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Here is something that I think is an example of bullshit.
Reading on the three-strikes laws, apparently the cost for keeping a prisoner incarcerated is…$70,836 a year.
The cost of feeding someone for a year for healthy food, when smart people use math to minimize costs while keeping nutrient levels high, is less than 2000 a year. And when not paying attention to taste and personal desire for variety, probably around 1000. Prisoners don’t spend almost anything their entire sentence, and can gain minimal levels of cash for doing labor. I’m not sure how much it costs to wash the clothes, and what the other ongoing expenses are, but I would be very surprised if costs added up to more than 4000$ bucks a year, for the terrible air conditioning there. (And now reading the actual calculation, here it is, about 3500 bucks for inmate food and activities)
Somehow, it ends up costing 70,000 a year to incarcerate a prisoner. I’m convinced this stat is totally inflated bullshit. I wonder what the true marginal cost, after group health insurance deals are made, the annual building repairs are made, of adding an additional prisoner is. Since its probably on the scale of not more than 8000 a year, with the bulk of that money going into maintaining the guard ratio and his salary and benefits. Somehow there are a lot of lies in this, but it takes time to pinpoint exactly *where* all the bullshit is.
But why are statistics like this inflated in the first place?
I don’t know if I would call it “bullshit.” It looks like they just divided the total cost of the department of corrections in each category by the number of inmates. If you take the line item from the 2016-2017 budget (page 69 of the pdf, 65 by page number) and divide it by the number of adult inmates, you get about $80,000/year, so there’s about a billion dollars from the budget that either went to juveniles, were uncounted for the answer you link (some administrative categories, perhaps?), and/or went unspent in some combination. You’re right that that’s not the marginal cost of an additional inmate, but that’s not the question it’s purporting to answer, and it’s probably harder for them to do then just a little bit of long division.
Ok. So, it looks like, after a century of research into dieting, most diets fail because….people get hungry, don’t like eating bland food without sugar and fat and that just kindof sucks..
Its interesting how wide-spread appetite suppressants are. Why does society seem to reject this solution? Not viewing people as biological machines, but some vague will-power thing? The most effective suppressants I know of are ADHD stimulants, which are regulated drugs. Would society disapprove of them being allowed for appetite suppression for obese people? (Also, would the companies selling them then dislike that the drugs used to control children’s behavior are also known as powerful appetite suppressants?)
All the effective appetite suppressants have turned out badly for one reason or another. Amphetamines have serious side-effects. Fen-phen caused heart problems. Nicotine is addictive and its usual delivery method makes you smell bad and tends to kill you. Various anti-depressants also have serious side effects. And the FDAs version of arithmetic where they weight even the most-unlikely life-threatening effect infinitely against mere desires (like not being hungry or in pain) means you’ll never see such a drug pass muster.
Why are there cheap caffeine pills but no cheap nicotine pills, for that matter? Is it manufacturing costs or marketing?
Does the population just shout down people picking up some nicotine pills because nicotine is this terrible thing that should be shouted at(shouting best down after having some hypocritical coffee or haughty moralistic abstinence) (It isn’t. Tobacco is, nicotine isn’t). Is it due to some federal regulation on how nicotine can be regulated? Is it manufacturing difficulty? Is it monopolistic patent pharma collusion, with makers deciding that cheap tasty lozenges could be made artificially scarce and expensive instead of the low profit-margin caffeine pill industry?
I wonder what the hell is going on there.
Isn’t vaping basically a cleaner way of ingesting nicotine?
I don’t know about pills but the nicotine liquid you can buy for vaporizers is really cheap in bulk.
If you are talking about the quit-smoking gum and patches and lozenges and such, I imagine the market is captive to some extent – since it’s composed of people who want to quit smoking by tapering down and can’t any other way.
Caffeine pills are just a more convenient way of getting caffeine in you. They’re not for people trying to quit coffee.
I think that most nicotine delivery products besides cigarettes are considered medical devices. E-cigs are new enough that the government still isn’t sure what they are.
Long-acting glucagon-like-peptides (e.g. Saxenda(R)) show some promise, but we’ll probably have to wait for them to go generic to see any nontrivial use.
Here is a question that I have. How did the estimated feedback for clouds in global warming change, when the planets meteorological knowledge has not *really* changed over the past decade?
” In the current climate, clouds exert a cooling effect on climate (the global mean CRF is negative)”
“The sign of the net radiative feedback due to all cloud types is less certain but likely positive”
These seem to be the official – enough statements of the IPCC, in 2007 vs 2013.
There have not been any massive improvements in climate knowledge during that period of time. Perhaps slightly better measurement systems with improvements in electronics, but nothing else.
I really wonder how many 10 year trends with cherry-picked points are being used to make all uncertainties appear to be positive feedbacks. Right now, I guess that the same trends that appear in biology and psychology research are happening to the climate research base. Positive studies are much more likely even if insane to be published then neutral studies. Studies that show worrisome trends are more likely to be published even if plenty of researchers believe the error bars of knowledge are too large to say anything useful.
Just how a bunch of smart people believed in a lot of antidepressants until it turned out that for a bunch of them, 70% of the studies and thought of them were negative and simply not published, I wonder if some false “cloud feedback” consensus can be created simply by favoring worrisome studies.
Are things looking up for Marine Le Pen?
My understanding was that Fillon had a pretty hard-line immigration policy, and that in a run off between him and Le Pen, he could count on both votes from the respectable right, and the left to win a landslide (a la Chiraq).
On the other hand Macron, who is currently beating Fillon in the polls, seems to be a supporter of Merkel’s immigration policy – so the contest between him and Le Pen becomes a straight left-right (immigration) battle?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_French_presidential_election,_2017#Macron.E2.80.93Le_Pen
25-30 point difference, there’s no way.
Wait, polls have him beating Le Pen by more than Fillon is? Is Le Pen also winning some of the socialist vote?
Crooked Fillon recently got caught with his hand in the proverbial email jar.
Okay, time to test out FiveThirtyEight’s predictive powers!
They’re giving Liverpool 43% to Spurs 31% to win today’s match, with 26% chance of a draw.
Given that we’ve slumped to sixth place in the table (which is a result I would have killed for in other years, but is a bit disappointing given we were Challenging For The Title this year), we need to win this one to (a) break our losing streak (b) bump us back up to fourth place so we can have a chance at the Champions League next season.
Which, all taken together, ordinarily would make me think “We’re gonna lose”.
BUT!
Sadio Mané (back after international duty in the Africa Cup of Nations), has just gotten us TWO GOALS (in the 16th and 18th minutes of the first half), God bless the lovely Senegalese darling, so there is definite hope.
BUT!
This is Liverpool. They flatter to deceive. They’re perfectly capable of conceding three goals in the second half.
BUT!
Spurs are a decent team! We play better against decent teams! If we can break our habit of conceding opposition goals in the first half and then needing to chase to get back on level terms in the second half, we could win this one!
All of which makes me go “Nate Silver, don’t fail me now, please let your football predicting prowess be better than your Trump predicting prowess – or at least as good – and our slim superior probability of winning be true as predicted!” 🙂
Okay, FiveThirtyEight were on the right side of that prediction as we ended up winning 2-0. They’re giving us the odds to beat Leicester in our next match, we’ll have to see if they can correctly discern the vagaries of the team to get it right 🙂
Have you bothered to reconcile their predictions with listed betting odds at sportsbooks?
Are you assuming “the experts” would be better than the decentralized opinion of interested parties operating in a relatively efficient market?
I’m interested in a purely for own amusement way in how their predictions line up with what the usual sports and betting pundits would predict. I have a fair idea how (for instance) Paddy Power might set the odds; seeing an outside organisation like this using (different? similar?) methods and comparing how accurate (or not) they are is just a layer of icing on the cake of “matchday expectations you know are too sanguine/depressed” 🙂
For instance, they’re giving us 64%-15% for us against Leicester in our next match. Now, I think that’s probably right, but the odds are too generous – I’d bump Leicester up and us down a bit. Why? Well, Leicester are last season’s champions, which everyone agrees was a fluke result, and this year normal service has resumed, they’re now in 16th position in the table. So you’d expect them to lose against a team of Liverpool’s calibre.
(Let me just pause and laugh for a moment about that).
On the other hand, though we are currently in fourth position in the table (thanks to yesterday’s result), we have been slipping – we were down as far as sixth and we’ve been on a losing streak lately – possibly due to the fact that Sadio Mané was on international duty.
This means that (a) we seem to be very reliant on Mané as our playmaker and if Leicester figure out a way to neutralise him, they have an advantage (b) we too are eminently beatable.
So it could go to a draw, or we could do as we did against Hull and end up beaten. That’s why I think that, although on the general go of things, FiveThirtyEight’s prediction is in the right area, I think they’re being a bit too generous to us. Is this because they’re using A Mathematical Method and not letting personal opinion tweak the odds? Are they right and I’m being too pessimistic?
We will know come the 27th!
Does anyone have any data on how large the UK austerity program was up to now? I’m having a hard time getting a straight answer on how big the cuts were.
No idea, the impression I was given by the press (whether it’s fair or not) was that George Osborne as Chancellor of the Exchequer wasn’t getting his figures right and did a lot of fudging first to make the economy look as if it was doing better than it was, and secondly to make it look like they were hitting targets when they weren’t, and thirdly to disguise the austerity cuts as much as possible.
I don’t think anybody agrees on anything: for example, are the cuts to disability (and which were discussed in a post on here before about “are they really driving more disabled people to suicide/causing deaths, as claimed?”) and the push to get people back into work who were on disability payments part of austerity or part of the Conservative ‘no leeching off the taxpayer’ mindset?
IIRC most of the cuts were more like decreases in the rate of spending increase rather than actual cuts, although I don’t have figures to hand.
This shows the data for UK spending through 2015. It looks as though it was increasing, although very slowly.
From the “he was still alive?!” department: Raymond Smullyan, the author of What Is the Name of This Book? and This Book Needs No Title, died a few days ago at the age of 97. In my view he wrote a better introduction to the concepts behind Godel’s theorem than Douglas Hofstadter’s. I need to reread both sometime.
These are sad news. Smullyan’s collections of logic puzzles are exemplary; I’d encourage anyone to give What Is The Name of This Book? or The Lady or The Tiger? to math-inclined teenagers you know, including your inner math-inclined teenager.
Smullyan also wrote what I think is the best rigorous treatment of Godel’s incompleteness theorems for people outside the field – that’s his short book titled simply Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems. It isn’t a popular math book; readers should feel at home with proofs in mathematics and to have been exposed to B.Sc.-level math before. But given those constraints, it’s an incredibly lucid and illuminating treatment.
RIP. When I was a 14-year old fascinated equally by chess, riddles and mystery stories, discovering his book “Chess Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes” felt like something too good to be true, like someone had conjured into existence the kind of book I most would have wanted to read. It even inspired me to compose several retrograde analysis problems of my own.
Wow — I hadn’t heard. Thanks for posting this! Smullyan’s logic puzzle books are wonderful, deep and joyfully fun at the same time. From time to time, I discuss some of the puzzles with my kids, and it’s great to watch light bulbs turn on.
How about alcohol in utero as meningful factor for changes in populationwide intelligence?
This is a working paper describing a 8,5 months long regional swedish policy experiment in 1967-68 with strong beer (less than 5,6 %) sold in general stores instead of in the government monopoly leading to a 1000% consumption increase. Results include 20 percent less earnings and higher risk for of low results in the military cognitive tests for those conceived before the start of the experiment but with the longest in utero exposure and born by young mothers (under 21).
Link
I don’t have a good source, but IIRC there is some controversy as to whether ethanol is the causative agent or simply a marker for poor nutrition and/or other things more likely to affect intelligence in utero.
(Anyone feel free to disabuse me of that notion if I am obviously wrong.)
Apparently it’s confirmed to be alcohol; you’ve probably heard of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, but what you might not know is that that’s now considered just the most extreme end of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders. I was reading an article about it recently, I forget where, and one of the mothers they found to interview claimed that she’d given up drinking entirely when she found out she was pregnant, about 6 weeks along, but since she’d been in the habit of drinking every weekend prior to that, her baby still had noticeable symptoms.
That would predict Russians being damn stupid. IIRC, they’re about average as other whites.
Two obvious possibilities – Russians would be about equivalent to other Asians without fetal alcohol holding them back; or the long hard-drinking history of the Russian population might have a selected for a genetic resistance to the negative effects of alcohol in this regard.
I was going to suggest that Russians aren’t that genetically distant from their more sober Slavic cousins… but I find myself being unable to provide any examples of substantially more sober Slavs.
Are you using just the stereotype “Russians drink” or some statistics how much Russian women drink, especially while pregnant?
The stereotype I’m familiar with about drunks — Russian or otherwise — is that they are usually male.
Here in Finland girls and women used to drink significantly less than men, but that social norm has been slowly dying, and in recent years the kind of health authorities whose job is to worry about possible consequences (FAS etc) have been semi-regularly talking in the media how worried they are about it.
There are interesting recent changes. Russian life expectancy peaked in 1960. From 1960 to 1985 it declined, probably because of increased alcohol consumption. So in 1985, I believe that Russian women drank a lot, although surely less than men. Gorbachev worked to limit alcohol consumption and life expectancy rose 1985-1990. After that male and female life expectancy diverged, men continuing the 1960-1985 decline and women, I forget, either remaining steady at the 1990 level or maybe rising. I thought I got all that from the paper I linked, but while it talks about sex differences, it doesn’t graph them. (The explicit point of the paper is a complicated theory about what happened under Yeltsin.) Probably it would be better for me to cite another source for life expectancy.
I have no first hand experience of Russia, but I concluded from a visit to Finland that Finnish men (specifically the academics I was interacting with) routinely got drunk in the evening. Finns are not Slavs. Does it have something to do with climate? Do Russians in the north drink more than Russians in the south?
Fascinating questions, I’d hope I had answers. That’s what is often commonly told to foreigners (“nothing else to do during the winters”), but I don’t think it should be taken seriously.
I don’t know much anything about Russia (except the stereotype “men drink, wives complain”), but what I do know about my home country and is maybe even more or less backed by research (but I’d be damned I can find all the sources right now) is as follows:
1. The Swedish-speaking part of the populace is to some extent culturally (and possibly genetically) distinct; they also have stereotypically more ‘civilized’ drinking habits (social drinking where everybody sings and eats crab-snacks and either just have fun or mostly hit the brakes when they are still tipsy). They live in the coastal areas, but the overall difference in climate is very small.
On the other hand, I’ve seen claims that before the 19th century when everybody got very excited about ethnic identities, people had very practical attitude when it came to learning languages. (A bright lad wants to study and become a priest or an official in the government, by of course he learns Swedish because that’s the language of ‘civilization’.) If you take a HBD view, that could imply several centuries of selection effects, but it also sounds like a just-so story and I don’t know there’s enough data to draw conclusions.
2. The government of Finland had the bright idea of experimenting with prohibition at the same time it was tried in the US, and to the surprise of no modern reader today, the effects were predictable. (The crime organized around smuggling exploded, the consumption of hard liquor sky-rocketed.) Some people said that we are still living with the consequences.
3. One guess is that the ultimate reason is maybe not dissimilar what happened to Native Americans, whatever that was about. Maybe the inhospitable climate and low population density meant that the country was a bit secluded, creating a practical distance to mainland Europe, a “mini-Atlantic” of sorts. Still, just a guess.
4. And I’ve seen also suggestions that when a large amount of people who have lived as peasants for centuries move to live in modern cities, not everybody adjusts well. There’s no deep generational cultural tradition about the role of alcohol in modern city life, and at the same time, the old country-side traditions are being disregarded en masse because they to large extent are not applicable to city life. Down with the washwater goes whatever cultural inhibitions of alcohol usage there was in the traditional lifestyle. The possible biological adaptations (or lack of them) could amplify this effect.
Compared to many other (West-)European countries, Finland modernized from almost fully agrarian society to something modern very fast, very suddenly in a couple of decades after the WW2. The upheaval was quite dramatic. [1] Now, curiously enough, in Russia something very similar happened, except in more massive scale and with the additional effects caused by Soviet-style city planning and housing ideology.
In general, I wonder to what extent the idea “the people of X have always been drinking much” could be just an inflated (if not outright constructed post facto) national myth to rationalize the current habits? Statistics might be interesting, if they could be found.
5. Forgo the stereotypes and history: in this day and age, I’ve occasionally seen the drinking habits of our youth compared to the same of working-class Brits, both in anecdotal descriptions by exchange students (“it was like being back at home!”) and statistics.
[1] As an aside:in the 60s, hundreds of thousands people — which is a lot in a nation smaller than NYC — emigrated to Sweden because there were industrial jobs in Sweden but no jobs at home. …well, it’s been decades, but I’m told the Swedes still maintain a half-insulting image of Finns being terrible alcoholics and the Slussen area in Stockholm had an infamous drunkard community of, well, guess who.
This occurred to me this morning as I was washing my hair, and you may disagree: the Black Bloc in the Berkeley demonstrations and elsewhere are re-enacting Kristallnacht. I don’t mean intentionally, but all the supporters and apologists who popped up in the “Daily Californian” with the following:
Are they so ignorant of history? Do they not know, or is it that they just don’t care? For all the talk of “It’s 1933 right now!” and “living under a Fascist regime” and “Literal Hitler”, who are the ones dolling themselves up in quasi-paramilitary gear*, for organised and planned disruptions, and using destructive tactics? It’s not the guys in the MAGA hats, it’s not even the goddamn KKK organising marches to smash up ethnic stores – it’s the Left who are acting like the Nazis, using a tactic that is both a statement of intent and a threat: not against the Jews this time but the capitalists (as represented by Amazon, the banks, Starbucks, etc) – “we’re going to destroy this system, we’re going to smash it and you”.
If I wanted to create a meme to drive people to the alt-right – or at least anti-left – all I’d need to do would be juxtapose pictures of Jewish shop-keepers and business owners sweeping up the broken glass from their destroyed premises in the wake of Kristallnacht with quotes like the above – “so-called violence”, “you care more about broken glass”.
*I’m Irish, with the coverage of the Troubles, I’m well accustomed to photos of people dressing in black and hiding their faces so as not to be identified by the forces of the State.
Are you sure about that?
Did actual Kristallnacht drive people in Europe to become increasingly sympathetic to the Jews? Did synagogue attendance go up?
My impression of history is that it helped the Nazis more than anything. It set the stage of “we are going to be violent and nobody is going to stop us, so you better back the winning team.” The same thing seems to be happening here. Other than some sternly worded tweets from Trump, nobody is stepping up to oppose these people. They have announced their intent to be violent, have actually carried out violence, promised more violence, and it seems clear that nobody has any particular interest in stopping them. If you’re a moderate living in Berkeley with no particular ideological commitment, which side do you want to be on?
In Berkeley, maybe. But compare: Richard Spencer getting it in the face was considered hilarious by pretty much everyone on the left. That woman in a MAGA hat getting pepper-sprayed? I haven’t seen anybody I know in real life defend that. Sure, you’ve got people on tumblr defending it – but nobody under their real name.
There’s a reason that people defending what happened at Berkeley – or, at least, under their own name – frame it as though all that happened was property damage. Everyone I know who posted stuff even remotely in support of the Berkeley violence – a far smaller number than posted stuff in support of Spencer eating one – mentioned nothing other than “garbage cans set on fire” and “broken windows”.
Additionally, where are you getting your history? The Nazi party held power in Germany, and had for years before kristallnacht. It caused significant worldwide outcry, and significantly helped stoke the anti-German sentiments in the US that helped allow Roosevelt to support the war against Germany before Germany declared war on the US.
EDIT: And your statement that nobody is stepping up to oppose them is false. For crying out loud, you’ve got Robert Reich suggesting the rioters were right-wing plants. And people on the right are opposing them, obviously.
The question is less “did people defend it” and more “did people rise up against it?” Was the perpetrator arrested (non-rhetorical, I legitimately don’t know). Did it lead to wide-spread denunciations of these sorts of tactics by anyone who wasn’t already on the right and denouncing them anyway? I see no particular evidence that these sorts of things make it harder for antifa to recruit or whatever. If anything, I’d guess the opposite.
Well lately all I’ve seen on social media are posts about how America was super racist and anti-semitic and we refused to let in Jewish refugees. I believe I’d read things in the past suggesting that “help the Jews” was way WAY down on America’s list of reasons for entering the war – almost incidental. But I claim no particular expertise here – I could be entirely wrong.
I’ve seen denunciations from people on the left. Not liberals, leftists. People I know.
As for whether it makes it easier to recruit – well, that’s polarization. The question is, did the pool of possible recruits grow more than the pool of people who dislike these tactics?
I predict a few things happening. First, the cops will show more competence. I don’t buy the “campus cops let it happen because they wanted it to happen” explanation – lacking more information, my guess would be “they were overwhelmed and outnumbered and had not expected this.”
Protests of stuff like this usually takes the form of cops lining up between protesters and people trying to get to the [Milo speech/MRA conference/whatever], a bunch of incoherent screeching about fascism or whatever from one side and knowledge-of-the-law-free yelling about “free speech” from the other side that ends up as comedy material on youtube, and eventually someone pulls a fire alarm. Maybe an awkward shoving match. Black bloc window breaking and people getting beaten up is more likely to happen at stuff like Trump’s inauguration or the G20. Police show up prepared for that, and they do kettle, beat up, pepper spray, arrest, etc people.
The “police let it happen because ANARCHO-TYRANNY” explanation would predict that police wouldn’t arrest people at Trump’s inauguration or the G20. They did, which lends credence to my hypothesis.
As for kristallnacht, no, it didn’t make people like the Jews more. But it did make them dislike the Germans more.
Incidentally, I asked a buddy of mine — a beat cop in Houston — what he thought about the way the Berkeley police handled the riot. His response was (paraphrased), “riot training varies a lot from department to department, and I don’t want to second-guess the cops on the ground. But situations like that are very tricky because of the potential of escalation and civil rights violations if you wade into the crowd, so it’s usually a last resort only in dire circumstances.”
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think any of the video footage people shot of Milo supporters actually being beaten and pepper-sprayed showed cops standing around just idly watching, did it? They were just holding a line while vandalism was taking place.
@Cypren:
MMA fighter Jake Shields stepped in to stop a guy getting beaten up, and he says when he tried to get cops to intervene they wouldn’t.
Lacking the number of cops present, but with reports that there were ~150 black bloc, I am guessing the cops didn’t even have the ability to wade in.
@Matt M: there’s an example of a guy stepping in. There’s a short video linked. He ends up arguing with a couple of black bloc. Their response to someone resisting appears to be not to swarm him – guy’s a pro fighter, but I still wouldn’t like his chances armed against a few guys with clubs or whatever.
dndnrsn,
That’s a fair example. I’d certainly like to see a lot more of them, or more proactive measures, to be sure.
For example, do we think it’s likely that a bunch of campus “moderates” might, say, form a human wall around the auditorium for a Milo speech so that antifa provocateurs can’t get in and disrupt (similar to the roaming bikers who “shield” military families from WBC protsts)? I don’t see this happening any time soon.
Why not? I’d volunteer. Something about something Voltaire said once…
Not on tumblr, and it may be cheating pulling this particular guy in, and it’s twitter not tumblr, but:
https://twitter.com/arthur_affect/status/827021737942466561
https://twitter.com/arthur_affect/status/827018845625909249
Ugh. I had forgotten about that. It’s … enlightening to see the Vocal Male Feminists all of a sudden think violence against women saying things you don’t like is grrrrrreat.
EDIT: Not that he represents all of them, of course. And I use capital-M capital-F Male Feminist to refer to guys who do stuff like explain to women why they need feminism, talk over women who say they don’t experience discrimination by saying “oh yes you do you just don’t realize it”, and other such ironic stuff. All male feminists are not Male Feminists.
I feel compelled to not hold Arthur Chu against the left, because hell, pretty much everyone will tell you he’s a fucktard.
It wasn’t a MAGA hat, that’s the point. It was a parody hat: pink, with “Make Bitcoin Great Again” on it, as a parody of the red “Make America Great Again” hats. She was on his side.
But our brave Nazi-puncher being apparently unable to, or uninterested in, identifying the enemy simply leaped in from the side and pepper-sprayed her. That’s the fruit of the “punching Nazis is your civic duty! anyone who has qualms about Nazi-punching is a Nazi themselves!” cheerleading – idiots who think that petty violence is the cool new way to make a five-minute hero of themselves.
Even better on Twitter, a woman being all approving of using violence against “female Nazis” when quite clearly the woman in the video is not a Trump supporter, she’s wearing a parody hat! She’s making fun of Trump! She’s one of your side! And you’re too self-righteously up your own backside in your “punch a Nazi” virtue you can’t even see that!
I know Tumblr has a bad reputation for SJW Special Snowflakiness, but this kind of lack of functioning brain makes me glad I never got into or onto Twitter.
Yeah, Deiseach, I second this question.
Another complication is that Kristallnacht happened a full 5 1/2 years after the Enabling Act of 1933. So far as I know, Jerry Brown doesn’t have dictatorial powers that include banning the Republican Party… and if he was, that’d be a heck of a civics lesson in federalism.
I’m not saying “The Black Bloc are Nazis”, I’m saying with all the hysteria about “we are living in an actual Fascist State under Literal Hitler”, who are the people behaving like the Nazi paramilitary organisations?
Who are the ones dressing up in the gear, organising and infilitrating protests, and using a particular tactic designed to be disruptive and destructive?
Who are the ones acting like the Fascists? Not the guys in the MAGA hats, as I said. When we get Red Hat Troupes marching through neighbourhoods deliberately smashing the windows of bodegas and Asian corner shops, then we’ve got Actual Trumpian Fascists to worry about.
And the apologists mocking the concerned that all they care about is broken windows and that property damage is no big deal – let me remind them that broken shop windows were a very big deal as a statement of intent, and that they are making a statement of intent re: their political views about capitalism (amongst other things). I am forced to the conclusion that they are so historically illiterate they are genuinely clueless why “organised mobs smashing shop windows as political protest and preliminary to The Great Day Of You’re First Up Against The Wall” gives people a bad feeling.
I mean, literally wearing all-black quasi-uniforms? Come off it!
Hey now, this is America we’re talking about. Our wannabe Nazis back in the ’30s wore silver.
Not that your average modern neo-Nazi would know that or care.
My fellow
AmericansSSC readers and commenters, you will be pleased to know that my reblog of a post on Tumblr, which echoed my criticisms as expressed on here, provoked (I think that is not too strong a term to use) a response from a fellow Tumblrite who took exception to the opinions expressed and who wished to engage me in fruitful debate:Ah, the white-hot cut and thrust of intellectual controversion at a high level! You can’t find that everywhere! 😀
(Part of the reason I love you all is that you get a higher class of insult on here).
I don’t know why you bother with expressing political opinions on that hellsite.
I mean, I have an account too, but I mostly stick to posting pictures of archaeological finds and cities in snow.
It sounds like you’re disappointed by the lack of heritage in the neo-nazi movement.
You can’t call him a fascist, he called no tag-backs.
I just generally have a low opinion of neo-Nazis. Even leaving aside the whole mountains-of-skulls thing, there are plenty of actually new and interesting things you can say if you want to be a right-wing contrarian, so why waste time rehashing a failed movement from seventy years ago?
The answer is “because you’re not very smart or creative, and mostly care about being xxxEDGYxxx”. I don’t know why anyone even bothers to fight these idiots; the Gathering of the Juggalos is probably more politically significant.
Even our trolls are orders of magnitude more intelligent and erudite than what you would typically encounter in say, youtube comments!
Nornagest, I was just teasing you.
“Even” our trolls?!?
I don’t know why you bother with expressing political opinions on that hellsite.
Sometimes the accumulation of lack of sense about what they’re saying means I have to clear it all out in a big blow-out, then I can go back to scrolling past the political stuff and searching out the fandom and swords and history and art stuff 🙂
I don’t know if it’s that the ones who are particularly impassioned about this stuff are young(ish) Americans (20s-early 30s) and so don’t have much of a mindset or view point outside their immediate locale and time, and that’s why they don’t see how what they’re doing looks to the average voter (which is not the young, if we can trust the analysis): why did they think people were trying to represent the Berkeley protests as right-wing false flag?
The guest poster pointed out how IRAP knows how to play the perception game:
By comparison, all the chirruping from the ninnyhammers that no, the Berkeley Black Bloc totally were Berkeley students and not outsiders meant that congratulations, idiots, you’re doing Trump’s work for him. You’re moving the perception, in the minds of the average uninvolved American who gets their information from what they see reported in the media and on the TV, of undocumented immigrants from “hard-working families who only came here to give their kids a better chance” to “gangs of thugs who dress in black and cover their faces in order to march through the streets setting fires and smashing windows”.
Or your brave Nazi-punchers assault a woman for the crime of wearing the wrong hat, and all the “This is what a feminist looks like” crowd cheer him on.
They may not like Trump, but their sympathies have moved a notch away from you. This is how you persuade people that what is needed is a Strong Man to Restore Order.
Violent resistance can be justified. Thuggery is not violent resistance.
while we’re at it, dunk your head in the toilet and give yourself a swirlie since i can’t do it to you myself
That part did amuse me. The last time a boy tried to intimidate me, I was six (the last time a girl tried it, I was twelve). Neither time worked* 🙂
By contrast, anonymous “go dunk your head in the loo” posturing is nothing. Besides, if he’d left that part out and just stuck to the top half of his response, it would have been more effective (if anyone here is Jewish and feels offended by my making a parallel with Kristallnacht, I apologise).
*Mainly because I was too unaware to pick up what was going on; in the case of that girl and her three friends who surrounded me, it took me two whole days for the penny to drop that “Oh, she was threatening that they would beat me up!”
A few of them were students at Berkeley, but neither “students’ nor “outsiders” is really accurate. Usually when something like this happens, the perpetrators are basically random people you find rattling around the Bay Area radical scene: many are students at other Bay colleges, but Berkeley itself doesn’t have an unusually radical student body these days. It’s an Ivy-tier school now, and while it’s very proud of its activist heritage, it turns down something like nine out of ten students. That means the ones that make it in are highly selected for conscientiousness and willingness to work with the system, and also that they have a lot to lose.
I don’t know if I know any of this particular batch personally, but I don’t know if I don’t, either. I do brush shoulders with Bay Area radicals occasionally, and you get a sense of how the scene’s shaped after a while.
Usually when something like this happens, the perpetrators are basically random people you find rattling around the Bay Area radical scene
Nornagest, I’d imagine myself a lot of outsiders turned up for the protests, both the kinds of radical activists that float around from one protest to another and the ordinary ‘any chance for a bit of street violence’ crowd who may not care tuppence about what the particular protest is about but it’s a great chance to smash windows (and do a bit of grabbing under cover).
But when you have the opinion columnists in the Berkeley student paper wittering on about
You really do have to say “Don’t you have a goddamn clue about the optics, you twit? This is not helping! Ordinary America turns on the nightly news, sees black-clad thugs smashing up the streets, and thinks ‘This needs to be stopped’.” People with more smarts on your side go “No, it wasn’t us, it was agents provocateurs!” and you blow the gaff by loudly insisting “No, it was us”. This means Ordinary America decides “And my tax dollars are going to fund a bunch of layabouts more interested in property damage than earning the degree they went to that university for?” so when Trump cannily talks about defunding UC Berkeley – whether he actually can do that or not – they don’t think he’s an idiot or a Fascist, he begins to sound like “common sense telling it like it is”.
The Left – and I don’t mean the liberals or the ordinary Democrat centrists/mildly left of centre – wants to be agents of change? They are not going to do it by street protest. These overgrown toddlers are going to leave Berkeley in a couple of years and move on to their careers (ironically, probably eventually with Amazon or the other Big Capitalist Corporations they’ve been breaking the windows of*, when the realisation sinks in that now they’re out on their own they need to earn money to live and writing whiny op-eds for radical papers won’t do that), but the damage they’ve done to the cause will outlast them.
*Imagine the job interviews: “And why do you want to work as a graphics designer for SwizzyFizzyGames?” “Well, three years ago I put on my black balaclava and yours was the first store window I ever heaved a brick through in the cause of bringing down the capitalist system in flames!”
Silicon Valley doesn’t want to destroy capitalism, it’s doing very nicely out of it.
Student newspapers always suck. Opinion columns in student newspapers can safely be assumed to be eight column inches of solid bullshit.
Fortunately, no one reads them, so the optics don’t really matter.
For some reason it’s really hard to find this on Google, so a lot of people might be unaware, but the darker internet has known exactly who the nazi puncher is for a few weeks now.
I’ve rot13’d this, because we don’t need linked back from any of this. It’s all NSFW. I wouldn’t open this link from a work computer or network.
uggcf://ntrbsfuvgybeqf.pbz/4puna-qbkkrq-evpuneq-fcrapref-chapure-abg-fnsr-sbe-jbex/
Well, no. The “darker internet” often commits to claims without sufficient basis. The fact that the “darker internet” says something is not a great reason to go talking about it as though it were true.
If you were to just fucking read it, you would see that his identity is pretty much nailed.
That was in the days before they had the Nazis as an example of everything that’s evil, though.
OTOH, the Nazis were firmly in control of Germany by then, which no doubt made a difference. It might be significant that Hitler held off doing Kristallnacht until he felt secure.
As a member of the right, but not alt-right, I totally agree. The alt-right’s core message is that the traditional American right plays honorably while the left doesn’t, and this gives the left a huge advantage which is why it always wins on policy and this makes the right losers and, in their words not mine, cuckservatives. When the left wins a tactical victory via violence its supports the alt-right’s world view via conservative principles on proper means. Personally, as a conservative/libertarian professor, I tend to think that anyone who thinks it’s justified to use violence to stop Milo from speaking at Berkeley would support using violence to get me fired.
I’m not sure I’d agree that the idea “the traditional American right plays honorably while the left doesn’t” distinguishes the Alt-Right from the mainstream Right. I think that’s been a pretty mainstream position for some time; examples would be Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, Hugh Hewitt’s If It’s Not Close, They Can’t Cheat: Crushing the Democrats in Every Election and Why Your Life Depends on It or Ann Coulter’s Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism.
I think what’s new with the Alt-Right is the idea that the Right shouldn’t take the high ground and that it should be total war, “on their heads be it.”
The alt-right’s core message is that the traditional American right is stupid and blind, preferring to get muddled down in questions about “debt ceilings” and “entitlement reform” while conceding every cultural, social and societal question to the left.
Lack of awareness of this sort of thing is absolutely rampant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY
Question from someone born in the 80s, who’s never been to the Middle East/North Africa, and who isn’t very knowledgeable about the history of those regions:
In the past couple of years I’ve seen a lot of social media posts like this video basically showing what are meant to be shockingly modern, liberal-looking pictures of Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Libya, etc. around the 60s and 70s, i. e. before Ayatollahs, Gaddafi, et al. (though that equivalence itself seems a little strange, since, if I understand, the Ayatollahs are theocrats and Gaddafi a socialist).
The message looks like: the Middle East in the 70s was basically like the Mary Tyler Moore show plus sand and then somehow things went horribly awry. The conclusion we are supposed to draw is usually left as an exercise to the viewer, and may seem to include: Islam sucks (or, more charitably, radical Islam sucks and has somehow replaced much more tolerant, liberal versions of the religion in both majority-Sunni and Shia areas), US foreign policy sucks, authoritarianism sucks, colonialism and US puppet dictators weren’t so bad (though if they inevitably result in what we have today, one doesn’t see how), or some combination.
Though the person who posted this to my social media was a right-wing libertarian, interestingly, such an argument could potentially support two very different sides in US politics: either as a way of saying “see, radical Islam is a cancer so we need to wipe it out,” or else as a warning against the dangers of reactionary authoritarian social movements destroying a beautiful liberal consensus in the blink of an eye, as many on the left seem to fear could happen with Trumpism.
But I have a more basic question: are these images wildly misleading or aren’t they? I mean, I can probably get together a photo collage making the DPRK look like a paradise, but it doesn’t mean anything, as it wouldn’t mean much if I took a few photos of the richest tiny portions of Iraq with the wealthiest, most liberal people living in a tiny enclave. Presumably these nations had enough unrest to result in what we see today, so… ?
Also a possibility: are the images misleading in the opposite direction? That is, because we in the US only ever see images of the Middle East as burning rubble and women in veils nowadays are we in fact unreasonably shocked to see halfway modern, liberalish, pleasant images of the Middle East from the 70s only because we could just as easily find such images today if “most of Iran actually a really nice place to live” were considered newsworthy?
> Presumably these nations had enough unrest to result in what we see today, so… ?
At the time those countries were post-colonial monarchies. There was not so much unrest as inequality; you are probably seeing photos of the top 1-10%, but not some tiny enclave.
The countries that have avoided major oil wealth but stayed as post-colonial monarchies (Jordan, Oman, Botswana etc) probably provide the best reference; grinding poverty in the back-country, torture in the dungeon under the palace, fine meals and fashion houses in the capital.
And things slowly getting better over time rather than worse.
This sounds about right to me.
Seems to be something of a Moldbuggy lesson here: yes, the king and the top 1-10% live in obscene wealth compared to the rest of you; yes, the king tortures political enemies in a dungeon under the palace and is responsible for a number of atrocities; no, your revolution to overturn this seemingly intolerable social order and replace it with something you imagine will be much better will not actually be better and will, in fact, almost certainly be much worse than the gradual but real improvements we are seeing under his majesty jerkface.
Depends on the type of revolution. A lot of the pan-Arab dictators (and Ataturk, even earlier) saw sweeping away the old order as part of their mandate and came to power with significant popular support – heck, some of those photos were taken when they were in power! (Not in Iran, obviously, but the ones from Egypt or Afghanistan or the like.) Even now the Syrian Democratic Forces are liberating women in northern Syria.
Islamist revolutions being bad doesn’t make revolution bad; it makes Islamism bad.
Indeed not. Revolutions are inherently bad, and there’s no redeeming them.
The only actual Islamist government (Iran) is a relatively ok place to live, certainly up there with the average modern absolute monarchy.
It’s secular dictatorships (not ‘illiberal democracies’ like Iran or Singapore) that are by far the worst for the people living there. For a dictator, the fundamental justification for ruling is that a civil war to remove them would fail. So their survival depends on ensuring that remains true, never letting the people get strong enough to falsify it or optimistic enough to test it.
If you ask the question, ‘why do you rule?’, the answer ‘because God said so’ is not great. But it is ‘because I can have your family killed’ that really requires constant reinforcement.
@1soru1:
I’d say that the worst, based on those countries, is “chaos”. Iraq under Saddam was safer than Iraq now, surely.
Why Iran and not Saudi Arabia? The latter is, so far as I can tell, the one Sunni state that has stayed reasonably close to traditional institutions, with law largely determined by legal scholars rather than legislators.
Iran seems to have modernized its institutions more, but I could be mistaken–I know less about them.
Saudi Arabia’s an unusual case. First of all, Wahhabism, the currently dominant ideology, is not one of the traditional sects of the region; it’s a fundamentalist movement dating to the 18th century. It initially didn’t pick up much momentum, and would likely have stayed a small minority sect except for one fact: early on, it was adopted as the family sect of the House of Saud.
That has allowed it to exert religious hegemony whenever the Sauds were in power over the region, which has happened three times over the last three centuries, the most recent forming the modern state of Saudi Arabia. It’s almost a state religion in the mold of the Church of England, and as such, stuff like the Saudi religious police are instruments of political control as much or more than they’re purely religious institutions. There are other Sunni sects in Saudi Arabia, particularly among the Bedouin, that likely have a better claim to following Sunni tradition.
As best I can tell, it’s a fundamentalist revivial, of which there have been others over the history of Islam–consider the Almoravides and the Almohades, for example.
The question is what it changes in the institutions. Saudi law recognizes the existence of all four madhabs, although I gather they no longer have separate courts for each. I am told that the judge is supposed to rule according to which madhab the party before him adheres to. I am not sure how that applies to cross cases, when a Shafi’i sues a Maliki, say, but that problem existed in the traditional system.
They have the shurta, the police, and presumably courts other than the religious courts operating under fiqh, but that’s been true through most of the history of Islam, one of the ways in which the theoretical separation between state and law is broken.
They even have the ‘Akila, which Schacht claims “fell into disuse at an early date,” as I discovered when I had the pleasure of primary sources in my classroom, Saudi LLM students taking my legal systems very different class. They translate it as “clan,” each of them has his clan, and if he was found guilty of negligent homicide the damage payment, diya, would be shared by his clan, the traditional system.
I can see why you find Islamic and Irish law so fascinating!
Somali too:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Legal%20Systems/LegalSystemsContents.htm
Somali too:
I have about as much background as you on the subject, but here’s a video linked around here in the past. It’s the president of Egypt ca 1950 using as a punchline the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood wants to make all the women wear hijabs. The idea is clearly ludicrous to him and the crowd. I find that a lot more telling than pictures which may be cherry-picked.
Wow, that is really surprising. I feel like for all our talk about the inevitable leftward march of flower god Cthulu, we have under our noses an example of a huge chunk of civilization taking such a hard conservative turn?
People on the right in the West usually tend not to see it as a victory for them so they don’t count it as a victory at all, and people on the left in the West usually tend to see criticizing Islam and Muslims as something right-wingers do, so they avoid noticing (or at least don’t say out loud) that socially conservative (to say the least) views held by Muslims are, in fact, socially conservative views. This on top of the “if it didn’t happen in the West it isn’t real” bias that most people in the West tend to have.
I don’t think this is correct.
People on the left criticize conservative cultural views as conservative cultural views, , and certainly many of those cultures are also Islamic, but the left doesn’t connect them to Islam in particular.
Take as examples the campaign against female genital mutilation and the Michelle Obama’s “Let Girls Learn” campaign.
Here’s an example of what I mean. Here in Canada, in Ontario specifically, the province has been trying to bring in a new sex ed curriculum. One big priority is making it more friendly for LGBT people.
Canada’s foremost left-wing paper published an interview with a principal of a Muslim school who wrote a guide to the new curriculum for Muslim parents. The interview is super softball, and they excerpt her guide. It includes:
The article does not challenge this excerpt, or even comment on it, and the excerpt goes directly against the paper’s generally pro-gay, pro-trans politics. As far as I can tell, the paper has not published a similar softball interview and comment-free excerpting of a guide for conservative Christian parents, and I do not believe they would. The paper has generally been in favour of the new curriculum.
More anecdotally, among the (overwhelmingly left-wing) friend group I have from university, condemnations of misogyny tend to be far harsher against Christians than against Muslims; in fact, I rarely see the former on, say, my Facebook feed. The hypocrisy goes both ways: I have a right-wing friend who actively thinks (and says) patriarchy is good, but suddenly becomes a feminist when it’s Muslim patriarchy.
I think you’re generally right, dndnrsn. I think a big part of it is that USA Left considers USA Right as the outgroup, Middle-Eastern Right as a fargroup, and so their conservative actions don’t really register as much. Particularly since Middle-Eastern Right (and Middle-Eastern Left) are part of the USA Right’s outgroup, and enemy of my enemy and all that.
It’s not like USA Left doesn’t care about victims of oppression in conservative Islamic societies, it’s that acknowledging those victims and the people who do the victimizing gives ammo to the outgroup. So push comes to shove, the USA Left acknowledges that oppression goes on, but you really have to push and shove to get to that point, and they’d much rather focus on things that happen over here that demonize our outgroup instead of ones that might demonize our outgroup’s outgroup. Hence why, say, Jackie and Emma Sulkowitz get more attention than Rotherham or Koln (at least that was my perception).
@lvlln:
First, this is just anecdata. I could be imagining things.
It isn’t just “oh things happening over in faraway lands”. As HeelBearCub points out, you see plenty of stuff about FGM and education rights for girls in places where they are denied education.
I mean stuff happening in the US, Canada, Europe, etc. If an imam and a priest in a major US city both preached in the same week, and both said it was justified for a man to smack his wife with an open hand to discipline her, I would bet that there would be more outcry over the priest. You’d probably see some right-wing outlets suddenly find their feminism and condemn the imam, but left-wing sources, my Facebook friends, etc would clearly pick one target over the other.
You’re right to bring up Rotherham and Koln. People who I know who I would generally expect to be horrified by such things were silent when they happened/were uncovered. Whether they didn’t know, or just found it inconvenient to mention them, I don’t know. I don’t want to impute motive to anyone, and I think that to some extent the motives are good (there are people who would beat Muslims with any stick available) but the end result is that the outcry (its existence, its magnitude, from all over the political spectrum) is based more on who does what to whom than what was done.
I recall most vividly the bizarre spectacle of seeing friends on Facebook explaining how Omar Mateen’s mass shooting, the deadliest in US history, had nothing to do with Islam, and was in fact really, when you think about it, the fault of white Christian Republicans. I’m being uncharitable, but only mildly.
@ dndnrsn
The hypocrisy goes both ways: I have a right-wing friend who actively thinks (and says) patriarchy is good, but suddenly becomes a feminist when it’s Muslim patriarchy.
I think ‘hypocrisy’ is too harsh a term for such
apparent inconsistenciesnuances.Hints: The map is not the territory. The word is not the thing. Patriarchy as practiced in the US is not patriarchy as practiced in Afganistan. Etc.
@houseboatonstyx – “I think ‘hypocrisy’ is too harsh a term for such
apparent inconsistenciesnuances.”To put a finer point on it, I don’t remember any honor killings in Leave It to Beaver.
@houseboatonstyxb/FacelessCraven:
But also for lesser stuff. I mean, the guy is a bit of a hypocrite. He’s less of a hypocrite than the rest of them.
@dndnrsn:
My most charitable interpretation of this thought process goes like this: “if I criticize a Muslim, I am lending support to Islamophobes. There are very few Muslims in the US who are going to be beating women as a result of this advice. There are many Islamophobes who may discriminate against or even assault Muslims because of prejudicial views that consider them all barbaric. Thus I will not reinforce those views.”
My less-charitable interpretation is just that Muslims are an ingroup to the Blue Tribe by virtue of being an outgroup of the Red Tribe, who are the only outgroup the Blue Tribe really recognizes or cares about because they’re the only ones that pose a direct threat to its agenda.
Interesting video, but I want to know who the audience is. The pictures of them are pretty blurry, but they look as though they are all wearing western dress, which suggests that they may be from the westernized upper class.
Also, with regard to the negative reference to al-Hakim… . He was a Fatimid Caliph, a sevener Shia (Ismaili) Imam, and viewed by some as crazy (and by others as religiously inspired–the Druze founder regarded him as an incarnation of God). So not someone Egyptian Sunnis, however orthodox, are likely to think well of.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that Iran is a relatively nice place to live: I know people who moved back there from the UK. The Libyan I know plans to go back eventually but not in the near future.
AFAIK you get can away with a very liberal lifestyle, if you do it in secret.
I also get the impression that Afghanistan was nice pre-1978, since I think it was a popular travel destination for Western hippies. That is less true now.
40 years of civil war can make any country significantly less nice, whoever wins. And the good guys lost in Afghanistan; at this point it’s just different flavors of villain.
War creates an environment that rewards bad behavior and punishes good behavior. This depletes the supply of good people and multiplies the supply of bad people. if you’re lucky, you run out of food, bullets or soldiers before you run out of good people, the war ends, stability returns and you can try to rebuild. If you’re unlucky, the supply of good people drops below a critical threshold, and you get the opposite of Scott’s “divine grace.” Infernal malice, I suppose. The critical mass of bad people become numerous enough to start flipping marginal good people, and suddenly there’s no good people left. At that point, it seems like the only solution is to start civilization over from scratch; warring tribes eventually conquered by a strongman, strongman creates stability, stability creates prosperity and eventually (maybe) freedom.
Alternatively, someone knocks your strongmen down every couple decades, constantly pushing you back into the “freedom” of warring tribes over and over again.
With regard to Iran, your last point is basically right. Iran is a fairly developed country – it’s “high human development“, 69th in the world by HDI (out of 188). Life expectancy is 73 years and 90% of Iranians have some sort of health insurance. It has the same average murder rate (3.9/100k) as the US.
Iran got screwed over by a long war with Iraq, and then by sanctions, but it’s still a decent place to live. Iraq likewise suffered from the war with Iran, the Gulf War, sanctions, and then the 2003 war and its aftermath. It is a less decent place to live than Iran, and a lot less safe.
With regard to Afghanistan in the 70s, what I have read is that the cities were quite cosmopolitan and developed, but there was a huge gap between the cities and the countryside. During foreign military involvement in Afghanistan, securing the cities hasn’t been the problem, it’s been the countryside, especially the parts with rougher terrain. Afghanistan is also in pretty rough shape after decades of war.
>modern, liberal-looking pictures of Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Libya, etc. around the 60s and 70s
Those places were modernizing, but they were not in any way liberal. Arab socialism was secular, but it was also deeply authoritarian, often accomplished by implicit or explicit military dictatorships. While they never used the term, Fascist is not inapt description for Nasser and his imitators.
So, I have somewhat updated my thoughts on CO2 and warming. It seems that until some point in CO2 levels, this happens. Namely, plants grow significantly faster, and are (somewhat) more resilient with heightened CO2 levels.
However, it appears that the response to plant growth and CO2 levels are asymptotic, with very little extra growth occuring after say.. 3x pre-industrial CO2 levels. Or, effectively, above a doubling of current CO2 levels, there becomes very little benefit to additional CO2. Which seems to mean that once the CO2 levels hit 800 PPM, all there is is additional warming without countering positive effects, or one has to “wait” for evolution to catch up to take advantage of such additional CO2 in the atmosphere.
Right now, my guess is that for the next 50 years or so, additional CO2 will have mostly positive effects, regardless of whatever feedbacks there are.(with the damaging effects of warming being exaggerated) Sometime during the next N years, mixed effects, and after that mostly negative effects(how large I am unsure of, and perhaps this changes depending on how evolution takes advantage of co2 increases), due to simply adding temperature without any real increase in the ability of plant life to take advantage of heightened CO2 levels.
(This all avoids the ocean acidification issue, though)
What is your source for the claim that CO2 fertilization maxes out at about 800 ppm? It could be true, but you only link to a piece on the effect of doubling CO2, and I don’t remember having seen the claim before.
The claim isn’t that it maxes out at 800 PPM. Its that the relationship between CO2 levels in the air and the rate of photosynthesis, holding other factors constant(light intensity, nutrient density) is asymptotic, with comparatively little gain above the level of 800 PPM for a large amount of plant life.
I’m not sure which plant species gave the first chart in that link (the relationship varies amongst plant species) but from what I can tell the shape of that graph is replicated amongst most papers that have attempted to find the relationship.
Its not surprising, since graphs like that show up all across biology. The rate of muscular growth and testosterone levels, the receptor response to pharma drug levels all share that graph’s structure.
I have not yet found a paper (though I have not delved through the entire literature base in any thorough way) that clearly compared a wide variety of plant and tree growth in regards to CO2 levels under conditions expected to be typical…but with the research I have done, there tends to be relatively little growth gain above the range of 800-1000 PPM under conditions that hold other variables constant that we can’t really expect to change in the natural environment(nutrient levels and light intensity levels)
I think that’s a very important note for long-term warming trends.
For warming that may occur this century, i’m much more worried about any sea-life changes then land-life, as it appear the temperature(and PH) variability is much much lower then land temperature variability.
As an additional note, it does look like the CO2 response differs amongst plant-life. So if there are multiple species competing for a certain ecological niche, the one with the best response to CO2, temperature, and precipitation changes should end up dominating that niche temporarily.
There’s another trait that has some varying research as to how this effects animal life. Its hard to say how this increased growth rate effects vitamin/mineral/protein density of the plants, and how animal life’s hunger/digestive system relates to total nutrient consumption vs volume consumption for herbivores.
Perhaps for this one sub-component of your damage function. A lot of people want to include other things. What’s worse is that modeling nearly anything that is reasonably fast-timescale 50 years in advance is basically impossible. We’re certainly not going to be able to say anything about how our technology, politics, and economics are going to be situated in their ability to adapt to the diminishing returns of this benefit.
This isn’t just your guess, the IPCC consensus has basically admitted as such.
Assuming this to be true, that would argue even more for taking the steps to combat climate change now.
Do the preventative maintenance and major repairs on your car while it is allowing to earn money, and therefore have the money to pay for it. Don’t wait until it breaks down and you lose your job.
Maybe. Although it’s worth pointing out that even if we discovered some magical technology tomorrow where we could flip a switch and instantly eliminate 100% of carbon emissions without harming industry or the overall economy in any way, it wouldn’t be a good idea to flip it right now. Right now, CO2 emissions are benefiting humanity.
One thing that has always bugged me about the climate change debate is that whenever I ask the question: “What IS the optimal global temperature, anyway?” nobody seems to have an answer. But I’d be willing to bet that if you surveyed 100 people, 90+ would suggest the answer is lower than what it is today, even though the expert consensus seems to be suggesting it’s actually higher. Understanding this dynamic is probably, like, kind of important.
@Matt M:
That’s essentially some form of begging the question.
We don’t have a “switch” we can flip and there appears to be no likely switch we will be able to flip in the future. Every indication is that it will take years of concerted effort in order to bend the demand curve for carbon so that it goes to zero.
You’ve set up a false choice, then assumed that the choice you want to take is better.
@Matt M: I suspect that depends on who you asked. The resident of North Dakota might have different ideas on which way the temperature should go compared to the resident of Arizona.
@HBC: No one’s suggesting any preventative maintenance or major repairs. Instead, it’s “stop using the car so there’s more miles left for future generations”.
This assumes we have a remotely defensible estimate of damage circa 2060. We don’t.
I think HeelBearCub is mostly correct. The evidence indicates that CO2 output isn’t something civilization as a whole can ignore for any long period of time, but for the next several decades the damage is being exaggerated with the benefits downplayed.
Unfortunately, the positive trend looks like it will end by the end of this century. And if alternative technologies are not widespread by then, then all that appears to be happening is adding heat to the planet and changing ocean PH levels and seeing what happens. (By the way, that’s totally ignoring the fact that most projections even accounting for discovering more resources appear to have the world run out of oil reserves within 250 years…meaning civilization *has* to develop alternative energy sources)
Maybe that’s why the projections for damage in the next 30 years are so exaggerated. That’s the timeframe where people are motivated, so if people won’t act for the long-run you need to lie to them in the short-run.(and its also the timeframe where someone can exaggerate damage to publish a paper and get a quote in a paper that adds to ones reputation and not be really professionally damaged due to being wrong).
It looks like only the chinese were sufficiently worried enough and risk-averse in relation to more agriculture and medical technology and birth rates that they thought to in advance limit birth rates (turns out in the western world, mostly people just liked sex more than the emotional pull for babies. But that was a planetary experiment! And if the guess was wrong the western world perhaps would be feeling malthusian trends today. Interestingly, this trend *does not* appear to be true in some second and third world countries(even those with cheap birth control access), and probably won’t reverse for quite awhile, if ever)
A lot of things will have changed by the end of the century for other reasons. A few relevant likely ones:
Countries that are very poor, most obviously Bangladesh, will probably not be very poor–consider what has happened to China as an extreme example. So diking against SLR or adapting in other ways will be a more practical option.
Newer technologies, such as solar, will have developed further and so become less expensive.
Fossil fuels will probably be more expensive due to resource depletion, although that might still be being balanced by improvements in extractive technologies.
Individuals will have adapted in various ways to higher CO2 and warmer temperatures, making further increases less costly. Most obviously, population will have shifted a bit towards the poles, crop varieties will have shifted.
The more general point is that conditions in 2100 and after are hard to predict, making it risky to bear costs now for benefits we hope to get then.
Where in the IPCC consensus is that?
Are there any decent free VPN services?
If you define “decent” as “permits traffic to flow at speeds exceeding dial-up internet” and “doesn’t inject malware/attempt to hijack your accounts”, then the answer is no.
Maintaining a VPN service is very costly both in technical terms (since they are literally paying for all bandwidth you use twice over — once to communicate with the endpoints you’re accessing, then again to send it to you) and legal ones (governments take a dim view of services specifically designed to anonymize people and evade scrutiny). Other than Tor (which is decentralized and under heavy assault on a number of fronts both technical and legal), you won’t find that kind of service made available for free.
Good to know, thanks.
BTW, I wasn’t aware that VPNs were used for anonymity. I just want to be able to bring check my email at a coffees shop without some hacker kid being able to snoop through my stuff from a couple tables away.
So, given that a decent VPN service isn’t going to be free, what kind of price tags should one expect? Are there services that charge by the minute, or are they all pretty much monthly or annual subscriptions…?
As long as you’re connecting to your email over an HTTPS or SSL connection (and if you’re using a webmail provider on any major service — Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, Yahoo Mail, etc — you are), you’re fine. The warnings you get about the insecurity of surfing on a public wifi connection relate to using non-secure HTTP connections.
There’s been a lot more attention paid to this in the last couple of years, and many sites that previously allowed insecure HTTP connections (such as Facebook) now route everyone over secure connections by default instead of making you specifically request it. You can also get browser extensions that will automatically attempt to encrypt all of your connections if the server on the other end supports it.
If you’re dealing with small mom-and-pop businesses or similar parties that don’t encrypt their connection — well, shame on them! But in that case, you’ll need a VPN. Note that the VPN isn’t really securing your connection, though. It’s only securing the connection between your computer and the VPN provider; once the connection jumps from the VPN provider to the target server, it’s insecure again. This is helpful to you only in the sense that you’re hiding in the noise of a million connections on the Internet rather than a dozen at your local coffee shop, making it somewhat less likely that you’ll be personally targeted. But it’s still a false sense of security overall.
To analogize in non-technical terms, using HTTPS is like shipping a package in an armored car to its destination. Using a VPN is like shipping your package in an armored car to a bank, which then sends it via regular postal service to the destination. This may be better than sending the package via the postal service if someone is waiting outside your door to ambush the postman, but it’s not a great deal more secure.
Thanks, that’s helpful. I used to use the HTTPS Everywhere extension in this laptop’s past life. Maybe I’ll give it a try again.
Then make your own VPN! With blackjack and hookers, if you so please. There’s a fun little project out there designed to make it as easy as possible to set one up on a Raspberry Pi. So, for less than $50 and an evening of tinkering, you can at least VPN back home safely (without even having to leave your main machine on).
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/ is 40 bucks a year and friends say it works great.
If you have a unix-like machine at home, you can tunnel everything through there.
Yeah, that’s the one that I use, for the sort of thing for which something like that is useful. Speed is of course not as fast as without the VPN, but usually the decrease isn’t enough to be annoying. Occasionally connections and configuration need a bit of fiddling, so I wouldn’t recommend it for the completely technologically clueless.
There’s also Hide My Ass is more expensive and with certain issues less helpful, but is more user friendly, and the areas where PIA protects you better than HMA are not those the OP mentions wanting the VPN for. I mention it because for some people it being more user friendly may be an overriding consideration.
Random question for anyone who might know:
Is there an adjustment that needs to be made to one’s normal eyeglasses prescription when ordering prescription sunglasses? If so, is there some formula, and if so, what is it?
[EDIT] I ask because I wear a prescription of -3 in my normal glasses. They are slightly weaker than the -3.25 “full strength” prescription that would get me to 20/20, but that’s how I like it. (Make my eye muscles do a bit of work, I say!) Then I ordered some prescription sunglasses online and decided to make them -3.25. When I got them, however, they felt significantly weaker than even my normal glasses.
My normal glasses have small rimless lenses. The sunglasses are big aviators. Does that explain the difference, or is it something else?
I don’t see why there should be a difference. The glass that prescription sunglasses get made off is ‘polluted’ with something that filters out some of the light, but there shouldn’t be a distorting effect that interferes with the lens function.
If that was an issue, they would have have to put prescription glass in regular sunglasses to counter that effect and they clearly do not.
As someone who has ordered prescription sunglasses in the past: For a given lens “grinding” technology, no, I don’t believe there is any difference. But the caveat is relevant. Different manufacturers can correct for different optical features and may therefore want more information from the optometrist. The Oakley sunglasses I got (many years ago) were like this — they could shape the lens in more subtle ways and therefore wanted more info. And the more light the lenses block, the larger your pupils will be (especially in darker conditions, as when it’s cloudy), so the more it’s in your interest to correct for specific features.
See my edit.
The general difference in pupil size from the reduced light could account for the apparent difference in strength, but it shouldn’t work that way with a perfectly matching prescription. Is it possible your eyes have slipped a bit since you last got them checked?
Of course, it’s also possible that they just screwed up the grinding.
My eyes haven’t slipped because my vision through my normal glasses still feels fine.
The pupil size shouldn’t make that much of a difference either; I notice the same weakness in the sunglasses regardless whether I’m wearing them in bright or dim conditions.
It seems more and more likely that they must have screwed up the grind. But man, that’s crappy luck: I actually gave them the wrong prescription (-2.5) by accident the first time; the sunglasses I’ve been talking about are the “second try”. They do at least feel more powerful than the first ones.
The long thread on Milo and reporting illegal immigrants reminds me of an issue I have been thinking of recently, in the context of the book I am writing.
One problem with the modern system of criminal law is that all crimes are treated as offenses against the state, hence prosecution is by the state. The result is that crimes the state approves of are unlikely to be prosecuted. The obvious modern example was the Director of National Intelligence committing perjury in sworn testimony to Congress. He was clearly guilty, pretty much admitted it, but was not and will not be charged. For a more extreme case, the Chicago Black Panther shootings, back when I was a graduate student in Chicago, were a pretty clear case of first degree murder by cops–none of whom were ever charged.
One obvious solution would be to permit private prosecution of crimes, as was the rule in 18th century England. My standard example of the advantage of that approach is an incident involving the radical journalist/politician John Wilkes. At one point when Wilkes was in jail in London there was a mass demonstration in his favor outside the jail. The authorities got worried, the troops opened fire on the crowd, and several people were killed.
Wilkes’ supporters charged the soldiers who fired and the Justice of the Peace who gave the order with murder, and they were tried. One of the soldiers skipped bail, the other defendants were acquitted, but there was a serious risk that they could have been convicted since the trial was in London which was pro-Wilkes.
On the other hand … . A system that permits private prosecution of crime raises the same sorts of problems being discussed in the thread here. You break up with your girlfriend, she gets mad and prosecutes you for smoking marijuana or under age drinking. That particular problem already exists in the context of college accusations of sexual assault, but it could become a much more common problem in a system of privately prosecuted criminal law.
One tempting response is that we should only have laws we really want enforced, but I think that is too simple.
(Apologies if I have discussed this issue in some previous thread–I might have).
So the major difference you’re describing vs. existing civil torts is that the prosecuting civilian need not have directly suffered loss?
Abused as it is, prosecutorial discretion does seem fairly important to avoid overwhelming the legal system (otherwise you’d probably get do-gooders trying to prosecute every case of public intoxication or whatnot).
I wonder if you’d end up with a case where “prosecutorial discretion” gets exercised as the state prosecutor offering “plea deals” with zero penalty (thus making the do-gooders’ attempts double jeopardy and getting them thrown out).
Double jeopardy already doesn’t apply to state vs federal prosecutions. If individual do-gooders had independent jurisdiction, they likewise wouldn’t necessarily be bound by a state acquittal either.
The dual sovereigns doctrine is a uniquely American exception to double jeopardy. It obviously doesn’t apply in unitary states, and in other federations it’s quite rare for a crime to be punishable at two different levels. (Canada, for instance, has no provincial crimes at all.) Reading up on other countries, I get the impression that America got some parts of federalism wrong and there’s some room for improvement, but don’t tell the founding father worshipers I said that.
In Britain double jeopardy applies to private prosecutions. (But there it’s no longer a universal rule – new evidence can force a retrial of an acquitted defendant.)
Questions surrounding double jeopardy multiply the problem of increased court workload and potential for abuse.
If we don’t prohibit double jeopardy, then we incentivize all kinds of terrible behavior. Have a mob that collectively has some money and hates someone? Great news! Find a criminal charge, any criminal charge! Sure, if you took it to a Silly State Prosecutor, they’d say, “We have maybe a 5% chance of getting a conviction; piss off.” However, you have more than a Silly State Prosecutor! You have twenty friends!
If we do prohibit double jeopardy, then we incentivize all kinds of terrible behavior. Want to commit a crime? Make sure you have a buddy who is already ready to bring a terrible prosecution against you. You’ll have immunity in no time!
Pretty soon, you’ll have judges who have to say, “No; that is a shit prosecution. We’re not going to allow it.” Or they’ll say, “No; that was a shit prosecution. We’ll let you bring a better one.” Either way, you’re the one exercising discretion for the government now, dawg.
In Britain the Crown Prosecution Service is authorized to step in and take over a private prosecution, for the reasons you’re describing.
I think originally the grand jury was supposed to filter out bad prosecutions before they got too far, by demanding that a prosecutor convince a dozen randos to sign the indictment. With professional prosecutors who knew how to game grand juries, they rapidly became worthless, which is why all the other common law countries have abolished them and the US probably would too if we hadn’t put it in the unamendable constitution.
I think that is correct for England in the 18th century, except that they were not randos. Being on the grand jury was a moderately high status position.
I was being flippant, but weren’t they literally random people off the (much shorter and more exclusive) list of eligible jurors? If not, how were jurors selected back then?
The Grand Jury was not the same thing as an ordinary jury.
The judges arriving somewhere on circuit was a big social event, and the grand jurors, as I remember, got to play a significant role in it. If you are really curious I can look it up–the relevant books are in the book case behind me.
Hang on a second. What exactly do you mean when you say that “Wilkes’ supporters … were tried”? Who conducted this trial? According to what procedures, decided by whom? What if they’d been found guilty — what would’ve happened next?
Or this: “You break up with your girlfriend, she gets mad and prosecutes you for smoking marijuana or under age drinking.” What does it mean that your girlfriend “prosecutes you”? What does this involve? What outcomes can follow?
I ask because… the only thing (it seems to me) that makes the actual justice system, the one we have, work, is the state monopoly on force. The state physically detains (some may say “kidnaps”) the accused (or credibly threatens to do so); those who resist, suffer violence, possibly deadly violence. If you’re convicted, the state physically incarcerates you. Resistance to that, as well, is met with force, up to and including deadly force. Any attempt to change this situation is also met with force (or, again, the credible threat thereof).
In light of this, what exactly does it mean to have a private trial? Of what consequence is it?
We already have private trials, for civil torts. I don’t see why in principle you couldn’t expand the system to criminal law.
But… that doesn’t answer my questions.
Which of your questions isn’t answered by “it works like civil law”?
They were tried by the ordinary court procedures of the time. In 18th century England almost all criminal prosecution was private, just as tort prosecution is in the modern U.S. system. If they had been found guilty and not pardoned they would have been hanged.
Presumably they, or at least the Justice of the Peace, would have been pardoned, which was a weakness of that approach for punishing people who committed crimes the state approved of.
There was a different procedure, an appeal of felony, which was fully private–Smith v. Jones rather than Rex v. Jones. It was still on the books but no longer in use and difficult to use. In another case, some of the Wilkites tried to use it against two brothers who had been convicted of murder and then pardoned, apparently because their sister was a lady of easy virtue involved with a couple of politically powerful noblemen. But they didn’t succeed.
If they had succeeded, the King could not have pardoned those convicted. Which was the point of the attempt.
@Said Achmiz:
The “they” above refers to the soldiers and the Justice of the Peace, not the supporters. That sentence tripped me up, too; my initial reading of “charged” was Wilkes’s supporters rushing at the soldiers, until I got to the “with murder” part.
The usual rule is that a pronoun refers to the nearest noun that fits.
This strikes me as a description that may be formally correct but that’s misleading given the kind of inference you want it to support. Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that the state is one of the parties with what amounts to veto power over a prosecution?
I point this out because one of the distinctive aspects of our actual criminal law system is that there can be very good evidence of a (non-civil) crime being committed, and whether a prosecution goes forward will still depend on whether a certain party that is not the state “presses charges”. Short of very serious crimes like murder, that seems like the most common arrangement. So in that sense those crimes are very much not treated as offenses against the state, whatever the formal language indicates.
IANAL, but everything I’ve read says that “the victim is pressing charges” is just shorthand for “the state is pressing charges and the victim is cooperating with that.”
They’re usually synonymous, because if the victim is willing to forgive the crime, then the state doesn’t have much reason to bother, but in principle the state can charge you whether or not the victim cooperates. And you can think of cases where that would be a good idea, such as a victim of domestic abuse who insists that her husband is a good guy, he just gets a little angry sometimes.
Legally speaking, the victim has no control over prosecution, although the state may if it wishes choose to honor the victim’s preference. Of course, if the victim happens to be the key witness, his reluctance to testify may be a reason for the state not to prosecute.
If you assault me and the case comes to trial, it is not “Friedman v. Skef” but “California v. Skef.”
I very specifically called out the relevant distinction using the term “formal”. The fact of the matter is that the system tends to give the victim this level of control regardless of whether the victim is needed as a “key witness” to go forward with a prosecution. And why would the state not have much “reason to bother” if “the victim is willing to forgive the crime”? More specifically, why in the cases where it would seem to be a “good idea” to prosecute anyway does that generally not happen?
The actual conventions don’t match the language, so making a big deal about the language is just misleading.
The state can, if it wishes, prosecute without the assent of the victim. The victim cannot prosecute without the assent of the state, nor can anyone else. As I pointed out, with examples, this means that someone who commits a crime the state approves of does not get prosecuted.
That is more than a formal difference.
Reminder that Wyden asked him a question that was impossible to answer lawfully. Senator Feinstein acknowledged this possibility in the beginning of the session, asking her fellow Senators to not ask questions with classified answers. The thread about Milo is filled with claims like, “It’s not nice,” “Don’t be a dick,” and, “Don’t be a huge asshole.” It’s pretty obvious which person in this exchange was being a huge asshole.
Re-reading that Lawfare piece, I had either forgotten or never registered the fact that Clapper apparently wasn’t under oath, so perjury is apparently right out. Putting my fake defense attorney hat on, we’re going to have fun with the phrase, “any investigation or review, conducted pursuant to the authority of any committee, subcommittee, commission or office of the Congress, consistent with applicable rules of the House or Senate” in 18 USC §1001. We’ll have to scour some case law to see if we can argue that the request of classified information was “pursuant to the authority” of an unclassified committee hearing or if Feinstein’s request for Senators to not be dicks (in this particular way) is buried somewhere in the rules of the Senate.
On top of that is the complication that nobody disputes the fact that the statement was corrected privately, immediately after the session. I don’t know how this plays for a strict reading of the law, but let’s be honest, a strict reading is never in play. This one is probably in the same class as what I said the Hillary emails case was: if you put it in front of a jury, it’s closer to a 50/50 than an 80/20 in either direction.
Getting back to your real question, gbdub points out the ‘overwhelming the courts’ problem. You mentioned college accusations of sexual assault, but I don’t imagine you’re proposing private courts of this type. Instead, the courts will have to find some filtering mechanism for what is surely going to be a deluge of private criminal complaints. Do you plan on still applying restrictions on standing? Going back to Clapper for a second, it’s abundantly clear that making a false statement to a Senate committee fundamentally is an offense against the state. To think otherwise would be akin to saying, “Let’s have private prosecutions for contempt of court.” To the extent that we think about allowing private prosecutions for some offenses, this one almost certainly wouldn’t qualify.
If there are no restrictions for standing (hell, even if there are), courts will almost certainly have to filter their caseload somehow. What do you think this looks like except for prosecutorial discretion… happening in the hands of a different element of the government? Whether it’s your ex-girlfriend, the owner of a hotel which you gave a bad review for online, or whoever, the fact is that you’re going to be seeing a massive number of shoddily-constructed cases. If you entertain them, you waste a ton of time. If you don’t entertain them, congrats! You’re the one exercising discretion for the government now, dawg.
“Instead, the courts will have to find some filtering mechanism for what is surely going to be a deluge of private criminal complaints. Do you plan on still applying restrictions on standing?”
No. What I am suggesting is the system that existed in England well into the 19th century. Any Englishman (including, I believe, any Englishwoman) could prosecute any crime. Most crimes were privately prosecuted, the main exceptions being crimes against the government, such as coining.
As a rule, the prosecutor was the victim, since he was both the person with the strongest incentive to prosecute and, usually, the one with the most information. But that was not a legal requirement.
The perception at the time was that the problem was not too many prosecutions but too few, since the prosecutor was paying the costs of the prosecution. To deal with that problem rewards were established for conviction for some crimes and, later, the possibility of reimbursement of the prosecutor’s expenses under some circumstances.
England did not get public prosecutors until the second half of the nineteenth century. After police forces were established in the early nineteenth century police officers often acted as de facto public prosecutors, but legally speaking they were simply exercising the same right to prosecute as private citizens who prosecuted.
I guess this comes down to whether or not you think anecdotes of billionaires pumping money into legal challenges or advocacy groups pooling resources to use the legal system as a weapon is a real phenomenon in our current society… and how pervasive this behavior will permeate through the entirety of society.
suntzuanime made parallels to civil law above. In civil law, we have statutes to handle frivolous lawsuits, specifically allowing a court to punish a person for bringing a dumb claim. Would you adopt something like this as a filtering mechanism that a judge could use? (Again, now a judge is exercising discretion and drawing the line on which cases are “frivolous”.)
I’ve actually suggested a rule in tort law where the losing plaintiff owes damages to the prevailing defendant, as was done in Periclean Athens for at least some categories of cases. One obol in the drachma, which I think meant one sixth of the amount the plaintiff claimed the defendant owed him. I can see arguments for something similar in criminal law, perhaps limited to cases where a majority of the jury voted for acquittal.
“Re-reading that Lawfare piece, I had either forgotten or never registered the fact that Clapper apparently wasn’t under oath, so perjury is apparently right out.”
The lawfare piece asserts that, but it is obviously slanted in favor of Clapper and against Wyden and it offers no support for the claim. Every other description of the incident I have seen says he was testifying under oath. Do you have a source, other than the Lawfare assertion, for the claim that he wasn’t?
That is not true. Whether it was corrected I do not know, but the claim that it was corrected is disputed.
Nobody seems to deny Wyden’s claim that Clapper had been told in advance of his testimony that the question was going to be asked.
How about the tape? It’s not in there. Apparently, this is very common for typical legislative hearings.
I suppose I should qualify such statements with, “Is not disputed by anyone who is serious.” TechDirt is not a serious organization on these topics, and I have an exceedingly long history of calling them out for complete and obvious bullshit over and over and over again on r/technology. Please do not cite them. Or read them. Or ever speak their name again.
The most thorough article that I have seen is WaPo’s. Reading down to their update is important. It says:
Wyden’s own staff doesn’t dispute it (and I haven’t seen any dispute of WaPo’s account on this), so I’m going to call it “undisputed”. The Advocacy Organization Whose Name Shall Not Be Spoken notwithstanding.
Notice the two-step that happened in both these quotes. “Clapper’s staff declined an opportunity to amend the record publicly.” The statement “…asking him if he wanted to amend his answer,” also implies that it would be an amendment to the record – the public record of a public hearing. OF COURSE he’s not going to amend the public record – that would be putting classified information in the public domain!
Wyden is a master at saying things that are technically supportable, but are horribly flawed… and they’re great for giving ammunition to advocacy organizations like, uh, nevermind… who aren’t as scrupulous about ensuring that they’re even technically kinda true.
I haven’t seen any documentation that specifies this particular question. He actually asked it in his follow-up time after spending most of his primary time in a back-and-forth, trying to re-word his question multiple times to pin him down. It’s really not clear which and how many of these questions were stated in exactly the form we see in the video. It may actually be the case that this specific question was verbatim in the advance, but it honestly seems unlikely. Can you provide some evidence? I will agree that if that exact question was there, his office dropped the ball in objecting ahead of time to say, “You can’t ask that in open session and you know it.”
Given the nature of the commentariat, I thought this might be of some interest to you:
https://www.edge.org/conversation/stuart_russell-defining-intelligence (Defining Intelligence. A Conversation With Stuart Russell)
Carrying over a conversation from the other thread, I’d like to get thoughts on:
1) Do you think most people mostly treat others peacefully?
2) If yes to 1), do you think this is mostly due to fear of consequences from police/going to jail or due to other reasons?
3) If you think it’s mostly due to other reasons, what do you think are the most salient reasons that people treat others peacefully?
1) In the US, obviously, yes
2) Mostly other reasons.
3) Most people don’t want to get into a confrontation that they might lose, or if they win might cost them more than they would win. Acting peaceably is usually easier and pays off better. Of course there are exceptions, and in those cases fear of official consequences enters into it.
What particular costs do you think are most likely to occur when a person engages in confrontation, even if he/she wins, other than official consequences?
You can get injured. Your property can be damaged. Your time will be spent. You can gain a general reputation for being violent/confrontational, which has both costs and benefits. Separately and more specifically, you can motivate revenge by the person you won over or their friends and family.
How much do you think this cost is pertinent: A person who engages in violence against others will think poorly of themselves afterwards. In other words, how much do you think conscience plays a role in restraining violent behavior?
I think conscience is likely to stop many people from engaging in planned and premeditated violence. But there are plenty of people who either are without conscience or who do not find some types of violence to bother theirs. And I think it’s the first thing to go in the heat of the moment.
What particular costs do you think are most likely to occur when a person engages in confrontation, even if he/she wins, other than official consequences?
A punch in the face? We had an exchange in the comments on a past thread over someone who, when dared by a drunken idiot to “Make me” when he wouldn’t stop acting like a clown, hit him – to the shock of the idiot and his friends, who plainly didn’t come from a culture where they expected any consequences from challenging someone other than backing down and clearing off, certainly not the possibility of physical retaliation.
Not everybody comes from a culture/background where, if you act like a jackass and challenge people to stop you acting like a jackass, you can continue to act like a jackass secure in the knowledge that everyone is too polite to use force.
This has its ups and downs – I do come from a culture/background where if you act like a blackguard and then follow that up with a challenge, you had better be prepared to back that up with your fists. For non-blackguards the rule tends to be: Don’t hit first, but if you do get hit, you can choose to hit back and that doesn’t necessarily reflect badly on your character.
The downside of that is that someone who is physically aggressive can dominate and even instill fear in a neighbourhood/grouping well beyond their actual importance, because nobody wants to get into a fight with a violent person and have them gather up their family and come break in your windows and doors (another reason I am less than impressed with the Berkeley students and ex-students defending the black bloc re: property damage on the grounds that windows don’t feel pain – for all their chirruping about their deprived/oppressed backgrounds, plainly they haven’t lived where the possibility of having your windows smashed and your door kicked in by the violent, and being assaulted yourself, is an actual threat).
The distinction you’re pointing to is the key difference between the honor and dignity cultures so well described in Campbell and Manning’s “Microaggressions and Moral Cultures” (summary at the link). The wealthier classes in Western society are living in a dignity culture; the poorer classes (and much of the rest of the world) are living in an honor culture. When the two meet, there are frequently sparks and a lot of surprise.
There’s a great piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates that I’m utterly failing at finding a link for (if anyone knows what I’m talking about, please link me! I’d love to read it again!) where he talks about his experience acculturating to upper-class professional culture, having grown up in the Baltimore ghetto. He recounts an incident where he got into an argument with someone at a political convention and almost escalated it to physical violence, but his boss pulled him back from the edge and gave him a sharp lecture of the “what the fuck do you think you were doing? You were about to throw your whole life away!” variety. He talks about what a sudden realization that was about how completely different the rules and assumptions of upper class society are from lower class, and how they don’t mix well at all.
Pretty sure this is the TNC article in question.
Thanks, that was exactly it! Absolutely great piece. It resonated with me a lot as someone who also grew up spanning two cultures and still has trouble respecting all of the norms of each in context.
I wish that bell hooks would read (and understand) that article, because she assumes that all men are taught honor culture to the same extent as her friends and family.
Do you count things like fraud, shop-lifting, petty theft, as violence for this question, or only assault & battery/muggings on up?
Mostly thinking of physical force like assault/rape/murder/armed robbery, but I’d include fraud, shop-lifting, and petty theft as well.
Then yes, out of a mix of official consequences and reputation, with a significant fraction who behave peacefully/honorable out of moral conviction.
In other words, I think most people do not steal/lie because they don’t think they could get away with it; if everyone thought that they could get away with it, but it wasn’t yet a widespread practice, you’d probably see a majority (65%?) engage in opportunistic theft (maybe violence up to intimidation, shoving in crowds, etc.) with the rest abstaining due to conviction, but overtime the participants increase as the hold-outs see honor as a “sucker’s game”.
Assuming there isn’t a sort of arms race in consequences, possibly including mafia like organizations to keep businesses profitable if we posit authorities are unable to inflict lawful consequences.
This is my problem with the Non-Aggression Principle. Libertarians like to play the definition game where things they like are defined as non-violent. If I decide to use force to oust a trespasser, I may be in the right but I’m still using violence against a peaceful person. If you want to claim the moral high ground, you have to say that it’s also wrong to use violence against property crimes.
I don’t think the libertarian position is “shooting a trespasser is nonviolent”. Rather, property being a right, property crimes are themselves violence and justify a violent response.
My point is that calling property crimes “violent” is torturing the use of the word. It redefines the common meaning so they can say they aren’t initiating violence.
It also smuggles in a libertarian conception of legitimacy. That’s why the state making you property taxes is violent but a landlord making you pay rent isn’t.
To clarify, my OP was trying to get at: do most people treat each other decently, and if so, what are the primary causes of this. Being peaceful (non-violent) is one way we treat each other decently and I used this specific term in my OP, but respecting other people’s property is also treating people decently and so I was curious about Randy’s thoughts inclusive of that as well.
I think violence can be used justly and unjustly, and am not a pacifist, for the record.
Are you saying that calling e.g. a riot that destroys a storefront “violent” is torturing the common meaning? Because I feel like that’s a fairly standard interpretation of “violence”, and calling it “peaceful” would be a greater warping of common usage.
This is another poor interpretation of libertarian principles.
In the case of the landlord, rent is what you pay for the use of the landlord’s property, according to a contract you both agreed to presumably non-coercively. Thus, not theft.
Taxes are the state taking your property according to laws which you are coerced to abide by. Thus theft. Unless you believe that all property belongs to the state, but that’s where libertarians and socialists differ.
Wrong Species –
Communication error.
It may help if you substitute something like “unilateral non-consensual action”. There are other subtleties about societal consent – consider the difference between yelling in someone’s face versus talking quietly to them, in either case without their consent; the fact that we treat one as marginally violent and not the other suggests something like a social contract of consent.
You will find the libertarian concept of violence is closer to common understanding than a strict definition. They handle, for example, BDSM much better, as well as non-consensual acts of social-level intimacy, like hugging.
Sort of. They lean heavily on social contracts, which libertarians would ordinarily claim to be against. Any libertarians around who can clear that up for me? Why do social norms matter vis a vis violence?
@Gdub
Rioting isn’t violent because it involves property damage but because the way people go about doing it. If you believe that me stepping on to your property without your express permission is a violent act, then yes, you are using a highly nonstandard definition of violent. If you choose to use violence to keep me away, you may be in the right. But you are still the one initiating violence.
I’m not a socialist but I don’t really see a difference in principle. A landlord can make you do what he wants. The state can make you do what it wants. In an anarcho-capitalist world, these people would be one and the same. So when the ancap says they want to get rid of the state’s monopoly on violence, all they are really doing is shifting that right from what we call the state to the individual property owners. It’s a shift from political authority to absolute propertarian authority.
@thegnskald
Are you suggesting that a duel is non-violent? After all, they both consent to shoot each other.
@gbdub
I was going to say something about it being the state’s property, which the “landlord” rents, but I see you’ve already gone there later in your comment, but attributed it to socialism (seems more feudal to me – the difference between allodial title, which is only held by the state, and fee simple, which is what everyone else has)
I’m not sure how it’s measurably different, from your perspective, from all property in the world belonging to private owners who won’t sell it to you at any price, and therefore you must pay rent to (and obey rules imposed by) one or another of them in order to exist.
Add to that the fact that you don’t have the automatic right to move elsewhere, and it begins to look a lot like feudalism. So maybe states are just a natural consequence of property. A state is just a very large landlord (or homeowner’s association), and the whole map is covered with them, and the common people (serfs, if you will) are born with no real property and no ability to obtain it.
@Wrong Species
First, I’m not really a strict libertarian, and I’m not someone who goes around saying “taxation is theft!”. I’m mostly objecting to what I perceived to be your overly glib interpretation of libertarian theories on violence.
A landlord can make you do what he wants.
No, a landlord can make you do what you agreed to do when you contracted with them for use of their property
You seem to be ignoring the issue of consent here – and that’s the rub! If I voluntarily enter into a lease, my landlord is hardly being violent by expecting me to honor the terms of that lease.
random832 raises an interesting point that a sufficiently monopolistic landlord might wield state-like coercive powers in a quasi-feudal way. So certainly “coercion” exists on a continuum.
But likewise “violence” is a continuum, and I don’t think it’s inherently silly to call trespassing “violent”, it’s just a minor form of violence.
I don’t want to speak for libertarians, but certainly I’m on board with proportionality in response to violence, and in remedies for victims of violence. So I wouldn’t say it’s open season on someone who just steps on my land. At the same time, if I physically toss the trespassing dude out after asking them to leave, I don’t want him to have a legal/moral defense of “I was just sitting here peacefully and he violently assaulted me!” The trespasser is ultimately the initiator of bad behavior, not the landowner asserting their property right.
You can define violence however you like. But everyone else believes that violence is some variation of “rough or injurious physical force, action, or treatment”. So when you say that libertarians don’t believe in initiating violence, it’s a bait and switch where you say one thing and mean something else. Based off the common definition of violence, you are initiating violence against the trespasser. Based off your own idiosyncratic definition, it’s whatever you want it to be. But just think how ridiculous that is. If I have been told to leave a property by the landlord and I’m sleeping there, you insist my act of sleeping in a room by myself with no one around me is an act of violence. Or maybe I’m trespassing without knowledge of doing so. You believe that by walking around, I’m committing violence against the owner. No matter how ridiculous it is though, libertarians in general will keep using this definition because they know that replacing it with a more appropriate word loses its rhetorical punch. It’s dishonest.
I agree. But violence isn’t the same thing as breaking property rules.
Now to the “consent” of property. We do have consent with states, it’s called immigration. But what about people who live in one state for their whole life? Imagine that you grew up in one house and you never left. At what point did you consent to the rules of the landlord?
The usual libertarian category is “initiation of coercion” or “initiation of force.” It isn’t coercion if it is mutually agreed to, as in a duel. It isn’t initiation if it is a response to someone else initiating coercion against you, as in responding with force to an attacker.
Wrong Species –
It is violence in the same sense that boxing or rugby are.
Words can mean different things. They can even mean different things to different people.
I would shoot somebody if they broke into my house. I would regard them as initiating the situation, more – they have created a scenario where my only options to rectify the situation are violence, either my own or outsourced to the police.
I don’t see the use of playing definitional rule-lawyering. In our society there is an implicit threat of violence behind damage to property, and ignoring that to make some kind of pseudo-leftist point doesn’t hold any value, particularly given the long-standing principles behind many variants of leftism which hold that property itself is violence. If you don’t understand why leftists would hold that, you don’t understand what property is.
[Libertarians] lean heavily on social contracts, which libertarians would ordinarily claim to be against. Any libertarians around who can clear that up for me? Why do social norms matter vis a vis violence?
Putting on my libertarian hat: social norms aren’t special. They’re just a non-physical tool that has proven to save time and effort when resolving disputes. They’re not mandated (coerced through force), but you can expect everyone to look at you funny if you eschew social norms in a libertarian setting, for the same reason you’d get looks if you insisted on splitting firewood with a pocketknife.
Or, to put a sharper point on it, if you insisted on poor tools when employing your trade with other people. A libertarian would claim you have every right to split wood with a pocketknife, but would not wish to buy firewood from you. Likewise, you have every right to speak menacingly (yelling in someone’s face can be physically unpleasant, so let’s suppose it’s just being growly and insulting, say), but no one’s going to seek conversation with you in that case. Like I said, nothing special; these are the normal reasons anyone would reject anyone who rejected social norms, libertarian or not.
@thegnskald
See my reply to gdub. I don’t know what you think I believe but I’m no leftist. I agree that the trespasser is in the wrong. My point is that it’s fundamentally dishonest to make up your own idiosyncratic definition without being upfront about it. Look at this conversation with a hypothetical socialist:
“I don’t believe in initiating violence”
“Then why did you hit him?”
“Because hateful words are a form of violence”
“…”
If you agree with me that what the socialist is saying is dishonest then you should admit that saying libertarians don’t believe in the “initiation of violence” is also dishonest.
@David
Why is it a coercive act for the government to demand property taxes but not for the landlord to demand rent?
So who is “initiating coercion” when a policeman, private security contractor, or concerned citizen tries to pull over the idiot who insists on driving 100 mph through a residential neighborhood?
If the answer leads to a conclusion that we have to let people drive at 100 mph through residential neighborhoods until they actually hit someone. then liberty or at least libertarianism is DOA. If the answer is that driving 100 mph through a residential neighborhood “coerces” the residents to accept an unwanted risk, then you are on a slippery slope to everything even slightly dangerous and unpopular being prohibited.
I see far too many libertarians trying to draw lines on the more cliff-like portions of that slope and saying “but obviously we should stop sliding here, because liberty”, to the point where I no longer consider the NAP to be useful guidance.
@John Schilling:
IANALibertarian.
But isn’t the answer to your scenario that the road will be privately owned and that people will choose to buy their property and build their homes adjacent to roads that don’t allow this? And that people accessing that private road have to abide by the contract which allows them access? (Well, at least the AnCappers).
I mean, I think that private roads are unworkable for other reasons, perhaps best summed up as “network effects”, but, you know, that’s just me.
That’s more of an anarcho-capitalist rather than general libertarian answer, and it’s not readily traceable to anything we can build out of our present society where most of the roads aren’t privately owned.
It also has the problem of, gee, I just bought the roads on all four sides of your house, and my price for ever letting you leave or anyone ever bringing a scrap of food in is everything you own plus a twenty-year sexual slavery contract on your teenage daughter. If I catch you setting foot on the road without permission, that’s Initiation of Force, just like it would be for the guy driving the fast car, and my men will defend my property against your nefarious aggression with these nifty pain rays that we bought from the now-defunct military.
I suspect that Homo Economicus, practicing perfect game theory against a player whose lust for their teenage daughter was quantitatively rational, could probably avoid that outcome at some lesser cost, but that’s not terribly reassuring.
@John Schilling
I think it’s relevant who owns the roads the idiot is driving through. If it’s a neighborhood owned by adult race car drivers that signed an agreement to allow severely high speed limits and the ensuing higher risk to person and property, then I wouldn’t say those abiding those rules were coercing the inhabitants, and those trying to stop the speedy guy going 100 mph would be initiating coercion.
If it’s the typical neighborhood owned by families with kids who post 25 mph lower speed limits, then they don’t consent to the increased risks of high speed limits and are coerced by the speeder who inflicts much higher risk of harm on them. The people stopping the speeder would by using retaliatory justified coercion.
It matters greatly what people consent to when determining whether something is coercive. And sometimes coercion is justified and sometimes it’s not.
@HeelBearCub
Here’s a list of private highways in the U.S..
Business complexes could privately own their roads, either by a single real estate developer that owns it all and leases out space, or a joint ownership by all the business owners on the complex. Same for residential real estate.
You can have private roads where people live, where they work, and in the spaces between those two spots. You can have private roads on private nature reservations and the roads to get to them to. You can connect cities with private roads.
All the above private roads can be restrictive or open to all, depending on the owner(s) wishes. I see this situation working pretty well for the most part, with some potential edge cases to work out.
@John Schilling
I don’t think I know anyone who thinks private property is inviolable. I think easements can be a reasonable restriction on private property rights, depending on the circumstances of the case. Certainly in the scenario you describe I think it would be justified for the surrounded person to violate the consent of the highway owner by moving across his land to get to the rest of society. I think it likely that a reasonable private arbitrator would come to that same conclusion if such a case went to court.
EDIT: I just thought of what I think is an interesting analogy to your example. Modern states engage in a public version of your private tyranny through the use of border controls, where people get trapped in countries with very corrupt governments and widespread destitution, not allowed to leave by the surrounding countries, no matter the price paid. So, similar to how I think it’s just to violate the consent of the horrid private highway owner, I consider it just to illegally immigrate.
@IrishDude:
The roadway network in America is decidedly not private. Even in 1795, when that first turnpike was built, it was not the only road, and the network that it connected to was not private.
So pointing at the fact that some private roads exist, which I knew and my argument does not depend on, doesn’t mean anything.
John Schilling already made the argument about the kind of thing that can happen if you allow your property to be surrounded and therefore made potentially inaccessible. Some private equity firm starts scooping up the right roads, and squeezing people really hard.
But now you’re just arguing that libertarian policies are awesome because anything that isn’t awesome will obviously be deemed unreasonable in court for mumble reasons, which is hardly an improvement over the NAP as policy guidance.
@IrishDude, JohnSchilling
Re: controlling roads to control the people served by the roads
It’s no hypothetical. Federal agencies have done this exact thing. When they want people off their land, they may try to condemn the only roads leading to the people’s homes. The example I am aware of, kid-you-not, is to expand a protected wetland area and aid duck migrations.
I wish I could give you a good source. Suffice to say that when a friend of mine worked on the Hill, she helped write a bill to combat this practice.
Why is it ok when a private organization owns the roads and charges people for its access but not when the government does so? Why is it that I’m “consenting” to his fees but not the governments?
@HeelBearCub
You say: “I think that private roads are unworkable for other reasons, perhaps best summed up as “network effects”, but, you know, that’s just me.”
I noted that private roads do and have existed, so they seem to me they can clearly work.
You say: “The roadway network in America is decidedly not private.”
I understand the way things are, but private roads do exist and can therefore ‘work’. Perhaps it would help if you would describe more what you mean about private roads not being workable.
And I made a counter-argument. I don’t consider private property inviolable and don’t know anyone else who does, with easements under certain conditions being the kind of things I think likely to hold up in private arbitration. And that, well, nation states already act this way against people living against their border, with observed really negative effects on those people that are trapped, so I don’t find government control of property to be a necessarily good alternative.
Aside from private property being something I don’t consider inviolable, if you are describing a situation where a firm tried to increase their profits by raising prices, I’ll note that this induces competitors. From the wiki page on private highways: “Because electronics did not exist in that era, all tolls had to be collected by human cashiers at toll booths, creating high fixed costs that could only be covered by a large volume of traffic. As railroads and steamboats began to compete with the turnpikes, less profitable highways started to shut down or be turned over to governments.”
@John Schilling
How many people do you think would consider the situation you described an unjust one? I think a vast majority of people would. Under a Machinery of Freedom arrangement, most people would then want to sign up for security services that protected the right of people to cross the ringed highway, and private security services would be incentivized to agree to arbitration agencies that their customers preferred.
Any response to the nation-state analogy on borders, and how we currently observe nations leaving people trapped in terrible situations by not allowing entry/exit?
@Wrong Species
To me, the difference in treatment partly depends on if you consider the government ownership legitimate. If a mafia comes to a town, breaks some legs, and comes to have de facto control over it, I don’t think shop owners are consenting when the the mafia makes their monthly rounds for ‘protection’ or ‘governing’ payment and the owners comply.
To the extent consent is on a continuum, the level of consent in the mafia scenario is much less than the level of consent given by shop owners that voluntarily join together to hire and pay fees to private security and governance firms.
Given that step 2 in any argument about libertarian principles is “well you know, libertarians don’t really agree on anything!” or “wait, which conception are you criticizing, because so-and-so writes …”, it’s really hard to say.
@Irishdude
That’s exactly right. The difference between libertarians and others isn’t that libertarians don’t believe in the “initiation of force” and other people do, it’s that they don’t consider the government legitimate but they have no problem with property owners. If we got rid of all the governments in the world, and started from scratch, we would be under a similar situation to where we are now, even if anarcho-capitalism was successful. Why? Because eventually someone would grow up in a household where they never have a definite moment of consent and yet they are still paying for services. If we broke up all the countries in the world in to micro-states, it would be the same result. So the libertarian problem with governments isn’t really that they exist, it’s how far their geographic reach is.
@skef
Me: “How many people do you think would consider the situation you described an unjust one?”
You: “Given that step 2 in any argument about libertarian principles is “well you know, libertarians don’t really agree on anything!” or “wait, which conception are you criticizing, because so-and-so writes …”, it’s really hard to say.”
I think you can use your knowledge of what you think is just, and what those around you think is just, to come to some idea of what other people think and how wide spread an ethical judgment might be. But if you don’t feel comfortable speculating on others, you can at least answer for yourself. Do you find the scenario John Schilling described an unjust one?
EDIT: And because it would be interesting to note, I wonder if any poster would speak up to call John Schilling’s scenario a just one. I’m guessing such people are out there, but my feeling is they’re probably pretty rare.
@Wrong Species
Well, both kind of. My definition of government requires political authority, where state agents engaging in behavior that would be seen as wrong if done by non-state agents are considered legitimate. Some people are given special moral status, which I have a problem with, and therefore I do have a problem that governments exist.
Geographic reach plays a role in what behavior used to gain property I consider right or wrong. For example, if 100 people are stranded on a tiny desert island, with just enough coconuts to last everyone a week which is when a ship is expected to rescue them, then I think I would not respect ownership claims of the first guy to find the coconuts and claim them all. I’d think the guy a jerk if he tried to defend his claim, and I’d join with the 99 in using coercion to acquire possession of the coconuts.
I’d feel very different about ownership claims over a coconut tree if they were plentiful and the desert island was vast.
Let’s imagine that we lived in ancapia. One guy manages to buy up all the land in the entire world(Assume the least convenient possible world). Suddenly there’s not a difference between government and property. It’s one and the same. He doesn’t need to use his political authority to assert his dominance, he can rely on what I call “Propertarian authority”. You may consider propertarian authority more legitimate but it’s still equivalent for all practical purposes, in this scenario at least. It still involves him having the right to do something that we wouldn’t let the other people do. Property taxes are the equivalent of rent. Regulations are the equivalent of rules. So we agree that every other person growing up in this situation besides the owner never really consents, right?
Now here’s the catch. This is not just a weird problem for a hypothetical world that’s never going to happen. It’s a problem for any possible world, unless you never have any children and then start from scratch. Someone is going to grow up on a plot of land where they never give their explicit consent. This affects both property owners and governments. So when you say that the government has the ability to do things other people can’t, that’s not true. The government collects taxes. The owner collects rent. Right now, we separate the two, but in your world you’re not really eliminating the government so much as conflating it with property.
@IrishDude
If we are just going to reason from what we “think is just”, what do we need libertarianism for? What about the aspects of libertarian thinking that many people find counter-intuitive? When someone responds to my intuition with “mumble mumble NAP mumble” what am I supposed to say?
If our intuitions about what is just are sufficiently reliable, why is it that libertarians themselves can’t come to agreement on so many issues?
Because the landlord owns the property and the government doesn’t.
That, of course, get us into the question of how property is justly acquired. It’s a hard problem for the libertarian in the case of property in land. I have an attempt to solve it, but not one I am very happy with.
It’s much easier for what is on the land, including the house the tenant is renting, since that was built by the landlord, if not with his own labor with the labor of other people who agreed to build it for him in exchange for things he did for them.
Why is it a coercive act for you to make me do something but not for me to make me do something? That’s the easier version of the same question.
That’s a fascinating way of looking at it, but I don’t think it’s correct.
The way I look at it, the government owns all its territory, and grants some (most) of it in fief to individual vassals (mostly citizens, but sometimes others) based on its internal rules of acquisition and transfer. The government still levies taxes on these fiefs, of course, the landlord just happens to be entitled to making productive use of it and reaping the lion’s share of the profits. The government also reserves the right to revoke said fiefs if it feels the need to do so, with compensation or not.
@Wrong Species
You said: “Why is it ok when a private organization owns the roads and charges people for its access but not when the government does so?”
I responded that the difference is whether the ownership is considered legitimate. Do you disagree that it’s relevant how someone comes to own something on whether them charging for use of that possession is legitimate? Do you think there is a moral difference between the mafia charging for their protection and governance services after violently taking control of a town and private vendors charging for their protection and governance services after being voluntarily asked to provide them by the townsfolk?
@skef
Let me first note that I can’t speak for all libertarians, just myself as a more fringe AnCap libertarian.
I think some ethical judgments of what is just are widespread (rape is wrong) and some aren’t (abortion is okay). If asked to speculate on how a certain hypothetical would play out in AnCapLand, having some sense of whether people would be likely to consider that scenario just helps to answer the question of what the response to the scenario would likely be. John Schilling’s proposed scenario seems like one where most people would be unlikely to respect the private property claims as unjust and therefore my response to the hypothetical is that the highway owners claim probably wouldn’t have standing.
Now, there are other situations that could be described that are more ambiguous, where there is much more disagreement about what is just or not. Say, what the proper compensation is for a man who without provocation seriously injure another man. I can see people coming to fairly different conclusions on what is just compensation. In such a scenario, I think a Machinery of Freedom type arrangement with private security and arbitration, with arbitrators picked to satisfy consumer preferences, is more likely to result in a judgment found just by more people than the justice system under states.
In other words, I think AnCap libertarianism describes a more just system, from how people voluntarily pick their service providers (instead of having them imposed on them) to how justice is determined by private arbitrators when there are competing beliefs on what is just.
Can you provide an example please? I think that would be easier for me to respond to.
You could say, as I do, that non-aggression is a good presumption for people to believe in, but that there exceptions to it can be just. You could say, as I do, that reasonable people might disagree on what counts as justified aggression, and so it would be good to have a system that best accounts for these varying opinions on justice.
I think intuitions about what is just are reliable on many things but not on all things. I teach my kids not to hit and not to steal, which seem like pretty good rules of thumb on how to live justly, rules of thumb I think most parents teach their kids. As he gets older I’ll teach him what I think are justified exceptions, and to the extent I get pushback from others on some of those exceptions, I say it’s good to debate.
I think the AnCap mechanism for debating and determining justice is better than state-based solutions, though it’s still not perfect.
@Wrong Species
I see consent as on a continuum, with the ability to exit a situation being a relevant factor. If a person is in a situation that can be easily exited, but they choose to remain, then I think that level of consent is higher than one in which a person is in a situation with very high costs to exit. So, I think the level of consent given to live in any particular city is higher than the consent given to live in any particular country, given how relatively easy it is to move to a different city but not a different country.
It’s why people tend to not like monopolies, as it feels like there is no choice or ability to opt out, and subsequently the level of consent is not as high as it would be with a diverse set of options. Governments are the biggest most salient monopolies. One man owning all the land would also be a monopoly with no ability to exit, and therefore the level of consent to remain in his territory would be nonexistent.
@IrishDude
My original point was that libertarians don’t agree on the sort of points that were being discussed earlier. I’ve talked to libertarians who would be fine the enforcement of private roads surrounding an area. One common way of pushing back against such examples is “it’s not important because it wouldn’t happen (or would only happen to someone being really dumb).”
Now you’re asking me to talk with you about your version of AnCap. I don’t care! One of the main reasons I don’t care is that “the AnCap mechanism for debating and determining justice” being “better than state-based solutions” assumes there is something that “the AnCap mechanism for debating and determining justice” refers to. I don’t think there is sufficient agreement such that that definite description has a referent. Even if your preferred conception would be helpful in “determining justice”, if other people won’t use it, that doesn’t matter much.
Many, many political systems would work well if everyone agreed on some given X or Y. “Things would be great if everyone agreed to ____” is famously not a convincing argument for agreeing to ______.
@Irishdude
Sure it’s important how the government came to be the owner but that’s a different question than whether ancap world would have less “political authority” than a state dominated one. You mentioned degrees of consent and the absence of exit, which I completely agree with. My point is that the person who grew up in a city-state has just as much consent as the person who grew up in a city owned by one individual.
Here’s another scenario. Imagine that we have two cities. One of them taken over by the mafia. Another had a single individual buy out the whole city, giving a fair price and without any kind of coercion. Both have exit rights. Now imagine that some time has passed. The mafia becomes more lenient and the business owner becomes more exploitive. After two hundred years, the individual policies becomes identical. Now a libertarian comes along and says we need to dismantle the mafia organization because of its illegitimate founding. The citizens are more reluctant because they have seen that the other city lead to the same end result and fear dismantling would lead to interim chaos. Wouldn’t you sympathize with the reluctant citizens?
Most of them. But then, most people would consider it unjust if anybody is poor and rich people aren’t being taxed at least 20% of their income to alleviate poverty. Most people would consider it unjust if there were ever any mass shootings in the news and people were allowed to buy machine guns without Extreme Vetting. Most people (in first-world nations at least) would consider it unjust if employers were ever allowed to pay people less than $5/hr for their labor.
And most people would consider it unjust if the state were not allowed to “initiate aggression”, for the common-language definition of those words, in a wide variety of situations.
“Most people would consider it just/unjust” is the standard for democracy, is neither necessary nor sufficient for and may be incompatible with liberty, and is a particularly bad fit for NAP-purist libertarianism.
@rahien.din wrote (seventeen posts above; thanks, nesting limit!)
You may be thinking of the Hammond family in Oregon. This was part of a long, drawn-out series of actions by the Fish and Wildlife Service to get them to move off their ranch to make it part of a bird sanctuary.
The Guardian has an article about the Hammonds.
Google supplies more information: Neighboring ranchers were flooded out by the feds. And it will surprise nobody who’s been paying attention that FWS has mismanaged the bird sanctuary so badly (e.g. letting carp take over the lake, allowing junipers to take over the fields) that fewer birds are present now than when it was owned by the ranchers.
The government, which we tend to think of as a guarantor against feuds, seems to have started and continued one of its own in this case—a very one-sided one. The 70-something grandfather and 40-something father are currently serving five-year sentences (in California, of course) on trumped-up arson charges.
@Wrong Species
The scenario you describe of two cities that seem similar, and whether we should think of them differently, reminds me of this nice article from David Friedman on communist/capitalist trucks.
I’m running out of energy to get into a more detailed reply for now, but perhaps we can pick up this thread in a future OT.
EDIT: @skef and John Schilling, similarly, I’d like to pick up this topic in a future OT. I appreciate your replies.
@Wrong Species
I didn’t find the counter-arguments to this point convincing, and I think that this is why the formalist patchwork of REDACTED IDEOLOGY is a much more grown up and sophisticated ideology than libertarian anarcho-capitalism (but still flawed), which is reflected by so many of its advocates being ex or post-libertarians.
If we accept that the anarchism part is incoherent, then what we actually have is a desire for decentralized privately run states. When this is the entirety of the ideology, it becomes much clearer to discuss, since you have absolved yourself of the ethical murkiness of justifying property and arguing over what counts as a violation and so on, and you can solely focus on questions of efficiency and outcomes and so on. Property depends on its ability to be defended, and so the state has the highest level claim of all.
In the REDACTED IDEOLOGY sense, anarcho-capitalists essentially believe that secondary property can exist all on its own.
If sovereign property is required, then the state is a given, and the question is only about organization.
How do you define a state? In particular, how do you define a decentralized state? Does “decentralized” mean no territorial monopoly?
If I defend myself with force against a mugger, am I a state? If not, what has to be added?
What’s the difference, in practice, between “decentralized privately run states”, with control/sovereignty over territory treated and defended as property, with the possiblity of subcontracting and delegating to smaller subdivisions (as “secondary property”), and feudalism (as actually practiced before the rise of centralizing forces in the Early Modern period)?
@David Friedman
Each state would have a territorial monopoly. But there would be a lot more of them.
I’m not actually arguing this position, by the way. I’m just saying that it’s more realistic than anarcho-capitalism, especially since it has monocentric law enforcement, rather than polycentric law enforcement (each territory has a fixed law agency, rather than there being a market in law agencies per territory, or rather; the market for law agencies is called war).
A state has to involve the organization of people. Probably something above the Dunbar number where you’d get bureaucracy type effects where people would be ruled by people they don’t know, and those rulers in turn wouldn’t know them. So you can distinguish a tribe from a state, but it pretty clearly isn’t anarchistic either, since there are still involuntary imposed hierarchies involved even in tribes, and there is no market in law.
@Kevin
Feudalism tied serfs to the land of their lords. That’s one of the defining features of feudalism along with the absence of land being a commodity. This wouldn’t be the case under Mldbg’s scheme (which I don’t agree with, but it’s far more plausible than anarcho-capitalism), so it’s pretty clearly still capitalist rather than feudalist.
I don’t think either of those is correct. Bloch comments somewhere that there are no references to serfs being tied to the land in France before (I think) the fourteenth century, so although it’s a possible characteristic it is not a necessary characteristic.
And there were markets for land in medieval Europe.
My preferred definition of feudalism is a system where the key resource is controlled at a level below the top, making the ruler a coalition leader rather than an autocrat. In medieval Europe the key resource was heavy cavalry. In Tammany New York it was votes. For details, see Plunkett.
That is a decidedly non-standard definition.
@DavidFriedman
“Bloch comments somewhere that there are no references to serfs being tied to the land in France before (I think) the fourteenth century, so although it’s a possible characteristic it is not a necessary characteristic.”
Not to mention that there’s significant variation between Western and Eastern European forms; it’s my understanding that the restrictions and labor obligations on villeins under manorialism were fairly light.
Edit: I’ve said to people before that when critics of AnCap compare it unfavorably to feudalism, and AnCaps defend against the charge, they’re usually both wrong. Namely, because their conception of “feudalism” seems to owe less to history and more to Monty Python and Mel Brooks; it’s usually an anachronistic amalgamation of grinding Eastern European serfdom, “Royal Absolutism” that was actually part of what replaced feudalism, and “the Dung Ages” myths like Droit du seigneur/ ius primae noctis, “Black Legend” propaganda about the Inquisition, nonsense about Columbus being denied funding because the kings and queens of Europe thought the Earth was flat (when actually it was because he was using a figure for the size of the earth that was known to be far to small, and there was, really, no way his expedition could even make it halfway to Asia; he lucked out by there being two unknown continents in the way), and other such stuff.
@IrishDude
So, this bit stuck out at me.
It seems to be saying that exit (or, if you will, “entrance”) is more important than voice, and that voice isn’t worth anything at all.
@random832
I don’t think it says voice is worth nothing, just that the incentives to produce desirable goods are stronger with easy exit/entry than through voice. When people can easily say no to what you’re offering, you’ve got to offer good value to get them to voluntarily buy what you’re selling.
For a really interesting look at exit and voice, I highly recommend this 15 minute talk from Balaji Srinivasan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOubCHLXT6A
Yes. Thank you.
yes, other reasons, and because people are basically good. That is, left to their own devices, people usually want to leave others alone to do their own thing (and thereby be left alone in turn). (I’m a middle-aged nice guy, so this may be typical mind fallacy talking; OTOH it matches data from my lived experience pretty well).
1) Yes
2) Other reasons
3) Laziness mixed with fear. Some herd effects too. Let me unpack that:
Laziness: it’s an awful lot of work going around being violent to people. I can feel good and get what I want much easier by using my skills to earn money or words to ask for things if I need them.
Fear: I might be able to beat up any given old lady I meet, but I can’t be sure her 250-pound linebacker grandson isn’t going to come after me with his gun- and baseball bat-wielding friends.
Herd: If I haven’t spent a lot of time cultivating my own network of gun- and baseball bat-wielding friends, or living a lifestyle that made it easy for me to evade such groups (i.e. no wife and kids, for starters), it would be pretty stupid of me to go around doing things that might rouse violent action against me. Lots of other people are in my same position (not having close ties to any violent gang), and we kind of know it. We can sense it. And that accumulates into a sense of civilizedness that we all like and continue to want to take part in, for example by generally following rules and not committing acts of violence.
I think yes to 1, at least in the part of the US where I live. I don’t think it’s directly due to police consequences, but I think the threat of police consequences contributes to creating a culture where violent actions aren’t something that most people seriously consider as an option. Once you have established a peaceful norm, it can be self-reinforcing, without most people needing to be actively afraid of police consequences. If violence is the norm, even people who are not predisposed to violence might consider preemptive attacks to protect themselves. If peace is the norm, people aren’t generally worried about being the victim of someone else’s preemptive strike, and you can default to mutually beneficial cooperation.
It’s not a proper conspiracy theory until the Vatican is mentioned, and here at long last it is!
Okay, before I start, does the New York Times retain any credibility as a newspaper, much less ‘the paper of record’, when it comes to He Who Must Not Be Named and his administration? This is the kind of tinfoil hat coverage I expect to see on websites that start off in red capital letters about how THE ANTI-CHRIST REVEALED: THE ROMAN CHURCH IS THE WHORE OF BABYLON AND THE POPE IS THE MAN OF BLOOD and then goes on to spill the beans about the New World Order, how the Jesuits founded both the Communist Party and the Nazis, and the Jews only think they’re pulling the strings because the Vatican is pulling their strings.
Now, as a Catholic, this is the kind of story you read where a stringer in Rome has had an agreeable luncheon with one of the many clergy in the Vatican bureaucracy who, as long as your paper is paying the expenses, will be quite happy to give you a story about the real inside scoop. Some of it may even be accurate. Generally, though, the paper doesn’t name names of sources and isn’t as upfront about the menu for the pleasant tête-à-tête as the Times’ story here –
Reading through the story (I’ve waded through it so you don’t have to unless you’re feeling in need of some suffering), we get a lot about Mr Harnwell. A lot. He certainly doesn’t seem to be encumbered by hiding his light under a bushel, nor shy about bigging himself up on his own website via approving quotes (allegedly) by Steve Bannon.
That the guy is a huge Bannon fan? Very likely. That Steve Bannon knows him from a hole in the ground? No idea, or at least not in other than the most cursory “I want to get a Breitbart reporter covering the Vatican beat, who can help me do that?” fashion.
Anyway, to get to the meat of the story (and very lean it is too), the tie-up between Harnwell, Bannon and the Vatican is that Bannon is (allegedly, we only have Harnwell’s word for all of this) linking up with Cardinal Raymond Burke, and Harnwell is the guy who introduced them.
Now, I’m fairly sure this name means nothing to most of you. But if you’ve been following the fluttering in the dovecotes during Francis’ reign, Cardinal Burke is an American cardinal, formerly Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura (basically the judiciary of the Catholic Church) and on the conservative wing. He’s “clashed” with Francis most notably over Amoris Laetitia – anyway, let’s just skip the inside baseball and say that if Francis is perceived by the media as a cuddly liberal who is going to drag the Church into line with the present-day Zeitgeist, Burke is the opposite of that.
Okay, so if you want to talk up a conservative conspiracy where Trump (or rather Bannon) is plotting with Elements Within The Vatican to overthrow or undercut the Reforming Pope, then sure, Burke is the guy you’ll pick.
On the other hand – Burke is a traditionalist. Bannon is a three-times divorcé who probably hasn’t darkened the door of a church since his kids were christened. This is not the kind of ally someone who is seriously dubious about Amoris Laetitia is going to cultivate, in other words. All we are going on here is Harnwell’s word and I think you should take it as seriously as any other “an inside source at the Vatican told our reporter” story, which is that both parties had a nice meal and a chat in pleasant surroundings and this is what was produced to justify the expenses claim.
Anyway, for a conspiracy theory, they missed the perfect ingredient! Cardinal Burke is Patron (he’s been demoted, or it’s being presented as a demotion, by moving him from the Signatura to this) of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (this video gets it hilariously wrong in every detail but it’s the kind of thing I mean about juicy conspiracy theorising).
The Order of Malta. The successors (well – it’s tangled, various organisations are going around claiming to be the real or the only true successors) of the Knights Hospitaller. Sure, it’s not the Templars, but it’s nearly as good!
Cardinal Burke who is head (okay, no he’s not the head but come on, petty details) of his own private army within the Church allying with Bannon and Trump in a pro-anti-Muslim, anti-Pope Francis internal coup – how could they have missed that angle?
Swiss Guard versus the Order of Malta – place your bets now! 🙂
Combining this with some of the paranoia above, I am forced to conclude that Burke is going to use Order of Malta commandos to carry out a coup in the US and turn us into the revived Holy Roman Empire with Trump as Emperor, to forestall the otherwise-inevitable coup by leftists that would result in the mass execution of every political figure to the right of Hillary Clinton. It’s the only thing that makes sense!
My only regret is that we couldn’t have done this in 1950 or thereabouts, when the Order of Malta aka Knights Hospitaller had an actual strategic bomber force. This was the same era that the International Red Cross operated a munitions factory, so the leftists won’t be left totally outgunned in the War of the Militant Pacifists.
(The boring version: Things that might be interpreted as ex-Axis military assets but with utility to the civilian postwar economy get parked with custodians of unimpeachably peaceful intentions to reassure everyone that they aren’t secretly gearing up for WW2.1)
What do you mean “nearly”? The Knights of Malta, aka the Knights of St. John, were the Christian equivalent of the Barbary Corsairs, organized piracy on a large scale. To minimize competition, the two firms had a simple rule for market division. The Corsairs only targeted Christian ships, the Knights only Muslim ships. That aside, their systems were pretty similar.
THE KNIGHTS OF SAINT JOHN!?!
(the knights of saint john!)
I meant “nearly as good for conspiracy theory purposes”. Everyone and their dog drags the Templars into their conspiracy (Dan Brown, Assassins’ Creed, you name it) but the only pop culture reference to the Order of Malta I can think of off-hand is “The Maltese Falcon”.
Clearly they are an untapped source for future conspiring 🙂
Did the Knights of Malta also raid Muslim coasts for slaves and loot?
I don’t know. My source is a student paper some years back in my legal systems very different from ours class.
But the Knights did operate a big slave market.
I just read something else about the Knights, and at the point they were operating out of Rhodes, at least, they did raid the coasts for slaves.
Yeah, I mean, it’s not like a crusading order and members of a religion whose leader commanded them to wage war against infidels could have had any other reason to target the other religion’s people.
Was there a command from the Pope to generally wage war against Muslims after the last of the Crusader States fell in 1291? The Crusades themselves were IIRC fairly specific in their targeting.
I think he’s talking about jihad there. As in “one party is Crusaders, the other party is Jihadis targeting everyone else”.
What Anonymous said. My point was that using ideas like “market division” and “avoiding competition”, as if the Hospitallers and Corsairs were modern firms competing for market share, just seems like a weird and anachronistic way of explaining why the Knights enslaved Muslims and the Corsairs enslaved Christians. The fact that enslaving enemies was a common part of warfare in this period, and that both sides were at war against the other, seems a much more adequate explanation.
You don’t gotta give somebody communion to conspire with them. Catholics don’t really go in for the “oh, impure sinner, must never interact with them in any way” deal as much as some religions do.
If I, a cardinal, have come to hair-pulling with the pope over his Exhortation on marriage and the family in regard to re-admitting the divorced to Communion, I’m going to have to do some very fast talking to explain how I’m cosying up to a guy who is on Divorce Number Three currently 🙂
I’m giving Cardinal Burke the credit that he does believe what he claims to believe and is not just cynically peddling a line for the rubes that he doesn’t care about when it comes to getting power for himself (e.g. the way Republican candidates have used the pro-life vote and then done little to nothing when they get into office because pragmatically it’s more trouble than they’re willing to take on for the level of reward they’d get). There’s a lot of politics in religion, sure, but not all religion is politics plain and simple.
Jesus broke bread with prostitutes, I don’t see why you can’t conspire against the Pope with a divorcé. We’re not called upon to totally shun the divorced or anything.
If your point of departure with the pope is that he is too liberal about relaxing the restrictions around marriage and that letting people divorce, re-marry and be re-admitted to the sacraments without the necessity of (a) annulment (b) penance and change of life, then it’s hypocrisy at best to link up with someone who’s a lapsed Catholic who divorced, remarried, divorced again, remarried again, and divorced once more. It sounds as if you don’t care for the principle, you’re only interesting in enforcing rules for no reason other than they give you power.
You know, all the old Protestant canards about priestcraft.
What, in this putative union of Trump and/or Bannon with Burke, is the end that they wish to achieve? The story in the NYT seems to boil down to: they’re both anti-Muslim bigots who want to work together to ensure Muslim immigration is halted and reversed. So as far as the reporter is concerned, Burke’s fight with Francis has nothing to do with anything like “he really does believe the doctrines on sacramental marriage”, it’s down to anti-Muslim sentiment, which is why he can link up with Bannon, who also
is a white supremacistshares anti-Muslim sentiment.If (for the sake of exaggeration) we take it that Burke wants a theocratic America where the Catholic Church rules, he’s not going to get it via Bannon, who quite plainly isn’t bothered about keeping Church laws. For that reason alone, making an ally and making agreements with Bannon is foolish. Unless we take the view of the paper, which is more or less “yeah yeah, we know the religious guff is only a cover story, the real thing both these guys have in common is right-wing politics and anti-Muslim bigotry”.
I’m saying I don’t believe the story because (a) there is only one source quoted who seems to be more interested in making himself out to be this influential mover and shaker with contacts on both the Vatican and the White House side (b) I think Burke genuinely is concerned about the sacrament of matrimony which is why he wanted the dubia on Amoris Laetitia (c) I don’t think Burke is motivated by white supremacist anti-Muslim right-wing politics but most importantly
(d) mostly because it reads like a conspiracy out of a Dan Brown novel, not real journalism. It’s lazy work.
I agree that Burke would be a hypocrite if, after fighting with the Pope about letting divorcees remarry, he then married Bannon. Somehow I don’t think that’s on the table, so I don’t see a more platonic form of “linking up” with him as any sort of violation of his principles.
The story seems unbelievable for other reasons, but it’s not implausible that a priest would work with a sinner. That’s sort of their job description.
Is Priestcraft more like Minecraft, or World of Warcraft? Either way, I think we’ve solved the vocations crisis.
And is Protestant a class and canard a race, or the other way around? What special abilities does a canard have?
A question for my fellow Red Tribe-ish, Trump supporter-ish types here on SSC.
Out in one of the more Alt-Right areas I frequent, they’re claiming that the more “establishment” republicans are going to have to join the “Royalists” (as they call the Congresspeople supporting “God-Emperor Trump”, a title they’re increasingly taking seriously) as a matter of survival, and that none of the “#NeverTrumpers” are going to cross the aisle on impeaching Trump because then they’d be literally “signing their own death warrants”. Meaning, not that they’ll be under threat from Trump supporters, but that if the Democrats ever retake the White House they will literally execute every single last Republican in Congress, even those who sided with them, and “Romanov” the entire Trump family. The question: I’m not a Leftist plant for thinking this is crazy, right? Because I’ve been called “Grima Wormtongue” and given “echo brackets” for saying that’s nuts. Or am I wrong, and we’re now really at the “you win the Game of Thrones or you die” stage of politics?
This strikes me as even more paranoid and insane than the left-wing theories that Trump is going to seize power and run a military dictatorship. At least there’s some vaguely rational-ish correlation that the military and police overwhelmingly supported Trump and so they might follow his orders.
To believe that Elizabeth Warren is going to ascend the throne and start rounding up Republicans for the gas chambers is to believe that there’s a hidden Progressive Army somewhere. (Okay, yes, I realize this was the plot of an Orson Scott Card novel. It was just as silly then.) It would have to be one with advanced alien technology preparing to emerge with their mind control rays to co-opt all of our existing armed forces when Her Most Exalted Diverseness gives the secret code word.
ARE YOU AIMING YOUR MIND CONTROL RAYS AT ME? ARE YOU?
…and of course, I post this snark and then click a link to a Power Line blog post (I know, I know, I’m a glutton for punishment) which ends (emphasis mine):
So apparently the tribal hysteria is not entirely confined to just crazy 4chan type posters and has infected the (somewhat) more mainstream right-o-sphere as well.
There have certainly been plenty of Democrats (voters and pundits, not so much politicians) advocating jailing e.g. “climate denialists”, “hate speakers” (for a broad definition of hate speech), and the entire Dubya administration.
I generally consider these calls about as serious and likely as calls to literally “lock Hillary up” which is to say, semi-serious but highly unlikely to actually happen.
“If they had the opportunity” covers a multitude of sins. The idea of Democrats passing a Canada or UK style hate-speech law if they could get it past the first amendment isn’t that outlandish, and based on the rhetoric applied to Sen. Sessions, they think that would apply to mainstream Republicans.
Some of them absolutely would throw conservatives (and libertarians and liberals who weren’t with the program) in jail if they had the opportunity. Expansion of the criteria for “harassment” and support for “hate speech” (in practice meaning “speech which opposes us”) laws demonstrates this. Very few of them yet have the taste for killing (the antifa probably do, but I kind of suspect it’s the other way around for them; they are thugs who have found a political excuse, not political radicals who have turned thuggish).
Believing they’d carry out mass execution of Senators is another level of crazy.
That is certainly true of some of them, and may be true of most of them. Fortunately, they don’t have the opportunity and even giving them the White House, 60% majorities in both houses of Congress, and six Supreme Court justices would not give them that opportunity in the short term.
As Civilis notes, they could do things like expanding hate-crimes laws to the point where what is today common speech among Republicans would be legally actionable. Republicans not being complete morons, this results in Republicans being more circumspect but not in Republicans being locked up en masse (though a few might chose figurative martyrdom)
A policy of locking up, or per Kevin C actually executing, Republicans merely for being Republicans, would be so obviously illegitimate that the civil service, the military, the police, would stall indefinitely when it came to carrying it out – even the ones who might privately want to, would (rightly) fear being stuck as the fall guys when the political tide turns and the top brass hide behind plausible deniability. It would take a generation of consistent Democratic rule to make that sort of thing a realistic possibility, and a generation of consistent Democratic rule would make that sort of thing unnecessary.
Strongly disagree; we’d see a repeat of the events following passage of the Federalist Sedition Act. Sure, most of you could stay silent; I personally am temperamentally unsuited to doing so even when it is in my best interests. But there’s also the actual conservative media. We’d see the editors of Breitbart, the Washington Times, and other conservative newspapers jailed. Right-wing bloggers would also be jailed, and some Fox News commentators. All in the name of “stopping hate”.
All it would take to silence the right would be for the government to not enforce the law when the left engages in violence against the right, as happened with the anti-Milo protesters in Berkeley.
If it is dumb when the left panics about Trump jailing his political opponents, why are we suddenly giving credence to wild speculation about what Elizabeth Warren would do, given sufficient power?
At least the people hyper-ventilating about Trump can point to the “lock her up” chants at his rallies.
@Iain
Who is “we”? No one here (including Kevin C.) is claiming Warren will be executing Senators; it appears “we” are unanimous in _not_ giving credence to those claims.
@James Miller
Selective enforcement and lack of enforcement of the laws against rioting could prevent public speaking by conservatives. It can’t really stop the right-wing media nor the internet. If it gets to the point where the government is allowing left-wing militias to burn down Fox News headquarters and murder Breitbart reporters in broad daylight, that’s another matter, but I think we’d reach the point of actually jailing them before that happened nationwide.
@Iain: Read what I wrote. The Elizabeth Warren story was deliberately sarcastic and absurd. Unless you believe in alien mind control rays.
[looks at you suspiciously] You don’t have alien mind control rays, do you?
The history of the Israel/Palestine conflict is very instructive on this point, with both sides forming citizen militias and active terrorist groups as the British government stood by and allowed violence to happen. I would expect a theoretical future Red/Blue Civil War 2.0 to proceed along the same lines, especially because of how dispersed power is in the US.
Sorry, I was using “Elizabeth Warren” as a metonym for “the Democrats” as a whole, which I guess is confusing given the context.
I’m talking about stuff like this:
If somebody on Tumblr reversed the sides and said this about Trump, people here would be making fun of it, and using it as evidence that the left is disconnected from reality. What, precisely, is the difference here? Is it the plausibility of the two sides? Because I’m having a hard time thinking of anything from the left to compare with “Lock her up! Lock her up!” from the president.
Or, to phrase it in a less confrontational way: if people are prepared to grant The Nybbler the interpretive charity to treat the remarks I quoted as a discussion of a hypothetical but deeply implausible situation — which I think is totally fair! — then perhaps they should also consider granting similar interpretive charity when reading comments from their outgroups. (As one example, consider the repeated discussions about people on the left who purportedly believe Trump is Literal Fascist Hitler.) Interpretive charity isn’t only good when applied to your own side.
Iain, I personally don’t think it’s crazy to suggest that people who say they want to have criminal penalties for speech they don’t like would in fact impose them if they got the chance. On the other side, this would be the equivalent of suggesting (on November 9, 2016) that Trump would start mass deportation of illegal immigrants or overzealously prosecute the media for defamation or even to prosecute Hillary Clinton. It is not the equivalent of saying Trump is literally Hitler — the equivalent of that is the Elizabeth Warren death squads.
@Cypren
Or N-Ireland. This fiction that only one side gets to use violence until the other side behaves (= accepts oppression) is rather silly. When violence becomes a viable way to achieve results and non-violent methods become less viable, those who want results will resort to violence, on both sides.
It’s a death spiral.
@The Nybbler:
Okay, sure, those are reasonable comparisons. But those sorts of claims are generally seen on SSC as strident and unserious. You can’t have it both ways: either your discussion about leftists jailing the editors of the Washington Times is a stain on your credibility, or we should go easier on people who express the same sorts of concerns on the other side.
Not red tribe, but Trump supporter. Do they mean metaphorically literally execute or literally literally execute? I can see a sense in which that might be colorful metaphor for something that wasn’t completely insane, but no, we’re not at the point of mass purges of political parties yet. Heck, Trump hasn’t even had Clinton arrested.
“Do they mean metaphorically literally execute or literally literally execute?”
The latter. Actual bullets into actual Republican brains.
“Target the enemy at every opportunity. Hit them wherever they show themselves vulnerable. Play as dirty as your conscience will permit. Undermine them, sabotage them, and discredit them. Be ruthless and show them absolutely no mercy. This is not the time for Christian forgiveness because these are people who have not repented, these are people who are trying to destroy you and are quite willing to harm your family and your children in the process. Take them down and take them out without hesitation.”
SJW Attack Survival Guide
That is extremely retarded. Good on you for trying to inject some sanity, but I would recommend not frequenting a place that fucked up.
Don’t use “retarded” as an insult.
I am not sure how to reply to this. Where are we on the euphemism treadmill now?
“Developmentally challenged” was the last answer I got. But that was a couple of years ago, so it’s probably considered archaic by now.
It’s illustrated well in an NAACP-like example: the advocacy group for such people in my county is “The ARC”, where ARC once stood for “Association of Retarded Citizens”.
I refer to my daughter as “special in the Olympics sense” and nobody seems to mind.
“Retarded” classically refers to a person, not an argument or assertion. Whether or not it is inherently more offensive than e.g. “stupid”, saying “that’s stupid” merely indicates that a person has made one stupid argument whereas “that’s retarded” strongly implies “you’re retarded”, generally incapable of making not-stupid arguments.
You probably ought not be doing that on the basis of one stupid argument.
Well, you could reply to it by never using “retarded” as an insult again. You’re not the only one in this comments section to do it; you’re just the first one after I got fed up.
This isn’t the euphemism treadmill: that would be if someone objected to describing a person as “retarded”.
But since it still has the meaning of “person with something wrong with their cognitive ability”, using it as an insult expresses some contempt or dislike or devaluation of people with below-average cognitive ability.
Since one of my daughters is one of those people with below-average cognitive ability, you using “retarded” as an insult or negative description of a thing makes me want to punch you in the face. Then the left would say, “Look, those Right-Wing SSC Commenters really are violent! We told you so!”—and neither of us wants that.
“Retarded” classically refers to an engine timing, not a person, argument, or assertion. You probably not ought assess whether a motor is knocking or in danger of detonation over the internet.
I try to live in the good old days, when it just meant delayed or hindered. I try to reclaim this slur whenever I can. If we’re waiting for Person X to show up to an event, and someone says, “Where is Person X?” I respond, “Oh, they’re just retarded. They’ll be here soon.”
As long as we’re PC-ing up the comments here, do you think we could get people to stop making racist jokes about the Irish?
That’s a problem mainly with you, not anyone else. Using insults is not nice in general – but apparently, according to you, this insult is off-limits, because you have a personal relation to it?
Here in the UK we had the National Spastics’ Society, which changed its name to Scope back in 1994. And now, low and behold: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=scopey
@Machina ex Deus – I had been under the impression that the movement to taboo the word in question had largely failed, you’re the first person I’ve run into to actually take offense to it, after years of hearing jokes where its supposed offensiveness was the punchline. It also galls me to lose a pejorative of long and honorable service.
On the other hand, while I am generally in favor of offending people these days, I find I have little stomach for actually inflicting offense directly. Consider me properly chastised.
@FacelessCraven:
Thanks. I appreciate it.
Terms for undesirable traits will get used as insults. It’s just how the world works. Every time we move on to another term, it simply comes to describe the same undesirable trait, and people start using it as an insult, because what it is describing is undesirable.
I have never heard a good explanation for this.
For what? Why people use “retarded” as an insult? Or why other people object against using it as an insult?
My belief is that people who chide others for using politically-incorrect insults are mostly just engaged in conspicuous virtue signaling. It explains quite nicely why there needs to be a never-ending race to create new euphemisms; it’s like the fashion industry for status-signaling. You don’t want to be caught dead using last year’s terminology, do you? So uncouth.
The rule probably ought to be “don’t harass people, especially the disadvantaged.”
I think this is an instance of “building a wall around the Torah.” But as someone upthread mentioned, this absolutely just leads us to the euphemism treadmill.
For an interesting counter example, I think it’s completely reasonable to require that people not use “gay” (and other related words) as negative terms, because it’s implying that gay is negative. Even though most people didn’t mean it that way, I understand why it is inherently offensive.
I don’t think this applies to things like “retarded”, “blind”, etc., because they’re merely hyperbolic description, which is appropriate for an insult (whether or not it’s appropriate to insult at all is another matter).
For a counter-counter example, the N-word is on it’s face just a reference to skin color, but it’s loaded with a bunch of very negative connotations, and you won’t catch me arguing that it’s ok to say just because it’s merely descriptive.
So why not the same protection for “retarded?” Because the euphemism treadmill is… bad, and it should be nipped in the bud.
All that being said, I personally don’t say it because my wife unfairly harasses me when I do.
It’s too late, “MR” (for Mental R-) has been replaced by “ID” for Intellectual Disability. The treadmill grinds on. Though Control Freak’s engine timing reference elsethread suggests a (very insulting, close your eyes now) Foghorn Leghornism: “That boy’s so slow, he’s firing 5 degrees after, I say after, top dead center.”
Why is it assumed that trying to stop people from using “retard” as an insult is what leads to a euphemism treadmill?
I would have thought it was the other way around. Like, people with intellectual disabilities exist, and people are not going to want to refer to these people by words with strongly pejorative force such as “stupid”, etc. So they’re going to look for words that don’t have that pejorative connotation attached for them, and if there aren’t any left in the language they’re going to have to invent new ones.
Meanwhile, somebody who wants to insult somebody for their lack of intelligence can use any of the many terms that have already been fixed at 100% pejorative, such as “stupid”, “idiot”, “imbecile”. Why, then, do people use the more euphemistic terms? I could be wrong, but I suspect the ultimate reason is that some people are contemptuous of the intellectually disabled and want to explicitly express that contempt. (To be clear, I’m not saying that every person who uses such terms does it for this reason—in fact I think most of them just use it in the normal memetic way, because it’s an insult they know other people mind and it’s the first one that came to mind—I’m talking about the motivations of the first adopters.) If that’s the case then it comes down to what you think is more feasibly eliminable, human kind-heartedness or human cruelty.
Personally, I don’t think *either* of these things are eliminable, and therefore I have to just accept the euphemism treadmill as something that will inevitably happen. But I’m not actually that fussed about it. Language changes. If in the future I have to stop using “intellectually disabled” to refer to intellectually disabled people because it’s now considered offensive, and adopt some new more PC euphemism instead, I’m entirely cool with that.
@thehousecarpenter – “I could be wrong, but I suspect the ultimate reason is that some people are contemptuous of the intellectually disabled and want to explicitly express that contempt.”
I disagree. Actions that arouse pity from the disabled bring scorn toward those who are able yet still wallow in folly. The base claim is that they are acting contrary to their nature, which brings their nature into question. The same idea can be seen in the now-taboo “you hit like a girl”.
Can I ask what the end-game in this scenario is, after the execution of one of two parties? Are they thinking communism? SJW enforcement militias?
My understanding of the argument is not that Trump and the Republicans are going to be murdered by the Left, but that it is clear the Left intends to do so. And that Trump and Congressional Republicans, if they don’t already realize this, will soon. Thus the more moderate Repubs in Congress will, in the spirit of Franklin’s “We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately”, join with the pro-Trump faction in backing Trump 100% as a matter of literal survival. Similarly, the argument is that Trump, to avoid having “his son getting eaten by crocodiles”; i.e. the whole family getting “Romanoved” by Black Block types or any of the other “Nazi-punchers” on the Left just slavering to do violence against those who disagree with them, will have to call upon the above support in Congress, his “100% support” amongst the rank-and-file military and police, Eric Prince (via his sister Betsy DeVos), et cetera, and openly defy the courts, the bureaucracy, and so on, carrying out the autocoup, giving Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the other “liberal” justices “free helicopter rides to the Atlantic”, and pretty much become right-wing dictator for life because he’ll have to as the only way to avoid having himself and his children murdered by increasingly unhinged, increasingly violent leftists; and, eventually, pass the job onto a son or grandson, so that, many generations from now, much like with Caesar Augustus, the historians will retroactively recognize The Donald as the first Emperor of the Trump Dynasty.
That’s pretty silly. No doubt there are some characters out there who could talk themselves into building a mountain of Trumpist skulls; the antifa we’ve recently seen in action, for example, might not be far from that point. But there really aren’t very many antifa in total, nor are those that do exist well positioned ideologically or physically to carry out civilian massacres, let alone pose a serious threat to the President of the United States. And if… wherever you’re hearing this… thinks the likes of Elizabeth Warren are anywhere close to resorting to organized political violence in the near future, I don’t know what to tell them. Tolerating the black bloc, sure; even tacitly admiring them. But that’s a far cry from overt support, or even the more obvious forms of covert support.
Don’t get me wrong, a number of Bad Ends in our future are a lot more credible now than I’d like them to be. But this particular scenario isn’t one of them.
“That’s pretty silly.”
I agree. But saying that is what got me echo brackets and replies of “Grima Wormtongue has now revealed himself…” As far as they’re concerned, anyone who disagrees with the argument is probably a Jewish Leftist infiltrator.
@Kevin C: Sounds like you need to find a higher class of place to hang out. Like, say, the nearest crack house.
@Kevin C, – What you are describing is full epistemic closure. I used to get most of my media intake from places with a similar degree of closure, though they mostly came at things from a populist left-wing stance. I eventually left when I realized that I was receiving no useful information; I already knew what the headlines and the commentary was going to be before the page even booted up: the government is doing awful things because it is evil, corps are doing awful things because they are evil, bad people are doing awful things because they are evil. It wasn’t even a matter of concluding that they were wrong in these accusations, just a realization that I understood their perceptual filter well enough that I didn’t need them to apply it for me any more.
Speaking more generally, what value do you derive from being in such a forum?
In the highly unlikely event that this happens I suspect I will welcome the inevitable death of the world in nuclear fire. It will be more sane than the alternative.
Ok, to be more specific then, what is the intended endgame? I mean, unless the hope is to convince moderate Republicans of this when it isn’t true, so that Trump can be God Emperor, they would presumably have a subsequent plan, right? Things don’t just stay the same after one of the two major parties is collectively executed. Even mustache-twirling villains usually have some sort of plan.
As a conspiracy theory this sounds kind of slip-shod.
I second the sentiment that this sounds about as delusional as the left wing people I know on the internet who panic on Trump sending death patrols to murder muslims “any time now” and brag how they would hide Anne Franks in their cellar.
Look at a place where there is real authoritarian government or other similar extreme political situation going on. For example, Turkey, or Rurssia, or Ukraine, or the infamous cases from the US South from the civil rights era (and before) everybody on the Left likes to iterate. The usual sign is that there are arrests and political violence and such in the real, physical world. And I don’t mean random violent protesters hitting random people and burning things (which while bad, happens semi-regularly almost everywhere — and the Berkeley protest was still far, far away from a real riots the police couldn’t control even if they tried), I mean targeted beatings and killings. The kind of where there’s knock on your door, next you know you have a hood over your head and being savagely beaten (if you’re lucky) or someone finds you dead in the nearby river next week (if you are not) or maybe you just disappear (if you are, for example, in al-Assad’s Syria prior to the actual fighting breaking out).
And even then, in Russia the couple of people who have infamously died have been very unlucky to anger some corrupted oligarch. Usually they just end up in a Russian prison.
The places you hang around sound like echochambers where the echo effect has reached insane levels. I’d suggest re-evaluating their epistemic value. Only a couple of months ago Obama was still the president, and the only black helicopters that landed in anyone‘s backyard to commit an execution did so in Middle-East, to kill Osama frickkin’-bin-Laden.
edit. Thinking about it, the more people propagate this kind of insane theories will make it more likely that enough people start to believe them and thus make them into a reality. (“If they are going to kill us / there’s going to be a revolution, might as well as be the one who strikes first and is doing the killing.”) Also, recall the Days of Rage blog post that was posted some time ago: the political violence in the US has still not yet even reached the 1970s level of insanity.
To be fair, Obama was more a fan of drone strikes than black helicopters and did kill 4 US citizens (though only one was explicitly targeted) and may have possibly signed a death warrant for a fifth, though that is unproven. So the precedent has been set, though I don’t think this is really a good argument that we’re about to see any critic of the president die in a fiery explosion.
But it should still make anyone who believes in due process and rule of law very uncomfortable.
You are correct, and I thought about mentioning the drone strikes, but it would sidetrack from my main point, that is, the previous democratic party government of US did not have indications of starting a reign of terror and killing republican senators.
As Moldbug recently pointed out – since the consensus is that only direct government action counts as oppressive government we’ve ended up with a government that outsources its political violence and applies it through disintermediated agents in a semi-random manner. Ferguson, MO was recently ethnically cleansed in a very violent process – but not a direct government one.
If I may ask, what American cities do you consider to have been ethnically cleansed? And when did this supposed cleansing happen?
Chicago. Detroit. Washington, D.C. New York City. Newark, NJ. Camden, NJ. Baltimore, MD.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Detroit
http://www.gif-explode.com/?explode=http://i.imgur.com/xZoKnTa.gif
http://www.nbcchicago.com/blogs/ward-room/White-Flight-By-The-Numbers-206302551.html
@ The Nybbler
It is apparently a well known “fact” among white nationalists that Baltimore is a lawless hellhole where no white person would dare venture for fear of being slaughtered by rabid packs of feral Negroes.
I find this amusing as I am a white man and have lived in mixed race neighborhoods in Baltimore for most of my life; and yet I have been repeatedly assured by various alt right types that I must have been ethnically cleansed.
Despite our city’s remarkably high murder rate, the odds of a law abiding, middle class, white man in Baltimore being the victim of violent crime are pretty slim. The overwhelming majority of both the perpetrators and victims of violent crime are people who earn their living breaking the law, mostly by dealing drugs.
White flight was not ethnic cleansing, as people left mostly for economic reasons, in particular falling property values. When the traditional industries that supported the city collapsed in the nineteen seventies, property values plummeted, crime rose as many of our poorer citizens turned to the drug trade as a means of support, and people pulled up stakes for greener pastures.
At no point was this migration principally driven by racial tensions, or fear of racially motivated violence. White flight is in many ways missed named, as was the dived between those who stayed, and those who left was not really a racial one. Plenty of poor whites stayed, and Baltimore experienced massive “black flight”, mostly to Prince George’s county.
In fact I think this phenomena did more damage the then any change in racial demographics, as it left behind concentrations of where successful communities had once been.
@suntzuanime
That is straightforwardly falsified by the fact that plenty of whites do live in these cities, and are at remarkably little risk of being shot.
@John Schilling
That is likely to be a very misleading statistic, as the risk of being a victim of violent crime is non randomly distributed in the population. It’s almost certainly
the case that young white men in Detroit who work in the drug trade (yes they exist), or habitually steal to support a habit, or are otherwise involved in a criminal lifestyle, are much more likely to be shot then a middle aged manager at GM.
No doubt this is true, but you’d need some implausibly high rates for it to be driving shootings/murders at 18%/5%. I don’t think 1 in 5 people in Detroit are or were e.g. actively involved in the drug trade, and that would be a minimum for this theory to work out — it assumes that ~100% of people in drug-related occupations or similar get shot at some point.
@Nornagest
Those are lifetime prevalence numbers. There are certainly communities where ten or twenty percent of men are involved in habitual criminal behavior for some portion of their lives, usually the mid teens to mid twenties.
But I would be surprised if white Detroit as a whole qualified. There may be something wrong with John schilling’s numbers, and It would be helpful if he could site a source.
Between 1950 (the peak of white population in Baltimore) and 1990, the white population of Baltimore went from 720,000 to 290,000, while the non-white population went from 226,000 to 450,000. In 1960, white population was 610,000 while nonwhite population was 330,000. By 1970 it was 480,000 to 430,000. Certainly whites were leaving already, but it seems hard to believe the race riots of 1968 did not accelerate this trend.
So, when affluent white people like me move back into the neighborhoods that our grandparents moved out of, displacing the people of color who had lived there in between, is that also ethnic cleansing?
@BBA
Depends. Some claim that “gentrification” is being accomplished through official (police) and unofficial harassment of, threats towards, and violence against the people in the neighborhoods to be gentrified. If they are correct, “ethnic cleansing” seems like a fair description.
Hm. I figured it was mostly simple economic pressure, but maybe economics is war by other means. And one wouldn’t expect the original “cleansing” to be so easily reversible just two generations later.
As long as nobody’s being ordered at gunpoint to leave the Bronx I have trouble calling it ethnic cleansing, but that’s just me.
They’re lifetime prevalence numbers for white people in Detroit, not white men. Given that a large majority of habitual criminals are men, to get a lifetime prevalence of ~18% in a mixed-gender community (again, assuming every habitual criminal gets shot at some point) you’d need about 35% of men. And since they’re usually young men, we’d either need about that percentage of young men to have been involved in criminal cultures over several decades, or even higher numbers for a shorter period of time.
That seems implausible to me.
I’m on a different computer and couldn’t find all of the exact sources I used last time, so this reconstruction is a bit patchy.
49 white people killed in Detroit in 2012.
701,475 people lived in Detroit in 2012, and 7.79% of Detroit’s people were non-Hispanic whites in 2010.
So, 49 / (0.0779 * 701475) = 0.0897% probability of a generic white person being killed in Detroit in an average year.
Life expectancy of a white person born in Michigan in 2012, 78.7 years.
Which gives a 7.1% lifetime probability of murder, but that’s for 2012 because 2012 was the last year for which I could easily find a racial breakdown of homicides. Detroit’s homicide rate has fallen by 22% in the past four years, so assuming no further changes that gives a bit over 5% lifetime homicide risk for white people in Detroit. And the ratio of shootings to homicides comes in at 4.25:1 in this source, which would be a 23% lifetime shooting risk.
Digging into the details, same sources, the lifetime homicide rate for white vs black people in Detroit comes to 5.6% vs 5.3%. Anyone claiming ethnic cleansing on the basis of that 0.3%, deserves to be laughed at.
Is the white homicide rate being driven by young white male drug dealers and their enforcers? If we assume that 52% of the white males in Detroit enter the drug trade at 15 and that 100% of those are shot by the time they are 24, that would about work. I’m skeptical.
John Schilling: my immediate observation is that the pool of potential victims isn’t just residents. E.g., as of 2013, about 72% of the people who worked in Detroit (and are so available to be crime victims there) didn’t live there. Just based on the demographics of the region, a larger proportion of that 72% are likely to be white than residents. http://michiganeconomy.chicagofedblogs.org/?p=462
I don’t know what the pattern of illegal activity is, but I at least wouldn’t be surprised if a fair fraction of people buying or selling drugs in Detroit, or engaging in other sorts of criminal enterprises that involve a heightened risk of murder, also don’t live there.
Good guess, but from my first cited source, 88% of Detroit’s homicides took place in a residential setting. That’s hard to square with white suburbanites being killed while they working in the city.
Honest question (because I don’t know much about it): where does the drug industry generally operate? I have an impression of crack houses and meth labs operating in what would ostensibly be residential, but that’s more pop culture osmosis than anything.
Imagine getting a citation because your neighborhood wasn’t zoned for meth labs.
@suntzuanime you now have me picturing turning HOA “lawn police” types loose on the drug trade, and I think that needs to be made into a sitcom.
In my experience, pot dealers tend to do business in their mom’s basement. Crack dealers do business out of a normal-looking house up the street where cars with out-of-city plates keep coming and going. Fifteen years ago, they had an open-air crack market going on a large traffic island across from the liquor store, but gentrification.
Meth dealers do business nowhere near me, I assume in trailer homes or perhaps some sort of barn.
And one of the guys alleged to be a dealer in my neighborhood is in his 50s. Drug dealing doesn’t look like drug dealing.
Ferguson, MO was recently ethnically cleansed in a very violent process – but not a direct government one.
Ethnic cleansing and violence have distinct and very serious meanings. Perhaps different, less loaded terms would work better. I’m fed up enough with people that think speech can be ‘violence’. ‘White flight’ and ‘gentrification’ are not ethnic cleansing.
Yes, a number of American inner cities seem to be self-segregating along ethnic lines, and one of the reasons people are leaving some areas has to do with violent criminal behavior, but nobody is being forcibly relocated. This (the self-segregation, or perhaps balkanization, not the ‘not forcibly relocated’) is most definitely not a good thing. Detroit, Balitmore, and Newark are, by American standards, horrible places. (Washington D.C. has been, until recently, headed the other way, due to the increasing power of the bureaucracy and it’s hangers on). It’s also most definitely not ethnic cleansing, or genocide, or whatever.
Nobody is being forcibly relocated, they’ll just be shot if they stay.
I am pretty sure Baltimore, Newark and Detroit aren’t quite as bad as Zimbabwe.
They’re at increased risk of violent crime if they stay. Nobody’s going to target them if they don’t move. And they’re at basically the same risk as members of the dominant ethnic group if they stay. The rioters that burned sections of Baltimore and Ferguson didn’t care whose property they burned and looted.
Yes, violent crime is a bad thing. These aren’t safe places to live, and they should be. We should be worried that the balkanization of the city will further exacerbate ethnic tensions, making the problem even worse (and, eventually, maybe leading to real ethnic cleansing). But ‘people leaving because crime has gone up’ isn’t ethnic cleansing.
What if it turned out that the 1960s-70s race riots were a deliberate and successful attempt to drive white people out of the cities so black politicians could take them over? Would it be “ethnic cleansing” then?
Civilis has a point. I suggest we use a more nuanced term. How about hyper-extreme white “double Holocaust” genocide cleansing?
What if it turned out that the 1960s-70s race riots were a deliberate and successful attempt to drive white people out of the cities so black politicians could take them over? Would it be “ethnic cleansing” then?
Ok, dictionary definitions of ethnic cleansing:
“the mass expulsion or killing of members of an unwanted ethnic or religious group in a society.”
“the expulsion, imprisonment, or killing of an ethnic minority by a dominant majority in order to achieve ethnic homogeneity”
“the systematic forced removal of ethnic or religious groups from a given territory by a more powerful ethnic group, with the intent of making it ethnically homogeneous”
If it really was a deliberate plot by Democratic politicians (a la the 70s ‘we need to make things bad to trigger a revolution’) I could see it described as ethnic cleansing even if it’s not forced expulsion. I could see arguing that some of the 60s-70s radicals would have committed ethnic cleansing of their neighborhoods if they could have gotten away with it. I could even see arguing that Progressives on some college campuses have tried to ‘ethnically cleanse’ their colleges if you’re willing to allow me to define ‘the right’ as an ethnic group for this purpose, which I could even argue is probably the best way to look at it. Americans now divide more by political tribes than ethnic groups, from some of the studies I’ve read about.
Outside of the recent political protests at Berkeley, I don’t think any of the recent bouts of collective violence in the inner city have been targeted on any group. They may use politics as a cover, but the goal is to smash stuff and loot things. They’re not picking and choosing who they hit.
An average non-Hispanic white person living in Detroit for their entire life has an 18% chance of being shot and a 5% chance of being murdered. This is an unusual definition of “they will be…” that you are using. Insofar as the risk is largely independent of ethnicity, it is also an unusual definition of “ethnic cleansing”. One could argue that Detroit is being cleansed, full stop, but that process appears to be tapering off.
@Civils
About recent targeting of white people during mass violence:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iB5lirVJtwE
@The Nybbler says:
>What if it turned out that the 1960s-70s race riots were a deliberate and successful attempt to drive white people out of the cities so black politicians could take them over? Would it be “ethnic cleansing” then
You don’t need the hypothetical. Most big US cities saw deliberate attempts by various city governments to drive people out of their cities. Which ethnic groups did the driving and which groups got driven varied from city to city, but driving freeways through the neighborhoods of your rival ethnics was standard practice.
About recent targeting of white people during mass violence:
There’s a difference between some of the rioters choosing targets of opportunity based on ‘they’re not part of our group’ and deliberately making a specific group the target of the riot, as in Kristallnacht.
I worry about my overly precise definition, as I don’t know if Kristallnacht even qualifies as ethnic cleansing under a strict definition of the term (it was most definitely a harbinger of the ethnic cleansing to come later, but we’re looking at it as if it were an isolated event). It’s a good self-test for whether the definitions I’m using work, as it’s definitely ethnically targeted violence, the question is whether it counts as expulsion or forced removal. Certainly, I’m not pedantic enough to argue with someone that says Kristallnacht was ethnic cleansing.
However, Baltimore and Ferguson weren’t Kristallnacht or even “hyper-extreme white ‘double Holocaust’ genocide cleansing”. I don’t mean to say that what’s been happening in the inner cities is a good thing; it’s serious, and we need to work to stop it from happening.
I probably should apologize for being a bit over sensitive here. I just think a lot of serious words get overused in a dangerous fashion, even sometimes by people I otherwise agree with. Because of a tiny group of idiots throwing similar phrases around, we right now have a larger group of idiots that thinks it’s perfectly okay to assault just about anyone on the right side of the political spectrum, and so it’s made me a bit touchy.
You have to understand that the kind of political views that you subscribe to are held by a percentage of the American public that can be safely rounded down to zero. There simply are no royalists.
And disseminating paranoid fantasies that rabid hordes of social justice warriors are planning some kind of night of the long knives under president Elizabeth Warren is not going to change that.
Trump himself might be willing to accept the job of emperor, but that’s based on nothing other then greed and a pathological need for self glorification. If anybody else was offered the job he would be the first to speak out against it as abrogation of the American democratic tradition, as it is likely not in his commercial interest to conduct business under a dictatorship not run by him or his close allies.
You keep confusing what most Americans mean when they say “Conservative”, with the kind of politics you believe in. The truth is that the overwhelming majority of the American right believes in some form of the legacy of the American revolution. Even the most explicitly racist elements just want to narrow the circle of political participation to exclusively include “whites”, not burn down the entire system of American democracy.
Outside of a bizarre tiny Internet bubble, there is no possible base of political support for a movement to install anybody as a monarch, or dictator, of any kind. The people who hold the real power over violence in our country, that is to say the United States military, take their oaths to the constitution very seriously. There is no Ceaser, Sulla, Franco, or Pinochet waiting in the wings to cleanse society of the leftist scourge. And it is an infantile fantasy to believe otherwise.
Don’t read the comments.
Do not read the comments at alt-right sites.
The comments section is virtually guaranteed to be a dumpster fire in reactor four.
Even so, the couple of places I’m familiar with would have to have gone sharply downhill for this sort of thing to become something more than a signalling exercise/fantasy.
I think that’s a general problem with intellectually-monocultural places: yesterday’s signalling exercise is today’s group-consensus position, then it’s tomorrow’s minimum-required-for-membership position. Trolls make this effect worse.
Trolls make this effect worse
If I were to troll alt-right sites, I would absolutely do it by screaming about how The Left is trying to murder us all.
Before answering this question you have to answer why this kind of thing almost never happens in democracies and then try to figure out if next time will be different.
Don’t listen to everyone else, it sounds pretty plausible to me.
There are elements of the right that worry about left-wing death squads and elements of the left that worry about right-wing death squads. Both are convinced that their opponents want to do things that will destroy society; many seem convinced their opponents are omnipotent or close to it. They can’t both be right, and I suspect neither are. Me, I think that what ends up destroying society is gonna be something we don’t see coming.
I think the hardcore on either side would be willing to pull out the death squads under the right circumstances, I just don’t think we’re a single election away from it.
Why is it wrong to “out” illegal immigrants by reporting them to the appropriate government entities?
During the various discussions about the Berkeley protests, Zombielicious and others used Milo’s planned presentation on how to report illegal immigrants to the authorities as proof that he was a bad person who should be strongly opposed.
Pro-argument I can see: I’m under the impression that Milo was specifically reporting people he didn’t like for reasons other than their illegal immigrant status; SJ activists, for instance. This trips the “argument gets counter-argument, not bullet” alarm.
Anti-argument: they are illegal immigrants. They are breaking the law to be here. Exercise of free speech does not give you a right to break the law, or a pass on the consequences of breaking the law. Claiming that reporting illegal aliens is unethical is an attempt to make an end-run around laws that have considerable popular support. Nor does this seem to be a case of “lawfare” or harassment via the legal system; the illegals in question are not having their lives combed through for minor violations to be gouged with; they have broken the law, and in the few cases I’m familiar with are openly bragging about having done so.
Edited for cuntiness.
It would be cool if we could minimize right-wing-snark in this thread. I can generate an arbitrary amount of that myself, but am much more interested in principled arguments on the issue. At least a few people in the previous threads were willing to grudgingly tolerate violence over this sort of “outing”, and I’d like to hear why. I also disagree with the “counter-argument not bullet” argument, but am not supremely confident about my position.
The weird thing is that isn’t necessarily true. People do generally acknowledge that it’s acceptable to have borders. They just act like it’s wrong to enforce the rules once illegal immigrants are inside the country. It reminds of the Wet feet, dry feet policy towards Cuba.
It’s not nice, for starters. But the main difficulty I see: how’s a civilian gonna determine a random person’s immigration status?
Unless they’re your employee that you’re paying under the table (in which case reporting them would be extra dickish), what’s the strategy? Call ICE about every “Mexican”-looking person you see who speaks Spanish in public? Seems like a lot of hassle for the false positives.
Growing up I knew a lot of people who were very open about being illegal immigrants.
They probably wouldn’t volunteer that information to a cop or an employer, but it’s something that’s going to come up in conversation eventually. It’s an open secret, if it’s a secret at all.
(As a sidenote, every time I hear “ICE” I feel like a Decker. Why does the name of the agency have to change every few years?)
Note the
. Like, there was that guy who was writing in the NYT(?) about his experiences as an undocumented immigrant, under his own name. Does not take a genius to figure that one out.
@Corey – “It’s not nice, for starters.”
Why not, specifically? And how not-nice is it? How angry should we be at this sort of behavior?
“But the main difficulty I see: how’s a civilian gonna determine a random person’s immigration status?”
For purposes of discussion, I am assuming that they have themselves openly admitted to being an illegal immigrant, or otherwise their status is not really in question; the criticism of Milo is that he’s outing actual illegals, not that he’s filing false reports.
[EDIT] – Let’s assume they didn’t publicly declare that they were an illegal immigrant, but someone found out anyway, which strengthens the flavor of Doxxing. Still, the people we’re talking about are actual illegals, so false positives aren’t an issue.
Depends on your opinion of the severity of the crime. At two ends of the criminal spectrum, (probably almost) everyone agrees that keeping quiet about murderers is wrong, and hanging out on streets with a radar gun reporting speeders to the police would be pointlessly mean. Or maybe consider tax evasion, another crime that’s common and people are often proud of, for a case a little further from the edges.
I often wish it were legal/effective to anonymously submit dashcam videos of drivers being asshats. A horn just does not do enough to get people to update their dangerous behavior.
Reporting tax evasion also falls into my bucket of “obviously a Good for society”, if probably-implausible for Joe Neighbor to provide evidence for.
Are you kidding me? I would bake cookies gratis for someone who wanted to volunteer to run a speed trap around my house. I’ve got a two-year-old. Speeding is not a victimless crime.
We’ve got those already in the UK. It doesn’t seem to cause much controversy.
Whether you should be angry should be affected by your attitude towards illegal immigration. But I get the feeling that the people who are actually angry are trying to have it both ways: they are angry in a way which implies that they like illegal immigration, but few of them are actually willing to say that they support illegal immigration to the degree necessary for their anger to make sense.
Last time I looked at numbers, something like 1/3 of Hispanic people in Arizona are undocumented. So “randomly pointing at Mexican looking people” would actually give you a pretty high hit rate.
Add in a few simple behavioral observations (“is standing at Home Depot soliciting day labor”, “pays for everything with cash”, “lives in neighborhood X”) and you could quite easily hit percentages that exceed the probable cause most warrants are based on.
Not saying we ought to do that, but it really wouldn’t be that hard.
Here is an attempt to steelman the underlying position. One can think that declaring open borders would lead to hundreds of millions immigrating to the US in a very short time, with very bad consequences for a country unable to deal with the suden influx, so it is propoer to have laws restricting immigration. At the same time, one can believe that the marginal immigrant at the current relatively small rates has neutral or positive consequences for the country. (Note this is unlike most laws prohibiting something: the marginal murder or fraud is not neutral/positive.) Then one can think that the State should not go through the effort of enforcing the law to deport current illegal immigrants, even if they are violating the law. Clearly being in the US is massively positive for the immigrant himself (as well as for relatives and close network, some of which are perhaps citizens), and deporting the immigrant causes a great concentrated harm on someone already in a vulnerable position, while costing the State money and time, and not having tangible benefits for the country other than an abstract “rule of law”. If deporting is unjust, then a fortiori outing people in order to get them deported is also unjust.
@Alejandro – “If deporting is unjust, then a fortiori outing people in order to get them deported is also unjust.”
Clearly. But a large plurality of the US does not accept this logic; they are pissed that the immigration laws have been flaunted for decades and want them to be strictly enforced.
I can understand the position you lay out, but that’s a different thing from agreeing with it. The attacks on Milo mostly seem to be claiming that what he’s doing is fundamentally indecent, ie that he’s violating universal rules of society in a way analogous to, say, screaming racial slurs at black people or waving “God Hates Fags” signs at a marine’s funeral. If one *doesn’t* agree with the claim that the illegal immigrants we already have should be allowed to stay, why is reporting one a bad thing?
The attacks on Milo are mostly just tribal; as far as I know, no one knows what Milo was actually going to do. He denies that he was going to publicly name “undocumented immigrants”.
@Alejandro
“At the same time, one can believe that the marginal immigrant at the current relatively small rates has neutral or positive consequences for the country.”
This reminds me of those bits about Justus Möser I linked in a previous thread, and how Muller uses him as an example of how “conservative” thinking differs in terms of systemic incentives vs. individual compassion. The example was Möser’s essays arguing against the then-current legal change forbidding guilds their traditional practice of excluding bastards from membership. He admits that it’s not a bastard’s fault they’re a bastard, and that humanitarian compassion is clearly on the side of letting them in. But, as he notes, consider what this does in the aggregate to the incentives. Anything that reduces the stigma associated with out-of-wedlock births and single parenthood reduces the degree society disincentivises extramarital sex, and if sex is significantly available outside marriage, then the single life becomes clearly preferable to the institution of lifelong marriage, and society has good reasons to incentivize marriage over singlehood. (Möser also notes that reduced stigma on out-of-wedlock birth will increase extramarital sex and (accidental) single motherhood, and that some fraction of those unintended pregnancies will not be affordable by their mothers, and will be “solved” by infanticide, leading not only to an increase in dead infants, but an increase in dead women when those committing infanticide are caught and executed (by drowning) for their crime. He also argues that the new statutes have taken property from the guilds, namely the “honor” of a guild which is a collective possession of it’s members, and which is reduced by being forced to admit bastards.)
Apply this in parallel here. Each marginal immigrant might, taken alone, have a case for being let stay. But then take the Kantian approach, and consider the resulting incentives in the aggregate, and how this weakens the ability to have in practice “laws restricting immigration”, which you admit are proper.
I’m not certain I agree with this proposition. For example, I think there are an awful lot of people who would agree that the murder of Hitler in 1930 would have been significantly more than a “marginal” good for Germany and the world. There are probably an awful lot of people who believe that the murder of Donald Trump in 2015 (or right now) would have been the same, or a fraud that deprived him of his fortune and therefore his ability to use it to buy access.
It seems to me that other than true pacifists (of whom there are very few; I suspect the vast majority of people have at least one person they would prefer to see dead, whether they’ll publicly admit to it or not), what most people object to is not necessarily murder as such, but murder of someone they personally believe is undeserving. The general prohibition on murder is a detente reached because none of us trust strangers to decide who is and who is not deserving, and therefore we surrender that privilege ourselves to reach a social equilibrium.
Opposition to illegal immigration is similarly about preserving a social equilibrium. Much like we don’t trust people to decide who to murder, we also can’t trust people to make objective decisions about who should and should not be allowed to break immigration law and how much value they bring to society. I’m not suggesting that the average illegal immigrant is the same level of net negative to society as the average murder. But the principle to me seems the same; it’s less important what the marginal benefit or harm of the act is and more about the marginal damage it’s doing to the concept of the rule of law. Once we eliminate neutral law and leave everything up to individual discretion, it’s hard to stop the floodgate from opening and getting an ever-escalating quantity of the behavior we’re trying to prohibit.
To be fair, “marginal” generally implies any random instance, while you’re talking more about (perceived) Greater Good-style specific exceptions. I do agree with your conclusion that individuals should not be allowed to determine what exceptions are justified, though.
I find the pro argument you give compelling; there’s a difference between being a law-n-order fanatic who would report any illegal immigrant who they found out about, and someone who co-opts the government into acting as their enforcer by selectively reporting crimes that mostly go overlooked.
As someone who is rather anti-authority I don’t like the idea of reporting anyone for any sort of victimless crime (and despite its bad effects on the whole, I don’t believe any individual act of illegal immigration can be said to have a victim), but I wouldn’t expect that argument to hold weight to a traditional conservative or other law-n-order type.
Eich is the canonical case, so let’s go with him.
Eich engages in legal free speech. His opponents organize a legal social campaign against him to get him fired. A lot of people around here feel that this is a “bullet”,
The “outed” illegal has broken immigration law, and engaged in free speech. Milo legally reports them to ICE. A lot of people here think this is a bullet.
How do you rank it compared to Eich? More egregious, less egregious, roughly equally awful?
I have never really given much of a damn about the immigration issue generally; the two things that get me angry about it are claims that Hispanic immigration is going to give Dems a permanent majority, and claims that we don’t have the right to enforce our own laws. This issue tweaks both: I accept that I have to put up with Blue Tribers; we’re all citizens here, they have as much claim to the country as I do, the best we can do is try and figure out a way to live together in peace. All of that goes out the window for someone who isn’t a citizen, has no right to be here at all, and is nonetheless acting like they own the place. In that case, Charity pretty quickly goes to zero.
A lot of times when Immigration comes up here, people float the idea about allowing open borders but denying immigrants access to welfare, voting, etc. I feel like this is a perfect example of why that would never, ever work.
Well, the obvious difference is that there isn’t going to be a social campaign designed to shame emigrants until their companies fire them. Instead, there’s a law, being enforced.
A lot of people seem to think that the point is to have conservative pressure mobs attack illegal immigrants, and that is pretty stupid. But it also seems to be a thought with very little backing, most of it due to some random professor claiming to have “reliable sources” which conveniently ended the debate in his favor.
I don’t like the comparison to Eich. This reminds me of the discussion we had in the last OT about left-wing vs right-wing efforts to silence speech.
In one case, you have people attempting to enforce (or aid in the enforcement of) laws that, whether you agree with them or not, no one disputes were legitimately passed in full accordance with the rules and procedures of our glorious democratic process.
On the other side, you have vigilante mob-style justice wherein people attempt to enforce things that are not laws, but they really think should be.
This is not a fair comparison.
However, I will suggest the fact that we end up with issues wherein the law is markedly different from the prevailing norm should be viewed as something of a cognitive dissonance between the state and the culture. I would suggest that vast majorities of people do, in fact, believe both “the average marijuana user shouldn’t be hassled” as well as “the average illegal immigrant shouldn’t be deported” even if they support legislation making both of those things illegal.
@Matt M – “On the other side, you have vigilante mob-style justice wherein people attempt to enforce things that are not laws, but they really think should be.”
The question isn’t whether the riots are justified. The question is if Milo is roughly analogous to, say, Amanda Marcotte or Andrew Cord, and thus someone we on the right should be disavowing to avoid being hypocrites.
To my understanding, he was a CEO and made more than ten times as much money as me. I’ve seen no argument that he will be unable to find work making the same amount of money as me, and will accept no argument that making only as much money as me is a “bullet”. (Well, I’m hesitant to really commit to “will accept no argument”, but it’d have to be a heck of an impressive one.)
“It’s a sufficiently low amount of money that the threat will intimidate people in such positions” is enough to make it a “bullet”. By your reasoning, robbing a millionaire of a half million dollars is just words.
We’re not talking about robbery, we’re talking about (the threat to) legally not giving money to a nonprofit based on their decision to have someone as their CEO. Calling it a “bullet” (or, talking about “mess with his livelihood” etc) makes the implicit argument that he is thereby unable to support himself or his family, which is a position I find fundamentally dishonest.
Also, while googling for past discussions about this I participated in, I ran across a statement that he was offered a CTO position at the same pay he had as CEO. We can argue counterfactuals all day about whether the boycott would have actually stopped if he’d taken it, but then we’d be talking about what he was threatened with in the counterfactual instead of in reality.
Would you consider it a bullet, or at least a credible threat, if Eich were gay and it were an anti-gay mob loudly and publicly calling for “legally not giving money to a nonprofit based on their decision to have someone as their CEO”?
I think the underlying distinction is orthogonal to the one you imply.
The difference between argument and bullet is not the size of the effect. An argument attempts to defeat an idea by persuading people, the one who proposes it or the ones he is speaking to, that it is mistaken. A bullet tries to prevent an argument from being made by making it costly for someone to make it.
Those are two quite different approaches to changing people’s ideas. In particular, the first works better if your position is true and the position you are attacking is false. The second depends not on that but on how much political or social power you have.
@Gobbobobble
Being gay is not in the same category as having political views or taking political action. Not a nonprofit either, but probably the closest equivalent is the call to boycott Apple for not supporting the Republican Convention.
@DavidFriedman
Is there no room for a distinction based on people’s right to decide what their own money is spent to support? They’re taking away their own money, not anyone else’s.
What are the odds that this salary cap, beyond which one apparently loses one’s permission to hold controversial political opinions (or at least opinions which would become controversial several years later), would happen to be just high enough that it doesn’t affect you personally? That was sure lucky, huh.
I think that’s definitional. “Punching up” and all that.
This strikes me as mostly an argument about social norms. The Right has historically believed in the idea that politics and professionalism are two separate spheres, and punishing companies for the beliefs or political views of their employees or officers which do not affect their work is out of bounds. As David says, it’s an attempt to shut down speech by imposing costs on the speaker. In contrast, the dominant attitude on the Left since at least the 1970s has been “the personal is political” (despite the original use of the slogan having nothing to do with attacking people’s personal lives).
This is essentially an argument about whether politics is boxing by Queensbury rules or total war. The Right’s historical view (which has been changing rapidly in the last decade; see Trump, Donald) has been that politics is a gentleman’s sport with rules where we all shake hands at the end of the day. The Left up until the 1960s largely treated it the same way, but since the Civil Rights era has more or less treated it as total war: you use any and all means at your disposal to undermine, destroy and pressure your opponents because winning is all that matters.
In large part, this is the difference of a group that believes it can work within the system to achieve its ends versus one that believes the system must be destroyed. Trump’s rise was essentially the Right coming around to the same conclusion that the Left did half a century ago and saying, “fuck it, the gloves come off.”
For the sake of clarity, it might be best to consider 4 categories of response rather than 2: arguments, bullets, direct action, and pressure. Direct action might be firing someone strictly because of their politics (it’s not violent, but it’s clearly a dick move). Pressure might be boycotting a brand because of their politics (which is not the best way to change minds, but it’s within your rights to not support people/causes you find offensive). Bullets are literal violence.
As random832 said, I think there are important distinctions between them.
Even granting that it was the Left first, even granting that it was relatively recent for the Right (two things I definitely do not actually concede), you don’t think there’s anything the Right has done before Trump that qualifies as this? I mean, just to pick a recent one, let’s not forget just why Trump has a Supreme Court vacancy to fill in the first place.
@random832: We’ve largely been in an escalating war of tit-for-tat for the last 50 years. Yes, I think the Left “started it” as much as anyone can really be said to start anything, but I think the Right kept the boxing gloves on a lot longer.
I don’t think you can really bring up judicial confirmations without acknowledging the elephant in the room: the “advice and consent” role was restricted to qualifications and temperament, not political views, until Robert Bork in 1987. We’ve been on a downhill spiral ever since, of which the unfortunate tabling of Merrick Garland was simply the latest incident. Both sides agree that we need to stop defecting and start cooperating, but neither one is willing to do so until they’ve gotten revenge for the last defect. So it continues.
Honestly, at this point, I’m sort of curious to see which side will be the first to start assassinating the other side’s Justices while they control the confirmation process, because I don’t doubt it’s coming. We’ve piled too much power into the hands of nine individuals in robes for it to not devolve into violence at this point.
That is an important distinction, but not the distinction between an argument and a bullet in this context.
I think you have a right to try to make someone worse off to punish him for making arguments you disapprove of, as long as you are making him worse off in a way you have a right to do, such as not buying what he is selling or not selling what he wants to buy from you. Or, for that matter, telling him that you think worse of him for making those arguments, supposing that he is likely to care.
But I also think that discouraging arguments in that way is an entirely different approach, and a much less attractive one, than discouraging them by offering better arguments against them. For one thing, it doesn’t require you to have better arguments, so works as well when you are wrong as when you are right.
@Friedman
They were not just boycotting though, they were putting big pressure on the figurative shop to remove the product from the shelves (boycotting would be if they stopped using the browser themselves and started a campaign to convince others to do so same).
By doing this, they removed the option for a ‘market vote.’
SJWs tend to be a minority who seek positions of power and/or seek influence with those in power, so they avoid needing majority support for their actions and as a minority, can force the majority to do what they want.