mrpku asked: Why are you so sure airstrikes in Syria are bad? I personally don't like them either, but I can see the logic - that threatening to hit anyone who crosses a line may make Assad/ISIS wary of crossing that line - and while I don't *think* that works that well (e.g. Libya), I also think Hillary Clinton knows more than me about geopolitics and wouldn't be very confident about disagreeing with her.
See, that’s the whole thing: every single time we’re contemplating an entanglement in the Middle East, it looks like there’s a humanitarian justification and a really good reason. I supported involvement in Libya, because it looked like a clear-cut case where a little involvement could do a lot of good. And instead what happened is that Libya is in an unstable state of ongoing conflict and much worse off than before. This happens every time. I no longer trust ‘I can see the logic”. Even when I can see the logic, this happens. Even when I find the logic really convincing, this happens.
Every time we bomb places in the Middle East without a long term plan, it ends up worse than if we had just not done that. Every time. When do we just internalize the lesson ‘don’t bomb places hoping it’ll make things better, even when you have a good reason?’ Because that’s the lesson it’ll take to end the foreign interventions.
I think Clinton values the lives of people in poor countries less than me; she might be rational given her goals. Though she was an architect of the Libya mess, so maybe she’s not even that.
Clinton is probably just calling for airstrikes in Syria because she believes in airstrikes in Syria but I would really like to believe she’s calling for airstrikes in Syria in the hope that Trump will reflexively do the exact opposite of that. It would be so satisfying. I think this is the emotion underlying the proclamations that Trump is playing 8-dimensional chess or whatever; it’s much nicer to believe that we’re in good hands and the scary stuff is the prelude to a better plan than to believe that the people in power are cruel, violent and bad at their jobs.
And now we’ve fired on Syrian government forces. It’s hard to get a really good feel for things from newspaper headlines, but I think this is genuinely a significant escalation of U.S. involvement in Syria, and accordingly probably a horrible disaster. Violent involvement in the Middle East with no long term plan beyond bombing the people we’re mad at usually works out so well, after all.
I will observe in very lukewarm defense of our new president that I think lots of the candidates for President would have been tempted to do this. It’s stupid and evil and absolutely on Trump’s hands, but it’s stupid and evil in precisely the fashion that American foreign policy usually is, not in a new or unpredictable way.
The motive is to retaliate for the use of chemical weapons. The use of chemical weapons is a horrible evil and I understand the impulse to retaliate against that kind of thing, but at some point we as a society have to notice that violent involvement in the Middle East, with no long term plan beyond bombing the people we’re mad at, makes everything worse even when we’ve picked a humanitarian justification.
atarimcgregor asked: Should people report users for racism/sexism/hate/etc. on sites that offer the possibility?
I think depends very strongly on the site.
It makes sense for there to exist sites that moderate for racism/sexism/hate, because lots of people want discussion/community environments without those things. So I absolutely agree, in principle, with the existence of communities that moderate for those things.
I think communities that moderate for those things are at risk of a couple different failure modes. One is adjudicating disputes/accusations/reports as a popularity contest, where important or eloquent or highly-followed users can get people harshly penalized for ambiguous comments or minor mistakes that were subsequently corrected, while no one can complain even about deeply hateful behavior if it’s by someone with a lot of social capital. For this reason, I think it’s almost always bad to report someone for racism/sexism/hate if you see a popular post calling on you to do that, because it contributes to moderation-as-popularity-contest-divorced-from-enforcing-site-norms. If it’s already been reported, don’t bother.
I also would not report it if the community has unhealthy expectations about what to do about racist/sexist/hateful comments. There are a bunch of subreddits that just remove the content and leave a note saying ‘this post was removed for violating rule 3: no racial slurs’, and this seems to work great, and I’d have no hesitation about reporting content in that sort of setup. If instead you have a community where the fact comments have been reported is used against the comment-writer (independent of a finding on the merits of the report), or where they’re expected to apologize immediately and condemned for asking what they did wrong, or where people hold ‘if someone says you’re racist then you’re racist’, then no, I think it’s a terrible idea to feed those dynamics.
This amounts to ‘in terrible toxic communities don’t participate in toxic dynamics, don’t dogpile, and otherwise yes use moderation’, which is not wildly insightful or anything. But I think sometimes people know a community is unhealthy and cruel and horrible and still feel like they need permission to disengage, and if you’re in that kind of community, yes, by all means do disengage.
In general Singer does a lot of ‘[argues for a thing] and then fails to consider why the norms and laws are the way they are and how it might be harmful to change them even if they are not correctly capturing all the underlying harms’. It is obnoxious. I think it’s valuable to sometimes notice when our norms are not correctly capturing the underlying harms, but it doesn’t cost you that much to add ‘but the problem with sculpting a norm that hews more closely to the actual underlying thing of moral concern is that it would hurt these people in these ways’ and it makes you 600% less obnoxious, guaranteed.
The latest internet controversy is over Jeff McMahan and Peter Singer’s terrible New York Times article defending the rapist in the Anna Stubblefield case. Stubblefield was a facilitated communicator for a nonverbal disabled man. She facilitated communications from him that he was in love with her, and had sex with him, and was convicted and sentenced to ten years in prison.
The article is terrible because it conflates importantly different concerns. First, it argues that Stubblefield’s victim was capable of communication and communicated consent, and that the defense was improperly refused permission to present evidence to this effect at trial. I read a lot about the case a while ago and my conclusion is that the victim did not communicate the things written in his name using facilitated communication. I do think that this evidence should have been presented and disputed at trial; that’s what trials are for. It seems like often we route around the fact juries aren’t competent to adjudicate complicated important technical questions by having the judge decide them and then disallow evidence that will only confuse the jury, but that has its drawbacks.
Next, it argues that even if Stubblefield’s victim was not capable of communication, it might not be right to say he can never meaningfully consent and therefore can never be allowed to have sex. This is true as far as it goes but does not really belong in an article about someone who was, as described in testimony, physically coerced by a caretaker in a position of power. There are so many appropriate occasions and circumstances to discuss how to humanely handle relationships between, say, two nonverbal and noncommunicative disabled people. The article does the topic a disservice by raising it in the context of the Stubblefield case. (Admittedly, the wrong was first done by literally everyone else; the verdict and the surrounding conversation discuss only the consent violation ‘having sex with someone too disabled to consent’ without the additional ones of ‘having sex with someone who could not resist and tried to scoot away’ and ‘having sex with someone in relation to whom you are in a position of absolute power’. But still, an article bound to provoke controversy needs to be extraordinarily careful to do better than the discourse in general.)
So, uh, yes, severely disabled people can have sex that they don’t experience as harmful and sex that they experience as a positive, meaningful experience. The inappropriate leap is the one from ‘people too disabled to give consent can have sex that they wanted and enjoyed; the fact sex happened does not automatically mean that harm happened’ to ‘there was probably no harm done in this specific case’, and that leap is not defensible.
People are talking about this as ‘Peter Singer now thinks raping disabled people is okay’, which is the most useless and inflammatory possible angle on this. The article is misleading about the state of the evidence on facilitated communication, picks a terrible example case for its second point, and then meanders from the correct position ‘it is not the case that whenever a severely impaired person has sex, harm occurs’ to ‘in this case, there’s no reason to think harm occurred’, despite the fact that there’s plenty of reason to think that in this case harm did occur. And then it fails to discuss the reasons laws and norms might be drawn in a way that prohibit even the cases where no harm occurs, and acknowledge the risks of trying to change them. It’s a bad article. It is not at all the bad article it is being advertised and complained-about as.
Anonymous asked: How exactly am I supposed to respect the way that Mike Pence sets for himself, when I know that given the chance he would impose them on me? Like, I'm not going to break the boundaries set by a person like him, but I sure as hell am not going to respect their reasoning.
He wouldn’t, though. Like, Mike Pence wants to force people to carry pregnancies to term and wants it to be legal for parents to subject their children to conversion ‘therapy’ and thinks civil marriage rights should only be for people whose marriages meet Christian religious definitions thereof, and all of those things are bad, and he merits criticism for them. He does not believe that there should be laws about (or even norms about!) men and women not being alone together. He has never advocated for that. He has not elevated to political office other people who advocate that. There is absolutely no reason to think he believes it. I am very sure if you asked him he would categorically denounce the idea, and based on my knowledge of similar people I think he would be 100% sincere. Why don’t we criticize Mike Pence for the harm of the policy positions he actually holds and the harmful things he actually does? I assure you we won’t run out of material.
The District of Columbia requirement that childcare workers have a college degree is horrible and cruel and classist. It should not be illegal to work with young children without a college degree. That’s not even a hard question. The justification for the policy is that high-quality interaction with young children matters a lot to their development, which is I guess a justification for working towards low staff-to-student ratios or better training, but it’s absolutely ridiculous as a justification for demanding college degrees!
As far as I can tell, it’s not even the case that someone noticed children get better outcomes if their instructors have college degrees! No one has even studied that!
But okay. Doing this means people without degrees can’t work in childcare, and that’s horrible. It also means there’ll be fewer childcare providers and childcare will get more expensive and it’ll be impossible for poor people to find childcare. They’re trying to sort of tackle that by subsidizing childcare providers returning to school, but that’s a horrible solution to this entirely self-imposed problem: mandate people have an expensive skill they don’t need, then try to mitigate the harmful effects on poor people by making it less expensive for them to fulfill the mandate, ignoring that they’re often working two jobs and don’t have the time to go back to school even if it’s subsidized, or that they might not be able to succeed at college, or that they simply can’t earn a degree before the regulation goes into effect in December, or that they should not have to because this kind of thing should not be permissible.
Anonymous asked: (1/4) I can't say I'm terribly concerned with what Mike Pence's policy is, but personally speaking, I would not feel either respectable or comfortable being alone in a private space with a not-closely-related member of the other gender, unless it was someone I trusted quite a lot indeed. If I'm meeting a guy to work on a project, I would certainly do it in a public place; meeting in a dorm room, mine or his, would feel very unsafe.
(2/4) I actually specifically view this as basic self-defense, and would flat-out leave a community that shamed me for it on the grounds that that clearly wasn’t a safe community – I may be more aggressive than most of the people you’re thinking of. >.> While I wouldn’t state it as specifically religious reasons, I am from a religious culture, and I expect most people my age would consider me prudish – I don’t like swearing either – so that may be related.
(¾) Honestly, though, I haven’t found it particularly messes up my ability to make friends – partially because it’s not an issue interacting online and I do a lot of that, partially just because in the culture in which I’m interacting with people the situation generally doesn’t come up in the first place – and I don’t think it’s made me more aware of gender; that’s always salient for me, at least with people I don’t know very well, and I don’t see that changing.
(4/4) (I can try to adjust how I see a specific person if requested, but that’s not the same thing.) Anyway, there’s one data point, for whatever it’s worth. Oh, and I also found your earlier anon very relatable on being pressured – I have not had that specific problem, but I put a lot of advance work (like the above) into making sure I can’t. So there’s another data point. (FTR, I am OK with everyone else going with what rules make them feel safe; I’m just not OK with them saying I can’t.)
I know a lot of religious people who adhere to the same policy as Mike Pence with respect to not being alone with people of a different gender. They’re Orthodox Jews, not evangelical Christians, but a lot of the justifications and a lot of the complications are the same.
A rule like this is helpful and empowering for some subset of people who have a hard time setting boundaries, and who want a way to avoid potentially uncomfortable situations without making it explicit that they’re avoiding it for discomfort reasons. “for religious reasons, let’s do that group project at the library instead of your dorm room” or “ is easier for these people than ‘uh I don’t want to suggest I don’t trust you and I don’t want to seem prudish and I don’t want to make a big deal out of nothing but I feel pressured’. I had an anon a while ago who talked about how they often had sex they didn’t want because they didn’t feel like they had a good way to say ‘no’. I think some people who really like rules like this have the same personality traits as that person and are preemptively protecting themself.
As always, if you tell people that their way of enforcing their boundaries is sexist and unacceptable, especially without giving them better tools to enforce their boundaries, you are harming them.
Obviously, rules like these are nonsensical around LGBT people in a bunch of ways. They damage friendships and mentorship relationships between people of different genders, and they set an expectation that relationships between people of different genders are automatically suspect in a way that I suspect is self-fulfilling and makes it harder for people to have functional friendships with people of different genders. They substitute a cultural rule for learning how to enforce your boundaries on your own terms, and that might make it harder to enforce your boundaries in situations where none of the cultural rules protect you.
In my experience, trying to be conscious of this rule means becoming way more conscious of gender than one otherwise is, which feels super unpleasant and I bet makes people more sexist. These are serious drawbacks. These are absolutely worth pointing out. But people (especially people who have no familiarity with communities that have rules like this and couldn’t explain why people might want the rules in the first place) really, really need to discuss those drawbacks in a way that doesn’t shame people for having unusual boundaries.