that target on their back.

          • AlesZiegler says:

            Just to be clear, I do think that comparing rightwingers to Nazis is bad.

          • Aftagley says:

            @wrong species

            Maybe I don’t, but I spent pretty much the first 10 years of my adult life living in heavily conservative spaces as a pretty far out liberal. I’ve had multiple people, in professional settings, say shit like, “Aftagley, you seem so smart, how can you be one of those f*cking brainless liberals?” I have also been called a communist to my face. People felt free to make Stalin comparisons because I thought higher taxes were justified.

            My political views also led to people calling me a baby-killer, a traitor (when people were saying the Hillary would somehow lead to the destruction of our country) and just a host of other stuff that wasn’t great.

            Now true, I can’t judge your subjective feelings of being called a Nazi against my subjective feelings of being called a communist, but I can assure you that I didn’t find it pleasant.

          • rumham says:

            @Aftagley

            My political views also led to people calling me a baby-killer, a traitor

            Perhaps because I’ve been on both shitlists, I can provide a bit of perspective.

            I grew up in a solid red town and I too have been called both of those for my beliefs. I had no fear that it would lead to me losing my job or friends. Nazi is quite different. There is video evidence of it being used to direct physical attacks.

          • I’ve had multiple people, in professional settings, say shit like, “Aftagley, you seem so smart, how can you be one of those f*cking brainless liberals?”

            And I, as a Harvard undergraduate in 1964, had a civil conversation with someone in which I offered defenses for various of Goldwater’s position, argument he clearly had never heard and had no immediate rebuttal for. At the end of which, he asked me if perhaps I was taking all of these positions as a joke.

            That sounds like the equivalent of your experience, minus the obscenity. I have generally described it as the intellectual equivalent of “what’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” How could I be smart enough to make arguments he couldn’t readily rebut and stupid enough to believe in arguments he knew had to be wrong.

          • Clutzy says:

            My political views also led to people calling me a baby-killer, a traitor (when people were saying the Hillary would somehow lead to the destruction of our country) and just a host of other stuff that wasn’t great.

            Babykiller is one that is probably the equivalent. If you use that one the center right does shun you and you certainly won’t be getting published in the WSJ or NRO.

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            If you use that one the center right does shun you and you certainly won’t be getting published in the WSJ or NRO.

            In fact, you can call the left Nazis and be a contributing editor to NRO.

          • albatross11 says:

            If you play your cards right, you can even get people on one side to call you a commie while the other side is calling you a nazi.

            Idiots gonna idiot, nothing to be done about it.

          • Aftagley says:

            @David Friedman

            I have generally described it as the intellectual equivalent of “what’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”

            Can I steal this line? I mean, I’m going to steal this line, but I’d like to know I was doing it with your blessing.

            @Meh
            Biggest belly-laugh I’ve had all week. Thank you.

          • When you are young, you are afraid people will steal your ideas. When you are old, you are afraid they won’t.

        • Jaskologist says:

          Sleepy Joe told black voters that Republicans were “gonna put y’all back in chains.” Slavers aren’t much better than Nazis.

      • AG says:

        The left is more focused on rallying the troops than convincing the enemy to defect.
        Similarly, Christians should theoretically be all about persuading people to convert, but how exactly did they think hellfire and brimstone messaging about the Whores of Babylon and Sodom were going to go over?

  14. anon-e-moose says:

    A few threads ago, several commentators helped me game-plan our wedding, specifically how to put the shindig on with ‘rona, riots etc. I didn’t have time to thank each of you for your input, so I thought I’d provide an update and a belated “thank you!”

    We’re cancelling the ceremony for November, and eloping next Friday with a simple family-only ceremony at a local park. We decided on this for a few reasons, but the primary driver was a mortgage-banker friend offered us a ridiculously good refi rate, but we’d need her credit score to qualify. (romantic, I know) She’s 100% on board with this (seriously!)

    That said, your comments about the relative risks influenced our decision. At the end of the day, the risk of the ceremony being degraded by politics or ‘rona was too great, given the (significant) financial outlay. I think this situation was a really nice real-world application of Utilitarianism and I believe that the rationalist/adjacent community’s framework was the most optimal way to approach the problem. So, uh, thanks!

    • Randy M says:

      I’m glad you are going ahead and getting married rather than putting off the commitment. I wouldn’t consider it eloping if your families are informed and involved. Best wishes to you.

    • I’m not sure it’s proper having your family present if you are eloping. You are supposed to be doing it in secret and against their strong opposition. Ideally with your wife-to-be climbing out a window in the middle of the night.

      • Lambert says:

        Shame there’s a quarantine coming into the UK so you can’t get to Gretna Green quickly. It’s still a popular place to get married.

      • anon-e-moose says:

        As an aside I’m surprised at how low-quality the wiki entry on “elopement” is. I would figure that the topic would be of scholarly interest with the gender dynamics and long history. Their “modern definition” is just a blog link.

    • achenx says:

      “Hey Hobbes, want to see an antelope?”

      (my first post got eaten, probably because it was just a link?)

    • Etoile says:

      That’s a great decision, and in this climate, you won’t offend anyone!
      I don’t see anything wrong with “eloping” if you were planning to anyway. Shotgun weddings are more of an issue if you weren’t intending on getting hitched….

      • anon-e-moose says:

        Apparently, never having done this before, I was unaware the elope had such a specific description. I was under the impression that it was a more polite way to say shotgun wedding. (which still really isn’t the case!)

        • John Schilling says:

          Shotgun wedding and elopement are traditionally close to polar opposites. With elopment, the groom enthusiastically favors the marriage, the bride either shares the enthusiasm or has been talked into going along with it by the groom, and the bride’s father is violently opposed to the whole thing. With a shotgun wedding, the bride’s father enthusiastically and violently favors the marriage, the bride either shares the enthusiasm or has been talked into going along with it by the father, and the groom wants nothing to do with it. Hence the father’s shotgun.

          A classic elopement would be a shotgun not-wedding if not for the bride sneaking out through the window while the guy with the shotgun is sleeping.

    • Deiseach says:

      We’re cancelling the ceremony for November, and eloping next Friday with a simple family-only ceremony at a local park.

      Clandestine marriages were all the rage in the 17th and 18th centuries 🙂 You need your father-in-law to rush up shaking his fist in ineffectual (fake) anger once the vows have been pronounced to give the proper flavour to the whole affair!

    • Ventrue Capital says:

      Mazel tov on your wedding! And sheva brachot for your marriage!

      And as Miss Manners mentioned decades ago, you can hold a sequel wedding or a recommitment ceremony later, whenever you have time and cash, and when society isn’t having a ride-through by the First Horseman of the Apocalypse.

  15. Bobobob says:

    Anyone here a fan of Hate comics? I’m currently rereading the Buddy Bradley strips for the fourth (or fifth) time, and I think Peter Bagge is a genius.

    I’m surprised Bagge isn’t mentioned on this forum more often. He used to contribute libertarian comic strips to Reason magazine, collected in the book Everybody is Stupid Except for Me (which I also highly recommend).

    • MilesM says:

      I just Googled it, and noped the hell out of there.

      For whatever reason, I have a very visceral, extremely negative reaction to certain styles of cartoon art. Crumb, for example, really creeps me out. So do Ren and Stimpy.

      Literally stuff of nightmares, as far as I’m concerned. 🙂

  16. Algon33 says:

    Got a request for psychological help from SSC’s commenteriat regarding a family member. They want help, but are picky about what therapists to talk to. They refuse to read self help books, or even go through some worksheets with me. I’m unsure about what to do. How can I help them?

    Some details may help. They have been suffering from what seems like anxiety to me, with a touch of depression and anger issuess. They lost their home a few years ago during their studies because their father got scammed. They lost their house, and nearly no income. My relative had to start working frantically after graduating in jobs they hated, but found a stable position in a field that’s close to what they initially wanted.

    But their mental state has become worse over the years, and their personality and values have changed. This would be fine, but they are unhappy about how they’ve changed. They’ve become prone to outbursts, more confrontational with close family members. Their relationship with their father has deteriorated, viewing their actions and words in a negative light. They want to help people with their career, but have become unwilling to help out others when it would cost them something. They’re worried about finances, though they’re not in any risk. Their self esteem has plummeted and worry about their future prospects. They are unsatisfied with their job but think they’re never going to get something better. Often, they’ll think nothing matters or burst into tears over their lost current situation.

    • AG says:

      Have they been able to go on a long break at all during these years, or has it all been a hustle to regain stability and then wealth?
      Has anyone sponsored a vacation abroad where they have zero responsibilities for several days in a row, and don’t have to worry about taking a hit to their finances to do so?

      • Algon33 says:

        Yes, they have been taking breaks where they had zero responsibility. Last vacation abroad was 6 months ago and family covered the cost after the vaction ended.

        The hustle… its hard to say. They’ve gotten a new job, which they say is an improvement. Looking at them working from home, their interactions with colleagues are pleasent, but they work long hours and even over the weekend. Though they were doing that before, too.

        Honestly, the shift in personality and stress wouldn’t be so worrying if it wasn’t getting worse, even when situation has been improving steadily.

        Also, thanks for replying!

    • Simulated Knave says:

      It is a cliche, but you can’t help people who don’t want to help themselves.

      Does this person see these things as a problem? Because if they don’t, there’s nothing to be done until that’s fixed.

      • Algon33 says:

        They acknowledge its a problem and have tried to get help, but gave up due to a relatively small issue (they said their assigned therapist was the wrong culture and didn’t get them). I’m just trying to think of a way to route around that, like talking them through a self help book, or finding a good app or so forth.

    • Gerry Quinn says:

      From your description they don’t have a psychiatric issue so much as something that might be helped by religion or philosophy or some other means of taking the view from 30,000 ft.

      They have a bunch of anger and resentment that’s poisoning them, but only they can spit it out.

      • Algon33 says:

        They are fairly religious, their mother is convinced religion is the cure and pushes them towards it. It hasn’t been working.

  17. Anteros says:

    Following on from the discussion on the previous thread about Elon Musk and his Starship. When do you expect the first successful return trip to Mars? As in, at least one human being making it back to Earth, alive?

    I often find myself thinking that there was barely half a century between the Wright brothers getting a few feet off the ground, and men walking around on the Moon. So, getting to Mars is just a further-away version of the Moon problem, right?

    Except that the the particular problems of a Mars trip haven’t actually been solved by the technology of getting to the Moon and back. I’m thinking duration – people coming back from three months on the Space Station can barely stand up when they get back. Two years or more in a weightless environment? Maybe human beings simply can’t manage that. The Radiation problem?

    As a result I wouldn’t bet on it happening in the next 50 years. Anybody more optimistic?

    • Lambert says:

      We choose to go to the Moon! We choose to go to the Moon…We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because we can’t see the future and don’t know the Outer Space Treaty is the best way forwards; because the goal might give us technological superiority in what might be the next theatre of the cold war.

    • AlesZiegler says:

      I agree with Lambert. If the first person walking on the surface of Mars will be Chinese, boost for the global prestige of China will be massive. Which is why they will try to do it as fast as possible.

      • Anteros says:

        Doesn’t that increase the probability of there being missions that go pear shaped – lots of dead astronauts? A couple of failed attempts would likely erode a lot of enthusiasm for the whole project.

        • AlesZiegler says:

          During the Cold War, there were also dead astronauts and cosmonauts, That did not stop the Space race.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      Radiation won’t be a problem for the first mission, unless someone decides they don’t want to do it anyway and tries to make it the problem. Radiation will be an issue for colonization, but not the first trip.

      Gravity may be a bigger issue. People have been able to get back on their feet, although shakily, after a year in zero-g if they kept up with exercise. Current plans seem to be ignoring any attempt at artificial gravity. And we don’t really have a way of finding out besides subjecting someone to it.

    • Purplehermann says:

      Is there a reason that wearing weights and using resistance bands for weight training isn’t enough?

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        Scott Kelly was stumbling around after his year in space. And he was disciplined about his exercise.

        The effects of zero-gravity are often overstated. But they are real and may be actual mission stoppers if the unknown unknowns are bad enough.

  18. albatross11 says:

    Conservatives have been at least as enthusiastic as liberals in the US about using the police and justice systems to punish people for using drugs not approved by the state, or for engaging in transactions like prostitution which are mutually agreeable to the parties involved but forbidden by the state. Conservatives seem to have been at least as big on the huge increase in prison population in the US as liberals. And at least as big supporters of mass surveillance on the public.

    This makes me think that conservatives overall are at least as big a threat to people just trying to live their lives in peace, or to the continuation of individual liberty, as liberals are. I mean, when I was growing up, the definition of living in a police state was that jackbooted thugs in black would kick in your door in the middle of the night, kill anyone who looked like resisting, etc. In the US these days, that’s just a pleasant Thursday evening in lots of big cities (hell, sometimes they even get the right address), and it’s mostly done to try to prevent adults from putting the wrong chemicals in their bodies. Similarly, as a kid, the image I had of a police state was where you had to show an internal passport to travel and where armed agents of the state went around demanding your papers all the time. Indeed, I grew up thinking that kind of police-state shit was not workable in the US because of our high gun ownership. Turns out I was mistaken about that.

    I see zero reason to think that the right is less a threat to my freedom than the left. They’ve just got different parts of the growing police state they prefer to support than the liberals.

    • Erusian says:

      In the US these days, that’s just a pleasant Thursday evening in lots of big cities (hell, sometimes they even get the right address), and it’s mostly done to try to prevent adults from putting the wrong chemicals in their bodies.

      This is wrong. Drug arrests make up, at most, a sixth of all arrests (and that’s excluding certain kinds of crimes like traffic violations). And of those, 25% were for driving under the influence, which has massive potential externalities. Drug crimes are a small part of the problem, albeit an egregious one.

      The most common reasons for arrest are petty crimes like disturbing the peace or minor larceny. This includes a lot of those no-knock raids, often chasing down some petty thief or another.

      With all that said, I broadly agree that there’s been a creeping intrusion of police power into victimless crimes and an increasing acceptance the government can do things like break into your home or round people up. I find it all very disturbing, honestly. But I’m not sure either side really wants to solve it, rather than weaponize it.

    • Well... says:

      it’s mostly done to try to prevent adults from putting the wrong chemicals in their bodies.

      Ostensibly that’s right, but if you look at the details it’s easy to get the impression it’s done because the government gets to keep whatever they plunder in the name of preventing adults from putting the wrong chemicals in their bodies. And for that we can largely thank Joe Biden, who found a dusty old civil asset forfeiture bill in (I think) the 1970s, picked it up, dusted it off, and blasted it through congress so he could look tougher on crime.

      I hate on Joe Biden a lot for this (and he deserves every bit of it and a lot more) but it’s worth nothing here that the war on drugs has a long history of progressive support — sometimes almost exclusively progressive support — going back long before even alcohol prohibition.

      I see zero reason to think that the right is less a threat to my freedom than the left. They’ve just got different parts of the growing police state they prefer to support than the liberals.

      But yeah, blue and gray tribe people have been saying this since forever.

    • Wency says:

      All of the things you describe as liberty don’t sound remotely appealing to me. Doing drugs, visiting prostitutes. Receiving lighter sentences for petty crimes that I don’t want to commit.

      From where I’m sitting (which is obviously not where everyone is sitting), a crackdown on crime FEELS like increased liberty. Freedom to walk around alone at night. For my wife to run errands unescorted. I’m old enough to remember the crack epidemic, the feeling that my city’s downtown was a warzone, a place you absolutely did not go after dark. And I remember a few very scary near-misses my family had when we violated that rule under special circumstances, such as leaving a baseball game, never to be repeated. I enjoy feeling free to bring my family to a baseball game in that same city nowadays, this time without the fear.

      Now, perhaps there are better ways to reduce crime than what we’re doing. My point isn’t to debate that, but just to observe that what we’re doing doesn’t FEEL like decreased liberty to me; I would have to put a lot of effort trying to get into a particular headspace for it to feel that way.

      • Lodore says:

        From where I’m sitting (which is obviously not where everyone is sitting), a crackdown on crime FEELS like increased liberty. Freedom to walk around alone at night. For my wife to run errands unescorted.

        Fair enough, you acknowledge that you’re speaking from how you feel about this. But when you think about it, you should also see that your right to go about your business unmolested should not trump my right to drop some LSD unmolested in the privacy of my own home. For the fact is, we can both get what we want without either of us impinging on the other.

        Is defending someone’s right to take crack ever doing them a favour? Absolutely not, but neither is turning crack addicts into criminals so that even if they do recover, they’re dogged by criminal records. Crack, like heroin, is a drug of desperation: the problem is endemic poverty and hopelessness, not the legality of the drug. Disenfranchised people are going to take it whether it’s legal or not.

        All of which is to say (1) not all drugs are the same, and (2) don’t confuse the symptom with the underlying pathology.

      • Eugene Dawn says:

        All of the things you describe as liberty don’t sound remotely appealing to me. Doing drugs, visiting prostitutes. Receiving lighter sentences for petty crimes that I don’t want to commit.

        To many people, owning guns isn’t remotely appealing. Can we now agree to cross of “banning guns” from the list of freedoms liberals are against?

    • SamChevre says:

      Just flagging that I absolutely do NOT agree that employers should not be able to discriminate by race/age/sex: I think they should be free to do so, and in some cases should do so.

    • Lodore says:

      The thread before last, I made the (to me) unobjectionable remark that calling the cops on some 16 year old peddling drugs was uncharitable, on account of the possibility that it could ruin the kid’s life. (The context was a post by Nancy Leibowitz, where she related a story that some busybody wanted to call the cops on some black kid in a clinic when she saw him with a wad of cash and assumed him to be a drug dealer. My point was that even if he was a drug dealer, so long as he wasn’t dealing drugs there and then it’s no one’s business.)

      I was dismayed by the hang-’em-and-flog-’em response from participants in a rationalist forum. No attempt to get beyond tabloid caricatures, no effort to inhabit the perspective of someone else, no attempt to not be led by a media narrative, no appreciation that different values are not wrong values.

      All of which is to say, I agree: the threat to liberty comes far more plausibly from the paternalistic attempt to condemn (and thereby facilitate control of) private behaviours. Liberals, to be sure, have their own authoritarian streak, but liberal pieties don’t (yet) land you in prison––conservative ones do.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        I was shocked, too, though more from seeing the lack of concern for doing damage to someone who wasn’t a drug dealer.

        Once the fear of drug dealer’s was set off, it seemed like there were people who weren’t thinking about other possibilities.

      • Deiseach says:

        No attempt to get beyond tabloid caricatures, no effort to inhabit the perspective of someone else, no attempt to not be led by a media narrative, no appreciation that different values are not wrong values.

        Yeah! How very awful of me to base my opinion on the actual 16 year old druggies, drop outs and petty criminals I interacted with (thankfully for a very limited time as I’m no longer involved in that particular field of education provision)!

        I should totally be cheerleading the kinds of little scumbags who got a vulnerable girl on the path of drug addiction which eventually led her to picking up a heroin habit, becoming a single mother and then proceeding on to a jail sentence for stabbing someone.

        It’s okay for them to run other people’s lives but nobody should make them face the consequences of their deeds by calling the cops, how very terrible that would be!

        The original post asked should people make assumptions about 16 year olds, and the answer to that plainly is “no”.

        But your question was “what kind of horrible person would call the cops on a real 16 year old drug dealer and ruin their life” and well, here I am. If the whole bloody question was confined to “drugs are only indulged in by nice middle-class kids when they go to college and spend four years sowing their wild oats, then they graduate, get a good job and sober up – or at least maintain a discreet habit of not-very-hard fun substances that they can afford out of their good job and indulgence in which is not at a level which renders them unable to function”, then we’d all be happy to say “good luck and good bye”.

        But the situtation is not like that. A lot of junkies are going to wreck their lives, the lives of their families, and the lives of anyone they come into contact with, and the same with the drug dealers. What the fuck do you think all the complaints about anti-social behaviour on housing estates are about? And such criminal families really do instigate reigns of terror where the other tenants are afraid of physical harm to themselves and their own houses if they ever come out and make a formal complaint to the police or the local authority, which makes it very hard to deal with the whole problem because you can’t evict people with nothing to go on but hearsay.

        Anti-social behaviour is defined in the Housing (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2009 as:

        “(a) the manufacture, production, preparation, importation, exportation, sale, supply, possession for the purposes of sale or supply or distribution of a controlled drug (within the meaning of the Misuse of Drugs Acts 1977 and 1984),

        Or

        (b) any behaviour which causes or is likely to cause any significant or persistent danger, injury, damage, alarm, loss or fear to any person living, working or otherwise lawfully in or in the vicinity of a house provided by a housing authority under the Housing Acts 1966 to 2009 or Part V of the Planning and Development Act 2000, or a housing estate in which the house is situate or a site and, without prejudice to the foregoing, includes;

        i. violence, threats, intimidation, coercion, harassment or serious obstruction of any person,

        ii. behaviour which causes any significant or persistent impairment of a person’s use or enjoyment of his or her home, or

        iii. Damage to or defacement by writing or other marks of any property, including a person’s home.”

        And if a 16 year old idiot thinks drug dealing is the way to easy money and the good life, I am plenty happy to let the police and courts get involved before they clamber up the ranks of criminal gangs like we have in my own country and start murdering each other in turf and trade control wars and vendettas.

        • AG says:

          So the issue isn’t that American police are treating blacks too harshly compared to whites, it’s that they aren’t treating whites nearly harshly enough to be equal to their treatment of blacks?

        • DinoNerd says:

          Yes, basing your opinion of random 16 year olds on actual 16 year old druggies is the height of rationality.

          If you believe that e.g. 90% of 16 year olds are druggies, and have some evidence to support it.

          Otherwise your logic seems to suggest that you should be punished for whatever crime(s) anyone in your demographic has ever committed.

          • CatCube says:

            Where on earth are you getting this expansion to “random 16 year olds?” The hypothetical posed by @Lodore was that the 16 year old was a known drug dealer.

          • DinoNerd says:

            I was under this impression this thread started with a 16 year old carrying lots of cash, at something like an eye doctor’s office.

          • CatCube says:

            The original thread was about a 16 year old who had done nothing other than flash some cash. In that case, I agree that calling the cops is unreasonable. There are plenty of examples of people with lots of cash and good reasons to have lots of cash where the cops go “Yoink! Ours now!

            @Lodore then posited that it shouldn’t matter if you *knew* the kid was a drug dealer:
            (From the post last OT)

            Let’s the say the kid was a drug dealer.

            (From Lodore’s post above this one, second deep, emphasis mine to show that it was stated outright the kid was selling drugs, and not an assumption based on possession of cash)

            I made the (to me) unobjectionable remark that calling the cops on some 16 year old peddling drugs was uncharitable

            That’s the one to which @Deiseach responded. I agree with her that in that case, you should call the cops.

        • Lodore says:

          So let me get this straight: for a period, you were involved in education provision for a cohort that you are happy to describe as “little scumbags” and “16 year old idiot[s]”, for whom you are “happy calling the cops even if that does ruin [their] life”. OK. I’m going to suggest that you have a think about attitudes that might be helpful in working with troubled kids and attitudes that aren’t. Even allowing everything you say (and I don’t), troubled kids don’t all (or even mostly) manifest as bad poetry and self-harm. Teenagers explode, not implode, and in ways that can hurt others. A charitable (dunno, maybe even Christian?) response is to understand the human motivation for the behaviour, while working to change the behaviour. Love the sinner, hate the sin–right?

          A lot of junkies are going to wreck their lives, the lives of their families, and the lives of anyone they come into contact with, and the same with the drug dealers.

          Getting addicted to drugs is hard. You need to have poor interpersonal relationships and/or mental health, lots of free time, and no hope in the future. There are practically no addicts who would not have presented with psychosocial and addiction issues anyway had they not been exposed to illegal drugs. This is particularly true of junkies: as a proportion of drug users, heroin users are small.

          As for drug dealers, I think you need to understand that it’s not so simple as “evil drug dealers terrorise otherwise delightful neighbourhood”. Usually, there are cross-cutting webs of loyalty, enmity, and involvement, with a general animus against involving the police in anything being the real issue in preventing crimes getting reported. But I’m probably wrong, because the tabloids say it’s like Mad Max, and everything printed in a newspaper is true.

          What the fuck do you think all the complaints about anti-social behaviour on housing estates are about?

          What the fuck I think it’s about is underage drinking, groups of teenagers making fusspots feel unsafe while they take Tiddles for a walk, and curtain twitchers getting afrit when an unfamiliar car parks twice on the street. Sometimes the aforementioned teenagers will have a spliff with their cider, creating a funny smell. (This has the salutary effect of sending them to sleep.) Most kids with behavioural issues take drugs; not all kids who take drugs have behavioural issues.

          Drug gangs really are not the problem, except in a tiny handful of estates, where the police usually roll them over in few years anyway.

          Look, here’s how this works. A kid sells some week or coke for the social cachet when they’re 16. A small proportion, who probably have links to organised crime to begin with, graduate to becoming professional dealers. The 99% who don’t get jobs, raise families, pay the mortgage, and occasionally enjoy the odd joint or pill. There are not enough drugs in the world to keep all the 16 year old dealers employed. Do you really think your anxiety merits blighting people’s lives?

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            “Getting addicted to drugs is hard. You need to have poor interpersonal relationships and/or mental health, lots of free time, and no hope in the future.”

            This is just not true considering the number of celebrities and doctors who get addicted.

            I also think drug dealing can make neighborhoods dangerous. It’s not *just* horrible adults who hate teenagers, though horrible adults who hate teenagers are also a factor.

            Have a theory just for the fun of it: what if some of the hatred of teenagers is an aftereffect of having been bullied by teenagers when one was much younger?

          • Deiseach says:

            Lodore, if you’re happy to let 16 year olds run around peddling drugs to get cash for consumer goods, go you.

            If I see some 16 year old with a pile of cash but I don’t know where they got it, I won’t bother my head about it.

            If I know the 16 year old is selling drugs, I am very much extremely calling the rozzers.

            I don’t know who you know or where you live. I worked in a school where a 15 year old girl died from sniffing glue because she was hanging around with kids who thought that was how you have fun, where 12 year olds were bargaining with the principal about “okay, you can smoke your cigarettes at the school gate but not on the school grounds” and where kids were coming from backgrounds where we had a pair of sisters who were lovely girls – and all the teachers were notified to be on alert because they had attempted suicide before and were at-risk of the same.

            When those kids dropped out, they went on to another programme that I also worked at, where some of them did make efforts to turn their lives around but some just kept on sinking. The weaker ones who were overly influenced by the scumbags didn’t get any benefits out of associating with “16 year old drug dealers how uncharitable to ruin their lives”. Those little bastards – and yes, I’m unapologetic about using this language – were ruining the lives of others without any care about the harm they were doing.

            So if all the social workers and intervention programmes and co-operation with the local Police Drug Officer doesn’t help, then the last resort is to minimise the harm and that means calling the cops or other relevant authorities on the gangsters, be they 16 or 60. I would prefer that they get help and turn their lives around, but when they are offered help and refuse it, snickering up their sleeves at the stupid people being bleeding-hearts, and they put their feet on the path of crime and deeper involvement with crime, then I prefer that they don’t go on to a successful career as drug gang enforcers, and if that means “ruining” their lives by calling the police, so be it.

            My own opinion is that I think they are ruining their own lives and that not calling the cops isn’t doing much because they see they can get away with it on account of “oh my circumstances are so hard”.

            I don’t know your 16 year olds who do a little amateur peddling of soft recreational substances then go on to have productive lives as good citizens. I do know the people who drop through the cracks and sink down further and further, and who are not benefited at all by 16 year old schoolmates selling them drugs and getting them contacts for the harder stuff.

            I don’t know university kids who played around with fun party substances but never developed a habit that would interfere with their later careers and lives because I never went to university and the people I saw in my work didn’t go to university; they were kids from vulnerable and broken families attending a school formally classified as DEIS, adults with low to no literacy levels, school drop outs (including the kids enticed into petty crime as catspaws by the lure of easy cash), and people in need of social housing and various other government assistance programmes. And they were all white, if that makes any bloody difference.

            Seeing ruined lives every day I went to work made me, already conservative socially, very much hard-line on things like “legalise drugs”.

        • rumham says:

          I should totally be cheerleading the kinds of little scumbags who got a vulnerable girl on the path of drug addiction which eventually led her to picking up a heroin habit,

          I’m sorry to pile on, but no one seems to have asked this: Why does the boy have agency here and not the girl?

          • Deiseach says:

            Lodore’s boy is not to be blamed or chided because that would ruin his life. The girl I knew was vulnerable – not very intellectually able, from an unstable home, easily influenced – the kind of “falling into bad company” that we old fogies warn about.

            If Lodore’s boy is vulnerable then yes, get him help. But from Lodore’s tone, I took it that it’s a case of “who the hell cares, let him make money fast and easy whatever way he can”.

        • Fahundo says:

          It’s okay for them to run other people’s lives but nobody should make them face the consequences of their deeds by calling the cops

          At least the scumbags can be assed to ruin someone’s life themselves, rather than hiding behind the state.

          • CatCube says:

            I don’t want people dealing drugs out of my apartment complex. Period. Point blank. Either I can appeal to the law, or I can be “assed to ruin their lives [myself]” by getting with the other neighbors to put on ski masks, burn their car, and break into their house in the dead of night to threaten them.

            Since the whole point of ceding power to a lawful authority is to eliminate mob rule, calling the cops is strictly better than this solution. After all, if you call the cops the kid at least gets a lawyer to make sure there’s some evidence he’s dealing drugs, while mobs are famously loose with their standards of proof.

            N.B.: While I’m not necessarily in favor of drug legalization (I’m not convinced it won’t just change the distribution of problems rather than solve them, though I’m only weakly against legalization), if we did that I don’t have any objection to somebody opening a storefront to sell drugs…as long as it’s somewhere else, away from where I live. I mean, I object in some general sense, but I recognize that if it’s been legalized then they have a legal right to open a storefront and wouldn’t put up a zoning fight if it’s not in my neighborhood. And at least a storefront would likely be some blocks away. But yeah, running drugs out of a home next to mine? Nope.

          • Eric T says:

            I don’t want people dealing drugs out of my apartment complex. Period. Point blank.

            Out of curiosity, is it the drug dealing you have an issue with, or all the things that come with it (crime, noise, loitering, potential violence)?

            Would you have an issue if it was like some 20-something high school dropout who occasionally sells weed but is otherwise harmless living next to you?

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @Eric T: I used to live in Portland, Oregon. I see a big difference between reducing the red tape around marijuana from “a felony to possess” all the way to “legal to sell out your residentially-zoned house” vs letting people get away with shooting heroin at all. Homeless addicts stealing for their next fix when they were functional and making biohazards by discarding their used needles and defecating on public and other people’s private property when not was a daily nightmare.

          • albatross11 says:

            CatCube:

            Isn’t that just zoning? I mean, I want alcohol and gambling to be legal, but I don’t want a bar, liquor store, or casino next door to me either.

          • CatCube says:

            @Eric T

            Out of curiosity, is it the drug dealing you have an issue with, or all the things that come with it (crime, noise, loitering, potential violence)?

            I guess I’d say 80/20 the petty crime, though note I have a visceral hatred for thievery, especially the kind of thievery where somebody does vast amounts of very expensive damage for piddling monetary gain. (Or even death to bystanders, like manhole theft.)

            However, I don’t know that it’s actually possible to separate “dealing drugs” from “petty crime” like that. If you’ve got a tweaker smashing car windows–costing hundreds of dollars each–to get $10 for his meth, I can’t see how he’s not going to be smashing those windows because the meth is manufactured by Bristol-Myers Squibb vs. a bald guy named “Cheeto.”

            Would you have an issue if it was like some 20-something high school dropout who occasionally sells weed but is otherwise harmless living next to you?

            I guess technically I’d have an issue with it, but I’m also not going around doing detective work to find this, either. If he’s so low-key I don’t notice it, by definition I guess it’s “harmless”, but if it starts to become noticeable, I think you’re starting to get real danger of the harms discussed above. At that point, yeah, I’m dropping a dime.

            Of course, I live in nice neighborhoods where an obvious drug house would get quickly hemmed up by the cops. If you let something like that fester to where the cops go, “Eh, that’s just this neighborhood” then it’s too late. You have to keep your neighborhood nice, because once that plate is smashed you can’t put it back together.

            Think of it in relation to the problems with cops we’re having. If the cops never got the opportunity to be doing stuff like kneeling on Floyd’s neck on a routine basis, it’d be easy to convince everybody, including police unions, to throw people who do this against a wall. However, once it becomes “normal” actually enforcing this prohibition means hemming up a higher percentage of cops that starts to turn it into a problem where the union leaders can’t just agree with you, because of the problems it’ll cause with their own constituency, as everybody in the union feels like they’re getting juked by their leadership.

            Problems are always easier to fix early rather than letting them fester. That’s what leads to the expression, “A few bad apples spoil the barrel.” Note that that statement is literally true–try it with a bowl of fruit if you don’t believe me. If you have an apple that’s starting to rot, put it in a bowl with a few fresh apples and watch how apples you would have expected to last a week or more turn rotten in days, radiating out from the bad one. You have to get rid of the bad apples when you find them, because the problems can get away from you fast.

          • CatCube says:

            @albatross11

            Yup. I was more trying to preempt the obvious response to my comment of “well, what if drug dealing was legal?”

            As my comment above shows, I’m prone to rambling which often obscures my point.

          • Jake R says:

            @CatCube

            You probably know this but some studies have shown that meth is about as addictive as nicotine. There’s a lot of person to person variance and it wouldn’t surprise me if meth ended up being more addictive, but I think they’re in the same ballpark. Remarkably few people break windows to steal $10 to buy cigarettes.

            We also have the “natural” experiment of prohibition in the US, which showed a pretty clear relationship between legality of the substance and associated crime.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @Jake R: If meth heads and crack heads are just much less romantic versions of 1920s bootleggers, that doesn’t change my position on how heroin should be illegal with strong enforcement.

          • CatCube says:

            @Jake R

            And yet, it’s the tweakers and not the people buying cigarettes for whom I need to design conduit encasements to guard against their copper theft.

            (I didn’t like thieves before I got this job, but I really started to dislike them once I realized just how much extra money it costs to defensively deal with these fuckers.)

          • Jake R says:

            @CatCube
            I should have been more clear. You said:

            If you’ve got a tweaker smashing car windows–costing hundreds of dollars each–to get $10 for his meth, I can’t see how he’s not going to be smashing those windows because the meth is manufactured by Bristol-Myers Squibb vs. a bald guy named “Cheeto.”

            My point is there are some pretty good reasons to believe he would not be smashing those windows if the meth was manufactured by Bristol Myers Squibb. The strongest evidence is that poor nicotine addicts don’t smash windows or steal copper to buy cigarettes.

          • CatCube says:

            @Jake R

            You’re going to have to articulate these “pretty good reasons”, because you can wibble all you want about how “studies” show that meth is only as addictive as cigarettes, but the fact is that there seems to be a significant difference between the behaviors of the two. I’ve seen people going through nicotine withdrawal be kind of a pain in the ass, but I’ve never seen one of them mug somebody to buy smokes.

          • Jake R says:

            @CatCube

            the fact is that there seems to be a significant difference between the behaviors of the two.

            Yes, there is a big difference in the observed behavior of meth addicts and nicotine addicts. The logical next step is to look at what differences in their circumstances might account for the difference in behavior.

            The popular account is that meth is just that much worse than nicotine. Nicotine makes ordinary people more of a pain to deal with, but meth turns ordinary people into monsters. But if it turns out that meth is not more addictive than nicotine (and this is still an “if”), then this explanation seems insufficient. So what other difference of circumstance could account for the difference in behavior?

            I am proposing that the difference is that meth is illegal and nicotine is not. There are a couple of ways in which this could make the meth addict more likely to commit other criminal acts. For one, the restriction of supply by law enforcement serves to increase the price. In fact, law enforcement agencies measure their success at drug interdiction by the street price of the drug. When the price goes up, they’re doing a better job of keeping drugs off the streets. On the one hand, this increased price reduces demand, at least to the extent that a drug addict is a rational economic actor. On the other hand, it’s not a stretch to see how this might lead to meth addicts committing theft to pay for their habit more often than nicotine addicts.

            Another possible cause is the effect of the norm violation. A nicotine addict is a law-abiding citizen. If he were to break into a car or steal copper, that would make him a criminal. The meth addict is already a criminal, so what’s a little more crime? The deterrent effect of punishment is already hanging over his head. It seems plausible to me that the risks of criminal prosecution become more salient to someone going from 0 crimes to 1 compared to someone going from 1 crime to 2. If a nicotine addict turned to petty theft, he’d be risking his entire lifestyle. For the meth addict, that ship has already sailed.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @Jake R:

            I am proposing that the difference is that meth is illegal and nicotine is not.

            Did alcohol consumers turn into dangerous people who stole bits of copper for their next fix during Prohibition, or did all the new violent and property crime come from the dapper men with Thompson guns, i.e. suppliers?

          • Jake R says:

            @LMC
            I tried to find information on petty crime during prohibition, but any search terms I try just turn up articles about the massive increase in organized crime. I’m willing to accept that it probably wasn’t very significant. This is a very good point and I should update my confidence accordingly.

            That said I’m now going to try to weasel out. According to this article alcohol prices during prohibition increased by a factor of 3-4. Several states apparently just didn’t bother to enforce prohibition. The ones that did carved out lots of exceptions like drug stores being able to sell alcohol as medicine. Most of all, though, the police were just utterly outclassed by the rise of organized crime. These things added up to a much weaker interdiction effort than we see with illegal substances today.

            I don’t know what heroin, cocaine, or meth would cost in a world where they were legal. Hell I don’t even know what they cost now. My guess would be that the difference is at least an order of magnitude. It seems like drug lords smuggling cocaine across the border are willing to tolerate massive losses and still remain very profitable. I’d love to see a comparison of how hard it was to get alcohol during prohibition vs how hard it is to obtain illegal drugs today.

            I’ll admit that even if I’m wrong about all of this I think I’d still be in favor of legalizing drugs. If you want people to stop committing theft, crack down on theft. This whole argument boils down to “people who do thing X are more likely to do illegal thing Y, so we should make X illegal too.” That seems like a precedent we might regret setting. And we’ve barely even gotten into the costs and efficacy of enforcement. The drug war could pay for a lot of broken car windows.

          • ana53294 says:

            One of the reasons nicotine addicts don’t go around smashing car windows to get 10$ to buy a pack of cigarettes, is because nicotine addicts can afford 10$ a day worth of nicotine. Because they have jobs.

            I don’t think it’s the illegallity of meth that makes crack or meth heads unreliable, untrustworthy agressive workers nobody in their right mind would want to hire. I think if we made nicotine illegal, and you could only buy contraband nicotine, employers would still hire nicotine addicts, only demanding they don’t smoke on the premises (like they do currently).

            Many employers, including the feds, currently kinda ignore employees who smoke pot even in places where it’s illegal. Why? Because a worker who gets stoned every evening can be functional like the guy who gets smashed every evening, but the crack addict can’t.

          • Garrett says:

            > Because a worker who gets stoned every evening can be functional like the guy who gets smashed every evening, but the crack addict can’t.

            Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

            Another set of possibilities is that the circumstances which made someone turn to meth are the same which made them unemployable in the first place. Poor job/life prospects, poor impulse control, whatever.
            For poor job/life prospects, this could be remedied by having decent employment opportunities in the first place. Note that the places which seem to be ravaged the worst are those which are poor in the first place. For poor impulse control or whatever (funny, since it’s in the same category of drugs used to treat ADHD), they’re still going to be non-productive members of society. Perhaps they’ll punch in fewer car windows, but they’ll still be miserable and unproductive members of society.

          • ana53294 says:

            The idea that people were screwed up before they started taking drugs, that’s why they started taking drugs, seems reasonable.

            But the thing is, drugs will make any situation worse.

            Nicotine, despite all its addictiveness, doesn’t seem to affect people that much, except making them jittery and more active.

            Pot makes people stupid.

            Alcohol affects impulse control.

            And stronger drugs destroy people even more than these softer drugs. I have seen what happened to people who started taking drugs. It’s horrible. These weren’t the worst, or even the stupidest people I’ve met. But what they turned into… Much worse than the stupider, worse people around them who didn’t take those drugs (everybody in those circles was drinking, smoking pot and tobacco; not everybody took harder drugs).

            I’m totally not convinced that drugs do bad things to people because they’re illegal. The guys whose life I’ve seen ruined haven’t faced any legal consequences because of their drug consumption. Their lives are still ruined. It’s not the law that destroyed their lives; it’s the drugs.

          • SamChevre says:

            I think there’s a very important difference between ‘addictiveness’ and ‘impairs judgment/perception’. Caffeine and nicotine are very addictive, but most people can drive safely and climb safely after having several cups of coffee. Alcohol is not very addictive, but very few people can drive or climb safely after several drinks.

          • AG says:

            Wait, is caffeine really that addictive? I read that caffeine sensitivity can basically recover in 72 hours, so someone can basically stop over a weekend.
            And while people have talked about getting withdrawal symptoms from coffee, you rarely see any stories from tea, even though some strains of green and black have the same caffeine content per cup as coffee.

          • ana53294 says:

            And there was a time and place when some of these drugs were legal, and they still ruined lives in ways nicotine or alcohol didn’t.

            The Opium wars were about the British being allowed to sell opium to China (I know it’s more complicated than this, but that’s not the topic). So producing, selling and manufacturing opium became legal. The lives of Chinese consumers of opium were ruined by the consumption.

            And the fact is, the tobacco industry was also evil, they even employed slaves, but consumption of tobacco did not ruin their lives.

            For a literary example of the life of a person ruined by opium despite it being legal, you’ve got Anna Karenina.

          • John Schilling says:

            I don’t think it’s the illegallity of meth that makes crack or meth heads unreliable, untrustworthy agressive workers nobody in their right mind would want to hire.

            But lots of people hire adderall users, even when there is only a nod and a wink to any medical need for it. And adderall is basically Upper Middle Class meth.

            Possibly middle-class mores enable one to be a functional drug addict, whereas the same or similar drug used by someone who never internalized things like “I need to actually be at work on time every day, and be polite to that jerk who thinks he’s the boss of me” amplifies existing dysfunctional behavior.

            If we thought it mattered, we could demand that legal meth be formulated like adderall. But I’m not sure it would matter.

          • ana53294 says:

            I haven’t heard of much issues with adderal users becoming aggressive or problematic workers.

            It could be middle class culture, it could be that the dose is carefully selected and there are many incentives not to take more than one pill (if your prescription runs out before the next one, you can’t legally purchase more pills), so you need to keep control of the dose.

            Opiates are, ISTM, more of a problem than anphetamines. Even legally produced ones create a lot of problems.

            I just disagree with the idea that the problems from drugs come from their illegality. Drugs are bad on their own, even if they are legal. Like the opiates. They can also be good, but they are pretty bad.

            Now, I favor decriminalization, but my problem with legalization is that I don’t want to be living in a world where drugs are an accepted social norm. And ISTM that legalization of marihuana led to social acceptance.

          • Matt M says:

            I mean, one other key difference is that since Adderall is a legal/prescription drug, this means that if you already have a job (with decent insurance) you can get it basically for free (or at least heavily subsidized). Even if you’d just as soon take meth, there aren’t any employers who will provide it to you at little-to-no-cost as a perk of employment.

            And then, once you do start taking it, you become consciously aware of the fact that your continued supply is contingent upon your keeping your job, which definitely adds to your motivation to show up to work on time.

          • Fahundo says:

            And ISTM that legalization of marihuana led to social acceptance.

            It was pretty socially acceptable before it was legal.

          • John Schilling says:

            And then, once you do start taking it, you become consciously aware of the fact that your continued supply is contingent upon your keeping your job,

            How so? There’s no requirement that one be employed to purchase adderall, and at fifty cents a pill I’m pretty sure any middle-class unemployed is going to be able to find the money.

          • Lambert says:

            > there aren’t any employers who will provide it to you at little-to-no-cost as a perk of employment.

            Not since VE day, at least

          • Garrett says:

            A key element of pharmacology involves administration. If you want “legal meth” it’s available as Desoxyn, used for the treatment of ADHD and narcolepsy. But that’s taking it orally whereas most meth-heads are smoking it which impacts the rate of onset. This has a significant impact on the “high” achieved as well as the risk of addiction. Scott would be in a better position to explain the details as it involves brains and medicine which is kinda what he does.

            Also note, this is one of the reasons why the black/white crack vs. cocaine issue is less obvious than people think. Crack, since it’s smoked, has much greater risks for drug abuse even though it’s the “same” drug being absorbed buccally or intranasally.

            Also, alcohol withdrawal (along with benzos) can be fatal. Not so with opiate withdrawl, though it may wish you were dead.

          • albatross11 says:

            Smoking probably makes you a little more productive and functional (other than the smell) in the short-term. I think meth might have a somewhat different sort of effect. OTOH, a hell of a lot of people are on very similar drugs for ADHD, so it’s not obvious to me what’s going on.

            Crack was and is associated with a hell of a lot of low-level crime and dependency, but cocaine (same drug, different price point and social context) seems not to be. It’s an interesting question why not….

          • Clutzy says:

            Crack was and is associated with a hell of a lot of low-level crime and dependency, but cocaine (same drug, different price point and social context) seems not to be. It’s an interesting question why not….

            Crack and Cocaine are, in fact, not the same drug. By reacting cocaine with a base (typically baking soda) it is converted to its free base form which has a different boiling point allowing it to be smoked instead of ingested or snorted. Smoking increases the uptake compared to snorting (making it similar to the speed of absorption for injecting cocaine) resulting in an intense but short lived (5-10 minutes) high. Whereas use of the HCl form through snorting results in a much longer high, being 30-60 minutes generally.

          • DinoNerd says:

            Wait, is caffeine really that addictive? I read that caffeine sensitivity can basically recover in 72 hours, so someone can basically stop over a weekend.

            My experience, when I was overusing caffeine in a big way, was that I could taper off caffeine without headaches, at a taper rate I could have quoted exactly at the time (=? one cup per day less per week?) when I anticipated circumstances where needing coffee would be inconvenient (vacations in the back woods) and/or I’d be forced to drink it in forms I didn’t enjoy. Quitting cold turkey was miserable; I never found out how long it would take to get rid of the headaches, because I was never forced to persist.

            But this is strictly anecdata – one person, at one stage of their life.

          • Deiseach says:

            Do you mean that I am hiding behind the state? I thought we, the people are the state which derives its legitmacy from the consent of the governed.

            But hey Fahundo, you don’t want the pigs hassling you, I understand. I can recommend several housing estates here for you to move into where the self-motivated scumbags will be willing to fuck your life up completely without the forces of the state getting involved in any way. Enjoy living under the tyranny of the feral!

    • teneditica says:

      Discussions about whether “the right” or “the left” is worse are completely worthless.

  19. Simultan says:

    I didn’t see this posted here yet, but forgive me if it’s old news.

    Last October, as the Bolivian election results were being counted, the Organization of American States published a statement that cast strong doubts on that election’s fairness, which ultimately stoked protests resulting in Evo Morales’s removal from power. But last Sunday the New York Times wrote:

    Now, a study by independent researchers, using data obtained by The New York Times from the Bolivian electoral authorities, has found that the Organization of American States’ statistical analysis was itself flawed.

    The conclusion that Mr. Morales’s share of the vote jumped inexplicably in the final ballots relied on incorrect data and inappropriate statistical techniques, the researchers found.

    “We took a hard look at the O.A.S.’s statistical evidence and found problems with their methods,” said Francisco Rodríguez, an economist who teaches Latin American studies at Tulane University. “Once we correct those problems, the O.A.S.’s results go away, leaving no statistical evidence of fraud.”

    […]

    The O.A.S. consultant who conducted their statistical analysis, Professor Irfan Nooruddin of Georgetown University, said the new study misrepresented his work and was wrong. He did not provide details and did not share his methods or data with the authors of the study, despite repeated requests.

    Here and here (and here from last year) are Andrew Gelman’s takes:

    I took a look [in November] and, without trying to judge the integrity of the election as a whole […], I agreed that the OAS report was flawed: as I put it, one of their analyses was “a joke, maybe suitable for publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences but I wouldn’t expect to see it any serious report.”

    The final official tally gave Morales 47.08 percent and his closest competitor 36.51 percent. As of right now, the interim government led by Jeanine Añez Chavez is still in power, and has yet to oversee the new elections that were promised (she has previously stated that Morales will be stopped from participating in any future elections).

    • Aftagley says:

      You’re presenting a very flawed and biased picture of this election. Ignoring the unconstitutional shit that got Morales even in the election in the first place, here’s how it happened:

      1. During the election, early voting totals made it look like Morales was not doing anywhere near as well as expected. He was winning, but it looked like he would face a mandatory runoff election.

      2. For some reason, the electoral board decided to stop counting votes or processing votes. This was incredibly out of the ordinary; it’d be like if the US election stopped counting electoral college votes at 225 or something.

      3. People in Bolivia protested

      4. The electoral board resumed counting votes, but the new votes returned went almost entirely to Morales.

      5. The OAS released a study claiming that these new results were highly unlikely and were evidence of fraud. This initial result is what’s currently being challenged.

      6. More protests happened. To quell the protests, Bolivia asked OAS to conduct a full audit of the election. They did, and released a damning report, indicating parallel shadow IT networks that processed voting data as well as more standard voting issues such as stuffed ballot boxes. This report hasn’t been challenged at all and showed the election was fatally compromised by Morales’ party/government.

      So, when people say that the statistical analysis was bad, that doesn’t mean the election was good. Even the NYT article you linked points this out:

      The resulting 100-page report, published in December, contained evidence of errors, irregularities and “a series of malicious operations” aimed at altering the results. These included hidden data servers, manipulated voting receipts and forged signatures, which the organization said made it impossible for it to validate the election’s results.

      The O.A.S. found evidence of tampering with at least 38,000 votes. Mr. Morales claimed outright victory by a margin of 35,000 votes.

      “There was fraud — we just don’t know where and how much,” said Calla Hummel, a Bolivia expert at the University of Miami who witnessed the election and analyzed the O.A.S.’s findings.

      • Simultan says:

        Well, it’s more complicated than that. There are two counts, so I’m not sure the Electoral College comparison holds. Quoting Gelman quoting Long, Kharrazian and Cashman:

        The TSE has two vote-counting systems. The first is a quick count known as the Transmisión de Resultados Electorales Preliminares (TREP, hereafter referred to as the quick count). This is a system that Bolivia and several other Latin American countries have implemented following OAS recommendations […] and is designed to deliver a swift — but incomplete and not definitive — result on the night of the elections to give the media an indication of the voting tendency and to inform the public. […]

        The second vote-counting system is the official count (or cómputo), which is legally binding under Bolivian law. The official count is more thorough and precise and takes longer. It is the only valid vote tallying system, and the TSE uses it to determine and announce the final election results. […]

        In these elections, the results of the official count generally coincided with those of the quick count, which ended once 95.63 percent of tally sheets were counted, with Morales having a lead of 46.86 percent to Mesa’s 36.72. The final official count, with 100 percent of votes counted, resulted in Morales winning the election in the first round with 47.08 percent, to Mesa’s 36.51 percent.

        Gelman writes:

        Neither the quick count nor the official count exhibit significant changes in voting trends in the final results; rather, the same well-known trend, explainable by differences in voter preferences in different geographical areas, is evident in both counts . . .

        The official count was never interrupted and was regularly updated online without any significant interruption. Any potential irregularity would have had to affect the official count and not only the quick count in order to affect the final result.

        I’ll also note that O.A.S. didn’t just get involved after Morales asked them to do a full audit, but also released a statement early on. Quoting the NYT article:

        The organization’s statement, which cited “an inexplicable change” that “drastically modifies the fate of the election,” heightened doubts about the fairness of the vote and fueled a chain of events that changed the South American nation’s history. The opposition seized on the claim to escalate protests, gather international support, and push Mr. Morales from power with military support weeks later.

        But yeah, I am only relying on second-hand interpretations – I haven’t looked at the data myself.

        • Aftagley says:

          I’ll also note that O.A.S. didn’t just get involved after Morales asked them to do a full audit, but also released a statement early on. Quoting the NYT article:

          Yeah, this is what I was trying to say in my point 5. They were originally there as election monitors, released their statement after TREP resumed reporting and then were asked to conduct a study.

          There are two counts, so I’m not sure the Electoral College comparison holds.

          Yeah, the metaphore is kind of strained, but the TREP is the unofficial “quick” count that gets reported to the public while the official count is still being officially counted/certified. It’s the same effect you’d get watching the election the night of as electoral points were being tallied, but I’ll concede that it’s not a great comparison.

          But yeah, I am only relying on second-hand interpretations – I haven’t looked at the data myself.

          Well, the OAS and the current Bolivian government’s position is that there is no good data. All of it was affected by rampant vote tampering. That being said, they totally need to hold a new election.

          • Simultan says:

            Yeah, this is what I was trying to say in my point 5. They were originally there as election monitors, released their statement after TREP resumed reporting and then were asked to conduct a study.

            I see – I was confused as you referred to a “study” whereas I understood from the Times article that it was only a statement, and that the actual study wasn’t released until much later.

            Well, the OAS and the current Bolivian government’s position is that there is no good data.

            I understood that the central argument was: votes seemed to go against Morales until the break in the quick count, after which they went in favour of Morales. That suggests he or his allies saw that the election was going the wrong way, stopped the count and made sure to fake the rest of the count.

            That’s also how I remember it being reported in most news media last fall. But the linked studies suggest that the official count happened orderly and without interruption, and that both counts in fact showed the same voting trend (quoting Gelman, “explainable by differences in voter preferences in different geographical areas”) throughout. That seems to invalidate that central argument for the votes having been rampantly tampered with.

            That being said, they totally need to hold a new election.

            I agree, and eventually so did Morales, who after weeks of protest offered new elections (on the morning of the day that the military asked him to resign). Let’s hope Añez Chavez announces new elections and allows Morales to run.

          • Aftagley says:

            I see – I was confused as you referred to a “study”

            Study was a poor word choice IIRC, it was a few-page analysis of the data with their conclusions attached. It wasn’t just a tweet, or something, they explained their findings. If you really care I can try and dig up the original document.

            But the linked studies suggest that the official count happened orderly and without interruption, and that both counts in fact showed the same voting trend (quoting Gelman, “explainable by differences in voter preferences in different geographical areas”) throughout. That seems to invalidate that central argument for the votes having been rampantly tampered with.

            No, all the linked study says is that the post-count reopening swing towards Morales was statistically explainable and not in and of itself evidence of tampering.

            None of that matters though, if the votes themselves that were being counted were tampered with, which OAS strongly maintains they were.

            Let’s hope Añez Chavez announces new elections and allows Morales to run.

            Yes for new elections, no for Morales, he’s done. Constitutionally he’s had his limit.

          • Simultan says:

            No, all the linked study says is that the post-count reopening swing towards Morales was statistically explainable and not in and of itself evidence of tampering.

            None of that matters though, if the votes themselves that were being counted were tampered with, which OAS strongly maintains they were.

            I’m not 100 % sure which study you refer to – the one by Long, Kharrazian and Cashman or the one by Idrobo, Kronick and Rodríguez (mentioned by the Times) – but the latter says:

            The OAS and other researchers have used three quantitative results to question the integrity of the Bolivian presidential election of October, 2019: (1) an apparent jump in the incumbent’s vote share after 95% of the vote had been counted, (2) comparisons across voting booths within the same precinct, and (3) acceleration in the growth of the incumbent’s lead after 7:40 p.m. on election night, when the government stopped publishing updated results. We revisit the evidence, finding that: (1) the jump does not exist; (2) a secular trend explains the within-precinct results; and (3) we can predict the post-7:40-p.m. results almost exactly using data from the previous poll, which the OAS endorsed.

            Our analysis does not establish the absence of fraud in this election; that could never be determined on the basis of quantitative analysis alone. The quantitative results that we revisit formed just one part of the OAS’s case against the integrity of the Bolivian election. Their team presented evidence of secret servers, improperly completed tally sheets, undisclosed late-night software modifications, and myriad other
            reasons for suspicion.

            But while quantitative evidence was merely one of the findings of the OAS audit report, it played—and continues to play—an outsize role in Bolivia’s political crisis. It helped convict Morales of fraud in the court of public opinion. We find that this key piece of evidence is faulty and should be excluded.

            Iow, it addresses more than the post-break swing, but not everything flagged by OAS. I had a look at the later OAS report and, as a professional programmer, reading it made me shudder. But I don’t see any great evidence of fraud at the level needed to dramatically change the results. Possibly there would have had to have been a second round.

            Here’s the original statement by OAS on the day after the elections. An excerpt:

            The OAS Mission expresses its deep concern and surprise at the drastic and hard-to-explain change in the trend of the preliminary results revealed after the closing of the polls.

            At 19:40 on Sunday, October 20, the TSE disseminated the results of the TREP. These figures clearly indicated a second round, a trend that coincided with the only authorized quick count and the statistical exercise of the Mission. Our information was shared today with the TSE and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

            At 20:10, the TSE stopped disclosing preliminary results, by decision of the plenary, with more than 80% of the votes counted. 24 hours later, the TSE presented data with an inexplicable change in trend that drastically modifies the fate of the election and generates a loss of confidence in the electoral process.

            At an appropriate time, the Mission will issue a report with recommendations ahead of a second round.

            So that early statement which led to the ousting of Morales only mentions that one piece of evidence which is now under criticism. I wasn’t able to find the analysis that came with it, though – maybe it’s more nuanced than the statement.

    • It was a right-wing coup, pure and simple. Good luck seeing any fair elections in Bolivia any time soon…or any elections at all, as long as the COVID excuse hangs around.

      And by “fair elections,” I mean that, if not Morales (because of a constitutional term limit ruling that is in dispute), then at least someone else from his party, “Movement Towards Socialism” or MAS should be allowed to run.

  20. Aapje says:

    Keep your distance while using Dutch fixed expressions…for your own safety

    ‘Haar op de tanden hebben’ = Having hair on the teeth

    Being assertive. Probably comes from the idea that masculinity correlates with body hair, so the most masculine person doesn’t merely have lots of body hair, but even has hair on their teeth.

    ‘Er geen gras over laten groeien’ = Not letting gras grow over it

    Not wasting any time.

    ‘Iemand de les lezen’ = Reading the lesson to someone

    Setting someone straight.

    ‘Onder de wol kruipen’ = Crawling under the wool

    Going to bed. It’s not necessary for the blanket to actually be made of wool.

    ‘Op de voet volgen’ = Following someone on foot

    Tracking someone’s every move. For example, reading all the news about a celebrity you stalk like.

    ‘Op rozen zitten’ = Sitting on roses

    Everything is going great.

    ‘Open kaart spelen’ = Playing open card

    Telling the truth or divulging your (actual) motives. Not playing games.

    ‘Boventoon voeren’ = Carrying the overtone

    Being so loud that in a group, everyone can hear what you say.

    ‘Het hoogste woord’ = The highest word

    The same as the previous.

  21. Edward Scizorhands says:

    There are two coronavirus links I’m trying to find again. My browser crashed and lost it.

    First is one that shows the estimated number of people who are infected at the current time in each state. It updated about once a week.

    Second is a map that breaks down the country into red-yellow-green regions based on the worry about cases there.

    I forget if I posted either of them here.

  22. Eric T says:

    Alright this is my third attempt to post this. I’m REALLY sorry if this breaks any rules but I just want to get this damn thing on the site and be done with it -_-

    In an effort to dodge the spam filter, I’ve broken it into parts and posted the following as replies.

    Effort Post: On Systemic Racism

    I’ve made a lot of posts about Systemic Racism across this and the last two OTs – I thought for the purposes of ease of engagement it might help me to organize all of my thoughts, buff them up with some more evidence, and lay it down in a way that is easy to read/search through so that I can refer back to it without much hassle.

    What this post is: I’m going to break down a couple dimensions of what us SJ-types mean when we talk about Systemic Racism, going from (what I think) the least controversial views on the topic I hold to the most controversial ones.

    What this post isn’t: I’m not going to discuss solutions or policy proposals in this post. I know y’all have a common critique of SJW-types, which is that they don’t present cogent policy proposals to solve their issues – I’m acknowledging that. However, I’ve always been of the “it’s better to convince people there is a problem BEFORE trying to sell them on the solution” school of argumentative thought.

    1. Black/Hispanic people suffer worse outcomes – I don’t think it can be explained away only by culture and genetics.

    Before we begin I want to be very clear – I am not claiming that there is no cultural explanation. Merely that it is insufficient to completely to completely explain away the evidence of Blacks suffering worse outcomes. Absent that as a complete explanation, I’m hopeful that you will agree that something else must be making up the difference.

    If “culture” was a perfect indicator of this kind of difference, we would expect large variations in largely different cultures. We do not see that: rural blacks underperform rural Whites around the same rate that urban blacks do. African Americans living in Atlanta underperform White Atlanteans around the same rate as NYC. Per the 2017 American Community survey, the vast majority of cities see average African American income as a percentage of that citiy’s average White income between the 40 and 65% range – regardless of region. The WaPo (yes I know) ran an article where they made the data into a nice graph if you want to look at it, or just go play around w/ the census data yourself [Warning – WaPo’s adblock detector is unusually aggressive, as in I can’t open this link on Firefox even if I disable my adblocking]. I don’t have any way of proving this next bit over the internet, so you’ll just have to take my word for it: there is a large, obvious, and clear cultural difference between Rural Black Culture and Urban Black Culture. There is a similarly large, obvious, and clear cultural difference between Northern Black Culture and Southern Black Culture. There is different history, different culture, different housing arrangements.
    It may be the case that all of these cultures align such that Black People consistently underperform White People across the board – there are undoubtably commonalities that could contribute – but the issue is that you wouldn’t expect it to have such a consistent impact, and always have Black People come up short? I at least hope you’ll see that Culture isn’t a clean catch-all for what is happening here.

    Okay maybe Culture isn’t the right example, what about genetics? Now, I am no geneticist, and so I concede there is some chance I am just wrong here: but is it not the case that “Black” Americans are comprised of a massively diverse set of origins and genetics. Some are from Sub-Saharan Africa, some from Northern Africa, some from the Middle East, some from the Caribbean – now I understand similar arguments can apply to White People or Asians for example, but that you DO see expected variation (ie: western Europeans have better educational outcomes when they travel abroad than Slavs or Greeks, Chinese and Japanese immigrants do better than Uighurs or Malaysians). I’ve tried searching for data on Black differences by their National Origin – I haven’t found anything sadly, but based on Anecdotal evidence, I can say the situation that my Nigerian friends and their families face in the US seems pretty much exactly the same as what my South African friends face in the US.

    I’ll concede that this isn’t the greatest argument, appealing more to my own lived experience than evidence, but the evidence is scarce. I think in order to definitively prove that there is a major racial component I would like to see something that answers the simple question: why do people of races as different as say Irish people and Russian have outcomes eerily similar to one another if Race is the driving factor. Certainly at least this means we can’t just fall back on Race, especially if I have evidence for something else that is stronger. I believe I do. I want to make this clear – even if you are able to prove there is a culture/genetic factor that doesn’t mean there can’t also be a structural one.

    • Eric T says:

      2. Racism Happened Guys – and it still impacts us today

      Historical Racism has been the thrust of my argument here for a simple reason: It’s really easy to prove, and I find the logic behind it compelling. The major point I’ve made underlining is that America has a history of Racist policies – these policies have materially hurt the outcomes of the modern generations of Black kids and their parents, which contribute to the worse outcomes seen above. We could talk forever about what did what, but I would like to pull a couple of specific examples to better illustrate the point.

      School Segregation: The way you would be taught in School would make you think that post Brown v. Board we all just got to work desegregating and all was well, but we all know this is wrong. This NYT post [warning: paywall – defeated by incognito mode] goes further into detail about how schools are separated than I ever could, but a common issue I hear is “well that’s just racial self-segregation, not racism!” and I would like to address that argument now. First, some of this segregation is self-imposed for sure, but don’t forget that in the 70s and 80s there was a concerted effort to stop integration done by White people using redistricting laws to prevent Blacks from entering “good” schools [Note: these two are book citations because they are the books that convinced me of this point. There is are plenty of freely available online writing about the state of segregation of schools post Brown v. Board of ed, but if I can convince at least one of you to read one of these two books it will be a win for me].

      Secondly, even if it is racially self-segregated, we’re still not meeting even a “separate but equal” standard here. Majority Black and Hispanic schools get less funding, in part due to simple taxation math (black folks are poorer ergo property taxes are lower)and in part due to some lingering BS policies from the 60s (see NYT article for more reading and specifics). Here in NYC it’s so bad that we’re basically investing in a completely alternate form of education so that Black Kids can get to HS and college. (And it barely works, the amount of Black Kids who get into specialized High Schools in NYC is pitifully low).

      The impact of School Discrimination is obvious and clear – Students who go to worse schools, regardless of Race, overwhelmingly do worse on Standardized Testing than those who go to richer or more elite schools. The quality of your education has been linked to everything from your health, to your job success, to your chance of incarceration. If Black People are, through no fault of their own, getting worse education opportunities than White People are, they will do worse in life. This is what I mean by systemic racism – nobody in this system is trying to make life harder for Black People, but it is.

      Redlining: Redlining, or the policy of using Housing Acts, mortgages, or other tools to manipulate or force minorities into worse communities, is pretty well understood. I haven’t run into many SSC people arguing that it didn’t happen, so I’m not going to waste time proving that it did, instead I’m interested in discussing what effect it still has on the modern lives of African Americans or Hispanics.

      First, it should be materially obvious that if your parents grew up in a terrible neighborhood and lacked the means to move out of it by the time you were born, you’re going to be starting at a disadvantage. The biggest predictor for if you will be successful in your life is not being born poor and redlining helped ensure minorities would be more likely to be born poor – born in areas with high crime, bad schools, and low-paying jobs.

      None of this is to say escaping Redlining is impossible, it certainly is not, but that redlining made the life of the average Urban Minority harder, and still does. Redlined districts were worse impacted by public health crises like COVID-19 are linked to increased gerrymandering [Warning: Academic Paywall. I know some of you are able to bypass said things so I included this link, but Its not necessary for my overall point] and a whole host of other issues.

      Voting: So y’all remember when minorities just weren’t allowed to vote? Well that didn’t go away as completely as we all would hope. The USCCR finds that efforts to make voting harder have outsized impacts on Minorities than they do on white people. Minorities are also prevented from meaningfully actualizing their democratic rights in other ways like having to travel further to get to a polling station or living in non-representative areas at higher rates. All of this isn’t some crazy plot by conservatives to wipe out Minority Voting Rights as Mother Jones would have you believe – the explanation is much simpler. Legal methods to deny voting access to minorities have existed since we as a nation started letting them vote, and while we’ve done a great job of eliminating them, we haven’t finished said job.

      Jim Crow Laws/General Racism/Pre-Civil Rights Era Policies: Finally, a catch-all category that shouldn’t even require evidence. There were dramatically racist policies that existed in the country over various periods of time. These policies materially harmed the ability of Black Americans to become wealthy and pass said wealth onto their children. They hurt the ability of Black people to move to nice areas, to own a home, to own a business, to do whatever shitty thing they did. What people often forget is the victims of those policies are still alive now. My Gramma went to a segregated school, my friend Ray has parents who lived in the Pre-Civil Rights era. Black communities had their wealth accrual ability meaningfully harmed until but a few generations ago: it should come as no surprise that they haven’t caught up to the rest of the country.

      My family had a house become my Grandad had the funds to build one. My mom was able to go to college because her parents were well-off enough to be able to send her to a nice school and help her afford a car. This generational passing of wealth does matter, and in Black communities the time simply hasn’t passed for it to be as effective as it should be.

      What’s all this mean? The short version is this: bad shit happened and it makes life harder if you are a minority. I cannot definitively prove that the achievement gap is caused by this instead of say genetics, but I think I have shown you why the evidence is such that I choose to believe it at least plays a significant role.

      2a. What about the Asians? They also had discrimination and they’re doing pretty good!

      Good question! They did also suffer from legalized discrimination and yet they seem to be doing quite well. I have some theories, but I openly concede this as a weakspot in my argument:

      First, Asian American discrimination was substantially shorter and less targeted at wealth/community destruction than Black discrimination was. As far as I can tell, there wasn’t a concerted effort to ensure Asian Americans didn’t start businesses like in the post-reconstruction South for Blacks.
      Second, Asian Americans also had, and still have, the benefit of coming from countries where they can first gain an education, wealth, status, or other advantages, before coming over to America. Given that the majority of African Americans were brought over as slaves, this option simply doesn’t exist for them.
      Third, the when/where they arrived was quite different: predominately the West and during the industrial era mainly. I suspect this has a major impact in how their communities grew and developed, but I am still researching this.

      Overall I find What about Asians? compelling evidence that there is likely way more going on then systemic racism – but I am not compelled that it is evidence there is no systemic racism.

      2b. Okay but what about X other race/ethnicity that does alright?

      I mean look, at the end of the day there are a variety of issues we could talk about that are specific to each race/ethnicity. Some may literally just have had more “luck” than others. I could counter by asking “what about native Americans?” or something similar but I think that if we do this we miss the point – my argument is the evidence is there. I think the issue at play isn’t “are there other factors” but instead “is systemic racism a factor that materially impacts the lives of minorities?”

      2c. Okay but Eric, this all just seems like classism. Isn’t the real issue that Poor people are harmed more?

      So I’m going to talk later in my section on Implicit and Explicit Biases why I think taking a race-blind attempt to solve these issues (ie: only help the poor regardless of race) will leave us liable to make the same kinds of mistakes that got us in this mess to begin with. But I think that even if you don’t buy that we’re kind of missing the forest for the trees here: the fact that minorities are more likely to be poor is systemic racism in it of itself. If you “control for class” as some advocate doing, you’re going to miss many of the dynamics that perpetuate the system, as I discussed above.

      But also there are just issues that still impact minorities despite their class. Wealthy Black people are still disproportionately underrepresented in political office, as CEOs, and in the highest paying/most prestigious professions. There are fewer Black doctors, lawyers, surgeons, engineers, etc. than population dynamics tell us there should be. This indicates that something other than strict classism is occurring here.

      ETA: Every SJW I know also wants to help poor people too by the way!

      • cassander says:

        First, some of this segregation is self-imposed for sure, but don’t forget that in the 70s and 80s there was a concerted effort to stop integration done by White people using redistricting laws to prevent Blacks from entering “good” schools

        First, There was an effort to stop busing, NOT an effort to keep blacks out of good schools. And there certainly wasn’t an effort to make the urban schools (which are better funded than the suburban) from being good.

        Secondly, even if it is racially self-segregated, we’re still not meeting even a “separate but equal” standard here. Majority Black and Hispanic schools get less funding, in part due to simple taxation math (black folks are poorer ergo property taxes are lower)

        First, this is not accurate. Every state I’m aware of allocates funding school funding either at the state level or has state spending top up local funding. local property tax revenues don’t matter.

        Your cited article on the matter isn’t particularly convincing, because it ignores state level spending differences, which are considerable (much more than outcomes). Classic simpson’s paradox problem.

        First, Asian American discrimination was substantially shorter and less targeted and wealth/community destruction than White discrimination was. As far as I can tell, there wasn’t a concerted effort to ensure Asian Americans didn’t start businesses like in the post-reconstruction South for Blacks.

        (A) there absolutely was. and (B) it was only shorter because Asians didn’t start coming in numbers until later.

        Second, Asian Americans also had, and still have, the benefit of coming from countries where they can first gain an education, wealth, status, or other advantages, before coming over to America.

        Asserting facts not in evidence. the Asian immigrants of the time were rather like Hispanic immigrants today, not the people learning confuscian classics.

        I could go on, but I think the point has been made. These arguments are just so stories that sound plausible, but don’t stand up to scrutiny when you dive down into them, and they certainly aren’t strong enough to justify ignoring all solutions that aren’t assuming racism, much less shouting down (not that you’re doing that!) people who bring up genetics, IQ, or culture.

        • Eric T says:

          First, this is not accurate. Every state I’m aware of allocates funding school funding either at the state level or has state spending top up local funding. local property tax revenues don’t matter.

          Schools in NYC aren’t funded by the State mainly at all.

          And while equalized funding is true NOW – it wasn’t always true: Otherwise Serrano v. Priest wouldn’t have been a thing, for example. The timeline of this shift – happening around the 70s and 80s (and even the early 2000s in some states, looking at you Vermont!) actually supports my version of events.

          I could go on, but I think the point has been made. These arguments are just so stories that sound plausible, but don’t stand up to scrutiny when you dive down into them.

          Bit rude, but I mean I feel like I had a lot more arguments, and I think you attacked like one dimension of my post, so “point has been made” i think is far from the case?

          • cassander says:

            Schools in NYC aren’t funded by the State mainly at all.

            I originally mentioned an exception for big urban districts, but took it out as being rather pointless, because everyone knows that. yes, big urban districts have retained local control of schools, but they are invariably MORE lavishly funded than the non-urban schools, not less. the problems with black schools have nothing to do with funding.

            And while equalized funding is true NOW – it wasn’t always true: Otherwise Serrano v. Priest wouldn’t have been a thing, for example.

            Yep, that was 50 years ago. People starting school when it happened are starting to think about retirement now.

            Bit rude, but I mean I feel like I had a lot more arguments, and I think you attacked like one dimension of my post, so “point has been made” i think is far from the case?

            Sorry, I was trying to avoid making a laundry list because I didn’t want you to feel like I was hammering on the same point over and over. My basic point remains what I said before, that none of these arguments is unproblematic. Many were true only decades ago, if ever, and even if correct there’s there’s not nearly certainty to justify chasing all non racism based arguments out of the public sphere over them.

          • Eric T says:

            Yep, that was 50 years ago. People starting school when it happened are starting to think about retirement now.

            Yes and as per my historical racism point – those people have kids who are entering school now.

            Their communities have higher crime rates, more vandalism, and are just worse in prestige, so even if the schools are better funded, good teachers dont work there. I work as a teacher in the Bronx – I can speak to this from firsthand experience.

            Furthermore, these soon-to-be-retirees are the ones who help pay for their kids college, need to afford tutors for SAT, etc. That’s what I’m saying, not that the system still exists, but the echos of the old system hit us to this very day.

            Many were true only decades ago, if ever, and they are not strong enough arguments to justify chasing all non racism based arguments out of the public sphere.

            I have explicitly NOT advocated for that. My stated position is very clearly: I think there are several factors, some not racism. I think racism is one of the factors though.

          • cassander says:

            Their communities have higher crime rates, more vandalism, and are just worse in prestige, so even if the schools are better funded, good teachers dont work there. I work as a teacher in the Bronx – I can speak to this from firsthand experience.

            Great, so solve THOSE problems.

            Furthermore, these soon-to-be-retirees are the ones who help pay for their kids college, need to afford tutors for SAT, etc. That’s what I’m saying, not that the system still exists, but the echos of the old system hit us to this very day.

            Funny how they don’t seem to hit the Asian community. But again, if the problem is money, then focus on poverty reduction.

            I think racism is one of the factors though.

            Except every issue we’ve discussed you’ve admitted it isn’t about racism. It’s about the fact that blacks are poorer today so can’t afford tutors, or how the communities black schools are in have higher crime and are less desirable to teach at. Everywhere I push, it seems, you fall back on “well people definitely used to be racist, and there’s a legacy of that.” but by definition, that means the problem isn’t racism.

            So why keep making it about race? My answer is that a lot of political and ideological infrastructure that got built up around race, and that stuff doesn’t just vanish overnight. Thus, whatever your issue is, it’s easier to get attention if you make it about race, and we have a huge industry of people motivated to find more racial issues so they can avoid packing up and going home. And so they look, and they find, and because identity is always a powerful tool in politics, they continue to succeed (in the sense of perpetuating themselves, if not actually correcting problems) but at long term damage to the health of the polity, because identity politics is toxic.

          • Eric T says:

            Everywhere I push, it seems, you fall back on “well people definitely used to be racist, and there’s a legacy of that.” but by definition, that means the problem isn’t racism.

            Yeah because you are only attacking me on the parts of my post literally about the legacy of racism and not on say – the studies I posted on implicit bias, or non-class based forms of discrimination that people face in promotion or political appointment, or the conversation about the way Racists still influence policy, or the discussion about how a lack of self-awareness of racial bias will cause race-blind policies to just repeat past mistakes. Ya know – all of the stuff i SPECIFICALLY flagged wasn’t about the history.

            I had a whole other half of my post that was about those things, and it honestly feels really weird that you are attacking me for advocating for the thing I said I was going to advocate for?

          • cassander says:

            @Eric T

            I had a whole other half of my post that was about those things, and it honestly feels really weird that you are attacking me for advocating for the thing I said I was going to advocate for?

            (A) I’m talking about those with you separately.

            (B) I would still think that pointing out how flawed one of your three legs is would have an effect on your thinking. the legacy of racism argument , even if true, frankly isn’t relevant to the discussion because it’s manifestly not about conditions in the present.

          • Eric T says:

            I would still think that knocking out a substantial number of your arguments should have an effect on your thinking.

            Except you haven’t! The points you are talking about and saying “current racism has nothing to do with this” were the points I SAID CURRENT RACISM HAD LITTLE TO DO WITH.

            Take the school funding example I posited above – you talked about modern funding, when my entire point was about funding and segregation post Brown v. Board.

            Even your invocation of Classism is pre-empted in my post: I acknowledge that race and class are tied up together, but if you’re not even going to deal with the things I said make it the reason we have to think about all of this different then I don’t know why you expect me to debate you?

          • cassander says:

            @Eric T says:

            Take the school funding example I posited above – you talked about modern funding, when my entire point was about funding and segregation post Brown v. Board.

            Well, no. You posted a link about how MODERN funding is disparate. and it’s not.

            But you keep dodging my more fundamental point which is, if you admit these things are not about modern racism, then why are you bringing them up in a conversation about modern racism? And it’s not just you. You are commendably willing to admit that racism 50 years ago is not necessarily racism today, but the vast majority of your ideological compatriots are not, and if I asked them a question like “if we are still dealing with the legacy of past racism, does that make modern society racist even if no one in it has a racist thought?” they’d almost all say yes.

      • FLWAB says:

        First, Asian American discrimination was substantially shorter and less targeted at wealth/community destruction than Black discrimination was. As far as I can tell, there wasn’t a concerted effort to ensure Asian Americans didn’t start businesses like in the post-reconstruction South for Blacks.

        Untrue. Asian immigrants, particularly on the West Coast, were often regulated out of business whenever the whites thought they were getting too prosperous. For instance, after finding it hard to find work in more lucrative jobs, Chinese immigrants found a niche they could fill in the laundry business (probably because it’s “women’s work” that didn’t threaten anybody with the vote).. By the 1870s Chinese laundries were quite widespread, and it led to some backlash. In particular in 1890 San Francisco passed an ordinance requiring all laundries working out of wooden buildings to get a permit (at a time when the vast majority of the cities buildings were made of wood). Every single Chinese owned laundry was denied a permit, while all other laundries except one were given one. This kind of local regulation was not atypical.

        While this is anecdotal, I once read a little local history book about a town in Washington that went over it’s founding. In one of the chapters it mention that there was one Chinese man in town who ran an inn and was doing good business. He was found shot to death in the woods one day, and the general consensus was the the killers followed him to his money stash, did him in, and absconded with the loot. Naturally there was no investigation: nobody was going to go to that much bother investigating the murder of a coolie. And that seems to have been a general consensus across the west. Samuel Bowes, who wrote a travel memoir about his time in the West during the late 1800s, had this to say about the treatment of the Chinese:

        To abuse a Chinaman; to rob him; to kick and cuff him; even to kill him, have been things not only done with impunity by mean and wicked men, but even with vain glory. Had ‘John’–here and in China alike the English and Americans nickname every Chinaman ‘John’–a good claim, original or improved, he was ordered to ‘move on’–it belonged to someone else. Had he hoarded a pile, he was ordered to disgorge; and, if he resisted, he was killed. Worse crimes even are known against them; they have been wantonly assaulted and shot down or stabbed by bad men, as sportsmen would surprise and shoot their game in the woods. There was no risk in such barbarity; if “John” survived to tell the tale, the law would not hear him or believe him. No one was so low, so miserable, that he did not despise the Chinaman, and could not outrage him

        • Eric T says:

          For instance, after finding it hard to find work in more lucrative jobs, Chinese immigrants found a niche they could fill in the laundry business (probably because it’s “women’s work” that didn’t threaten anybody with the vote).. By the 1870s Chinese laundries were quite widespread, and it led to some backlash. In particular in 1890 San Francisco passed an ordinance requiring all laundries working out of wooden buildings to get a permit (at a time when the vast majority of the cities buildings were made of wood). Every single Chinese owned laundry was denied a permit, while all other laundries except one were given one. This kind of local regulation was not atypical.

          Hmm this is good to know! I admit what I know of Chinese immigration is mostly post-fall of Qing Dynasty-era stuff, so this is something that slipped my radar entirely. As I said in my original post, those are just theories I’m working on (hence the lack of evidence) and I openly concede Asian American success as a weakness of my stated view.

          • JayT says:

            I mean, there’s also the whole internment thing. That was arguably the worst thing the American government has done to a group of people on it’s land since slavery.

          • Eric T says:

            I mean, there’s also the whole internment thing. That was arguably the worst thing the American government has done to a group of people on it’s land since slavery.

            Yeah that’s why I said “length” and not “degree of badness”

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          Untrue. Asian immigrants, particularly on the West Coast, were often regulated out of business whenever the whites thought they were getting too prosperous. For instance, after finding it hard to find work in more lucrative jobs, Chinese immigrants found a niche they could fill in the laundry business (probably because it’s “women’s work” that didn’t threaten anybody with the vote).. By the 1870s Chinese laundries were quite widespread, and it led to some backlash. In particular in 1890 San Francisco passed an ordinance requiring all laundries working out of wooden buildings to get a permit (at a time when the vast majority of the cities buildings were made of wood). Every single Chinese owned laundry was denied a permit, while all other laundries except one were given one. This kind of local regulation was not atypical.

          +1
          White Americans used to be very openly racist to both blacks and Asians. SJ seems a particularly bad model for figuring out their dramatically disparate outcomes.

      • J Mann says:

        2b. Okay but what about X other race/ethnicity that does alright?

        IMHO, one interesting question would be “how do 1st and 2nd generation African and Afro-Caribbean immigrants do relative to (a) African Americans generally; (b) other immigrant groups, (c) Caucasian Americans?” I don’t know the answer, but would give it some weight, whether it supported/challenged your hypothesis.

        • Eric T says:

          I tried to find basically exactly this when I was writing Part 1! Consider this a plea for this kind of evidence.

        • AG says:

          This is also relevant to the conversation on why Asian Americans appear to have bounced back. The swaths of model minority Asians are almost all 1st or 2nd generation kids of parents who often had enough money and smarts to get a Phd in the homeland. We would have to look at the descendants of those with a longer American heritage to better compare.

        • DinoNerd says:

          IIRC, it was at one point (1980s?) common knowledge that Afro-Caribbean immigrants to the US did better on average than African Americans of long term US ancestry. The reason given was a culture valuing education; people referred to them as “black Jews”, and they weren’t referring to religion.

          Also, FWIW, a lot of the Asian immigrants who’ve done well in the US, collectively, also had (and have) a strong tendency to value education. When I was younger, my peers in the top half of STEM talent were disproportionately Jewish; now they are disproportinately Asian – and more recently South East Asian (from India).

          I don’t think this disproves structural racism in any way. But it certainly adds complexity and nuance.

          [Also – the above is also consistent with an explanation involving entering the US with valuable credentials, wealth, or both, as in AG’s comment.]

      • Robert Liguori says:

        There are more Jewish doctors, lawyers, engineers, surgeons, etc. than population dymanics says there should be. Does this mean that there is systemic racism in America in favor of Jews?

        I respect the effort that you have put into these replies, but they are very, very, just-so-y. We do not have general evidence that hardship done to ancestors impoverishes a minority group for generations; we do have several minority groups who keep showing up, keep getting oppressed, and keep accomplishing things the moment the oppression is lifted to the not-actually-mass-murder level. We have ethnic groups who have been historically enslaved (most obviously the eponymous one) who, while not experiencing great outcomes in the ranking of minority ethnic groups, do not bottom out entirely.

        If you want to argue that Historical Factor X applied to Group Y causes Z outcomes, you need to do more than establish that X happened to Y. Can you quantify exactly what kinds of oppression cause what outcomes, and for how long? Can you point to a sub-population of Group Y who did not suffer X in the listed timeframe and who have wildly divergent outcomes?

        And, since you brought it up, how much impact do you estimate that culture and genetics have relative to historic discrimination in group outcomes? Presumably, you think that we can rank all of the various ethnic groups by intelligence, life outcomes, etc. If we were to do so, how do you think the various groups would line up? How much divergence do you think is possible without the explanation of systemic racism?

        • Eric T says:

          There are more Jewish doctors, lawyers, engineers, surgeons, etc. than population dymanics says there should be. Does this mean that there is systemic racism in America in favor of Jews?

          Not sure, but fairly confident that it is “no.” In another thread I posited that above-average performing groups who were discriminated against would do even better. Hence why i am willing to accept a cultural and a genetic factor,

          If you want to argue that Historical Factor X applied to Group Y causes Z outcomes, you need to do more than establish that X happened to Y. Can you quantify exactly what kinds of oppression cause what outcomes, and for how long?

          I can’t EXACTLY [edited this for clarity], and I doubt anyone ever could, but what I thought I attempted to do is show how specific policies are causing or at least contributing to, specific outcomes, which was basically the entire point of part 2. In particular I think its hard to argue that Redlining didn’t fuck shit up for minorities who suffered from it, though I guess we can disagree about how long the “fucking up” lasts. I’d say the impacts are still felt today, and I think I’ve outlined why.

          And, since you brought it up, how much impact do you estimate that culture and genetics have relative to historic discrimination in group outcomes? Presumably, you think that we can rank all of the various ethnic groups by intelligence, life outcomes, etc. If we were to do so, how do you think the various groups would line up? How much divergence do you think is possible without the explanation of systemic racism?

          Gonna be honest, I don’t feel qualified to give numbers given a dirth of data about genetic and cultural difference. I feel like before we get into is it 80-10-10 or 30-40-30 or whatever, I have to first convince you that one of the numbers isn’t 0 – that was the point of this post.

          • Robert Liguori says:

            In particular I think its hard to argue that Redlining didn’t fuck shit up for minorities who suffered from it, though I guess we can disagree about how long the “fucking up” lasts. I’d say the impacts are still felt today, and I think I’ve outlined why.

            Are you aware that Asians and Jews also suffered from redlining? I am not a historical expert, and I freely concede that there was a whole hierarchy of racially-disfavorable conditions and that black people were at the bottom of the list, but I feel like you are ignoring the very real and very harmful discrimination that people went through in early-20th-century America, because the people going through that suffering were the wrong race.

            Gonna be honest, I don’t feel qualified to give numbers given a dearth of data about genetic and cultural difference. I feel like before we get into is it 80-10-10 or 30-40-30 or whatever, I have to first convince you that one of the numbers isn’t 0 – that was the point of this post.

            That is fair. And I think that all reasonable people agree that there absolutely is a level of societal discrimination which hard-stops you as a group from contributing at a meaningful level to society, and that black people in America experienced that level of discrimination historically.

            But if that number is <5%, if we can prove that systemic racism is not the meaningful driver in outcomes of black people in the same way it's not the meaningful driver in the lives of market-dominant minority groups, what does that mean for you?

            Is this about justice for historic wrongs, or equality today?

          • gbdub says:

            How do you square your confidence in the statement “there is no systemic racism in favor of Jews” with your previous assertion:

            the fact that minorities are more likely to be poor is systemic racism in it of itself.

            Apologies if this comes off as nit picking. I actually think it’s one of my biggest issues with most SJ commentary, so I’d appreciate your thoughts on the matter.

            Far too often, in my mind, an SJ advocate will assert that racism / sexism / Xphobia exists. To prove this, they will show statistics that demonstrate some disparity between the supposedly favored group and the supposedly oppressed group. And then they are done. And it is often strongly implied that all or most of the disparity MUST be due to discrimination (e.g. the oft-cited “women earn 77 cents for every dollar men earn”). Disparity equals discrimination, QED.

            But they never apply this consistently. Does the disparity of Asian American or Ashkenazi Jewish success relative to other white people prove discrimination against non-Jewish white people?

            Does the lack of men in nursing and teaching prove anti-male discrimination in those fields?

            Does the fact that men are arrested at a much higher rate than women prove discrimination against Men? What about the fact that they die earlier (note that both of these disparities, identified between black and white people, are frequently cited by SJ advocates as evidence of anti-black racism).

            Clearly, there is a lot going on in all these scenarios that can’t be explained as simple discrimination. But any attempt to probe these (at least for the disparities that SJ advocates selectively apply disparity = discrimination to) is liable to get one accused of “denying America’s obvious history of X-ism”.

          • Eric T says:

            Apologies if this comes off as nit picking. I actually think it’s one of my biggest issues with most SJ commentary, so I’d appreciate your thoughts on the matter.

            First I think it’s helpful to think of it as evidence of that fact, not proof of it. So the fact that there are worse outcomes for X group is evidence something is suppressing X group. The fact that their are better outcomes for Y group is evidence something isn’t suppressing Y group. But a single point of evidence does not proof make. I try to augment this by proving the supressive factor exists on X group through other points of evidence.

            For example on Jews, I think there relative success is evidence against them being suppressed. But if you just dig into the facts, the evidence for oppression against them stacks up much higher. Outcomes don’t = discrimination, but they can be a point in proving/disproving it.

            Does the lack of men in nursing and teaching prove anti-male discrimination in those fields?

            Some of it is self-selection – men enter these fields at way lower rates. But yeah actually, I remember reading some pretty interesting articles about how men are harmed/prevented from being teachers. I’ll have to find it again, but I found it pretty compelling. I think the reason that the average SJW skews feminist though is the female career discrimination happens in the most lucrative/desirable/prestigous careers (Doctor/Lawyer/Tech) and not in careers that are arguably respectable, but don’t pay well and don’t draw in insane prestige. I’ve been a teacher for 2 years, and there’s a reason I’m leaving it for law school. So when you average it all out, one side faces “worse” forms of discrimination than the other (or at least that’s the argument)

            Does the fact that men are arrested at a much higher rate than women prove discrimination against Men? What about the fact that they die earlier (note that both of these disparities, identified between black and white people, are frequently cited by SJ advocates as evidence of anti-black racism).

            For dying earlier I think its partly depending on what they are dying of to prove discrimination. I don’t know these statistics so I won’t comment.

            For arrests – absolutely. There is a pretty strong arrest bias against men. Though its worth noting this trend has shrunk over the last 10 years so at least we’re making progress there.

            Clearly, there is a lot going on in all these scenarios that can’t be explained as simple discrimination.

            Yeah but just as you see SJ’s denying that there are other things, I see Red Tribers and denying that the discrimination is even a thing. I think the refusal to consider each other’s views is what’s causing each side to retreat more and more into “my way isn’t just right, it’s 100% right!” on this issue.

            I think Scott put it best

          • Aapje says:

            @Eric T

            So the fact that there are worse outcomes for X group is evidence something is suppressing X group.

            Yes, but it isn’t evidence that this suppression is oppression, rather than something else. We can see by the lower life expectancy of smokers that something is suppressing their life expectancy, but most people believe that this is self-inflicted, rather than because smokers are oppressed by non-smokers.

            What I object to is the common bias where for some groups, worse or better results are immediately assumed to be due to (being harmed by or benefiting from) oppression, while for other groups, it is either assumed not to be oppression or different possible causes get proposed and/or investigated.

            For example on Jews, I think there relative success is evidence against them being suppressed. But if you just dig into the facts, the evidence for oppression against them stacks up much higher.

            It seems to me that their relative success undermines the narrative that differences between ethnic groups are entirely due to white supremacist society, unless one believes that Jews care more about helping other Jews than gentiles care about helping gentiles, so Jews have stronger white supremacy helping them.

            The success of Jews and Asians should IMO be a prominent matter of investigation, because it clashes with many narratives, but instead, I see it usually be ignored.

            This can also feed the far-right. For example, Ivy universities seem to use affirmative action to achieve representative ratios of whites, Asians and blacks. However, if you separate whites into Jews and gentiles, you see that gentiles are underrepresented and Jews overrepresented. SJ advocates seem to generally believe that underrepresention in such places is or leads to oppression, so by that same logic, gentiles who don’t identify with Jews would reasonably feel oppressed.

            Some of it is self-selection – men enter these fields at way lower rates.

            But the exact same thing is true for women for STEM professions and the like! Women make substantially different choices at the university level, before possible hiring or workplace discrimination can have an effect.

            I think the reason that the average SJW skews feminist though is the female career discrimination happens in the most lucrative/desirable/prestigous careers (Doctor/Lawyer/Tech) and not in careers that are arguably respectable, but don’t pay well and don’t draw in insane prestige. […] So when you average it all out, one side faces “worse” forms of discrimination than the other (or at least that’s the argument)

            The majority of students of medicine and law are now women, although they tend to leave far more often. It seems to me that many of these professions are lucrative and prestigous in part because the norm is to work long hours and (thus) have a shitty work/life balance.

            One can question whether these careers are really that desirable and whether their high incomes exist to compensate for them being really rather shitty. The male provider role expects men to earn well, which logically means that they will be more willing to sacrifice for a higher income by choosing less pleasant professions that pay better or make sacrifices at work that women are less willing to make on average (like overtime and long commutes).

            If men are far more often not ‘allowed’ to choose less lucrative careers, to have a better work/life balance and can’t find a partner willing to subsidize them, can’t it be that men are actually being oppressed (as well)? It is a pretty common belief that most poeple are happier if they work to live, rather than live to work, yet women seem to achieve the former more often.

            For dying earlier I think its partly depending on what they are dying of to prove discrimination.

            One difference is that men die of workplace accidents far more often than women (a ratio of over 9:1). If one jumps to the conclusion that society pushes women out of lucrative jobs, shouldn’t one then also jump to the conclusion that society pushes men out of safe jobs? Or better yet, not assume either way.

            Yeah but just as you see SJ’s denying that there are other things, I see Red Tribers and denying that the discrimination is even a thing. I think the refusal to consider each other’s views is what’s causing each side to retreat more and more into “my way isn’t just right, it’s 100% right!” on this issue.

            The issue is that I often believe in different forms of discrimination than SJ advocates or believe that certain kinds of discrimination are much more common, where SJ advocates quite often deny forms that I believe in or deny that the size is as big as I claim.

            I actually think that framing this as if only SJ advocates believe in discrimination, while anti-SJ people (not necessarily red tribers) reject it, is a kind of bad faith that really undermines debates. It implies (and this is actually often made explicit) that claims of discrimination that clash with their SJ beliefs are not genuine concerns or truly believed, but are disengenious attempts to muddle the issue.

      • Wrong Species says:

        Let’s grant that black people being more discriminated against had an effect. What about Hispanics? They were barely on anyone’s radar outside of the southwest until the last 40 years. Asians have been discriminated against for over hundred. Every country East Asians go, they succeed, even when they start off dirt poor. Every country Hispanics are in they are somewhere in between white and blacks. It’s ubiquitous. Isn’t it weird how that just keeps happening, regardless of where?

        • AG says:

          And the leftist response is to say that this is evidence of global anti-black sentiment.

          Which, there is a colorist bias in most Asian cultures, as well as in previous intra-white conflict, so there might be something there.

          In the last OT I linked to Publishing Paid Me, and one of the trends noted is that black authors get advances lower than even other POC.

          • Wrong Species says:

            The question is why is there always the same pattern everywhere in the world. It always goes:

            Jews
            East Asian
            White
            Hispanic
            Black

            If institutional racism was the answer, it’s weird that it’s always in the same order. Let’s just say that for whatever reason, everyone wants to maximally discriminate against blacks. You still have to wonder why they treat Asians better than Hispanics. And if you look at Southeast Asians like Thai/Cambodians/Phillipinos, they do noticeably worse than East Asians like the Chinese/Japanese/Koreans. Notice how little racism seems to be a predictor. Do you think the average redneck is making a distinction between Hmong and Chinese?

          • AG says:

            The prestige-Asians-vs-jungle-Asians prejudice is colorism in actions.
            Within Central and South America, darker indigenous tribes have worse outcomes. Paler South Asians are the preferred faces for culture. Even within Africa, the Egyptian ethnicities are contrasted against those to the south.

            So yeah, global anti-black sentiment is kind of to be expected. Which means that they’re at the bottom of the rat race of prejudice. The Asian faces prejudice from the white person, but the Asian can still have prejudice against the black person, and the black person gets the double whammy.

          • Wrong Species says:

            This whole line of thought is completely unfalsifiable. One group of Asians comes to the US and succeed. One group comes and does worse. You just assume the fact that one group does better is proof that they were discriminated against less without any kind of evidence. Even if it were true that Americans were making these fine grained distinctions, which they aren’t, it still doesn’t establish causality.

          • AG says:

            White American’s don’t have to make these fine grained distinctions. They can simply be prejudiced against PoC. Mind you, some ethnicities that are currently white were previously not considered such. The Irish and the Black man were both compared to apes in their facial structure, as proof of their inferiority. But then within the PoC category, the Irish and the Asians themselves still also compared the black man to the ape.

            Very few hierarchies only have two tiers, and some groups climbing the ladder doesn’t mean that they aren’t kicking the person beneath, or trying to pull the ladder up behind them.

            Publishing Paid Me, though, shows that non-black PoC authors are yet still favored over black authors, even if those same non-black PoC authors are still getting paid less than white authors. So, evidently, there is some measure of making a distinction between merely non-white and black.

        • Wrong Species says:

          You really have no idea what you’re talking about. If we look at non-Western countries that made it to first world status, it’s East Asian countries. Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan. China has lower than Mexico GDP per Capita but that’s because they started from a lower base(thanks communism), but they are quickly catching up, and they aren’t stopping any time soon. You can look at a GDP per Capita map of the world. It’s remarkable how well it lines up by region, regardless of their past, regardless of whether they were colonies, regardless of their government corruption.

          East Asian immigrants in the US are non randomly selected from the population of their continues or origin

          People say this all the time. Has anyone ever bothered to find out what the breakdown of Asians is? Are most of them recent immigrants from well-off families? I can’t find the data on this. And what about the Vietnamese, who have a lot of Chinese ethnicity and do much better than the Hmong?

          I’m not going to continue this discussion with someone who called me an idiot.

        • cassander says:

          @hyperboloid says:

          By 1950, the year after the communist revolution, civil war and foreign occupation had driven down further to $448, over the next sixty years of communist rule it would grow to $8,031.00, a CAGR of just a shade under five percent.

          some of those years were not like the others. Chinese GDP per capita was lower than subs aharan africa’s when Mao died. And the CCP is definitely responsible for 25 years of basically zero growth.

          Countries that have gotten rich have aggressively pursued land reform, a mixed economy with free markets complimented by state led development with a strong focus on exports, and extensive investment in public goods. Whether they called themselves Communist or capitalist, were dictatorships or democracies, the countries that took this path succeeded.

          What utter nonsense. First, no communist country followed that path. China allowed some of that in certain few limited areas, and they succeeded while the rest of the economy stagnated. Second, “focusing on exports” was not the key. Attracting FDI was. Countries that allowed and encouraged it did well. they got to import expertise, gave them a direct incentive to reduce corruption, and avoided the cronyism and inefficiencies of nationalize industry, import substitution, and other failed developmental models.

          The African states that have followed this lead like Ethiopia, Ghana, and Rwanda are experiencing similar results, until the pandemic they were among the fastest growing economies in the world.

          this verges on the dishonest. Ghana has a gdp per capita of ~2,200, rwanda and Ethiopia are both below 1000. let me know when one of them is half as rich as korea is today.

        • WoollyAI says:

          some of those years were not like the others. Chinese GDP per capita was lower than subs aharan africa’s when Mao died. And the CCP is definitely responsible for 25 years of basically zero growth.

          No, hyperboloid is being a jerk but this isn’t a horrible argument. To steelman a defense of Mao,

          The Warlord era arguably starts in 1916. It’s essentially a giant free for all between all the armed forces in China.
          Things get worse in 1927 when the Kuomintang butcher their Communist allies in Shanghai. So now there’s a civil war and warlords running amuck.
          This civil war is put on hold in late 1936, (thanks Zhang Xueliang!) just in time for the Japanese invasion.
          The Japanese invasion ends in 1945 and there’s maybe a year before the civil war goes hot again, only to end in 1949.

          So the best defense of Mao is that it’s really, really hard to overstate the difficulty of rebuilding China. There’s been 33 years of constant intense war and it’s not like the century of humiliation before that was a picnic.

          Mao played the hand he was given very poorly but, to be fair, he was dealt an atrocious hand.

        • cassander says:

          @WoollyAI says:

          So the best defense of Mao is that it’s really, really hard to overstate the difficulty of rebuilding China. There’s been 33 years of constant intense war and it’s not like the century of humiliation before that was a picnic.

          That’s not a defense of mao. rebuilding china wasn’t going to be easy, but he made things much, much worse for a decade or so, then failed so spectacularly that things didn’t get better for better for another decade or so, despite the fact that the groundwork was clearly in place.

        • Wrong Species says:

          @hyperboloid

          Like I said, since you’re not arguing in good faith, I’m not going to debate you. I just wanted to say that I’m interested in data that goes beyond current immigrants. Does the Korean guy whose father got here in the 50’s owe his success to family fortune? I doubt it. Most Asians aren’t immigrants so if we’re saying that Asians only succeed because of family background, you need to go beyond recent immigrants.

          You may or may not be stupid in some general sense, but your arguments on race are ignorant, based on prejudice, and unworthy of respect from intelligent people.

          You can stop the virtue signaling. No one here is impressed.

        • Eric T says:

          You can stop the virtue signaling. No one here is impressed.

          Can we just move away from the term virtue signaling? I don’t think we need to ban it but in my experience those two words kills reasonable debate real fast.

      • Beck says:

        Majority Black and Hispanic schools get less funding

        Same link as Eric T
        Man, that was a weird paper. And I think it shows more or less the opposite of what’s claimed in the comment. From the text:

        From this table, we can see that on average, both Black and Latinx total per pupil expenditures exceed White total per pupil expenditures by $229.53 and $126.15, respectively. This is anticipated due to the strong relationship between race and poverty (Reardon & Owens, 2014) and the increased federal funding targeted toward students in districts with concentrated poverty (Cascio & Reber, 2013). (Cascio & Reber, 2013).

        The average trend across states in per pupil spending disparities tends to be positive, suggesting that states are spending more in the typical Black and Latinx students’ districts relative to the typical White student’s district over time.

        It’s hard to follow (for me, at least), but the authors claim seems to be that *as states get more segregated*, per pupil expenditure tends to fall by some amount. Also from the paper:

        From these two figures, we see that between-district Black–White segregation decreases for most states.

        The summary (I’m not super confident in this, so someone brighter feel free to correct me) seems to be something like:
        -Racial segregation is decreasing in most states.
        -Per pupil expenditure is higher for non-white students than white students on average.
        -The amount that per pupil expenditure is higher is increasing over time.

        I *think* what they did was work out that, as states got less segregated over some time period, spending on non-white students went up relative to white students. Then they just flipped the sign and declared…pathways to inequality.

        • Eric T says:

          I *think* what they did was work out that, as states got less segregated over some time period, spending on non-white students went up relative to white students. Then they just flipped the sign and declared…pathways to inequality.

          That may be true – the point was about history after all, and while minorities may get more funding/student now that wasn’t the case over time.

          Fair critique though!

      • Scott Alexander says:

        Thanks for this.

        I agree that these factors certainly have an effect. I think a better question might be “of the observed black-white gap, what percent of the variance should be explained by institutional racism, vs. by other factors”? If it’s 90%, obviously we should all be really dedicated to fighting institutional racism. If it’s 10%, we should still be slightly dedicated, but maybe also focus on other things. I’m not sure what the range of opinion is on this – for example, I think I’ve heard Charles Murray say 50%. Are there people who self-identify as SJWs who also say 50%? If so, do they and Murray have a difference of emphasis rather than a substantive difference? Not sure!

        Re: redlining. I actually don’t understand this at all. The few times I’ve read about redlining, the practice is described as some sketchy person getting a black family to move into a white neighborhood, the white people freak out because they think the neighborhood is about to go black, they all sell their houses to the sketchy person for much less than they are worth, and the sketchy person sells the houses to black people and makes a profit”. As described, this sounds kind of like a scam perpetrated on white people. Am I completely just reading terrible explanations and missing what redlining is? If not, how does this restrict black people from moving into good neighborhoods?

        Re: can’t be genetic/cultural because diversity of black Americans – I’m not sure this is a good argument. For example, I’ve heard claims like “black Americans have different hair that needs a different kind of hair care” and “black Americans have much higher risk of sickle cell anemia”. It’s possible statements like this are just true of one black subgroup, but this isn’t my impression. If they’re true of the large majority of black Americans, then black Americans overall can have consistent genetic differences from white Americans.

        Re: 2b and arguments that Asians etc do all right. To me, the interesting argument isn’t that Asians can do okay despite suffering some discrimination. It’s that other ethnicities do much better than white people on the same axes where blacks do much worse. For example, Ashkenazi Jews have about the same income and education advantages over whites as whites have over blacks. Asians (I think, I might be remembering wrong), have the same advantage in arrest rates and SAT scores over whites as whites have over blacks. For most indicators of wealth and social success, Ashkenazim will be at the top, then Asians, then whites, then Hispanics, then blacks. It seems pretty weird to focus on only the races that do worse than whites, then say that all racial differences must be due to institutional racism by white people (of course, there are people who say that Ashkenazi-white differences are due to institutional racism by Ashkenazim, but we call those people “Nazis” and are generally against them).

        This is one reason I find it hard to answer the “what percent of variance” question – there are vast forces here that we have no understanding of. The fact that blacks were discriminated against horribly in the past is suggestive, but we can also find lots of examples of races that were discriminated against horribly in the past and now do really well. So it seems worth wondering whether the effects of discrimination fade after a few generations (see eg here for some evidence this might be true) and then whatever causes the Ashkenazi/Asian thing is the main driver. Overall I am just not sure of this.

        • Jaskologist says:

          You’re thinking of blockbusting, not redlining.

        • Buttle says:

          Redlining was originally US federal government policy not to guarantee loans (think Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae) for houses in neighborhoods in which even a single black person lived. This was in many cases the main reason that white people reacted so strongly when a black person attempted to buy into their neighborhood — simple economic self interest. Not the Klan, Uncle Sugar Able. Not at all just in Dixie, legal redlining and racial covenants were facts of life everywhere in the US until not very long ago at all.

          • SamChevre says:

            One absolutely key thing to remember about redlining: when redlining was the practice, the neighborhoods where blacks could live were sharply restricted, and housing in those neighborhoods was MORE expensive than comparable housing elsewhere. After the Fair Housing Act, the direction of the price differential changed.

          • Scott Alexander says:

            Re: Jaskologist: Thanks, that explains my confusion.

            Re: Buttle: Did the government do this with the intention of promoting segregation, or for some other reason?

          • Act_II says:

            @Scott
            If you haven’t already, I recommend reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Case For Reparations. It includes a discussion of redlining, with nice visual aids. You don’t necessarily have to agree with the top-line thesis, but it’s a fascinating exploration of the history of systemic racism regardless.

          • Eric T says:

            If you haven’t already, I recommend reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Case For Reparations. It includes a discussion of redlining, with nice visual aids. You don’t necessarily have to agree with the top-line thesis, but it’s a fascinating exploration of the history of systemic racism regardless.

            My initial version of this post actually included this link, when I was editing it down I noticed that pretty much everyone I talked with conceded redlining had existed so I didn’t want to take time on it.

            It’s a great article.

          • Lillian says:

            @Scott Alexander

            Did the government do this with the intention of promoting segregation, or for some other reason?

            Okay so, first off Wikipedia offers a pretty succinct summary on how redlining got started: “In 1935, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB) asked Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) to look at 239 cities and create “residential security maps” to indicate the level of security for real-estate investments in each surveyed city. On the maps, the newest areas—those considered desirable for lending purposes—were outlined in green and known as “Type A”. These were typically affluent suburbs on the outskirts of cities. “Type B” neighborhoods, outlined in blue, were considered “Still Desirable”, whereas older “Type C” were labeled “Declining” and outlined in yellow. “Type D” neighborhoods were outlined in red and were considered the most risky for mortgage support. These neighborhoods tended to be the older districts in the center of cities; often they were also black neighborhoods.”

            The point of this was to ensure that the Federal government did not end up insuring risky loans. The government wanted to give lenders some breathing room so they would lend more during the Great Depression, without actually paying out much in the way of cash. The way they did this was to simply insure secure loans and refuse to insure risky ones. Now at the time they didn’t have FICO scores nor the means to create them, so they instead they classified mortages not the qualities of the person taking out the loan, but by the qualities of the neighbourhood in which it was being taken out. Black neighbourhoods got the shaft, but so did a lot of non-black neighbourhoods.

            One interesting example of a redlined white neighbourhood is River North in Chicago, which at the time was 0% black and nowadays is I believe the whitest neighbourhood in the city. The area remained shabby, generally unpleasant, and run down until the late 1970s, when local real estate magnate Albert Friedman started redeveloping it. Today it is the most desirable and affluent neighbourhood in Chicago, featuring the highest rents of the whole city. Redlining clearly did not doom it.

            Now this is not to say that redlining didn’t have a negative effect on black people as a whole. Since people mostly socialise and conduct business within their own race, the non-redlined whites might have served as a sort of lifeline for the redlined whites, whereas blacks didn’t have that option since a far greater proportion of them was redlined. The point is that if there is a relationship between redlining back then and low home equity now, it’s not a straightforward one. Indeed a large number of the most desirable and wealthy neighborhoods in Chicago today were redlined back in the day. Whereas many of the worst neighbourhoods in the city (such as Austin) were not. I do believe on the whole redlining did wind up deny blacks opportunities to enrich themselves, but I think there’s a lot more to the story than just that.

          • Aapje says:

            @Lillian

            Did the existing population benefit from the development in River North, or did they simply get pushed out?

            Benefiting from increased home equity requires that you own, rather than rent & that you actually stay as the prices are rising.

        • Eric T says:

          I’m super tired so I’ll try to avoid saying something dumb like the US population is over 100% like I did last night.

          I think a better question might be “of the observed black-white gap, what percent of the variance should be explained by institutional racism, vs. by other factors”? If it’s 90%, obviously we should all be really dedicated to fighting institutional racism. If it’s 10%, we should still be slightly dedicated, but maybe also focus on other things. I’m not sure what the range of opinion is on this – for example, I think I’ve heard Charles Murray say 50%. Are there people who self-identify as SJWs who also say 50%? If so, do they and Murray have a difference of emphasis rather than a substantive difference? Not sure!

          I think that’s where I’m trying to get at with my whole “multiple factors” line of thought. I don’t know where the specific number is, My intuition is that 50% sounds reasonable although I personally think its higher than that (though probably not by too much. 90% doesn’t seem to match up to the evidence)

          Re: can’t be genetic/cultural because diversity of black Americans – I’m not sure this is a good argument. For example, I’ve heard claims like “black Americans have different hair that needs a different kind of hair care” and “black Americans have much higher risk of sickle cell anemia”. It’s possible statements like this are just true of one black subgroup, but this isn’t my impression. If they’re true of the large majority of black Americans, then black Americans overall can have consistent genetic differences from white Americans.

          I think this is fair: as I mentioned above my understanding about genetic differences is lacking, and I find the evidence on the topic very lacking.

        • AG says:

          @Scott

          Institutional/systemic racism has never been one single factor, and trying to cast it as one vs. other factors is a mistake. Institutional/systemic racism is a way to describe the cumulative effect of Moloch, as it pertains to racial outcomes. Any one factor is going to have a small effect by itself, but they still build to a hostile environment, death by a thousand papercuts.

          Meanwhile, you note that “Asians (I think, I might be remembering wrong), have the same advantage in arrest rates and SAT scores over whites as whites have over blacks,” and yet this doesn’t translate into wealth distribution and political/social power outcomes. What could possibly cause this breakdown in correlation?

          • Aapje says:

            @AG

            You can typically aggregate and deaggregate factors. Choosing to zoom into a certain level is a choice, not necessarily a mistake, even if you could zoom in more.

            Any one factor is going to have a small effect by itself, but they still build to a hostile environment, death by a thousand papercuts.

            That may be true, but it can also be true that non-racist ethnic differences can make the effect of racism worse or less bad.

            For example, a common Jewish answer to discrimination seems to be to invest in human capital. For example, to become a doctor. After all, they can take your stuff, but cannot excise the knowledge from your mind. With the increasing premium on human capital, it may be that historic racism has on the whole contributed to Jewish success (of the survivors), rather than taken away from it.

            Meanwhile, you note that “Asians (I think, I might be remembering wrong), have the same advantage in arrest rates and SAT scores over whites as whites have over blacks,” and yet this doesn’t translate into wealth distribution and political/social power outcomes.

            Asians are being heavily discriminated against in education right now, as part of affirmative action. So assuming that we agree that discrimination definitely tends to have an effect, while it is actually being done (rather than in the past), this can explain some of it.

            Furthermore, Asians have a strong preference for STEM careers, which is a good choice for a good income, but a bad choice for political/social power.

            I suspect/guess that the arrest gap between Asians and whites is mostly present for adolescents, while the gap between blacks and whites is more prominent at later ages, which might then have a far larger effect on how it is treated.

          • albatross11 says:

            My guess: The Asian/white crime gap is about 10% IQ and 90% culture. The Asian/white education and STEM gap is about 50% IQ and 50% culture.

          • AG says:

            I forget, does g as a predictor for outcome refer mostly to quality of life (and so stops applying to the upper class)? Does it predict for power at all?
            Crime rates may be similar. If abuse/major trauma is just about the only clear case where nurture trumps nature, then Asians having a higher arrest rate than whites might be similar, where both groups are above the waterline of effect, so to speak, and ditto for IQ.

      • AlexOfUrals says:

        the benefit of coming from countries where they can first gain an education, wealth, status, or other advantages

        So you’re saying that an average immigrant to the US from the 3d world is starting better off than an average black person born here? I’m don’t know much about your other topics but I have so much to say on this one. Let’s go in order:

        > education
        Education from almost every non-first world university is only good to check the “degree” mark on the positions where such is required. Many of hiring sites ask you to select your college rather than just write it down, and I’m yet to see one which bothered to include anything outside of the US. Granted checking this mark costs quite a lot but any low-tier college in the US does it just as well.

        >wealth
        Most of the world have lower income levels than the average for African Americans. See e.g. this list and note that the only 3 Asian country which are above the American blacks ($41,361) are Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong.

        >status
        How exactly being transplanted to a country where you don’t know anyone, don’t really know the customs or cultural norms all that well, and often speak with silly/annoying accent helps one to raise social status, in you view?

        >other advantages
        Advantage of having absolutely official restrictions on where you can work – in many cases this means exactly one specific company, or college – and whether your spouse can work, for example. Or the advantage of being thrown the heck out of the country if you stop working in that company for whatever reason. Also the advantage of having no clue how many things work, so you’d e.g. buy a car for MSRP or walk out on a cop when they stopped your car.

      • oldman says:

        I’m a non-American who has only visited America once, the following comes from purely an outsider perspective. You say that culture is unlikely to be a cause, as there is a consistent earnings gap across many cities in different regions of America (I’m paraphrasing, but I think this is a fair summary?)

        Doesn’t that then mean that the systematic racism is therefore roughly equal across all regions of America? That areas that had Jim Crow had as much systematic racism as areas that didn’t? Maybe America is more homogeneous than I thought (as I said – I’m an outsider) but if America is heterogeneous, doesn’t this argue against systematic racism being a driving factor?

        • Mark V Anderson says:

          Yes I agree that this is one of the weaknesses of the analysis. He says that Black urban and rural culture is different so unlikely to explain differences in outcome both places. But as you say overall culture is quite different in different places in the US, so I think systemic racism would be quite different, and yet outcome differences are similar. I think Black culture is more similar urban and rural than overall culture, and so is better explanation.

          • Eric T says:

            I posted above why I think the systems of racism were actually not as varied as some people think (ie: many of them came down from the federal level, several programs like redlining and anti-bussing were practically identical in major cities because they copied one another) but I concede that this isn’t the most elegant argument in favor of.

            I guess the idea would be this: Historical Systemic Racism had less to do with Culture and more to do with Law. Modern Systemic racism is more tied up in culture.

      • RalMirrorAd says:

        1. Someone did an Analysis of the Sanford Education Data Archive and basically plotted the distribution of per district funding per pupil for whites, asians, hispanics, and blacks.
        https://exhibits.stanford.edu/data/catalog/db586ns4974

        https://twitter.com/AnechoicMedia_/status/1269447771066597377
        If anything it looks like Hispanics have it worse in terms of the distribution of funding.
        The way to read those lines (for an X and Y axis) is that the top 1-X% of students have Y dollars per pupil allocated to that district.

        2. The very premise that education spending disparities cause education outcome disparities seems suspect.

        A. Spending increases have not correlated with scholastic achievement historically
        B. Spending gaps between the US and other OECD countries don’t explain average scholastic achievement
        C. Voucher studies show small or near zero improvements in educational outcome

        3. There’s also the fact, and this is often pointed out by believers of systemic racism, that poor whites score higher on the SAT than wealthy blacks. The school district the wealthy black attends in this instance is almost certainly

        The ‘Alternative Hypothesis’ if you like has a causal chain that goes something like this:

        Parental Cognitive Ability predicts parental Income (where ‘predicts’ = ‘Explains a significant but clearly not all the variation in’), income predicts whether they live in an affluent neighborhood or not, which in turn predicts the local portion of the districts school funding. (Bearing in mind that schools can and do receive state and federal grants, and AFAICT there are rules that limit just how much disparity in funding is permissible)

        because cognitive ability like height is heritable, parental CA predicts child CA which predicts child performance in school as well as child’s income.

        You’ll end up with observed correlations between certain measures of school funding and child income, or generally correlations between level of scholastic achievement and income/education spending, but not necessarily any correlations through time between spending and educational attainment or between countries educational attainment and education spending.

    • Eric T says:

      3. “Racism” v. “racism” – or how more people contribute to racism than you think.

      My SJ friend and I have a way of talking about Racism. We break it down into “big R” Racism and “little r” racism. I’ve found it a helpful way to explain the topic to non-SJ types. I’ll try to explain it here as best I can.

      Racism is when you, as a person, have an obvious and actionable bias against Black People, and you choose to act on it. Racism is when you decide not to hire a Black man because he is Black. It’s ugly and its mean. And it still exists. 48% of Hate Crimes motivated by Race (themselves 60% of all Hate Crimes) target Black Americans, compared to only 20% targeting white. I wish I had some data to back this up but I once asked my black middle school students how many of them had been called the N-Word by a white person. Every single one said they had, most said it had happened over 5 times, and around 40% said it happened over 10. Ta-Nehsi Coates writes about how the word has spread, and how Black People are able to tell when it is used in a friendly way vs. a derogatory way (spoiler: exactly how you think, also NYT paywall).

      I don’t think many people on SSC will argue that Racists don’t exist, I suspect the disagreement comes from how many people are Racist. Here’s something to remember: Racism isn’t something you can practice in polite company. If you are a Racist, you have learned to hide it, at least in the presence of non-Racists. The number of actual Racists therefore is going to be a decent amount higher than the Racists you run into.

      Think of Scott’s arguments about Outgroups functioning as “dark matter universes” – people with these fringe views congregate in areas. I spent a lot of time doing political work in the deep south, and it really re-oriented my perspective on how many of these big R Racists still exist. But here’s my plea: even if only 5% of the country are Racists, that portion of the country still votes, influences policy, contributes to national discourse, and yes Steve King, sometimes get elected.

      FAR more controversial is the topic of little r “racism” – the one we tend to talk about in discussions of political conversation and systemic racism. “racism” isn’t intentional, sometimes is completely harmless, and largely is hidden from view. When modern SJ-types decry someone as a Racist what they really mean often is that they think they are racist – if that makes sense? Basically this is the kind of unconscious, often out-of-our hands racism that SJ types like myself argue pervades society on the macro level. I want to break this up into a couple different sections:

      3a: Everyone’s a little bit racist

      I mean maybe not everyone
      but let’s be reasonable here for a second. Every human being creates biases in their head, and every human being is likely going to think they are better at detecting their own biases than they are, even if they are smart, well-educated, and well-meaning. The sinister part with racial biases is threefold:

      First, they tend to be easy to deny. Because racial categories are so vast, and the people we interact with so small, its easy to make friends/relationships/working acquaintanceships with people in a category you are biased against and thus convince yourself of said bias not existing. I do the exact same thing with conservatives – I may have a couple conservative friends, but I still almost certainly have subconscious biases against the Red Tribe.

      Second, they tend to be rather small most of the time. Most Americans don’t go around actively thinking about race – even when they interact with said race. But that doesn’t mean the biases don’t flare up when people have to make judgement calls about other races. [A note: these meta-studies are focusing on ways to solve systemic biases. That is not why I included them, as I said above, this post is about proving the problem not addressing solutions. I include them because I think their inclusion criteria are good enough to provide strong evidence for such biases to exist]

      Third – and this one may surprise you, they are often completely logical positions to hold. Black People ARE more likely to be criminals, unemployed, etc. If all you have is someone’s race, it is a perfectly logical Bayesian decision to update your belief about them accordingly – just as with age, sex, or class. This is what I was getting at earlier in Section 2c: Race-Blind policies, if done perfectly logically, just end up causing society to fall on the same racial divisions it already is in. If part of the problem with structural racism is that black people are just more likely to end up as criminals, taking a race-blind approach won’t fix incarceration rates because they are ACTUALLY more likely to be criminals. Note that I don’t think that having a belief based in logic makes the belief not “racist” though it certainly makes it not “Racist” And double note: I am NOT saying that only white people can hold these views. Anyone who thinks that only white people can be racist is, in my humble opinion, a big dumb dumb.

      Now to cut off an argument I expect may arise: “if that line of thinking is logical isn’t that the end of the debate? Logic=Truth=Good right?” Well while I agree it’s logical on the individual level to hold “little r” racist views from time to time, it:
      A. Doesn’t make any of my previous arguments about how this is a deeply unfair system and at least substantially the fault of those in power any more wrong – we should try to change the world such that the logical view is NO LONGER “little r” racist.
      B. Doesn’t mean I don’t think the world wouldn’t be a better place if we strived for increased racial equality on the opportunity level. In the world where people of color aren’t structurally disadvantaged we can presumably have a society where more people are better able to fill the roles they’d excel at. Insert some free market bullshit here or something idk I’m at work when I’m writing this.

      3b. This shit’s still happening

      There are some facts that nothing else we’ve talked about thus far; class, culture, genetics, history etc. do as good a job explaining as modern bias. I want to identify some of them and discuss why I think “racism” is more prevalent than some may believe.

      Minority candidates for office do worse than white candidates do, regardless of their class. Perhaps there is a genetic component – maybe black people are just worse public speakers? But it seems far more likely that maybe there are some biases being brought out at the voting box.

      Minorities are less likely to be promoted regardless of job performance. This is true both in the military and in the corporate world (even for our very successful friends, the Asian Americans). Again, maybe there is some kind of cultural component that makes minorities worse at management – but it strikes me as far more likely that minor biases make it such that management decisions are unfairly slanted against them. That seems like A. it matches the fact that this issue stretches across cultures better, and B. just way simpler. I’ve worked for biased bosses before.

      Minorities are more likely to pay higher rates on loans, or be denied loans altogether. Housing loans, even when controlled for income, loan amount, and neighborhood disfavor black people. And minorities saw moderate decreases in their loan payments just by using an app over meeting-face-to-face (though for us technophiles – the app didn’t serve as a total fix sadly). Again, maybe minorities are just worse at advocating for loans? I don’t know if that’s true, and the fact that people might be captured by biases seems just more likely.

      • cassander says:

        Minorities are more likely to pay higher rates on loans, or be denied loans altogether.

        They’re also more likely to default on loans. That seems relevant.

        • Eric T says:

          Absolutely relevant! The argument I suppose is why?

          I fell behind on my student loans once, but my loving middle class parents were able to loan me a few grand until I found a job. Perhaps it is the case that minorities who lack the kind of stable financial and family backgrounds (as I noted in Part 2) are less able to handle those kinds of temporary shocks to income?

          I will dig into more evidence to figure out if there are other factors at play here, and get back to you.

          • Matt M says:

            From the perspective of the lender, it doesn’t matter why.

          • JayT says:

            But the fact that you have resources other than the money in your account and the job you hold makes you a better bet for the lender. The only way we could “fix” this issue is by raising the rates on everyone, because if you give low rates to bad bets you’re not going to be able stay in business very long.

          • Eric T says:

            Again this isn’t a solutions-oriented post. I’m not saying “lenders should do X” to compensate. And as I said in Part 3 – I think Bias may actually be fully rational! So maybe the lender, from a purely business perspective, SHOULD charge the black man higher rates.

            My argument is the reason it is rational is factors that are in a large part out of said black man’s control, factors that I think are somewhat fixable. But first we have to agree the factors exist.

          • cassander says:

            Matt M got it in one.

            It’s the same as with crime. If one group commits crimes at X times the rates of whites, it’s not racist if they get arrested at X times the rate of whites. If they default more on their loans, it’s not racist to charge them more. You can’t just point to the disparity as self evident evidence of racism without looking at the underlying reality. And with loans, unlike crime, the underlying reality is actually pretty measurable.

            Bias that’s rational isn’t bias, it’s knowledge. I’m not biased against poison for not drinking it.

          • Eric T says:

            It’s the same as with crime. If one group commits crimes at X times the rates of whites, it’s not racist if they get arrested at X times the rate of whites. If they default more on their loans, it’s not racist to charge them more. You can’t just point to the disparity as self evident evidence of racism without looking at the underlying reality. And with loans, unlike crime, the underlying reality is actually pretty measurable.

            I’m starting to feel like maybe ya didn’t read my entire post because I did explicitly say that this kind of bias is often completely rational. I even used crime as the example, which is why this is a bit annoying -_-

            Regardless, see my response above for how I feel on crime as well as loans.

            ETA: I saw your edit. I think this may be a semantic disagreement. I think if you want to rename it from Bias to something else, lets. Lets called it “schmekledorf”

            Schmekledorf may be rational on the individual level, but I think it makes the world worse and is unfair, and I’d like to address the things that make shmekledorf exist.

          • FLWAB says:

            I’m starting to feel like maybe ya didn’t read my entire post because I did explicitly say that this kind of bias is often completely rational.

            I think their disagreement with you is that they disagree with you on whether rational bias is racism. You say some racism is rational, while they believe that if there’s a rational reason then it’s not racism.

            EDIT: Kinda ninja’d by Eric’s edit

          • rahien.din says:

            My family once had a bad run of automotive luck. We kept getting into accidents, but were never at fault.

            At one point, our insurance agent called my dad in for a meeting, and told him that they might have to cancel our policy. “Why would you do that? We’re good drivers, we pay our premiums, and none of these accidents was our fault,” says my dad. “Doesn’t matter,” replies our agent. “You’re just a bad investment.”

            On one hand, this makes perfect sense. Did we think the company existed simply to give us money?

            On the other hand, this makes no sense whatsoever. What, exactly, were we giving them money for?

          • Eric T says:

            I think their disagreement with you is that they disagree with you on whether rational bias is racism. You say some racism is rational, while they believe that if there’s a rational reason then it’s not racism.

            Yeah I saw their addition after I made my response, I think that’s the angle I was missing.

            I think my answer for that is something like this: the system is the one that is racist, the person acting within it is not culpable save for the fact they aren’t fighting it (see another thread for my thoughts on that)

          • Jiro says:

            “Everyone’s a little bit racist, the system is racist” is one of the primary examples for why there is a motte and bailey fallacy. If you define racism such that it’s not severe, may be rational, and may even be the right thing to do in some cases, you have no business saying that racists are evil and everyone who won’t give in to your anti-racism demands is on a par with slavekeepers.

            And even if you don’t say that, your allies certainly will.

          • Eric T says:

            If you define racism such that it’s not severe, may be rational, and may even be the right thing to do in some cases, you have no business saying that racists are evil and everyone who won’t give in to your anti-racism demands is on a par with slavekeepers.

            Did I ever do that?

            ETA: Damnit guys stop adding shit when I’m replying that invalidates my whole reply!

            Here’s the idea. We all have some biases yes – but having those biases is only human, and I would say far from Evil. I think accepting those biases exist and working to fix the situations that cause them is Good. I also think that the biases aren’t always rational, which was the point of my first bit about not always knowing when you are actually biased.

          • cassander says:

            @Eric T says:

            Did I ever do that?

            You didn’t, but your political allies have.

            I also think that the biases aren’t always rational, which was the point of my first bit about not always knowing when you are actually biased.

            Again, if you’re accurately measuring the world, you’re not biased, you’re correct. charging people who are more likely to default more for loans isn’t morally problematic if they’re more likely to default. In fact, it’s essential if you don’t want the banks to go out of business.

          • Eric T says:

            charging people who are more likely to default more for loans isn’t morally problematic if they’re more likely to default. In fact, it’s essential if you don’t want the banks to go out of business.

            I’m not sure how many different ways you want me to say “I don’t think it is morally problematic for the bank to do this” – but hopefully that was the last one.

            What I do find morally problematic is the systems that I think make that the Bank’s rational (and indeed as you posit) essential choice.

          • cassander says:

            @Eric T says:

            I’m not sure how many different ways you want me to say “I don’t think it is morally problematic for the bank to do this” – but hopefully that was the last one.

            But you are saying it’s racist, which amounts to saying it is morally problematic. But let’s put that aside.

            What I do find morally problematic is the systems that I think make that the Bank’s rational (and indeed as you posit) essential choice.

            I genuinely don’t know what you mean by this. The only actors in this scenario are the borrower and the lender. You’re saying that it’s not morally problematic for the lender to charge the borrow based on risk, so who’s acting immorally?

          • AG says:

            @cassander

            Eric T is making a Moloch argument. Yes, in any individual loan case there are only two parties, but the leftist cause is trying to get out of the Molochian minimum of systemic skew by getting more cooperation from everyone involved, even though defecting is the rational choice for the individual.

            For the much more aggressive leftists, making it moral is a tactic towards that end. Defectors must be deterred, and Overton Window boundaries are useful for that.

          • cassander says:

            @AG says:

            Eric T is making a Moloch argument. Yes, in any individual loan case there are only two parties, but the leftist cause is trying to get out of the Molochian minimum of systemic skew by getting more cooperation from everyone involved, even though defecting is the rational choice for the individual.

            charging someone a rate based on their risk IS cooperating. It’s exactly what we want a banking system to do. I’m sure if we dug down into it we could find that, e.g. people named Brad get charged higher interest rates than Stevens. If we do, we shouldn’t jump to assuming that there’s anti-brad bias at work, especially if we know that brads also default at higher rates.

          • Act_II says:

            @cassander
            You misunderstand what cooperate/defect mean in this context. (In fairness, they were poorly chosen terms for this). The point is that an action that is locally optimal may nonetheless be harmful in the broader scheme.

            In this case, the fact that black people are systematically denied loans means that black people systematically have a harder time escaping unstable financial situations, which in turn means that they will continue to be denied loans. Even if an individual loan applicant is trustworthy, they are less likely to get a loan for no reason other than where they grew up. And even if no individual lender is behaving maliciously, they are punished by the market for taking chances, which still perpetuates a state of society in which there is a racial underclass.

            Your name example is different for several reasons. For one, it wouldn’t cross generations; a black family will have black children that fall prey to the same issues, but a Brad can just name his son Steve. For that matter, he could also change his own name. For two, names obviously don’t have a causal relationship with defaulting on loans, so any correlation would either be insignificant or an artifact of a different problem (e.g. you probably would see a difference between Brads and Jamals or Brads and Cletuses, but those would really just be race and class differences in disguise).

            The presumption on the left is that having a racial underclass is both undesirable and unnatural; that is, black people got off to an unfair start due to slavery/Jim Crow/redlining and still haven’t escaped this generational cycle only because of a system in which even well-meaning lenders are punished on average for lending to them. This why the other poster brought up Moloch; it’s just an artsy way of saying “we’re in a bad Nash equilibrium”. The way out cannot be an individual one; we need to either make a large coordinated effort to shift the equilibrium or we need to change the game entirely.

          • cassander says:

            @Act_II says:

            You misunderstand what cooperate/defect mean in this context. (In fairness, they were poorly chosen terms for this). The point is that an action that is locally optimal may nonetheless be harmful in the broader scheme.

            That was what I thought was said. we just disagree on what is optimal. My contention is that charging people an appropriate rate for their risk is optimal, even if that means blacks get charged more, non average.

            Even if an individual loan applicant is trustworthy, they are less likely to get a loan for no reason other than where they grew up.

            Not for no reason., because they are a greater credit risk.

            And even if no individual lender is behaving maliciously, they are punished by the market for taking chances, which still perpetuates a state of society in which there is a racial underclass.

            They aren’t getting punished, they’re a greater risk, and there’s nothing racial about it. And if they are being treated equally, considering the risk, over time things will equalize, especially if you have race neutral anti-poverty programs which they can avail themselves of.

            Your name example is different for several reasons. For one, it wouldn’t cross generations; a black family will have black children that fall prey to the same issues,

            Again, you fall back on assuming that they’re getting denied loans because they’re black, not because they’re a greater credit risk. If it’s just the credit, then one generation can work hard, run up a good credit score, then cosign for the kids and the problem is solved in a generation.

            The presumption on the left is that having a racial underclass is both undesirable and unnatural;

            Everyone presumes that. We differ on solutions.

            that is, black people got off to an unfair start due to slavery/Jim Crow/redlining and still haven’t escaped this generational cycle only because of a system in which even well-meaning lenders are punished on average for lending to them.

            Again, not punishment. Those blacks aren’t equally good risks getting denied, they’re worse risks.

            But frankly, no, I don’t think the left believes this. Or, at least, a decreasing share of it does. I do think that this is what most of the right believes, that blacks are behind and that they’ll eventually catch up if treated fairly. but more and more of the left is buying into the theory that blacks aren’t just behind, they’re being actively pushed down because they’re black by active racism today.

          • Act_II says:

            @cassander
            Read my post again. I don’t deny that black people are greater credit risks. In fact, my argument is predicated on that. That is the problem. Black people are greater credit risks because the black community has more people in difficult financial straits. They cannot simply “work hard and get good credit” for the next generation when they are denied the lines of credit they need to do so. Your assertion that it will all even out over time flies in the face of all evidence; we know that poverty is a difficult cycle to get out of, and we can see that black outcomes are still disproportionately worse even after several generations in the market.

            Lenders are punished by the market for lending to those who pose a greater risk. There does not need to be any racial animus for lenders to lend less to black people. There isn’t an individual evil villain; it’s the entrenched system that perpetuates inequality. That’s what systemic racism means.

            It seems like you almost realize that a systemic solution is needed when you bring up welfare. Yes, effective welfare programs are a good systemic solution to this sort of racial inequality. Unfortunately, the current state of welfare in the US is better at keeping people from starving than raising people out of poverty due to a number of issues (like welfare cliffs and stumbling blocks from the right), so more work is needed.

            But frankly, no, I don’t think the left believes this.

            I am on the left and I believe this. Eric T seems to be on the left and believe this as well. If you’re right, we’ve put a whole lot of effort today into pretending to believe something just to make you question your priors. Less of the condescension, please.

          • cassander says:

            Act_II says:

            They cannot simply “work hard and get good credit” for the next generation when they are denied the lines of credit they need to do so.

            Yes, they can. they aren’t entirely denied credit, they have to pay a little more for it. that’s not good for them, but it’s not an insurmountable wall, and it’s no harder for them than for anyone else who’s in the same financial position. Being treated like anyone else would be in their situation is the goal.

            Your assertion that it will all even out over time flies in the face of all evidence; we know that poverty is a difficult cycle to get out of, and we can see that black outcomes are still disproportionately worse even after several generations in the market.

            You’re assuming that black under performance is entirely caused bu external factors. I don’t think that’s accurate.

            That’s what systemic racism means.

            then the term is a meaningless stand in and should be abolished.

            Unfortunately, the current state of welfare in the US is better at keeping people from starving than raising people out of poverty due to a number of issues (like welfare cliffs and stumbling blocks from the right), so more work is needed.

            Yep. but its problems have nothing to do with race

            I am on the left and I believe this. Eric T seems to be on the left and believe this as well. If you’re right, we’ve put a whole lot of effort today into pretending to believe something just to make you question your priors. Less of the condescension, please.

            Less of the cherry picking, please. My next sentence: “But frankly, no, I don’t think the left believes this. Or, at least, a decreasing share of it does.

          • AG says:

            Why is it a meaningless term? “Systemic racism” takes the racism off of the individual and moves it to the system, within which individuals in it act in a rational and optimal way (for the individual),
            but that causes skewed outcomes.

            The point of codifying systemic racism as a concept is to introduce the complementary idea that there can therefore exist systems in which the individuals in it can still act in a rational and optimal way, and yet does not produce skewed outcomes. (Insert Elua joke here)
            This image has been memed to hell and back, as all such diagrams include simplifications, but it does have useful ideas in it.

          • cassander says:

            @AG says:

            Why is it a meaningless term. “Systemic racism” takes the racism off of the individual and moves it to the system, within which individuals in it acting in a rational and optimal way (for the individual), but which causes skewed outcomes.

            Because the definition amounts to “anything deemed to be a problem had by any group of people that isn’t white”. One might as well say racism with Chinese characteristics.

            The point of codifying systemic racism as a concept is to introduce within the conceptual space the idea that there can exist systems in which the individuals in it can still act in a ration and optimal way, which does not produce skewed outcomes.

            Unless you can define a limit to systematic racism that less than 100% equity between all groups always, I don’t see how anything has been codified.

            This image has been memed to hell and back, as all such diagrams include simplifications, but it does have useful ideas in it.

            A good meme, and I realize the intent, but (using those terms) I see the broad slate of progressive policies as pushing equity, not justice. I suspect they’d think it was the reverse.

          • rumham says:

            @AG

            Why is it a meaningless term. “Systemic racism” takes the racism off of the individual and moves it to the system, within which individuals in it acting in a rational and optimal way (for the individual), but which causes skewed outcomes.

            Because there’s already a word for that. Disparate outcomes. Changing the name to include racism without adding anything to the definition to justify it makes it a meaningless change.

            At least, meaningless if you’re being charitable. If you’re not being charitable its just privileging the hypothesis.

          • DarkTigger says:

            Why is it a meaningless term? “Systemic racism” takes the racism off of the individual and moves it to the system, within which individuals in it act in a rational and optimal way (for the individual),
            but that causes skewed outcomes.

            I don’t want to say a thing like systemic racism does not exist at all,
            but the word has become utterly meaningsless because people use it as a center beam in their Motte.
            I have read university educated people writing for national newspapers, went from “your prejudices are racism” to “my prejudice are actually offers for self reflection, also I can’t be racists because systemic racism” several times, last year.

          • albatross11 says:

            So, when we’re talking about rational discrimination, I think it’s maybe useful to split it into a few further categories for thinking about it:

            a. It’s rational for me to discriminate (be a small-r racist in EricT’s terminology) because my customers, bosses, or other employees are big-r Racists in EricT’s terminology. That is, I put pretty white women in the front office and keep big black guys in the back because that’s what the customers want.

            b. It’s rational for me to be a small-r racist because of differences that are very hard to evaluate in other ways. Maybe I need to make a decision right now about whether to walk by a bunch of black teenagers or a bunch of identically-dressed Asian teenagers. The only available information says “cross to the Asian side of the street.”

            c. It’s rational for me to be a small-r racist because of ignorance. That is, there are other ways to evaluate someone that are better than race, but I don’t know them. An example here is worries about being robbed by an employee–letting the employer check the applicant’s criminal record makes it easier to convince them to hire a black applicant.

          • Aapje says:

            @AG

            Appalachia whites as a group suffer from the exact same issue (being considered loan risks). So do they also suffer from systemic discrimination, in your view?

            And if both poor white communities and poor black communities suffer from this problem, isn’t it systemic poverty that is the issue, rather than systemic racism or such?

          • AG says:

            @Aapje

            Yes, the Appalachians suffer from systemic classism. But their poverty rate seems be mostly driven by rural vs. urban classism, whereas black poverty is bad within the urban category. Furthermore, while classism explains the outcomes of blacks living in poverty, it does not explain the disproportionate black poverty rate.

            As I wrote in 155.5, one of the potential factors of that poverty rate are policing practices that are not correlated with class.

          • Clutzy says:

            Yes, the Appalachians suffer from systemic classism. But their poverty rate seems be mostly driven by rural vs. urban classism, whereas black poverty is bad within the urban category. Furthermore, while classism explains the outcomes of blacks living in poverty, it does not explain the disproportionate black poverty rate.

            I don’t really get this urban/rural thing your going for. Blacks could have remained rural, they chose to move to urban locations and thus transplanted their poverty to that location. In some people’s opinions they also imposed outsized costs on the original urban populations which caused associated urban decline for several decades.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            As I understand it, black people were driven out of rural areas (see sundown towns)– that’s why they moved to cities.

          • AG says:

            @Clutzy

            The Appalachians are poor because the money-making jobs are mostly in the city. They can move to the city and have a good chance of improving their financial standing.
            The urban blacks are poor because they can’t access the money-making jobs in the city, despite living there.

          • Clutzy says:

            The urban blacks are poor because they can’t access the money-making jobs in the city, despite living there

            That seems like an indictment of urban blacks not a defense of them. They are in a prosperous region, whos prosperity predates them, and still are not? This is kind of the opposite of Appalachia. They are in a region that could and should be prosperous, and they built it up, but was partially destroyed by outside forces. The chestnut blight removed a major agricultural product from them. If not for that Rural Appalachia would have an economy much like rural plains states, except probably more prosperous and more densely populated.

          • Aapje says:

            @AG

            Rural Appalachia is poor for rural regions, not merely when compared to cities.

          • AG says:

            @Clutzy
            This is overtly giving the Appalachians charity not extended to urban blacks. Apparently Appalachians get to chalk up their woes to external forces, but blacks do not get to chalk up their woes to the external force of racism? Why couldn’t Appalachia switch over to another crop? Is their culture’s fault that they couldn’t recover, unlike the Dust Bowl states? And if they move to another location, they can assimilate. Do the Appalachian kids who took the midnight train going anywhere make up the urban whites living in poverty?

          • SamChevre says:

            Do the Appalachian kids who took the midnight train going anywhere make up the urban whites living in poverty?

            Yes.

            I grew up in Appalachia (although in a distinct, non-Appalachian culture); I spent a decade learning to sound like I wasn’t from there. My family is still mostly in Appalachia.

            It’s just a very different culture, and assimilation is genuinely hard; a lot of people leave and struggle to fit anywhere else, end up in jail, etc.

          • Eric T says:

            I also grew up in Appalachia for a bit, and can I really recommend Hillbilly Elegy for anyone who wants to more about it? It’s a (in my humble opinion) phenomenal book.

          • Clutzy says:

            This is overtly giving the Appalachians charity not extended to urban blacks.

            Only in that they have woes in a community they founded. I don’t have much sympathy for Appalachians, but blacks, particularly northern urban blacks moved to those cities for the financial opportunity, and now complain they haven’t derived sufficient economic gain from that move. And on top of that they impose outsized costs on those cities that predate them.

            Apparently Appalachians get to chalk up their woes to external forces, but blacks do not get to chalk up their woes to the external force of racism? Why couldn’t Appalachia switch over to another crop? Is their culture’s fault that they couldn’t recover, unlike the Dust Bowl states? And if they move to another location, they can assimilate.

            If they do move I expect them to assimilate. I have much more sympathy for southern blacks, but you’ll notice people like the mayor of Atlanta have little tolerance for the looters and rioters. Could Appalachia shift to a new crop? IDK. All I know is they have a place, they seem to stay there, they keep their pathologies in that spot, and I really don’t hear much from them. JD Vance is like the only person who talked about these people in my lifetime.

            Do the Appalachian kids who took the midnight train going anywhere make up the urban whites living in poverty?

            To the extent that they are I also have no sympathy for their pathologies and complaints about treatment from the system they intentionally migrated to.

          • albatross11 says:

            Nancy:

            The way I understand it, there was a huge migration of blacks from the Southern countryside up to Northern cities, in search of a better life. I think some of this was driven by active mistreatment, and some by lousy economic conditions in the South–I’m not sure how those fell out.

            I think many small towns and rural counties in the US never did have a lot of blacks, and passed laws to keep it that way. I think some towns also tried to drive their blacks away, but I don’t know how common that was. And many places had large populations of rural blacks who started out as slaves and were freed and then became poor farmers or low-skill farm laborers, and they continue to have large populations of blacks to this day.

        • rahien.din says:

          They’re also more likely to default on loans. That seems relevant.

          And this almost certainly argues that banks discriminate for blacks and Hispanics in lending, not against them.

          This is true only if banks are setting their rates rationally. But discrimination is irrational.

          Moreover, the argument isn’t normalized properly. If banks charge left-handed people rates of 1-2% and right-handed people rates of 60-70%, right-handed people will default more frequently precisely because of discrimination. If banks charge left-handed people the same rates as right-handed people, and the default rates are also identical, the outcomes test is mute – even if left-handed people are granted loans twenty times more frequently than right-handed people.

          members of any group that’s genuinely discriminated against will perform better in any given job than members of other groups

          This is true only if discrimination ends once you get the job. If your clients and coworkers and boss discriminate against you, you could still seem to underperform.

        • Randy M says:

          I don’t think you get his argument. Because banks hold X to a higher standard in loans, the X that do get loans should therefore default less; by definition they are less risky than the lower ranking non-X’s given loans.

          If we also see higher default rates as well as higher standards… then while redlining may be a link in a regrettable chain, it is nonetheless is a rational action that has not caused the situation.

        • rahien.din says:

          The argument is very clear. Consider two populations, each with the same Gaussian distribution of financial reliability. The bank provides loans to people above a certain threshold of reliability – the right tail. For group Y, the threshold is 75% and for group X it is 90%. While this means that X will have a lower default rate than Y, it also means that the bank is giving more loans to Y. Compare the size of the tails. That is discrimination against X.

          But this doesn’t make sense because it is irrational for the bank to behave that way. Banks make money by giving loans. If they restrict the supply of loans, they are making less money. So, all things being equal, if they hold X to a higher standard than Y, this boils down to giving out fewer loans and thus ceding profits. A rational banker would embrace the same risk thresholds across the board. Thus, if there is discrimination, we can conclude that banks are not acting rationally, and we have no reason to conclude that any of their other actions must be rational. They could be acting out of simple malevolence.

          Moreover, the argument is too simplistic because it assumes that the only way a bank would discriminate is in the thresholds for obtaining the loan. That’s false. If a bank holds X to a higher standard (lowering default rates) but also subjects X to predatory lending practices (raising default rates) it’s possible for X to be heavily discriminated against and yet have a default rate very similar to Y. The argument inappropriately lumps all these effects together, such that the true causes are obfuscated.

        • AlexanderTheGrand says:

          @scoop

          The outcome test applies with all other things held constant. If the bank’s only decision is whether to lend or not, and black lendees default more, that’s some evidence the bank is acting between rationally and towards favoring black applicants. (Note it’s weak evidence, as @rahien.din points out.)

          But it’s not evidence that there’s no discrimination anywhere — only in that selection process! As an unsubstantiated example, black CEOs may make a company perform less well if implicit bias makes people lose confidence in the firm. A black salesman may do worse because his potential clients don’t feel as naturally at ease around someone who looks differently from them.

          Granted, it’s still not rational to hire the salesman who makes your clients feel uncomfortable, from the company’s perspective. But many of these examples are true because society sees certain races as out-of-place in certain roles. Something like this with circular dependencies is exactly where it can be rational for a larger organization (i.e. government) to step in and correct the problem.

        • albatross11 says:

          This is called the outcome test, and it was proposed in the 50s by Gary Becker to demonstrate whether discrimination is taking place, and it hinges on an incontrovertible truth.

          Note that the outcomes test works out differently in different places. In lending, it suggests that blacks are not being discriminated against in the sense of being given worse loan terms than they should given their default probability. In analyses of stop-and-frisk, as I understand it, it works the other way–the rate of finding guns/drugs on blacks ended up being lower than on whites, indicating that blacks were being discriminated against in terms of whether they’re frisked vs how likely it is they’re actually carrying something illegal.

      • Two McMillion says:

        Since “Racism” and “racism” are so clearly different things, why use the same term for both of them?

        • Eric T says:

          Since “Racism” and “racism” are so clearly different things, why use the same term for both of them?

          I wish we didn’t. I would love to force SJW’s to come up with a new word for it.

          • Two McMillion says:

            I see why someone might want the moral authority of the word racism. In particular, this section:

            Now to cut off an argument I expect may arise: “if that line of thinking is logical isn’t that the end of the debate? Logic=Truth=Good right?” Well while I agree it’s logical on the individual level to hold “little r” racist views from time to time, it:
            A. Doesn’t make any of my previous arguments about how this is a deeply unfair system and at least substantially the fault of those in power any more wrong – we should try to change the world such that the logical view is NO LONGER “little r” racist.
            B. Doesn’t mean I don’t think the world wouldn’t be a better place if we strived for increased racial equality on the opportunity level. In the world where people of color aren’t structurally disadvantaged we can presumably have a society where more people are better able to fill the roles they’d excel at. Insert some free market bullshit here or something idk I’m at work when I’m writing this.

            …is a much harder sell then, “You’re a bad person if you don’t agree with me”.

          • Eric T says:

            @Two McMillion

            Exactly. Reality is rarely as neat as the narratives we hope exist are. My hope is to push the dimensions on this topic somewhat so we can have discussions that map closer to reality than said narratives.

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            I think most SJ-types think of racism as existing along a spectrum; big-R and little-r racism are at more or less different ends of the spectrum but there’s no in-principle difference between them. I am sympathetic to the idea that a big enough difference in degree is basically a difference in kind, and so we should have two words for the different ends of the spectrum, but our language ought to also have some acknowledgment that there is a family resemblance between the two kinds of racism: they both involve treating people differently on the basis of race, so whatever word we use for little-r racism should recognize this.

      • Two McMillion says:

        Do you think it is possible to have a world where no small-r racism exists? If not, what level of small-r racism is acceptable in society?

        One of my problems with the small-r racism you talk about here is that my model of the world says that we don’t actually understand how societies work, and that a lot of crazy things happen for stupid reasons. You seem to model outcomes for groups as a collection of people’s choices, but my model says they are more like a force of nature: outcomes just happen, for whatever ineffable reason.

        It doesn’t surprise me to hear that that could include a collection of unequal outcomes by race. But by the same token, it makes me say, “Well, we got rid of most capital-R racism, and that seems like the best we can do. Unequal outcomes probably happen all the time for all sorts of reasons, and it’s just something we have to live with.”

        You’ve given some statistics about worse life outcomes for minorities, but sometimes they have better ones. White Americans, for example, have a higher suicide rate then black Americans, and are less likely to end up in the NFL or NBA. If these situations were reversed, you’d likely call it small-r racism, but what do you call them now? To me, they seem like the same sort of thing- the ineffable winds of fate blowing where they will.

        • Eric T says:

          Do you think it is possible to have a world where no small-r racism exists? If not, what level of small-r racism is acceptable in society?

          Again I’m trying to keep this post issues oriented – the “what to do about this post” would be, if you can believe it, way longer than this. Mostly because I don’t have a concrete answer, just 100 guesses with varying confidence levels I’m trying to parse through.
          My current answer is “less but not 0”

          You seem to model outcomes for groups as a collection of people’s choices, but my model says they are more like a force of nature: outcomes just happen, for whatever ineffable reason.

          I suppose, but I think there are some very clear logic chains. Redlining in particular I find hard to say isn’t causal to current issues considering how badly anyone living in those areas, regardless of race, tends to do.

          are less likely to end up in the NFL or NBA. If these situations were reversed, you’d likely call it small-r racism

          Can I be honest? I don’t give a shit about the NFL.

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:

          The NFL is an interesting case because it’s crippling work, but well paid, at least at the top, and a lot of people would like to do it.

          • Eric T says:

            I remember reading somewhere that if you do the math it turns out it’s a bad value-proposition unless you’re like a star player. Something about how you only work a few years then have virtually 0 applicable skills and major injuries.

            I’d look into it but, again, I really don’t give a shit about the NFL. I’m more of a baseball guy.

          • Randy M says:

            I remember reading somewhere that if you do the math it turns out it’s a bad value-proposition unless you’re like a star player.

            That sounds like the Freakanomics analysis of drug dealing, actually. Terrible expected value, but for those that make it, huge payout.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            That matches what I’ve heard about professional (American) football.

            It’s very dangerous and a bad deal for most of the men who take part in it..

          • Matt M says:

            That matches what I’ve heard about professional (American) football.

            It’s very dangerous and a bad deal for most of the men who take part in it..

            This depends significantly on where you draw the line.

            If you draw the line at high school football, it is certainly true (the vast majority of players risk serious injury and will receive essentially nothing of value in return). If you draw it at college it’s partially true (many players will receive a significant college scholarship, a product worth somewhere in the 10-100K range depending on the particulars, although most won’t choose take advantage of it and realize the value of it). If you draw it at the NFL level, it’s hard for me to believe (yes there’s still risk of injury, but the minimum annual salary is still something like 10x the median US household income, and even mildly successful players end up with significant name recognition and social status boosts).

          • JayT says:

            The thing is, most NFL players aren’t even successful enough to get name recognition. The average career length is under three years, and guys that are only around for a few years don’t make much more than the minimum salary, which is about $500K. Once you take out stuff like taxes and agent fees a mediocre player with a two year career will probably only take home $500-$600K for his entire career. That’s nowhere near enough to retire on when you’re 26 years old. That’s a pretty weak payoff for 10+ years of pretty grueling competition. It’s even worse for the guys that never make it off the practice roster.

          • JayT says:

            I can understand why someone would play for the love of the game, I’m just saying that unless you are a top end player in the NFL, it’s not a good way to make a living compared to almost anything else.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            As I understand it, the college scholarship is of less value than it might seem because the demands of training and playing don’t necessarily leave a lot of time for study. Also, if I remember correctly, the scholarship ends if the person gets too injured to keep playing football.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            Scoop, thank you for the information.

          • Clutzy says:

            As I understand it, the college scholarship is of less value than it might seem because the demands of training and playing don’t necessarily leave a lot of time for study. Also, if I remember correctly, the scholarship ends if the person gets too injured to keep playing football.

            To supplement Scoop, who is right, there is also the fact that the idea that D1 athletics make it impossible to study is silly. My brother was a D1 athlete and did an engineering Co-Op. The reason the scholarship isn’t worthwhile for some athletes is because they shouldn’t have been admitted to that academic institution, often athletes comprise a large percentage of the bottom decile of admitted students.

        • albatross11 says:

          I’d say there’s another interesting issue here: the optimal level of rational discrimination in society is greater than zero.

          Consider ethnic profiling in policing. Let’s imagine (hypothetically–I’m making up numbers as an example) that the police become 10% more efficient by using the race/ethnicity of a person when deciding whether to pull them over or question them or whatever. Now, this is individually unfair for blacks, who bear most of the cost of making that 10% gain in efficiency happen. It must really suck to be an innocent black guy who gets pulled over by the cops all the time because many of the black guys driving through this neighborhood at night are drug dealers.

          I think it’s sensible to surface the tradeoff here–to decide democratically or as a matter of openly debated public policy whether we’ll take the 10% hit in police efficiency or keep pulling over innocent blacks at higher rates than everyone else to increase police efficiency.

          At some point, the increase in police efficiency is high enough we’re better off having the police do some ethnic profiling. What if profiling leads to a 50% drop in the murder rate in some high-homicide-rate city?

          To the extent there are differences in behavior or ability or interest across racial groups, this will be an issue you have to contend with. Why aren’t 12% of NASA’s rocket scientists, or 12% of Google’s programmers, black? What would happen to the quality of the workforce of those companies if they were required to have their top-tier technical workforce reflect American racial demographics?

      • J Mann says:

        Minorities are less likely to be promoted regardless of job performance. This is true both in the military …

        A quibble: if I’m reading it correctly, the RAND study on military promotions that you link didn’t find that black officers were promoted less often regardless of job performance – it found that after controlling for entry point (military academy, ROTC, OCS, etc) and area of specialization, black officers were promoted less often than white officers.

        In the discussion of other studies, the authors note that black officers have been found to receive worse performance evaluations on average than white officers and to receive fewer promotions.

        I think it’s a reasonable hypothesis that the difference in evaluations is in part due to racism, but the RAND study definitely didn’t examine that question or try to measure job performance.

        • Eric T says:

          That could be me misreading it – apologies on my part. It was late when I was browsing that one. My intention was not to mislead, as I hope the fact that I literally linked the study proves haha!

      • Kindly says:

        spoiler: exactly how you think, also NYT paywall

        Aaaaaaaaaa

        Can the spoiler actually spoil something? I don’t know how you think I think.

        • Eric T says:

          Aaaaaaaaaa

          Can the spoiler actually spoil something? I don’t know how you think I think.

          Mind-reading 0.o

          The answer is basically “context” mixed with “we learn it over time”

    • Eric T says:

      4. Concluding thoughts
      I have a lot more I want to add but truthfully my mind is beat. I’ll try to respond to people but I do have to play D&D tonight so I’m going to be off for a bit. I just wanted people to see that SJ doesn’t have to be “emotion” based or lacking of any kind of critical thinking. I hope that if I’m not able to convince you, I can at least update your opinions of those of us fighting for SJ positively.

      • Anteros says:

        I appreciate you writing that – it’s clear, extremely reasonable and cogent. Can I swap you for my SJ friends who are none of those things?

      • metalcrow says:

        A+ work, good post. More of this please

      • theredsheep says:

        will type this sans caps bc lots to say and sleeping baby in arm apologies

        1. it seems to me that lots of this is effects-of-past-racism, not present-racism, as you have presented it. promotions elections etc might be better explained by drag of discrete clumps of big-r racists not systemic blight of structural racism. or by nebulous small-r associations with lower class->poverty->crime which is a cast iron bitch to fix

        2. supposing i am convinced a lot of objection to sj stuff is on what to do about it level. scott has spoken about use of w supremacy as cultural bludgeon by overeducated whites for class enemies for example. the sj approach is actively counterproductive bc it entrenches hostility; can’t scold our way out of mass bias. more of a flagellant cult for neurotic honkies than practical approach to problem solving. doesn’t seem true of all eg you but damn those people are loud

        3. to say nothing of affirmative action which expects me to accept bias against me–and my family–to use our careers as a counter in somebody’s social engineering experiment. zero-sum game, fuck that noise. encouraging that pattern of people qua reps of their race as in perpetual competition is unhelpful in terms of basic psych as it makes the black person an emphatic stranger coming to take your crap

        4. i don’t want to spit wincey colorblind is great boosterism but think part of answer is emphasizing common experience. consider botham jean; his brother forgave the cop in court and right-wing was blown away by some level 99 christian fu. hella good pr though i don’t want to cheapen essential nobility of gesture itself. then somebody snarked about how it was whites way of weaseling out of collective guilt we knew we deserved for something. is it unreasonable to think aggressively reframing everything in terms of eternal race war might be prolonging eternal race war?

        all that said tyvm for posting great relief from flood of ignorant bile on fb etc. cheers to you sir

        EDIT sorry, realized most of this is not about existence of problem–but i do think the action level is your real problem, the more so because it distorts perception of issue at hand.

        • Eric T says:

          it seems to me that lots of this is effects-of-past-racism, not present-racism, as you have presented it. promotions elections etc might be better explained by drag of discrete clumps of big-r racists not systemic blight of structural racism. or by nebulous small-r associations with lower class->poverty->crime which is a cast iron bitch to fix

          It is possible, but I think the issue about race-blind policies I brought up in part 3 are why tackling this as a bias issue would still be helpful. My view is this: it’s more that I think the system has been constructed, partially intentionally, partially unintentionally, to make it harder to succeed if you are a minority. Some overcome, some don’t.

          but i do think the action level is your real problem, the more so because it distorts perception of issue at hand.

          This is partially why I want to step away from solutions for a bit. I think the conversation has gotten so tangled up in the language of solution we’ve lost the fact that many disagree there is a problem. Build a strong foundation before you build a house and all that!

          • theredsheep says:

            I don’t think the argument is about solutions so much as a persistent and widespread belief (though not always expressed in so many words) that so-called SJWs are acting in remarkable bad faith, and this is strongly encouraged by common SJ tactics. For example, the concept of “white fragility,” which says that defensiveness about an accusation of X is itself proof of X. This is A. obviously begging the question and B. tantamount to an accusation of bad faith in itself.

            And it’s just one of a whole broad box of tools which seem not just ill-suited for the job, but perfectly designed to perpetuate the conflict they purport to address. At this point I’d suggest that, if you want to act constructively on race relations, you abandon the social justice label altogether.

            Incidentally, I really doubt genetics has anything to do with it, though admittedly I’m no expert on that. Why would Europe and (depending whom you ask) maybe China and India select more strongly for intelligence than Africa and the Americas?

          • albatross11 says:

            theredsheep:

            I think one problem here is that dumb people and dumb takes are more common than smart, nuanced ones. And for Mollochian/Scissors Statement/Toxoplasma reasons, the dumb/non-nuanced views get a much wider hearing than the careful ones.

            I mean if you judge American conservative ideology by its most visible and loudest supporters, you will come to the conclusion that conservatives are a bunch of idiots. This turns out not to be so informative about what a serious conservative thinker would say.

          • Aapje says:

            Why would Europe and (depending whom you ask) maybe China and India select more strongly for intelligence than Africa and the Americas?

            I can come up with just so stories for culture, the governmental system, eugenics, environmental challenges, the existence or lack of (violent) competitors, etc.

            For example, ancient Rome would put handicapped babies to death. As handicaps correlate with mental disability, that would probably have some eugenic effect on average intelligence.

          • theredsheep says:

            Ancient Rome also had massive lead exposure, etc. And most of human evolution, including the period covering racial differentiation, happened in pre-agricultural times when there was a lot of diversity in lifestyles but it didn’t align all that well with race or very broad geographic areas. Hunter-gatherers in Europe didn’t live lives all that different from hunter-gatherers in southern Africa.

            Africa and the Americas are very big places with a lot of distinct populations, and there’s been a ton of intermarriage (or at least interbreeding) over the centuries. The Racialism FAQ by Prussian just offers a more coherent explanation IMO.

          • albatross11 says:

            Population expanded enormously after agriculture was developed. There were a lot more generations of selection of humans as hunter-gatherers than as farmers, but a lot more humans being acted on by selection as farmers. We see some impacts of this in simple, easily-measured things like lactase persistence and alcohol metabolism and resistance to various diseases. It seems really likely that there’s a lot of other stuff that we don’t know about because it’s subtle and hard to see/study.

            I don’t think you can rule out evolved mental differences (intelligence, personality, temper, etc.). You shouldn’t assume they explain stuff you observe with a gazillion confounding variables, but that doesn’t mean you can rule them out, either.

          • Gerry Quinn says:

            “Why would Europe and (depending whom you ask) maybe China and India select more strongly for intelligence than Africa and the Americas?”

            They probably wouldn’t, or not in any consistent way. I don’t buy the oft-posited theory that high latitudes require more intelligence because they are tougher to live in and require more planning ability due to climate. But while the outcome of evolutionary selection is adaptation of some kind to selection pressures, the nature of the adaptation is not fixed. Kangaroos learned to hop, but they might have found another way to move faster. Lots of things can affect evolutionary development, including what random genetic differences get pressed into service. For example, interbreeding with other hominid subspecies could obviously introduce novel genes, and this appears to have happened in several regions of the world. So it seems hard to argue that differences are impossible.

      • Eric T says:

        You don’t really make much of an effort to explore how much outcome data can be explained by things other than race alone.

        But I have not been able to find it in search.

        Yeah you kinda answered your own critique. As I said in Part 1 – the Data are sadly lacking here.

        I try to sidestep this by conceding I think Genetics and Culture play a role, but that systemic racism ALSO plays a role.

        • Anteros says:

          I try to sidestep this by conceding I think Genetics and Culture play a role, but that systemic racism ALSO plays a role.

          I think this really singles your contribution out from most of what I hear from my SJ friends. My experience is that even to suggest that genetics or culture might possibly have a teeny weeny influence on outcomes leads immediately and irrevocably to the suggester being cancelled.

        • Eric T says:

          I think this really singles your contribution out from most of what I hear from my SJ friends. My experience is that even to suggest that genetics or culture might possibly have a teeny weeny influence on outcomes leads immediately and irrevocably to the suggester being cancelled.

          I think that’s sad. I guess I am lucky that my SJ friends do not feel the same way. We’re not a monolith, and as you might suspect from the fact that I read/comment on this blog I’m big on Rationalist thought and the like.

          Don’t get my wrong I’m still a disgusting ultra-lib who’s going to vote democrat probably no matter what, but ya know. At least I’m trying!

        • Randy M says:

          Don’t get my wrong I’m still a disgusting ultra-lib who’s going to vote democrat probably no matter what, but ya know. At least I’m trying!

          It’s by and large the tactics that have given some posters here an aversion to SJW.
          With rational debate from radically different starting places, you’ll get debate and opposition, but not disgust, here.
          (Anyhow, that’s how I see it.)

      • Skivverus says:

        Agreed that this is a good (set of) post(s). One more thing to complicate the analysis, though:
        Sometimes – frequently, even – the attempted solutions have ended up exacerbating the problems.
        I’m afraid I don’t have anything formal to cite at the moment, just a comment from my former boss on how banning hiring discrimination on the basis of criminal history – a policy ostensibly introduced to combat racism – interacted with corporate liability for employee misbehavior. (Or, in less flowery language, how you’re not allowed to avoid hiring thieves, and also not allowed to avoid fines if they end up stealing something again)

        • Eric T says:

          Sometimes – frequently, even – the attempted solutions have ended up exacerbating the problems.

          Yes – and that’s part of the reason I’m trying to make this a “Let me convince you the problem exists” post and not involve solutions discussions rn

          Finding out the solutions to these issues will likely be the hardest thing the SJ community has to do. I think its more likely to succeed if smart, rational people work on finding the solution. I think that’s more likely to occur if they agree there is a problem.

      • Erusian says:

        If “culture” was a perfect indicator of this kind of difference, we would expect large variations in largely different cultures. We do not see that: rural blacks underperform rural Whites around the same rate that urban blacks do.

        How do you explain that Africans outperform African Americans then, particularly Africans from certain countries? If you posit that African Americans have a basically unified experience (and you implicitly assume that, that being African American, regardless of geography or state policy, universally causes issues), why could it not be an issue with African Americans and not simply skin color racism?

        I do find the cultural argument fairly convincing. Though I have to say, I’m not sure it washes America’s hands. It’s not as if culture springs unformed from the ether. Black people don’t trust the police, the government, the banks, and this leads to certain negative outcomes. Why don’t they trust those institutions? Let’s think really hard about this…

        That said, I do think it leads to the solution being a more internally focused one. You mention the Asian objection but I don’t think the shift came about because White America decided, “Hey, these Asians are alright. Let’s dial back the oppression from a 9 to like a 3.” It was because they managed to build a significant degree of community safety and wealth and leveraged that to climb institutional ladders despite significant discrimination. This is the story of Ashkenazi Jews too. Which isn’t to say either Asians or Jews don’t suffer significant prejudice. (Jews, in particular, have been whitened by certain social justice types despite being the number one per capita target of racial hatred by a huge margin.)

        The current solutions, however, seem largely focused on giving African Americans a leg up on those institutional ladders or some kind of privileged control of institutions. This is not how the groups which have escaped it did escape, in fact they all suffered huge amounts of discrimination and exclusion even as they were climbing out. (Arguably, Asians and Jews are still discriminated against in preferences.) And I don’t think we can argue it’s worked, so why do we keep trying it? We have a method that worked for other races, why aren’t we trying to implement it?

        None of which is to wash our hands of guilt or to say it’s all on African Americans to fix everything in their own communities. Or rather, it is on them but that’s not to say it’s helpful or just to sit there and do nothing and tut tut. This wouldn’t be true even absent the history, which obviously is there as well.

        On the whole, bravo.

        • Eric T says:

          How do you explain that Africans outperform African Americans then, particularly Africans from certain countries? If you posit that African Americans have a basically unified experience (and you implicitly assume that, that being African American, regardless of geography or state policy, universally causes issues), why could it not be an issue with African Americans and not simply skin color racism?

          I think its difficult to compare between countries like that because their educational and government systems are so vastly different it basically becomes noise. Africans also presumably don’t suffer (as a general rule – not talking about South Africa here) as much racism in their home countries, simply by virtue of being the dominant culture.

          And I’m not sure I agree that the African American experience is the same everywhere – I buy that it was probably worse in Georgia than in Cali. In fact in my research I found that the places with the best outcomes for African Americans tended to be the ones with the fewest, though I have no idea what that means!

          Black people don’t trust the police, the government, the banks, and this leads to certain negative outcomes. Why don’t they trust those institutions? Let’s think really hard about this…

          Ooh good point! I like that

          As for the bit on solutions: again trying to veer away from that for now. The solutions discussion is messy, and it will be messier still if we don’t work on shoring up the problem discussion first.

          • Erusian says:

            I think its difficult to compare between countries like that because their educational and government systems are so vastly different it basically becomes noise. Africans also presumably don’t suffer (as a general rule – not talking about South Africa here) as much racism in their home countries, simply by virtue of being the dominant culture.

            Sorry, I should have been more clear. African immigrants to America and their descendants do better than the general African American population. They are, if anything, darker than the average African American yet outperform them.

            And I’m not sure I agree that the African American experience is the same everywhere – I buy that it was probably worse in Georgia than in Cali. In fact in my research I found that the places with the best outcomes for African Americans tended to be the ones with the fewest, though I have no idea what that means!

            Which place is best and worse then? If the gap is lowest, what are they doing? (Not a leading question, I don’t know.)

          • Eric T says:

            They are, if anything, darker than the average African American yet outperform them.

            I think its because they A. Manage to dodge some of the history, and B. (correct me if i’m wrong here) modern immigrants tend to be, due to somewhat restrictive immigration policies, higher-skilled. Compare to slaves who were just brought over writ-large regardless of ability.

            Which place is best and worse then? If the gap is lowest, what are they doing? (Not a leading question, I don’t know.)

            I’ll run through my research but I believe the answer was Oregon. I didn’t write it down because I didn’t know what to make of the point other than it was neat. Worst is one of the deep south states – Alabama I think?

          • FLWAB says:

            I’ll run through my research but I believe the answer was Oregon.

            If true, ouch. Oregon literally banned black people from being residents from 1849 to 1926. It’s still only 1.8% African American today.

          • Eric T says:

            If true, ouch. Oregon literally banned black people from being residents from 1849 to 1926. It’s still only 1.8% African American today.

            Yeah that’s what I mean. When I first read this I thought it was 100% evidence against my point. Then I thought about it some more and thought “well if there were 0 black people there they probably weren’t passing any racially discriminatory policies and they probably weren’t segregating”

            And then I thought “well no, because once they get in they’re probably going to face major barriers.”

            And THEN I thought “well no, because a lot of the people living in the state probably didn’t have anywhere near any interactions with Black folks if they were banned for 50 years, and they probably viewed black people as so foreign that they’re not even really the Outgroup any more”

            And then I thought “I’m tired and I’m going to move on”

      • FLWAB says:

        I do have to play D&D tonight

        DM, or PC? What’s the story if the former, whats your character if the latter?

        • Eric T says:

          DM, or PC? What’s the story if the former, whats your character if the latter?

          DM – I’m a forever DM sadly. And it’s not actually D&D it’s Mutants and Masterminds, but for some reason I’ve fallen into the bad habit of referring to all TTRPGs as “D&D” – maybe because that’s what I did to explain it to my parents.

          It’s a dawn of superheros game, I’ve always like the stuff in X-men about mutants first appearing on the scene and society reacting to that. So the point of the game is less “can the PCs beat the bad guys” and “who the PCs decide the “bad guys” are and HOW they choose to beat them matters” – as I always say, the best superman stories are not about whether he can win, but whether he should

          • FLWAB says:

            Sounds fun. Have you cooked up any interesting supervillians?

          • Eric T says:

            Sounds fun. Have you cooked up any interesting supervillians?

            I’ve been trying to make a couple “low-level’ types right now because its early days. So the first one they’re really contending with can alter the size of things, which makes for some trippy encounters (ever fight a tank-sized cat? Neither have I!)

            The other one has insanely, incredibly good luck. He’s been a bitch and a half for the party and it’s been really fun to find ways to use that ability to screw with them.

            I’m brainstorming some more trippy powers rn: I have an idea for a supervillian who can remove friction, and am trying to figure out how that would work.

          • FLWAB says:

            I’m brainstorming some more trippy powers rn: I have an idea for a supervillian who can remove friction, and am trying to figure out how that would work.

            Would removing all friction make any solid object fall apart? I may need to brush up on my basic physics.

            But if its a more comic friendly removing of friction, then he definitely needs to get around by making the soles of his feet friction-less and using a jet on his back to rocket slide at high speed.

          • Eric T says:

            Would removing all friction make any solid object fall apart? I may need to brush up on my basic physics.

            Me too, but fortunately it’s comic-book physics all the way down. One of the PCs can run at 2400mph but I don’t immediately have him kill any civilian he picks up XP

            he definitely needs to get around by making the soles of his feet friction-less and using a jet on his back to rocket slide at high speed.

            Yes, how did I not think of this.

          • MisterA says:

            I have been wanting to run a Mutants and Masterminds game with basically this exact premise for a while now; with a bit of White Wolf’s old Aberrant setting thrown into the mix.

            What I’ve struggled with is the actual content for weekly scenarios. Are you writing your own, improvising at the table, or running pre-published adventures? And if the latter, do you have any good recommendations for this type of game?

          • Eric T says:

            What I’ve struggled with is the actual content for weekly scenarios. Are you writing your own, improvising at the table, or running pre-published adventures? And if the latter, do you have any good recommendations for this type of game?

            A combination of writing and improv. I like my games to be player driven, so I come up with some outlines, locations, hooks and characters but I let the PCs drive the plot and react to what they do accordingly.

      • Eric T says:

        Alright I gotta go for the night – thank you all for the interaction and good debate. I knew the second I posted this I was going to get some, let’s say, energetic conversation, and fielding 10 different discussions with y’all at once is fun, but pretty damn tiring. I think tomorrow I’ll go back to posting about space or something.

        I do want to do a sort of follow-up to this incorporating the critiques I have (and am sure I will) get, but I’ll probably need a week or two off to do that. This was a lot

        I do want to genuinely thank the SSC community for it’s welcoming nature. I’ve been a long time reader (my ex showed my I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup almost 5 years ago now), and had dabbled in posting a bit in the past, but never really felt like part of the community. Ironically jumping in fully as an under-represented political voice here has made me feel more like one of y’all. What a weird place this is!

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          I think you are incorrect but I’m glad you are encouraged to engage. This is a tough subject.

        • gbdub says:

          Thank you sincerely for engaging. I think it’s enlightening (and community building) even if nobody ends up moving all that far from their initial positions.

          P.S. have you read Scott’s “Social Justice and Words, Words, Words”? It’s the post that introduced the motte-and-bailey concept here, and I think it does a better job of explaining the kind of visceral suspicion we feel around the equivocation of “big R” and “small r” racism, and might make sense of some of the responses you’ve gotten here.

      • albatross11 says:

        I know The Bell Curve had some data saying that income of blacks in a given narrow IQ range was a little lower than that of whites, but that the income gap was much narrower than when you didn’t control somehow for the IQ gap.

    • Eric T says:

      I’ve long wanted a good study to compare African Immigrants in multiple countries. I was told this was a good one but I don’t want to pay for it -_-

      • LT says:

        Maybe you know this already, but the paper’s available on sci-hub…
        (Not sure if posting a link would be against any rules, but I’m sure you can figure it out!)

      • Aapje says:

        It’s very interesting. They find little effect of parental income on upward mobility, suggesting that the welfare state is functioning well and/or you at least can’t ‘buy’ your way up:

        First, low income and poverty levels such as have been observed in the past for Afro-Caribbean, Chinese, South Asian and other Asian immigrant groups in the US do not appear to represent a major obstacle to upward mobility for the children of these immigrants.

        The authors suggest that it may be work & education attitude that is inherited from parents, not wealth. For natives, these may have become so correlated that incomes correlate with the success of the offspring (but that is then because those with better work & education attitudes have higher incomes). First generation migrants may then simply be too old to convert their work & education attitude into good incomes, assuming the pipeline to good jobs is quite long & you need parents to support you through that; but the children can do so relatively well.

    • Two McMillion says:

      Well, thanks for the posts.

    • Jake R says:

      Thank you for a well-written effortpost. In particular the argument in section 1 about the cultural diversity between urban and rural blacks is one I hadn’t heard before. I’m not convinced, but it’s always good to hear a new argument.

      With regards to “Racism vs racism” have you read our hosts article Agaisnt Murderism? I think it addresses much the same issue. I’ve described it to friends as the most important essay written in the last 20 years. There aren’t many words worse than “racism” for having a fuzzy definition and high emotional load, and any attempt to shed light on it is valuable.

      The linked studies in 3b are also appreciated. But I confess it’s difficult to take such studies at face value when the entire field is so blatantly searching for such studies, and any journal publishing counter evidence is hard to imagine.

      • Eric T says:

        With regards to “Racism vs racism” have you read our hosts article Agaisnt Murderism? I think it addresses much the same issue. I’ve described it to friends as the most important essay written in the last 20 years. There aren’t many words worse than “racism” for having a fuzzy definition and high emotional load, and any attempt to shed light on it is valuable.

        Yes and I do very much care for that article. I think it probably plays a role in why I want to shine a light on definitions more.

        The linked studies in 3b are also appreciated. But I confess it’s difficult to take such studies at face value when the entire field is so blatantly searching for such studies, and any journal publishing counter evidence is hard to imagine.

        Yeah I tried to use Meta-Studies with reasonable inclusion criteria to counter this, but I concede the field is WILD right now.

    • Two McMillion says:

      If American society were exactly the same except for the absence of systemic racism, would the average white person have an easier or a more difficult life?

      • Eric T says:

        If American society were exactly the same except for the absence of systemic racism, would the average white person have an easier or a more difficult life?

        I have no idea really! My intuition is “slightly worse” my hope is “practically the same”

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:

          My hope is “considerably better” because less talent would be wasted.

          • Eric T says:

            My hope is “considerably better” because less talent would be wasted.

            That’s my secret hope too, but I’m something of a massive cynic.

    • Le Maistre Chat says:

      Cool, thank you.

      1. Black/Hispanic people suffer worse outcomes – I don’t think it can be explained away only by culture and genetics.

      I think we’re already getting into “the map is not the territory” issues here. We have black people, we have Latinos, and we even have black Latinos. The / obfuscates that the two minorities could have worse outcomes in the United States for different reasons.

      Thomas Sowell has argued that African-Americans are basically Borderers with different genetics (and genetics matter very little to human psychology) and an extra scoop of discrimination. Latinos are obviously no kind of Anglo at all and may (but usually don’t) have very similar genetics to non-Hispanic whites.
      So it seems intuitive to me that Latino immigrants have worse outcomes than (Anglo) whites because they are willing to move here for economic reasons without speaking the dominant language. I don’t think that’s an economic injustice: the reductio that it is would be “immigrants deserve handouts to bring them up to economic equality the minute they cross the border.” The obvious solution to mitigate that economic inequality is to rapidly assimilate their children in an economy with high social mobility within the dominant, English, culture.
      Black people are suffering under the material outcomes of different injustices.

      • AG says:

        I have very little tolerance for SJ’s histrionics over colonialism, but there is a point to be made about how indigenous populations in many countries are in a similar situation as black Americans. That does speak to some kind of “systemic/institutional bias against X population,” as Borderer genes and culture alike can’t be the magic source for it happening to all sorts of minority populations around the globe. What remains as the common thread, then, is that they’re all societies with power differentials. That there’s always a correlation between poverty and a particular race/ethnicity shows that this power differential is not just classism.
        (And reinforcing that it’s not about colonialism, the Uighurs would be an example here.)

    • Paul Zrimsek says:

      If it’s true that rural blacks underperform rural Whites around the same rate that urban blacks do, then that’s an awkward coincidence for anyone’s preferred explanation, isn’t it? I mean, Rural White Culture and Urban White Culture (or Northern White Culture and Southern White Culture) are so different from each other that we’re having a Culture War about it; if they both turn out to be equally racist, that’s at least as surprising as Rural Black Culture and Urban Black culture being equally unconducive to achievement would be. (As well as a bit unpleasant for the side in the aforementioned Culture War which uses accusations of racism as its weapon of choice.)

      • Eric T says:

        I think if you accept that some of these policies were occurring on the national level (voting rights for example), and that even in “liberal” areas like NYC the governments were very heinously Racist not but 50 years, it makes it a little easier to understand why that’s happening.

        • Paul Zrimsek says:

          That’s interesting to me because I would have put the importance of past discriminatory policies– so famously worse in the South than elsewhere– near the top of the list of theories which are called into question by uniformity of present-day disparities. In any case, the more explanatory weight we put on national policies of the past, the less room there is for ongoing Racism as a factor; this doesn’t seem, in my admittedly outside view, like something that fits in very well with the social-justice view of things.

    • J Mann says:

      PS: Thanks for the post – really enjoyed it!

    • m.alex.matt says:

      If “culture” was a perfect indicator of this kind of difference, we would expect large variations in largely different cultures. We do not see that: rural blacks underperform rural Whites around the same rate that urban blacks do. African Americans living in Atlanta underperform White Atlanteans around the same rate as NYC

      I’m not going to take any positions on the wider point, but just to come down on this particular aspect of it:

      You would not expect very different outcomes between Northern and Southern blacks because they aren’t actually really different cultures between the North and South. During the Great Migration of the 1920 to 1970 period some 6.5 million Southern Africa nAmericans left the South and went north and west. They totally overwhelmed the less than a million black Americans that had already lived outside the South and brought their Southern culture with them

      The vast majority of Northern state African Americans have a grandfather or (now, in 2020) a great grandfather who came from a state like Georgia or Texas. Many still have cousins in the South.

      What distinctive Northern African American culture that existed in 1910 was pretty much wiped out by a process of assimilation. Segregation and the Northern version of Jim Crow pushed long tenancy Northern blacks and the new Southern black migrants into the same neighborhoods and the much smaller number of Northern blacks folded into the culture that migrant Southern blacks brought with them over the generations. Northern black culture in the 19th century was much more bourgeoisie and urban, most Northern blacks either didn’t have any within-familial-memory experience of slavery at all or, if they did, it was from a grandparent or great grandparent who was manumitted in the first half of the century on reaching 18 or 21. Segregation did exist in the North before the Great Migration, but discrimination wasn’t as violent and aggressive as it was in the postbellum South.

      That changed when millions of people with a generational memory of being freed only with military force and then being forced into sharecropping positions not too distantly related to slavery, whose background was rural and — for lack of a better word — peasant, showed up and moved into their urban neighborhoods.

      Southern black culture in the North and West has adapted some to being very urbanized, but Southern black culture in the South is also very urbanized today. They’re not exactly the same, but they’re close cousins.

    • baconbits9 says:

      Your broad view maps very closely to what I believed about 20 years ago, so this is a partial explanation of the evidence and concepts that pushed me away from this view. Let me sum up half of my position by saying

      1. Serious racism existed in the US for centuries against blacks and
      2. Current racism, including structural racism, is wildly over rated as the primary cause of the current black/white divide in the US.

      It looks like more than a few people have responded with the arguments that other minority groups have experienced significant issues due to their background and managed not only to do better than blacks in the US but in some cases better than whites. This is a strong baseline to start from, but it misses a large piece of evidence that makes it stronger. Black Americans who emigrated to the US during the 20th century do as well or better than Black Americans whose ancestors arrived via the slave trade. The majority of these later immigrants are from areas that were significantly poorer per capita than Black American incomes during the period of immigration. Two stark examples are Jamaican and Haitian Americans who report household incomes of 15-25% more in the US than black families do. I am hard pressed to come up with a coherent explanation for why these two groups would fare better that other US blacks which is consistent with structural white vs black racism being a major driver of black outcomes.

      I think these two populations are the most informative because both Haiti and Jamaica have long, troubled histories of slavery, with terrible long term outcomes for the countries economically that continue to this day, and their US populations (of the immigrants and their descendants) are large with estimates of over 900,000 and 1,000,000 people respectively. On average I would expect these immigrants to have lower levels of education and capital formation at the time of their immigration than blacks in the US, and they should have experienced the general effects of all structural racism that US blacks did after arriving.

      A second piece of the puzzle is the observation that the black/white gap has not been static. From a broad view gains made by blacks against whites in economic and educational terms continued under the more repressive and overt racism. Literal forced segregation of schools in the US is associated with black wages gaining on white wages, and the repeal of legal segregation is not associated with an acceleration of this trend, but a deceleration, stop and by some measures reversal. I can absolutely buy the argument that segregation caused a portion of the gap and that blacks had to struggle to gain ground but to explain how the effect of segregation was greater 50-60 years after it was legally revoked is a difficult nut to crack.

      Part three is the question of how did white people get so rich? If you take many of the issues brought up as explanatory for Black Americans today they apply even more so, by orders of magnitude sometimes, for white Americans from 1880. Lack of education, lack of generational wealth, structural repression (alternating against the Irish, Italians and Germans at least, and lots of Eastern European immigrants as well). A large amount of Irish immigration came from a period where they were one of the poorest ethnic groups in the world, with starving countrymen and laws that prevented them from owning and passing on property. A lack of education and capital has not been enough to prevent many groups of immigrants from gaining wealth over time and many of these observations apply to waves of immigrants from Central and South America as well.

    • Jaskologist says:

      Look more into marriage and illegitimacy rates. The black family was destroyed in very recent history. No society gets far without a strong institution of marriage and children raised by their fathers.

    • Erc says:

      I concede there is some chance I am just wrong here: but is it not the case that “Black” Americans are comprised of a massively diverse set of origins and genetics.

      You’re wrong, most American Blacks comes are of West African origin.

      • m.alex.matt says:

        Isn’t West Africa pretty absurdly genetically diverse?

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          The most divergent human populations in Africa are the central rain forest Pygmies and the Khoisan peoples of southern Africa, who are a tiny percent of the population due to being hunter-gatherers (except Khoikhoi arid pastoralists) when the Bantu and then the white South Africans showed up.
          That doesn’t mean West Africa (which included the Bantu ancestors but lots of other people too) isn’t relatively genetic diverse, but I don’t have numbers handy.

      • DinoNerd says:

        *thoughtful* It’s my impression that most American blacks have a healthy dose of European genes, unless their recent ancestors came from Africa.

    • DinoNerd says:

      Thank you. The places where our viewpoints differ are especially interesting to me. I don’t grant the premise of “you should treat people as what you expect from the average of their demographic, without farther effort”, which you accept in describing small “r” racism, as being rational.

      I fear that once you grant this premise, you’ll have systemic racism forever.

      The “should” above is used in the sense of “if you aspire to be a rational decision maker” not just “if you aspire to be a good person”.

      There is an implicit context – no one can engage their “slow” processing system for every random decision they make. But for important decisions, or even those where you happen to have spare slow system capacity, you’ll get better outcomes if you actually look at individuals as individuals.

      If you don’t look at individuals as individuals, you’ll leave money on the table, sometimes literally. I know a fair number of managers/companies who’ve done very well for themselves hiring employees who don’t have the traditionally required background for their jobs. (In this case, degrees.) They come cheap initially, though you may have to give them extra training early on, and are often extremely loyal, particularly if youtreat them as well as everyone else who does equally good work. And best of all, they may be available, when those with the perfect background have already gotten offers they prefer, and will want a huge signing bonus to consider moving.

      You’ll probably have to put more effort into picking the good ones, and/or getting rid of the ones that simply don’t work out. But that’s likely to be worthwhile, any time good staff are a limited resource. (Less so in times of mass unemployment, of course.)

      Dittto, by the way for other relationships, e.g. tenants. Or (especially) friends etc.

      I also think this is a good thing to do in the moral sense, aka “if you aspire to be a good person”. But that’s not needed for this argument – and in fact goes farther, perhaps to the point of taking a chance on people with glaring red danger flags, simply out of compassion, even though it’s not otherwise rational.

      • teneditica says:

        I don’t grant the premise of “you should treat people as what you expect from the average of their demographic, without farther effort”, which you accept in describing small “r” racism, as being rational.

        Further effort is not always possible, and not always worth it. It might not be possible because you need to make a split-second decision, it might not be worth it because you have to pay minimum wage anyway.

      • DinoNerd says:

        The other thing I think you missed pointing out, in terms of both systemic racism and irrationality, is a common human tendency to overdo things. The following numbers are completely made up, and intended to make the anti-pattern obvious, not to be accurate.

        Suppose we could all agree that purple people, on average, commit more crimes than green people. Let’s farther assume each group is homogenous; no individual differences in criminality, or the severity of the crimes commited. And they are nicely arranged into entirely seperate communities.

        How much more policing should purple people communities receive?

        Well, this is a trick question. If the goal is justice, the answer is probably “the same extra % as their crime rate”. I.e. if 100,000 purple people commit 101 crimes in the same time period that 100,000 green people commit 100 crimes, there shouldn’t be more than 1% extra police in purple communities.

        What happens in reality is that a lot of people get an idee fixee that purple people are more likely to be criminals. Some simplify farther to “purple people are criminals”. And then they decide how much extra policing (and extra-suspicious policing, and lesser assumption of innocence or even general politeness) to apply to purple people based on that no longer numerical intuition.

        That is absolutely not rational.

        • baconbits9 says:

          That is absolutely not rational.

          This conclusion doesn’t hold. You can absolutely have a rational reaction of ‘all X are Y’ if the risk of being wrong plus the cost of finding out are large enough.

          • DinoNerd says:

            No. The rational reaction would be “it’s too dangerous to risk contact with X, because there’s no safe and affordable way to find out if it’s also Y”.

            It would also be idiotic in the toy example I used above, where you’d also be well advised to avoid green people – a 1% difference in risk hardly matters.

            How many people are avoiding contact with whichever local group has the highest rate of covid-19 cases, without avoiding contact in general?

            [Addendum – I have precisely the above reaction to (a) eating fungi identified by most amateurs, such as myself and (b) eating unidentified red berries. Both are likely to be poisonous, and mistakes in fungus identification are notoriously easy. Your general principle would have me also avoiding commercially grown button mushrooms, strawberries, etc.]

          • baconbits9 says:

            No. The rational reaction would be “it’s too dangerous to risk contact with X, because there’s no safe and affordable way to find out if it’s also Y”

            No, because that position gives you the same behavior with some extra bits tacked on, where as ‘don’t deal with X’ works just as well without those extra bits. Rationality isn’t about getting the answer perfectly right in every scenario, but making do and getting good enough answers to allow you to free up resources for addressing other problems.

          • DinoNerd says:

            Hmm, maybe you are right, and everyone rational should always and in all circumstances avoid all male humans. Some of them are murderers, and they are much more likely to commit murder than women. Better not have anything to do with any of them; they might kill you.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @DinoNerd: Stop trying to make lesbian separatism happen. It’s not 1971 anymore.
            (It’s 1968.)

          • Nick says:

            @Le Maistre Chat
            So give it three years, is what you’re saying?

          • Gerry Quinn says:

            Even the lesbian separatists are having problems with the current revolutionaries.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            The lesbian separatists are especially having problmes.

          • baconbits9 says:

            Hmm, maybe you are right, and everyone rational should always and in all circumstances avoid all male humans. Some of them are murderers, and they are much more likely to commit murder than women. Better not have anything to do with any of them; they might kill you.

            Nice, quickly go from its rational to get as much information as possible, no matte what, to completely ignoring the crux of the argument to attempt to score points. Is this intentional irony, or are you anti-rationalist trying to bring it down from the inside?

        • albatross11 says:

          DinoNerd:

          A weird thought I had about your example: Suppose purple people are 25% more likely than green people to be, say, driving on an expired license, for whatever reason. It may actually be rational for policemen in that society (purple policemen as well as green) to basically spend all their time pulling over Purple drivers. They get 25% more arrests for driving on an expired license that way.

          I assume this basically explains why police departments that are expected to bring in a lot of revenue tend to target black drivers. If black drivers are even a little more likely to have something wrong that will let the cops write a ticket or two, then the police maximize their revenue by spending all their time pulling over black drivers. This is true, even though on average the white drivers have more money to take, since it’s less likely that the policeman will find a good reason to take some of it, and since the fines are independent of income.

          Also, police departments that have quotas or give out promotions based on arrests and tickets and such will encourage exactly this behavior. And again, this has nothing to do with bias in any individual officer–the black policemen will have the same incentives as the white policemen.

          • Eric T says:

            Also, police departments that have quotas or give out promotions based on arrests and tickets and such will encourage exactly this behavior. And again, this has nothing to do with bias in any individual officer–the black policemen will have the same incentives as the white policemen.

            This is the Molochian example that @cassander and I were debating about in another thread: nobody in this system is acting in an irrational or bad faith way, but a discrete class is being harmed for factors largely outside of their control. Barring a fix to the underlying factors, the best solution is to instill something that dis-incentivizes cops from doing this.

          • Clutzy says:

            There is also the part where black people do, in fact, commit more traffic violations per capita. The State of New Jersey tried to prove its cops were super racist, and instead found out blacks sped a shit ton.

          • cassander says:

            @eric T

            instill something that dis-incentivizes cops from doing this.

            Unless you plan to tell the cops to ignore it when people of certain races commit crimes, I fail to see how you can do this. I believe Steve sailer calls this the campaign against noticing things.

          • albatross11 says:

            Surface the tradeoff. Make it an open public debate–should we instruct the police to avoid using race as a criterion for pulling people over even though blacks are more often driving on an expired license than whites? Should we instruct the universities to lower admissions requirements for blacks and raise them for Asians to get the racial numbers of students to reflect the state’s demographics?

            Those are legitimate policy questions. (Personally, I’d say no racial profiling and no affirmative action.) But they need to be discussed openly, with all the facts and trafeoffs spelled out. Those policies are generally debated with many important facts never mentioned (or never mentioned by mainstream sources), because You Can’t Handle The Truth. Often, the policies are disguised, as with Harvard somehow deciding that Asians score worse on personality and interestingness so they don’t have to formally state that if you’re Asian, you’ll need to be in the 99.99th percentile, if you’re white, you’ll need to be in the 99.9th percentile, and if you’re black, you’ll need to be in the 99th percentile (or whatever the numbers are).

          • DinoNerd says:

            The big problem with your example, is that pulling over people to check if they might be in the process of committing a crime (driving on an expired license) violates “unreasonable search and seizure”, and the legal principles that led to this particular phrasing in the US.

            The alternate version – ignoring minor traffic violations by people less likely to also be driving on an expired license, so as to concentrate on those where you have better odds of winning the jackpot, and getting them for something major – seems slimey to me, and I suspect a reasonably competent lawyer could make something of it without relying on the “racial profiling”/”disparate impact” trump card they currently have available. (Those laws seem as if they mostly just codify my feeling above, at least with regard to “unreasonable search and seizure”.)

          • DinoNerd says:

            @Clutzy

            … and instead found out blacks sped a shit ton.

            Now that’s interesting. Where I live, everyone speeds a shit ton, and it’s commonly unsafe to drive at the speed limit, because your slow driving would be causing eddies in traffic.

            If I had to come up with a racially defined group of especially bad drivers locally (not the same as speeders, of course), I’d probably pick “people who learned to drive in Bangalore”. (I’m too polite to say “Indians”, and in any case, folks of Indian origin raised in the US who I know personally don’t seem to be contributing to this stereotype, at least not when I’m in their cars.)

          • AG says:

            Police will pull over people for driving lower than the speed limit if they think that there’s a black man in the car. And then also approach in a pre-escalated fashion, assuming high risk of violence.

            And lest anyone cry anecdata, consider this longreads from 2018 on the recently-canceled Cops reality show, and how the TV crews got to see firsthand how the police were often blatant about their discrimination. Also, relevant to any discussion of if leftists believe that police are more racist than they really are, is the opposite directly, where viewers of Cops believe that black people commit crime more often than they really do.

          • Clutzy says:

            Now that’s interesting. Where I live, everyone speeds a shit ton, and it’s commonly unsafe to drive at the speed limit, because your slow driving would be causing eddies in traffic.

            Of course, that is the case on all our motorways. Here’s a quote from the original NYT article, “In the southern segment of the turnpike, where the speed limit is 65 m.p.h., 2.7 percent of black drivers were speeders, compared with 1.4 percent of white drivers. Among drivers going faster than 90 m.p.h., the disparity was even greater.” I’d say that in IL, at least, a person generally considers himself not speeding if he’s less than 10 MPH over the limit on a highway. But going over 90 in a 65 is one of those situations where you get pissed, but generally just kinda hope the cop fudges the numbers so you don’t get the super speeder ticket.

            What’s particularly useful about the speeding study, is that it fits our general trends and explains away almost all of the complaints where people say thing’s like “white people use even more drugs.” What we see is that, yes, everybody is a little bit rebellious, but as you go up on the rebelliousness index, blacks are increasingly over-represented, with them peaking with crimes like armed assault and murder.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            I’m skeptical of many supposed statistics that show the cops are racist. Like “blacks are only 10% of the population but get 30% of the arrests.” If they are committing more crime[1], there should be more arrests. I don’t know at what level, but definitely not at 10%.

            But one that stuck out was the fact that cops pull over more black drivers during the day — when you can tell the race of the driver — than at night, when you can’t. That one really seems like the cops are being racist.

            [1] and 8x the murder rate sure means more crime

          • I’d say that in IL, at least, a person generally considers himself not speeding if he’s less than 10 MPH over the limit on a highway.

            I think that’s the norm in most of the U.S.

          • AG says:

            Every time I see this “8x the murder rate” bit, I have to reiterate that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Our society is highly hostile to felons, so racism that pushes more people into crime (they get an arrest on their record, which penalizes them in their job applications or education) ends up influencing the murder rate. Reducing the school-to-prison pipeline will help more people escape a life of crime and violence.

          • albatross11 says:

            AG:

            I can sort-of see that argument working for property crime or drug-dealing–you can’t get above-ground work, so you have to find some underground way to keep food on the table. But I don’t see how that leads to a much higher murder rate. Particularly as a large fraction of the solved murders are driven by personal disputes–often a man murdering his girlfriend or ex-wife or her new boyfriend. That’s not something you do because your initial criminal record kept you from finding a good job.

          • cassander says:

            @AG says:

            Our society is highly hostile to felons, so racism that pushes more people into crime

            how is racism causing people to commit crime, exactly?

          • Matt M says:

            I think the Steve Sailer approach is to point out that blacks comprise something like 8x the amount of murder victims as well.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            If it’s “8x the murder rate, but for a good reason,” unless that reason is so good we want the murder rate to continue[1], the police should still definitely be investigating and arresting more.

            You can say “but maybe it was racism elsewhere in the system.” And maybe it is! But the point of “they are getting arrested out of proportion to their population size” was to prove the cops or their policies are racist in the first place. You can’t use it to prove racism if we are assuming it’s caused by other racism.

            We know that police pull black people over more during daytime. That’s a win. You can take the W. Really.

            [1] I really really doubt black people want this. Has anyone done a poll?

          • albatross11 says:

            It’s about 8x the rate of committing murders and 7x the rate of being a murder victim, I think. But it’s been several years since I’ve read that report, so I could be misremembering.

    • Eric T says:

      I’m probably not going to have the time/mental energy to read and respond to these any time in the near future, but I wanted to let you know I do see this and I will read these.

      Thank you for the response.

  23. Oldio says:

    Apologies if this is overly CW-adjacent, but it’s a question I’ve had for a while, and a break from the discussions on race, coronavirus, protests, or the effects of the protests on coronavirus.
    In right wing American circles, it’s not super uncommon to run across horror stories of innocent law abiding gun owner runs into ridiculous/nonsensical/absurd bureaucracy to do something innocuous in a blue state. Usually the implication is that blue state bureaucrats are intentionally trying to make things inconvenient for political reasons. On the other hand, blue tribe/mainstream media from time to time runs comparison charts on “buying a gun in the US v these eight other countries”, usually with a bunch of bureaucratic steps involved.
    My question is- do we have any gun owning SSCer’s from not-America(or Blue states in America, I suppose) who could chime in on their impression of the process? It seems like two conflicting narratives that could be resolved by comparison.

    • Jiro says:

      I’m not sure that comparing buying a gun in the US to buying one in a country where there is no right to own a gun, is really a good comparison. I mean, if the bureaucracies are just trying to turn a right into a non-right by using red tape, that’s still bad.

      • Oldio says:

        It may not be the greatest comparison, but if the stated purposes are identical(prevent gun crime through regulations) then it’s probably the best than can be hoped for.

      • Garrett says:

        > where there is no right to own a gun

        I reject your assumption. There’s a right to purchase and own a gun everywhere. It’s merely that most governments ignore that right.

    • Christophe Biocca says:

      The narratives aren’t conflicting. Non-US countries just have even more restrictions than the ones complained about by the pro-gun-ownership people in the US.

      In Canada, I don’t have personal experience with this but the rules are all at the federal level and are much stricter than any US state that I know of off the top of my head. Some highlights:

      – All firearms possession requires a license, which requires going through a mandatory safety course, passing background checks, etc. The background check is rerun daily, any criminal charge will result in the license being suspended (I think, not 100% clear on that one).
      – All handguns are restricted, requiring (in addition to the above), that the gun itself be registered, and you need to justify why you need one. The license specifies where you’re allowed to carry it. Being allowed to carry it in public is only allowed if you prove it’s used as part of your profession (like Brinks truck guard), or that you need it for protection.

      • Simulated Knave says:

        Several Canadian courts have ruled that carrying weapons for the purpose of self-defence without an unavoidable imminent threat is a purpose dangerous to the public peace – i.e. illegal.

        Inspiring, it isn’t.

        • Eric T says:

          I thought that was only in public places though or am I misremembering?

          • Simulated Knave says:

            Yes. However, good luck going between private places without passing through a public one. And private places open to the public will certainly count for that purpose as well – I doubt a bar allowing the carrying of weapons would do well if charged, or that its patrons would either.

          • Eric T says:

            Yes. However, good luck going between private places without passing through a public one.

            Maybe I’m wrong and Canada is wackier than I thought, but presumably you can transport your weapons, you just can’t have them out right? Like if am moving, and I’d like to move my guns, I can put them in a box in the back of my car. Similarly if I’m going hunting and I have a rifle stored in my vehicle as I drive to wherever I’m going, I’m not going to be charged for that right?

          • Austin says:

            @Eric T I’m paraphrasing quite a bit, but in Canada:

            Non-restricted firearms are only required to be transported unloaded. If you are leaving your vehicle they need to go in a secure container, your trunk does count. This covers most hunting rifles. In general people don’t flaunt them.

            Restricted firearms, which covers most handguns, must be unloaded, affixed with a secure trigger lock, in a non transparent case, and you must have a document called an Authorization to Transport. Basically that’s permission to go from your house to the range and back, no stops.

            There’s also prohibited firearms, which are subject to the same requirements, plus there are restrictions on who can own them, and those are mostly grandfathered in. There is currently some legal drama on this as the government has just reclassified a bunch of firearms to prohibited. Also, all restricted and prohibited firearms have to be registered with the Federal Government.

        • Garrett says:

          It’s one of the reasons I left. Being able to carry with you the means of effective self-defense is a critical corollary to the right to life. Denying it is an inherent infringement on the right to life.

          • Simulated Knave says:

            I could forgive prohibiting guns in many public spaces. Sort of. The argument is fairly clear.

            All weapons? Fuck that bullshit.

          • Eric T says:

            Denying it is an inherent infringement on the right to life.

            Is it? Certainly we could envision a society where there is either:
            A. Such a low crime rate
            or
            B. Such good enforcement and crime prevention

            That carrying a weapon is not only not essential, but downright pointless. I mean considering how unlikely you are to be involved in a situation where a firearm is necessary in most parts of THIS country, I don’t know if I’d call it a critical corollary to the right to life? Like nobody in my entire social network has ever owned guns except my boy nick and we’re all the same amount of alive as he is.

            There’s an argument that owning guns is an important right. Inherent infringement on the right to life seems a bit dodgy to me though.

          • John Schilling says:

            Is it? Certainly we could envision a society where there is either:
            A. Such a low crime rate
            or
            B. Such good enforcement and crime prevention

            I could perhaps envision such a society, but if I were to do so I would then have trouble envisioning why such a society would need to prohibit carrying guns.

            And if the answer is going to be “because it’s the gun control that causes the low crime rate”, I’m going to point to all the beatings and stabbings in relatively gun-free England and laugh. If all you’ve done is nigh unto eliminate gun violence, while allowing unrestrained thuggish violence of the strong against the weak, then I’ve got to point out that an excess of thuggish stabby violence is why we invented guns in the first place.

            But, OK, suppose you’ve eliminated all the crime violence. Why do you care whether the law-abiding citizens are carrying guns?

    • AlexOfUrals says:

      I’ve bought a handgun in Pennsylvania, then I brought it to and registered (yes you need to do this) in California and bought ammo here. And I’m originally from Russia, although I never owned a handgun there – but that’s kind of the point. To use an analogy, if we say that buying a gun in Pennsylvania is as easy as driving a car with auto-transmission, then California can be compared to a stick-shift, and Russia to flying a plane. Jet plane if you’re speaking about something rifled or short-barreled.

    • Honk says:

      I have gone through the firearms purchasing process in Italy (Probably the most lax in the EU, along with the Czech Republic), as well as in California and Massachusetts (widely regarded as the two strictest states in the US for gun control).

      All three have unique policies both for the firearms purchasing permit process, and then for what is actually legal to purchase with a permit. Overall, these three were roughly equivalently burdensome procedures, significantly more complex/restrictive than the rest of the US, and significantly less complex/restrictive than the rest of Europe.
      I can talk more deeply if there’s interest (firearms policy is a personal rabbit hole of mine), but some interesting differences at a high level:

      In Italy, the process was a few weeks, including a medical examination (physical and mental), and the support of a local gun range. Actually pretty slick as far as Italian legal process normally goes.

      In Massachusetts, I had to get local police chief sign off, take a class with a registered instructor, as well as wait ~3 months for permit approval. Approval was highly variable based on county policy.

      California has an written exam on basic firearms practices, along with a mandatory waiting period, and registration with the electronic background check system.

      • AlexOfUrals says:

        In California, is there a reason not to just buy it in Nevada and then send a letter to DHS? And is there a similar mechanism in Massachusetts?

        • John Schilling says:

          It is illegal under federal law for anybody other than a Nevada resident to buy a handgun in Nevada. And gun dealers in Nevada will check.

          Same goes for long guns except that it is possible for Nevada to establish reciprocity with adjacent states. Needless to say, California has not established such an arrangement with Nevada (or anyone else).

          • AlexOfUrals says:

            Aaaaaah. That explains it, thanks.

          • nkurz says:

            @John Schilling:
            > Same goes for long guns except that it is possible for Nevada to establish reciprocity with adjacent states. Needless to say, California has not established such an arrangement with Nevada (or anyone else).

            That seems odd. Why would Nevada need to establish reciprocity with California for a Nevada gun dealer to sell a long gun to a non-resident if the transaction is legal under both Nevada and federal law?

            And yet, when I search for such laws, your overall conclusion seems to be correct. Californians, and only Californians, appear to be prohibited from purchasing long guns in Nevada : “You cannot be Californian. Californians must have state-approved firearms shipped to their dealer in California.

            Searching a little more, my guess is that the underlying issue is that California state law prohibits Californian residents from directly importing of guns into California, and (some) Nevada dealers choose to voluntarily refuse sales to Californians to avoid issues.

            Or am I wrong? Is there some specific law that says a Nevada gunshop is not allowed to sell to a Californian but is allowed to sell to an Arizonan?

          • John Schilling says:

            That seems “off”. Why would Nevada need to establish reciprocity with California for a Nevada gun dealer to sell a long gun to a non-resident if the transaction is legal under both Nevada and federal law?

            Because Federal law explicitly says it is only legal if both California and Nevada agree. The underlying(*) compromise is, each state is allowed to decide which of its own residents are allowed to own guns and of what type. The Feds reinforce this by not allowing residents of one state to buy guns under another state’s laws, and to the limited extent that they allow exceptions to that, the states in question also have to agree to the exception.

            * And pre-Heller, so may not endure but hasn’t been directly challenged yet.

          • Garrett says:

            > underlying(*) compromise is, each state is allowed to decide which of its own residents are allowed to own guns and of what type.

            Loophole. We should call it the home-incarceration loophole or something.

      • Oldio says:

        So what I’m getting is that the paper restrictions are similar Italy-Massachusetts, but Italian bureaucracy is somehow more efficient, and California is a similar story.
        I do thank you for answering- wiki articles give a summary of gun laws in different countries/states, but I’m more interested in the experience of navigating the system. Gun policy/demography of ownership is somewhat of a policy rabbit hole on this end, as well.

        • John Schilling says:

          California is a similar story.

          California, for all its faults in this area, at least doesn’t have the part where there are people (medical examiners, police chiefs, etc) who can arbitrarily say “I don’t think you’re the sort of person who should have a gun, mumble something officially approved reason for denial but it’s a judgement call and I say no”. The requirements are very explicit and if you meet them approval is automatic.

          California does get to the “judgement call and I say No” level when it comes to permission to carry a gun in public. With an awful lot of “No”.

    • John Schilling says:

      Tibor wrote up something about how it works in the Czech Republic here. Note that Czechia is one of the most gun-friendly of the European nations.

    • Aapje says:

      @Oldio

      I’m a non-gun owner from The Netherlands who is IMO fairly aware of how things are in both countries.

      Dutch law has no concept of a right to own a gun, but of a legitimate need. This can be:
      – military/police/etc
      – hunting
      – shooting sports
      – dealer/manufacturer

      So no right to own a gun for self-defense.

      To own a gun for shooting sports, you have to first be a member of a shooting club for a year and to have shot their guns at least on 18 days. You also have to participate in a competition that uses the gun. The gun you can buy depends on the experience you have, so you can buy progressively ‘bigger’ guns.

      The permit lasts a year and you have to ask for an extension every year. To get a permit, there is a check on ‘good behavior’ (crime check). The gun can be kept at home in a safe and transported to and from the gun club. There is a house check at least every three years to see if the gun is stored according to the rules.

      It’s very strict, but the rules have their reasons, although those reasons are not always necessarily good.

  24. Le Maistre Chat says:

    I would be extremely interested in anything our SJ-identifying members have to say about woke capitalism. The feeling on our side is that the humble protester is acting as a foot soldier for some of the most powerful people in America.

    I made a top-level post about Sony’s Twitter statements about looting Sony products (which hurts the retail corporation or small business but not them). This time I’ll cite Woke Hasbro.

    • Eugene Dawn says:

      You have it the wrong way around; the brands are responding to the protesters, who are in control: the brands are just making sure they are perceived as having a brand identity compatible with the values of their desired consumer base.

      It’s cringey and annoying, just like when brands “salute our troops”, or whatever, but if you ignore it, it mostly has no other impact on your life.

      • Eric T says:

        Thanks [BRAND]!

      • Matt M says:

        Yeah, I hate Woke Capital as much as anybody, but I agree with Eugene on the direction of the causality. For whatever reason, every brand on Earth has decided that it’s super important to pander to SJWs, and not even remotely important (or even desirable) to pander to red tribe (with the few notable exceptions such as the military stuff, as Eugene mentions).

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          @Matt M: Our money isn’t worth pandering to despite being “~50% of Americans, I guess” seems like the most textbook example possible of classism. It’d be like if there was an informal ban against advertising pandering to the British working class, so all commercial products were coded upper-class (Prince Albert in a can?).

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            I think it’s mostly age and geography-related: 18-34 is a much more desirable demographic for brands.

          • baconbits9 says:

            You aren’t being pandered to right now because you aren’t in the streets demanding to be pandered to.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @baconbits9: So I suppose the thing to do is reason how to get more Christians, working-class Americans, petite bourgeois Americans, etc out in the streets shouting to be pandered to and go do it.

          • Jake R says:

            @LMC
            But first you have to get them playing Magic and video games.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @Jake R: Um, how about just video games? I actually have serious moral qualms with telling anyone to buy Magic cards when it’s a pay-to-win game costing up to $1,421 to be competitive in Hasbro’s “Modern” format.
            I believe we ought to love our neighbors and keep each other entertained without spending $1,421 on a deck of cards.

          • Jake R says:

            @LMC

            Sure, I only play on Arena where I give them $50 every 3 or 4 months. My point though was Sony and Hasbro aren’t pandering to the groups you mentioned not just because they aren’t making noise but because those groups by and large aren’t their customers.

          • Fahundo says:

            I spent about $1300 on my PC before we even get into actually buying games for it. My steam library is probably worth more than that.

          • Aftagley says:

            I actually have serious moral qualms with telling anyone to buy Magic cards when it’s a pay-to-win game costing up to $1,421 to be competitive in Hasbro’s “Modern” format.

            You’re conflating competitive with top tier. The majority of the costs in building modern decks are the manabase. Once you have a manabase, every deck gets cheaper, but if you don’t you can still play perfectly fine versions of the decks. Sure, they lose a couple of percentage points to the optimized versions, but they’re still great fun!

            I can sleeve up a sub-$75 infect deck for modern and have a reasonable shot at winning. Hell, I could sleeve up that Urza deck with a slightly slower manabase and some minorly less awesome counterspells than cryptic command and get it under $400.

            Real talk – I’ve been rocking a Gifts-storm deck in modern for years now that I love and costs under $200.

          • Deiseach says:

            It’d be like if there was an informal ban against advertising pandering to the British working class, so all commercial products were coded upper-class (Prince Albert in a can?)

            Well, almost every product from jars of jam onwards likes to proudly display its “By Royal Appointment” crest on the label, even if you can’t quite visualise Queen Elizabeth having Weetabix for breakfast (but who knows?) 🙂

            Or this excerpt from a 1941 letter of Tolkien’s, where he is describing a visit to a pub in a village outside of Oxford:

            J.B. had given me a little pot of snuff as a birthday present. So I brought it out of my pocket and read out the ancient label: ‘AS SUPPLIED to THEIR MAJESTIES the KINGS of HANOVER & BELGIUM etc. the DUKE of CUMBERLAND and the DUCHESS of KENT’. ‘Will any one have any?’ I said. Many horny hands of yokels were thrust out. And several caplifting explosions followed! You had better not tell J.B. what I did with (a small portion) of the precious Fribourg and Treyer stuff. Major Lewis — unaware that Blackwell lives at Appleton and that the locals were all ears – gave an amusing account of visiting Blackwell’s shop with Hugo Dyson. When he came to the point at which the assistant returned to Hugo and said: Sorry, sir, we have no second-hand copy, but we have a new copy (and H. replied Well, rub it on the floor and make it second-hand: it’s all the same to me), there was loud applause.

    • Aftagley says:

      I think it depends. Ben and Jerry’s had a pretty good statement about it, although I don’t think anyone was particularly surprised that the hippy-est company in America would be on the side of the lefties. But yeah, I agree with Eugene Dawn, it’s mostly cringey but if it’s backed up by concrete and positive action, it can be fine.

      This time I’ll cite Woke Hasbro.

      Man, I don’t know. I’m pretty fine with this one. For those who don’t follow a link, it’s MTG saying they’re going to be pulling some cards that are, shall we say, not amazing in their depictions of race.

      For example – the first card they’re pulling is called, “Invoke Prejudice” and has a figure wearing a color-swapped KKK outfit complete with hood. The next one is called “cleanse” and had the effect “Destroy all black creatures.” Others have fairly caricature-esque depictions of other races.

      I think these were going to be a problem and Wizards of the Coast wanted to head it off at the pass.
      This is the kind of concrete action I want to see from [BRAND]s, although they still get the crab.

      • Matt M says:

        For example – the first card they’re pulling is called, “Invoke Prejudice” and has a figure wearing a color-swapped KKK outfit complete with hood.

        This is supposed to be offensive to minorities why, exactly?

        The fact that their de-facto example of prejudice is an evil white man is wholly unsurprising and expected, so I’m not too offended by it myself, but uh…

        The next one is called “cleanse” and had the effect “Destroy all black creatures.”

        Oh come on. In the game of magic creatures are associated with colors. Are there not similar cards that confer effects on “white creatures” and “blue creatures?”

        • JayT says:

          Choosing the word “cleanse” for the black creatures seems a bit on the nose though, you have to admit. I suspect that if “cleanse” destroyed all green creatures and something like “obliterate” destroyed all black creatures that there wouldn’t have been an issue.

          I will say, I don’t understand what was wrong with the “Stone-Throwing Devils”, but I also don’t play MTG, so I might not be looking at the right card.

          • Unsaintly says:

            Apparently it’s an obscure slur against middle easterners

          • Two McMillion says:

            Choosing the word “cleanse” for the black creatures seems a bit on the nose though, you have to admit. I suspect that if “cleanse” destroyed all green creatures and something like “obliterate” destroyed all black creatures that there wouldn’t have been an issue.

            Then why not just change the name of the card?

          • Aftagley says:

            Then why not just change the name of the card?

            Because it’s a lot of effort for a card that just isn’t worth it. This card saw effectively 0 play. It’s only legal in eternal formats and none of them want a 4 mana highly conditional board-wipe.

            If this was something that saw play, or could potentially impact the future, then maybe changing it would be worthwhile, but this card was dead.

          • Randy M says:

            They do change the name of cards in a fashion, by printing new cards that do the same thing. They can’t change the name of cards that already exist in any meaningful way, the ink is dry already.

            They could do it for the magic online version (if there is one for Invoke), but having a card with a different name on-line and in paper is weird and not worth the trouble for a niche card whose only claim to fame is smirking at real world problems.

        • Aftagley says:

          This is supposed to be offensive to minorities why, exactly?

          If you sold a product, would you want something on it that looked like it had KKK imagery on it?

          I don’t think this is so much “these are offensive” as “hmm, we don’t think these meet our current standards and will therefore no longer recognize them as official product.”

          Come to think of it, this is an interesting callback to your argument on monuments. I don’t think WoTC should be bound by whatever relatively loose standards their predecessory had when it came to card art/concept.

          • rumham says:

            I don’t think this is so much “these are offensive” as “hmm, we don’t think these meet our current standards and will therefore no longer recognize them as official product.”

            What standards are they falling short in?

          • Aftagley says:

            I mean, I don’t know if they have one that explicitly says, “don’t use KKK imagery…”

          • rumham says:

            I mean, I don’t know if they have one that explicitly says, “don’t use KKK imagery…”

            That’s just one example. But let’s focus there. Why would that be a problem? Why just use “…” there?

            To expand back to the original, what do all of those cards they have just banned have in common?

          • Aftagley says:

            If I had to guess, they are cards that would not make the final cut today. They are ones that slipped by under a different regime of art directors or flavor editors that now present a problem to WoTC. That they were identified this quickly, and seemingly without public push-back means WoTC was likely aware this could present an issue, so they used this time to divest.

            Sure, it’s a subjective judgement, but all of this is subjective. It’s art!

          • rumham says:

            they are cards that would not make the final cut today

            Why?

            means WoTC was likely aware this could present an issue

            What issue?

            Sure, it’s a subjective judgement, but all of this is subjective. It’s art!

            It’s a subjective judgment on offensiveness.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Also, I mean, I kind of think people who are actual racists* would think it’s cool, so maybe that’s bad? In her video essay about the ethics of fictional portrayal of Nazis, Lindsay Ellis made the observation that despite being explicitly anti-nazi, neo-nazis rather like and appropriate the imagery from American History X. Ed Norton looked badass, despite the extremely bad consequences to him and his family for his ideology. Don’t see anybody appropriating “Springtime for Hitler,” though. So if you’re going to do something that can be construed as “cleansing minorities,” don’t make it look cool to people who actually like the idea of cleansing minorities.

            * or is it Racists now? I haven’t read Eric T’s SJ post yet so I’m like 12 hours behind on SSC lingo and it’s causing me acute anxiety

          • Eric T says:

            Also, I mean, I kind of think people who are actual racists* would think it’s cool, so maybe that’s bad? In her video essay about the ethics of fictional portrayal of Nazis, Lindsay Ellis made the observation that despite being explicitly anti-nazi, neo-nazis rather like and appropriate the imagery from American History X.

            I really love this video, it made me really update my views on like how depictions in media can be used by groups. I found it a super interesting watch even though I disagree with a decent chunk of it.

            * or is it Racists now? I haven’t read Eric T’s SJ post yet so I’m like 12 hours behind on SSC lingo and it’s causing me acute anxiety

            This is the most Power I’ve ever had muahahaha (I kid obviously)

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            I discovered her channel from a link on SSC about a month or so ago and binged watched all her content. I think she’s extremely insightful.

            Also, I just finished reading your SJ post, thanks for that! Excellent contribution.

          • Deiseach says:

            I don’t think this is so much “these are offensive” as “hmm, we don’t think these meet our current standards and will therefore no longer recognize them as official product.”

            I think part of the derision is that this is a problem that could be solved by quietly dropping/discontinuing these cards but the company chose to make a BIG OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT about it.

            (I don’t understand this game but don’t American companies regularly do things like stop making particular flavours of ice-cream or soda, so discontinuing a particular old card wouldn’t be that big of a deal unless it was made into a big deal?)

          • Eric T says:

            I think part of the derision is that this is a problem that could be solved by quietly dropping/discontinuing these cards but the company chose to make a BIG OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT about it.

            Wizards makes a BIG OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT every time than ban any card for any reason though so this may be some partial cherrypicking.

          • Matt M says:

            If you sold a product, would you want something on it that looked like it had KKK imagery on it?

            I still think this isn’t quite right.

            What sort of image should a card labeled “invoke prejudice” have? If they switched it to an obvious Antifa expy, do you suppose Antifa would be happy about that? Because hey, they’re being depicted in a card game and isn’t that great? No, clearly they’d object and say “Wait a minute, Antifa isn’t a good example of prejudice!”

            Putting a KKK guy on this card is explicitly a negative portrayal of the KKK. If you can’t depict them negatively, then that means you can never depict them at all. So who are you supposed to depict in things that require negative examples? Are they supposed to find a perfectly balanced group who is pretty widely hated such that we’re fine with depicting them negatively, but not so widely hated that depicting them at all is totally beyond the pale? Who fits this mold exactly? Juggalos? Nickelback fans?

            What’s next? Removing all the Nazis from Raiders of the Lost Ark because Nazis are bad and their presence might be offensive to holocaust survivors? What should we replace them with? Generic white guys of indeterminate origin working for a fictional evil corporation?

          • Randy M says:

            There’s no particular reason that card needed to be named “Invoke Prejudice.” The effect could have been flavored differently.
            If you do have that name, you could have goblins laughing at the pointy eared elves.
            Ironically, the elves in Lorwyn were quite violently and superficially prejudiced, calling non-elves “eyeblights”. Curious how that would fly today.

            It is a values dissonance that we can have murder as a card but prejudice is beyond the pale, let alone the large number of cards that encourage you to sacrifice creatures, such as one in the pending set.

        • Tarpitz says:

          Harold McNeill, who did the art for Invoke Prejudice, is as far as I can tell a straight up neo-nazi. Not in an “anyone to the right of Mao” way – in a “thinks Hitler and Charlie Manson were pretty rad” way. And while it may be a coincidence that Invoke Prejudice got allocated Multiverse ID 1488, if it is it’s further evidence that not only are we living in a simulation but it was built by a massive troll.

          • cassander says:

            “It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods. If such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money.”

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        Man, I don’t know. I’m pretty fine with this one. For those who don’t follow a link, it’s MTG saying they’re going to be pulling some cards that are, shall we say, not amazing in their depictions of race.

        Jihad. Card art is “Caucasoid” Muslim lancers (white people? Brown people?).
        As Jihad enters the battlefield, choose a color and an opponent.
        White creatures get +2/+1 as long as the chosen player controls a nontoken permanent of the chosen color.
        When the chosen player controls no nontoken permanents of the chosen color, sacrifice Jihad.

        Crusade is a plain +1/+1 for White creatures. Art has gone through at least three different paintings.

        Imprison. Card art is the Man in the Iron Mask imprisoned naked. Rules text is the most anodyne gamist text you can imagine.

        • Aftagley says:

          I’m with you on Jihad, I don’t personally find it bad.

          For imprison, well, maybe I’m revealing some implicit bias here, but the guy looks like he’s black. Having your imprison figure be of African descent is a bit too close to uncomfortable for WOTC, I guess.

        • cassander says:

          crusade is particularly egregious, I feel, because white is clearly the color of religious fanaticism, and crusade is entirely appropriate in that context. What’s next, banning Murder?

      • LadyJane says:

        I think these were going to be a problem and Wizards of the Coast wanted to head it off at the pass.

        Other than Crusade, all of these cards were incredibly old and obscure, and also just terrible. No one was playing with any of them. And the one exception, Crusade, had modern reprints with new and perfectly non-offensive art. I strongly doubt this would’ve been an issue if they hadn’t actively decided to make it an issue out of the blue.

        I’m pretty Social Justice oriented myself, but this is just silly. Invoke Prejudice and the Gypsy card were the only ones that were actually offensive; I can kinda sorta see how Jihad and the old art for Crusade might seem tasteless, but Cleanse, Imprison, and Stone Throwing Devils are all perfectly fine, to the point where it’s baffling that anyone would consider them problematic. (With Cleanse, it should be noted that “black” is simply a color type in Magic and has nothing to do with Black people, and “destroy [color type]” effects are incredibly common.)

        • Guy in TN says:

          My take is that you can conceptualize the bans into three categories:

          1. Cards that could be seen as advancing racial slurs in of themselves
          (Stone-Throwing Devils, Pradesh Gypsies) These are obscure slurs to most Americans, but slurs all the same.

          2. Cards that depict racism in action (Invoke Prejudice, Imprison, possibly Jihad) These cards don’t necessarily advance (or even depict positively) racist ideas in of themselves. MTG just doesn’t want them to be part of their fantasy universe. An imaginary card named “Evil Racist Demon” would also fit this category. There are many aspects of life that MTG doesn’t want in their universe (e.g. explicit sex and nudity), and they have decided that racism fits the bill.

          3. Cards that neither are racist nor necessarily depict racism, but could be easily used by white nationalists to associate Hasbro with their cause. (Crusade, Cleanse) This appropriateness of this type of card is, unfortunately, dependent on the larger, fluid political context of society.

          I don’t think Crusade and Cleanse would have been banned if we didn’t have a burgeoning white nationalist/anti-immigrant political movement (particularity associated with the gamer/4chan crowd) that glowingly references the Crusades as the time where we showed those dark-skinned people who was boss, and frequently references racial “Cleansing” against blacks. MTG doesn’t want to give any ammo to someone who would weaponize these cards to make a political point, or make people feel uncomfortable at tournaments.

          • johan_larson says:

            I’m just going to sit here and soak in the warm glow of the flavor text from the version of Crusade in the Elspeth vs Tezzeret duel deck.

            Finally, I understand. Home isn’t where you rest. It’s what you fight for. — Elspeth Tirel

          • Eric T says:

            @johan_larson

            I love this video on MTG flavor text.

            I think my favorite may be Squandered Resources

            “He traded sand for skins, skins for gold, gold for life. In the end, he traded life for sand.”

          • John Schilling says:

            They really needed to have not used “white” as one of their color groups, I think. Or “black” for that matter. I get the symbolism they were going for, but it is too closely intermingled with the other sort of symbolism.

          • cassander says:

            @Eric T

            Phyrexian Hulk

            It doesn’t eat, it doesn’t sleep,
            it doesn’t laugh or cry.

            All it does from dusk till dawn
            is make the soldiers die.

          • Matt M says:

            I wonder if there are people whose full-time job is to write flavor text for Magic cards. Like a weird bizarro version of Elaine writing for the Jay Peterman catalog in Seinfeld…

          • johan_larson says:

            If you are going to have sides that are good and evil, and associate colors with them, you’ll be hard pressed to stay away from white and black, respectively.

            For good, I suppose you could use gold or silver. But what color would you use for evil?

            Probably better to stay away from either good vs evil or color associations completely, if white and black just won’t do.

          • John Schilling says:

            Red works fairly well for evil I think. Silver or Green might work for good. Alternately, use White and Black but be extra careful not to talk about “white people” or “black people”, and “creatures” doesn’t fool anyone if too many of them are clearly humanoid. Especially not “black creatures”.

          • Eric T says:

            @Matt M

            I wonder if there are people whose full-time job is to write flavor text for Magic cards. Like a weird bizarro version of Elaine writing for the Jay Peterman catalog in Seinfeld…

            There Is! Kind of. So Ant (interviewed here) is technically a freelancer but mentioned in an interview that writing Flavor text is basically his fulltime job. Ftext writers also do Names too though, not just flavor text.

            @cassander

            How about Drainpipe Vermin?

            When times are tough, the poor eat the rats. When times are tougher, the rats eat the poor.

          • cassander says:

            @Eric T

            That’s fantastic.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            Evil could be a muddy gray-green-brown mixture.

          • Guy in TN says:

            The “black human creature” and “white human creature” issue is tough, for sure.

            If I worked for MTG, I would purposefully invert the races as much as possible in the artwork and theme design, making sure that all my black “humans” were depicted as obviously white people (aristocratic vampires livings in castles and such) while all my white “humans” are people of color.

          • Deiseach says:

            the Elspeth vs Tezzeret duel deck

            Looking at your link, there’s a card there called “Cathar’s Crusade”.

            Are they not going to discontinue this as offensive to Gnostics? 😀

          • Eric T says:

            Looking at your link, there’s a card there called “Cathar’s Crusade”.

            Are they not going to discontinue this as offensive to Gnostics? 😀

            No because unlike all of the cards they did ban, Cathar’s Crusade is actually a good card. I use it in my EDH deck.

          • Randy M says:

            They’d better not, that card is actually playable.

      • Two McMillion says:

        For example – the first card they’re pulling is called, “Invoke Prejudice” and has a figure wearing a color-swapped KKK outfit complete with hood.

        No it doesn’t. It has a character wearing stereotypical executioner’s outfit, the design of which predates the Klu Klux Klan.

        • Aftagley says:

          What? no.

          1. The stereotypical executioner’s outfit doesn’t have a pointy hood. It goes flat over the head. I guess you could be charitable and say that maybe it’s a stereotypical jester/wizard outfit (what the klan used as inspiration for their hoods) but I’d say that doesn’t matter because…

          2. Context is king. If your card is named “invoke prejudice” well, first off, don’t name a card that, but secondly – you should make sure not to use an image that can be very easily parsed as being a symbol of hate.

          • Orion says:

            Not only is the card called “Invoke Prejudice,” the actual game mechanic is basically redlining. If the opponent wants to play a creature that’s a different color from any of your creatures, they have to pay double. In other words, the card is about creatures of one color banding together to make it expensive for creatures of other color to move into the board.

            If I had to argue for why it’s problematic to have a card for this, when magic has cards for all kinds of violent and immoral things, I might say that although there are a lot of cards in magic that let your fictional avatar do things that would be immoral in real life, part of the appeal of playing Magic is to imagine your avatar doing things that are “clever,” “awesome,” or “cool.” Racist housing policies are bad, and murders are also bad. There are some people who think we should never portray murder as something cool and awesome, but that’s a fringe perspective at this point. Consensus is that it’s okay to portray murder as clever, exciting, and fun, in a fictional context. Everyone does it. Very few people, on the other hand, portray racist housing policies as exciting and fun, and it’s probably best not to start.

          • Tarpitz says:

            you should make sure not to use an image that can be very easily parsed as being a symbol of hate.

            And indeed consider hiring an artist who is not actually a neo-Nazi for the commission.

      • axiomsofdominion says:

        Several of these bans are super dumb. Black in magic is the color of swamps, rot, disease, etc. White is the color of divinity, healing, and purity. Cleanse makes perfect non-offensive sense in context. In order for Cleanse to be racist or offensive Magic as a whole has to be those things.

        Invoke Prejudice is a much better candidate for a ban. Meanwhile why ban Crusade but allow “tribal” as a keyword? Those are comparably offensive, regardless of whether one thinks they are offensive or not.

    • broblawsky says:

      Capitalism doesn’t create ideologies; it assimilates them in order to survive and perpetuate itself. I think you’ve got your causative relationship the wrong way around here.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        I’ll agree with that: the SJ mob controls the large-cap CEOs rather than vice versa.
        Do the protesters understand that they’re more powerful than the billionaires who run S&P 500 corporations , though?

        • LadyJane says:

          Do the protesters understand that they’re more powerful than the billionaires who run S&P 500 corporations , though?

          No, because that’s blatantly untrue. Also, the state has vastly more power than either – if you actually look at the amount of wealth that Congress as a whole has control over, then each individual Representative or Senator could be abstracted as a multi-billionaire, regardless of their actual net worth.

        • Eric T says:

          Do the protesters understand that they’re more powerful than the billionaires who run S&P 500 corporations , though?

          Hahahaha I wish we were. All that protests have gotten these billionaires to do is make donations that don’t even register as a blip on their total wealth and make some very minor company policy changes. Any billionaire/S&P 500 company could literally do nothing right now and they would be fine. I think you really overestimate the power of twitter/online shaming if you think we could get Amazon to say… pay their employees more. Or let them use the bathroom.

          ETA: I think this kind of argument is similar to saying something like: Because the Montgomery Bus Boycotts were capable of effecting policy change, clearly the protestors were more powerful/controlled the state. I think that’s clearly untrue, and the much more reasonable answer is that you can force change on individual issues without being the more powerful of the two negotiators. If I convince my boss to give me a raise by presenting him with the fact that I got another offer, am I in control of my boss?

        • axiomsofdominion says:

          You can’t be serious. Can the protestors redistribute the wealth of the capitalists? Than it isn’t the protestors who have power. Capitalists are showing their “revealed preferences” for being wealthy over anything else. They aren’t giving up something that matters to them.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            They’ve giving up $20 bills on the sidewalk. That seems to demand a logical explanation.
            There aren’t SJW overpriced card games and Red tribe overpriced card games, or entertainment corporations that can afford to make AAA video games, or film studios. Beyond making new material, even old movies get cancelled. It’s the SJW versions or nothing.
            If this is revealed preference to maximize for being wealthy, what does that tell us about Power in this country?

    • herbert herberson says:

      We have an chaotic and inchoate movement with no central structure or unified demands, and all the relevant organs of liberal capitalism (in this case, consumer brands associated with young/urban/etc consumers and the Democratic Party) are trying to step into the leadership void and guide it to non-threatening ends and/or harness its energy to their own uses. Hardly surprising or novel (but certainly still concerning).

      • Gerry Quinn says:

        Wouldn’t it would be worse if they were believers?

        • herbert herberson says:

          As a leftist, this isn’t even a question I can answer. A world where capital genuinely supported the more radical BLM demands is, at the very least, too different from the real world for me to speculate on.

  25. rahien.din says:

    Hi Nick,

    We had been engaging in a long discussion of materialism across several threads. I am not sure in which thread we left off. Worse, I disengaged from SSC for a bit and missed some OT’s – if you replied, I missed it.

    Are you still interested in discussion?

  26. 10240 says:

    (A response to threads such as the ones about whether lockdowns are a power grab rather than motivated by the epidemic, or people not being genuinely concerned about global warming if they don’t support nuclear power.)

    It’s uncharitable and borderline libelous to assert as a fact that people who support a policy are not actually motivated by the reason they claim to be motivated by, without very strong evidence. (Here it’s done mostly by right-wingers; here is an example from Scott of a left-wing version.) In the absence of strong evidence, assert it as a suspicion rather than as a fact. Even that’s probably wrong.

    Things that are not strong evidence:
    • That their claimed reason doesn’t actually support the policy (in your opinion). In their opinion it probably does.
    • That the policy they support could help achieve the supposed ulterior motive.
    • That their political side has a general tendency to favor policies that involve the supposed ulterior motive, which is something generally regarded as a bad things. E.g. left-wingers supporting policies that increase the size of the government or limit freedoms, or “neo-puritans” supporting policies that involve various sacrifices. More likely than that they want big government for big government’s sake, less freedom for its own sake or sacrifices for sacrifices’ sake is that they are more tolerant of these, so they are more likely to support policies involving them when they have some other, genuine reason for it.
    • That it’s irrational to support the proposed policy based on the stated reasons, as long as there is a remotely plausible flawed reasoning to support the policy for the stated reasons. People don’t think about politics rationally. Also, the supposed ulterior motives (big government for its own sake, sacrifices for their own sake) would themselves be irrational; if it’s irrational to support a policy based on the stated reasons, that’s hardly evidence for ulterior motives if the supposed ulterior motives are themselves irrational.
    • That they exaggerate the problem, or oppose certain solutions. Many environmentalists, for example, support renewable energy, and oppose both fossil and nuclear energy. The risks of nuclear energy may be orders of magnitude smaller than either the claimed or real risks of global warming, but people are egregiously wrong about comparing the risks of different things all the time (see e.g. the amount of attention paid to terrorist attacks or school shootings compared to “everyday” murders, let alone other causes of death). People pay attention to different problems roughly in proportion of how much they hear about them in the media, rather than making any serious effort to compare the harm caused.
    People are biased when talking about politics: they often don’t make the slightest mental effort to question arguments for points they support, or to consider opposing arguments. Arguments that global warming is an existential threat help argue against fossil fuels, so they are believed; arguments that nuclear energy should be used to reduce the use of fossil fuels opposes their stance on nuclear power, so they are not accepted. They process different arguments separately; they don’t run any sort of consistency check, such as whether it’s reasonable to oppose nuclear energy to combat what (in a separate argument) they consider an existential threat.
    • That they make hypocritical exceptions for the issues they care about. Yes, it’s hypocritical to support the BLM protests while opposing other protests or religious services. That doesn’t mean they don’t think the lockdown is actually useful to contain COVID, it means they care about their partisan issues more than about COVID.

    People are irrational, biased and hypocritical. (Most of the mistakes I’ve listed above are ones I could imagine myself making.) One the other hand, it’s rare for most people to consciously lie when talking about politics. (It isn’t rare for politicians, but I believe it’s rare for commentators, journalists, and everyday people.) As long as there are plausible (if flawed) ways their stated reasons to motivate their talking points, those reasons are likely genuine.

    Asserting that people definitely don’t believe the motives they claim, as opposed to just refuting their arguments when they are mistaken, adds nothing of value to the debate. It does subtract substantially: for instance, if no one genuinely believed in global warming, that would imply that it’s probably an entirely wrong theory. On the other hand, if people just exaggerate its consequences, and are illogical about what solutions they support, that has no such implications.

    • cassander says:

      @10240 says

      It’s uncharitable and borderline libelous to assert as a fact that people who support a policy are not actually motivated by the reason they claim to be motivated by, without very strong evidence. (Here it’s done mostly by right-wingers; here is an example from Scott of a left-wing version.) In the absence of strong evidence, assert it as a suspicion rather than as a fact. Even that’s probably wrong.

      It’s also usually wrong. People are frighteningly sincere, at least when it comes to stating the issues they care about. Why they choose some solutions over others, however, is more complicated. And one is right to ask about underlying motives when the justifications or preferences vary wildly, because while people are usually sincere, they’re always motivated.

    • John Schilling says:

      And therefore nobody who isn’t basically a card-carrying Klansman can be accuse of Racism, or even racism, because they all claim to have other motives and we can’t disbelieve them without proof.

      You go out of your way to list things that you think aren’t strong evidence. What, in your opinion, does constitute strong evidence for this purpose?

      If the answers basically reduce to “we found the minutes of the secret meeting where they said this was really their motive”, meh, not interested. People routinely lie about their motives, and dealing with other humans effectively requires heuristics for determining when, yeah, they’re probably lying about their motives. And the list of things that you call “not strong evidence”, are what I would say are about the best heuristics we’ve got for this necessary purpose. No one of them is proof, but in combination they can make for a pretty good guess.

      It would be uncharitable to assert that someone is not being completely honest about their motives without at some point explaining why you believe that. But I think you’re setting the bar for that unreasonably, impractically high.

      • 10240 says:

        You go out of your way to list things that you think aren’t strong evidence. What, in your opinion, does constitute strong evidence for this purpose?

        Hardly anything. My claim is that it’s virtually never appropriate to assert it with confidence that they don’t actually believe their stated motives. Say “I suspect this may not be the main reason they want…” rather than “This is not the reason they want…”. Again, I think even that suspicion is often wrong, but not always.

        And therefore nobody who isn’t basically a card-carrying Klansman can be accuse of Racism, or even racism, because they all claim to have other motives and we can’t disbelieve them without proof.

        I’m not in favor of readily accusing people of racism. I’d accuse people of being definitely racist for saying racist things; in that case, there is no question of motives, what they say is itself the evidence.

        Now, having biases (such as racism) that make someone more likely to reach certain conclusions is different from their stated motive not actually being the main motive. E.g. if someone suggests calling the cop on a teenager who has a wad of cash because she suspects that he is a drug dealer, and she suspects that (partly) because he is black, she genuinely wants to call the cops because she suspects he is a drug dealer, even if racist bias was involved in making that conclusion.

        • GearRatio says:

          I’m not in favor of readily accusing people of racism. I’d accuse people of being definitely racist for saying racist things; in that case, there is no question of motives, what they say is itself the evidence.

          There’s an inconsistency here; you dismiss people’s “this is a bad argument” objections above as being mere opinion. But here there’s suddenly a hard standard of what “racist things” are that can be said, and that you get to decide what they are.

          I agree with you that a reasonable person might be able to reasonably determine what a racist thing is to say, but disagree that a reasonable person can’t identify a disingenuous, inconsistent argument looks like.

          This holds together if the racist things I’m saying are hard slurs outside of rap songs and quotes, or if I’m saying “I think some races are inherently inferior to other races based on unjustified bias, and I treat them differently because of that”. But beyond that you are very potentially asking that I let you make a judgement call on somebody, but demanding that I don’t do the same thing.

          • 10240 says:

            you dismiss people’s “this is a bad argument” objections above as being mere opinion

            I don’t dismiss it. I just say that even if the argument some people are making is bad, it doesn’t mean that it’s not the actual argument they believe.

            When I wrote “That their claimed reason doesn’t actually support the policy (in your opinion)”, I included the parenthetical just because, naturally, in these debates there is no consensus about whose position is actually right. In the absence of the parenthetical, i.e. if your opinion that their claimed reason doesn’t support the policy they propose is objectively right, my point still stands.

            But here there’s suddenly a hard standard of what “racist things” are that can be said, and that you get to decide what they are.

            Racism doesn’t have a precise definition, and I didn’t say that it had. There is a subjective element when it comes to calling something racist, but the subjective element is to how you define racism, not to whether the motives of the person in question are what he claims.

            Can you give me an example where you would confidently accuse someone of racism, but this requires asserting that his motives are different from what he claims?

      • Eric T says:

        And therefore nobody who isn’t basically a card-carrying Klansman can be accuse of Racism, or even racism, because they all claim to have other motives and we can’t disbelieve them without proof.

        I’m not sure if the Racism/racism distinction is just a coincidence but if not I’ll consider my entire post a win if I’ve added any clarity to the term “racism” in online discussions.

    • GearRatio says:

      I don’t 100% disagree with this, but I think it doesn’t really grapple with the way things would play out in a real-world situation if it was applied. Let’s imagine Bob says this:

      I am very concerned about global warming, but I oppose nuclear.

      Let’s then say I ask Bob why this makes sense, and he doesn’t have anything to say or can’t back up what he’s saying to a reasonable standard.

      This means one of several things is true of Bob:

      1. Bob does not care about global warming, but hides his true motivations behind something else knowingly.

      2. Bob does not care about global warming, but hides his true motivations behind something else unknowingly.

      3. Bob is too stupid to have an adequate defense of his position.

      4. Despite genuinely caring about global warming a great deal, Bob is lazy to an extent that overrides his passion and has never thought about/researched the nuclear angle.

      5. Despite having a reasonable defense for his position and caring a great deal about it, Bob is unable to articulate his reasoning.

      And one of those is true; Bob can’t be honest, less lazy than he is passionate about global warming and able to articulate researched positions he’s passionate about and still give me zip when I ask him why he holds a particular position.

      So that means when I speak honestly about Bob and in the hyper-accurate way you seem to demand, I now have to say “Bob is either stupid, a liar to himself/others/both, lazy, or a shitty communicator”. I’m not sure Bob or you would be any happier with this.

      Now, there’s still ways I could be wrong to say this. One of your more valid points above is that I may be inappropriately discounting Bob’s valid (or at least reasonable) defense. If Bob is saying stuff that isn’t straight nonsense and I won’t acknowledge that, then my whole system breaks; I’m not giving Bob the respectful debate he deserves.

      I’m also being unreasonable if Bob is, say, saying this stuff to his girlfriend at dinner, as opposed to in a public discussion forum or in a discussion/argument with me. Bob shouldn’t have to be interrogated on his beliefs when he’s walking down the street and then forced to defend them ala walrus meme.

      The flip side of this is that if Bob brings his views to a public discussion forum, he gets minimal slack. In addition, the closer Bob gets to influencing policy, the less slack he gets. In addition, the more Bob presents himself as an expert, the less slack he gets.

      If Bob wants to be anti-carbon and anti-nuclear at the same time in private, it’s none of my business. But if Bob voluntarily enters a public forum and can’t justify his belief to a reasonable level, he’s courting a stupid-or-liar-or-lazy-or-shitty-at-argument judgement and I have no more sympathy for him than I do a drunk who picks fights with bouncers.

      I have a similarly low level of sympathy for arguments that I should be nice to Bob where the concept of “being nice” demands that I don’t point out the necessary conclusions Bob’s inability to defend his position demands, for the same reason I wouldn’t throw a boxing match or refrain from voting to be nice to the opposition candidate’s supporters.

      • 10240 says:

        I do think that “lazy” or “stupid” in your terminology are more likely than liar, so it’s not reasonable to round it to liar if you don’t want to be hyper-accurate.

        I also think that most people, much of the time, don’t care to come up with rock-solid reasoning for their views until they are confronted about them. This includes opinion makers on both political sides. It’s a bit harsh to call people stupid or lazy for something most people do. If you want to call out pundits for laziness, I support that, but do it in a general way, rather than implying that this or that particular group is trash because its pundits are lazy, if other groups’ pundits are similarly lazy.

        IMO the most likely situation is something like this:
        1. Bob has some reasons to oppose nuclear power, such as the risk of accidents or long-term problems with the storage of nuclear waste. (I find it unlikely that he can’t say about why he opposes it.)
        2. Bob lives in a bubble where usually no one disputes environmentalist positions, whether it’s anti-fossil or anti-nuclear. So he never makes a magnitude comparison between the downsides of nuclear and fossil. (People fail to make such comparisons all the time.)
        3. If you are to debate him and you come up with detailed arguments that his position is wrong, he might change his views. More likely, he is too invested in his views to change instantly, and suspects that there are good reasons anti-nuclear views are common in his tribe. He may shift his position slightly, and plan to look up arguments in more detail. (People rarely change their views suddenly and dramatically in result of a debate.)

        • GearRatio says:

          It’s a bit harsh to call people stupid or lazy for something most people do.

          We disagree a massive amount on this, and a hypothetical nuclear-is-great situation-global-warming-is-terrible is a great reason why. Taking as a given that a whole lot of nuclear does a whole lot of good and taking as a given that global warming is a very significant negative, not being willing to hold people to a standard and just going “well, most people are lazy and stupid; it’s perfectly OK for there to be a norm where you can spout off about any damn thing from a place of ignorance and also a norm where everybody has to treat you with kid gloves when you do” is a death sentence.

          If being ignorant/wrong/dishonest in a counterproductive way is negative when one person does it, it’s worse when a lot of people do it. I can’t wrap my head around “Well, demonstrably bad behavior X is really common, so let’s not rock the boat on bad behavior X” very easily.

          1. Bob has some reasons to oppose nuclear power, such as the risk of accidents or long-term problems with the storage of nuclear waste. (I find it unlikely that he can’t say about why he opposes it.)

          Bob’s belief doesn’t exist in a vacuum – he’s a enthusiast anti-global-warming guy. That’s the topic. If Bob was only anti-nuclear and had good arguments for why global warming didn’t matter, that’s one thing. But if he’s gung-ho on a soapbox about cutting carbon and hasn’t ever grappled with the elephant-in-the-room nuclear thing, then something is inconsistent that can only be explained by dumb/dishonest/lazy.

          2. Bob lives in a bubble where usually no one disputes environmentalist positions, whether it’s anti-fossil or anti-nuclear. So he never makes a magnitude comparison between the downsides of nuclear and fossil. (People fail to make such comparisons all the time.)

          But for this to be true, Bob is getting all of his information from a local low-information social group. He never thinks to look into further; he’s already getting everything he needs about this supposedly important-to-him subject from feeling ingroup and hating outgroup.

          Let’s overlook the part where given this it’s incredibly likely that Bob gives zero genuine shits about global warming and at least one shits about being viewed in the correct way by the correct people. That’s not for sure.

          But what is sure is that Bob never did even a minimal amount of work to determine what the actual best-course for reducing mankind’s carbon output is, because if he had he couldn’t have avoided grappling with nuclear. And grappling with nuclear gives four possible outcomes:

          1. Bob supports nuclear

          2. Bob doesn’t support nuclear, but he has a reasonable argument why the harms of nuclear either don’t work or don’t outweigh the harms of global warming, which he thinks is pretty damn bad

          3. Bob got to nuclear and believes it to be an overall environmental net good, but his motivations aren’t genuinely “what’s best for the planet” and he’s ignoring all that

          4. Bob got to nuclear, and just immediately was uncomfortable with the concept and refused to grapple with it.

          5. Bob got to nuclear and didn’t understand the pro-nuclear position enough to refute it, but he’s decided to be anti-nuclear anyhow.

          1. and 2. are fine positions. 3. indicates Bob is lying to himself or us about what his motivations are, and 4. means he’s either lazy or his concerns about global warming carry less value to him than a few hours of his time. 5. is the dumbness with a dash of indications of bad motivations.

          Again, this doesn’t matter if Bob keeps it to himself, but if Bob brings it to an argument and expects people not to notice that he’s in the lazy/liar/dumb or to throw a fight he picked, I don’t have much sympathy for him.

          3. If you are to debate him and you come up with detailed arguments that his position is wrong, he might change his views. More likely, he is too invested in his views to change instantly, and suspects that there are good reasons anti-nuclear views are common in his tribe. He may shift his position slightly, and plan to look up arguments in more detail. (People rarely change their views suddenly and dramatically in result of a debate.)

          This is an end-run around the topic; I don’t think it’s an intentional dodge, but it’s a dodge. Bob came to the argument himself. I didn’t force Bob into a position where he felt he needed to argue global-warming-bad-nuclear-worse but didn’t know the bare minimum to show he had ever thought about it. Yet here is Bob, in a public forum, arguing that position.

          We can switch the argument to “How best can one convince Bob”, which 3. attempts to do, but the part where Bob is here arguing a position he claims to be very important but appears to know nothing about inescapably tells us something about him. And this something about him is what you are to some extent asking us to ignore.

          If there aren’t any stakes besides “be nice to Bob” and I don’t think that concealing Bob’s serious flaw in how he drew up his beliefs will hurt him, I might let him win. But the moment there’s any stakes at all in an argument he chose to join, I’m not obligated to ignore his weakness to mine and and my side’s detriment or to encourage a “be as wrong as you want for whatever reason you please” norm.

          • 10240 says:

            Bob’s belief doesn’t exist in a vacuum – he’s a enthusiast anti-global-warming guy.

            Yes, I assumed that.

            And grappling with nuclear gives fourfive possible outcomes:

            I think the most likely one is a variant of 2. and 5.:
            He thought about nuclear, and he opposes it based on certain arguments. Those arguments don’t actually support his opposition to nuclear, but he has never bothered to either make the effort to estimate the magnitude of the harm caused by nuclear himself, or look up such estimates made by others.

            Let’s overlook the part where given this it’s incredibly likely that Bob gives zero genuine shits about global warming and at least one shits about being viewed in the correct way by the correct people.

            Here I disagree significantly: it’s very likely that he does care about global warming.

            If being ignorant/wrong/dishonest in a counterproductive way is negative when one person does it, it’s worse when a lot of people do it. I can’t wrap my head around “Well, demonstrably bad behavior X is really common, so let’s not rock the boat on bad behavior X” very easily.

            I don’t really disagree that common bad epistemics should be pointed out. However,
            • If most people in all political groupings are lazy (as I think they are), then we should treat that as a general problem. We shouldn’t dismiss one particular group on the basis that most of them are lazy, and adopt the views of the opposing group. Using harsh words to describe a particular person or group gives the impression that the bad trait is specific to them. Instead, we should look for the arguments of the intellectually prudent minority in each group (who may make more circumscribed arguments than most or their group), or just evaluate each argument without going ad hominem.
            • If you think they are lazy, stupid or dishonest, you shouldn’t pick one (e.g. “I’ll call them dishonest, because if they are lazy or stupid, that’s not better either”). They have different implications.

          • GearRatio says:

            Let’s overlook the part where given this it’s incredibly likely that Bob gives zero genuine shits about global warming and at least one shits about being viewed in the correct way by the correct people.

            Here I disagree significantly: it’s very likely that he does care about global warming.

            But why? Bob’s actions on this subject stop squarely at “Agree with people around me until they smile harder”. I care about my shoes not falling off, so I’ve researched the best way to tie shoe knots. I care about not being hungry, so I eat. Bob cares about global warming, so he agrees with his friends and gets social accolades.

            If the definition of “cares about” is inclusive of “says they care about, but will actively avoid doing even a bare minimum of anything about”, then I don’t even know what we are talking about anymore.

            We’ve created a situation where Bob can do only actions that promote him socially within his bubble and avoid all actions, no matter how low-cost they are, that do anything to indicate he has any interest in learning or doing anything about global warming and “cares about global warming” is still credible. What does “cares” even mean in this scenario?

            He thought about nuclear, and he opposes it based on certain arguments. Those arguments don’t actually support his opposition to nuclear, but he has never bothered to either make the effort to estimate the magnitude of the harm caused by nuclear himself, or look up such estimates made by others.

            This isn’t 2., because 2 demands he has a reasonable argument. 5. is fine, but necessitates I tell Bob he’s stupid, no matter how I guild the lily. In a hypothetical situation where nuclear expansion is much better than the global warming hypothesis and it’s pretty clear, it necessitates I tell him he’s very stupid.

            If most people in all political groupings are lazy (as I think they are),

            You know this is the exact same thing you are complaining about once you stop prioritizing “dishonest” above “other faults” on the bad insults list, right? Maybe everybody is just busy/dumb/dishonest; you can’t know for sure without pretty strong proof.

            What you are doing is finding a bad characteristic (people are uninformed) and assigning a plausible cause to it based on behavior(lazy, because otherwise they’d get more done). That’s what the other people are doing(social motivated, because otherwise they’d support nuclear) to a T. It’s not different unless you’ve singled out accusations of dishonesty as worse than accusations of idiocy or sloth.

            Using harsh words to describe a particular person or group gives the impression that the bad trait is specific to them.

            In Bob’s case, the bad trait(whatever it is) is specific to him; it’s just not exclusive to him. You get to the fact that it’s not exclusive in a second, I’m not ignoring it. But Bob, in the abstract, is a problem; at best he’s coin-flip right, and at worst he’s actively working against solutions to the problem. To the extent the discussion is important, specifically resisting Bob is justified because A. Bob is wrong and B. Bob is making himself part of the discussion.

            If Bob is a liar, or chronically lazy about things he claims to care about, or too dumb to understand things he decides to chime in on(especially if he’s convincing despite being dumb, which happens), then a norm which demands Bob brings quality to the party or doesn’t show at all is, to me, a huge positive.

            We shouldn’t dismiss one particular group on the basis that most of them are lazy, and adopt the views of the opposing group.

            If you think they are lazy, stupid or dishonest, you shouldn’t pick one (e.g. “I’ll call them dishonest, because if they are lazy or stupid, that’s not better either”). They have different implications.

            Two things about this:

            1. This works better if you are in the camp of “there’s no reasonable way to draw reasonable conclusions about someone’s motivations, at all, and we should take them at their word no matter how much their behaviors seem to implicate a probable conclusion”.

            We differ on this; I think in our hypothetical case where Bob says he cares about global warming but only actually does the set of things that get him the “cares about global warming” social points his bubble gives out, it’s reasonable to assume he cares about the points he’s earning and not the other aspects he’s ignoring.

            2. The implications I care about here are practical. I want the harm Bob does to stop, regardless of Bob’s motivations. How bad I want this varies by how important bob is.

            A story:

            A while back there was an adversarial collab about circumcision, and one of the nation’s most visible experts on the anti-circumcision side took exception to it and showed up to talk about how bad he thought it was.

            He then cherry-picked a single study performed in Africa that showed male-to-female HIV transmission went up when adult men were circumcised, and used this as part of his body of justification for supporting the abolition of infant circumcision. Male acquisition of HIV might go down, he argued, but if it made women more likely to get it, that took away some or all of that advantage.

            If you read the study, though, it turned out that HIV transmission to women only went up when the couples resumed sex before the wound from the circumcision itself healed. For anyone who abstained until they weren’t bleeding in their wife’s vagina, male-to-female transmission was the same as the non-circumcision control.

            If an honest, hardworking, smart person read the same study and accurately relayed the results, they couldn’t use that as an argument against circumcision at an age by definition prior to sexual debut.

            He did, though, and in doing so illustrated that he should never be listened to with the credibility applied to an honest expert about anything regarding circumcision, since he had already illustrated that he was either too dishonest, too lazy, or too dumb to be accurate about it.

            I’m not at all guilty about pointing this out(unless I later out turn out to be wrong about what the study says, or something). I would like nothing better than for this guy’s audience or he himself to decide he’s unreliable and dangerous, and for him to never speak in public again. That’s what I’m going for when I accuse someone of being a liar/dumb/lazy in a public forum – I’m trying to strip away their credibility.

            So this seems like less of a distinction to me than you; these things all seem to circle back to the same conclusion to me (“this person’s opinions are worthless; disregard them. Person, please shut up forever).

            Continued in a second post where I soften my stance a little.

          • GearRatio says:

            Softened stance! Self Criticism! Incoming!

            I have what I’m finding out are a weird set of priorities. I work under these assumptions:

            1. If you haven’t made a good-faith effort to have an accurate estimate of your knowledge on various subjects, you are a low-quality person.

            2. If you claim to care about something/love something/be terrified of something but won’t do stuff to protect it/put effort into it/protect yourself from it, you are self-evidently lying about caring about those things unless you can show there’s something you care about more(as demonstrated by effort) that precludes you from caring for the thing you care about a lot, but less.

            3. Any person at any level participating in a discussion is declaring his opinion to be important enough to be defeated if wrong, in proportion to how sure he is / how much change he demands. Essentially, I think if an opinion was important enough to a person to state, it should have been important enough to make defensible, and if you stated it without a defense prepared to justify your confidence you are doing something wrong and potentially dangerous.

            I suspect this puts me in a very different mindspace from you in a lot of ways. If somebody comes to the table with shitty arguments, him getting eviscerated is a good outcome for me; I hope he feels bad enough that he stops talking.

            If somebody is accused of not caring because their behavior isn’t consistent with caring, it’s self-evidently true to me that the accusation is correct.

            So these put me in a place where I’m arguing with you in a way that’s overly harsh, because using my set of definitions what you are saying comes off as borderline nonsense in some ways. Which would be fine if mine were the only definitions that exist, but they aren’t, so this is mostly an apology to you for that.

          • 10240 says:

            I care about my shoes not falling off, so I’ve researched the best way to tie shoe knots. I care about not being hungry, so I eat. Bob cares about global warming, so he agrees with his friends and gets social accolades.

            Most people have no power to effect any significant change over issues like global warming, beyond perhaps talking about it in an effort to convince a few people to take it more seriously. So they have little incentive to carefully think about the details of how to solve it.

            Some people (like many on SSC) like to think about solutions anyway. Others don’t. Even those who do probably only think in details about solutions only for a fraction of the issues they have an opinion about.

            You know this is the exact same thing you are complaining about once you stop prioritizing “dishonest” above “other faults” on the bad insults list, right?

            I do think that
            • dishonest is a stronger accusation than lazy
            • laziness is the most likely cause of bad arguments, dishonesty is much less likely
            • dishonesty, if it was true, would have more sweeping implications. E.g. my perception is that claiming that “they don’t actually believe global warming” is often used with the connotation that the entire thing is a hoax, an implication not justified by what I think are the actual reasons bad arguments are made. This sort of thing is what I regard most dangerous about cavalier accusations of dishonesty.

          • John Schilling says:

            laziness is the most likely cause of bad arguments, dishonesty is much less likely

            It’s a suspiciously narrow form of laziness that has a person presenting and defending an argument but somehow unable to gain a basic understanding of what they are arguing about.

            I believe that asserting an argument, in more than the most casual passing fashion, constitutes an implicit claim to know enough about the subject at hand that one’s opinion is worth the bother of listening to. If that’s not the case, the speaker is both lazy and dishonest.

          • 10240 says:

            I believe that asserting an argument, in more than the most casual passing fashion, constitutes an implicit claim to know enough about the subject at hand that one’s opinion is worth the bother of listening to. If that’s not the case, the speaker is both lazy and dishonest.

            @John Schilling , People talk about things without deep knowledge about them, in more than a passing fashion, all the time. People pass on claims that are generally assumed to be true in their circles without verifying them.* The people I’m calling out are making assertions about other peoples’ mental processes without the ability to actually know them with any degree of certainty. As such, I don’t think it’s reasonable to implicitly assume that people have detailed knowledge about the things they talk about, outside of, say, a scientific article.

            I’m not going into a debate about whether this should be defined as dishonesty or not. Even if it is, it’s not the sort of dishonesty I was talking about, and which I consider dangerous to assume other people are engaging in. The dishonesty I’m talking about, which I think is uncommon, is that people don’t genuinely believe what they claim they believe, or that the reasons they claim they support a policy are not actually at least some of the major reasons they support it.

            * I’d be reluctant to even call this necessarily lazy. Much of what you know about the world, you haven’t personally verified; you rely on authority. You understand things to some level of detail, but beyond some level, you fall back on just assuming that what other people say is true. Outside your fields of expertise, you’ve probably picked up much of it in informal ways, assimilating other peoples’ general knowledge.

          • albatross11 says:

            GearRatio:

            How do people get better in your view?

            We are surrounded, all day every day, with godawful examples of how to think about important issues. TV talking heads and the zillion-headed monster of Twitter and prominent media voices and memes on social media and most news sources model the kind of thinking about issues that you’re complaining about. When I was a kid, I got really into watching Crossfire-style talking head arguments, and that was one model I had of how contentious issues could be resolved. It took me awhile to realize that really understanding and discussing issues in a sensible way requires different techniques.

            So, instead of writing people off as low-quality people because they don’t know how to think about contentious or important issues, I try to model what I think of as good techniques for doing so. Sometimes I lose my temper and say something needlessly snarky or nasty, but I try not to, because I figure that one way to invite better discussions is to model the kind of discussions I’d like to be in.

            Shorter me: Maybe the problem is that most people never learn how to learn and reason and argue about contentious subjects well, because most of the high-status social models for this kind of behavior are lousy at it.

            Also, I note that a lot of us here have some kind of technical background in science, engineering, math, CS, etc. This inclines us toward a particular kind of reasoning (often involving thinking about numbers) that is not commonly modeled in everyday discussions of most political issues.

            I mean, you can consume tons of mainstream media discussion of BLM and police shootings and such and never have anyone mention how many blacks are shot by police per year. For a lot of people discussing the issue, the question has never even come into their mind. This is the rule, not the exception, in mainstream high-status discussions of important issues.

          • GearRatio says:

            Condensing your argument, it seems to me to go something like this:

            Bad examples are everywhere. Good examples, like crossfire, are rare; I’m good and presumably you are good because we ran into good examples.

            But if that’s what you are saying(correct me if it isn’t), it’s just not correct. Neither good nor bad sources are rare anymore. On every subject, there’s a thousand people with a spectrum of reasonable informed views. Google also exists.

            The difference between you and somebody else isn’t that you ran into Crossfire. The difference is that you ran into something like Crossfire and gave a shit about it, and gave a shit about it in a way where you then did work.

            Shorter me: Maybe the problem is that most people never learn how to learn and reason and argue about contentious subjects well, because most of the high-status social models for this kind of behavior are lousy at it.

            If I tried to start a wide-spread movement for universal abstinence from sex until the extinction of the human race, it wouldn’t be very popular and I wouldn’t become high-status by advocating it. The reason for this is because nobody wants it and nearly nobody would accept it.

            If somebody says “You are good, and people who aren’t like you are bad and stupid. Feel good about yourself”, he stands a pretty good chance of being popular(at least in the sense that this is most of our public discourse). The reason for this is that people want this and accept it, and bestow status on people who give it to them.

            In a world where the low-quality things are all that’s available, fine, this excuse flies for me. But in the world a million alternatives, this is just people rewarding people for low-quality stuff because it would take them a few mouse clicks to do better.

            Also, I note that a lot of us here have some kind of technical background in science, engineering, math, CS, etc. This inclines us toward a particular kind of reasoning (often involving thinking about numbers) that is not commonly modeled in everyday discussions of most political issues.

            I don’t have a high school diploma. With the exception of self-paced non-video distance learning I wasn’t formally taught anything by a teacher in person after I was 14, and before I was 14 it was my mom, a woman of limited education.

            I’m not so smart as some around here, but I can hack it to a certain extent because I worked hard to learn how. I found other-tribe people to argue with. I fought with people in my tribe.

            I have zero sympathy for someone who says they weren’t exposed to the right kind of thinking, or that they didn’t have the right background. They could have made that for themselves, but they didn’t care enough to do better.

            I mean, you can consume tons of mainstream media discussion of BLM and police shootings and such and never have anyone mention how many blacks are shot by police per year.

            It’s a two minute process to look this up on google. I know there is a definition of “cares about this issue” that says it’s OK not to make this search at all, even if one is about to enter an argument about how many black people are shot by police per year. I think that’s an unreasonably low standard.

            For a lot of people discussing the issue, the question has never even come into their mind.

            This is not better. To care so little about the truth of an argument you are voluntarily making that it never even occurs to you to check to see if you are lying is horrifying.

            If this doesn’t ring true to you, try thinking about it this way. Let’s say I came up to you and said that black men were horrifying rapists, and that they’d any white woman they came into contact with was in immediate danger of being raped. Because of this, I then argued, black men should generally be suppressed/punished/hidden away in some way.

            Would “Well, he grew up in a real racist area where this belief is common, and it never occurred to him to check to see if his accusations were true” be an appropriate excuse for my bigotry? Because if I’m not super-justified being a racist in this scenario, then neither is the guy who is pushing a “cops murder black guys at a high rate” scenario.

            You can say “well, just don’t be a racist; then – model not being a racist for that guy”. But the fact that this guy has managed to evade the significantly less racist factual reality this long very plausibly means that he has no interest in it in the first place. At some point it has to be OK to point that out.

    • Uribe says:

      When someone says “You don’t really care about climate change if you oppose nuclear power” I suspect in most cases the assertion is a rhetorical tactic meant to force the other into prioritizing these two positions, since one can’t turn both right and left at once. But I agree with you that one can earnestly believe in both things and earnestly not want to make any tradeoff between them. People can be irrational because it’s an intellectually easy path.

      However, the one asserting “you don’t really care…” is likely being intellectually dishonest, unless by “really” he means “REALLY, really”.

    • Wrong Species says:

      I’m a conservative and yeah, I’m not seeing the whole “power grab” thing either. It’s obviously political but I don’t see them using this as an excuse to try and shut down the churches or anything permanently. Virtue signaling + Trump being anti-lockdown is a solid enough explanation.

      • Matt M says:

        I know we’ve already had this argument a million times and I don’t wish to repeat all the details of it, but I just want it to be noted that in my opinion, Trump is not anti-lockdown.

        • Wrong Species says:

          I’ve argued that the whole thing is just pure partisanship(which after the whole “Health Experts support BLM protests” debacle should prove that’s absolutely true) but Trump not being anti-lockdown is new to me. At the very least, the perception of him by everyone is that he’s anti-lockdown, and that’s what counts for partisanship.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Trump is just not as pro-lockdown as the Democrats. He doesn’t oppose lockdowns, but he thinks Michigan went too far with theirs.

            If I want two hamburgers and you want one hamburger, you are less pro-hamburger than I am, but I cannot reasonably call you “anti-hamburger.”

          • Matt M says:

            Right. Trump is pretty okay with one Stalin. The fact that Gretchen Whitmer wants 50 Stalins does not make Trump anti-Stalin.

    • Skeptic says:

      It’s uncharitable and borderline libelous to assert as a fact that people who support a policy are not actually motivated by the reason they claim to be motivated by, without very strong evidence.

      I have an almost completely opposite take. I would say it’s borderline delusional to assert otherwise without extremely strong evidence to the contrary about the speaker. But I believe you’re creating a false dichotomy by framing this as “it’s either their stated reason or nefarious/conspiratorial reason X.” It’s not about ‘nefarious policy A’ because it’s never about policy or outcomes in the first place.

      It’s neither. Aside from the 3-5% or less of the population that’s bizarrely attracted to pondering things in terms of abstract logic, it’s always neither. Politics is basically never about policy.

      It’s about status. Who gains or loses status? When liberals complain conservatives don’t want a strong E-verify system to change the incentives of illegal immigration, they have a good point. It’s about relative status. When conservatives complain liberals don’t want nuclear energy to reduce global warming, they have a good point. It’s about relative status.

      Outcomes and policy aren’t even secondary concerns. They’re not concerns at all

      • 10240 says:

        Why do you think so? To me, the model where people say things largely because they believe them (albeit with some status concerns, mostly in the form of conforming to the prevailing views) seems largely compatible with reality, so I see no reason to use more complex models with ulterior motives such as status. (That’s for everyday people and small time commentators. Politicians are all about popularity.)

        When liberals complain conservatives don’t want a strong E-verify system to change the incentives of illegal immigration, they have a good point. It’s about relative status. When conservatives complain liberals don’t want nuclear energy to reduce global warming, they have a good point. It’s about relative status.

        Can you elaborate on what you mean here? Whose status compared to whom?
        ——
        Hmm, if it’s all about status, how does your comment elevate your status?
        Wait, well, it does seem like, on SSC, claiming that everything is about status is better for status than naively assuming that people do things for the reasons they say…

        • Baeraad says:

          Wait, well, it does seem like, on SSC, claiming that everything is about status is better for status than naively assuming that people do things for the reasons they say…

          I have noticed this also. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that for a lot of posters here, “status” and “popularity” seems to have become the original sin in the same way that misogyny/racism/homophobia is the original sin in liberal circles. Why do not all people agree with my obviously-right opinions? It can’t be that they have a different perspective – no, no, it must be because they are shallow, status-obsessed phonies! Feh.

          Honestly… is it so hard to believe that liberals would like to believe that it’s possible to keep from doing horrifying things to nature in any way? Sure, they might be wrong to believe that, and it might be necessary to do one sort of horrifying things or another to nature or else go back to the Stone Age, but… is it really a complete mystery why people don’t want to accept a possibility that’s that thoroughly demoralising and depressing as long as they have any grounds to hope to escape it?

          • Guy in TN says:

            @Baeraad

            Why do not all people agree with my obviously-right opinions? It can’t be that they have a different perspective – no, no, it must be because they are shallow, status-obsessed phonies!

            +1 Yep. And at the very least, shifting the debate from the contents of the argument, to the sincerity of the person making the argument, is one the oldest tricks in the book.

      • Garrett says:

        I’d like to hear more about the ‘status’ thing. Sure, most stuff said by politicians is uninformed drivel trying to make the other team look bad, but I suspect we’re talking about more than professional politicians playing status games.

        If you’re arguing that people are merely parroting their team’s talking points, I can buy that. But I’m not sure that’s so much about status as much as it is about overlapping worldview, organizational trust, and limited time to investigate issues.

        About the only time I think it’s about status is when someone uses the phrase “wrong side of history”.

    • AlesZiegler says:

      +1

  27. Belisaurus Rex says:

    Maybe it’s been asked here before, but:

    If you were literally offered the blue pill that would allow you to unironically and wholeheartedly become a liberal, no side effects, would you take it and why/why not?

    • Jaskologist says:

      No. Litany of Tarski.

      • Belisaurus Rex says:

        You don’t have to believe it’s false, just that there’s a gap in your understanding. It’s definitely a different interpretation or emphasis on the same facts, at least among informed people.

        Didn’t mean to imply that these beliefs were literally false, but I guess those are the connotations that blue pill has.

        I worry that I pull at loose ends too much, but a wholehearted belief doesn’t change that, it just changes which loose ends you pull.

        • Randy M says:

          Didn’t mean to imply that these beliefs were literally false

          You didn’t imply that they were false, but were offering a way to change minds that doesn’t revolve around evidence or reasoning, ie, non-rational.

          Which makes the “Rationalist” preoccupation with psychadelics quite strange.

    • Le Maistre Chat says:

      Define “liberal.” Unironically and wholeheartedly becoming @DavidFriedman …

      • Eric T says:

        I mean I read a lot and so do a lot of liberals. I promise there’s plenty of good books out there you’ll be reading in our secret liberal hangouts.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Less of this kind of content, please

      • chrisminor0008 says:

        Could you clarify what about this you don’t like? On the surface, it doesn’t seem all that different from other hypotheticals that have been asked here about aliens with spaceships the size of moons.

        • Wrong Species says:

          I get it. There’s a kind of implicit premise that being a liberal is what the dumb sheep do and anyone who’s not a moron is already red pilled(not that I think Belisaurus is saying that). It invites some unnecessary sniping.

        • Belisaurus Rex says:

          It’s just not a great question. I don’t know what I expected besides “no”. There’s definitely a way to phrase it that would’ve gotten more positive responses.

          • LadyJane says:

            It’s not just the phrasing, the concept as a whole is bad. At least if you’re going to specifically make the question about political views. I suppose something vaguely similar might work if it was just a general “would you take a pill that changed your personality/beliefs in XYZ ways?,” like Yudkowsky’s hypothetical about Gandhi taking a pill to make himself slightly less pacifistic.

            That said, the phrasing (particularly the use of “blue pill”) is needlessly incendiary even for this already divisive concept.

  28. broblawsky says:

    When did the English Midlands stop being a global center of innovation?

    • Lambert says:

      There’s still a bunch of decent universities and automotive R&D there.

      But the answer is ‘sometime between British Leyland and Margret Thatcher’.

      • Anteros says:

        Surely you’re not implying that during the existence of British Leyland the midlands was a global Centre of innovation? After all, it spawned things like the Austin Allegro…

      • broblawsky says:

        If the Midlands becomes a center of innovation around the time James Watts and John Wilkinson collaborate (1774) and stops being one once British Leyland collapses (1975) that gives it a solid 201 years of being one of the global centers of mechanical engineering research. Does that sound about right?

  29. Le Maistre Chat says:

    ‘Where Are Libertarians on Police Reform?’ Right Where We’ve Always Been.

    This seems like a strange time for libertarianism to be a fringe political position. Any calmly considered opinions on what keeps it from being popular?

    • cassander says:

      “Vote for me and I promise not to do anything” is a lousy way to get support. Politicians who promise to do and fix things are much more popular.

      • Erusian says:

        “This one quick hack will fix the government and lower your taxes! Politicians HATE him!”

    • Eric T says:

      My intuition is that most people want the government to Do things, mainly things that help them/the people they care about. People like getting things, having wide sweeping policies they support passed, and establishing the power of their side. It makes them feel good/safe/powerful/ whatever.

      Libertarianism doesn’t really help people get to any of those states directly.

      • rumham says:

        Bingo. The winners always seem to be the ones who want to control the most aspects of others lives. This is at all levels of government. Hell, HOA board members are usually like this. There’s a limit to how far it goes, of course (see the former soviet union), but we’re definitely not there yet.

    • Plumber says:

      @Le Maistre Chat, as an aside my refinery worker libertarian “Facebook friend” (a face-to-face friend in the ’90’s), and my many school teacher left-liberal-progressive “Facebook friends” (face-to-face friends in the ’80’s) are agreeing now, which decidedly wasn’t the case three weeks ago!
      My Republican motorcycle repair shop owner friend (both a Facebook and still a face-to-face friend) is now alone, while three weeks ago he the libertarian and his wife were buds!

    • Uribe says:

      I’m with Libertarians on many issues, such as getting rid of most laws and regulations. I wish there were a popular Left-Libertarian, someone who believes in a big welfare safety net perhaps via UBI.

      Maybe Andrew Yang one day?

      • Garrett says:

        As long as you can find a way to fund it non-coercively. That is, without taxes or similar things.

    • Wrong Species says:

      If you tell people that you are against the government distributing money to some program, it just sounds like you just don’t want that thing to be done by anyone, regardless of whatever arguments you try to make about principles.

    • Jake R says:

      My theory is that people have a hard time conceptualizing large numbers. We know it’s 93 million miles from the earth to the sun; we can run calculations using that number. But I don’t think anyone can really visualize what that kind of distance means on an intuitive level.

      The US federal budget is a very large number. I think that to a lot of people, a number that large gets rounded off to “basically infinite” on an emotional, intuitive level. This isn’t helped by the fact that we’ve been running up a massive national debt for the last 20 years with no apparent consequences. I don’t want to be uncharitable here, but I do think it takes deliberate effort to keep in mind that government doing more good things has increased costs. We humans just aren’t built for wrapping our heads around thee kinds of numbers these discussions entail.

      I don’t think it’s a coincidence that discussions of what actions government should take are more about results and consequences and who benefits, and less about costs. I think when libertarians say “yes I want X done, I just don’t think the government should do it” it gets rounded off to”yes I want X done, but I don’t care about it very much.” And this makes perfect sense in the infinite budget conception. If the state has an infinite pool of resources, and I’m not fighting to get some of it for the thing I care about, well I must not really care about it that much.

      I apologize if this is uncharitable. I generally try to avoid playing “what’s really going on in the heads of people who disagree with me.” This is an idea I’ve had for a while and I’m curious if it makes sense to anyone else, but it’s just a theory and not something I’m committed to.

      • Uribe says:

        Agree that conceptualizing those large numbers is hard. An added complexity is not knowing what that debt will in fact cost in the future. We don’t know what growth will be over the next 30 years. And we don’t know who specifically will pay those costs. Will the debt be monetized into inflation? Will future tax rates be more progressive? More regressive? Will we be dead by then?

        I’m agreeing that all these abstract seeming things are hard to wrap our heads around.

    • keaswaran says:

      Most people are socially conservative but economically liberal. Exactly the opposite of the prestige view among educated people, who are most of the people we talk with on the internet. What’s surprising is that it had been so many decades between Huey Long and Donald Trump, in which no national figure seemed to really press on that popular coalition.

      • cassander says:

        for what it’s worth, Edward Luttwak called this one. What one might call nationalist socialism has a very broad appeal. It got suppressed by the cold war, but it was bound to make a comeback.

      • rumham says:

        Exactly the opposite of the prestige view among educated people, who are most of the people we talk with on the internet.

        While libertarians (socially liberal and economically conservative) are quite over-represented on the internet, I hardly think that it’s the majority view of people talking on the internet or among even educated people in general.

        I would say that is by far the socially and economically liberal viewpoint.

        (although socially liberal seems to be going out of style pretty quickly. At least by the original definition)

    • salvorhardin says:

      It’s hard to be a consistent libertarian without taking some set of positions such that most people will find at least a couple of those positions deeply uncomfortable. Which positions on that list make which people uncomfortable varies a lot over time, but the existentially-qualified invariant persists.

      There are also tribal-affiliation stereotypes that are very hard to break. For example, there are a lot of leftist activists who are sounding awfully libertarian on police reform right now, many of them of the same sort who sounded awfully libertarian on same-sex marriage ten years ago (another issue where libertarians were decades ahead of the broader sentiment shift). But they still think of libertarians as tribal enemies on account of the Koch brothers association and general anti-tax, pro-market sentiment.

  30. Uribe says:

    I think Eric T made many fair points todat. An effort to make your points thoughtfully and to be clear about what you mean is always greatly appreciated.

    It seems the main criticisms from this crowd are that we want to see things quantified, which is hard to do, but it’s the work that needs to be done to convince a mostly rationalist crowd that thinks in terms of numbers and probabilities.

    Eric didn’t get into prescriptions, but I suspect that’s where we’d get into a lot more disagreements. He said in a different thread he wouldn’t have a problem with hate speech legislation and doesn’t consider the First Amendment sacrosanct. The day my Democratic congressman says they’re in favor of hate speech laws is the day I join the Republican party. (I suggest that this is not a winning issue for the left and they should back down from it.)

    Consider what would happen if there were hate speech laws. Consider who would be prosecuted for committing them. The powerful or the weak?

    Not to mention that it would be the end of democratic values in this country.

    • NostalgiaForInfinity says:

      Western European countries generally have hate speech laws and haven’t slipped into authoritarian dictatorships [since the laws were implemented].

      • Two McMillion says:

        Western European countries generally have hate speech laws and haven’t slipped into authoritarian dictatorships [since the laws were implemented].

        Western European countries can do what they like. America lacks any sort of political self-restraint.

        • Eric T says:

          Western European countries can do what they like. America lacks any sort of political self-restraint.

          This seems incompatible with like… reality. What is so unique about America that means we’ll fall of the slippery slope and start litigating against decent, common ideas, and the European nations won’t? America as a whole is substantially less liberal than a lot of these countries are.

          • rumham says:

            start litigating against decent, common ideas

            Saying “I treat people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin” seems to be considered increasingly offensive.

            European nations won’t?

            I don’t think that’s true. Try tweeting “Mohammed married a 9-year old” in the UK. Are you allowed to make this factual statement in Germany?

          • Eric T says:

            Saying “I treat people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin” seems to be considered increasingly offensive.

            People on the internet find this offensive =/= the government will ban it for hate speech. I think there is a long long winding path we have to go through before that’s a realistic possibility. The Democratic Party skews way more right than Leftist Twitter.

            I don’t think that’s true. Try tweeting “Mohammed married a 9-year old” in the UK. Are you allowed to make this factual statement in Germany?

            No idea about the UK, but the existence of Pegida tells me that while I’ll probably get frowned at in a lot of polite society I won’t be arrested or governmentally censored.

          • AlesZiegler says:

            @rumham

            Fyi, it is perhaps relevant for your question that German political party AfD had in its 2017 platform a point titled “Islam does not belong to Germany”. Their platform in English is here, it is on the page 48.

          • rumham says:

            @Eric T

            Looking for the Mohammad incident, can’t find it. Might have been propaganda.

            People on the internet find this offensive =/= the government will ban it for hate speech.

            Remember when white people were allowed to quote stuff? here is a blatantly racist enforcement.

            Was that tweet hateful?
            Went pretty quickly down that particular slope, eh?

            She wouldn’t be allowed to post quotes from numerous interviews I’ve seen given in the last 3 weeks. That isn’t a problem for you?

            How about the literally thousands of people all over the EU who have received visits from the police for tweeting about immigration? Should people not be allowed to talk about border control? I’m a goofy open borders guy, and even I think that’s nuts.

            How about when a dictionary definition becomes hate speech?

            Once again, no dog in that fight, but it’s clearly ridiculous.

            The people who want hate speech laws are the ones who end up defining the terms. And their definition is ever broadening. It can and already has been used for politics in many democratic countries. That’s the reason we have the first amendment.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Just this past week, UCLA professor Ajax Peris was referred by his bosses for disciplinary hearings for reading MLK’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” out loud in class. Because it has the n-word.

          • rumham says:

            @AlesZiegler

            This might be why Germany hasn’t gone full censorship route yet:

            The criticism of religion, which also applies to Islam, is legitimate within the legal framework, as it is part of the basic
            right of freedom of opinion. Religious satire and caricatures
            are protected by the right of freedom of opinion and the
            freedom of the arts.

            It appears that Germany has at least a portion of the U.S. first amendment protections. Is this true? If so, it kinda makes the point that they’re really important.

          • AlesZiegler says:

            @rumham

            Without bothering to look it up, I wager that of course Germany has a clause protecting freedom of speech in their constitution. I think that almost every liberal democracy with written constitution has it. It is just usually formulated or interpreted more narrowly than in the US. But earlier US Supreme court interpretations of First Amendment before sixties was roughly in line with how freedom of speech is interpreted in much of Europe.

            I personally think that in this, American way is better, but it is not the case that whole of Europe is an authoritarian hellhole because we have less constitutional freedom of speech.

          • Medrach says:

            It is, as some people in this thread have already pointed out, a bit more nuanced. Germany has, of course, a clause for free speech and free expression in the basic law.
            There are, however, criminal and civil codes that limit the effective range of free expression quite a bit compared to the US.
            They mostly focus on a two-prong approach: Insults and public incitation to violence.
            Insult (or more generally Honor-based) based prosecution is rare. It’s hard to prove and you need to be an exceptional sissy to bring suit. It still happens but even then some courts take a wide view, especially when directed at public figures and politicians. Short of “formal insults” there is quite a bit of leeway there.
            The other point is those “calls to violence” and that is a bit more compliacted and controversial. There has been a semi-wide-spread (as in discussed much in media but I know 0 real world people who know or are about this) talk about the increasing polarization and downgrading of public discourse, particularly as it focuses on the internet. After a few widely noticed right wing attacks, most famously the assasionatin of Walter Lübcke and multiple shootings/mass killings, there have been calls to better police the internet.
            There has now been a renewed push and political will to censor “aggressive” or “hate-speech” (that term does not exist here but it can sort of stand in) on social media. My personal view is that all the people who are going to get prosecuted about this are 55 year olds who post the equivalent of “hang em high” in social media comments after reading boulevard news articles about some new alleged rape or something and that this will blow up in everyones face.
            The counterargument is that the people saying these things create a ground-bed of “hate” that makes others think their violent acts are more acceptable.

            Also I think it is worth noting that the entire discourse surrounding speech is just different here. While the US has a built in horror of government censored speech I feel like socially censored speech is much wider there. The PC language stuff going back to the 90s, not calling black people black, etc. The debate in Germany is about government censorship but in a way where the government is still seen as the arbiter of “social okay” and not as the heavy handed bugbear, true or not. Noone I can think of is fundamentally horrified by there being limits to speech.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        Western European countries generally have hate speech laws and haven’t slipped into authoritarian dictatorships [since the laws were implemented].

        Sure, and everybody in Spain 1500 had freedom of religion because you could go to whichever Catholic church you wanted.

        • Nick says:

          Religious freedom took another huge step forward in 1534 when you could start getting a Jesuit confessor.

        • Eugene Dawn says:

          If countries with hate speech laws burned thousands of people at the stake for saying the wrong thing, this would be a reasonable comparison. Since they don’t…

          I think hate speech laws are bad, but they are clearly orders of magnitude less bad than both authoritarian dictatorships and the Spanish Inquisition, and you can oppose all three of these without making wildly inappropriate analogies between them.

          • albatross11 says:

            +1

            Hate speech laws, strict gun control, etc., may be bad policy (I oppose both), but they’re clearly not automatic hellhole-makers, because I’ve been to Germany, France, Switzerland, Belgium, Netherlands, Spain, Italy, UK, etc., and none of those places are hellholes. They’re not the US, they have their own pluses and minuses, but they all seem like pretty nice places that you wouldn’t be sad to live in.

          • b_jonas says:

            Burning people on a stake would be unpopular and probably ineffective. So instead those states use the hate speech laws as an excuse to try to control television and other popular news media.

      • Clutzy says:

        I think this vastly underestimates how America’s immense freedom of speech provides a massive anchoring effect.

    • Eric T says:

      Not to mention that it would be the end of democratic values in this country.

      Would it? I mean as NostalgiaForInfinity points out above, other very democratic countries have Hate Speech laws. Many of them more democratic than the US is.

      I’m German and so maybe this just seems like a no-brainer to me – German Volksverhetzung laws have been on the books for longer than I’ve been alive and the democracy seems to be going pretty damn good.

    • Jaskologist says:

      Don’t confuse “democratic values” with “American values” or “good values.” Democracy is just about the voting process. It can produce bad laws like any other system.

      Hate Speech laws are very very bad. But if they’re voted in, they’re perfectly democratic.

    • Fahundo says:

      Something can be bad without necessarily being the end of democratic values. I can’t say I know much about how all western European countries do it but looking to the UK as an example I’d rather not have hate speech laws.

  31. Skeptic says:

    Approximately six square blocks of Seattle have been taken over by brave protestors agitating for justice/anarchist looters trying to destroy America, and they have declared their new state the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone“

    In the least surprising turn of events in the history of man, (it has been reported) the new fledgling state was immediately taken over by a local rapper turned warlord named Raz Simone. Armed guards are now patrolling the barricades/borders.

    Personally, I expect this to simmer down to nothing over the course of a few weeks as people get bored, the trash piles up, and the food and marijuana run out.

    What say you SSC, let’s get some falsifiable hypotheses as to how this ends…

    • Uribe says:

      My prediction is that a year from now we will remember the coronavirus, and these protests as just one of the crazy things that happened during it, which played a role in the 2nd Spike.

    • Le Maistre Chat says:

      What say you SSC, let’s get some falsifiable hypotheses as to how this ends…

      Police brutality against extremists embarrasses the Democrats in August. Humans set foot on the Moon next year.
      You want any more falsifiable predictions about the late 1960s?

      • Uribe says:

        I’m going with the theory that, like 1968, the incumbents get the blame. I also predict The Mets will pull off a miracle World Series victory next year.

    • Guy in TN says:

      I have my suspicions that this whole “autonomous zone” thing is a trap/honeypot. Occupy never had it this easy- they could barely keep a park, and you’re telling me these guys are claiming to “control” a whole block of the city? Including a police precinct?. It just feels too easy to be the whole story.

      I mean, Trump is calling these guys domestic terrorists. So the groundwork for mass arrests, with serious charges for every person occupying it (or even providing material support) is being laid. Perhaps by allowing them to create an occupied zone, the government is attempting to more clearly demarcate this group as “bad” protestors in the mind of the public, giving himself clearance to treat them with a heavy hand (something that would be difficult to do with your standard anti-racism march that we’ve seen, full of normies talking about “love”).

      I don’t want to stick my neck out there and make a falsifiable prediction with any confidence. But if I was in the CHAZ I would make sure to never show my face, never give my real name, and have a backdoor exit for the moment things get ugly.

      • Skeptic says:

        All of the decision making has been local. Seattle is a notoriously leftist city by American standards.

        I really doubt the socialist/fringe city council and municipal government are conspiring with Trump to do anything.

        • Guy in TN says:

          All of the decision making has been local.

          You think the FBI hasn’t infiltrated at least somewhat here? You are familiar with COINTELPRO, right?

          • John Schilling says:

            I’m familiar with a program by that name that ended about half a century ago. And I’m familiar with the bit where people speaking from anywhere on the right-of-Lenin part of the political axis get accused of being stooopid conspiracy theorists if they so much as suggest that government officials aren’t being entirely honest about their motives and plans.

            Here, you actually are proposing a literal conspiracy theory, and all you’ve got to support it is “but there was a conspiracy like this fifty years ago”.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @John Schilling
            The FBI was coordinating with the local police to stop Occupy Wall Street. They admit to have infiltrated Black Lives Matter earlier in the decade.

            It’s true, I have no evidence that the things the FBI always does, they are still doing. (That’s why we’re making predictions here, not stating cold-hard facts).

            And I’m familiar with the bit where people speaking from anywhere on the right-of-Lenin part of the political axis get accused of being stooopid conspiracy theorists if they so much as suggest that government officials aren’t being entirely honest about their motives and plans.

            sneer sneer sneer

          • Fahundo says:

            Here, you actually are proposing a literal conspiracy theory, and all you’ve got to support it is “but there was a conspiracy like this fifty years ago”.

            Isn’t this better than a lot of conspiracies? If someone had successfully fooled most of the world into believing they landed on the moon in 1919 I’d find conspiracy theories about 1969 a lot more plausible.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          You can tell it’s a bad idea when the people who would be its supporters claim it was a secret plan by the opposition.

          Like with the cops pushing down that Buffalo protestor-who-maybe-wanted-something-to-happen: if you can be baited into something stupid that easily, you need to reassess your decision-making.

      • Wrong Species says:

        So the groundwork for mass arrests, with serious charges for every person occupying it (or even providing material support) is being laid.

        My prediction is that this is not going to happen. Pretty high confidence.

    • Alejandro says:

      Friend of the blog nostalgebraist made this post about the situation yesterday.

    • Tenacious D says:

      An outcome that looks like:

      A) Freetown Christiana
      B) Waco
      C) Jonestown
      D) People give up and go home

      I’m too far removed from the situation to rank these, so I’ll naively guess they have roughly-equal probabilities.

      Conditional on A), by the end of the decade there are double-digit enclaves like this.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        A) Freetown Christiana
        B) Waco
        C) Jonestown
        D) People give up and go home

        If this thing still exists on November 3, D. They’re there strategically to make the Republican incumbent look bad.
        Archetypally, when Marxists think they can declare a new government on some urban blocks the government loses control of, they get smashed after 70 days, which is closest to B. (I should probably note that the cultists at Waco were much more innocent than the Paris Commune, which pulled a “that escalated quickly” by murdering two Army Generals at the beginning of the 70 days).
        Freetown Christiana and a mass suicide are both very low probability.

        • BBA says:

          I’m curious, do you think Occupy Wall Street was a Democratic op? Or going further back, the anti-WTO riot? Both took place under Democratic incumbents.

          To speculate inaccurately about CHAZ from thousands of miles away, both politically and physically: it’s hard to say with an amorphous leaderless blob like CHAZ what their positions are, but they clearly aren’t made up of Democratic partisans. They’re calling for the solidly progressive mayor of Seattle to resign, for instance. The mayor for her part is treating them like a precocious toddler – they think they’ve seceded from the union, isn’t that cute?

          I expect many would say things like “liberals get the bullet too” but how many actually believe it versus think it’s fun to LARP as Che Guevara is an open question. And on a personal level it may not be a strict either-or.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            I’m curious, do you think Occupy Wall Street was a Democratic op? Or going further back, the anti-WTO riot? Both took place under Democratic incumbents.

            No. Communism is a specter that haunts liberal republics, especially the cities that vote most left-of-center (see: Paris Commune, at a time when a majority of French voters were still conservative Catholics). “Liberals get the rope too” seems like a reasonable summary of the Seattle anti-WTO riot in particular, coming at the tail end of two terms of Clinton free trade agreements.

    • rumham says:

      Personally, I expect this to simmer down to nothing over the course of a few weeks as people get bored, the trash piles up, and the food and marijuana run out.

      Well. for starters, the city is not playing hardball. They are still getting all the taxpayer services (like trash) and local businesses are giving free food.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        If a gang had taken over my city block, and they “asked” for food donations, damn right I’d give them out.

        • metalcrow says:

          This is fair, but i haven’t seen any other evidence that they’re being threatened or intimidated. https://twitter.com/_katya_long/status/1270885865783390208 seems to imply no one has even complained to the city, which is a pretty strong signal it’s not intimidation.

        • keaswaran says:

          In this case, my understanding is that the gang abandoned the neighborhood to the locals.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          Hearing second-hand, it doesn’t seem like people are scared and being forced to donate.

          I didn’t say it explicitly, but I definitely thought it was just essentially a mafia, but that looks like it’s wrong. We haven’t found anyone who feels pressured.

          Now, maybe they can’t say it now because they are afraid and they’ll say it after everything is over, but at this point I need to wait for that positive confirmation to show my original theory was right.

      • baconbits9 says:

        Trying to expand the area will be the big test of political will.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          Is the governor Inslee aware yet?

          It was like Republican Congressman who insist they have no idea what Trump tweeted out.

          • Evan Þ says:

            He was asked in a press conference yesterday and claimed that was the first he’d heard. So, at least, he knows now.

    • Two McMillion says:

      My question: The law of Washington state, talking about treason, says:

      (1) Treason against the people of the state consists in—
      (a) Levying war against the people of the state, or
      (b) Adhering to its enemies, or
      (c) Giving them aid and comfort.
      (2) Treason is a class A felony and punishable by death.
      (3) No person shall be convicted for treason unless upon the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act or by confession in open court.

      Is trying to establish a zone not subject to Washington law treason under this definition?

      • Garrett says:

        Maybe. But given the other goings-on, if it fizzles out with little more than extra litter to show for it, I don’t know that anything need to be done about it. Everybody will agree it was “performance art” or something.
        What will really matter is if there’s significant human or property damage by the time it gets shut down, or if it turns into a seige.

      • keaswaran says:

        It doesn’t look like it fits any of these categories, unless you take some strange definition of “enemies” or “war against the people”, such that *preventing* the use of tear gas amounts to war.

    • ltowel says:

      3 possibilities: everyone will get bored and go home, people will start dying of COVID and go home or the local business district will coop this to create a cool new urban park. I hope for the third.

      This is Seattle’s nightlife district and it’s centered on a street full of clubs. Residents are treating it like a block party; the cops stopped gassing people, only one person got shot with a real gun, a subset of protesters proclaimed victory and there’s now a town fair celebrating that victory over injustice.

      Actual protests will continue (albeit much smaller), but this is a sideshow which will make the techbros of the city feel like something is accomplished, and Trump acting like it’s a real thing only makes it more of one.

    • Matt M says:

      I find it pretty amusing that the literal first thing they did to secure the existence of their state was to set up a border, provide a physical barrier to secure it, and post armed guards to deter unauthorized entry.

      While I’m not sure I agree with their stance on communism, I am pretty sympathetic to their stance on whether or not journalists should be allowed to exist in their community…

      • metalcrow says:

        Are journalists not allowed in? I got the impression the physical barriers were to prevent the armed “occupying force” (the police) from coming in and taking it back, but anyone else was allowed freely in/out. At least, that’s what i’ve been hearing from people who live there who are posting about it.

        • Matt M says:

          I definitely heard people saying that on Twitter the first night it was set up. I haven’t attempted to verify it further, or confirm that it is still true.

  32. Trofim_Lysenko says:

    So, downthread I got pushback on the idea that one of the aspects of contemporary left and liberal rhetoric in American politics that alarms people and makes them worry about a slide towards authoritarianism is the rhetoric about a permanent majority and opposing ideologies being basically permanently ejected from the overton window.

    What surprised me isn’t that I got pushback, but that the primary flavors of pushback were:

    1) Yeah, so?
    2) Isn’t that what all political parties are trying to achieve?

    To answer the second question first: No, I don’t think that the goal of all political parties are to obtain so complete a grip over their respective political systems that their ideology becomes the only one in the overton window and their politicians become a controlling majority not just now but for a prolonged and indefinite period. You have parties with platforms that emphasize things like very broad and powerful protections on freedom of speech, devolution of legislative and regulatory authority, and structural roadblocks to direct majoritarian rule. These are all things which make the rise of a one-party system more difficult.

    As for the bigger question of why this matters: What do you think of when you think of long-term one-party rule? Here’s a partial list, and please note that I am deliberately omitting communist and socialist revolutionary governments examples like China, Cuba, Vietnam, as well as the examples that are too obviously connected with authoritarian regimes like South Africa’s Nationalist Party during Apartheid:

    Japan, 1955-1993 (LDP)
    Mexico, 1929-2000 (PRI)
    Russia, 1999-Present (Unity->United Russia)
    Singapore, 1959-Present (PAP)
    South Africa, 1994-Present (ANC)
    South Korea, 1963-1979 (DRP)
    Sweden, SDP (this one is sort of borderline but I decided to err on the side of inclusion in a continued effort to be fair)

    The irony here is that I find it hard to make any list that doesn’t look like I’m stacking the deck. I’ll be the first to admit that you can have extremely functional one-party rule, as post-War Japan and Korea and modern Singapore and Sweden seem to demonstrate. But I also think there’s a pretty strong correlation between one-party government and authoritarian government. I can dig into any one of these examples in greater detail if you’d like, but the short version is that Japan and Sweden are basically the exceptions here, and I’m not so sure about Japan.

    People often like to throw around cliches like “Dissent is patriotic”. I think that’s simplistic, but I think it also gestures at something real: Having a meaningful “opposition” (in the sense that they are a threat to the current party’s dominance) is a valuable safeguard on the excesses of ANY government, left-wing OR right-wing. And any setup where you LACK that safeguard puts a system at more risk of a slide towards authoritarianism than a setup where that safeguard is present.

    In case it’s not clear, I think this can be generalized. If the cultural pendulum swings the other way and come 2050 you have Conservatives rubbing their hands together talking about how soon Progressives will be politically irrelevant and the only question is if the Democrats will move right fast enough to survive in the face of the coming Permanent Conservative Majority, while other Conservatives stroke their chins and warn their fellows to be careful and not rest on their laurels, because the Democrats said the same sort of thing in the early 21st century and were proved wrong….

    Then I think that liberals and progressives would absolutely view those developments with alarm, and I think that would be an entirely reasonable response.

    • LadyJane says:

      I think you’re misunderstanding what they mean. I certainly don’t want a world where any specific ideology or party – even one that I find favorable – manages to crush all opposition and win forever. I don’t think most liberals or progressives want that either. I believe that a certain amount of disagreement is healthy in a functional democracy, both because it helps to prevent stagnation and because – humans being the diverse and argumentative creatures that they are – it’s utterly inevitable without putting authoritarian measures in place to keep it from happening. And I think many liberals and progressives would agree with that.

      Of course, liberals and progressives do seek some permanent victories on things like gay marriage, which may lead to the impression that they want to silence all dissent and freeze the Overton Window around them for eternity. But I think that interpretation is missing a key distinction: They want permanent victories on specific issues, which is hardly unique to them. Pro-life advocates want a permanent victory on abortion, and I can’t object to that on the meta level, even if I disagree with them on the object level; if I agreed with their ontological belief that a human fetus had the same moral value as an infant or an adult, then I’d likewise agree that they should win forever.

      As an example, let’s go back 150 years and look at the debate between Abolitionists and supporters of slavery. The Abolitionists didn’t just want temporary victories, they wanted to unquestioningly end the debate in their favor, and they succeeded. Would you say that the variety of political discourse in the modern world has suffered from the fact that slavery is no longer in the Overton Window, and likely never will be again? Do you consider the modern world to have “one party rule” and an absence of disagreement because all parties are functionally abolitionist now?

      • Trofim_Lysenko says:

        I don’t think I am, and so I think your response is a non-sequitur. I am referring to a specific phenomenon, the claim “We are coming to a day where we will enjoy permanent political majority. We will have 51% or more of the popular vote in most or all political contests. As a result, we will have control of the presidency, the senate, the house, and a few decades after that the legislature.”

        It is simply incorrect to try and reframe that in terms of single-issue questions.

        EDIT: That said, to answer your question, I’m conflicted, because my default answer is that I want ALL options to be within the realm of public
        discourse, even if I want them to lose when it comes time to make policy. So it really depends on how we frame the question. I can live with the guy who suggests chattel slavery as a solution to America’s homeless problems or as an alternative to prison (“useful work in the community!”) being unable to get elected dogcatcher. I am very unhappy if that guy can’t get a public platform from which to air his unpleasant and distasteful views.

        • LadyJane says:

          I can live with the guy who suggests chattel slavery as a solution to America’s homeless problems or as an alternative to prison (“useful work in the community!”) being unable to get elected dogcatcher. I am very unhappy if that guy can’t get a public platform from which to air his unpleasant and distasteful views.

          Would you say that organizations have a positive obligation to give him a platform, then? After all, no one’s going to throw him in jail for his views, and no one’s allowed to stop him from making videos about his political views and sending them out to people. But if YouTube decides not to host those videos, isn’t that well within their rights?

          • Aapje says:

            It can both be within their rights and be oppressive. Those are not exclusive to each other.

            It’s also perfectly within people’s rights to shun gay people, but wouldn’t you consider a society where most people do so to be oppressing gays?

            Ultimately, jailing people is also merely a very strong variant of throwing up barriers for people. It’s on the same spectrum as banning people from mainstream ways to spread their beliefs. Both will reduce the ability of those beliefs to be shared (but not to zero), it’s just that one way is more effective than the other.

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:

            I haven’t decided where I fall on the specific question of massive social media platforms like YouTube and Facebook, but in general I think they are within their legal rights but are doing the wrong thing.

            I would analogize it to freedom of association vs. bake the damn cake arguments, with a lot of the same problems.

        • DinoNerd says:

          We are coming to a day where we will enjoy permanent political majority. We will have 51% or more of the popular vote in most or all political contests. As a result, we will have control of the presidency, the senate, the house, and a few decades after that the legislature

          I think the people making this prediction either don’t understand human nature, or are knowingly misleading their supporters for present gain.

          If the demographics that currently support Democrats become a majority, some of them will find themselves taken for granted and their desires/needs/opinions ignored, and any competent Republican tactician will start attempting to recruit them. (And if competent Republican tactiticians are scarce, they’ll ultimately start a new party to represent their interests, and/or flood into an existing minor party, to the point that it replaces the Republicans.)

          Of course this means that the policies (or at least the pork) associated with each of the parties will change, just as they have before.

          Southern whites used to be reliable Democrat supporters. Unionized white working class used to be reliable Democrat supporters. We can have a fun game guessing which group(s) will defect next.

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:

            My personal belief is that it’s all just a little bit of Whig History repeating. It’s an appealing, if dangerous, fantasy.

            There was a brief winow in George H.W. Bush’s presidency where a few Republicans started making similar claims. Then Clinton got elected. 🙂

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            +1. I read some Mark Twain (Puddin’ Head Wilson) and it was interesting how the socially divisive issue of the day was whether the town would be wet or dry, i.e. prohibition. How much do people fight about that today?

            100 years from now, people are unlikely to care about the Big Social Issues that divide us today. Not that they aren’t important to us. But even if One Side Wins, they will just find something else to fight about.

            It’s tough to think about, because it means our Really Big Fight isn’t that important, which is ego-deflating. Also, anyone who says the Really Big Fight isn’t important is trying to recruit you for the enemy.

          • Aapje says:

            @Edward Scizorhands

            It’s tough to think about, because it means our Really Big Fight isn’t that important

            That’s not actually what it means. That the fight is no longer happening, doesn’t mean that the result/winner was irrelevant. The fight between communists and tsarists was no longer relevant after communism won decisively in Russia, but that winner resulted in a very different outcome than if the tsarists had won.

    • Guy in TN says:

      @Trofim_Lysenko
      In a scenario where contemporary left ideologies become the permanent majority (with contemporary conservative ideologies outside the Overton window), why does it necessarily follow that it becomes a one party state? Wouldn’t multiple parties develop within the new paradigm, based on the internal divisions inside contemporary leftism? (e.g., liberals vs. socialists, technologists vs. greens)

      [Note I haven’t followed the conversation below, so maybe this is already discussed]

      • Trofim_Lysenko says:

        I referred to that possibility in passing, and I think it’s what some of the people arguing for this possibility think would happen: That the Republicans will die off and instead of a Center-Right Republican and Center-Left Democrat with vestigiial Libertarian, Reform, and Green Parties we get a Center-Left Democrat, Left Social Democrat with Socialist and Green spoilers or some such.

        However, in the context of the original question I was trying to answer, which is “Why are American conservatives and/or Red Tribe types afraid that American Liberals will create an authoritarian government?”, I think it’s fair to point out that this scenario is very much a risk factor for that sort of slide into authoritarianism. I would also note that for most American conservatives, “Don’t worry, instead of a one party left-wing rule, there’ll be a new paradigm where voters choose between Social Democrats and Socialists!” is rather cold comfort.

        • Guy in TN says:

          I think it’s fair to point out that this scenario is very much a risk factor for that sort of slide into authoritarianism.

          In what way? The Democrat’s divisions are becomes increasingly stark, almost as if in subconscious anticipation of an incoming inter-party split. IMO as soon as there is a viable electoral opening (~20-30 years maybe), I predict a mass exodus of leftists into to something akin to the DSA.

          “Don’t worry, instead of a one party left-wing rule, there’ll be a new paradigm where voters choose between Social Democrats and Socialists!” is rather cold comfort.

          Well sure, but that’s a different question and a different objection. They will probably feel similar to how Libertarians have felt over the past half-century. Which sucks for them, but not every ideology is guaranteed a “win”, that’s just how these things go.

        • Desrbwb says:

          “Why are American conservatives and/or Red Tribe types afraid that American Liberals will create an authoritarian government?”

          Because there’s rich seam of conspiracism on The American Right? They’ve been fed a diet of ‘liberals are the enemy of everything it means to be American’ for decades. So Liberals must be godless communist dictators in waiting, socialism is anything left of Rush Limbaugh and compromise can never be considered an option. Now that may well be uncharitable, but as a foreign observer that’s how the US right comes across a lot of the time. It also looks far more plausible that a push into authoritarian government will be coming from the increasingly hard right GOP rather than the ‘liberal’ DNC.

          It’s also worth noting here that American politics skews very heavily right in general compared to many other first world democracies. You don’t really have centre-right and centre-left parties in the US. Republicans are extremely right, and the Democrats are more ‘diet right-wing’ than ‘centre-left’ (admittedly there is the more recent and growing split in the Democrats, but the DNC establishment remains both in control and the core of this attitude).

          Your ‘cold comfort’ is the reality of the present political landscape to someone on the left. The choice being offered is “Don’t worry, there’s not a one party right-wing rule, voters choose between 2 flavours of corporate right wing conservatism, but one is more willing to pay lip service to progressive talking points”. Which is probably why sentiment like the one you’re expressing here don’t generate much sympathy from the left as a whole. Essentially the entire point reads like “I fear having to deal with a version of the current paradigm where I’m not on top”, which isn’t exactly a conciliatory attitude to take towards those out in the cold in the current status quo.

          Frankly the US’s overton window can safely shift a lot to the left before there’s any real reason to be concerned about ‘one party left-wing rule’.

          • cassander says:

            Because there’s rich seam of conspiracism on The American Right in America?

            FTFY. there are the endless claims of trump’s imminent dictatorship and election thievery. Just like there were of Obama. And Bush before him.

            It’s also worth noting here that American politics skews very heavily right in general compared to many other first world democracies.

            In some ways yes, others not. the US has considerably more left wing positions towards immigration, abortion, and many other issues.

            But in general, less of this, please.

          • Desrbwb says:

            Less of what? Trofim asked proposed a question and his explanation, I answered and hopefully explained why I found his reasoning unsatisfying for explaining what I’ve observed of US politics.

          • cassander says:

            @Desrbwb

            less of the broad attacks on the other party’s lack of virtue.

          • Garrett says:

            That’s interesting because there’s reason to argue that the US is far to the *left* of most other Western nations. We’ve had abortion-on-demand for nearly 50 years now; calls to convert to a regulatory system like Germany is seen as beyond the pale. We were one of the first Western countries to establish same-sex unions and then same-sex marriage. We have one of the most progressive taxation schemes in the OECD. We don’t even have a State religion!

          • LadyJane says:

            @Garrett: I’d say the US is libertarian leaning compared to Europe; we’re somewhat further left on social issues and civil liberties, but significantly further right on fiscal policy.

          • cassander says:

            @LadyJane

            when you include state and local spending, and account for tax expenditures (which are much more common in the US) the fiscal gap closes considerably. the US is still on the right side, but not really an outlier. That said, we spend the money differently, the US welfare state is much more about transferring money to the old than the poor.

          • Desrbwb says:

            “less of the broad attacks on the other party’s lack of virtue.”

            Eh? Is there some kind of SSC code I’m missing? I’m genuinely confused here. This entire comment thread could be construed as an attack on the left’s ‘virtue’, as the starting premise appears to be ‘the left wants an authoritarian one party state’ (hardly a charitable or ‘virtuous’ stance) whereas the more accurate view imo is ‘the left wants to win all the elections, just like the right’. I do not understand where this ‘the left is secretly working towards authoritarian oppression shtick’ comes from (just look at the recent OT here where ‘the lockdowns are a leftist plot to destroy Christianity’ was apparently a serious viewpoint put forward, which I found 100% baffling). As I said, the US is so much further right than the European systems I’m more familiar with, so this apparent hysteria that moving a bit more to the left will precipitate societal collapse just rings hollow.

          • AlesZiegler says:

            @cassander

            I have to back up Desrbwb. Since this whole thing started with Clutzy asserting that lockdowns are “a power grab” by the Left not genuinely motivated by concerns over public health, it is hardly disproportionate to bring up alleged nefarious motives by the Right in turn.

          • Jaskologist says:

            We don’t even have a State religion!

            Gonna have to disagree with you there. On this subject, Moldbug is spot on.

          • cassander says:

            @AlesZiegler &Desrbwb

            And I didn’t think that was great either, but he was politer about it, and still got several people pushing back, so I didn’t feel a need to repeat what they said.

          • Clutzy says:

            I have to back up Desrbwb. Since this whole thing started with Clutzy asserting that lockdowns are “a power grab” by the Left not genuinely motivated by concerns over public health, it is hardly disproportionate to bring up alleged nefarious motives by the Right in turn.

            Huh? The lockdowns aren’t the power grab, the other policy changes justified by the lockdowns are. Although some lockdowns have followed clear CW lines (churches and gun stores being designated in ways that differ from other similar entities for example).

    • WoollyAI says:

      The proper model is probably not Japan or Mexico but US politics from 1865-1933, ie from the end of the Civil War to FDR. During this 68 year period southern Democrats held the presidency for 16-20 years (depending on how you count Johnson), held the House for 22 years, and the Senate for a mere 10. During this same time you see massive industrialization in the North, with all its attendant benefits, while the South remains largely rural and undeveloped. It’s not a one party state, but one party is pretty clearly in charge and shaping the country to their benefit.

      If we rephrased this as a dominant party and a rump party, where one party sets the national agenda and the other party acts as an occasional check, most progressives would be thrilled.

      Look at New York. There’s still Republicans there, there’s even been a Republican mayor. But it’s very, very progressive. No authoritarian regime, nor purges in the street. Not a one party state, but it clearly one dominant party. Progressives seem pretty happy with it.

      • Eric T says:

        Progressives seem pretty happy with it.

        Do we? I’m pretty sure that none of my progressive friends are very happy with the New York government. especially recently. bill de blasio is hardly the progressive golden boy.

        I mean yes, I’m happy my party keeps winning here, that’s great and all. I do wish they’d fix the fucking subway though.

      • Garrett says:

        > No authoritarian regime

        I’ll take my full-capacity magazine and extra-large big-gulp to go, please.

        • Eric T says:

          I’ll take my full-capacity magazine and extra-large big-gulp to go, please.

          Ah yes I forgot the most important factor of figuring out whether a regime is authoritarian or not: can I buy a Large soda or do I have to buy TWO medium-sized sodas?

          Can we all agree that it’s possible for a government to be somewhat restrictive of individual choices without sliding all the way to authoritarian? Is Florida an Authoritarian Regime because I can’t skateboard without a license?

          • Fahundo says:

            Is Florida an Authoritarian Regime because I can’t skateboard without a license?

            yes

          • Eric T says:

            yes

            Damn. I’ve been bested.

          • Lambert says:

            Is the thing about skateboarding in Fl true?
            The sources i looked at said it’s perfectly legal to skateboard without a license.

          • Randy M says:

            Damn. I’ve been bested.

            I mean, when you’ve outlawed the second human invention after fire, might as well own the label.

            “Oh no, you can have wheels… just not on a plank.”

          • Eric T says:

            Is the thing about skateboarding in Fl true?
            The sources i looked at said it’s perfectly legal to skateboard without a license.

            I have no idea, this was just a thing I heard once. You can substitute any silly, barely restrictive law here if it isn’t.

          • Nick says:

            @Randy M
            Ironic, because outlawing wheels should makes you less susceptible to slippery slopes.

          • Eric T says:

            Boooooo

          • Garrett says:

            @Eric T:

            It was enough of a bite that I had to start digging into it and skateboard licenses in FL are apparently a myth. Though not one I could immediately rule out, so there is that.

            @Nick:

            Thanks. I needed a laugh.

          • rmtodd says:

            Is Florida an Authoritarian Regime because I can’t skateboard without a license?

            Dunno about that, but under a strict interpretation of Florida’s drug laws, you could get into serious trouble for smuggling a box of Velveeta cheese across the border:

            From the wikipedia entry on tyramine:

            Status in Florida

            Tyramine is a Schedule I controlled substance, categorized as a hallucinogen, making it illegal to buy, sell, or possess in the state of Florida without a license at any purity level or any form whatsoever. The language in the Florida statute says tyramine is illegal in “any material, compound, mixture, or preparation that contains any quantity of [tyramine] or that contains any of [its] salts, isomers, including optical, positional, or geometric isomers, and salts of isomers, if the existence of such salts, isomers, and salts of isomers is possible within the specific chemical designation.”

            This ban is likely the product of lawmakers overly eager to ban substituted phenethylamines, which tyramine is, in the mistaken belief that ring-substituted phenethylamines are hallucinogenic drugs like the 2C series of psychedelic substituted phenethylamines. The further banning of tyramine’s optical isomers, positional isomers, or geometric isomers, and salts of isomers where they exist, means that meta-tyramine and phenylethanolamine, a substance found in every living human body, and other common, non-hallucinogenic substances are also illegal to buy, sell or possess in Florida. Given that tyramine occurs naturally in many foods and drinks (most commonly as a by-product of bacterial fermentation), e.g. wine, cheese, and chocolate, Florida’s total ban on the substance may prove difficult to enforce.

      • Trofim_Lysenko says:

        By your own description this doesn’t meet the criteria. One of the distinctive features of America’s political structure is that between two legislative bodies, lifetime supreme court appointments, the presidency, and (historically, if somewhat weaker today) relatively powerful State governments and more restricted Federal powers, it has historically been very hard for any one party to get a lock on the nation the way PRI did in Mexico or PAP does in Singapore.

    • Desrbwb says:

      I still think you’re missing the point. The point is that all political parties ideally want to ‘win forever’. The initial bullet point offered was.

      “Indefinite One Ideology/One Party rule via a permanent Democratic Party majority shored up by changing demographics.”

      But the goal of all political parties is ‘win elections, gain and maintain power (ideally) to make the country a better place’. I just don’t see how ‘wanting to gain and retain power’ is a uniquely left/liberal/democrat stance. If you keep winning fair and free elections, then surely that just means you have the best policies (or more cynically, the best liars/propagandists) and so you deserve to remain in power.

      “No, I don’t think that the goal of all political parties are to obtain so complete a grip over their respective political systems that their ideology becomes the only one in the overton window and their politicians become a controlling majority not just now but for a prolonged and indefinite period.”

      Can you find an example of a political party that has ever declared before an election (being a gracious loser doesn’t count) something like ‘we’ve had a good run, but the other side genuinely deserve to win this time, as they’ve been out of power to long’. I sure can’t, and that’s why your proposition rings hollow. Nobody wants to lose.

      • Aapje says:

        I think that the main difference is that the left also owns most of the deep state, so there are far fewer internal checks and balances.

        • By “Left,” do you mean Democrats? Because to me, it seems like neo-cons own the deep state in terms of foreign policy, and neo-liberals own the deep state in terms of economic policy. (Of course, both conflict with Trump’s more paleo-con foreign and economic tendencies). None of these would I personally classify as “Left.” In some ways, Trump’s paleo-con instincts in foreign policy (not that he always follows through on them) are more “Left” than those instincts of the current deep state, in which case I’d say that the deep state is actually to the right of Trump on that issue.

          Maybe it’s just me as someone who came of age politically during the Iraq War, but someone who is pro-intervention in Syria or anywhere else will always code as “right-wing” in my mental model, and anyone who attempts to get out of such foreign entanglements will always code as relatively more “left-wing.” True, Trump has beat the war drum on Iran, but I suspect that the deep state is just as excited, if not more so, about the idea of finally “moving on to Tehran.” They will for the moment demur on that issue as if they aren’t, just to make Trump look like the outlier (because of Trump derangement syndrome), but what do you want to bet that Biden will be a peacenik when he comes into office? I doubt it. Insofar as they would be interested in a re-instatement of something like the Iran nuclear accord, it will be for pragmatic reasons; it will be because they perceive it as being the more prudent course of action for bolstering the American empire right now, and not because they have any sort of principled objection to war with Iran.

          • cassander says:

            By “Left,” do you mean Democrats? Because to me, it seems like neo-cons own the deep state in terms of foreign policy,and neo-liberals own the deep state in terms of economic policy.

            The first I’ll give you, the second not so much. neo-liberalism is dead and there’s been no serious liberalizing of of the US economy for 2 decades. everything is soft social democracy occasionally dressed up to resemble neo-liberal ideas, but that is fading. even free trade seems dead for the foreseeable future.

        • Garrett says:

          The right wins temporarily. The left gets their wins baked into the Constitution by SCOTUS make-believe.

    • Orion says:

      I tend to think it’s okay for competitors to try to win every contest, and even to plan to win every contest, even if they would not prefer a counterfactual scenario in which they actually won every contest. You get a lot of the same triumphalist rhetoric from sports teams, I think. “If we work hard, develop our talent, and stick to our game plan, there’s no reason we shouldn’t win every game this season,” and so on. You could say that in reality if one team actually won every time, the sport would get less interesting, competition would be pointless, audiences would lose interest and eventually everyone loses their jobs. You could accuse every team of being an extremist faction plotting to win 100% of their games and ruin sports for everyone, but I don’t think that’s an especially helpful way to look at it. 100% of the time a team shows up to play, they play to win, but they know they won’t win 100% of the time. I tend to interpret intra-party political rhetoric about the coming Democratic majority as morale-raising boosterism. These people are adopting the motivational tactics of a coach, effectively saying “we have a plan to win today, we have a plan to win next week, and we have everything we need to keep winning from there, so let’s hit the field and take it all the way to championship!”

    • Eugene Dawn says:

      A few lines of response:
      First of all, to answer your hypothetical at the end, Republicans did indeed make this exact argument, and Democrats…realized it was right, and struggled for a while, winning the presidency only once in a span of 25 years, moved to the right on a lot of issues, etc. It was not a crisis for democracy, there was no totalitarianism, and while Democrats were certainly alarmed at the prospect of having their political opponents in power, eventually both the electorate and the Democrats had changed enough that Democrats were able to win again.

      As WoollyAI points out below, something like one-party rule is actually pretty common in American history: the Roosevelt coalition dominated the Presidency, Senate, and House for an almost uninterrupted 20 years; between the Civil War and the Depression, Republicans dominated the government.
      I think it’s uncharitable to suppose that your opponents are envisioning one-party rule like Singapore, and not just a reconstituted New Deal coalition.

      Even putting this aside, however, I am skeptical of much of what you say. Your evidence that Democrats want to achieve this state of affairs is that Democrats think that under certain conditions, they would be more likely to win elections. The only relevant questions to ask are, “is this true”, and “are the conditions they imagine fair”; if so, then Democrats are right to look forward to a world where they constantly win fairly contested elections! The problem with Putin’s Russia isn’t that one party consistently wins, it’s that one party consistently wins because of the blatantly unfair conditions under which the voting happens.

      And here is where the problems with your argument really crop up, because, as pointed out earlier, the conditions under which Democrats conceive of winning are: ending Republican gerrymandering and vote suppression. As long as Democrats are accurate, the conditions they imagine are more fair than the current ones; the conditions under which Republicans are winning are closer to the conditions in one-party states.
      I think the Democratic argument is a bit overstated, but there is some truth to it: it’s Republicans who have stripped incoming governors of their powers so Republican legislatures can maintain a semblance of one-party control; it’s Republicans who have targeted voting provisions at African-American voters with almost surgical precision; Republican gerrymandering is a key part of Republican electoral strategy. Finally, although both the Senate and Electoral College are legitimate, it is worth noting that they are the least Democratic features of the American electoral landscape, and the former has a structural bias towards Republicans, and the latter, while it can advantage either party, has so far only helped Republicans take the presidency.
      In short, the sorts of antidemocratic features of a one-party state are actually the ones that help Republicans, for the most part (though of course not exclusively, and only in the current moment).

      It seems to me that though Democrats might be overstating things, they are basically right that their agenda is more popular, and if America were more democratic they would win more elections. I think the conditions under which they imagine winning more elections are conditions of fairer elections, and so I think there is nothing to complain about.

      • baconbits9 says:

        First of all, to answer your hypothetical at the end, Republicans did indeed make this exact argument, and Democrats…realized it was right, and struggled for a while, winning the presidency only once in a span of 25 years, moved to the right on a lot of issues, etc

        Which stretch is this? Your link makes it sound like you are talking about the late 60s through the early 90s, but this statement is pretty misleading. The Dems controlled the House for this entire period and the Senate for 20/26 years. The presidency is far more tied to luck/individual personalities than demographics.

        • Eugene Dawn says:

          Yes, ’68-’92. It’s true this ignores the House, but then, I think in any realistic near-future Republicans are likely to continue to have an advantage in the Senate (though they may lose it in 2020); so the comparison to Trofim_Lysenko’s hypothetical one-party Dem future doesn’t seem out of line.

          Anyway, I think losing the Presidency consistently for a quarter-century, often by massive landslides, is more than just bad luck: it really represented a moment when the Democratic coalition fractured and Republicans were able to capitalize on it.

          And the post-Civil War and New Deal-era examples still hold, even if you don’t like this one.

          • baconbits9 says:

            If JFK isn’t assassinated then the Ds have the option of running Johnson in ’68 without the baggage of his terrible stint as president, and then RFK in ’72/’76/’80 depending on how all those elections shake out. Losing both Kennedy’s was a major headwind that at least partially explains the generally weak conadidates that the Ds put up prior to 1980.

            During the Reagan years it seems far more likely that actual candidate strength was at play than anything else. Reagan hammered Mondale by 17 million votes but Ds took more than 5 million more votes across house and senate elections, and 6 million more in 1980 (vs 7 million more for Reagan vs Ford).

            And the post-Civil War and New Deal-era examples still hold, even if you don’t like this one.

            Sure, plus the 12 years of R control of house/senate/WH prior to the GD.

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            I think it’s best explained by the realignment of parties post-Civil Rights Act, with a key basis of Democratic support switching to the Republicans; obviously there’s still luck involved here (if JFK lives, maybe the CRA never happens) but there were definitely deep structural forces at play.
            But sure, I don’t want to undersell the role of chance and contingency, and anyway, all of those features would still hold in the hypothetical Democratic-majority world: a sufficiently charismatic Republican in the right circumstances would still be able to win the presidency in almost any plausible near-future.

      • Trofim_Lysenko says:

        Your characterization of American History is incorrect. The closest we’ve come to true one-party rule would be FDR’s presidency…in other words, the most authoritarian president since the one that imposed martial law in the middle of a Civil War, and who even then was blocked by the Supreme Court and came close to trying to deliberately alter its structure to remove it as a check on executive power. You’ll have to forgive me if I find that less than persuasive.

        The problem with Putin’s Russia isn’t that one party consistently wins, it’s that one party consistently wins because of the blatantly unfair conditions under which the voting happens.

        This is where we part company. Popular support is not a sufficient condition for good or just governance, and I think anti-majoritarian safeguards are an important safety feature on any system of government.

        • Eugene Dawn says:

          Your characterization of American History is incorrect.

          I don’t think it is. From 1861-1933 (72 years), Republicans controlled the Senate for 62 years (82% of the time), the House for 52 years (72%), and the Presidency for 52 years. They controlled all four branches for I think 40 years (56%) if I counted right.

          The New Deal era is roughly 1933-1969, a period of 36 years in which Democrats controlled the Senate and House for 32 years (89%) and the Presidency for all but the eight years of Eisenhower (78%). Democrats controlled all three branches I believe for 26 years (72%).
          It’s stronger control than 1861-1933 but the two eras are definitely comparable. I suppose we can also compare the size of the Senate/House majorities to be finer-grained, but that seems pointless to me; I think the era 1861-1933 is exactly the sort of situation you can expect to obtain when one party becomes a perennial minority party.
          Especially since the Republican strength in the Senate isn’t going anywhere in the near future, you shouldn’t expect to see Democrats having unified control across all three branches as a regular feature of politics any time soon.

          As to the rest of the post, there is nothing threatening to anti-majoritarianism about winning elections, and while obviously we want some anti-majoritarian safeguards, we also want plenty of majoritarian features to the government to make it representative of and responsible to the governed.

          “This party anticipates winning lots of elections!” is completely unthreatening without additional premises, premises that you have failed to provide except by gesturing threateningly at the spectre of one-party rule. If you want to argue that dominant-party Democratic rule will be like Putin’s Russia, or the PRI in Mexico though, I think you can’t overlook that those governments rig(ged) elections; without that, a dominant party that governs badly ceases to be popular, and thus ceases to win elections, and the problem solves itself.

          Here in Canada, the Liberal party are regarded as the natural governing party but this doesn’t mean they rig elections or anything; it means they have the easiest time putting together a governing coalition, but if they screw up, or the Conservatives run someone charismatic, or whatever, they lose and have to regroup. There is no reason why you should believe Democrats are envisioning anything other than that when they imagine themselves winning elections, at least, no reason you have given so far.

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:

            The phenomenon under discussion are extended timeframes of uninterrupted control. That’s why I specified that the closest parallel I could find was the period of FDR’s presidency where his party also controlled both houses of congress and attempted to control the Judiciary.

            That’s why I excluded Canada from my initial list. It fails that criteria.

            And again, I am not saying that it is a guarantee of authoritarianism, rather that it is a risk factor, and in my view a strong one given historical examples of one party rule.

            If you don’t see the difference between “one party wins more elections than the other” and “one party wins ALL the elections and makes ALL the laws and appoints ALL the unelected officials for a period of decades”, and how once you have a party in that position they are vulnerable to the temptation, I don’t know what to tell you. PRI was in power before it engaged in any electoral tampering. I’m not sure that there’s been any in Singapore or during the reign of Japan’s LDP.

            And again, as I already saod in the original thread, I don’t think any sizable number of Democrats Want authoritarian government. I don’t even know that a majority believe in the “coming Permanent Majority” since it’s easy to fimd examples of articles warning that triumphalism is premature and risks complacency. Bit that doesn’t actually matter because “bad people seize power with the intention of creating an authoritarian government” is not the only path to that outcome. Structure matters as much as amny individual virtue or even most political ideologies. Some may be particularly vulnerable because they include features like a desire for a lot of tight control over individual behavior, but even political philosophies that are supposed to be about principled restraint and limited power tend to fall to mission creep if they get and hold too much power for too long.

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            I don’t even know that a majority believe in the “coming Permanent Majority” since it’s easy to fimd examples of articles warning that triumphalism is premature and risks complacency.

            Given that your entire argument rests on the premise that Democrats looking forward to control of the government means they are more likely to be authoritarians, this rather undercuts your argument.

            I agree a world in which Democrats basically never lose control over any branch of government is very plausibly a bad one, but I think it is neither one that is very plausible (the Senate will continue to have a Republican lean for the foreseeable future; American politics has plenty of thermostatic reaction; etc.) nor one that Democrats are actually looking forward to.

            The (somewhat) plausible future that Democrats are talking about is the future where generational turnover and demographic change make Democrats slightly favoured to win national elections for a brief period of time before the parties realign over whatever new issues seem important.

            If you think what Democrats are envisioning is more like your “total control for decades” model you should provide some actual examples, not just your paraphrase of what Democrats say.

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:

            Given that your entire argument rests on the premise that Democrats looking forward to control of the government means they are more likely to be authoritarians, this rather undercuts your argument.

            That is not the premise of my argument. My argument in this thread is that one party rule is a significant risk factor for a slide towards authoritarian government. That this risk is not dependent upon the attitudes of the party going into it, and while some ideologies are more vulnerable than others, even ones which purport to want only limited power and limited government are vulnerable if they find themselves in control of all the levers of power for an extended period.

            The reason I started this thread is that in the original thread the responses, including yours, indicated that you saw no issue with one party rule. That you now say you see how that could be bad even if you think that’s unlikely makes me hopeful I’ve gotten my point across.

            As far as “permanent majority just means winning slightly more elections than before”, if you’ve read the same commentary on the prospects of a permanent Democratic majority I have and that’s ehat you think, I’m not interested in trying to change your mind. I don’t think that’s the correct reading, and I think it’s mostly a distraction from my broader point about one party rule. It applies equally well with the situation and the party names swapped.

          • Clutzy says:

            Republicans in California have been making complaints for a decade now of things that are very authoritarian in their nature. They accuse the government of having erected a two tiered justice system where criminals can indeed be lawless, but the normal person just trying to do business is harried with extremely expensive traffic tickets, and regulations that force him to spend 3 years getting approval for a pool.

            Then there is again another tier where a guy like Ben Shapiro goes to Berkley and his supporters are consistently violently assaulted with no repercussions. No one, for example, believes that if the Proud Boys had blockaded 6 blocks and the city hall in Seattle the response would be anything like what we have seen.

          • Eric T says:

            I’m curious what our Social Justice posters think of this truth claim.

            Rings false to me. I guess it would depend on who’s president? Joe Biden: 100% no. Bernie Sanders? Well with someone that wild who’s to say….

            (For real I think that the idea we’d blow up people inside of America with Predator Drones seems a bit much)

          • Matt M says:

            Deleted because I regretted posting it. I’m trying to be less annoying. My apologies for the times I don’t succeed.

          • Aftagley says:

            I’m curious what our Social Justice posters think of this truth claim.

            The proud boys wouldn’t have to use force in Fort Worth to set up their autonomous zone for the same reason that the guys in Seattle didn’t: Everyone there basically already agrees with them.

            Do I think the feds would send in predators to bomb the proud boys? No. Basically in any situation; we’re decades away in degrading norms for that kind of tech to be used on US soil. I’ll bet with 100% confidence that drone strikes will never be used on US persons on US soil by the US government.

            Do I think the feds would conspire to use force to kill/subdue the proudboys in this situation? Perhaps, but not if they did the kind of low-effort subjugation that’s happening in Seattle.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            No one, for example, believes that if the Proud Boys had blockaded 6 blocks and the city hall in Seattle the response would be anything like what we have seen.

            I don’t know about that. They didn’t drone strike the Bundy stand-off, despite left-twitter gagging for it.

          • Matt M says:

            They definitely used lethal force and killed one of the Bundys. I’m not exactly sure how many of them were protesting and what the denominator is here, but let’s say it’s 100. So they killed 1% of the total right-wing protestors in order to disband the protest.

            Do you support the killing of 1% of the current protestors if that’s what it takes to disband them? Why or why not?

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Support it? No, but there are guys with rifles at the AutoZone, and if the cops do try to forcibly disperse it, I will not be terribly shocked if one or two of the occupiers are killed.

          • Matt M says:

            So why do you suppose they aren’t dispersing the guys at the Autozone?

            The answer pretty clearly can’t be “because they might have to shoot someone” given that they were perfectly fine with shooting someone when it was the Bundys…

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            So why do you suppose they aren’t dispersing the guys at the Autozone?

            The Bundy’s took over the federal wildlife refuge on January 2nd. The move to arrest the leaders and the shooting of LaVoy Finicum didn’t come until January 26th. So it took over three weeks to start shooting with that occupation. The AutoZone started four days ago.

            You don’t seem to be calling for the same response we got for the Bundy standoff, but for one vastly more swift and violent.

          • Fahundo says:

            IIRC the Bundys had also been using the land illegally for like 20 years before it escalated to them trying to occupy it.

          • John Schilling says:

            They definitely used lethal force and killed one of the Bundys. I’m not exactly sure how many of them were protesting…

            Reality check here: “They” killed a Bundy supporter (not part of the Bundy family) who had left the protest site and made at least two attempts to commit suicide-by-cop. And even then, “they” tried to avoid a lethal confrontation.

            The actual protests, in both Nevada and Oregon, were dispersed without anyone being shot and/or killed.

            It will always be possible for a protester, perhaps depressed by the failure of his protest, to commit suicide-by-cop. This does not mean that “they” are still maintaining the Jackbooted Stormtroopers of Waco(tm) to murderously suppress dissent.

          • Clutzy says:

            The Bundy case is illustrative because of the actual tactics they used were similar to a siege and starve out. Which is what would be happening if in midtown Seattle had been taken over by the Proud Boys. Groceries would not be entering the occupied zone.

        • Eugene Dawn says:

          My argument in this thread is that one party rule is a significant risk factor for a slide towards authoritarian government.

          Okay, understood. But your initial evidence for Democratic authoritarianism wasn’t that Democrats were on track to becoming the eternal ruling party (which would plausibly be a risk factor) but that some Democrats anticipate the possibility of such; if you are actually worried that in the near future, the last Republican will be elected and etc., etc., then sure. But the fact that some Dems think this might happen is not really evidence that anything nearly that dramatic will.

          The reason I started this thread is that in the original thread the responses, including yours, indicated that you saw no issue with one party rule. That you now say you see how that could be bad even if you think that’s unlikely makes me hopeful I’ve gotten my point across.

          I think we were just talking past each other; I don’t think it would be good to have one party who wins every election for every office. I was just pointing out that the “once Republican gerrymandering” part of it is actually plausibly justified, and if justified, cuts in the opposite direction. Like, if Alexei Navalny says, “if Putin didn’t rig elections, he would never win again”, that is very weak evidence that the Russian opposition is on track to form an authoritarian government, and if accurate much more strongly indicts United Russia.

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:

            your initial evidence for Democratic authoritarianism

            Was my entire post, not just the one bullet point. Or rather, was my evidence for why the FEAR of Conservatives/Red Tribe types who fear Democratic authoritarianism is not wildly outlandish and baseless. I have concerns, as I’ve said, but it’s less of outright authoritarianism and more of the sort of soft despotism that CS Lewis and De Toqueville wrote about. My pointing out that

            that some Democrats anticipate the possibility of such

            and more specifically that we can separate the Democrat writing on the subject into “This is going to happen soon, Hooray!!” and “This would be awesome if it happens, but….” was my evidence that this is a desired outcome for the party as a whole.

            So the argument goes:

            1) One Party Rule is a bad thing because it’s a risk factor for creating or enabling an authoritarian regime.
            2) Democrats are really pumped about the idea of one-party rule.
            3) Therefore, Democrats getting their preferences enacted increases the risk of one-party rule, which increases the risk of an authoritarian regime.

            I am not convinced it’s likely to happen, and in fact think I think it’s UNlikely to happen. But again, my beliefs are irrelevant to the point that the idea of a permanent majority and one-party Democratic rule is something that, on the whole, the Democratic party’s members would prefer if possible, even if many don’t think it likely.

            I was just pointing out that the “once Republican gerrymandering” part of it is actually plausibly justified

            Which is a separate discussion completely from either the original thread or this one, and thus irrelevant. This is why I didn’t respond to your point then and will not respond to it now.

            EDIT: I get that this comes off as dismissive. So without taking away my original response, let me try and elaborate: I have my own opinions on the political debate over vote fraud, GOTV vs. Voter Suppression, gerrymandering, andd so on in American politics. I have very little, meaning basically zero, interest in discussing them with anyone. Such discussions are almost no light, all heat, and most of the stuff I’d like to see change is almost entirely orthogonal to the entire discussion (dispensing with FPTP in favor of a preference voting method, preferably a condorcet method, better third party ballot access, etc etc etc), so it’s a waste of effort and energy to engage on the topic, doubly so when it’s a diversion from the topic at hand.

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            Was my entire post, not just the one bullet point.

            Yeah that’s fair; moving discussion of this one point to a new topline post made me downgrade the other points.

            Anyway, I think even your clarified argument doesn’t work: premise 1) is that actual one-party rule is dangerous, but there is no reason why Dems shooting the shit about one-party rule makes actually existing one-party rule any more likely. Democrats getting their preferences met only increases the chances of authoritarianism if it moves them closer to actual one-party rule; even if Democrats believe this, there is no reason to believe they are right.
            And I think you are wrong about how one-party the Dems envision their future rule being. I think they imagine something more like Republican presidential dominance in the post-civil rights era, where Republicans have an advantage in the Senate.

            Anyway, I think we both are clearer on the other’s position so I’ll bow out of further discussion here.

          • John Schilling says:

            But your initial evidence for Democratic authoritarianism wasn’t that Democrats were on track to becoming the eternal ruling party (which would plausibly be a risk factor) but that some Democrats anticipate the possibility of such; if you are actually worried that in the near future, the last Republican will be elected and etc., etc., then sure.

            Can’t speak for Trofim, but I don’t much care if the Democrats secure eternal one-party rule. It isn’t necessary or sufficient to the argument that they actually achieve that state, only that they believe that they will.

            If Democrats believe that they are likely to achieve a one-party Democratic state, then Democratic politicians and bureaucrats will be incentivized to secure power without accountability at every step, because they believe it will always be their power. Democratic voters and activists will cheer this on rather than demand limits or constraints because the power will always be exercised for their champions in the pursuit of their causes.

            And if it turns out that they’re wrong, then sometimes that excessive power will be exercised without accountability by Republican governments instead of Democratic ones. This is not an improvement. We don’t want this. But the Democratic belief in “demographics is destiny”, true or not, makes it more likely that we will get this.

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            @John
            That’s a fair point, and I know you are not Trofim so I don’t want to hold either of you to what the other has argued, but if this is the sort of dynamic Trofim has in mind, he should just cite the steps Dems have taken “to secure power without accountability”; these would be damning on their own regardless of the motivation behind them.

            Also, while that mechanism sounds plausible, there is also the converse mechanism, whereby Republicans, who see their prospects of winning future elections fairly diminishing, decide to implement measures to limit the ability of Democrats to leverage popular support. Which is to say, anticipation of either winning or losing elections perennially should a priori be equally likely to result in authoritarian, unaccountable behaviour.

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:

            Which is to say, anticipation of either winning or losing elections perennially should a priori be equally likely to result in authoritarian, unaccountable behaviour.

            I said exactly this at least twice.

            I think I need to work on the clarity and brevity (or rather the lack thereof) of my posts.

          • John Schilling says:

            Which is to say, anticipation of either winning or losing elections perennially should a priori be equally likely to result in authoritarian, unaccountable behaviour.

            Anticipation of losing elections forever should a priori result in desperate overuse of power while you’ve still got it, and spiking the guns of power on your way out the door. Those should perhaps cancel in the long run, but the second part never works as well as the practitioners hope. And we’re certainly seeing some of the first part being clumsily executed by Republicans now.

            Divided government has always been humanity’s best hope for freedom. The harms of single-party government come in advance of the reality, and yes, at least to some extent from both sides.

          • Divided government has always been humanity’s best hope for freedom.

            My current view is that the least intolerable outcome of the next election is either Biden with the Republicans in control of at least one house or Trump with the Democrats in control of at least one house.

            The one advantage of the former is that it might result in Trump and his allies losing control over the Republican party. But that’s by no means guaranteed.

    • kai.teorn says:

      Everyone is always pushing the overton window in their favorite direction. Everyone likes to think that, if they succeeded in pushing it, this shift is forever. It’s a live ecosystem. You can’t ask mammals to not push dinosaurs towards extinction if that’s already happening.

      You can fight and win certain battles but you’re never guaranteed to not lose the war. You seem to be saying, “the other side must let us keep on living even if we’ve lost the war.” Sorry, it rarely works that way: the other side may not be able to keep you alive even if they wanted to. Generations change and you may end up with insufficient manpower to be represented in the public consciousness.

      What you can and, I think, should ask for is that, if and when you indeed lose and disappear from the “window” of public consciousness, your side’s legacy and thinking be preserved and studied. That I fully support, and that is what libraries and universities must be responsible for. We must have a deep, diverse, and well-funded infrastructure for preserving and studying history. Then, inevitably, your lost side will keep producing offshoots and resurgencies, and at some point maybe even stage a comeback of sorts.

      Summarizing: do not lament becoming a permanent minority in politics; if that happens, it happens. Instead, do make sure that your side produces enough quality thinking and writing to become newly relevant at some point in the future. And do fight for universities to be the keepers and meaningifiers of the entire wealth of our culture, instead of (as they often are now) knee-jerk responders to the hot topics of public discourse.

  33. ana53294 says:

    I want to address “The people are not genuinely concerned about global warming if they don’t support nuclear power” argument, specifically.

    First, what does genuinely concerned mean? If it means do I think global warming is going to be a costly, expensive future problem, and we need to heavily invest in attenuation, such as water desalination technologies, solving desertification, breeding crops that need less water, subsidize renewable energy so it creates a market for it and it becomes economically sustainable, sure, I do believe that. I also think that to invest in those solutions, countries need to be rich, and a world that is one degree warmer than the counterfactual but also richer, can deal with the problems better.

    So, that’s my position on climate change. And I am also against nuclear, and whenever I get a vote, I’ll vote against it (after my number one no lockdown priority).

    Why? Well, because it seems to me that the problems generated by climate change are problems we know how to deal with, even if they are costly. I mean, floods are a problem that can be dealt with a technology available to a man with a spade or even a beaver.

    The cleanup of nuclear sites and getting rid of nuclear waste is not a technology we currently have. And no, burying it under many metres of reinforced concrete does not count as getting rid of nuclear waste.

    The areas surrounding Fukushima and Chernobyl are still not fully available for humans to live in. This, in my eyes, is a big problem. If my home, the place where my ancestors lived for generations, was ever to be in some exclusion zone, I would be really, really upset. It’s a problem, a problem there’s no solution for. I haven’t seen effective cleanup of nuclear contamination anywhere. AFAIU, it’s not feasible. Or else the Japanese government would be doing it, right?

    Sure, I’ve heard a hundred times that Chernobyl was a consequence of stupid commies messing around, and then covering up what happened, exposing more people to risk. Fukushima happened because Japan is in an area with active earthquakes. But so is California.

    The thing is, until there is a solution for the stupid commies and earthquakes, I don’t want nuclear stations even in places without stupid commies or earthquakes. Because a nuclear station will be there for sixty years or so and there’s no guarantee we won’t be getting the equivalent of stupid commies in the next sixty years.

    There’s a saying, “If a problem can be solved with money, it’s an expense, not a problem”. You don’t solve an expense by creating problems for yourself. Climate change is an expense, a big expense future humans will have to face and one they will be able to handle much better if they’re richer, more technologically advanced. Nuclear energy creates problems, problems that, AFAIK, have no solutions.

    • Le Maistre Chat says:

      The thing is, until there is a solution for the stupid commies and earthquakes, I don’t want nuclear stations even in places without stupid commies or earthquakes. Because a nuclear station will be there for sixty years or so and there’s no guarantee we won’t be getting the equivalent of stupid commies in the next sixty years.

      Oh God, that’s feeling like a rational weighing of future unknowns these days.

      • Tarpitz says:

        Note that Ana is writing from Spain: the likelihood of a given future political outcome is different for her than for a US poster.

    • AlesZiegler says:

      Yep, I agree that is a dumb argument. It is of course possible to be genuinely worried about BOTH climate change and risks of nuclear power.

    • Tatterdemalion says:

      There is a classic way of being wrong that goes

      You believe X
      I believe that X implies Y
      Therefore you believe Y

      Obviously, this is only valid if you and I are both infallible, which we clearly aren’t.

      What you’re describing is the modus tollens to its modus linens: i believe that concern about global warming means one should support nuclear power; you do not support nuclear power; therefore you are not concerned about global warming.

      FWIW, I think that you’re probably wrong about nuclear power not being worthwhile as part of the solution to global warming. But having different ideas to me about the solution clearly doesn’t mean you aren’t concerned about the problem.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        FWIW, I think that you’re probably wrong about nuclear power not being worthwhile as part of the solution to global warming.

        I think she is too: the only renewable power plants that can handle base load are hydroelectric and geothermal, which are limited by geographic luck. That presents a trilemma of: some fossil fuels aren’t so bad, nuclear isn’t so bad, or blackouts as an ongoing feature of life.
        But she’s analyzing it in terms of probable rate of very bad outcomes over X years from rare earthquake-induced or commie-induced events, so it’s a rational position rather than a fallacy.

        • ana53294 says:

          I don’t believe liquid gas is so bad. There are geopolitical problems, sure, but I don’t think it’s that bad.

          • Thomas Jorgensen says:

            We have geologic records of what warmer period sea-levels was like. A natural-gas based grid means CO2 keeps going up, and that means the water rises. This will cost us far, far more land area than even one heck of a lot of chernobyl events, and for a longer timespan too. The exclusion zone will be habitable again on a timescale of centuries, but if the seas rise, well, not getting that land back any time soon.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        See also: mistake theory versus conflict theory

    • Aapje says:

      @ana53294

      Radioactive waste actually decays over time, so if you bury it, some does indeed disappear. The most dangerous radioactive elements are those that decay the fastest.

      But anyway, the issue I have with many plans is that they depend on false assumptions and/or hope. Fact is that current renewable energy is not viable right now to replace all fossil fuels with. This is less due to cost of generating the electricity, but due to availability. There is no viable storage technology in the short term.

      So any plan that calls for a move to renewables, while excluding nuclear, relies on hope that viable storage technology will be developed relatively soon. That is possible, but far from guaranteed, since it is something that people have been looking for, for a long time. So we haven’t failed to succeed so far because we didn’t try, but because it is hard. It may be too hard to achieve sufficient results in the next decades.

      If you don’t have a deadline by which you stop hoping for storage technology to improve sufficiently, but start building nuclear plants, then you de facto prefer climate change over building nuclear plants. Which is in itself fine, but this clashes with the claims that climate change has such drastic and irreversible consequences.

      The areas surrounding Fukushima and Chernobyl are still not fully available for humans to live in.

      The exclusion zones have a radius of 20 and 30 km respectively. This is not really all that big.

      If my home, the place where my ancestors lived for generations, was ever to be in some exclusion zone, I would be really, really upset.

      Yes, just like the people whose islands are being flooded are upset over losing their homes and people are otherwise worried about the places they live becoming uninhabitable due to climate change.

      Do you think that more people will be displaced due to nuclear accidents than climate change? The experts seem to think the opposite.

      Note that nuclear plants typically get placed in remote areas with relatively few inhabitants.

      Because a nuclear station will be there for sixty years or so and there’s no guarantee we won’t be getting the equivalent of stupid commies in the next sixty years.

      The claim/risk of climate change is irreversible change. Something that you can tear down after 60 years is a lot less of a risk in that sense.

      The thing is, until there is a solution for the stupid commies and earthquakes, I don’t want nuclear stations even in places without stupid commies or earthquakes.

      You’ll get them anyway, because China and other places that don’t give a shit about what we decide are building lots of them.

      The only effect of us not deciding to build them is that others will have them, but we won’t.

      • ana53294 says:

        Fact is that current renewable energy is not viable right now to replace all fossil fuels with. This is less due to cost of generating the electricity, but due to availability. There is no viable storage technology in the short term.

        Sure, let’s not do all. Let’s get rid of coal, or at least not open new coal, and plug the holes with gas. Just moving from coal to gas is a net improvement.

        And I think you’re too focused on storage. From what I’ve read, on a big enough scale, renewables are a lot less intermittent. Sunny days in Spain and windy nights in Denmark compensate each other.

        You can do storage to smooth out intermittency issues, or you can change the way electricity is paid for, have smarter homes that spend the electricity during peak production hours.

        Look, just being able to get all the energy for AC from solar is a big improvement. And consumption of AC will correlate with solar production, for obvious reasons.

        Which is in itself fine, but this clashes with the claims that climate change has such drastic and irreversible consequences.

        I don’t actually believe that. I believe climate change has expensive consequences.

        I can’t do anything about China, heck, I probably can’t do anything about Spain, either, but I can try to do what I can towards the goals I believe in.

        China uses a lot of nuclear, if you don’t use nuclear, you’ll be losers who’ll lose the competition, also applies to China produces lots of contamination, if you don’t, you’re a loser, too, and I don’t think it’s true.

        • JayT says:

          Natural gas isn’t without risks either though. Here’s a superfund site where a natural gas company was. People can’t live there either.

          I wouldn’t be surprised if there was more land lost to natural gas contamination than nuclear. There is certainly more land lost to coal.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            There’s almost assuredly more land lost to gas/coal than nuclear, but does that also hold on a per-joule basis?

          • Austin says:

            It looks like that site is a manufactured gas plant that started operation in the 1890s, which is a very different thing than a modern natural gas facility.

            The plant would make gas from solid fuels such as coal, rather than process gas from drilled wells.

          • JayT says:

            @Edward
            In the US, nuclear is about 20% of power generation vs coal’s 24%, so I would be comfortable saying that we lose more land/joule with coal. Natural gas accounts for 38%, so I’m less confident there. Though, is there actually any land in the US (other than the land directly associated with running it) that has been lost because of nuclear?

            @austin
            The Fukushima plant was 40 years old when it was shut down, which means it was a very different thing from modern nuclear power plants. From what I’ve read, a newer power plant would not have had the same issues the Fukushima one did. So I think the comparison stands.

          • Austin says:

            @JayT The difference I am getting at is this:

            West Florida Natural Gas: Coal in, gas out
            Eunice fractionation plant: Gas in, dry gas out
            Fukushima: Uranium in, electricity out
            Modern Nuclear Power Plant: Uranium in, electricity out

            I think the comparison doesn’t stand, largely because the way we use the term natural gas has changed over time.

      • DarkTigger says:

        Radioactive waste actually decays over time, so if you bury it, some does indeed disappear. The most dangerous radioactive elements are those that decay the fastest.

        Have you ever looked at the half life of U235? And that of it’s fission products.
        Just as a short comparison, the last tests Germany did for a permanent depot lasted less than 30 years before it started to contaminate ground water. U235 has an 6 digit half life.

        • John Schilling says:

          U235 has an 6 digit half life.

          This would be the same U235 that was randomly buried with absolutely no attention to containment and contamination control, before we dug it up and at least tried to be careful with it?

          The “put it somewhere underground; doesn’t matter where, it won’t be a problem” demonstrably works at least tolerably well with U235, because that’s what God or whomever has been doing all along. Some of the fission products are another matter, but as Aapje notes those are the ones with much shorter half-lives.

          • DarkTigger says:

            Well the one is Uran ore with a low U235 concentration, the other is is elemental Uran in a fuel rod, with a lot higher concentration. And even than, afaik areas with natural Uran deposits have lower life expectancies as surrounding areas.

            I’m not saying it is an unsurmountable problem. But saying “yeah we just bury it, and the problem will have solved it self quickly”, does not create trust in all the following arguments.

          • John Schilling says:

            Well the one is Uran ore with a low U235 concentration, the other is is elemental Uran in a fuel rod, with a lot higher concentration.

            This is irrelevant from an e.g. groundwater contamination standpoint. Groundwater leeches (tinynum) percent of the minerals in each of the billion or so tons of rock it flows through; it does not matter whether than billion tons of rock includes a thousand tons of pitchblende at 0.6% U-235 or three hundred tons of spent fuel at 2.0%. You get the same amount of U-235 in the groundwater either way; only the total amount of U-235 matters.

            And, natural pitchblende is 0.6% U-235, spent fuel is about 2.0%, so not really “a lot higher concentration”. If someone really thinks it matters, we can blend the spent fuel with something to get it down to 0.6% or 0.06%.

            But saying “yeah we just bury it, and the problem will have solved it self quickly”, does not create trust in all the following arguments.

            Shouldn’t there be a presumption of trust, instead of a requirement that trust be created?

            I can go either way on that. But if there’s no presumption of trust, and speaking the plain and simple truth doesn’t create trust, then I’m done here.

          • DarkTigger says:

            and speaking the plain and simple truth doesn’t create trust,

            Look I lived less than 100km away from a place, they had to reopen and evacuate, because the problem did not resolf itself quickly. And it would have become a bigger problem, if nothing would have happened for another decade or so.
            So, I don’t see how “it will resolf it self quickly” is plain and simple true.
            Maybe in America were you can bury stuff somewehre were there is no population center for dozened of miles, it’s not a problem, but here in tightly settled Europe it is.

          • John Schilling says:

            Maybe in America were you can bury stuff somewehre were there is no population center for dozens of miles, it’s not a problem, but here in tightly settled Europe it is.

            There’s no technical reason why you have to bury your nuclear waste in tightly-settled Europe. If you’re going to impose political rules that say “We are only allowed to dispose of nuclear waste in the stupid way”, fine, but that’s a poor reason to distrust the people who are telling you that there is no technical reason that nuclear waste can’t be disposed of safely.

            And I’m going to guess that far more people have suffered from e.g. arsenic leached into the groundwater as a result of manufacturing solar cells for Germany, than from uranium leached into the groundwater as a result of nuclear power generated for Germany. But you all are willing to outsource that, so out of sight, out of mind.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            France seems to be handling the waste problem pretty well.

          • bean says:

            John, I think you’re missing something here. Groundwater leaching is going to depend things like solubility. Ores are almost by definition a very stable form of whatever the element in question is, so I’d expect them to be pretty resistant to dissolving in the groundwater. The same is not necessarily true of whatever form we happen to be using them in before we bury them.

          • John Schilling says:

            Ores are almost by definition a very stable form of whatever the element in question is, so I’d expect them to be pretty resistant to dissolving in the groundwater. The same is not necessarily true of whatever form we happen to be using them in before we bury them.

            True in the general case, but in the specific case of spent nuclear fuel, the fuel elements are usually made of uranium dioxide – which is exactly what the active ingredient in most uranium ore is, and should be just as resistant to leaching.

            (In case anyone is wondering, we don’t use refined pitchblende directly in nuclear reactors because enrichment requires turning it into something else, e.g. UF6, first. Then we turn the enriched UF6 back into UO2).

          • Lambert says:

            I thought the real problem was stuff like caesium and strontium leaching out, not uranium.

            Of course, encasing the whole thing in borosillicate glass or ceramic specifically designed to be impervious to water solves the problem.

          • Algirdas Vėlyvis says:

            @John Schilling

            It’s not clear if bean meant chemical form, or crystal form when he wrote this:

            Ores are almost by definition a very stable form of whatever the element in question is, so I’d expect them to be pretty resistant to dissolving in the groundwater. The same is not necessarily true of whatever form we happen to be using them in before we bury them.

            You answered like he meant chemical form. While I agree with your broad point that uranium leaching into groundwater is likely not a problem, I suspect this:

            True in the general case, but in the specific case of spent nuclear fuel, the fuel elements are usually made of uranium dioxide – which is exactly what the active ingredient in most uranium ore is, and should be just as resistant to leaching.

            is likely not true. Even if you have same compound, precise form of crystalline state matters very much when it comes to dissolution kinetics. Uranium dioxide in man-made form will have different properties (smaller crystallites, possibly larger fraction of amorphous material), thus dissolve/leach orders of magnitude faster than larger crystals in ore form (never mind single crystals). Sintered powder will leach faster than an equivalent mass piece of ore rock.

            Since you read Derek Lowe’s blog, you probably recall his write-up of ritonavir polymorph debacle – same principles apply.

            Also, naturally occurring ore contains impurities which affect dissolution kinetics as well, compared to pure oxide. (This could work to support your point – impurities might as well enhance leaching from ore compared to pure oxide in otherwise identical state.)

          • Eltargrim says:

            @Lambert

            Vitrification is indeed a good way of dealing with the leaching issue, but it’s not a panacea. Uranium and plutonium are particularly difficult to incorporate into oxide glasses, and you have to be careful about the amount of chromium and molybdenum as well. Molybdenum in particular is troublesome, as it can precipitate out in a cesium sodium molybdate phase that is quite soluble. All of these can be managed, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution to waste.

            I’m a glass chemist who used to work with nuclear waste glasses. Based on what I’ve seen in the field, I support nuclear power. The problems with vitrification are political, not technical.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          If it has a really long half life, that means it’s decaying slowly, that means it’s giving off few particles per unit time, that means it’s not very dangerous to be around for moderate periods of time.

          • Lambert says:

            There’s a bunch of intermediate half life nuclides whaich are what cause the real issues.

            Luckily they seem to have big enough fast cross sections that by gen V, we should be able to shovel them into fast reactors and get out waste that’ll be safe in a few hundred years.

      • 10240 says:

        Fact is that current renewable energy is not viable right now to replace all fossil fuels with. This is less due to cost of generating the electricity, but due to availability. There is no viable storage technology in the short term.

        Based on a quick Google: EU total final energy consumption is approx. 66 kWh/day. Li-ion batteries are approx. $156/kWh. If we use solar panels, we have to store energy for the night. The night is more than half of a day during the winter, on the other hand energy consumption is less during the night than the day (and it could be further shifted to daytime), so the battery capacity we need is probably less than half the daily consumption. That makes for approx. $5000 per capita. If they work anything like laptop batteries, they need to be replaced every few years, so it comes out to $1000–1500 per year. It ain’t cheap, but it sounds doable. (I have no idea if battery prices would increase as a result of a massive increase in demand due to scarce materials, or conversely, decrease due to economies of scale.) Am I making a mistake?

        • baconbits9 says:

          Averages don’t work here, you need a calculation where you figure the worst ratio of sunlight/electric use and that is your baseline for replacing fossil fuels, plus you have neglected to add in the cost of the solar panels, and the new distribution system as well. The problems are not just day/night, but summer winter. You need something like 3-4x (depends on latitude, cloud cover etc) the number of solar powers in winter as summer and there are very different usage patterns as well.

          Plus you are talking electric use, but if you want to calculate for all fossil fuels you have to figure on all of the gasoline and natural gas that gets burned directly in cars/trucks and home heating systems etc. Your calculation could well be off by a factor of 5-10.

          • 10240 says:

            plus you have neglected to add in the cost of the solar panels, and the new distribution system as well.

            Yes, I was only trying to address storage.

            Plus you are talking electric use, but if you want to calculate for all fossil fuels you have to figure on all of the gasoline and natural gas that gets burned directly in cars/trucks and home heating systems etc.

            The figure was for total energy use, not just electricity.

          • baconbits9 says:

            Yes, I was only trying to address storage.

            You still at least need to address the short day/long night high energy use winter days for storage or propose storage that will last from summer to winter.

            The figure was for total energy use, not just electricity.

            My mistake. I think your numbers are still off by at least a factor of 2 and possible up to 5x.

          • 10240 says:

            @baconbits9 Storage from summer to winter is definitely unfeasible using batteries. I assumed enough solar panels to produce enough energy in the winter. For long nights, I’ve assumed less energy consumption during the night than the day.

          • Thomas Jorgensen says:

            Enough solar to supply winter is also unfeasible.

            January.
            https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm?source=solar-states&year=2019&month=1
            June
            https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm?source=solar-states&year=2019&month=6

            Pay attention to the scale on the left.

        • Thomas Jorgensen says:

          Solar has enormous seasonal swings in actual production. A factor of over twenty in Germany – this is not intuitively obvious because you eyes are very adaptive, but winter in Germany has, from the perspective of a solar panel, hardly any light at all.

          Which means you either need to overbuild solar by a factor of twenty (This would have catastrophic environmental impact – this is far more than will fit on roofs and roads, and land pawed in solar is dead.) or store power enough to last all of winter from summer surpluses. Try doing the math on that. It is not very reasonable.

        • JayT says:

          That’s assuming that it’s even feasible to make that many batteries. The raw materials needed aren’t infinite, and there are environmental issues with collecting those raw materials. I would be surprised if the affect on the world wasn’t significantly worse than nuclear.

    • rumham says:

      I want to address “The people are not genuinely concerned about global warming if they don’t support nuclear power” argument, specifically.

      Is that the original argument? I thought it was “if you think climate change is a world ending threat, you would support nuclear power, as it is our most effective solution currently and is not a world ending threat”

      • AlesZiegler says:

        Many people think that climate change is dangerous, but not a world ending threat. Me for example.

        • ana53294 says:

          Yeah, I don’t believe it’s a world ending threat, either.

          Not something worth ruining our economy and handicapping poor countries over.

          • rumham says:

            I think this may be where the disagreement lies. It is the specific inclusion of many activists of the “world ending threat” type language that makes this dismissal of nuclear power indicative of a lack of thought and/or honesty.

    • cakins says:

      How much does your recommendation on nuclear power change if we rephrase the storage problem in engineering/economics/political terms? Presently nuclear waste is generated by nuclear reactor designs that only use a given unit of fuel once and then discard it The economics of nuclear fuel production, not fundamental physics, are what create the nuclear waste problem – it’s simply cheaper to only use the purified uranium once and then go out and find more uranium.

      I’m being lazy, forgive the Wikipedia links, but if we derate the claims made at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnup#Waste by 10x , the problem becomes storing 10% of the materials for 3K years. Technologies to do this, or their precursors, exist already – see the Long Now project, which is trying to build a clock that runs for 10K years.

      This addresses only part of your reservations – in particular cleanup – but nuclear waste, at least, begins to sound like a problem that can be solved with money. How close to an ideal money-solvable problem does it have to be before you’ll switch from a no vote to yes, or at least to apathy?

      • ana53294 says:

        Once we manage to clean up Chernobyl and Fukushima, for good, I’ll become neutral on nuclear.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          As soon as we resurrect the workers two died at the October 29, 2013 wind farm accident in Ooltgensplaat, we can build more wind farms.

          I get how “you have to fix the old thing first before you can do the new thing” seems like a power argument, but it proves too much. Some things we can work to prevent in the future while getting use out of them, but we cannot undo the old thing.

        • bonewah says:

          I think, respectfully, you are exaggerating the risks of nuclear power in your mind.

          Chernobyl is basically a tourist attraction now.

          https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48943814

          To the best of my knowledge Fukushima isnt terribly dangerous either.

          As mentioned above, technology exists to burn up nuclear waste as fuel. I would argue that seeing as that waste exists now we have a duty to the future to clean it up. The fact that cleaning up our existing waste also produces continuous, carbon free power is a huge plus, but i would argue that we should do it even if it didnt.

        • Thomas Jorgensen says:

          we wait. Time will clean it up just fine. Not very much time, either, as such things go – a handful of centuries – Time will take much, much longer to give us back the coastlines after they flood.

        • John Schilling says:

          And that only because of an earthquake that killed 16,000 people. Even assuming that better design practices, etc, couldn’t have prevented Fukushima, we’re basically faced with johan larson’s favorite aliens showing up and saying “In exchange for eliminating global warming, we will make your earthquakes 1% more destructive”.

          How is that not an enormously good deal for anyone who thinks that global warming is a catastrophic threat?

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          Unfortunately, it’s seem like it’s much better to kill 100 people than to inconvenience 100 people.

          Dead people are dead. But inconvenienced people live to tell everyone how horrible you are and how their lives were ruined.,

    • 10240 says:

      Unsolvable problems can also be considered expenses, if we count the monetary equivalent of the harm they cause. For instance, I think most people would be willing to move to a different town if offered several times the price of their home. Even at such compensation levels in the case of accidents, nuclear wouldn’t be excessively expensive.

      Conversely, coastal areas can be protected from rising sea levels using dams, but it will be uneconomical to do so in sparsely populated areas. I’m pretty sure even those areas will, in total, contain much more people than the nuclear exclusion zones.

    • John Schilling says:

      I want to address “The people are not genuinely concerned about global warming if they don’t support nuclear power” argument, specifically.

      Thank you for taking the time to do this. And you lay out what would be a pretty good case, except that it looks to be based on flawed math and flawed engineering, so that’s the part I’m going to focus on.

      The cleanup of nuclear sites and getting rid of nuclear waste is not a technology we currently have.

      Lots of people disagree with this(*). In particular, I’m pretty sure a large majority of people with advanced degrees in nuclear engineering disagree with this. I’m not going to say it’s 97% of them, but it plausibly could be.

      Which raises the question, why do you believe this? You clearly believe that global warming is a very serious problem, and I’m going to guess that your reason for that is a combination of the people with advanced degrees in climatology mostly believing that, and the politicians and public intellectuals you trust are telling you to believe the climatologists about climate. So why do you disbelieve the nuclear engineers about nuclear engineering?

      I could try to explain to you how nuclear waste can be safely disposed of, but I feel that would be a wasted effort if I don’t understand why all the previous explanations haven’t convinced you.

      The areas surrounding Fukushima and Chernobyl are still not fully available for humans to live in. This, in my eyes, is a big problem.

      And here the problem is one of math, specifically of scope. You believe that global warming is a major problem. I presume you’re not one of the ones who believe it is a literal extinction risk, but still at the level of seriously degrading the utility of Earth as a place to live. Would it be fair to say that you expect the net effect of global warming to be at least a five percent degradation of Earth’s ability to serve as a home for humanity?

      The Chernobyl exclusion zone is I believe now 2,600 square kilometers. The Fukushima exclusion zone is 371 square kilometers. Five percent of the land area of the Earth is 7,447,000 square kilometers.

      A thousand Chernobyls and a thousand Fukushimas combined, would cause only a fraction of the damage expected by even mild “consensus” versions of the global warming threat. And the same holds true of human casualties.

      Are you expecting ten thousand Chernobyls or a hundred thousand Fukushimas if we adopt nuclear power on a large scale? That seems a bit much. But if not that, it looks like you are throwing out a very effective solution to what you believe is a very big problem, because it might be a much smaller problem.

      The thing is, until there is a solution for the stupid commies and earthquakes, I don’t want nuclear stations even in places without stupid commies or earthquakes. Because a nuclear station will be there for sixty years or so and there’s no guarantee we won’t be getting the equivalent of stupid commies in the next sixty years.

      But there aren’t likely to be very many new earthquake faults cropping up in the next sixty years, at least.

      “Stupid commies” as a reason to avoid constructing nuclear power plants is a new and strangely compelling argument. But again, it’s weakened by the technical detail. The problem at Chernobyl wasn’t so much that it was run by stupid commies, but that it was designed and built by stupid (and militaristic) commies. Only people who care more about being able to build lots of atom bombs in a hurry than they do about public safety, build the sort of nuclear power plant that can fail in anything like that fashion.

      This isn’t a trait unique to “stupid commies”, of course, but it is common enough among stupid commies who run sovereign national governments. The only solutions, though, are to not let stupid commies run nations, or not let stupid-commie nations build nuclear power plants. Supid commies are going to stupid commie. If we’re not willing to get rid of them altogether, then they’re going to build atom bomb factories whether we want them to or not. That’s not a good reason for us to refrain from building clean power plants. And the potential harm from stupid commies maybe getting hold of one of our clean power plants, is more Fukushima than Chernobyl.

      There’s a saying, “If a problem can be solved with money, it’s an expense, not a problem”.

      Anybody who thinks that large expenses aren’t a problem, is expecting someone else to foot the bill. And I’m kind of afraid that’s going to be me, so you’ll understand some of my skepticism on that front. But more than that, costs are problems even if they aren’t denominated in dollars or Euros. The Chernobyl and Fukushima exclusion zones are costs denominated in square kilometers. Other costs are denominated in lives. The one about safely disposing of nuclear waste, that costs dollars and votes – we can pay for truly safe disposal, if you’ll let us.

      And I can’t do the math in any way that makes the total cost of solving the global warming problem via sensible use nuclear power, come within two orders of magnitude of the total cost of leaving a consensus-level global warming threat unsolved. So it seems to me that anyone who believes the consensus about the global warming problem, has to be 99+% certain that it will be solved by other means, or actively hostile to the concept of quantitative cost-benefit tradeoffs, to oppose the use of nuclear power to mitigate global warming.

      * At least about the technology. The politics are a real problem, but the adverse politics is driven by people not believing in the technology.

      • Garrett says:

        FWIW, despite being the type of reactor involved at Chernobyl, there are still 10RBMK reactors in use with 6 which were shut down only significantly after the incident (including 3 at Chernobyl itself!)

        Even as a substantially-outdated known-defective design probably 40 years past the initial design basis is still safer than most people think it is.

        • Lillian says:

          A friend of mine once pointed out that for sufficiently bad global warming scenarios, we could mass manufacture RMBKs, have a Chernobyl ever decade, and still come out ahead.

      • ana53294 says:

        Another point I didn’t mention, but I think I should add:

        All that land that is going to be lost, isn’t going to be in Spain. Whereas the consequences of a Spanish Chernobyl will be in Spain.

        Second: when the Spanish government last tried to build nuclear stations, they weren’t trying to build them in the empty Spain, they were trying to build them in the populated part of Spain, namely the Basque coast. There were going to be three of them.

        The whole of Biscay is 2,217 km2, less than the Chernobyl exclusion area. If you get a catastrophe of similar characteristics, you are getting rid of a place where one million people live, the basis of our culture, our traditions, our history, our memory. Sorry, but no, I’m not willing to potentially risk the entirety of the Basque country to save some islands in the Caribbean. We can invite the people to live here, that’s OK, Spain has lots of empty land, and besides, those island in the Caribbean all together would be less than our net migration numbers.

        Whatever percentage of reduction in quality of Earth is left after we do everything but nuclear, I’m willing to live with, if it means I get to keep my country. And my country is the Basque Country, not Spain.

        Seeing the behaviour of the Spanish government, I’m not sure how far they are from stupid commies, but they seem pretty stupid to me. I don’t trust them.

        Anybody who thinks that large expenses aren’t a problem, is expecting someone else to foot the bill. And I’m kind of afraid that’s going to be me, so you’ll understand some of my skepticism on that front.

        I get you there, I’m also annoyed by people’s belief that there is a money tree and we can pay for things like shutting our entire economy down while keeping decent pensions.

        But the thing is, nuclear energy isn’t cost effective. Not in first world countries. The energy of Hinckley Point in the UK is already more expensive than offshore wind. And they haven’t even finished building it yet.

        You’ll tell me that that’s because of stupid commies in the government bureaucracies, and I’ll agree, but I’ll say you need to figure out how to build popular stuff cheaply (like trains and roads and bridges), before you can convincingly say that you can build nuclear cheaply.

        Other costs are denominated in lives. The one about safely disposing of nuclear waste, that costs dollars and votes – we can pay for truly safe disposal, if you’ll let us.

        Yet nobody in the US is willing to pay the price in votes. AFAIK, there is no nuclear waste disposal site anywhere in the US.

    • I want to address “The people are not genuinely concerned about global warming if they don’t support nuclear power” argument, specifically.

      That would be too strong a statement. The more plausible version is that people who treat climate change as not merely a bad thing but a catastrophic threat, likely to kill hundreds of millions and with a real possibility of destroying civilization and perhaps the human race don’t believe what they are saying if they also oppose nuclear power.

      • Thomas Jorgensen says:

        … Near as I can tell, the actual reason this incoherent position is as extremely common as it is, is simply that people are absolutely terrible at admitting error.

        First there was the anti-nuclear-weapons movement. This was large, active, and basically lost hard.

        A lot of people got tired of fighting a hopeless fight and drifted over to the environmental movement, which was at the time having some success stopping rivers catching fire.

        This meant the early environmental movement had a lot of people in it with.. Not very nuanced views of nuclear fission. This got worse because fossil fuel interests, recognizing an existential threat, threw pin money and other support at anyone fighting nuclear fission power plants.

        This turned into a horror story, because the anti nuclear movement had a lot of victories, and every one of those victories meant a coal plant stayed in operation, killing about a hundred people a year from conventional pollution, and also spewing c02, for a longer term certain disaster.

        After this had gone on for a couple of decades, people started to care about global warming. But nuclear is a right damn uncomfortable solution to this problem, because going in that direction means a hell of a lot of people have to admit they were wrong to fight the atom in the 70s, 80s, and nineties, that basically their entire life work was a mistake that make them personally at least partially responsible for thousands of deaths, and the endangerment of the future climate, because the alternatives they promoted were mirages that could never work and they were always the useful idiots of King Coal.

        Sure, mostly this was all honest mistakes, and trusting sources they shouldnt have, but this goes beyond it being difficult to get a man to understand a point his salary depends on not understanding – Not understanding this point is a requirement for a lot of these people retaining a shred of self-respect.

  34. Le Maistre Chat says:

    I’m now starting to hear of Chinese-Americans fearing that things are now looking like the start of the Cultural Revolution.
    That’s a bad sign in both Bayesian and mental health of a racial minority terms.

    • Viliam says:

      When I saw the treatment Bret Weinstein got at Evergreen State College, my impression was that it was a less intense version of Maoist “struggle sessions”. So I can understand how Chinese-Americans can get triggered.

      I mean, look at this Minecraft rendition of the Three Body Problem, and tell me those people differ from American SJWs by something other than having soldiers on their side.

      (I have problems finding the original viral video, so I will just link this, but what I originally wanted was the video of students screaming at Weinstein.)

    • suntory time says:

      “Starting to hear of X fearing” is a very weak start to an argument. I’ve been starting to hear of many minorities worrying that things are now looking like the start of a fascist dictatorship since… well, even before the latest president.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        “Minorities” is under-defined here. American citizens and other residents of Chinese descent can have personal experience with Communism. Which US minorities have the experience to use personal experience for Bayesian predictions about processes of a Fascist dictatorship? Latinos with Chilean ancestry? As opposed to Cubans and Venezuelans, whose experience with daily life when a dictatorship starts would also be Communism…

  35. AlphaGamma says:

    So this is a thought I’ve had based on a lot of Twitter threads I’ve seen in the aftermath of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston being pulled down in Bristol. Of course, if I actually raised it on Twitter I run the risk of awakening an angry mob accusing me of being an apologist for slavery.

    The general thrust of these threads is that anybody who claims that ”relatively few people thought slavery was wrong” before a certain point ignores the views of the slaves themselves, as if it is self-evident that all slaves, everywhere, ever were abolitionists. The question is, were they?

    If we look at the Classical world (and yes, I have seen the argument that the ancient Greeks and Romans were bad people because they owned slaves), we have numerous accounts of freedmen owning slaves. So even if those freedmen had been against slavery as an institution while they were enslaved, it can’t have been a particularly strongly held view if they then went and bought slaves of their own when they were able to do so.

    The transatlantic slave trade is of course another matter- it’s commonly cited as particularly bad as systems of slavery go. So the weak form of the argument- that most or all slaves traded across the Atlantic or descended from those who were were abolitionists- may well be true. On the other hand, a lot of these slaves came from societies where slavery was commonly practised (though the slaves were treated significantly better). I’m not sure if all of them, on being enslaved and trafficked across the Atlantic, necessarily had an epiphany that slavery as practised in their homeland in the absence of external buyers was wrong. And someone who thinks “this form of slavery is bad, but if you treat the slaves differently it’s fine” can IMO no more be called an abolitionist than someone who only eats free-range meat can be called a vegetarian.

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      It occurred to me independently that A Funny Thing Happened to Me on the Way to the Fuorm had to be based on period sources because it didn’t have any opposition to slavery as an institution.

    • The original Mr. X says:

      IIRC, Spartacus’ army enslaved POWs and other Roman prisoners, so there’s another datapoint for you.

    • qwints says:

      You are quite literally being an apologist for slavery.

      • FLWAB says:

        How so? Please explain your points when you make strong accusations.

        • qwints says:

          The claim that slaves approved of (or did not oppose) the institution of slavery is a defense of the institution of slavery. The argument is morally repugnant, with the dehumanizing analogy of “free-range meat” closely resembling the long chain of arguments made that enslave persons were something less than fully human. Arguing that slaves approved of slavery has a long history as an argument in defense of slavery.

          • Eric T says:

            I’ve sort of settled into my role as SSC’s resident SJW so I feel like it will be bad for my Brand(tm) if I do this, but I’m going to disagree here.

            The claim that slaves approved of (or did not oppose) the institution of slavery is a defense of the institution of slavery.

            I’m not sure that it is. If anything it could be even more condemnation of it:
            Slaves were so prohibited from gaining knowledge and understanding of the world that they often knew nothing other than the system they were born in. Slaves were often enslaved as children, sometimes from birth. It’s like Plato’s Cave, and the blame is firmly on the people who locked them in the cave.

            The argument is morally repugnant, with the dehumanizing analogy of “free-range meat” closely resembling the long chain of arguments made that enslave persons were something less than fully human.

            I don’t want to speak for AlphaGamma here but I think they were using the vegetarian example more as a discussion of people holding views, not an attempt to analogize slaves with cattle. It’s perhaps an unfortunately chosen example, but hardly intentional I suspect.

            Arguing that slaves approved of slavery has a long history as an argument in defense of slavery.

            They absolutely do, and I think we should be careful and considerate here. After all some of the stories of slaves turning around and owning slaves are likely conformation bias: history is written by the victors and victors were slavers for a long time. That said I think that using this argument or at least bringing it up for discussion does not a slavery-apologist make, even if it is a bit inelegant.

          • FLWAB says:

            He was clearly writing in defense of not condemning people in past because they approved (or participated in) slavery. He said that people claimed

            The general thrust of these threads is that anybody who claims that ”relatively few people thought slavery was wrong” before a certain point ignores the views of the slaves themselves, as if it is self-evident that all slaves, everywhere, ever were abolitionists. The question is, were they?

            So the question at hand is, did all slaves disapprove of slavery? I think people are allowed to ask questions about how people thought about things in the past, particularly when the greater question is whether we should disapprove of people based on what they believed (or did) in the past.

            Nowhere here do I see anyone saying or attempting to say that slavery itself is not morally abhorrent.

          • albatross11 says:

            I think it is extremely common to see your own society’s rules as ones it’s okay to live by. Free blacks owning slaves was living by their society’s rules, and further, slavery had existed in some form, at that point, for basically all of human history, so it’s not like none of them could possibly have just accepted that this was how the world was, and they’d better live in it.

            People who think through the morality of their society’s rules and customs are the exception, not the rule. And because we’re kinda herd animals, even then it’s much easier to do in a group than as an individual.

            Further, people who conclude that their society’s rules are evil often find it prudent *not* to loudly proclaim this fact to their neighbors who think those rules are just nature’s way and God’s will. People who were revolted by the idea of having slaves in a slave society could often just avoid owning slaves, or at least avoid being too close to it. Let your less-sensitive brother run the plantation while you go off and handle the more savory side of the family business in town.

          • Nick says:

            As evidenced by my last intervention on this subject, I’m ambivalent. On the one hand I agree with albatross (and many others who have pointed it out) that it’s really hard to disagree with your society’s mores. Ignorance can be strong, even invincible. On the other hand, I’m not sure their ignorance was invincible. Europeans, I am told, observed at the time that the Americans were hypocrites when it came to slavery. Some early revolutionaries, like Laurens, were already abolitionists.

            One thing I’ve been thinking about lately is that the Founders were in some ways more critical of their own slaveholding than later generations—at least in my impression, which is very much not an expert one, please weigh in if you have experience with primary sources. Jefferson, as @Evan Þ quotes, wrote that he trembles before God’s justice. Washington, among others, freed his slaves upon death. It seems to me that the racist ideology (including, e.g., the theology) was post hoc rationalization which slaveowners built up to avoid unpleasant conclusions about themselves or their society, particularly as moral fervor surrounding abolition grew. And it’s hard, anyway, to regard as truly invincible the ignorance of those who followed and engaged in public debate about it.

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            On the other hand, I’m not sure their ignorance was invincible. Europeans, I am told, observed at the time that the Americans were hypocrites when it came to slavery. Some early revolutionaries, like Laurens, were already abolitionists.

            I think this is right: slavery was pretty controversial among the founding generation. A partial list of founders who were abolitionists or at least publicly conflicted about slavery includes John Adams, Benjamin Rush, John Marshall, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Ben Franklin, Gouverneur Morris, and Lafayette.

          • Arguing that slaves approved of slavery has a long history as an argument in defense of slavery.

            Does that mean that it is false?

            Or that you don’t care whether statements are true or not?

            The slaves that were carried to the New World were mostly not captured by whites, because Africa was a deathtrap for them at the time due to disease. They were captured by other Africans and sold to slave traders. It seems unlikely that the people who captured them disapproved of slavery. It’s possible that the tribes they were captured from had a sharply different view of the subject, but as there any reason to think so?

            So far as Greek antiquity is concerned, the slaves were largely citizens, or the descendants of citizens, of other cities captured in war. So far as I know, all the cities had slavery.

          • Ketil says:

            So far as Greek antiquity is concerned, the slaves were largely citizens, or the descendants of citizens, of other cities captured in war.

            Is there any nation anywhere that didn’t do this, at least when fighting people of different tribes (a.k.a. barbarians)? I mean, you have taken the enemy’s capital city, now what do you do with it? You plunder the valuables, burn the buildings, kill the men, rape the women, and enslave the children. Variations include killing women and children, or enslaving women after raping them. This has been standard practice from the dawn of history in every culture – with the possible exception of places like feudal Europe, where a common culture and religion encompassed a multitude of warring states, the rulers were all related to each other, and some rules could be agreed upon. One of those rules was that serfs would remain serfs and stay the property of whichever noble owned the land.

            From Wikipedia: France abolished slavery in the 1300s¹, Spain did it in the mid-1500s but was unable or unwilling to enforce it in the colonies. In the late 1700s, abolitionism became a thing, and European countries started to abolish slavery throughout the 1800s.

            ¹ Not sure how effective this was, as they abolished it again after the revolution, and reinstated it under Napoleon.

          • AlphaGamma says:

            @Eric T:

            I don’t want to speak for AlphaGamma here but I think they were using the vegetarian example more as a discussion of people holding views, not an attempt to analogize slaves with cattle. It’s perhaps an unfortunately chosen example, but hardly intentional I suspect.

            Pretty much this. Perhaps a safer, if slightly less apt, example would be saying that someone who drinks beer but won’t touch anything stronger can’t call themselves a teetotaller.

          • qwints says:

            It’s possible that the tribes they were captured from had a sharply different view of the subject, but as there any reason to think so?

            Yes.

          • AlphaGamma says:

            @David Friedman

            It seems unlikely that the people who captured them disapproved of slavery. It’s possible that the tribes they were captured from had a sharply different view of the subject, but as there any reason to think so?

            Both in response to qwints’s glib ”yes” and to viVI_IViv’s description of slavery and human sacrifice in Dahomey (which I was unaware of), here are parts of Olaudah Equiano’s description of the society he was raised in- an area he calls Essaka, which he describes as nominally subject to the kingdom of Benin. Of course this is something of a rose-tinted description, as he was kidnapped from this society aged about 11:

            Those prisoners [taken in an unsuccessful slave raid on Equiano’s village] which were not sold or redeemed we kept as slaves: but, how different was their condition from that of the slaves in the West Indies! With us they do no more work than other members of the community, even their master. Their food, cloathing, and lodging, were nearly the same as theirs, except that they were not permitted to eat with those who were free born.

            They [a group of men from another culture, whom he calls the Oye-Eboe] always carry slaves through our land, but the strictest account is exacted of their manner of procuring them before they are suffered to pass. Sometimes indeed we sold slaves to them, but they were only prisoners of war, or such among us as had been convicted of kidnapping, or adultery, and some other crimes which we esteemed heinous.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @AlphaGamma: +1 to Equiano.
            On the opposite coast of Africa, Arabs enslaved Bantu people at an estimated rate of 6,000 a year. Just like in the Americas, they were wanted for plantation labor: “As the plantation economy boomed and the Arabs became richer, agriculture and other manual labor work was thought to be demeaning. The resulting labor shortage led to an increased slave market.”
            We never hear about the Zanj Rebellion, a 14-year revolt against the slave plantation economy where 300,000 rebels were killed at the Battle of Basra alone.
            Is there any reason to think that Bantu people had a sharply different view of slavery from the Arabs?

    • Two McMillion says:

      Even in the Old US South, you’ll find records of black people who owned slaves. Here’s just one example: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4248955?seq=1

      There is a trope among Neo-Confederate types that 12% of slaves were owned by black people, though this is an exaggeration. Nonetheless it has some basis in truth.

    • viVI_IViv says:

      So the weak form of the argument- that most or all slaves traded across the Atlantic or descended from those who were were abolitionists- may well be true. On the other hand, a lot of these slaves came from societies where slavery was commonly practised .

      Africans have been enslaving each other since forever, the transatlantic slave trade wasn’t anything really different, just some Africans who sold other Africans to foreigners.
      Heck, Mauritania only officially abolished slavery in 1981, and still allows it unofficially, as various other African country do.

      (though the slaves were treated significantly better)

      From Wikipedia:
      “Since Dahomey was a significant military power involved in the slave trade, slaves and human sacrifice became crucial aspects of the ceremony. Captives from war and criminals were killed for the deceased kings of Dahomey. During the ceremony, around 500 prisoners would be sacrificed. As many as 4,000 were reported killed In one of these ceremonies in 1727.[5][6][7] Most of the victims were sacrificed through decapitation, a tradition widely used by Dahomean kings, and the literal translation for the Fon name for the ceremony Xwetanu is “yearly head business”.[8] In later years this ceremony also included the spilling of human blood from the sacrificed.[4] Related with this, there was also a significant military parade in the ceremonies that further displayed the military might of the kingdom of Dahomey.[2]”

    • ana53294 says:

      While they didn’t get slaves, abolitionist freed slaves instituted a system of racial segregation in Liberia.

      Haiti was a mess, but there was forced labor there after the revolution (which is almost slavery), blacks of different tonalities of skin owned slaves, whites owned slaves, and overall, it doesn’t seem like there were that many principled abolitionists who opposed slavery even if they happened to be on top. Although Haiti did help Simon Bolivar fight to free slaves. So I don’t know, but it does seem like after the revolution, Haiti did what it could to fight against slavery.

    • AG says:

      A good chunk of Classical world slavery was quite different from Antebellum South slavery. Many of them had mechanisms for slaves to eventually free themselves. The system laid out in the Bible periodically erases all debts and slave ownership.

    • Aftagley says:

      If we look at the Classical world (and yes, I have seen the argument that the ancient Greeks and Romans were bad people because they owned slaves), we have numerous accounts of freedmen owning slaves.

      My impression of roman slavery is that the kind of slaves who were able to earn their freedom and have enough money to buy their own slaves were the “professional” class of slave – accountants, clerks, etc. My understanding is that these slaves had vastly different lives and experiences under slavery than say, miners and plantation workers. Just the former is, for reasons of roman propaganda, more present in our conceptions of Rome than the latter, despite the latter being way more numerous.

      I’d also look at the servile wars and say, “hmm, certainly seems like a lot of people didn’t like slavery.”

      • Eric T says:

        I’d also look at the servile wars and say, “hmm, certainly seems like a lot of people didn’t like slavery.”

        The Steelman to this I think is “those people didn’t like being slaves, but were fine with the institution of Slavery” which I think is what the point of former slaves coming around to own slaves later getting at. That they didn’t have an issue with the system, just an issue with being at the bottom of it. Basically Killmonger from Black Panther.

      • Tarpitz says:

        Brett Devereaux argues here that Spartan helots in particular were treated abominably, to a degree that shocked the sensibilities of other Greek slaveholding societies.

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      What was the earliest opposition to the institution of slavery?

      I have a notion that part of the moral opposition happened because slavery was being used for luxuries like cotton and sugar instead of necessities like salt.

      • albatross11 says:

        I believe early Christians and later Muslims forbade taking Christians (later Muslims) as slaves, at least in some places.

      • FLWAB says:

        In 1315 King Louis X declared that any slave setting foot in France would be freed. It seems to have stuck, as a slave trader in 1571 who tried selling slaves in Bourdeux was arrested and his slaves freed. Of course they did have slaves in their oversees colonies. In 1700 an English court ruling upheld the idea that slavery had no place in English law, and that slaves were free as soon as they set foot on English soil. This led to several more court cases that advanced the idea that slavery was illegal in England, though enforcement of these rulings was spotty and only applied to Englishmen, not foreigners. Of course, they still had slaves in the colonies. Honestly, it seems like slavery was very unpopular in at least Western Europe for several hundred years, but economic concerns and the fact that Africans and others seemed foreign enough not to empathize with kept the institution alive as long as it was generally out of sight.

    • keaswaran says:

      Sure, if you divide people into “thought all slavery was wrong” and “thought some slavery was wrong” and “thought slavery should be done better” and “thought slavery was just fine”, then sure, it’s only very recently that a majority of people fall into the first category.

      But the point is, even if you want to be a cultural relativist, and judge people entirely by the standards of their own times, Colston was not in the upper 50% of his time, even if it wasn’t the case that 50% of people wanted full abolition of all slavery.

  36. johan_larson says:

    The Globe and Mail has an interesting article(registration required) today about why the US’s efforts to fight COVID-19 have been so scattershot.

    One of the problems was that the office that should have been responsible for coordinating the effort has been repeatedly defunded and refunded by successive presidents.

    The problems that led to America’s current failure stretch back decades.

    Successive presidents of both parties threw out previous administrations’ pandemic strategies, only to later realize that such planning was actually important and scramble to replicate it.

    Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama disbanded the White House’s health and security unit before later changing their minds and reconstituting it. They each launched major disease preparedness efforts, during the 2005 emergence of H5N1 bird flu and the 2014 Ebola crisis. The unit was dissolved for a third time in 2018 when Mr. Trump’s then-national security adviser, John Bolton, merged its functions with a different office of the White House.

    The Trump administration ultimately drafted its own pandemic playbook with a national biodefence strategy in the fall of 2018. The plan had not been fully implemented by the time COVID-19 hit.

    “We’ve experienced a boom-and-bust cycle where there’s a crisis, we pay attention, and then we get complacent,” said Gerald Parker, who led preparedness efforts at the Health and Human Services Department during the Bush administration. “Over time, the priority of pandemic preparedness has waned.”

    Trying to change the system right now is probably a mistake. The number of cases per day is already trending down, and the main threat now is some sort of second-wave resurgence as we reopen society. Mudding through is probably the best we can do. Any really strategic changes will have to be made with an eye toward future pandemics, not this one.

    Not that I expect anything of consequence to be done in the short term. The political culture only seems to be able to care about one thing at a time, and right now that thing is police violence against minorities.

    • viVI_IViv says:

      Other countries did better.

      I think the problem is that at the moment the US has a dysfunctional political culture: every issue immediately becomes partisan: Trump talks about chloroquine => chloroquine is right-wing, Trump supporters protest lockdowns => lockdowns are left-wing, and so on.
      There is no room for nuance and uncertaintly, government agencies and politicians need to display confidence, either they play the part of the technocratic holy priests of science, or they play the part of the chest-thumping alpha male pack leaders. Nobody can admit that they don’t know or that they have been wrong, because this would create an opening for their political opponents to attack. Hence the bold arrogant incompetence.

    • suntory time says:

      First, whether or not previous presidents wanted their own strategy or not, the current administration did not have a functional strategy when one was needed. This lack of a strategy lies solely on the current government. This was three years into the term, not some first-month catastrophe. How long did they need?

      Second, any national strategy, no matter what it was, needed someone at the top to push a coherent and functional viewpoint. The current administration waffled between multiple approaches, and eventually threw up its hands and told governors to take care of it (while still coaching from the sidelines). Given the fact people are allowed to travel throughout the US without restriction, a purely state-based strategy was never going to work.

      • johan_larson says:

        Precedent, standard procedures, and institutional inertia are real things. If previous presidents had treated the health and security office as something important, and made sure to take its recommendations seriously, and kept its funding stable and on the high side, it is likely Trump would have done the same. They didn’t. He is mostly responsible, sure. But he is not solely responsible.

        • suntory time says:

          I don’t know why it is so hard for Americans to blame the person in charge for things that happen on their watch.
          His administration is absolutely solely responsible for not having an effective strategy. Institutional inertia would have led to him to leave the existing pandemic procedure in place, not led to a remove and replace with something worse or not yet implemented.

          • cassander says:

            (A) having a plan is not the same thing as having the ability to implement it, and there was no ability in the US to have nationwide pandemic response

            (B) Even if there had been a plan, if trump had tried to do anything sooner, he’d have been condemned as fear monger trying to make himself dictator.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            The US policy response, while deserving of strong criticism, is pretty close to the average Western government response.

        • albatross11 says:

          +1

          The job of the president and congress is to make sure the federal government is prepared for various forseeable crises. (Once the crisis is happening, the people at the top usually can’t do much good, and often mainly get in the way of effective responses.) Neither Trump nor Obama ensured that the CDC, FEMA, etc, would be prepared for this particular kind of forseeable crisis, nor did the congress, because our federal political system is dysfunctional and inept. The system is broken, and the kind of people we elect to positions of power are overwhelmingly not remotely up to the job of fixing or routing around it.

          The federal response to every major disaster I can think of has been somewhere between not so great and abysmal. The response to 9/11 was to pour trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives down a sewer for no benefit, killing a million or so foreigners in the process and also making the US a much less free but probably no safer country.

          Trump is, as far as I can tell, uniquely inept, but ineptitude or at least inability to overcome the broken system seems to be a constant. This bodes ill for my country, the country my kids and hopefully eventual grandkids will probably grow up in. I wish I knew how to fix it.

          • cassander says:

            Neither Trump nor Obama ensured that the CDC, FEMA, etc, would be prepared for this particular kind of forseeable crisis,

            True, but frankly, the CDC and FEMA didn’t care much about it either.

            The response to 9/11 was to pour trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives down a sewer for no benefit, killing a million or so foreigners in the process and also making the US a much less free but probably no safer country.

            (A) throwing money at problems is the american way.

            (B) nothing like a million foreigners died because of iraq and afghnistan. And the iraqis, at least, were freed from one of the nastier dictators of the late 20th century while their per capita GDP has more than doubled, despite low oil prices. That ought to count for something.

            (C) outside of the abomination that is the TSA, how are we meaningfully less free?

            Trump is, as far as I can tell, uniquely inept, but ineptitude or at least

            Was obama uniquely inept? Because it seems the two of them did more or less the same thing, albeit in very different styles.

            inability to overcome the broken system seems to be a constant.

            Hence the need to return more power to the states, as they are far more accountable than the feds.

          • Eric T says:

            (B) nothing like a million foreigners died because of iraq and afghnistan. And the iraqis, at least, were freed from one of the nastier dictators of the late 20th century while their per capita GDP has more than doubled, despite low oil prices. That ought to count for something.

            1. Some studies put causaulties of the Iraq War alone over 1,000,000 and easily over 100,000 in afghanistan so I don’t think nowhere close is accurate.

            2. Yeah but I mean then they got ISIS and civil war so unclear how much of an upgrade that was.

          • cassander says:

            Eric T says:
            June 13, 2020 at 2:29 pm ~new~

            1. Some studies put causaulties of the Iraq War alone over 1,000,000 and easily over 100,000 in afghanistan so I don’t think nowhere close is accurate.

            Yes, and they’re nonsense. the death toll in iraq was about 100,000 from 2003-10, not counting the lives saved by the end of Saddam’s reign of terror.

            2. Yeah but I mean then they got ISIS and civil war so unclear how much of an upgrade that was.

            they “got isis” because obama pulled our of iraq then poured gasoline all of syria, neither of which can be attributed to to bush administration’s response to 9/11.

          • cassander says:

            @Eric T says:

            I reported my previous comment, please delete it, I forgot to delete the tilde new tilde, and it won’t let me edit things.

            1. Some studies put causaulties of the Iraq War alone over 1,000,000 and easily over 100,000 in afghanistan so I don’t think nowhere close is accurate.

            Yes, and they’re nonsense. the death toll in iraq was about 100,000 from 2003-10, not counting the lives saved by the end of Saddam’s reign of terror.

            2. Yeah but I mean then they got ISIS and civil war so unclear how much of an upgrade that was.

            they “got isis” because obama pulled our of iraq then poured gasoline all of syria, neither of which can be attributed to to bush administration’s response to 9/11.

          • Eric T says:

            Yes, and they’re nonsense. the death toll in iraq was about 100,000 from 2003-10, not counting the lives saved by the end of Saddam’s reign of terror.

            I mean, the Lancet Surveys (which seemed pretty thorough) thought they were 650,000. Where are you getting 100,000 from?

          • cassander says:

            @Eric T says:

            I mean, the Lancet Surveys (which seemed pretty thorough) thought they were 650,000. Where are you getting 100,000 from?

            ~100k is the figure from the iraq body count project. the Lancet study was heavily criticized at the time, and doesn’t look better in hindsight.

    • keaswaran says:

      I don’t think it’s helpful to say “the number of cases per day is trending down”. I think it might still be true when you aggregate all cases at the national level. But that’s just because New York, New Jersey, and Illinois still make up some of the largest caseloads and they (along with the rest of the northeast) are trending down. 21 states are trending upwards (some of which had a month or so of trending down in April, others of which have been steady or rising the whole time). Even with summer weather helping everyone do things outside.

      https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html#states

  37. a real dog says:

    How much profanity do you use in conversation, and why? How does profanity use affect your opinion of a person?

    Obviously you want to avoid it in more formal contexts, but suppose a relaxed conversation with friends. I’ve noticed (purely anecdata) that intelligent people tend to form two clusters:
    A) do not use vulgar words at all, or only if really angry; view people using them as uncultured barbarians; heavily correlated with conscientousness, in the OCEAN model
    B) use vulgar words for emphasis with wild abandon; treat it as signal for honesty and unfiltered speech, in themselves and others; heavily correlated with openness to experience, in the OCEAN model

    I’d expect SSC to lean heavily towards A) due to the conscientousness angle. I’d expect the red tribe-aligned posters to lean towards B), once you’re into breaking taboos you usually go all the way. Also, adjacency to blue-collar culture. Another factor: swearing is culturally coded as masculine, which signals a bunch of things depending on your gender.

    • Belisaurus Rex says:

      What’s makes you think conservatives/red tribers are the ones breaking taboo?

      I would expect blue check marks to swear more than Bible thumping flyovers, but maybe I misunderstand your point.

      • a real dog says:

        I noticed that red tribers vocal on the internet are mostly the ones who like to stir shit up and/or call things as they are, politeness be damned.

        I guess this applies to minority opinions in general – if saying what you think results in dogpiling, only those who enjoy the dogpile will raise their voices.

        • Gerry Quinn says:

          That seems orthogonal to swearing. If you like getting dog-piled, you probably consider yourself to be winning when the mob swear at you. Using language that is a little pompous and flowery, but objectively civil, can help stimulate this.

          As for swearing itself, for me it usually depends on whether the people I am with do, though in no case do I do it a lot.

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      I curse some– sometimes because I’m angry and sometimes for emphasis.

      One of my friends mentioned there were people who find him hard to take. I find him to be easy company, so I asked him what was going on, and he said that one of the reasons was the amount of cursing he did. I hadn’t noticed he was doing it at all.

    • Eric T says:

      I swear an above average amount. More on social media than in real life, but that’s because my real-life interactions are almost entirely professional.

      I don’t think I think that swearing has any signal of a person’s intelligence or openness. I certainly haven’t noticed any correlations.

      • a real dog says:

        I think it’s a barber pole thing, actually. In my neck of the woods, the stereotypical dumb underclass (which may or may not actually be dumb) swears a lot, the “normies” avoid swearing to differentiate themselves, and people who feel either safe about their social status or consider it a dumb game do whatever their personal taste dictates, resulting in the bimodal distibution mentioned.

        I certainly brought a bias against people who swear from my low-middle-class family home, which was violently shattered when meeting people from other backgrounds.

        I think the openness correlation is true because people who will be interested in trying a new thing (whether it’s foreign travel or this weird new drug) tend to swear a lot more. Perhaps it’s a nurture sheltered vs street-smart thing? Then again, that also probably affects your openness.

        • Tarpitz says:

          In the UK, I’d say an aversion to swearing codes religious*, lower middle class or both, and that the remainder of the populace swear significantly more on average than their US counterparts. Very old people of any background might have an aversion to swearing (or to women swearing, or to swearing in front of women) but that generation is dying off. I don’t think personality types come into it much.

          *And of course note that this is a far smaller category than in the US.

    • Fitzroy says:

      I suppose preferentially I’d be in category B – words only have the power we choose to give them and creative and byzantine swearing is a joyful art (for the very best examples of which I suggest watching Peter Capaldi’s character, Malcolm Tucker, in “The Thick of It”).

      I am, however, capable of reading the room and knowing when to pretend to be category A.

    • SamChevre says:

      I almost never use profanity, and prefer environments where it is rare.

      That is mostly because I grew up in an environment where both profanity and swearing were very taboo, but it also reflects a preference for low-drama, low-conflict environments.

      I don’t think of “use of profanity” as breaking along red/blue lines–partly because most strongly-practicing Christians are fairly red tribe, and also very careful to avoid profanity.

    • Aftagley says:

      I learn towards B) – habit I picked up in the military and haven’t been able to shake.

      That being said, I don’t think swearing reflects a lack of culture or conscientiousness. I actually don’t see swears being all that different from non-swears. If two guys stub their toe on a table and one says, “This friggen thing!” and the other says “This F*cking thing!” I see that as being completely the same. It’s the same emotion, it’s the same intent, just differs on what particular syllables they were trained to release when frustrated.

      • CatCube says:

        I’m in the same boat. I really try not to at work, and especially around my boss, but I slip up a lot. He’s never said anything, but a coworker who’s known him for decades has said he’s extremely religious and really doesn’t like it. I’ve slipped up sometimes and he’s never said anything.

        He also was willing to hire me out of the military, and just supported my promotion to GS-12.

    • Eugene Dawn says:

      Very blue tribe, I swear a ton, though I can switch pretty easily; I never swear around kids or my family for instance.

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      I would say A, but when I do it’s not out of anger but either for humor or for emphasis.

    • AG says:

      C) Entirely context based. Or you could say that one code-switches depending on if the people around them are A) or B)

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      I know people who don’t listen until I swear.

      I try not to swear so I really dislike this.

      • Gerry Quinn says:

        That’s a use of it certainly, if you don’t do it much. If you do it all the time, it won’t have any effect.

    • Randy M says:

      If the situation calls for it, probably under my breath. Or if it is particularly humorous, but usually that’s only the case because it’s out of character, like cursing out a video game character for some minor inconvenience.
      Typical day, no swears, either of the blasmphemous, scalogical, or profane varieties.

    • Nick says:

      I’d like to say I don’t swear much these days, but I’m responsible for 20% of the f-bombs in this thread, so.

    • Trofim_Lysenko says:

      I used to swear extremely little, then I joined the Army and after five years I was using those fucking words as fucking punctuation. Little shits got fucking everywhere. Especially fuck. Verb, Noun, Adjective, intensifier….incredibly fucking versatile. Then I realized that swearing *that* frequently A) was offputting to most people outside that environment, B) diluted the impact of profanity *as* an intensifier. So now I try not to swear too much except for humour or when genuinely communicating intense emotion.

      My reaction to it in others depends a lot on social context and my assessment of intent.

    • Plumber says:

      @a real dog says:

      “….Also, adjacency to blue-collar culture….”

      I use curse-words/swears a lot and I didn’t used to, and I can pin point when I changed: in the last year of the 20th century I was a newly indentured apprentice plumber not yet 33 years old that looked even younger thanks to spending most of my 20’s out of the sun, and I was told by one of the journeymen ” Kid, you don’t curse enough. We’re going to teach you to curse!”, and over the next few miserable years they did and unfortunately the habit remains.

    • keaswaran says:

      I’m very much like A. I basically don’t swear, not because I control it, but because I never really learned how to do it, so it just doesn’t come naturally to me. If I stub my toe, I just have some louder and longer variant of “OWWWW/AUGHH”.

      I don’t view people who swear as “uncultured barbarians” though, as they say, I just “pardon their French”, as a form of language that I slightly understand, but just don’t naturally produce myself.

    • Rebecca Friedman says:

      A) very solidly. I wouldn’t quite say that people who swear a lot are uncultured barbarians, that’s going a bit far, but they make me uncomfortable and I don’t want to be around them (at least not when they’re swearing).

      I expect I am closer to blue tribe than red, but don’t really fit in in either.

    • Fahundo says:

      How do the A people here react to the way swearing is handled in TV shows?

      In my opinion TV shows often feel really fake, because the amount of swearing or the types of swears allowed is always toned down compared to what I expect to hear when real people talk to each other. (They also feel fake for other reasons, but let’s focus on this.)

      Have you noticed anything similar?

      • Randy M says:

        I don’t know. I know there are some people who speak, as Tom Wolfe coined it in I am Charlotte Simmons, Fuck Patois, but a hear a swear word once or twice a day at most. So it definitely depends on the context. If it’s an action show or something involving teens or twenty-somethings hanging out, yeah, there’s probably 10% of the cursing.

      • Rebecca Friedman says:

        I don’t watch TV. If I do, I flinch every time someone swears, and unless the show is absolutely amazing I stop watching in short order. (But there are other reasons for that; swearing bothers me but it certainly isn’t the only, or even main, reason I don’t watch TV.) Or I watch anime, which has all swearing conveniently in a foreign language; as long as there isn’t real anger/hostility in the tone that doesn’t bother me. (My fondness for foreign languages counterbalances it.)

        So judging on my extremely limited sample, TV shows strike me as having much too much swearing for my comfort, but it doesn’t make them feel fake; a lot of subcultures have too much swearing for my comfort, the TV shows just belong to them, not to mine.

        (It certainly doesn’t feel fake in terms of too little swearing, but I would not expect to notice if it was. A lot more swearing and I wouldn’t watch no matter how good it was, but I’m not sure that matters, I’m not remotely their target demographic.)

    • How much profanity do you use in conversation, and why?

      Very nearly none. An occasional “damn” or “goddamnit,” but that isn’t usually in conversation.

      My wife claims that when I first got a video game, one of the early tank games some forty years ago, she heard more cursing from me than all of our previous interactions — that was before we were married.

      How does profanity use affect your opinion of a person?

      Negatively, but not by a lot. I have come to realize that quite a lot of people use as punctuation terms I see as far outside the bounds of civil conversation.

      So the first half of your A, but not the second.

    • Lord Nelson says:

      I’m not sure red vs blue is the right divide here. I would go with religious upbringing vs non-religious upbringing.

      If I had to choose, I lean towards A. I’m a lifelong Christian who grew up in the middle of the Bible belt, where anything stronger than “crap” was not allowed. As an adult, there are some words I still refuse to say for religious reasons, and other words that I will use for emphasis when needed. I try not to swear in anger at other people (religious reasons, plus it tends to escalate conversations), but will gladly swear to let off steam if I’m angry at myself.

      Other people cussing doesn’t bother me as long as it’s not excessive. When I lived in Philly, occasionally I would hear people yelling profanities on the street. If you’re screaming right below my window at 2 am and every third word is “fuck”, I don’t have a very high opinion of you.

      Another factor: swearing is culturally coded as masculine, which signals a bunch of things depending on your gender.

      Is it? Perhaps swearing in anger is coded as masculine, but my female friends call each other “bitch” all the time. It seems like it’s evolved into a term of endearment among certain women.

      • I’m not sure red vs blue is the right divide here. I would go with religious upbringing vs non-religious upbringing.

        My first conversation with either parent about religion was when I was about ten. I told my father that I had concluded that it was more likely than not that God did not exist. He told me that was his view as well.

        I use very nearly no profanity.

    • b_jonas says:

      I swear occasionally. I do so in two contexts: quick interjections just as I realize something bad, whether it’s a mistake that I’ve made or a circumstance that I have to face; and swearing used for emphasis when I’m angry about something and communicating that anger. I’m a stereotypical nerd who communicates more in writing on the internet than in person, so you’ll find these swearwords both in speech and writing. I can also swear when I’m not in a conversation but in outbursts talking to myself, whether speaking out loud or silently. In fact, that happens more, because I try to limit profanity in conversations because many listeners don’t like them, but also because they let me notice anger, and delaying my anger and calming down when I’m in a conversation is important regardless of profanity. I am male.

  38. leadbelly says:

    Just so everyone knows Michael Levin is an anti-gay white nationalist

  39. Belisaurus Rex says:

    Does it even make sense to fact check questions or statements of opinion? Are these things that can even have a true/false value? (Assuming the person believes their own opinion…)

    And is the reason why censorship of these things has been increasing just because the news is becoming much less fact based (rise in editorializing, not suggesting that the news gets the facts wrong), so questions and opinions start looking more like the news? There’s that annoying trend to make article titles questions.

    • episcience says:

      I think so. For an opinion to be worth widely publicizing it needs to be able to communicate something to the average reader/viewer/consumer. If it is based on false or misleadingly incomplete facts, the opinion isn’t talking about the same world as a the reader (or, worse, convinces the reader that the incorrect facts that ground the opinion are correct).

      So you could design a useful fact checking process which distinguishes between the following statements:
      – “I believe that all demons seduce young women, so demons should be hunted.”
      – “7 out of 10 demon sightings in the last year involved the seduction of underage women, so an aggressive policy of demon extermination is recommended.”

      The key conclusion of the opinions are the same, but you could argue that couching the background facts in the frame of a belief (that demons seduce women) does no service to the conclusion the opinion is trying to argue (that we should hunt demons). Fact-checking the background assumptions that frame the opinion in question can be useful, depending on the context and purpose of the opinion.

      • Belisaurus Rex says:

        I have definitely heard that being able to consider an opinion or perspective without regards to whether it is true or not is a mark of privilege. I think it is a baseline for reasoned communication, but then maybe both are true.

    • Aftagley says:

      In addition to what episcience says about the background information to the reader, good and reputable opinion outlets should also fact-check the expected outcomes of the person’s proposed solution. If someone is proposing something that likely will have no positive effect, an outlet should push back on the opinion.

      For example, if your problem is that a town keeps flooding, it would be weird for a paper to run an opinion piece about how we should all make blood sacrifices to flood-zor, the god of too much water. Sure, it can be his opinion that it would help, but if there’s no evidence that flood-zor could help, then there’s no reason to run an opinion piece on it. In addition to mis-informing the public, you run the risk of crowding out actual solutions from the public consciousness.

      That’s why opinion pieces are so difficult. Arguably the standard of facts has to (or at least should be) be higher than normal reporting, because they are so dependent on facts for the final conclusions.

      • Aftagley says:

        This was actually going to be a part of my original answer, but I cut it to avoid a ramble.

        It works when there is a problem with several likely outcomes and you want to convince someone that your likely outcome is this best. Like, let’s go back to the flooding example. Lets say the town arrives at three possible solutions:

        1. Do nothing, let the low-lying areas continue to flood.
        2. Invest in a massive breakwater system and dramatically improve the drainwater network to reduce the impact of flooding.
        3. Issue public grants to let people either modify their houses to better survive flooding or help them move.

        All of these are “factually correct” solutions, but it’s really hard to say which one is “best.” To use your words, there is no agree-upon method of arriving at the perfect solution, instead we just have workable options. It’s going to come down to value judgement, risk management trade-offs and well, public debate. This is the kind of issue that I would love to read opinion columns on and that I think they’d be helpful.

    • Jake says:

      I think it also makes sense to fact check the inputs to an opinion article. Most opinions aren’t developed in a vacuum, so if I say something like “Chocolate is objectively the best flavor,” and referenced a poll where chocolate won, it’s definitely fair game to question the poll. (this is a really bad example, but you probably can see where I’m going here….didn’t want to include better examples, because that may lead to arguing about the example instead of the premise).

      The other thing I think it makes sense to check in opinion articles is consistency. If I say “Chocolate is objectively the best flavor,” then later in the article advocate for providing free vanilla ice cream for everybody, that doesn’t seem consistent. I think the next stage of GPT-3 type development is going to be developing AIs that can detect where articles are inconsistent, and pointing out, or fixing that. Without something along those lines, I can easily see an internet where GPT-clones spew out articles that have no basis in reality and turn everything into worthless garbage.

      • Fahundo says:

        I can easily see an internet where GPT-clones spew out articles that have no basis in reality and turn everything into worthless garbage.

        At that point AI will truly know what it is to be human

      • Belisaurus Rex says:

        I’m taking Fahundo’s comment to mean that the internet is already there and I agree.

  40. Skeptic says:

    Edited to say it’s a constitutional amendment to repeal ban given the criticism of the post. Edits will be in strikethrough for posterity

    California has once again decided that there are too many Asian Americans on its campuses. They are set to begin reinstating racial discrimination in the UC system as official state law (original in strike) official policy in the state. An amendment has passed the Assembly 58-9 and is widely expected to pass the Senate with > 2/3 majority. It will then appear on the ballot in November and require a simple majority of voters to pass.

    This is not a hypothetical

    My questions to SSC given this passes

    1) What will the delta be in % Asian at Berkeley and UCLA compared to 2020?

    2) What will the median SAT score need to be for Asians to attend Berkeley? UCLA?

    3) What will the median MCAT need to be for Asians to attend UCSF?

    4) For those who agreed that the issue in this country is systemic oppression of minorities, is this the solution?

    • Nick says:

      They are set to begin reinstating racial discrimination in the UC system as official state law.

      Can you please cite your sources?

    • Eric T says:

      Ok this seems very misleading and hyperbolic. The only things I could find are articles saying California is putting out a referendum to vote on repealing Prop 209

      This would allow colleges to consider race during admissions. It is a far cry to go from that to “reinstating racial discrimination in the UC system as official state law.”

      I agree with the idea that Affirmative Action done in the strictest sense probably harms Asian Americans. I think we can quibble over whether it does more Harm than Good, my suspicion in California is that the area is so absurdly liberal and Black people make up such a small amount that it’s probably the case that Prop 209 is fine, arguably even good. But I don’t think “hurts Asians” = “bad policy.” For example, if a law came out in California that hurt each Asian American but helped each Latino American the same amount, would it be Bad? There are more Latino Americans, and they tend to be poorer/worse off so marginal utility says that it’s probably an increase in net happiness.

      I don’t know, as I’ve mentioned below I have some issues with Affirmative Action as a solution to the education gap.

      • Skeptic says:

        I’ll edit to say it wont be official state law yet, it’s a constitutional amendment to remove the ban.

        Although this isn’t a slippery slope, the obvious intention of removing the ban is to explicitly make it state policy

      • cassander says:

        This would allow colleges to consider race during admissions. It is a far cry to go from that to “reinstating racial discrimination in the UC system as official state law.”

        No it isn’t. That’s what it would be in practice.

        But I don’t think “hurts Asians” = “bad policy.”

        But hurts blacks = bad policy is true?

        • Eric T says:

          But hurts blacks = bad policy is true?

          You know I think if you keep being maximally uncharitable to my points I’m going to just start ignoring you.

          I never said ANY policy that hurts blacks is bad policy, I think I specifically outlined a set of policies that have really bad outcomes for them. Pretty much any policy is going to hurt X group and advantage Y group, my argument was that Black Americans have been in the “X” category way more than they’ve been in the “Y” and we should probably correct for that.

          If a policy hurt Black Americans but helped Native Americans more for example I think I’d be cool with it. Hell on purely utilitarian grounds, if a policy hurt each Black American by 1 util or whatever and helped each White American by 1 Util I’d be uncomfortable with said policy but I’d fully concede that it may be a utilitarian policy – though given the marginal nature of utility (ie if you’re already pretty well off you can weather shit well but if you’re at the bottom of society things that make you worse off hurt a lot) that may not be the case.

          My point was explicitly that said historical policies I critiqued did not do that. They hurt Black Americans needlessly without meaningfully helping the rest of the country. Integrated schools didn’t lose quality education just because black people started to go to them.

        • cassander says:

          I never said ANY policy that hurts blacks is bad policy, I think I specifically outlined a set of policies that have really bad outcomes for them.

          You never used those words. you’ve implied it over and over again.

          Pretty much any policy is going to hurt X group and advantage Y group, my argument was that Black Americans have been in the “X” category way more than they’ve been in the “Y” and we should probably correct for that.

          the way to do that is to remove policies that are hurting them, not hurt other people back

          If a policy hurt Black Americans but helped Native Americans more for example I think I’d be 100% cool with it.

          Do you not see how this only generates an endless oppression Olympics, where the key to political power is ever more obsession with grievances against your group, and the damage that will do to the polity?

          They hurt Black Americans needlessly without meaningfully helping the rest of the country.

          Funny, that’s exactly how I’d describe affirmative action and Asians, hurts them to no purpose.

          • Eric T says:

            the way to do that is to remove policies that are hurting them, not hurt other people back

            Find me an actual meaningful policy that substantially benefits one large group of americans without hurting another large group of americans and I’ll openly and vicariously advocate for it.

          • cassander says:

            Libertarianism. You can’t hurt people if you do nothing. Welcome to the club! You can pick up your gadsen flag over there.

          • Eric T says:

            Libertarianism. You can’t hurt people if you do nothing. Welcome to the club! You can pick up your gadsen flag over there

            I asked for a specific meaningful policy that substantially benefits a group not a vague appeal to an ideology but sure.

            Libertrianism can contribute to people being harmed. If there is an underclass that needs a degree of government protection, weakening government will hurt them. It may help more people but don’t pretend your ideology is so amazing there are no trade-offs.

          • cassander says:

            @Eric T says:

            Libertrianism can contribute to people being harmed. If there is an underclass that needs a degree of government protection, weakening government will hurt them.

            Any underclass, particularly in a democratic society, is far more likely to be oppressed by the government than helped by it. In fact, one might even go so far as to say that if you’re being helped above and beyond that of other people you’re not an underclass by definition.

            It may help more people but don’t pretend your ideology is so amazing there are no trade-offs.

            I’m not a libertarian, but you might take the same advice. I’ve asked you numerous times to address the long term damage that identity politics is doing, and you keep dodging the question.

          • Eric T says:

            Any underclass, particularly in a democratic society, is far more likely to be oppressed by the government than helped by it. In fact, one might even go so far as to say that if you’re being helped above and beyond that of other people you’re not an underclass by definition.

            I mean that’s fair but that isn’t always true. Weaker governments sometimes just are bad at stopping public violence. The recent anti-immigration riots across South Africa come to mind as a recent example.

            I’m not a libertarian, but you might take the same advice. I’ve asked you numerous times to address the long term damage that identity politics is doing, and you keep dodging the question.

            I feel like I’ve actually been fairly consistent here:
            A. I’ve openly admitted several of the solutions proposed by SJ types are deeply flawed.
            B. I’ve admitted a suspicion that identity politics will hurt certain racial groups at the expense of others
            and C.
            I’ve admitted that solutions to the issue are liable to be very complicated and messy. I didn’t explicitly say messy=some people will be harmed but I mean sure.

            All of this to say I don’t think I ever once implied there wouldn’t be tradeoffs, see my response to Two McMillion where I fully admit my suspicion Whites would be worse off by a bit:

            If American society were exactly the same except for the absence of systemic racism, would the average white person have an easier or a more difficult life?

            I have no idea really! My intuition is “slightly worse” my hope is “practically the same”

            Now obviously I hope that isn’t the case but hope=/= belief on what will actually happen.

            Also I found some of your comments on identity politics to be engaging with me in bad faith, which is why I haven’t answered them. In my response to your classism point I outlined my frustration about how I included an entire section on why you can’t just say “all this history devolves into modern classism” and how it didn’t seem like you were engaging with that.

            What did you want me to do, copy paste that section of my original post?

          • souleater says:

            @Eric T

            Find me an actual meaningful policy that substantially benefits one large group of americans without hurting another large group of americans and I’ll openly and vicariously advocate for it.

            This is a fascinating comment to me, because it shines a light on what might be a major piece of fundamental philosophical disagreement we have. The idea of the government picking winners and losers deeply, deeply bothers me. Or the idea of the government using its power to bring up one citizen at another citizen’s expense.

            It seems to me that your perspective is that the government inherently picks winners and losers, and that that’s okay as long as its done in a way that maximizes happiness. My perspective (although I might have to refine this as I think about it) is that that would be a form of artificial injustice, and that natural injustice, caused by history, culture, genetics, nature, the invisible hand, or bad luck is inherently more moral/ethical than artificial injustice caused by government.

            I don’t want to derail your conversation with cassander, but I would be really interested to explore this in a top level post one day when you’re less busy. I know you’re already involved like… 12 separate conversations on this thread

          • cassander says:

            @souleater

            “First, do no harm.” is a good rule of thumb in a lot of situations.

            @Eric T says:

            I mean that’s fair but that isn’t always true. Weaker governments sometimes just are bad at stopping public violence. The recent anti-immigration riots across South Africa come to mind as a recent example.

            Given your support for the protests, this is a somewhat ironic statement. But the US is not at any risk of that sort of state weakness, so bringing it up is rather besides the point.

            A. I’ve openly admitted several of the solutions proposed by SJ types are deeply flawed.
            B. I’ve admitted a suspicion that identity politics will hurt certain racial groups at the expense of others
            and C.
            I’ve admitted that solutions to the issue are liable to be very complicated and messy. I didn’t explicitly say messy=some people will be harmed but I mean sure.

            None of these addresses my concern, which is that identity politics is toxic and divisive and is eating our political seed corn. For a polity to function, its members have to think at some level that while they might disagree with one another, they’re all fundamentally on the same team. Racial politics undermines that notion. In the 70s, when the country was basically 90% white and 10% black, we could get along with “Everyone is equal under law now…and we’re going to throw some bones towards the blacks because we were shitty to them.” but as the country has gotten more diverse, that unprincipled exception to universal equality has gotten bigger and more glaring and more problematic. If you want a racially diverse america, you need racially blind policies more than ever, otherwise everything will degenerate into a racial spoils system.

            Also I found some of your comments on identity politics to be engaging with me in bad faith, which is why I haven’t answered them. In my response to your classism point I outlined my frustration about how I included an entire section on why you can’t just say “all this history devolves into modern classism” and how it didn’t seem like you were engaging with that.

            I don’t recall exactly where that was. There have been a lot of comments. so if you’d like to point to where you feel I didn’t respond, I’d be happy to do so.

          • Eric T says:

            But the US is not at any risk of that sort of state weakness, so bringing it up is rather besides the point

            Got it in 1. That’s why I don’t think its Ironic. I thought Eisenhower stepping in to enforce Brown v. Board was Good for example.

            None of these addresses my concern, which is…

            That’s very fair, but what you accused me of was being unwilling to argue my point of view contained trade-offs, when I clearly did not make that clear. The fact that I don’t believe in your specific trade-off is a debatable point but not a sign of me not, as you put it “not taking my own advice”

            As for where I said my bit on classism, in my last response to you in our subthread on Part 2 of my post I said this:

            Even your invocation of Classism is pre-empted in my post: I acknowledge that race and class are tied up together, but if you’re not even going to deal with the things I said make it the reason we have to think about all of this different then I don’t know why you expect me to debate you?

            And I mean it. You bring up good points how Part 2 proves that classism is a major element, if not the major element, of the historical racism problem. But what’s frustrating to me is that I myself concede that point in part 2 but argue the biases we still have as a society will mean any attempt to make a “race-blind” policy will end on them not actually being “race-blind” but captured by biases.

            You may not agree with that, but if you’re not going to tackle why I think race-blind policies just won’t work while you argue the answer to the problems I raise in my post are race-blind policies than I genuinely don’t know how you expect me to continue a debate with you.

          • cassander says:

            @Eric T says:

            Got it in 1. That’s why I don’t think its Ironic. I thought Eisenhower stepping in to enforce Brown v. Board was Good for example.

            I don’t see how this follows, exactly. Not being snarky, I just don’t see what this has to do with the power of the state.

            None of these addresses my concern, which is…

            That’s very fair, but what you accused me of was being unwilling to argue my point of view contained trade-offs,

            I don’t think that was my point. My intent was to point out that you have a double standard and aren’t balancing trade offs fairly. I can’t imagine what sort of theory of justice makes it fair to blacks to take up admission slots that would otherwise go to asians, for example, but that is the likely effect of repealing prop 209.

            My point was also that if you take your argument seriously about the legacy of racism being different from actual current racism, then there’s no need to have racialized solutions to the problem. If the problem isn’t that people are discriminating against blacks in loans, blacks are just actually worse credit risks because they’re poorer, programs that help low income people with credit that ignore race will not just help them, but help them disproportionately. (i’ll come back your address of race blind policies in a minute)

            And I mean it. You bring up good points how Part 2 proves that classism is a major element, if not the major element, of the historical racism problem.

            I’m not sure exactly what you mean by classism here.

            But what’s frustrating to me is that I myself concede that point in part 2 but argue the biases we still have as a society will mean any attempt to make a “race-blind” policy will end on them not actually being “race-blind” but captured by biases.

            I believe you’re still claiming that rejecting black applicants for loans at higher rates than whites is “bias”, even if blacks are worse credit risks. And I can’t accept that, and don’t find it acceptable as an answer to why race blind policies won’t work. And do you not see the problem of this logic? that it allows anything other than 100% equality of outcomes between all groups as proof of bias that needs to be fought?

            If you’re not asserting that, I’d appreciate a fuller explanation of how you expect that race neutral policies will be captured.

            And fwiw, you still haven’t touched on the toxic nature of identity politics.

          • Eric T says:

            I don’t think that was my point. My intent was to point out that you have a double standard and aren’t balancing trade offs fairly. I can’t imagine what sort of theory of justice makes it fair to blacks to take up admission slots that would otherwise go to asians, for example, but that is the likely effect of repealing prop 209.

            The one that says that 150 years of slavery is probably worse than what this country did to asian people, or at the very least higher-impact?
            Like Ideally no I wouldn’t want trade-offs to exist, but my argument is:
            A. They Have to Exist
            B. Not doing Anything still causes tradeoffs, just in the other direction. I’m not a big believer in an Action/Inaction distinction.

            My point was also that if you take your argument seriously about the legacy of racism being different from actual current racism, then there’s no need to have racialized solutions to the problem.

            So I think it my be best if I restate my point in full:
            There is an overall pervasive system of racism that unfairly biases minorities. Some people refered to this as a Molochian system, and I agree – it certainly has been constructed as a “death by 1000 papercuts” type of thing as someone posited below. But the whole point of part 3 was to prove that this kind of thinking hasn’t gone completely away and the biases still exist. This means that 1) its inaccurate to say that just because one of the major issues with the Molochian system is that minorities have been made poor it is the ONLY issue and thus solving based on class would fix it, and 2) because these biases are still pervasive in modern society any attempt to fix along “colorblind” lines won’t be truly colorblind.

            Take the example of promotion: if it is the case (and you may argue it is not) that minorities aren’t promoted regardless of job performance, and that contributes to their poverty – than simply making minorities less poor doesn’t fully solve the problem. They’re still less likely to get promoted – and if anything all we’ve done is confirm our biases “See we helped the minorities and they still aren’t getting promoted! Can’t be racism then.”

            I believe you’re still claiming that rejecting black applicants for loans at higher rates than whites is “bias”, even if blacks are worse credit risks. And I can’t accept that, and don’t find it acceptable as an answer to why race blind policies won’t work. And do you not see the problem of this logic? that it allows anything other than 100% equality of outcomes between all groups as proof of bias that needs to be fought?

            I mean its a systemic bias and not an invalid rational one for the individual to hold. I believe plenty of people have explained this to you better than I think I can. Not to be a jerk or anything but I can’t continue this discussion because I’ve presented this point several different ways, as have other people and it really seems like its not getting through so perhaps we’re better off leaving it for now.

            As for why demanding race-blind solutions won’t solve: consider the following. Imagine if we instituted policies that helped poverty, but for some reason did not solve increased crime rates among minorities (I know you probably think these things are inexorably linked – I do too but just go with me here). The issue would be that the perception that Black People are criminals would probably still influence people. The Bank Teller might deny a loan because he thinks the Black man is more likely to be a criminal. Or perhaps more charitably to said teller, the default rate of African Americans may still be higher because crime hurts investment opportunities, damages family units, and lowers property value.

            So the answer is really that to make headway on this issue we have to be cognizant of the myraid different ways races are disadvantaged – and they vary from race to race. Native Americans probably have a slightly different set of needs than African Americans do, as do White Americans, Asian American, Jewish Americans etc.

            My argument is this: I’ve presented several studies and examples showing why both Racists and racists have influence over policy and day-to-day life. Maybe not tremendous influence, but influence all the same. So the attempt to be race-blind is, in my humble opinion, doomed from the start. If you don’t think your ship is off-course than it doesn’t matter if it actually is: you won’t correct it because you believe you have no reason to. Thus I think confronting and accepting our biases and working to solve for them will be key to attaining justice.

            And fwiw, you still haven’t touched on the toxic nature of identity politics.

            1. As I said ALL the way at the beginning – I am trying to avoid making this a solutions or policy focused discussion, and am instead trying to explain why there is a racism issue. I only included the points on classism and race-blind solutions because I believed discussing the issue basically impossible without them. It shouldn’t surprise you that given that I haven’t really be discussing whether certain SJ policy proposals are toxic.

            2. I think again some of your arguments aren’t operating in good faith, or at least not connecting with me. Consider how you opened the discussion on Identity Politics supposed “toxicity”

            My answer is that a lot of political and ideological infrastructure that got built up around race, and that stuff doesn’t just vanish overnight. Thus, whatever your issue is, it’s easier to get attention if you make it about race

            Like the idea that we’re having conversations about race because it’s easier isn’t just something that I strongly disagree with, its something I don’t know how to argue with because it seems so obviously not true. Race is a tricky, messy, complicated topic and it would be a hell of a lot easier for me to just come in here and say “I think more welfare is good”

            Furthermore I just disagree with some of your basic premises, that this will “spill out of control and everything will become about racial issues” seems outright hyperbolic to me. We’re discussing racism because we think racism both happened and is still happening and discussing it is key to fixing it.

            Furthermore, again I find this discussion difficult to have in the abstract. What exactly about identity politics do you find toxic? Is it just discussing that there is a race problem? I don’t think any part of my post, which seeks to do just that, was toxic.

            Is it the proposed solutions? Well if so, as I already said I’m not interested in discussing those at this moment. There are dozens of proposed solutions some more racialized than others, and until I make Effort Post 2: Electric Boogaloo I think any discussion about them will be lacking context and evidence.

          • Tatterdemalion says:

            Find me an actual meaningful policy that substantially benefits one large group of americans without hurting another large group of americans and I’ll openly and vicariously advocate for it.

            Off the top of my head, with the – important – proviso that I’m explicitly excluding “will make people angry because a policy they don’t like has been adopted, but won’t a) materially impact their life in any way, or b) subject them to provocations they couldn’t very easily ignore” from “hurt”:

            :- State funded contraception and (if you define “person” by “mind”, which I think you should) first and second trimester abortion, with easy access to it. Help the direct recipients, and also save the taxpayer money.
            :- Gay marriage. Has virtually no effect on anyone who isn’t a) gay and b) married.
            :-Let trans people serve in the military. Won’t help many people much, but won’t harm anyone.
            :- Almost, but probably not quite, marijuana legalisation, perhaps? I guess that the set of people who will be hurt by legal marijuana users (including themselves) acting antisocially, but wouldn’t have been otherwise, will probably be pretty small, but just about large enough that it does need to be a (small) part of the discussion.
            :- Almost certainly a variety of dull administrative/executive changes – “instead of using this structure or procedure for this function of the state, we could use that one instead”. The problem here is a) identifying them is much harder than on ideological questions, and b) convincing people that you have done so.

            There are pareto-improvements possible in politics; the common factors in most of them (apart from the last, important but hard-to-identify category) are that they a) involve removing an arbitrary restriction imposed for norm-based rather than utilitarian reasons, and b) are supported by the left and opposed by the right (although in 20 years time it wouldn’t surprise me if this had changed).

          • cassander says:

            Eric T says:

            The one that says that 150 years of slavery is probably worse than what this country did to asian people, or at the very least higher-impact?

            it was definitely higher impact. it also ended 160 years ago. Slavery is not an eternal excuse.

            B. Not doing Anything still causes tradeoffs, just in the other direction. I’m not a big believer in an Action/Inaction distinction.

            then you should be thanking me for not punching you in the face!

            More seriously, though, the results of acting are usually going to be more complicated than not acting, so even if you adopt the position that there is no moral difference between the two, you should be less certain of action than not-action, because the consequences are less predictable.

            But the whole point of part 3 was to prove that this kind of thinking hasn’t gone completely away and the biases still exist.

            You’re still treating difference of treatment as “bias” not “accurate response to reality.” You might as well argue that tailors are biased against fat people because they charge more for larger sizes.

            This means that 1) its inaccurate to say that just because one of the major issues with the Molochian system is that minorities have been made poor it is the ONLY issue and thus solving based on class would fix it, and 2) because these biases are still pervasive in modern society any attempt to fix along “colorblind” lines won’t be truly colorblind.,

            these feel like much the same point to me. And, frankly, I reject the notion that racism in the sense of unwarranted prejudice against black people, is a substantial problem facing black people today. there has never been a society as dedicated to hunting down and extirpating racism as the modern US.

            I mean its a systemic bias and not an invalid rational one for the individual to hold. I believe plenty of people have explained this to you better than I think I can.

            You can’t just slap systematic in front of a word and change its meaning. we have the actuarial tables, and charging higher credit risks more isn’t bias. the fact that you can’t understand this leads me to despair for the future.

            The issue would be that the perception that Black People are criminals would probably still influence people. The Bank Teller might deny a loan because he thinks the Black man is more likely to be a criminal.

            yes, because he IS more likely to be criminal! You can’t condemn people for noticing reality! You’re asking people to bury their heads in the sand and ignore their lying eyes. do you not see how that is problematic?

            My argument is this: I’ve presented several studies and examples showing why both Racists and racists have influence over policy and day-to-day life.

            and I pointed out how those claims are, at best, deeply problematic, particularly your example of supposedly racist bankers. More to the point, though, if you want people to start ignoring race, you can’t spend all day shouting about how important race is. that’s not how people work

            Like the idea that we’re having conversations about race because it’s easier isn’t just something that I strongly disagree with, its something I don’t know how to argue with because it seems so obviously not true. Race is a tricky, messy, complicated topic and it would be a hell of a lot easier for me to just come in here and say “I think more welfare is good”

            That “your” was impersonal, not directed at you. it should read “for someone who has a “Thus, whatever a person’s issue is, it’s easier to get attention if that person makes it about race” and objectively, it is.

            Furthermore, again I find this discussion difficult to have in the abstract. What exactly about identity politics do you find toxic? Is it just discussing that there is a race problem? I don’t think any part of my post, which seeks to do just that, was toxic.

            When politics is about interest, it’s much more possible to have give and take and a presumption of good faith. I’m negotiating with someone for a house right now, they want me to pay more money and I want to pay less. Neither one of us thinks the other one is a bad person just because our interests don’t line up. I do not have any stake in an identity as a home buyer, nor they a home seller, and we can eventually come to an agreement. But if you inject identity into this, suddenly the lines harden. all of a sudden, they are not just my opposite, they’re my out group. we’re not two people working out a deal, I’m trying to strike a blow for all home buyers everywhere. Our disagreement becomes moral and fundamental, and thus much harder for resolution. It draws bright lines where compromise used to be possible, and brings in outside forces.

            Identity coalitions are also intrinsically less flexible than interest based coalitions, because there are far more interests than identities. and since identity is psychologically powerful, it tends to suck other issues into it, so instead of, to take a crazy hypothetical, a rational discussion about the best methods of policing, discourse descends into shouting about racists vs. anarchists. It’s hard enough to have rational discussion in politics without identity coming in, once it’s there, rationality is a hopeless dream.

            At its core, identity politics works by raising the salience of tribal distinctions which reduces trust and makes almost everything worse and harder. And that goes double when your stated goal is lowering the salience of tribal distinctions

          • Eric T says:

            Off the top of my head, with the – important – proviso that I’m explicitly excluding “will make people angry because a policy they don’t like has been adopted, but won’t a) materially impact their life in any way, or b) subject them to provocations they couldn’t very easily ignore” from “hurt”:

            Fair enough. Allow me to put on my best conservative hat here:

            :- State funded contraception and first and second trimester abortion, with easy access to it. Help the direct recipients, and also save the taxpayer money.

            Unless of course you think Life begins at conception, in which case you are funding Murder. And I think even if YOU don’t think it does, I think people do, and while I can’t say for certain I think the idea that my government was funding murder factories in my state would cause me a substantial amount of not-easily avoidable stress.

            :- Gay marriage. Has virtually no effect on anyone who isn’t a) gay and b) married.

            This almost certainly harms Religious control over the definitions of Marriage right? Like the state coming in and saying “we get to decide what marriage is now” is not great for the Church.

            :-Let trans people serve in the military. Won’t help many people much, but won’t harm anyone.

            I actually have no response to this one, but I’m not sure it meets my “substantially helpful” criteria.

            :- Almost, but probably not quite, marijuana legalisation, perhaps? I guess that the set of people who will be hurt by legal marijuana users (including themselves) acting antisocially, but wouldn’t have been otherwise, will probably be pretty small, but just about large enough that it does need to be a (small) part of the discussion.

            I think that there’s a compelling argument that increased drug use harms the economy. Not sure if this applies to Marijuana though. Certainly removing one of the most frequent charges of putting people in jail in some areas would hurt Private Prisons though? And isn’t drug enforcement a common way police fight gangs?

            :- Almost certainly a variety of dull administrative/executive changes – “instead of using this structure or procedure for this function of the state, we could use that one instead”. The problem here is a) identifying them is much harder than on ideological questions, and b) convincing people that you have done so.

            Yeah maybe? Again not sure these hit the “substantial benefit” category if they’re not actually moving resources around. If they are moving resources around, then they had to come from somewhere?

          • Eric T says:

            @cassander

            Reading your post I think we have suffered a real breakdown in communications here. From my perspective it seems like you are accusing me of advocating positions I am explicit not only “not advocating” but am actually advocating the opposite of.

            The bank example smacks of this: I have repeatedly said that it’s not the Bank’s fault for discriminating against black people and that I don’t want to force the Bank to not do that now, i want to shift the incentive structures that make that the Bank’s rational choice. You accuse me of denying the truth of the matter because the Black man is actually the worse investment. I feel like I’ve conceded that fact but argued that it shouldn’t be that way (It’s not the mans fault, systems outside of his control, Moloch, etc.)

            I feel like I and others have said this as many ways as I can think of right now, so I will respectfully bow out of this conversation. It is swiftly becoming something akin to what an old debate coach of mine called “two ships passing in the night”

            tbc: I don’t think this is your fault or anything, If anything its a sign I perhaps need to explain my position a bit more clearly.

            ETA: Furthermore I just am not interested in debating with anyone who says this:

            the fact that you can’t understand this leads me to despair for the future.

            about me. I’d hope if you see anything from all of my posts it’s that I’m putting all of my effort into understanding, grappling with, and replying to a variety of different concerns. I don’t think its fair to imply that I’m being obtuse or operating in bad faith.

            I’ll perhaps come back to this discussion another time, but I think I’m out of Spoons (if I’m using the term correctly)

          • cassander says:

            @Tatterdemalion says:

            :-Let trans people serve in the military. Won’t help many people much, but won’t harm anyone.

            I got hung up on by a navy recruiter because I admitted I take prescribed adderall. “let trans people serve” means “don’t kick out people who say I identify as trans” then sure. but if it means “tri-care now covers gender reassignment” there’s definitely a cost associated with that.

          • Fahundo says:

            I got hung up on by a navy recruiter because I admitted I take prescribed adderall.

            Really? My experience with recruiters is that they want you to get in, to the point that they’ll pre-test you for drugs to see if you need to wait a while to go in for the no-shit drug test that will get you kicked out.

          • cassander says:

            @Eric T says:

            The bank example smacks of this: I have repeatedly said that it’s not the Bank’s fault for discriminating against black people and that I don’t want to force the Bank to not do that now, i want to shift the incentive structures that make that the Bank’s rational choice.

            I don’t care who’s fault it is. but you do think that the bank’s behavior is a problem to be solved. I don’t. I agree that it’s unfortunate that black people are worse credit risks but as long as they are the bank is doing what we want it to do, and any solution that doesn’t down to “finding a way to make people better credit risks without” isn’t a solution. And there are plenty of ways to solve that problem that don’t require racial solutions.

            about me. I’d hope if you see anything from all of my posts it’s that I’m putting all of my effort into understanding, grappling with, and replying to a variety of different concerns. I don’t think its fair to imply that I’m being obtuse or operating in bad faith.

            I don’t think you’re doing either. I was despairing for my lack of ability to communicate things I consider important.

          • cassander says:

            @Fahundo says:

            Really? My experience with recruiters is that they want you to get in, to the point that they’ll pre-test you for drugs to see if you need to wait a while to go in for the no-shit drug test that will get you kicked out.

            If I’d agreed to stop taking it, I could have gotten in, but I wasn’t going to do that. And you need a waiver if you’re on any sort of psych meds. Now, depending on the timing, your location, what you’re trying to do, etc., the availability of that waiver can change a lot, but it’s still an issue.

          • Aftagley says:

            “tri-care now covers gender reassignment”

            Ok, are you advocating the Tri-Care cease covering all non-mandatory surgery? I know dozens to hundreds of people who vision corrective surgery in military, should Tri-Care stop paying for those? What about semi-elective cosmetic surgery? Hell, what about braces and orthodontistry?

            All of those will cost (in total) the US taxpayer way more than gender reassignment would and, if you believe that the surgeries are as helpful as the trans community says they are, have less affect on our soldier’s mental and physical well-being.

          • cassander says:

            @Aftagley says:

            Ok, are you advocating the Tri-Care cease covering all non-mandatory surgery? I know dozens to hundreds of people who vision corrective surgery in military, should Tri-Care stop paying for those? What about semi-elective cosmetic surgery? Hell, what about braces and orthodontistry?

            Yeah, I don’t think I’d have a problem with any of that. Tri-care is swallowing up a distressingly large share of the military budget, and something needs to be done. And my baseline recommendation for most questions related to military pay/perks is “abolish it and convert the present expenditure to a base salary boost.”

            All of those will cost (in total) the US taxpayer way more than gender reassignment would and, if you believe that the surgeries are as helpful as the trans community says they are, have less affect on our soldier’s mental and physical well-being.

            Or we could just not accept soldiers that are coming in with a high likelihood of wanting extremely expensive procedures done.

          • Find me an actual meaningful policy that substantially benefits one large group of americans without hurting another large group of americans and I’ll openly and vicariously advocate for it.

            To expand on Cassander’s reply:

            Drug legalization.
            Repeal of the minimum wage law.
            Deregulation of medical drugs
            Replacement of professional licensing by certification.
            Abolition of the draft — but we already managed that one.

            I’m assuming that the number of people actually employed in enforcing any of things I want to repeal isn’t large enough to count as your “large group of Americans.”

            I assume you wouldn’t agree about the minimum wage law because you believe that it helps low skill workers, but if so I think you are mistaken.

          • I’m not a big believer in an Action/Inaction distinction.

            Do you consider yourself a mass murderer?

            It’s hard to avoid that conclusion without that distinction. Your income probably puts you in at least the top tenth of the world’s population and there are people in the bottom tenth whose lives could be saved by prudent expenditure of a fraction of it.

          • Eric T says:

            To expand on Cassander’s reply:

            Drug legalization.

            Again see above: there is evidence that drug use hurts the economy, drug charges are a convenient way to break up gangs, and certainly there would be some reasonably significant amount of people who would try drugs and get addicted that just wouldn’t if we didn’t legalize them.

            To be clear, Legalize All Drugs was like my go-to debate case in College. I’m a big fan of the proposal, but I sincerely doubt it wouldn’t cause a lot of people harms.

            Repeal of the minimum wage law.

            Even if this ended up being good for the average worker in the long run I can think of several classes of workers it would be bad for: namely people working in limited employment areas. I think state minimum wages are probably better policies anyway given how much the cost of living varies but I sincerely doubt there wouldn’t be a class of workers who’s lives don’t get worse if the floor on their wages is removed.

            Like certainly at least in the short-run while the markets adjust and companies figure out pricing points there’s going to be a non-insignificant amount of people who will get their lives basically ruined.

            Deregulation of medical drugs
            Replacement of professional licensing by certification.

            I don’t know enough about these issues to comment I’m afraid 🙁

            Abolition of the draft — but we already managed that one.

            Ooh good one. I have to admit I’m having a hard time countering this one. My inclination is removing the draft may vaguely be harmful in a sort-of “preparing for the worst case scenario” way but I doubt it given that historically speaking any super important wars had huge surges of volunteers accompanying them.

          • Eric T says:

            Do you consider yourself a mass murderer?

            It’s hard to avoid that conclusion without that distinction. Your income probably puts you in at least the top tenth of the world’s population and there are people in the bottom tenth whose lives could be saved by prudent expenditure of a fraction of it.

            I know you may not believe me: but yes.

            But so is everyone else I know so it’s not really a relevant thought in my mind. I don’t feel tremendously guilty about it because I’m a human being like everyone else and focus on the things I deal with, but when I start approaching the deep moral thought process I find it very difficult to deny that instead of the weed I bought last week I absolutely should have given some charity 80 bucks.

            I feel a lot like Scott’s Infinite Debt post: I have the deaths on my hands but to stay in Good Standing I just try to do a little at a time.

          • Fahundo says:

            drug charges are a convenient way to break up gangs

            Wouldn’t taking away the monopoly gangs have on products relegated to the black market also help break them up?

          • Fahundo says:

            I’m not a big believer in an Action/Inaction distinction.

            Do you consider yourself a mass murderer?

            I know you may not believe me: but yes.

            Ok, you might be willing to use the word murderer to describe yourself. But if the claim is that you see no distinction between action and inaction, there has to be more to it than that. That would imply that you think society should treat you the same as someone who had personally gunned down all the people whose lives you haven’t saved.

          • albatross11 says:

            Ending the drug war puts a lot of government agencies and employees out of business.

            Ending employment certification requirements hurts the incumbents who got those requirements put into place to limit competition.

          • Eric T says:

            Ok, you might be willing to use the word murderer to describe yourself. But if the claim is that you see no distinction between action and inaction, there has to be more to it than that. That would imply that you think society should treat you the same as someone who had personally gunned down all the people whose lives you haven’t saved.

            If society started doing that I’d certainly be out saving lives more often!

            I think that A. everyone’s sort of doing this so we’re all at the same baseline – I think its not great that society’s baseline is “bunch of people actively not saving lives” but hey, here we are.
            B. Enforcing rules and laws is more about stability, social mores, and order to me than trying to legislate morality. I do want the stability, social mores, and order to be moral but that’s beside the point.
            C. Any kind of society built on that kind of enforcement mechanism would swiftly fall apart, so it’s not practical in the same way that me trying to actively fix all the problems in the world isn’t practical.

          • John Schilling says:

            The one that says that 150 years of slavery is probably worse than what this country did to asian people, or at the very least higher-impact?

            If you’re talking about the impact on people alive today, I’m skeptical on that one. Most of the “150 years of slavery” was over 200 years ago. The Chinese exclusion act, and the internment camps, are things still in living memory. I think a moderately horrible thing done to your grandfather is likely more impactful than a terribly horrible thing done to your great-great-great-great-grandfather.

            More generally, there has to be a statute of limitations on this sort of thing, and every other data point we have says it should probably not go back even to 1865. Lots of ethnic groups have immigrated to the United States. Many of them came from terrible situations in the old country, and while you can perhaps argue that the one is somehow our fault and the other isn’t, in terms of impact it shouldn’t matter which continent your grandparents were oppressed on. Most of them came here nearly penniless, and either uneducated or with deprecated educational credentials, so the economic impact should be about the same as “you’re free but we were kidding about that whole 40 acres and a mule thing”. Most of them were subject to a generation or more of roughly Jim Crow level oppression once they arrived.

            And within two generations, almost all of them were just plain Americans, as prosperous as any other. The bit where that doesn’t hold for African-Americans is deeply weird and demands a better explanation than “It’s because their great-great-great-great-grandparents were slaves”.

            And it demands a better solution than “The white guys whose great-great-great-great-grandparents enslaved theirs are guilty as sin and need to fix it, even if their ancestors were living in Europe when all that happened”.

      • Skeptic says:

        These are repeated games in which the rules change.

        Society does not exist in a vacuum where one can move utils from one race to another, and that doesn’t even touch the reality of how affirmative action works to boost the richest African Americans and Latinos at the expense of poorer people with different skin tones.

        But it’s all hand waving until we get down to brass tax. It’s an official message from the polity and state that all animals are equal but some non-Asian animals are more equal than others. It’s telling every Asian kid in California that they need to outscore everyone else to have even a shot.

        But honestly I doubt tests will be used in the future, it exposes the system to legal liability since there’s a metric that can be used.

        Also: see Richard Carranza

        • Eric T says:

          Society does not exist in a vacuum where one can move utils from one race to another, and that doesn’t even touch the reality of how affirmative action works to boost the richest African Americans and Latinos at the expense of poorer people with different skin tones.

          Yeah this is again why I said I have issues with Affirmative Action as it has been traditionally done. I myself admitted last thread I’d rather help poor Whites than even Middle-Class blacks.

          • redoctober says:

            I myself admitted last thread I’d rather help poor Whites than even Middle-Class blacks.

            So, I actually think helping middle-class blacks over poor whites is a good and useful functioning of the system. I think one of the key benefits of AA as it’s practiced is that it increases minority representation in the Upper Classes/Elite, even if it makes that representation non-proportional to population demographics. It seems to be true that having examples to look up to/prominent advocates/powerful defenders in the elite classes is really important to people in under-represented groups; I think it benefits society more for there to be 10 black billionaires than 10,000 more white millionaires. A system that benefits poor whites over middle class blacks seems like it would flip those outcomes.

          • baconbits9 says:

            I think one of the key benefits of AA as it’s practiced is that it increases minority representation in the Upper Classes/Elite,

            Except it doesn’t actually do this, this line of thinking is based on the dual assumptions that there is only one way to get into the upper classes, and that it can be easily attained without earning it. What actually happens with AA for higher education is it sets up a situation where a significant number of minorities are competing for a limited number of slots. You are more or less guaranteed to have dead-weight loss here by taking reasonably talented people and pushing them into a system with a fixed level of positive outcomes.

            The second point is that when you take a person with limited abilities (ie anyone) and put them in a position that requires better abilities than they have then they fail at high rates. Affirmative action is a double negative for minorities, it brands its failures as failures and the encourages its successes to be failures.

          • I myself admitted last thread I’d rather help poor Whites than even Middle-Class blacks.

            Ceteris paribus I agree.

            But you are treating college admission as if it were relevant primarily as a way of income distribution, which strikes me as a very serious mistake.

            It’s a way of allocating training and, eventually, employment. The difference between having a smarter person become a doctor and having a less smart person become a doctor is not just which of them gets the income, which is how you are thinking of it, if I correctly understand you. It’s also whether a patient lives or dies. The same point is true, mutatis mutandem, across the whole range of training or employment.

            Our current educational system doesn’t, as best I can tell, do a terribly good job of allocating either training or employment, and I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the things it could do better is offering opportunities to people who are both smart and poor. But the main way of doing that, in my view, is to loosen lots of constraints that keep able people from rising, things like professional licensing requirements for hair braiders and barbers and permits for starting small businesses and degree requirement for babysitters. That’s a more important stairway up out of poverty than a few more people making it through Harvard.

          • Eric T says:

            @David my reply got eaten but to keep it short:

            But you are treating college admission as if it were relevant primarily as a way of income distribution, which strikes me as a very serious mistake.

            I don’t think I’m doing that, I’m only really talking about that dimension of College because its the dimension most relevant to the discussion we were having. I’m also not really in favor of affirmative action, despite how many people in this OT who keep telling me its a bad policy may think.

            And I think making it easier to open small businesses is good broadly, so I agree with you on that.

    • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

      Stupid question: how can this possibly not go against title VII of the United States Civil Rights Act?

      • qwints says:

        Stupid Answer: Title VII doesn’t apply to college admission .

        Smart Answer: To be clear about what is happening here, California amended its constitution via Proposition 209 in 1996 which, among other things, banned the UC system from considering race in admission. The relevant language in Title VI is quite short “no person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” That obviously doesn’t require California to have a law banning considering race in admissions, so repealing the law won’t violate Title VI.

        The more complex question is why doesn’t Title VI ban colleges receiving federal funds from considering race in admissions? The answer is in the line of cases starting with Regents of Univ. of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978). In Bakke, the majority analyzed the legislative history of Title VI to conclude “In view of the clear legislative intent, Title VI must be held to proscribe only those racial classifications that would violate the Equal Protection Clause or the Fifth Amendment.” Thus, for public state universities, the analysis is the same for Title VII as for equal protection claims under the 14th amendment, which is reflected in Department of Education guidance.

        This moves the analysis to “strict scrutiny” which allows the government to discriminate on the basis of race only if it’s the “least intrusive means” of achieving a “compelling state interest.” The courts have spent the last 40 years hashing out whether racial preferences in admissions meet this test, and the answer remains a limited yes as of Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, 136 S. Ct. 2198 (2016).

        • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

          Thanks!

          Proposition 209 also ban discrimination in public employment, which is presumably what this is about (from one of the articles upthread):

          “Some of the opposition want you to believe that Asian Americans unilaterally oppose affirmative action,” Assemblyman David Chiu (D-San Francisco) said during Wednesday’s debate. “That is simply not true. … I hear all the time that my Asian American constituents want more teachers who look like us, more principals, university presidents, more first responders, firefighters, bilingual police officers. Current law prevents that.”

          Why is that not covered by Title VII?

          • qwints says:

            Good point that 209 covers employment as well. I’m not familiar with that line of cases, but it looks like it starts with United Steelworkers of America v. Weber, 443 U.S. 193 (1979) if you want to research.

  41. souleater says:

    Is the phrase “Social Justice Warrior” considered rude? Whats the nicer way to refer to this ideology?

    • Eric T says:

      I think it has a lot of negative connotations, but I personally don’t mind it.

      Social Progressive is a term used often in my circles but I don’t know if it gets the entire point across.

      • Aftagley says:

        It originally wasn’t, but when the gate that contained a bunch of people who enjoy video games happened, they turned it into a pretty negative term. It’s one of those words that aren’t inherently rude, but some one in the ideology might have their hackles raised if they hear you using it.

        I’d also just use social progressive.

        • Jaskologist says:

          But we have a lot of social progressives who want to be clear that they are not all SJWs.

          • souleater says:

            If someone told me they were a social progressive, I would understand that to mean they were telling me they were proponents of socialism, not that they were proponents of social justice.

          • Aftagley says:

            @Jackologist

            Right, but I’d take that as more evidence of how successful anti-SJW propaganda has been more than true difference in goals between SJWs and social progressives. They both kinda want the same thing, but social progressives don’t want to be thought of as constantly-triggered otherkins.

            @Souleater

            I don’t think that’s correct. Most proponents of socialism will just call themselves socialists.

          • Jaskologist says:

            SJW is generally considered around here to encompass a set of tactics in addition to goals. Social progressives may very well support the ends without the means.

          • souleater says:

            @Aftagley

            I defer to you as an authority here.

            but If someone described themselves as a ‘social democrat’ I would also understand them to mean they were calling themselves socialist. the idea of social democrat == socialist == social progressive seems intuitive to me, but sometimes my intuitions are wrong.

          • Aftagley says:

            hmm, I agree, I would also classify a self-described social democrat as one being more interested in socialism than social justice. I’d never thought about this before.

            I agree it makes no sense.

          • Nick says:

            @souleater
            I don’t get that at all. “Social progressive” = “progressive on social issues” to my mind. It’s the opposite of “social conservative.”

          • Garrett says:

            The term progressive also doesn’t make a lot of sense as there already is/was a progressive movement. It had at its core what one of my poli-sci professors described as an effort not only to create a better type of government but a better society and a better *type of people*. (Hence the effort on both prohibition but also eugenics).

            So I’m left either thinking that you’re about to support eugenics once you think things through, or that you have a different underlying philosophy with some of the same conclusions which requires a different name.

          • Tatterdemalion says:

            I wouldn’t use “social progressive” without first specifying what I mean by it, not because I think it’s in any way offensive, but because it’s not a term in common use, and if I heard it used I wouldn’t be sure what set of views it was referring to, especially on issues where liberals split from social justice types.

          • To me, “Social Democrat” implies “socialist” in the sense of the Scandinavian capitalist welfare states not in the sense of the ownership and control of the means of production which, being an economist, I take to be the default meaning of “socialism.”

            “Social progressive” is not a term I am familiar with, but if I had to guess it would be someone who was in favor of things like gay marriage but not necessarily in favor of more government control of the economy. “Progressive” in social issues but not necessarily economic issues.

            But I don’t like the term “progressive,” because it takes for grante a particular belief about what direction of change represents progress, and that’s a large part of what people of differing political views disagree about.

        • cassander says:

          @Aftagley

          It originally wasn’t, but when the gate that contained a bunch of people who enjoy video games happened,

          This is bad form, Aftagley. You should be ashamed for not saying “…the gate that contained a bunch of people who enjoy video games opened

          • Aftagley says:

            You’re 100% correct. I legitimately feel shame right now.

          • cassander says:

            First Deiseach tells me I’m as good as an apostle and now you’ve said I’m 100% correct about something? Either this has been a banner couple weeks for me, or I’m going mad from the isolation.

          • Garrett says:

            @cassander:

            Yes, but no one will listen to what you have to say.

          • cassander says:

            @Garrett

            Anyone who gets the not very good joke gets a gold star from me! If you’re ever in DC let me know, and I’ll buy you a drink.

          • cassander says:

            @Atlas

            As long as you’re not trying to stop me from being king of asia, i think we’ll get along fine.

        • Fahundo says:

          but when the gate that contained a bunch of people who enjoy video games happened, they turned it into a pretty negative term.

          It was definitely used as a pejorative before that. Maybe the great opening made that use more visible.

          • AG says:

            Of course it was used as a pejorative first. It was always one. The term was coined by a leftist to complain about keyboard warriors within their own faction. People didn’t start reclaiming it as a badge of pride until the outgroup got their hands on it.

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      I find you get a little more light than heat by saying “social justice advocate.”

  42. Eric T says:

    @souleater

    I don’t want to derail your conversation with cassander, but I would be really interested to explore this in a top level post one day when you’re less busy. I know you’re already involved like… 12 separate conversations on this thread

    What you weren’t expecting was that I am a crazy person. I’m happy to also discuss this now because why not, what’s one more ongoing conversation when you’re already going through 12

    This is a fascinating comment to me, because it shines a light on what might be a major piece of fundamental philosophical disagreement we have. The idea of the government picking winners and losers deeply, deeply bothers me. Or the idea of the government using its power to bring up one citizen at another citizen’s expense.

    I think the idea isn’t that there can’t be a rising tide that raises most, or even all ships, but that any policy that meaningfully impacts a large amount of lives will inherently cause some degree of change. And I think it’s somewhat irrational to expect none of that change to be negative.

    -Policies that help working rights hurt corporations who benefit from union-busting.
    -Policies that help slaves harms slave owners
    -Policies that help blacks may very well harm whites, or at the very least harm Racists.
    -Policies that help religious freedom harm New Atheists.
    We could go on, I think the old adage is “those who try to please everyone end up pleasing nobody”
    And to be clear I do think Harm =/= “I don’t like these policies” – but for many people the government doing things that go against their deeply held world views makes their lives worse. The Racist is actually more uncomfortable when he has to go to school with a black kid, but i’d argue that it’s okay because it’ll make society better.

    It seems to me that your perspective is that the government inherently picks winners and losers, and that that’s okay as long as its done in a way that maximizes happiness. My perspective (although I might have to refine this as I think about it) is that that would be a form of artificial injustice, and that natural injustice, caused by history, culture, genetics, nature, the invisible hand, or bad luck is inherently more moral/ethical than artificial injustice caused by government.

    I think the reason I’m sensitive to Social Justice issues is because the government has routinely held certain people as the “losers” for a very long time, and it strikes me that now the government wants to make those people “winners” its an issue for a lot of people. I know this is the same for me too but in reverse – its something I’m trying to work on.

    I’m not sure why artificial injustice is more inherently injust that random injustice. I’d love an argument in favor of that position.

    • MilesM says:

      I’m not sure why artificial injustice is more inherently injust that random injustice. I’d love an argument in favor of that position.

      I think this is going to come down to how you define “injustice.”

      But surely, there’s a difference between (for example) “An old man slipped and cracked his head on the way to the supermarket (because someone threw out a garbage bag that leaked, and no one bothered to clean the sidewalk to make it safe for the elderly)” and “An old man fell and cracked his head because a Buffalo cop pushed him.”

      • Eric T says:

        But surely, there’s a difference between (for example) “An old man slipped and cracked his head on the way to the supermarket (because someone threw out a garbage bag that leaked, and no one bothered to clean the sidewalk to make it safe for the elderly)” and “An old man fell and cracked his head because a Buffalo cop pushed him.”

        I’m honestly not sure the difference is anything other than “there’s someone we can blame and maybe adjust the behavior of.”

        Like if I were to step off of earth and become the Arbiter of All That is Fair – it’s unclear to me why I wouldn’t want to stop these two examples from occurring equally as much.

        • MilesM says:

          Do you think that belief is consistent with choosing to devote one’s time to fight for social justice in the US?

          (Not angling for a “gotcha”, or insinuating hypocrisy, I’m genuinely curious. If I felt that way, I think I would definitely focus my energies elsewhere, but I also don’t think people have any moral obligation to be 100% consistent.)

          • Eric T says:

            Do you think that belief is consistent with choosing to devote one’s time to fight for social justice in the US?

            Yes for two reasons:

            1. I fight for lots of things. I might be the “Social Justice” guy here but I’m the “Effective Altruist” guy in my SJ friend group. I try to oppose a bunch of different things I view as injustices, some of them like Global Poverty are probably a combination of “Artificial” and “Random”
            2. I think the way I view it is on the degree of injustice, but one of the other ones is my ability to actually address it. So while Malaria is probably a bigger issue than US-based Racism in absolute terms, I don’t really know what I can contribute to the Malaria issue. ETA: And realistically I don’t think I could motivate myself to care as much about it. SJ hits close to home for me due to where I live, grew up, and work.

        • albatross11 says:

          I think the main practical difference is that we have a mechanism in place to disincentivize assaulting senior citizens, which seems not to be working in this case, whereas random accidents are harder to disincentivize.

    • March says:

      This is also a comment on @souleater’s original comment, just latching on to this here thread instead.

      To me, even though I’m sympathetic to the different moral weight of ‘natural injustice’ and ‘artificial injustice’ (my intuitions think the salient difference is ‘bad luck’ vs ‘cruelty’), ‘natural injustice caused by history’ is just ‘fossilized artificial injustice’.

      • souleater says:

        I partially agree with this. My post below talks about why I think ‘natural injustice caused by history’ should still be counted as natural injustice.

    • souleater says:

      So before I saw your post, and then wrote my own it never actually occurred to me to make a distinction between these two categories that I’ve just made up, so I might end up contradicting/reversing myself here. Point being, please have some grace for me if I end up sounding stupid. I think my working definition right now is:

      Natural Injustice – Bad things happen, there’s nothing anyone can do about it. You weren’t targeted specifically, it wasn’t your fault. If mugger randomly chooses to rob you that’s natural injustice. just like if you get cancer, or are born to bad parents, or your job gets automated away. It sucks, life isn’t fair, it happens to everyone. The key part here is “Completely outside your control”

      Artificial Injustice – Something bad happened to you, specifically, because you were chosen to be the loser, in a situation where you had a seat at the table. Pretty much only happens when you have influence, but not control. Things like your boss is laying off you or your coworker, and you had a chance to plead your case. “After talking about it, and hearing what you have to say, we’re screwing you.” Key part is “If you had more control, things would have worked out better for you”

      I’m at work, but I’ll post more soon

      ETA: Historical Racism is a really important example of artificial injustice, and I should have included that in my definition.

      • souleater says:

        Eric T said this up thread

        I’m honestly not sure the difference is anything other than “there’s someone we can blame and maybe adjust the behavior of.”

        I think thats kinda the root of it. Artificial Justice is (in my view) more dangerous for society because it creates a power struggle between different factions. A government where artificial injustice is the norm is, in my view, necessitating conflict theory and power struggles.

        The winners and losers with natural injustice are random but the winners and losers with artificial injustice are based on power. I think this incentives political violence, corruption, tribalism and civil wars.

        I know I just said natural injustice is random, but I suspect that you’re going to point out that it really isn’t random, its due to historical racism a type of artificial injustice (forgive me for putting words in your mouth). That’s kinda true in some ways, and a valid point to make. But I would argue that no amount of control/political power/influence today will undo the artificial injustice that occurred historically. So I would consider modern consequences of historical artificial injustices to actually be a type of natural injustice.

        You said previously that you don’t want to talk about solutions to racial issues just yet, and I’m not trying to trick you into that.

        • Eric T says:

          The key part here is “Completely outside your control”

          Arguably this makes this kind of injustice even more injust right? Like at least with the kind you had a chance of stopping, there were things you could have done to stop it. If it really is outside of your control it seems like its so unfair that it should probably be worse.

          I know I just said natural injustice is random, but I suspect that you’re going to point out that it really isn’t random, its due to historical racism a type of artificial injustice (forgive me for putting words in your mouth). That’s kinda true in some ways, and a valid point to make.

          I think that’s pretty close to what I was going to say. In global geopolitics I’m unsure if I’m compelled that much is truly “random” more that it was “so complex its difficult for an outsider to parse” but ultimately still following the whims of those shaping history, be them individuals or large groups.

          But I would argue that no amount of control/political power/influence today will undo the artificial injustice that occurred historically. So I would consider modern consequences of historical artificial injustices to actually be a type of natural injustice.

          I think this is where we may disagree. Someone asked me in response to my large post if I favored SJ on Utilitarian or Recompensatory Justice – and I think the answer is a little of both.

          -If I could definitively prove that some kind of policy combinations that improved outcomes for Black People would make the country like… 0.1-0.5% worse on whole I think i might still support it from a “Dessert Claim” style of approach.

          -Similarly I think if I could definitively prove that it made the world better overall, but was unjust I might oppose it depending on exactly how much it made the world better.

          If it does both (as I think it does) then I support it vigorously.

          ETA: The point I was making here is that even if we can’t undo previous injustices, I’m not sure that doesn’t mean addressing them isn’t good.

          You said previously that you don’t want to talk about solutions to racial issues just yet, and I’m not trying to trick you into that.

          haha I know you aren’t. Tbc: the reason I don’t want to talk about solutions right now is I’m still evaluating many of them. Some seem a lot more promising than others but I’m trying to approach this with an open mind.

          • souleater says:

            As far as natural injustice being more unjust than artificial injustice because you have no one to appeal to, I would say that natural injustice is unthinking, unfeeling, and can’t be said to be immoral because it isn’t an agent… It can be unfair, but its no more evil than a wild animal. it just is.

            Artificial injustice is an agent deciding to screw you in favor of someone else. You were wronged by a specific person, or group of people and can justify retribution.

            I said that I believe that no amount of political power could undo historical artificial injustice.
            What I mean by that is that I think that there could never be a set of laws or cultural changes that would make majorities of all tribes smile and nod and say “Yes, the scales have now been balanced. Minorities have received recompense/parity/justice for past wrongs and without inflicting inordinate injustice on others.”

            I believe that no matter what anyone does, you will still have many whites say its too much and unjust, and many POC say its not enough. therefor, you can’t “undo” what has been done.

          • Eric T says:

            What I mean by that is that I think that there could never be a set of laws or cultural changes that would make majorities of all tribes smile and nod and say “Yes, the scales have now been balanced. Minorities have received recompense/parity/justice for past wrongs and without inflicting inordinate injustice on others.”

            Right but presumably we can move in the correct direction? Post Rwandan-genocide the RPF made the decision to use Gacaca courts to prosecute instigators of the genocide. Regardless of whether they did Too Much or Too Little, I think the obviously wrong answer was “do nothing”

            Now that had the benefit of being direct and clear. It gets more complicated the further back you go. But I mean are you willing to draw a brightline somewhere? If I steal all of your money, buy a car with it, then immediately die leaving said car to my kid before you can sue me, are you just Shit out of Luck? How long does something need to be ago before it ceases to be artificial and becomes natural?

          • souleater says:

            I don’t actually think moving in the correct direction is a good idea. Right now (or within recent memory) we had a Chesterton’s fence that basically said “Don’t discriminate based on race” My big concern is that once we demolish that fence it will be very difficult to rebuild later.

            Now that had the benefit of being direct and clear. It gets more complicated the further back you go. But I mean are you willing to draw a brightline somewhere?

            I agree that in cut and dry, clear examples with a well defined debt and harm, it makes sense to pay restitution. Your theft of the car would be valid.
            I don’t think I could draw a line anywhere defensible. but I think there are clear cases where restitution is reasonable, clear cases where its unreasonable, and gray areas.

            Like in law, I think a statute of limitation needs to be in place, with clearer situations justifying longer statues.

            My fiance is a black woman, and she once told me that freed slaves were promised by law a mule and some acres of land 150 years ago but they were never given what they were promised. I don’t know if that’s true, but if it is, I would be more inclined to agree to that than try to make up for redlining or segregation where the cost or fair recompense would be impossible to tease out.

          • Evan Þ says:

            @souleater, the idea of giving each freedman “forty acres and a mule” was floated a number of times during the war, but the only person who actually promised it was General Sherman during his March to the Sea. He only promised it to one group of freedmen, and his order was later annulled by President Johnson.

            I think that would’ve been a great idea at the time, or just about any time in the 1800’s. Now, things are more complicated.

        • Garrett says:

          > Artificial Justice is (in my view) more dangerous for society because it creates a power struggle between different factions.

          By this definition, though, having shitty parents isn’t a “natural injustice”. It’s an artificial injustice caused by those shitty people decided to have and keep a child to whom they could not be an effective parent.

      • Aftagley says:

        Natural Injustice

        So what if you legitimately don’t think that Natural Injustice exists? Or at least you don’t think it exists to remotely any degree where it’s worth talking about?

        Like, take the mugger. Why’s he out mugging? What causitive factors led him to a life of crime? Could those be corrected? And the muggee (is that a word?), why is he out walking in a high-crime area? Could we make it safer for him?

        Or bad parents, can we solve that? Could we increase education spending to try and correct the deficiencies caused by bad parents; or create early-interventionist practices that identify bad parents and help them get better?

        I just think that our systems are so man-made and entirely artificial, so any injustices that arise from it, even if they seem “natural” are still artifacts of the system that need to be corrected.

        • Randy M says:

          And the muggee (is that a word?)

          Thugee is a word, but sadly it doesn’t mean “one who is thugged upon” so probably not.

        • souleater says:

          So what if you legitimately don’t think that Natural Injustice exists?

          Are you speaking hypothetically here? or is this your view?

          If someone actually said that, I would think that I haven’t communicated my thought well. I would want to step back and make sure we are talking about the same things.

          I’m not trying to motte and bailey you here. But I think we can agree that natural injustice is real if we all stay in the motte where NJ means:

          A low probability, bad thing happens, that happens completely randomly.

          If I was stuck by lightning, on a clear day, I guess someone could say it wouldn’t have happened if they lived in a bunker, but most reasonable people would just say “that sucks man, bad luck, life isn’t fair.”

          Perhaps the difference between NJ and AJ is if a reasonable person could say “This wouldn’t have happened to you if you had more political power”

          • Aftagley says:

            Are you speaking hypothetically here? or is this your view?

            It’s the first approximation of my view. I’m not trying to warp hypotheticals here, I haven’t fully dived down into this line of thinking, but I was presenting my initial reaction to your argument honestly.

            A low probability, bad thing happens, that happens completely randomly.

            Here’s where you’re losing me. Justice, or injustice, implies that either you got a fair outcome or you didn’t. I guess you could kind of call getting struck by lightning as unjust, but it would definitely parse weird to me (unless you’d done something to piss of Zeus, I mean. Then you got what was coming.)

            For me, the term justice implies that it’s the result of a system arriving at a result, where from what you’ve written you see justice as whatever the result was, independent of the process that produced it. I think my definition of justice is more in line with the commonly held-one.

        • MilesM says:

          That assumes you can understand the system well enough to intervene and that you can design interventions that won’t result in new problems.

          Otherwise, all you’re doing is building a new layer of injustice on top of the old one, and getting even further away from being able to address the underlying problems.

          I think calling certain things “natural injustice” just acknowledges the fact there’s no way to accurately identify the causes of some problems, or meaningfully quantify their impacts.

          If it’s all man-made problems, where is the cutoff for relevance? I’m a white guy who currently lives in the US… But is what happened to slaves in the colonies in the 17th century more or less relevant when determining how I fit into this problem than what I was surrounded by when growing up in Eastern Europe in the 1980s, or what happened to my grandparents during the 1940s?

          (Most – all, really – reform-minded people I talked to about this matter consider the former directly relevant, and the latter issues just, well, historical bad luck they can’t be expected to know about. Or irrelevant, because clearly things “worked out” for me. By magic.)

          • Aftagley says:

            That assumes you can understand the system well enough to intervene and that you can design interventions that won’t result in new problems.

            That is definitely a problem. Any intervention should only be done after careful study and needs to be constantly reevaluated to ensure it’s actually having the intended solution.

            I think calling certain things “natural injustice” just acknowledges the fact there’s no way to accurately identify the causes of some problems, or meaningfully quantify their impacts.

            Maybe, but I’m worried that the justice system that relies on the above to categories would have an entrenched bias for the people currently benefiting from an injustice to push it into the “natural injustice” category.

            Potentially bad example: Say we have a world where participating in democracy is limited by height. If you’re not at least 5’8″ you can’t vote. Now, yes – the fact that any individual does or does not grow to 5’8″ is an example of natural injustice – some people are just short. But the fact that you’ve built your voting system off of that natural injustice is wrong.

            I’m worried that most problems are like that – there might be a root cause of the derives from chance, but the way that chance turns into bad luck is forced by society.

            If it’s all man-made problems, where is the cutoff for relevance?

            Dunno. Start with the most pressing concerns and work our way down, I guess?

          • MilesM says:

            @Aftagley

            Dunno. Start with the most pressing concerns and work our way down, I guess?

            Not really what I was getting at. Identifying the most pressing problems is – relatively speaking – the obvious and easy part. (and in case it needs to be clarified – not sure if I’m reading that line correctly – I don’t think my problems are at the top of the list)

            But what you’re talking about requires determining what everyone’s responsibility is when it comes to fixing it.

            I assume that if you don’t believe in “natural injustice” that is really no one’s fault, then you also don’t believe in collective guilt.

          • Aapje says:

            @Aftagley

            If you’re not at least 5’8″ you can’t vote. Now, yes – the fact that any individual does or does not grow to 5’8″ is an example of natural injustice – some people are just short. But the fact that you’ve built your voting system off of that natural injustice is wrong.

            But if I look at the current world, the judgments seem to be primarily on merit (although that may be the merit of the group, when people can’t judge people individually).

            Women choose to work fewer hours on average than men. Employers value longer hours worked for both men and women, so pay people who work longer hours more, which is more often men than women.

            Yet this is often called sexism and an injustice, where it is demanded that companies pay women more, rather than that women work more (or men less).

            Or take the general dislike for lower class people/culture, which seems to exist for both the white and black underclass. Yet more black people are in the underclass, so non-racial discrimination will have disparate impact, which is then often called racist.

            I see a lot of SJ people either completely ignore that the actual mechanism is not explicitly discriminatory, but is based on a certain type of merit, or they actually deny that this merit is valid.

            However, it quickly becomes absurd to tell companies what choices will make them more money, when it is their money and not yours that is on the line. Or to tell people that their preferences are invalid.

            It truly feels very oppressive.

          • AG says:

            Why should they pay people who work longer hours more? The worker is getting compensated for their longer hours by dint of getting paid for those hours. Unless you’re talking about salaried workers, but then, it’s based on perception of who is working longer hours and who is actually being more productive, rather than true merit of who was actually more productive for the company.

            Sure, I could faff around more for a couple of hours per day, too. Gimme a raise!

          • Aapje says:

            @AG

            Ultimately it doesn’t even matter. That they pay both men and women who work longer hours, more per hour, shows that companies see value in workers that work longer hours.

            The way that capitalism works is that if you think you know better than them, you can start your own company where you pay part-time workers more (or full-time workers less) and then try to outcompete them.

            Anyway, I can speculate that amortizing fixed employment costs over longer hours is generally beneficial, that longer hours reduce communication overhead, that people work more efficiently when the person they need help from is actually available at that exact moment, etc.

            However, when women are not physically incapable of working more hours, and they aren’t, there is not actually a barrier to women created by the workplaces that reward longer hours. So then Aftagley example of implicit discrimination doesn’t seem to exist.

            Of course, you can argue that discrimination elsewhere makes it impossible for women to work longer hours, but I don’t see how workplaces are to blame for that.

        • John Schilling says:

          I just think that our systems are so man-made and entirely artificial, so any injustices that arise from it, even if they seem “natural” are still artifacts of the system that need to be corrected.

          That’s less convincing when it is applied to injustices in past generations, though.

          Bob can be poor because his grandfather’s crops were burned by long-dead evil thugs and so he couldn’t afford to send Bob’s father to college and Bob grew up in poverty. Dave can be poor because his grandfather’s crops were eaten by long dead locusts, etc. Why, aside from the ability to say “yep, them thugs were truly evil!”, should one of these be treated any differently than the others.

          • Aftagley says:

            That’s less convincing when it is applied to injustices in past generations, though.

            I agree.

          • redoctober says:

            Bob can be poor because his grandfather’s crops were burned by long-dead evil thugs and so he couldn’t afford to send Bob’s father to college and Bob grew up in poverty. Dave can be poor because his grandfather’s crops were eaten by long dead locusts, etc. Why, aside from the ability to say “yep, them thugs were truly evil!”, should one of these be treated any differently than the others.

            If the folks who burned Bob’s grandfather’s farm then stole the land and built generational wealth upon it, then Bob would have something to claim against- present day wealth that would have, if not for artificial injustice, be his. Dave has nothing to claim against, except for the current population of locusts.

            If Bob’s grandfather’s farm was burned and stolen today, we’d support making it right; saying “Time limit’s up, sorry, you lose” is a totally artificial constraint on achieving justice- thus, artificial injustice. Making Bob 100% whole is impossible- there should probably be a discount rate applied backwards, just as there is one forwards. But a discount rate of 100% encourages you to be as maximally avaricious and cruel in the present as you can be, with the hope that by the time anyone’s got the wherewithal to stop you, the time limit has passed and you (or your descendants) can go “Ahh, man, that was ages ago, let bygones be bygones”.

          • DarkTigger says:

            @redoctober
            Uhm, we literally have that? Look under prescription in the Wikipedia entry to Statute of limitations.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            “Generational wealth” assumes a lot. Most families that get any kind of fortune blow it rapidly, in number-of-generations scale.

          • John Schilling says:

            If the folks who burned Bob’s grandfather’s farm then stole the land and built generational wealth upon it, then Bob would have something to claim against- present day wealth that would have, if not for artificial injustice, be his.

            “If”. It is far more likely that the people who burned the farm simply burned it. Or that if they gained anything from it, they blew it on hookers and blow in short order. Or had it taken or destroyed by some later group of thugs.

            But, OK, we can make that distinction.

            Bob’s grandfather’s farm is taken by thugs who we can identify as having passed it down to their descendants unto the present day. His family never manage to recover from this and so Bob remains poor

            Charlie’s grandfather’s farm is burned by thugs who left nothing to their descendents. Charliem and the thugs’ grandchildren if any, are poor to this day.

            Dave’s grandfather’s farm is consumed by locusts. Dave, and the locust’s great^Nth granchildren, are poor to this day.

            We can make that distinction, but we somehow never do. Nobody recognizes the distinction between Bob and Charlie – if they think Bob is suffering a present injustice, they think Charlie is just another Bob and will never accept that they can’t find someone who has inherited the guilt and must be made to pay. Dave, we forget about entirely.

            If Bob’s grandfather’s farm was burned and stolen today, we’d support making it right;

            We’d support that even Bob were Charlie, the farm was just burned, not stolen, and the arsonists were penniless. There would be the small matter of who should pay, of course. And if Dave’s farm were consumed by locusts today, we’d have about the same desire to “make it right”, and about the same problem with who should pay.

            Really, Charlie and Dave are the matched pair in this one – they’ve suffered harm for which there is no guilty party we can point to and say “you have to fix this”. But once a generation has passed, we forget about Dave entirely, promote Charlie to Bob, and insist that the guilty must be made to pay even if they are inconveniently dead.

            And that means we need a scapegoat to fill the role. We identify the scapegoats, of course, by their skin color.

          • Aapje says:

            @John Schilling

            Indeed and Social Justice writings are full of allegations that entire groups have gotten those benefits. They typically don’t claim that we should figure out that Scott was a slave holder and then tax all his descendants/heirs (or the heirs of the heirs of the heirs), but claim that all white people benefit(ed), including those who were not even in the US when it happened.

            In itself that is absurd, if not extremely racist. What logic is there behind the claim that if you give money to Jack, who happens to be white, other white people, but not black people, will benefit?

            Similarly, black people are typically also grouped by skin color. No distinction is usually made between the black descendant of slaves and the black descendant of (white or black) slaveholders. Or between black people who experienced slavery and migrants who came later, including those that came after both slavery and Jim Crow.

            Mixed race makes it even harder. A person who is half-descended from slaves and half-descended from slaveholders would have to compensate himself as much as he deserves to be compensated for slavery (if we ignore Jim Crow and such). Yet again, I see these people typically just classified as merely black with no such nuance.

            Without all that nuance, pretty much all that is left is outright racism, in my view.

    • gbdub says:

      For me the issue with the government (or whoever) picking winners and losers is that it feels like using Racism to solve racism (to use your big/little distinction). For example, many affirmative action policies boil down to selecting one individual over another based in part on their race. These decisions are extremely impactful on the individuals directly involved. That feels wrong, and frankly Racist, in a way that say, using general tax dollars to invest in an underserved mostly minority community does not.

      • Eric T says:

        These decisions are extremely impactful on the individuals directly involved. That feels wrong, and frankly Racist, in a way that say, using general tax dollars to invest in an underserved mostly minority immunity does not.

        But could you not make the same argument about the investment? Presumably if the government is going to invest in a business, every minority business they invest in is a non-minority business they choose not to invest in (I know it’s not that simple, but neither are college admissions). Is not getting into college worse than not getting a needed investment? Maybe – I have honestly no clue.

        You can make the same argument with class: tax dollars spent to help the Poor are not being spent to help the Middle Class or the Upper Middle Class or the Upper Class. The only reason it doesn’t feel as icky is because it seems like we as a community are pretty okay with the have-nots getting benefits at the behest of the haves, but there are many people who’d take serious umbrage with the concept.

        I guess what I’m getting at is demanding we never pass policies that disadvantage large groups seems like an impossible bar to clear – and from the SJW perspective its annoying that this bar is being set up now and not like… in the 60s when we were all cool with redlining and shit. (I know that’s not a totally fair point and I don’t 100% believe it – but lots of SJWs do believe this and I think understanding that is key to understanding frustration over this particular form of defense)

        • Garrett says:

          > You can make the same argument with class: tax dollars spent to help the Poor are not being spent to help the Middle Class or the Upper Middle Class or the Upper Class.

          I make a different argument: that there was no right to the tax dollars in the first place! I don’t object to money being given to poor people. I object to money being *taken* from others in the first place.

        • gbdub says:

          When I said “invest in” I mean more like “build a better school or homeless shelter” and less like “give a loan to an individual black business owner because he’s black“. The latter is a bit better than college affirmative action because it’s a bit less zero sum, but I put it in then same objectionable category.

          Basically, choosing between two individuals based on race in a way that has a strong positive impact on on one and a strong negative on the other feels inherently objectionable to me in a way that making broad community level choices that have more diffuse individual effects isn’t.

        • Ketil says:

          But could you not make the same argument about the investment? Presumably if the government is going to invest in a business, every minority business they invest in is a non-minority business they choose not to invest in

          Yes? Is this something the government actually does? I.e. give (or invest) money in businesses based on the race of the owner? I don’t really see much difference between this and instituting a specific tax for white people.

          I’m okay with progressive taxation, even if it affects different groups disproportionately. I’m not okay with taxation based on skin color.

          • Eric T says:

            Is this something the government actually does?

            No just me misinterpreting what gbdub means by investment.

            I think my original point stands though: building a school in a black neighborhood trades off with building a school elsewhere. It may feel less icky that racially selecting by applicant but when you drill down to it I’m not sure the impacts end up being meaningfully different for me to draw a line between them.

            Again my point here isn’t to argue for or against any of these policies, just to say that the ” never pass policies that disadvantage large groups” argument I see as block to some SJ policies are pretty much applicable to any policy any time.

          • cassander says:

            Yes, it does. Government spending is often required to give certain amount of money in things like procurement to companies that are owned by a variety of classes: women, minorities , veterans, etc. This leads to no small amount of shenanigans.

          • Aapje says:

            @Eric T

            I’m in favor of doing things that will offset the reduced opportunities that poor people generally have, although primarily by helping them improve themselves, rather than pulling them ahead for doing a worse job than non-poor people.

            I’m not convinced that being black in itself results in a significant lack of opportunity, because the claims about what harms black people face often either seem false/extremely exaggerated or self-inflicted harms. Having to deal with stereotypical questions or assumptions happens to very many people and if that actually caused that much of a lack of opportunity, most white people wouldn’t have a job.

            On the other hand, discriminating by skin color has enormous risks and downsides & can very easily cause more harm in the backlash than it resolves. It probably increases stereotypes, racial awareness and racial resentment, so it can easily make things worse.

    • Eric T says:

      A dimension of how this discussion started that I’d like to circle back on is how this all impacts government policy. My initial stance was basically “There is no policy that would substantially benefit a large group of people that would not harm some other group of people” – I use the word substantially because presumably the government could do some really tiny thing and nobody would be Harmed.

      This isn’t to say that the Harm has to be equal, or even commensurate, to the Help. The Helped may be more numerous, in some way more deserving, or just benefit way more than the Harmed are disadvantaged. This is why I don’t think the correct answer to this problem is “Do Nothing”

      To me this seems like a pretty realistic view of any kind of large action to effect change. Presumably the invention of electricity was bad for the Gas tycoons and their workers but I really am quite glad we went through with it and I have a smartphone now.

      • rumham says:

        Presumably the invention of electricity was bad for the Gas tycoons and their workers but I really am quite glad we went through with it and I have a smartphone now.

        I know that this is a distraction, but odds are over 50 percent of the time that if you live in New York, your electricity/smartphone is powered by gas.

        Electricity is quite the boon for gas tycoons.

    • I’m not sure why artificial injustice is more inherently injust that random injustice. I’d love an argument in favor of that position.

      Are you familiar with the concept of moral luck?

      Consider two careless drivers. One of them almost runs down a kid, but the kid manages to jump just in time. The other one the kid doesn’t manage. The fact that the first kid jumped was not due to any virtue of the driver. Yet we feel the second driver is more guilty, more deserves some bad outcome.

      For a stronger version, consider someone who was a concentration camp guard in Nazi Germany. We feel he is a bad man. Suppose we conclude, after a little research, that most people who grew up in that environment would have taken the job. We still feel as though he is a worse person than most others, even though most of them, in the same situation, would have done the same thing.

      Still simpler, consider a would-be murderer who misses vs one who doesn’t miss. Being a bad shot is not a moral virtue, yet we feel the latter deserves more severe punishment.

      This pattern is a puzzle in both our law and our moral intuitions. The best answer I know of is by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. He approaches it from the other side, not why we hold the unlucky man guilty but why we hold the lucky man innocent.

      Suppose we held, as seems natural, that guilt depends on intention not results. Many Englishmen know that Catholics cannot be trusted, that if the Pope ordered them to they would try to kill the king. The fact that the Pope has not given them the order is not a virtue of theirs. Nor is the fact that they don’t happen to have an opportunity to kill the king. So we should hold all of them as guilty as we would hold the successful assassin.

      As the example suggests, the problem with basing guilt on intention is that we don’t know the inside of other people’s heads and are likely to have a biased view of what is there. We do observe the outside world. So it makes more sense to base our system of rewards and punishments on the observed results of people’s actions, not on what they, morally speaking, deserve, and leave it to God, who does know, to reward or punish the latter.

      This leads us, a couple of centuries later, to what Nozick described as entitlement rather than desert. I am entitled to something, say my car, not because I deserve to get it but because I got it by a series of legitimate transactions rather than stealing it.

      To see the moral force of that claim, imagine that we are in a just society, where everyone has what he deserves, and we agree to bet a dollar on a coin flip. You win. You are entitled to get the dollar, even though you did not deserve to have the coin land your way. Is the distribution of wealth now unjust?

      Seen from this standpoint, the fact that someone is poor because of the bad fortune of his ancestors, your “random injustice,” may mean he isn’t getting what he deserves but not that he isn’t getting what he is entitled to. To fit an argument for reparations for slavery or something similar into this framework you have to put it in the form of something like a delayed award of tort damages, to the descendants of slaves from the owners of property inherited from slave owners. But doing that won’t give the pattern of results that people in favor of reparations want. It gives no claim against the descendants of post-Civil war white immigrants. And it does give present Afro-Americans a claim against the descendants of the Africans who enslaved their ancestors and sold them to European slave traders — a claim, relatively speaking, by rich against poor.

      To put the point most simply, giving people what they deserve is not within the power of human institutions and basing our decisions on trying to do so is likely to have bad effects. Giving them what they are entitled to at least sometimes is.

  43. Eric T says:

    Can someone give me a rightist (again is this a term???) perspective of why Donald Trump’s approval ratings have fallen so much in the last two months?

    According to 538’s average Trump went from around -4 in the beginning of April (49.7 Disapprove, 45.8 Approve) to around -14 (55 Disapprove, 41 Approve).

    Now the obvious answers are COVID-19 and the Protests, but COVID seems to be getting better, not worse (at least compared to the grim predictions of exponential growth we got in April) and the Protests seem pretty divided among Tribe lines. Trump’s approval rating was at a high point during impeachment – a similarly party divisive occurrence. And all my Leftist friends hate Trump pretty much exactly the same as they do now as they did in April.

    • baconbits9 says:

      Trump got a Covid bump because leaders (or ‘leaders’ if you like) often get a bump at the outset of a crisis as people pull together and that loses steam as the threat goes away.

    • Two McMillion says:

      I think it’s random polling noise.

      • keaswaran says:

        Random polling noise would be largely erased by the fivethirtyeight averaging process. Looking at the whole history of the line, you can see approximately the magnitude of that noise.

        For the entire period from Feb. 13, 2019 to Dec. 14, 2019, his approval rating was always between 41.0 and 42.9. The government shutdown over the wall ended on Jan. 25, 2019, and the articles of impeachment were approved on Dec. 18, 2019, so there are clear explanations for why his approval rating left that range before and after.

        This also appears to be the range his approval was in from May 4, 2018 to Jan. 7, 2019, apart from a brief drop on Sept. 1-22, 2018. (That gap appears to correspond to the McCain funeral and the Kavanaugh hearings, though I can’t tell if those are sufficient explanation for a slight fall outside the range.)

        That 42.9 to 41.0 range that his approval stayed within for months at a time, for about a third of the presidency, was crossed from top to bottom from May 23 to June 11. And at the end of March, his approval had been as high as 45.8. So there has definitely been very significant movement in these two and a half months.

        But it’s probably all rebound from the initial coronavirus bump, with maybe only a little help from the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests.

    • Erusian says:

      When you break it down by affiliation, the biggest shift has been among moderates/independents. Republicans have seen a small shift downward and Democrats basically haven’t budged but there’s been a large swing among moderates/independents.

      Impeachment was largely seen as a frivolous and self-indulgent exercise by Democrats. Covid-19 was largely not blamed on Trump either, as far as I can tell. But relatively few moderates like Trump’s strongman act and a lot of them have accepted there’s a distinction between rioters and protestors. Biden’s been pretty good at messaging here, especially because the far left response (America is fundamentally racist! defund all police! rioting is legitimate! anarchy in the streets! who cares about small business!) has been much less popular.

      • Wrong Species says:

        I can’t believe people still think Trump’s tweets mean anything.

        • suntory time says:

          Tweets from one of the most powerful people in the world don’t mean anything?

          • Wrong Species says:

            Not when they have zero bearing on his actions and we see this play out every single day. The left says that Trump is a joke, and he is, but they take everything he says seriously. If Trump is going to stage a coup so he can be dictator for life, he’s doing an amazing job at hiding it.

          • Aftagley says:

            I mean, they give us insight into his state of mind.

            Unless you think he’s just straight-up trolling, presumably the stuff he tweets about wanting to do he actually does want to do. The fact that what he says he wants to do and what comes out the other end of the black box diverge seems pretty meaningful to me.

          • cassander says:

            @Aftagley

            Trolling isn’t far off. He’s saying things that he thinks will make him look good to his constituents (or his enemies look bad) and get attention. And he’s pretty good at it.

        • matkoniecz says:

          They are good demonstration of his mind, and at least some people are not enthusiastic about such person.

          Once or twice I thought “maybe people overestimate how lame/buffoonish/hostile/idiotic Trump is?”

          Then I visited his twitter (after all, this is directly from him and not distorted) and become convinced that “Orange man bad” was broadly correct and confirmed by Trump itself.

          (yes, spending time on that was a mistake)

    • Garrett says:

      > rightist (again is this a term???)

      Not really, though “right-wing” is a general broad term.

      The reason “leftist” has become a thing is that there’s clearly a wave of intellectual thought on the left which currently doesn’t have a name. It isn’t progressive, liberal, socialist or Marxist. So we’re all vaguely gesturing at something we all vaguely recognize exists, in the hopes that someone can come up with a widely-accepted name we can all use.

      • albatross11 says:

        “Woke?”

      • souleater says:

        I don’t think rightist is a common term either, but I don’t object to people using it. it sounds a little weird to me, but its strikes me as a fair way to describe “the right wing”

    • Matt M says:

      I hope this doesn’t come across as too harsh. I say this all as a “rightist” myself so I hope Scott doesn’t ban me for being uncharitable here, but here goes…

      A couple months ago, right when COVID was starting, I announced that I was betting some money on Biden on PredictIt. Since then I’ve doubled my original position. I’ll probably add more again soon. In the last week, my prediction has changed from “Biden will win” to “Biden will win in a landslide AND Dems will re-take the Senate AND Dems will increase their majority in the house.”

      The Republican Party, as it stands today, is an absolute joke and embarrassment. Every “rightist” I know is currently annoyed at them. Most never really liked them, but were willing to swallow their pride and vote for them anyway under the assumption that they were good on at least the very basics, such as, “Don’t allow a violent communist revolution to take place within the country.” Whoops! Turns out they couldn’t even get that right. They don’t even have a plan to stop it. They sit there and they tweet “No. Stop. Don’t.” and continue to do nothing. And keep in mind, this isn’t their only fault, this is the immediate follow-up to their previous great idea “Put the whole country under indefinite house arrest because some 90 year olds are dying in nursing homes.” Yeah, great. Tear up the entire bill of rights. I’m sure your constitutes will love that. Put 50 million people out of work in exchange for a $1200 check. Smart. Cancel church, cancel sports, cancel schools, march side-by-side with the communist revolutionaries. Great look there guys. Bubba in Mississippi is really gonna love that.

      Biden has to run one ad and one ad only. “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” I think this is the first time in my life when the answer, for virtually everybody, regardless of party affiliation, is a resounding “No.” You can come up with a bunch of excuses if you want. You can say that COVID isn’t Trump’s fault, that the lockdowns were imposed by governors and not him, that the feds don’t have the power or authority to suppress local protests, that Hillary/Biden would have handled this all even worse. It doesn’t matter. That all sounds like excuses, justifications, and whataboutism. The simple fact of the matter is that four years ago, a lot of leftists were saying to me “If you vote for Trump, the US will become a totalitarian shithole.” Well, guess what. They were right. As recently as three years ago I was pleading with TDS people “How exactly has Trump made your life worse?” Today the answer is obvious. Every American can immediately think of two or three plausible answers.

      I’m not sure that Biden or Dem Congressmen can or will fix it. In fact I’m pretty sure they won’t. But I’m so overwhelmingly disgusted at the cowardice and failure of every Republican, the thought of even mailing in a ballot to support them seems like too much work. I suspect many others feel the same. I expect this election to have the lowest GOP turnout we’ve seen in a very long time.

      • Matt M says:

        As an instructive example of what I’m talking about, I saw an exchange on Twitter last night. Some loser GOP pundit (I can’t remember who, but it doesn’t matter) said something like “Look at what’s happening in Seattle – this is the future if you don’t re-elect Trump.” The best reply I saw was from Stonetoss (who really is one of the more astute political observers we have on the right) and it said “Actually this is the present with Trump in office.”

        That about sums up how I feel. You can threaten me with “It could be worse with Democrats in charge” all you want. But as it stands right now, it’s pretty ****ing bad today and Trump is unable and unwilling to do anything about it but send mean tweets. We gave him a chance. He blew it. He does not deserve another.

        • Wrong Species says:

          Yeah, people are freaking out about Trump’s supposed authoritarianism because of his tweeting, but he wasn’t even willing to do anything to stop cities from burning. Trump is the worst of both worlds. He provokes leftists in to a rage but doesn’t actually bother to do anything. Our only hope is that Biden somehow keeps the extremists in check and we try again four years later. I’m not optimistic.

          • suntory time says:

            Protests seem largely peaceful to me at the moment. It’s not clear that Biden would have to do anything to “keep extremists in check”.

          • Eric T says:

            Our only hope is that Biden somehow keeps the extremists in check. I’m not optimistic.

            You’re hoping Biden is going to do something? Seems unlikely.

          • Wrong Species says:

            You’re hoping Biden is going to do something?

            Hope in the sense that it’s the only option, not because I think it’s going to happen.

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          You do realize the whole “God-Emperor Trump” thing was just a funny meme, right? What did you think he was going to do, get elected and purge all the hippies?

          ETA: And as for what to do about Seattle…that’s not a job for the federal government. That’s a problem for Seattle and the state of Washington.

          • Matt M says:

            Except when it was Waco and Ruby Ridge and the Bundys and Clinton/Obama were in office. Then it was absolutely a federal concern and “shoot to kill” was an entirely acceptable conflict resolution method.

            But now that it’s antifa in a big city, everyone wants to just shrug and say “well what can you do?.” Sorry, no. Not buying it.

          • rumham says:

            Weren’t the Bundys on federal land? That would have to be Trump. And I don’t think anyone from any team likes the way Waco and Ruby Ridge played out.

            But yes, the rhetoric online will definitely be different between this and the Bundys.

            Same for the different protests.

          • Fahundo says:

            Waco and Ruby Ridge were both pretty fucked and I’d rather not see them happen again. What about the Bundy standoff puts it in the same bucket as the other two?

          • Aftagley says:

            I don’t think you can throw Waco and the Bundys in the same list. They had remarkably different outcomes and with only one death out of dozens, it’s hard to say the feds were in shoot to kill mode.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Um, Waco and Ruby Ridge were massive misuses of federal power. As a small-r republican, I’m against exactly those sorts of tactics. It wasn’t the targets I necessarily had a problem with, it was the methods. What I want is a government that does the right methods, which so far I’m getting from Trump.

            Also…why am I supposed to care what a bunch of anarchists do in Seattle? I don’t live in Seattle.

            Now, I do not want the government doing wrong things to help me politically. But I double don’t want it doing wrong things that hurt me politically. I don’t think this whole thing is a good look for the Democrats and the left. It seems like you want the federal government to do the wrong thing in a way that helps my political opponents. I’m not seeing the upside here.

          • Garrett says:

            > What did you think he was going to do, get elected and purge all the hippies?

            I didn’t vote for Trump because I projected (correctly) that he was squishy on things I care about. But I’d be okay with Trump purging all the hippies. For whatever version of purge you’d like to use.

          • Matt M says:

            Um, Waco and Ruby Ridge were massive misuses of federal power. As a small-r republican, I’m against exactly those sorts of tactics. It wasn’t the targets I necessarily had a problem with, it was the methods.

          • Matt M says:

            And this is why we will always lose. Because we are unwilling to do to our enemies what they are perfectly willing to do to us.

          • Randy M says:

            And this is why we will always lose. Because we are unwilling to do to our enemies what they are perfectly willing to do to us.

            I dislike this sentiment. I may defend a weaker form with different tactics (enact your own hate speech laws until we all remember the virtues of free speech) but the immolation thing, nuh-uh.

          • albatross11 says:

            Combine this sentiment with everyone having a filter bubble that highlights every bad thing done by the other side to us, but seldom notes the bad things done by our side to them, and you get a formula for civil war.

          • Eric T says:

            But I’d be okay with Trump purging all the hippies. For whatever version of purge you’d like to use.

            Can we not advocate the “purging” of anyone? I feel like that’s not too big an ask.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            And this is why we will always lose. Because we are unwilling to do to our enemies what they are perfectly willing to do to us.

            Or we could be smart. We don’t really have a dog in this hunt. Anarchists are taking over territory from Democrats, so…yeah….

          • cassander says:

            @Conrad Honcho says:

            To quote Republican Senator Alan Simpson, “We have two political parties in this country, the Stupid Party and the Evil Party. I’m proud to be a member of the Stupid Party.”

            Don’t rock the boat…

          • I’m proud to be a member of the Stupid Party.”

            You didn’t include the final bit of the quote as I know it, not necessarily from the same source.

            “Sometimes the two parties get together to do something that is both evil and stupid. We call that bipartisanship.”

          • Garrett says:

            > Can we not advocate the “purging” of anyone? I feel like that’s not too big an ask.

            I didn’t advocate for purges. And I have no plans to. But, after what happened to James Damore, should they happen, I won’t stop them and might even get out the pom-poms.

      • Matt M says:

        Fighting them in court would be a nice start, sure.

        If you want to get super technical about it, my complaint is less “Trump didn’t magically solve all these problems” and more “Trump isn’t even bothering to look like he’s even trying to solve any of these problems.”

        We put him in office to fight for us, for our interests, for our freedoms, whatever. If he fights and loses, well that sucks, but it’s something. But right now, he’s not even fighting.

      • John Schilling says:

        Until C19, the answer for virtually every American would have been “yes,” in a way that it hadn’t been since the Clinton administration.

        Perhaps so, but I’m not going to hold 9/11 against Bush or the 2008 recession against Clinton. The Long War, I can hold against Bush.

        I’m with Matt on this, except for the part where I wasn’t the least bit surprised by it. It is normal for life to get better for ordinary Americans, without the President having to do anything but stay out of the way. It is always annoying to hear people argue that, if my life is better I should vote to reelect the President for it.

        Presidents have little scope for making life better. They can always make life worse. Sometimes, they have the opportunity to stop other things from making life worse. That, is the standard we should hold them to. Don’t make things worse, and be ready to protect us when things go bad.

        Trump spent his first three years doing little to make life better, and doing little to make life worse, at a time when nothing else was making life worse. So things got better. Then we got a major catastrophe with a bunch of parasitic hangers-on of minor catastrophes, and Trump, did little to protect us. He’s a straight-up do-little president, who tweets outrageously.

      • Deiseach says:

        In the last week, my prediction has changed from “Biden will win” to “Biden will win in a landslide AND Dems will re-take the Senate AND Dems will increase their majority in the house.”

        I wonder. I see in the news that protesters are pulling down statues of Christopher Columbus. I think there are moderates/undecided who would be very much in agreement about investigation and punishment for the death of George Floyd, who would go along with the wider calls for police reform, but who would not be comfortable with the “Columbus is responsible for genocide/the entire American project is illegitmate, burn it all down”.

        It all depends on what happens, of course: if the military are sent in and heads get broken, that will drive sentiment one way. But statue-toppling and setting up People’s Republics may driven sentiment another way.

        • Matt M says:

          but who would not be comfortable with the “Columbus is responsible for genocide/the entire American project is illegitmate, burn it all down”.

          And why should these people vote for Trump, who is not lifting a single finger to even attempt to stop it?

          My view on Trump is like Lysander Spooner’s view on the constitution. It either authorizes all of this crap, or it’s powerless to prevent all of this crap. In either case – what good is it?

          • Evan Þ says:

            That’s a decent argument to vote third party. It’s less of a good argument to vote for Biden who’ll be appointing people who encourage this stuff.

            (On the federal level. On the state level, I’m voting for the joke Republican sacrificial goat over our Democratic governor who’s keeping us locked down, and I’m seriously considering trying to oust my church elders who’re rolling over to him.)

          • Matt M says:

            Right. My model depends less on Trump voters switching to Biden, and more on Trump voters not bothering to vote at all.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          Yeah, I absolutely cannot vote for Biden unless he denounces the leftists destroying statues and acting like they can declare People’s Republics of Six Blocks in the strongest possible terms. He has to convince me he’s strong, that his university-educated appointees wouldn’t just be more Red Guards.

      • Deiseach says:

        “Put the whole country under indefinite house arrest because some 90 year olds are dying in nursing homes.”

        Unfair characterisation, I know this is rhetorical hyperbole but the age range where it starts getting into serious territory is as follows (info up to this week from here):

        55-64 years – 7,863 deaths in total
        65-75 years – 12,448 deaths in total
        75-87 years – 15,287 deaths in total
        85+ years – 20,207 deaths in total

        EDITED to correct figures to “all sexes” death totals.

        So for someone in their late 50s/early 60s being cautious about the possibility of contracting the coronavirus is not stupid. You can certainly argue about the lockdown versus the total numbers of deaths and that unless it’s in the millions then it should have been let run its course, but people in general will be just as angry with the Republicans if family members die either way.

        • Matt M says:

          I think it remains true that in most jurisdictions, the median age of COVID deaths is higher than the average life expectancy. So in a certain sense, over half of the people dying from COVID are people that we can basically concede have already lived long and rich lives. While I would be sad if my 90-year-old grandfather died of COVID, I’m not sure it would be “tragic.” Given that he’s generally in poor health and has already survived cancer twice, my prior of “he will probably die soon” was already quite high anyway.

          Like, if God came to us and offered us a bargain – I’m going to send you a horrible disease, but the good news is I’ll let you pick a specific demographic group to suffer the majority of the damage – are “people already above the age of life expectancy” not the group we would pick? Under strictly utilitarian grounds? Or is that “sacrifice the old” mentality so morally icky we’d refuse to pick and demand the disease be equally and randomly distributed?

          Personally, I think my grandfather would happily trade his life for the lives of any of his grandkids, if it came to that.

    • Erc says:

      Impeachment was just a meaningless show, the riots mean people seeing their small businesses being burned down. Trump’s apologists have taken to claiming it’s not that bad because it’s “Democrat cities” being burned down, but go tell that to the 1/3rd of small business owners in those cities who vote Republican. People look at it and they ask why they’ve been paying taxes for this massive, expensive military for decades which is invading all these un-pronouncable foreign countries but is apparently incapable of doing anything when America’s cities go up in flames.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        Trump’s apologists have taken to claiming it’s not that bad because it’s “Democrat cities” being burned down, but go tell that to the 1/3rd of small business owners in those cities who vote Republican.

        That’s crazy.

      • Matt M says:

        Every city in the US over 500K population is a “democrat city.”

        Politically speaking, Dallas and Houston are “democrat cities”

  44. Space Hobo from Hobospace says:

    You are an alien captain. 1000 years ago your ancestors had to leave your doomed home world on a slower than light generational space ship that fits 20000 passengers towards the nearest planet with passable gravity, nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere, liquid water and probably even biosphere. Unfortunately now that you arrived and all out of resources to keep moving, the planet you arrived to Earth, year 2020. Natives are about 50 years behind what your ancestors were when they had to build the spaceship and it’s not like you have a chance to advance while all your resources were tied to maintaining the ship itself.

    Since your ship was only ever designed to get to that thought-to-be-uninhabited-by-sapient-life planet and colonize it, you need to get to the surface now. What is your plan? If you ruin Earth particularly a lot, you don’t have a technology to clear radiation, or impact winter or something like this.

    • Aftagley says:

      20,000 is a small community, not an invasion force. I’d ask the government of Canada for a block of land somewhere in Northern BC and offer to trade them some of our cool technology for it.

    • DarkTigger says:

      Let’s face it. We are a couple of thousand at best, living in what can described as an small bucket of dwindeling recources. Playing with open cards, asking for help, and an place to settle, and offer technology and usage of our ship is probably the best option.

    • FLWAB says:

      Find a nice uninhabited chunk of Earth. We have plenty, you should be able to find a spot that suits them climatically. If you can, stay in orbit long enough to learn some languages first, but if not just plonk yourself down. Start setting up a colony and negotiate with the locals as best you can. Possession in 4/5ths of the law.

      Edit: if you’re taking recommendations, I’d go for St. Kilda.

    • Erusian says:

      Presuming I have some time (as in, I need to start landing people within a year, not literally right now), I’d abduct the astronauts on the ISS and interrogate them on the society below. Finding out that there is no large convenient empty landmass below and that humans are highly tribal to the point they’ve been fantasizing about fighting off hypothetical aliens for generations, I’d prefer to land on the moon and claim that. The humans can reach that but not easily enough to be a real threat. And I can offer to trade them astral resources for whatever I need.

      Since I’ve traveled from my starting point to Earth in 1,000 years ago, I can travel at least 272 AU’s a year (presuming I came from Alpha Centauri, I can go faster if I’m from further way). Or, put another way, I can travel from Earth to the sun in about 36 hours. Going to Jupiter would take about a week. Whatever resources I need to refuel or make my habitats would be well worth the cost at fair trade with the Earthlings.

      If I absolutely must land, and I’m not going to be capable of raising an island from the sea, I’d ask for refuge with Sao Tome and Principe. They’re sovereign so no awkward negotiations over exactly what my status is. It’s small enough my population wouldn’t be completely overwhelmed (they’d be about 10% of the population) and it’s weak enough I could protect my people in a civil war. It’s also close to a lot of useful resources in Africa and its island nature makes it highly defensible against both military and espionage attacks. Not to mention most of its neighbors are not that militarily adventurous. And it’s on the equator, which means it’s ideal for getting back into space. It’s also terribly poor (and not particularly densely populated for an island country) so I can bribe its people pretty easily. Portuguese (and its sister language Spanish) also gives me access to a lot of other relatively poor resource rich countries. And it’s a healthy distance from major military powers (and not between the US and China).

      • suntory time says:

        Starting off with abductions and interrogations might not be the best way to establish friendly relations.

        • Erusian says:

          No, but it is a way to establish how hostile they are. If taking someone, asking them some questions, and then letting them go unharmed is enough to make them hostile enough to retaliate then I know negotiation is pointless. These people will respond to even very minor provocations with retaliation, which means that conflict is inevitable. Even if I don’t do anything wrong, they’ll make something up. Whereas if they respond with something more moderate (“Not cool, please don’t do that again.”) then we’ve established they’re willing to try diplomatic routes.

          • suntory time says:

            You’re dealing with an entirely unknown culture, so abductions are at best an unknown level of provocation. I wouldn’t assume it’s a minor infraction. How about using the massive amount of free information the culture is spewing into the airwaves as a start?

          • Erusian says:

            You’re dealing with an entirely unknown culture, so abductions are at best an unknown level of provocation. I wouldn’t assume it’s a minor infraction. How about using the massive amount of free information the culture is spewing into the airwaves as a start?

            If we have that level of cultural mismatch and they’re not willing to tolerate the friction in overcoming it, that’s the same as my previous comment.

            As for free information, how do I know what it means? How do I even know how to access it? I mean sure, there’s a couple of completely isolated humans who are very technically skilled I could demand tell me. But your solution is… what, that I have a universal translator and an internet connection I brought from home?

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            I don’t think our language and culture are that hard to figure out. But, I come from the culture. Has their anthropology atrophied while on the ship?

          • eyeballfrog says:

            If you don’t have a universal translator, how are you planning to interrogate the astronauts to begin with? I would think simply sitting next to the ISS and sending them AM radio signals would be the best plan. Just sitting there trying to communicate and not attacking anything suggests you come in peace, and the people analyzing the radio signals should figure out that they’re AM fairly quickly. The ISS is a good choice as you’re unlikely to be attacked for risk to the astronauts and the astronauts are probably going to be some of the most open-minded people towards aliens. Not sure exactly how you overcome the language barrier, but you have your own linguists and every linguist on Earth working on it. Something could probably be worked out.

          • Erusian says:

            Has their anthropology atrophied while on the ship?

            Well, they’re an entirely different species, so it’d probably be harder. Also, I don’t see why they’d spend effort maintaining anything anthropological when they don’t expect to meet intelligent life.

            If you don’t have a universal translator, how are you planning to interrogate the astronauts to begin with?

            Step 1: Teach them enough of our language so they understand I want them to teach me their language.
            Step 2: Force them to teach me their language.
            Step 3: Ask them basic questions. I’m more interested in cultural understanding than military secrets, so presumably they won’t object too much.

            I’ve already accounted for people noticing they’re gone, so a somewhat long timescale isn’t an issue.

            Just sitting there trying to communicate and not attacking anything suggests you come in peace

            Humans get a vote on whether there’s peace too, and the aliens know nothing about us. Showing their hand like this would be unwise. Just because the aliens are peaceful doesn’t mean we will be and even if we’re both peaceful it doesn’t mean that either of us knows that. And either side could take potentially genocidal action very quickly. So caution is advised.

          • The Pachyderminator says:

            I don’t know if I’m one level of irony below this conversation, but an abduction on first contact sounds like an overtly hostile act to me. I would be in favor of retaliation in that case, and I’ve always considered myself more pro-hypothetical-alien than most.

          • Erusian says:

            I don’t know if I’m one level of irony below this conversation, but an abduction on first contact sounds like an overtly hostile act to me. I would be in favor of retaliation in that case, and I’ve always considered myself more pro-hypothetical-alien than most.

            If you can switch from being pro to anti-alien based on one crime, then you aren’t really a safe bet for the aliens to rely on.

          • kaelthas says:

            That is actually a really bad test to see how hostile they really are. First contact is a very special situation where the parties are paranoid and know nothing about each other, and some of the states/deciders involved may be on a hair-trigger.
            Once relationships are established, you have settled down and mankind has profited from your cool technologies, reactions will be far more relaxed.
            There is another reason this is a very bad test: You probably won’t survive a negative result.
            Aside from that, while most people will probably willing to overlook this little incident, there will always be some kind of anti-alien faction, and you don’t want to give these guys stuff they can use against you.

          • Erusian says:

            That is actually a really bad test to see how hostile they really are. First contact is a very special situation where the parties are paranoid and know nothing about each other, and some of the states/deciders involved may be on a hair-trigger.

            If they’re on a hair trigger then I shouldn’t trust them. And again, they don’t know I’m here until I do something. If they already know I’m here and we can communicate, then I should demand something else but to the same end of showing that these people are willing to make concessions and resolve things diplomatically.

            Once relationships are established, you have settled down and mankind has profited from your cool technologies, reactions will be far more relaxed.

            This is a startlingly naive view. You think that the aliens should blindly trust and share everything with us? That might work. But if it doesn’t, they’ll be wiped out more or less immediately as a tiny minority among a huge population that they no longer have any advantage over.

            Seriously, do you have any examples where that worked? I’m reminded of everything from early Spanish-American contacts to the Dutch training Aceh tribesmen in how to use guns and then being massacred.

            There is another reason this is a very bad test: You probably won’t survive a negative result.

            Why wouldn’t I survive a negative result? The humans don’t know what happened. Even if they do, I have a spaceship, they don’t. I could go pick up an asteroid and hurl it at the earth and game over for their entire species. They have a few missiles which can barely reach outside orbit. I could even find one of the right size so that it only kills most of them and I take a tiny patch of habitable equatorial land for my tiny population.

            Point of contact is where the aliens are strongest. Afterward, humanity will become familiar with the aliens and their technology while we retain their overwhelming numbers and resources so the power balance will shift in our favor.

            This can end well but only if both sides are willing to make steps towards trusting each other and honest, impossible to fake signals of good will. The aliens are the side who’s position is steadily getting worse, so they’re the ones who needs more reassurance.

            Aside from that, while most people will probably willing to overlook this little incident, there will always be some kind of anti-alien faction, and you don’t want to give these guys stuff they can use against you.

            Why? Do you think that xenophobic behavior is primarily driven by the actions of the xenos? If these people ever renege on this deal, and I mean ever, even hundreds of years into the future, the alien species dies out. If the xenophobic faction is strong enough a minor incident can tip it into taking control, then the aliens would be foolish to trust us.

          • Deiseach says:

            If taking someone, asking them some questions, and then letting them go unharmed is enough to make them hostile enough to retaliate then I know negotiation is pointless.

            I don’t think anyone is going to be very happy to be grabbed from their place of work by unknown beings, interrogated about their society, and then let go even if it is unharmed. We don’t say to hostage-taking bank-robbers “not cool, please don’t do that again”, and I think aliens doing it is more sign of their potential aggression than “we’d really like to learn about your society”.

            In fact, they’re not trying to find out about our societ(ies), they are testing for aggression response (“how far can we poke the bear?”) and our capacity to retaliate (“are they equal, superior or inferior to us in weaponry and ability?”) so that would influence me in thinking they were potentially hostile/invasive, and my response to that would be a lot different than “hey, hi, can we have permission to dock with your space station, come aboard, and talk?”. As in “get out the big guns and if we don’t have big guns go find some” response.

            Point of contact is where the aliens are strongest.

            Gunboat diplomacy from aliens is no more welcome than it is from other human cultures. And if the initial impression they make is aggressive, violent against the persons of Earth citizens, and designed to intimidate (“we can go pick up an asteroid and hurl it at the earth and game over for (your) entire species”) then why would we ever trust them in future? Even if we both sign treaties, why would we believe the aliens would not resort to violence and posturing the second they feel threatened?

            Either the aliens are a real threat to Earth, in which case we should work to ensure they can’t ever go “get an asteroid” by gaining control of their ship, technology or people, or they’re not and were simply posturing in order to fool us, in which case we should work to make sure they can never become that threat (which is going to sour relations right from the start and lead to those aliens being discriminated against). “We come in peace” is the better way to start, and keep an ace up your sleeve in case the humans do try and attack you if they perceive weakness.

            Do you think that xenophobic behavior is primarily driven by the actions of the xenos?

            Well, yeah? Sure there will likely be a minority of people who are anti-alien simply because they’re aliens. But if the first thing the aliens do is kidnap Earth people, then those humans are going to look less like “xenophobic bigots” and more like “crap, they’re right, we have to defend ourselves”.

          • Erusian says:

            I don’t think anyone is going to be very happy to be grabbed from their place of work by unknown beings, interrogated about their society, and then let go even if it is unharmed. We don’t say to hostage-taking bank-robbers “not cool, please don’t do that again”, and I think aliens doing it is more sign of their potential aggression than “we’d really like to learn about your society”.

            In fact, they’re not trying to find out about our societ(ies), they are testing for aggression response (“how far can we poke the bear?”) and our capacity to retaliate (“are they equal, superior or inferior to us in weaponry and ability?”) so that would influence me in thinking they were potentially hostile/invasive, and my response to that would be a lot different than “hey, hi, can we have permission to dock with your space station, come aboard, and talk?”. As in “get out the big guns and if we don’t have big guns go find some” response.

            Is this how we deal with, for example, Russia? Or Israel? Is it how we dealt with Britain or France when they broke the international system? Like, was the US and Soviet response to the Suez Crisis to team up and invade France and Britain and kill them all?

            No, of course not. I mean, we tried to build up our own capacity but we sent negotiators and tried to resolve issues diplomatically (and mostly succeeded). A lot of people in this thread seem to want to hold these aliens to much, much higher standards than we hold our own species. Indicative of prejudice, perhaps, but a good reason for them not to trust us.

            Gunboat diplomacy from aliens is no more welcome than it is from other human cultures. And if the initial impression they make is aggressive, violent against the persons of Earth citizens, and designed to intimidate (“we can go pick up an asteroid and hurl it at the earth and game over for (your) entire species”) then why would we ever trust them in future? Even if we both sign treaties, why would we believe the aliens would not resort to violence and posturing the second they feel threatened?

            Either the aliens are a real threat to Earth, in which case we should work to ensure they can’t ever go “get an asteroid” by gaining control of their ship, technology or people, or they’re not and were simply posturing in order to fool us, in which case we should work to make sure they can never become that threat (which is going to sour relations right from the start and lead to those aliens being discriminated against). “We come in peace” is the better way to start, and keep an ace up your sleeve in case the humans do try and attack you if they perceive weakness.

            How is this gunboat diplomacy? Gunboat diplomacy involves threatening people unless they give you what you want. At no point have I suggested demanding or threatening anything. I have suggested they make a minor provocation and see how we respond and then, if we respond diplomatically, that they negotiate for asylum in a specific country or they trade with us on fair terms.

            Also, you’re… kind of making my point. “Act how we want you to, otherwise we can’t stand you having power” is a pretty big threat, especially to a species on the verge of extinction. Especially to a species that’s completely new. For all we know, kidnapping is a part of initial contact (as it was for some Native Americans). It’s significantly worse than how we treat most other countries. I mean, it was the relation the Soviet Union treated its satellites but that’s not exactly an ideal relationship.

            Well, yeah? Sure there will likely be a minority of people who are anti-alien simply because they’re aliens. But if the first thing the aliens do is kidnap Earth people, then those humans are going to look less like “xenophobic bigots” and more like “crap, they’re right, we have to defend ourselves”.

            I see. What happens if they don’t kidnap anybody but some alien abduction weirdo swears up and down that they kidnapped him/her? Since this action justifies getting a gun and shooting it at the aliens, wouldn’t that justify it too? How would you tell the difference?

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            The alien visitors don’t want to suggest to Earth that their situation is precarious, even if it is.

          • anonymousskimmer says:

            If taking someone, asking them some questions, and then letting them go unharmed is enough to make them hostile enough to retaliate then I know negotiation is pointless.

            Every culture has taboos. Never assume anything other than basic actions of mobility (literally walking) or communication isn’t a taboo. And with respect to walking, always understand that you may walk onto a taboo area. And with respect to communication, understand that you may unintentionally be rude.

            “Act how we want you to, otherwise we can’t stand you having power” is a pretty big threat, especially to a species on the verge of extinction.

            You’re positing that the aliens don’t have theory of mind. If they did, they would know that the earthlings 1) only have one habitation, too, and will respond based on this; and 2) don’t know that your ship is the only one of your species.

          • Erusian says:

            Every culture has taboos. Never assume anything other than basic actions of mobility (literally walking) or communication isn’t a taboo. And with respect to walking, always understand that you may walk onto a taboo area. And with respect to communication, understand that you may unintentionally be rude.

            Sure, everyone has taboos. Even about talking or walking. Imagine walking into Area 51 or saying a taboo word.

            The point of this is to establish that we are going to violate those taboos, even on accident, and that we are willing to make amends but only if they respond by informing us we’ve violated those taboos and explaining the taboo. Because we are trying to establish that we need a baseline of understanding, forgiveness, and mutual cooperation here. If they won’t give us that, then we can’t treat them as friendly even if they are. One small mistake and we’re dead, and we will make mistakes.

            You’re positing that the aliens don’t have theory of mind. If they did, they would know that the earthlings 1) only have one habitation, too, and will respond based on this; and 2) don’t know that your ship is the only one of your species.

            How not? My presumption is that the Earthlings will respond in their best interests to defend themselves. In fact, this entire strategy is predicated on the idea that if it comes down to aliens or humans, humans will pick humans every time. So we can’t just trust them to treat us nicely. But at the same time, we need to establish (through actions, not just words) that they want to put in the effort necessary to work with us. If they do, then we can begin to build up trust. If they don’t, then we can’t do anything to make them trust us. This is either a two sided thing or a no sided thing. Prisoner’s dilemma and all that.

            In fact, let’s do the game theory: It’s an iterated game. In the beginning the humans or aliens can cooperate or defect. On first contact, if humans and aliens cooperate then everything goes well for both. If humans defect and aliens cooperate, then the aliens are wiped out. If humans cooperate and aliens defect, the humans are wiped out. There are also intermediate defect states, say the death of a few people. If both sides defect, humans are wiped out and the aliens survive.

            The obvious option here is for humans to cooperate, since humanity can’t be made worse off by cooperation (they’re either wiped out by hostile aliens or helped by friendly aliens or suffer some small provocation by cautious aliens). And the obvious option here is for aliens to defect, since the only way they’re vulnerable is if they cooperate.

            Now it’s the next round of the game. Humans have adapted somewhat and can now credibly threaten the aliens. Now we’re in a more standard prisoner’s dilemma. The stereotypical answer is both sides should defect but if humans cooperated last round and the aliens quasi-cooperated by not going full defect (ie, a small kidnapping) the humans have made a costly signal that they want to cooperate. The aliens have made a semi-costly signal by not attacking as much as they could even though their strategic situation is deteriorating. Further, the aliens no longer suffer no consequences from defecting (the humans will shoot their new anti-alien missiles). Hopefully this leads to both sides choosing cooperate and an eventual peaceful outcome.

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:

            they’ll be wiped out more or less immediately as a tiny minority among a huge population that they no longer have any advantage over.

            The part I think you’re failing to understand is that the aliens can be wiped out immediately from the word go. They can’t maneuver from their parking orbit (specified in the OP) or go anywhere else, the ship was “only ever designed to get to that thought-to-be-uninhabited-by-sapient-life planet and colonize it”, meaning I seriously doubt it has much in the way of orbit-to-surface weaponry, certainly not enough to make good on “He who holds the orbitals holds the world”. The 50 year tech advantage just isn’t THAT significant in the face of the massive mismatch between a single ship with a population the size of a small town and the entire planet, including a whole bunch of countries with both military and civilian launch platforms that can deliver ordnance to orbit and more than enough conventional and nuclear ordnance to reduce any plausible 2070-tech level spaceship to one more hazard to our satellites.

            I could go pick up an asteroid and hurl it at the earth and game over for their entire species.

            No, you can’t. See the OP. You are “all out of resources to keep moving”.

            Is this how we deal with, for example, Russia? Or Israel? Is it how we dealt with Britain or France when they broke the international system?

            You/the aliens aren’t Russia, Israel, Britain, or France. What keeps countries from serious retaliation is the threat of reprisal is the potential cost of war or a nuclear engagement. When that cost isn’t there, you get reprisal or invasion, depending on how much you’ve annoyed the other side. C.F. Libya in the 80s, Iraq 1991-2003, Serbia in the 90s, Taliban 2001, etc.

            Now, you can maybe BLUFF that you have a bunch of kinetic impactors, or anti-matter bombs, or just plain old nukes aboard your ship and are ready to deploy them if humans get antsy, but depending on a bluff to preserve your species is…unwise.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            I read “all out of resources to keep moving” to say that they couldn’t pick another planet, not even Mars. But if they have enough fuel to land, they have more than enough fuel to maneuver in orbit. Any terrestrial launch will be very very visible and the visitors can slide out of the way.

            The bigger problem “you need to get to the surface now.” I didn’t take “now” to mean “in the next 5 minutes” but it probably means they can’t wait years.

            *Late edit*: If they can move around our solar system, they are nearly a Type II civilization and there’s really nothing that Earth, nearly a Type I civilization, could do about it. The visitors are the obvious winners and it’s not even close. Getting them into Earth orbit without a lot of extra fuel is (a) what makes the scenario interesting, and (b) is a rather reasonable thing that could really happen, since the tyranny of the rocket equation makes adding each extra little bit of extra delta-V more expensive than the last one.

          • Erusian says:

            You can definitely change the scenario if you want, @Trofim_Lysenko, but that isn’t the one I’m discussing. I made clear my interpretation, including the ability to move and that I have a year or so of time, from the start. Of course it falls apart if I’m wrong about that but it’s not fruitful to change the scenario. If you want to argue the scenario is absurd that might prove something but I don’t see how it can be obviously absurd that we have enough fuel to dodder around in orbit and travel multiple AUs but not enough to go to another solar system (which is orders of magnitude farther away).

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:

            “all out of resources to keep moving” means all out of reaction mass. I think the plain meaning of that is that you have either the bare minimum reaction mass necessary to de-orbit (which just means enough to brake your orbital velocity, not necessarily enough to accelerate to higher orbits, and thus limits your ability to dodge significantly), or you have no ability to move your ship at all and the landing must be done the same way we’ve done our space missions to date: with detacheable modules. The latter actually seems more plausible to me given the limitation of technology level.

            As Edward points out, given the tyranny of the rocket equation, and since we’re talking about 2070 technology and not 2570 technology, I think you’re the one fighting the hypothetical to justify your planned course of action.

          • Space Hobo from Hobospace says:

            By being unable to move I meant in more general sense that you can’t just say “Screw this, we’ll try another planet in 1000 more years” – you settle on Earth or you die out. Staying out of range for Earth-based projectiles should be an option, at the very least you should be able to spot the issue from a long distance away.

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:

            Very well, objection to “stay out of range” is withdrawn, though I would argue that if you can stay out of range indefinitely, much less toodle out to the asteroid belt and accelerate a sufficiently large asteroid up to dinosaur killer energies you’ve now completely gotten away from the way you originally framed your 2070-ish tech and “limited resources devoted entirely towards colonization” scenario.

            If you have the capability to do that, you have the capability to settle elsewhere in the solar system.

          • Deiseach says:

            At no point have I suggested demanding or threatening anything.

            (1) Kidnapping astronauts off the ISS
            (2) Forcing them to teach the aliens their language (and by “force” you mean what exactly?)
            (3) Pfft, I’ve got a spaceship, I can rain asteroids down on you and destroy your societies

            I’m not getting any “oh no we’re really nice and trustworthy” signals out of all this!

            You say “start with a minor provocation and see how humans respond”. Suppose you and I, two strangers, meet and the first thing you do is steal my purse or slap me in the face or something. How the heck do you think I’m going to react? What do you think I will think of you? If I am all “oh never mind I’m sure it was only a mistake” then I’m inviting you to keep using force and domineering me. I’m not going to trust you or your intentions, I’m going to have a bad opinion of you and your motivations, and I’m sure as hell going to try and have other people with me next time we meet, and maybe I’ll even bring something along with me so I can hit your thieving hands the hell away if you try any more shit.

            Whereas if you say “Hello, my name is…” and we engage in polite conversation where you don’t try kidnapping me or forcing me to teach you “An bhfuil cead agam dul amach go dtí an leithreas?” by slapping me in the face, you’d be surprised how much nicer things would go!

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      Negotiate with the native to settle my people outside Broxton, Oklahoma. Bluff to having much better tech that we do and dangle the idea of slowly releasing it.

      • kaelthas says:

        I see two problems with the bluffing strategy:
        1) I fear bluffing will backfire really bad, once it is discovered, and destroy the fragile trust that is necessary for your survival.
        2) The government might decide to take your secrets by force: Kidnapp a few of your Scientists/Technicians, throw some neutron bombs on your camp, …

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          You don’t want to out-and-out promise you have things like cold fusion.

          But suggest that you technology is pretty impressive, strong enough that you are capable of great destruction. Not that you would. Your behavior is all peaceful.

          • kaelthas says:

            I still don’t see how this would keep the US Government from using all means available to them, including torture and nukes, from getting their hands on this technology, or destroying it if they can’t.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            It wouldn’t stop the US Government from doing that.

            And I know that scenario is really common in fiction, but when does it happen in real life? When some lesser developed nation wants a superior nation’s technology, they resort to spycraft, not hot war, to get it.

          • kaelthas says:

            And I know that scenario is really common in fiction, but when does it happen in real life? When some lesser developed nation wants a superior nation’s technology, they resort to spycraft, not hot war, to get it.

            This is a special case. The Aliens have only 1/15.000 of the manpower of the technically inferior nation. And Nukes are the great equalizer. (I wouldn’t expect “50 years ahead” tech to be able to effectively shield against a neutron bomb).

          • albatross11 says:

            If they were going to make war against us, the right move would be to do it from deep space, ideally before we knew they were even there. Maybe mount engines on big rocks in the oort cloud or on comets, and then send them toward Earth all at once so that by the time we realize there’s a problem, we’ve got too many things to deal with at once–while the aliens stay safely far outside the range of any weapons we have. We can’t nuke an alien space ship in the asteroid belt or in orbit around Mars anytime soon. After they’ve killed off 90+% of the population and wrecked most of the planet’s economy via big rocks smashing into things and failed harvests and big-rock-induced tidal waves and such, they can worry about mopping up.

    • Deiseach says:

      I think most governments of Earth would be happy to take a group that size as potential citizens, they might even agree to let the aliens settle in whatever countries appeal to them and so divide them up amongst several nations. They’re not a huge number, their tech is very cool but as you say only 50 years ahead of us so they can give an impetus to Earth invention but they’re not advanced enough to be a threat, and there’s no home governments/fleet backing them up.

      This is not an invasion force, it’s a refugee ship. Alien Nation (the movie and TV series) dealt with exactly this, and the Newcomers in that numbered 300,000 yet were (mostly) assimilated into Los Angeles.

    • Eric Rall says:

      I don’t like our chances long-term settling on Earth, we’ll be a very small and (at least initially) insular minority, and our tech edge is going to be lost rapidly when we barter for land and supplies. We’d then be utterly dependent on the good will of the natives, and what I will have been able to glean from monitoring their broadcast media is probably not encouraging on that front. So instead of looking for land, I’d instead take an approach of offering to trade technological information for the supplies we need to keep going in hopes that the next habitable world doesn’t have an advanced technological civilization yet.

      Of course, this depends on the nebulous “resources” we’re out of being things that modern humans could reasonably procure for us. If we’re talking about food, air, or water, that’s trivial: the hard part is if the quantities needed would strain the sum of Earth’s existing launch capacity and my ship’s reusable surface-to-orbit cargo shuttles.

      If we need fuel for our engines, which seems the most likely, then it depends on what our ship runs on. It’s almost certainly not ordinary chemical fuel, since that’s ludicrously impractical for interstellar trips. If we have a fission-based reactor, no problem: Earth has plenty of Uranium and Thorium and several cultures have the technology and infrastructure to make Plutonium in quantity as well as to isolate the more useful isotopes of U and Th. Likewise for an Orion-style nuclear pulse drive: the US and Russia each has thousands of ready-made warheads in storage, although they might need to be remanufactured to produce the optimal yield for our pusher plate.

      If we have a fusion-based drive, it depends on the particular fuel we use. Humans could sell us deuterium in quantity, no problem. Tritium would a bit of a problem depending on the quantity needed, but if our drive uses tritium we’d need to produce our own en-route anyway (tritium has a half life of 12.3 years, which is nothing in the life span of a generation ship) so we could probably just buy lithium or boron to make the tritium from. If we use He3, we might be out of luck: it occurs naturally, but in very low concentrations, and humans only have the infrastructure to concentrate out small quantities; and manufacturing it means manufacturing tritium and waiting for it to decay.

      If our drive runs on metastable liquid metallic hydrogen, or antimatter, or something even more exotic, them we’re probably out of luck. We’d need to teach humans how to make it, wait for them to ramp up the infrastructure (which may involve several iterations of us teaching them how to make the tools to make the tools), and hope they don’t decide to alter the deal with us in the meantime.

      If we need spare parts, especially electronics or other high-tech goodies, that’s potentially as difficult for humans to provide as exotic fuels would be. In that case, it might be lower risk to just find a way to settle down on Earth as others are proposing.

      • albatross11 says:

        With the technology the aliens had to have to get here, they could probably settle on Mars. If they need to settle on Earth, work our our language and negotiate for a place to settle that’s acceptable to others–probably some basically empty place they can handle like a very hot/dry desert or some land in Antartica. Since we could build cities in those environments if we needed to, aliens with 50 years more advanced technology could surely do it.

    • Randy M says:

      Honestly the best bet is probably to park the ship in Earth orbit and trade for any necessities that we can’t fabricate. For a mixture of political and biological reasons.

      I think the conditions on Earth are probably particularly amenable to all kinds of life–water’s great that way–but almost certainly not precisely what these aliens are adapted to. Moreover, alien biology is going to be at best incompatible and at worst actively hostile on to native biology. The new comers aren’t going to be able to eat anything that grows currently on Earth, and their crops are going to be out competed by the natives except perhaps in niche regions if they are very lucky. And it’s unlikely they have the capabilities to blast away all organic matter from a suitibly large region without retaliation.

      • bullseye says:

        I’m even less confident that Earth would be naturally hospitable to them. When oxygen first became common in our atmosphere it caused a mass extinction. And if it’s possible for life to evolve without water, I would expect water to be very hostile to that life.

        • Randy M says:

          Life as we know it (an admittedly unknown fraction of life) is built from small bags of water in which chemical reactions take place; I’m dubious of hydrophobic aliens being possible.
          But an exception might be a post-organic, technology-based species.

          Using some non-oxygen based metabolic processes seems more plausible.

          • Eric T says:

            Life as we know it (an admittedly unknown fraction of life) is built from small bags of water in which chemical reactions take place; I’m dubious of hydrophobic aliens being possible.

            I guess the issue with this is we’re basing our example off of exactly one evolutionary chain: ours. Of course our life is built from small bags of water: we had an abundance of water. Chemical soup and all that. It’s like reaching into a bag and pulling out a blue marble and declaring that all marbles in the bag are probably blue. I think from a Bayesian sense we can say “it’s now more likely the next marble will be blue” but I don’t know if I’d ever go so far as to be dubious of it not being blue.

          • Fahundo says:

            There’s another thing to consider. Hydrogen, Oxygen, Carbon, and Nitrogen are among the most abundant elements in the Milky Way, if Wikipedia is to be believed. I’d imagine this increases the chances that life on other planets would be composed of these elements.

          • Randy M says:

            I guess the issue with this is we’re basing our example off of exactly one evolutionary chain:

            Not really. I am biasing my definition of life by what we know life to be; that is, there may be morally relevant types of beings that are so wholly different we wouldn’t even call them alive under our current definition. Fair enough.

            But for something vaguely similar to us, water is incredibly useful, possibly essential, though of course it’d be hubris to state that with too much certainty.

            Water is uniquely good for heat transfer. It is a simple, common molecule that is nonetheless liquid without extreme cold or pressure. Being liquid, it allows reactants to approach each other, can alter its shape but retains cohesion as opposed to solids or gases.

      • Space Hobo from Hobospace says:

        I would like to point out that water and oxygen is literally what aliens have come for.

    • This isn’t that far from the background story of Cherryh’s Foreigner, the first of a long series that I have greatly enjoyed, except that the stranded aliens are humans on an FTL colonizing ship that somehow got lost. The inhabitants of the planet are a humanoid species, physically very much like us although somewhat larger, stronger, and much better at mathematics, but with deep psychological differences. Their technology is at the level of steam engines.

      They end up, after friendly interaction followed by violent conflict due to psychological differences neither species recognized, being given an island about the size of New Zealand in exchange for agreeing to feed human technology to the Atevi, slowly enough not to disrupt the Atevi society.

      The series starts about two hundred years later.

    • bullseye says:

      Everyone’s assuming that the aliens would be at a huge military disadvantage, but I’m not so sure. They’re 50 years ahead of us, and I don’t have any idea what weapons will be capable of 50 years. They might have bio-weapons designed to clear a planet of undesirable species.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        Aside from weapons of mass destruction, that tend to ruin the place you’re trying to rule, I don’t think 20,000 soldiers using 2020 tech could take over the world in 1970. Also, it’s 20,000 aliens, not 20,000 alien soldiers.

      • Erusian says:

        My assumption was precisely the opposite. They have a spaceship. That alone means they can basically conjure up nuclear level strikes without much effort or fallout and disrupt a huge amount of our communications. Let alone the more advanced technology. There also aren’t that many of them so they can make the Earth mostly uninhabitable and still have enough land left over for them.

        I’m presuming they don’t want to do that because otherwise it just turns into an immediate fight.

        • John Schilling says:

          They have a spaceship. That alone means they can basically conjure up nuclear level strikes without much effort…

          Rocks Are Not free, Citizen.

          Meanwhile, the primitive Earthlings can conjure up nuclear level strikes by the thousand at the push of a button. It took them a lot of effort to reach that point, but sunk costs are sunk.

          I mean, we know how this story ends, right?

          • Erusian says:

            Rocks Are Not free, Citizen.

            Not free, but cheaper than the alternatives if they didn’t bring major weapons with them. Which… why would they, who were they expecting to fight?

            Also, those calculations leave out the relative size of the ship and the asteroid. This isn’t a battleship but a large generation ship, which means it has relatively more impressive engines than an Imperial ship needs.

            Meanwhile, the primitive Earthlings can conjure up nuclear level strikes by the thousand at the push of a button. It took them a lot of effort to reach that point, but sunk costs are sunk.

            Aimed at Earth, not the aliens. As far as I know, no nation has the capability to hit a ship in deep space, and certainly not one that can dodge.

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:

            Read my response up thread, and reread the OP.

            You’re not in deep space dodging. Your target was earth, and you arrived are all out of resources to go anywhere else.

            In other words, you are in parking orbit and out of delta-V.

            You’re already in Earth’s engagement envelope and your ability to dodge is going to be VERY limited at best and non-existent at worst

          • Erusian says:

            As I said up thread @Trofim_Lysenko, you can certainly invent a scenario where that’s right. It’s simply not the scenario any of us are discussing.

  45. Belisaurus Rex says:

    In Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, he has the main character reject the teachings of the Buddha because he believes that Buddhism does not teach you how to become like the Buddha, but instead how to remove suffering from your life. Is this a legitimate criticism of Buddhism (factually correct) and if so, why don’t Buddhists want to be more like the Buddha but instead follow his (apparently unrelated) teachings to get stuck in a local maximum?

    • Aftagley says:

      IMO, it’s not entirely accurate. The way to end suffering is to achieve enlightenment. Once you have ended suffering, you will have awakened your Buddha nature. To draw a line between the Buddha’s teachings on suffering and the teachings on achieving enlightenment is kind of strange if considered in a vacuum.

      That being said, I think it’s perfectly clear that perhaps Siddhartha’s path to enlightenment might have been different than the one Buddha used to teach the majority of his followers. My read of Siddhartha was that this was a man cursed with uncommon attributes that forced him to find his own path towards enlightenment, not necessarily that Buddha was not actually working towards the successful illumination of his followers.

    • Faza (TCM) says:

      I believe one of the major points of contention between Theravada and Mahayana is that the former holds that one’s goal as a practitioner should be personal enlightenment (and, hence, release from suffering), while (some strains of) Mahayana hold that one’s goal should be the liberation of all beings (the Boddhisattva vow). The latter is much closer to “being like the Buddha”.

      Regardless, I had a different impression of Siddhartha’s qualms about Buddhism. That it was not so much that it doesn’t teach the practitioner to become like the Buddha, but rather that the Buddha’s way of achieving enlightenment cannot be taught at all:

      “Do not be angry with me, O Illustrious One,” said the young man. “I have not spoken to you thus to quarrel with you about words. You are right when you say that opinions mean little, but may I say one thing more. I did not doubt you for one moment. Not for one moment did I doubt that you were the Buddha, that you have reached the highest goal which so many thousands of Brahmins and Brahmins’ sons are striving to reach. You have done so by your own seeking, in your own way, through thought, through meditation, through knowledge, through enlightenment. You have learned nothing through teachings, and so I think, O Illustrious One, that nobody finds salvation through teachings. To nobody, O Illustrious One can you communicate in words and teachings what happened to you in the hour of your enlightenment. The teachings of the enlightened Buddha embrace much, they teach much – how to live righteously, how to avoid evil. But there is one thing that this clear, worthy instruction does not contain; it does not contain the secret of what the Illustrious One himself experienced – he alone among hundreds of thousands.

      • Belisaurus Rex says:

        Thank you for posting the text, but I don’t see how that’s any different.

        “Doesn’t teach you to become like the Buddha” is pretty close to “can’t teach you to become the Buddha”, and is a valid complaint if the Buddha is trying to teach you and failing.

        If the Buddha’s experience is so pivotal to enlightenment, then trying to teach people without that is doomed to failure.

        • Faza (TCM) says:

          First we must define what it means to “become like the Buddha”.

          What differentiates the Buddha from an enlightened Buddhist practitioner is that the Buddha achieved enlightenment by himself. “[B]y [his] own seeking, in [his] own way, through thought, through meditation, through knowledge.”

          If we mean “like the Buddha” in a strict sense, it is by definition impossible to teach, because someone who is taught cannot achieve enlightenment “by his own seeking”.

          So we need a less strict meaning of “like the Buddha”, which is usually taken to mean “achieving enlightenment”, or Nirvana (Nibbana).

          What does it mean to achieve enlightenment? The key to the Buddhist understanding of it lies in the Four Noble Truths:

          Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.

          Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the origin of suffering: it is this craving [taṇhā, “thirst”] which leads to re-becoming, accompanied by delight and lust, seeking delight here and there; that is, craving for sensual pleasures, craving for becoming, craving for disbecoming.

          Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the cessation of suffering: it is the remainderless fading away and cessation of that same craving, the giving up and relinquishing of it, freedom from it, non-reliance on it.

          Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the way leading to the cessation of suffering: it is this noble eightfold path; that is, right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.

          Enlightenment, as taught by the Buddha, is the cessation of suffering and the Buddhist dharma (dhamma) is the way leading to the cessation of suffering.

          Therefore, to “remove suffering from your life” is to become like the Buddha in the broad sense.

          What Siddhartha is saying, as you note, is that enlightenment is an experience that cannot be translated into a teaching. You can teach people to follow the noble eightfold path (“how to live righteously, how to avoid evil”), but this will not suffice for them to achieve cessation of suffering.

  46. albatross11 says:

    An interestingly narrative-bending story on NPR. I hope he holds onto his seat, but then, I’m more-or-less libertarian and want that wing of the party to get stronger, not weaker.

    • broblawsky says:

      It’s interesting to me that Trump’s endorsement of Riggleman may not be enough to save him.

    • Aftagley says:

      Maybe I’m dumb, but how does that story bend any narratives?

      I see an example of “republican elected official isn’t sufficiently and uniformly republican and so he gets (potentially) primaried out.”

      That’s been my understanding of the modern republican party since at least the Tea party, maybe even since Newt and his contract. What am I missing here?

      • albatross11 says:

        But also this is a Southern Republican supported by Trump who is supportive enough of gay marriage to have officiated one.

        • broblawsky says:

          Yeah, this is absolutely not the type of guy I would expect to get primaried. According to 538, Riggleman has a Trump alignment score of 94.5%, an unusual level of Trump alignment.

          This suggests that the Republican right-wing evangelical\populist movement (as opposed to the pro-business or libertarian elements of the party) is less ideologically bound to Trump than I believed.

          • Aftagley says:

            Wasn’t that the takeaway from the Luther Strange/Roy More debacle? Trump endorsed the more mainstream politician over the firery evengelical outsider then as well.

            My takeaway is that as long as both sides are saying they’ll be loyal to trump and follow his agenda, primary voters don’t really care who has Trump’s official endorsement.

          • Matt M says:

            He’s also doing it in Alabama with Jeff Sessions, although that seems to be more of a personal grudge than ideological…

          • Eric T says:

            Wasn’t that the takeaway from the Luther Strange/Roy More debacle? Trump endorsed the more mainstream politician over the firery evengelical outsider then as well.

            My takeaway is that as long as both sides are saying they’ll be loyal to trump and follow his agenda, primary voters don’t really care who has Trump’s official endorsement.

            I worked on Doug Jones’s campaign actually! Most of the Red-Tribers I talked to didn’t really care who Trump had endorsed.

  47. Loriot says:

    One dish I’ve been experimenting with lately is egg-oatmeal pancakes – that is, mix eggs and rolled outs, a little milk and salt, then fry them. The main issue I’ve found is that if you just mix it and fry it immediately, the egg mixture won’t stick to the oats when you try to fry them. Instead, you have to let the oats soak for a couple hours in order to make the mixture more cohesive. But having to prepare it hours before hand and taking up fridge space in the mean time is very inconvenient. Any ideas how to solve this problem?

    • gdepasamonte says:

      I have two oatmeal pancake recipes to hand, though I’ve tried neither. Both use true oatmeal i.e. ground rather than rolled oats. One has you “cook” the oatmeal by boiling milk and mixing the two, which will hydrate the oats more quickly – you might have to wait for the mixture to cool a little before adding the eggs, though. The other has you soak the oatmeal overnight in cold water, no need to refrigerate, and drain it when you are ready.

    • DarkTigger says:

      I think I had my recipt for this two or three OTs ago.
      I don’t use milk but hot vegetable stock, and let the mix only sit long enough so that the eggs don’t stock when I add them. I think the the almost boiling part, is important here, to make the oats stick by themself. So maybe hot milk would work too.
      Also I don’t really make pancakes and more little pattys alittle smaler than my palm.

    • broblawsky says:

      What kind of milk:egg:oats ratio are you using?

      You could try using a pressure cooker for the oats? I have no idea if this will work, but pressure cookers let you skip the soaking process for cooking dry beans.

      • Loriot says:

        Right now I’m trying 1 egg:2tbps milk:1/3 cup oats. But I’ve been experimenting with different amounts and styles and stuff to try to optimize the recipe.

    • AG says:

      Use a cupcake pan (preferably silicone) and bake?

      Alternatively, get waxed cupcake wrappers and steam like it’s dim sum. Then you can still fry as a finishing process, if you want that crunch.

    • For what it’s worth, my oatcake recipe, historically conjectural and based on a comment by Froissart, is just oats (steel cut, not rolled), water, and salt. You add water and salt to the oats, let them sit for an hour or two, then fry them on a dry pan, no oil needed although it might taste better with oil or butter. I was trying to come up with something that didn’t require any perishable ingredients, since Froissart was describing the travel food of Scottish troopers.

      It’s actually pretty good. It turns out that oats taste sweet, even without any sugar.

      • gdepasamonte says:

        Oatcakes are quite different to oatmeal pancakes. The Froissart comment appears in one of my sources too, F Marian McNeill’s Scots Kitchen (1929). She reports also that Skye fisherman made their oatcakes by dipping a handful of meal directly into the sea and shaping the resulting dough. I suppose they must have eaten it raw.

        Ordinary household oatcakes recipes usually have a small proportion of fat added – butter, bacon fat or other animal fat. I experimented a little with some of these non-bread grain products when it was hard to get ordinary wheat flour earlier in the year, but didn’t try any oatcakes without fat. I have a suspicion they would come out quite fragile – don’t you find this?

        I discovered also that barley meal/flour makes pleasant griddle cakes and pancakes (I had never tried it before, and it is not easy to find where I live, though it was once a staple).

  48. John Murawski says:

    To: Scott Alexander

    I’m a journalist writing about the Motte & Bailey fallacy and would like to talk to you about it since you’re credited with popularizing the concept. Please let me know if you’re available by phone to discuss.

    John Murawski
    Reporter
    RealClearInvestigations
    mobile: 919-812-1837
    email: jmurawski@realclearinvestigations.com
    Twitter: @johnmurawski

    • Anteros says:

      Fallacy?

    • Erusian says:

      Does Scott have a policy on giving people his email? I mean the public contact one that’s elsewhere on the site. I’d be happy to put it here but I don’t want to do that without knowing his policy.

  49. Two McMillion says:

    Can anyone suggest why this is anything other that utter intellectual dishonesty?

    My guess is, “Nobody thought of it”. Thinking of all the things you should correct for is hard.

    • AG says:

      I asked a similar question earlier, but is there a point at which controlling for so many factors makes analysis almost automatically a p-hacking case?

      Is there a difference between “This study shows that the medicine is very effective for 50-70 year old middle class hispanic grandmothers” and “This study shows that the medicine is only effective for 50-70 year old middle class hispanic grandmothers?”

      • qn1 says:

        What do you mean? I have been reading about stuff like this recently, so am curious.

        Controlling for covariates just seems like an obviously good thing.

        Now if you make like 50 sub-groups, compute p-values, don’t apply multiple hypothesis correction, and report those under 5% as significant, that’s certainly a bad move.

        But re-balancing your data (or doing some matching procedure) in order to “factor out” the effects of covariates like age seems obviously good. Unless you try like 15 different methods to do it, and pick the one that gives you significant result, etc.

        But yeah why “automatically a p-hacking case”?

        • Lambert says:

          If you control for things that are causally downstream (colliders) of the thing you’re studying as if they were upstream (confounders), you get weird problems like the obesity paradox.

    • rumham says:

      I certainly didn’t, and I look for EDIT: counterfactuals confounders. But if I was getting paid to….

      Well, I guess it would matter a great deal who was paying me and what they thought about the issue.

    • Not thinking of it doesn’t require dishonesty. Ignoring it once it is pointed out does.

  50. souleater says:

    But I forgot to list one that was so obvious and so important once I thought of it that I’m now pretty convinced that every study that doesn’t control for it is actively trying to trick readers: age

    Whites are, on average, almost exactly ten years older than blacks: 43 years old to 33 years old.

    I’m a mistake theorist, and I don’t think they were trying to trick anyone as much as haven’t thought about it. But for the record I did see your post, and I actually thought it was fascinating. I don’t have anything insightful to add.. but this was a really, really interesting observation.

  51. Erusian says:

    I agree a lot of these statistics are motived junk, but my immediate reaction is that I think you’d get a lot of sympathy among Democrats if your argument was the number one thing poor minorities need is better healthcare so they can live longer to help them generationally climb out of poverty.

    • Eric T says:

      the number one thing poor minorities need is better healthcare so they can live longer to help them generationally climb out of poverty.

      I suspect you are right: I know a lot of Dems/Libs/SJ-types who think something very similar to this. Maybe not the generational climb out of poverty thing, but definitely the minorities need better healthcare thing.

      Now as for the Healthcare debate, I am NOT qualified to weigh in on that one, so I’ll avoid opening that can of worms.

    • Eric T says:

      Longer lives would help groups rise from poverty if you were helping people who would have died at 30 die at 60 instead, but helping people who already would passed retirement age live even further past retirement age reduces generational wealth transfer.

      It would have been far better for my bank account, and possibly for the bank accounts of my kids if I didn’t blow all the money, if my parents had bit it the day after they stopped working.

      Wait maybe I’m just being really dumb but wouldn’t this be a strike against your point then? If African Americans are indeed 10-years younger than average then yes a 33-year-old makes 20% less than a 43-year old, but also with fewer retirees/people working less as they approach old age balance that out somewhat?

      I suspect I’m totally wrong here but I want to know why I’m wrong.

    • Randy M says:

      It would have been far better for my bank account, and possibly for the bank accounts of my kids if I didn’t blow all the money, if my parents had bit it the day after they stopped working.

      Only assuming they provided no valuable services to you with that free time.

      also with fewer retirees/people working less as they approach old age balance that out somewhat?

      Somewhat, if true (see previous point about older people helping families, especially on the low end). But, somewhat doesn’t mean completely. If you increase factor X and decrease factor Y, it doesn’t necessarily cancel out unless they move exactly the same. Which they certainly wouldn’t in this case due to all the complexities around income increases, cost of living in elderly years, and so on.

      And you have to consider the shape of the actual demographic curves; there are typically more young than elderly for any given decade.

    • if your argument was the number one thing poor minorities need is better healthcare so they can live longer to help them generationally climb out of poverty.

      1. The black/white life expectancy difference is less than four years, so it looks as though much of the difference in average age is due to differences in birth rates.

      2. Hispanic life expectancy is higher than white life expectancy, although it’s unlikely that hispanics have better health care, which suggests other major factors.

      • Erusian says:

        1. The black/white life expectancy difference is less than four years, so it looks as though much of the difference in average age is due to differences in birth rates.

        Interesting. Though the Democrats see birth rates as a product of healthcare, including lower birth rates, so it wouldn’t change their position.

        2. Hispanic life expectancy is higher than white life expectancy, although it’s unlikely that hispanics have better health care, which suggests other major factors.

        Fair point. Though the question then is whether it could mitigate it, at least to the interventionist mind.

  52. baconbits9 says:

    As if there wasn’t enough going on the Market rolled over and is down almost 6% today and has a shot at taking out 2950 before the close.

    • Aftagley says:

      The Fed Giveth, the Fed taketh away. Although, for real, at this point who honestly needed to be told by Powell that we were in for a bad year?

      • baconbits9 says:

        I think that it was more the ‘Things are going to be bad for a while plus we won’t do anything unless it gets worse than bad’ implication.

  53. Le Maistre Chat says:

    … and the median age of Asian-Americans is 33.x, same as blacks.
    That is really interesting.

  54. SamChevre says:

    You are close to a key insight from Jim Manzi’s book “Uncontrolled”–it is approximately impossible to identify all and only the things you should control for when doing an analysis.

    For example, how many studies on intelligence controlled for lead exposure before Kevin Drum suggested it? Not having that control makes for a lot of problems, because lead exposure specifically harms impulse control–that means any time lead exposure isn’t controlled for, the correlation between low intelligence and impulsiveness is too high.

    • albatross11 says:

      Also, there’s a positive correlation between positive lead exposure and being either black or poor, so there’s a mechanism there to explain some or all of the black/white differences in IQ and crime.

    • methylethyl says:

      Fetal alcohol exposure also lowers both intelligence and impulse control. And only a small minority of cases have the obvious facial anomalies. So it’s likely that most cases go undiagnosed, or mis-diagnosed as ADHD, ODD, and other things with some shared symptoms. And since no parent wants to admit to that, good luck controlling for it…

  55. Aftagley says:

    Interesting counterpoint to the recent discussion about how impossible it is to fire Federal Employees: The Far-Right, politically incorrect college English professor at the Naval Academy whom the Acadademy desperately wants to fire, but can’t. Link

    I admit, I’m strongly biased against military academies in general, but I really love this story and like this guy.

    • broblawsky says:

      God, he sounds insufferable.

    • Garrett says:

      How do you get far-right out of that piece? Having read it, and finding it entertaining, I’m not certain where I’d put him ideological. But anybody who spends a bunch of time talking encouraging gay men to use condoms for safe anal sex while teaching English I’m going to have a hard time coding as Far-Right.

  56. keaswaran says:

    Don’t 58-year-olds make quite a bit more than 73-year-olds? (I don’t exactly know how retirement income tends to be classified.)

    I’m pretty sure you’re right that overall, just correcting for age will take away some of this disparity (assuming these aren’t statistics about people from a given birth cohort or graduation cohort, which already controls for this). But it won’t take as much as you expect just by looking at variance in income within the prime earning years.

  57. albatross11 says:

    This is something I tried to post on an earlier thread and it got eaten.

    There’s a lot of discussion about historical injustice–like, how much of the black/white gap in wealth or income or crime or IQ scores or life expectancy is due to evil past behavior by whites, vs other causes. But I don’t see why that’s relevant.

    Morally, no whites alive today bear any responsibility at all for slavery or the nasty shit that happened after reconstruction ended in the South. Hardly any bear any responsibiltiy for Jim Crow laws and the ones who do are mostly very old people sitting in nursing homes. Very few whites alive today even bear any responsibility for housing policy in the 50s-70s. Neither moral guilt nor moral credit is applicable to races or bloodlines, so even if my grandparents supported sundown laws, or for that matter marched around in white robes burning crosses, it wouldn’t have anything to do with my own moral status or obligations.

    Practically, who cares whether white people or black people or space aliens or impersonal forces of economics and physics led to the problems we see today? We should want to fix the problems that we can fix regardless, subject to doing some cost/benefit analysis. I don’t think white people writ large are responsible for the black/white IQ difference, but if we discovered a way to narrow that difference by, say, doing really expensive and aggressive lead remediation across the country, I’d be all for it. I suspect white people writ large are responsible for the substantial voluntary segregation that persists in churches to this day, but I don’t think we need a policy response to that.

    • broblawsky says:

      Redlining was still happening as of 2015. Economic discrimination is not a thing of the past.

      • cassander says:

        those claims look pretty thin. “The mayors of Jersey City and Newark are concerned that poor, minority neighborhoods haven’t been getting their share of fiber-optic quality broadband internet access.” Right, what reason could fios possibly have for not running running expensive infrastructure to poor neighborhoods to sell a luxury good besides racism, right? And it looks like banks are getting condemned for both not loaning minorities enough money and loaning them too much.

      • albatross11 says:

        I haven’t looked into these cases, but my impression is that mortgage lending is pretty ruthlessly profit-driven, even to the point of happily offering people loans that will clearly just put them into bankruptcy in a few months. (When we were looking for a house some years ago, we got an offer for a mortage like this.) This makes me strongly suspect that what’s going on in most of these cases is some kind of differential outcome based on profit-maximizing behavior. That is, I think you’re seeing rational discrimination rather than irrational discrimination.

        An example of this kind of thing I’ve heard elsewhere is that blacks apparently pay more than whites, on average, for cars. The most likely explanation for that I’ve seen is that car salesmen are equally predatory to everyone, but blacks are on average less experienced with car salesmen and so end up with worse terms.

        The “reverse redlining” thing is, as I understand it, just offering blacks worse terms than whites on average on mortgages. That might be due to differences in important things w.r.t. getting the mortgage paid back, but might also be due to differences in sophistication as buyers–it *really* helps to have some family members who’ve bought houses before to ask for advice.

        The reason the cause matters is that it changes what response would work. Eliminating racial animus among car or mortgage sellers or real estate agents can help with irrational discrimination, but won’t help a bit with rational discrimination.

        And of course, in moral terms, the responsibility for these things (much less damaging than slavery or Jim Crow but still nasty) lies with the individuals and organizations that do them, not with the race to which those individuals belong.

        • baconbits9 says:

          The most likely explanation for that I’ve seen is that car salesmen are equally predatory to everyone, but blacks are on average less experienced with car salesmen and so end up with worse terms.

          Cars are often financed so if one group is a higher risk than another to default they will pay more.

      • cassander says:

        @albatross11 says:

        I haven’t looked into these cases, but my impression is that mortgage lending is pretty ruthlessly profit-driven, even to the point of happily offering people loans that will clearly just put them into bankruptcy in a few months.

        In normal times, banks don’t want to do this because the cost of repossessing and reselling the house exceeded what the bank could make from it. During the bubble years, this stopped being the case because prices were rising fast enough that banks could make money on defaults. My understanding is that this has been cut back somewhat since the crash. certainly I got raked over the coals a couple years ago when I bought a place, though that was more citi’s ineptitude than due diligence.

        The “reverse redlining” thing is, as I understand it, just offering blacks worse terms than whites on average on mortgages. That might be due to differences in important things w.r.t. getting the mortgage paid back, but might also be due to differences in sophistication as buyers–it *really* helps to have some family members who’ve bought houses before to ask for advice.

        I’ve never met my mortgage banker in person. I filed out some forms online, got back quotes, and went with the guy that was cheapest.

        The reason the cause matters is that it changes what response would work. Eliminating racial animus among car or mortgage sellers or real estate agents can help with irrational discrimination, but won’t help a bit with rational discrimination.

        Rational discrimination isn’t discrimination. charging people more likely to default more for their loans is exactly what we want a banking system to do. And capitalism left to its own devices will kill irrational discrimination.

        • baconbits9 says:

          During the bubble years, this stopped being the case because prices were rising fast enough that banks could make money on defaults.

          Banks don’t make money on defaults, even if the bank can end up selling the house for more than the loan they legally have to return the excess to the former mortgage holder in most cases. Now they can keep enough to compensate them for missed payments, fees, penalties etc but the math will rarely work out in their favor because of the large costs associated with foreclosures plus the costs of originating and servicing the loan.

          What did appear to happen was loan originators who used every trick in the book to allow people to make payments for long enough that they would qualify for refinancing. For this you need typically around 2 years of payments, though maybe 1 in a really hot city like San Fran, then the borrower has better credit from making a couple of years worth of payments and home prices are up enough that the next loan acts as if it has a down-payment.

          Tricks to do this were things like interest only loans, teaser rates and adjustable rate mortgages. Each of these shaves a few bucks (possibly a few hundred) off the early payments making it easier to make them. The other thing to do, which was the most common, was to sell the loans as quickly as possible to have them bundled into the infamous mortgage backed securities of the time. Making your cut on the origination and servicing fees.

          • cassander says:

            Banks don’t make money on defaults,

            You’re right. Not lose money would have been more apt. But ultimately, someone, somewhere was paying for these houses, and the enterprise was only sustainable as long as housing prices were rising fast enough that no one got stuck with the hot potato.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            Is it possible that one part of a bank was setting up incentives which weren’t good for the whole bank? I think that’s what happened with Wells Fargo.

          • albatross11 says:

            As I understand it, a lot of mortgage brokers were/are fairly quickly reselling the loans to be packaged in CDOs. That means they care a lot about what they will be paid for the loans, but not at all about how those loans will perform in a year or two.

        • 205guy says:

          Rational discrimination isn’t discrimination. charging people more likely to default more for their loans is exactly what we want a banking system to do. And capitalism left to its own devices will kill irrational discrimination.

          This combined with the original post about sins-of-our-fathers really points out the problem, as well as how individualistic/libertarian thinking is blind to it. Jim Crow and redlining kept poc from participating in the country’s wealth building. Now after years of compound returns and rising property values have enriched those who could participate, people try to say racism is no longer a problem. Point is, past racism is still a problem today, and those who benefited from the past racism should at least acknowledge this. Then it seems logical that present mortgage rates should make amends by discounting the risk of poc lending—and probably spreading that risk to all other loans. I could get behind a program that immediately raises a poc’s credit score in exchange for a finance and budgeting class and ongoing support.

          • cassander says:

            This combined with the original post about sins-of-our-fathers really points out the problem, as well as how individualistic/libertarian thinking is blind to it.

            Funny, because we feel exactly the same way about your blindness to the power of capitalism. The Irish, Jews, and Asians were also kept from building wealth. but once those restrictions were removed, they were able to do so just fine. the irish, I assume, as as rich as other white americans, and asians are richer. So why did capitalism work for them but not for blacks? If you want to say “because blacks had it worse” I will agree with you, whole hardheartedly. They did, so it will take longer. But that doesn’t mean it won’t work, and claiming that it won’t work for them when it did for others is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence.

            people try to say racism is no longer a problem.

            Because it isn’t. Often people on the left will even admit that racist acts by individuals aren’t the issue. But they insist on using the word because it has political power, and twist themselves into knots to justify that.

            Point is, past racism is still a problem today,

            Past racism, by definition, isn’t present racism, and the people who advocate about present day racism should at least acknowledge this.

            and those who benefited from the past racism should at least acknowledge this.

            My ancestors were Jewish serfs who came to the US in the late 1800s when they got tired of getting murdered by Cossacks. My grandfather was kept out of medical school by quotas and when my dad started working in the 70s there were still wall street firms that didn’t hire jews. How exactly did I benefit from past racism?

            Then it seems logical that present mortgage rates should make amends by discounting the risk of poc lending—

            No, it doesn’t, for both reasons of justice and practicality. on grounds of justice, I didn’t do anything wrong to anyone, and no one should be punished for things that other people did. On practicality, if the problem really is that black people are, on average, worse credit risks because of past poverty, then a racially blind anti-poverty programs will solve the problem exactly as well, and without (A) hurting people like poor whites or (B) doing long term damage to the political fabric of the country by making politics about identity and summoning the toxicity that involves.

          • John Schilling says:

            Point is, past racism is still a problem today, and those who benefited from the past racism should at least acknowledge this.

            That’s too fuzzy a category to be useful. And I’m pretty certain you’re going to simplify “those who benefited from the past racism” to “all white men in America” without the slightest sense of irony.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            cassander:

            Jewish serfs? I thought Russian Jews were kept out of farming and abused in a lot of ways, but not by being serfs.

          • albatross11 says:

            205guy:

            I wouldn’t support trying to set mortgage rates by race, because I think screwing around with prices for political reasons usually doesn’t work out very well. (Watch as everyone selling mortgages tries mightily to avoid lending to blacks because they’re required to offer them rates that are unprofitable, or watch as the market opens up other alternatives for borrowing for a house and whites and Asians flock to those alternatives to avoid paying the cross-subsidized higher rates, or….)

            On the other hand, I’m 100% in favor of making better financial education available for people who need it, and targeting it at blacks and hispanics and anyone else who needs it.

            To the extent that discrimination is rational, we don’t always want to get rid of it, and in fact it’s quite hard to work out how much of it we want to keep around. In some places, we may be able to make discrimination not be rational, but doing things like working extra hard at giving people who’ve never had money some extra help at learning how to manage it. In others, we can make the world a better place by making it easier for an unsophisticated person to buy a house or a car without getting screwed over.

            The distinction I’d draw here is like this: suppose you have a university that notices that its black students are struggling relative to its white students. You could solve that problem by telling professors to give their black students better grades, but that would quickly cause more problems. Or, you could offer the black students extra help–maybe have an academic advisor talk to the black students each week to see how they’re doing, help them find tutoring and other academic support, make sure they know when they have to drop a class to avoid getting an F on their transcript, etc. That second solution seems like it could make things a better overall–in particular, if you’re a kid who went to a shitty high school and had few challenging classes[1] and now you’re in a college with people who went to much better high schools and are prepared for tough classes, this might save you from flunking out or giving up on your plan to go into engineering or science in favor of some much less challenging major.

            In general, I prefer remedies to structural racism/different histories/whatever that help the people with the disadvantage to overcome it. I think reparations-like direct payments can work in some situations but usually won’t work the way their advocates hope. And I think a lot of proposed remedies are really terrible, because they will increase rational discrimination, or otherwise gum up things we need to work like prices and credentials. (Suppose blacks get into medical school with much lower qualifications than whites, who get in with much lower qualifications than Asians. You are utterly indifferent to American racial categories, and have moved to a new town where you know nobody. Would you rather choose a black, white, or Asian doctor given no other knowledge?)

            [1] This happened to me–my high school was rural and mostly white, and had some decent classes, but I don’t recall many times I felt like I had to really work hard. Getting to college and having classes that moved faster and expected a fair bit of work to keep up was a rude shock for me.

          • cassander says:

            @Nancy Lebovitz says:

            Jewish serfs is the descriptor given in family lore. Maybe they were free peasants, but that wasn’t so great either.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            It certainly looked like the Russian Jews in Fiddler on the Roof were engaged in agriculture. And at the end they’re forced to sell their houses at fire sale prices and many head to the United States with the proceeds and any personal items they can cart to an ocean liner.
            Appeal to fictional evidence, I know…

    • Tatterdemalion says:

      What are your views on inheritance tax?

      • albatross11 says:

        Same as any other tax, but I don’t really see the point. Morality is about individual action, not actions of vast groups. If it turns out my great grandfather was a serial killer or a war criminal, I don’t bear any moral guilt from that. I have no idea how people deal with inheritance that later is discovered to have been stolen, and have no idea what the right answer would be to such a situation. But I also don’t see how it would inform us about, say, moral responsibility of white people now for policies that screwed over black people in the past.

        Did I benefit or lose out by policies intended to keep blacks down in 1950? Maybe my parents’ home loan was on slightly better terms than it would have been otherwise, but also the whole society was poorer from the loss of wealth in keeping an eighth of the society down intentionally. I think accounting for all that would be really hard. I also think even if we did the accounting for everyone, trying to balance the accounts would be:

        a. Much worse policy than trying to address current problems.

        b. Look nothing like justice to almost anyone.

        c. Create bad incentives for future behavior instead of good ones.

    • meh says:

      Morally, no whites alive today bear any responsibility at all for slavery

      I think there are 2 separate things being grouped together here. Being responsible for something immoral is distinct from being the beneficiary of something immoral. Your moral obligation may be less when you are merely an unknowing beneficiary, but I don’t think they are automatically zero just because you are not responsible for the original act. We can argue what degree of obligation is appropriate, but not being responsible doesn’t necessarily make it zero.

      For example, say I am playing Pete Sampras at the US open. A gambler I don’t know has bet on me, so before the game he drugs Sampras to reduce his reaction time, doctors his racket to be slower, doctors my racket to be illegally faster, etc. I win the game, but this is discovered one week after. Clearly I am not responsible for this act; but should I still be considered the US Open winner? Should a rematch be offered? Ok, maybe logistically we can’t have a rematch, but what about not including the game in the world rankings calculation? It is not obvious what should be done.

      • Noah says:

        The problem with the “beneficiary” standard is that it seems to rely on counterfactual histories in weird ways. You can easily construct an argument that American blacks have “benefited” more from slavery than American whites, certainly financially. I’m pretty sure the following are true:

        1. If slavery had been made illegal when we adopted the Constitution, the US as a whole, and therefore the white population of the US, would be richer (I feel less certain trying to take the hypothetical further back; at some point you run into questions like “would we still be part of the British Empire and how would that affect things?”).

        2. African-Americans today are probably significantly richer than they (whatever “they” means) probably would be in the hypothetical where their ancestors never became slaves (at least they are far richer than Africans; of course it’s possible that certain parts of Africa would have been in better shape if not for the slave trade).

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          African-Americans today are probably significantly richer than they (whatever “they” means) probably would be in the hypothetical where their ancestors never became slaves (at least they are far richer than Africans; of course it’s possible that certain parts of Africa would have been in better shape if not for the slave trade).

          Point of order: white people usually couldn’t march into the rain forest and enslave free people (look up the disease load white people suffered when they tried to explore and colonize much later with Victorian medicine). They bought African slaves from other Africans whose property they were under the local cultural-legal system.
          So in a counter-factual where slavery was illegal in the United States or British Empire in 1787, many Afro-American ancestors would still be slaves. You then have to estimate how many fewer people would have been enslaved by the West African kingdoms because the market for slaves included 0 demand from overseas.

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:

          My assumption is that if slavery had been illegal, Africans would have benefited from moving to the US the same way Europeans did.

          • Prior to recent decades, was there any substantial voluntary immigration to the New World from Sub-Saharan Africa?

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            That assumption makes no sense.
            Not counting black slaves, the United States population only grew from demic expansion from Independence to 1830: we had net migration out from Loyalists and the early German-Americans. In the 1830s we started to get net immigration, which was only from the UK (which included all Ireland), France, Germany, and Scandinavia.

            Between 1831 and 1840, immigration more than quadrupled to a total of 599,000. These included about 207,000 Irish, starting to emigrate in large numbers following Britain’s easing of travel restrictions, and about 152,000 Germans, 76,000 British, and 46,000 French, constituting the next largest immigrant groups of the decade.
            Between 1841 and 1850, immigration nearly tripled again, totaling 1,713,000 immigrants, including at least 781,000 Irish, 435,000 Germans, 267,000 British, and 77,000 French.

            It’s baseless to assume that the demand for free agricultural labor in an alternate timeline would expand to the exact same people who were brought here as slaves. You’ll note that besides the Irish, the preference was to bring in fellow Protestants. If they couldn’t meet the demand, the next most tolerated source would be more Catholics: more French if more wanted to come, Spanish, people from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Poles if the Russian Empire let them leave… probably also Jews, based on the philosemitism we can document from the Founding Fathers to the Civil War.
            You’ll note that there was a one-issue political Party dedicated to not accepting Catholic immigrants. I wonder how they would have felt about Orthodox immigrants in a timeline where we had an even larger demand for European labor due to having no slaves.

          • INH5 says:

            Starting in 1790, US immigration laws explicitly limited naturalization to “free white persons of good character.” Birthright citizenship didn’t provide a way around this for the children of immigrants until 1868, as a direct result of the Civil War. And as soon as it looked like large numbers of Chinese immigrants might be able to take advantage of that, it wasn’t very long before a xenophobic backlash slammed the door on them.

            In 1924, all Native Americans were granted citizenship (before, it had been excluded from “tribes not taxed”). In 1940, select groups of nonwhites (mostly groups that were WW2 allies) were allowed to be naturalized. It wasn’t until 1952 that racial criteria was fully removed from naturalization requirements, but by then strict quotas based on national origin were in place and wouldn’t be removed until 1965.

            Also, prior to 1965 there were no numerical limits at all on immigration from the Western Hemisphere, yet Mexican immigration, which on some border towns was as easy as walking a few city blocks, was very low prior to the last half of the 20th century, in spite of events such as the Mexican Revolution. So even if the ability was there, the motivation might well not have been. Europe experienced a population explosion in the 19th-early 20th century due to industrialization and advances in medicine, and that surely played an outsized role in why so many Europeans made the choice to venture across the Atlantic.

            Taking all of this into account, it seems extremely unlikely that significant numbers of Africans would have been both willing and able to voluntarily immigrate to the US prior to the late 20th century in any alternate history that includes the United States in a recognizable form.

          • Starting in 1790, US immigration laws explicitly limited naturalization to “free white persons of good character.”

            That’s the requirement to become a citizen, hence able to vote. Were there restrictions in the early period preventing non-citizens from coming to the country and working?

            Were free blacks voting citizens, either in the north or the south, prior to the Civil War?

    • Eugene Dawn says:

      Whether a problem can be fixed depends in part on what the cause is: if an issue is cultural, or genetic, then the set of potential solutions look very different than if a problem is caused by discrimination, past or present.

      What’s more, even if no individuals alive today are responsible, institutions can be; even if an institution is no longer actively perpetuating discrimination it can be important to understand why it did so in the past, and if it can be reformed to reduce the possibility of making a similar mistake in the future.
      And of course, path-dependence is a thing: institutions and cultures are shaped by their past in important ways. We may well wish to know if there are lingering effects of discrimination written into important institutions.

      And, finally, in general, it’s important to genuinely reckon with past crimes and mistakes, even ones you personally aren’t responsible for. No one who reads this blog ever went on a propaganda tour of the USSR, but I doubt you’d disagree that there are a number of commenters here for whom it would be valuable to reflect on Scott’s review of Chronicles of Wasted Time; not because it tells them about mistakes they have made, but because it tells them about mistakes people much like them made, and that they might be prone to making in similar situations.

    • Loriot says:

      Putting aside all the subjective moral arguments for a second, if there’s a toxic waste dump in your city, it doesn’t matter who was responsible for it – it’s the people who are alive today who have to clean it up.

  58. proyas says:

    Between 1914 and 1920, how and when did the name of the military conflict change?

    For example, in 1914, before the U.S. and Italy were involved, was it just called “The War” or “The German War” or something?

    When did people start calling it “The Great War” and “The World War”?

    Did different combatant nations have different names for the conflict (e.g. – the Russians call WWII “The Great Patriotic War” and the Vietnamese speak of “The American War.”)?

    • John Schilling says:

      I believe it was generally called “The Great War” or “The World War” from the start; it never literally involved all the nations of the world, but it always included several world-spanning Empires. It continued to be called “The Great War” or “The World War” until the late 1930s, when it became clear that a greater world war was imminent.

      • Belisaurus Rex says:

        Was it so clear before early 1939? “Peace in our time” and all that? I thought that there was little fear in 38, because Britain and France told Czechoslovakia that they wouldn’t be starting a world war for it.

        • John Schilling says:

          Chamberlain got such a good reception from his “peace in our time” line because it defied people’s expectations, not because it met them.

        • Betty Cook says:

          Quoting from a novel published 1936, the first speaker having just returned to England from some diplomacy on the continent:

          “I thought–at one point we all thought–something was going to happen. All the old, filthy uproar. I got as far as saying to Bunter one night: ‘It’s coming; it’s here; back to the Army again, sergeant…” But in the end it made a noise like a hoop and rolled away–for the moment. … The old bus wobbles one way and you think, ‘that’s done it!’ and it wobbles the other way and you think, ‘all serene’; and then, one day, it wobbles too far and you’re in the soup and can’t remember how you got there.”

          “That’s what we’re all afraid of, inside ourselves.”

          “Yes. It terrifies me.”

          (Gaudy Night, Dorothy Sayers)

        • AlesZiegler says:

          Here is what J.M. Keynes thought in 1937:

          By “uncertain” knowledge, let me explain, I do not mean merely to distinguish what is known for certain from what is only probable. The game of roulette is not subject, in this sense, to uncertainty; nor is the prospect of a Victory bond being drawn. Or, again, the expectation of life is only slightly uncertain. Even the weather is only moderately uncertain. The sense in which I am using the term is that in which the prospect of a European war is uncertain, or the price of copper and the rate of interest twenty years hence, or the obsolescence of a new invention, or the position of private wealth-owners in the social system in 1970. About these matters there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability whatever. We simply do not know. Nevertheless, the necessity for action and for decision compels us as practical men to do our best to overlook this awkward fact and to behave exactly as we should if we had behind us a good Benthamite calculation of a series of prospective advantages and disadvantages, each multiplied by its appropriate probability, waiting to be summed.

      • baconbits9 says:

        I believe in the US it was called ‘The European War’ until they got involved.

    • Lillian says:

      British war correspondent Charles à Court Repington published a memoir titled The First World War 1914-1918 in 1920. On page 391 of Volume II he relates the following: “I saw Major Johnstone, the Harvard Professor who is here to lay the bases of an American History. We discussed the right name of the war. I said that we called now The War, but that this could not last. The Napoleonic War was The Great War. To call it The German War was too much flattery for the Boche. I suggested The World War as a shade bettter title, and finally we mutally agreed to call it The First World War is onrder to prevent the millenium folk from forgetting that the history of the world was the history of war.”

      Per Repington’s journals this conversation occurred September 10th, 1918, so a month before Armistice Day. However, according to Wikipedia the very first recorded use of the term “First World War” was four years earlier in September 1914 by German Philosopher Ernst Haekel, who said, “There is no doubt that the course and character of the feared ‘European War’ […] will become the first world war in the full sense of the word.”

      • Liam Breathnach says:

        Haekel’s prescient comment is interesting when compared to the “It’ll be over by Christmas” was supposedly the prevailing sentiment of the time.

  59. FLWAB says:

    How much research is being put into manufacturing targeted artificial viruses?

    First: I know. Creating new viruses sounds extremely risky. Viruses mutate a lot, and if you create a virus to kill X, maybe it ends up wiping out A-V as well. But all the same, if we could figure out how to make them and make them safely they would an amazing boon to mankind.

    The obvious applications are wiping out parasites (or their insect vectors) that are harmful to humans and their livestock. We could rid the world of malaria, screwworm, and who knows how many other terrible creatures, all without poisons. But beyond that, it would help in much more prosaic matters. We could easily wipe out crop pests without also harming neutral or beneficial insects. We could exterminate rats and roaches without poison. And we could finally do something about invasive species!

    To be honest, it was gardening that got me thinking about this. Every year we put herbicide on the lawn, and every year the dandelions come back. You can’t stop them. They’re a menace. And while dandelions might be tolerable, there’s invasive Vetch all over my garden. You ever try to get rid of vetch? You have to consistently pull it for at least five years in a row, and it pops back like a jack in the box. And even if you keep it out of your garden and your lawn, the neighbors have it too and it will be back before you know it. The only way I can tell of getting rid of it efficiently is herbicide, but all the herbicides affect the plants I want to keep: native plants that I like and don’t spread everywhere like wildfire. What I wouldn’t give to go to Amazon and order up a spray bottle full of Vetch Virus Xtreme and spray it around the backyard. Then I can sit back and watch as it all turns to blight and shrivels up int he summer sun, while the plants I prefer are growing strong and tall!

    Anyway, is anyone working on this and is my dream of cheap designer viruses for the masses even plausible?

    • Randy M says:

      I suspect viruses would have the same problem you have with herbicides–they would mutate or simply automatically also effect (due to similar biology) other more benign species.
      Given that they are much harder to control that chemicals, we should tread carefully here.
      However, I don’t know how much treading we are currently doing. And at the moment, anyone working on artificial viruses is probably keeping their head down and whistling innocuously. (pardon the pun)

      • FLWAB says:

        I had hoped that a virus could be somehow engineered to only effect a single species: I mean, isn’t it hard to make them hop from species to species in real life?

        Maybe I should pin my hopes on nanobots instead. Yes, beautiful nanobots who can tell Vetch from Lupine and Strawberries and who will turn all the pesky weeds into more of themselves. That’s the risk free solution!

    • Lambert says:

      Plant viruses are weird bastards that get everywhere and plant immune systems are even weirder.

      Bad things would happen if it mutated and started killing something like maize or seedless bananas.
      Also the target organisms would eventually evolve to be resistant to the virus.

      That said, I’d not be shocked if bacteriophage therapy makes a comeback in the face of increasing antibiotic resistance.

      • FLWAB says:

        Bad things would happen if it mutated and started killing something like maize or seedless bananas.

        Maybe we could engineer some kind of replication limit, where they can only spread so far in case they jump targets…would that even work? Do viruses even have telemeres?

        • Juanita del Valle says:

          No, they don’t. It’s an interesting question but most viral gene sequences are so short and simple that it’s very hard to think of a way to embed a replication limit in them – and even if you did, mutations would likely route around it in short order. Millions of years of evolutionary pressure have not eliminated cancer in humans, after all, despite the existence of a complex network of both inter-and-intra-cellular checks and processes that work to prevent it.

    • Matt M says:

      I was thinking about this from the perspective of COVID. Someone earlier in a thread here said “It seems like there’s a lot of people out there who just aren’t at risk, and also don’t have antibodies.”

      So I was wondering (note, this is fiction, not an actual theory) – could it be a low-grade bioweapon? Could you design a virus specifically to kill off, say, 1% of the population. Could it be random? Is there some sort of human genetic equivalent of “Everyone whose social security number ends in 99, congratulations, you’re the unlucky 1%?”

      • albatross11 says:

        Disclaimer: I’m an interested amateur–if you know more than me, please correct me.

        There are people who get HIV and never get very sick from it. (“Long-term non-progressors,” but there are several causes for that and I’m describing one.) As I understand it, one reason has to do with how the immune system works. Almost all cells express a molecule called MHC1 on their surface, which provides some samples of bits of the proteins being made inside the cell. (The fragments are called peptides and the ones that elicit an immune response are called antigens.) Some specialized immune system cells also have a molecule called MHC2 on their surface, which provides samples of bits of proteins that the cell has encountered and chopped up. Most of your adaptive immune system basically runs on the stuff presented by those two molecules.

        There’s a fair bit of genetic diversity that determines what MHC molecules you will make, and this determines what antigens can be presented in these molecules. When you first get HIV, the actively infected cells put a clearly foreign antigen in their MHC1 molecule, and generally get killed by cytotoxic T-cells. Some HIV-infected cells have a latent infection that doesn’t make any markers, and they periodically wake up and crank out virus. Over time, there’s natural selection–the strains of the virus whose antigens show up on at least one of the MHC molecules on the surface of infected cells tend to get killed off. Eventually, the virus mutates to the point that those MHC molecules can’t bind any of its antigens very well, and then your immune response to the virus basically stops. Pretty soon, it has infected most of your T cells and your immune system has fallen apart and you die of some infection that normally only kills 80 year olds on chemotherapy.

        A few people have an unusually wide repertoire of MHC molecules, and these people can get HIV and never get very sick, because the virus never manages to evolve around their MHC molecules’ ability to bind antigen. The thing that lets HIV turn into AIDS and kill you doesn’t work on them, and so HIV just becomes one more latent viral infection that’s slightly gumming up the works but not enough to really cause big problems.

        If you could design a virus that would be invisible to the MHC repertoire of 1% of the population, maybe you’d get the same thing. 99% of peoples’ immune system adapts to the virus and eradicates it; 1% never adapt and the virus runs wild and kills them.

      • albatross11 says:

        The other way this might work that I know of (see previous disclaimer) has to do with the entry receptor for the virus. Basically, any virus needs to find one of a small number of receptors on the surface of a cell to gain entry. A virus is just a package of genetic material and proteins until it gets inside a cell, so if it doesn’t find its receptor before something eats it or it degrades, it won’t have any effect.

        If you had a respiratory virus which could also bind to some additional receptors that 1% of the population had in their lungs or nervous system or something, you could imagine that virus being deadly for 1% of the population and a cold for the other 99%.

    • metacelsus says:

      Gene drives are a better and safer alternative to this. We now have the technology to eliminate any sexually reproducing species. And gene drives, unlike viruses, can’t jump species barriers, and can be stopped if we decide to do so (by releasing a reversal gene drive).

      • keaswaran says:

        Aren’t a lot of plants sort of complicated though as to whether they are really sexually reproducing or not? Some self-pollinate, many propagate through means other than seeding, and I think some might even produce fertile seeds on their own, even if they prefer to do it with someone else’s pollen.

      • FLWAB says:

        Fascinating: I wasn’t familiar with gene drives. I’m a little confused as to how they would work: would we use them to make unwanted species sterile? If that was the case…wouldn’t the sterile gene die out pretty quick?

      • Algirdas Vėlyvis says:

        We now have the technology to eliminate any sexually reproducing species.

        Sounds like famous last words. If you follow this field you’ve probably seen this. Has the technology improved lately? (this is not a field I pay close attention to.)

        EDIT: well, clearly I am not paying attention. The paper in Nature was a follow-up on mosquito mitigation study which did not involve gene drive. My question / request for info still stands, though. Do you know of any gene drives deployed in the field? Any success yet? (Superficial googling is not showing me anything.)

    • Algirdas Vėlyvis says:

      You might enjoy reading “The Moral Virologist” by Greg Egan.

      • keaswaran says:

        I’ve been thinking about that story a lot recently – I had forgotten the title though, so thanks!

        • Algirdas Vėlyvis says:

          PSA: most of Greg Egan’s older books (pre Incandescence) are available in e-book format in the US for $3 on all ebook platforms: Kobo, amazon, etc. Also, DRM-free on Smashwords. (Smashwords I think sell worldwide, at least I have no problem with a Canadian credit card.)

          (“The Moral Virologist” is included in Axiomatic.)

          And, surprisingly, the newest story collection “Instantiation” is also for $3 in same outlets. The stories range from merely good to excellent, imho.

  60. WarOnReasons says:

    This argument only works if all PhDs and Masters are the same. In reality, PhD in STEM would pay a lot more than PhD in humanities and the ratio of whites in the former is significantly higher.

    • Le Maistre Chat says:

      In reality, PhD in STEM would pay a lot more than PhD in humanities and the ratio of whites in the former is significantly higher.

      This. STEM PhDs are a better way to achieve wealth than [Noun] Studies PhDs. That universities are an ideological monoculture that offers both things like Computer Science and, to quote Futurama, a Degree in Baloney, to impressionable 18-year-olds is part of the problem when discussing economic justice under contemporary capitalism.

      • Belisaurus Rex says:

        I’ve always wondered what happens to people who get their Degree in Baloney. There can’t be THAT many slightly-above-minimum-wage jobs for mid-20s. What do these people do when they get into their 30s? How do you migrate from Starbucks barista or insurance salesman to anything well-paying? Is it just seniority giving you increased pay?

        I’d feel pretty ripped off if I was a minority and the first person in my family to ever go to college, and then I had to work for Aflac as a door-to-door salesman for my whole life. Where’s the mobility?

        • GearRatio says:

          I think part of what you missed is that insurance salesman potentially pays kind of a lot; so does mortgage originator. Claims adjuster starts at ~40k; team leads make ~70k. Trainers can potentially do OK.

          All of these jobs besides trainer are pretty grind-y and unpleasant and much easier to get with a degree than without. Most of them discriminate pretty heavily against existing employees without degrees for promotion.

          So the deal is a history degree is marketable, but it isn’t all that marketable for things having to do with history; it’s just a way to escape being a hated sub-group it’s OK to judge on parameters other than competence.

        • albatross11 says:

          I graduated from a good state university (CS and Economics) and got a job as a programmer. Around the same time, a couple of my friends graduated (political science and psychology)–one got a job as a luggage salesman, another as an office clerk in a state bureaucracy. A liberal arts undergrad from a good but not Ivy university qualified you, 30 years ago, to be a clerk or a salesman.

          Going deeply into student loan debt and deferring 4+ years of income so you can get hired as a luggage salesman is not what you’d call a great investment in your future.

        • Eric T says:

          Lot of us Liberal Arts majors go into Politics, Teaching, Paralegals/Legal Assistants or any of the more “people-person” jobs, especially in cities.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          I suspect before maybe 10 or 20 years ago, any degree was still a big boost in the market, and college didn’t cost insane amounts.

          Also, STEM degrees weren’t money machines until the 1990s. People went into STEM because they liked it. If you got hired as a programmer in the early 90s you’d make like 40K and that was the good life.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          If you got hired as a programmer in the early 90s you’d make like 40K and that was the good life.

          Nah, if 40K was made by programmers instead of tabletop nerds it would be much more “the good life” for its creators due to making video game dosh rather than overpriced 1.5″ statue dosh from the beginning.

    • Statismagician says:

      More problematically, I suspect the within-group variance for each education bucket is really different for blacks and whites. Yet another reason why meaningful regression analyses are harder to do than social scientists think.

      • albatross11 says:

        And even harder if it’s some journalist or activist picking through statistics so they can find some number that bolsters their case….

        • Statismagician says:

          I’m not sure if either journalists or activists are statistically-savvy enough to do that deliberately, as a group. Mistake theory seems more likely here – or at least ineffectual conflict.

  61. Noah says:

    I think you’re overstating it a bit. In one limit, if the statistics of who gets what degrees were the same, but hirers ignored degrees and only cared about your race, you would expect higher degrees to pay more simply by virtue of being more white. You need to adjust for this effect in your statistical analysis (I haven’t bothered running the numbers).

  62. RMECola says:

    Does anyone else feel that engaging with politics is pointless? I spend so much time reading blogs such as this, news articles, op-eds and the like, largely in the hope that i’ll become better informed and able to discuss the pressing issues of the day. But I no longer feel like i could reasonable convince someone opposite of me that my ideas are right. I’m not even sure I have the confidence to say that the ideas I believe are correct; i’ve largely outsourced the research and verification of my biases to smarter and more driven individuals, and i suspect that is largely true for most people.

    I was motivated to post by reading J.K. Rowling’s essay on her views on trans rights and her involvement. Regardless of whether or not her conclusions are correct, I thought the piece was well written. She gave a very passionate plea for understanding, eloquently describing her misgivings about current trans- activism, largely based in her own history of abuse. It gave me brief hope that it would receive some appreciation, and acknowledgement of the hard questions that need to be asked, maybe not agreement, but at least a certain humanity extended. But of course, the only narrative that prevails is the “devastation” that was felt, the legions of right thinking people that gladly threw the most influential children’s author of the last generation under the bus in the hope of gaining status and clout.

    When I discovered Jonathan Heidt’s moral foundation theory, it helped me take a less harsh attitude towards people with different opinions than my own. If everyone has a predisposition to take different viewpoints based on different value differences, then crude judgements of intelligence and character fall aside, in lieu of a more nuanced understanding of character. But by the same token, it seems fruitless to engage with the opposition using the rationalists tools readily at disposable. At the end of the day, my opponent and I will be drawing on different sources, with a completely different lens of what is right, and on the labor of experts that we sought out specifically to confirm our pre-existing notions of how thing are and should be.

    • cassander says:

      Does anyone else feel that engaging with politics is pointless?

      It most definitely is. But it’s fun!

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        Agreed. I pretty much only hang out and post here on SSC anymore, because trying to change anyone’s mind on reddit or FaceBook is pointless. And I’m not even trying to change anyone’s mind here, just provide the most coherent explanation I can for the worldview of people who think like me.

        A few months back someone posted a spreadsheet containing a breakdown of all the Internet Culture War tribes, like “social democrats” and “trumpists” and ” the dirtbag left,” and “the rationalist diaspora.” The rationalist diaspora was described as an “observer tribe.” That’s kind of what I feel like now. I’m much more interested in analyzing and predicting outcomes of various culture war battles with all of you fine folk than I am in fighting them myself.

        • cassander says:

          I’d be curious to see the rise and fall of the political insults over time. rethuglican vs. demorat, and so on.

        • BlackboardBinaryBook says:

          Agreed. I pretty much only hang out and post here on SSC anymore, because trying to change anyone’s mind on reddit or FaceBook is pointless. And I’m not even trying to change anyone’s mind here, just provide the most coherent explanation I can for the worldview of people who think like me.

          One of the few things we agree on!

          I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’ve really changed any of my major positions due to what I’ve read here, but it has introduced more doubt and helps me have a more nuanced and compassionate view of my outgroup. Which I value a lot.

    • Eric T says:

      people that gladly threw the most influential children’s author of the last generation under the bus in the hope of gaining status and clout.

      I really want to engage with this because I understand where this is coming from but I probably have to wait til tomorrow. I just wanted to pop in and say JKR and Leftist Twitter have been feuding for a long time, this was just the latest clash in a long war.

      • J Mann says:

        I would say that in my experience, Leftist Twitter is not nearly as good as you are in engaging with and responding to opposing arguments. It prefers mob shaming or smugly declaring that arguments are invalid.

        (To be fair, the same is true of Rightist Twitter, Sports Twitter, and for all I know Knitting Twitter. I’m not sure if Twitter flattens otherwise reasonable people’s arguments or if it amplifies what I would consider unreasonable Twitter.)

    • Erusian says:

      Does anyone else feel that engaging with politics is pointless? I spend so much time reading blogs such as this, news articles, op-eds and the like, largely in the hope that i’ll become better informed and able to discuss the pressing issues of the day.

      No. I’ve been pretty successful at getting my policy preferences enacted on at least local levels (include state) and at least felt like I had a voice in national debates. Of course, I don’t sit there reading online and commenting. When I get passionate about an issue, which is admittedly rare, I organize people and then try to apply pressure to decision makers or replace the decision makers. This is my understanding of how politics is supposed to work.

      Like to take a relatively uncontroversial example, I was tangentially involved (through a friend) in the development of a small block of shops in a blighted neighborhood. Well, it turns out the developer was a crook and the state seized the properties they were working on. And the state, naturally, stopped construction as it’s not a construction company.

      I, along with some others, contacted the relevant officials from both parties and organized a petition drive and at two points gave speeches in public hearings on the issue (which we got in through political processes). A few other construction companies, sniffing some good will and profit, started sniffing around. The properties were sold back and a new construction company resumed the work. The shops opened about half a year later than they would have otherwise. It’s a small thing. On the other hand, about twenty small businessowners are now in operation (and own their own real estate!) who would not have been otherwise. It certainly didn’t save the republic, but it’s still doing good.

      On a broader scale, I played some small role in the end of felony disenfranchisement in Florida.

      Getting involved does not mean sitting behind a keyboard and debating. It means getting out there, getting people behind you, and making your case to elected officials… or campaigning against them if they won’t. And it doesn’t mean being afraid of the Twitter mob or anyone else for that matter.

      One thing you learn doing things like this: Twitter and extremist social justice is not real life.

      • matkoniecz says:

        Congratulations on your work (even better that there were clearly positive effects!)

        +1 to engaging on very low level.

        In my case what I am doing is on even lower level – reporting potholes, self-contradictory traffic signs, asking for tree planting etc (in almost all cases – via a simple email).

        It had some real effects and I am trying to disengage from global or country scale politics.

        Examples:

        stroller ramp before report: https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/899988/10916001/9b2058ba-8259-11e5-9342-9ca8a5665292.JPG

        after: https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/899988/16962507/25933c56-4df2-11e6-910b-741dad85fa98.JPG

        —–

        deteriorating road element (it was losing segments over weeks, soon it would start to become real danger to cyclists):

        before: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/899988/67147259-b6a6a680-f293-11e9-90e7-8d325eae6ab4.jpg

        repair: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/899988/70353450-a65f8080-186d-11ea-8dc7-b788fd53b489.jpg

        after: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/899988/67238395-5fe4cc80-f44d-11e9-9690-3746eb03560d.jpg

        —–

        repair of a poorly constructed detail of bicycle crossing during road construction (fixed as part of the road construction, without need to go through a separate construction project):

        before: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/899988/44535867-64074400-a6fb-11e8-8424-1057da02544d.jpg

        after: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/899988/44795680-90173f00-abab-11e8-8990-ff322d5def7b.jpg

        —-

        curb trap (on a route heavily used by old people):

        before: https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/899988/19687110/7b0044e4-9ac4-11e6-88cc-6271e3a79d9d.JPG

        after: https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/899988/25312929/856fe230-282d-11e7-84cb-66b8583ecd5c.jpg

        • Erusian says:

          It had some real effects and I am trying to disengage from global or country scale politics.

          I find it fascinating how many people complain about something in control of their local civic organization and then refuse to report it to the people who are in charge. Good work improving your community, by the way.

          • Error says:

            How *does* one report things like this?

            It’s something obviously useful, I can think of a few things I’d like to report, but have no idea who to report them to.

          • John Schilling says:

            You look up the telephone number of your city councilman and call. Tell the person who answers that you’d like to talk to the staffer responsible for [X], and have a brief statement of the problem ready to open with.

          • CatCube says:

            @Error

            You don’t often even need to talk to a city councilman. If you’ve got a relatively functional city government (and if you’re not in a really run-down city, it’s probably more functional than you’d think), just call the publicly-posted number for the appropriate bureaucracy.

            Here’s a secret, that @matkoniecz is pointing to: the people who are supposed to fix this stuff often just don’t know it’s broken. You may have some vague notion that the people responsible for infrastructure have teams out there checking 100% of everything every day, but that’s not the case, and is probably very far from how it actually happens.

            I don’t know how cities work in this respect, but if you’re in a rural area off of an interstate, you probably have a section lead who’s responsible for half a county, and he’s the only guy looking for problems. It may take a week or a month before he even drives by the section of road with a problem, and if it’s something intermittent like a signal problem or a blocked culvert (that’s only visible to him driving on the road if it happens to be raining, for example) then it can take a long time for internal processes to detect it.

            For something like a broken pedestrian button on a signal, nobody who works for the local Department of Transportation may have any reason to press it, so they won’t notice. A signal maintainer may inspect it and detect the problem eventually, but that inspection is probably not happening more frequently than every one or two years.

            Many other government employees besides that guy will take a “not my problem” approach and not call the section lead. Cops may or may not bother.

            Another possibility is that they may know about the problem, but if nobody has bothered to complain, they’re going to spend the time and money on problems that people are complaining about. Either way, you should call.

            To give a couple of specific examples, though I don’t have pictures: A few years ago, a truck making a turn at the intersection right by my apartment rode up on the sidewalk and crushed a catch basin near the intersection. It was a hazard to anybody on the sidewalk, and I walked by it for three days. On the morning of the 4th day, after I walked by it on the way to the train, I called the city’s Public Works department, just at the number posted on their website. When I got back from work, there were cones and tape around the broken basin, and the old one had been jackhammered out. When I got back from work the day after that, a new one had been installed and concrete placed to restore the sidewalk.

            At that same intersection, I called in about a broken pedestrian call button and they had it replaced when I came back later that day.

            On a smaller example, even in my office building, I think I might be the only guy that bothers to call facilities if something’s broken. As an example, a door handle on my floor was loose. It wasn’t broken, but the loose bolt would eventually break because it was getting banged around during every use. After two weeks of this, the light bulb went on and I called the guy who interfaces with our landlord. A guy from the building management was there to fix it within an hour.

            Just because hundreds or thousands of people walk by every day doesn’t mean that one of them has told anybody about the problem. All of them might be doing the same thing as you, and just muttering under their breath about it!

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            @CatCube, this was a wonderful comment to read. Not earth-shattering, but it just made me happy. Thank you.

          • Evan Þ says:

            Thank you. You’ve motivated me to finally send an email to my local city Public Works about a poorly-timed stoplight nearby which regularly leaves left-turn traffic backed up despite giving ample time to every other direction of travel. I guess I’ll see what happens now.

          • CatCube says:

            @Evan Þ

            Edit: It didn’t occur to me until I hit “Post” that it’s possible that your complaint *does* have an easy “restore to function” repair. Many signals are _actuated_, which means they don’t start a phase until there’s a demand from some sort of detection device, to minimize delays. But sometimes these detection systems break! That’s what my complaint about the pedestrian button was–it would rarely give you the pedestrian crossing phase because the button was broken. This detection is done for cars with an induction loop in the road or, for more modern controllers, with a video detector. It’s possible that this is broken, and all somebody has to do is go out there and replace it.

            You may want to make the complaint first, in case this is it.
            ——————————-
            For that one, don’t be surprised if you do actually have to get more involved with your councilman. You should totally still do it, and don’t let me talk you out of it! But I also want you to understand that you’re asking for something a lot more elaborate than I was.

            Both of my complaints were simply restoring a system to its baseline functionality after obvious damage, and required either no design (fixing the signal button; this was invisible damage, but it was obvious the signal controller wasn’t getting a demand when you pressed it if you went and tried it), or straightforward application of a standard detail (the catch basin), where a team of government workers just needs to go out and install something they’ve done a thousand times. An engineer may have been required to look at something for a few hours to make sure there were no obvious problems with the updated catch basin–it was a new design–but it didn’t require huge amounts of planning, just execution.

            Signal timing is another matter. If the signal is pretty far separate from other signals or intersections, and if the intersection is typical, and they have good data about traffic volume, maybe they can dust off something nearby and upload new timing.

            However, there’s a decent chance that they’ll have to do a traffic study, which takes months, then design the new timing and have an engineer stamp off on it. A lot of government agencies, in the name of cost-cutting, have hollowed out their internal engineering staffs. If this describes your local municipality, then they’ll have to hire an outside engineering firm to do all of this. If this is so, they probably won’t want to do a single one, but bunch up a lot of work to keep it all on one contract.

            You should totally still do this, let me emphasize that. The software for timing intersections will compute the amount of fuel wasted per year sitting at a signal, so you’ll want to emphasize the environmental costs as that’s something that may get their ears to prick up. It also wouldn’t hurt to sit and look for a while to get an idea of the actual delays. This page relates the average stopped vehicle delay to the Level of Service for an intersection–I don’t know if the information is still current, but it seems to track with my (decade out-of date) knowledge of what the numbers were.

            This will help you when making your report, because just like in software, a nicely detailed bug report that highlights the action to be taken is always going to be better received. If you can tell them (on the phone or in their web form), “The traffic waiting to turn left from Alpha Street onto Euclid has unacceptable delays. There are delays of up to x minutes, and I watched for yy minutes at zz o’clock and there seemed to be an average delay of ww seconds.” That’s *way* easier for them to figure out what you don’t like, and what they have to do, as opposed to “this intersection is terrible.” For starters, now they know they don’t have to go figure out why it’s terrible, they know to bring out a turning movement counter and a stopwatch when they go to see what you don’t like.

            I had the luxury of coming back and seeing the work already in progress. For what you’re doing, there’s going to be a much longer flash-to-bang time, and you may actually have to pressure people about it because somebody else may come up with a catch basin or broken pedestrian button that they can fix right away with the same money.

          • matkoniecz says:

            How *does* one report things like this?

            My experience from Kraków, Poland:

            How it used to be about 15 years ago: you need to write (or print) an official petition on a paper and leave it in the government office.

            How it used to be about 5 years ago: you still need an official petition, but you can do it through a clunky government website

            Nowadays: email

            It is also possible to call, file official petition, message via FB/Twitter, report via councilman etc. I prefer email – I can submit it in the evening and I can avoid FB/Twitter. But other methods are available for people who prefer them.

            The tricky part is to locate what entity is responsible for what. If institutions are working well then it ios not really necessary – contact any of them and they will forward your message or at least give you info who is the correct recipient.

            For example in my city tree planting goes to sekretariat@zzm.krakow.pl (Zarząd Zieleni Miejskiej), public road maintenance to sekretariat@zdmk.krakow.pl (Zarząd Dróg Miasta Krakowa), public transport and bicycle infrastructure (except cycleways and roads) to sekretariat@ztp.krakow.pl (Zarząd Transportu Publicznego).

            How to detect how to contact in your location? Google something like “road maintenance LocationName”, call/meet local government representative, look at local government website etc. Maybe they have section “how to report potholes”?

            If you do it regularly you may learn what is the most efficient ways to get reaction (if it is true – mention that problem is causing risk of death/injury, what is the most effective communication channel, attach photo if emailing, describe location well).

            Depending on a location – maybe FB/Twitter/special purpose website would also work?

            But – if system works well in your city/town than your message will be forwarded or you will get reply who should be contacted.

            Also, I keep record of all what I send (on Github issue tracker, what is probably one of the weirdest uses of this software development tool) and resend after several months of no reaction (nowadays getting less necessary).

            You look up the telephone number of your city councilman and call.

            It differs on a location, but in my city it is far more efficient to directly contact institution responsible for a given type of work (for minor stuff).

            Lobbying to build a bridge or something likely needs to be done at city councilman level and higher but “please repair pothole at crossing of Grzegrzółki and Szczebrzeszyn roads” can go directly to a road maintenance department.

          • matkoniecz says:

            Here’s a secret, that @matkoniecz is pointing to: the people who are supposed to fix this stuff often just don’t know it’s broken. You may have some vague notion that the people responsible for infrastructure have teams out there checking 100% of everything every day, but that’s not the case, and is probably very far from how it actually happens.

            +1 It may be longer than CatCube mentioned. In case of storm water sewer grates in my city period is about 8 years (or at least it was some time ago).

            For checking whatever traffic light vehicle detection system detects cyclists? The period is infinity, they never recheck it.

            In one case I got request for a phone call – it was quite interesting.

            It was call from someone maintaining sewer grates (rainwater collection from roads). I was reporting ones that were sunken, as irritant and danger for cyclists*. He mentioned that

            – my city has enormous number of sewer grates (I do not remember the number, it was larger than I expected)
            – team for maintaining this is limited, they inspect grates but period is about 8 years
            – he is very thankful for reports before problem reaches stage of “there is a car-sized hole in the road”
            – also, he complained about different institutions that I mentioned as a problematic (water works) and had anecdote that his current project is handling faulty pipe that caused car-sized hole in the road. Water works were still claiming that it is not a problem that should be fixed 🙂

            There are multiple effects here:

            – early warning may reduce cost of fixing stuff
            – stuff that you report is prioritized over other repairs (this is not necessarily 0 sum game, maybe they would do something less useful otherwise!)
            – with multiple people complaining about such problems I would expect more focus on that (this may take decades but it actually works)

            (*yes, 98% of what I report is bicycle related)

          • matkoniecz says:

            On a smaller example, even in my office building, I think I might be the only guy that bothers to call facilities if something’s broken.

            +1 This kind of lobbying (is it even a correct word?) is amazingly effective, because number of people is doing this is really low. So any request is likely to be effective if it is something done routinely (rather than swimming pool construction or road rebuild that requires large funding).

            You’ve motivated me to finally send an email to my local city Public Works about a poorly-timed stoplight

            Congratulations and good luck!

            Not sure how your city works, but making an appointment/remind to resend in 3 months may be useful. Resending of already written email takes little time and in my city it often was necessary some time ago. It seemed that for any incoming request they rolled dice whatever they will process it or ignore. Nowadays they are far better at this.

          • ana53294 says:

            LA has an app for reports like these.

            I guess eventually all cities will have one.

      • BlackboardBinaryBook says:

        Twitter and extremist social justice is not real life.

        Amen.

        Ezra Klein on this:

        Atlas, thanks for posting that. I really needed to read it. I recently felt a giant surge of white liberal guilt when, after disengaging from media for several weeks for mental health reasons, a friend told me he was going to miss our regular Zoom game night because he’d be out protesting. Until that point I had no idea the protests were even happening. And even though there was a time when I would have been out there in my neon green NLG Legal Observer hat, shoulder-to-shoulder with my friend, this time around I knew I wouldn’t be going.

        I beat myself up for sitting in my privilege bubble, gardening and cooking while the world goes mad around me. But you’ve reminded me of the things I’m still doing on a local level to make a difference.

      • Error says:

        Do you have a source link for this? I remember seeing it somewhere, but Google is failing me right now.

    • Trofim_Lysenko says:

      Define “engage with”? I occasionally try to engage at the local level when issues come up that I care about. I don’t fit neatly into any political camp except by slapping together labels (moderate libertarian? Libertarian leaning conservative?) and to the extent any of my views end up supported by the major parties it’s mostly by happenstance.

      As a result I’ll engage with political discussion here and IRL but it is rarely with the expectation of any particular result. I don’t have Social media accounts and try hard to avoid the entire ecosystem.

    • Beans says:

      I think talking about politics is pointless most of the time, but engaging with it in concrete targeted ways is not. But the latter is much harder than the former, so few do it.

      It’s also unclear to me whether protesting actually counts as effective political engagement, as opposed to just an upgraded, aggressive version of talking about politics, in which the “conversation” stands up and forces people to notice it. Usually with pretty flaccid results.

    • suntory time says:

      I think it’s ok to not know if your beliefs are correct. At the end of the day we are making up a political framework by consensus, and there is constantly room for improvement.
      I would also think that it is unlikely to change the opinion of people actively discussing politics, as it takes a certain amount of internal certainty to argue online in the first place. But, for each poster, there will be many lurkers reading opinions and working out their internal beliefs.

    • SamChevre says:

      I’m similar. I tend to believe that one person with a rifle could do more for causes I care about than 40 years of marches, and I’m just not willing to be that guy.

    • AlesZiegler says:

      I feel that engaging with politics in a sense of being “better informed and able to discuss the pressing issues of the day” for its own sake is on a basic level bad for my mental health, and I am most definitely not the only one in this respect.

      It is however very different matter, as others already pointed out, to try to stay informed about politics in order to have sufficient knowhow on how to work towards some positive changes on a local level.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        I feel that engaging with politics in a sense of being “better informed and able to discuss the pressing issues of the day” for its own sake is on a basic level bad for my mental health, and I am most definitely not the only one in this respect.

        +1. Rational ignorance seems basic to mental health.

      • Fahundo says:

        This is one of those issues where I rarely see my perspective represented, so I might as well post it here. It seems like everyone who pays any attention to national politics is constantly lamenting how they regret every second of it and would be better off living in ignorance, but for some reason this is hard to do.

        For me though, I get bored before I get worn down or depressed. I never feel any compulsion to stay up to date on everything going on; I just look at news when I have nothing better to do. I don’t have a twitter account and my facebook account is largely vestigial. A few weeks into covid-19, like maybe mid-April, I just stopped paying attention to pandemic news and infection stats. Not because it was too depressing or too mentally taxing, but because it no longer interested me and I was pretty sure I had my situation figured out enough that I wasn’t going to get blindsided. And it was incredibly easy for me to just not pay attention and took absolutely no effort.

        In general, I never end up feeling that the amount of attention I pay to national politics causes me distress or unease, and it’s something I can just easily ignore when I don’t want to be immersed in it. When people around me start talking politics and I see the conversation going nowhere, I’m pretty good at either staying silent or throwing out some milquetoast, non-enthusiastic agreement that allows me to avoid committing to discussing anything.

        TLDR politics doesn’t bother me much if at all, and it’s hard to imagine myself constantly checking in on social media and news feeds that do nothing but upset me.

        Also local issues like filling potholes are just super boring compared to things like Saudi Arabia luring a journalist into a trap so they can murder him.

    • meh says:

      yes, even on SSC. 3 things i get tired of…
      1. There is a segment here that will automatically go contrarian on whatever you want to say

      2. No matter how narrow or limited of a point you want to make, the conflict theorists will come out, pattern match to see which side your arguments soldiers are on, and then make a counterargument that assumes you hold the entirety of that sides’ argument (the vox or fox news version). the counterpoint offered is completely irrelevant to your original point, arguing against something entirely different. attempts to reiterate the scope of your argument are not received, or even sometimes passed off as unimportant to to the counter-argument. Something like:

      Alice: I claim X
      Bob: What? Y is completely ridiculous!
      Alice: I was only claiming X
      Bob: Who cares, look at how ridiculous Y is!

      3. I often find a large enough inferential distance to some peoples replies that I can hardly tell what they are for or against.

      • Paul Brinkley says:

        There is a segment here that will automatically go contrarian on whatever you want to say

        At the risk of proving your point: I don’t think this is always the case.

        (To demonstrate, all we have to do is observe the number of top-level posts in OTs that have no replies.)

  63. Le Maistre Chat says:

    I tried to reply to the Call for Book Reviews, but it looks like it was closed on the 4th.
    I’ve decided I’d like to review The Machinery of Freedom (1973/2014) for the contest.

  64. Belisaurus Rex says:

    Does it discuss why the Scots were so overrepresented among the American founding fathers? Was it hatred of the English in general, or were the Scots really in some kind of cultural golden age?

  65. Nancy Lebovitz says:

    I’ve been wondering for a while about how many sacred values people can afford to have at the same time, and we’re seeing a recent collision between “minimize COVID-19” and “prevent police from murdering black people”.

    Is it possible that you risk contradiction by having more than one clearly actionable sacred value?

    • suntory time says:

      Not any more than you “risk contradiction” by living your life each day. I don’t think most people sit down and decide that certain things are sacred values, they just have an internal hierarchy and make decisions as they come. Even with more structured rules, there are exceptions: google the pikuach nefesh.

      • Aapje says:

        Not just that, they also get manipulated told by others. For example, right now many people in positions of influence imply or state that these protests will save more lives than they cost, which at the very least is highly doubtful.

        • Matt M says:

          Yeah – the official position of such people is that their “sacred value” is actually “minimize the amount of unnecessary death” and that, since the protests will save more lives than they cost, protesting is not only permissible, but that their sacred values require it. And their sacred values also would then require shutting down any right-wing protests over trivial matters such as haircuts, which will cost lives but save none.

          Such people are in no internal conflict whatsoever. They may be factually incorrect, but that’s beside the point…

  66. I haven’t noticed anything here about the interesting new stories on the George Floyd case that came out in the last few days. According to at least two witnesses, George Floyd and the officer who killed him knew each other, having worked security for the same customer, and according to one of the witnesses they didn’t get along.

    That increases the probability that the killing really was murder, as it is being charged, not manslaughter, as I had been assuming, and raises at least the possibility that it was first degree murder.

    It also suggests some interesting possible twists for crime fiction.

    • suntory time says:

      If this is David Pinney’s account, he’s walked that back: ‘On Wednesday, Pinney told CBS News in an email he had confused Floyd with someone else: “There has been a mix up between George and another fellow co-worker,” he wrote.’

  67. William James Kirk says:

    Anybody here know of any existing tools for statistically integrating available data to come up with a personal probability of getting/having COVID19, using geographic base rates, demographic and behavioral information, current best guesses about incubation periods, etc? There’s no shortage of population-level forecasting, but the only attempt I know of at the sort of “subject-specific” estimate I’m thinking of is https://coronability.com/ — and as a (brand new) statistician, I could do better than that, at least for the US. If there’s not anything better out there in this vein I’d like to hear about it, and if there’s not, I’d be interesting in building a tool. Would anybody else here be interested in contributing to such a project?

  68. BBA says:

    A bar near my office where my coworkers and I often had after-work drinks, back in the days when I worked at an office and there were such things as bars, had its walls covered with police and fire department patches from around the country and around the world. Mostly domestic, of course, because it’s easier to travel domestically than abroad. But also, if they had a uniform patch from every police department on earth, the wall would still be full of American patches.

    The US has a lot more police forces than other countries. Some of this is purely structural – in most of the US a municipal police force or county sheriff’s office is the primary law enforcement agency, whereas in most other countries it’s an agency of the national or regional (state/province/prefecture/canton/etc.) government. Municipal police is either limited in power like “code enforcement officers” here, as in France, or nonexistent, as in Australia. (Naturally the major exceptions are the countries Americans are most likely to visit. Canada is somewhere in between the two models, with municipal police having primary authority in cities but provincial/national police in rural areas, and lots of local variation; Toronto’s suburbs have their own police departments but many of Vancouver’s are policed by the RCMP. And England-and-Wales, except for London, has an odd setup with regional police forces funded by the national government and supervised by elected commissioners, but not directly associated with municipalities.) But we also have a lot of specialized law enforcement agencies that other countries would lump into a single police force. At the federal level there’s FBI and ICE and ATF and DEA, state and local governments may have similar divisions, and then there’s all the governmental bodies that insist on having their own police force to protect their property. (The Library of Congress Police, because overdue books are serious business.) On top of this, there are private police forces, most often controlled by railroads and universities, but it goes beyond that – in the District of Columbia, “any corporation or individual” may apply to appoint their own special police officers to patrol their respective property. Hence, the Cathedral Police.

    All this fragmentation is great for patch collectors but probably a net negative for accountability. When officers transfer from one department to another, their disciplinary records may not follow them. And there have been cases of setting up sham organizations to claim police powers, like a number of “Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children” in New York State that issued badges and guns and didn’t do much more than that. This obviously doesn’t have much to do with the current anti-police mood, which comes from documented abuses in plain old municipal police departments, but it doesn’t help.

  69. rocoulm says:

    This just in: apparently, the Fenn treasure has been found.

    Great, now I have to find another buried gold cache to fantasize about one day hunting for…

  70. Spookykou says:

    @Eric T

    It is honestly hard to read the OT, I am a slow reader and people are posting a lot, so if this has been covered elsewhere feel free to ignore/point me in the right direction.

    First, I would say I more or less agree with most of what you have expressed here, and that I have only one significant disagreement with you, which is that I don’t associate your positions with Social Justice (TM) as I understand it.

    I think this is a good place to mention that I do not use social media and I don’t have twitter, 90% of my understanding of SJ comes from SSC and as such I am not overly confident in my understanding of the movement.

    What do you think would be the response to and future prospects of a young actor or actress who expressed publicly on their twitter, some of the positions you have expressed in this thread, with regard to the possibility of cultural and genetic factors being real?

    My impression is that they would be summarily cancelled, do you think this is likely or unlikely?

    Alternatively interesting, do you think those that cancel do not represent SJ? Do they represent a majority only on twitter, or maybe they are just a vocal minority? Do you agree with them or would you in the instance outlined above? If you disagree with them, do you actively work against them?

    To be clear I think you represent a less common viewpoint here, and have generated a lot of great discussion, you just don’t really pattern match to SJ for me(which of course might speak entirely to me).

    • Eric T says:

      I think this is a good place to mention that I do not use social media and I don’t have twitter, 90% of my understanding of SJ comes from SSC and as such I am not overly confident in my understanding of the movement.

      I think SSC’s comments are somewhat hostile to SJ and are probably on-balance unfair to it the same way that if you went into a SJ community and asked about the Rationalist community the responses would probably be on-balance unfair (well actually they’d probably be: “Who the hell are they?” but assuming we get past that point).

      The issue with movements is that the most vocal members of the movement tend to be the ones who care a lot about the movements and are thus the most extreme members. These more extreme members very publicly do or say a lot of things and this in turn is amplified by selection bias/reporting from the movement’s Outgroups.

      I have a kind of rough plan for a massive “Against Fear” type effort-post one of these days where I dive deep into some of the concerns every tribe has against the others, and “cancelling” is one of those fears. My understanding based on preliminary research is that far far fewer people are effectively cancelled than the SSC community makes it seem like based on how likely they seem to think getting cancelled is. I suspect this may be amplified by how vitriolic the SJ community was to our host in the past.

      What do you think would be the response to and future prospects of a young actor or actress who expressed publicly on their twitter, some of the positions you have expressed in this thread, with regard to the possibility of cultural and genetic factors being real?

      My impression is that they would be summarily cancelled, do you think this is likely or unlikely?

      I genuinely don’t think it would go over well, but I’m not sure they would be summarily cancelled. Twitter is a massive space and people say stupid shit on it ALL the time. Every day there’s hundreds of ill-founded attempts by someone or another to “cancel” someone from the left, or “dox” them from the right or send death threats then never go anywhere and fade away as quickly as they form. Again its just selection bias, we hear about the times these occur because the fact that they occurred is noteworthy – the fact that they didn’t is not.

      Alternatively interesting, do you think those that cancel do not represent SJ? Do they represent a majority only on twitter, or maybe they are just a vocal minority? Do you agree with them or would you in the instance outlined above? If you disagree with them, do you actively work against them?

      Twitter is a very leftist space that has weaponized this kind of cancellation largely because they have no other weapon – twitter is just words after all. In person, or in forums, or on youtube even, the community is much more open minded. ContraPoints has had major wars with Leftist Twitter to the point of making several videos deemed cancel worthy by them, made a video calling that shit out, and still remains a bastion of the Leftist/SJ movement online. I think in 5 years when we all stop using Twitter and move on to whatever the new Social Media format is, cancel culture will just be replaced by whatever the new zeitgeist is.

      I have no issue with “cancelling” people the same way I have no issue with putting people in jail: It’s fine in theory, overused in practice. Some people deserved what was coming to them. I love Louis CK, he’s my favorite comedian, and I still watch his shit on Netflix. What he did was gross and he should have definitely received social shame and some career backlash for it. Similar thoughts for Kevin Spacey, though his response to that controversy is perhaps even more to blame for his situation than his actual controversy (so memable!)

      But those are rarely the instances we discuss. We discuss the poor college professor cancelled for sharing his views online because it is the kind we find most abhorrent so of course it sticks in our mind. But I can assure you, online the right has its fair share of issues. Every single Leftist Video Essayist I follow (from Lindsay Ellis to ContraPoints to hbomberguy) has talked about receiving right wing death threats, getting personal information leaked online, or in some very extreme cases being swatted. Again however (and this is just making me REALLY want to write a 40,000 word essay on being against fear) I suspect, and preliminary research backs up, this happens far far less often than the Left implies it does.

      I don’t actively work against Leftist twitter because while I find some of their tactics annoying, I try to be more productive and work to reach out to moderates and Right-wingers and convert them to our side rather than “rallying the troops” as someone in this OT said.

      Basically: Twitter is the cesspool of discussion for all sides.

      • J Mann says:

        Eric, do you think more people have been cancelled than were blacklisted during the communist scare?

        (I’m not sure – the question is probably whether there was a blacklist of less famous CCP members. I certainly have heard of more people being cancelled than blacklisted, but that might be recentism).

        Second, the problem with cancellation is that it chills everyone else’s speech.

        Drew Brees will probably survive expressing the opinion that we should stand together to fight racism and that while he himself knelt before the anthem, he personally thinks kneeling during it is disrespectful, but if he didn’t have a long list of bona fides and if he hadn’t immediately gone on an apology tour, he probably wouldn’t have. How many other people are staying quiet because of the relatively few cancellations?

        • Eugene Dawn says:

          I think that “cancellation” is vague enough that it will be hard to get a good comparison, but this is an interesting question. Wikipedia has a partial list of blacklistees which I think has about 350 names on it; I am not sure if any names are repeated.

          I can’t find a similar list for cancellations, and I don’t pay enough attention to trust myself to come up with one.

        • Eric T says:

          Eric, do you think more people have been cancelled than were blacklisted during the communist scare?

          Preliminary research says fewer – though given that blacklisting was done mostly from the Top-Down and cancellation is Bottom-Up (ie done by the masses instead of the government or other powerful organizations) this is completely unsurprising to me.

          Second, the problem with cancellation is that it chills everyone else’s speech.

          I think this is possible but I also think this is a self-fulfilling prophecy as well. If nobody took cancellation seriously than cancellation would cease to be, at least outside of the truly heinous issues, because people wouldn’t react to it. Most efforts to “cancel” go nowhere, and I have a working theory that people REACTING to the cancellation attempt (ie it getting publicized, it getting called-out, or over vigorous defenders swooping in to argue) is the main correlative factor for whether the cancellation attempt actually succeeds. Hence why I am “Against Fear” so to speak.

          I also don’t know how new an issue this is. This will be part of the Effort Post one day as I’m still researching it, but it seems like large social groups trying to ostracize, oust, or socially damage people for what they say/do/think is as American as apple pie. This doesn’t make cancel culture OK, but I think it means it’s not as panic-worthy as some people indicate it is.

          He personally thinks kneeling during it is disrespectful, but if he didn’t have a long list of bona fides and if he hadn’t immediately gone on an apology tour, he probably wouldn’t have.

          I think this is fair – but the rich and powerful are by simple nature of their status, the ones most at risk of “cancellation” and also the ones most able to simply weather it. I think had Brees just ignored this shit would move on, the media is hopping from issue to issue at breakneck speed. JKR is still going to write books, hell even Louis CK is back now somehow.

          I think the issue is more when the cancel culture descends to the semi-famous. Public figures who don’t have legions of fans to support them. Bloggers and professors and thinkers. Again I’m still researching this, but I think this is the far more pernicious form of Cancellation but it is also that far less common one.

          • J Mann says:

            Thanks – I’m looking forward to your post! (And please call out for help if you start to feel burned out. You’re my favorite new poster by a wide margin, and speaking selfishly, I’d hate to lose you. Arguing against the local weight of opinion can get exhausting, but is super valuable.)

            Some thoughts on the blacklist for you to address in that piece.

            1. As far as understand, the Hollywood blacklist did include some government involvement but also large private components – the Hollywood Reporter was integral in launching the investigation, and the American Legion organized grass roots support to pressure private Hollywood companies, for example.

            2. I question whether we can confidently assume that a crowdsourced blacklist will be less harmful than a blacklist enacted through some government involvement. Crowdsourcing can be very effective in some cases.

            3. I wouldn’t assume that cancellation is light. I have a friend at a company that just fired a twenty year employee for posting to his facebook friends that he thought many of BLM’s problems were better addressed through cultural changes.* He won’t make the top line of twitter or get in the paper, but he got fired when someone screencapped the post and several people complained to his employer. It’s true that Louis CK has a special, but I think it’s going to be hard for this guy to avoid a major shift in his employment prospects after getting fired for racism.

            * (To be clear, I am not endorsing this opinion.)

          • Eric T says:

            You’re my favorite new poster by a long shot, and arguing against the local weight of opinion can get exhausting, but is super valuable.)

            Thank you 🙂

            1. As far as understand, the Hollywood blacklist did include some government involvement but also large private components – the Hollywood Reporter was integral in launching the investigation, and the American Legion organized grass roots support to pressure private Hollywood companies, for example.

            My understanding was that the Hollywood Reporter got the original 10, and then the government swiftly took charge of the hunt for more names, and the vast majority of people blacklisted were done so because of government-led or sponsored investigations. I’m reading Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist to learn more about it right now actually.

            I question whether we can confidently assume that a crowdsourced blacklist will be less harmful than a blacklist enacted through some government involvement. Crowdsourcing can be very effective in some cases.

            I don’t mean to imply that, merely that crowdsourced blacklists will be far more scatter-shot than the government is liable to be, so I’m not surprised if the total number of people on said blacklist would be higher.

            I wouldn’t assume that cancellation is light. I have a friend at a company that just fired a twenty year employee for posting to his facebook friends that he thought many of BLM’s problems were better addressed through cultural changes.

            Unfortunately the issue of this is makes it difficult to confidently investigate. And self-reported data is just so unreliable that it’s hard for me to parse. My current line of investigation is comparing unjust firing lawsuits: as at least some people have to think that they stand a chance in court, and see how they stack up against other commonly held Stupid Reasons for getting fired that end in lawsuits both in modern times and reaching back as this data goes.

            Early analysis says, as I mentioned above, It’s probably not nearly as common as we think it is. I have another idea for how to find narrow in on this data but it is substantially more involved as it requires at least some actual interviews with people responsible for making these kinds of decisions. I have the ability to do that thanks to a lot of connections I have, but not the time right now.

            I appreciate the offer for help. I think I’m good, I’m approaching this as something to work on in the background when work is slow, so that helps me avoid burnout (as people probably guessed from my frequent posting: works been SLOW this week).

          • Paul Zrimsek says:

            I think the most important difference between the blacklist era and Cancel Culture is that the latter is still going on– and it’s not unreasonable to worry about how much worse it might get.

          • Eric T says:

            I think the most important difference between the blacklist era and Cancel Culture is that the latter is still going on– and it’s not unreasonable to worry about how much worse it might get.

            Hence why someone needs to knuckle down and figure that shit out!

            (Me. It’s going to be me. I’m about this life now).

            But no I get that. I think what I’m trying to do is figure out how Cancel Culture (and other non-SJ based fears like Incel Culture) stack up compared to previous historical events to try to bring that discussion down from the “SJWs are going to destroy free speach on the internet forever!” level.

          • Fahundo says:

            I think a large part of the problem is that the internet in the 00s was a place for contrarians to thrive, and now it’s infested with people that have been brainwashed by TV Standards and Practices to expect all discourse to be sanitized.

            So you have an incredibly small group of fanatics who seek out people to cancel for sport, and a much, much larger group of people who read a headline and think “wow, he said something racist? NBC wouldn’t allow that, and neither should Twitter!”

          • Paul Zrimsek says:

            Sure, Eric, and I respect the effort. I only hope that when you say…

            bring that discussion down from the “SJWs are going to destroy free speach on the internet forever!” level.

            …you’re merely slamming their epistemic overconfidence, not ruling their conclusion out in advance.

          • Eric T says:

            …you’re merely slamming their epistemic overconfidence, not ruling their conclusion out in advance.

            Yeah I’m trying to avoid the latter, but I’ve always been of the “If you’re gonna predict doom and gloom you better have a lot of evidence to back it up” and I have thusfar been unimpressed XP

          • John Schilling says:

            I think this is possible but I also think this is a self-fulfilling prophecy as well. If nobody took cancellation seriously than cancellation would cease to be, at least outside of the truly heinous issues, because people wouldn’t react to it.

            Pedantically true, and pedantically irrelevant because the odds that literally nobody will take cancellation seriously are insignificant. If nothing else, the people doing the cancelling will be taking it seriously.

            My problem, since I don’t think you are making a pedantically irrelevant statement, is that it looks to me like you are echoing the “If you ignore the bullies, they can’t hurt you” nonsense that I’ve heard far too often and don’t need any more of. Bulllies can hurt you even if you ignore them.

            So can cancellation. It does not matter if you don’t take cancellation seriously; if your employer takes it seriously, you’re fired. If your ISP or social-media platform owners take it seriously, you’re denied online social interaction – which, for some of us, is basically the only sort of social interaction still legal. These are serious consequences.

            I do not believe that employers, etc, are going to serenely notice that Alice hasn’t responded to the twitter mob and on that basis not fire her. If I recall correctly, Justine Sacco was fired before her plane landed.

            And, as others have already noted, the problem isn’t just the firings, but the chilling effect of the firings. Even if the possibility of “cancellation” is small, when the consequences are so high I’m not going to be receptive to “see, there’s nothing to be afraid of, you’re just a big fraidy-cat” arguments.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @Fahundo:

            I think a large part of the problem is that the internet in the 00s was a place for contrarians to thrive, and now it’s infested with people that have been brainwashed by TV Standards and Practices to expect all discourse to be sanitized.

            You misspelled “academia”.

          • Fahundo says:

            No, what I’m specifically talking about is people who weren’t on the internet at all until smart phones and social media made it…more accessible? I don’t know.

          • Mycale says:

            I think the chilling effect is huge and easy to overlook if you aren’t part of the group whose expression is chilled.

            Eric T, I know your plans to go to law school (congrats on the LSAT score!), so I’ll use an example that might feel salient. At my fancy T14 law school, I was aware of a classmate who expressed some views that were not looked upon favorably by the SJ crowd at the school. It’s worth noting that these weren’t particularly extremist views — they wouldn’t raise any eyebrows here, for instance — but he was an outspoken conservative and quite identifiable. The result was that people spent several weeks trying to “cancel” him, including going to the administration, sending repeated emails denouncing him (and the groups he was affiliated with) to the entire law school body (technically violating school listserv policies, which was obviously never punished), and contacting his employer in an attempt to get his post-graduation job offer revoked (fortunately they were unsuccessful).

            The people engaging in that behavior included a number of people who acted quite friendly toward me. But they also made it clear that they supported this type of “de-platforming.” I don’t think they would have hesitated to do the same thing to me if I were 100% honest publicly in my views on various issues of the day (and if I were prominent enough for them to care), which is why I only express my real thoughts anonymously on online fora like here.

            The threat of being cancelled feels a lot more serious when you’re the type of person whose life Twitter (as a collective) would enjoy ruining.

            The other result is that the type of people who run the risk of being cancelled for their views simply will stop engaging in discussions in real life. I appreciate your thoughtful responses here, and I’m glad that I can exchange comments with you here. But, to be clear, I would never engage in this conversation in real life. I value my career too much to run that risk when people know my identity. I think that’s unfortunate, since it leads to a breakdown in discourse in our society, but I’m unwilling to be a sacrifice in the hope of improving dialogue. I’ve talked to a number of people who feel approximately the same way, but it’s hard to notice this in daily life since this obviously isn’t something that you broadcast.

          • Eric T says:

            @Mycale – thank you for sharing your perspective and experience. It saddens me to hear you were negatively influenced by people in the movement I identify with.

            I think the chilling effect is huge and easy to overlook if you aren’t part of the group whose expression is chilled.

            Eric T, I know your plans to go to law school (congrats on the LSAT score!), so I’ll use an example that might feel salient. At my fancy T14 law school, I was aware of a classmate who expressed some views that were not looked upon favorably by the SJ crowd at the school. It’s worth noting that these weren’t particularly extremist views — they wouldn’t raise any eyebrows here, for instance — but he was an outspoken conservative and quite identifiable. The result was that people spent several weeks trying to “cancel” him, including going to the administration, sending repeated emails denouncing him (and the groups he was affiliated with) to the entire law school body (technically violating school listserv policies, which was obviously never punished), and contacting his employer in an attempt to get his post-graduation job offer revoked (fortunately they were unsuccessful).

            I won’t ask for more specifics out of a need for privacy, but sometimes I hear these stories only to find out later the thing said was actually something that would raise an eyebrow here. I don’t know how to judge this without, but I will take your word that this was only a moderately controversial position.

            These several people weaponizing their words to instill fear is disappointing, but the important point to remember is they failed. I can’t remember who said it, but someone pointed out a comparison between cancel culture and the police. I’ve seen people here call the protestors innumerate because police don’t actually kill that many black people. But when black people talk about their fear of the police, or their mistrust of them, it’s innumeracy and not a “chilling effect”

            I do NOT want to imply that’s what you are doing, I think you are operating in nothing but good faith, but I think if people get to tell me to look to how little cops actually end up shooting the black guy, I get to point to how little the cancel culture actually ends up cancelling the conservative. I don’t know how to resolve these problems, other than to continue to advocate open discourse between the Tribes and pressure my faction of SJs to move away from such methods.

            The people engaging in that behavior included a number of people who acted quite friendly toward me. But they also made it clear that they supported this type of “de-platforming.” I don’t think they would have hesitated to do the same thing to me if I were 100% honest publicly in my views on various issues of the day (and if I were prominent enough for them to care), which is why I only express my real thoughts anonymously on online fora like here.

            The threat of being cancelled feels a lot more serious when you’re the type of person whose life Twitter (as a collective) would enjoy ruining.

            The other result is that the type of people who run the risk of being cancelled for their views simply will stop engaging in discussions in real life. I appreciate your thoughtful responses here, and I’m glad that I can exchange comments with you here. But, to be clear, I would never engage in this conversation in real life. I value my career too much to run that risk when people know my identity. I think that’s unfortunate, since it leads to a breakdown in discourse in our society, but I’m unwilling to be a sacrifice in the hope of improving dialogue. I’ve talked to a number of people who feel approximately the same way, but it’s hard to notice this in daily life since this obviously isn’t something that you broadcast.

            I acknowledge this isn’t a fear I have to deal with, the same way that being a tall nerdy white guy means I don’t have to dear with internet sexism, or racism, or much of any hardships outside of my control really. I try to be sympathetic to the view of those at risk. Part of why I’ve started using my real name online is to push against this trend broadly, and while I don’t think you are under any obligation to suffer for your beliefs, those of us with the privilege to weather doing so perhaps should. I know that if Leftist twitter saw some of the things I post here they would be displeased ™ but I genuinely don’t care. I’m in a position where I believe I could weather that storm pretty well.

            I’m rambling a bit so to wrap up: this isn’t something I know how to solve any better than just trying to put myself out there and encourage the kind of discourse that is being chilled.

          • Mycale says:

            @Eric T,

            Thanks for your response here and elsewhere. I think the SJ movement would be much improved if your approach was more common (and the same is true if the people in my groups were more that way).

            Re: the example, that’s a fair point that you can’t evaluate the situation independently (given that I can’t provide more details), although I think the fact that his employer declined to rescind the offer suggests an outer bound (i.e. you know he didn’t say anything truly horrendous).

            I don’t think it’s accurate to say, however, that the people trying to harm the student failed. They merely did not succeed completely. But they caused him enormous stress and hardship, distracted him from his studies, likely cost him various board positions (that he would have otherwise had a good shot at), and dragged his name through the mud on the internet (which we all know lives forever!). Put another way, if someone had offered to pay me money to go through the experience he did, I’m not sure of my exact price, but it would at least be a six figure amount. If it were the same offer but there wasn’t a guarantee that I would keep my job, then I don’t think I’d do it for anything less than “retire right now forever” money — which is why I stay silent on these issues in real life.

            I actually like the comparison to the BLM movement in many ways. For what it’s worth, I’m one of the people who expressly advocated against the view you outlined re: BLM’s complaints being primarily founded on innumeracy. See: link.
            (I have various disagreements with BLM, including with respect to scope / tradeoffs, but I think the basic impulse of having an “outsized” reaction to other people’s intentional conduct that harms your group is quite reasonable.)
            That’s not meant as a gotcha — I don’t post a lot and wouldn’t expect you to recall my views on this point in detail. I say that to suggest a point of commonality.
            When I read about the killing of George Floyd, I don’t fault people for thinking “Wow, if they can do that, what else are they getting away with?” and being scared, even if I know the stats say there are only ~1,000 deaths caused by cops annually (justified and unjustified).
            In the same way, when I see prominent (or even mundane) examples of conservatives getting cancelled for expressing their views honestly, I don’t fault people for being very careful in the opinions they voice, even if I can’t point you to stats showing the exact extent of the problem (although if forced to, I’d maybe gesture at the ideological breakdown of academia, but obviously there are lots of confounders there).

            I don’t know how to solve the problem either. I think the kind of good faith dialogue you’re engaging in here is part of it, but it’s only a part — no matter how good of a conversation I can have with SJ proponents anonymously on SSC, I’m not going to talk about these topics in real life until I think the power of the cancellation crowd has been diminished. But I also don’t think it’s reasonable to expect you to expend lots of effort fighting with your overzealous allies on the SJ front (I spend some time, but not a lot, trying to tone down craziness from people further to the right than me, but mostly only where there’s a personal relationship and I think I can really effect some change). It’s a genuinely tough problem.

          • AG says:

            A very large chunk of the left is intimately familiar with how chilling effects can lead to mental stress and even eventually a physical deterioration: the closet. Of course they’re going to fight tooth and nail for a world where they can never get pushed back into it again.

          • John Schilling says:

            Of course they’re going to fight tooth and nail for a world where they can never get pushed back into [the closet] again.

            Apparently, by ensuring said closet is packed to capacity with conservatives and maybe some insufficiently-woke liberals if there’s room left over.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            Apparently, by ensuring said closet is packed to capacity with conservatives and maybe some insufficiently-woke liberals if there’s room left over.

            Yeah, I noticed that this seems anti-utilitarian. How much does each person’s mental stress and even eventually a physical deterioration from chilling effects count?

          • 10240 says:

            IMO in the political arena the primary victim of chilling effects is not the speaker, but society in general, or whatever sector of society the speaker is advocating for: they create an uneven playing field, making it harder to arrive at the truth. For my own sake, I could shut my mouth, or only comment anonymously. However, if people like me shut up, then our ideas are removed from public discourse. That concern is the reason it would stress me.

          • AG says:

            The point is, the right created the superweapon first. Perhaps they shouldn’t have thought that the left would never pick it up.
            Who has the responsibility to disarm first? The right-controlled states have been entirely too happy to pass discrimination bills wherever they have gained power, so the left has no incentive to believe that any relenting won’t get them shoved back in and retaliated against.

            And the death toll and track record of violence is far higher on one side than the other.

          • cassander says:

            ~AG says:

            Who has the responsibility to disarm first? The right-controlled states have been entirely too happy to pass discrimination bills wherever they have gained power, so the left has no incentive to believe that any relenting won’t get them shoved back in and retaliated against.

            Citations, please?

            And the death toll and track record of violence is far higher on one side than the other.

            yes, it is.

          • AG says:

            Citation is the Supreme Court upholding just this morning that discrimination on the basis of sex extends to sexual orientation and gender identity. What were they striking down with that ruling?

            And your second answer is glib and you know it. We’re talking about SJ soft power in this thread, in a nation where the faction that gasses its citizens are so thoroughly right-wing that the FBI has to assume white supremacist infiltration when working with them. (Also, ICE is just about gassing immigrants.)

            SJ is not strongly associated with tankies/Maoists/pro-Putin/pro-Xi unless you’re playing the weakman game.

          • cassander says:

            @AG

            What were they striking down with that ruling?

            I have no idea. why not say what case you’re talking about?

            where the faction that gasses its citizens are so thoroughly right-wing that the FBI has to assume white supremacist infiltration when working with them. (Also, ICE is just about gassing immigrants.)

            I’m sorry, the factions that gasses its citizens? Why don’t you give me a quick rundown of which party controls the police in the 20 biggest cities in the country? For bonus points, you can show how many decades it’s been since they elected a republican.

          • 10240 says:

            The point is, the right created the superweapon first.

            @AG We may want to distinguish between chilling effects on opinion speech on the one hand, and actions and speech admitting those actions on the other. In any society that bans or ostracizes an action (homosexuality or anything else), people who nevertheless do it inevitably have a strong incentive to keep quiet about it. Right-wingers didn’t invent this, whichever society first had laws or norms did.

        • Nick says:

          Helen Andrews has a piece comparing the original #MeToo Shitty Media Men list to the blacklists of the McCarthy era, and #MeToo does not come out of the comparison favorably.

          • Eric T says:

            I’ve always found this comparison remarkably unfair, as Vincent Hartnett was a leading expert of communism, former naval intelligence officer, and was hired to create an informative list the government could use to crack down on communist infiltrators. Moira Donegan was a 20-something writer who wanted to create a private spreadsheet in her spare time so she and her friends could avoid people with Rape accusations: said spreadsheet was leaked publicly and the internet went wild with it, but it should be patently obvious and completely unsurprising that Donegan’s standard of proof was way lower than Hartnett’s.

            ETA: To expand on this view: I 100% suspect there were private lists of “commies” circulating out there somewhere during the Red Scare that likely had similarly shoddy evidence as Donegan’s list for the same reason: made by amateurs for private use. There simply wasn’t an internet for said lists to be leaked to.

          • Nick says:

            I don’t see how anything you’ve said absolves Donegan. She must know, as informal blacklisters knew in the 50s, that she could not control the spread of the list or the measures people would take in response to it. It is completely unsurprising therefore that the list was leaked and used as cause to fire the accused. I don’t see any way the Internet makes a difference, either.

          • Eric T says:

            She must know, as informal blacklisters knew in the 50s, that she could not control the spread of the list

            Did she? My understanding is she shared the list pretty much exclusively with her friends, none of whom were particularly famous or well known right? I think it would have been awfully hubristic of her to think that it was going to get leaked online and jumpstart a massive movement to get these people fired. Especially since I don’t think she took any steps towards that process herself right?

            I don’t see any way the Internet makes a difference, either.

            Before the advent of the internet it seems far less likely anyone’s private shit list could spread rapidly across the country.

          • souleater says:

            @Eric T

            I agree with you here, having a private list circulated among your social circle on who has a reputation on making people uncomfortable is very different than a list intended to get people blacklisted or fired.

          • Paul Zrimsek says:

            If Donegan’s list, in its original, privately-circulated form, was even a part of Cancel Culture– I prefer to think of it as Gossip Gone Wild– it’s a part which doesn’t analogize well at all to the blacklist. In the blacklist, as in the Brees case, the goal was to punish controversial speech; Donegal’s admittedly loose accusations, on the other hand, were to do with uncontroversially bad behavior, with the intent of warning other women away from it.

            If we DO take it as part of Cancel Culture, I agree that “the SJWs may be harsh and vindictive, but at least they’re slapdash!” isn’t all that great a defense.

          • MilesM says:

            @Eric T

            Is it “unfair”? And if it was unfair, what does it really matter to those affected?

            Yesterday you argued that it’s no more unjust to get your head cracked open because you were pushed by a cop than it is to suffer the same injury because someone failed to clean the sidewalk.

            Regardless of the fairness issue, I don’t think “It’s unfair to compare these lists because one was made by an incompetent and disseminated by a mob, and the other was made by an intelligence officer for the government” is really that great of a defense…

          • Eric T says:

            Is it “unfair”? And if it was unfair, what does it really matter to those affected?

            Yesterday you argued that it’s no more unjust to get your head cracked open because you were pushed by a cop than it is to suffer the same injury because someone failed to clean the sidewalk.

            The point of Nick’s link was to say “look how bad #MeToo is, this list isn’t even as good as the McCarthy list! In that context, yes I think the comparison is a bit absurd. There are plenty of other reasons to have issue with that list.

            I think you’re confusing my point yesterday: It may be cosmically equally unfair but the difference as I explicity stated is someone can be blamed in one instance. Considering this is conversation about where to assign blame/moral guilt, I don’t think this is a contradictory position.

            Regardless of the fairness issue, I don’t think “It’s unfair to compare these lists because one was made by an incompetent and disseminated by a mob, and the other was made by an intelligence officer for the government” is really that great of a defense…

            I mean did I ever say I was defending this list specifically? Just opposing the comparison. But ya know what, if you’re gonna step, let’s go.

            -I think people absolutely can, should, and in some cases must, communicate potential threats to one another in a hostile or possibly dangerous space. As Paul posits above, they weren’t assembling a “we don’t like these people’s opinions” list it was a “these people could be predators, steer clear of them”
            -Yes there was a chance for this list to leak and catch on. But for reasons above, I don’t think it was a very foreseeable or high-chance risk. Kind of like a black swan. I don’t think its fair to come too hard on your average nobody to not have a good grasp of that risk
            -The article is presented in a way that is misleading. The people who it claims were fired unfairly were Leon Wieseltier and Lorin Stein. Arguably what they did wasn’t worth firing but neither ever denied doing it. Both publically admitted [NYT Paywall] to doing the actions they were accused of. Whether they should have been fired is irrelevant to the question of fault for the author at hand: the list was never to get people fired. It was to help people avoid individuals who did shitty things. Many of them did said shitty thing.

            ETA: changed some wording, didn’t want to imply nick posted the link in bad faith.

          • Nick says:

            @Eric T

            Before the advent of the internet it seems far less likely anyone’s private shit list could spread rapidly across the country.

            A 50s shitlist didn’t need to spread across the country; it only needed to spread across Hollywood, which is to say, through one’s own social network. Likewise for the very incestuous media world today. We’re not in 2000, with independent newspapers situated in every town in the country. A lot of media is based in a few large cities, and everybody in journalism is a few links from each other.

            Did she? My understanding is she shared the list pretty much exclusively with her friends, none of whom were particularly famous or well known right? I think it would have been awfully hubristic of her to think that it was going to get leaked online and jumpstart a massive movement to get these people fired. Especially since I don’t think she took any steps towards that process herself right?

            That is inconsistent, I think, with the nature of the list. It was indeed shared at the start with a few of Donegan’s friends. But if they are all it was to be shared with, why 1) the emphasis on anonymity, 2) on highlighting men with multiple accusations against them, and 3) the admonition never to share it with a man? Taken together the implication is you can give this to women you trust, to add to anonymously or just to protect themselves. As NY Mag reports, it was a mere 24 hours before it spread beyond Donegan’s friends. Read between the lines (why a “fairly small number” and not just a small number? Are we talking about 3 people or 30?) and it might have been quite a few. “Of course,” Kircher writes, that model didn’t work. Why, if it was obvious to Kircher that it would spread, was it not obvious to Donegan? Do we have to conclude she is stupid or something?

          • Eric T says:

            Why, if it was obvious to Kircher that it would spread, was it not obvious to Donegan? Do we have to conclude she is stupid or something?

            Because Kircher has the benefit of hindsight? I don’t think every mistake is a sign that someone is stupid. I post things online all the time that I’m sure could, in theory, spill out into some giant culture war and end up with me or someone else facing blowback if everything goes wrong in the right way. I don’t think you have to be stupid to not be prepared for the worst.

            aken together the implication is you can give this to women you trust, to add to anonymously or just to protect themselves.

            Yeah I think that was the point. Donegan was worried about women in the media world being preyed upon by men. Given that several of the men on this list turned out to be actual predators, maybe it wasn’t the best solution but I don’t think it was a particularly awful attempt at keeping people safe. Sure it ended up not being great, but I’m confident there are 1000s of secret lists out there we never hear about for all sorts of things.

          • Eric T says:

            Also can I just say it’s a bit annoying that someone posts a link comparing two things, I point out that I think the comparison is unfair since the two things are nothing alike, and a wave of people descend on me informing me that it’s not the point, or that the fact the two aren’t actually similar isn’t the issue, or whatever.

            Yeah like maybe, but I’m not the one who brought this up!

          • Nick says:

            @Eric T

            The article is presented in bad faith. The people who it claims were fired unfairly were Leon Wieseltier and Lorin Stein. Arguably what they did wasn’t worth firing but neither ever denied doing it. Both publically admitted [NYT Paywall] to doing the actions they were accused of.

            This is misleading. First, according to your article, Stein only admitted to several instances of workplace harassment:

            He acknowledged dating and expressing interest in women with whom he had professional connections, including interns and writers for the magazine, conduct that he acknowledged was “an abuse of my position.” He told the board that he had occasionally engaged in sexual behavior in the office after hours, but said that in all instances, the sexual contact was consensual and had happened when he was single. Mr. Stein got married in 2015.

            Still, he said he knew some of his behavior had made his colleagues feel uncomfortable. “The way I behaved was hurtful, degrading and infuriating to a degree that I have only begun to understand this past month,” he wrote.

            But what he was actually accused of was “Assault, workplace harassment, nonconsentual anal, quid pro quo offers at FSG.”

            Second, Andrews is perfectly clear that her problem is with the way fairness and due process are being tossed out the window. Her thesis is in the paragraph right after the mention of Wieseltier and Stein: “The men behind Red Channels were textbook McCarthyites, but they also respected certain ground rules of fairness and due process that their modern successors in MeToo have preferred to disregard.” You are of course welcome to regard it as a good thing that Wieseltier and Stein admitted to their wrongdoings and faced consequences to it by their employer. But that is supposing that they did what they said they did, and aren’t being made to apologize; false confessions occurred during the McCarthy era, too, and are regularly touted as one of the consequences of its abuses of due process. You also have to face the fact that informal blacklists in the 50s did successfully identify communists.

            Moreover, if you’re going to say the list was fine now, you will have to explain why Hartnett was punished with the worst libel damages in history and Donegan gets to walk away with fame and approbation as well as a book deal. If you want to regard how Hartnett was treated as unjust, good!, but then you will have a hard time distinguishing Donegan’s list from the informal blacklists of the 50s.

          • Eric T says:

            @Nick I think we’re getting wildly off topic. All I initially said was I take umbrage with the idea that the #MeToo Shitty Media Men list is at all a fair comparison point to Hartnett’s professionally made, governmentally paid for, officially sactioned blacklist. A much more reasonable comparison would be to compare it to any amateur anti-commie lists at the time, which I feel pretty confident in saying would have similar amounts of wrong info on them.

          • MilesM says:

            @Eric T

            Actually, piling on crossed my mind when I posted my reply and saw three other people already did as well, and I felt a little bit bad. (and decided to just drop the whole thing)

            On the other hand, that sort of thing is bound to happen when someone posts as much as you do, and starts so many discussions with people who disagree with you.

            (My totally scientific estimate is that you’re responsible for ~17% of all posts in this OT. 🙂 )

          • Eric T says:

            (My totally scientific estimate is that you’re responsible for ~17% of all posts in this OT. 🙂 )

            Jesus Christ, a simple CTRL-F says I’ve posted or been name-dropped around 185 times in this OT.

            I should… do something else for a bit.

            ETA: I have no issue with piling per-say, I basically invite it haha. But my issue was mostly that I was just trying to make a point about how I thought a specific comparison wasn’t a great one and everyone blew it into this totally different conversation about how “this isn’t a good defense” or something or other.

            Like I can think the list was a mistake while also thinking that this is an unfair comparison guys.

          • Nick says:

            @Eric T

            Because Kircher has the benefit of hindsight? I don’t think every mistake is a sign that someone is stupid. I post things online all the time that I’m sure could, in theory, spill out into some giant culture war and end up with me or someone else facing blowback if everything goes wrong in the right way. I don’t think you have to be stupid to not be prepared for the worst.

            I think you’re seriously understating how much the content, and who it was about, lent it towards leaking. Obviously not everything you write about someone else is going to get out. Obviously not everything even about prominent people you know is guaranteed to get out. A document full of sexual assault allegations against them is much closer to a guarantee. We’re not talking about some kind of one in a million chance event here.

        • Matt M says:

          Drew Brees will probably survive expressing the opinion that we should stand together to fight racism and that while he himself knelt before the anthem, he personally thinks kneeling during it is disrespectful, but if he didn’t have a long list of bona fides and if he hadn’t immediately gone on an apology tour, he probably wouldn’t have.

          This is actually a great example of how it’s obvious that modern-day cancel culture has tons more power than the “red scare” ever did.

          What percentage of relatively well known people, when accused of being a secret commie, responded by immediately denouncing communism, publicly apologizing for everything they’ve done that caused reasonable people to properly suspect them of harboring sympathy to communism, and immediately engage in public attacks versus other suspected communists?

          Very few. Yet this is the behavior of about 99% of well-known people accused of racism. During the red scare, it was still socially acceptable to attempt to defend yourself. Today it’s not. Your only viable option if you’re a public figure is to immediately beg for forgiveness and do whatever it is your accusers demand you do.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Your only viable option if you’re a public figure is to immediately beg for forgiveness and do whatever it is your accusers demand you do.

            I don’t think that’s true. You can also give them both birds straight up. Jordan Peterson did. Dave Chappelle did. Drew Brees is just a………………word I’m not going to use on SSC.

          • Matt M says:

            There’s one very specific reason why Dave Chappelle is allowed to defect that doesn’t apply to Drew Brees.

            And as far as Lobsterman goes, isn’t he currently battling crippling drug addiction while his daughter is out thotting it up on TikTok? Not sure he’s the best example of “Don’t worry, you can resist the mob and everything will turn out fine!”

          • Eric T says:

            his daughter is out thotting it up on TikTok

            Not sure how much you can blame that on the Left…

          • Fahundo says:

            So you’re saying the left CAN be blamed for his drug addiction, then.

          • Eric T says:

            So you’re saying the left CAN be blamed for his drug addiction, then.

            Got me there :O

            It’s a shame that SSC doesn’t have signatures on comments, mine would be “Inferring positive claims from the absence of claims is always a risky move.” – Guy in TN

            that or

            “Stop telling me why Affirmative Action doesn’t work, I’m not Pro Affirmative Action. Please I don’t know how many times I can say it.”

          • anonymousskimmer says:

            If you didn’t defend yourself during the red scare you could go to prison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Control_Act_of_1954

            Assuming you weren’t lynched instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alabama_Chapter_of_the_Communist_Party_USA#Backlash_from_Police_and_The_Ku_Klux_Klan

            The penalties for not defending yourself were severe, whereas begging forgiveness can evade some sanctions from SJW mobs today.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Chappelle didn’t defect on race stuff but on gay and trans stuff. Which is usually these days even a bigger deal than race stuff. (Edit: I’m not sure that’s true since I don’t think anyone survives race cancellation. Except Mel Gibson and I don’t know why, but I mean, Mad Max is great so it’s all right I guess?). Peterson’s problems have nothing to do with the initial outrage over his remarks about transgender pronouns.

            I’m not saying it’s good. I find the whole cancel culture thing abhorrent. I just disagree about bending the knee being the “only viable option.” I would call it the worst option, because if we actually want to fight against that culture, the only way we can do that is by robbing it of the power to make people bend the knee. Stand up to the mob.

            I say that of course under a pseudonym in a hidden comments thread on an obscure blog full of preternaturally reasonable people.

          • AG says:

            Getting cancelled for racism is a relatively small subsection of what one gets cancelled for, and just about the only subsection where the impacts consistently stick.
            The list of people who have flipped the bird and been totally fine for getting cancelled on gender and sex things is much larger, and that puts the broader comparison of SJ-based cancelling vs. McCarthyism in context.

          • Jake R says:

            I find it hard to believe that Drew Brees would have actually been cancelled in any meaningful way. It’s hard to describe how people feel about him here in Louisiana without verging on the homoerotic.

            I’m pretty disappointed in the way the whole thing has panned out. It seems pretty clear that he isn’t saying what he thinks is true. The whole thing gives off the vibe of a politician who can’t give an opinion on something until he’s seen the polling.

          • Matt M says:

            The whole thing gives off the vibe of a politician who can’t give an opinion on something until he’s seen the polling.

            Does this not imply that public opinion in the 1950s was more generally pro-communist than public opinion today is pro-insufficiently-anti-racist?

            Like, it seems clear that Drew Brees is more afraid of being called a racist than Hollywood actors in the 1950s were afraid of being called a communist.

          • Paul Zrimsek says:

            Like, it seems clear that Drew Brees is more afraid of being called a racist than Hollywood actors in the 1950s were afraid of being called a communist.

            That may tell us more about Brees’ personal situation than it does about the general tenor of the times. If the actors spent most of their working time around children of liquidated kulaks and Polish officers, as Brees spends most of his around blacks, they would have had more unpleasantness to worry about.

          • During the red scare, it was still socially acceptable to attempt to defend yourself. Today it’s not. Your only viable option if you’re a public figure is to immediately beg for forgiveness and do whatever it is your accusers demand you do.

            That was pretty much my reaction to the quote from Stein a bit higher up in this. By his account, he had dated various women he had professional contacts with and engaged in some consensual sex. Followed by:

            The way I behaved was hurtful, degrading and infuriating to a degree that I have only begun to understand this past month,

      • Eugene Dawn says:

        The issue with movements is that the most vocal members of the movement tend to be the ones who care a lot about the movements and are thus the most extreme members.

        Actually, w.r.t. cancelling, I am not totally sold on this idea. It sounds plausible, and I don’t want to dismiss it totally, but it also seems to me like it’s the newest, most weakly attached members of a group who are most insecure about their status in it, and who are most susceptible to the zeal of the converted–they also may not be very well-informed about the ideology of the group, either because they are new to it, or because they aren’t very interested in ideology in general and are joining a group for some other reason, like social pressure.
        I think in many cases it is these people who have the most reductive, black-and-white view that sees every statement short of 100% support as cancel-worthy.

        • Eric T says:

          It sounds plausible, and I don’t want to dismiss it totally, but it also seems to me like it’s the newest, most weakly attached members of a group who are most insecure about their status in it, and who are most susceptible to the zeal of the converted–they also may not be very well-informed about the ideology of the group, either because they are new to it, or because they aren’t very interested in ideology in general and are joining a group for some other reason, like social pressure.

          This may be possible but it doesn’t really match up with what I’ve seen. The people leading the cancelling charge on twitter seem to (based on my limited analysis of the topic so far) have a long history of activism/SJ posting. I think those newcomers are likely the ones who join in the fastest when they see the more established extremists get the first hit in.

      • Nick says:

        I think SSC’s comments are somewhat hostile to SJ and are probably on-balance unfair to it the same way that if you went into a SJ community and asked about the Rationalist community the responses would probably be on-balance unfair (well actually they’d probably be: “Who the hell are they?” but assuming we get past that point).

        Oh, I know from experience how SJ communities would treat SSC. I know because my SJ friends have repeatedly cast SSC and the rationalist community as a hotbed of sexism and white supremacy, and made up grandiose lies about us, which I verified to be false. One of many reasons my opinion of social justice is in the gutter.

        The issue with movements is that the most vocal members of the movement tend to be the ones who care a lot about the movements and are thus the most extreme members. These more extreme members very publicly do or say a lot of things and this in turn is amplified by selection bias/reporting from the movement’s Outgroups.

        I think this is a common mistake in conversations about social justice wrongs. Yes, there is bad behavior characteristic of ideologies which dominate a certain community or society. Every ideology polices speech, for example. Every ideology has a minority of loudmouth idiots. Every ideology’s defenders, at least nowadays, will attract death threats whenever they advocate it in a prominent way, no matter how banal their message.

        But this mostly-admirable both-sidesism ignores the pathologies unique to or aggravated by social justice ideology. Classical liberalism, for example, has done quite a good job avoiding struggle sessions or circular firing squads or purity spirals, and it’s been around for a lot longer. So did the left-liberalism typical of the Democratic Party center.

        My understanding based on preliminary research is that far far fewer people are effectively cancelled than the SSC community makes it seem like based on how likely they seem to think getting cancelled is. I suspect this may be amplified by how vitriolic the SJ community was to our host in the past.

        Have you heard of “chilling effects”? It doesn’t matter per se how many people are publicly shamed, harassed, and possibly doxxed, because you can create a culture of fear by having relatively few public examples. And that culture of fear exists. Freddie deBoer was documenting this years ago. Jesse Singal has been more recently, and says over and over and over and over how many journalists, academics, and other practitioners in fields nominally concerned with truth and objectivity are terrified to say anything aloud, to say nothing of fields like young adult fiction and, God help us, knitting instagram. As I said when that last one happened,

        The problem is, knitting Instagram self-evidently didn’t implode before social justice. Neither did YA fiction, or the many other communities this has happened to. Social justice showed up, and everything went to hell. It’s all well and good to say this could happen to anything, and to point it out among, um, Neo-Nazis, but these ideologies, it seems to me, must have particular beliefs or practices which give rise to purity spirals.

        I agree of course that the way Twitter is designed is part of the problem. Likewise tumblr. But ultimately I don’t think you can pin it all on that. These communities, again, work just fine right up until social justice entryism destroys them—platforms enable all the worst behaviors, but don’t actually cause them. Something more fundamental is wrong.

        • Eric T says:

          Have you heard of “chilling effects”? It doesn’t matter per se how many people are publicly shamed, harassed, and possibly doxxed, because you can create a culture of fear by having relatively few public examples. And that culture of fear exists. Freddie deBoer was documenting this years ago. Jesse Singal has been more recently, and says over and over and over and over how many journalists, academics, and other practitioners in fields nominally concerned with truth and objectivity are terrified to say anything aloud, to say nothing of fields like young adult fiction and, God help us, knitting instagram. As I said when that last one happened,

          I’ll save the larger response for when I have the full facts, but my early investigation is that “this has never happened before” or “these things were fine before” is patently false at worse, rose-colored nostalgia at best. I’ve been trying to compile a history of similar events across different communities and positions across American history. Obviously the internet turns this one into a sort of force-multiplier: extending the impacts across the nation. But I don’t know if the data would actually support that there’s something unique about SJism that pushes it more towards entryism than a variety of popular or “extremist” ideologies before it. Just that the impacts of the ideologies which are further from the center are far more visable and far more widespread due to the shrinking of the world, so to speak.

          Again I’m not going to really dive to deep into this until I finish getting a fuller picture. But I’ve found a lot of evidence that being Pro-Civil rights in the south in the 50s and 60s or being Anti-Great Society in the late 60s in some parts of the country, or being Anti-War during the early sections of the Vietnam war, or being opposed to the Iraq War post 9/11 may have similar chilling effects (again, just more localized).

          Imagine Twitter existed and in the world post-9/11 you wanted to post the factual statement that the US had killed far more Afghani Citizens than Al-Qaeda ever did, and there was little to no evidence the Taliban had anything to do with 9/11. How do you think your job security would be right then and there? The data I’m pouring over indicates the effect may be comparable to cancel culture for a lot of these moments in history.

          Again, not saying that makes it okay, just that this may be some recentism. There have been a lot of movements who chill speech, just because more moderate movements don’t doesn’t mean SJ as it exists now is some weird pariah.

          • AG says:

            I acknowledge that this is uncharitable, but it’s kind of rich talking about the chilling effects of SJ internet speech vs. some of the sentiments in recent OTs that “hey maybe the police should suppress the people harder to make the crime rate go down” and “look, the actual police shooting rate has very small numbers, there must not be any racism happening.”

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            I don’t follow. A chilling effect on crime is desirable while a chilling effect on speech is not.

          • Eric T says:

            A chilling effect on crime is desirable while a chilling effect on speech is not.

            If you thought the speech was genuinely harmful, it would be.
            I don’t but let’s not pretend like there isn’t arguments that offending people causes harm.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Maybe crime hurts people a little more than speech, though? Speech doesn’t murder you or steal your wallet.

          • Randy M says:

            I don’t but let’s not pretend like there isn’t arguments that offending people causes harm.

            I’d like to see one.
            I’d really like to see one that is sophisticated enough that it somehow accounts for the fact that making an obscure statement is terrible, but retreating that to the world is noble.

          • Eugene Dawn says:

            A chilling effect on crime is desirable while a chilling effect on speech is not.

            I think the point is that cracking down on protesters with the police can also have a chilling effect on speech.

            EDIT:

            Contrast with “a chilling effect on racism is desirable”–that sounds great, if you’re sure that it’s only racism that SJ cancel culture chills.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            I think the point is that cracking down on protesters with the police can also have a chilling effect on speech.

            Contrary evidence: my FaceBook feed. And literally everyone’s FaceBook feed.

          • INH5 says:

            Imagine Twitter existed and in the world post-9/11 you wanted to post the factual statement that the US had killed far more Afghani Citizens than Al-Qaeda ever did, and there was little to no evidence the Taliban had anything to do with 9/11. How do you think your job security would be right then and there?

            Cable News personalities represent something of a test case (though probably closer to moderately big e-celebs rather than private citizens with social media accounts), and to quote Glenn Greenwald (writing in 2014):

            UPDATE II: In response to my question about whether any U.S. television hosts issued denunciations of the attack on Iraq similar to what Martin just did on RT, Washington lawyer Bradley Moss replied: “Phil Donahue (MSNBC) and Peter Arnett (NBC).”

            Leaving aside that Arnett wasn’t a host, this perfectly proves the point I made, since both Donahue and Arnett were fired because of their opposition to the U.S. war. Arnett was fired instantly by NBC after he made critical comments about the war effort on Iraqi television, while a memo from MSNBC executives made clear they were firing Donahue despite his show being the network’s highest-rated program because he would be “a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war”.

            During that same time, MSNBC’s rising star Ashleigh Banfield was demoted and then fired after she delivered a stinging rebuke of misleading pro-war TV coverage by U.S. outlets, while Jessica Yellin, at MSNBC during the time of the war, admitted in 2008 that “the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the president’s high approval ratings” and that executives would change stories to make them more pro-war.

            All of that stands in rather stark contrast to the clear denunciation of the Russian intervention by Martin which RT broadcast and this morning is promoting. We’ll see if she suffers any recriminations, but if she does, U.S. media behavior during the attack on Iraq was hardly any better.

          • I may be mistaken, but my impression is that the current cancel culture is cancelling on a much weaker basis than, say, the McCarthy case. You didn’t have to be a communist to be accused of being one, but I think you did have to be a left-winger of some sort — merely arguing that the increase in the military budget should only be ten billion instead of the fifteen the President had asked for wouldn’t do it.

            But to be attacked online for racism adjacent offenses, all you have to do to comment on twitter that abolishing the police is a silly idea.

            I’m thinking of a recent case where the editor of one of the top econ journals said more or less that, and the response from, among others, some prominent economists was that perhaps he shouldn’t be editor.

          • AG says:

            My point is that police racism and brutality can lead to a chilling effect on the oppressed that appears to look like a decrease in brutality on the part of the police. See also North Korea.

            So if someone is going to argue that “even if there aren’t that many actual people who have their lives ruined by cancelling, there’s a chilling effect on speech,” they need to bite the bullet that “even if there aren’t that many incidents of police shooting unarmed black men, there’s a racist effect on society.” No more claiming that BLM is operating off of an incorrect perception of reality.

          • INH5 says:

            But to be attacked online for racism adjacent offenses, all you have to do to comment on twitter that abolishing the police is a silly idea.

            I’m not familiar with the McCarthy era, but getting fired or blacklisted for opposing the invasion of Iraq, when even at the time there wasn’t any strong evidence evidence that Saddam Hussein had anything to do with 9/11, and in hindsight it was clearly a terrible idea, seems comparable or even worse. I guess you could argue that abolishing the police is obviously bad in a way that invading Iraq isn’t, but on the other hand there are a number of helpful explainers being passed around that say that “abolish the police” doesn’t really mean “abolish the police” (I find the parallels to Trump backtracking on, say, banning Muslims or building a wall across the Southern border very striking, personally).

            Bill Maher also had a show canceled for merely saying that the 9/11 hijackers weren’t cowards, though that was admittedly just 6 days after 9/11.

          • Jake R says:

            @Eugene
            He followed it up with:

            I’m thinking of a recent case where the editor of one of the top econ journals said more or less that, and the response from, among others, some prominent economists was that perhaps he shouldn’t be editor.

            A quick google search turns up this article.

          • John Schilling says:

            I’m not familiar with the McCarthy era, but getting fired or blacklisted for opposing the invasion of Iraq,

            I’m pretty sure that’s an example of being blacklisted for being ashamed of Texas and/or the nation’s most prominent Texan.

            And a pretty soft “blacklist” at that; at the time I described it as a scorched-earth attempt at crossover success, and their immediately subsequent tour set new records for the genre.

          • Eric T says:

            Question to those of you posting about the Dixie Chicks and music in the Bush/Post-9/11 era in the same OT as a conversation about Lindsay Ellis videos.

            Are you psychic?

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            @Eric T

            Nice! Now I know what I’m watching before bed.

        • BlackboardBinaryBook says:

          my SJ friends have repeatedly cast SSC and the rationalist community as a hotbed of sexism and white supremacy, and made up grandiose lies about us, which I verified to be false. One of many reasons my opinion of social justice is in the gutter.

          I think this is a perfect example of what Eric was talking about. Your friends did something shitty, you blame it on SJ as a whole.

          I’ve been steeped in SJ since the early aughts when it was a thing no one cared about except on college campuses. Now it’s this huge many-branched movement, and yes some of those branches are ridiculous and/or dangerous and/or possibly even evil. But it’s right up there with feminism and conservatism as a large and diverse movement that gets vilified by its opponents (who often lack understanding of its core tenants) for the actions of the loudest and worst branches/actors. The SSC community is just as susceptible to the toxoplasma of rage as anyone else. As a community we try to help each other resist, but when it comes to SJ this place can be a pretty resounding echo chamber.

          • Matt M says:

            Whens the last time SSC banded together to drive someone out of their occupation because they had opinions we disagreed with?

            Like, when has anyone even remotely associated with SSC has done that?

          • Eric T says:

            Like, when has anyone even remotely associated with SSC has done that?

            No offense but y’alls ‘movement’ is not large enough to have [ETA an important adjective] INFLUENTIAL splinter factions and extremists, nor is it old enough to go through the kind of evolution that cause those things to occur. SSC/LW is on the younger end of a community, and is pretty well moderated/controlled. In 10 yeas if there’s a revolt where some elitist crypto-libertarians flee SSC and form their own site and start doxxing people I will return from whatever law firm I’m working at to say

            “I told you so”

            All of this to say apples to oranges. The better example would be a comparison to the red tribe: where they have their own extremist branch bringing along a suite of issues (Doxxing, Leaking Personal Information, Death Threats, a certain large door that was opened by people who like to play video games)

          • Nick says:

            I think this is a perfect example of what Eric was talking about. Your friends did something shitty, you blame it on SJ as a whole.

            I’ve been steeped in SJ since the early aughts when it was a thing no one cared about except on college campuses. Now it’s this huge many-branched movement, and yes some of those branches are ridiculous and/or dangerous and/or possibly even evil. But it’s right up there with feminism and conservatism as a large and diverse movement that gets vilified by its opponents (who often lack understanding of its core tenants) for the actions of the loudest and worst branches/actors.

            With respect—and if folks think this is out of line, speak up before the edit window—please don’t lecture me about the quality of my friends. Please don’t pretend you were there or knew what happened, because you weren’t You weren’t there, and I won’t be sharing the details. I have been engaging with social justice, productively, for something like 11 or 12 years now, and still I have watched as one friend after another was taken over by it like some kind of alien mind virus and began saying and doing things they would not have before. Forgive me for noticing the common denominator.

            ETA: Meh, got a second opinion and I’m being rude. Sorry for the standoffishness of the original post.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            I think this is a perfect example of what Eric was talking about. Your friends did something shitty, you blame it on SJ as a whole.

            From my perspective, changing his worldview the way you recommend would be a dangerous moral step backwards.

            Ephesians 6:12
            “For we are not fighting against flesh-and-blood enemies, but against evil rulers and authorities of the unseen world, against mighty powers in this dark world, and against evil spirits in the heavenly places.”
            Foundational, black letter New Testament Christian ethics is “Don’t treat humans as shitty, engage in warfare against their evil ideas.” Treating humans as shitty leads down the path to dehumanizing them relative to the in-group and physical war.

          • Eric T says:

            @Nick

            I don’t want to pile on to you so I’ll just say this.

            I’m sorry about your friends. But maybe through your frustration you can understand mine. From my perspective my SJ friends are some of the most loving, caring, wonderful people I know. They’re friendly, supportive, open-minded and compassionate and they’ve been there for me in some really tough spots. Certainly no mind-virus. When people bag on the movement it probably irks me in a similarly opposite way to people saying its your friends fault and not the movement.

            I don’t know how to resolve this issue, but maybe we can find a way to understand each other’s perspectives better in time.

          • BlackboardBinaryBook says:

            @Nick & @Le Maistre Chat: I thought a while about how to phrase my post, and there’s a good reason I said “your friends did something shitty,” not “your friends are shitty.”

            I have friends who do shitty things. I do shitty things. We’re all human. I roll my eyes when my SJ friends say things like “conservatives only understand fear,” and I roll my eyes when my conservative friends say things like “SJ is an alien mind virus.” And I try to stop myself from saying snarky things to people who tell me not to lecture them regarding the quality of their friends after I’ve been very careful to address the actions of their friends (telling “grandiose lies,” which I hope we can all agree is pretty shitty), rather than insult the friends as people.

            I appreciate you thinking better of it, Nick.

            ETA: Also, I do understand where you’re coming from re: the alien mind virus thing. I won’t pretend I haven’t seen it happen with people who get into social justice. But I’ve also seen it happen plenty of times with people who get into religion. My point (and I think Eric’s point) was that no ideology has a monopoly on radicalism. Social justice happens to be the one whose radicalism is focused on by this community.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @BlackboardBinaryBook:

            there’s a good reason I said “your friends did something shitty,” not “your friends are shitty.”

            I get the distinction, but what’s the cause of doing shitty things?

          • BlackboardBinaryBook says:

            I get the distinction, but what’s the cause of doing shitty things?

            People are shitty sometimes? The “Foundational, black letter New Testament Christian ethics” you describe certainly hasn’t stopped large numbers of self-identified Christians from doing really terrible stuff in the name of their faith. I don’t think that means Christianity itself is evil (or that Christian people as a group are).

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            I’m sorry about your friends. But maybe through your frustration you can understand mine. From my perspective my SJ friends are some of the most loving, caring, wonderful people I know. They’re friendly, supportive, open-minded and compassionate and they’ve been there for me in some really tough spots. Certainly no mind-virus. When people bag on the movement it probably irks me in a similarly opposite way to people saying its your friends fault and not the movement.

            I know it’s customary in times like this to link an obligatory XKCD, but in this case, I find there’s an obligatory SMBC.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            From my perspective my SJ friends are some of the most loving, caring, wonderful people I know.

            To their outgroup, though? I’m not saying they’re not, but I mean, to whom do you see them being loving, caring and wonderful, and is there any group of people to whom they’re not particularly loving, caring and wonderful?

          • AG says:

            Like, when has anyone even remotely associated with SSC has done that?

            Oh, there is certainly DRAMA that has happened in the Bay Area rationalist community. Even fairly recently, in fact. I’ve read a couple of different rants about how the community was flagrantly hypocritical in who they were tolerant of vs. who got buntzed out, which broke their heart because they thought the movement was supposed to be better on that front.

            Scott keeps most of that kind of thing off of SSC itself, thank goodness.

      • cassander says:

        @Eric T

        How many people were jailed or fined by the government because of non-violent/espionage communist activity? And how many were for non-violent racism? Because the former list is pretty short, and the latter list gets longer every day because we have entire government agencies totally dedicated to stamping out the latter. The anti-racist crusade employs vastly more resources than the anti-domestic communism crusade ever dreamed of having.

        • Eric T says:

          My understanding is jailed is WAY higher for Red Scare:

          For example, on January 2, 1920 alone between 3,000 and 10,000 people in 35 cities were detained on suspicion of sympathizing with Communists or anarchists. These raids targeted entire organizations, and its widely believed the majority were non-violent. Thousands remained jailed for extended periods and Over 500 non US citizens were deported from these raids alone. This many people haven’t been jailed in any given year from non-violent racism in America, let alone in a single day.

          I don’t have numbers on fines.

          • cassander says:

            That’s a very wide range and “it’s widely believed” that the majority were non-violent does not make me more confident. Even if true it would still imply that a lot WERE violent. By contrast, we have plenty of data on modern arrests for anti-isms, and 2,550 incidents of hateful intimidation were recorded as having happened. The FBI does not record the number of arrests, it seems.

            And that’s to say nothing of the action by the dozens of government bureaus dedicated to civil rights litigation.

          • Eric T says:

            Let’s hem up those figures then.

            According to the newly formed ACLU At least 3000 were arrested, and many others were held for various lengths of time and the vast, VAST majority of them were not charged with any violent crime. Indeed while the Feds alleged they found bombs, nobody was ever charged and the bombs never produced. Other sources claim they found exactly 4 weapons: handguns, across the entire raid. One book I read estimated non-violent persons arrested were well over 2000. The FBI themselves admit the whole thing was a massive disaster.

            Also worth noting that Intimidation isn’t just for speech: for example here in NYC it can cover a variety of hostile actions including stalking, vandalism, property damage, and burning crosses.

            So even if every reported incident ended in arrest (obviously they don’t, most reported incidents of pretty much any crime don’t lead to arrest), it seems unlikely to me that they’d all fall under the category of non-violent

          • SamChevre says:

            The 1920’s Red Scare put a lot of people in jail. I don’t think the 1950’s McCarthy era did.

            But the fines (including judgments in Civil cases) and the amount of effort and money spent (including HR personnel) on compliance with anti-racism law dwarfs anything in the anti-communist era.

          • Eric T says:

            @scoop

            According to Aleksandr Vladimirovich’s book Plato’s Dreams Realized: Surveillance and Citizen Rights from KGB to FBI which I have in my little library:

            Of the 10,000 arrested, 3,500 were held by authorities in detention. The book makes it seem the main pretext was weirdly the Immigration Acts. The Department of Labor first gave the FBI warrants for raids on the Communist Party but our old pal J Edgar Hoover got a bit greedy and managed to convince them to give him warrants to go after the Communist Labor Party as well. Only about 500 immigrants were actually deported however. The rest were held for a variety of charges, including everything from aiding&abetting to possession of alcohol (prohibition had just come into effect). But the vast majority were simply not charged and eventually released when the Department of Labor cancelled a ton of Hoover’s warrants.

          • cassander says:

            @Eric T says:

            According to the newly formed ACLU At least 3000 were arrested, and many others were held for various lengths of time and the vast, VAST majority of them were not charged with any violent crime.

            were they charged with any crime? and how various are the lengths of time we’re talking about?

            The FBI themselves admit the whole thing was a massive disaster.

            It sounds to me like a bunch of people were rounded up, then let go. How many were actually convicted of anything? I was talking about the 50s red scare rather than the 20s, but even here, one orgy of arrests, while certainly a violation of these people’s rights, strikes me as considerably less impactful than the actual cash settlements extracted from financial institutions, which the current government does on a regular basis.

          • Eric T says:

            @cassander: see above. According to my book, the Palmer raids alone lead to about 1000+ charges being officially filed. Most of the other 10000 were released in the span of a few weeks. Many were settled and ended out of court but over 500 people were deported. Vladimirovich claims that over 400 of the deportees were here legally but I don’t know what his source on that is.

            Idk about you but I’d rather be fined than deported. And remember the Palmer raids were just 1 incident I happen to know a lot about because I’m reading books on it. Many more small raids occurred throughout the country.

            Idk the numbers for the 50s yet I’m still learning about that, smaller I think but I suspect that’s in part due to how disastrous the 20s went. The ACLU is a thorn in the government’s side to this day.

          • cassander says:

            @Eric T says:

            see above. According to my book, the Palmer raids alone lead to about 1000+ charges being officially filed. Most of the other 10000 were released in the span of a few weeks.

            And we’re back up to 10,000 again, I thought we’d agreed on 2,000. It’s also worth noting that this was occurring under Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, a man who was fine with his opponent in the 1916 election getting arrested for protesting his war under laws that were repealed until after he left office. It was a weird time, and the Palmer raids were basically a one off that had had far more to do with war hysteria than anti-communism.

          • Eric T says:

            It was a weird time, and the Palmer raids were basically a one off that had had far more to do with war hysteria than anti-communism.

            Were they? Palmer himself was very anti-communist, so much so that Wilson once said he “was seeing red behind every bush and every demand for an increase in wages”. And don’t even get me started on our boi J. Edgar Hoover.

            I’m not saying this is impossible, but the Palmer Raids were 2 years after WWI ended, my understanding is war hysteria had mostly died down by then.

        • souleater says:

          Who in the US are being jailed for nonviolent racism? I have never heard of this before.

          • Eric T says:

            Who in the US are being jailed for nonviolent racism? I have never heard of this before.

            There are some, but the number is small. Usually its in connection to harassment/hate speech laws or protests. It’s hard to get an official estimate but the numbers are way below red scare numbers.

  71. Urstoff says:

    Well they don’t call it the “Scottish Enlightenment” for nothing. Although it’s interesting how the major Scottish thinkers are all 18th century, and then English thinkers dominate the scene in the 19th century (as they did in the 17th century).

    I read that book many years ago, so I don’t recall his explanation for why the outburst of creative thought in Scotland during that period.

  72. Deiseach says:

    It’s Friday, it’s been a long week, I’m sure everyone is fed-up of all the rí-rá, so I’m just basking in the beauty.

    • gdepasamonte says:

      I enjoyed this, thanks for sharing. Marais I knew only as the one-hit-wonder played mostly by show-off flutists. These are delightful groupings for listening at home. (The instruments are very beautiful, too.)

      The Economist recently recommended Corelli’s wonderful trio sonatas to lockdown listeners, which I have also been enjoying.

      • Dino says:

        Fun factoid – Corelli was the first composer to write exclusively instrumental music.

        • Rebecca Friedman says:

          Do you mean he was the first composer to not write non-instrumental music as well as instrumental, or the first composer to write music that was meant only to be performed instrumentally, not sung?

          I’d have to do more checking for the former claim, but there is definitely a lot of instrumental-only music prior to him.

          • Dino says:

            What I should have more precisely said – he was the first composer to exclusively write instrumental music, meaning he was the first who never wrote any vocal music. Just checked the needed citation – “Harmonies of Heaven and Earth” by Joscelyn Godwin. He also says Corelli wrote only for strings and continuo. Also, Godwin only implies Corelli was the first to do this.

  73. Wrong Species says:

    The most important idea of the 20th century was that the key to public approval is through control of the cultural institutions. Everyone is just now figuring that out. No matter what happens, it means that this will permanently affect the cultural landscape. We’ll either have:

    1)A non-stop battlefield where political parties are constantly ratcheting up spending on propaganda media in movies/tv/books/etc. to the detriment of anyone who isn’t. Think of how elections are now in the billions of dollars, easily crowd out third parties, and are ubiquitous during election season but it’s like that for for everything, all the time.
    2) An one party society where every artist must pass the state’s filter for submission to the proper ideology.

    I imagine that someone is thinking that I’m paranoid and to that I say we’ll see. Someone else is saying that we’re already seeing these play out, but it’s going to get much more extreme, systematic and it’s going to happen in all countries. Neutrality isn’t coming back.

    • Matt M says:

      I’d say approximately half the world’s population already lives in #2. Everyone in China and everyone whose livelihood depends on doing business with China (and this subgroup includes people as generally wealthy and powerful as LeBron James).

    • WoollyAI says:

      The core of rebellion, as you have seen by this, and read of other rebellions, are the Universities; which nevertheless are not to be cast away, but to be better disciplined: that is to say, that the politics there taught be made to be (as true politics should be) such as are fit to make men know…

      And from these the schoolmen that succeeded, learnt the trick of imposing what they list upon their readers, and declining the force of true reason by verbal forks; I mean, distinctions that signify nothing, but serve only to astonish the multitude of ignorant men…
      …From the universities also it was, that all preachers proceeded, and were poured into the city and country, to terrify the people into an absolute obedience to the Popo’s canons and commands, which, for fear of weakening kings and princes too much, they durst not yet call laws.

      I think that neither the preaching of friars nor monks, nor of parochial priests, tended to teach men what, but whom to believe. For the power of the mighty hath no foundation but in the opinion and belief of the people.

      Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth, on how universities are a Papist plot to overthrow the king. Basically, all these fancy new universities (as of ~1600) are teaching radical beliefs to the clergy of England, turning them into papists or radical protestants, instead of honest, king-fearing Anglicans, and then these radical preachers spread this heresy to the people. King James really should have done something about that.

      We’ve known about the importance of cultural institutions for awhile. What’s falling apart is the belief that they can be neutral, ie, that we can erect laws/social norms to prevent one party/ideology/side/whatever from dominating them.

      • baconbits9 says:

        What’s falling apart is the belief that they can be neutral, ie, that we can erect laws/social norms to prevent one party/ideology/side/whatever from dominating them.

        I think it is more that simply they have been elevated constantly (everyone go to college, here are massive subsidies for student loans) basically constantly increasing their influence without any idea what that influence was.

      • SamChevre says:

        What’s falling apart is the belief that they can be neutral

        I’d add also that in the US, the Civil Rights Act (and related fascistic enactments) has dramatically reduced the ability of institutions to be diverse. If individual institutions are not neutral, but there is a wide array of diverse institutions, the overall impact is much less one-sided.

      • Wrong Species says:

        It’s not that I think they didn’t view culture as having potential political implications. But I don’t think they saw its control as a necessity to the extent that the Critical Theorists did. I don’t imagine Shakespeare or anyone else at the time thought of his work as a revolutionary political act.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth, on how universities are a Papist plot to overthrow the king. Basically, all these fancy new universities (as of ~1600) are teaching radical beliefs to the clergy of England, turning them into papists or radical protestants,

        And while Joseph de Maistre was Piedmont-Sardinia’s ambassador to Russia, he warned the Czar that unless the universities were changed to make students better Orthodox Christians, they would teach the next Pugachev to overthrow the state.

        EDIT: pulling a citation from Scripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of, Maistre put that in writing followed by “I have no words to tell you how much could be feared” followed by a twelve dot ellipsis and quoting the Aeneid:

        “War, horrible war! And the Neva foaming with much blood!”

        • And Turgot advised the King of France that he should nationalize the educational system to make sure the right things were taught.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            Since Turgot was a liberal economist in the same milieu as Adam Smith, I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here: that “nationalize the educational system” was a rare bad call?

            More constructive to say, one of Scott’s intellectual specters is that nobody realized Marxism would be an economic (ergo human welfare) disaster, which would make Ludwig von Mises the Homeric nobody.
            So a really smart man, be he a right-wing philosopher or a liberal fringe economist, could make accurate predictions on a 70-100 year scale. What’s the range that allows one to make such accurate long-term predictions rather than be blinded into false predictions by their ideology?
            I fear it doesn’t include the only popular or prestigious ideology.

  74. keaswaran says:

    I would have thought that the orthodox view is that one of the ways that racism depresses black income (and, at some point in the past, women’s income) is by encouraging black people to end their education earlier. So you wouldn’t want to ignore this component of the effect.

    • keaswaran says:

      Yeah, this definitely makes sense. What you really want in an analysis of the impact of (say) race and racism on finances is a way to separate out how much is due to childhood environment, how much is due to educational attainment, how much is due to differential hiring practices, etc. and then analyze how much each of these is due to what you might call racist behaviors by others and how much is due to other differential factors.

  75. metalcrow says:

    Anyone remember the whole fad around Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation several years ago, which just seemed to die off? Is there anyone here who is still involved/interested in the research or has actually tried it themselves? A lot of the research coming out of it when it was big seemed really positive (but of course it would be since it’s was the newest “big thing”), and it was so interesting people were trying to build their own devices at home. What happened to it, and does anyone here still use TDCS, or did use it but stopped?

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      I was hoping that transcranial direct current stimulation could be combined with biofeedback so that people could learn to get better use of their brains.

    • Algon33 says:

      Funny, I was excited about Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation as a possible cure for migraines, as my brain is basically crippled with them.

    • Space Hobo from Hobospace says:

      Hey, that’s the thing they used in The Expanse to make people into sociopaths. I didn’t think it was real.

    • noyann says:

      It’s considered for depression, but the jury’s still out.

  76. Edward Scizorhands says:

    Whatever happened to the E-drive stuff?

    • John Schilling says:

      Turned out to be thermal distortion of part of the thrust stand whenever the “drive” was powered on. Not an unknown phenomenon when you are trying to measure micronewtons of thrust.

  77. The Pachyderminator says:

    nostalgebraist’s firsthand description of the ominous-sounding “autonomous zone” in Seattle

    According to him, the city’s response to the protests, both the municipal government and the police, has been a nonsensical clusterfuck, and since the police abandoned “the zone” it’s suddenly become very chill. He can’t confirm reports of extortion of local businesses or armed checkpoints.

  78. Eric T says:

    Okay switching gears for a bit. I know nootropics are somewhat popular among this community. On the advice of a friend who I greatly trust I ordered some Tianeptine Sulfate pills. (I may have been better served by waiting for Scott’s new survey to go up but I placed the order like a day before he posted the survey).

    I’m pretty sure I’ve done my do-diligence in making sure I’m not about to kill myself, but just so I make triple certain: is there ANYTHING I absolutely should know before trying them?

    • Elementaldex says:

      Obvious advice, but there is one known death to tianeptine in the nootropics community, don’t overdose. Take the recommended amount and no more. If it seems like its not doing anything don’t take more. Wait. Try again in 24 hours.

    • Dog says:

      The main thing is to know it’s an opioid agonist, and to really understand everything that entails. There are plenty of reports of people getting addicted. As a former opiate addict (to admittedly stronger drugs) I can tell you it was like living a nightmare. I guess my question is what you’re hoping to gain by taking it? Maybe it’s worthwhile for treating depression. If it were me and I was just wanting to experiment with nootropics though, I would choose something else.

      • Eric T says:

        Depression mainly, but yeah I have no desire to get addicted so I’m planning on keeping the dosage low. Thank you for sharing your experience.

        • Dog says:

          Yea, it’s supposed to be pretty good for depression without a lot of side effects. I’ll also plug bupropion / Wellbutrin if you haven’t tried that.

          One more word of caution. Deciding to keep the dosage of an opioid low before you’ve started taking it, deciding to keep the dosage low when you’re about to take your daily dose, and deciding to keep the dosage low after you’ve already taken your daily dose can be very different experiences. In retrospect, it’s shocking to me how much I was able to rationalize different choices in those situations. I would suggest picking a dosage schedule in advance based on how it is normally prescribed. If you’re a month in and you find you have totally rational and legitimate reasons why you need to increase the dose, that’s a warning sign.

  79. BBA says:

    A meaningless statistic I’ve seen: the NYPD represents about 10% of New York City’s budget, while the LAPD is about 50% of Los Angeles’s budget. Some are using this to argue that LA spends too much money on police and could cut the LAPD considerably.

    Why it’s meaningless: NYC does a lot that the City of LA doesn’t. The single biggest department in New York is the Department of Education, which operates the city’s public schools. Los Angeles doesn’t have a Department of Education or any funds for schooling in its city budget, as the Los Angeles Unified School District is an entirely separate entity with its own taxing power and budget process. New York’s next-biggest department, HRA/DSS, operates welfare programs funded by federal and state grants as well as local taxes. That’s a county-level function in both New York and California, and Los Angeles County is much bigger than the city of LA, while New York City encompasses five counties (aka boroughs) and has absorbed all functions of those counties’ former governments. So to get an accurate view of how much of each city’s budget is spent on police, you’d compare total budget of the City of New York to the combined budgets of the County of Los Angeles plus the City of Los Angeles plus the 87 other cities in LA County plus the 78 school districts, and then compare the NYPD to the LAPD plus the other cities’ police departments plus the LA County Sheriff minus the part of the Sheriff’s department that runs the jails (because that’s the NYC Corrections Department, not NYPD), or maybe add Corrections to NYPD? But at this point I think you can see how silly this exercise is.

    And that’s setting aside the complex questions of what to count in the city budgets, which if you dive into the details are mazes of twisty little dedicated funds, offsetting federal and state grants, and a few self-funded departments, all different. The picture changes dramatically depending on what you count as on-budget or off-budget. You can say “money is fungible so everything is part of the same budget” but even if you think that’s true, the people deciding on the budget certainly don’t.

    • Statismagician says:

      I kinda suspect that making this sort of apples-to-apples comparison impossible is a big part of the reason why government (and large corporate) budgets are so weird.

    • cassander says:

      Almost all reporting I read on state budgets only ever discusses revenues into and out of the general fund. This was particularly galling when everyone was getting upset about Kansas’ tax policy a few years ago, because only 1/3 of Kansas’ spending is in the general fund and when you looked at the overall picture, changes that were made were quite minor. Big municipal budgets are even more complicated.

    • 10240 says:

      Why not just compare how much money they spend on police per capita, perhaps adjusted for local price levels or the GDP of the area they serve? How much the cities’ governments spend on other things has nothing to do with whether they spend too much or too little on police.

      • Eric T says:

        How much the cities’ governments spend on other things has nothing to do with whether they spend too much or too little on police.

        I don’t know about this. I’d be more okay with the ridiculous NYPD budget if the city wasn’t also refusing to fix or fund the fucking MTA. And yes I KNOW this isn’t how budgets work, I’m allowed to be irrationally angry from time to time!

        On a broader point, I think it’s okay to spend more on things if you’ve got a lot of money, and spend less on them if you have less money. Like it may be the case that more police spending provides positive, if diminishing, returns on law and order. I know a lot of people who think that. But if that’s the case, the cutoff is absolutely dependent on what else we need the money for.

        • 10240 says:

          On a broader point, I think it’s okay to spend more on things if you’ve got a lot of money, and spend less on them if you have less money.

          Assuming we are comparing two governments at the same administrative level, and the places have similar economies, the amount of money they have is not outside of their control: it’s largely a function of how much tax they levy. If they spend the same on police, but one has a lower overall budget (when comparing apples to apples), then the reason that it has less money to spend on things other than police is not that it spends too much on police, but that it has lower taxes.

          • Eric T says:

            Right, but I want them to fix the trains and I’d prefer they not raise taxes to do so. I assume this means something gets cut – the police’s overly inflated budget seems like a good place to start.

        • BBA says:

          The MTA is a state agency. Officially it’s an independent corporation with a 21-member governing board appointed by various officials, but functionally it’s a branch of the Cuomo administration and all the big decisions are made in Albany. Its operating costs show up on the state’s budget, not the city’s.

          The city has some responsibility to pay for capital costs, and this is where Cuomo can make hay by blaming de Blasio for underfunding it. But the state also has a history of diverting money from the dedicated taxes that are supposed to pay for the MTA to plug other holes in the budget. So there’s lots of blame to go around.

          Just from eyeballing the MTA’s budget, operating costs are vastly greater than capital costs, to a surprising extent… I guess there are a lot more drivers and conductors than there are construction workers, I thought material costs would be significantly more though.

          Conclusion: blame Cuomo for the subways being busted, blame de Blasio for everything else.

      • Thomas Jorgensen says:

        Los angeles, population 4 million, spends 3.14 billion on the LAPD. 775 dollars/capita, or 1.14% of gdp.

        New York City has 13 million and change living in the metropolitan area, (I presume here the rest of the state is not the concern of the NYPD? If not, that brings the numbers down a good chunk) and spends 5.9 billion. That comes to 446 dollars per capita, or 0.6 % of gdp.

        So Los Angeles really does spend drastically more on police than New York does. How does this stack up internationally?

        Berlin, Germany spends 1.545 billion euros to police 3.7 million people (per capita gdp: 36,798 euro), which comes to 417 euros per cap, or 1.3 percent.

        Canton of Zurich spends CHF587 million to police 1,504,346 people, (CHF 96,613 /capita)
        390 CHF /capita, or 0.4 percent.

        Uhm. Nobody ever accused Zurich of being an anarchic place, either.

        Sweden does not.. have municipal police, it is all under national authority, which at least makes finding the numbers easier : 21 billion SEK, 10.3 million, (SEK 478345 / capita)
        2.038 SEK /capita or 0.4 percent.

        So, yes, LA is over policed. But not uniquely so.

        • Lillian says:

          The NYPD’s jurisdiction only extends to the borders of the City of New York, and the rest of the metropolitan area is outside their jurisdiction. Consequently New York City is spending $5.9 billion on 8 million people, which works out to 738 dollars per capita, close to the same as Los Angeles. I conclude LA and NYC are equally policed relative their populations.

          • cassander says:

            But how many people commute into NY every day?

          • Lillian says:

            A lot, but the same is true for Los Angeles. I can’t find any information on the specific numbers off-hand, but the New York City Metropolitan Statistical Area has 20 million people while the Los Angeles Metropolitan Statistical Area has 13 million people. This suggests to me that Los Angeles likely has proportionally more commuters, since LA proper accounts for 31% of its MSA while NYC proper accounts for 40% of its MSA.

    • Eric T says:

      I think it might be helpful to look instead at how much each department’s budget over time. For example, the NYPD budget has grown at a staggering rate over the years. This growth doesn’t get explained away by inflation, or population growth, or even crime rate (which has gone down since the early 2000s).

      When people in NYC say things like “the NYPD could do their job with a fraction of their budget” they’re usually pointing to the internal data. I agree comparing data between cities is a bit disingenuous.

      • cassander says:

        looks like the NYPD budget is 8x what it was in 1981. City taxes are up 9x. Would you say they’ve also grown at a staggering rate? What about the education budget, which is also up 9x? I’m pretty sure that test scores aren’t up anywhere near as much since 1981 as crime rates are down.

        • Eric T says:

          What about the education budget, which is also up 9x?

          Yes, the NYC education system is abysmal and part of the issue is we just keep throwing money at it.

      • BBA says:

        The chart also shows a much less dramatic growth in headcount. In 1980 there were 26,913 police officers in the NYPD (plus the NYCTA and NYCHA police forces, which NYPD absorbed in 1995). Last year, it was 36,461, slightly down from the peak in 2000.

        There is clearly some administrative bloat going on, but total headcount in the department has been flat for the last decade, and yet the budget has continued rising rapidly in a time of low inflation… something else is going on. (Also, what happened in 2008? “Civilian” staff grew from about 10,000 to about 15,000 that year. Was there another agency merger that the chart doesn’t reflect?)

        • Eric T says:

          yet the budget has continued rising rapidly in a time of low inflation… something else is going on.

          My understanding is that it’s being spent on “stuff”. New squad cars, new weapons, new surveillance gear. Salaries and benefits have gone up as well, the Police Union here is very good at what they do.

  80. Jake R says:

    In lighter news, Sony has announced the first wave of games for the PlayStation 5. Among them is the much-anticipated sequel to one of my favorite games, Horizon Zero Dawn. The game takes place in a post-apocalyptic United States and heavily features tribes of humans hunting giant robots with bows and arrows (implausible? yes. awesome? YES). While the original game took place in Colorado and parts of Utah, it appears the sequel will be taking us to San Francisco. Since I know a lot of the commentariat hail from the Bay Area, I thought you might appreciate some gorgeous renderings of your local landmarks ravaged by the sands of time.
    Trailer
    Some landmarks identified by the subreddit

    • Fahundo says:

      Honestly wondering where the plot is supposed to go. IIRC in the first one she found out where all the robots came from and why they were trying to kill people, and stopped the AI responsible. Now the problem is red weeds?

      • Jake R says:

        Gur ebobg gelvat gb xvyy rirelbar jnf bar bs avar fhoebhgvarf bs gur znfgre greensbezvat NV gung zlfgrevbhfyl orpnzr fragvrag naq ena nzbx nsgre fbzr bhgfvqr sbepr vagreirarq. Nabgure bar bs gur avar jnf gur nagntbavfg bs gur QYP. Gung fgvyy yrnirf frira haerfgenvarq, cbgragvnyyl ubfgvyr NV bhg gurer, abg gb zragvba gur ynetre tbny bs erfgbevat gur znfgre greensbezvat NV naq gur zlfgrel bs jung pnhfrq gur fhoebhgvarf gb erory va gur svefg cynpr.

        • Fahundo says:

          Qvqa’g cynl gur QYP, ohg V gubhtug gur ernfba gung cnegvphyne bar ena nzbx jnf orpnhfr vg jnf gur bar erfcbafvoyr sbe qrfgeblvat rirelguvat naq fgnegvat bire vs fuvg jrag onq jvgu gurve svefg nggrzcg ng greensbezvat.

          Nyfb jnfa’g bar bs gur bgure frira NV gur bar gung znqr Nybl gb pbzong vg? V svtherq gung vaqvpngrq gung vg jnf jbexvat nybar.

          • Jake R says:

            Nyy gur fhoebhgvarf rffragvnyyl ybfg birefvtug, naq ortna sbphfvat ba gurve vaqvivqhny bowrpgvirf jvgubhg gur “ovt cvpgher” vasyhrapr bs TNVN. Gurl nera’g arprffnevyl nyy qnatrebhf, ohg gurl ner fvatyr-zvaqrq. Gung bar bs gur fhoebhgvarf jnf gnfxrq jvgu jvcvat rirelguvat bhg naq fgnegvat bire vf jul gung bar jnf gur ovttrfg naq svefg ceboyrz.

            Gur nagntbavfg bs gur QYP vf Urcunrfghf, gur fhoebhgvar gnfxrq jvgu qrfvtavat znpuvarf gb greensbez gur rnegu. Vg abgvprq gung crbcyr jrer nggnpxvat gur znpuvarf sbe cnegf naq zngrevnyf, fb vg qrpvqrq gb fgneg znxvat zber qnatrebhf qrsrafvir znpuvarf, naq riraghnyyl rfpnyngrq gb znpuvarf fcrpvsvpnyyl qrfvtarq gb uhag qbja naq ryvzvangr uhznavgl. Cerfhznoyl bgure fhoebhgvarf pbhyq unir fvzvyne snvyher zbqrf.

            Nybl jnf perngrq nf n ynfg qvgpu beqre ol TNVN evtug orsber fur jnf qrfgeblrq. Cerfhznoyl gung beqre jnf pneevrq bhg ol gur fhoebhgvar gnfxrq jvgu ercbchyngvat gur rnegu jvgu negvsvpvnyyl trfgngrq uhznaf, naq vg’f abg pyrne jung rssrpg gur arjsbhaq nhgbabzl unf unq ba gung bar.

    • Eric T says:

      I just want to play the new spider-man.

      The original really made me feel like spiderman ya know XP

  81. Aftagley says:

    Does this hold up when you compare incomes of similar aged individuals across racial gaps?

    • Statismagician says:

      It looks like really quite well, actually, although this is from Payscale and they don’t post detailed methods – controlling for job, education, and years (relevant? total?) experience they find all of a 2% remaining pay gap. Interestingly it’s less than 2% for individual contributors and more for managerial positions; I’m not sure how to parse that.

      • Statismagician says:

        Yes, that was quite striking. I wish they’d also incorporated a location term; I wonder about the different coastal/interior demographic mix doing weird things to the data in either direction.

  82. proyas says:

    I recently learned about how controversial the 1953 Miller-Urey experiment was. The details are here: https://www.truthinscience.org.uk/content.cfm?id=3161

    This comes as a real shock to me, as I had long assumed science had found a credible biochemical pathway for nonliving molecules to become stable, organic molecules that eventually coalesced into the first microbes. 

    Am I missing any new facts or arguments that might have been raised over this issue over the last 10 years or so, or does the information in the hyperlinked page accurately reflect our present understanding (and hence uncertainty)? 

    • FLWAB says:

      To the best of my knowledge we still do not have a solid idea of how ambiogenesis occurred (assuming that it did). All we have are hypothesis, but nobody has demonstrated anything significant. There are multiple competing models.

    • phi says:

      The uncontroversial part of the Miller-Urey experiment is that one can get amino acids to form from much simpler molecules. I’ve heard that similar experiments have been done since under different atmospheres and energy sources, and have produced some of the other kinds of molecules used in life, but I don’t know the details.

      It’s also uncontroversial that scientists currently don’t know how life managed to form from nonliving molecules. But I wouldn’t really say that the page “accurately represents our current understanding” as it contains a number of howlers.

      Firstly, let’s consider the discussion of the early atmosphere. The page claims that the early atmosphere, like our own, contained plentiful oxygen. The oxygen in our atmosphere is produced mainly by plants and photosynthetic microorganisms. Prior to the origin of life, we would expect there to be little to no free oxygen gas. Yet the page claims geological evidence for it, without providing a source. I hunted around for some information on geological evidence for early atmospheric oxygen, and found this article: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/origin-of-oxygen-in-atmosphere/ It points out that oxidized iron begins to show up in soils around 2.45 billion years ago and is absent before that, indicating low atmospheric oxygen levels for the early Earth.

      The page then goes on to claim that water vapor would not exist, because it would be broken down by solar radiation. While this is a process that can happen, the reverse process will also happen, and with great enthusiasm since it is thermodynamically favorable. The end result is an atmosphere that at any given moment contains trace amounts of hydrogen and oxygen due to breakdown of water, but contains many more molecules of intact water.

      The next howler is the claim “in any process that leads to complexity there must be an information source”. This is… …not a valid scientific principle. For one thing, the word “complexity” is poorly defined. It certainly seems like turbulence is a complex phenomenon, but it arises spontaneously, from tiny perturbations in a fluid flow. These perturbations can be very simple, containing practically no information, but will still lead to turbulence. Also there’s loads of information in the random thermal motions of the surrounding water molecules, so information-wise, everything should be good for life to form, right?

      Okay, a somewhat more reasonable error next, the kind of mistake a well-meaning undergraduate might make. They calculate the equilibrium constant for an amino acid at something like room temperature, and find a tiny number like one molecule in 10000 liters. This would seem conclusive proof that amino acids could never form spontaneously on early Earth, right? Except that it would then also imply that amino acids could never form in Miller’s experiment. The page’s author seems to think that Miller got around this by saving the products of the reaction. But since that would be essentially a process of picking one molecule out of a flask of a trillion trillion, setting it aside, and repeating the process billions of times until a macroscopic sample was obtained, this is obviously absurd. The subtle mistake here is that the process is not occurring at room temperature in thermodynamic equilibrium. The sparks in Miller’s experiment provide a burst of energy that can cause a much higher reaction rate. The products formed are then in a room temperature solution, and can persist for a long time before breaking down, unless they are hit by another spark.

      • proyas says:

        Thank you!

      • proyas says:

        Firstly, let’s consider the discussion of the early atmosphere. The page claims that the early atmosphere, like our own, contained plentiful oxygen. The oxygen in our atmosphere is produced mainly by plants and photosynthetic microorganisms. Prior to the origin of life, we would expect there to be little to no free oxygen gas. Yet the page claims geological evidence for it, without providing a source. I hunted around for some information on geological evidence for early atmospheric oxygen, and found this article: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/origin-of-oxygen-in-atmosphere/ It points out that oxidized iron begins to show up in soils around 2.45 billion years ago and is absent before that, indicating low atmospheric oxygen levels for the early Earth.

        I think the argument is that even low atmospheric oxygen levels would have prevented amino acids from persisting long enough to coalesce into more complex proteins. No one is disagreeing that oxygen levels were much lower before the rise of photosynthetic life. However, if even a small fraction of the atmosphere were oxygen–and it could have been–then the process demonstrated by the Miller-Urey experiment doesn’t work anymore.

  83. Biater says:

    The discussion of the most recently tabooed cards from Magic the Gathering, reminds me that years ago cards were banned for their anti-Christian flavor. Demonic Hordes for one, and Lord of the Pit (with the creature type of Demon). Wizards of the Coast then stopped making demon-themed cards (or making them while calling them something else). Of course, demons are back, and prejudice is out now.

    Seems like a simple example of how the biggest taboo in American went from a Christian one to a racial one.

    Or how the most offensive swear used to be “G*d d*mn”, but is now “n*gg*r”

    “So why did demons go away in Magic? Because it seemed like a safe choice in a very unsafe time. ” Mark Rosewater, Magic Editor

    • Eugene Dawn says:

      Was “G*d d*mn” ever the most offensive swear word? I have a hard time believing that.

      • Aftagley says:

        In recent history – no.

        I guess I could believe it if someone said that back in the 1800ds that it was considered worse, but that seems like it’s too long ago to be meaningfully relevant.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        Look up the “How historically inaccurate is HBO’s Deadwood?” controversy.
        The show’s creator admitted that he believed based on research that “goddamn” was as offensive in the 1870s as “[racially charged] —-sucker” would be the year they filmed the show and even minced blasphemy was almost as strong to them as “shit”, “But they’d all wind up sounding like Yosemite Sam.”

        • Gerry Quinn says:

          I recall reading that in those days the currently horrific to Usians C-word [though where I live it is in regular use, and has near zero sexual connotation except when used in the specific sense of the noun] would instead have been ‘snatch’, which I haven’t heard spoken since I was a kid in the ’60s.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        Well this was rated G. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I heard the MPAA wanted to bump Planet of the Apes up to a PG for that, but the filmmakers countered it wasn’t a swear: Heston’s character was literally calling for God to damn those responsible for the nuclear war to hell, and the MPAA agreed.

        • Matt M says:

          “What’s the problem Mr. Standards and Practices… I’m literally just expressing my belief that this man had intercourse with his mother!”

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            But that’s not literal. He doesn’t literally believe the man had literal intercourse with his mother. But Heston’s character literally is imploring the literal capital-G God to literally damn the literal people responsible to the literal capital-H Hell.

        • Evan Þ says:

          One listener complained of the word damned as frivolous swearing. But I mean exactly what I say – nonsense that is damned is under God’s curse, and will (apart from God’s grace) lead those who believe it to eternal death.

          – C. S. Lewis, in a footnote to Mere Christianity, responding to complaints about the earlier radio broadcast of the chapter.

      • Silverlock says:

        For me personally? Definitely. Still is.

    • broblawsky says:

      This is roughly analogous to the banning of the phrases ‘demon’ and ‘devil’ in 2nd-edition D&D, to be replaced with the less objectionable ‘tanar’ri’ and ‘baatezu’.

    • Le Maistre Chat says:

      Seems like a simple example of how the biggest taboo in American went from a Christian one to a racial one.

      There is always a state religion.

    • meh says:

      they really need to remove all cards that promote violence

    • b_jonas says:

      I thought that the demons went away specifically because of the Chinese market, not the American one. But now that I tried to look this up, perhaps it’s not the case, or perhaps that applies only to the depictions of skeletons (especially in the art of Terror).

      Let me look at statements on Wizards’ website. A 2017 article about Unhinged mentions demons going away and returning to Magic, but it doesn’t specify this. A 2010 article mentions the pentagram on Holy Strength, but also doesn’t specify if it was for America or not. A Q&A from 2002, for a question about the Unholy Strength pentagram, gives a cop-out where it tries to claim that it’s not the pentagram specifically that was problematic, but any reference to real world religion. Mind you, this did eventually became Wizards’ aim: that’s why they have fantasy Greek style gods and Egyptian style gods instead of referencing real ones, Runeclaw Bear instead of Grizzly Bear, and no other set like Arabian Nights. Another 2002 Q&A confirms that the skeletons were removed specifically because of China.

      I guess you may be right that the demons and pentagrams were removed because of the American market at the time, not the Chinese market. That makes sense, because Fourth Edition, which didn’t yet have Chinese translated versions, already removes the Unholy Strength pentagram. I’m still confused though, because Ice Age, which follows Fourth Edition shortly, still has Lim-Dûl the necromancer consulting demons and reanimating a hoard of skeletons.

  84. proyas says:

    Here’s a good a social theory as any about what’s behind the ongoing social problems in America:
    https://unherd.com/2020/06/why-the-rich-are-revolting/

    It partly blames “elite overproduction” along with college indebtedness and unaffordable housing prices in cities where young elites like to live. Basically, America has a glut of ~110 IQ young people who, at age 18, thought getting a B.A. at a mid- or low-tier college was their ticket to the good life, but after graduation, reality hit them and they ended up working at Starbucks, with their paychecks being gobbled up by student debt payments and outrageous rent.

    I’m not a sociologist, but I think there’s a lot of truth to the theory. Assuming it is right, what is the solution, and more importantly, will the solution be implemented?

    For example, I don’t see how a cultural shift against academic credentialism will happen since the notion that a college degree is the key to success is too deeply ingrained in the American psyche, and is perpetuated by powerful special interests. I also don’t see how it’s politically possible to implement reforms that will substantially decrease the costs of college. Likewise, real estate prices in trendy cities are high because of the actions of many entrenched interests (NIMBYs, real estate developers, older people who bought property when it was cheap and want to see it appreciate, unions, all kinds of activists who support things like environmentalism).

    In other words, I don’t see how the factors that have led to the overproduction of elites in America will be resolved for the foreseeable future. A bleak possibility is that the share of the population that consists of frustrated elites will stay the same as now or grow, which I assume would mean continued social disorder without any resolution.

    Am I missing something?

    • andrewflicker says:

      Assuming you took the diagnosis as correct, one “solution” would be the continued increase of societal wealth and continued automation, freeing up money to pay people for status games even more. IE, instead of getting hired at Starbucks, you get hired at “generic white-collar marketing / B2B sales / lobbying” etc job. That’s what *already* happens to a ton of fresh grads, so it’s not implausible that it continues to gain steam. And then those professionals are making decent income, climbing the wealth ladder, etc., just not with any real concrete productive output- merely zero-sum games.

    • Erusian says:

      Personally, I’d set a Federal quota of scholarships based on market demands for degrees or trades. People who pursue these degrees/trades, up to the quota, have their tuition paid by the Federal government in order of best to worst test scores (with perhaps diversity set asides), minus people whose parents are in the 1% or so. Everyone else has to get non-Federally backed dischargeable-in-bankruptcy student loans for college or trade.

      This solves the student debt problem: the only way a student can take on debt is if a bank assesses them as a good risk and if they go through bankruptcy they can lose the debt. And it means that anyone who gets indebted to get a degree gets told they should have scored higher on a test or gotten a more in demand degree. They will have literally said, “I’d rather go to the bank and get a loan to pursue this rather than what the government has determined will probably be needed by the economy and so have a job at the other end.” at which point it’s easy to point out it’s their fault. No one told them, even by implication, their indebtedness was a pathway to success.

      Call it student loan reform, say you’re going to end the government giving out new student loans and find an alternate way to fund education, etc.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        I think you get some effects from lag– how many jobs are in a field now aren’t going to be the same as what there will be four years from now. I’m not sure whether what you’re proposing is worse than what we’ve got now, which also has lag effects.

      • proyas says:

        Your ideas might help the situation, but I don’t think they’d get enough political support to be enacted.

        Again, considering the constraints on political action, I don’t see how America can make the necessary reforms to address the problem of elite overproduction.

        • Erusian says:

          Really? Because something like this is, in my view, what Democrats are already advocating for. Medicare For All/Free College For All doesn’t solve the scarcity problem, it simply moves the rationing from the market to the government. When that happens, the government needs some form of decision making, and it likes standardized tests with racial set asides already.

          • proyas says:

            I don’t think Medicare For All and Free College will get enough political support to be enacted.

            Maybe a generation from now at the earliest.

    • cassander says:

      This is a theory I (and others) find very compelling, but can we actually test it? I rather hope it isn’t the case, because I agree with you that the solutions are all politically unpalatable. It doesn’t help that it’s a problem that seems to plague a lot of societies throughout history. You see the same thing in Chinese dynastic cycles, for example, with writers late in a cycle complaining about how many people are flooding the exams and how they cause trouble once they don’t get the careers they were hoping for.

      • Erusian says:

        What’s the difference between the late and early cycle? What causes elite production on a per capita basis? Like, if a society just arbitrarily says 1% of the population are elites (perhaps through a census system) then it’s always going to have roughly the same percentage of elites. But at times it seems like there’s “excess” and at other times it seems like there isn’t. Is it simply that they get blooded? Some people lose, fall out of the elite, and are irrelevant because they lost? If so how is that different from the exam failures?

        • cassander says:

          Well, usually there’s a dynasty collapse and then a bunch of people die, and the people who are left are scrambling to survive. then dynasty rules well and usually has a high demand for exam grads. People prosper, and more and more people can afford to have their kids train and sit for the exams, so more pass, and you have elite profusion. You even have something analogous to PhD overproduction, with failed/passed but jobless exam takers around the country turning to exam tutoring as a profession and making the problem worse.

          • proyas says:

            Dynastic transition is an interesting outcome to envision for the U.S. When we think about the ill fates that might befall the U.S. if its current problems get worse, we draw examples from Western history, like the fall of the Roman Empire or of the USSR, but what if Chinese history is more accurate? The U.S. government (dynasty) is disbanded and a new government and constitution are founded, and the country bounces back, with the countdown to collapse reset.

          • cassander says:

            we really have absolutely no idea what it looks like. the closest you get to to collapse of a developed country is the UK in the 70s and late war Germany. And the US has an immensely strong sense of national identity in some ways, but we’re also an ornery set of people who don’t our neighbors all that much. I don’t think there’s much you can predict with any confidence.

    • Matt M says:

      I mean, these people aren’t actually elites… they’re just some combination of descended from elites/expected to be elites/think they are elites. The actual elites go to the very top schools (either on scholarship or with daddy’s trivially large amounts of money) and get the very top jobs and can easily pay their bills.

      Any eventual solution require some sort of reckoning… a moment of truth where the wannabe-elites either recognize themselves, or are somehow made to recognize that they aren’t actually elite at all. Lower-to-middle class rural whites have been going through this process for the last 20 years or so. Coming to accept that society doesn’t actually care about them and nothing they thought was guaranteed will be handed over so easily. They haven’t always handled it the best way (see: opioid epidemic). But they didn’t burn down society either.

      • cassander says:

        I mean, these people aren’t actually elites… they’re just some combination of descended from elites/expected to be elites/think they are elites.

        That’s actually the problem. They’re not, they expected to be, and they’re pissed off about it.

        • original-internet-explorer says:

          I recall being lectured about how we were the future of society.

          Later my friends received a lot of phone calls offering very low salaries. 12k-18k GBP. If they worked hard, spent their evenings at side projects and were strategic they would maybe earn 60k in take home pay decades from now. This is the truth nobody talks about in Western Europe. The market is rigged against the young – Eric Weinstein’s description of the system is accurate – it’s a game of pretend.

          I gave up and went back to my summer job as a Cleaner because it pays more net in my circumstances than being a Professional exchanging status for money. I slowly came to the result that being in the Tacit economy will mean being ahead of anybody doing information processing for a living. The salaries paid out to engineers and scientists mean pursuit of knowledge is a vow of poverty – I’m out. It’s a bad deal – you have to be indoctrinated and compete aggressively for crumbs. The other option is to compete in the rockstar economy of Silicon Valley where very clever people have anchored on six figures as if it were a lot of money in their context and the market is rigged by companies instead of the government. Great choices!

          The truth about blue collar is completely different to what you read about on the internet. It’s split between illegal migrants earning enough to survive on and what we call operators making high five to six figures. The middle class can’t afford the wages of most blue collar workers and it means they pay for substandard labour or they find themselves wandering the isles of Home Depot or Lowes pretending to be plumbers.

          Tacit knowledge is invisible – if there is a recession in it don’t expect the New York Times to print headlines about it.

      • proyas says:

        I mean, these people aren’t actually elites… they’re just some combination of descended from elites/expected to be elites/think they are elites. The actual elites go to the very top schools (either on scholarship or with daddy’s trivially large amounts of money) and get the very top jobs and can easily pay their bills.

        Yes, I know, I just used “elites” as a catch-all term because I didn’t want to explain what you explained and make my OP too long.

        Most of the dissatisfied American elites are not actually elite, and only think they are because they were raised under the cult of self-esteem, now have curated (social) media echo chambers that are always confirming their biases and telling them they’re right about everything, and because everyone has lied to them about the value of a college degree.

    • AG says:

      Move jobs out of the trendy cities. No more new HQs in NYC or LA.

    • Marlowe says:

      Excellent essay — thanks for sharing. I don’t see an easy way out of this. Because of the amazing productivity of modern civilization, most people don’t need to do “real” things like grow food or perform manual labor. That leaves a lot of people for “elite” or white collar jobs, many of which are important and productive, and many of which, necessarily, are not. This leaves lots of idle time, or half-hearted work in bloated institutions, which is easily co-opted into busybody-ing, being angry, etc. In the past, these idle elites spent their time hunting foxes, or whatever; now, there are too many of them, and they don’t want to identify as elites. Like the examples in the essay, the identification is with the downtrodden, not necessarily bad of course, but notable.
      I don’t know what to do about this that’s feasible and that respects individual rights.

      • Doctor Mist says:

        and many of which, necessarily, are not.

        Why “necessarily”?

        And what does it mean anyway for a job to be not important and productive? It seems to me that there are a ton of really great things in the universe at large that we could be doing if we have a lot of spare people, which by hypothesis we do. Why are we hiring people into jobs where they have lots of “idle time, or half-hearted work” when these other things are out there?

        I get that there is a certain tragedy-of-the-commons thing going on here: I may be willing to pay for lots of things that directly benefit me but not to pay for one of these guys to teach reading to third-world kids. And there are certainly lots of people who at least think they would rather get paid $N to do an unimportant make-work job in the U.S. than get paid $N to live in Africa and teach. But why are the companies that produce the things I want spending so much money hiring people who by hypothesis aren’t contributing to the production of the things I want?

        Maybe this is just Moloch/Cost Disease/Whatever, but it strikes me that there is at least something missing from your explanation.

    • DeWitt says:

      I’d bet (or not, I mean..) my money on a housing bubble bursting again, eventually. The money the young are expected to fork over simply doesn’t exist, and the illusion that housing is worth the price it’s set at today can’t persist forever.

      • proyas says:

        Won’t older NIMBY people in the cities and foreign investors looking for places to store their excess wealth continue conspiring to keep urban real estate prices high be constraining supply while artificially hiking demand, respectively? I don’t see those interests yielding to younger, poorer people.

        Making things worse is the fact that the overproduced elites who are mad about high rents haven’t even correctly recognized their true enemies and demanded appropriate political changes to solve the problem. Instead of demanding measures to curb real estate speculation and to build more housing–NIMBY people, historical preservationists, and environmental concerns be damned–they want dysfunctional solutions like rent controls. Make government bigger to pump more money into the broken system.

        Likewise, the overproduced elites don’t want to solve the problem of high college costs productively by addressing the real reasons why it has gotten so expensive, why so many college degrees don’t lead to good jobs, and why so many students drop out with huge debts but no degree. They just want to pump more money into the broken system in the form of student debt forgiveness and more student aid.

        These sad realities are why I initially described the overproduced elites as “~110 IQ young people.” They’re smart enough to get into college and to be able to read news(y) articles on a regular basis that give them some clue that something is wrong with the world, but they are not smart enough to fully grasp why the problems exist, what the real solutions are, or to get the engineering degree that would net them a decent job.

  85. Eric T says:

    I mean there’s a reason why hiring and wage wasn’t in my effortpost XP

    Yeah if you control for all the things where I say the racism is happening then there’s not a lot of racism left.

    I do find this data somewhat compelling though, and yes I’d say it’s moved the needle a little bit on modern biases, though the promotions thing pretty much falls in-line exactly with what I said in my post, which was my bigger concern.

    • Wrong Species says:

      Imagine a society where institutional racism plays little to no role but there are still differences because of some combination of genes/culture. What does that society look like?

      • Eric T says:

        You’re going to have to get me way more high if you want any kind of answer to that question that I’d feel confident about in the moment. I’m not trying to be pithy, but for someone who believes in systemic racism that’s asking me to think about what like 90 different changes would be when they all finish interacting with one another. I have thought about this before but my answer keeps changing. The short answer is: not radically different than our society, but more Fair and a little bit Better.

        Some thoughts: poverty rates would probably flatten out a bit more as there wouldn’t be as many issues for Black/Latinos to deal with, because there would be a more efficent distribution of talent total efficiency would rise, I suspect there’d be an increase of minority participation in politics, including candidates, and we’d see far more minority managers, business owners, entrepreneurs and high-ranking officials.

        Some less confident thoughts: Minorities wouldn’t die as early as they do in status quo, crime rates overall would fall, and the population would be on-balance more educated.

        Far less confident thoughts: Bernie Sanders will be president.

        • Cliff says:

          Minorities wouldn’t die as early as they do in status quo

          Hispanics and Asians have higher life expectancies than whites in the U.S., don’t they?

      • AG says:

        Well, we can look at the case where institutional/systemic bias against certain white ethnicities went away over time in the US.
        On the other hand, Europeans in the past have talked about how EU nations experience more classism than racism compared to the US, due abolishing slavery earlier. However, some of those class stereotypes are still linked to ethnicity and colorism (chavs or gypsies, for example). This somewhat matches the trends as described in Albion’s Seed.

    • cassander says:

      Yeah if you control for all the things where I say the racism is happening then there’s not a lot of racism left.

      the point is that you don’t get to define any differences between outcomes among races as racism. Blacks getting paid less because they’re black is racism, them getting paid less because fewer have gone to college isn’t.

      • AG says:

        Blacks getting paid less because they’re black is racism, them getting paid less because fewer have gone to college isn’t.

        I can’t tell if you’re joking in this statement or not. First half of the statement is big R, second half of the statement is little r.

      • If I correctly understand the argument, it’s little r only if the reason fewer have gone to college ultimately is due to Racism.

        If the reason is that blacks have a different distribution of talents, or of interests, or choose to have more children and spend less money per child, or are recent immigrants still working their way up (not plausible for African-Americans but could be for West Indians), then it isn’t racism.

        You have to ultimately trace causal links.

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:

          In re why fewer blacks are going to college, there’s another possibility– that colleges are optimized for white people and not for black people.

        • souleater says:

          @Nancy

          What does that even mean?
          I’m not being sarcastic.. what does it mean for college to be optimized for one race over another? How would we know if it is or isn’t?

        • AG says:

          @souleater

          Teaching styles can be more effective for one culture over another. Secondly, in that the benefits of college are often based on socializing, unconscious cultural bias that arises from a non-diverse population leads to self-segregating, which turns into locking the minority demographic out of the beneficial connections that college should offer.

          We can look at the differences between “mainstream” universities and more specialized ones, such as historically black colleges and religion-affiliated schools.

        • albatross11 says:

          I know there’s a long history of black colleges, and I believe there have also been grade/high schools that had some kind of Afrocentric theme. In one of his books (I forget which), Thomas Sowell also talked about a selective all-black school in DC that had results comparable to those of the top white schools in the city. It would be interesting to see someone dig into the data from all that….

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:

          I raised the point without having something specific in mind, I was just irritably channelling my inner SJW in order to have a more complete list of possible reasons. This is a somewhat embarrassing admission, but I feel like this is a relatively safe place to tell the truth now and then.

          This being said, just being majority black might be more optimized for black people.

          I listened to Tavis Smiley’s show when he was on NPR, and I’m not sure that anything other than putting in a lot of hours (not necessarily on that show) could have given me as good an impression of African-American culture– mostly writers and musicians, as I recall and as would be natural for a radio show. I’m enough of a concrete thinker that having concrete examples of the size of a culture does more for me than just having a general principle.

          I’m not thinking that optimized for black people means only teaching about what black people have created, but I expect the proportion to be higher.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          This being said, just being majority black might be more optimized for black people.

          Universities being majority black would either mean getting them to segregate to HBCs, or reserving 50.1% of admissions to all universities for them while whites, Asians and non-white Latinos (LOCs?) have to fiercely compete for the other 49.9%.

        • albatross11 says:

          One thing that’s worth noticing is that US black culture has an amazing level of cultural output, particularly in music and sports, but also in literature, poetry, and acting. A person consuming US cultural output would probably estimate the fraction of blacks in the US at *way* more than 12%.

          There have been some environments that produced incredible flowerings of creativity from American blacks–think of Motown, the Harlem Renaissance, gospel, jazz, blues, and rap, and probably all kinds of stuff I don’t even know about. If you were looking for an environment that maxed out black achievement, I think you might try to find ways to replicate something about those environments.

        • albatross11 says:

          LMC:

          We’ve had all-black and nearly-all-black colleges in the US for quite a long time, and we’ve still got some nearly-all-black colleges to this day. If being surrounded by blacks in a high-achieving academic environment is a big win for helping blacks succeed, we ought to be able to see that in the history of those institutions. I don’t know enough to know whether we do see that or not, but that’s the obvious place to look. Also, I think there are nearly-all-black charter schools in some places that really push on academic and behavioral standards–that’s another place to look for evidence.

      • cassander says:

        @ag

        To add to davidfreidman’s response, I am not willing to accept that refusing to hire/grant a loan to/whatever someone who isn’t qualified is any sort of racism. At most, I can grant that people assuming that individuals are less qualified and not bothering to check is. Otherwise, that way madness lies. It is to accept that if every big R thought was magically banished from everyone’s heads, society would still have a racism problem.

        • Spookykou says:

          @cassander

          It is using the term racism in a different way from the more traditional usage, probably intentionally because of how loaded the term is.

          I am curious though if you fully reject the premise, partially reject it, or only reject the name.

          Hypothetically, a government enforced official policy makes it impossible for your grandfather to buy a home and build generational wealth while his IQ/culturally/credit score identical white neighbor is able to. Two generations later your white IQ/culturally (but no longer credit score) identical neighbor was able to afford college by taking out a mortgage on their inherited home, while you, a renter for life, just like your father, just like your grandfather, could not. You now make roughly 50% of what your neighbor makes. The bank is totally rational in giving them a loan and not giving you a loan so they can send their kid to college, and you can not. The preconditions that made that choice rational were predicated on Racist policy that denied your grandfather a home loan explicitly because he was black, does the government(the same one from before) have any obligation to try and assist you specifically to redress the damage they inflicted on your family?

          (Let me put on my Jeb Bush hat) Please engage with the hypothetical.

          I understand if you think the hypothetical is nonsense and does not reflect the real life of any real people, and by all means bracket your response to the hypothetical with a disclaimer.

          I do not think of myself as SJ so my hypothetical might be wildly off base, but it is my impression that this is more or less one facet of what is implied with the term, and I am curious as to your level of disagreement.

        • cassander says:

          @Spookykou says:

          It is using the term racism in a different way from the more traditional usage, probably intentionally because of how loaded the term is.

          I consider this a bug, not a feature.

          The preconditions that made that choice rational were predicated on Racist policy that denied your grandfather a home loan explicitly because he was black, does the government(the same one from before) have any obligation to try and assist you specifically to redress the damage they inflicted on your family?

          No. They have an obligation to stop the racist policy, but they didn’t do anything wrong to me. they did it to someone who is dead and beyond redress. I am not owed any more than someone who is in equal circumstances to mine because his grandfather was a drunk and blew the family fortune. And for what it’s worth, my Jewish grandfather was kept out of medical school by quotas.

          Second, even if they did owe me something, what you described is not how affirmative action and associated policies actually work. There is zero effort put towards actually identifying wronged individuals and attempting to make them whole. Instead, it is blandly asserted that everyone who isn’t white is equally entitled to benefits apparently without end, whether they’re just off the boat or had 10 generations of slaves in their background. I could accept a sort of Jim Webb position, but what we’ve created isn’t an attempt at restitution. It’s a grievance engine that can never be satisfied.

          I understand if you think the hypothetical is nonsense and does not reflect the real life of any real people, and by all means bracket your response to the hypothetical with a disclaimer.

          I think a lot of people are in those circumstances. Life isn’t fair, and the best way to help them is with race neutral policies that don’t poison the body politic with identity politics that only heighten divisions over time.

        • Spookykou says:

          Thank you for your detailed response!

  86. haroldedmurray says:

    Sounds like a God of the gaps argument:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps

    As far as I understand it, God of the gaps refers to the sort of dogmatically religious mentality of using the gaps in our scientific knowledge to say that God must be real, and responsible for unexplainable phenomena:

    “You can’t explain why phenomenon_1 works. The only explanation for these unknown phenomena must be that God is making it happen, and this is proof of God’s existence”.

    Then 5 years later, science has advanced and people understand how phenomenon_1 works a lot better, but there are be sub-gaps that are not explained, which are phenomenon_2 and phenomenon_3. So the new argument from the dogmatically religious will be:

    “You can’t explain why phenomenon_2 and phenomenon_3 work. The only explanation for these unknown phenomena must be that God is making it happen, and this is proof of God’s existence”.

    Just because science hasn’t yet advanced to the point that we understand certain phenomena doesn’t mean that it’s God that’s making it happen. There will always be gaps in our knowledge, but we can assume from the past that those gaps will shrink and shrink over time, without us having to resort to “the only explanation is God”.

    I see this as being “racism of the gaps”. Just because we haven’t figured out what to control for doesn’t mean that racism is the only explanation for whatever gaps there might be. If we’re seeing that as we control for more reasonable things, we’re converging toward 1, the remaining gap may not be because of racism, but may just be as of yet unexplained, but explainable phenomena.

    • haroldedmurray says:

      Sorry, I just edited my comment to have more context.

    • Beans says:

      This is a better-articulated version of a comment I made a little while ago, and a reason I quickly become suspicious of extended efforts to root out subtle racism, which often strikes me as “racism of the gaps” which is posited for little to no good reason.

  87. ada668ed says:

    Bit late but some points regarding the “welcoming” party for Eric T.

    Throwaway account as I am not eager to further discuss these especially as some examples were used that is understandably controversial/not-your-view-but-you-haven’t-needed-to-point-that-out-yet.

    First things – happy to have you on board. Hope we don’t drive you too crazy(ier).

    You did mention this earlier, but you really need to decouple the issues between small r and big R.

    For example, advocating to use big R to reduce small r (ie. affirmative action) without being a hypocrite.
    Another may be in cases where you are stating “I’m not saying they are small/big r – they are being perfectly rational”. Instead, it may be better to specify – It does not matter if they are big R (it would be bad, but not the point), their actions are contributing to small r. The fact that going against it might not be rational/work in capitalism, means that it may be necessary for the state to get involved to force them.
    Probably a bit lighter than that, but right now I feel you are too wishy-washy even in stating your desires.
    Other times it might be more subtle. For example, say 20 years ago, I shot you in the leg (sorry) causing you to be disabled. Now, you are still disabled, and are advocating gun control. I may say “Why? I said I was sorry, and don’t even have a gun at the moment. Plus after the “Dance, boy, Dance” practice was banned, the few incidents of permanent leg injury are mostly stair-related”. If you point to your leg, while it reasonable to have caused you to dislike guns and to use that as motivation. But as a logical argument, some especially here may feel you are stuck in the past, irrational, or muddling the waters between the two issues.

    You probably also realized, but your moral philosophy is not exactly universal.

    In fact, I am seeing a lot of similar disagreements with those that have issues with utilitarianism, which despite being rational adjacent, many in this community do not have high regards for.
    One point is of your challenge to find a policy that doesn’t hurt “large” group. Most of the examples others have been pretty tame. Here’s a spicy one that still fits your criteria-
    Limit the maximum lifetime healthcare cost (NOT out of pocket cost) of individuals.
    Medical costs are rather concentrated on a small subset of people that have chronic issues. Not chronic diseases in general, though that is also true, but individual people that have outsized medical costs. (5% accounted for half by this study)
    Though this is true for most distributions, for this area it is particularly fat tailed and for which negatively affects the rest of the curve.
    Remember that the rational community though perhaps not this one, previously tried to quantify how many minor inconveniences are comparable to a fatal one.

    Lastly, rather than (just) the Asian minority, it may be useful for you to look at another minority group – Native Americans.
    Not only did they face arguably similar or worse treatment, which happened many generations ago, they also have faced less “inertia” and had many of even the more radical policies – repatriation, preferred treatment, limited sovereignty, etc. Plus, most would not think that they are in a particular good spot now.
    This can be used to both strengthen your arguments and/or to question them.

    • Eric T says:

      Thank you for the post. I understand that you’re not interested in discussing this further, but I wanted to get my points out there and neither of us needs to continue the discussion. I feel like despite me saying this 5 people are going to respond to this thread XP.

      For example, advocating to use big R to reduce small r (ie. affirmative action) without being a hypocrite.

      Earlier today on this very forum I made a joke that went like this:

      It’s a shame that SSC doesn’t have signatures on comments, mine would be …
      “Stop telling me why Affirmative Action doesn’t work, I’m not Pro Affirmative Action. Please I don’t know how many times I can say it.”

      Can I get that signature now?

      Another may be in cases where you are stating “I’m not saying they are small/big r – they are being perfectly rational”. Instead, it may be better to specify – It does not matter if they are big R (it would be bad, but not the point), their actions are contributing to small r. The fact that going against it might not be rational/work in capitalism, means that it may be necessary for the state to get involved to force them.

      That may be a way to put it, but I think an issue a lot of people have with Social Justice is that it tells them they are doing something Wrong. What I wanted to get across with the big R/little r distinction is a lot of us SJ types truly believe you can be acting perfectly rational, do nothing wrong, and still contribute to little r because the system has been set up to be that way.

      For example: let’s envision a society where everyone was Racist EXCEPT the bankers. The bankers giving loans are perfect rational robots who give loans perfectly rationally. However because of all the other Racists out there black people are more likely to be poor, arrested, not have a stable family etc. etc. etc. The rational banker robots decide (correctly) that being black is causally linked to being a worse investment, so the rates they give out are worse. It’s not BankerTron3000’s fault, he’s doing the right thing (I mean some SJW would argue the right thing would be for BankerTron to sacrifice some of his own well being to help those less fortunate than him, but let’s push past that for now). However that doesn’t mean we should be fine with the fact that Black people are struggling to get loans. In that society, a policy designed to help them get loans so they can dig their way out of redlined districts or whatever would be a good and fair thing.

      Other times it might be more subtle. For example, say 20 years ago, I shot you in the leg (sorry) causing you to be disabled. Now, you are still disabled, and are advocating gun control. I may say “Why? I said I was sorry, and don’t even have a gun at the moment. Plus after the “Dance, boy, Dance” practice was banned, the few incidents of permanent leg injury are mostly stair-related”. If you point to your leg, while it reasonable to have caused you to dislike guns and to use that as motivation. But as a logical argument, some especially here may feel you are stuck in the past, irrational, or muddling the waters between the two issues.

      This is a good analogy, but it falls victim to the response I get from a lot of people which is “don’t judge me by the sins of my father” – lots of people rightly point out they weren’t the ones passing Jim Crow laws, why should they pay them back. In order to sidestep the issue, I try to focus on how those policies still materially impact people today, so it’s more like your grandad set up a gun to automatically shoot me in the leg every once in a while, and I’d really like you to turn it off now please.

      You probably also realized, but your moral philosophy is not exactly universal.

      No, really? 😛

      One point is of your challenge to find a policy that doesn’t hurt “large” group. Most of the examples others have been pretty tame. Here’s a spicy one that still fits your criteria-
      Limit the maximum lifetime healthcare cost (NOT out of pocket cost) of individuals.
      Medical costs are rather concentrated on a small subset of people that have chronic issues. Not chronic diseases in general, though that is also true, but individual people that have outsized medical costs. (5% accounted for half by this study)
      Though this is true for most distributions, for this area it is particularly fat tailed and for which negatively affects the rest of the curve.
      Remember that the rational community though perhaps not this one, previously tried to quantify how many minor inconveniences are comparable to a fatal one.

      I, sadly, know a lot about history and rockets and not a lot about medicine.

      Lastly, rather than (just) the Asian minority, it may be useful for you to look at another minority group – Native Americans.

      I’m currently reading An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States to broaden my knowledge on this topic. It’s a heavy book so I’m taking a break from it for now.

      Thank you for the time contributing to my welcoming party!

      • 1. Thanks for your contributions to the conversation.

        2. At some point when you are not overwhelmed with arguments about Social Justice, I want to engage with you on issues in moral philosophy. You made an odd and interesting statement a few days ago, to the effect that if some group, such as Asians, who were innately more productive ended up doing better than the average but not as much better as they should due to prejudice, then you would want changes that made them even more better off than they were.

        That raises interesting questions about how you distinguish things people are entitled to benefit by from things they are not.

        3. “and still contribute to little r because the system has been set up to be that way.”

        Earlier, I believe, you said you didn’t accept the action/inaction distinction. If so, doesn’t everybody in the world who could do something to make African-Americans better off contribute to r?

        If that is your view, aren’t all of the African-Americans who fail to donate a large fraction of their income to people elsewhere in the world, say in Africa, who are much poorer than they are, contribute to unjust inequalities much larger than r? How does your line of argument imply that anyone should be making any effort to reduce r when there are many people in the world who are unjustly much worse off than African-Americans?

        • Eric T says:

          At some point when you are not overwhelmed with arguments about Social Justice, I want to engage with you on issues in moral philosophy.

          I do too. I can say a little now but I think its probably best we save any kind of protracted discussion about philosophy for a future OT.

          You made an odd and interesting statement a few days ago, to the effect that if some group, such as Asians, who were innately more productive ended up doing better than the average but not as much better as they should due to prejudice, then you would want changes that made them even more better off than they were.

          That raises interesting questions about how you distinguish things people are entitled to benefit by from things they are not.

          I think that’s fair. My view here is… complicated. I think people should be given as much a fair shake as possible. My ideal world would probably be one where everyone’s success and failure is based solely on their individual merit, but also one that has a sizable security net so failure=/= death or misery.

          In the context of race this would mean allowing each person of each race the ability to thrive. If we could actually excise all racist bias and aftereffects of Racist policy from modern world and there was unequal outcomes, I’d probably be fine with that. I understand that things like IQ are still part of the lottery of birth, but I think the other stuff is at least solvable. I’m not sure if that one is solvable in a way that doesn’t completely obliterate individuality.

          Earlier, I believe, you said you didn’t accept the action/inaction distinction. If so, doesn’t everybody in the world who could do something to make African-Americans better off contribute to r?

          If that is your view, aren’t all of the African-Americans who fail to donate a large fraction of their income to people elsewhere in the world, say in Africa, who are much poorer than they are, contribute to unjust inequalities much larger than r? How does your line of argument imply that anyone should be making any effort to reduce r when there are many people in the world who are unjustly much worse off than African-Americans?

          So I mentioned this before in the original discussion: my views on this matter fall pretty in line with what Scott once posted about Infinite Debt.

          1. On an abstract moral level I accept that I should be donating all of my money to like the AMF or MIRI or something. I can construct arguments that appeal to my intuition about how this causes things that feel deeply wrong (like justifying organ harvesting) but I can’t really logically persuade myself that they are actually wrong.
          2. I acknowledge however that I, like everyone, am a deeply flawed human. If I tried to help everyone in Africa or whatever the most important cause was to maximal ability, I’d quickly get dejected/overwhelmed/angry/tired/whatever and give up. I think the world would be a better, more moral place if that WASN’T the case, but it is.
          3. I know that I care deeply about social justice. My caring isn’t rational in the sense that my moral system is (I think it is at least): it comes from my upbringing, my job, my life and my intuitions. But these are so much more powerful motivators to me, and I am selfish enough a creature, that I can continue doing this work and advocating for it far better than I ever could for something like MIRI.
          4. This in turn leads me to believe that it would actually be immoral for me to try to shift gears and focus on like global poverty, because I’d likely get nothing done to actually help. Helping a less important cause is still better than not helping the Most Important Cause
          5. I acknowledge therefore that we all are kind of trapped by this Infinite Debt, but seeing how I can’t even motivate myself to get out and help the global poor, it seems like me trying to make other people, especially those less fortunate than I, do it is both doomed to failure and hypocrisy. However, this doesn’t mean that I don’t think that’s the moral solution. If I could press a button that would give us all the motivation, temperament, and selflessness to devote all of our beings to helping the global poor, I’d almost certainly press it.
          6. So yes while poor americans are, by virtue of the fact they buy non-necessities instead of Malaria nets, contributing to Malaria, they’re doing it A. Less than I am, and B. so is everyone else, so engaging in Moral Condemnation is just a giant waste of my time.

      • haroldedmurray says:

        That may be a way to put it, but I think an issue a lot of people have with Social Justice is that it tells them they are doing something Wrong. What I wanted to get across with the big R/little r distinction is a lot of us SJ types truly believe you can be acting perfectly rational, do nothing wrong, and still contribute to little r because the system has been set up to be that way.

        This is reminding me of one of Scott’s articles:
        https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/social-justice-and-words-words-words/

        Everyone is a little bit racist. We know this because there is a song called “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist” and it is very cute. Also because most people score poorly on implicit association tests, because a lot of white people will get anxious if they see a black man on a deserted street late at night, and because if you prime people with traditionally white versus traditionally black names they will answer questions differently in psychology experiments. It is no shame to be racist as long as you admit that you are racist and you try your best to resist your racism. Everyone knows this.

        Donald Sterling is racist. We know this because he made a racist comment in the privacy of his own home. As a result, he was fined $2.5 million, banned for life from an industry he’s been in for thirty-five years, banned from ever going to basketball games, forced to sell his property against his will, publicly condemned by everyone from the President of the United States on down, denounced in every media outlet from the national news to the Podunk Herald-Tribune, and got people all over the Internet gloating about how pleased they are that he will die soon. We know he deserved this, because people who argue he didn’t deserve this were also fired from their jobs. He deserved it because he was racist. Everyone knows this.

        So.

        Everybody is racist.

        And racist people deserve to lose everything they have and be hated by everyone.

        This seems like it might present a problem. Unless of course you plan to be the person who gets to decide which racists lose everything and get hated by everyone, and which racists are okay for now as long as they never cross you in any way.

        And this one:
        https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/03/10/response-to-current-affairs-on-against-murderism/

        And, unfortunately, this is the entire point of my Against Murderism article. In real life, leftists will say that racists are inhuman monsters. Then as soon as someone points out this is bad, they will retreat to saying that obviously nobody believes that, racism is just a collection of structural subconscious privilege discrimination IAT

        ALL of the social justice advocates I know (read: everyone I know) do NOT act like people who are “racist” are “doing nothing wrong”. They act like they’re inhuman monsters and the worst people ever. Until I see them being more charitable and consistent, and stop yelling at and Cancelling everyone they can possibly can, I cannot really put my faith in them or their ideology, and I cannot really think that it’s coming from a good, constructive and genuine place.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          Thus if they’d repent about people like Donald Sterling, we could feel safer.

        • Eric T says:

          Until I see them being more charitable and consistent, and stop yelling at and Cancelling everyone they can possibly can, I cannot really put my faith in them or their ideology, and I cannot really think that it’s coming from a good, constructive and genuine place.

          At the risk of repeating myself…

          • haroldedmurray says:

            I know you probably meant this to be that your presence proves that some SJWs actually have pure motivations. But from another standpoint, you’re just serving to provide the motte in the grander motte and bailey of the blue tribe.

            I believe your personal motivations are pure and you’re not trying to do this. But I still think you are serving that function. Too many others of the blue tribe seem to be not following your lead, and honestly, I almost never see anyone calling them out on it. The few times I do see it, the people who are calling them out get shamed for “tone policing” or speaking “from a place of privilege”.

          • Eric T says:

            I know you probably meant this to be that your presence proves that some SJWs actually have pure motivations. But from another standpoint, you’re just serving to provide the motte in the grander motte and bailey of the blue tribe.

            Even if your personal motivations are pure and you’re not trying to do this, I think you are still serving that function. Not many others seem to be following your lead.

            This is a very pessimistic/cynical view of things. I’m genuinely trying to put my best foot forward as a positive example of what kinds of people the SJ community contains once you get past the screaming wave of twitter/tumblr/wherever they congregate.

          • Nick says:

            @haroldedmurray

            I know you probably meant this to be that your presence proves that some SJWs actually have pure motivations. But from another standpoint, you’re just serving to provide the motte in the grander motte and bailey of the blue tribe.

            That is not how motte and bailey works; motte and bailey applies to individuals, not to groups.

          • haroldedmurray says:

            That is not how motte and bailey works; motte and bailey applies to individuals, not to groups.

            Why not? What’s to stop the memetic evolution of motte and bailey-style arguments across groups, where some people are those who provide the motte for easy consumption, and others take advantage of this for getting all the gains of the bailey?

          • Eric T says:

            Why not? What’s to stop the memetic evolution of motte and bailey-style arguments across groups, where some people are those who provide the motte for easy consumption, and others take advantage of this for getting all the gains of the bailey?

            Because you never get discussion and growth then. If every time a pair of Red-Tribers did this to me on an issue I got upset and thought of it in motte and bailey terms for the entire Tribe I’d likely have 0 conservative friends.

            The SJ movement is vast and multifarious. Some of us believe very different things than others. It will ALWAYS be possible to view this disagreement as a motte and bailey problem. If you do, then what’s the point of me even being here talking to you? No matter what arguments I make, no matter how persuasive I get, no matter how kind I try to be I’ll never change your mind. If that’s the case, I think its a sad world.

          • Eric T says:

            Perhaps we need to introduce the idea of systemic motte-and-bailey. Or perhaps a distinction between Motte-And-Bailey and motte-and-bailey.

            I see what you’re doing here you cheeky bastard.

            ETA:
            I still stand by what I said: approaching discussions in this way will likely kill any chance of productive discourse imo. If you can’t accept that people of a major social movement can have very different points of view I’m not sure how you will ever meaningfully engage with that movement.

          • Aftagley says:

            where some people are those who provide the motte for easy consumption, and others take advantage of this for getting all the gains of the bailey?

            Because fallacies can’t be enacted collectively.

            To be a bit more verbose, the world you’re advocating for here is one where every example of outreach and bridge-building from your outgroup should be met with scorn and suspicious since it’s all evidence that they’re trying to pull a fast one on you collectively. That’s a path towards bitter loneliness and never-ending conflict.

          • Nick says:

            @haroldedmurray

            Why not? What’s to stop the memetic evolution of motte and bailey-style arguments across groups, where some people are those who provide the motte for easy consumption, and others take advantage of this for getting all the gains of the bailey?

            As the others say, this applies equally to every group; so your objection, if it worked, would work anywhere for any thing. There’s always some idiot on your “side” who will present the dumbest possible argument for your position, but you’re not beholden to them.

            I think in general people should repudiate them, but it is already clear in most cases that one does. It should be clear enough from his posts that Eric didn’t come to SSC to defend the latest Twitter pileon, and it’s not fair to hold him to that.

          • haroldedmurray says:

            Some of us believe very different things than others

            That’s kind of my point. I think that these ideas propagate very well because of the multiple definitions for the same stuff across different people. Some of the definitions are easy to consume, and others are useful, and that why gains are made so rapidly.

            Because you never get discussion and growth then.

            You’re taking my statement about how I beieve things are happening and countering with “you shouldn’t believe this, it’s bad for you”. That might be true, at least in some situations. But that doesn’t disprove my initial claim that this is happening.

            You seem to be providing reasons why we should be charitable to each other, saying that it’s better if we trust each other. I generally agree with this. But you haven’t proved this this style of memetically-evolved group motte and bailey isn’t actually happening. Just because trusting people different from you is generally good for people and the world doesn’t mean that some people aren’t taking advantage of this. I really think it is happening which is how many ideas that would have been tenuous ten years ago have taken such strong root in social discourse.

            Because fallacies can’t be enacted collectively

            In this context, motte and bailey is not a “logical fallacy” perpetuated by an individual, it’s a memetic pattern, a pattern that propagates itself because it works and succeeds in spreading itself.

          • Aapje says:

            @Eric T

            This is a very pessimistic/cynical view of things. I’m genuinely trying to put my best foot forward as a positive example of what kinds of people the SJ community contains once you get past the screaming wave of twitter/tumblr/wherever they congregate.

            The issue is that I’ve seen all kinds of abuses by SJ people where no or far too few SJ people spoke out against these abuses to stop them. That’s one of the major things I’m judging the movement by.

            I’ve also read (parts of) many of the most popular SJ works and found that most contain very strong bias (what I consider sexism and racism), which most SJ people, including the nicer ones, tend to deny. This is also a major part of my judgment.

            That there are a few people that call themselves SJ advocates, but don’t have such strong biases or that speak out against abuses of their friends is good, but individuals that are very un-prominent and non-influential just don’t have significant weight. To put it bluntly, a thousand of you don’t add up to one Peggy McIntosh or bell hooks.

            That doesn’t mean that we can’t discuss things nicely, but I see you as an example of an outlier that stands at the sideline, while a majority in your movement demands things that are really bad.

          • Eric T says:

            @haroldedmurray

            Nick and Aftagley expressed my points above pretty much exactly how I would so just to add:

            The difference between Motte and Bailey and people having different interpretations is that the former is intentional. Nobody sent me here to lure you in with honeyed words, and I’m not going to change up my definitions on you (barring people convincing me I should, in which case I’ll give you all fair warning lol).

          • haroldedmurray says:

            For the record, I’m not trying to say Eric is personally doing anything malicious, duplicitous, or ill-intentioned.

          • Paul Zrimsek says:

            Perhaps we need to introduce the idea of systemic motte-and-bailey. Or perhaps a distinction between Motte-And-Bailey and motte-and-bailey.

            N.B. This quote is from a deleted reply of mine, intended as a light and playful reaction to the subthread as a whole; I deleted it because it sounds hostile and sarcastic when considered as a reply to Eric’s at 5:24, which hadn’t yet appeared when I started typing.

          • Aftagley says:

            In this context, motte and bailey is not a “logical fallacy” perpetuated by an individual, it’s a memetic pattern, a pattern that propagates itself because it works and succeeds in spreading itself.

            Ok, so your proposal is to take a pretty useful term that applies to specific logical errors that people make in arguments and make it now apply to vague group action? Are you putting this up for a vote? Can I vote against it?

            Motte and Bailey as it currently stands is useful, imo, because it helps me understand when I’m arguing across definitions. It lets me know when I’m being unfair and makes me think before I start invoking works like racist, sexist and homophobic.

            Just pick a new term, my dude. You’re describing a separate phenomenon so pick a separate word. Call it, ummm… cup-caking.

          • Nick says:

            +1 to Aftagley. You’re describing a different phenomenon, which for clarity’s sake deserves a different name.

          • Eric T says:

            N.B. This quote is from a deleted reply of mine, intended as a light and playful reaction to the subthread as a whole; I deleted it because it sounds hostile and sarcastic when considered as a reply to Eric’s at 5:24, which hadn’t yet appeared when I started typing.

            For what it’s worth, I thought it was pretty funny.

          • I still stand by what I said: approaching discussions in this way will likely kill any chance of productive discourse imo.

            That’s close to my feeling about “racism.”

            People don’t get what they deserve, it’s far from obvious what “deserve” means, there is no plausible set of institutions that would consistently give people what they deserve, and institutions that justified themselves that way would probably make the world less just and worse off, since claims about desert provide a blank check to help those you like at the expense of those you don’t like.

            It makes sense to object to behavior that hurts people unfairly. Going from that to objecting to any feature of the society through which disadvantages from past unfair treatment can propagate, such as the policy of hiring people on the basis of how able they are when one of the reasons for differences in ability is that some of them went to bad schools or grew up in neighborhoods with a lot of lead, is a mistake.

          • original-internet-explorer says:

            @Eric T

            There are redeemable parts of SJ.

            The thing most wrong about the Liberal faction is their blindspot on tacit knowledge. This has been exploited by the left and right before. Imagine for instance the Essential Workers coordinated a General Strike.

            SJ talk of lived experience which is a part of the tacit. The problem is that it is easy to strawman the way SJ people use it but the steelman version of this is very strong.

            Tacit knowledge is a scientific reality. It is measurable. The Liberals take lived experience to be nonsense – that anybody with empathy or effort can insight the experience of another person. This is true for some but I don’t see SJ leaning in and saying in rebuttal that this is not economical to be a human emulator and also tacit knowledge is notorious for being easy to observe and difficult to achieve. That is all true – it’s the metapolitical dollar on the sidewalk nobody is picking up.

            The Liberal faction has been claiming it possess knowledge it does not have access to for decades. If people here recall the answers Hayek gave – he was saying the Soviet was not being scientific by ignoring a type of decentralized knowledge. The Liberals are now performing the same mistake for reasons of class because they are all middle class information processors and see the integration of blue collar insight or the observations of minorities as a moral affront. The distance between the social justice advocate and the blue collar right winger is not as wide as people think.

          • Eric T says:

            That’s close to my feeling about “racism.”

            People don’t get what they deserve, it’s far from obvious what “deserve” means, there is no plausible set of institutions that would consistently give people what they deserve, and institutions that justified themselves that way would probably make the world less just and worse off, since claims about desert provide a blank check to help those you like at the expense of those you don’t like.

            Not to turn this into another SJ debate but I think its a bit unfair to compare this to what haroldedmurray was discussing. I think we can have reasonable discussions about what policies to provide reparations for, how to do it, why, who gets it, whether its just if it harms other groups etc. etc.

            Certainly I feel like I’ve had plenty of logical, fair, calm, and rational conversations with people on the topic. But the idea that you should view a member of the opposing Tribe putting their best foot forward as a “Motte and Bailey” type of trick means you’ll just never engage with opposing views in good faith. Here’s an example of what I mean

            I’ve divided my opinions on racism to the historical and modern types: basically Part 2 and Part 3 of my post. Your objection provides fair grounds for the historical, but what about the modern? If I were able to prove to you that unfair biases existed today, we could discuss how to solve those biases rationally without hitting into the issues you bring up. There is plenty of room for rational discussion and that’s even before the question of if what you are saying is true (I don’t think it is)

            But with the “Motte and Bailey” approach we just never get that kind of discussion about anything, because you’re too busy thinking this is all some kind of rhetorical trap by the Blue Tribe, and I vice-versa.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            I see this as a case of “not all SJWs”.

            My exposure to SJ has greatly increased my concepts and vocabulary for fear, anger, and resentment, and I’m unsure of what to keep and what to throw away.

            Part of the situation is that there’s a substantial toxic aspect to SJ, and it affects people on a large scale. Some people, like Natalie Wynne (ContraPoints) and Lindsay Ellis have taken damage from it, and a lot more people are frightened.

            At this point, I think people who don’t use SJ as a tool for emotional abuse are displaying their own emotional health, but are generally not clear about how destructive their side is.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            original-internet-explorer

            One of the ways SJ works out in practice is that they produce a curated version of the experience of marginalized groups.

            You’re supposed to just accept their version, and not notice that a lot of women don’t agree with each other. Nor do poc. Nor do poc sub-groups.

            What’s worse, if you aren’t in a marginalized group, you aren’t supposed to ask members of that group about this because that would be bothering them and they’re already suffering enough.

          • If I were able to prove to you that unfair biases existed today, we could discuss how to solve those biases rationally without hitting into the issues you bring up.

            Perhaps I was unclear, or am misunderstanding you. As far as I can tell, “racism” as you use the term means “black people ending up with worse outcomes than they deserve, for whatever reason.”

            It was that position I was responding to.

          • Eric T says:

            As far as I can tell, “racism” as you use the term means “black people ending up with worse outcomes than they deserve, for whatever reason.”

            Ah to be clear as I said in my post:
            I acknowledge some difference may be caused by things internal to minorities control: culture for example. But the things like bias or historically Racist policies that still have knock-on effects today, I would categorize as racism. I guess the important part is setting the line at “what they deserve” and I tried to do that very thing in my response to your question about my moral philosophy.

            I guess I don’t see this as an infinite regression, rather as an answerable question and part of the, admittedly difficult, process of figuring out the right way to fix all of this.

          • original-internet-explorer says:

            @Nancy Lebovitz

            Marxism/Liberalism/Monarchy are political religions and Social Justice is closer to a political cult. When we look back to Soviets and the Fascists – each also developed a mythology and retcon of history – so that is reason to worry when we see the New York Times promoting projects which promote racial SJ interpretation – the 1619 Project is the tip of something large. You might know already the Marxists say “not in my name”. There is a radicalism in Liberalism that isn’t springing out of the heart of the Left or Right – that is why I call the New York Times our Isengard.

            This is impossible in the standard political spectrum model where Liberals are supposed moderates. I describe in my other comments a political model by the science fiction author Liu Cixin that implies a blindspot exists for the failure modes of Liberalism. The Marxists still remember events like those that form the basis of their reaction but the West has forgotten.

            The mask isn’t off the New York Times and the other liberal papers yet – but it is slipping and I believe we are going to see something that isn’t nice.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            original-internet-explorer:

            What distinction are you making between a religion and a cult?

            The way SJ is moving in on education is a big deal, since people tend to not change their minds about what they were taught in school.

            I’m not sure I’d file SJ under Liberal. They’ve made some use of Liberal values which makes it attractive to a lot of liberals, but SJ might be its own thing.

          • original-internet-explorer says:

            @Nancy Lebovitz

            The conventional one where a religion is a later formalized version of the cult with the rough edges sanded off. The cult is the one obsessional with their burning truth.

            SJ and Liberalism. I dissent from the idea it’s sharing some values – it looks like common descent with mutation. I don’t agree with Jordan Peterson – they are not Marxists. What we see there is a coalition of convenience like the libertarians and the conservatives under the liberal-right banner. They are in the same train car until they reach the next stop – which has happened in both groups.

            What you need to explain to me Nancy to persuade me otherwise is this –
            not SJ – but why so much cognitive real estate has been ceded to SJ by who? A little from the Left – but it’s mostly the Left Liberals caving and providing cover.

            There exist no blue collar men in the SJ. Zero nailguns per 100,000. Half of blue collar are left wing. Liberalism is the political ideology of the people who process information. Where does SJ become the most infectious? The strongholds are in Silicon Valley, the Universities and Journalism. Even the strongholds of the Left like Healthcare, Unions and Manufacturing aren’t as allied.

            SJ cannot exist in an environment where Left Liberalism does not flourish – you are very welcome to contradict me if you can.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            @ original-internet-explorer

            I’ve been following some discussions about cults, with the definition of cult going in a somewhat different direction. Some people don’t like talking about “cults” and instead talk about organizations being more or less cultic.

            I like the description of cults as being high-demand organizations, or in the case of SJ, a high demand ideology. Cults or high demand organizations (I’m going to call them HDOs) aren’t necessarily religions– they include multi-level marketing, political organizations, human potential systems, and, arguably, some abusive families and relationships.

            John McWhorter has described SJ as a religion and mentioned writing a book about it. I hope he does.

            From my point of view, SJ is related to liberalism to the extent that liberalism has a major focus on helping people. And for historical reasons in the US, helping black people by ending violent and mostly government-enforced injury to black people. Some of it was active injury, some of it was forbidding voting, which made it easier to commit other sorts of injury.

            Descent with mutation seems like a reasonable way to look at it, with several roots. There’s the liberal desire to help, what I think is a Marxist belief that the existing system is so bad it must be destroyed, a Freudian belief (possibly not actual Freud) that you can make accurate deductions of other people’s disreputable motivations, a Christian belief in original sin, and an American belief that you have to do something.

            There’s at least one more place with a lot of SJ– science fiction, both professional and fannish. And it does tend liberal, though there’s enough conservatism that there’s been something of a split.

            My tentative theory of why so much cognitive territory got ceded to SJ is partly that the easiest way to organize people is by opposition to another group, and partly that a lot of what people need to live in peace with each other is tacit cooperation. Tacit is natural and efficient, but it’s vulnerable to ideological attack because it isn’t in words.

        • Eric T says:

          @Aapje – I responded to the wrong thread but eh. Screw it I’ll just leave it here.

          The issue is that I’ve seen all kinds of abuses by SJ people where no or far too few SJ people spoke out against these abuses to stop them. That’s one of the major things I’m judging the movement by.

          Am I allowed to say the same thing about the Red Tribe and Trump? My brother is disabled, is the fact that the Red-Tribe elected a president who flagrantly made fun of the disease my brother had proof that too few of them care? Can I castigate them all because they refuse to excise their most influential, and most problematic member?

          I’ve also read (parts of) many of the most popular SJ works and found that most contain very strong bias (what I consider sexism and racism), which most SJ people, including the nicer ones, tend to deny. This is also a major part of my judgment.

          We should talk about this sometime. Not now mind you, I’m approaching 200 comments on this OT and I really should take a break.

          That there are a few people that call themselves SJ advocates, but don’t have such strong biases or that speak out against abuses of their friends is good, but individuals that are very un-prominent and non-influential just don’t have significant weight. To put it bluntly, a thousand of you don’t add up to one Peggy McIntosh or bell hooks.

          You say that now, but just you wait until I’m president. Then you’ll see. You’ll all see.

          • Evan Þ says:

            …but just you wait until I’m president

            Are you running? We really need some better candidates this year!

          • Ninety-Three says:

            Can I castigate them all because they refuse to excise their most influential, and most problematic member?

            If you disapprove of Trump, it seems perfectly reasonable to castigate both individuals who voted for him and the movement as a whole that elected him. Extending that castigation to the non-Trump-voting members of the movement could be described as noticing that while they may not be Trumpist, their continued advocacy for the movement caused and perpetuates trumpism.

          • Tatterdemalion says:

            Am I allowed to say the same thing about the Red Tribe and Trump? My brother is disabled, is the fact that the Red-Tribe elected a president who flagrantly made fun of the disease my brother had proof that too few of them care? Can I castigate them all because they refuse to excise their most influential, and most problematic member?

            Speaking as a mostly-non-SJ liberal leftist, my answer would be “not just yes, but hell yes, but you can’t then generalise from that to “all other groups””.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Except, for our part we don’t think he was making fun of the guy’s disability. While Trump might have met the guy decades before, it’s highly unlikely he remembered his disability, and certainly no one in the crowd was aware of it. It’s far more likely he was making a generic mockery of timid/weak men, and whoops, the reporter happened to have a specific disability with a resemblance to that.

            So, no, no one actually has antipathy for your brother’s condition. You can choose to hold it against Trump supporters anyway, but we don’t think it’s fair, because we don’t hate the disabled.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            While Trump might have met the guy decades before, it’s highly unlikely he remembered his disability, and certainly no one in the crowd was aware of it. It’s far more likely he was making a generic mockery of timid/weak men, and whoops, the reporter happened to have a specific disability with a resemblance to that.

            Donald Trump doesn’t practice the expected norms around how to mock weak men. Was he wrong in that case? Absolutely 100% and morally he should have apologized. To give a different example, women are often on their guard against male “creeps”, but “creepy” can be an unjust interpretation of recognizing a subtle disability like Autism Spectrum Disorder.
            But there’s all this baggage in politics around apologies being a sign of weakness.
            People voting for Trump was in part a howl of rage at upper class speech norms.
            Imagine if the British Labour Party was allowed to contest free and fair elections in, say, 1918, but candidates had to speak posh because working-class slang was punished as hate speech. That’s how the Red tribe felt.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Was he wrong in that case? Absolutely 100% and morally he should have apologized

            I’m not sure what you mean by that. Do you think Trump knew the man was disabled when he mocked him, and used his disability to mock him?

            In my heart of hearts I do not believe he did. Now, in Normal World, if I did that, I would apologize profusely for the appearance of having mocked someone for their intrinsic characteristic (disabled) when I only meant to mock them for their extrinsic characteristic (being a weasel under social pressure). But in Political World an apology is an admission of guilt, so don’t ever do that. It would not at all be reported as “Trump apologizes for mocking man not knowing was disabled and is hereby forgiven” it would be “Trump admits to heartlessly mocking man specifically because he was disabled.” So you’re better off not doing it.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @Conrad: Candidate Trump was under-informed about the man’s life and in Normal World should have apologized upon being informed that mocking his behavior was actually mocking a disability.
            We can compare this to the whole set of norms around male “creeps” (basically “suspected sexual predators women should protect themselves from”): prejudice against an innocent-hearted man who comes across “creepy” because of Autism Spectrum Disorder is bad.

            I agree with what the incentive structures around apologies in politics are, which says very bad things about universal-suffrage elections under modern social conditions. 🙁

          • Aapje says:

            @Eric T

            who flagrantly made fun of the disease my brother had proof that too few of them care

            Trump is a dick, but there are immense differences in severity at play here. I see universities being increasingly purged of people with views different to that of a certain group, threatening to corrupt science, but also to remove trust in science by large parts of the population. I see outright discrimination being increasingly institutionalized (not merely informally by biased people, but with explicit policy). I see people being fired for criticisms. I see biased kangaroo courts being instituted that refuse to adhere to basic principles of justice that are crucial to even a semblance of fairness. Etc, etc.

            At the end of the day, all that Trump did, is hurt some feelings. He didn’t propose cutting funding for disabled people or do anything else that would impact them beyond hurt feelings. To me, this is not on the same level at all to the things I named, which in my view, threaten to destroy the fabric of society.

            Making fun of true or imagined traits that people have is also not specific to an ideology (or the right side of the political spectrum), but seems to just be asshole behavior. There is no political movement that is free of assholes, so if you dismiss a movement/ideology/party for this, you’d have to dismiss the Democrats and SJ as well, where I’ve seen this same kind of behavior.

            Frankly, your argument here is what I see as a result of the toxic outrage culture we have right now, where people share & get upset over outrage porn that has a strong emotional resonance, but typically has extremely low importance. These are usually just temporary hypes that lots of people talk about briefly and that nearly anyone then quickly forgets again.

            We should talk about [SJ works] sometime.

            Sure, if you want you can propose something we can talk about (preferably a paper or part of a book, so the effort isn’t too large).

          • Aapje says:

            @Conrad Honcho

            The performance by Trump is very dissimilar to the actual disability of the reporter, who has a hand & arm that are permanently flexed in front of his chest. There is none of the flailing that Trump did.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @Aapje:

            At the end of the day, all that Trump did, is hurt some feelings. He didn’t propose cutting funding for disabled people or do anything else that would impact them beyond hurt feelings. To me, this is not on the same level at all to the things I named, which in my view, threaten to destroy the fabric of society.

            Yes, so very much this.

          • John Schilling says:

            At the end of the day, all that Trump did, is hurt some feelings.

            Using the moral authority and privileged media access of the presidency to blatantly and gratuitously hurt someone’s feelings, will cause a lot of people to discount the moral authority of the presidency and too-pointedly ignore whatever is said from that bully pulpit. Since presidents not named Donald J. Trump usually take care to exercise that particular presidential power in broadly positive ways like promoting national unity in a crisis, damaging it for the sake of a cheap shot causes incalculable but nonetheless real harm.

          • Eric T says:

            Trump is a dick, but there are immense differences in severity at play here. I see universities being increasingly purged of people with views different to that of a certain group, threatening to corrupt science, but also to remove trust in science by large parts of the population. I see outright discrimination being increasingly institutionalized (not merely informally by biased people, but with explicit policy). I see people being fired for criticisms. I see biased kangaroo courts being instituted that refuse to adhere to basic principles of justice that are crucial to even a semblance of fairness.

            And I see Trump rolling back a variety of LGBT protections, environmental regulations, passing frankly useless immigration bans on countries that actually send us high quality immigrants and imposing nationally accepted rhetoric that may have something to do with the sudden spike in hate-crimes.

            Look Trump’s an incompetent oaf but let’s not pretend he’s not doing some damage here. He’s not just “insulting people”

            Furthermore I agree with John Schilling, Trump’s flagrant lying and insulting, dogging on the Press regardless if they’re actually telling the truth or not, and overall tone is immeasurably damaging what little trust Americans had in their institutions at all.

            Sure, if you want you can propose something we can talk about (preferably a paper or part of a book, so the effort isn’t too large).

            Yeah let’s. I’ll think of something, but the SJ world is vast, is there a specific topic you’d like to focus on? I know you said you found some SJ writing problematic.

          • Ninety-Three says:

            will cause a lot of people to discount the moral authority of the presidency and too-pointedly ignore whatever is said from that bully pulpit.

            Shouldn’t they? Donald Trump, as we agree, doesn’t seem to deserve that authority. And if this makes people question the office more generally, I repeat: shouldn’t they? This seems like a mirror of a common debate regarding journalism: is the problem that people don’t trust the institution, or that the institution has proven it lacks the safeguards that would make it deserving of trust?

          • cassander says:

            @Eric T says:

            And I see Trump rolling back a variety of LGBT protections, environmental regulations,

            trump supporters want less regulation.

            passing frankly useless immigration bans on countries that actually send us high quality immigrants

            If the ban in useless, why care about it, but more importantly the idea that the use is getting a lot of high quality immigrants from yemen, iran, somolia, libya, and sudan is hard to credit and makes one question your veracity

            and imposing nationally accepted rhetoric that may have something to do with the sudden spike in hate-crimes.

            Christ, what’s next? blaming him for the weather?

          • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

            Iran is one of only 10 countries to have won the International Mathematics Olympiad (as a team) and is 12th by number of medals.

          • John Schilling says:

            Shouldn’t they? Donald Trump, as we agree, doesn’t seem to deserve that authority. And if this makes people question the office more generally, I repeat: shouldn’t they?

            No, they should not.

            The track record of presidents not named Donald J. Trump is that they wield this particular aspect of presidential power in a broadly positive and useful fashion, e.g. mitigating civil disorder by reassuring peaceful protesters that their concerns are being heard at the highest levels while calling on rioters to knock it off. We want presidents to be able to keep doing that, so we want people to keep looking to the bully pulpit with some measure of respect.

            The bit where Donald J. Trump does not have the temperament to safely wield this power, does not mean that we need to take this power away from the Presidency. It means that we may have erred in electing Donald J. Trump to the presidency.

          • metalcrow says:

            @cassander

            trump supporters want less regulation.

            This is true, but isn’t really relevant to the ethics of the actions themselves. If Trump and his supporters were to roll back the FDA (which is accurate to wanting less regulation), they would be barely 1 step removed from the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people over the coming years. The rollback of the regulations Eric T mentions are, while not as harmful as removing the FDA, do cause harm, which is backing the statement made that “let’s not pretend he’s not doing some damage here. He’s not just “insulting people””

          • Aftagley says:

            @Conrad honcho

            The reporter in question was a former New York Daily News reporter and had interviewed Trump several times, one on one in his office and claims that at the time they were on a first-name basis. The guy’s disability is also pretty immediately evident. So, any such defense of this rests on Trump having forgotten the guy, but not forgotten the facts of a story he’d written and the surrounding controversy. This is not especially likely.

            The performance by Trump is very dissimilar to the actual disability of the reporter, who has a hand & arm that are permanently flexed in front of his chest. There is none of the flailing that Trump did.

            This is not true. While Trump did flail his arms, you can clearly see that he has both hands flexed down while doing so.

            Also – what are you claiming? That while insulting a disabled reporter, he just happened to start flailing in a way that was incredibly easy to mistake as being insulting to the guy’s disability? Flailing in a way that he doesn’t when imitating most other non-disabled people? Give me a break.

          • Ninety-Three says:

            @John Schilling

            We want presidents to be able to keep doing that, so we want people to keep looking to the bully pulpit with some measure of respect…

            It means that we may have erred in electing Donald J. Trump to the presidency.

            Exactly. We want presidents to be able to do that, and Trump clearly isn’t. The Oval Office does not magically imbue a man with competence, and Trump proves that process for putting a man there does not always select for competence. If Trump makes people think of the next guy “Wait a minute, what if he’s an idiot too?” then good, because he might well be!

            Any moral authority the office of the President may have is derived from the process that selects him, and if the process reveals itself to be flawed that authority should be diminished.

          • Evan Þ says:

            If Trump and his supporters were to roll back the FDA (which is accurate to wanting less regulation), they would be barely 1 step removed from the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people over the coming years.

            That hasn’t yet been proven. If Trump had actually rolled back the FDA last year, so they weren’t able to block COVID early response, that would have quite possibly saved 117,000 American lives already.

          • metalcrow says:

            @Evan Þ
            true, but i’m not sure that is significant enough to count. Like, the FDA does a looot of other things that save lives, from drug testing and checking to food inspection and recall and safety mandates. Even just the food part, The Jungle lead to the establishment of the FDA (vis-a-vis the Pure Food and Drug Act), which has been saving lives since 1906. How many lives have been saved by preventing food-borne illness outbreaks? (actual question, i can’t find a study on this, but i would be shocked if it’s not more than 100,000). I feel that more than just one failure on their part is needed to establish that the FDA is a net negative.

          • cassander says:

            metalcrow says:

            This is true, but isn’t really relevant to the ethics of the actions themselves. If Trump and his supporters were to roll back the FDA (which is accurate to wanting less regulation), they would be barely 1 step removed from the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people over the coming years.

            Only if you assume those regulations are saving hundreds of thousands of lives, which I don’t think they are. Given the FDA’s recent performance, I don’t think you should either.

            “let’s not pretend he’s not doing some damage here. He’s not just “insulting people””

            Passing policies you don’t like isn’t “dealing damage”, or at least, you can’t just blithely assume it is. And when making public statements and tweeting, which is what is under discussion here, insulting people is all he can do, because policy requires paperwork.

          • albatross11 says:

            “Abolish the FDA” is a bit like “abolish the police.” The interesting question is which functions done by the FDA you plan to stop doing, and which you plan to assign to someone else.

            As an example, you could imagine making FDA approval advisory. Medicare and Medicaid and the VA and Tricare and such won’t pay for non-approved medicines, but you can buy them as long as you sign a disclaimer acknowledging that they’re not approved. (Maybe there’s a process by which FDA can ban things they think are extra-dangerous.) And you could imagine making FDA approval happen by default for medicines that have been approved in the EU, UK, Canada, Japan, Australia, or South Korea, with the FDA having a process to un-approve them for sufficient cause. That wouldn’t abolish the FDA, but it would take away a lot of its power. I don’t know whether the result would be net-positive or net-negative, but it’s certainly not obvious to me that it would be a lot worse than what we have now.

          • albatross11 says:

            I could certainly be wrong, but I think most of the prevention of food-borne illnesses is happening at the federal level from the Agriculture department (which does inspections of food processing facilities) and at the state/local level by state/county/city health departments (which do restaurant and commercial kitchen inspections and impose requirements on things like how long food can stay out and what temperature things must be stored at/cooked to).

          • metalcrow says:

            @cassander

            Passing policies you don’t like isn’t “dealing damage”, or at least, you can’t just blithely assume it is

            This cuts both ways. You can’t just assume rolling back a variety of LGBT protections and environmental regulations isn’t dealing damage. In fact, the former will cause a number of my friends to no longer be protected from discrimination, so it is, actually in reality, dealing damage or causing the potential to.

            And while i agree i’m not proof positive of the FDAs net benefit for the US health system, you’ll have to do better than one failure to show they are a net negative. After all, they stopped people from giving heroin to babies.

          • metalcrow says:

            @albatross11
            That’s a good point, and i would agree to it. Replace the FDA with the Department of Agriculture or any other clearly beneficial organization for my argument in this case. I definitely agree the FDA has had a number of failures, and reforming them would probably be a good goal, just not from the pure perspective of less regulation being desirable.

          • cassander says:

            @metalcrow says:

            This cuts both ways. You can’t just assume rolling back a variety of LGBT protections and environmental regulations isn’t dealing damage. In fact, the former will cause a number of my friends to no longer be protected from discrimination, so it is, actually in reality, dealing damage or causing the potential to.

            And once you’ve shown that the removal of those regulations has harmed their lives in a material way, I’ll listen to your complaint about trump causing damage. Not before, though. the burden of proof is ought to be on the one who wants to use the power of the state, not inaction.

            And while i agree i’m not proof positive of the FDAs net benefit for the US health system, you’ll have to do better than one failure to show they are a net negative. After all, they stopped people from giving heroin to babies.

            And in doing so, according to any number of impeachably left wing sources, are waging a racist war against black america. You can’t have it both ways, so which is it?

          • metalcrow says:

            @cassander
            I am absolutely struggling to understand your position here. You are saying that repealing laws preventing “discrimination based on gender identity in health care” will not cause harm? How? Really, how will this not cause harm? You’re saying, from my viewpoint, that the burden of proof is on me to show that someone pointing a gun at my head won’t be harmful. Definitionally, discrimination is harmful. And stopping people from stopping it from happening is also, definitionally, harmful! Please, what am i missing here?

            Also, i don’t know how the book you referenced has anything to do with feeding heroin to babies. I mean, i haven’t read it, but i fail to see it’s relevance.

          • cassander says:

            metalcrow says:

            I am absolutely struggling to understand your position here. You are saying that repealing laws preventing “discrimination based on gender identity in health care” will not cause harm? How? Really, how will this not cause harm?

            Because I don’t think doctors refusing to treat trans patients is a problem, and I think that requiring insurers to charge trans people the same as cis people isn’t reducing harm, it just spreads it around. What harm do you think will come from this repeal, exactly? Please be specific.

            You’re saying, from my viewpoint, that the burden of proof is on me to show that someone pointing a gun at my head won’t be harmful.

            What? I’m not following your analogy here.

            Definitionally, discrimination is harmful.

            Sure. That doesn’t mean that any particular law prohibiting discrimination is necessary, effective, or worth the cost.

            Also, i don’t know how the book you referenced has anything to do with feeding heroin to babies. I mean, i haven’t read it, but i fail to see it’s relevance.

            You can claim that the war on drugs is saving hundreds of thousands of lives by saving us from heroin babies. Or you can (as almost everyone on your side of the aisle does) that the war on drugs destroys hundreds of thousands of lives. You can’t claim both at once, so which is it?

          • metalcrow says:

            @cassander

            I don’t think doctors refusing to treat trans patients is a problem, and I think that requiring insurers to charge trans people the same as cis people isn’t reducing harm

            ok, thank you for being more specific. To those points:
            1. A hypothetical friend of mine wants to get HRT. They go to a local doctor covered under their employee provided health insurance, and due to these newly repealed regulations, can be told “no we won’t treat you”. Well, now they have to find a new doctor who will treat them, one which is both covered under their insurance (which they can’t change since it’s specific to their job) and which is not unreasonably far away. In the city, sure this is just an inconvenience. But if you’re unlucky and you’re in a city with a lot of doctors like that, or not in a city and there aren’t many doctors, you now cannot get treatment. I’m not gonna say this is purely good, i support the right of a baker to not bake a cake for a gay couple. But when it’s a doctor for proving care for a debilitating mental health issue, the harm outweighs the cost in the worst case.
            2. I mean, charging people less money is less harmful then charging them more money, right? You can argue that there is a 2nd and 3rd order effect here where insurance will now go up for everyone since trans people cost more for the insurance company, and since they can’t charge them more they’ll charge everyone more, but we already do that for other pre-existing conditions we require insurance companies to ignore. And if you also advocate for the abolishment of those then i think, even if you can be proven right from a utilitarian perspective, everyone else and even myself will reject it on deontological grounds for emergency sanity and “fairness” reasons.

            What? I’m not following your analogy here.

            You said the “once you’ve shown that the removal of those regulations has harmed their lives in a material way, I’ll listen to your complaint”, and i was using the analogy to reject that.

            That doesn’t mean that any particular law prohibiting discrimination is necessary, effective, or worth the cost

            Ok, fair. But is the cost of telling insurance companies “no, much like discrimination based on pre-existing conditions and race, you also can’t discriminate based on gender” cost anything? it seems like it’s just a free rule to the existing umbrella.

            You can claim that the war on drugs is saving hundreds of thousands of lives by saving us from heroin babies

            Oh, shit no this was my bad. I was referring to the 1900s where heroin was put in cough medicine, and the Pure Food and Drug Act stopped than. Not the war on drugs.

          • Aapje says:

            @Eric T

            Rolling back LGBT protections and environmental regulations to what they were before Obama came to power is just the consequence of losing an election. It’s not radical. In my experience, it is fairly common for progressives to ‘anchor,’ by seeing relatively new legislation as impermissible to revoke. However, I don’t see why this is more reasonable than the opposite: conservative desires to prevent progressive change. If you want them to allow you to make progressive legislation, it seems to me that you have to allow them to make conservative legislation (including rolling back progressive legislation).

            The immigration ban you point to was explicitly intended to be temporary (and has since been revoked). Trump believed that the existing rules allowed terrorists to enter the US and wanted stricter rules. He chose to halt migration from certain countries until the new rules were implemented, rather than continue with the existing rules. I think that your criticism only makes sense if the ban was intended to be permanent, suggesting that you misunderstand it.

            In any case, restricting migration is a normal duty of an administration and it is hardly radical to want to restrict migration (which nearly all countries do).

            The hate crime allegation is immensely weak, because it involves a scientifically unproven causal claim, as well as involving a potential ban on addressing a topic that may inflame people. Suppose that BLM protests turn out to cause (anti-white) hate crimes. Would you accept a ban on BLM protests if that is the case, even if you believe that those protests save more lives than the hate crimes cost? If not, it is not reasonable to demand that one’s political opponents don’t engage in rhetoric that inflames people, but that they deem to have greater benefits than downsides.

            Anyway, I see all of these as relatively benign in their impact on the long term functioning of the system. They involve progressives/leftists (temporarily) losing, but don’t involve threats to the system in a meaningful way.

            There are way better examples of how Trump threatens the system, like his threat to adjourn congress. Although when it comes to the political process itself, there is a bipartisan effort to burn it down.

            Furthermore I agree with John Schilling, Trump’s flagrant lying and insulting, dogging on the Press regardless if they’re actually telling the truth or not, and overall tone is immeasurably damaging what little trust Americans had in their institutions at all.

            Dogging on ‘populists’ is what the media did long before Trump arrived on the scene. He is a product of a media culture where the media nudges people with all kinds of subtle (or less subtle) manipulations in a certain direction.

            There was no way for someone with certain opinions to get attention in a way that makes them electable, but to attack the media.

            This actually illustrates the difference between corruption to the system itself and responses to that corruption, which in turn can be very damaging and corrupting. However, without preventing or solving the initial corruption, the backlash will keep occurring.

            but the SJ world is vast, is there a specific topic you’d like to focus on?

            My main obsession interest lies with gender issues, so you might want to pick something in that direction. Perhaps a paper on one of the foundational terms.

            Nussbaum’s chapter on objectification is a fairly decent one to discuss, as it defines the term better than how it is typically used by SJ advocates, but it still has serious problems. So (IMO) it’s not cherry picking a particularly weak SJ text, but it is still something that can be considered fairly illustrative for the errors that are often made.

            But don’t feel obliged to discuss that text if you don’t feel comfortable with it or have something else you prefer. I just prefer to not discuss Judith Butler, because her texts are just so horribly written and argued, that the discussion would be much more ‘bad philosophy’ than ‘bad SJ.’

          • If Trump and his supporters were to roll back the FDA (which is accurate to wanting less regulation), they would be barely 1 step removed from the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people over the coming years.

            I think you have the sign of the effect wrong.

            According to Peltzman’s study of the Kefauver-Harris amendments to the Pure Food and Drug Act, that single strengthening of the requirements for approval cut the rate at which new drugs were being introduced in half while having no detectable effect on their average quality.

            I can even put a number on one of the other effects. When the FDA finally approved the use of Timolol as a beta-blocker, more than a decade after it had gone into use elsewhere for that purpose, it estimated that its use would save eight to ten thousand lives a year. They were, in other words, confessing that their previous decision had killed about a hundred thousand people.

            That was only one case, so your “hundreds of thousands” is probably an underestimate of the magnitude of the FDA’s effect.

          • metalcrow says:

            @DavidFriedman
            Damn, thank you, that’s super interesting. I’m going to preemptively say i don’t understand every role of the FDA nor am i an expert in them. My understanding is that the FDA, in approving drugs, can do 2 things:
            1. It can delay drugs that are good from getting to market and saving lives (con, from your example)
            2. It can stop drugs that are bad from getting to market and killing people (pro, see Thalidomide)

            I’m going to ignore the Food part of their jobs, since albatross11 says most of the prevention of food-borne illnesses is happening at the federal level from the Agriculture department.

            I guess the question would be, which of these two effects outweighs the other? I have always assumed the 2nd, since it seems like it’s much easier to make a bad drug that kills people than a good one that helps people and in a worst-case world without the FDA people could just sell the 2nd type of drug all they want (like they did before 1900 with heroin cough medicine and snake oil). I would be partial to an argument the FDA is not doing a good job! But Thalidomide alone caused 10,000-20,000 birth defects in other countries over 3 years, which is somewhat comparable to the lives lost by their decision in your example.

          • cassander says:

            @metalcrow says:

            I’m not gonna say this is purely good, i support the right of a baker to not bake a cake for a gay couple. But when it’s a doctor for proving care for a debilitating mental health issue, the harm outweighs the cost in the worst case.

            (A) I don’t think there’s a meaningful distinction between the baker and doctor.

            (B) this supposed harm is highly hypothetical. If this were really a problem that needed laws to solve, then there should be evidence of that. And that’s even before we get to the problem of secretly anti-trans doctors simply refusing to treat trans patients by saying “sorry, not accepting new clients” instead of “sorry, I don’t treat trans people.”

            ? You can argue that there is a 2nd and 3rd order effect here where insurance will now go up for everyone since trans people cost more for the insurance company, and since they can’t charge them more they’ll charge everyone more, but we already do that for other pre-existing conditions we require insurance companies to ignore.

            (A) you can’t argue that, it’s axiomatic.

            (B) We shouldn’t be doing that for pre-existing conditions. You don’t get to buy car insurance after you wrap yourself around a tree, that’s not how insurance works.

            Ok, fair. But is the cost of telling insurance companies “no, much like discrimination based on pre-existing conditions and race, you also can’t discriminate based on gender” cost anything? it seems like it’s just a free rule to the existing umbrella.

            There are no free lunches. There’s an enormous and expensive apparatus of compliance and enforcement that comes with all these mandates, and grows with every one.

            Oh, shit no this was my bad. I was referring to the 1900s where heroin was put in cough medicine, and the Pure Food and Drug Act stopped than. Not the war on drugs

            those are the same thing, that’s my point.

          • metalcrow says:

            @cassander

            I don’t think there’s a meaningful distinction between the baker and doctor.

            What

            We shouldn’t be doing that for pre-existing conditions

            While this is an ethically consistent! position, it is shared by basically no one. And i don’t mean that hypothetically, i just consulted a number of ideologically diverse groups chats i’m in with >300 people, and literally no one agreed to this statement.
            Also no, wrapping yourself around a tree is not at all equivalent to depression and cancer, and honestly that’s really quite rude.

            those are the same thing, that’s my point.

            No, they’re not. For 1, the first happened 100 years before the war on drugs. For 2, this was about preventing people from unknowingly ingesting substances which were unknowingly harmful to your health. I am in favor of allowing people to import medicine and take it and not be prosecuted! That should be allowed. But the war on drugs was against people knowingly ingesting substances where the side effects were known. This not equivalent at all.

            Honestly, while i thank you for your time, i’m not going to continue this conversation. The principal that “We shouldn’t be doing that for pre-existing conditions” is such a….wild ethical principal that i think we’ve got a true fundamental value difference here, and the gulf is so wide i can’t see across it. My partner has depression. By telling me this, you imply that my partner should only have access to mental and physical health care at a much higher cost than anyone else. Which he can’t afford, because of the previously mentioned depression. So forgive me if i think you saying that my partner, indirectly, shouldn’t get care really fucking ticks me off.

          • cassander says:

            @metalcrow says:

            I don’t think there’s a meaningful distinction between the baker and doctor.

            What

            I don’t know how else to say it.

            While this is an ethically consistent! position, it is shared by basically no one. And i don’t mean that hypothetically, i just consulted a number of ideologically diverse groups chats i’m in with >300 people, and literally no one agreed to this statement.

            There are several people on these threads here who will argue that point, david friedman is probably the most eloquent, but most right wingers with an economics background would make a similar argument. I suspect that your group chats are not as diverse as you seem to think. the illogic of insurance covering pre-existing conditions and the problem it causes aren’t complex.

            Also no, wrapping yourself around a tree is not at all equivalent to depression and cancer, and honestly that’s really quite rude.

            Yes, it is. You buy insurance BEFORE the condition you’re trying to insure against, not after. Insurance is about preventing catastrophic losses from uncertainty, not handling certainty, and using an insurance model for known conditions is a bad idea.

            No, they’re not. For 1, the first happened 100 years before the war on drugs.

            the war on drugs started in the 191Xs, with prohibition.

            I am in favor of allowing people to import medicine and take it and not be prosecuted

            Funny, just a little while ago you were talking about how repealing FDA regulations was killing hundreds of thousands of people. Now you want to repaal a bunch of them. So, again, which is it?

            Honestly, while i thank you for your time, i’m not going to continue this conversation. The principal that “We shouldn’t be doing that for pre-existing conditions” is such a….wild ethical principal that i think we’ve got a true fundamental value difference here,

            I articulated no ethical principle. I explained a technical point about how insurance works

            My partner has depression. By telling me this, you imply that my partner should only have access to mental and physical health care at a much higher cost than anyone else. Which he can’t afford, because of the previously mentioned depression.

            No, I’m not. health insurance is not the same thing as healthcare. I think that forcing healthcare to be bought through what we call insurance raises the cost for everyone, including your partner, and that if we stopped doing that, prices would fall.

            So forgive me if i think you saying that my partner, indirectly, shouldn’t get care really fucking ticks me off.

            You might get ticked off less if you took the time to actually understand the point I’m making instead of assuming that people who disagree with you are heartless monsters who want you and yours to suffer.

          • metalcrow says:

            @cassander
            you might get less people ticked off at you if you didn’t advocate for a position that is harmful. Truthfully, it doesn’t matter. The super-majority of the population disagrees with you, and this is proven time and time again when this reform isn’t passed. Believe what you want.

          • cassander says:

            @metalcrow says:

            you might get less people ticked off at you if you didn’t advocate for a position that is harmful.

            Less of this please. Around here we try not to assume that the people who disagree with us are evil.

          • We shouldn’t be doing that for pre-existing conditions

            While this is an ethically consistent! position, it is shared by basically no one.

            I share it. I expect quite a lot of other people do.

          • CatCube says:

            Yeah, I have the same belief, and thing @cassander’s comparison to allowing you to purchase car insurance after wrapping your car around it a tree is apt. (I usually use the comparison of allowing you to purchase house insurance after your house has burned down.)

            “Insurance” is where your premiums pay the actuarial cost of a risk. If the risk has already happened, then the actuarial cost is 100% of the outlay. If you’re demanding coverage for something that has occurred and not paying 100% of the cost, what you’re participating in isn’t “insurance.”

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            @Aftagley

            If Trump had insulted the guy on the basis of his disability, he wouldn’t have denied it. He would have doubled down and said “yeah, I made fun of that cripple, and I’ll do it again.” He is not shy about his insults and has no shame.

            I’m not saying Trump wouldn’t make fun of a disabled person. He absolutely would. But he wouldn’t be coy and deny it. So while he would make fun of a disabled person, I do not believe he made fun of this particular disabled person (for his disability).

          • albatross11 says:

            cassander:

            Instead of arguing with all those other people on his side of the aisle who aren’t here right now, how about addressing the arguments currently being made?

          • cassander says:

            @albatross11 says:

            I’m not sure what argument you don’t think I’ve addressed.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        It wouldn’t be as convenient as an automatic signature, but I’ll put in good word for Ditto, an excellent clipboard manager. It makes my life online a lot easier.

      • Ninety-Three says:

        In that society, a policy designed to help them get loans so they can dig their way out of redlined districts or whatever would be a good and fair thing.

        Would it? Some black people are presumably getting screwed by BankerTron because it has rationally used its limited information to place them into a high-risk bucket even though they individually are low-risk. But on average, it’s giving black people worse rates because they are actually more likely to default on the loan. What loan rate is fair if not the one proportionate to your odds of paying it back? If a man is uneducated, poor, and prone to violence, even if it isn’t his own fault that he ended up that way, he still is those things, and I’m curious about what you consider fairness to be if it requires treating people as something other than what they are.

        • albatross11 says:

          Individual fairness isn’t the same as group fairness, and they’re usually incompatible. Suppose we have two groups: green and purple. The greens are a little better off financially than the purples, on average.

          Suppose we give individually tailored interest rates. Then, greens will overall have better interest rates than purples, and purples will have a complaint about bias.

          Suppose we give the same interest rate to everyone. Then some people (mostly purples) will get a better interest rate than is merited by their ability to repay the loan; others (mostly greens) will get a worse rate than is merited by their ability to repay.

          Suppose we establish some kind of affirmative action like scheme in which we individually assess everyone, but them adjust the interest rates to make the two groups come out the same on average. Then, greens will overall have worse interest rates than they should based on ability to repay, and purples will overall have better interest rates.

          Note that in either of the last two cases, allowing anyone to just offer loans whose interest rates are not based on race but only on ability to repay will destroy the system–everyone screwed over by the anti-bias scheme will vote with their feet for the race-blind scheme. You must prevent any kind of competition that doesn’t discriminate in favor of purples, or your anti-biased lenders will have only purples or only people with bad prospects for repayment (purple and green), and so their interest rates will necessarily go up.

          I believe that in like 99% of cases, any kind of opaque or hidden cross-subsidy like this is a bad thing. It breaks a part of the price system, which is the only way we know how to actually organize an economy to be efficient, and it requires lies and suppression of information to function.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            Excuse me if this is obvious, but over time, the situation is self-amplifying.

            The group which gets higher interest rates is financially weaker and therefore more likely to default on loans, which makes it plausible to raise their interest rates more.

          • Cliff says:

            Excuse me if this is obvious, but over time, the situation is self-amplifying.

            The group which gets higher interest rates is financially weaker and therefore more likely to default on loans, which makes it plausible to raise their interest rates more.

            I don’t think this is obvious or true. Either the loans are priced appropriately or not, I don’t see any reason why interest rates would spiral to infinity or zero.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            When I say self-amplifying, I mean that the difference could be expected to increase, not that it would necessarily increase to infinity.

          • Ninety-Three says:

            @Nancy Lebovitz

            Yes, just as giving a good loan to Jeff Bezos will allow him to found Amazon, make a bunch of money, and become more capable of paying back future loans leading to even lower interest rates for him. Self-amplification in the system for efficiently allocating capital is a feature not a bug. If you want to take care of the poor then make a welfare system, don’t expect bank loans to act as one because that’s not what they’re for.

          • albatross11 says:

            Nancy:

            And yet, people whose grandparents came to the US with nothing often seem to be doing pretty well now, which suggests that the feedback loop isn’t all that powerful.

  88. Clutzy says:

    Actually, those ratios look like a pretty significant amount of reverse discrimination. Equal credentials are not equal because of affirmative action.

  89. Tatterdemalion says:

    I’m afraid I’m deeply sceptical of this. Controlling and not controlling for things is tricky; it’s easy to manipulate deliberately, and even easier to screw up accidentally.

    The gold standard here is identical resume tests, at least in one direction (absence of discrimination in identical resume tests doesn’t prove absence of discrimination in the real world, but discrimination in identical resume tests does prove discrimination in the real world), and those are still pretty consistently finding significant discrimination (see here).

    I don’t think that one study that a result contrary to most of the rest of the field should be given much weight.

    (On edit): that said, the fact that it looks as though that conclusion runs against the authors biases makes me slightly less dismissive of it that I would otherwise.

    • Eric T says:

      I haven’t read this analysis but if true, seems pretty compelling evidence for hiring discrimination. I’ll dive into this analysis tonight.

    • Austin says:

      I thought the concern with those types of studies were that the names chosen for the resumes coded for both race and class, and we don’t know how much is attributable to each component, e.g. “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal?”

      Would “Are Cletus and Nevaeh More Employable than Ta-Nehisi and Malia?” have different results?

      • Statismagician says:

        +1. Those studies are just as, if not more supportive of the ‘no, it’s really just about perceived-SES-as-proxy-for-reliability’ position.

        • Eric T says:

          I wonder if there’s a way to do this study without this issue. Like could you find a job where the hiring manager knew your race. The issue is that step is usually an interview – which is impossible to control for.

          Growing up in small-town America I applied for lots of jobs where I physically handed someone my resume or picked up an application. I wonder if that would work?

        • Statismagician says:

          I could see that possibly working, but my impression is that mostly it’s entry-level stuff like retail and restaurants which still works this way and I don’t think anybody’s suggesting that minorities aren’t adequately represented in service industries.

          Also we still wouldn’t necessarily be able to separate culture, SES, and race, though I admit reasonable people can disagree about the degree to which that’s a sensible thing to even try to do in the first place.

        • Austin says:

          @Eric T It would be worth seeing what the outcome of a study where the resume is for William Smith and sometimes you send Will Smith instead

        • Eric T says:

          +1. Those studies are just as, if not more supportive of the ‘no, it’s really just about perceived-SES-as-proxy-for-reliability’ position.

          Actually going through the methodology of these studies, it seems like some of them didn’t do this, they measured call-backs after interviews or resume audits instead.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          I vaguely recall resumes that used middle-class names but put other markers of race in the resume, like “organizer for campus chapter of NAACP.” I can’t remember or imagine what the marker would be for being white, though.

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          I can’t remember or imagine what the marker would be for being white, though.

          Just pick any of the things from “Stuff White People Like.” “President of Taylor Swift Fan Club.” “Organized Annual Country and Western Music Festival.”

        • John Schilling says:

          I can’t remember or imagine what the marker would be for being white, though

          Furry polyamorous atheist bird-watcher. Or something like that.

    • Cliff says:

      I recall an Australian study where they experimented with race and sex-blinding resume reviews and found that blinded resumes resulted in less diverse outcomes.

  90. Le Maistre Chat says:

    Breaking news from Woke Capital.

    Summary quotes:
    David Shor is a 28-year-old political data analyst and social democrat who worked for President Obama’s reelection campaign. On May 28, Shor tweeted out a short summary of a paper by Princeton professor Omar Wasow. The research compiled by Wasow analyzed public opinion in the 1960s, and found violent and nonviolent protest tactics had contradictory effects.
    … despite its superficially innocuous content, Shor’s tweet generated a sharp response. To take one public example, Ari Trujillo Wesler, the founder of OpenField, a Democratic canvassing app, replied, “This take is tone deaf, removes responsibility for depressed turnout from the 68 Party, and reeks of anti-blackness.” Trujillo Wesler repeated the accusation of racism (“YOU need to stop using your anxiety and ‘intellect’ as a vehicle for anti-blackness”), and then tagged Dan Wager, the CEO of Civis Analytics, the firm employing Shor, “Come get your boy.”
    … Civis Analytics undertook a review of the episode. A few days later, Shor was fired. Shor told me he has a nondisclosure agreement preventing him from discussing the episode. A spokesperson for Civis Analytics told me over email, “Out of respect for our employees and alumni, Civis does not publicly discuss personnel matters, and we don’t plan to comment further.”’

    • Eric T says:

      Wait. Maybe I’m totally wrong but isn’t the triple parentheses around the name thing like some kind of anti-semetic thing? Not trying to justify this but maybe this is the wrong person to be holding up as the innocent harmed by the masses?

      Idk am I wrong about this? I’m bad on this kind of stuff.

      • Canyon Fern says:

        The triple parentheses was, and is, the anti-Semite’s way of implying Jews are controlling such and such thing. Jews have since reclaimed the punctuation style as, I think, some sort of symbol of defiance: “here I am, haters!” If you see someone calling himself (((Bill))), he’s most likely a Jew announcing that fact.

        [Or, of course, they’re just doing whatever. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re an intelligent plant. -L]

        • Eric T says:

          Ah, that explains it. Thanks muchly!

          Yeah, revise my position to: bad bad SJ twitter stop doing this.

      • Eltargrim says:

        The triple-paren is used more ironically than in earnest. My understanding is that this David Shor is jewish.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          I would guess that sincere antisemites on 4chan invented it. These people are chan-exposed Jews operating on anywhere from 1 to 17 levels of irony.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          I think he is Jewish, but lots of Gentiles throw the triple-parens around their names to stand in solidarity with the Jews.

          “Oh, you’re gonna make them wear a Star of David? Well, now I am too. I am Spartacus.”

          • Lambert says:

            Huh, The thing about Christian X of Denmark wearing a star is an urban myth.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            “Man alone of the animals that plays the ape to his dreams.”

            Extra credit for recognizing the quote without looking it up.

      • Mercurial says:

        Yes, you’re wrong. It used to be/is a thing that anti-semite types did to call attention to who’s Jewish. There’s a lot of Jewish people, especially on twitter, that put parentheses around their own name. It’s either them declaring they don’t care if people know they’re Jewish, or trying to “reclaim” something anti-semetic.

      • DinoNerd says:

        Oh for crying out loud. Wouldn’t it be nice if some of these people could just come out and say whatever it is they mean – even if it’s “I hate Jews” instead of coming up with stupid code after stupid code.

        • Lillian says:

          It’s not a code exactly. The usage originates from the Coincidence Detector browser plug-in, which will enclose Jewish names in parenthesis as you browse the internet so as to illustrate the high degree of Jewish over-representation among academia, the media, the wealthy, and appointed government bureaucrats. It is as it happens, it is indeed quite a lot, to the point that it’s difficult to believe it is pure coincidence. The people behind the plug-in wish to imply the explanation is that the Jews have conspired to become America’s ruling class. So the point of the code is not to say, “I hate Jews” exactly, though it does certainly tend to imply that. Rather it is to remind the reader that, as the plug-in’s website puts it, “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to parenthesize.” Ironically this means that Jews parenthesizing themselves are doing the plug-in’s work for it, something which has caused the /pol/tards no end of amusement.

          For the record, I personally reject theory of Jewish collusion to influence and control the American halls of power. Instead, I believe that what has happened is that America has successfully built a mostly meritocratic system and high IQ populations rising to the top is what happens in meritocracies. That the system rewards high IQ and Ashkenasi Jews happen to be high IQ is in fact a coincidence, as the roots of the system predate there being any significant numbers of Ashkenasim in the US.

    • Canyon Fern says:

      then tagged Dan Wager, the CEO of Civis Analytics, the firm employing Shor, “Come get your boy.”

      Hnnnnnnnnnrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh. Busybodies, tattletales, holier-than-thous!

      My editor, Ludovico, has thought about programming his website to auto-post new articles to Twitter, the better to put his (meager) writings in front of more people. But the last thing he needs is for some namby-pamby do-gooder to tell him off for daring to study a foreign language and the corresponding culture… and I’ve seen American leftist terms getting exported to the Chinese intellectual class in bulk, especially recently with the “don’t call it a Chinese virus!” nonsense.

      [I would pattern match to “privileged white oppressor” in most woke activists’ eyes, and the last thing I need, as someone who gets all his business online, is for someone to smear my personal domain name all over Twitter as a cultural appropriator. -L]

      EDIT: Maybe I’m overreacting, but I am just so goddamn tired of the new practice of digging up dirt on people and getting them fired.

      • Nick says:

        I’ve never heard a plant growl before!

        Seriously, though, that sucks. I’m sorry you have to worry about that sort of thing. It makes me glad I don’t write for a living. =/

      • souleater says:

        I’m learning Mandarin, and I’d be interested in reading his blog

        Can you provide a link?

    • Aftagley says:

      Didn’t we already discuss this downthread? Maybe I’m crazy but I remember already getting worked up about this. Anyway, controversial take: I don’t really mind this whole chain of events.

      1. He wasn’t tweeting this into a vacuum. He was already positioned as someone who pushed back against the identitarian wing of the party and his tweeting this, on the day when right wing propaganda was trying to completely tar the burgeoning protest movement as being nothing but riots and looters was pointed. Don’t try to tell me it’s not. Nobody just “happens” to find a study from a couple years back and post it. He knew that, despite only posting a summary of a paper, he was making a concrete political point and using data science to recommend political action. If you’re going to object when climate scientists swerve outside of science to recommend politics, object to it here.

      2. He didn’t just “work” at an analytics company. He was their head of political analytics. Head. He was management and the face of the company’s political market which they are trying to expand. He is then on twitter using analytics to push a point potentially contrary to the company’s interest or at least with the high possibility of tarring their company. I’m somewhat on board with a company not punishing their line-level employees for taking political stands, but, imo, management doesn’t have that right. You are, you represent your company.

      3. On a specific level, what he’s saying is kind of controversial. He’s saying that the current pain, suffering and outrage being felt by a non-insignificant portion of this country… is less important than which of two old white dudes will run the country in 6 months and that they need to modify their expression of that feeling to avoid upsetting the electorate. Now, you can agree or disagree with this point, but it is controversial. The african american segment of the democratic party often and accurately points out that the white wing of the party ignores them except when it comes time to count votes. This tweet is, for better or worse, a perfect crystallization of this.

      4. I didn’t want the guy fired. I don’t want anyone fired. I want everyone to be happy.

      • albatross11 says:

        Aftagley:

        On a specific level, what he’s saying is kind of controversial. He’s saying that the current pain, suffering and outrage being felt by a non-insignificant portion of this country… is less important than which of two old white dudes will run the country in 6 months and that they need to modify their expression of that feeling to avoid upsetting the electorate.

        Okay, so it’s insensitive and off-message and divisive and controversial and probably just reflects his white privilege and all those bad things, but is it true? I mean, it really does seem kinda important to me which of those two old white dudes ends up running the country. And in fact, in five months, a big majority of the people who’ve been protesting so far will agree that this is a really big deal.

        Liberals and progressives in the future will be *really careful* not to bring those issues up, for fear of being hounded out of their jobs. But elections will continue, and if the Democratic party and broad liberal/progressive movement is unable to have internal discussions that take account of how something happening now is going to affect the elections in six months, then we’re probably going to see a lot of Republicans continuing to win elections. Self-satisfied Twitter mobs can rage about this to their hearts’ content, convince themselves that all those Americans who voted the wrong way because they thought rioting and looting were bad and abolishing the police department was a terrible idea are really racist sexist homophobic deplorables, but the folks making the actual decisions and laws may not care so much.

        I mean, that’s only important if you think elections have consequences. Otherwise, no problem.

        • Aftagley says:

          Good point and good question.

          I don’t know. Even setting aside my inability to accurately gauge the accuracy of the study that he linked, I’m unable to determine if the electorate of 1968 with 1968’s streams of information will behave the same as 2020’s. This might be the kind of question that only gets answered in another 30 odd years when someone does a study about voting patterns in this coming election.

          I’d argue that not only do I not know if this was true, whether or not it’s true is unknowable.

          • albatross11 says:

            My point isn’t whether Shor was right, but rather that this is exactly the kind of discussion that needs to happen within a political movement, in order to make good decisions. Punishing anyone who questions the wisdom of some actions by people on your side is blinding yourself. Maybe Shor was all wrong and violent protests were totally the way to go. But next time when your broad political movement is doing something that scares the hell out of the normies whose votes you’ll need to actually be able to get into power and make any changes, people who are pretty sure that this is happening will know that saying so out loud is as much as their job is worth.

            This is the Darth Vader school of management, right? Someone tells you they failed, so you gruesomely kill them. The next person tells you of a problem and you force-choke them to unconsciousness and leave them in a heap on the floor. You propose a plan to destroy the Rebels that has a big hole in it, someone points it out, and you chop their head off with a lightsaber. Pretty soon, you will never hear any bad news from your own side, even when it’s bad news you urgently need to avoid losing a battle or suffering some other terrible loss.

        • Ninety-Three says:

          Okay, so it’s insensitive and off-message and divisive and controversial and probably just reflects his white privilege and all those bad things, but is it true?

          Doesn’t matter to the company. They’re enforcing a norm that management shouldn’t draw too much liberal ire, not that management shouldn’t draw too much liberal ire unless the things management is saying happen to be true.

          The rest of us can despair at living in a society where the generation of ire is not dependent on whether a thing is true (and even where it is counterproductive to the goals of the irate), but the company doesn’t and shouldn’t care about that. His job was in part a PR position and truth is no defense from bad PR.

          • albatross11 says:

            truth is no defense from bad PR.

            The more this statement is true of an organziation, movement, or society, the worse its prospects for future success.

      • Aftagley says:

        This is worrisome because it seems that, within the Blue Tribe at least, the beliefs, actions and goals of the Black Lives Matter movement are increasingly being sanctified as beyond debate or examination, with censorship and ostracism rather than argumentation being used to respond to (real or imagined) criticism.

        Rioting and looting wasn’t a goal of BLM or the ongoing protests, it was an isolated and quickly suppressed unwanted side effect. And the criticism wasn’t imagined; right-aligned networks are still labeling these overwhelmingly-peaceful protests as being full of rioters and looters.

        Shor was not taking a hugely controversial stance in opposing rioting and looting:

        Again, messages don’t happen in a vacuum. If overwhelming discourse is either category A: “all protests are good because of their goals, despite instances of violence” or category B: “all protests are bad because of the rioting, despite the overwhelming lack of violence” the nuances of a message that critiques specific instances violent protesting are going to get lost and people will, accurately, sum up the contents of your message into category B.

        But let’s say this wasn’t his intention. Let’s say he just randomly saw that study, found it interesting and decided to tweet it out independent and completely removed from the ongoing situation. I’d still fire that guy. I don’t want my head of political analytics releasing public messaging that entails analytics in a way that’s going to piss of a huge percentage of my potential customer base. As mike berbiglia once said, what he should have said was nothing.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          I don’t want my head of political analytics releasing public messaging that entails analytics in a way that’s going to piss of a huge percentage of my potential customer base.

          Are a significant percentage of the domestic potential customer base in the Red tribe? Or is saying hurtful things about them safe business practice because of the financial disparities between Blue and Red?

        • Ninety-Three says:

          And the criticism wasn’t imagined; right-aligned networks are still labeling these overwhelmingly-peaceful protests as being full of rioters and looters.

          To sort of defend their point: when one city has twenty buildings razed and dozens more burned, the ratio of peaceful protesters to rioters becomes much less important than the fact that holy shit, that’s a lot of rioters. And with Minneapolis arsons still rolling in a week later, I’d say it wasn’t suppressed that quickly.

        • Ninety-Three says:

          I find the idea that beliefs have to be judged on their hypothesized net contribution to a cause rather than truth or falsity highly unnerving. This a theory of political discourse with obvious potential for serious abuse, in which the most radical fraction of a movement can browbeat potential dissenters into refraining from criticizing its mistakes, falsehoods, lies or crimes. A movement with a solid intellectual basis does not need to rely on this theory.

          I agree, but the company is not trying to build a healthy political movement, they are trying to turn a profit given the political incentives that currently exist. It’s clear that his tweet did draw ire, I argue that it was predictable it would draw ire, and at that point why should the company retain employees who make foreseeably bad PR decisions?

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          Rioting and looting wasn’t a goal of BLM or the ongoing protests

          I think you’re right.

          But a lot of white liberal institutions are burning their reputations to the ground to defend the rioting and looting as essential to the Black Experience, so it’s not surprising to see conservatives think that black people are defending the looting.

        • albatross11 says:

          This reminds me so much of the firing of Jason Richwine. In both cases, you make statements that are true in the narrow technical sense of being factually accurate summaries of the current state of human knowledge, but not in the broader and more important sense of being what the powerful people want to hear, and so you get fired.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          If only we had some cultural institutions whose job it was to speak truth to power.

        • Nick says:

          @Ninety-Three

          I agree, but the company is not trying to build a healthy political movement, they are trying to turn a profit given the political incentives that currently exist. It’s clear that his tweet did draw ire, I argue that it was predictable it would draw ire, and at that point why should the company retain employees who make foreseeably bad PR decisions?

          Two points. First, a common theme of these pileons is that everybody forgets about it (except the victim, of course) a few days later, but by then the damage is done and the employee has been fired. The fact that the tweet drew ire should, frankly, not have been a big deal.

          Second, setting aside whether it was predictable, why didn’t his boss just have a talk with him about being more careful next time? Why is the first step “throw his ass out on the street”?

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:

          From what I’ve been seeing on facebook, there are black people excusing rioters, but the proportion is lower than white people.

          Anyone have a better overview?

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        1… he was making a concrete political point and using data science to recommend political action. If you’re going to object when climate scientists swerve outside of science to recommend politics, object to it here.

        Sure. However, there’s no symmetry between his punishment for using data science to recommend political action and the (non-)punishment when a climatologist does it.

        2. He didn’t just “work” at an analytics company. He was their head of political analytics. Head. He was management and the face of the company’s political market which they are trying to expand. He is then on twitter using analytics to push a point potentially contrary to the company’s interest or at least with the high possibility of tarring their company.

        What kind of world do we live in when saying “BLM is awesome! More would be accomplished by peaceful protests than violent ones!” carries the high possibility of tarring their company and so should be beyond the pale for management?

        3. On a specific level, what he’s saying is kind of controversial. He’s saying that the current pain, suffering and outrage being felt by a non-insignificant portion of this country… is less important than which of two old white dudes will run the country in 6 months and that they need to modify their expression of that feeling to avoid upsetting the electorate.

        Well how important is it which old white dudes will run the country in 6 months?

        This brings us to a line where some black people’s outrage is ethically and epistemically superior to the truth. This is the whole social danger of postmodernism every conservative with the erudition to do so has been warning about our whole adult lives (or depending on the individual, since de-converting, like an earlier generation had people like Christopher Hitchens and David Horowitz de-converting from Trotskyism.)
        It’s self-refuting to say that the pain, suffering or outrage of a select list of peoples your ideology has identified as Oppressed means nothing they say can be analyzed for truth or falsehood and even saying “I’m on your side; let’s only use non-violence” is an unethical act deserving censorship and loss of livelihood.

        Try applying this epistemology and ethics break somewhere outside US parochialism:
        You go to Southeast Nigeria and meet a lot of poor black people, most Igbo. They tell you their suffering includes crappy higher education there and limited access to universities abroad, the fact that the Muslims and Yoruba teamed up to commit mass murder of their grandparents’s generation, unethical distribution of oil revenue, and rampant heresy in overseas dioceses/provinces of the Church. Then go north and Muslim Nigerians tell you the Igbo’s behavior is outrageous and they should go away. If everyone is poor, black and outraged and questions of “What’s the truth here?” are unethical enough to deserve punishment… then what?

  91. ltowel says:

    Yes, we mean literally abolish the police.

    The surest way of reducing police violence is to reduce the power of the police, by cutting budgets and the number of officers.

    But don’t get me wrong. We are not abandoning our communities to violence. We don’t want to just close police departments. We want to make them unnecessary.

    I get it. Police brutality is horrible. But I can’t imagine there’s a better way to stop muggings from happening after all the bars let close then having a beat cop on the corner. Maybe the socialist utopia will solve envy and greed and we’ll only have 5 deadly sins to deal with. I don’t envy the people with the hubris to make public policy – it’s much easier to tear it down then to build it up.

    • Eric T says:

      So something to note: the actual policy proposal the author advocates for is reducing uniformed numbers by half. I don’t know about elsewhere, but that wouldn’t actually be that insane here in NYC. Then NYPD currently has 34,440 uniformed officers, but has operated historically quite well with around 20-25,000 uniformed officers. So maybe half is overzealous here but a 33% cut would actually probably be totally fine for the city.

      • ltowel says:

        I read it as “the least we can do is cut it in half”. In any case, police budgets are getting cut – there’s gonna be municipal budget crisis world-wide.
        I think it’d be disingenuous and irresponsible to publish an op-ed that doesn’t literally mean abolish the police with the title “Yes, we mean literally abolish the police”

      • teneditica says:

        Nah. If someone literally says that they literally want to abolish the police, I’m not going to be lectured on what the policy proposals they advocate actually are.

        • souleater says:

          What a weirdly agressive way to communicate to someone giving you their time…

        • Purplehermann says:

          Specifically, accusing someone of ‘lecturing’ you when they draw attention to what’s written, and otherwise add to the thread… less of this please

      • souleater says:

        he idea of cutting police doesn’t strike me as particularly objectionable… cutting by half still seems extreme, but I could meet then partway and maybe do a 20% reduction and revisit the issue in a few years. but I feel like I’m trying to craft policy with a group who are promising different things to different people.

        It makes me feel like meeting their written requests wont satisfy them, and they will immediately move the goal posts closer to what they’re telling each other they want. I don’t want to try to meet them halfway only to have the rug pulled out from under me. I want to work with people I disagree with here, but if they are asking for a complete nonstarter like abolishing the police, I don’t think we can have any sort of meeting of minds.

        What percentage of these protesters would you guess really truly want to abolish the police? My guess is its 50-70%

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        So something to note: the actual policy proposal the author advocates for is reducing uniformed numbers by half.

        I don’t think that’s a fair reading of the article.

        I’m having a really hard time putting this into words after seeing the back-and-forth with Guy in TN and ECD last OT where everyone couldn’t decide on what “to police” means rather than the current incarnation of “police forces in the United States,” but I’ll try my best.

        She literally wants to abolish the police, and replace what the police do with other types of civil servants who help people solve their problems rather than arresting them.

        … Tracey Meares, noted in 2017, “policing as we know it must be abolished before it can be transformed.”

        So, abolish the current police forces and organizational structures, and transform them and society as described by:

        People like me who want to abolish prisons and police, however, have a vision of a different society, built on cooperation instead of individualism, on mutual aid instead of self-preservation. What would the country look like if it had billions of extra dollars to spend on housing, food and education for all?

        Yes, she literally wants to abolish the current police forces, and the idea of the way in which we “police” society. However, if we can’t get on board with all that right now:

        I’ve been advocating the abolition of the police for years. Regardless of your view on police power — whether you want to get rid of the police or simply to make them less violent — here’s an immediate demand we can all make: Cut the number of police in half and cut their budget in half.

        So, she spends the entire article explaining that yes, she wants to abolish the police and replace them with other types of people who try to solve the problems we have the police solving in different ways, and this is important to do because lots and lots of attempts to reform the police have failed. And she’s got one line where she says that if we can’t do all that right now, at least start by cutting them in half. I don’t think it’s fair to throw out all the ways in which she advocates for abolishing the police, but since there’s one line where she’ll settle for abolishing half of them right now, that means she doesn’t really want to abolish the police. She really wants to abolish the police (and transform society).

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          If I was in charge of irony, and I had to roll up all the insanity of “New York Times publishes article that puts lives in danger” and “no, ‘abolish the police’ doesn’t mean abolishing the police,” I would order this op-ed to appear in the New York Times.

      • John Schilling says:

        I think there’s been enough ink spilled over this exact subject that when someone literally chooses the headline “Yes, we mean literally abolish the police”, we should probably take them literally (but not seriously).

        If they also propose a compromise wherein we start by literally abolishing half the police, I’m going to expect that there will be further “compromises” to come which add up to Zeno’s Abolition of the Police.

        • The Pachyderminator says:

          The author almost certainly didn’t choose the headline. It’s not safe to conclude anything about authorial intent specifically from that.

          • Matt M says:

            Uh, if I submitted a piece for publication and the editor used a headline that is clearly not at all what I actually believe, I would be very publicly making a big stink about it.

          • John Schilling says:

            And in the immediate post-Cotton era, that stink would be heard loud and clear. The idea that the NYT’s editors are, here and now, choosing op-ed headlines that make Social Justice look bad, is not plausible.

          • albatross11 says:

            Oh, I’d say building an echo chamber within the NYT makes it very likely they will run op-eds that make social justice look bad. Not intentionally, but still….

        • Aftagley says:

          to come which add up to Zeno’s Abolition of the Police.

          Bad news Bob, hey just decided to fire another 1/16 of you. Tell your left forearm not to show up on Monday.

    • DinoNerd says:

      I suspect that there are many better ways than policing as currently practiced in parts of the United States.

      It’s very easy to go from “we need something that does X” to “we need something called Y” and from there to “we need a Y exactly like the one I am personally familiar with”.

      It’s also easy to do the converse – “the Y we have has problems”; “we need to have nothing called Y” and/or “we need to have nothing like Y”.

      I don’t think we’ll solve anything with this kind of rhetoric.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        I suspect that there are many better ways than policing as currently practiced in parts of the United States.

        It’s not just the United States. The Lego police meme is like five years old.

        It’s terrifyingly irrational that we’re being forced, for fear of being censored and also losing our ability to make a living, to agree with the framing “the problem with police brutality is anti-black racism and the quantity and social trade-offs are exactly as bad as we assert without evidence.”

    • Le Maistre Chat says:

      In the absence of a centralized state with a monopoly on violence, the overwhelming tendency historically has not been for local communities to find innovative non-violent ways to cooperate, but for highly frequent small-scale brigandage, predation and feuding between clans/gangs to occur, as in e.g. the Scottish Highlands or Papua New Guinea prior to state pacification.

      Got it in one.
      A city of significant size can’t even go 16 hours without government police without dropping us back to past levels of violence so overwhelmingly unpopular that elected rulers call in the Army.

      • Mercurial says:

        To be fair, it seemed like people were already on the edge of rioting just before the police went on strike. I wonder if the army would have been called in regardless (see recent riots) regardless of the cop’s attempts at maintaining law and order.

    • sharper13 says:

      still the case for some societies today like Somalia

      Who are these guys, if not the Somali police?

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        The “AnCap Somalia” discussion on the English internet appears to leave the country frozen in 2006.
        The rise of the Islamic Courts Union caused Ethiopia to send in its Army to support a United Nations-appointed transitional President, Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed.

        • Ethiopia being Somalia’s traditional enemy, with which they fought a war under Barre’s dictatorship. Rather like straightening out a situation we don’t like in France with the use of the German army.

          People interested in the traditional stateless institutions of Somaliland, northern Somalia, will find a chapter on them in my Legal Systems Very Different from Ours. For more expert information, take a look at the works of I.M. Lewis, an LSE anthropologist who started studying the area in the 1950’s and became the leading expert on it.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          People interested in the traditional stateless institutions of Somaliland, northern Somalia, will find a chapter on them in my Legal Systems Very Different from Ours. For more expert information, take a look at the works of I.M. Lewis, an LSE anthropologist who started studying the area in the 1950’s and became the leading expert on it.

          Yes, Somalis have non-Islamic mores/legal institutions called Xeer that are understood to be compatible with Islam, which is the only religion present, and Somaliland and Puntland are ethnically homogeneous (Somali). Combined with an economy where pastoralism (traditionally hostile to states) was still common, it was only minimally surprising that the stateless cities didn’t descend into block-by-block chaos.

        • cassander says:

          don’t forget their internationally appointed minister of tourism!

    • Wrong Species says:

      It’s as depressing as it is predictable. And the process is now on turbo.

      “Nobody believes that”
      “Only a few wackos believe that”
      “Only a few op eds advocate that”
      “Only the extremists believe that”
      “Not all of us believe that”
      “If you don’t believe it, you’re a monster”

    • salvorhardin says:

      So this seems to me to be a problem that should be familiar to software engineers like those I assume are overrepresented here.

      You have a terrible, old, crufty legacy system that’s part of your critical infrastructure. You’ve come to realize, belatedly, that it is not only riddled with bugs but full of fundamental design flaws, so that patching and point-fixing is not a long term sustainable strategy. This is one of those rare times where the thing really does need to be rewritten from scratch.

      But that doesn’t make it easy. You can do cool thought experiments about how the new thing should work. You can make prototypes that give great demo but don’t scale. And you need to do all this to get the new thing to eventually work! But it’s all too easy to believe that it’s sufficient: to believe that because you see how the prototype could work, you see how the production system could work. Smart, well intentioned people keep making that mistake all the time.

      And the old awful system, because it is critical infrastructure, can’t just be shut down while you stand up the new thing. So instead you have to keep running people through the meat grinder of maintaining the old awful thing while you hash out the hard design problem for the new thing and qualify it for production. And even once you do that, the migration process is a pain and a half.

      And it’s totally legitimate to point out the problems to the starry-eyed enthusiasts of the new vaporware way– as long as you don’t neglect to acknowledge the very good reasons they have for wanting to burn the old thing down. If you can propose a better incremental migration path than a rewrite that satisfies the same requirements, they *should* be all ears– of course they aren’t sometimes, and that’s a problem– the presumption should be that incremental fixes are better than rewrites the vast majority of the time– but on your end, it should be a rebuttable presumption.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        Generally the consequences of burning the old software down don’t include people being killed or losing 100% of their private property.
        Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France is actually entirely about this, though he was writing too early to be a software engineer.

        • salvorhardin says:

          Software breakages kill people pretty frequently, as it happens, and this will get to be a much bigger problem as more of our infrastructure is software-ified. Bruce Schneier is good on this.

      • cassander says:

        This is the great virtue of capitalism. It’s constantly burning down legacy efficient systems and generating new ones in a way that makes sure the lights stay on.

      • Ninety-Three says:

        the presumption should be that incremental fixes are better than rewrites the vast majority of the time– but on your end, it should be a rebuttable presumption.

        Man, I would be thrilled if that was the discussion anyone was having. Is there some bubble separate from mine where anyone is trying to either rebut or defend that presumption rather than simply declaring themselves correct?

        • ltowel says:

          I … kind of feel like this oped is doing that? It felt like an a attempt to rebut that presumption by arguing for literal police abolition.

          • salvorhardin says:

            There’s also the more cynical political argument that if you want major yet still moderate reforms passed, you need the abolish-the-police people to be out there with a big megaphone to make those reforms look moderate, because proposals at the very edge of the Overton Window rarely actually get enacted.

            I’m hoping that’s true here and that it results in something close to federal enactment of the whole Campaign Zero reform agenda, which is pretty nuanced, well-thought-out, very far from both the status quo and police abolition, and was at best spreading slowly locality-by-locality before recent events.

            The analogous phenomenon in software engineering– someone comes in with a bold design proposal for a complete rewrite, the rewrite doesn’t happen but its best ideas get incorporated into a more evolutionary set of fixes– does also happen sometimes, and can be a very good outcome.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            There’s also the more cynical political argument that if you want major yet still moderate reforms passed, you need the abolish-the-police people to be out there with a big megaphone to make those reforms look moderate, because proposals at the very edge of the Overton Window rarely actually get enacted.

            By that logic, every policy proposal by a Republican needs far-right street protests going on when they’re proposed. Should that strategy be upheld as Constitutional?

          • Ninety-Three says:

            There’s also the more cynical political argument that if you want major yet still moderate reforms passed, you need the abolish-the-police people to be out there with a big megaphone to make those reforms look moderate

            Even if that logic is true, I doubt that describes the motivation here. The slogan wasn’t picked by seven shadowy men in smoky rooms strategizing for success, some rando just said it one time and it caught on. If it were a poor tactical decision to campaign on abolishing the police, there’s no central authority capable of turning the messaging around. If Joe Average isn’t behaving tactically (hint: he never is), whether or not someone is behaving tactically seems like it might not impact sloganeering.

            Personally I think they’re just LARPing. Abolishing the police sounds hardcore and fun if you don’t think about it too hard, just like burning down random buildings does.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        If you really want to know how a system works, yank it out and watch what breaks.

        If the system is a web browser, okay.

        If the system keeps people from being raped, not okay.

        • John Schilling says:

          The current system keeps some people from being raped and causes other people to be raped. But the people it causes to be raped are mostly lower-class and often criminals, so I guess that’s supposed to be OK. OK-ish, better than letting middle-class people be raped?

          Maybe the “abolish the police” crowd have something going for them after all.

        • ana53294 says:

          @John Schiling

          The people who are raped as a result of the system are raped as a result of the prison system, not policing.

          Marginalrevolution has ran several blog posts about how the US spends too much on prisons and too little on policing. You can modify the prison system without modifying the policing system, thus avoiding both prison rape and the type of rape police prevents.

          I think many people would be a lot more on board with “abolish prisons” than “abolish the police”. At least I would be, for certain values of “abolish prisons” (more paroles, more community service, shorter sentences, fewer prisons, nicer prisons, minimum wage for prisoners, free calls from prisons, no for-profit prisons, a reduction in the number of prisons, etc.).

        • John Schilling says:

          The people who are raped as a result of the system are raped as a result of the prison system, not policing.

          I’m not convinced there’s a difference between the two, particularly at the level of city and county jails that are run by the police. But in any event, the police don’t need to wait for their preferred victims to be sent off to prison before they get busy with the raping.

          And then there’s the Rotherham dynamic where the police will cover for whoever is raping members of the local underclass, to the extent of harassing or arresting people trying to stop the rapes, because that’s the minimum-effort, minimum-bad-PR path.

      • albatross11 says:

        Salvorhardin:

        This is basically how I see it, too. The current system is screwed up in a ton of different ways, many of which look very hard to fix. (Also, it’s not one current system, it’s about a thousand interlocking ones–local police departments, state and federal departments, courts and prisons at every level, etc.) Indeed, I think broadly the same thing is true of medical care, and to a lesser extent of both K-12 and college education and local NIMBY/zoning/environmental laws.

        The question is, how do we reform these systems when:

        a. We rely on them for critical functions and can’t shut them down for a few years to switch over to something better.

        b. They are full of interlocking networks of entrenched interests, each of which will fight to keep their existing goodies.

        c. These interlocking networks of entrenched interests are also critical to keeping the system working. (Examples: Policing for a profit is a terrible idea, but ending it will put a largish number of municipal governments into an immediate fiscal crisis. Opaque cross-subsidies in medicine mean that nobody can know how much something will cost them, or get a clear idea of how much it actually costs to provide, but substantial parts of the medical care system that we need will stop working without the cross-subsidies.)

    • SamChevre says:

      One additional possibility is extra-legal groups that serve as law enforcement, but with fewer constraints than the police. The last time we had reasonably widespread, effective private law enforcement within the US, the Force Act was passed to allow the Army to suppress the private militias.

      • BBA says:

        reasonably widespread, effective private law enforcement

        I mean…uh…that’s certainly a way to describe them but…

      • TheSkeward says:

        The Enforcement Act of 1870, also known as the Civil Rights Act of 1870 or First Ku Klux Klan Act, or Force Act was a United States federal law written to empower the President with the legal authority to enforce the first section of the Fifteenth Amendment throughout the United States. The act was the first of three Enforcement Acts passed by the United States Congress from 1870 to 1871 during the Reconstruction Era to combat attacks on the suffrage rights of African Americans from state officials or violent groups like the Ku Klux Klan.

        Just to confirm your position: the Ku Klux Klan was an effective private law enforcement organization crushed by government overreach?

        Other than the KKK, are there other vigilante groups you’d be in favor of? What are your thoughts on how extra-legal groups serving as law enforcement with fewer constraints than the police are working out in, say, Mexico?

        • are there other vigilante groups you’d be in favor of?

          The original Vigilantes, the Committee of Vigilance in San Francisco, is viewed by some as the good guys, responding to a corrupt law enforcement system, by others as the bad guys.

      • SamChevre says:

        The Ku Klux Klan was an effective private law enforcement organization crushed by government overreach because it was not even close to providing equal justice to everyone.

        My point was diametrically opposite to your comment: there’s a very good reason to have public police forces, and not private militias serving as quasi-police. The second isn’t a new idea: it’s an already-tried bad idea.

        (The Klan is tricky because it was also an anti-colonial resistance movement. Those tend to be remembered very differently by the two sides.)

    • viVI_IViv says:

      Tucker Carlson makes the argument that when the left says “Abolish the Police” or “Defund the Police” what they really mean is replace the current, mostly Trump-leaning but generally politically neutral police force with a partisan militia that will perform police functions while enforcing leftist orthodoxy. When I heard him first I thought he was being uncharitable, but man, given the stuff the leftist establishment is saying and doing, Tucker may well have a point.

      Other people have commented on how close the current situation looks to the Maoist Cultural Revolution, the only difference being that the Maoists had the Red Guards and the People’s Liberation Army with coercive enforcement power. If the push to “abolish” the police succeeds, then whatever will replace it will be the People’s Liberation Army to the BLM Red Guards.

      (And history teaches us that the People’s Liberation Army suppressed the Red Guards once the CCP consolidated its power, just like Hitler’s SS suppressed the SA once he got into power. Prediction on the fate of BLM is left to the reader as an exercise)

      • Ninety-Three says:

        Man, Tucker Carlson is a shameless partisan and I resent his characterization of the Democrats as always seizing power (especially as opposed to the Republicans who supposedly never do) but other than that… he’s not wrong. Of the people who have thought the slogan through enough to not endorse its literal meaning, “Replace Republican-leaning cops with some kind of woke diversity initiative” is the stated goal and “The new cops hate Trump and Trump voters” is while not a goal, at least a predictable and desirable side effect of the plan. Reword his speech to hit the same points with positive affect instead of negative and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it in the New York Times.

        I still think he’s being uncharitable in implying the intent behind it is some kind of Machiavellian power grab, but just in terms of proposed policies and the effects they’ll have, he’s not wrong.

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      I’ve wondered how private organizations can build up sufficient trust ex nihilo to be able to function as courts and police.

      • John Schilling says:

        You don’t need trust to function as a police force or court. You only need trust to function as a good police force or court.

        And you certainly don’t need universal trust. A vigilance committee can be trusted by the Right Sort of People, thoroughly distrusted by the Wrong Sort of People, and yet be very effective at keeping the Wrong Sort of People in line (or just running them out of town).

    • meh says:

      how many twitter wars were just fought over people taking the claim literally and being told they were wrong?

    • Paul Zrimsek says:

      The real puzzle to me is how all these people who generally regard themselves (I think it’s fair to say) as intellectuals and nuance-meisters, keep adopting these maximalist slogans which then have to be laboriously walked back. We just got done seeing it with #BelieveWomenWaitNotThatOne, and here it is again.

      • cassander says:

        because the maximalist slogans get attention, and the elaborate walking back proves their sophistication to themselves.

        • albatross11 says:

          I wonder how much is the Twtter-mobbing and witch hunts. If 90% of dedicated liberals and progressives in media think “abolish the police” is a terrible slogan, it may still be the case that most of them don’t feel secure enough in their position to say that out loud.

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      Just to add, I do think the slogan is bad because it’s confusing.

      Yes, they literally want to abolish police.

      No, they do not want to end the act of policing society for bad behavior or government responding to crime.

      Given that what they actually want to do is to replace The Police with other institutions for policing society, they should call it “Replace the Police!” That sounds slightly less insane, and is the start of a dialogue. “Wait, replace them with what?” That’s a much better in than “you’re crazy” followed by “what I really mean is…” So, massive rhetoric fail.

      Also interesting in light of all the stories about Trump disbanding the NSC pandemic unit. When sure, that’s technically true, but the unit and its responsibilities were combined with those of other units into a new unit. The duty it was intended to perform (pandemic policy advice) was still being done, just by a slightly different organization.

      So, “Abolish the police!” Technically true but misleading as to what they actually want to do.

      “Trump disbands pandemic unit!” Technically true but misleading as to what actually happened.

      None of this is to say that replacing the police or reforming the NSC were good or bad ideas. I’m not making any judgement call on the appropriateness or inappropriateness of the policies in this post, I’m just pointing out how annoying all the semantic disagreements are.

  92. albatross11 says:

    Interesting article by Matt Taibbi.

    I wonder how much of the toxicity he’s describing is linked to the precariousness of most media sources.

    • original-internet-explorer says:

      As I see it some of Liberalism’s new generation are people like Scott who move like comets – and others are in a decaying orbit.

      It’s hard to wrap my mind about the phenomena. The biggest ‘viewquake’ I had was – thanks to The Three Body Problem of Liu Cixin – that there aren’t two factions left/right on a spectrum. I believe the book was written using the Straussian technique as critique of the West’s political system producing crisis or as a criticism of Humankind’s political nature causing conflict. Westerns are familiar with the idea that a writer under a totalitarian society might write differently but I don’t believe they spot the same in reverse describing their own society because Barrack Obama endorsed the book.

      The setup starts with a description of the Cultural Revolution – which sounds to a Westerner like a criticism of China. It’s not that.

      There exist three factions and their behavior is similar to orbiting bodies. We live on a planet as it were with Three Suns representing the Left, the Right and the Liberals. The gravity of each body affects the others. In our history we see the consequences of historical orbital relations. One special event is where the suns converge on a path to our planet called the Trisolar Day – in each three different species of political crisis rip the planet apart.

      I mention this because I think the best description of what is happening right now is that the Liberal body had a dalliance with the Left body. It now moves back to the Right body and we see the chaos spreading across the planet by these disruptions.

      The nice idea is that it kills the belief in centrism or moderation. There is no origin point for the political order since the West dissolved the monarchies. Instead of having a back and forth between the Left and the Right policies we see the possibility of total disaster were the wrong synchronizations to happen.

      The dangerous delusion of the West is that the political system has a natural Equilibrium. This hypothesis says it does not and this explains the extraordinary events in our history. It also chimes with descriptions of the West’s political dynamism. There are lots of ways to read into Three Body symbolism but really any of them would be an improvement on the prevailing metapolitical discussions.

      I’m very suspicious about Brett Weinstein and Eric Weinstein’s descriptions of the world because though I believe they are sincere advocates of Liberalism they are using the political compass model of the world and that I am convinced will fall down horribly as story of what we are seeing.

      I was triggered by Matt Taibbi because he’s like Brett and Eric – sincere but friends don’t let friends use bad maps. I want to hear what Tyler Cowen really thinks about what is going on because he is woke to the idea the different factions are telling themselves tales of convenience.

      • Wrong Species says:

        Interesting take on the Three Body Problem. It’s certainly not an endorsement of liberalism. The series is about survival and how you need to do what you need to do to protect your people. Choices that feel wrong can in fact be the right choices. It’s a refreshing perspective. One of my pet peeves in media is when some character says “If we do X, then how does that make us any different from them”. Your principles mean nothing if you’re all dead. If a Westerner had written it, more people would recognize that.

        • albatross11 says:

          I thought the author was drawing a comparison between the Chinese who adopted a foreign (weatern) ideology and loyalty and wrecked the old Chinese society, and the humans who adopted an alien ideology and loyalty and strove to wreck human society.

          • original-internet-explorer says:

            Mao’s favorite book was Dream of the Red Chamber. It is a complex tale unknown in the West but the theme is about the fall of a noble house. Mao probably identified with it so strongly because he saw stagnation of his society and I guess he blamed that on the West. I can understand that because I have a relationship of that sort to the Book of the New Sun – it describes the stagnation of our society to me. Recall if you have read the chapter called The Picture Cleaner the Knight in White Armour with Golden visor bearing a strange stiff banner in the Desolation. We know that one.

            I think any criticism of China or the CCP contained in the Remembrance of Earth’s Past is accepted in Chinese society. Liu Cixin is an insider – he won’t be turning up on the Steve Bannon podcast.

            Supposing Liu Cixin’s view Wrong Species mentioned to be correct – then we are seeing now a Cheng Xin in Seattle where it would have been better to have a Luo character.

            The star of the Right is probably rising now and when it reaches the zenith the gravity of it will be difficult to resist. My worry is that one of the factions is torn apart – my belief is if that happens our civilization is ended – the dynamism of the three factions is the impetus that drives our scientific and technological projects.

        • original-internet-explorer says:

          I’ve found it frustrating trying to explain Liberalism. It’s like political dark matter.
          When somebody already believes they have the answer it’s hard to get through.

          The majority conflate Liberals for a Left or Right faction. I think the political scientists and historians of political history see the world differently but they are so niche they are ignored. It is like Moravec’s Paradox in Robotics – in the field everybody knows and externally the public is delusional. I’m sure David Friedman can give examples where different species of economist have converged but the public believes something impossible. There is a wiki for Liberalism where it is obvious why it can’t be Right or Left.

          The star of Liberalism waxes and wanes with the social evolution of the middle class – what I prefer to call the information processing class because I can’t swallow the top/middle/lower model of society coupled with “Progress” where we all transition into the middle.

          Confusion is compounded by the common understanding of the word Liberal. Sophisticated commentators use liberal-left/liberal-right and far left/far right but this is adding epicycles.

          The Liberal faction has a red or blue orientation it calls Right or Left in our Liberal world. Which orientation it has depends on the last encounter with another orbital. Obviously in the 60s a close encounter was had with the Left and in the 80s with the Right. This confusion is probably a feature of the system. The reason why it isn’t clear is that it is rare for a leftist influence to affect our planet at the same time as a rightist influence. When we see two stars in the sky – it signals conflict. If we see three it’s probably a new Dark Age.

          In the Three Body Problem it takes a while for the Trisolarians to work out the existence of a third orbital because their historical past doesn’t reveal it. This is because they were always conflating one of the Suns for another. They never saw three Suns at any one time because that was the Trisolar Day where all records would be destroyed. It’s a powerful metaphor – Liu Cixin is a genius – the model adds Time and vectors to the political model instead the beautiful static view with equilibrium. If there is one message to take away – it’s that there is no equilibrium.

          You can believe progress is desirable without believing progress is inevitable. The belief progress is inevitable becomes complacent thinking if there is no equilibrium. As I see it – Elon Musk and Peter Thiel – this is something they are strongly correct about that the middle class does not understand. We don’t have much time to make the world better – the clock is ticking.

    • Erusian says:

      I wonder how much of the toxicity he’s describing is linked to the precariousness of most media sources.

      I’ve long thought there’s a direct link between media sources appealing to “mainstream/acceptable” (read, left wing college graduate) sentiment and their lack of funding. That’s a smaller group than most people think. About a third of people, a rough supermajority of whom are liberal, meaning about 20% of the population. Probably less because these effects become much less important at a community college. This means there are slightly more members of the New York Times set than there are African Americans. Yet we somehow intuitively understand that as a niche market yet see mainstream media as… well, mainstream.

      One thing people forget about the golden era of news or orchestras is that common people went to them too. Imagine if opera stars could fill stadiums the same way pop stars could, something that was true within living memory, and you understand intuitively one reason for the decline of opera. Likewise, where opera is the healthiest (Eastern and Central Europe) it’s cheap and easy to get into (or if it isn’t easy, it’s because it’s sold out).

      But investors and reporters are almost universally upper class, white, and leftist, members of that privileged minority. Even the right wingers are mostly heretics from that group. So you have a glut of publications fighting for a small but wealthy part of the populations that already has dominant brands. As with any oversubscribed niche, this means there’s a lot of competition and a lot of people starving trying to win that battle. (This is a similar problem as how tech tends to produce a lot of solutions for technical people, to the point things like cloud hosting for software engineers are hugely overinvested in, while other sectors basically get no attention. This is because most software engineers are software engineers and relatively few of them are, for example, garbagemen. Or ever have been.)

      This is one of the reasons conservative news outlets outcompete liberal ones. Conservative outlets are in a less competitive market, less competitive means more profitable, more profitable means more money to invest or make acquisitions. This point has been made explicitly by Sinclair and the Daily Wire. Of course, it doesn’t have to be political news: one imagines news about anything that doesn’t appeal to that set would work.

  93. Le Maistre Chat says:

    So in A Confederacy of Dunces, is Ignatius Reilly someone the reader is supposed to look down on in contempt for liking old things and being dependent on his mother, or someone wise enough to perceive the link between “monarchy with a tasteful and decent king who has some knowledge of theology and geometry” and enough freedom of thought to cultivate a rich inner life?

    • Nick says:

      Ignatius’s problem wasn’t liking old things, it was… well, every other conceivable personal problem a man can have.

    • jewelersshop says:

      Ignatius likes old things for all the wrong reasons; Nick pretty much nailed it. The bit about Ignatius’ dog is not exactly a “rich inner life.” And the girlfriend who is into all the hot new ideas is not an improvement on Ignatius. (Jones is, I think, the main one to root for, though it’s nice to see Mr. Levy and Patrolman Mancuso and Miss Trixie improve their lots.)
      Just as an aside, I’d never heard of those writing tablets Ignatius uses for his academic diatribes – but my parents were familiar with them as the lined paper that 1st-graders use when learning to print.

    • Well... says:

      I think we’re supposed to lovingly, admiringly, laugh at him for his lack of self-awareness (among other things). We’re supposed to have a similar relationship to characters like Frasier Crane, or Lisa Simpson. And given John Kennedy Toole wrote Ignatius (IIRC) somewhat autobiographically and then killed himself, maybe it’s a “God I fucking hate myself — but please take pity on me” kinda thing.

      Now I’m trying to think of a protagonist we’re supposed to look down on in contempt…maybe Beavis and Butthead?

  94. sharper13 says:

    File among things I learned today and found illustrative:

    The entire active duty Canadian Army (23K) is about half the size of the NYPD (36K).

    Edited to add: Also appears to have twice as many police per capita (411/100K) as Canada (180/100K) does, while Minneapolis (221/100K) is much closer.

    • Trofim_Lysenko says:

      That’s more like 1.6x and I’d argue says waaaay more about the Canadian Army than the NYPD. 3 brigades and change, call it one medium-weight division, and it only makes medium weight because of the 80 or so Leopard 2s they recently bought, and I don’t think they even have all of them in service.

    • SamChevre says:

      I remember reading in something — I think from the 1920’s–that England conquered the world with an army the size the the New York City police force.

    • Ninety-Three says:

      Also appears to have twice as many police per capita (411/100K) as Canada (180/100K) does

      This is what I would expect given the much lower crime rate: there’s just less cop-work to be done in Canada. As an illustrative example, the Canadian city with the most murders per capita is still below the American average.

    • Austin says:

      C’mon man, that’s almost like 2/3rds the size of the NYPD. The state of our armed forces is pretty poor, sadly.

    • sfoil says:

      Expeditionary warfare is much more capital intensive than policing. So the Canadian Armed Forces has has a $22 billion dollar budget compared to the NYPD’s $5.6 billion. Even if only a third of the CAF’s budget is going to “the army” (an estimate, since Canada doesn’t seem to really allocate its budget by service branch), they’re still outspending the NYPD by several billion dollars. Also, even if New York had the same per-capita police presence as Minnesota (and how’s that working out for them lately?) they’d still be at 19K police, which is at least in the ballpark of the Canadian army’s numbers. That being said, NYC is a notoriously heavily-policed city.

  95. Le Maistre Chat says:

    The Hungarian government, which under the Fidesz Party describes itself as “Christian democracy” and “illiberal democracy”, used images of the “Distracted Boyfriend” meme couple for pro-family billboards.

  96. johan_larson says:

    The G7 countries (US, UK, France, Germany, Japan, Canada, and Italy) have differences, but they have a lot in common: they are all first-world democratic nations with mixed economies. But these rather similar nations have very different death rates from COVID-19.

    UK 611/million
    Italy 566/million
    France 450/million
    USA 353/million
    Canada 213/million
    Germany 106/million
    Japan 7/million

    If we include Japan, we have a difference in death rates of 87:1. If we don’t, it’s 5.8:1, which still seems pretty big. It’s strange that similar organizations and institutions trying to solve the same problem end up with such dramatically different results.

    • Eric T says:

      I spent quite a bit of time in Japan, and let me tell you something about them, it is a clean culture. If you’re even a little bit sick, you wear a mask. The subways are so pristine that you could eat food off of the floor (though if you tried the people would glare angrily at you). In my entire stay I don’t think I saw one rat. It’s just…. clean.

      I have no idea if this matters or not, but my intuition says the Japanese are probably uniquely good at following guidelines designed to keep them safe. The culture there values the community over the individual much more than say the USA

      • Jake R says:

        Also, there are zero public trashcans and nobody litters. Not even once, not even a little bit, not ever. I’ve seen parks in the US with trash cans every 20 feet and trash on the ground in between them. Not in Japan.

        • Eric T says:

          Yes this! My first week in Kyoto I was out at a park and had bought some food from a vendor and was eating it outside. VERY aware of the cleanliness, I tried to ask someone where the trash cans are, and they just took my trash from me and put it in their pocket. To this day I feel bad about this interaction.

          • anonymousskimmer says:

            You gave a person the opportunity to do a good deed for a newbie. Don’t feel bad.

          • Anteros says:

            I was going to say something similar. The person who took the trash probably has a good feeling about the interaction. Time to let that bad feeling go!

          • cassander says:

            I’ve often said that the Japanese have a very peculiar sort of nationalism about them. They understand that all foreigners are inferior to Japanese, but they try not to hold it against us, at least to our faces. After all, it’s not our fault that we grew up in horribly uncivilized places that aren’t Japan and never learned any better.

      • DarkTigger says:

        One big thing in Japan might have been sheer luck. The head of the Japanes epedemic prevention agency started his career during the first SARS epedemic, and he applied lessons learned back than to Covid-19. Like if you see a cluster, of cases identify where those people met and put them in quarentine even before you got a diagnosis.
        This was unexpectelty succesful since (like the old SARS) Covid-19 depends on super spreader events.
        Other countries did not do this, because they thought Covid-19 would rely on Superspreader events less. This was an misconception.

      • John Lynch says:

        Yes, my experience while living in Japan, too. Extremely hygenic.

    • Tarpitz says:

      I suspect there are also some big differences in reporting standards going on. Death data is the best way we have of tracking the progress of an outbreak within a country (albeit with significant lag), but I’m not sure it’s good for accurate international comparisons right now.

    • viVI_IViv says:

      It’s puzzling that there are no clear patterns. By geographic proximity the UK is closer to France than Italy, by culture is closer to the US and Canada, by age structure Japan, Germany and Italy are most similar to each other while the US has a much younger population.

    • noyann says:

      Some random ideas.

      The chief of political health decisions in Japan had gotten a crash education during SARS-1 and, lacking hard data in the early phase, reacted from mostly a gut feeling, with a diagnostic emphasis on clusters and immediate isolation of everybody in a detected cluster. Turned out to be the right strategy for the variability in Covid-19’s R.

      The federal chancellor of Germany is a physics professor (show her a formula and she groks the implications), she didn’t have to wait for rising numbers to be alarmed early on. Germans have a high trust in their NPR and in science in general. They believed the early information and started a social distancing before the official lockdown began; the effect can be seen in retrospective.

      The UK suffers the consequences of the early ‘let it burn through’ strategy.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        It might be the people, not the leadership.

        The Asian countries had experience with various outbreaks in recent memory. The people were ready to respond even before the government did.

        France, from what I heard, responded hard to SARS-1, and the people thought it was an overreaction.

        To mix metaphors, experience is a dear teacher and some people get what they need to learn good and hard.

        Germany did well because it’s full of Germans.

        • noyann says:

          Or a better approximation is the combination of people and their government, more precisely, the values selected for by voters and enacted by the elected. We are governed by whom we elect, for criteria important to us, and who we elect lays the foundation for reelection and for trust through demonstration of such criteria. For Japan and Germany, my gut says that transparency, accountability, and demonstrated competence are important parts of these values, but then I wonder about the (rich, industrialized, cultivated, democratic, educated) Switzerland with 224 deaths/million.

          My current feeling is that the search for a simple pattern for Covid-19 death tolls will fail, there is too much interacting here. First it will take some years to get realistic numbers out of the cover-up countries. Then an analysis is bound to include factors as disparate as the wealth of a nation, the culture of compliance with authority*, trust in (and correctness) of media, air humidity and wind speed during the Covid season, style of life (indoors/outdoors; elderly living in family/separately), population density and its variation, group sizes in recreations, schools, and at work, general level of health (smoking, nutrition, sports), … and, and and…
          Create a score for each (easy, eh) and correlate, and my guess is that wildly disparate combinations of factors will have led to similar outcomes.

          * In spirit, not just grudgingly only when observed… A blogger reported from Wuhan that some of the infected smeared their sputum under door handles. To stick it to the Man? “Because If I suffer so shall everybody”?

          • Viliam says:

            I think that Switzerland can be explained by having many Italians working there. Closing the border with Italy would have greater economical impact for them than for any other country, which is why they didn’t do it.

          • noyann says:

            There was an argument saying that, by culture and mentalities, Switzerland was basically a nation consisting of three large chunks that are similar to the three large neighbors.

            But a comparison of Covid numbers and language regions (as a proxy for political culture) doesn’t show more than a crude germanic-romanic distinction (with the Valais being influenced by closer ties to Italy?).

    • 10240 says:

      Early on there was a pretty fast exponential growth. Italy had a doubling time of about 3 days, other countries were similar. A 5-fold difference in the total number of cases may be something like a week’s difference in when they ordered a lockdown.

    • Derannimer says:

      Do the death rates represent “Covid deaths / total pop” or “Covid deaths / Covid cases”? If it’s the former, then isn’t that reflecting both chance of getting Covid in the first place, and also chance of dying once you get it? Those seem like they’d be influenced by very different factors. Idk, it just seems like kind of a messy number.

    • salvorhardin says:

      How believable are the Japanese death numbers?

      • Eric T says:

        Does Japan have a history of lying about this sort of thing? I mean they’re a very open democracy with freedom of the press and a robust civil bureaucracy, you’d think massive death coverups would be really hard for them, at least way more hard than for China.

        • salvorhardin says:

          I don’t think they’re lying. I wonder if they might be fooling themselves. The obvious way to check is to look at overall excess death numbers which aren’t affected by choices on how to classify cause of death– did these not show the spikes in Japan that they did elsewhere?

          • keaswaran says:

            I’m getting conflicting reports on a quick google search, but both claims seem to suggest an overall number of covid deaths that are much lower per capita than the others. (One says the number of excess deaths was negative, and the other says the number of excess deaths in Tokyo was 200 even though the number of reported covid deaths was 16.)

    • One issue is how they decide whether someone died of Covid. I believe in some places, possibly they U.S., they test any corpse that could have been due to Covid, which would include flu deaths among other things, and classify it as Covid if it tests positive. If there is a significant false positive rate, that could substantially inflate the figures. At the other extreme would be only counting people who were hospitalized with the appropriate symptoms, tested positive, shows the usual sequence of further symptoms, and died.

  97. b_jonas says:

    There’s a pair of statements repeated frequently about how effective condoms are for preventing unwanted pregnancies. Where do they come from and should I trust them?

    The first says that if a man and woman has an active sex life and wants to use condoms for contraception, then there’s 18% (or 20%) chance per year that they’ll get pregnant, and that most of this chance probably comes from the couple having sex without a condom or using the condom incorrectly a few times. I can more or less believe this number, because this is something that should be easy to study if you just give people free condoms and free pregnancy tests, and in exchange ask them that you’ll call them back a year from now with one simple question.

    The second claim is that if a man and woman definitely uses a condom every time they have sex, and they don’t do something stupid like reusing condoms, then there’s a 2% (or 3% in another source) chance per year that the woman gets pregnant. I don’t understand how anyone could have figured out this number. The two numbers together imply that many couples sometimes choose not to use condoms, even if they don’t want children. So to get this statistics, you would have to get someone to observe the lady in the bedroom every day and check whether they’re actually use condoms for sex. And you’d have to do this with thousands of couples for at least months, and with hundreds of couples who do always use condoms for a year. It seems unlikely that anyone could have actually done such a study. Instead, the 3% number sounds like something a condom manufacturer has invented because it sounds reasonably safe, but also makes it unlikely that someone will try to demand compensation if they do get pregnant despite using condoms. So can you please point me to an actual primary source for where this statistics comes from?

    • Thomas Jorgensen says:

      At a guess, they just asked people in the above study if they ever neglected to use condoms and assumed 100% honesty from their respondents, and that gave them the 98 number as a lower bound.

    • Oldio says:

      IIRC the 3% number is perfect use, the 18% number is typical use, aka assuming they made a mistake using them a few times. 3% assumes they made no mistakes.

      • Ninety-Three says:

        That doesn’t address b_jonas’ question of how exactly cases are getting labeled as perfect or typical use in order to generate those percentages.

        • Oldio says:

          Having never used the things, I’m not really sure what constitutes perfect use, but had a general understanding that it contrasted with the “spherical chicken in a vacuum mathematical average of users” in some way.

    • TomParks says:

      This is a 2011 review of data from multiple studies: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3638209/

      The authors address limitations in what can be known through self-reporting about contraception use, so even if you’re more interested in questions of epistemology than in the efficacy of different contraception types, you may find the whole thing worth reading.

      Side note: This is my first post, so if I haven’t violated commenting standards, it’s purely accidental.

      • Anteros says:

        Hello, welcome, and you probably can’t rely on beginners luck forever..

        • TomParks says:

          I’ll be relying on beginner’s luck, a cursory glance at the directions, attention to role models and a willingness to leave if the sort of thing I like isn’t this sort of thing. That’s as far as I’m willing to go.

          • Anteros says:

            I don’t think @TomParks needs those – strikes me as a naturally civilised being already. But yes, recommended reading nonetheless.

          • b_jonas says:

            @Anteros: You can tell that from just two comments, despite that we’ve got several reports when a reader was confused about a ban for a regular commenter, but later changed their mind when they looked at specific (but not deleted) comments that Scott linked to?

          • Anteros says:

            If I gave the impression that it wasn’t worth @TomParks reading the comments policy, it wasn’t one I intended.
            First impressions, that’s all.

          • TomParks says:

            Thank you for @b_jonas for the link to Scott’s comment rules. That was what I was obliquely referencing in my commitment to giving a cursory glance at the directions. I know I’ve seen them before, but they were hard to find again when I was trying to locate them.

      • b_jonas says:

        Thank you. That article references two studies, a larger one with publication date 1999 and a smaller one with publication date 2003. The second study is unconvincing, but the first study does seem good. The study is based on self-reporting, but the method is good enough that the results are believable. Hundreds of participants agreed to record every intercourse in a diary for six months, and there were very few dropouts.

        The study also randomizes latex condoms (the commercially more common type) versus non-latex condoms, and finds that non-latex condoms are harder to use correctly. The alarming conclusion is that if you agree to participate in such a study, you have a few percent chance to get pregnant just because you were assigned a non-latex condom. Now I’m curious if there are any new studies, because maybe commercial latex condoms have improved in quality in the two decades since.

        • Protagoras says:

          Nonetheless, over a six month period I would expect a considerable number of reporting errors, so I would trust the numbers for perfect use for methods that require less effort on the part of the user to be more accurate. Though I suppose even if the condoms themselves almost never fail, and it’s almost always user error, telling people that means people who are overconfident about how prone they themselves are to error (which is to say, people) will overestimate how well the method will work for them. Still, I think that’s better than the situation where some people use “they have such a high failure rate” as a reason not to bother to use condoms.

    • keaswaran says:

      My impression is that some of these numbers for the year are likely extrapolated from smaller time periods. We figure out the half-life of certain radioisotopes in the millions of years, because we look at large samples for small periods of time, and presumably we can do the same thing for condom use – look at a large enough sample of couples for a small enough number of sexual encounters, where we can be highly confident that a condom was used correctly in each encounter.

  98. Tatterdemalion says:

    As I read this, you’re saying – or at least, quoting someone saying – that “treating black people worse white people when all the information about them other than race that you have is the same, purely because of their race, because black people are worse that white people” falls outside your – or at least their – definition of racism.

    Have I understood that correctly?

    • SamChevre says:

      I think you are misunderstanding what Sean Last is saying: this is an issue with statistical data. “Equally qualified” is hard to define–is everyone with a high school diploma “equally qualified?”

      Sean Last’s point is that is there is significant discrimination, equal paper qualifications will not reflect equal expected abilities. So it’s to be expected that employers’ expectations aren’t the same for people with “the same qualifications”–just as colleges don’t consider a high school diploma from Bronx High School of Science and one from a random high school in the Bronx the same.

      • Tatterdemalion says:

        I’m not quite sure what you mean, I’m afraid – I can see two possible interpretations – either

        1) In the real world, employers have information about employees rather than their qualifications, which may correlate with race even when you control for correlations, and which it may be legitimate to discriminate on the basis of

        2) How good an employee someone will make correlates with race when you control for qualifications, and so it is legitimate to take race into account when choosing between two identically-qualified people about whom you have no other information.

        If you’re saying 1) then my response is that that is possible (although I’m somewhat sceptical about it being a strong effect; I suspect that controlling for qualifications filters out a lot of things). But identical-resume tests specifically filter out that effect – the only information available to hirers other than race in those tests is identical – so that effect, if it exists, can’t explain the discrimination they find.

        My response was based on the assumption that Last and Atlas were arguing for 2), and I think anyone arguing for 2) has to answer that question.

      • Tatterdemalion says:

        1) In the real world, employers have information about employees rather than their qualifications, which may correlate with race even when you control for correlations, and which it may be legitimate to discriminate on the basis of

        It’s too late to edit this paragraph, so I’m just going to have to rewrite it. I was sober when I wrote it, I swear.

        In the real world, employers have information about employees other than their qualifications, which may correlate with race even when you control for qualifications, and which it may be legitimate to discriminate on the basis of.

      • AG says:

        One example is discrimination against the homeless. Two people may have gone to college and gotten the same CS degree. Both join startup companies. One of the startups craters, leaving that person homeless (living in their car, or couch-surfing). Job applications commonly require having a permanent address.

    • Spookykou says:

      I think the implication is supposed to be that the ‘information’ about them is the same, in that they both were admitted to college X but if college X practices affirmative action, and you are cognizant of this, then them both having been accepted does not actually mean they have the same ‘information’ because(You assume) the black student got into the program because of affirmative action and so presumably did not actually have the same level of attainment to get into the same university program. Effectively, the claim is that the information is a lie, not because a black person is inherently worse than a white person, but because AA means you can’t trust the information you are getting because it preferences people who otherwise have worse performance in this particular way.

      Of course this seems like it should only apply in a situation where the only information you can get from the applicant is that they were accepted into a university program, which seems like an oddly limited supply of information on a perspective applicant.

      Generally my understanding is that racism in hiring is hard to justify from an efficiency standpoint because even a brief interaction can reveal that the black applicant is actually smarter/better suited than the white(or whoever) applicant, or vice versa, and or if the two applicants actually have any meaningful differences at all.

      • Thomas Jorgensen says:

        .. Okay, I am just going to inject this here. If you give two cents about affirmative action and are also not literally waving a sign outside a college protesting legacy admissions, you need to take a very, very hard look in the mirror. Far, far more, and far less qualified people benefit from the second.

      • Tatterdemalion says:

        .. Okay, I am just going to inject this here. If you give two cents about affirmative action and is also not literally waving a sign outside a college protesting legacy admissions, you need to take a very, very hard look in the mirror. Far, far more, and far less qualified people benefit from the second.

        Absolutely. Also athletic, musical etc scholarships are heavily abused.

      • SamChevre says:

        I think “far more” is accurate, but my recollection was that the qualifications were much more similar for legacies than for African-Americans–for legacies, it was much closer to a tie-breaker.

        I’ve argued in favor of legacy admissions before on SSC.

      • Thomas Jorgensen says:

        Being a legacy and being african american are both reported to be worth 150-200 sat points, depending on the school.

        But legacies tend to go to better than average primary and high schools, so if they still need a 150 point lift to get in after that, their native intelligence is going to be quite a lot worse than the african-american affermative action admit at the same score. And there are so. Many. More. Of them.

      • SamChevre says:

        reported to be 150-200 points…

        Do you have a source handy? I definitely want to update my priors if that’s the case.

        The data I was remembering was from Michigan (Gratz case) where the difference was considerably larger (340 points, or 3.0 vs 4.0 GPA)

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        Great, but I don’t think employers have the information about whether or not someone from Degree Program X was a legacy admission or not.

        So it’s not, “employers don’t bias against legacies but do bias against blacks because racism,” it’s “employers bias against people they know may have gotten extra help to get their credentials.” If the “education” section of resumes for applicants who were admitted on a legacy basis came with an asterisk you’d see the same behavior.

      • Tatterdemalion says:

        So it’s not, “employers don’t bias against legacies but do bias against blacks because racism,” it’s “employers bias against people they know may have gotten extra help to get their credentials.” If the “education” section of resumes for applicants who were admitted on a legacy basis came with an asterisk you’d see the same behavior.

        Disagree. Racial discrimination was a thing well before affirmative action, and is a thing in fields where people don’t have qualifications. Affirmative action is mostly just an excuse – and a transparent one at that – for racial discrimination, not a big part of the reason for it.

      • albatross11 says:

        Affirmative action programs are usually an instance of discrimination, though I think the original version of the idea was just to make an extra effort to recruit people from underrepresented groups. Basically, send recruiters to historically-black colleges and womens’ colleges, advertise for jobs in Spanish-language media, stuff like that. And that part seems perfectly reasonable and inoffensive to me, whereas the intentional racial discrimination seems like a terrible policy.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        Thomas Jorgensen

        Thanks for raising the point. What proportion of Ivy students are legacies? For other prestigious universities?

        What about in-state students at state universities?

        Athletic and other talent scholarships?

      • johan_larson says:

        What proportion of Ivy students are legacies? For other prestigious universities?

        About a third of Harvard students are legacies.

        https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/07/harvards-freshman-class-is-more-than-one-third-legacy.html

        In fairness, some of those legacy students would have made it without the legacy bump. The brains and diligence to make it to Harvard, and access to the sort of resume-building preparatory program that makes you a viable candidate, almost certainly run in families.

        The interesting figure would be what portion of current students would not have made it if legacy status didn’t count for anything

      • Thomas Jorgensen says:

        … And so would some of the african american students. Since the bump in admittance odds is about the same, roughly the same fraction.

        Note, using any of this for hiring is asinine in either case- if they are a graduate, the relevant measure of their skills is their performance at uni, not prior to it, just bloody well ask for a full transcript.

        But most of the complaining about AA is from parents clutching their pearls about their offspring having worse odds of admittance, (or, uncharitably, their precious offspring having to hang out with non-melanin deficient people) and by raw number of spots being handed out in a less than perfectly meritocratic manner, the people they should be directing their wrath at is not minorities, it is the legacies.

        Since I hardly ever see anyone want to make reforms that impact them, well.. I dont feel I am making a huge leap when I suspect racism. Just a very small step.

        Note that AA is also pretty asininely designed given its goals – One of the theoretic points of it is that minorities get a crappy deal in pre-university education, and thus, a 1450 sat score earned after graduating from “Inner City Slum School, Metal detectors everywhere variant 2b” indicates rather more potential than a 1450 score from “Hothouse school, variant 7a”. But the actual effect is, of course, to give AA who go to 7a a huge leg up while not helping the kids (regardless of race) from 2b at all, and that fact also makes most of the rest of the goals pretty moot – The AA kid from 7a is going to be a whole damn lot like whity-mac-whityface from the same school.

        If the Ivies wanted actual diversity of students and to mine for brilliance being overlooked in rough circumstances, the SAT is not the way to go, just use raw class rankings.

      • albatross11 says:

        But most of the complaining about AA is from parents clutching their pearls about their offspring having worse odds of admittance, (or, uncharitably, their precious offspring having to hang out with non-melanin deficient people) and by raw number of spots being handed out in a less than perfectly meritocratic manner, the people they should be directing their wrath at is not minorities, it is the legacies.

        Okay, so imagine that the policies worked the other way: say black students had slightly higher admissions requirements than white students. In that case, wouldn’t the complaining also be from parents “clutching their pearls about their offspring having worse odds of admittance?” Or might there be other reasons someone would object to racial discrimination in education, even if they weren’t concerned for their own kids’ admissions outcomes?

        If we lived in that world, black parents would be pissed off, and I’d agree with them. In our world, however, policies that disadvantage my kids in admissions are acceptable, and policies that disadvantage Asian kids are even more acceptable. You’re welcome to think ill of me for thinking those policies are bad ones, but that’s not going to win my support for a policy of intentionally disadvantaging my kids.

        Also, if you look around a bit, you can find a lot of people arguing against racial discrimination in university admissions on principle. It’s possible to assume they’re (we’re) all secretly racists who don’t care about principles, in much the same way it was possible that everyone who supported the invasion of Iraq was a secret America-hater who loved Saddam. And indeed, those two arguments are equally convincing.

      • Legacy admissions and affirmative action admissions both result in admitting people with lower qualifications than they would otherwise have. If your objection to either is that doing so is unfair it applies to both. If your objection is that both reduce the value of the information provided by a degree, and so result in a worse sorting of people into jobs, that also applies to both. An employer can partly compensate for the distortion produced by affirmative action by taking account of it in hiring decisions, since he can tell if an applicant is black. But he cannot compensate for the lower quality of information about black applicants, since he doesn’t know which ones would have been admitted even without affirmative action. Since he does not know if an applicant was a legacy, he can compensate for neither the worsened information about legacy applicants vs non-legacy applicants nor the lack of information about which legacy applicants would have been admitted even without the legacy advantage.

        The main difference between the two cases is their objective. Legacy admissions has, I think, two related objectives. One is to encourage alumni donations. The other is to make the body of students and alumni into an ingroup, an “us,” an extended family, a pattern dramatically visible in college football games. Affirmative action has as its stated objective making African-Americans better off.

        The negative effects described above undercut the latter objective. African-Americans are less well sorted into schools. As Thomas Sowell argued a long time ago, the mathematically talented African-Amerian, in the top ten percent of the American population by that measure, ends up in MIT, where he is at the bottom of the class, the rest being from the top one percent, instead of at RIT or IIT where he would fit in just fine as an average student. One result is that he gets a less good education. Another is that his fellow MIT students observe who is in the bottom of the class and draw the obvious conclusion, whether or not they are willing to admit it. Both undercut the objective.

        The second effect is to encourage rational discrimination, because of the reduced value of the degree — what a Harvard degree tells a potential employee is different depending on his race. That effect might benefit the African-American who otherwise would not have been admitted to Harvard, but harms the one who would have been.

        So the main difference I see between the two cases is that legacy admissions achieves its objective while having undesirable consequences in terms of other desiderata. Affirmative action has undesirable consequences which, among other things, undercut its objective, possibly enough to make the net effect on African-Americans negative.

      • The interesting figure would be what portion of current students would not have made it if legacy status didn’t count for anything

        And what proportion of black students would not have been admitted if race didn’t count for anything. Those, not the total number of each group, are the relevant measure of the size of two biases.

        An even better measure would be that number weighted by how far below the normal cutoff each accepted student was.

      • Thomas Jorgensen says:

        … And if people argued for strictly meritocratic admission, or admission by lottery, I would respect that. Hell, that is the system I live and studied under under, and I am fine with it.

        It is the fact that people want to strip the advantage AA students get due to their parentage from them while preserving the advantage legacies get due to their parentage that gets my goat. US university admissions are twisted into a 9 dimensional pretzel, only straightening out the part that helps the downtrodden while leaving the rest in place is not reform, it is just top down class war.

        Also.. Encouraging endowment donations? Harvard has an endowment of in excess of 40 billion. They should be ashamed of themselves both for charging tuition and for accepting donations. Seriously, they are supposed to be an university, not a hedgefund.

        And again, what is wrong with asking for a full transcript? Does any real employer really give two shits how conscientious someone was in the middle of the puberty hormone storm that is highschool, or is this just a fancy sounding rationalization?

      • johan_larson says:

        And what proportion of black students would not have been admitted if race didn’t count for anything.

        That figure, we have.

        The Harvard admissions office conducted a study of what the representation of various groups would be under four scenarios:
        1. Admission by academics only.
        2. Admission by academics, legacy status, and athletics.
        3. Admission by academics, legacy status, athletics, extracurriculars and personal factors.
        4. Admission by all of the above, plus demographics.

        The portion of the class that would consist of African Americans in each case would have been:
        1. 0.67%
        2. 1.83%
        3. 2.3%
        4. 11.2%

        So, best bet, if Harvard eliminated AA, and kept the rest of its admissions criteria the same, it would admit roughly one in five of the African American students it currently admits.

      • AliceToBob says:

        @Thomas Jorgensen

        But most of the complaining about AA is from parents clutching their pearls about their offspring having worse odds of admittance, (or, uncharitably, their precious offspring having to hang out with non-melanin deficient people)…

        Acknowledging that your comment is uncharitable doesn’t make it any less ignorant.

        …and by raw number of spots being handed out in a less than perfectly meritocratic manner, the people they should be directing their wrath at is not minorities, it is the legacies.

        I, and many others I know, have plenty of disdain for *both* AA and legacy admissions.

        Since I hardly ever see anyone want to make reforms that impact them, well.. I dont feel I am making a huge leap when I suspect racism. Just a very small step.

        Yes, the predictable judgement: “you’re a racist”.

        Look, I don’t like legacy admissions. But I’m also not going to support any policies based on race that limit educational opportunities for kids, mine or otherwise. I don’t care what euphemism is fashionable right now: AA, racial rebalancing, personality tests… it’s all grotesque. Part of that is due to the (thankfully, limited) racism I’ve encountered, and the extensive racism my parents and grandparents faced in their time.

        Yours is a cute rhetorical trick; people push back against racial discrimination in the admissions process, and you manage to label them racists for it. I think you’re shooting yourself in the foot with this tactic, so please continue.

        Anyhow, I just kissed my mixed-asian kids before sending them off to daycare, and now this racist is going to do some work so I can save for their 529s.

      • Matt M says:

        I think part of the reason people hate AA more than legacies is that AA seems newer, and also less an inherent/intuitive aspect of the human condition.

        Like, no matter how meritocratic we’re told America is supposed to be, I think most of us just sort of expect that the natural order of things is such that Harvard will prefer the sons and daughters of rich alumns. We may not like it, but we don’t expect we can do much about it. Society has pretty much always worked that way, and do what we might to try and resist it, it’ll continue to.

        But AA is not only very new (therefore, we know it’s not inevitable), but it also seems almost opposed to human nature. We naturally prefer our own – setting up incentives to punish our own and reward others seems almost deliberately counter-intuitive.

        So if your son loses out to a legacy, your reaction is “Well that sucks, but that’s kinda just how society is and there’s not much to be done about it.” But if your son loses out to AA, it’s “wait a second, we can reverse this injustice immediately, AA is an intentional policy we recently adopted and we can just as easily un-adopt it.” We are generally accustomed to the idea that we might occasionally lose out, even though our merits would suggest we should win, to people of greater wealth and status (the conventional view of privilege). We are very much not accustomed to or expecting that we might lose out to people of less wealth and status (the modern form of privilege) and whom are lower than us on meritocratic grounds as well.

      • albatross11 says:

        Thomas Jorgensen:

        For public institutions, I think we want as close as possible to pure merit-based admissions. I understand that there’s some fuzziness about what that should entail (how much weight do you give extracurriculars vs test scores vs personal story), but I think any form of discrimination on the basis of race, religion, native language, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, or sexual identity should not be allowed.

        For private institutions, I think it’s their business whom they let in, and not really a matter for public debate. But for that to be reasonable, it has to apply to everyone, not just Ivy League schools with great connections and wealth, and it has to apply to all directions of discrimination, not just the ones acceptable to the powerful. Harvard can continue to discriminate against Asians and I can continue to think they’re doing something nasty and getting away with it (not facing much public backlash) thanks to their vast influence.

      • I think part of the reason people hate AA more than legacies is that AA seems newer,

        I think part of the reason is that our society in general, and especially that part of it that most supports affirmative action, claims that what is particularly virtuous about us is the opposition to racial discrimination. Lots of people are unhappy with the fact that things are better for rich people than poor people, but nobody claims they aren’t.

        And then the same people who say “isn’t it terrible that some employers discriminate against blacks when blacks who done nothing to deserve it” support discriminating against Asians and for blacks.

        A further cause of annoyance is that the previous round, a few decades before I was born, consisted of universities discriminating against Jews for the same reason they now discriminate against Asians.

      • Matt M says:

        They’re still discriminating against Jews (as Jews are lumped into the generic category of “white”, which is discriminated against). Just not as heavily as Asians, and not as specifically targeted.

      • @Matt:

        Given that they are discriminating in favor of blacks and against Asians, I’m not sure if the net effect on whites is positive or negative.

        Checking some numbers, it looks as though total Asian college enrollment is probably a little lower than total black enrollment, since the black population is a little more than twice the Asian and the black enrollment rate a little more than half the Asian.

        But that’s looking at all schools, and my guess is that there are few would-be students of any racial groups who can’t get in somewhere.

        If I look at the Harvard figures, the number of Asians appears to be more than twice the number of blacks. I haven’t seen figures on how much Harvard discriminates against Asians, but if non-discriminatory admissions would let in 50% more Asians, the current discrimination frees up more places than are occupied by all of the black students.

        So it may well be the case that the net effect of discrimination by Harvard, positive and negative, is that they admit more white students than a race blind admissions policy would.

        P.S. Some more googling gives a lower ratio of Asians to blacks admitted to Harvard than I first came up with, so my calculation above may be off.

      • Matt M says:

        David,

        The same mechanisms they use to discriminate against Asians, they also use to discriminate against whites (that is to say, whites also score lower on personality assessments, are less likely to be admitted at any given SAT score, etc.)

        You just don’t hear about it as much because Asians have it much worse, and are far more sympathetic of a group.

      • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

        @Matt M
        Sauce? The 2017 statistics have white students having a slightly below-average SAT score.

      • Aapje says:

        @Matt M

        They’re still discriminating against Jews

        No, by lumping Jews in with gentiles, the discrimination is offloaded to gentiles. They are underrepresented, while Jews are very overrepresented.

        It’s very similar, (but with the opposite sign), to how the lumping in of recent African migrants with the ancestors of slaves results in the 1st/2nd generation African migrants being immensely overrepresented, while the descendants of slaves are very underrepresented.

      • 10240 says:

        @Aapje I don’t follow. If Jews are lumped with white people for discrimination/affirmative action purposes, then they experience the same discrimination in the same direction as whites. That is, if whites are discriminated against, then so are Jews: they are overrepresented, but less overrepresented than if there was no discrimination.

      • Aapje says:

        @10240

        Jews will be slightly less represented compared to the general population when it comes to admission to university, but this will already be far less true come graduation, because exams will filter out some of the less able.

        However, American Ivy universities tend to not fail out students if they can, but let them graduate with a lesser degree, which employers are going to account for. So in reality, the students that do get in on merit will tend to graduate with a top tier degree and will have less competition from others with a top tier degree.

        Due to AA, Jews will probably be more, rather than less over-represented among those with top tier degrees & will probably also be more over-represented at the jobs that demand top tier degrees and/or select both for Ivy degrees and actual ability.

      • 10240 says:

        @Aapje So your argument is basically that discrimination benefits the very good (in any group), because they do get in and graduate regardless of discrimination — but discrimination worsens the overall student pool, so fewer people will be good and have a top-tier degree. I guess this is true for certain values of “good” (especially if the graduation requirements are fixed, rather than adjusted so that approx. a given percentage of students graduate). Among a Jew, a non-Jewish white and a black person of equal abilities, the non-Jewish white and the Jew still have the same chances, and worse than the black person if they are not among the very best; if they are so good that they definitely get in, then they are in an equally good position, and discrimination may benefit them all a bit.

  99. Nancy Lebovitz says:

    A couple of times recently, I try to post a comment and get a “you must be logged in to post” notification, even though I’m apparently logged in. I have to log out and log in again to post.

    Has this been happening to anyone else?

    • souleater says:

      This happened to me for the first time earlier this week.

    • Nick says:

      I get this once in a while. Not sure what does it.

      Another reminder to always copy your comment before posting.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        You’re right, I should save before trying to post.

        Mercifully, when I get the you must log in warning, and I log out and log in, my comment appears in the top text box. I can’t remember whether I can post it there and have it show up where I intended, or if I need to move it to where I wanted it.

    • John Schilling says:

      Sporadically, yes. Haven’t systematically studied the issue; it seems to be less common but not completely vanished now that I’m posting almost exclusively from a single computer.

    • DarkTigger says:

      This happened to me several times.
      I have half a feeling, we get auto-logged off after a certain amount of time (24h?) on the Serversite, but this does not get reported to the browser. So when I logged in during lunch break on one day, and than log in again the next day, the timer ticks of while I’m reading, and than doesn’t show that I’m logged of when I want to comment. Closing and reloading the browser does fix it for me.

    • Viliam says:

      A similar thing happens to me, but I only have to log in.

      I open a page, and I am logged in. I type a comment and submit it. Now somehow I am logged out, and I get “you must be logged in to post”.

    • Mark V Anderson says:

      Constantly. It sucks. This has happened to me ever since we’ve had to log in to comment.

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      Does if matter if you check “remember me” when you log in? I don’t always remember to.

      • Mark V Anderson says:

        I think it happens more often when I don’t check remember me. But it happens either way.

  100. Ninety-Three says:

    An exercise I think might get interesting results with the local commentariat: What is your most controversial/unpopular political view that doesn’t put you in an obvious political camp?

    Personally, I’m opposed to privacy. I think it’s a spook and I hate almost every argument I’ve heard for it, most of which I feel are attempting to spin a disgust response as rooted in consequentialist harm reduction. It’s not that my fondest wish is a city with every square foot under camera surveillance, but when I am elected as ruler of the world, bioethicists are first up against the wall and second are the privacy advocates.

    • Beans says:

      Is this about the politics of privacy, or literally, privacy in the most neutral sense? If the latter, I hope you don’t mind if I stand outside your window for a few hours. Please leave the bathroom door open.

      • Ninety-Three says:

        A little of column A, a little of column B. In a world where everyone’s windows were left open, I assure you that the view through mine would be thoroughly unremarkable and I imagine you’d get bored pretty quickly.

        • Beans says:

          I dunno, if nothing is going to stop me, why don’t I hang around just in case I learn something that will allow me to take advantage of you? I might be a bad guy, after all, and if privacy is not a thing, you’re going to need another justification to prevent me from eavesdropping into stuff that isn’t my business. You’ve got no grounds to tell me to stop watching you, so I’ll just wait around until I learn your schedule and where you hide the spare house keys. Hypothetically.

          • Ninety-Three says:

            You can learn my schedule by observation in the current world, as can you spot my spare house key if I’m stashing it somewhere outside my locked doors (and if I’m not, I don’t particularly care whether you know which kitchen drawer it’s in).

            So why don’t you do those things?

    • John Schilling says:

      Why do you post under a pseudonym?

      • Ninety-Three says:

        Partly decades-old habits and partly signaling. Using your real name on the internet has a certain stuffy formality to it, not only do pseudonyms avoid that but they let me choose a particular thing to project rather than going by Bob Johnson because that’s what chance stuck me with.

        • Eric T says:

          Using your real name on the internet has a certain stuffy formality to

          Heeeeyyyy

        • Well... says:

          Is Bob Johnson actually what chance stuck you with, or was “Bob Johnson” just a generic name you used as an example?

          [ETA] Another question for Ninety-three: when you shit in a public bathroom stall, do you close the door?

          Also, do you believe in other people’s privacy? Like, do you think it’s ridiculous that the women’s lockerroom at the gym should be hidden behind a wall and a door?

          • Nick says:

            If so then I’m pretty sure, FWIW, that using a short name like “Rob J” would not have anybody groaning in exasperation at how boring you are.

          • Rob K says:

            @ Nick

            au contraire. Or perhaps it’s not the name.

    • Eric T says:

      I’m also pretty opposed to privacy arguments too but that’s more a side issue for me.

      My most controversial view in my Leftist camp would probably be that I’m a big believer in strong national borders and controlled immigration.

      It seems to me that there a certain moments in history, where depending on the nation’s economic status, more or less immigration would be a boon. If a nation has a dearth of low-skilled workers or an aging workforce, taking in lots of immigrants would be a good thing to do (Japan could probably benefit from this).

      But if a nation is suffering from high unemployment then it seems pretty clear that more workers isn’t going to be good for the country.

      • anonymousskimmer says:

        I want immigration to be something that countries negotiate bilateral treaties about.

        But if a nation is suffering from high unemployment then it seems pretty clear that more workers isn’t going to be good for the country.

        Then you switch immigration preferences to prefer capital.

      • Belisaurus Rex says:

        I’ve been reading your posts in the past few open threads, and what makes you believe that you’re a Leftist?

        You believe in racial IQ differences, strong borders, controlled immigration…what’s next, no universal healthcare either?

        • Eric T says:

          You believe in racial IQ differences

          Yeah but like… only a little. I still think that systemic or historic biases make up far far more of an exploitative factor. The fact that I learned that modern immigrants from some African countries outperform even Chinese Immigrants make me even more confident of that over a Racial IQ difference since I got here. I am more of a believer in cultural differences but that’s not too weird I think.

          Strong borders, controlled immigration

          As I mentioned, this is probably my most anti-Leftist view.

          Things I do believe in in case you doubt my leftist cred:
          -Universal healthcare
          -Free college/cancelling student debt
          -Lowered military/police spending
          -Reparations of some sort
          -Welfare Good
          -Abortions Ok
          -LGBT Rights
          -Legalized Weed/Maybe All drugs??
          -Criminal Justice reform (freeing nonviolent drug offenders is a chief priority)
          -Anti Private Schools

          The list goes on XP

          ETA: Also was the 4000 word essay on systemic racism not enough to convince you? guess I need to try harder next time.

          • Well... says:

            -Legalized Weed/Maybe All drugs??

            I don’t see this as a left-wing thing. For one thing, progressives were the inventors of the war on drugs, and for another thing, progressives have always been there ready to help it along and make sure it never ends. Joe Biden is only one example.

            -Anti Private Schools

            I don’t see this as particularly left-wing either. I guess anti-public schools would be right-wing, or at least libertarian, but anti-private schools to me just maps as some flavor of pro-civic participation.

          • Eric T says:

            For one thing, progressives were the inventors of the war on drugs, and for another thing, progressives have always been there ready to help it along and make sure it never ends. Joe Biden is only one example.

            I think this confuses the Democratic Party with the more Left Wing/Progressive part of the Tribe. We’re very pro legal weed.

            I don’t see this as particularly left-wing either. I guess anti-public schools would be right-wing, or at least libertarian, but anti-private schools to me just maps as some flavor of pro-civic participation.

            Maybe? The only other people I know who are against private schools are Leftists

          • Well... says:

            I’m aware of the progressive/Democrat distinction, but I used the word progressives deliberately there. It really was progressives who started the war on drugs. They happened to be Democrats too but that’s neither here nor there.

            I don’t think people’s thoughts on weed represent very much else. I suppose if someone was very anti-weed it might predict them being very mainline/partisan/big-R Republicans, but that’s it.

            I’ve met very few people who earnestly support the full legalization of all drugs, and the sentiment doesn’t seem to be concentrated on the left more than anywhere else. If anything it seems to be more common among people who expressly reject well-known ideological packages.

          • Matt M says:

            I think the crossover between “weed should be legal” and “vaping should be illegal” is actually pretty big.

            Which shows it’s more about aesthetic preferences than deeply held ideological values regarding individual autonomy or whatever…

          • Aftagley says:

            For one thing, progressives were the inventors of the war on drugs

            This is wildly inaccurate.

            President Nixon is the us president who created the War on Drugs and established the DEA. Nixon also established the schedule and codified our perspective on drugs which drugs were illegal. Reagan expanded it’s scope and doubled down on the stricter sentencing laws and Bush senior is the president who began shaping our foreign policy and military/Intel assets to go after drug producers internationally.

            If you want to go back, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics was the original federal agency designed to go after illegal drugs, founded in 1930 by conservative president Hoover.

            At best you can say that the war on drugs was a conservative-led effort that progressives went along with because they didn’t want to look weak on crime.

          • cassander says:

            @Aftagley says:

            The war gets started with Harrison Narcotics Act and Prohibition under Woodrow Wilson, and both were firmly supported by progressive. It’s true that the progressives eventually gave up on alcohol, but you can’t write that out of the history of prohibition. And calling hoover a conservative is a bit silly, he was the was the most progressive president in american history in 1930.

          • Aftagley says:

            The Harrison Narcotics Tax Act? The one that kept them legal and prescribable but imposed a tax and meant you couldn’t advertise them?

            I think you really, really, have to squint if you want to tie that to our modern drug war. Heck, you can make just as compelling an argument that this was a natural outgrowth of the 1906 Pure Food Act (under Teddy, arguably someone who could fit in either as a conservative or progressive depending on the topic). For the record, I think even the 1934 act was separate enough from our modern prosecution of drugs to not really be applicable.

            As for prohibition, maybe? But there were just as many evangelicals marching out there with the suffragets to end the tyranny of booze.

          • cassander says:

            @Aftagley

            I think you really, really, have to squint if you want to tie that to our modern drug war.

            Not nearly as hard as you have to squint to (A) ignore alcohol prohibition, and (B) ignore the importance of the legal precedents that the Harrison act established.

            As for prohibition, maybe? But there were just as many evangelicals marching out there with the suffragets to end the tyranny of booze.

            Implying that the religious were’t progressive, which definitely wasn’t the case.

          • The fact that I learned that modern immigrants from some African countries outperform even Chinese Immigrants make me even more confident of that over a Racial IQ difference since I got here.

            You can’t assume that all African populations are the same. Quite a long time ago, the Ibo were being described as the Jews of Africa. I could be wrong, but my guess is that that’s who the Nigerians immigrating to the U.S. mostly are.

            I would also expect African immigrants in general, under current circumstances, to be on average from the upper levels of African society.

            I am more of a believer in cultural differences but that’s not too weird I think.

            That’s Thomas Sowell’s view as well, at least in Ethnic America. As I remember the argument, he thinks southern plantation slavery, basically living in a miniature centrally planned society, created a much less functional culture than West Indian peasant slavery, and that that explains the relative success of West Indian immigrants.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            As I remember the argument, [Sowell] thinks southern plantation slavery, basically living in a miniature centrally planned society, created a much less functional culture than West Indian peasant slavery, and that that explains the relative success of West Indian immigrants.

            ???
            Caribbean plantations were famous for working the slaves to death, while cotton and tobacco plantations were humane enough that slave populations continued to grow by internal fecundity after the British (Navy) abolished the trade.
            That’s a downright Nietzschean analysis of which social experiences produce better cultures, if you’re remembering it correctly.

          • John Schilling says:

            Slaves who are worked to death in three years don’t produce a better culture; they produce no culture at all. Or at least no enduring one. By process of (literal) elimination, the Afro-Carribean culture would have been dominated or at least disproportionately influenced by the small minority of slaves working in domestic or other service positions, with little cultural input from the short-lived agricultural work force.

          • Thomas Jorgensen says:

            …Yhea, that is daft, if you want to look for an origin of dysfunction in african american culture, the obvious big thing is Jim Crow and other relatively recent mallet blows to the noggin that subsection of the US got. Jim Crow was literally a terrorist campaign that promised death to any african american that became visibly successful. See: Tulsa. And a lot of other crap. That sort of thing is going to leave scars.

          • Jaskologist says:

            The rates for out of wedlock births in the AA community have roughly tripled since 1965. Whatever the cause, it doesn’t seem plausible that it’s Jim Crow laws, which have gotten much better in that time span.

          • bullseye says:

            Slaves who are worked to death in three years don’t produce a better culture; they produce no culture at all. Or at least no enduring one. By process of (literal) elimination, the Afro-Carribean culture would have been dominated or at least disproportionately influenced by the small minority of slaves working in domestic or other service positions, with little cultural input from the short-lived agricultural work force.

            The high death rate doesn’t mean there weren’t many agricultural slaves at the time of abolition; it means that the agricultural slaves at the time of abolition were mostly new arrivals from Africa. So I’d expect black Caribbeans to have more African culture than African-Americans do, and looking at religion it appears that is the case.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            20 years I spent a few years trying to disprove genetic causes for AA under-performing. It became a “God of the gaps” exercise. I could create an Objection, because maybe theory X was true instead or you hadn’t accounted for explanation Y. That would last a few months until I found someone who could take it apart. Then I would repeat the cycle, with the same result.

            It’s probably true that there is a significant genetic cause. [1] It will take a long time to really prove, probably after I’m dead, because racists desperately want it to be true and will flood the zone with all kinds of bad studies, kind of doing the “God of the gaps” from the other direction by making stupid assumptions that can shortly be dismissed. There’s some irony. [2]

            If we accept it, we can work on better social remedies. For example, stop insisting that Just One More Educational Fix will change our underclass into architects. Right now it’s universal Pre-K. Each time the Just One More Educational Fix fails to produce results, support for the welfare state weakens. Admit that we aren’t going to fix it, that we’re just going to have millions of people (of all races, whites may well outnumber blacks here) who cannot excel at intelligence-oriented tasks, and proceed from there.

            [1] The basic argument for is that there is some genetic basis for intelligence and distinct population groups will always drift on things that have genetic components. So you can either disbelieve in evolution, or disbelieve in intelligence. You see a lot of “well I don’t think there’s any such thing as intelligence” among certain people, and that’s because of the repugnant conclusion it leads to. [2]

            [2] Just because racists want it true doesn’t make it false. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence, and reversed racism is not justice.

          • albatross11 says:

            Edward Scizorhands:

            I think the situation is too complicated to conclude that the IQ gap is mainly environmental or mainly genetic in origin. Probably some of each, but who knows? Untangling that looks like a hard research question, to me. Also, genetic isn’t the same as intractable. For example, suppose it turned out that the IQ gap was caused by vitamin D deficiencies in blacks because of darker skin–that would be a genetic cause of a difference that could be solved by giving blacks vitamin D supplements or buying them all sunlamps or something. Suppose it turned out that the IQ gap was caused entirely by some deep-seated thing in American black culture, and the only way to repair it was for black kids to be raised in middle-class white homes. That would be intractable–to try to solve the problem would be a godawful crime against humanity.

            But I think we have another problem that gets missed a lot in the (IMO kinda dumb) debate about whether group differences should be mentioned in public.

            What most everyone gets: The existence of a difference in outcomes does not imply that something bad is happening, in the presence of group differences. Blacks go to prison more than whites and also commit more crimes per capita than whites, so problem solved, right?

            What most everyone misses: The existence of group differences and outcome differences in the same direction doesn’t mean that you know how much of the outcome differences come from the group differences. Maybe blacks commit more crime per capita than whites, and also the police come down on them harder when they do. Or maybe they come down less hard. The answer isn’t obvious, you have to look for evidence and try to untangle what’s going on. The answer is probably knowable, but it’s not automatic.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Sure, it’s not fully genetic. I just said significantly genetic.

            There is some good evidence that some cops are racist. And this is probably worse when you are poor, if you have a police system set up to be run for profit.

      • Simulated Knave says:

        Interestingly, there are some solid arguments that adding immigrants doesn’t help that much with aging populations (unless they’re immigrants who have lots of kids, obv).

        The thing is, most immigrants bring their families soonr or later. Including their elderly relatives. So their actual contribution to the average age of the country is less than one would expect.

        Since one of the major concerns about the aging workforce is the massive cost to healthcare systems, the potential follow-on problems are obvious.

    • anonymousskimmer says:

      I want the military to transition from the caste-influenced enlisted/officer division.

      My preferred mechanism of doing this is:

      Currently the US military academies take a certain portion of their cadets from the enlisted ranks. I want this to become 100%. I also want the same for the ROTCs, with the sole exception for non-command specialties (e.g. surgeons, lawyers, etc…). For the non-command specialties I want the warrant officer ranks expanded all the way to W-11, and I want the non-command officers to have these ranks instead of the standard O ranks.

      For these non-command ranks I want to introduce enlisted-to-officer conversion paths for the likes of EMTs/nurses->doctors/nurse-practitioners and paralegals->lawyers, etc…. And then maybe eventually do the same for them as for the command-line ranks (e.g. require those who want to be surgeons/doctors/lawyers to serve as EMTs/paralegal grunts first).

      Every command-line officer will have served as a grunt for at least 6 months to a year before getting the opportunity to command grunts. Even then this will only be an opportunity – should they not get a place in an academy or an ROTC they’ll have to serve out their 2 or 4 year term of as a grunt.

      Castes have no place in a republic of equal citizens.

      • albatross11 says:

        Have any other countries done this? It seems plausible to me that it would work out, but I have zero experience in any military organization. I wonder what the SSCers who’ve been in the military or know a lot about it think.

        • johan_larson says:

          It’s not quite the same, but all officers in the Finnish military have served as ordinary conscripts first. To be accepted to the military academy you have to completed your conscript service, and have done well enough during it to be selected for extended NCO or reserve-officer training.

          • nimim.k.m. says:

            To add some viewpoint on this.

            For me, the enlisted – commissioned officer hierarchy has been always difficult to mentally translate into Finnish every time the subject comes up. There is a word literally translated as “underofficer” which corresponds to NCOs, then there are “officers” who have ranks and duties approximately corresponding to “commissioned officer” (those I suppose would include both active duty and reserve officers, where reserve officers are conscripts selected for officer training, and active duty officers who have completed academy and will try to get into the higher command hierarchy). From technical point of view, they all form a hierarchy of ranks as in any NATO-compatible Western military, and all separate officer classes, active duty career officers, reserve officers and “underofficers”, have had different training for different tasks and duties. However, the words for enlistment and commission (and also the weird thing “warrant officer”) are quite meaningless if directly translated. Also, idea of officers who become officers without going through at least a part of same basic training as everybody else sounds like a weird class thing from Britain, like in Marryat’s Royal Navy nautical boys’ book that I read as a kid where grunts were brought in by press gangs and officers were a separate thing consisting of gentlemens altogether.

        • John Schilling says:

          There are a number of countries, including I think Germany and Israel, in which officers are required to serve a year in the enlisted ranks. This seems to work fairly well. However, it is I think pretty clear from the start who are the actual enlisted soldiers and who are the officer candidates putting in their year.

          I don’t think this is realistically avoidable. The job requirements for enlisted and commissioned positions are sufficiently different that you can’t expect to find good officers (as opposed to NCOs) by observing the performance of the enlisted, and you can’t expect people who know they would be good officers to enlist on just the hope that their talents will be noticed. “Mustangs” are a thing, but the good ones are too rare to be the basis for a national military command structure.

          There have been attempts to build classless “people’s armies”, with chains of command but no other rank hierarchy; they generally don’t work very well once the initial wave of revolutionary fervor wears off.

          • Belisaurus Rex says:

            The idea that a commissioned officer straight out of undergrad ROTC could be the superior of a noncom with 30+ years experience just because of a college degree seems mind boggling to me. (Yes I know that in practice the officer would be dumb to boss the noncom around.)

            Is there a justification to this?

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:

            The short version is that it’s the same reason someone hired as a manager with the ink barely dry on their MBA can boss around a subordinate with 20-30 years of experience but without the MBA and the managerial authority: position in the chain of command matters.

            The longer version is that while the skillsets overlap somewhat at the lower levels of organization (Squad, Platoon, and Company), they diverge more and more the higher up you go.

            Officers’ primary task is to provide combat leadership. Their primary expertise is (or at least is supposed to be) tactics and strategy and the ability to read and respond to the tactics and strategy of the enemy in a timely and appropriate manner. This includes other disciplines, the most important being a healthy understanding of logistical issues and how they impact both your and the enemies’ operations (amateurs talk tactics, experts talk logistics), but the other stuff is secondary. Especially secondary, although a lot of militaries tend to forget this, especially in peacetime, is routine HR/Admin type work.

            Non-Commissioned Officers’ primary responsibilities are: moment-to-moment direct supervision of subordinates in the execution of their basic skills, training those subordinates in their skills, and managing the administrative paperwork associated with training and professional development.

            So, an example of how this blends together at the Platoon level (a lot of this comes straight out of what used to be FM 7-8 and I don’t know what they renumbered it to when they redid all the FMs and TMs after I got out of the Army):

            The Platoon Leader (an O-1 or O-2) is in ultimate command of the platoon. He or she is personally responsible for everything it does or fails to do.
            -Maintains “big picture” awareness of his platoon’s status, the enemy’s status, the overall mission per higher, and what his actions need to be to support and accomplish that mission.
            -Is always determining what the next move or series of actions in the overall plan is going to be. A platoon leader always needs to have an answer to “what next?” or “now what do we do?” ready BEFORE the question is asked.
            -Controls the maneuver of his subordinate units (squads) and coordinates them.
            -Requests and controls supporting assets such as CAS, Artillery, UAV recon, etc.

            Now, because the Platoon Leader is a very junior officer, he is almost unique in the military in that he is expected to consult closely with the Platoon Sergeant, and take advantage of the platoon sergeant’s experience.

            The Platoon Sergeant (mopst often E-6 or E-7, preferably an E-7) is the second in command of the Platoon, and just as the Platoon leader is unusually tied to consultation with the PL, the Platoon Sergeant is unusual for an NCO in that he has an active command responsibility IF the PL is taken out. The Platoon Sergeant:
            -Provides expert advice on technical and tactical matters, giving the PL the information the executive needs to make the command decisions.
            -Is focused on translating the PL’s current command into action.
            -Handles logistical issues and resupply and keeps the PL informed of supply states.
            -During peacetime, oversees individual skills training and professional development of junior NCOs and enlisted soldiers.

            Again, note that this is as much overlap as there is. A good Platoon Sergeant pretty much CAN do a Platoon Leader’s job. A Good First Sergeant cannot necessarily do a Company Commander’s job, and a good Battalion or Brigade Command Sergeant Major is definitely not going to be as good as the equivalent officer at the role of Battalion or Brigade Commander. I’m going to stop here and then make another post comparing and contrasting the duties at the Battalion or Brigade level.

          • cassander says:

            To add to Trofim_Lysenko’s excellent response, there is a doubtless apocryphal story of a young cadet being asked what he would do if, while in command of a platoon, he got an order to set up a flag and flagpole. He responds “well, I’d start looking about for some rope and a flag and some men to raise the poll.”

            “Wrong cadet” the instructor responds. “You find a capable sergeant, tell him where you want the pole raised, then move on to your next task.”

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:

            EDIT: Not THAT apocryphal, Cassander, at least in principle. I can personally report to having been (and having seen others) counselled for getting too caught up in the details of execution when in a position where the emphasis is supposed to be on command responsibility.

            So, in my first post, I gave you the example where the is the MOST overlap between Enlisted and Officer functions, at the Platoon level. What about when we get higher? What is a Brigade Commander doing and what is a Brigade NCOIC (Non-Commissioned Officer In Charge) doing?

            A Brigade Commander’s basic tasks are:
            -Managing and driving the “operations” process by providing overall leadership, vision, and guidance to their staff and to subordinate commanders. The “operations process” is a cycle of Planning an operation, Preparing for an operation, Executing an operation, and Assessing that operation’s successes and failures and using that information to prepare for the next operation. Again, note how “big picture” this is. Also note that the first three phases of that operations cycle are where the expertise in maneuvering and employing your units and in large unit strategy and tactics is critical
            -Developing functional teams within the Brigade organization and with external units or partners. In other words, the Commander makes sure his Staff knows how to work together, that his Infantry Battalions can work with his Artillery Battalion, and that he has good working relationships with other brigade commanders, foreign units he may be expected to work with, and other branch assets like Air Force aviation, naval support, etc.
            -Having a total knowledge and understanding of the tactical and strategic situation, the capabilities of your unit and your supporting units, the overall intentions and goals of higher command, enemy capabilities, deployments, and intentions, and any factors that might affect your ability to carry out your mission. Obviously this is never 100% possible, but this is the -goal-.

            So what about the Brigade NCOIC? The Brigade NCOIC’s job is to:
            -Act as the advisor to the Brigade CO on any issues pertaining to management of the enlisted. The closest analogy here would be “Human Resources” in civilian corporatese but the parallel is only partial as at this level you also have dedicated S-1 or Personnel Officer (who the CSM is going to work very closely with).
            -Ensuring that policies are communicated and enforced across the Brigade. This is everything from uniform appearance and facilities maintenance to professional bearing, attitude, and conduct.
            -Ensuring that standards for individual enlisted readiness and training are being met (think Physical Fitness and Weapons testing here as well as personal professional development and counselling for enlisted).
            -During actual combat operations, the Brigade NCOIC becomes a roving representative of the commander, assessing enlisted morale, acting as an agent of the Brigade Commander where needed to send messages or set standards, and pitching in wherever the weight of their authority and experience is needed.

            Note that this is more general because A) the higher up you go the harder it is to get detailed without going into a huge amount of detail that will make this a slog to get through and B) I have less personal experience with this level of organization. However, I think comparing and contrasting the two NCOIC/OIC pairings illustrates the difference. If you take some time to think about it, I think you can see how the two tracks diverge in terms of focus and expertise.

            A butterbar is getting at least as much training from their nominally subordinate Platoon Sergeant as they are from the Company XO and CO, but by the time they’ve become an XO themselves they’re -mostly- getting guidance from the CO and Battalion Commander and Staff and much less from the First Sergeant and Battalion NCOIC. By the time they’re a Company CO, and from that point on, their mentoring and professional development is almost entirely in the hands of the Officer chain of command, not the NCO chain of responsibility.

          • Simulated Knave says:

            cassander:

            George McDonald Fraser mentions it in his McAuslan books as a test: what orders are given in order to erect a flagpole?

            The only appropriate order is, “Sergeant, get that flagpole up.”

          • cassander says:

            For the ideal exemplar of a Senior NCO, see Basil Plumley.

          • John Schilling says:

            The idea that a commissioned officer straight out of undergrad ROTC could be the superior of a noncom with 30+ years experience just because of a college degree seems mind boggling to me.

            Aside from the points already made: so what? The reason we make officers out of people straight out of undergrad ROTC is not that these are the people we want leading or commanding our soldiers, it is that we expect they will become the people we want leading or commanding our soldiers.

            Stipulated that a thirty-year NCO would probably do a very good job of commanding an infantry platoon. Who commands the infantry brigade? The same guy twenty years later?

          • anonymousskimmer says:

            @John Schilling

            Stipulated that a thirty-year NCO would probably do a very good job of commanding an infantry platoon. Who commands the infantry brigade? The same guy twenty years later?

            High year tenure is a ridiculous requirement. If the 30-year NCO can meet the PT requirements and knows what’s needed to run a brigade 20 years later, why not?

          • John Schilling says:

            If the 30-year NCO can meet the PT requirements and knows what’s needed to run a brigade 20 years later, why not?

            First, he doesn’t know what’s needed to run an infantry brigade. Second, on the off chance that he does know, he didn’t learn any significant part of that during his thirty years as a grunt or NCO.

            And third, he’s a minimum of sixty-eight years old. Realistically, somewhere in his seventies – and late seventies by the time his tour as brigade commander ends. That’s a bit much for a job that involves anything remotely resembling infantry combat. In the real world, mandatory retirement age from that job is 64.

            If your plan is that the only people who can command infantry brigades are people with mental flexibility and temperament to perform well in all of the very different jobs between “rifleman” and “brigade commander”, and will be healthy enough to command an army in the field in their seventies, I think you’re going to run out of qualified candidates before you run out of brigades.

            Hmm, maybe we can find a viable cell sample and start cloning Carl Mannerheim?

        • Trofim_Lysenko says:

          I think there’s value at least for the Army and Marines in having officers with enlisted experience and tasks, but I think that John Schilling made an excellent point some years back when I brought this up (which he has partially reprised here) that the higher up in rank you go the less relevant this experience becomes. I also think this experience matters a lot less in the Navy and Air Force where there isn’t really a base level skillset. “Every Marine a Rifleman” makes sense philosophically in a way that “Every Sailor a ____” doesn’t unless you maybe fill in “damage control party member” or something similar.

          And as others have pointed out, I don’t think this will get you away from the social dynamics you find distasteful. Egalitarian and Democratic norms have no place in a functional military organization, which is not the same thing as saying that officers can or should get away with abuse of authority or wanton disregard or disrespect of the input of NCOs and enlisted. As the saying went in the US Army when I was in “You’re here to defend democracy, not to practice it.”.

          • anonymousskimmer says:

            Egalitarian and Democratic norms have no place in a functional military organization,

            The institutional changes I’m proposing are not “within” a functional military organization, they are “prior to”.

            To paraphrase your informative comparison between NCO and Officer ranks and cassander’s apocryphal:
            We place a head of state on top of the military and funnel all expense requests of the military through a congress for a reason. It is the head of state’s and congress’s jobs to recognize when the operational parameters of the military are contrary to the fundamental mission of The Republic.

            It is the officer corps job to hear this and incorporate it in military practice.

            Perhaps the Space Corps would be an organization in which to try my experiment out?

          • cassander says:

            @anonymousskimmer

            Space force seems dead set on changing things as little as possible. I’d be shocked to see anything bold come out of them, and it’s a shame.

          • anonymousskimmer says:

            🙁 Coast guard then?

          • Aftagley says:

            🙁 Coast guard then?

            Former CG officer here. Not likely, for most of the same reasons as listed above.

          • anonymousskimmer says:

            @Aftagley

            National Guard it is then. 👍

        • Purplehermann says:

          Israeli army has officer and non officer ranks, everyone starts as a non-officer

      • Dragor says:

        I am super into this. I have always thought this ever since I learned that there’s a ceiling on advancement if one joins as a grunt. Struck me as unjust probably for the reasons you identified.

        • sfoil says:

          The only real “ceiling on advancement as a grunt” is the reality of human biology — you’re going to have a hard time putting in twenty years working your way up to sergeant major and then another thirty getting to be a field marshal. Otherwise there’s nothing stopping an enlisted man from applying for a commission whenever he wants, indeed there is a bit of a thumb on the scale in their favor (not needing congressional recommendation for academies, more scholarships, etc).

        • John Schilling says:

          Admiral Jeremy Boorda, General John Foss, General Tommy Franks, General Alfred Gray, Admiral George Kinnear, General John Shalikashvili, and General Larry Spencer would like to have a word with you about that “ceiling on achievement”. All of them enlisted at E-1 and retired at O-9 in the post-WWII US military. Shalikashvili, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was the military commander of all US military forces period. So if there’s a “ceiling”, it’s that you have to go through West Point to have the government invent a unique six-star rank to promote you to.

          However, the path from E-1 to O-9 does not involve being promoted to the very highest enlisted rank and only then being made a lieutenant. If you’re going to be doing anything but the lowest sort of officer-type work, it would be a waste of your time to do high-level enlisted work (and a sign of foolishness or lack of confidence for you to follow that track). If you’re going to be an officer, you jump from the Enlisted to the Officer track fairly early in the process, by some combination of your own determined request and the service’s recognition of your aptitude.

        • Trofim_Lysenko says:

          For example, in the Army it’s the Green-To-Gold program. I was invited to apply and encouraged by my command right after I made E-3 (which took closer to 2 years time in service rather than one since my particular military occupational specialty takes a long time), and to be honest there are days when I think I made a mistake deciding not to pursue that opportunity.

      • cassander says:

        For the non-command specialties I want the warrant officer ranks expanded all the way to W-11, and I want the non-command officers to have these ranks instead of the standard O ranks.

        Why? There’s definitely an aesthetic appeal of dividing up the army into grunts, officers, and highly trained non-command officers (warrants), but is there anything that’s actually accomplished by this that isn’t accomplished by, e.g. the Navy’s distinction between restricted and unrestricted officers or the split between command and technical NCOs?

      • Incurian says:

        I am in favor of way more warrants, especially in the air force. Also I’d like to bring back specialists above E-4.

        I used to be in favor of requiring enlistment prior to commission (though I didn’t take that route myself) because it has a certain logic to it, and because that’s how the military worked in Starship Troopers. I eventually turned weakly against it…

        It’s possible that this is entirely the result of selection bias, but most of the prior-enlisted officers I’ve worked with had a sort of arrested development. Something about the enlisted mindset they just couldn’t shake, to the detriment of their performance as an officer. They were all great lieutenants and even junior captains, but those are basically internship roles where their relative experience let them stand out. As cohorts get promoted though, the experience equalizes and the share of officer-specific work increases.

        I don’t understand the comment about castes. The castes would still exist but require [additional] prerequisites. Also rank would still be a thing.

        ETA: The enlisted ranks are extremely overrepresented here, and they all seems great.

        • cassander says:

          I’ve come to feel it’s the sort of thing that makes more sense in some services than others. I could see it working well in the marines, but it would be pointless in the air force.

        • CatCube says:

          I had a (mustang) major tell me that prior service was a big help as a platoon leader, it helped a bit as a company commander, but once you got above that what you were doing as an officer was so different from being an EM it didn’t help you at all.

        • anonymousskimmer says:

          I mean caste in the sense of varna, not jati.

          Edit to add: Yes, they still would exist, but they would be less rigid than they are today (and they are less rigid today than in centuries past).

          Our modern military structure separating grunts from officers ultimately comes (I haven’t researched this, just guessing) from the plebian/equestrian/patrician castes of Rome, the gentry/commoner castes of Britain, etc….

          Rome had three primary varnas (not including non-citizens) and three rank structures (plebian rank ladder, equestrian rank ladder, and patrician/senatorial rank ladder). https://www.warhistoryonline.com/ancient-history/12-ranks-roman-military-officers.html

          Many feudal societies around the world seemed to follow this model as well (nobility / knights / commoners).

          The post-medieval British had two primary varnas, and two rank structures (enlisted and officer).

          The US inheritance of this structure doesn’t make it natural, or even the best system.

          It’s possible that this is entirely the result of selection bias, but most of the prior-enlisted officers I’ve worked with had a sort of arrested development.

          It took me around two years to behaviorally overcome having been a biotech technician who couldn’t order supplies and was expected to implement what I was told to do after getting a new job as a research associate who was expected to order supplies and plan DNA assembly strategies. I’m sure there will be an adaptation period during and after getting an M.S. and Ph.D. too. This is a sociological artifact of what you are 1) expected to do, 2) allowed to do, and 3) any hazing rituals you went through. The best way to deal with this in my opinion is to treat adults as adults, regardless of their rank.

          • sfoil says:

            The US inheritance of this structure doesn’t make it natural, or even the best system.

            The US is hardly the only nation that has “inherited” the system of having separate populations of officers, enlisted, and technical specialists. In fact I’m not aware of any militaries where this distinction isn’t present.

            In the US, this system is exactly as democratic as the rest of governmental functions: certain positions are elected and then they appoint people who appoint people etc, via a bureaucratically automated process. In fact this is exactly how military commissions work in the US: at regular intervals the Department of Defense presents the President with a big list of names for appointment as officers and he “signs” them without reading them.

            And as far as egalitarianism, the requirements to be a commissioned officer are public and the process is open to any citizen, and it is in fact illegal (via those democratic processes mentioned above) for the military to reject candidates who are too poor, too black, etc.

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:

            Your guess is incorrect. Ranks and organizations often have very old names (the oldest in modern use go back to the middle ages, the newest are less than a century old), but the organization structures and means of selecting officers and enlisted have changed RADICALLY over the years.

            You should probably spend more time researching the military, and more importantly how “non-hierarchical” and democratized militaries have actually worked out.

          • anonymousskimmer says:

            I spent time in NJROTC and one year in ROTC. The fact that 4 years of JROTC is sufficient to get one an automatic E3 after boot camp is absurd. That fact that 4 years of ROTC is sufficient to get one an automatic O1 is likewise absurd.

            I’ve known people who generationally followed in their parents footsteps straight into the enlisted ranks (e.g. my brother following in our father’s footsteps) or into the officer ranks by networking with the JROTC/parents into ROTC or getting the politician’s sign-off on the academy recommendation.

            This is typical for the US military (my father only differed in that he followed his step-father into the Navy enlisted ranks to avoid the Vietnam draft [his step-father was enlisted in WW2, then went in to construction] instead of his absent biological father into the Army officer ranks). This is a caste system. It existed in the pre-US Revolutionary military where the command officers were typically new-world gentry. It existed in the Civil war system where the officers were typically scions of wealth. Heck, despite knowing that I never wanted to join the military I went into NJROTC and ROTC primarily as a means of trying to feel closer to my father.

            This is a caste system inherited from the systems of Rome and feudal Europe. It still exists, though is far less rigid than in the past. I want it to be even less rigid than it is now.

            It’s the same crap where STEM parents want their kids to follow them in to STEM, and are disappointed when their kid wants to be an artist.

            I don’t want “non-hierarchical”, I want the hierarchical pre-selection process to change in the ways I specified above. That is all.

      • sfoil says:

        I also want the same for the ROTCs, with the sole exception for non-command specialties (e.g. surgeons, lawyers, etc…).

        Why exactly do you think it’s necessary that every battalion commander has spent six months as a private but not that every surgeon spend six months as a medical orderly?

        • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

          I think the idea is rather that a military surgeon doesn’t need to spend six months as a private.

        • anonymousskimmer says:

          1) The morality of commanding other people to possibly kill or die.

          2) Read further. I think something like this might be a good idea, and want to see something like it, though not necessarily 100%, and not necessarily immediately.

          3) The sheer amount of education necessary to become a doctor starts becoming prohibitive of other time sinks.

          • sfoil says:

            I think the idea is rather that a military surgeon doesn’t need to spend six months as a private.

            Right, but his objection seems to be that you can spend decades as an enlisted man without entering the “officer caste”. But you can also spend decades as a medical orderly without entering the “doctor caste”. The solution in both cases is the same: go to ROTC/med school. Gaining experience as an orderly obviously doesn’t eventually add up to being able to perform surgery. Likewise digging foxholes doesn’t suddenly make you competent to run a large combined-arms unit. This is a very old problem, armies had and have a hard enough time with the fact that being in command of a large formation doesn’t indicate that you’ll be able to manage a huge formation.

            I might be overstating the case here. There might be something to this idea with ground warfare services. But it’s obviously not the case that we should even intuitively expect a mechanic or security guard to translate his skills into effectively flying an airplane or navigating a submarine as a matter of “egalitarianism”.

            1) The morality of commanding other people to possibly kill or die.

            What of it? Junior officers also get ordered to kill or die, and it is true in both modern or historical armies that they die in combat at greater rates than enlisted soldiers.

            The problem of opportunity cost is not unique to doctors. Right now the Army and Marines expect about five years of experience to be a company commander and fifteen to be a battalion commander. These figures are comparable to what it takes to be an attending physician. If you don’t want to waste a potential surgeon’s time doing menial tasks as a barrier to entry then I don’t see why you’d want to do it anywhere else.

      • John Lynch says:

        Most enlisted are not officer material. I know, I was enlisted. Anyone who has been in the military is welcome to speak up, but I met some real characters who had no business having power over anyone. There is already a system to promote those with good officer potential, but it’s hard and requires a lot of self-motivation. That’s OK with me.

        I’m not sure wasting the time of good officer candidates by having them do menial tasks for years on end is a good idea. It seems like a poor way to compete with the civilian job market. Requiring a college degree for officers serves pretty much the same function that it does in civilian life- it’s a “first cut” which weeds out people who shouldn’t be there.

        Ultimately, military effectiveness, the ability to fight and win wars, is what matters. If going all-enlisted wins wars, then I’m for it. But I doubt it would help. The Finnish example is different because everyone is drafted, so it’s the whole society. In an all-volunteer force you are getting the subset which volunteers. It’s not the same thing.

      • Aftagley says:

        The skillset for being a good officer is wildly different than the skillset for being a good enlisted. I’m not talking in terms of differing perspectives on leadership, I’m talking about the good, say, 40-60% of an officer’s career that is basically just serving as a functionary in a hierarchical bureaucracy. Most enlisted just wouldn’t be great at this and the ones that would normally get identified and shunted into either an officer-like rate (IE intel or one of the incredibly technical specialties) or just get a ticket to ROTC.

    • Space Hobo from Hobospace says:

      You can’t expect transparency from the government, and informational asymmetry will only make tyranny cheaper.

    • Dragor says:

      I’m for the right consume drugs and have sex while being broadly speaking against sexual activity and drug consumption. Individually they fall into camps, but conjoined I think my views are unusual.

      • Eric T says:

        I don’t want to needle you or ask any uncomfortable questions, but what’s up with being broadly against sexual activity? From my perspective sex is a fun, enjoyable thing that if done responsibly has little to no side-effects.

        Legitimately just curious!

        • Well... says:

          a fun, enjoyable thing that if done responsibly has little to no side-effects.

          If by “responsibly” you mean “in a way that ensures no pregnancy” then one of the side-effects is that humans go extinct.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            Side effects may include headaches, herpes, and human extinction.
            Ask your doctor if sex is right for you.

          • Akrasian says:

            What do you mean? Unintended pregnancies are hardly the only thing ensuring the survival of the human race. People can use protection for recreational sex and *also* decide to have children.

          • Well... says:

            Given the context, I took “responsibly” to mean “always with effective contraception” rather than “always with the intended result, whether that be pregnancy or lack thereof”.

        • Noah says:

          Not Dragor, and based on his response below, we’re probably not coming from the same place, but I would generally agree with you if I didn’t have a moral problem with abortion. As it is, a lot of people’s attitude seems to be something like “well, worst comes to worst I’ll murder* someone, only a 2% or so chance of that happening, totally worth it”.

          Sex where you’re happy to bring to term and bring up any resulting children is a different story.

          *Though I personally don’t think that abortion is quite as bad as murder (nor for that matter is infanticide).

      • Dragor says:

        Not a sensitive topic at all! I’m by no means sex phobic, it’s just that I view it as similar to any other craving such as the craving to watch a television show or something. The absence of the craving for sex seems preferable to the craving plus its satiation.

        • Well... says:

          I used to say that drugs ought to be legally permitted but culturally restricted. (Right now they are legally restricted but culturally kinda permitted, which is the worst possible combination.) It felt like an unusual view at the time, and still does now.

    • anonymousskimmer says:

      https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/what-its-like-to-get-doxed-for-taking-a-bike-ride.html

      But the Park Police had made an error. “Correction, the incident occurred yesterday morning, 6/1/2020,” they wrote in a follow up tweet. As with most such clarifications, it had only a fraction of the reach: a mere 2,000 shares.

      It was based on that initial, false information that Weinberg had become a suspect for the internet mob. To his surprise, the app that he used to record his regular rides from Bethesda into Georgetown via the Capital Crescent Trail shared that information publicly, not just with his network of friends and followers. Someone had located a record of his ride on the path on June 2, matched it to the location of the assault from the video, matched his profile picture — white guy, aviator-style sunglasses, helmet obscuring much of his head — to the man in the video, and shared the hunch publicly.

    • Wrong Species says:

      Every argument to the effect of “You can’t ban X because it will have no effect/exacerbate the problem” is wishful thinking. It’s obviously stupid when the other side does it but everyone thinks it’s different when it’s their position.

      Take free speech. Free speech is great and I certainly don’t want to get rid of it. But you’ll see people make the argument that goes something like this:

      “If you ban an idea, all you’re doing is pushing it underground. It will fester and never be refuted. The best way to silence a wrong idea is to debate it so that everyone sees its wrongness and knows not to believe it.”

      Of course, this is wrong. The best way to keep people from an idea is to make sure they never hear about it. That’s why governments have been doing that for thousands of years instead of holding a debate club at court. But people will still make the argument because its convenient.

      • Tatterdemalion says:

        Prohibition feels like it’s an obvious counter-example to this theory.

        I agree that it doesn’t seem to be one that generalises well, but I think that if you want to claim this as a near-universal rule, you do need an explanation as to why it didn’t apply there.

        • Ninety-Three says:

          Prohibition proves this theory a lot better than you’d think. Despite being much less effective than its proponents would have hoped, you can hardly look at the figures for 1920s alcohol use and claim no effect.

          • Tatterdemalion says:

            Sure, but I can and do claim that it “exacerbated the problem” – alcohol consumption was clearly a worse problem in the prohibition era than previously.

      • albatross11 says:

        You can’t totally stamp most things out. You can reduce them, but that often comes at an unacceptably high cost, as with prohibition.

      • eyeballfrog says:

        The problem here is that the power required to completely suppress an idea is the power to suppress any idea. If you have that power, then free speech is gone–it exists only at the whims of those in power. If you don’t have that power, then people will still be talking about it, and your ban on discussing the idea is just playing whack-a-mole.

        So a slightly more detailed version of the argument is “Unless you’re planning on abandoning free speech altogether, all you’re doing is pushing the idea underground.”

    • Well... says:

      I don’t know if it’s a political view exactly, but I don’t believe in being “informed” in the sense of knowing what’s going on in the news.

    • Trofim_Lysenko says:

      These days? To quote Tom Lehrer:

      “I do have a cause, though, and that is: Obscenity!
      …I’m for it.”

      That one was never that popular on the Right, and is still iffy on the Left (sexual license in PERSON seems to enjoy wider acceptance there than potentially exploitative/objectifying/etc artwork/prose/photography these days).

    • salvorhardin says:

      Radical cosmopolitan anti-nationalism (i.e. patriotism is a vice, countries do not rightfully belong to their citizens but rather all the earth belongs to all humanity, preferring your fellow citizens to other humans on the basis of your shared citizenship is immoral) is probably mine. It certainly narrows down your options to leftist or libertarian, but is a minority position among both, and I have lots of other disagreements with both its leftist and its libertarian adherents.

      I am also a privacy skeptic– having been persuaded by David Brin’s arguments in _The Transparent Society_. Awhile back there was a thread on books that substantially changed how people thought about the world, and that one is high on my list.

      • Tatterdemalion says:

        I would struggle to compose an argument against this that I would find convincing, but I will point out that virtually all humans ever have felt the other way very strongly, and that constitutes one hell of a Chesterton’s fence.

        • salvorhardin says:

          I think the ev-psych explanation (roughly AIUI, nations feel to us like the sub-Dunbar bands whose genes we evolved to preferentially propagate) is a pretty compelling argument for why the fence is there and why it’s so hard to tear down. I don’t find it a good normative argument for why the fence ought to stay up, much as the fact that humans everywhere love sugary desserts is not a good reason to believe they’re good for us, nor is the widespread psychological propensity to believe in supernaturalism a good argument that supernaturalism is true.

    • Open borders may do it for me. The right accuses the left of being for open borders, but not many people on the left are willing to say they are.

      Market anarchy would be the other candidate.

      You can find my thoughts on privacy here.

    • johan_larson says:

      What is your most controversial/unpopular political view that doesn’t put you in an obvious political camp?

      I think we are doing airline and airport security inefficiently. We are spending too much time and money putting everyone and their luggage through security processes and too little trying to identify who might actually be a threat. It would probably also make sense to spend some of the money on back-end security, directed at airline and airport workers. Also, in the case of the US, the No Fly List is an affront to liberty, and should be made smaller and more accurate, and more open to challenge. Or maybe the whole thing should be scrapped. And using the list for foreign carriers on flights that happen to cross US airspace without landing there just seems asinine.

      Here’s a good article about it, sourced from an Israeli security expert.

      As far as I can tell, no one in mainstream politics is proposing to do anything about this. It just isn’t on anyone’s radar.

    • Logan says:

      I agree that privacy is about a disgust response more than consequentialist harm reduction. There’s a difference between privacy and secrecy. Secrecy is about the actual act of observation, privacy is about the state-of-mind of the one being observed. That’s why the backscatter machines were an invasion of privacy, even though there’s no actual harm in having the TSA see you naked. I wish people would talk more about the value of privacy in itself, rather than the value of secrecy.

      Loss of privacy is up there with any non-physical torture I can think of. If the government required teenagers across the country to read a list of porn they’d looked at to a local cop, and you responded that it didn’t materially harm them so it wasn’t cruel, you’d be a sociopath. As a former closeted gay teen, I’d claim that current government policy isn’t all that different.

      Maybe you don’t value privacy, but I value it more than anything except food and water. Surely you don’t think it should be illegal for me to purchase privacy, if it’s so valuable to me. Yet the government is trying to make it more and more difficult for me to legally obtain privacy. No consequentialist argument is necessary, privacy is good because I want it and the government can fuck off.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        In re the TSA seeing images of naked people: you’re underestimating how obnoxious people can be. There was reasonable concern about the TSA sharing images of people who were unusually odd or sexy.

        • Logan says:

          That’s still an issue of privacy, not secrecy. If you are a sexy looking person, and someone shares a picture of you naked, that’s doesn’t reveal a secret about you. There’s no real information in that picture that people couldn’t have guessed or shouldn’t know. I mean, it can in theory (maybe the TSA finds out you have a large penis) but that’s not necessary to create an invasion of privacy. I’m not worried about the damage it will do to my career if people find out I have a large penis, I just want a general sense of control over dissemination of details of my private life.

          The actual damage is the mental exertion in having to care about things you didn’t before. When I’m testifying before Congress, I care a lot about my appearance and my words and my demeanor. When I’m walking in public, I care a medium amount. When I’m alone in my apartment, I barely care at all. When I’m thinking in my own head, I don’t have to exert any mental resources to self-censorship and wondering how I come across. Invasion of privacy merely asks you to wonder how you are perceived, it’s just about knowing that perception is happening and hoping that you are perceived well, the damage is done right there.

    • Aftagley says:

      Let’s see, I’m pretty solidly left, but I’m a bit heterodox on:

      1. Abortion: I support it, but it doesn’t have the same gutpunch for me that it does for others in my party. I never want it outlawed where I live, but I have a hard time mustering up energy to care when, say, Alabama makes it more difficult. I just peg that as yet another reason never to live there and move on.

      2. Nationalism: I’m strongly nationalistic and get viscerally angry when I hear leftists bash America, talk about how much better obviously-worse places like Canada are (sorry) or what have you. This extends to strongly supporting the military and intel agencies.

      3. Privacy: Kind of like Ninety-Three I think that it’s a bit of a red-herring and public debates over it are so full of bad faith arguments.

    • Purplehermann says:

      Jewish punishments are superior to modern punishments, Eved Ivri (a specific form of slavery in Jewish law) in particular, and laws based on that particular concept should be put into practice ASAP.

      (There are a few others that might be less popular, but I hold less strongly)

      • How do you feel about stoning disobedient sons to death?

        • Purplehermann says:

          1. I was referring to the actual punishments, not when to apply them.

          2. There is this odd tendency I see to take jewish laws out context, generally by people who understand little hebrew and are unfamiliar with talmud or halacha.

          3. The disobedient son has to have some very specific circumstances. The justification given by Jewish sages is that a son who acts like this will inevitably turn to banditry and kill people.

          You can disagree with their reasoning, but should be aware of it and what the necessary circumstances are:

          He must steal and eat/ drink (he must glut himself on) at least a certain portion of wine and meat (in one go I believe) from his father within the the 3 months after turning 13 (or growing two black hairs in his pubic region) and even then only if the parents decide to take him to court as a disobedient son.

          (There are further requirements which I don’t quite understand, like his father and mother being equal in voice. The talmud actually debates whether the disobedient son is a hypothetical case only as the requirements are very strict.)

          A boy who steals and gluts himself on his father’s wine and meat, and who has parents willing to press charges for his general disobedience does seem like a probable candidate to turn to banditry.

          I doubt his parents will do a good job raising him from here, he already acts like a bandit, and if he doesn’t learn a trade, how else is he getting his wine and meat?

    • Baeraad says:

      Personally, I’m opposed to privacy.

      I’m not happy about it, but yeah, I’m with you.

      If the last years has taught us anything, it is that we are not capable of behaving ourselves for five seconds without someone watching us. I’m sick of reading about scandal after scandal after scandal that just proves beyond all doubt that everyone does whatever they think they can get away with. Long live Big Brother! We’re apparently such absolute moral imbeciles that we can’t stop doing bad things in the shadows, so let’s just abolish all shadows so we can finally have some peace.

      I do think that once absolutely everyone’s private behaviour is a matter of public record, we’re going to have to reconsider the badness of a lot of behaviours, because it’s going to turn out that absolutely everyone is guilty of them. But that might be for the best too. Once it turns out that there really is no one righteous, no, not one, we’re going to have to either give up on the idea that moral purity is a reasonable thing to expect from anyone or else purge ourselves into extinction. And seeing the worst of the hypocrites and busybodies start wailing, “I’m only human! Don’t judge me!” is going to be hilarious, so there’s that.

      And as for other responses in this thread, let me just say: I am fine with you watching me piss, as long as I don’t have to watch you watching me piss. Leaning over the edge of my stall is obnoxious. But you can put as many discreet cameras inside of it as you please. If I can have the illusion of privacy, I can live with giving up the actuality of it.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        “If the last years has taught us anything, it is that we are not capable of behaving ourselves for five seconds without someone watching us.”

        The problem is that we can’t trust the good will or good sense of the people watching us, eigher.

    • Jon S says:

      How about: organ sales should be legal (possibly with heavy regulation). I think that our current policy is barbaric relative to legalizing it.

  101. Nick says:

    Edmund Burke turned decisively against the French Revolution when he heard about the events in Paris:

    Initially, Burke did not condemn the French Revolution. In a letter of 9 August 1789, he wrote: “England gazing with astonishment at a French struggle for Liberty and not knowing whether to blame or to applaud! The thing indeed, though I thought I saw something like it in progress for several years, has still something in it paradoxical and Mysterious. The spirit it is impossible not to admire; but the old Parisian ferocity has broken out in a shocking manner”.[84] The events of 5–6 October 1789, when a crowd of Parisian women marched on Versailles to compel King Louis XVI to return to Paris, turned Burke against it. In a letter to his son Richard Burke dated 10 October, he said: “This day I heard from Laurence who has sent me papers confirming the portentous state of France—where the Elements which compose Human Society seem all to be dissolved, and a world of Monsters to be produced in the place of it—where Mirabeau presides as the Grand Anarch; and the late Grand Monarch makes a figure as ridiculous as pitiable”.[85] On 4 November, Charles-Jean-François Depont wrote to Burke, requesting that he endorse the Revolution. Burke replied that any critical language of it by him should be taken “as no more than the expression of doubt”, but he added: “You may have subverted Monarchy, but not recover’d freedom”.[86] In the same month, he described France as “a country undone”.

    He went on to found contemporary conservatism as we know it. He’s still read today, especially his Reflections on the Revolution in France. He’s considered a liberal conservative in contrast to the throne and altar conservatism of contemporary Joseph de Maistre.

    Roger Scruton in 1967 was a pious Cambridge liberal. But while visiting Paris in ’68 he was caught up in the student protests. In his own words,

    I suddenly realised I was on the other side. What I saw was an unruly mob of self-indulgent middle-class hooligans. When I asked my friends what they wanted, what were they trying to achieve, all I got back was this ludicrous Marxist gobbledegook. I was disgusted by it, and thought there must be a way back to the defence of western civilization against these things. That’s when I became a conservative. I knew I wanted to conserve things rather than pull them down.

    Scruton went on to be possibly the most prominent conservative intellectual of the last fifty years, at least in Britain. He’s strongly influenced by Burke, but his interests were often as not in aesthetics, and Scruton brought a stronger traditionalism into contemporary conservatism than did Burke.

    Folks have lately been comparing 2020 to 1968, as the Floyd protests have broadened their scope and their base. 1968, of course, was only a reflection of 1789. So what great conservative intellectual has just been minted? How will he (she?) develop conservative ideas?

    (If it’s not obvious, this question is mostly in jest. But take it as seriously as you like.)

    • BBA says:

      I dunno, Matt Yglesias maybe?

      • cassander says:

        He’s (barely) smart enough to know what side his bread is buttered on. And actually getting mugged didn’t change his mind on things, I doubt any of this will.

    • Belisaurus Rex says:

      Someone in Minneapolis who had their personal safety threatened as the news continually reassures them that they’re completely safe?

      • salvorhardin says:

        This goes both ways. My friends in Minneapolis, who were liberal before but by no means anti-police radicals, are now much more radically anti-police than they were a month ago due to observing the behavior of the police up close in a way they had not had occasion to do before.

        • albatross11 says:

          Yeah, the video of the police slashing tires was pretty striking. It’s like they decided “hey, let’s make sure everyone believes all the bad things people are saying about us!”

        • Clutzy says:

          Same, I have a long term friend that has experienced, as far as I can tell, a total mental breakdown over this. He is posting stuff everywhere, going to protests, defending arson (with the now meme-worthy Boston Tea Party analogy), etc.

    • Well... says:

      I think this was kinda Candace Owens’s story. She’s not “newly minted” in 2020, but on a “history book” timeline she could be considered so. IIRC, she was a more stereotypical left-wing young lady who was the subject of apparently racist attacks, and it was witnessing the response of liberals around her that caused her to identify as conservative. I’m probably telling that story wrong in important ways, but that’s how I remember it and it seems to fit the Scruton mold.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        She was a left-wing grifter who decided to become a right-wing grifter. The reverse path of David Brock.

    • keaswaran says:

      For anyone who wants to think seriously about this, you should also look for newly minted conservatives in 1776, and in 1848.

  102. Dragor says:

    I believe this is an odd fractional thread and thus CW friendly? If not, correct me and I will delete this post. Anyhow: can anyone link me to articles or research that look into deadliness of encounters with police separated by race and encounter type (I’ve read the SSC post). I’m generally into police reform, and I like the idea of a lot of different cities trying different things to improve US policing, but I am not sure some of the specific claims being made are accurate or correctly leading.

    • albatross11 says:

      Disclaimer: I’m an interested amateur here, so I don’t know how well regarded these statistics are by criminologists, but they all seem quite solid to me.

      This paper by Ronald Fryer looks into police use of force, including shootings.

      This is the Washington Post’s database of police shootings for 2019. They also have compiled data for 2015-the present. This is the best source I know for police shooting numbers, and spending a few minutes making simple queries on the page will teach you more about police shootings than several hours of watching/reading most media coverage of the subject.

      The national crime victimization survey asks people whether they’ve been victims of a crime, and also stuff like the sex and race of the offender. This gives a check on other arrest numbers–any bias in policing won’t show up in the victimization survey, but there could be bias in the responders; by contrast arrest statistics probably involve a lot more third-party-convincing evidence, but also incorporate any biases by the police.

      This FBI report from 2018 talks about all kinds of crime as reported to the FBI by (mostly) local police forces. I think they’re mostly reporting arrests or charging someone, not convictions, but I think this is the best data on who’s getting arrested for various crimes, and it also has demographic data.

      • Belisaurus Rex says:

        The WaPo database is a good resource.

        Before you click the link, make predictions on what you think the data will show, and write it down to keep yourself honest.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      There have been some good comments about this in the past week here on SSC. I expect they will follow-up.

      Here is a professional round-up in Vox about the fact that shooting of both un-armed people and of black people has fallen recenty.

      https://www.vox.com/2020/6/2/21276472/police-killing-statistics-african-american

    • Mark V Anderson says:

      Here is another database on police killings. It has similar data to the Wash Post data base, but I like it better because it goes back to 2000, and it has more information.

  103. Error says:

    My understanding is that culture war topics are still acceptable in the hidden open threads. If I’m wrong, someone please report this, and Scott please nuke it.

    Background: I’m increasingly anti-political and increasingly irritated by partisans (on both sides of the aisle) outraged that I’m not On Their Side.

    A couple days ago a friend linked me to this “poll”, courtesy of Trump et al; and also to this other “poll”, apparently (see later) courtesy of the SJWs. Both manifest colossal bad faith, in very similar ways. It occurred to me that I might be able to use this.

    I want supporting exhibits for a statement along the lines of “Dear partisan, observe here the epistemic bankruptcy infecting both current political Sides. Wake me when that changes, until then, fuck off.” The examples must be invulnerable to objections like “that’s not representative” or “Poe check needed”, and well enough matched that even partisans can see the similarity — I want as little room as possible for “but Example A (from Us) is not the same thing as Example B (from Them)”. The ideal example will make insiders cringe.

    The Trump example above should work as-is; the site is an official campaign mouthpiece (Snopes checked), and at least one Trump voter has told me they found it cringy as hell (though more confirmation might be useful). Good enough for now. But the blue-tribe equivalent appears to be from a parody account, so it won’t do. Neither will J. Random Social Media User.

    I’m looking for something blue-aligned, coming from an official-ish source, recent enough to be relevant, and demonstrating a similar complete disregard for good faith. Ideally the suggestion should come from a blue-triber themselves, so I know it’s something even true believers will recognize as cringe-worthy; but I’ll take what I can get.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      I think the “other poll courtesy of the SJWs” was an anti-SJW troll.

      In fact, they pinned the tweet to their account, so we know they are anti-SJW trolls.

      • Eric T says:

        Yeah this definitely has a certain banned term written all over it.

        @Error, I’ll keep my eyes open. Nothing is screaming to mind right now but I’m sure I’ll run into something. Maybe next time Uncle Joe sends me a campaign email.

      • Error says:

        I did point out that it appeared to be a parody account. If it had checked out, I wouldn’t be here asking.

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      I don’t think either of these things are supposed to be taken seriously, and I don’t know why you’re seriously engaging them.

      I mean, if you asked me to pick between the Epic Games Store and White Supremacy I would pick White Supremacy, not because I like White Supremacy but because screw the Epic Games Store. Or at least I would have done that before they pledged to give me Total War: Troy for free if I snag it on launch day, so now I’d just ignore the poll.

      • Mycale says:

        Hey, in the defense of Epic Games / the Epic Games Store, apparently they’re bankrolling Old World, which is a very interesting looking 4X game developed by the lead designer of Civilization IV. It’s still in Early Access but already fun (I went ahead and got it on a recommendation). Reportedly, the studio developing Old World would have went under without financial support from Epic Games, so I’m willing to cut them some slack (and use their subpar launcher . . . for now).

        On-topic: as someone on the right, wow is that Trump campaign poll cringy. This is where I have to tell myself, “Think of the judicial appointments….” Sigh.

    • Tatterdemalion says:

      I want supporting exhibits for a statement along the lines of “Dear partisan, observe here the epistemic bankruptcy infecting both current political Sides. Wake me when that changes, until then, fuck off.” The examples must be invulnerable to objections like “that’s not representative” or “Poe check needed”, and well enough matched that even partisans can see the similarity — I want as little room as possible for “but Example A (from Us) is not the same thing as Example B (from Them)”. The ideal example will make insiders cringe.

      You’re screwed, frankly. No single example could ever be invulnerable to – or even slightly resistant to – the accusation that “that’s not representative”.

      I think you will be very easily able to prove to most people that people with terrible opinions/behaviours exist on their side; I think that most people already believe that. What you won’t be able to show anything meaningful about with anecdata is the distribution of those behaviours vs better ones on either side, and if you present yourself as doing so then, frankly, you deserve everything I expect you’ll get.

      What you might be able to sometimes do with a relatively few examples, though, is show some things to your interlocutor that most people will think are terrible. If they defend them, you will be able to demonstrate to third parties that they are willing to defend things like the thing they have just defended, and this may convince people to give their opinions less weight. That’s arguably a dark art, but arguably legit, depending partly on how precisely you do it.

  104. Ninety-Three says:

    Some journalists and other prominent figures have been getting canceled recently for not being sufficiently on-board with Black Lives Matter, and it’s shaking my general willingness to defend cancellation. Normally I say the righties complaining about such things are mistaken to infer political bias: the Such and Such institute cancelled So and So because PR is important and you can’t have prominent figures pissing people off like that. Firing him is just their attempt to serve market demand and make the profit-maximizing move.

    I have a much harder time making that argument about the current situation. Most Americans, even most Democrats oppose looting, endorse the use of force against looters, and oppose defunding (let alone abolishing) the police. If I were a soulless journalism robot telling my audience what they wanted to hear, I’d be fired from the New York Times. I’m not sure if this indicates anything about the validity of my defense more broadly, but it seems like at least this time the disconnected liberal elites really are running the show and they seem to be disregarding Joe Average in petty pursuit of their own narrative.

    I can still tell a just-so story where this is profit-maximizing: controversy gets more clicks, something something Toxoplasma of Rage. Alternatively, journalists get paid in peanuts and prestige so you can’t take away their ability to fire an unwoke coworker without them noticing that their compensation sucks and abandoning your publication. But those explanations feel a lot flimsier than the obvious practicality of “Richard Stallman lost his job because he was the head of a PR organization and the normies hate it when you talk about pedo stuff.”

    I’m still annoyed by talk of liberal elites, so rather than converting to standard Republican talking points I’m asking for a steelman of the latest round of George Floyd-related cancellations. Can they be described as anything other than politically motivated (or for half marks, at least motivated by politics whose approval is closer to majority than to the lizardman constant)?

    • Viliam says:

      I think that however crazy a belief might seem to you or me, generally speaking, there is a person on this planet who sincerely believes it, or at least endorses it as “maybe technically wrong, but backing this statement contributes to greater good”.

      In this spirit, I think it is likely that there are people out there who sincerely believe that the cancellations were the right thing to do, or at least that they were sacrifices necessary to create a better world.

      (I am talking in general here, because I don’t know what exactly the “latest round” refers to, and I think I prefer it that way. There are so many outrageous things out there that learning about yet another one does not seem useful.)

      • Belisaurus Rex says:

        A few people in my area have begun digging up years-old text messages with racial slurs, sending them to Universities and employers, and getting students expelled and workers fired.

        No, the context of the racial slur is irrelevant–quoting rap lyrics is no defense.

        • Lambert says:

          The career prospects of sociopaths with photoshop must be looking pretty good right now.

          • Belisaurus Rex says:

            Even easier, click F12 or rightclick “Inspect” on your computer and change the text through the command prompt there. You can CTRL+F to search for their text in the console, then change it. Then take a screenshot. This works on Facebook AND Twitter…

            Edit: For my next post, instructions on how to build a nuclear reactor in your basement using only household appliances.

          • GearRatio says:

            @Belisaurus Rex

            I do this to edit Wikipedia pages to insult my children.

          • Lambert says:

            I hear a Farnsworth* Fusor isn’t that hard to get running, if you’re comfortable with vacuum pumps, glassblowing and lethal power supplies.

            *Yes, namesake and cannonical ancestor of Prof. Farnsworth

      • albatross11 says:

        The problem here isn’t just the people sending the messages (probably some mix of volunteer thought police, crazy people, folks trying to settle a score, and folks trying to eliminate a rival or an annoying boss), it’s the people responding. The right response to this from an employer isn’t “Well, then, Jones is fired,” it’s “Thanks for your input. We will consider this matter using our normal HR procedures, and if there’s sufficient reason for any action on our part, we will take it, though of course our internal personnel decisions will not be made public.”

        • Belisaurus Rex says:

          Yeah, I guess the panic response (“If I don’t crack down hard they might come after me too!”) is a lot worse than what “They” would actually do to you. Irrational or not, people are still afraid of internet mobs.

          Edit: There HAS to be a Star Trek Original Series episode where there’s a whole planet full of people that all live in fear of some deity or robot that doesn’t actually have any power.

          • zero says:

            There’s always “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” with obvious parallels.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            I can’t think of many cases where the employer says “thanks for the information” and shuts up. So I can’t say whether they get dragged or not for not complying.

            There is a guy in Europe who has made it his personal mission to delete from the Internet any mention of how he once harassed a bunch of teenagers because it’s stopping him from becoming a lawyer. And so he harasses the hell out of any people that dare to support the website that keeps the archive of his harassment allegations alive.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        In this spirit, I think it is likely that there are people out there who sincerely believe that the cancellations were the right thing to do, or at least that they were sacrifices necessary to create a better world.

        While I’m sure there are True Believers out there, there’s also an awful lot of power-tripping fools. It’s not the ideology. If Evangelical Christianity had social power right now they’d be out hunting for sinners who play Dungeons & Dragons or something and trying to get them run out of town.

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:

          Have you read Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. He talks about how much fun it is to be in a twitter mob (he was in the one that went after Justine Sacco and it took him a while to see there was something wrong with the mob), how much damage they do to their targets, and how they have nothing to do with justice.

    • 10240 says:

      Normally I say the righties complaining about such things are mistaken to infer political bias: the Such and Such institute cancelled So and So because PR is important and you can’t have prominent figures pissing people off like that. Firing him is just their attempt to serve market demand and make the profit-maximizing move.

      I do think that it’s usually mostly to protect their PR. However, that doesn’t mean that there is no political bias, it just puts the blame on the customers who like the company less if it retains the employee in question than if it fires him, rather than on the company.

      It’s us, the customers and the general public, who decide what is good or bad PR! When I demand that companies don’t fire employees for their political speech, I’m trying to make it worse PR to fire them, and better PR not to. It’s in the company’s interest to fire him, but the only way we can try to reverse their incentives is to nevertheless punish them if they fire the employee, and reward them if they don’t.

      Beyond PR, there is the dictatorless dystopia effect. Scott relaying Bostrom:

      Bostrom makes an offhanded reference of the possibility of a dictatorless dystopia, one that every single citizen including the leadership hates but which nevertheless endures unconquered. It’s easy enough to imagine such a state. Imagine a country with two rules: first, every person must spend eight hours a day giving themselves strong electric shocks. Second, if anyone fails to follow a rule (including this one), or speaks out against it, or fails to enforce it, all citizens must unite to kill that person. Suppose these rules were well-enough established by tradition that everyone expected them to be enforced. So you shock yourself for eight hours a day, because you know if you don’t everyone else will kill you, because if they don’t, everyone else will kill them, and so on.

      I believe something like this takes place among managers. I suspect major contributors are harassment laws and overbroad anti-discrimination laws: it’s too risky for a company to hire an outspoken opponent of left-wing identity politics as a manager, so all executives are either raging SJWs or know to hold their mouths. Other contributors are that some are true believers, and that some believe (perhaps wrongly) that suppressing allegedly-racist thought is necessary to preserve PR.

      Another effect is that many people on the left consider anyone to their right on identity issues racist/sexist/homophobic, which they consider the worst sins in the World. On the other hand, even most people who oppose these firings of people for being insufficiently left-wing treat them as just one of many concerns. So the left-wing hardliners have outsized influence, both as customers (influencing PR) and as managers.

      OK, this wasn’t really a steelman that it’s not politically motivated, more of an attempt to explain how the political motivations work. It’s not exactly “liberal elites” as much as some reasons why progressives among the elites have outsized influence. Also, I mostly care about organizations that are not inherently political. Inherently politicized organizations like journals are a different matter, I think.

      Alternatively, journalists get paid in peanuts and prestige so you can’t take away their ability to fire an unwoke coworker without them noticing that their compensation sucks and abandoning your publication.

      I don’t think so. I presume journalists get paid little is that supply and demand are not working in their favor. Unless you think that journalists are underpaid even compared to what their market-clearing wage would be, they don’t have a lot of market power. I’d actually find the opposite likely: commenters have said (I haven’t verified) that funding for journalism has dropped in the last few decades, which suggests that demand for journalists has decreased. Since wages are downward sticky, it’s more likely that journalists get paid above their market-clearing wage than below. Furthermore, journalists as a whole are to the left of their audiences, so there is more supply compared to the demand for left-wing journalists than right-wing ones.

      • Eric T says:

        I don’t think so. I presume journalists get paid little is that supply and demand are not working in their favor. Unless you think that journalists are underpaid even compared to what their market-clearing wage would be, they don’t have a lot of market power. I’d actually find the opposite likely: commenters have said (I haven’t verified) that funding for journalism has dropped in the last few decades, which suggests that demand for journalists has decreased.

        My ex has been working in journalism since college and actually has some clout. She basically told me the exact thing you’re saying here.

        • albatross11 says:

          The common claim I’ve heard is that more and more of the output of even top media outlets is written by unpaid interns who are being supported by their parents. The threat to strike or walk off the job is a lot stronger, when you’re an unpaid intern. What’re they gonna do, not pay you anymore?

          • cassander says:

            . The threat to strike or walk off the job is a lot stronger, when you’re an unpaid intern.

            I’d think the opposite. If there’s enough supply that people are working for free, replacements should be easy to find.

          • albatross11 says:

            It depends on how many replacements there are who can write at the required quality and can afford to work for nothing.

          • Aapje says:

            @cassander

            If there is a large supply of people who are willing to take little pay to advance a certain agenda, but a small supply of people who are willing to take little pay advance a different agenda, you might get the situation where:
            – the media is more left-wing than the populace, because left-wing journalists are willing to work for less pay, so they undercut right-wing media on price
            – left-wing media can abuse their workers to an extreme degree, but only if they stick to a certain agenda

            the media can get stuck in a situation where deviating from that agenda too much will balloon

          • cassander says:

            @Aapje

            I think out disagreement is a matter of degree, not kind. Those writers wouldn’t work for free for Rupert Murdoch, but if a bunch of them quit, I think a lot of them would work for the times, especially if the times was even modestly adept at painting it as “they were fired for insubordination”, not because times editors lacked revolutionary zeal.

          • albatross11 says:

            I suspect that there’s also a large part of your salary writing for the NYT that is paid in prestige (“I write for the New York Times”) rather than in cash.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @Aapje:

            – left-wing media can abuse their workers to an extreme degree, but only if they stick to a certain agenda

            I just want to draw attention to how this is not only cruel, but obviously backwards.
            If you had to say what was the one stated goal of the Left from the French Revolution through the collapse of Communism…

        • Clutzy says:

          I mean, its hard to build clout as a journalist if you are replaceable to your sources and your readers, and most are. Because they don’t vet sources strongly, particularly anonymous sources, there is no reason for readers to believe reporter A more than reporter B. There are some people who have developed followings (mostly on the right in our current environment) because their reporting was counter-narrative and ended up prevailing, particularly with things like the Mueller investigation. But most people aren’t doing that. So the people don’t believe you.

          But also if there are a thousand hacks willing to leak the leaks that FBI and State Dep. officials want them to, you have no value to them either, so your sourcing is also worthless.

      • Ninety-Three says:

        Everything you said about a politically motivated public is my standard argument, what I find striking about this case is that rather than journalists canceling someone for using a racial slur on behalf of the racial slur-hating public that makes up their market, the current month seems to be canceling people for e.g. supporting military intervention while their market supports military intervention. In recent weeks, “what you get canceled for” and “what the public considers bad PR” seem to have become decoupled, and the current set of things you get canceled for seems best explained by “A faction of uncommonly woke liberals have seized the cancellation gun and are using it for purposes other than maximizing market share”. The steelman I’m seeking is an explanation other than that.

        I kind of see your point about outsized influence. It does not seem unreasonable to propose that that the leftmost 20% of customers are way more willing to boycott over insufficient praise of BLM than the rightmost 20% are willing to boycott over excessive BLM praise, and this gives the left more bargaining power in determining what counts as bad PR than simple polling averages would suggest. I can imagine data that would test this hypothesis, and now I’m wondering if anyone has tried to gather it.

        Unless you think that journalists are underpaid even compared to what their market-clearing wage would be, they don’t have a lot of market power.

        I think that the market clearing wage for journalists is $X, or $Y plus benefits, and journalists are currently making $Y while substantially valuing the sense of importance their job brings, which includes the right to police the opinions of their fellows. This is analogous to how US soldiers get paid way less than private military contractors because Blackwater can’t offer the warm fuzzy glow of nationalism and serving your country.

        • 10240 says:

          Everything you said about a politically motivated public is my standard argument

          Yes, that part of my post didn’t intend to explain the current decoupling, but to question your point that we should consider PR concerns to absolve the companies when PR concerns are the reason for the cancelling.

          Actually I don’t really think the decoupling is a new thing either, at least as long as we assume that PR concerns should be a function of how far someone is from the median views (my point about left partisans being more enthusiastic about race/sex issues than right partisans weakens that assumption). For instance, I believe Damore’s views are well within the Overton window of the general public. Actually they probably aren’t extreme even among techies, at least as long as you ask in private: IIRC according to an internal poll, some 40% of Googlers agreed with him.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        Eric T:

        “I’d actually find the opposite likely: commenters have said (I haven’t verified) that funding for journalism has dropped in the last few decades, which suggests that demand for journalists has decreased.”

        Just realizing the the colloquial and economic meaning of demand diverge here. As I understand it, Craigslist is what tore the guts out of newspaper journalism because the classified ads were what was supporting newspapers.

        Does this imply that people never cared very much about the articles? Or that somehow the articles needed to be bundled with the ads to get people to buy the newspapers so that the classified ads were worth buying?

        Or that there used to be a good niche that no one thought to exploit of having a non-news newspaper which was nothing but classified ads and a comics section?

        • SamChevre says:

          a non-news newspaper which was nothing but classified ads and a comics section?

          I grew up with those–Pennysavers.

    • WoollyAI says:

      If I were a soulless journalism robot telling my audience what they wanted to hear, I’d be fired from the New York Times.

      I think you misunderstand the NYTimes’s business model. Profit no longer comes from advertising, it comes from subscriptions, especially digital subscriptions. The NYTimes has about 5 million paid subscriptions, including ~4.5 million digital subscriptions, with a digital subscription costing ~$17/month.

      Who pays $17/month for the NYTimes and what do they want to read? From a financial standpoint, the majority of the country doesn’t matter, what matters is their subscriber base. If their subscriber base doesn’t care about looting and wants to abolish the police, then the NYTimes will privilege those views. 4.5 million subscribers is 1-2% of the country, so you can have views heavily outside the mainstream become standard talking points in what has become a niche paper.

      Can they be described as anything other than politically motivated

      I think the argument goes like this:

      #1 Google and Facebook have eaten advertising and that’s no longer a viable business model for media.

      #2 The new business model relies on deep engagement and upselling. Maybe this is NYT subscriptions, maybe this is Hannity’s new book, maybe this is a Patreon, but the core goal is no longer to get as many views as possible but to identify and upsell to people who are deeply invested and willing to spend $10 or more on your reporting in some way.

      #3 Modern “media” is stuck chasing the extreme left/liberal wing. There’s no way the NYT et al can upsell to the right/conservative side because there’s a long history of mistrust between the right and traditional media and also they’d be competing against established brands like Fox News. And the independents/centrists just don’t engage with news as strongly as the extreme wings. So the only market you have left is…the left.

      That’s why the NYTimes might be making these moves. General PR doesn’t matter, PR within their niche is what matters.

      • albatross11 says:

        Presumably if you’re on the right and want a high-end newspaper, you’re reading the Wall Street Journal, or maybe The Economist.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        I don’t think we actually know that the NYT base wants.

        One person reported cancellations were 50/50 over “angry over Tom Cotton op-ed” and “angry over the opinion editor being fired,” and a super-majority of letters that they published were in the latter camp.

        It’s easy to say “NYT is liberal, their audience is liberal group-thinkers,” but the subscribers tend to be older non-woke people who are used to paying for news instead of something they get for free. They are willing to pay for good information and often eager to pay to hear something that conflicts with their worldview.

        (IIRC, Jesse Singal said 40% of liberals favored military intervention. Tom Cotton’s viewpoint was not anything outside the Overton window even only among liberals!)

      • DinoNerd says:

        *thoughtful* I’d probably be willing to pay at least New York Times prices for a daily news source I had good reason to expect to (a) get their facts right (b) publish retractions when (a) failed and (c) not select topics/emphasis to please/support any specific political positions. Bonus if they covered world news, not just US news or their own locality + US news.

        I’m not willing to pay NYT prices for the NYT currently, much as I enjoy some of their editorials. On a bad day, I don’t trust them to manage spell checking and proof reading, never mind fact checking – and I absolutely don’t trust them to be neutral or middle of the road.

        FWIW, I don’t see how the NYT could be neutral with regard to US politics once the US president began a public vendetta against them. They are kind of between a rock and a hard place.

        Also I tend to except an tolerate a certain amount of pro-elite bias from anything expensive and highly literate – that would include both the Economist and the Wall Street Journal, and perhaps the NYT as well. (I don’t like it, but I can see who pays their bills.)

        What I don’t know is how many other potential customers feel the way I do.

        • FWIW, I don’t see how the NYT could be neutral with regard to US politics once the US president began a public vendetta against them.

          I would have thought that being visibly neutral in that situation would be an advantage. Once they start acting as the other side of a feud, Trump’s behavior looks much more reasonable. “Of course I attack them — they are attacking me.”

          • Ninety-Three says:

            I think it’s more that given the existence of such a vendetta, their actions fall under a cloud of suspicion even if not obviously litigating the feud. Would you trust a nominally neutral NYT to not merely be taking a subtler approach to scoring political points in that situation?

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            It would be tough, but the NYT often manages to report on itself well. It’s a challenge but an editor who gives some reporters the mandate “you will not take a dog in this fight, write it as an outsider” can often get good results.

            That was before the recent brouhaha. Who knows what would happen if a bunch of people on the news side decided the independent reporter’s version was violence.

    • viVI_IViv says:

      I can still tell a just-so story where this is profit-maximizing

      No newspaper other than perhaps celebrity gossip borderline-pornographic tabloids like The Sun is run to maximize profits. At least not directly in terms of sales or ads. Most of them in fact operate at a loss. All the “reputable” newspapers are owned by old-money families or big financial groups with political interests which use them as mouthpieces.

    • Logan says:

      I think you should consider the possibility that you have miscalculated the level of public support for the things “these people” were fired over. This could mean you’re using a single outlier poll, or the questions used in the poll don’t match exactly the issue actually raised by the fired reporters.

      I say this because your representation of the public will doesn’t match my own conception. For example, you say the majority support violent suppression of looting, but wasn’t the controversy at NYT about violent suppression of the current protests, not hypothetical looters? What percent think the current protests are looters? I’ve seen polling numbers all over the place and highly dependent on the precise question asked, so I’m skeptical you can ascertain with confidence that recent journalist firings aren’t supported by the public.

      • Derannimer says:

        The Cotton op-ed distinguished between protesters and looters, saying, “a majority who seek to protest peacefully shouldn’t be confused with bands of miscreants.” The initial Times statement apologizing for the op-ed conflated the two, then was quietly amended.

        From the Taibbi piece making the rounds:

        In classic Times fashion, the paper has already scrubbed a mistake they made misreporting what their own editorial said, in an article about Bennet’s ouster. Here’s how the piece by Marc Tracy read originally (emphasis mine):

        James Bennet, the editorial page editor of The New York Times, has resigned after a controversy over an Op-Ed by a senator calling for military force against protesters in American cities.

        Here’s how the piece reads now:

        James Bennet resigned on Sunday from his job as the editorial page editor of The New York Times, days after the newspaper’s opinion section, which he oversaw, published a much-criticized Op-Ed by a United States senator calling for a military response to civic unrest in American cities.

        Also not sure why you say “hypothetical looters”; there are actual looters, and there were more at the time Cotton wrote the op-ed.

        • Aftagley says:

          Right, but this is also when militarized cops were being used to beat down peaceful protesters. The largest story in the world when the NYT published this piece was Trump using federal forces and supporting police to tear gas, shoot and beat protesters for a few blocks so that he could go take a photo.

          In the face of direct evidence that federally controlled forces are being used to violently suppress peaceful protesters, it’s pretty easy and accurate to draw the conclusion of “more federal involvement = more violent responses”

          • The question is what Cotton was calling for, not what it’s consequences might have been. The original version of the Times editorial lied about that.

        • cassander says:

          @Aftagley

          the trump protesters were relocated a couple blocks, not “suppressed”.

          • Aftagley says:

            I mean, I was there. We were protesting in front of the white house, then a bunch of guys come out, used irritant gas and flash bangs to get our crowd moving, advanced with horses to keep us moving and shot sting rounds and OC spray at the people who weren’t moving fast enough. We went from people lawfully protesting to people running away from police force, how is that not suppressing us?

            It’s not like we reformed at that point and kept protesting. Maybe this speaks ill of my steely resolve, but after I’ve been tear-gassed I go home. It 100% suppressed me and a bunch of people I was there with.

          • cassander says:

            @Aftagley

            It wasn’t suppression because you could have kept reformed a block a way. Or you could have acquiesced to being relocated a couple blocks and skipped the teargassing entirely (though I realize that this was, at best, poorly explained at the time). the motive of the action was reclaiming a particular piece of real estate, not ending the protest.

          • Aftagley says:

            the motive of the action was reclaiming a particular piece of real estate, not ending the protest.

            Even accepting this is true, which I don’t, since when has motive mattered? If I’ve just been driven off patch of real-estate A via force, why do you think I should have been able to understand and trust that I could totally and legally stick to piece of real-estate B and be totally fine? Would you trust the cops to no just keep going?

            Also, have you ever been OC sprayed? Or gassed? Or hit with a sting round? I’m 3/3 on those and they make you want to stop doing what you were previously doing. The fact that we could, legally protest somewhere else doesn’t matter if they make use physically unable or at least strongly unwilling. You don’t have to set out with the specific intent of suppressing someone’s rights to still end up doing so.

          • cassander says:

            @Aftagley says:

            Even accepting this is true, which I don’t,

            what motive are you claiming? the story seems to be agreed on by all.

            since when has motive mattered? If I’ve just been driven off patch of real-estate A via force, why do you think I should have been able to understand and trust that I could totally and legally stick to piece of real-estate B and be totally fine? Would you trust the cops to no just keep going?

            Because they stopped at the edge of their perimeter.

            You don’t have to set out with the specific intent of suppressing someone’s rights to still end up doing so.

            As I said at the time, we’ve long accepted that presidents have carte blanche to wall off huge swathes of cities and roads in the name of security. I don’t like this, I wish we wouldn’t do it, but this is not that different. Free speech zones are a long established absurdity.

          • Aftagley says:

            what motive are you claiming? the story seems to be agreed on by all.

            In short – that the administration was looking for something to prove their strength against the protesters and this is how they chose to do it. This NYT piece is a good primer on it. I don’t think it was all or nothing, but the show of force was a factor.

            Because they stopped at the edge of their perimeter.

            This isn’t really an answer to my question, and they didn’t stop at any perimeter edge, they forced some people up 17th and pushed others down H street. Also at both ends of these streets were collections of DC metro PD – uninvolved with the current operation and just as clueless as us, but we didn’t know that. Again – why should any of us have expected that this wouldn’t be a precursor to them holding us, continuing to advance or, i don’t know, delaying us for a couple minutes than arresting us for violating curfew?

            As I said at the time, we’ve long accepted that presidents have carte blanche to wall off huge swathes of cities and roads in the name of security.

            And, like even else said at the time, that’s not how this normally happens.

          • cassander says:

            @Aftagley says:

            In short – that the administration was looking for something to prove their strength against the protesters and this is how they chose to do it. This NYT piece is a good primer on it. I don’t think it was all or nothing, but the show of force was a factor.

            Never blame malice where stupidity is sufficient. Trump wanted this photo, someone told him the crowds hadn’t been moved yet, he got frustrated and he said get rid of them. Or maybe barr said get rid of them, and then they did it, badly.

            This isn’t really an answer to my question, and they didn’t stop at any perimeter edge, they forced some people up 17th and pushed others down H street.

            So they forced the crowd one block north and one block west, like I said.

            Again – why should any of us have expected that this wouldn’t be a precursor to them holding us, continuing to advance or, i don’t know, delaying us for a couple minutes than arresting us for violating curfew?

            Because, you know, they didn’t do anything and weren’t involved.

            And, like even else said at the time, that’s not how this normally happens.

            No, it’s normally done with more competence. They fucked here. but let’s not pretend it was a categorically different action than a presidential motorcade, or that you guys would have dispersed if you’d been told that they were just making room for trump to have is photo taken. Because you wouldn’t have.

          • Aftagley says:

            Never blame malice where stupidity is sufficient.

            Why not both?

            So they forced the crowd one block north and one block west, like I said.

            No, they were forced roughly two blocks west, then split and some were forced northward and others west.

            Because, you know, they didn’t do anything and weren’t involved.

            So you’re saying that protesters should have thought… “Hmm, these cops just forcefully ejected us, but I’m sure these very similarly dressed cops are our friends?”

            but let’s not pretend it was a categorically different action than a presidential motorcade

            It was 100% different. For those, individual streets are cleared at ingress points, traffic is allowed to filter out then the remaining stragglers are dispensed with. They don’t run down the street with a bulldozer.

          • Cliff says:

            I read they didn’t use tear gas, just smoke bombs, but protestors assume those are tear gas?

          • cassander says:

            @Aftagley says:

            Why not both?

            because malicious schemes are a lot rarer than you’d guess. Fuckups are far more common.

            No, they were forced roughly two blocks west, then split and some were forced northward and others west.

            So 2 blocks. how exactly does that change things?

            So you’re saying that protesters should have thought… “Hmm, these cops just forcefully ejected us, but I’m sure these very similarly dressed cops are our friends?”

            No, they were supposed to assume that the cops that were standing around doing nothing instead of assisting the others were doing nothing.

            hey don’t run down the street with a bulldozer.

            they don’t use bulldozers, but I wouldn’t risk standing in front of a presidential motorcade and refusing to move. Would you?

          • I read they didn’t use tear gas, just smoke bombs, but protestors assume those are tear gas?

            I believe a later statement from the park police conceded that they had used a gas that had teargas-like effects, just not the particular gas that “teargas” usually refers to.

          • CatCube says:

            Edit: Wrong place.

    • Matthew A says:

      Some journalists and other prominent figures have been getting canceled recently for not being sufficiently on-board with Black Lives Matter …

      I think conversation tends to go better if you first substantiate it with some examples so we know specifically what is motivating your post. Folks may only know of some examples or may know of others (with different characteristics) from the ones you’re thinking of. This will improve clarity, help ensure folks are on the same page, and make for a more fruitful discussion.

    • John Lynch says:

      Don’t underrate fear. It’s not the cancellation that threatens free speech, it’s self-censorship out of fear of cancellation.

      I think journalists used to call it the “chilling effect.”

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        Don’t underestimate how many people read 1984 and fantasized about being the boot stomping on the face.

    • keaswaran says:

      “Some journalists and other prominent figures have been getting canceled recently for not being sufficiently on-board with Black Lives Matter”

      Do you have any examples? The only one that comes to mind is the opinions editor of the Times, and he was fired because there has been several years of grumbling about him, and he finally did something they decided was big enough.

  105. Belisaurus Rex says:

    Model this, the paperback version of Tyler Cowen’s Big Business is more expensive than the hardcover on Amazon.

    • sharper13 says:

      Interesting… so something below spaced out trips a filters on SSC. Had to post this three times to get it to actually show up. Only worked after disguising the names of the publishers.

      Check the publishers. P i c a d o r for the paperback reprint vs. St. M a r t i n’s Press (who also has the eBook rights and makes more money on selling those).

      • anonymousskimmer says:

        P i c a d o r
        is an indefinitely banned user. Since Scott uses simple text searches to ban that’s what happened.

  106. Eric T says:

    Good news everyone! I got a time machine. But I can only send each person back in time once. For some reason upon seeing my time machine, your inner Roman patriot awoke, and now your goal is to use my time machine to stop the fall of the roman empire. You can bring anything you want back with you, but any technology not yet invented in the year you arrive won’t function/will cease to be. Where/when do you go and how do you do it?
    Caveat: You will mystically learn Latin upon arrival and look like a Roman if you do not already.

    • Belisaurus Rex says:

      “Why should Caesar just get to stomp around like a giant while the rest of us try not to get smushed under his big feet? Brutus is just as cute as Caesar, right? Brutus is just as smart as Caesar, people totally like Brutus just as much as they like Caesar, and when did it become okay for one person to be the boss of everybody because that’s not what Rome is about! We should totally just STAB CAESAR!”

      But right before he crosses the Rubicon instead of a few years later. Alternatively, encourage Crassus not to invade Parthia, if that is easier. The Roman Republic was doing fine, and while the peaks of Empire are higher, it is not quite as stable as Republics seem to be.

      Many people would consider the Roman Republic to have been an empire, in the same way the French Republic(s) had imperial possessions despite not having an emperor.

      • cassander says:

        Many people would consider the Roman Republic to have been an empire, in the same way the French Republic(s) had imperial possessions despite not having an emperor.

        So france’s republics were empires. That fits, because napoleon’s empire was officially a republic!

      • The original Mr. X says:

        But right before he crosses the Rubicon instead of a few years later. Alternatively, encourage Crassus not to invade Parthia, if that is easier. The Roman Republic was doing fine, and while the peaks of Empire are higher, it is not quite as stable as Republics seem to be.

        Are you being ironic here? The Republic had been trapped in a cycle of violence ever since the murder of Tiberius Gracchus in 133 BC. There had already been seven or so (depending on how you count them) civil wars or rebellions during Caesar’s lifetime.

    • WoollyAI says:

      You can bring anything you want back with you, but any technology not yet invented in the year you arrive won’t function/will cease to be.

      Well, the obvious thing is to bring back a ton of gold or other rare minerals, along with notes on a variety of medieval and renaisance tech, such as the gunpowder, the compass, better smelting techniques, printing presses, etc. It’s not like you won’t be able to make a printing press or mix the right ingredients to get blackpowder.

      When is the more interesting question. I think the best time is 10-15 years before the death of the eldest Gracchi brother and to do your best to prevent that. That’s really when the Republic started to fall apart and the Republic is far more worth saving than the later empire. You could try your luck with Sulla, it’s definitely simpler because you do have an absolute dictator committed to restoring the Republic, but I think it’s too late for that.

      Honestly, gunpowder is good, but military power was never really an issue for the Romans. I think the printing press is the real game changer, be the first in mass media and use that advantage to steer the empire away from collapse.

      Also, being in Israel/Palestine during the reign of Tiberius could be enlightening.

      • Wrong Species says:

        military power was never really an issue for the Romans

        The fifth century emperors would strongly disagree. They tried and failed multiple times to stop the various barbarian groups. It’s possible they could have lasted a longer if they could have stopped the Vandals from taking North Africa.

    • cassander says:

      Gunpowder is key. there’s no reason that you can’t make guns with roman levels of technology. They didn’t because guns require more than just take stumbling onto the the fact that mixing charcoal, sulfur, and bird shit makes a good incendiary. You had to do that, then spend a couple centuries refining it, purifying it, and realizing that was more useful to use it to shoot projectiles than to light things on fire. Once you have them, though, they largely eliminate the ability of “barbarians” to threaten settled peoples. They also, though this is more contentious, drove state formation by increasing the capital intensity of warfare. I’m not sure if you can save the roman republic or not, it’s that possible its city state institutions would simply never have been able to scale up, but you can definitely save Rome.

      • Trofim_Lysenko says:

        I’d argue that the development of firearms are also a deathblow to warrior aristocracy as a feature of social hierarchy, in the long term. Which is not to say that they necessarily prevent OTHER forms of undesirable social structures, and in fact they probably make other bad structures EASIER to form, but that’s another point in the favor of firearm technology.

        Firearms, the Printing Press, and increasing literacy are a really potent combo.

        • The original Mr. X says:

          Why is having a warrior aristocracy undesirable?

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:

            Stability and overall welfare, basically. Elsewhere you may have seen me being down on naive democracy/majoritarian rule, but an entrenched aristocracy can be just as bad.

            A truly wise and just noble or monarch is great, arguably the best form of government overall, but kings and nobles aren’t immortal, and the social and cultural dynamics associated with the establishment and maintenance of an aristocratic class make ensuring that ALL the monarchs and nobles impossible, and the failure state is fairly ugly.

            I would prefer a system of government that discourages the normalization of having entire families killed to secure the succession, and periodic wars for either new territory or over successions that aren’t secure.

            Note that firearms and explosives aren’t the only thing that led to these social changes, and we’re talking a multi-century process, but I don’t see any reason not to help set conditions that will start the transition early.

      • johan_larson says:

        I don’t see any particular reason why the empire has to be so darn big and cumbersome. A smaller state that fits naturally defensible borders might work better. It might be worth thinking about where those defensible strategic boundaries are. If you control the entire Italian peninsula, the line from Genoa to Venice at the top of the boot is only 280 km, which should be defensible. Pisa to Ravenna, a bit further south, is even shorter at 170 km.

        I’m not sure where the cut points are further north, but there should be plenty of fortifiable passes in the Alps.

        • cassander says:

          Because if you’re smaller, that means leaving space for someone else, and when that vacuum gets filled, whoever fills it can threaten you. the security dilemma is unending, which is why the modern US is defending Guam, Taiwan, Ukraine, and Latvia.

      • Tatterdemalion says:

        Gunpowder is key. there’s no reason that you can’t make guns with roman levels of technology. They didn’t because guns require more than just take stumbling onto the the fact that mixing charcoal, sulfur, and bird shit makes a good incendiary. You had to do that, then spend a couple centuries refining it, purifying it, and realizing that was more useful to use it to shoot projectiles than to light things on fire. Once you have them, though, they largely eliminate the ability of “barbarians” to threaten settled peoples.

        Are you sure about that? My (admittedly third-hand) understanding is that trained bowmen were actually more effective than early musketeers; the big advantage of the gun was that you could make a hastily-raised peasant militia much more dangerous, and for the Romans, with their big standing armies, that’s probably not so relevant.

        • Hazzard says:

          It’s a mix of issues. Guns were more reliably at dealing with armour than bows. Bullet-proof armour was expensive in the renaissance and had its drawbacks. I doubt the Romans would be able to produce the bullet-proof armour. I think guns would make things worse for Rome, rather than better.

        • cassander says:

          First, being a trained bowman is a lifestyle choice. Keeping in shape to pull a serious bow requires constant practice, and an army of people in that shape all but requires a culture that produces very large numbers of archers as part of daily life. Almost anyone can use a gun, and it takes far less effort to get someone to use a gun well.

          Second, guns are loud and scary. Battles are won more by making the enemy run away than by killing them, so this matters. this applies doubly to artillery, which can also inflict destruction that puts any archer to shame.

          third, as Hazzard says, guns were good at piercing armor, which is one of the reasons you see the proliferation of full suits of plates in the 1500s. less settled people aren’t going to be able to produce armor like that in enough quantities to protect themselves. The Romans could. 1500s level matchlocks and canon would be devastating against the goths and huns.

          For most of history, there’s back and forth between settled and unsettled peoples. The settled are usually better organized, and usually have the upper hand, but when they get sloppy or the unsettled get organized, the settled people could be in for some serious trouble. once you get serious guns, though, that pretty much stops being the case. the logistics of moving into unsettled terrain means the settled can’t go and wipe them out, but the unsettled lose the ability to attack even disorganized settled people, because they can’t produce weapons and armies that can stand up in a straight fight.

        • Wrong Species says:

          If anyone knows better they can correct me, but I believe that there weren’t that many bowmen left by the end of the 16th century.

          • John Schilling says:

            Mostly correct, except for nomadic populations that couldn’t make guns. The settled populations, even the ones with a long tradition of producing good bowmen, pretty much all switched to guns by the time early muskets were available.

            For approximately the reasons already stated: Good enough at killing from a distance, good enough (with a bayonet) at killing in close combat, very good at penetrating armor, very good at producing concentrated raw terror. The superiority of a good bowman in only the first of those categories was not nearly enough to offset the other advantages of the musket, which was really a well-balanced all-in-one tool for doing the things you need to win a battle.

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:

            They lasted longer in China for a combination of reasons, but basically, yes. In PRACTICE, Firearms were superior enough to bows in the vast majority of actual battlefield applications that they had mostly displaced them by the late 1500s. One of the best discussions of primary sources on this is a defunct blog I really hope doesn’t lose hosting anytime soon. Of particular note:

            In actual combat, there are no recorded instances of bows outranging muskets, whereas there are multiple primary sources attesting to the opposite.

            -16th-17th century texts generally refer to musketeers and arquebusiers requiring MORE training than bowmen, not less.

            But there are a ton more great entries. In short, once you have early 1500s-era matchlock muskets, you have a weapon that is pretty much flatly superior in practice to most bow designs for most purposes.

            And it’s worth noting that if you’re talking going back in time, you can bring back a simplified design with you that incorporates at least some of the design refinements of later weapons without necessarily requiring the sort of mechanical complexity and cost of later lock designs, so you don’t even have to limit yourself to the original 1500s designs. If nothiing else, you can design more ergonomic wood furniture and better sighting systems.

          • cassander says:

            @Trofim_Lysenko says

            -16th-17th century texts generally refer to musketeers and arquebusiers requiring MORE training than bowmen, not less.

            Archers don’t take decades to train, but they do need continual practice. Guns and powder cost more money, and especially early on when there were few guns in private hands, the average person had little experience with anything mechanical, and there were no good systems of training yet I can see the training being laborious. But once you’ve taught someone to use a gun, they can leave for a years and still be pretty good when they come back. Not so much for bows.

            And it’s worth noting that if you’re talking going back in time, you can bring back a simplified design with you that incorporates at least some of the design refinements of later weapons without necessarily requiring the sort of mechanical complexity and cost of later lock designs

            That’s the fun question, isn’t it? When’s the earliest you could go back to and still be able to make mass numbers of Ferguson rifles?\

            Also, there’s a great discussion of the bow vs. musket question in John Francis Guilmartin’s Gunpoweder and Galleys.

        • The original Mr. X says:

          If that were the case, we would expect bow-based armies to regularly defeat musket-based ones except where the latter seriously outnumbered them. In fact, we see the complete opposite.

      • The original Mr. X says:

        Once you have them, though, they largely eliminate the ability of “barbarians” to threaten settled peoples.

        Most of the “barbarians” who overthrew Rome were themselves settled peoples.

    • Deiseach says:

      As a Barbarian sitting at the Western edge of the Known World: Oh, this is gonna be good

      “Do you think we should stop slave-raiding into Britannia?”

      “Nah, they started it”

    • Hazzard says:

      I’d stop Christianity from taking over. I think you have to accept that the Roman Empire will have civil wars, but you’ve got to contain them. How to do that is easier said than done.

      I think the best options are to stop Julian the Apostate from dying, or otherwise stop Christianity from taking over. That leads to a lot of internal stability and makes religion another dividing line in Rome.

      There’s several options.
      Save Julian from dying
      Stop Constantine the Great from winning the Battle of Milvian Ridge
      Try to wipe out Judaism/Mess up Jesus’ life/do something about early Christianity.

      1 and 2 I’d solve with introducing grenades. Wouldn’t create a huge military shakeup like introducing guns, at least not immediately. And firearms would show up earlier, but in a more organic way. Frag Grenades could mess up enemy formations, be difficult for anyone else to copy due to being perishable and the spread can be easily controlled.

      Also, the only Roman Enemy that could really take advantage of grenades and later firearms would be established states like the Sassanids, or Roman Breakaways. But keeping grenades only used by the Emperor personally and who he trusts is a way to keep an advantage over everyone else. I’d also introduce stirrups. This would even out against the later migrations from the east, which would make their cavalry a little less deadly.

      I have a soft spot for saving Julian over destroying Constantine because Julian was a Pagan Thinker who could see what was wrong with Christianity and would be on board with my plan if I could prove it worked. And after he died, Christians seized the reigns for the rest of the Empire.

      Plans 3a, 3b and 3c are much more complex.
      3a) Kick off a much earlier Jewish revolt in history. This could easily be done by having Roman Emperor statues put up in Jerusalem when the Romans were persuaded by some of the more pragmatic Jewish leaders not to.
      3b) Kill Jesus when he’s young, or kill all his disciples during the crucifixion or during the Aftermath. Peter and Paul are the most important ones to my understanding, but it can’t hurt to be thorough. At the very least, it would shake-up the foundations enough that they might not spread throughout the Empire, or butterfly effect things to stop the initial rise of Christianity among the elites.
      3c) Track down and kill some of the early cults which are the letters from Paul’s audience. And make sure Peter doesn’t make it to Rome.

      • MPG says:

        What does Christianity have to do with Roman civil wars? It’s not the motivation for Julian’s war with Constantius II, and the succession from Julian through Jovian to Valentinian I is surprisingly peaceful.

        Do you blame it for the failure of the Tetrarchic system? That looks to me pretty straightforwardly like dynastic ambitions on a collision-course. Maybe Diocletian appointed Severus and Maximinus Daza because he suspected Constantine and Maxentius of Christian sympathies, but not even Lactantius alleges that, when he’s dreaming up a conversation between Diocletian and Galerius on the succession. Once Constantine is hailed as Augustus in York–nothing to do with Christianity there–the system has to give and, in the event, not even Maximian seems really to have been on board with Diocletian’s plan.

        Christianity is the motive force, or the excuse, for Constantine’s successful war with Licinius. One could, I suppose, make a case that the war ruled out non-dynastic succession for the foreseeable future, except, of course, that it did not (witness Jovian, Valentinian I, Theodosius I, scads of later Eastern emperors…) Rulership by two unrelated people at once? Regret it or not, the Romans seem not to have been comfortable with the idea. Dynastic ambitions aren’t going away any time soon and, again, Christianity seems scarcely more than incidental: its theology can hardly suggest that blood heritage is more important than adoption or other bonds created by law.

        If you think that Eugenius’ revolt was driven by a desire to restore paganism, you have a second data point, but it’s limited. I don’t see how appointment of a senator by yet another “barbarian” warlord (Arbogast, in this case) is going to change the underlying system at all.

        Or do you think the fifth-century pagans were right, and Rome failed because the gods were angry that sacrifices had ceased? I think the sixteen hundred years since show that European states can do pretty well without worshipping the primordial gods of their families, nations, or places, but you might have a counter-argument.

      • Deiseach says:

        Friendly reminder that Heliogabalus wasn’t Christian and that was its own unholy political fuck-up. When your own granny is the one orchestrating assassination plots against you, then it’s not about religion.

        Can you develop your point more? Are you going for Gibbons’ “Christianity made the Romans weak and effeminate and they lost all the good old martial virtues and vigour of the pagan times?” because that’s an argument whose basis boils down to “they were no longer cruel and ruthless enough to put down rebellions and crush conquered territories with such force that the natives were too afraid to try again”, and if we take it that part of the long collapse of the Empire was the pressure on the borders from incursions by ‘barbarians’, those barbarians fleeing from invasions and problems in their own lands are not going to care if you’re Christian or pagan, or if you are Exemplary Ancient Roman Virtues because war, famine and plague are flogging them onwards.

        If you mean “pagan Rome will be on good terms with other pagan cultures and won’t be bothered about trying to convert them to the One True Faith, so a lot of problems will be averted there”, you have a pagan Roman Empire that is still very interested in squeezing the last drops out of client territories via tax farming and hoping to be sent in some official capacity to a rich province so you could make your fortune there, and that isn’t going to endear you (or the Empire) to the locals.

    • Evan Þ says:

      Now that WoolyAI brings it up, my current inclination is to go to Galilee c. 32 AD and ask Jesus what to do with the time machine. No need to speak Aramaic; I can identify Him as the one who understands my modern English perfectly.

      Even from a secular perspective, Jesus is a wise Jew who’s neither in bed with the Roman occupation nor violently resisting it. He’s well positioned to tell apart the good and bad things about Roman rule from the perspective of the subject peoples, in a way we might well be missing from two thousand years later. Our intervention should be informed by that, to maximize the good and minimize the bad. We don’t (shouldn’t?) want to just make Rome last longer (we arguably got it till 1922 in our timeline); we want to make it better or at least keep it from getting worse.

    • Wrong Species says:

      I really don’t believe that you could preserve the empire, unless maybe if you invent gunpowder. Everything was a stall.

      That said I would probably assassinate Honorius. He was weak and pathetic and everything that happened during his reign would bring Rome to an end. The only issue would be how would the Eastern half of the empire react. If they left the West alone to proclaim their own emperor, then great. If they try to unify the empire under Arcadius, then you have the same problem of a weak emperor. In that case, maybe just assassinate Theodosius before the Battle of the Frigidus. Then the whole issue of his sons goes away.

      • cassander says:

        true, but if you stall long enough, you get to be Byzantium for 1000 years.

        • Wrong Species says:

          Byzantium had a really good geographic position though. It explains why the Eastern Roman Empire had inactive emperors in the first half of the fifth century and did alright. They were well protected from the Germans. Even after the Arabs invaded, they still had Anatolia for the next 400 years, which is extremely defensible territory. And of course, they had Constantinople, which we’ve talked about before.

          • cassander says:

            I actually think the real difference was the city itself being effectively unsiegable. This made things difficult for the enemies of the empire, of course, but it also cut down on civil wars. Ambitious generals couldn’t just march into town and depose an emperor, if they tried they’d be stuck outside the walls while the emperor stat inside them with the treasury, militia, fleet and any forces that were still loyal. Emperors were deposed, of course, but by action of palace intrigue of the mob. These could be inspired by people outside the walls, of course, but ultimately only someone inside the city could depose an emperor, which made everything a bit more stable.

          • cassander says:

            There were definitely civil wars, I didn’t mean to imply that there weren’t. But there were definitely fewer than there were in the late western empire, and they often took the form of a general marching up to the walls, camping outside them, and hoping the mob or the high officials did away with the emperor. 717 is a relatively rare example of a full on civil war with armies clashing.

          • Wrong Species says:

            But there were definitely fewer than there were in the late western empire,

            Sure, but the late Western Empire was more unstable than most places with the same issue of hereditary succession as the Eastern Empire that caused unstable dynasties. The civil wars were sometimes just a general camping outside of Constantinople but there are plenty of times where actual battles were fought. My question would be how they compare to other places during the Middle Ages. France had one dynasty for 800 years(although part of that is outside the time frame).

          • cassander says:

            @wrong species

            well, the succession wasn’t really hereditary in the east (or west), at least not until the Palaiologos showed up. There’s actually a book about this. There’s a lot of dynastic turnover, but it comes about by coups. Sometimes a threat of war plus coup, but it almost always involves either the mob or place elites losing faith in one side or the other more than direct battlefield results, which made it much less damaging for the empire.

          • Wrong Species says:

            the succession wasn’t really hereditary in the east (or west),

            That’s what I meant. Since they didn’t have an entrenched system in place, it meant that Roman leadership was chaotic. Even if most of those involved coups/riots, it still leaves plenty of military conflicts.

            Take Basil the Second. His early reign was extremely unstable as he tried to assert power after being under the thumb of generals and eunuchs. When the general Bardas Skleros rebelled, there were apparently three battles before he was defeated at the Battle of Pankaleia.

            You could also look at the Battle of Kalavrye which helped Alexios Komnenos establish a power base in which he could later become emperor.

            We could go back and forth on how representative these are but based on my reading of the Byzantines, they certainly weren’t unique.

          • Deiseach says:

            So then the question becomes: do we want to try to preserve the entire Empire, do we pick the Western half, or do we go with the Eastern half and let the West go hang, because the Eastern is stronger and we can make it last even longer and more effectively?

    • James Miller says:

      Rome fell in 1453 when the Turks took Constantinople. I arrive in 1450 Constantinople with as much gold as the rules allow, give it all to Emperor Constantine XI and suggest he use it to hire lots of mercenaries.

      • Belisaurus Rex says:

        YES, not 1922 as suggested above

      • cassander says:

        if you really want to save Constantinople, you have to go back a lot further. I say you go back to 1303 and sink the ship the catalans officers are taking to the city.

        • Belisaurus Rex says:

          Yeah, if it’s the Byzantines you want to save, maybe convince Alexios Komnenos to help the Latins during the siege of Antioch. In hindsight this does not hurt Alexios much since the Latins would win anyway, but this is the pivotal moment of the First Crusade and the Byzantines look horrible for not showing up. This is their chance to be the heroes and save the crusade, which maybe gets them on better terms with the West.

    • albatross11 says:

      Paper hadn’t been invented yet, but the main thing you’re going to need is information. Some gold would be good, too, but mainly you need to bring back enough information to kickstart the industrial and scientific revolutions a couple thousand years early. There’s obvious stuff–the recipe for gunpowder, how to make halfway decent lenses for glasses, telescopes, and microscopes, the germ theory of disease + recipes for making soap, techniques for making a good still for both antiseptic and industrial-revolution-funding purposes, instructions for making steam engines and hydraulic presses/jacks, maps of useful mineral deposits to be discovered in the next 2000 years, instructions for making a sextant and doing stellar navigation, etc. 30 years after your arrival, your gun factory is using production lines and control charts and your trade ships are selling mass-produced goods in China and India.

      • salvorhardin says:

        Helen Dale’s _Kingdom of the Wicked_ is an entertaining exploration of what might have happened in that sort of scenario.

      • Lambert says:

        I think there’s more to seafaring than the sextant.

        TBH I’d try to shortcut that part by sending ships full of mutineers and iron tools off the Eastern end of Eurasia promising to give them land and pardon if they come back with some willing proto-polynesian shipwrights and seamen. Might have to wait for the favourable winds of El Nino.

        Also start marking nice trees for the Navy.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        How far were the Romans from being able to make paper?

        • Lambert says:

          Well it was invented in 2nd century China, reaching Europe in the High Medieval. If you set your mind to it you could probably figure out how to make paper from rags and wood using Roman technology within a few years. Paper mills may or may not be viable, depending on the effect of slavery on capital vs free labour costs (and ultimately land costs).

          I suppose the other question is the cost of paper vs papyrus.
          And the medieval era saw the introduction of parchment, which was superior to both but very expensive.

    • Well... says:

      any technology not yet invented in the year you arrive won’t function/will cease to be.

      I’m hijacking slightly here, but if we truly consider the breadth of what “technology” might encompass, how many people living today could really travel in this time machine more than a few hundred years pastward and emerge as something other than a useless oaf? Language, clothing, eyeglasses, dental fixtures, learned methods of problem-solving…all of these are technologies, the modern instantiations of which we mostly take for granted.

      • albatross11 says:

        Yeah, if information can’t be brought back (you can’t use Arabic numerals because they haven’t been invented yet), then I think you’re stuck bringing piles of gold to give to someone you think could save Rome.

    • John Schilling says:

      What’s my budget for scribes to handwrite the Encyclopedia Britannica in six-point minscule on vellum scrolls? Alternately, how pedantically anal are your arbiters of forbidden technology?

      Regardless, I’m bringing silver coin for spending money, gold for capital, the best sword and mail shirt your tech-censors will allow to dissuade silver-hungry thieves until I can hire proper bodyguards, some select natural poisons refined as best I can get away with, and books. Britannica, probably a mid-20th century edition, and The Way Things Work (Simon & Schuster, not MacAuley), and a few others if they’ll fit.

      What to do with them: weapons are overrated. Yes, we can teach the Romans gunpowder. And it would be silly to stop there; anyone who can do gunpowder can do fulminate of mercury, rifling, Minie bullets, and socket bayonets. That’s your sweet spot for preindustrial armaments. But the periods where Rome faced any serious martial shortfall, are the periods in which demographic and political rot were going to bring down the system with or without guns. If you’re trying to save the Republic, it hardly helps that Caesar crosses the Rubicon with an army of musketeers – especially as the reserve armies at home will probably have the older weapons. On the other hand, a decent telegraph network might let the Senate keep closer tabs on distant affairs, rather than have to appoint autonomous unaccountable dictators.

      Beyond that, which Rome am I trying to save? Republic, Western Empire, or Eastern Empire?

      Republic, I think I might try buying my way into the Senate and establishing bureaucratic reforms in parallel with the military reforms of Marius. And maybe poison Sulla just to be safe.

      Western Empire, you pretty much have to get in early before the rot sets in and the throne becomes a salable commodity. The easy answer is to poison Commodus in infancy and get myself a job as tutor or advisor to whomever Marcus Aurelius chooses as a successor. Then try to lock in systematic reforms, because competent emperors adopting/appointing competent successors wasn’t going to last forever. Telegraph network, modern bookkeeping, probably printing, and some political theory.

      Eastern Empire, I might actually go the military route and try to give Romanos Diogenes a force of musketeers at Manzikert. That eliminates a major military threat, keeps Anatolia in the Empire, and probably prevents the Doukas family from screwing over the Empire from within. Also probably results in an Empire strong enough that it doesn’t need Frankish crusaders to deal with the Turks and the Saracens, so Constantinople isn’t sacked in 1204.

      • Lambert says:

        >The Way Things Work

        Ah I see you’re a man of culture as well.

        I kind of want to get the original »Wie Funktioniert Das?«
        Mostly to laugh at how literal technical vocabulary sounds in German.

        There’s also the 1967 Volume 2 which goes both deeper into things like nuclear reactors and more abstract into things like road junction design. But the diagrams are annotated in a grotesque font, so it’s not really the same.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        I’m reminded of Heinlein’s “Elsewhen” which included somewhat of the replicating technology project. I remember a sliderule and books (the Rubber Handbook?) of physical and chemical constants. Neither of them are permitted, but the Romans would probably benefit from abacuses.

        Stirrups and horse collars are just ideas, so they can presumably be brought back. All you’d need is to make prototypes and convince people to try them.

        Would Rome benefit from border collies?

        I’m admittedly operating on the assumption that anything which makes Rome more prosperous would help keep it from falling. This is a guess.

        Anything I want? No weight or volume limits? Can I come back with a team?

        *****

        I checked. Invention of paper in China, 100 BC. Fall of Rome, 100 AD. I can probably have some kind of paper.

        Could the Romans benefit from tea and silk? Maybe. Is there other Chinese tech they could use?

    • MPG says:

      I’d have to be sure, first of all, how long I’m supposed to keep the Roman Empire from falling: have an emperor, titled thus and recognized by his eastern colleague, at least nominally ruling somewhere west of Illyricum after 476? Sure, that might be doable. Making it past the climatic and pandemic catastrophes of the mid-sixth century? Going to be a lot tougher. There’s a reason why that’s the best bet for a hard cultural dividing line and serious systems collapse in Italy and Gaul, and it’s not just the Gothic Wars of Justinian.

      Second, I’d want to be sure just why–for a requisite value of “fall”–it did fall. I rather like Peter Heather’s theory, so let’s run with it. The Western Roman Empire fell due to a spiraling loss of territory and revenue. Land falls out of the control of the central government, taxes stop coming in, the army has less money to keep it going–and the army, make no mistake, is the big expense in a pre-modern state: none of this nonsense about Robert Baratheon wasting the whole fisc on tourneys–the army therefore has fewer men, loses more territory; rinse, repeat.

      Where does one stop the cycle? Sure, we can fantasize about setting up an alt-Rome sometime earlier, but once we get to a point where the “fall” of Rise and Fall appears in hindsight (always in hindsight!) to have begun, there are three obvious places:

      1. in 376, before the Tervingi and Greuthungi crossed the Danube. Stopping that, however, is either going to take some very clever statecraft on the part of the local Romans or stopping the Huns several steps back (yes, yes, I know: it’s not just “barbarians moving in lines on a map,” but the Huns do seem to be providing a good part of the motive force for what’s happening). None of the archeology or politics is understood well enough for us to be sure what will help–I’d certainly not risk bringing gunpowder and possibly, accidentally, setting up a rival ex- or para-Roman state, which might just bring down the empire based in Italy.

      2. At Adrianople in 378. More than doable. Just get Valens to wait for Gratian or, better yet, keep Valentinian I from dying (perhaps impossible: a stroke isn’t going to be curable even with future knowledge of anatomy), and sheer numbers may win them the battle. Better tactics, enable by future knowledge, wouldn’t hurt either.

      3. In 408-409, when Alaric has invaded Italy and is trying to get himself made Generalissimo (TM) of the Roman Empire. After he sacked Rome, people knew they didn’t have to work in the system anymore. Probably too late already, however.

      Any of these steps immediately bogs us down in the fundamental problem of contrafactual history. We never know what would have happened, and the knock-on effects simply cannot be predicted beyond the very short term (as in, the rest of that battle, that day), as we do not understand the overlapping nexuses of causes well enough to know why everything did happen to begin with. That’s what rules out buffing Rome earlier on, or meddling with tech, which others can always copy. There’s no telling whether there will be a Roman Empire when you’re done. You might have set up a cultured state with continuity to Roman institutions that will last another millennium–we have empirical proof it was possible, after all–but it stoutly calls itself “The Republic of Ravenna” or the “Empire of All the Spains” or some such. At that point, we might just persuade Justinian not to invade Italy and throw our money behind the Ostrogoths. You know, lest darkness fall.

      The safest bet, therefore, is to strengthen the institutions of the Roman Empire at a point where 1. We can be reasonably sure such strengthening will do any good; and 2. What we produce will still look like the Roman Empire. That means post-third-century “crisis,” as we can have no idea whether meddling with Marcus Aurelius or Elagabalus or whoever might not lower that date from 476 to 451 or something. We also have to be able to do so while navigating the impossibly complicated political structures of the late Roman world, without any of the social connections that made such navigation actually possible. I mean, even a court doctor or a prominent bishop, the obvious respected outsiders, could be, or could have once been, on the career-track of the imperial bureaucracy. A private army, equipped with miracle weapons (more gunpowder!) or not, is likely to get itself crushed pretty fast. Somebody will abscond with the blueprints and the experience, and the Romans love to copy others’ stuff. All the more if I’m a weirdo outsider, and my men split on me with the goods.

      The obvious way out is to do the trick of every budget alternate history: mind-melding with some identifiable personage. We will want to arrive at a time when the empire already has reasonably strong institutions, and gain as close to centralized control as we can, avoiding war with Persia and keeping the less-organized barbarians at bay. We will also want to achieve ideological unity within the Empire, on terms intelligible to actual ancient people and not to the 21st-century projections of modern historical fiction.

      Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the emperor Constantine. Justinian was the Roman Empire Restoration Society of the 23rd Century’s second-best shot, and Julian the bizarro-world creation of a late night at a surprisingly iffy bar a few blocks from UCLA.

      In all seriousness, however, I’d want to be an emperor. I don’t think any system of inheritance or governance is going to prevent weak governance, but keeping child-emperors out of it would be a good idea, and splitting the empire, though pragmatically necessary, also splits its army. Constantine’s my first pick, then. Don’t kill Crispus, and make the other members of the imperial family go through a bureaucratic training program: perhaps by being actual members of the bureaucracy. Make the best your Caesars. Try for a more laissez faire religious policy, just to keep from wasting energy on disputes you won’t really resolve. I doubt that made any meaningful difference, however.

      After that, it’s anyone’s bet. The empire was doing pretty well for most of the fourth century. A nudge might be all it needs to keep going for a few more decades, and, after that–well, nothing lasts forever.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        Land falls out of the control of the central government, taxes stop coming in, the army has less money to keep it going–and the army, make no mistake, is the big expense in a pre-modern state: none of this nonsense about Robert Baratheon wasting the whole fisc on tourneys–the army therefore has fewer men, loses more territory; rinse, repeat.

        So whatever Aragorn’s tax policy was, it was functional and George R.R. Martin’s wasn’t.

        • MPG says:

          I’ve never actually read A Song of Ice and Fire, still less watched A Game of Thrones, but I hear complaining about that feature of it on the internet. My guess–if I had to guess–is that the Baratheon treasury is actually emptied out by the expense of building and rebuilding a navy. That’s exorbitant.

        • Tarpitz says:

          My impression is that Westeros’s fiscal position has been deliberately hollowed out by Littlefinger to help contribute to the chaos he needs to enable his continued rise to power. When the treasury secretary is not subject to any effective oversight and is not only skimming personal fortunes off the top but intentionally wasting money on every conceivable outlay, I assume the books can get pear-shaped very quickly indeed. Bobby B’s fighting, drinking and whoring may not be a satisfactory explanation from the point of view of a 21st Century economist, but they’re perfect as a way for Littlefinger to explain to his betters (and the mob) why the sad realities of the situation are beyond the capacity of even a fiscal genius such as he to fully remedy.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            A just for the fun of it theory: I listened to a podcast about the Iron Bank as a major player in the Winds of Winter.

            Part of the overarching story is that cooperation breaks down– what of the Iron Bank breaks down into factions competing over the Iron Throne?

      • Deiseach says:

        The safest bet, therefore, is to strengthen the institutions of the Roman Empire at a point where 1. We can be reasonably sure such strengthening will do any good; and 2. What we produce will still look like the Roman Empire.

        Hmmm – so go back to when Augustus was the first Emperor and sort out his tangled family line so that we get a proper successor and dynasty founded, not the mess of nephews and grand-nephews falling out of favour, dying, and being exiled that meant the succession then bounced around from Tiberius to the rest and resulted in the role of emperor becoming a saleable commodity for whoever had enough gold to bribe the army to back him.

        So maybe get his marriage to Clodia to stick, and produce sons and grandsons in the direct line, and keep him away from Livia. Difficult, as the Romans didn’t want an emperor or a monarchy and the creation of a dynasty like this would have been too overt, but much tidier.

        The problem in preserving the Empire is not the technology as such, it’s the politics. Imperial politics is every bit as bad as Chinese imperial dynastic politics, with potential heirs rising and falling from favour, fighting each other, mysterious sudden deaths, and all kinds of plots being discovered that warranted wholesale executions. Everyone is allying and marrying with each other, then launching wars against their ‘allies’.

    • DeWitt says:

      I choose to save the Eastern Empire, since I don’t think the Western empire has a reasonable hope of survival. Even then.. Oof. That thing where the Romans and the Persians use Arab auxiliaries to such a degree that they make their own empire isn’t something I know to avoid. Ditto their defeat at Manzikert, which owes to poor rulership over Armenian subjects enough that I’m not sure how to avert such a defeat. The fourth crusade looks like much more of a fluke: the previous crusaders had not been on good terms with the Romans, but outright sacking their capital and occupying their land is a different matter entirely. Murdering the then-doge of Venice, Enrico Dandolo, might have helped a lot, as the man did a hell of a lot to steer the crusaders that way. He’s also in his nineties by the time, so such a murder shouldn’t be too difficult an endeavor. The best bet is likely to murder Isaac II, who was a schemer among schemers, a terrible person by all accounts, and someone without whom the Greeks might be able to maintain the Komnenian restoration. Maybe.

      Now, the Western empire? No way. That it hasn’t been recreated ever since should clue people in that it isn’t a matter easily recreated or preserved. The empires of China, India, and Persia formed about places offering uncommonly good agricultural potential, which gave them natural centers around which to expand. Rome isn’t even the most arable part of Italy, where the land is much better once you go north, and the Western emperors didn’t have the same base to draw from as their foreign colleagues did. It could remain strong and prosperous as long as it had an organisational advantage over its neighbours; the Romans knew this, and destroyed whatever kingdoms formed outside their borders that they could, but it didn’t last, and never could. I don’t see how it could last into the modern era the way an empire centered around Constantinople could at all.

      • MPG says:

        But it did last, and for several centuries, too. Sicily and Africa are the agricultural heartland of the Western Roman system, and, despite the revolts of Firmus and Gildo, on the whole pretty loyal, though Mauritania was never as heavily Romanized. The political base of the empire has shifted north by the end of the fourth century, anyway, to Trier, Milan, and then Ravenna, so the challenge is not to preserve the importance of Rome itself, but of the Roman state. That is quite a different matter.

        If you wanted to daydream about continuation into modern times, you might come up with a scenario for establishing a quasi-federal system with strong loyalty to the central power. I’m not sure that’s realistic in the ancient world, where the typical pattern seems to be profound affection for one’s city and love of the idea of Rome, with much less attachment to “Africa” or “Gallia” or “Hispania,” let alone to the subdivided microprovinces of the post-Diocletianic empire. Still, there might be some way of making it happen convincingly enough to be the basis for a novel or something. The expansion of the Roman state under and after the Tetrarchy gives one possible approach; so, alternatively, might a route that rejects state centralization and expansion to harden the de facto splitting of the empire during the 250s. Individually weaker, a Gallic, Italian (= Roman?), and Palmyrene empire might, being less unwieldy, endure against outside threats for longer and, sharing an educated culture, form a kind of shared commonwealth. I’m not sure that’s any advantage over fourth-century centralization, but I don’t see any inherent reason why Rome should not survive so long as it can avoid the loss of land and the East-West split, both of which are products of particular choices made in the second half of the fourth century. Just because it did fall does not mean it needed to fall.

        It’s only daydreaming, of course, because I can hardly think of a state that has actually been continuous for the last two millennia. China, I suppose, Persia, or Japan, but that’s really only–to my outsider’s judgment–by a convention that calls them by the same names despite multiple ruptures in state organization and cohesion.

    • Lambert says:

      Assuming a strict ‘no inventing physical technology before its time’ interpretation, maybe agrarian reform?
      Which is maybe what other people are talking about vis-a-vis the Gracchi.
      Fewer latifundia, more small farms. Possibly change inheritance law to not be quite so promogeniturey (without going so far as Salian partible inheritance) Maybe bring about some financial innovations like options or insurance to allow smaller estates to better weather risk.

      Discourage slavery to increase the wages of the free poor.

      Maybe start felling the Hercynian forest to settle. Or maybe that would go wrong and facilitate the formation of Germanic Protostates.

      Engage in diplomacy with the Han and powers in the Indian Subcontinent, with the aim of weakening the Parthian grip on the silk road. Maybe try to conquer/ally with cis or transcaucasia and enough of Chorasmia to link up with the Han parts of the silk road in the Taklamakan Desert.

      • cassander says:

        what tears apart the republic isn’t class conflict, it’s the failure of the senate to develop proper state institutions. The generals start winning thees huge victories, which gives them huge wealth potentially huge networks of patronage which unchecked would let them totally dominate the state. So the other senators try to deny them the ability to do things like give land to their soldiers, which makes the soldiers angry enough to march under their generals. the marian reforms needed to be paired with a system for ensuring that winning huge military victories didn’t give you the power needed to overawe the whole political system, and that’s a really tall order.

    • John Lynch says:

      Someone did use a time machine and saved half the empire for a thousand years.

      They made sure Constantine won the battle of Verona. He went on to turn Byzantium into a second capital which withstood the attacks of the barbarians which overthrew the western empire. It didn’t fall until 1453, to the Ottoman Turks. That’s a pretty good historical intervention.

    • John Lynch says:

      To save the Eastern Empire, you need to beat the Turks at Manzikert in 1071. Or, failing that, convince the Byzantines not to fight that day.

      Alternately, stop the war with the Sassanids in 602. That war weakened both empires so much that the Arabs were able to take over half the Byzantine and all of the Sassanid territories.

    • Erusian says:

      The reign of Commodus was probably the last time you could stop the Crisis of the Third Century, which is the real fall of Rome. Depending on the amount of influence I have, boosting up Pertinax could prevent the century of anarchy and civil war that followed. Or perhaps preventing Commodus’s New Year’s Eve massacre. There were certainly wider historical forces at play but the economic policies were not so bad and desperate yet and anything that prevents a century of armies roaming the countryside would do a lot to prevent the huge economic destruction that permanently weakened Rome.

      As for how to do this, it depends on my situation. I’m going to presume I’m a Roman citizen with upper class manners because Rome was a highly stratified and snobbish society, especially as time went on. In that case, probably the late 180s (perhaps 187) where I can ingratiate myself with Pertinax during his wilderness period (and be away from Rome for Commodus’s massacres). I’d then convince him to pay a normal donativum to the Praetorians plus the donativum promised by Commodus. And make sure everyone gets their full pay. And also to hedge against them with his own forces as far as possible. Even if this doesn’t lead to a smooth succession, it will at least hopefully lead to a shorter and less destructive civil war.

      • MPG says:

        The reign of Commodus was probably the last time you could stop the Crisis of the Third Century, which is the real fall of Rome.

        Do explain. It certainly wasn’t the fall of Roman Africa, nor of the urbs Roma, and something that lasts two centuries after 235 by even an ungenerous reckoning has an awful lot of fall left in it. “Permanent weakening” hardly seems to describe the empire of Constantine, or even of Valentinian I, either. It may well be that the experiences of the third century produced a bureaucracy with much greater social penetration, but ultimately weaker institutional power: it was ossified, inefficient, etc. I’m doubtful, because any explanation on the level of such systems has to account for their success in the even more bureaucratized East.

        I really do suspect, at least under the pressure of these sorts of contrafactual games, that Guy Halsall is right and the Western Roman Empire never had to collapse. There was nothing in it that made it happen. It simply did, due to a long series of mistakes and failures in the course of the late fourth and early fifth century. Any other conclusion simply begs too many causal questions.

        • Erusian says:

          “Permanent weakening” hardly seems to describe the empire of Constantine, or even of Valentinian I, either.

          Strong rulers do not mean strong nations. By every imaginable measure, the Empire after the Third Century was weaker than the one before it. This includes contemporary opinion where people thought the empire had almost fell. There’s also plenty of charts like this that show a huge decrease in economic activity during the long civil wars to follow.

          After that the Empire was in a cycle of taking increasingly large percentages of a shrinking economic base to create larger and larger armies ultimately leading to proto-feudalism. Preventing that, it seems, would be key.

          • MPG says:

            I return to this rather late. Briefly:

            Yes, of course fourth-century Rome is economically weaker than second-century Rome. Indeed, second-century Rome was probably economically weaker than first-century Rome. Fourth-century Rome had, however, a more organized bureaucracy and greater state penetration, and so was not weaker “by every imaginable measure,” only by the measures most relevant to its continued survival against external threats. It was, however, a great power, and remained so at least into the 420s. “Permanent weakening,” yes, then, but with a real rally that a focus on the third century does not recognize. Can we agree on that score?

            I cannot see how to apply a phrase such as “the real fall of Rome” to the third century. There is no systems collapse, not like happens in the sixth century, and no loss of a person, ruling in his own right or as figurehead, under a title such as “Augustus” or “Caesar,” as happens in the fourth century.

            If what you really mean is, “the third century saw the step toward Rome’s eventual fall that I consider decisive,” well, sure, you can say that. Plenty of those here would put that step back as far as the Gracchi (there is, after all, an old and honorable custom, even among Roman historians, of imagining that what was truly Roman ended, or was about to end, sometime before Augustus–it’s certainly been true of Roman religion). But to put the “real fall” of Rome before a span of continued existence almost as long as the United States has existed–and much longer than united Germany or Italy, to name two other obvious comparanda–beggars belief. Even if you put the true fall of Rome at the loss of Africa–an idea I’m certainly willing to countenance–it’s still two centuries, and that’s a long time in human affairs.

          • Erusian says:

            If what you really mean is, “the third century saw the step toward Rome’s eventual fall that I consider decisive,” well, sure, you can say that.

            That is what I’m saying, but a little further. After the third century Rome was caught in a cycle that would inevitably lead to its destruction or devolution in one form or another. The west could have doddered along like the east but then it would have been like the east: a quasi-feudal entity in a state of decay for centuries (though the east would eventually recover more fully). You bring up an increased bureaucracy: yes, because they needed increased revenues and increased control to extract bigger armies from a smaller base.

            Also, mind you the question is how to prevent the fall of Rome. That doesn’t mean you have to be there at the point of the fall. Like, if I wanted to stop the American Revolution then 1775 would be a very bad time to show up.

      • cassander says:

        the death of the principate was inevitable, I think. From augustus on, the emperors worked to marginalize the one institution that could theoretically threaten them, the senate. But doing that meant marginalizing the only real institution that had any sort of legitimacy granting ability. By the 3rd century, the secret of empire was out, and I don’t see how there was a way to get it back in the bottle.

        • Erusian says:

          Perhaps. But if the civil wars that resulted were less destructive, it may have been different. Not every transition to monarchy destroyed the power base of the nation.

    • DinoNerd says:

      This is hard. Rome’s problem was that it didn’t have the social technologies we have for accomplishing various large scale activities, and got too big for the social technologies it had. It invented and switched to new designs for government and production over time, but they arguably weren’t good enough to hold an empire that large together, and contained the seeds of their own destruction. (Or maybe not – the Roman Empire lasted longer than most modern poilities, even if it was bumbling from coup to coup, shedding peripheral portions, and ceding internal areas to external tribes in exchange for their help in defending the whole. It could perhaps be argued that those social technologies were better, than e.g. the US system that hasn’t even kept the country going for 300 years yet.)

      Note also: learning Latin on arrival is in no way enough. You need to also know Greek to have any chance of passing as upper class; in the Eastern Empire (perhaps only in in most periods) you need to know Greek more than you need to know Latin, even to be a normal person-on-the-street, never mind an elite or adviser to same.

      If you bring in lots of military technology, it’ll be used in support of an autocratic emperor, probably self-promoted from the military. It may help you defeat barbarians on the fringes; it won’t do any good to speak of when some other general decides to become empreror. And if the barbarians can learn how to make and use it, they will. (And not just the barbarians – there were other empires.)

      If you bring in public health measures, and e.g. defeat the plague of Justinian, you delay some problems – but my guess is that you only manage to delay them. A larger population would help with some of the problems, particularly in the West. But it would like as not make others worse, or not help with them at all.

      A plentiful supply of slaves works against the acceptance of all kinds of economic improvements that would seem obviously desireable to a person from the current era. [Sound bite summary: who needs machines, or a more efficient process, when you can simply get more slaves.]

      • cassander says:

        If you bring in lots of military technology, it’ll be used in support of an autocratic emperor, probably self-promoted from the military. It may help you defeat barbarians on the fringes; it won’t do any good to speak of when some other general decides to become empreror. And if the barbarians can learn how to make and use it, they will. (And not just the barbarians – there were other empires.)

        the barbarians can use guns just fine, but they can’t make them or powder in sufficient numbers to fight settled peoples. And the guns do help the rival generals problem somewhat, if you can arrange to have your field armies not to have the sort of artillery that would be needed to take your forts.

        This is hard. Rome’s problem was that it didn’t have the social technologies we have for accomplishing various large scale activities, and got too big for the social technologies it had.

        I think this is really the heart of the matter.

      • matkoniecz says:

        the Roman Empire lasted longer than most modern poilities, even if it was bumbling from coup to coup, shedding peripheral portions, and ceding internal areas to external tribes in exchange for their help in defending the whole. It could perhaps be argued that those social technologies were better, than e.g. the US system that hasn’t even kept the country going for 300 years yet

        In 1776, in Philadelphia, the Second Continental Congress declared the independence of the colonies as the United States – about two centuries ago.

        Roman Empire lasted five centuries.

        Roman Republic lasted also about five centuries.

        It is easy to forget that it is a long time.

    • valleyofthekings says:

      I believe that Rome fell apart because it got too successful and everyone got complacent.

      To keep Rome stable, my plan is to convince it that it’s under threat of attack by ghost lizard people from Atlantis.

      My army of projector drones make nighttime appearances, creating moving images of lizard people. Their voices taunt the Romans, mostly in an unintelligible language but occasionally in heavily accented Latin. If the Romans mobilize a “defense” against the “lizard people”, they are driven off; if not, my drones blow up a building.

      The Romans will feel united against an external threat, and this will keep their empire strong.

      The hard part is how to make sure the threat lasts after I personally die. Perhaps I should program an AI to carry out the simulated attacks after I am gone. It will need the ability to build its own drones, and it will need the creativity to vary the attacks slightly over time.

      What could go wrong?

    • original-internet-explorer says:

      The water wheel was already used by the Romans engineers to produce kinetic power deployed in clever ways. I can put that into my brain for Roman arrival with a small change.

      They already are receptive to the technology – I can show them it is possible to increase the power by changing the wheel orientation. This is described in a quality documentary – The Ascent of Man – Jacob Bronowski.

      It sounds small but hydropower was the key. A society can use serfs or slaves to do many things – that is the benchmark. To invent a technology that justifies not using near free labour is the automation rocket equation.

      http://history.alberta.ca/energyheritage/energy/hydro-power/hydro-power-from-early-modern-to-the-industrial-age.aspx

    • TomParks says:

      Hmm. Give Julius Caesar a copy of the homonymous play by Shakespeare? Teach germ theory before the Plague of Justinian? Those might be too random to work. Maybe you’d get a fallen empire sooner rather than later. In fact, here’s my quick stab at an answer: The duration of the Roman Empire is such an outlier that any random counterfactual change to its history would be more likely to shorten it rather than lengthen it.

    • bullseye says:

      Some people mentioned bringing knowledge of firearms. Would Roman steel be up to the task? I’ve read that metallurgy advanced throughout the Middle Ages.

  107. Mark V Anderson says:

    So how come now when I do ctrl F for the comments for any search factor I use it says there is one comment. This is whether I use cedille new, or date, or what ever else. Maybe my computer is messed up somehow? This doesn’t always happen, but it’s been doing it a lot this week. It’s like my computer is rebelling at all the comments.

    • Creutzer says:

      cedille new

      Off-topic, but: you mean “tilde new”. The cedille is that thing that distinguishes ç from c.

  108. albatross11 says:

    This article claims that the Buffalo police who resigned did it, not because they supported the guys knocking the old man over, but rather because they’d been informed by the police union that if anything happened and they were sued for it, they’d be on their own.

    • rahien.din says:

      The more I hear about police unions, the more it seems that their primary victims are cops.

      • albatross11 says:

        If police unions work like other unions, they will likely spend most of their time defending the worst of their members, because those are the ones who mostly get into trouble and are in danger of being fired or demoted. I gather this is also often true of teachers’ unions, for the same reasons. The employment protections that keep the boss from firing you because he’s having a bad day or he has a grudge against you for some past thing also prevent the boss from firing the guy everyone knows has a bad temper and seems to always show up at the station with guys who’ve resisted arrest and are covered in bruises.

        • rahien.din says:

          It’s worse than that.

          Everything you describe is feature, not bug. An essential aim of any society is to pull up the weakest member. (If it wasn’t, then all societies would each consist of exactly one person.)

          What’s bad is when police unions make it impossible for cops to support each other in the moment.

          The officer kneeling on Floyd’s neck needed help in order to avert a murder. In an alternative world, one of the three three other officers might somehow intervene. But it would be worse for him if he contravenes his fellow officer – and it seems like the reason for that is the police union.

          You can see it on the one guy’s face. He seems to be thinking “This situation is fucked and there is no way out.”

          • albatross11 says:

            Every society needs to have a balance between pulling the weakest members up, punishing misbehavior, and removing the weakest members from critical positions where they will cause a lot of damage.

            It *is* good for the union to support pulling the weakest members up, but it’s very bad when the union prevents either punishing misbehavior or removing people from critical jobs they can’t do. I mean, I want the airline pilots’ union to help the pilots who are having problems and pull the weakest ones up, too, but not so much so that they keep pilots on the job flying planes who are dangerously incompetent, or who occasionally show up to work drunk.

  109. Belisaurus Rex says:

    Despite how much Bayesian statistics is used in Rationalist communities, it’s really not all that common or popular among actual statisticians. Is it just an educated way to say you’re open-minded, like how every politician says they support “evidence-based” policy?

    Isn’t it kind of condescending to suggest that other people don’t use evidence or do not update with new information?

    • meh says:

      Isn’t it kind of condescending to suggest that other people don’t use evidence or do not update with new information?

      It’s pretty well accepted that all humans have intuition and emotional decision making that runs quite contrary to probability. For a popular review of such, see https://www.amazon.com/Dan-Ariely/e/B001J93B34?ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1&qid=1592151373&sr=8-1

      See also this for peoples ability to update on evidence (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mnS2WYLCGJP2kQkRn/absence-of-evidence-is-evidence-of-absence)

      In my experience, especially with those more conflict theorist oriented, updating on evidence is not a given.

      Is it just an educated way to say you’re open-minded, like how every politician says they support “evidence-based” policy?

      not just open-minded, but open-minded in a particular way; specifically how you evaluate evidence, and have it confirm to actual probability. (ok, maybe more accurately, how you *try* or *strive* to evaluate evidence). Most people tend to a strict True/False evaluation. So if there is not enough evidence to switch them from True to False, a theory on why the evidence must also be False needs to be formed. Claiming to be Bayesian and dealing with probabilities instead of T/F lets you be more open minded, since you don’t need to reject any evidence in this way. It all gets incorporated.

    • Lodore says:

      Despite how much Bayesian statistics is used in Rationalist communities, it’s really not all that common or popular among actual statisticians.

      If you were to say ” it’s really not all that common or popular among people who use statistical methods”, this might might be true. But amongst actual mathematically trained statisticians, Bayesian inference is a mature and developing area.

      Isn’t it kind of condescending to suggest that other people don’t use evidence or do not update with new information?

      Absolutely it would be, except that I don’t think that’s what’s being said. The polemical claim is that frequentist reasoning gives you access to only one hypothesis (“the null hypothesis is false”), whereas Bayesian perspectives adjudicate between at least two hypotheses (“the null hypothesis is true” vs “my competing hypothesis is true”). In the frequentist case, updating and evidence collection doesn’t change the fact you have access to only one hypothesis.

      • Belisaurus Rex says:

        I have friends working in statistics and none of them touch Bayesian statistics in their day to day work. They’re familiar with it, but perhaps it’s more useful as a theory than in practice.

      • keaswaran says:

        I think you can count on one hand the number of Statistics departments that have a Bayesian plurality. (Maybe even just one finger – I can’t think of any other than Duke.) My impression is that it’s a lot like Continental philosophy within academic philosophy – most departments are dominated by frequentist statisticians/analytic philosophers, but a small minority are dominated by Bayesian statisticians/continental philosophers. Every department will offer some classes in Continental/Bayesian, but it’s much more prominent in Physics/English departments than in Statistics/Philosophy departments.

    • Ninety-Three says:

      Only as condescending as it is to suggest that other people aren’t Rational.

    • Tatterdemalion says:

      Isn’t it kind of condescending to suggest that other people don’t use evidence or do not update with new information?

      Almost all non-rationalists absolutely don’t handle using evidence or updating with new information at all well.

      Almost all (aspiring) rationalists don’t handle using evidence or updating with new information at all well.

      One of the main virtues of the aspiring rationalist movement is that it provides some mental tricks that, if followed, would let you do it a little less badly, although still not well (you’ve been issued with defective hardware; running error-correcting codes on it can pick up small mistakes but not large ones).

      The danger of the aspiring rationalist movement is that understanding those tricks makes it easier to fool other people, and much easier to fool yourself, into believing that you are less irrational than you, and pretty much everyone else, actually is.

      The other virtue of the aspiring rationalist movement – and the one I prize – is that it can teach you to be more aware of just how irrational you are, and to mitigate some of the consequences. Reading SSC hasn’t enabled me to be right about things noticeably more often, but I think it probably has enabled me to be confidently wrong less and tentatively wrong more.

    • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

      When do Rationalist communities use Bayesian statistics, as opposed to using Bayesian-inspired jargon to refer to changing their minds.

    • Creutzer says:

      The Rationalist community likes Bayesianism for two reasons. First, on philosophical grounds, with credences (degrees of belief) being fundamental.

      Second, it likes to refer to Bayesianism as a source of inspiration for cognitive tools. People are, indeed, bad at using evidence right, and they are bad at thinking in probabilities. Bayesianism, with its emphasis on credences, makes people more comfortable with uncertainty. Bayes’ Theorem gives a nice intuitive handle about how evidence relates to hypotheses. These simple notions, when taken seriously, change the way people think.

      Bayesian statistics is a different practice entirely, and not that wide-spread in the Rationalist community, either. I can’t recall a single essay that makes use of it, really. People may understand philosophical Bayesianism, but that doesn’t mean they have any clue how to do Bayesian stats. Bayesian stats are less cook book recipe-like, so it’s harder to just plug numbers into a readily available tool and get some numbers out. The Rationalist community, as such, has relatively little need for doing statistics in the first place (though I certainly wouldn’t mind the SSC survey ditching classical statistics!).

      The question of the adoption of Bayesian statistics in the practice of scientists and statisticians is a totally different one. I’m not a statistician, so I can’t speak to the depths of the math, but it absolutely is useful in practice at least for some people, not least because sometimes you absolutely need to answer questions that don’t fit well into a null hypothesis testing framework, or you want not to have to deal with the issue of stopping rules and multiple hypothesis testing. As for why your statistician friends in particular don’t find occasion to use it: what do they say when you ask them?

    • keaswaran says:

      “Evidence-based medicine” is exactly this kind of condescending idea, and it is essentially based in frequentist statistics. Unless there’s a randomized controlled trial, they say we don’t know anything. They’re the reason every health authority outside of East Asia was against wearing face masks.

      • My complaint about frequentist based statistics is that almost everyone who isn’t a statistician misunderstands and so misuses them. What you want is the probability of your theory being false, conditional on the evidence. What the statistics gives you is the probability of the evidence (I oversimplify slightly), conditional on your theory being false (in a particular way — the null hypothesis). So you pretend the latter is the former.

        • Aapje says:

          IMO, a bigger issue is that it is assumed that the errors are random (noise), even though there is very strong evidence that non-random errors are both common and significant.

        • viVI_IViv says:

          What you want is the probability of your theory being false, conditional on the evidence. What the statistics gives you is the probability of the evidence (I oversimplify slightly), conditional on your theory being false (in a particular way — the null hypothesis).

          But I don’t think it’s really possible to do much better in a formal way, since you don’t have a formal prior over theories.

          Yes, some rationalists like to talk about universal priors based on Turing machines, but these aren’t really usable and they aren’t actually that universal (except in the uninteresting case of infinite data, where everything converges to the same thing anyway) and they definitely are not what statisticians use when they apply Bayesian statistics. In actual Bayesian statistics, che choice of the priors is itself part of the theory.

        • albatross11 says:

          Aapje:

          I think that’s just a problem with the fact that probability models that are tractable to work with also have to make a lot of simplifying assumptions, not something specific to Bayesian or Frequentist statistics.

  110. metalcrow says:

    There’s been a lot of use of polls lately to determine if Americans support the protests that have been happening, with the results being…unclear to some degree. By coincidence, i happened to stumble across this analysis of polls during the civil rights movement, which offers some very interesting perspective.

    – 1961: “Americans were asked whether tactics such as ‘sit-ins’ and demonstrations by the civil rights movement had helped or hurt the chances of racial integration in the South. More than half, 57 percent, said such demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience had hurt chances of integration.” — Gallup

    – 1963: “A Gallup poll found that 78 percent of white people would leave their neighborhood if many black families moved in. When it comes to MLK’s march on Washington, 60 percent had an unfavorable view of the march.” — Cornell University’s Roper Center

    – 1964: “Less than a year after [Dr King’s] march, Americans were even more convinced that mass demonstrations harmed the cause, with 74 percent saying they felt these actions were detrimental to achieving racial equality and just 16 percent saying they were helping it.” — Gallup

    – 1964: “A majority of white New Yorkers questioned here in the last month in a survey by the New York Times said they believed the Negro civil rights movement bad gone too far. While denying any deep-seated prejudice against Negroes, a large number of those questioned used the same terms to express their feelings. They spoke of Negroes’ receiving ‘everything on a silver platter’ and of ‘reverse discrimination’ against whites. More than one‐fourth of those who were interviewed said they had become more opposed to Negro aims during the last few months.” — New York Times

    – 1965: “In the midst of the Cold War, a plurality of Americans believed that civil rights organizations had been infiltrated by communists, with almost a fifth of the country unsure as to whether or not they had been compromised.” – Cornell University’s Roper Center

    Given that these polls seems to paint a picture that, at the very least, most Americans were not clearly in favor of the protests during the civil rights movement, i was wondering if anyone might be able to provide perspective on how the movement actually ended up working. Are these polls non-representative? Did the movement only work after the next generation which was more positive towards them started voting en-masse? Does this indicate anything for the current movement?

    • Ninety-Three says:

      “In the midst of the Cold War, a plurality of Americans believed that civil rights organizations had been infiltrated by communists, with almost a fifth of the country unsure as to whether or not they had been compromised.”

      This makes me think of North Dakota. In the midst of the Cold War I wouldn’t be surprised if a plurality of Americans thought the Boy Scouts had been infiltrated by communists. It is not obvious to me how much this statistic tells us about the civil rights movement in particular.

      • metalcrow says:

        That’s very fair actually. In fact, digging into that poll in particular it looks like the exact question asked was

        “Most of the organizations pushing for civil rights have been infiltrated by the communists and are now dominated by communist trouble-makers. Do you agree with the statement or not?”

        which is the double whammy of North Dakota and privileging a positive answer.
        Although the breakdown itself does have 35% disagree, 19% don’t know, and 46% agree. So a uncertain answer was possible, and 46% is more than the North Dakota constant of 33%.
        Regardless, it is probably less significant than the other polls.

    • AG says:

      It indicates that while the journalist tweeting that study should not have been fired, the study itself shouldn’t be taken as gospel, either, and should be subjected to the skepticism all self-report studies should be.

  111. albatross11 says:

    There is a paywall, so I won’t link it, but for anyone who has a Wall Street Journal subscription, they had a reporter spend a couple days wandering around the CHAZ (BLM/Antifa run few blocks of Seattle). His description was that he didn’t see any violence or chaos, and that it was kind-of a party atmosphere. He interviewed a street medic who commented that he hadn’t seen major injuries since the police pulled out–since then, he’d seen occasional minor injuries, but nothing serious.

    I’m concerned about the ability of major media sources to actually report bad things associated with BLM right now, in light of various Twitter-mob-led purges. The WSJ seems relatively unlikely to have such purges, so it’s interesting that so far, their reporter didn’t see any sign of chaos or violence there.

    • S_J says:

      In my bubble of the Internet, a gun nut and long-time blogger (born in Idaho, lives and works near Seattle) went down and visited Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.

      He notes that the Capitol Hill area seems to attract “young people trying to figure out who they are”.

      When he visited CHAZ, he expected checkpoints and armed patrols of some kind. Instead, he found a relaxed, block-party style atmosphere. The photos are interesting.

      His opinion was that CHAZ was effectively a bunch of young people throwing a tantrum.

      • Aftagley says:

        He notes that the Capitol Hill area seems to attract “young people trying to figure out who they are”.

        That’s the nicest way of describing a hipster neighborhood I’ve ever seen?

        When he visited CHAZ, he expected checkpoints and armed patrols of some kind. Instead, he found a relaxed, block-party style atmosphere. The photos are interesting.

        So, where did this expectation come from? My entire exposure to the Seattle thing has been, this is just dumb kids doing something well-meaning in a city that’s probably being slightly too indulgent. Where is this pervading message of it being some kind of militarized gulag coming from?

        • cassander says:

          >That’s the nicest way of describing a hipster neighborhood I’ve ever seen?

          we used to play a game, “hipster or homeless person.” You pointed to someone and the people you were with had to guess which were they were. You had to be at least a block away, though, because if you got any closer you could smell the hipsters.

        • suntory time says:

          So, where did this expectation come from? My entire exposure to the Seattle thing has been, this is just dumb kids doing something well-meaning in a city that’s probably being slightly too indulgent. Where is this pervading message of it being some kind of militarized gulag coming from?

          One reason may be Fox ran digitally altered images suggesting it.

        • Trofim_Lysenko says:

          At a guess, association from phrases in the media (mainstream or social) like “seized control” and “declared autonomy”. Bonus points for framings like “expelled” or “driven out” the police.

          “In the face of mounting community pressure, Seattle PD withdrew from….”

          Vs.

          “Today protesters seized control of Capitol Hill in Seattle, expelling police from the neighborhood and declaring it an ‘autonomous zone’.”

        • 205guy says:

          From people who believe that one Russian “friend” I have on Facebook who always seems to post leftist AND rightist scissor memes. According to his “sources” the CHAZ is full of rioters burning buildings to the ground and the hells angels are banding together to come “retake” the city.

    • John Schilling says:

      Get with the times, man! The CHAZ is so yesterday; it’s now the CHOP. And tomorrow, no doubt the Capitol Hill People’s Front (splitters!).

      As with Haight-Ashbury or Occupy Wall Street, the block party with delusions of grandeur is phase one. It really is harmless fun while it lasts, but it can’t last.

      • keaswaran says:

        Neither Haight-Ashbury nor Occupy Wall Street had a phase two though, right?

        • John Schilling says:

          I think they both had the phase with lots of drug dealers mostly selling to townies, the free love getting a bit rapey, way too much trash and worse on the streets, and the whole thing becoming not nearly as much fun or politically inspiring. That’s phase 2.

          Whether you go through the “then men with guns come in and restore/impose order” phase before you get to the “and then even the lowlife opportunists give up and go home” phase is optional.

    • theredsheep says:

      IIRC they have pledged not to leave until [set of implausible demands] is granted, so I expect either this will end like Occupy–forcible eviction, everybody slinks away grumbling–or like Waco. These do not seem like people with a plan or an exit strategy.

  112. Dino says:

    The Economist is now competing with 538 in predicting the 2020 election – they say Biden has a 84% chance of winning.
    Forecasting the US elections

    Also, they are calling for reforms.

  113. Anonymous Coward says:

    Here’s Google’s cache of a post on Reddit announcing the creation of a “Conflict Resolution Advisory Council” for the CHAZ, post since removed: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:gGAbDVrgO54J:https://www.reddit.com/r/CapHillAutonomousZone/comments/h7vov1/clearing_up_the_raz_disinformation_introducing/+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

    It’s since been taken down, but it was up for over two days and went through multiple edits. As far as I can tell, Reddit is the only place this was ever announced. Unfortunately, google didn’t catch the craziest edits, including the following two bits:

    The Council will mandate that more than 25% of its members must have a violent criminal history with previous or current incarceration experience.

    And most absurdly:

    Some women have expressed to us that they wouldn’t feel comfortable presenting a case involving a sexual offence to a Council that is partly made up of criminals with a history of committing sexual offences. We are placing a cap of 50% on the proportion of Council members who have performed one or more premeditated sexual assaults or rapes in the preceding twelve months. Homelesspersons and disabledpersons are exempt from this cap.

    I haven’t seen corroboration elsewhere, but I also haven’t seen a straight-up refutation. This is fake (and/or satire), right? Can someone confirm authoritatively, and if not, do people generally agree with that assessment?

    • Guy in TN says:

      If google didn’t cache the text, then where are you getting it from?

      • Anonymous Coward says:

        Right-wing sites picked up on it quickly and included that text in their articles on the topic. See, for example, this gloating summary from a particularly skewed source. The post was cross-posted to different subs, and some comments specifically quoted the “criminal history” parts google didn’t catch (example), so I don’t think those sites made it up. The most parsimonious explanation seems to be that Google cached a copy, then the post was edited further, then it was removed before Google’s spiders got around to caching it again.

    • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

      It definitely looks like an obvious troll.

    • AG says:

      The fact that the post hasn’t been put up on any other sites (except by reporters) shows that there’s not general agreement. No one has come forward to defend the post, or be outraged that the post is gone. The fact that the original post went up on Reddit, rather than any more official site, also supports this.

      Can anyone tell me if a manifesto that got mainstream traction ever went up on Reddit first?

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        Lots of things haven’t been done on reddit but are still happen on reddit for the first time, because reddit exists now.

        I was suspicious of it being a troll. I know people who are good at these troll things, and this has their handprints all over it. Especially the footnote on the reddit post. That’s where they are winking at the camera.

      • keaswaran says:

        The obvious candidates would be the incel shooters, but Wikipedia says the guy in Isla Vista e-mailed his manifesto to 34 people, and the guy in Montreal didn’t mention a manifesto.

    • Trofim_Lysenko says:

      In the specific case of the whole CHAZ/CHOP thing it’s not clear to me how much actual organization there IS, but if you can’t trace the source back to someone with a real name actually from that area I would tend to dismiss it as a troll.

      More broadly, the problem with inchoate movements/protests/etc that lack a clear organization or leadership is that it becomes very difficult to start drawing lines betweeen “official communication”, “true believer going off message due to zeal/extremism”, “false flag by counter-revolutionary elements”, and that ambiguity is going to be exploited to cover BOTH any gaffes by “real” members AND any actual troll posts/agent provacateur actions. This works equally well for physical actions and behavior, it’s not just a phenomenon for messaging.

      So as a general rule, if you see something that looks crazy and popped up without attribution, treat it as non-representative unless:

      A) You see it tied to an actual person known to be a representative of the given group/organization/etc under discussion.

      OR

      B) It gains traction and currency among those supporters anyway.

      For Physical actions, you add in other factors like whether they occurred as part of a group or physically separated from them.

      That’s my approach, at least.

  114. viVI_IViv says:

    People downthread were saying that the torn down were mostly statues of Robert Lee of no artistic value made in the 60s to spite civil rights activists.

    Then statues of Winston Churchill have been defaced in London. Now a statue of Thomas Jefferson has been torn down in Portland, OR. I fully expect Washington to be cancelled next.
    It seems that the cultural elite in the Anglosphere now hates the founding myth of its own civilization. Can a civilization that not only is not proud of, but actively hates its past, persist, let alone progress?

    • baconbits9 says:

      There has also been defacement of abolitionist statues 1 and 2 a memorial to an all black civil war regiment.

      It seems that the cultural elite in the Anglosphere now hates the founding myth of its own civilization. Can a civilization that not only is not proud of, but actively hates its past, persist, let alone progress?

      This isn’t civilization, its a small group of people who have discovered that they can act without consequences for a time.

      • viVI_IViv says:

        This isn’t civilization, its a small group of people who have discovered that they can act without consequences for a time.

        With the full endorsement of all the major cultural and financial elites. It definitely is a crisis of civilization.

        • suntory time says:

          No, it’s really not.

        • baconbits9 says:

          This isn’t full endorsement, this is temporary and local abandonment of restrictions on such behavior with a bunch of cheer-leading. This might morph into full endorsement from the left eventually which will be a major step down to road of very bad things, but this isn’t that.

        • viVI_IViv says:

          Major corporations have publicly endorsed the riots and said they will pay the bails of anybody arrested. Anybody who dares to publicly criticize what is going on gets purged. If this is not endorsement by the elites then I don’t know what it is.

        • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

          What actions are you taking based on this crisis? I think “crisis” implies something acute enough that you should be buying put options for a couple of years in the future.

        • LesHapablap says:

          Here in NZ, the Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters has said that he “won’t pander to the woke brigade.” And:

          The debate this week made its way to New Zealand, with Māori Party co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer calling for the country’s colonial statues to be removed.

          “Why do some woke New Zealanders feel the need to mimic mindless actions imported from overseas?” said Peters, referring to protests in the US and the UK where colonial statues have been vandalised, torn down, and thrown in lakes.

          Earlier on Friday, a statue of Captain John Hamilton was removed from Hamilton’s Civic Square following a request from Waikato-Tainui. The council said the request came amid “growing international drive to remove statues which are seen to represent cultural disharmony and oppression”.

          “A self-confident country would never succumb to obliterating symbols of their history, whether it be good or bad or simply gone out of fashion,” Peters said in a statement. “A country learns from its mistakes and triumphs and its people should have the knowledge and maturity to distinguish between the two.

          “The woke generation are the equivalent of a person with no long-term memory, stumbling around in the present without any signposts to guide them.

          “Deal with it, grow up and read a book.”

          For context, Winston Peters is of the NZ First party which is currently allied with the Labour Party to form the current government. He’s known for being opportunistic and selfish, and extremely politically savvy. NZ First is a sort of populist anti-immigrant party.

      • albatross11 says:

        I strongly suspect that this has a lot more to do with “it’s fun to tear shit down” than a deep ideological evaluation of the person being depicted in the statue.

    • 10240 says:

      Can a civilization that not only is not proud of, but actively hates its past, persist, let alone progress?

      Why not? What does it have to do with whether it persists or progresses? I may be wrong, but I have a hunch that this is a fake consequentialist argument against something you oppose for different, emotional reasons.

      • viVI_IViv says:

        Well, do you have an example of a civilization that destroyed its symbols and did not collapse? All examples I can think of of cultural destruction are associated to collapse.

        • herbert herberson says:

          Well, do you have an example of a civilization that destroyed its symbols and did not collapse? All examples I can think of of cultural destruction are associated to collapse.

          The Byzantine Empire’s iconoclasms were in the 7th and 8th century; its fall didn’t occur until the 15th (and contrary to the vague popular conception of a steady fall into decadence, there were two significant periods of expansion between those two dates).

        • 10240 says:

          No, nor do I have an example of a civilization that destroyed its symbols and did collapse, let alone one where there is a clear causation from the cultural destruction and the collapse. I don’t have a sample. Most cases of cultural destruction I can think of involves a new culture destroying symbols of the old culture after the old culture has already “collapsed”. The “collapse” of the old culture can be anything from a collapse of civilization (e.g. as the result of a conquest) to just a few elements of the culture being replaced.

          (One example of a culture sort of destroying its own symbols I can think of is when protestants painted over frescoes and stopped praying to saints. This happened after Catholicism was replaced by Protestantism, it generally didn’t involve societal collapse, and the new Protestant culture has been living on for centuries.)

          Most societies that exist for a long time have elements in their past they find abhorrent today. I also think it’s unjustified and meaningless to be either proud or ashamed of past things one had no part in. I’m not on board with destroying all symbols that are associated with both good and bad, but I can see that some people disagree with me.

          Can you explain how not being proud of, or even hating ita past would lead to the collapse of a civilization, either through examples or general?

          I guess you can argue that repudiating elements of the culture that made a civilization great means people will behave in a way that worsens the state of the civilization. But I presume the symbols being destroyed here (when it’s not just random destruction) are destroyed because of their (supposed) association with aspects of the past that most people now repudiate (largely for good reason), not for their association with positive elements of the past.

        • LesHapablap says:

          China’s Cultural Revolution? It didn’t collapse but the outcome was pretty awful. If I had to pick a most likely worst case scenario for the US then that would be it. Still very unlikely though, unless somehow we get a die hard social justice person in power.

      • The original Mr. X says:

        If you think that your country is evil, you’re less likely to act in ways that help it survive (serving in the army, paying taxes, following the law, etc.).

        • 10240 says:

          They are thinking that their country was evil, not that it is evil. (Maybe they think it’s still evil, but it is not implied by the destruction of old symbols.)

          • viVI_IViv says:

            But then what does their country stand for?

          • 10240 says:

            @viVI_IViv A country is a group of people with a territory. Moreover, it’s a group people are part of mostly through the accident of their birth, rather than a group people voluntarily join for a particular purpose. What does it mean for it to stand for something?

            If you mean something like “what are the values most people in the country agree upon?”, the answer is the country’s present values, not its past values.

      • albatross11 says:

        Can you make a near-term prediction (say, for the next couple years) based on this?

  115. albatross11 says:

    My not very informed speculation:

    I bet, if you carefully examined a lot of the Twitter mob/woke cancellations of people, a really large fraction of the time, you’d see that there was a personal beef behind the whole thing. Joe and Fred never did get along, Joe is standing in the way of Fred’s advancement into a better job, and so Fred has a strong incentive to either try to start a mobbing, or to get behind it and push so he can get even with Joe/get Joe’s job.

    This tracks with a large number of minor hate crimes (one kid spray paints a swastika on another kid’s locker at school, say). The perp is almost always either someone with a personal beef with the target, or the target himself trying to get attention.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      This summary might be: “All movements are wrong; some are useful.”

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      Thanks for the link. I’ll note that this is an article, so it’s a more efficient way of getting Hughes’ ideas than listening to a podcast.