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(Jutland: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)
Jutland: The end of the main fleet action
After losing sight of Scheer, Jellicoe took his fleet south, intending to keep the Germans to the west of him, and intercept them when they tried to get home.
(A brief sidenote on geography. The Germans were based out of Wilhelmshaven, near the corner of the Jutland peninsula. Because of minefields laid by both sides, there were two main routes in, either hugging the coast of Denmark past Horns Reef or going through a gap to the northwest of Wilhelmshaven and straight into the Jade Estuary. However, at this point, Jellicoe was directly north of that gap, and in a position to block either route home.)
At around 1840, minutes after the German fleet disappeared, the rear battleships of Jellicoe’s line began to dodge torpedoes. At 1854, Marlborough was hit by one, launched by the Wiesbaden, which was amazingly still afloat despite the pounding she had taken. Despite the flooding through the 20-foot gash in her side, and lost the use of several of her forward boilers, Marlborough remained in the battle line, although she was limited to 16 knots instead of her normal 21. The two men killed aboard were the only casualties among the battleships of the Grand Fleet (excluding the 5th BS).
Jellicoe was not well-served by his subordinates during this phase of the battle, who allowed the Germans to escape without informing Jellicoe or attempting to pursue, except Commodore William Goodenough, commander of the 2nd Light Cruiser Squadron. Goodenough, who we have met previously (his flagship Southampton was the first to give a proper report on the presence of the High Seas Fleet), chased the Germans, managed to maintain contact with their trailing units.
Beatty also declined to pursue the Germans. He instead turned in a full circle ahead of the Grand Fleet, wasting a valuable 7 minutes. In fairness, Lion apparently suffered a gyrocompass failure, but his attempts to cover it up (including producing a doctored track chart in the 1920s) do not reflect well on him.
At 1855, Scheer, for reasons that are not clear, decided to turn east again. He justified this either as an attempt to surprise Jellicoe or to help Wiesbaden, but neither explanation makes much sense, particularly as he put the battlecruisers, lightly armed and heavily damaged, in the van. (Lutzow was badly damaged enough to be sent home independently at this point.) Goodenough spotted the turn and reported it to Jellicoe at 1900. Jellicoe intercepted, placing his line across Scheer’s course again, the battle being rejoined at around 1910. By 1915, the British were shooting even more effectively than they had earlier, and the German van began to buckle even before Scheer ordered another turn away at 1918. (He actually raised the flag to prepare for this turn at 1912, but delayed the execution for 6 minutes.) This was covered by the German battlecruisers and destroyers, in an action known as the ‘death ride’. This charge, into probably the heaviest concentration of naval gunfire the world has ever seen, has been described as ‘the most splendid and least intelligent moment in the short history of the Imperial Navy’. It did achieve the objective of drawing off the British fire from the turning battleships, and the battlecruisers closed to within 4 miles of the British before turning away, covered by the torpedoes of their escorting destroyers. Before firing ceased around 1930, the British had managed to land 25 hits on the German battlecruisers and 12 on their battleships, while of the British ships, only Colossus was hit, taking two shells from Seydlitz.
At this point, we come to the most controversial moment of the battle. The first destroyer attack, by 13 boats, was launched at 1915, six minutes before Scheer gave the order. This first wave launched a total of 31 torpedoes between 1922 and 1930, with the loss of one boat and four others badly damaged. (The second wave didn’t even manage to find the British in the mist on the North Sea.) Not one torpedo hit, as Jellicoe ordered his ships to turn away at 1921, presenting a smaller target to the torpedoes, extending the range they had to run, and giving his ships a better chance to dodge. Some later claimed that he should have turned towards the torpedoes, a tactic that became common during WW2. However, one of the greatest fears the British had was that German destroyers would lay floating mines, which they would then lure the British over (a tactic the Japanese had used in their war with Russia a decade earlier). A turn-towards, in addition to putting the fleet more at risk than the turn away, would have made this a real possibility. Despite the volume of criticism leveled against Jellicoe (some said that he was motivated by a fear of drowning, caused by his near-miss when Victoria sank), he had in fact written a letter to the Admiralty when he assumed command of the Grand Fleet in October of 1914, stating that he would turn away in this situation, to preserve the fleet. Even Churchill, despite his contemporary criticism (he initially suggested that Jellicoe should have used a completely new maneuver to deploy on the center during his first deployment), later recognized that Jellicoe “was the only man on either side who could have lost the war in an afternoon.”
At this point, Jellicoe was blind again. His light cruisers were either holding station on him or beating off destroyer attacks. Even the previously-reliable Goodenough failed him, sending an erroneous message stating that the Germans were heading northwest. At 1950, Beatty suggested that the battleships follow his battlecruisers, who were in front of Jellicoe’s line. It is unclear why he did this, as he probably couldn’t see the Germans, either. Jellicoe agreed to give Beatty his leading division at 2001, although his leading division couldn’t even see Beatty at this point. He then sent his scouts directly west, in an attempt to bring the Germans to action before it was fully dark. At this point, Scheer had decided to head for Horns Reef, and was steering directly south, planning to try to get through the British fleet after nightfall.
At 2020 (a few minutes after the official time of sunset), Beatty found the German battlecruisers again. Hipper (who had left Lutzow when she was disabled) was in the process of transferring to Derfflinger when the British opened fire, obviously interrupting his attempt. Again, visibility hindered the Germans, and the British landed six hits on Hipper’s ships, putting Derfflinger’s last turret out of action, and taking only one 5.9” hit in return. The German line had been reversed, and was being lead by the pre-dreadnoughts of the 2nd Battle Squadron. These came within range of the British, taking two hits and having no more success than the battlecruisers, although the Posen of the following 1st Battle Squadron did land one hit on Princess Royal. Finally, the mist descended around 2040, and the clash between the dreadnoughts had drawn to an end.
As a side note, one of the turret officers aboard HMS Collingwood was Prince Albert, later known as George VI. He was proud of being in action there, but sad that Collingwood did not take any hits ‘as she had nothing to show that she had been in the fight’. This was a common sentiment among the officers and men of the Grand Fleet, and Beatty used the lack of damage to claim that they had not actually been in action.
That turned out longer than I thought. It looks like we’ll have two more parts before the series wraps up, covering the night action and the aftermath/analysis.
I’m a volunteer tour guide at the USS Iowa in Los Angeles, and I enjoy explaining battleships so much that I’ve been doing it here for quite a while. This is my index of the current posts, updated so that I don’t have to ask Scott to put up a link when the previous index gets locked down. Please don’t post a reply to this index comment so I can keep it updated as new ones get published and the new posts are easy to find.
History:
General History of Battleships, Part 1 and Part 2
The Early Ironclads
Pre-Dreadnoughts
The loss of HMS Victoria
The Battle of Jutland: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
US Battleships in WW2
Rest-of-world Battleships in WW2
Battlecruisers
Battleships after WW2
The Destroyer that accidentally attacked a President
The South American Dreadnought Race
Dreadnoughts of the minor powers
Technical:
Fire Control
History of Fire Control
Armor, Part 1 and Part 2
Propulsion
Armament Part 1 and Part 2
Turret vs barbette
Underwater protection
Secondary Armament, Part 1 and Part 2
Survivability and Damage Control Part 1
Misc:
Bibliography
Thoughts on tour guiding
Questions I get as a tour guide
What’s your favorite battle that did not involve battleships?
(And what’s your favorite non-battle ship?)
Hmm. The Battle of Bubiyan Channel during the First Gulf War, but mostly for the image of a helicopter using a dunking sonar as a wrecking ball. Or Midway, if I’m allowed to use battles where the battleships didn’t do anything.
And probably the first USS Yorktown (CV-5). I’ve liked her since I was really young. Not sure why.
(An honorable mention goes to the USS America (LHA-6), which I got to ride aboard last summer from San Diego up to LA.)
Can you expand on this, or point me to a page? Google isn’t giving me anything on it.
My knowledge of this is informal only, but basically after the escorts got destroyed, every helicopter that could showed up and started attacking small boats. One British Sea King didn’t have anything more than small arms, and quickly ran out of ammo for those. So the pilot lowered the dunking sonar, and began to attack with it. Apparently, it worked pretty well, but got destroyed in the process.
I don’t want to derail Bean’s discussion but this is the Naval gazing thread and I just wanted to say that US Navy 7th Fleet has confirmed what I think many of us suspected. The 7 sailors listed as “missing” after the USS Fitzgerald’s collision with Motor Vessel ACX Crystal on Saturday were trapped in containment. Their remains have been recovered from the flooded compartments and their names are:
– Seaman Gunner’s Mate Dakota Rigsby, 19, Palmyra VA
– Yeoman 3rd Class Shingo Douglass, 25, San Diego CA
– Sonar Tech 3rd Class Ngoc T Truong Huynh, 25, Oakville CN
– Gunner’s Mate 2nd Class Noe Hernandez, 26, Weslaco TX
– Fire Controlman 2nd Class Carlos Sibayan, 23, Chula Vista CA
– Personnel Specialist 1st Class Xavier Martin, 24, Halethorpe MD
– Fire Controlman 1st Class Leo Rehm Jr., 37, Elyria OH
Fair winds and following seas mates. Your watch has ended. another begins.
Indeed. Tragic, but this is the cost we’re going to pay for having a navy which operates.
On a lighter note, the USN just scored its first air-to-air kill since 1991.
I’m in LA this Saturday for a friend’s wedding and am suggesting to my wife that we visit to the Iowa. We visited the Texas this time last year and really enjoyed it, but could only stay briefly before the heat and humidity got to us – I imagine LA would be easier to handle? Are there other nearby attractions you’d recommend seeing?
LA has much better weather than Texas. It’s been relatively hot lately, but that means you’re looking at mid-80s at most (probably lower on the coast), and fairly low humidity. NWS says high of 76 for Saturday. Anecdotally, I grew up in the Midwest, and of the days I’ve spent on the ship, some have been hot, but none have been the sort of miserable you get there.
If you’re actually looking at being on the ship Saturday, I’ll be there for at least part of the day. Are you on the discord?
In terms of nearby attractions, I’m not sure what you’re interested in. The LA Maritime Museum is next door, but it’s not brilliant. Worth the $5, maybe not worth the time. Lane Victory is also cheap, and not a bad place to go. I’m not sure about other attractions in San Pedro. Further afield, Queen Mary is OK (although she’s deep in the mud and missing engines, and parking is horrible), Aquarium of the Pacific is pretty good.
Thanks… we’d love to visit but after looking at our time and transport options I think we’ve decided to see the Griffith observatory instead. Will have to plan it for our next trip!
Fair enough. The Griffith is pretty good, although the day I went, it was a lot busier than I’ve ever seen Iowa (except for Fleet Week). I personally didn’t get that much out of the visit, but I’ve been interested in space for a long time.
Also, their parking is terrible, and we had a long walk in.
But did anybody actually die, to justify the term ‘death ride’?
OK, granted, with 25 large-caliber hits, probably somebody died. But AFIK no German battlecruisers were sunk in that part of the action. So here’s the thing:
If I recall correctly, and correct me if I’ve missed something, we’ve got five German battlecruisers and almost two dozen battleships, against a superior British force including six battlecruisers and four super-battlecruiserish “fast battleships”. The five German battlecruisers are tasked with finding the British fleet and luring them into battle. Mission accomplished, and if the British fleet wasn’t lured entirely into an ambush it is because their own battlecruisers were able to extricate themselves when they first encountered the German main fleet. During the main fleet engagement, the German battlecruisers matched off against their larger and more numerous British counterparts. When the engagement turned against the Germans, Scheer pulled his battleships out and ordered the battlecruisers and lesser elements, alone, to cover the battleship’s escape.
Mission fucking accomplished.
In addition to completing their scouting and screening roles, every British capital ship sunk at Jutland was sunk by one of the five German battlecruisers, none by the battleships. In spite of sailing into “heaviest concentration of naval gunfire the world has ever seen”, outnumbered four or five to one by proper dreadnaughts and superdreadnaughts, none of the German battlecruisers were directly sunk during the battle and only one was damaged beyond repair to be scuttled later.
And yet I repeatedly hear that one of the key lessons of naval combat from World War I (meaning Jutland), is that battlecruisers were a very silly idea because they aren’t survivable against battleships.
So my question: Is this an example of the winner writing a set of extremely misleading history books, to cover for their insanely reckless powder-handling practices that might have just as well doomed actual battleships under fire? Shouldn’t the lesson actually be that battlecruisers, when run by people with not-insanely-reckless ideas of powder handling and damage control, were perhaps the most awesome ships of the early dreadnought era?
Would help if we had more than one major surface action to study. But from that one action, I’m not seeing the case against the battlecruiser.
That three battlecruisers blew up in a couple minutes was well known almost immediately after the battle. the other details you mention were only known later, if at all. I don’t think it’s a case of winners setting the history to cover their assess as conventional wisdom setting the history before all the facts were in, a simple theory that fits with the facts beating out more complicated, if more accurate, theories.
Starting with the nitpick:
Lutzow was actually detached before the Death Ride. So none of the battlecruisers that went on it died. I’m not sure about destroyers, and would have to check sources.
Overall, I’m in agreement with you, with one massive caveat. Simplifying somewhat, British battlecruisers traded armor for speed. German battlecruisers traded guns for speed. They generally were on par with the British battleships in terms of percentage of armor by weight.
That said, the experience of Lion, Tiger, and Princess Royal showed that even British battlecruisers which did not have catastrophic magazine explosions were surprisingly survivable. (This was a pre-war British prediction which Friedman highlighted as being correct if we ignore the cordite issue.) I think you’re right, and that Jackie Fisher, on his good days, was very good indeed.
On the other hand, the Grand Fleet took a total of 2 shells (ignoring the 5th BS, which were intended to be sort of hybrid ships), so we don’t have a particularly good control for heavily-armored ships on the British side. I may have to look over the records for the QEs and the three of Beatty’s battlecruisers not protected by the Maori.
There was something of a cover-up, but cassander also makes a good point. I’m not sure how and when German records of the battle came out, and what was known about the ships which survived.
Wikipedia lists five German destroyers lost at Jutland, four of which have individual pages. Of those four, two (S35 and V27) are described as being lost near the end of the Run to the South (16:26 GMT), and a third (V4) is described as being lost during the night action (02:15 GMT). V48 doesn’t have where or when listed on its page, and V29 doesn’t have a wikipedia page, but google books turns up references to both in “Jutland 1916: The Archaeology of a Naval Battlefield”, by Innes McCartney (V48, V29). From that, it looks like V29 was sunk as part of the same torpedo run as S35 and V27; and V48’s loss is poorly documented, but its wreck was found about 2 miles south of of S35, which seems to indicate it was also lost in the Run to the South.
TLDR: looks like 4 destroyers lost in the Run to the South, 1 in the night action, and none in the Death Ride.
I think the term “Death Ride” refers to the situation (five BCs engaging 24 BBs), not the outcome.
I’ve heard claims along those lines, but I’ve understood them as a shorthand form of the more nuanced and more defensible claim that Jutland demonstrated the superiority of the German BC design philosophy over the prewar British BC design philosophy.
To oversimplify, there are two major purposes for building BCs:
1. To dominate Armored Cruisers in the commerce raiding and sealane defense roles, the way Dreadnought BBs dominate pre-Dreads in the line of battle.
2. To serve as a fast scouting, flanking, and raiding element of the main battle fleet.
Both roles require a fast ship, and you need to sacrifice something else to get more speed out of a ship of a given size. That something needs to be some combination of guns and armor. If you’re designing exclusively for one role or the other, you’d choose different combinations: a sealane defense BC can sacrifice more armor because it can rely on Fisher’s concept of “Speed is Armor” and disengage if threatened by a superior force, while a battle fleet BC needs to be able to stand up to BBs and take a pounding.
German ships were designed mostly for the second role, while British ships were designed for a mix of both roles (the extent of the latter being exaggerated in many casual accounts: Bean talked about this in detail in one of the earlier Battleship threads, about how the British BCs were intended for both roles from the beginning). For example, SMS Lützow, a German BC, and HMS Lion, a British BC, were both about the same size (26,319 long tons and 26,690 long tons, respectively, if I’m reading the tables on Wikipedia correct). Lion had a significantly heavier main battery (8x 13.5″ guns vs 8x 12″ guns) and was slightly faster (28 knots vs 26.4 knots), but Lützow had much heavier armor (a 12″ main belt, vs a variable thickness main belt on Lion that was 9″ amidships and 4″ towards the ends of the ship). The effects of the armor difference do get exaggerated by people who forget or ignore the British ammunition-handling problems and their contribution to the British BC losses, but there was definitely a difference in armor thickness.
I think armor may be vastly overrated as a contributor to warship survivability, particularly at the level of supposed “immunity zones” and impervious citadels off which the enemy’s heaviest shells will bounce harmlessly. Armor against quick-firing HE shells, splinter protection where needed, and something like a protected cruiser’s armored deck seem like cheaper gains. But what gets your ships and crews home to fight another day are compartmentalization, reserve buoyancy, stability margins, redundancy, shock hardening, general robustness, and solid damage control procedures.
Things which, conveniently, don’t require many kilotons of steel and so might fit on a battlecruiser without costing it speed. On the other hand, maybe their fine-lined speed-optimized hulls didn’t have the buoyancy or stability margins of comparable battleship hulls. Bean, do your sources say anything about the relative survivability, aside from armor thickness, of battlecruisers vs. battelships?
The only other survivability parameter I have ready to hand is metacentric height, which was usually identical between the relevant battleship/battlecruiser pairs. The only battlecruiser with proper TDS was Hood, and that set a lot of her size. I’d suspect that things like compartmentalization were also the same, as both types were designed to capital ship standards. The big difference is going to be in the hull form, although I don’t quite have the numbers to characterize it. I will say that beam for both navies usually seems to have had more to do with docking facilities than anything else. The Germans BCs had lower block coefficients, while the block coefficients for the British were fairly similar for both types.
I decided to test your theory on armor by looking at Warspite’s experience at Jutland. She was hit more than any other battleship there, and it should give us a good baseline. I’m using Campbell as my source throughout.
Hits between 1654-1815:
Warspite was hit twice in this period.
1. An 11″ shell that pierced the 6″ after side armor (upper belt, I think), and detonated before it went through the 2.5″ middle deck.
No benefit.
2. A hit on the forefunnel.
No benefit.
There were 13 hits between 1815 and 1900, when she was out of control and being shot at by the entire German fleet. Numbering per Campbell
1. Came in through the side above the belt, bounced off 1.25″ main deck. Unfortunately, I don’t have good data on German gun penetration at the time. Tiger’s main deck was 1-1.25″ thick, so I’m going to go with Probably no benefit.
2. No details, looks to be above deck.
Probably no benefit.
3. Came through 6″ belt, and burst directly behind. Some holing.
No benefit, assuming that the shells would get set off by the BC armor.
4. Strange upward ricochet. Only hit light armor.
No benefit.
5. Deflected off armor gratings in the funnels. I don’t know how thick those were offhand. Will have to do more research on QEs and BCs.
6. Bounced off 1″ armored deck.
No benefit.
7. Set off on the armored deck on impact. Holed deck, caused fire in 6″ battery.
No benefit.
8. Pierced upper part of tapered main belt. Campbell estimates 7.5″, and says this was an illustration of the error of not carrying the 13″ armor to the main deck.
No benefit.
9. Details are sketchy.
No benefit.
10. Shell hit 6″ belt obliquely, and broke up without exploding. Larger part deflected off 4″ barbette. Tiger had similar armor in that area.
No benefit.
11. Deck hit. Penetrated upper deck, burst above main deck.
No benefit.
12. Went through a bunch of superstructure, then burst on main deck, holing it.
No benefit.
13. Hit aft, in thin shell plating.
No benefit.
Total:
Confirmed benefit: 0
Probably no benefit: 2
No benefit: 13
Well, this was interesting. Not a single hit on the 13″ belt, so that wasn’t evaluated. And the QEs had weirdly thin horizontal protection, fairly similar to Tiger. I’ll have to look up exactly why (but not tonight, as I need to go to bed), but that might have hurt them quite badly. I know I picked the test, and it’s bad form to adjust the test after you do it, but I may try to figure out what would have happened if they’d had a thicker deck, and look at the other battleships.
I’m actually starting to wonder if Warspite’s experience had as much to do with the post-Jutland campaign for heavier horizontal armor as the exploding battlecruisers. Several of these seemed like an extra inch would have been very helpful in keeping the shells out.
Another test would be to look at what would have happened to Derfflinger or Seydlitz if they’d been armored like the British battlecruisers. In that case, I should have much better estimates for the penetration of the guns firing at them, which will help.
Thanks for the analysis. #7 and #12 are particularly interesting, because if a shell bursting against your armored deck will hole it then that armor isn’t doing any good at all(*). Particularly if the burst starts a fire in a gunnery space, because now you’ve got nothing but your powder-handling procedures to keep the whole ship from going up.
I seem to recall somewhere, probably Nathan Okum’s work, that penetration for glancing-impact shell bursts is roughly 0.2 shell diameters, which would suggest a battleship or battlecruiser needs a 2.5-3″ deck. The QEs didn’t have that, which is strange for such otherwise well-designed ships. And now I’m thinking in terms of a “protected battlecruiser”, where the #1 priority is making certain nothing gets through that deck to the machinery and magazine spaces below the waterline, and we otherwise just toughen things up above that so they degrade gracefully under the inevitable penetrating hits. Though you’d still want to armor against 6″ HE and the like.
* beyond setting off the fuze before the shell penetrates any deeper
The QEs had a really weird horizontal armor system, with the armor spread across three or four decks. I’m not sure what the designers could have been thinking, or if they were thinking at all. A quick check of my various books shows that both Iron Duke and Revenge were much better protected in that vein.
The only thing that got near the magazines was a big shell fragment (may have been the base, don’t have Campbell to hand) that got thrown basically straight down and ended up in the magazine cooler equipment. But that was at a very different angle from what is was possible for an intact shell to fall.
There were actually a lot of these that put fragments through the main deck, but it was late and I was tired of typing.
I want to build a simple mobile app (user accounts and database querying) that will run on iOS *and* Android. Assume all I know is HTML/JavaScript.
What combination of frameworks or other software could I use to build a scalable prototype with the smallest possible time investment?
For a prototype, none. Grab a tutorial on how to wrap a web page in an app and do that.
For an actual app I will vote for native every time. Take a look at raywenderlich.com and run through a couple tutorials, it’s easier than you think.
You will probably get the best result by investing in learning native app development, but for simpler applications I have found that Intel XDK works pretty well.
It is mostly Cordova underneath, but it is packed into a nice IDE and with a cloud compilation feature that means that you can develop for iOS without a Mac.
Being Cordova, you use HTML/CSS/JavaScript.
The Ionic framework is multiplatform and based on Angular + Cordova, and might be useful for fast prototyping. They have a web tool that allows you to build a simple app from pre-packaged components and preview your app on Android and iOS. You can also build from the command line + your IDE/ editor of choice. You could use a service like Firebase as a starter database while prototyping.
react native
I second this recommendation with the tacit inclusion that React is a good time investment in general.
I’m interested in discussing whether small scale political violence ever advances the perpetrator’s cause. The last decade has seen a number of attacks by people with a clear poltical view, but isolated from a larger campaign of violence. It’s my impression that the consensus is these attacks benefit the side attacked politically. Is this the case? If so, why do such attacks continue?
Depending on how you define “political violence”, the Ruby Ridge and Waco incidents resulted in a substantial and enduring reduction in the militarization of the major Federal law enforcement agencies in the United States and in greater tolerance for small cultish groups going off to mind their own business. The Columbine shooting I think marked the beginning of serious anti-bullying efforts in the US educational system.
Alas, only the major Federal law enforcement agencies in the former case, and I am skeptical of the actual effectiveness of the anti-bullying measures in the latter. But it may be that “leave me alone!” is a message that can sometimes be effectively conveyed by small-scale violence.
The Waco and Ruby Ridge cases are complex – one can look at the actions of the Branch Davidians and the Weavers (perhaps as well as McVeigh) as successful acts of political violence – the Feds certainly became much less aggressive afterwards and there was a substantial reduction in the sorts of firearms laws the Feds were enforcing.
Alternatively, one could view the Feds aggressive enforcement itself as poltical violence – with that violence causing such political/cultural backlash that the the Feds ceased using.
Finally, it might be as simple as the Feds learning better tactics. The Feds avoided violence during the Bundy standoff and the wildlife refuge occupation, but still ended up succesfully arresting their targets. (Although the acquittal of some of the occupiers may complicate this perspective.)
But you were specifically talking about “small scale political violence.” I don’t think you can call anything done by the United States government “small scale.”
Violence done by one extended family and/or a modest religious cult against the Federal government, resulting in at least superficially favorable policy changes by the Feds and lasting decades, seems like it ought to qualify.
I looked into that at the time and concluded that the acquittals were due to the prosecutors trying too hard to get a federal felony conviction when the laws and fact pattern didn’t really support one. For some reason, it never occurred to Congress to make “Conspiracy to steal a federal building” a felony, so they tried to stitch together a felony from other laws.
The key charge filed was “Possession of a firearm in a federal facility”. There are three versions of this charge:
A. A misdemeanor charge, based on simple possession without one of the three exception categories applying.
B. A felony charge, based on intending to use the firearm to commit a crime.
C. A murder charge, based on killing someone while committing a violation of A or B.
C obviously wasn’t the case. There was very strong evidence against the defendants for A, but that’s only a misdemeanor. The prosecutors charged B (and didn’t charge A, presumably to close off an option for the jury to show leniency without acquitting), and also charged a second felony, “Conspiring to Impede Officers of the United States”, in order to satisfy the “committing a crime” predicate of B.
The Conspiring to Impede charge was a bit of a stretch, given the way the statute was written. The defense argued that this statute was aimed at efforts to impair specific agents from performing specific duties, while the defendants’ actions were aimed at taking over the building, not at any particular agent or duty. By my reading of the statute, it looks like the defense’s interpretation fits the central intent of the law, and while the text of the statute could plausibly be stretched to cover the case, there’s a long-standing legal document to interpret grey areas in statutory interpretation in favor of criminal defendants. The jury appears to have applied this doctrine to acquit on the Conspiracy charge, which automatically lead to acquittal on the Firearms charge as well, and the misdemeanor version of firearms charge wasn’t charged, so the jury didn’t have the option of convicting on that.
There were other charges against some of the defendants: “Use and carry of a firearm in relation to a crime of violence”, which was dismissed by the judge prior to trial, and various charges of theft or degradation of government property. I haven’t looked into these in detail, but my best guess is that the former really didn’t fit the facts of the case (hence the dismissal), and the latter failed on reasonable doubt due to the difficulty of proving a particular person committed a particular act of theft or degradation.
There were also a number of state crimes which don’t appear to have been charged: “criminal trespass while in possession of a firearm” (a misdemeanor) seems pretty clear-cut, and “unlawful paramilitary activity” (a felony) seems like less of a stretch than the charges the federal prosecutor charged. I’m not sure why not. There’s also a federal criminal trespass statute (a misdemeanor) which also wasn’t brought by the federal prosecutors, probably for the same reason they didn’t charge the misdemeanor version of the firearms charge.
Sources:
Federal prosecution memo for the case
Conspiracy to impede statute
Possession of a firearm statute
Thanks. That’s interesting, and I hadn’t seen it pulled together before.
While it stretches the definition of “small-scale,” I think it’s relevant to ask what role the OKC bombing played in this. Seeing as how McVeigh claimed to have been directly inspired by Ruby Ridge and Waco.
I’d argue there’s never, ever been any serious anti-bullying efforts.
I remember reading “voices from the hellmouth” almost 20 years ago now.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/99/04/25/1438249/voices-from-the-hellmouth
After columbine there was a pretty solid anti-bullied movement where the teachers joined in with the bullies adding official sanction to the torture of oddballs.
The reaction to the columbine wasn’t to prevent bullying: it was to categorize kids getting the shit beaten out of them as potential shooters. Because a lot of people are scum. And a lot of those people are teachers and school administrators. They’re not evil but lazy and stupid in a way that’s almost indistinguishable.
What would effective anti-bullying efforts look like?
What about more school choice? These students obviously hate their school because they feel so different from everyone there. They probably wouldn’t shoot up the place if they had somewhere they felt they belonged.
I see the result of this being: the student moves schools a few times, every time being the new outsider and having difficulty breaking into the already established social networks. Thus, they end up hating the school, prompting another move and another bout of outsider-ness. Repeat, all the while disrupting their actual learning because of minor differences in how each school teaches the material.
It might work in limited situations, but I’d expect a lot of students to just never find somewhere they belong.
Totally agree. School bullying is the worst because the victim has no power to leave. The bullies have a captive audience. It’s basically the only situation in life where you’re forced to be around people who you may despise. Very unfortunate.
It Gets Better was a solid effort, though being a specifically LGBT-oriented campaign made it more of a culture war stance and less of being generally anti-bullying.
‘Violence never solved anything’ is obviously bullshit, or at least missing a lot of necessary caveats, including ‘what exactly you mean by solve’? But ‘small-scale violence never did’ is a rather stronger case, if only because predictably achieving large results with small actions is never easy, even for more controllable forms of action.
Perhaps the canonical example of the success of small-scale violence were the actions of Lehi (aka Stern Gang) in post-WWII Palestine, which pretty directly led to British withdrawl without establishing a successor government, and so the rest of Israeli history.
Circumstances were key; they were plenty of larger outbreaks of violence from both sides pre-WWII, but that was before Britain needed US permission to maintain an Empire. Given that, Britain would struggle to engage in any action that could be presented as looking like the American Revolutionary War, and certainly would have been unable to maintain an anti-insurgency campaign against Jewish nationalists.
So ‘small-scale violence’ can solve things, providing both that you are unfussy about your definition of ‘solve’, and have a whole bunch of historical circumstances arranged in your favour. Circumstances that very likely would have enabled you to achieve an equal or better outcome using different tools.
Assuming you’re looking for relatively recent examples, George Tiller’s murder shut down late-term abortions in a large region permanently (and all abortions in his city for a few years) which I think his killer might view as a success.
Not even Charlie Hebdo will print cartoons of Muhammad anymore, and at the very least The Independent cited security concerns when choosing not to reprint the famous cartoons following the attack on Hebdo’s offices.
My suspicion is that small scale violence can be very effective when it is in support of a pre-existing custom or norm. Since Westerners are already extremely sensitive about racism and “Islamophobia” a few small acts of terrorism can keep a great many people in line. By focusing violence on people already considered transgressive they could probably altar people’s behaviour quite significantly, but the latest wave of attacks seem to be optimised for grabbing attention not imposing law.
Ironic, since Columbine had exactly nothing to do with bullying.
I thought Columbine was more the start of the “zero tolerance” craze rather than anti-bullying. i.e., “take a bite of a pop-tart and then hold it and say ‘bang bang’ and get suspended.” That kind of stuff doesn’t have anything to do with bullying, either.
It was definitely that. Serious anti-bullying measures came in at about the same time, but I don’t know if there’s a causal relationship.
Zero Tolerance was a serious anti-bullying measure. A stupid, counterproductive one, but the people involved were very serious in their folly.
I think you’re right. I was always under the impression that the anti-bullying measures put into place in the US were meant to address a real and very serious problem: gay and lesbian middle and high school students were victims of endless bullying, and as a result, were killing themselves at a far greater rate than the general population.
Then, a common theme in American behavior: we do something good and nice and necessary, and then out of a well-meaning put poorly thought out egalitarianism, keep doing it and expanding it until it reaches a hysterical pitch and starts to cause serious damage.
So an anti-bullying measure designed specifically to help a specific group of people turns into a set of rules punishing kids for next to nothing, hyper-sensitive children and their parents complaining every time someone looks at them sideways, and schools and teachers spending more and more of their time on unnecessary (and counterproductive) behavior control rather than teaching. I come from a family of teachers, and the stories they tell about this are insane.
@John Schilling
What does not being allowed to play cops and robbers on the playground with finger guns have to do with anti-bullying?
@Conrad: (I mostly agree that this is orthogonal to bullying but) bullying often involves abiguous threats, so schools might enforce not even looking like you might be threatening violence.
What does not being allowed to play cops and robbers on the playground with finger guns have to do with anti-bullying?
In addition to what hog^5 said, it’s also an aspect of the school system trying to solve multiple problems at the same time using the same tool.
Most bullying cases are complicated he-said she-said tales by not particularly reliable children. Some of the teachers might have an idea who the real bully was, but the principal likely doesn’t and the school system and school administration certainly don’t. Confronted with the risk to their kid’s permanent record, which has a chance (probably small) to affect their chances in life, some parents will do anything for their kids, and those parents are more likely to have their kids be bullies (and this isn’t limited to bullying but also other disruptive behaviors). Those parents will direct their efforts at the top end, to the school system itself, and in the area I was in, were willing to use lawyers. Zero tolerance policies take the risk away from the school system and make sure the guilty get punished; that the innocent also get punished is considered a small price to pay.
We’re unfortunately stuck with a choice between a school system that doesn’t punish truly disruptive behaviors, a system that lets the kids who have parents willing to spend time and money to fight the system get away with disruption (which benefits the affluent, connected and privileged), or a system that relies on draconian zero tolerance rules. I’m not sure which is the best option; a lot’s going to depend on where your kids and the kids around them fall, especially the worst of them.
Permanent records don’t exist.
That comment is going on your permanent record.
I thought that one motivation of zero tolerance policies was race. If you end disproportionately punishing members of one race and the rules allow you to use discretion, you can be accused of discriminating and you have no defense against this accusation. If following exact rules with no discretion leads you to disproportionately punish members of one race, you have a defense.
I’m not sure it matters if they exist, if multiple generations of people have grown up being told that they do and a majority have had nothing particularly strongly disconfirm the idea of such a thing at least following you as far as college.
Kids are told it exists in order to intimidate them into good behavior, without any thought given to the possibility that they may – as kids or parents – use underhanded tactics to protect their / their children’s records. It’s self-sustaining at this point, even if teachers and administrators stop using it as a threat, parents and other kids will keep the meme alive.
Permanent records don’t exist.
I used it as shorthand for the long term permanent effects on a kid’s educational path. If you want to maximize your chances of getting in a top university, you look at grades, the difficulty of classes taken, and extracurricular activities. All of the administrative punishments the school can dish out impact at least one of those, if not all three.
This story (google cached link, as original seems to be dead) suggests there _is_ such a thing as a permanent record and some colleges do request it.
1) Seed strategy:
There’s a strategy where you use small scale political violence to intimidate local civil authorities and provoke reprisal, and hope that a combination of heavy handed reprisals from the government and more strategic reprisals from your own enforcers give you increasing leadership over the population and/or world sympathy.
The failure mode is when you either lose the sympathy of the people or the government proves capable of stamping you out and/or outlasts you. I don’t know the details of world history, so I’d welcome corrections and additions even more than usual, but I’d propose:
Arguable successes: IRA, Algeria, Communist China, Iranian Revolution, Cuban Revolution.
Likely failures: Sendera Lumino, Sandanistas, Students for a Democratic Society, etc.
2) Bad cop:
Arguably, small scale political violence can be the bad cop in a good cop/bad cop strategy. I’m more skeptical of this one – I think violence tends to harden your opponent’s position rather than soften it.
3) False flag:
This seems to work best for those who already have power and want to keep their enemies down.
I think we need to analyze it in more detail in each case, personally. For example in the case of the IRA, it’s important to distinguish what we mean by IRA. The stated and consistent goal of Irish Republicanism was the complete independence of the isle from the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth, complete withdrawal of the British government from the soil of said isle, and a united Irish Republic whose territory consisted of the whole of that isle. By those standards, the Irish Republicans’ attempts to use violence failed in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Easter Rising also failed, but arguably set the groundwork for Sinn Féin’s political victories in 1918, so if you count that as being of a piece with the Irish Republican Army’s actions from during the War Of Independence, I suppose you could claim that it was a partial success.
That said, I would argue that this partial success owed quite a lot to timing. If the Brits had really wanted a repeat of 1916 and the mass execution of the Dáil Éireann for treason, they could’ve made that happen (absent a few escaping stragglers), but the aftermath of WW1 made that sort of big military action politically unfeasible even if the current British Government weren’t sick of war themselves (and I suspect they were).
Compare and contrast that with the Anti-Treaty IRA and it’s PIRA/OIRA successors. They continued the fight with the explicit goal of kicking the UK out of those northern counties and re-uniting them with the by-then actually Independent (courtesy of WW2 and further Empire weariness) Irish Republic. That was the goal all the way from the Border Campaign up to the Good Friday Agreement. So, going into The Troubles with the Goal of a united Irish Republic with exactly 0 UK presence anywhere on the soil of Eire, the peace treaty ended with:
-The UK retaining political control over Northern Ireland.
-The Republic of Ireland amending its constitution to remove any claim of sovereignty over northern Ireland.
In return for:
-The right of citizens born in Northern Ireland to choose Irish or dual British-Irish citizenship instead of the default UK citizenship if they so choose.
As far as the large-scale geopolitical goals of the IRA, that is ALL they accomplished! I suppose you could point to the promise the promise that IF, some far off sunny day, a majority of both the Republic of Ireland & Northern Ireland want unification, the UK will step aside as a victory, but I think that’s less of a concession than a statement of a reality that’s been in place since at least the late 60s. Does anyone seriously think that if there had been genuine majority support in both Ireland and Northern Ireland for unification in, say, 1970 that the UK would’ve said “No, and if you try it we’ll consider your attempt to annex our territory an Unfriendly Act”? Really?
So, in the final analysis, I will grant that the IRA of 1918-21 was able to get partial success given: A) widespread popular support so strong that it constituted a majority of the elected government recognized by the citizens in its area of operations as legitimate, and B) an opponent who didn’t really want to fight that war at that time. Not exactly a resounding success.
It’s also only a “seed strategy” in the sense you mean if the aforementioned Easter Rising was not intended to succeed in winning independence on its own. To what extent was that the case? I think that the way the failure of the Easter Rising and the British Response laid the groundwork for the success in 1918 was more happy accident or at least fallback position than actual goal.
And AFAIK, every attempt to –deliberately- follow that sort of “incite heavy-handed response, ride popular swell of support to victory” strategy on the part of armed/militant groups has failed. I don’t believe that this was a deliberate strategy on the part of the Chinese or Cuban revolutionaries, for example.
Thanks – I appreciate the education.
Which success do you mean in the case of Communist China? Tiananmen?
To me that feels like a pretty good case of “we provoked an overblown reaction from the authorities, won the sympathy of the world, yet everyone is still so afraid of the authorities that nothing really came of it”?
I assumed he meant Mao, thus my quibble that I didn’t think that ‘seed’ strategy was applicable to the Chinese Civil War.
If he meant Tienanmen Square that makes even LESS sense, since as I understand it it led to DE-liberalization policies enforced so strongly that in many respects China is still not back to where it was immediately before those protests, and in the meantime has successfully produced generations which no longer view liberalization as nearly so desirable.
Yes, I meant Mao. As I said, my understanding of history is very unsophisticated, and my understanding of the Communist Chinese Revolution is basically (a) Mao said something about the people being the sea in which revolutionaries swim; (b) the US thought for a while that Chiang had a chance; and (c) then it turned out he didn’t.
How about the Palestinians? My perception is that violence against third parties (for example the hijacking wave of the 70s and 80s) was unsuccessful, but that violence against Israel and moderate Palestinians has left the more violent parties in control of the conflict. They haven’t won independence yet, but Hamas controls the West bank, nobody seems under pressure to hold free elections (possibly because the world community doesn’t want to see the results), and the parties most willing to use violence have control over a substantial portion of the aid flowing in.
Mao only survived because George Marshall basically forced Chiang not to wipe him out immediately after ww2 when he was best able to do so.
Edit: Tibor mentions radical Islamic terrorism below, so this is just more detail on the point that Osama bin Laden’s was a “seed strategy.”
Osama bin Laden was upfront (at least at some points, in certain contexts, here’s one link but you can find lots of corroboration pretty easily) that his was a seed strategy. He didn’t really care how many Americans died, and he didn’t expect to overthrow any particular Western government; he cared that Islam was divided and polluted, and wanted to unify it under a caliphate. His goal was using terrorism to provoke Western reprisal to in turn create a unified nation of Islam that was free of–and unified against–Western influence. The story of how his strategy played out (e.g. differences between ISIS and Al Qaeda) offers a lot of additional examples of ways this strategy can play out in practice.
At least in case if Islamic terrorism, I believe the goal is to provoke conflict. The Islamists want westerners to hate muslims which in turn makes muslims hate westerners and bring them to their ranks. The bigger the social barriers between muslim minorities and the majority in western societies, the fewer will assimilate into the larger society which is a positive thing from the perspective of the Islamists. Anything that makes those barriers higher helps.
But it is not inherent to muslims. With IRA for example, I think it was the same principle. For the IRA, the worst thing possible are unionist Irish. For the Islamists the worst thing are westernized muslims.
Small-scale lethal attacks seem to be a mixed bag.
Consider the US’s history of lynching. Wiki suggests that there were, on average, fewer than 10 attacks / year across the US. But those attacks had huge psychological and political impacts. We still talk about the practice today.
I think it’s small-scale non-lethal political violence that consistently backfires.
People are willing to punch their opponents because punching is satisfying. It’s not nearly as morally-taboo as killing. The penalties are costly enough to make it a good signal. But not so huge as to end your life.
This galvanizes the opposition. Before things turned punchy, the opposition just got the glow of feeling intellectually correct. After things turn punchy, the opposition gets to imagine themselves as correct and physically heroic.
I suspect this triggers a feedback loop. Villains throw a punch. Heroes decide that they’re willing to risk a punch to stand up for the cause. So they march. At that point, you’ve got a big crowd of Heroes.
As you add extra people, the risk to any individual drops. But each person in the crowd can still tell themselves that they’d be willing to take a punch, if it came to that.
The psychological benefits stay constant, but the expected costs fall as more people join. This means that more people are willing to join. And the crowd grows. So the expected costs fall.
An example of this is that antifa kept justifying punching Richard Spencer on the basis that we should stop Nazis before they gain power and commit genocide. The problem is that punching Richard Spencer didn’t stop him at all, as he was very much alive and still commited to his views, perhaps a little more than before.
In this spectrum, it’s the middle ground that’s shaky. They would be better off either doing nothing against him physically, or commiting to outright assassinating him. The justifications they were using for punching him, actually required them to kill him, which at least somewhat suggests they were doing it to feel good. Half-measures don’t work.
Agreed, which really just brings us back to the old saw of “Don’t fight unless you have to, but if you have to fight hold nothing back.”
It did however make it much harder from him to find venues willing to host his meetings.
@abc
In real life meetings are really window dressing, or morale boosting at best. All the important stuff to do with spreading a message takes place on the internet.
We’re all still operating in 20th Century mode, but nobody really needs a “street prescence” anymore to get people to agree with you.
Disagree, if you want to go beyond “get people to agree with you” to organize people to actually do something about it, you still need face to face.
Are the various rationalist meetups simply window dressing and morale boosting?
@abc
Do you really need to go beyond getting people to agree with you? If you have an army of people who will vote like you, that’s all that matters for peacetime democratic politics.
So why do rationalists organize meetups?
Seriously, stop playing stupid. There’s a reason political pressure organizations exist. Even tech-savy causes like the EFF need a physical presence and face to face interaction.
@abc
I had never heard of Richard Spencer until he got punched.
@abc
I feel like that’s more about enjoying each other’s company and the human need to be near other humans. Probably some weird cuddle pile stuff too.
This doesn’t really help information spread any more than it does online. Less so, because it’s the more primitive mode of propagandizing and has a lower transmission rate.
Can you explain why beyond people’s desire to get in close and personal? Now we have other methods that don’t expose you to being shut down or no platformed from a real life space. Why do you think the old methods are still useful politically? Saying that this and that organization believes that they are still necessary doesn’t explain anything, since I believe they are mistaken and operating on false premises.
Because 90% of politics is winning the support of people who aren’t nerds, and only nerds offer their support based on their evaluation of arguments and supporting facts. For everyone else, you need to convey not just arguments and facts but also e.g. confidence and a sense of community. Which is where that “weird cuddle pile stuff” and other silliness about people’s desire to get in close and personal comes in to play.
If the only platforms you are allowed or the only platforms safe enough for you to take are the ones suitable only for conveying mere facts and arguments, then you’ve been no-platformed, or close enough as makes no difference. If the other side still gets to hold their face-to-face meetings because that’s safe enough, nobody violently disrupts their meetings, then that is a gross inequity and something needs to be changed.
@John Schilling
It seems pretty easy to convey emotion without being there in person. Both Martin Luther King and Adolf Hitler’s performances are etched into my brain, despite never seeing them in person.
All the most famous speeches that have fired people up have reached the most people through communication technology (radio, tv, the internet). Emotion vs facts is just about messaging, and most political memes you’ll see flying by on twitter are heavy on emotion and light on facts. That’s simply a matter of appealing to people’s natures.
It seems to me like implying that a band can’t be famous today without having live concerts, which just isn’t true. How many people hear of bands by randomly stumbling into a concert, compared to those who hear it on the radio, tv, or internet? Political rallies like rock concerts are for the faithful. They are an experience, but that doesn’t make them the most effective medium for spreading the message itself and galvanizing people around it, fact wise or emotion wise. Once upon a time it did, but we have ways that are far far superior now.
The majority of people who support one political side over another, at this current time of relatively free assembly, do not go to political rallies. Most people are convinced over to a political side by transmitted messages (media, the political entertainment genre etc), or informal peer correspondance. In real life gatherings for political purposes come dead last, and are extremely overrated as necessities in my view.
People have gatherings because it’s fun and feels good, and perhaps because they still think they are as vital to success as they once were in an age before instant communication, and the ability to in effect, hold virtual rallies on the internet (think of the reach a lot of e-celebs have). As for nerds, they seem pretty much the same, because it was the nerds (rationalists in this case) having the quite literal cuddle piles in their gatherings.
Of course, morale and camaraderie are just as easily transmissable over the internet too (Spencer’s alt-right, frogtwitter, /pol/ etc are practically bursting with morale and cameraderie). Most of the downsides are on the individual not the collective level. A modern internet based hippy movement would have a harder time facilitating spontaneous um… “free love”. The alt-right, of course, does not have this problem to begin with.
pretty much
personally I’d prefer it if feel-good progressivism could keep it nonviolent though. Unfortunately they can’t seem to handle that, so low-level meaningless political violence it is.
This is my same justification for dismissing as a hysterical loon anyone who compares Trump to Hitler.
If you REALLY think he’s Hitler, you should be well in the process of developing a plan to assassinate him, even with high odds of the plan failing and ending in your own death.
Shouldn’t having such a degree of confidence in that view require a bit more historical evidence that assassination is a viable means of stopping dictatorships?
Where exactly on the map is the Glorious People’s Republic of SomeGuyKilledTheBadDudeAndEverythingIsNowOkistan?
Let’s say Hitler is responsible for 6 million deaths. If you think your plan has a 5% chance of successfully killing him, that’s 300K people saved via conditional probability. Now let’s say there’s only a 5% chance killing Hitler actually stops the holocaust, that’s still 15,000 lives. Approximately 5 9/11s.
You wouldn’t risk your life to stop 5 9/11s? What kind of selfish monster are you?
The Holocaust was some 11 million deaths.
The problem is that there’s very little information about the effects of assassination. Could killing Hitler have made matters worse, perhaps by having a successor who’s got better sense militarily?
If Black Earth is correct that the Holocaust was slowed by bureaucracies in conquered territories which weren’t completely subjugated, could assassinating Hitler have accelerated the Holocaust?
@nancy
Hitler only “got” to kill 11 million because he repeatedly insisted, against military advice, to a number of huge military gambles all of which (prior to the invasion of russia) succeeded beyond his expectations. Almost anyone else and you just don’t get ww2, and no ww2 means no holocaust.
@Nancy Lebovitz
Anecdotally, at least, the British shelved a mid-war assassination plan on the basis that killing Hitler might aid the German war effort.
What about trying for lethality and failing? Last week a left wing radical tried to assassinate a dozen or so Republican congressmen and it seems to have been forgotten already.
Do you think the conversation would be different today if he had succeeded? It’s very surreal. I don’t know what the climate would be like if we were watching a dozen state funerals this week.
To be honest I can’t believe what an awful shot the guy was. From what I understand he had about 10 minutes, against unarmed people, reloaded several times and managed to kill no one.
I mean, the sorts that tend to be anti-Republican are statistically likely to also be anti-gun, so I for one am not surprised.
I’m also not surprised it’s nearly forgotten already. What, are the talking heads that are anti-gun just supposed to up and lambast about how awful it is that someone went after Trump’s ilk and it should never have been possible in the first place?
Wouldn’t that be good outreach to Republicans on the issue? When left wing militias started forming, I noticed some rightists having second thoughts about that whole second amendment thing. This would require the hypothetical left wing article author to get over their own cognitive dissonance, however.
Yes, a radical left winger trying to kill a bunch of conservatives really makes me, a conservative, want to give up my guns.
Are you sure you weren’t just missing jokes about how “that’s it, we should have gun safety laws preventing the sale of firearms to Democrats?” Do you have links to any actual right wingers expressing this idea?
As far as outreach goes, I think you’ll see that none of these Republican lawmakers change their minds about gun rights. This should make it clear to Democrats that no, we’re really serious about gun rights. It doesn’t matter if people are shooting at us, we’re still not giving up our guns.
Can anyone link the “how many children have to die before you support gun control? All of them” meme?
I don’t think anybody questions the sincerity of the Republican attachment to guns. It’s the wisdom of said attachment that tends to get questioned. I don’t really expect the recent shooting to convince anybody pro-gun to change their stance, but it certainly doesn’t seem like a strong argument against gun control.
Qwints below, in partial refutation of the attacker being a bad shot, points out that he was under fire from three capital hill police, part of the victim’s security detail.
Some of us don’t have security details.
The argument against gun control would be that, absent legal restrictions, some of the spectators would have been armed and could have fired on the attacker.
Absent a security detail, who exactly is carrying a gun around at baseball practice? Are you planning on stealing home wearing a holster? Leaving your gun unattended on the bench while you’re at bat? Running back to the parking lot while under fire? There will always be times and places where it is not reasonable to have a gun to hand; if anybody really wants to shoot you, they can wait for one of those times. It seems obvious to me, an Ignorant Canadian who Hates Liberty, that the better answer is to minimize the chance that there’s a guy shooting at you in the first place.
As I said, I do not expect this event to convince gun enthusiasts of anything. Let me assure you that it is not going to convince gun skeptics, either.
No, because I think there is a sentencing increase if you attempt to steal home while armed.
By which you mean eliminate all guns from the continent?
If so, I don’t believe in the possibility for an efficacious attempt, and even if largely successful, deaths by stabbing are possible.
If not, then what?
@iain
That works in Canada, where people are generally civilized and peaceable.
I thought that too, before I moved here. But in the US, at least in certain parts of it, that is fundamentally unrealistic. The appropriate tone isn’t “having a gun on you is the best way to keep the peace”. It’s “Having a gun on you is the only way we have left to keep the peace”.
Seriously, however bad you think it is here, it’s at least ten times worse than that. At least, in some parts. Those people don’t have other options
If you’re armed, it’s robbing home.
Thanks, that’s the distinction I was looking for but not, apparently, on speaking terms with.
Scalise had a protective detail of three capitol police, Special Agents Crystal Griner, David Bailey and Henry Cabrera, that immediately returned fire.. Alexandria Police responded within three minutes of the first 911 call.
That’s interesting. When I was hearing recounts by congressmen who had taken refuge in the dugout they said it wasn’t until long after the shooting started (about 6 minutes) that they heard return fire. Then again, all after action reports are going to be fuzzy because of the whole “getting at shot at” thing tends to mess with your perceptions and memory.
The conversation would definitely be louder. The republicans would be more outraged. So, the reaction would be stronger.
I think that attack would still have backfired.
The key question if a normal person would feel like they’re taking on an unacceptable risk by expressing their political opinion.
In this case, the shooter is being portrayed as a lone nut. He was attacking a small, identifiable group. And he got killed.
Republican Congressmen might be less willing to make public appearances for a while. And I’d expect them to ask for increased security.
Generic conservative voters would be outraged that someone attacked their leaders. They might carry guns to their next political rally just in case. But I don’t think they’d feel personally threatened.
Perhaps you’re the victim of how the popular media portrays shootings. Although I’ve never been any kind of shootout myself, I’ve taken training classes in self defense firearms.
First, depending on the firearm being used, it’s far more difficult to score a hit than we’re made to believe. However, my understanding is that he was using a decent rifle, so this probably doesn’t apply. But for the record – if you’re using a handgun, then any distance greater than what you could conduct a conversation at – say, 10 yards max – is going to be difficult to hit.
Second, people are much more robust than portrayed. When shot, it’s extremely unlikely that the victim will just fall down dead or unconscious – for that you’d need to destroy the CNS. Indeed, more likely is that in the heat of the moment, they won’t even be aware that they were shot. If the shot were sufficient to knock them down – say, by breaking a leg bone, they’ll still be quite capable of fighting back, at least until shock sets in. A hit in the heart, aorta, or femoral artery, such that the person is likely to die, still affords some time for them to fight back.
Finally, barring the destroyed CNS or major blood vessel (where they bleed out immediately), my understanding of the state of medicine is that if you survive to get to a hospital in time, you’ll almost certainly make it through.
All in all, it’s much more difficult to kill someone with a firearm than portrayed on TV.
While what you say is absolutely true I also shared Honcho’s surprise that no one was killed. By all accounts Hodgkinson opened fire on a tightly clustered group of people at a range of less than 30 yards with a semi-automatic rifle*. He had the initiative and almost every mechanical advantage he could hope for. He should have killed at least one of them.
*I’ve heard conflicting accounts regarding specific make and model (as is typical) but everyone seems to agree on 7.62mm being the caliber.
Doesn’t the “tightly clustered” aspect provide better support for hits than kills? There were quite a few of the former.
It essentially puts you about where punching your target would put you. It comes at the cost of radicalizing the other team, while failing to take out the target. Worse, it demoralizes your own team, because both your moderates and your extremists hate it; the moderates for the attempted act itself, and the extremists for the embarassment of the failure to carry it out.
Would you count the current campaign of terror by Muslims in the west, particularly in Europe as small scale or large scale? It’s certainly been effective at getting aspects of sharia imposed on Europe.
Well, it was made up of individual small scale acts of political violence.
Wait, really? What and where exactly?
In Germany we recently passed a bill which banned civil servants from wearing Muslim headscarfs and there’s been a lot of discussion of extending that to all people in public.
Try publicly mocking Christianity, try publicly mocking Islam. Note the different reactions you get from law enforcement.
Examples?
What happened to the guy who left bacon in front of a mosque for starters.
Googling I find two UK cases and one case in the US (where the FBI of offering a reward, wth). And the cases I found weren’t about leaving bacon in front of the mosques but placing the bacon on doorknobs and throwing it inside the mosque and in one case shouting racial slurs.
Are those what you are referring to?
@abc
Or the Brit who quoted Winston Churchill’s thoughts on Islam in a speech.
Vandalism in the medium of pork products is not really what I’d consider “public mockery”. Tekhno’s example is more pertinent, assuming this thing I found on the Google is the correct case.
This atheist was convicting for insulting both Christianity and Islam. I don’t think the result would have been different if he’d only targeted Christians.
So can you point to examples of people prosecuted who only targeted Christians?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/mar/23/austria.arts
This for example. I’ve read the book, it’s really tame.
@abc
Here’s one in Germany from 2016. Like the Greek example, it is incredibly mild. Do you have any examples of people being successfully prosecuted for equally unobjectionable offences against Islam?
can’t speak to the punishment or so forth, but some twitter activity by what appears to be official police accounts is pretty chilling. if user abc wants to make something out of this discussion I would recommend going there – i’d certainly like to know more myself
I was more thinking of attacks outside of a larger campaign. I would include violence such as anti-police violence (Dorner, Johnson, etc.) or anti-conservative violence (Hodgkinson, Corkins) where the attacker clearly shares mainstream beliefs but where the attack is condemned by essentially everyone in the mainstream.
Define “condemned”. I’ve seen a lot of “condemnations” of Hodgkinson that amount to “his problem was that he acted alone and not as part of a larger effort”.
Let’s turn that around: If your social opponents were sincerely condemning Hodgkinson, would you be able to tell?
@abc
He didn’t coordinate meanness? (sorry Scott)
Is anybody listening to the mainstream, anymore? Trump didn’t get to where he is by mainstream media, and yes, of course the talking heads and established political left have to decry all violence (when not urging people to “fight in the streets” or holding up faux bloody severed heads of their political opponents), but where activists are actually having their conversations, on twitter, on reddit, on FaceBook, lots of people were…less condemnatory. What does it matter if Rachel Maddow says this is awful, but the kinds of people who might do this again are on reddit reading about how the Republicans have to expect this sort of response because they’re so evil?
Does the mainstream matter?
Okay, well, it really, really depends on how you define “small scale political violence” and what you imagine the perpetrator’s cause to be.
Here in Portland, there was an incident recently on the light rail where a man started yelling anti-muslim slurs at two women, and, when several passengers confronted him, he pulled out a knife and slashed their throats. Two of the men died.
CNN quotes him as saying, after the police caught him, “”Think I stab (expletives) in the neck for fun? Oh yeah, you’re right I do. I’m a patriot.” and “That’s what liberalism gets you,” and in court he ranted about freedom of speech.
All of the language is expressly political, right? But the guy sounds exactly like I expected him to after I heard that somebody had been stabbed on the train. Thankfully, I haven’t yet witnessed a murder, but I have seen various people throw these omni-directional tantrums, shouting slurs and expletives at anybody around them.
Here’s my take, from being on the receiving end of a few of them: I don’t think the people throwing them are really differentiating between the people around them. In some cases people are literally screaming at walls, but even when they manage to alight on people, I don’t think they see us as individuals. It’s a holistic attitude: Everybody on the max, or in the public park, or the sidewalk, is just an arm or an extension of the world that has wronged them. We’re all collectively guilty, so we’re all valid targets.
I guess I just needed to put that out there, but I think, in many cases of violence where the perpetrator claims a political justification, the idea of actually advancing any strategic or tactical goals, or, in fact, the idea of advancing any kind of material goals at all is the furthest thing from their minds.
I think there is an important distinction between terrorism and milder forms of political violence. A bunch of idiots having a riot so Charles Murray couldn’t speak at Middlebury was an ordeal for Murray and Stanger (and an embarrassment for the school), but not much like a terrorist attack.
Howso? To the extent that we define terrorism as “the use of violence to achieve political ends” it would seem to me that Murray/Milo related riots are EXACTLY that!
@Matt M
If that’s the definition of terrorism, all war is terrorism, so I think that’s an overbroad definition.
There’s no universally agreed-upon standard, but here’s the general form I’ve always found most convincing:
Terrorism is
1) the use of violence
2) against non-military targets (whether people or places/structures)
3) with the aim of maximizing fear, shock, suffering, or other negative emotions in the target population
4) in order to coerce that target population to take or to cease a specific political course of action.
All war and military operations share 1 and 4. Some actions by militaries, to include the US military, have met all 4 points and should be considered acts of terrorism by a contemporary audience. Not all actions by insurgents or avowed terrorist groups meet all 4 points and should NOT be considered terrorism in the technical sense (though they may well constitute perfidy or other violations of the laws of war).
And I feel like the Murray/Milo protests meet all of those criteria, with the exception of the word “maximizing” in point 3.
They certainly used violence against non-military targets to create fear and shock for the purposes of coercing a target population to cease a course of action they deemed to be political.
Protests that devolve into riots, where maybe a couple people go to the hospital and some property is damaged, aren’t actually all that great at spreading terror. Even Murray, the target of the riots, has continued giving speeches. (Other, better-run colleges have managed to host these without incident.) Lumping them together with politically motivated assassinations and terrorist attacks seems like it loses a lot of important detail–like using “WMD” to mean everything from nukes on ballistic missiles to mustard gas.
Yeah, and following 9/11, millions of people continued to work in office buildings in Manhattan, and other, better-run airlines offered flights that didn’t crash into buildings. What’s your point?
Good enough at spreading terror among e.g. university administrators, which may be a winning strategy.
I agree that no-platforming and especially rioting to shut down speakers you dislike is a very bad thing, and we ought to discourage it. I’m just saying it feels like it fits in a very different category than blowing up a car bomb in a crowded market, or even shooting an abortion doctor with a sniper rifle.
@albatross11
There’s the chilling effect, though. I am a right winger and I’m far less likely to attend any sort of right wing political event or speech because it’s not worth of the possibility of getting attacked. I’ll watch on YouTube instead.
I have started on ADHD medication (thanks to those who advised), and want to give a speech about Better Living Through Chemistry, but a doctor advised me to keep it secret because of risks of medication theft. Any advice?
These medications are common enough so that their blackmarket prices are probably not high enough to justify such worries. I described my taking Adderall in a book I authored.
My use of ADD medication recently became eligible to vote, and I haven’t had any problems in all that time. When I was in college, I had a small safe I kept it in (the kind sold for keeping your wallet in while playing sports or such), enough to deter casual theft. Now, I live on my own, and I keep it in a drawer. When I was still living with my parents, the meds lived in a basket, which I think went into the cabinet when we had company. Never had a problem with that, either. I’d strongly urge you to speak (maybe somebody else will benefit), and just make sure they’re not really easy to steal.
I’ve been using ADHD meds on-and-off for something like 20 years (Modafinil for most of the past year, and Adderall or Ritalin previously), and I’ve never had a problem with theft. The only precautions I’ve taken have been to avoid leaving the prescription bottle or pharmacy bags unattended in plain public view.
I suspect doctors are trained to pushed patients to take precautions against theft of abusable medications, partly because some meds (particularly the higher grades of opioids/opiates) are genuinely a theft risk, and partly because falsely claiming your meds were stolen is apparently a common enough drug-seeking tactic that many doctors are inclined guard against it by refusing to write a new prescription to replace stolen meds unless the patient has filed a police report.
I don’t worry about it. My car, computers, guitar or TV would all net a burglar more money than a month of ADHD medication.
I keep a weekly pill organizer in my bag. But that’s mostly so I don’t have to carry around multiple bottles of vitamins. If someone stole that, I suppose I’d be mildly inconvenienced?
I don’t think medication theft is a big deal, but your car/computers/TV are all much harder to steal with a much higher likelihood of getting caught.
What would life be like if it was like The Sims? In the game, you control your little character in every way. If you leave him alone he’ll go on autopilot, but once you give him commands, he’ll almost always carry them out. The exceptions are something like him starving or needing to use the bathroom, in which case everything gets cancelled and they become a priority. Other than it’s pretty easy to play with your character. You don’t worry about him wasting his time watching tv or getting in to trouble because he does what you tell him.
So imagine that life was like that. Instead of procrastinating, it would be easy to do the work you need to do. Instead of binge watching Netflix, you read a book. Of course, you don’t have to be doing something productive 100% of the time but if you wanted to, it would be trivially easy to override the part of your brain that doesn’t want to. What would that world look like? It sounds pretty good, is there any way it could be worse?
Well, the fact that the controller and the controlled are separate entities – and the controller may not have your best interests at mind – might lead to some less than perfect outcomes.
In this scenario, you’re still the same person. I’m not setting up a scenario where you can kill your “character” and go back to some other world. If your body dies, you die. It’s more like the mind is not as beholden to your base instincts.
Ah, so sort of as if the venerable Ghost in the Machine psychological dogma were true?
Basically, yes.
So what you really want is to be able to switch off the desire to go fuck around when you feel you should be working?
I kinda wish there was a way to switch off and have my body run through a half-hour to an hour of exercise while I sleep or something. Because it’s not the effort that bothers me so much as the boredom.
Podcasts are the best approximation to that I’ve found, although sensory data does still attempt to intrude.
I’m not sure you’re modeling the Sims correctly. More “trivial” needs like Entertainment and Social Interaction still exist, so to a certain extent, you do HAVE to include “Netflix time” for your character. And if I remember right, the character creation system is such that everyone has different needs, or needs they value more than others. So you can create an anti-social character who rarely needs human interaction and can get all they need from a couple hours of online gaming… or you can create someone who doesn’t give a lick about productive tasks and will only be happy interacting with their neighbors, in person, all day long.
After reading about someone who created a “painting goblin” I tried out a similar strategy using a family with 1 adult and 4 children. The children were walled into a basement with 4 compartments and no stairs. They each had the basic necessities and painting equipment. They also got personality traits that allowed them to remain sane in the basement.
They paint constantly, quickly become very skilled and you make a fortune from the paintings and can upgrade everything to top tiers. They can also be kept happy by putting the best masterworks on their own walls.
Interestingly they were way way more successful than any of my previous families in pretty much all ways, the kids were all happy almost all the time with massive numbers of life achievements.
The adult used the free money to do whatever she wanted which included chemistry and the money supply funded her creating of youth potions to keep herself young.
I then had her buy lots of things which yield easy money and saved up a lot until I could let the kids out of the basement.
So now they all get to say young eternally in a lavish mansion filled with their own masterworks.
People might use their newfound abilities to pursue evil goals. Productivity and hard work are only good if what’s being produced/worked for is good. Isaac Newton and Norman Borlaug were conscientious workers, but so were Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.
I wonder how many potential evildoers were stymied by the simple fact that they couldn’t be arsed to actually go out and do the evil.
Don’t forget the ones who had the willpower but were too thick to pull it off. I’m thinking of people like the shoe bomber here.
Remember the character Clem from Buffy, the affable, low-key demon they hung out with for a while? I remember one of the writers mentioned online at one point that Clem actually was evil, in theory.
It’s just that he liked hanging out and eating snack food (and not getting killed by Buffy) much more than he actually cared about inflicting evil, so he took the path of least resistance. The idea being that for a lot of demons, “Slaying the innocent and destroying the world” is around the same level on the priority list as “Feeding the poor and ending world suffering” is for most humans.
The limited available commands – and the occasional cat burglar coming in to steal your refrigerator – might not work out as well as you might hope.
Something Awful tried this experience with each of The Sims. Here are my two favorite articles on the results: http://www.somethingawful.com/feature-articles/week-life-ithe/1/ (Sims 1), and http://www.somethingawful.com/feature-articles/week-life-ithe-2/1/ (Sims 2). They’re hilarious.
This is basically the mental construct I have to use to get anything done. So for me: no. I don’t see many ways it could be worse, but since that was the question (instead of: “Let’s enthuse about how awesome this would be”), I’ll give it a try:
I can only imagine that the risk would be similar to pain insensitivity. On the face of it: awesome–no pain! On its actual implementation, it can lead the pain-insensitive person to do unwitting harm to themselves. Perhaps operating in such a mode, the focus-insensitive person would be able to so focus on a desired task as to unwittingly let other things slip. I know that this happens in “The Sims” from time to time. I’ll be so focused on a Sim’s particular goal that I let under-represented (in the UI) concerns slide. For instance, I will be 3 days into binge-writing a book only allowing the requisite breaks to refill the meters, that I will be surprised when a batch of friends alert me that we are no longer friends, because I’ve been inadvertently ignoring them.
That’s a good point. I can imagine a society where people try so hard to have accomplishments that they end up with no friends to impress.
I thought people might like to know what this comment section tends to talk about. I mean – we pretty much already know but I thought it’d be nice to have some numbers.
I do a bit of text mining in my job so it was fairly quick to whip something up. I scraped all ssc comments (there are about 343,000 of them, turns out), compared the word counts to an English corpus and then calculated each word’s statistical overrepresentation using a method based on the one outlined here.
I then ranked them by significance. Below are the top 100 words, another 500 are available on this pastebin.
Key: word, then “burst value” (the exponent of something similar to a p-value), and the total frequency.
(Sorry I couldn’t make it look prettier.)
————————————————
trump -81478.36 17990
argument -56316.02 19694
mean -37413.50 23523
wrong -36679.03 20620
moral -36260.09 10500
agree -30571.30 15754
scott -23600.73 13409
arguments -23247.78 8529
right-wing -22862.00 2245
theory -22293.95 10697
guess -21380.51 9381
left-wing -20603.80 2042
ssc -19789.77 4194
long-term -19685.51 1959
whatever -19331.81 11089
humans -18658.22 8650
libertarian -18210.08 4346
disagree -18102.60 5794
obviously -17960.72 9379
rationalist -17465.59 2287
evil -17420.19 6561
obvious -16986.63 9278
weird -16045.57 5383
myself -15402.36 7473
utilitarianism -15229.51 1888
jews -15106.06 4079
god -15100.77 8987
sex -14645.81 9727
thread -14322.23 5393
sjws -14292.01 1464
guy -14257.41 7953
morality -14030.34 3302
correct -14002.32 8210
stupid -13712.49 4911
deiseach -13702.18 1409
racist -13635.74 4147
rational -13426.87 4816
religion -13362.40 5259
libertarians -12942.95 2882
hillary -12489.88 3819
rationalists -12401.60 1287
gender -12266.68 5946
exist -11961.66 7157
outgroup -11766.15 1227
racism -11755.04 3407
assume -11565.37 6962
onyomi -11512.79 1203
feminists -11361.23 2983
sounds -11357.37 6543
liberal -11251.00 5977
politics -11040.28 7279
rationality -10501.54 2239
religious -10420.92 5246
literally -10294.66 5126
gay -10285.37 5569
assuming -10249.53 5220
christianity -10007.34 2616
communism -9956.58 2415
slavery -9886.65 2703
feminism -9843.30 2823
beliefs -9793.47 5384
argue -9764.08 6018
feminist -9665.52 2677
explanation -9661.80 4684
terrible -9661.76 4275
nobody -9584.58 5392
heelbearcub -9535.09 1014
morally -9505.71 2385
reasoning -9493.99 3305
fairly -9397.24 6141
hypothesis -9317.60 3206
bias -9165.31 4456
shit -9143.98 2416
moloch -9113.93 974
ideology -9073.84 2813
clinton -8879.26 4444
alt-right -8794.02 943
sjw -8789.40 1636
bunch -8722.58 4519
liberals -8619.46 3056
hate -8454.84 4750
explicitly -8430.47 3397
edit -8396.76 4213
personally -8124.45 4748
arguing -8072.79 4305
totally -7961.54 4901
moldbug -7860.93 852
guns -7683.95 3957
probability -7671.15 4624
math -7647.82 4234
truth -7572.44 4999
hell -7514.83 4227
impression -7472.23 3809
opposite -7354.36 4323
welfare -7257.57 4148
hitler -7239.74 2054
iirc -7233.47 1226
leftists -7154.07 1566
random -7085.99 4277
existence -7042.38 3925
————————————————
It surprised me a little that “trump” is on top, but I suppose it’s because the corpus hasn’t been updated since the word became a lot more common in general. Otherwise the list looks pretty much as I expected. Thoughts?
Wow, Daisy is sure popular.
“Terrible” seems to me to be something that Scott in particular says a lot. So it’s interesting that it’s also common in the comments even though he doesn’t comment so much.
Wait, what? That’s the first time I read that word here (I think).
Is that an ex-user or another obscure euphemism of the past?
Nah, it’s the proprietor of this blog.
I think I read somewhere that it turns out to be a sled.
You brightened my day.
I’m glad!
For that matter, I thought that word was banned, which was why people kept calling him Voldemort.
“Moldbug” isn’t banned, because check it out. The name of his political philosophy is. But being nerdy geeks, if we’re going to call his followers “Death Eaters” we’re going to go all the way with it.
deiseach -13702.18 1409
*looking for a hole to hide in*
This is definitely the sign of someone who doesn’t know when to shut the hell up 🙂
jews
god
sex
thread
sjws
guy
morality
correct
stupid
deiseach
ah the company you keep
Good thing correlation doesn’t equal causation.
Now I have to go looking for secret bible codes in the SSC wordcloud? People, come on!
Isn’t this what automation is supposed to do for us? 😀
This also gives us agree scott arguments, obviously rationalist evil, assumption onyomi feminists, nobody heelbearcub morally, and assuming aapje nornagest
I clearly assume too much.
“Battleships” is only 536. We must do better, my
minionsreaders!On a technical note, I’m surprised that a lot of the usernames don’t rate higher. Do you know why this is?
Most people don’t refer to others usernames until the subthread goes deep enough. At that point “SJW” has been said three times.
Yes, but my understanding is that the frequencies are based on the difference between our use of the word and the frequency in general use. Some of the usernames shouldn’t appear in general use at all.
Plausible, but what constitutes “general use”? I see “SJW” in the comments sections on a few blogs I read, but never in books, magazines, or newspapers.
I’m not sure what it’s comparing to. In this day and age, ‘General Use’ might come from Google N-Grams or something of that nature, which is processing enough data to get a representative sample of everything.
I’m not sure where the corpus comes from, tbh, it’s a standard one I use at work.
Don’t read too much into the usernames, the method uses a workaround when the word isn’t found in the corpus – it would normally have an undefined significance level.
Maybe a word cloud would be more interesting, give me a sec…
Back again! Here is a wordcloud with the 1000 most overrepresented words, grouped into lumps based on occuring in the same contexts. I think it’s kinda neat, even if I wouldn’t overinterpret it – the semantic network I made it from was very messy. But the dense clusters are legit.
I like how you’ve got a little cluster of swear words and then the word “pretend”.
Heh, so now we have Deiseach clustered with idiots, jerks, self serving, stupidity and progressives. And all very close to Trump. I think you need to start worrying, Deiseach.
That aside I kinda like how under the big long-term and short-term is a tiny yay begging for attention.
My impression is that SJW is not a whole lot more clear a description than All Trite. SJW might mean masked antifas busting heads at a political rally, or a clickbait article about how white women wearing cornrows is problematic, or someone who marches for LGBT rights. The fuzziness of the definition is part of the fun, since you can lump all three groups together and demand that the clickbait-writer answer for the head-bashing antifas.
“no-one” is off by itself.
I think mean is confounded by the fact that it’s a mathematical term, moral descriptor, and has a meaning of… um, meaning as well.
Ah, then, what’s the median use of mean?
The meanings of mean are incommensurable. So median has no meaning for mean.
There are multiple examples of such things. I was noticing that this is case insensitive, so “liberal” and “Liberal” get counted the same. But in my mind, at least, they’re rather different, with the capitalized variety being closer to modern Democrat ideas, and lowercase being more like enlightenment ideas (and, as I’m given to understand, still the common definition in Europe).
Is “onyomi” a poster? Otherwise this feels like an unusual focus on the minutiae of written Japanese.
Yes.
How do people around here manage your “knowledge”, i.e. stuff you read (papers, blogs, (e)books), statistics you might want to reference in the future, your thoughts about said stuff, etc.
Used to have a text file, a HTML file, etc. Now I just use GoodReads.
I have a Dropbox folder called “hate facts repo”.
IRC logs? I’m not a fan of consistency with myself.
I’ve tried to start using Anki more systematically for discrete facts I learn, but I have not been able to consistently sit down and write Anki notes for things I’ve come across in the last [time period]. One obstacle is that I am I am inefficient at writing notes and any time I spend an hour at it I am disgusted with my low output.
To piggyback on MrBubu, I’m curious if others use spaced-repetition and have found ways to be more efficient or otherwise get over the hurdle?
I use a desktop wiki application called ConnectedText. But I’m probably going to migrate to a web-based wiki at some point…the benefits of the desktop app are not enough to outweigh the lack of cross-platform ability. Hosting your own private instance of mediawiki is really simple if you have some basic computer literacy.
Combination of bookmarking “aha! definitely want to remember this site!” on the computer and “I’m nearly sure I vaguely remember reading something along the lines somewhere” then desperate Googling when I need to find the source to back up a point I’m trying to make.
I used to use Evernote for this, but since they changed their rules for free usage so that I couldn’t run it on all my devices without paying, I’ve moved it to OneNote (which I find doesn’t work as well).
I just keep a text file on my email account, listing interesting articles in one note, specific quotes in another. I’m not sure it’s a great method, but it’s about as good as I can do with my limited technological literacy.
Folder structure, for stuff with a sequence with numbered subfolders (iterated if necessary).
A loooot of bookmark files lying around.
And stuff of a single topic or theme or project that has many files and needs good searchability (e.g. huge texts or manuals broken into single pages or chapters) goes into a Devonthink Pro Office database (Mac only, but with any cheap old mac as server to run on it can be used from any web-capable OS).
I have a blog (link at my name), and I use it almost exclusively for knowledge management purposes. It has evolved over time as content has been added, as any such blog probably should, and it is much more ‘mature’ now than it was when I started out. If you want an example of what you might end up with if you decide to use a blog as a knowledge management tool and then stick to it for half a decade or more, my blog is probably a good illustration/example of where you might end up (I’ve blogged for a decade but I did not emphasize knowledge management particularly during the first years, so those years are irrelevant in this context).
Aside from the blog I also use a goodreads account to keep track of the books I read. In the past my quote collection was limited to my blog, but recently I also exported a substantial proportion of my somewhat large (1500+ quotes) quote collection to goodreads.
Bookmarks are used for the short term; I bookmark stuff (e.g. lectures, quotes, studies…) I might decide to blog later on.
I don’t find my own thoughts on various topics particularly interesting and I try, though occasionally unsuccessfully, to avoid sharing them on my blog except to the extent that they quite directly relate to the content (books, lectures) I cover.
I would note that although my blog is public and people can read it if they know the url, if you’d prefer a system where other people can not read along that is also very easy (just as easy) to set up.
Whenever I learn something, figure out when it would be useful, then add it to the appropriate page in my wiki.
Why don’t fighter pilots spend much of their time playing video games?
Military pilots assigned to combat aircraft don’t get a lot of stick time, because operating modern combat aircraft is very expensive. In well-funded militaries, they typically get single-digit hours per month, which seems more like a hobby than a profession. Even good simulators are too expensive to use routinely.
But do the simulations actually have to be really good to be useful? There is an entire segment of the video game industry devoted to flight simulators. You’d think the military could take the best of them, tune them for realism rather than fun, spend some money on semi-realistic flight controls, and for maybe $20K each have PC-based simulators that are close enough to be useful. And at that price, you could get one for every pilot and have them spend virtually all their time practicing on it.
But for some reason this isn’t done. What am I missing?
What’s your basis for believing that’s not done?
Googling ‘military training video games’ and ‘pilot training video games’ bring back lots of interesting hits
My personal experience playing football suggests an underrated amount of ad hoc training happens through video games
The ex military guys I know also seem to play a ton of video games
If it were done, I would expect the companies producing the games to advertise the fact prominently. Imagine being able to advertise your game as so realistic, it’s used by the USAF. It would be pure crack for armchair fighter jocks. But I haven’t heard of anything like that.
Might be that they are afraid of a negative spin on it.
In my home country every now and then the newspapers pick on video games and the whole “killing simulator for soldiers”-thing comes up sometimes.
I suspect there’s a fair amount of resistance on the military side.
While I was in grad school, I bid on several small-business military contracts (SBIR and STTR) to try to develop my thesis (applying AI search and optimization techniques to missile guidance and spaceship navigation) into a software business. These types of contracts required the technology developed under the contract to be commercializable, and my commercialization strategy was video games (using a modified version of the guidance algorithms for game AI in a realistic spaceship dogfighting game).
Each project had proposals judged by a group of 2-5 people within the military, each of whom rated the project independently. I saw a pretty consistent pattern where most of the reviewers liked my proposals, but at least one of the reviewers on each project saw the video game connection as an indication I wasn’t taking the subject seriously, and that was enough to drop my average score below the threshold for funding.
Being super-realistic isn’t always a selling point, since games often compromise realism in the name of fun. Call of Duty sells a lot more units than Arma.
While the USAF hasn’t done so, the US Army has released a couple games. They’ve done alright; I’ve played America’s Army and thought it was a pretty good military shooter, and VBS1/2 are built on the ArmA engine. But they’re definitely niche rather than mass-market things.
@johan_larson
I think that the real issue is that air forces don’t actually want to optimize for maximally capable pilots. If you are an Air Force general, what value does it bring to you personally? Maximally capable pilots are not going to perform noticeably better for the kind of missions being flown today. So you will just be seen as the general who needs much more money to do the same thing slightly better (see the bottom of this comment).
Probably, because they want the pilots to actually do the right thing in stress situations, not go looking for the F1-key, when the actual aircraft is not using a keyboard. You don’t want the simulator to have a feature that is not in the airplane or one that is in the plane, but not the simulator. As planes get upgrades, there are many variants of the same plane and the simulator has to match that.
A combat plane gives important feedback physically, not just through instruments. So if you just use a static simulator, it will feel very different for the pilot.
The F35 simulator will use the same software as the plane, which also means the same bugs & that you even get to debug the plane by using the simulator.
I’ve seen this fallacy before: What if we take something cheap and then add all the stuff that makes it actually expensive? It would still be pretty cheap, right? Hmmm…no.
No, because of Queep. Pilots spend a lot of time doing non-pilot tasks, because:
– A lot of time is spent on planning and debriefing, probably for good reasons.
– Once pilots are above a certain level of competence, the rest of their time can then be used to make supporting personnel obsolete, to make lattes for their boss, etc.
This is really important. What skills are you learning in a PC-based cheap simulator? The onboard systems don’t work the same way (the operations manual for a certain common narrowbody airliner runs 1800 pages, and it has no EW system and a very simple radar), you’re using a keyboard instead of the real control layout, and you can’t turn your head to look around. There might be some value in early training as a means of teaching tactics, but once you’re operational, the most important thing is to make sure that when you need to turn on the jammers, you turn them on in the right mode immediately, instead of trying to find the J key on your keyboard. Training on tactics can take place at the same time you’re training for systems proficiency, and the amount of time involved is close enough that you don’t need to take the risk of mistraining to get more tactics.
I feel like teaching flight procedures would be possible. For instance, this is how you start up an A-10 Warthog in DCS World. I feel like even if the sim doesn’t build the muscle memory for the controls, it’ll at least teach you which switches to flip and when.
(DCS World, admittedly, is not a “cheap” simulator. There’s a reason they sell each individual plane for the price of a full game.)
That is training you build with a checklist in a classroom. That’s even cheaper than DCS World.
There may be some room for computer-aided systems operation training, but computer-aided systems operation training is very much not the same thing as a video game.
Bean is correct.
The flight simulator/trainers I have seen are are terrifically expensive. You have essentially a closed pressurized simulated cockpit mounted on hydraulics and gimbals and gyros, an exact physical rep of the instrumentation panels, and an (also exact) out-of-the-window-view and heads up display for whatever plane you are training on.
Pilot need to develop muscle memory for stalls, spins, banks etc for whatever specific fighter they are training on.
Pressurization? I hadn’t heard of that one, and a search (I have good aerospace library access through work) turns up no mentions of pressurizing the actual simulator. There was some comments on pressurizing things like G-suits to simulate the problems those can cause, though.
I did find some interesting stuff involving the use of G-suits and ‘motion chairs’ which attempt to simulate motion without actually moving the simulator.
Also, I thought that most military simulator work was systems-oriented, not acrobatics. But I’m mostly a naval guy, at least on the military side.
As VR takes hold in commercial markets V-suits will be able to able to provide a lot of the same functionality. Again, I can talk about my personal experience only, and it may be a couple of years out of date.
A huge amount of military tech flows into the commercial markets and gets massively cheaper, really quickly.
This is going to happen with VR.
Its a very symbiotic relationship.
I can’t speak for every combat pilot or even most of them, but I have a relative who’s one, and several years ago when I lived closer to him he played a ton of Microsoft Flight Simulator. (He probably plays less now, because kids. But I’ve seen him maybe twice in the last year, so I don’t really know.)
He said it was actually harder than flying a real plane, because he didn’t get the same kind of seat-of-the-pants feedback.
This product category exists, they’re called “flight training devices” or FTDs (because to be a “simulator” you need full motion, according to the FAA). There’s a few lesser categories, too, separated mostly by how accurate their controls and instruments are. These are used in commercial flight schools, usually to substitute as many actual flight hours as possible so as to reduce costs.
Similarly, Lockheed bought the rights to adapt the commercial version of FSX (ESP, I think), and they produce their own software called “Prepar3D,” which I think mostly hits the same sort of market – some FTD manufacturers, flight schools, hobbyists, etc. (The license says it can’t be sold for “personal entertainment”, presumably as part of their own license from Microsoft, but I think that’s mostly ignored).
I know that doesn’t really answer your question, but your suggestions aren’t totally off-base, it just seems they fit more in the cost-saving commercial market.
I Twittered this at Scott and posted it on the Subreddit, but I’d be interested in feedback here too.
I wrote an article about an initiative in the U.S. to give hospitals a quality rating. This is a laudable goal, but the agency in charge (CMS) seems to have made some bad mistakes in executing it.
For example, the model they use is quite opaque, and there are multiple programming issues in implementing it.
As someone in the Subreddit pointed out, this may be a glimpse into a bad future where buggy computer programs issue inscrutable grades that no one understands, but people have to accept them.
Good analysis. This all reminds me of some conversations I had with a kidney transplant surgeon. I had assumed that you would try to go to the best hospital possible, but she said no, “healthcare tourism” is discouraged. If you go get the fancy procedure done two states away at the Mayo Clinic and then there’s a complication months later, the people at your local hospital won’t know what to do about it since they don’t even know what the procedure you had really was. And then, of course, it’s hard to even know which hospitals really are going to give you better treatment. As a nerd, it’s always sobering to hear anything pointing out that even with pretty comprehensive data, it’s ill-advised to make a real cost-benefit analysis.
At least if the metric is inscrutable it makes it harder to overfit to it. Tim Harford in ‘Messy’ writes about UK hospitals gaming the system to get good grades while throwing patients under the bus. He advocates randomising the metric from year to year and keeping it secret. Everyone has a broad idea of what it means to be a good hospital and having a static set of measures is just inviting trouble – Goodheart style. He compares this to school exams where the general topic is known in advance but the specific questions are not.
Interesting – I haven’t read ‘Messy’ yet, but I really enjoyed ‘The Undercover Economist’ and especially ‘The Logic of Life.’
I think it could be good to keep a grading scale close to the vest, but at least it should be directionally consistent! In the system I describe some hospitals would have their ratings improved by doing worse on some measures.
How to design a grading scale? It would be cool to train some model to predict future success or failure of medical operations.
(Incidentally, I was assigning grades in a class on a totally clear-cut quantitative subject last week, and I wish I had a better idea of what makes a good grading system…)
Of interest to me this week was a story about climate and the environment affecting politics. Every 48 or so years, the bamboo plant flowers en masse in parts of India, Myanmar and China. This results in loads (millions) of rats running amok and causing mass famine, known as the Mautam. In 1958, there was a Mautam in the Indian state of Mizoram, which led to death and disease. It also led to the creation of an indigenous group predicated on relief, which later morphed into a full fledged political party and led an armed rebellion against India for 30? 40? years. Incredible.
That is like something from a freaky sci-fi short story.
Plants (and I presume animals) with large numbers of genetically identical individual members do weird things.
Alternately, it’s a strategy to produce so many offspring in a single year that predators can’t eat all of them, ala mast years in oak trees.
I saw a mayfly explosion on the Mississippi one year. One day, millions of flies everywhere. The next day, flies all dead on the ground, covering everything. Sparrows and robins sitting everywhere with bulging stomachs.
I’d like to discuss our conceptual model of racism in America. This is somewhat inspired by conversation in the most recent Links thread, but also something that’s been on my mind for a bit.
Typically, we seem to model racism as “extreme xenophobia,” such that we assume people hate others primarily for being different, and make up various reasons to validate their hatred. Under this model, hatred should directly correspond with how different someone looks, acts, behaves, etc.
And while that may have been true in America for a long time, I’m not so certain it is anymore. Consider the common exchange that goes something like this.
Blue: Racism in America is a huge problem! Look how much poorer blacks are than whites!
Red: Oh really? If blacks are poor due to racism, then why are recent African immigrants from Nigeria on par with whites in income? If we were racist, you’d expect them to have the toughest time of anyone!
I want to emphasize the italicized portion, because that’s what I’m disputing. My theory is that modern racism in America is based not primarily on “he looks different” but rather it is a very specific disdain for stereotypes commonly associated with American black culture, which is different from African culture. Therefore, an American racist encounters a recent immigrant from Africa… someone with an odd-sounding African name perhaps, and who speaks with a French or English accent, someone who is (likely) working or studying, this person stands apart. They are clearly not a member of American black culture, which is the thing that is hated more than “dark skin” is. Even if you’re a strong believer in *thing that shall not be mentioned*, you likely must concede (as the blue person would likely point out!) that immigration to America self-selects the “best of the best” among Nigerians, and that the ones who make it here are likely smarter, more hardworking, more law-abiding, than average.
If my theory is true, light-skinned American blacks could be facing large amounts of oppression, even while dark-skinned recent immigrants do very well.
This is just a theoretical consideration, right? Without assertion that any amount of oppression actually exists?
Yes. Given my tribal leanings, you can infer what I actually believe all you’d like 🙂
Right, thanks. Would be somewhat impolite to roll into a debate on the possible properties of phlogiston and shout that it doesn’t exist. 😉
What predictions does this model give us that don’t also fall out of selective migration or better culture for the immigrant blacks?
Here’s one: Consider second generation African and Carribean immigrants. Your model suggests thst the ones who came here young enough to pick up an American accent (black or generic American) will do *worse* than the kids who came here late enough to retain their accent. The ones with the foreign accent will continue being mentally slotted into the immigrant black category and benefit from ot.
Basically yes. Although accent is just ONE example of things that may signal “I am an immigrant, not an ‘African-American'”
Another prediction: the effect youre describing will work for high achieving immigrants (say a Nigerian coming to the US for his PhD) and for more normal immigrants (say, refugees or people admitted on a family visa). If you could figure out how to look at those groups’ outcomes separately, you might learn something. Though this will be confunded by the difference in abilities–we expect the guy smart enough to get a PhD to do better in life whether or not he’s on the receiving end of a lot of discrimination.
Another prediction might be that signals from African Americans of *not* being part of the dysfunctional culture get ignored.
That wouldn’t rule out the possibility that the main factor is “better culture for the immigrant blacks,” with immigrants who arrive younger picking up the American culture.
Sounds to me like how this type of hatred actually works is not based strictly on the amount of differences, but largely on proximity, relevance, bad blood and whatnot. Consider that during the Reformation Wars, local heretics were given greater priority for extermination than the Saracens, threatening though they were as well. I mean, France allied with the Ottomans at one point, against fellow Christians!
Sometimes, the differences between the groups are astoundingly small, but do not diminish the hatred both feel towards each other. Under the circumstances you give, American blacks would be the familiar enemy, and recent immigrants from Africa would – while superficially similar – not elicit the kind of response. After all, they just came here, the oppressors have no quarrel with them.
Well, sure, traitors before enemies. In Dante’s Inferno the lowest circle of hell was reserved for betrayers.
“Traitor” is a different model than “people with small differences who live near us.”
Interesting. I wonder if this is another example of Scott’s in-group/out-group/far-group schema. African-Americans would be a out-group to the Red Tribe whereas African-Africans would be a far-group.
However, sometimes there is sustained contact in decent sized numbers. It’s one thing for someone to come across one Haitian doctor, but what about in e.g. a small-ish city in Iowa that has a meat packing plant largely staffed by Somali immigrants? In those cases there’s certainly some generalized xenophobia and anti-Muslim sentiment. But is there also some black-skin specific friction that is different than it would be if they were Rohingya instead of Somali?
In this case I would probably fall back on xenophobia, sure. I think if the meat packing plant was staffed largely by non-English-speaking, non-assimilating white-skinned Russians (for example), there would still be hostility towards them from the local populace (see: “The Irish were discriminated against too!” debates)
Or for a more contemporary (albeit foreign) example, the widespread anti-Polish sentiment in modern Britain.
I’m curious if your example was a direct reference to this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postville:_A_Clash_of_Cultures_in_Heartland_America (with the Hasidic Jews replaced with Somali immigrants).
Also how do I make a text hyperlink?
No, from an article or articles I recall but I’m not going to try to dig up, talking about Somali immigrants working in meat factories in the Midwest (probably from the last year or two). I wasn’t aware of that book or story. Looks interesting.
LESS_THANa href=”https://YOUR_URL”>YOUR LINK TEXT LESS_THAN/a>
Swap the two LESS_THANs for the appropriate character.
As well as writing the HTML, you can also select the text you want to link and click the link button.
Hmm, I don’t appear to have one of those. Just a basic reply box. I don’t see any sort of “advanced features” type button either. I wonder what’s going on.
African-Americans are a fargroup to much of Red Tribe. There’s a huge white expanse in the US, where there just aren’t significant numbers of black people. Obviously not in the old South, but elsewhere.
I think they’re a far group to a lot of blue tribe, too.
I grew up in an extremely liberal part of Oregon where there were virtually zero black people. I used to joke that most of the population was desperately waiting for a black person to move in so that everyone could show them how tolerant a community we were.
A more cynical interpretation was something like “It’s easy to love minorities when your community is 99% white”
and that 1% intentionally sought out and is desperately trying to fit into that community.
And were basically all college professors, or college athletes <_<
Let’s talk about Toronto.
Toronto is arguably the most diverse city in the world. There’s a pretty good chance that, since the last census, the percentage of non-white Torontonians crossed the 50% mark. There’s a little bit of everybody: 12% south Asian, 11% Chinese, 8.5% black, 3% Arab, 3% Latin American, and so on. Despite this diversity, support for multiculturalism in Toronto remains consistently high, even relative to the already high levels across Canada. You might think that this is just minority groups pushing up the numbers against the opposition of the embattled white minority, but I can assure you that this is not the case. As a proxy for multiculturalism as generalized tolerance vs multiculturalism as self-interest, I point to my second link, showing particularly high support in Toronto for “Aboriginal Peoples as a very important national symbol”, despite the relatively low First Nations population in Toronto itself.
The cynical interpretation might be: “It’s easy to see minorities as scary others when your community is 99% white”.
@Iain,
In other words, NAMs only make up one eighth of the population of Toronto. In NYC where I live the black population alone is more than double that.
Nobody is afraid of walking around Chinatown after sunset.
The Pacific Northwest is a small part of the United States and a small part of the blue tribe. Most big cities in the US have substantial African American populations. (Deep NE — ME, VT, NH — is even more racially homogeneous than the PNW, but there aren’t any big cities there.)
@Nabil ad Dajjal:
There are parts of Toronto you don’t want to walk around after sunset, too. If they do not conform to your racial stereotypes, I apologize profusely.
What does NAM stand for here?
Yes, this is one of the thing that annoys me about accusations of southern racism. I’ve lived in the south my whole life. I went to school with black kids, my church is maybe half white, half of my coworkers are black. And then I get lectured by 97% white Vermonters like Bernie Sanders about how awful and racist I am. If I had any problem with black people I’d move to where you live Bernie.
In general, the southern states have a substantial black population, often including high profile elected officials (mayors and congressmen; usually not governors or senators), and they are overwhelmingly Republican. The Southwest and Northwest have small black populations, but the NW is blue and the SW is red, more or less. I don’t think things are looking so good for this model.
@Iain
“Support for multiculturalism remains high” is a non-sequiteur to “Toronto is very ethnically diverse”. Multicultural is the not the opposite of “ethnically homogenous”. It is the opposite of “well-assimilated”.
So, how multicultural is Toronto, actually? I do not mean “count the Shwarma places and Ethiopian/Cambodian restaurants”. Are those various fractions unassimilated? Or are they, as I suspect, mostly sharing the Canadian flavor “Universal Culture” and associated terminal values with minor variations? Do they organize politically discrete ethnic blocs, or are these various fractions scattered across the Canadian political in distributions that approach the national averages? Etc, etc.
In short, I’d like to see more detail in your picture before I conclude that Toronto is an example of “Multiculturalism works” and not actually one of “Assimilation works”, which is something we already knew about the US and Canada.
@Trofim_Lysenko:
In a Canadian context, you can’t draw an easy line between “multicultural” and “assimilated”, because the culture that we ask everybody to assimilate to is basically just multiculturalism plus respect for the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
There are distinct ethno-cultural voting blocks among Canadian immigrants, in the same way that, say, white evangelicals are a voting block. For example, Korean Christians in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) were apparently an important swing demographic in the recent Conservative leadership race, giving the social conservative candidates a boost relative to the more libertarian candidate. The federal Conservative party won a majority in the 2011 election by carefully targeting religious immigrant communities in the Toronto suburbs. I don’t know whether this meets your definition of “politically discrete ethnic blocs”, although I personally tend to see it as a sign of Canadian success.
The closest thing to an explicitly ethnic party in the country is the Bloc Québécois, which has nothing to do with immigrants.
As I have argued many times before, the distinction between “multiculturalism” and “assimilation” is a false one. The most effective mechanism of assimilation is welcoming people into the country, telling them that we embrace their cultures within the broader Canadian tapestry, and then ruthlessly indoctrinating their children with hippy liberal ideas about equality and freedom. I believe in Canadian values. I believe that, given the option, people living in Canadian society will tend to choose those values of their own free will. Yelling at people about how they have to give up their culture and conform seems actively counter-productive; it’s like telling a bunch of frogs in a pot on the stove that they should try to boil faster.
Assimilation works in Canada because of multiculturalism.
Notwithstanding all of the above: the point of my original post was simply that Matt M’s line about loving minorities being easy when you don’t interact with them is a facile quip, and doesn’t represent a deeper truth about reality. Toronto indisputably has a massive minority population, and is clearly okay with that.
I think this is one of the main things people think of when they promote “assimilation.”
You say
and
in the same paragraph. I’m intrigued.
Somebody less multiculturalist might say something like, “We do not believe in brainwashing. Our society is based upon free human beings making free choices. Not all foreigners feel this way, so we must take care to invite to join us only those who do.”
Presumably you could use Canada and the UK as controls, as neither country had plantation slavery, so the vast majority of black people in those countries are or are the descendants of willing immigrants from elsewhere – mostly the Caribbean (of course, most black people in the Caribbean are of slave descent) and sub-Saharan Africa.
The only hard statistic I can think of off the top of my head is that in the UK, Caribbean immigrants and their descendants underperform the native white population academically, while African immigrants (and their descendants?) outperform the native white population academically – this might be heavily the province of Nigerians (and Ghanaians?) though.
Answers contained here:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
I think you are modeling the evo-psych just-so story explanation incorrectly.
I think the actual model is that it’s difference plus perceived genetic threat. Thus, a single, different individual from far away is actually prized as a sexual partner. Adding a little bit of genetic diversity is a good thing for fitness. Sure, individuals of the same sex who are in direct competition may be jealous 9 for obvious reasons) but what you don’t get is systemic, widespread hatred for a single person or a small group from far away.
But, if that genetically different person is from an observably genetically different tribe or people near enough and numerous to impinge on your own ability to spread your genes, that should activate the desire to defend your genetic legacy.
Not saying I buy it, but I think that is the predicted in-group/out-group/far-group mechanic.
Right. A few people joining your community is different from a large group displacing your community.
You put this in terms of hate. I would think that racial prejudice more often takes the form of feelings of superiority. We all like to think well of ourselves, and one way to do it is to have a low opinion of others.
That fits the fact that in societies with a strong black/white divide, such as the U.S. south before and after the Civil War, whites had no problem with blacks in lower status roles, such as servants. You wouldn’t want a servant you hated, but you would want one you patronized, saw as loyal but low status.
David, I’ve seen other people model racists as wanting to feel superior, but in my experience, I don’t think that’s a major factor. I’d chalk modern racism up to:
1) Stereotyping: A security guard who follows minority kids around a store, or a taxi driver who prefers non-black passengers probably isn’t doing so in order to feed a personal ego trip – they’re doing it because of a perception of the relative odds of shoplifting or a ride to someplace where they can’t find another fare, or something on that order.
2) Lack of concern/empathy regarding structural issues: The new racism is “white privilege” – the assumption that if a white kid or an immigrant can make it without starting with what feels like money or connections, so can everyone else.
And the evidence is that they’re behaving rationally by doing so.
Occasionally I’ll see a non-black person say that shop-lifting was easy because security focused all its attention on black people.
@Nancy
The relevance of that depends on the effect of more security scrutiny on behavior. A greater percentage of black people are poor and if the increased tendency to shop-lift due to poverty is greater than the depressive effect of more security scrutiny, they would still shop-lift more.
There may also be a network effect at play, where if a large number of poor people live together, they may develop a criminal culture, with better technique (like faraday shielding in clothes/bags to prevent alarms from going off). If shop owners catch these people less, but correctly assess that they catch people with better technique less, they are correct to give higher weight to the more professional thieves they catch.
On the other hand, a lot of business practice is a matter of custom rather than testing. Testing is expensive, both in intrinsic cost and risk that the usual method might be better. (See loss aversion.) Also, in this particular case, it might be difficult to get security to focus on all customers equally.
Also, this isn’t just about poverty and/or perceived poverty. I’ve seen accounts from upper and middle class blacks about being treated as though they’re likely to shoplift.
A custom might have been reasonable when it was established, but is now out of date.
Side effects might be getting ignored. For example, non-criminal black people might be less likely to shop in stores where they are suspected of being shoplifters, or at least spend less time and money in those stores.
Nobody walks around with their paycheck printed on their shirt. So security guards have to use indirect signs to detect poverty, if they want to discriminate on poverty (and poverty is itself an indirect sign that doesn’t perfectly correlate to willingness to steal).
If skin color is seen as a better predictor of poverty than people’s clothing (for example), then my argument is correct. It’s plausible that poor shoplifters wear fairly nice clothes (as they might not have paid for them).
Sure, but no conclusive evidence has been provided that racial profiling is ineffective. ‘Reasonable’ is also a very subjective standard. It’s not unreasonable that the shop owners focus their efforts on those most likely to steal. It’s not unreasonable that innocents don’t want to be regularly bothered. Reality is complicated in that the innocent and the guilty cannot be easily be distinguished.
Who should pay the costs of this reality is a very subjective choice.
The reduction in theft may be worth it. One can wonder why the shops that do this don’t get out-competed, if it truly costs them (a lot of) money.
Side effects can go both ways. Perhaps some very spendy white people prefer shops with fewer black people. Perhaps black people make for bad customers, on average. AFAIK, taxis and restaurants generally consider them bad tippers on average and thus bad customers, as a group. Extra customers are not ‘free.’ They tend to tie up salespeople, so bad customers have an opportunity cost.
Note that I’m not necessarily claiming that any of this is true, but I object to the automatic assumption that it cannot be true and that the cost to shop owners of race neutral behavior is very small or zero.
True, although I’d definitely suspect that “black main in suit” is far less likely to be followed around a store than “black man in tank-top and basketball shorts”
J Mann:
There are two sides to the stereotyping issue:
a. I may have incorrect assumptions about the statistics between races that lead me to overestimate your probability of robbing my store, or underestimate your probability of graduating high school.
b. I may have correct assumptions about those statistics, but be treating you badly because of them.
If we’re in situation (a), then hopefully I’ll get better information and stop assuming untrue things about group statistics.
If we’re in situation (b), then we are facing a tradeoff–for me to treat you better as an individual, I must behave in a less rational way. That may be something I should do or even something the law should compel me to do, but it is a very different situation from (a).
J Mann:
Your second point smuggles in an assumption–that there is a meaningful sense in which white privilege explains the differences in outcomes between blacks and whites. That may be true, but I don’t think it’s so obviously true that anyone who disagrees with it can sensibly be labeled a racist.
In fact the evidence points in the opposite direction.
Sorry for not being more clear – I didn’t mean to state an opinion whether the types of racism I identified were or were not justified/problematic, etc., just to offer them as ways in which someone might be identified as “racist” without being substantially motivated by a desire to see her own group as superior. I thought about putting “racist” in quotes in the main post, but that would be read as expressing skepticism, and I wanted to express no opinion. 😉
For what it’s worth,
(a) I think stereotyping can be motivated by false information, true information, or by an overestimate of an otherwise true trend. I think it’s unfair enough on the individuals that when we can avoid it, we should.
(b) Regarding “privilege” and “structural racism,” I think it would be great if we all had more empathy. I think it’s hard to see when the system is harmful to the oppressed, but we should try. (For example, it’s easy to say that the sentencing disparity for crack cocaine is unfair to minority communities, but you could just as easily argue that it’s motivated by a desire to reduce crime in those communities – I think you have to be thoughtful when you’re tuning rules to make sure you’re likely to be doing good.)
As a potential refinement, outright racism has become low status.
So, I’d expect prejudice to look like an argument about comparative advantage. Assert that different races / cultures have different skills. Then imply that your group is especially good at the things your group considers important.
This has a status gain. Not only do you like your servant, you’re saying he’s exceptionally skilled at serving.
It also has a toxoplasma gain. If the political opposition isn’t on the ball, they’ll argue, “racial and cultural effects don’t exist!” rather than the infinitely more correct stances of “you haven’t proven your specific effects exist” or “you haven’t proven that your effect sizes are large enough to matter.”
Then you get a high-ability servant. And you get to feel intellectually correct.
Except that the opposition is likely to be wrong in both cases. Unless you mean “haven’t proven” in the “evolution is just a theory” sense.
My impression is that the socially acceptable forms of racism (at least in my social class) involve stating openly that racism is wicked and everyone is the same, but then moving to a suburb that has almost no blacks in it, chosen because the local school district is almost all white and Asian.
I haven’t seen much of what you describe in American popular culture, and never in a social setting. You can find some H. Beady people arguing along those lines, but if you’re trying to find a socially acceptable way to hide your hatred or sense of superiority over blacks (or other races), these arguments will not have the desired effects.
Certainly it feels like this is how (the non-tautological parts of) class-ism works.
I think this is very likely. An ex-girlfriend of several years went to school in neighborhood with a lot of recent African immigrants, so I got to know some of their kids fairly well; they had darker skin than most black Americans, but they spoke with the region’s standard dialect (their parents sounded African, which is a distinctive family of accents that’s quite unlike AAVE), most of their friends were white or Asian, and when they grew up they married a broad range of ethnicities. A lot like the standard immigrant experience, in other words.
Prejudice based on skin color wouldn’t predict that; even the “growing up black in America” narrative wouldn’t. But prejudice based on culture would.
So would the theory that it’s culture via the culture’s effect on the people who hold it rather than on other people’s attitude to them. Which I think was Sowell’s conjecture–that slavery left American blacks with a culture less functional than either African or Caribbean.
Also true.
The other model that would easily fit this observation is that the immigrants were drawn from the top of their home country’s distribution in terms of intelligence, work ethic, etc., and that their kids got some of that.
For most ways discrimination plays out day to day, it intuitively seems like it would be hard for the would-be discriminator to distinguish between two black guys based on their culture–how does the cop pulling you over or the potential employer considering whether to hire you even know about that stuff?
Accent, and to a lesser extent dress and mannerisms, for both. Location, for the cop. Name, for the employer: something like “Uche Mgbeke” connotes “immigrant family” strongly compared to, say, “Jamal Thomas”.
Of these, I think accent’s the big one. It’s a strong and I think underappreciated marker of culture: you could have two identical white guys in suits, and I’d immediately think totally different things about them as soon as they opened their mouths, if one came out with a Tidewater accent and the other sounded like a dumb hillbilly stereotype.
Likewise “Jamal Thomas” carries a different connotation from say “Nat Brown” or “Jim Strong”
There is more than one African-American subculture.
I strongly recommend the introduction to The New Jim Crow as evidence. The introduction is free if you look inside the book.
The author is a black civil rights lawyer. She didn’t know about the mass incarceration problem, and the effects on ex-prisoners. The NAACP and the Black Congressional Caucus didn’t have it on their agendas. It was hard for her to believe how bad it was until she’d been told a number of times.
That is a powerful piece of writing, at least insofar as Ms. Alexander’s personal experience goes. But I was concerned by this bit: “In less than 30 years, the US penal population exploded from around 300,000 to more than 2 million, with drug convictions accounting for the majority of the increase”. That’s very much at odds with the recent and IMO much better researched discussion we had on the matter here. Alexander cites one Marc Mauer, “Race to Incarcerate”, and I can’t get a good read on whether that’s a reliable source without buying and reading it.
I’m concerned that, moved as she clearly is, Alexander might be grasping at easy answers like “just end the war on drugs already!”, when the more difficult problem might be a million or so black men incarcerated and subsequently marginalized on account of all the murdering and raping.
However, my main point stands: if your first thought is dysfunctional black culture, you’re leaving out a lot of black people whose lives are so remote from that culture that they didn’t even know mass incarceration and subsequent stigma were a problem.
I’ve only scanned the big chart, but it looks as though rape and murder are a small proportion of the reasons people are imprisoned. There are a lot of assaults short of murder and property crimes, not to mention people awaiting trial.
Relevant anecdote: what happened when a anglo-Nigerian comic got stopped by a southern cop :
http://welovemediacrit.blogspot.de/2009/10/oh-im-sorry-maam-i-thought-you-were.html
I am a foreigner to the US, and this was pretty much immediately obvious to me upon moving here. My only confusion was why nobody else seemed to realize this.
Nobody really thinks about it, but for the most part, black people who “act white” are accepted in most parts of this country without a second thought. Hell, this is so common that accusations of “acting white” are explicitly made in the African American community, and it carries a connotation that the person acting white has betrayed his friends and family.
This is actually somewhat confusing to me, because I was led to believe that the reason racism is bad is because it is unfair to hold people accountable for things they have no control over. Nobody has any control over what colour skin they were born with. However, ideas are fair game for criticism and disapproval, under the idea that people choose to support ideas, and so they’re not really suffering if we criticize and disapprove of a given idea, because people can always just stop supporting it. If someone opposes something that is cultural, assuming they have a valid justification for it, is it fair to call that racist?
I mean, there was a pretty strong backlash against southern confederate culture a year or so ago, and this was justified by nearly everyone as a reasonable critical reaction to a set of bad ideas. If anyone had stopped to say that this was racist against southerners, they would have been laughed out of the room. It wasn’t racism. It was the legitimate criticism and rejection of ideas that were demonstrably bad for society. There are certain elements of the analogous culture under discussion that large swaths of the country believe are demonstrably bad for society, and they have what they believe to be reasonable rational justifications for it. Why the disparity?
Race is more or less immutable (modulo some edge cases where someone can pass for a member of another race). Accent is hard to change. Other cultural markers can be changed, at some cost. Plenty of people learn the right fork to use as an adult, or learn how to speak like an educated person in college, or learn how to dress for a professional job on their first professional job or maybe their summer internship.
There are a lot of different potential responses to this answer, but the one that I would favor is that Black culture in the US has been basically squashed except as a rejection of white culture. Between the drug laws, the draft, the highway commission using interstates as physical barriers to contain black neighborhoods, the FHA refusing to back loans to blacks, welfare programs that provided incentives to non traditional homes, the murder and incarceration of black leaders and the public education system it has been difficult to build any kind of identity that doesn’t surround being anti white.
I think this is at the core of the disagreement between red and blue when it comes to racism.
Red says “I’m not racist! I only hate their culture! You know, that thing which glorifies murder, drugs, and misogyny in song. Where people who attempt to improve themselves are dismissed as weak nerds. Where out of wedlock childbirth is common. Why SHOULDN’T I hate that? Why don’t you?”
Blue says “Bullshit. You ignore flaws in other cultures. You would find ANY reason to dislike people who look different than you. Besides, most of the problems with their culture are a direct result of white racism anyway.”
(I’m a red so perhaps I am getting blue’s argument wrong. A blue is free to correct me on this)
No, you’ve got the Blue mode right (the appeal to Johnny Cash in defense of rap is a classic). Blues would probably also point to critiques of misogyny from within the Black community. Some might also critique the idea of the Black community being a monolith, though race essentialism has gained a lot of power on the Left in the last decade.
It seems to me that a huge part of the red/blue split on race, at least in terms of rhetoric, comes down to this: By almost any measure you can think of, blacks are doing pretty badly in the US vs pretty much everyone else. Worse outcomes in school, less income, less savings, more jail time, more out-of-wedlock births, even shorter life expectancy. That difference in outcomes is so obvious that it’s visible to the naked eye, but all kinds of statistics are around to quantify them.
One view (more concentrated on the blue tribe) tends to ascribe this to external stuff–the legacy of slavery, fallout from Jim Crow and redlining and such, ongoing discrimination, etc.
The other view (more concentrated on the red tribe) ascribes these worse outcomes to internal stuff–generally black culture, stigmas against acting white, etc.
These views aren’t mutually exclusive, and probably most members of each tribe have some mix of these views.
But I think the driver here is the huge and visible difference in outcomes. If blacks were doing about as well as whites, we wouldn’t spend any time looking for explanations for that, we’d just say “ok” and move on.
As an illustration of why I think this is so, consider Asians. In the US, Asians do better than whites on (I think) all or almost all those same measures. There was some pretty nasty anti-Asian discrimination (though not as bad as what blacks faced), but nobody feels the need to refer to that to explain why Asians are doing well in the US. It doesn’t seem to need an explanation.
@qwints
Leave Johnny Cash aside, there is a real question in how you square this theory with the cultural geography of racism in the US. It peaks in Appalachia. That’s a culture that looks an awful lot like the one Matt M above has the Red Tribe attribute to African-Americans.
It’s one thing to steelman in order to subject your own beliefs to the best counterarguments possible, but it is quite another to fool yourself into thinking that the steelman is actually a widely held belief because you don’t want to face up to the reality of who you are lying down with.
Or the driver is the tendency of both sides to see the problem in terms of race.
@Brad
Source for the claim that racism peaks in Appalachia?
I would also note that working-class/rural poor Appalachian white culture and cultural cues are right down there at the bottom of the US cultural pecking order, producing a lot of delightfully shuddery “Among The Savage Hicks With iPhone and Hand Sanitizer” ethnography pieces and equal sneering disdain for accents, dress, mannerism, and so on.
So, if you are correct and racism peaks in Appalachia, I don’t think that conflicts with the cultural model. It fits on at least two levels:
1) When you’re near the bottom of the ladder, most people become acutely conscious of losing any more self-image/social status and look for ways to prop themselves up. “Sure, I’m low status, but at least I’m not [insert disfavored group here].”.
2) Outgroup vs. Fargroup distinctions.
What role does the geographic distribution of the people who write about this sort of thing play? While the urban poor are often mostly minorities, the rural poor are mostly white (except maybe in the Deep South?).
Media being largely clustered in urban centers on the coasts, it’s not surprising that their view of poverty and privilege splits largely on racial lines, because that’s what they see every day. There are of course many more poor white folks who can’t be described as “privileged” by any stretch of the imagination (yeah, they may be white, but not only are they poor, they carry their own markers that would instantly get them recognized and discriminated against in high-end culture). But they are out of sight, out of mind for the people setting the narrative.
@Trofin_Lysenko
Here’s a paper for you:
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/51d894bee4b01caf88ccb4f3/t/51d89ab3e4b05a25fc1f39d4/1373149875469/RacialAnimusAndVotingSethStephensDavidowitz.pdf
Regarding your arguments for compatibility:
What you are saying seems plausible, but it is completely different from what Matt M said. In his model the root of red tribe racism is that the fine, upstanding, hard working, god fearing members of the red tribe hate black culture because it stands for everything they oppose.
If that were what was going on you’d expect it to peak among some group like the Mormons, not Appalachians. Or taking into account your near/far group point at the very least the most economically and culturally successful parts of the red tribe–the southern Episcopalian doctors and lawyers descended from good families going back to before the civil war. That’s not what’s going on.
It may be that your framework is compatible with the larger category of all cultural theories, but it isn’t compatible with the one Matt M laid out.
Brad, what if it’s both? You’ve got two flavors of racism:
1) the overt racial animus, I’m better because I’m white, we don’t take kindly to your type ’round here. That’s probably what your data is capturing as peaking in Appalachia.
2) the attitude Matt describes, basically “African Americans are good people but the poor ones are stuck in a self-destructive culture”
I think 2 really is a fairly common attitude among the red tribe (who don’t consider it racist), more common than 1. It probably doesn’t show up on your poll, but it would get you labeled racist among the blue tribe if you expressed it openly. And frankly, Blue talks a lot more about 2 these days – microaggressions and structural oppression and legacy of slavery and all that. The Red/Blue split really is then mostly about who/what is to blame for the ongoing problems among large segments of the African American population.
Type 1 racism is largely limited to Red sub tribes, apparently in Appalachia, where they have their own self-perpetuating cultural problems.
But interestingly (to me at least) it’s not like black people don’t have their own internal rifts over culture. Before he was outed as a creepy probably serial rapist, that was a big thing of Cosby’s. And there’s the classic Chris Rock bit about black folk vs. n*****s.
@gbdub
As far as it goes, I don’t much disagree. But what binds the different parts of the red tribe together? Why is the attitude among the “high” part of red tribe culture towards poor whites and poor blacks so different? Poor whites are family that get compassion and understanding no matter how much they screw up while blacks are neighbors that are judged by the state of their lawn, their clothing, and so on.
That’s hard to explain using a pure cultural explanation. The unconditional us vs. conditional and revocable us dynamic looks like the classic type of racism.
I don’t think white upper class red or blue tribe members are big fans of the white underclass. (When and where I grew up, they were referred to as white trash, and held in very low regard.)
On the other hand, there is also a good deal of concern about gender discrimination, where the difference in outcomes is not only not huge and visible, it’s ambiguous in sign. Consumption is done largely by couples, so it’s hard to say whether women are really poorer than men. The most obvious outcome linked directly to individuals is life expectancy, on which women do better than men. Auto insurance costs are higher for young adult men than for young adult women, due to statistical discrimination.
The usual difference cited the other way is in wages, but that’s not huge and visible unless you ignore the fact that women differ from men in ways relevant to how much they earn, such as what fields they go into and how likely they are to drop out, at least for some years, to produce and rear children.
Nonetheless, discrimination against women is widely viewed as an issue that must be dealt with.
@Brad
Blacks are a fargroup to Mormons. Not many black people in Utah.
Defensiveness. Poor whites don’t generally blame rich whites for their poverty. If they did, the rich whites would probably tell the poor whites the same things they tell poor blacks. But poor blacks are much more likely to blame whites for their poverty. Which was definitely true at one point, but as white people have internally tabooed racism, passed civil rights laws, engaged in Affirmative Action, it becomes increasingly difficult for the Red Tribe to accept blame for black underachievement.
If you want to communicate that it’s about the culture, consider including examples of whites who have those behaviours and blacks who don’t.
(I keep seeing example of people who are willing to complain long and hard that their culture is misunderstood, but who are not willing to take basic steps to fix the problem).
Would that help, if the examples were basically “I also hate white people who act black?” I mean, I’m not under the impression that rural, prejudiced, whites would be thrilled if their son or daughter started wearing their pants sagged low, listening to gangster rap music, etc.
Does that prove that you aren’t racist? Or that you are?
In regards to culture, you can point many “Church and Chitlin’s” blacks who’ve found acceptance among the GOP. It is from these ranks that people like Tim Scott, Mia Love, Herman Cain and Thomas Sowell are drawn.
Now I’ve heard progressives argue that the this is simply tokenism and that the conservative desire to separate “the good ones” only proves how racist they really are but isn’t identifying “the good ones” and welcoming them into the fold precisely what MLK wished for when he dreamed that his children be “judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”?
Edit:
Furthermore, as Trofim notes above, white people who “act black” specifically the urban NWA flavor of black are almost invariably viewed as low status themselves. It seems to me that “racism” at least when it comes to blacks in the US has a lot more to do with “normies don’t like surly bastards who let thier underwear hang out in public” than progressives would like to admit.
Edit 2: somewhat ninja’d by Matt
Hating on white people who act black could also be interpreted as anti-black racism at one remove, so it would be better to followup on my original suggestion and mention black people you approve of.
@hlynkacg:
Think about that statement for a little bit.
(Me trying an experiment): Why do you think I am specifically pointing this statement out?
no one likes wiggers
source: am one
oh, and hbc: would you do me and everyone else a solid and explain what you mean instead of doing your best Socrates impression? Thanks in advance~
@ AncientGeek
I just did, and you can add several of the guys I deployed with, a few co-workers, and two of the regular families in my church to that list if you like.
@HeelBearCub
I suspect that you’re taking issue with the fact that I feel the need to identify “the good ones” rather than treat everyone equally but I’d rather you just said so.
That said, if that is in fact your objection, my response is that in an argument between Rousseau and Hobbes I’m backing Hobbes. I hold that nastiness and brutality are the default, and that virtue is a choice.
@hlynkacg:
So the majority of white people are the “bad ones” as well?
@HeelBearCub
If only the line between good and evil were differentiated merely by skin color then civilization would be easy, but alas it cuts right through the human heart.
My very generic, broad brush model of the Blue Tribe is that they only assign moral agency to white people. An evil white person is evil by choice. An “evil” non-white would have been good if only he hadn’t been driven to evil by whites. For instance, finding the phrase “the good ones” problematic indicates you think they’re all good ones. Is there any race that’s all good ones? Would be nice to have a cheat sheet for good and evil by race.
Charles Murray wrote a whole book (Coming Apart) comparing the cultures of upper-class and lower-class whites and detailing the dysfunctional behaviors common in the latter group.
Glenn Beck spent a good year practically tongue-kissing photos of MLK on his show. Did that stop people from calling him racist? Trump trots out Herman Cain and black sheriff dude on a regular basis. Does that get him off the hook? For a non-political example, when the NBA stripped Donald Sterling of his ownership rights for the crime of saying racist things to his girlfriend (who was trying to extort him for cash) in private, people pointed out that Sterling chose to employ and pay millions of dollars to a black head coach. Did that matter?
Hell, using the phrase “but I have black friends” is now, in popular usage, taken as a positive sign of racism.
Are all forms of that argument bad? How about “homosexuals bad, because more likely to commit suicide” versus “homosexuals more likely to suicide, therefore persecuted”.
Men are much more likely to successfully commit suicide than women. Are men persecuted? Obviously not, their suicides are driven by toxic masculinity and patriarchal culture! (/Sarcasm)
The problem isn’t that all forms of “discrimination can drive bad behaviors” are bad arguments, it’s that they tend to get applied very selectively. There’s the old saw about how if all the markers where men have it worse than women (more in prison, lower scholastic achievement, more suicides, shorter life expectancy, more deaths at work/in warfare…) were applied to a racial minority, there’d be outrage at the obvious discrimination. It’s got a grain of truth to it.
I think you mean that they get applied self-servingly. Selecting for correct causal arrows, moral relevance, etc is just getting things right.
Red: “Oh yeah? Let me tell you about Muslims and Mexicans…”
I mean, that claim is a no-win for Red.
And blues.
Fair ain’t got nothing to do with it.
Deserve
I normally would never print a “this article sucks” post – it’s rude and typically dull – but I was blown away last week. So I nominate this as the worst article I’ve read in, say, ten years. Ten is a nice round number: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/06/against-domesticity.
I challenge anyone to explain how she managed to work “neoliberal” into this piece and still get published. Hell, I challenge anyone to defend this thing. I would say this was a parody of how the hoi polloi view the Manhattan writer set, but if it is, CA hasn’t revealed the joke yet.
My eyes glaze over when I try to read that. TL;DR?
That’s a hard request – the article is all over the place. Maybe: “social media technology props up the patriarchy by erasing the difficult aspects of cooking, thus culturally insulting wealthy Manhattanites by suggesting it’s easy to make Thai soup”?
Thanks.
I don’t particularly understand what’s so damn hard about cooking, in the age when you can find recipes for just about anything you want to make. Sure, there are recipes which are labour-intensive (like Ruthenian pierogis), time-intensive (like European doughnuts), or requiring a modicum of dexterity/precision (like pancakes) or rare ingredients (like Breton beans) – but I’ve never had problems unless I strayed from following the instructions as given. Thai soup doesn’t seem excessively hard (ingredients may be hard to find in provincial places), certainly not more than Breton beans.
I don’t particularly understand what’s so damn hard about cooking, in the age when you can find recipes for just about anything you want to make.
Listen, I have two cooking methods:
(a) I boil it
(b) If I can’t boil it, it goes in the oven
That’s it. I can’t bake (even Yorkshire pudding goes tragically wrong) and my sister got the hand for pastry from my mother, not me. I can follow recipes just fine, it’s that it never turns out the way it’s supposed to (thank God for Delia Smith and her recipe for baking a ham for Christmas, that has saved my life and sanity so that instead of method (a) – boil on top of the cooker in a huge saucepan for five hours plus, I can safely and reliably use method (b) – stick it in the oven).
Cooking is an art as much as anything else, and some people are artists while others of us are “yeah just whitewash the fence and don’t get fancy about it” 🙂
I think Ms Frost is at about my level of culinary talent, but instead of accepting that and adapting to “okay so I can’t make my own Thai soup to my exacting standards”, she’s defensively huffy about it. It’s okay, sister, not everybody is good at everything! But I rather imagine she had a smug image of “housewives? well, aren’t they all dull conservative women who couldn’t cut it in the real world of work?” and she assumed that being a young clever urban professional she could automatically master anything she turned her hand to.
Except now she finds that no, she can’t cook but one of those dull domestic women she liked to vaguely pity can, and that rankles just a little (when talking about her Kentucky grandmother, she seems not to take into account that if you have nine kids and a house and farm to look after, something you can stick on the stove to simmer for six hours and then leave it alone without needing you to stand over it checking it, so you can get on with the rest of your work, is going to be the necessary way of cooking).
I have a friend that needed many attempts to actually make fried eggs His mistake was taking a giant frying pan for a tiny flame and then wondering why the heat wasn’t evenly spread out, his eggs partially burned. He was 20 at the time and had 4 years of cooking lessons in school.
I don’t get it either but some people seem to have anti-talent for cooking.
I once met a woman who insisted she couldn’t bake. Not even cakes or muffins. This woman is a chemistry major from MIT who was working in a lab. To this day I still can’t figure that one out.
You do realize this makes you an English stereotype, right?
Attention, interest, order of operations, substitutes, and expectations.
But can you execute the recipes? I’m an adequate cook, but it takes me ~50% longer than my mom to do basic recipes. She sort of waves her knife at things, and they fall apart. I can’t do that, and I’m not great at stirring two things on the stove while mixing a third. Someone who wasn’t taught anything is going to have to work even harder to get results.
I believe some people are so traumatized by their early failures that they just decide they’re bad cooks and don’t try again. My sister started a fire trying to make instant mac and cheese and hasn’t stepped foot in a kitchen since.
If you can read, you can cook.
I like cooking and am reasonably good at it; however, I could understand complaints from those who do not and are not (and those two, of course, go together; I do have a hard time, however, understanding the “can’t boil water or make toast” level of cooking incompetence which exists, and it is a little hard for me to square being interested in food, but not interested in cooking, though obviously the two don’t have to go together).
Cooking is time consuming: first you have to buy the ingredients, then you have to cook, then after you eat, you have to do the dishes. This is why, even liking cooking as I do, I almost never cook anything elaborate if only cooking for myself; doesn’t feel worth the effort and no one to help do the dishes.
Cooking can be cheap, but only if you know what you’re doing and aren’t attempting to use Mario Batali’s recipe which calls for squid ink, stinging nettles, and saffron. Though one can find cookbooks which include tasty, cheap, healthful, easy-to-make recipes, they are in the minority of cookbooks. Knowing which cookbooks those are itself takes experience.
A little bit of training from someone who knows what they’re doing in e.g. knife skills goes a long way, but a lot of other cooking skills are pretty specific. Can you wrap a dolma? It doesn’t seem very hard to me, but I couldn’t teach my father to do it to save his life.
As for that thing people have where they can either cook without a recipe or cook without slavishly following the recipe, that also just comes from experience. For example, when I first started cooking Indian food, I would very carefully measure out 1 tsp. mustard seeds, 1/2 tsp cardamom powder, etc. because I had no idea what function these mystery ingredients were actually playing in the recipe. Once I had enough experience with these to know which flavors which spices were actually imparting, I could much more successfully improvise and/or play fast and loose with the recipe.
I can cook, I have worked in a few kitchens and bakeries, and have been cooking for my family for the past 8 years. I can wander into my kitchen and rummage through what we happen to have around and produce a good meal without a recipe and frequently without any real measuring tools and just eyeballing (and using whatever pre packaged sizes I started with lke a can of tomatoes).
Cooking isn’t just following a recipe. Either I or my wife make oatmeal for our kids 5 days a week, we do almost the same thing every morning, with the same brand of oats, the same amount of milk, with frozen berries, salt and cinnamon. If you put me in front of a different stove (especially gas vs my electric) or ask me to double the recipe there is a decent chance it burns at least a little to the bottom of the pan (in either of these scenarios I am probably short on sleep due to traveling or visitors so there is that as well). This happens despite having literally cooked oatmeal (super easy) a thousand times.
When you open a recipe there are lots of standardized parts, for example 1 cup of whole milk should translate across virtually every kitchen. However lots and lots of recipes call for non standardized measures, or non intuitive measures, and other semi vague directions. For example
2 small/medium/large eggs
a sprig of rosemary
cook on low/medium/high heat
stirring occasionally/often/frequently/constantly
beat until its the consistency of (pick unclear adjective here)
mix until it coats the back of the spoon
If someone says “if you can read you can cook” they are forgetting that there aren’t universal definitions for all these things, and don’t appreciate that they are fortunate that their personal understanding happens to mesh fairly closely to the average uses for cooks.
Lets take stirring as an example find a bad cook and as them to help you out by stirring something on the stove top, this is a non exhaustive list of things they can do poorly that will negatively effect the outcome.
1. Stirring to briskly (ie basically beating instead of stirring).
2. Stirring the center, or edges only, or stirring the center and the edges separately and not mixing between them.
3. Fiddling with the heat because it looks like it is cooking to fast/slow
4. Not fiddling with the heat when it is cooking to fast/slow
5. Pushing stuff around the pan without anything flipping over.
6. Not taking it off heat (if called for) to stir, or taking it off heat (when not called for) to stir
There are a lot of things in the kitchen that you can do a little wrong without realizing it. Using a medium instead of a large egg probably won’t ruin your recipe, but using the wrong size eggs, not beating until sufficiently “frothy”, not stirring fast enough or long enough as you pour it into hot milk, not removing the pan from heat while you do so, or not babying the mixture when you return it from heat can leave you will a subpar custard, making 2 or 3 of these mistakes will probably leave you with a total crap fest.
> this is a non exhaustive list of things they can do poorly that will negatively effect the outcome.
Two additions to the list, which I have both personally done:
– Not scraping the bottom and sides, and so allowing material that adheres to the bottom and sides to burn.
– Scraping the bottom and sides when they have already burned but the rest of the pot was salvageable.
Gold Jerry, pure gold. There probably deserves to be a separate category for mistakes which are fixable with X at time T, and mistakes that must be fixed with Y at time T+1 and cannot be fixed at time T+2.
I think a certain conflation between cooking and baking doesn’t help. Cooking is fairly forgiving of minor transgressions, and exact measure not so critical. Baking, on the other hand, isn’t.
But leaving that aside, being a good cook requires experience, which requires failure. Persevering in the face of failure is difficult, and in the case of cooking/baking, a far easier alternative is available, IE, restaurants, pre assembled meals, etc.
Given interest, I am certain I could teach anyone to cook. It’s the interest that is the problem.
onyomi, one more thing for possible difficulties with cooking: planning.
This is a part that some people hate, it’s one of the reasons that Blue Apron and the like have customers.
Not doing something that’s called for meets my definition of not being able to read, or at the very least not being willing to. Hopefully it’s obvious I didn’t mean that being able to read is sufficient to cook in the sense of being an Iron Chef contestant. But yes, anyone with literacy should be able to handle every recipe in a beginner’s cookbook on their first try. The only extra advice I’d have is to not serve anything to someone until you’ve tried it out on yourself a few times first.
I don’t cook, for several reasons.
– I was never taught to do so.
– Attempts to do so on my own were a lot of trouble, created a surprising mess, and yielded disappointing results.
– I don’t need to cook, since I can easily enough eat out once per day and choose non-cook options for the other two meals.
My grandpa passed down a pancake recipe which describes the proper consistency of the batter in terms of an obsolete motor oil grade. Also contains the delightful phrase “cook until done”.
I did manage to figure it out (though my sourdough starter still isn’t as good as his was), but it took some experimentation.
Ways to remove something from heat that sound plausible to some % of the population but are wrong
1. Turn off electric burner, leave pan on burner
2. Slide pan partially off burner
3. Move pan to burner that was on recently
4. Lift pan off burner 5-10 seconds later than it should have been.
5. Move pan to other surface, especially one that sucks the heat out.
For an experienced cook “remove from heat” means something specific (but also conditional on the next line). Remove from heat and stir for 5 mins means put the pan down somewhere else, or turn off the gas burner, and continue stirring. For scrambled eggs it means “lift a few inches off the burner, stir/scrape, replace on burner”.
Whether someone turns the burner off or simply lifts the pan is going to leave them with perfectly serviceable scrambled eggs. Again, I’m not talking about turning people into actual chefs.
All of these posts on the joys of cooking are making me really upset about my recent move.
My family just left NYC for the suburbs – well, it’s been almost a year already, Jesus – for all the usual reasons. On the whole, I’m super glad we did. Love owning a house more than an apartment, much better for the kids, etc. etc.
But my commute went from 10 minutes (if I took a cab) to an hour and a half in each direction. And I already work kind of long hours. A terrible outcome for several more important reasons, but for the purposes of this thread: I never get to cook anymore.
I love cooking, but getting home at 8-8:30 and starting to dice whatever ain’t happening. It really bums me out.
This might be another domino falling. After we left the city, my wife and I started to see the possibilities of life outside of it, and they’re pretty fucking great. And now we’re starting to question if we really need to keep working crazy hours just to live in the New York suburbs. Maybe New Hampshire or Maine or Montana or Virginia (you can tell I’ve never been to a lot of America) might be even better.
You just conceded the point, a bunch of directions can reasonably be interpreted several ways, the fact that one mistake in and off itself won’t ruin scrambled eggs* isn’t evidence for your position, it is a demonstration that the simplest of all recipes has some room for interpretation. Most simple dinner recipes are 3-4x as complex as scrambled eggs in terms of steps or ingredients.
* my 4 year old disagrees, he loves scrambled eggs and when I botched a batch in this way as a time saving effort while handling my 2 year old he refused to eat them. Everyone is a critic!
You do realize this makes you an English stereotype, right?
Why do you think there is no world-renowned British Isles cuisine? 🙂
As for the comments lower down about electric cookers and leaving pans on the heat, oh yeah. I was raised in a house with a gas cooker and we only switched to an electric cooker a few years back. Turn the gas ring off, the heat goes off immediately. Leave the pan sitting there, no problem about over-cooking or burning. Do the same with an electric cooker (particularly a ceramic hob) and big mistake 🙂
If by conceded the point you mean I admitted there are trivial disagreements over how to interpret something like “remove from heat” which in simple dishes will not effect the final quality of the meal anyway (my apologies to your 4 year old here), sure. I’d just argue that’s a pedantic point, and that it doesn’t change the fact that anyone who can follow simple directions can prepare a very good meal. The only real disagreement I can see here is over what counts as “cooking”. I think being able to make a handful of dishes fits the bill. Then again, I think memorizing a handful of chord progressions means you can play the guitar. It won’t impress anyone who is serious about the instrument, but it’s more than enough to entertain yourself and others.
Nope. I mean you have conceded the point that literacy alone isn’t enough to follow every, or even most, instructions for an inexperienced cook.
For homework define the terms cream, whip, beat, fold, mix, and stir in an easy to understand (for a complete novice) way. Then specify how you should alter your cooking time and technique for a gas vs electric range for 3 recipes that benefit from the explanation, and then a brief discussion on how to determine how hot your burners are on low, medium and high compared to what the average recipe writer experiences. We will leave adjustments for ambient temperature, humidity and elevation for next week.
Yes they will. My 4 year old notwithstanding crappy scrambled eggs (and still we are talking the absolute bottom of simple meals, half a step above making toast from pre sliced bread) quickly become cold and crappy scrambled eggs after you push them around with your fork for a few mins.
Expectations also matter, people with no experience cooking usually eat consistently (if consistently bad) cooking at take out joints, large chains or from their grocer’s freezer. Putting in any amount of time and effort and having the result come out worse than that makes eating very unappealing.
One reason cooking might be a harder skill for an autodidact to learn than might be expected is that failing *really* sucks. Not only did you fail—which feels bad enough by itself—your ingredients are spoiled, you’re still hungry, *and* you have to clean everything up. It’s a triple whammy of suck.
Beginner mistakes are usually less punishing.
Thai soup’s easy. Vietnamese soup, on the the other hand, is very hard, or at least very time-intensive.
I think it’s meant to be a amusing riff on “housework is annoying.” No doubt the author has a lot to say about Mondays as well, and cribs about half her essays from old “Cathy” cartoons.
The individual points don’t sync well, but I don’t think they’re intended to. It’s sort of an SJ Dave Barry writing purportedly funny observations, including:
– Hipsters who claim that domestic work is easy or fulfilling are annoying. (Cf. any comedy routine in the 90s that mentions Martha Stuart).
– Hipsters who claim that domestic work is easy or fulfilling are degrading the women of the past, who were martyred under the yoke of soul-crushing domestic chores. (I think meant mostly humorously).
– Domestic tasks are annoying.
I liked it. And the throwaway line bashing neoliberalism is mandatory for Current Affairs.
I found it amusing in a ‘smart, well read, somewhat tipsy person at a party going off on a weirdly passionate rant’ sort of way. Maybe the author would find that reaction even more offensive than yours. Donno.
It’s not even the worst I read today.
It’s even semi-correct if you strip away the nonsense: having to do labor is unpleasant to the lazy. Not sure how this is different for household labor vs paid labor or what makes this feminism.
The argument is presumably that neoliberalism has increased the pressure on laborers to work more efficiently, thus making paid labor less pleasant; which has resulted in people finding their happiness in the home.
The author is a commie, who is upset that the proletariat is not resisting effectively. A female Freddie deBoer, as it were.
It seems well suited for hate reading.
What made me initially hesitant to post this is that I LIKED that article you just linked to. I thought it was reasonably interesting and challenging; definitely well written. It’s not like I had something against her work going in.
But articles like the one I linked to just makes me go “ah, another one.” Another person who thinks they’re defending the proletariat from Park Slope by righteously complaining about problems no one else on earth would view as such (“Fathers get too much credit for child care and cooking!” What?). That topic’s been done to death, though, particularly at SSC and by better writers than me, so no need to revisit.
What struck me about this article, though, is it so confused. Just weird unfocused anger in search of a victim. I mean, CA just published “In Defense of Liking Things (https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/05/in-defense-of-liking-things),” which seems to run directly counter to it.
I do understand the point though. Just like the article that I linked to, she is upset that people are prioritizing irrelevant things over effective activism. I suspect she thinks she is being clever/effective by packaging it this way for the current affairs audience (I’m not sure who that audience is, so she may be right, if it’s young women from Brooklyn).
Honestly, she seems like a bright youngster, with critical thinking ability, so with some more life experience and such, she might turn out well.
Very dull but hardly the worst in 10 years. It’s basically a rant on quaaludes, which misses the whole point of a rant. I suspect “neoliberal” got through because the editor’s eyes had glazed over by then; the only real question was whether it filled the ad-hole, and obviously it did.
I was going to object to this:
on the grounds that Whole Foods is a bit high end for the Soviets, but actually my local WF hot bar seems to always be down to nothing but asses and ends, so just add a long line for it and you’re there.
I was going to go off on the part about women and immigrants doing unappreciated highly skilled labor to feed people, pointing out that while cooking CAN be highly skilled labor, it often isn’t, especially when feeding large numbers of people cheaply. But the rest of the article pretty much sapped my will, so, meh.
Yeah, you’re missing some important nuances here. To begin with, all of Amber A’Lee Frost’s writing that I’ve seen is humorous and usually self-mocking in tone. Not to say the main argument isn’t sincere, but it’s supposed to sound a little crazy. I also think many of its points are quite sound: I find those time-lapse cooking videos seductive for making it look so easy, but *of course* it’s not always that easy in practice.
I don’t understand the indignation of commenters here at the statement that housework is real work, and that such work has usually been done by women. Which statement of fact do you dispute? (Chesterton, as I recall, said much the same thing, though he drew a different moral.)
I’m a satisfied Current Affairs subscriber, and have liked some of Frost’s work in the past, but I was not a big fan of this one. My major complaint was what felt like the shoe-horning of patriarchy/misogyny into it. I know she’s trying to be funny, but as you say, the main argument seems sincere.
Sure, the time-lapse cooking videos make it look easier than it is. But so do the image series posted online of DIY carpentry projects. Is that the misandristic suppression of the drudgery of traditionally masculine work? Or is it just that it’s boring to show 20 pictures of someone cutting up pieces of wood with a table saw, just like it’s boring to show a video where someone stands there chopping up greens for a minute straight.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If enjoying things is evil, people are just going to start thinking Sauron’s not quite that bad a guy.
Just a misunderstood champion of orc rights against the systematic oppression of non-humans by Gondor supremacists. I mean, they even call it “The White City,” how much more racist can you get?
There’s actually a book with this premise.
This has been an internet meme recently, though approached from the other side of the political spectrum.
A heroic Maia of the mind like Sauron would never succumb to the vice of altruism, not even on behalf of the orcs who are his allies against the second-handers and whim-worshippers who would deny him his rightful ownership of the Ring they could never create themselves. The 93-minute palantir speech in Athelas Shrugged spells it all out.
A novel written from the orc point of view.
I’m gonna join in the chorus of people saying this wasn’t that bad. The core of the article makes some good points and addresses a genuine issue in housekeeping. She’s exactly right about those Tasty videos – I’ll go ahead and lump those in with the Instagrams of twee “Bento-box” school lunches and precious bathroom decor. It all paints a euphoric, idealized picture of homemaking and it can be fun to look at, but absolutely dangerous for a schlub like me to start making comparisons, as I get up off my sagging couch and dump some chicken nuggets on my kid’s plate while I warm up a frozen pizza. It’s all fodder for the “Mommy Wars”, you know? And it does drive me crazy that all those cute blogs make it sound like it’s easy to have a home-cooked meal and a clean house in just 30 minutes a day! It’s not realistic, and people learning how to do this stuff for the first time had better be prepared to put in the work. Sure, find ways to make it fun if that works for you, but housework takes time, it takes effort, it takes planning and prep. There’s no getting around it. If I could afford a cleaning service I would jump all over it.
Agreed. I have no kids (hence a lot more free time than those who do). I love to cook (my wife does too) but generally avoid complex recipes except for special occasions. I have no talent for presentation (food, decor, or otherwise).
I get lots of compliments on my food, but even I get annoyed by the people that insist on bragging with “You don’t make your own pickles/pizza dough/bacon? But it’s so easy!” And I know how to do all those things, I just don’t want to bother. I try not to inflict that or worse on those without talent/experience/interest.
But pickles are so easy, my 4 year old makes his own pickles! All you need is water, salt, cucumbers and grape leaves.
Hmm? Oh, no I don’t know where they sell grape leaves, we have grapes in our garden, so I just go pick a few when we make pickles. I guess just plant some grapes in your yard and wait 2-3 years, then pickles!
Cooking is just another example of how there is no average.
You don’t buy grape leaves, you steal them from your neighbors.
And if you can’t get grape leaves, oak leaves (or any other leaves high in tannin) work just as well. You could probably even use wood chips, though don’t quote me on that.
Getting suitable cucumbers is harder. If you use the kind you typically get at the store and try to ferment them into pickles, you will get a mushy mess; you need pickling cucumbers, which are smaller, much firmer, and far harder to find.
Be careful with wood chips. A lot of the stuff that is used in landscaping is treated with nasty chemicals that you don’t want in your food. If you didn’t make the chips yourself out of a log, I’d stay away.
Homebrew stores sell food-safe oak cubes. Not sure if that would work, but it certainly has tannin.
There are also food-safe hardwood chips sold for use in smoking and barbecuing. I’ve got some of those that bought off Amazon I use for oak-aging homemade vinegar.
What role are the grape leaves playing? Natural yeasts? I use a live yoghurt starter with good results, but have grape vines on the front balcony, so am open to the possibility.
The grape leaves add tannin which inhibits an enzymatic reaction that would break down some of the cellular structure, in short they help the pickle stay crunchy and not go mushy.
They’re a source of tannins, which inhibit the pectinase enzyme which would otherwise break down one of the carbohydrates in the cucumber’s cell walls over the course of a long ferment. If you let the pectinase run rampant, you’ll wind up with soft pickles instead of crunchy.
I’ve seen recipes variously calling for grape leaves, oak leaves, horseradish leaves, a pinch of black tea leaves, or a splash of red wine as a source of tannin. I’ve also seen recipes that call for cutting off the blossom end of the cucumber, which is where most of the pectinase in the cucumbers is stored.
I see. Thanks to you both. I think I’m achieving something comparable by accelerating the ferment using the lactobacilus starter – certainly I get acceptable levels of crunch up to a couple of months later, after the ferment has completed. But perhaps I’m missing out on heretofore unknown levels of crunchiness. I’ll give it a try next time.
I don’t make my own pickles, but if I have to take sides between the people who make their own pickles and the people who are annoyed by it, then I’ll have to take the side of the makers.
Really, the issue is that (a) it is actually not that hard to make your own pickles and (b) the world is full of fulfilling things to do, so (c) it’s not easy to learn to make your own pickles AND become a proficient ballroom dancer AND learn to speak Russian AND have a successful career AND raise a family AND grow your own produce AND train a show dog AND make insightful webcomments, which is why I concentrate on that last thing to the exclusion of the others, as well as hygiene.
The people who say “hey, you should try making your own pickles, it’s easy!” are actually right, and they’re sharing something they enjoy, which puts them in the same good but mildly annoying place as the people who tell you that you need to travel more or take up bike riding or give up Diet Coke. They’re just sharing what works for them, and if you’re happy with your life, put it on the pile of “maybe I’ll try it someday,” along side ice fissure spelunking and sex trapezes.
I’ve tried making pickles, but they smelled off a bit and I was worried about contamination, so I haven’t tried it again.
Kimchi and sauerkraut are both easier than pickles and use the same basic process, so they might be worth trying first.
How can one be easier than the other? They are both just “put vegetables into salt water”–right?
Pickles are more sensitive to fermentation time, mostly. Whether you ferment sauerkraut for a week or a month, you’ll end up with perfectly good sauerkraut; whether you end up with good pickles depends on your tolerance for sourness in pickles and on the cucumbers you picked and on the amount of tannin in your solution.
Fermentation proceeds faster in higher ambient temperatures, so that matters too.
How would you know if the kimchi was spoiled?
(Actually I love it, but that was a gimme.)
We subscribed to Blue Apron this month, and they love “quick pickles” – basically 30 minutes or so soaked in vinegar and spices.
During the summer, my dad used to always have a big jar of pickled watermelon rinds in the fridge. Man, I loved those things – I’ll need to figure out how to do it.
let’s see:
Amber A’Lee Frost
Complains of misogyny
yeah, that’ll do it every time. I’ll never forget my first introduction to her – Freddie posted an article by her to prove sexism was real, and then the article contained no proof of sexism but rather proof of stupid behavior on her part. That’s also when I started to wonder if Freddie was honestly that thick on these issues, as opposed to pretending for progressive cred to enable his pushing of socialism.
Freddie seems honestly thick on racism/sexism/etc. AFAIK, he believes quite strongly in the SJ model of privilege.
You are both using a particularly non-standard version of “thick” which appears to mean “disagrees with me personally”.
Pretty sure that *is* the standard version.
It’s pretty rough. In particular this:
is untrue for almost all values of “burns”.
I think it’s basically “here’s a thing I (for the purposes of squeezing out an article to a deadline) don’t like, therefore I will analogise some of its aesthetic features to other things my audience and I don’t like.” without nay unifying central thesis.
So you get, “cooking is used to keep women in the house, which is terrible, and is also increasingly being done by men, which steals credit rightfully accruing to women, and is being made easier and more approachable, which undermines the significance of important female labour”.
I’m a bit surprised we didn’t get cultural appropriation into the mix. That feels like the easy way to go, but maybe it would have made it uncomfortable for her to enjoy and assess a Thai soup under any circumstances.
Also, sorry Julia Child, but champagne is a pretty terrible match with dessert. Have it with fried chicken!
This article’s posted a link in the subreddit, but I think this may be the more congenial venue.
I’m bringing up this article because, well, Klein is missing one crucial point and I think that point might be extremely instructive to the history of the last forty years or so.
See, unless I am seriously misremembering, the Oath Keepers are a bit misrepresentative when it comes to the militia movement. Most of the militia movement (Posse Comitatus, Sovereign Citizens et al) derive back to the John Birch Society and a few other groups that took the label Americanists back in the 1970s. Oath Keepers, however, is something of an outlier – they are fundamentally* a Christian Right organization. And that’s important to the general thrust of Klein’s argument, because by Klein’s schema the Christian Right’s original conception of liberty isn’t natural liberty – it’s hegemonic liberty (with Christ as the ultimate hegemon, of course), especially in the more elite and more Prosperity Gospel parts of the movement. Or to put it in the Albion’s Seed schema, the Christian Right is the largest Cavalier movement in modern America, and the only one with a mass following. (I doubt it’s a complete coincidence that the Christian Right really took off as a political force at about the point when the traditional Cavalier rationales stopped being acceptable in polite society, though other late 60s/early 70s social changes were also involved.)
(* – pun fully intended)
Now, there’s a reason I said original conception of liberty, and it’s the same reason I consider this distinction instructive: I think there’s been something of a fusion between the hegemonic and natural concepts of liberty, and while there’s elements of this dating back at least a century or three I think it’s gone into overdrive in the last 50 years or so driven on overlap between the far edges of the hegemonic liberty Christian Right and the natural liberty Americanists (the classic example of said overlap being, of course, the aforementioned Oath Keepers). That, in turn, might be one of the drivers of modern American polarization; I think there’s an argument to be made that this synthesis brought a bunch of relatively apolitical people with Borderer-ish ideals from the center into Red Tribe, at the cost of hollowing out the center. (I’m not even sure how much confidence I’d put in that argument being right – somewhere between 25% and 50%? – but spitballing here.)
(Aside: I wonder if a better phrasing of natural liberty would be “freedom to be left alone”.)
You have some kind of source for this? Everything I’ve seen suggests that they’re as secular as anybody. Here’s the article where Stewart Rhodes first published the idea for the organization. Here’s a mission statement of sorts on their official site. You’ll note that the only mention of religion is to explicitly rule out “acts of aggression against any person based on…religion…”, Christ is never invoked at all, and God is only invoked in direct quotation or reproduction of the official US government serviceman’s oath. (edit: God is also invoked in quotes/paraphrases of George Washington. Mea culpa. Still, pretty anodyne American civic deism stuff.). I’d link the wikipedia page for more of the same, but too many links tends to trip the spam filter. Hell, even the SPLC doesn’t characterize them as religious or religiously motivated–far-right extremists, but not Christian far-right extremists.
Herp derp, I am in fact apparently seriously misremembering; that’s what I get for posting before double-checking. Oath Keepers only date back to 2009 and I did most of my studying the Christian Right a year before that, that makes it extremely unlikely that they are the group I’m thinking of.
Double-checking, I was almost certainly thinking of the Promise Keepers and remembered the wrong name. Either that, or my screws crossed with Posse Comitatus, which is the militia movement with Christian Identity ties (I was remembering that Posse Comitatus was secular, which on review is definitely incorrect), but my understanding is that Christian Identity is distinct from the Christian Right and has its origins in the John Birch/Liberty Lobby circles.
I don’t think Promise Keepers were political. They may be “right wing christian” to the extent that every unabashedly hetero-normative gender segregated group is non-progressive, but they weren’t political, afaik.
I made the same mistake. 🙂
The bite I found too big to swallow was something else. Klein seems to be saying that once you grant that secession is morally justifiable, there’s no limit to secession and subsecession and subsubsecession except finally a war of all against all. Perhaps that’s true in theory, but one would imagine that in practice there would be many factors that limit it. A subgroup could finally be homogeneous enough that they substantially agree on most things, or on enough things to make the pain of even peaceful secession too great. A subgroup could finally be small enough that fear of neighboring subgroups would be enough of an incentive to voluntarily give up further division. And way at the other end of the process, a government could rule gently and even-handedly enough that most everybody buys in, whether they agree with everything or not.
It’s sort of the old security distinction between intentions and capabilities. I might firmly believe that I or my county or my state have the right to secede, without in any way being inclined to do so. (Did I say “might”? I nearly think I could strike that.)
That’s not to say everything’s rosy. The Oath-Keepers would not have codified their list of Orders They Will Not Obey unless it seemed to them they might be given such orders, and the list would not be controversial if there weren’t highly-placed people who are inclined to give such orders.
Maybe. Obviously there will be a lot of people who disagree with their commitment not to ‘disarm the American People’ or the one about secession, but I don’t think, for example, there are very many officials who are raring to blockade cities and ‘turn them into giant concentration camps.’ I think it’s pretty much expected that any government would be set against an internal group which supports secessionists, regardless of the morality of secession.*
I read Klein a little differently- I think he’s arguing that whether or not you grant the morality of any one secession, once you actually accepted that it would end up devolving down to individual levels, at which point the government would not function. You’re right that things never really devolve to the individual level, and that we’d have towns or states or clans, but there would be a trade-off. If the United States dissolved the federal government, there would be a serious sea change in power structures across the world.
*Frankly, it seems to me that the only OTWNOs that get issued regularly in America are the ones about warrant-less searches and confiscation of property without trial, which really seem to go unremarked upon by such groups.
Does Klein oppose the separation of the thirteen colonies from the British Empire as well?
Unless you support world government, there simply has to be some cut off point. You can’t say that all secession below the level you are comfortable with leads all the way to anarchy, but that the level you are comfortable with is stable, without supplying some fairly substantial reasoning as to why this is so. To say that secession is bad because it leads to further secession that leads to disfunction is simply not a quantifiable argument, because you have to address why already existing historical divisions haven’t inexorably broken all the way down to collapse. You have to decide where the scale economies lie. The question is totally about what size government needs to be to be functional, not about secession. That’s much more difficult than simply writing off secession as a solely destabilizing force.
At every scale of reality, phenomena that are comprised of competing forces have a size range they can operate in. Soap bubbles are found in a certain size range where they are stable for the longest periods, because their existence is a constant battle between gas pressure and surface tension. Stars only exist in a certain size range because without nuclear fusion it is not a star, and once you pile on enough mass to ignite, radiation pressure is in a constant fight against gravity. Once you go outside of these parameters a phase transition into something else occurs. (As an aside, does anyone know if any Marxists, particularly Lenin, ever adressed the “what size range can human society within government exist” question? This seems lurking implicitly in dialectical materialism – which is all about competing forces and how they produce “the transformation of quantity into quality” – but it all seems to be time based rather size based).
I’m not opposed to world government on principle, so there’s no inherent contradiction there.
But from a pure thought perspective, it’s not clear why if secession is acceptable, individual secession isn’t allowed. Certainly, in the counterfactual world where the mere existence of guns ensures that anyone has the ability to freely determine their own destiny (defending themselves against tyranny from any external sources), there’s no reason why an individual couldn’t “secede” and hole themselves up in a remote cabin, pay no taxes, and threaten to shoot anyone who comes near. Or do something more disruptive.
Obviously, in a practical sense there are real limits, but the majority seem to be the ordinary ones that all warlords struggle with.
As for the bit about the thirteen colonies, I can confidently say that had I been present, I would have much preferred any of the peace compromises proposed by Lord North or John Dickinson. With a long view of history, it doesn’t seem like Canada or Australia are markedly worse off for not rebelling (though of course things would have been very different were it not for the “shot heard round the world” pushing places like France towards democracy).
Part III will go up Monday June 26th.
Topic: Security personnel behaviour.
Thesis: Their rudeness is largely counterproductive for their security systems’ goals (at least the nominal ones).
To be rude, in the sense of being insulting and contemptuous, is to cause stress without giving an acceptable reason. Stress wonderfully concentrates the mind. It focuses it on eliminating the cause of the stress. Since in the case of rudeness there is no conceivable cause in one’s own behaviour, the person stressed by the security officer
a) becomes keenly focused on understanding things like:
the police work, the policeman’s mindset, the exact way particular a operation of theirs is being run
b) develops a sizeable grudge against the police and some wider group of people to which they belong and which they serve. *
Generating (a) + (b) is something no security system should wish for (excepting some special cases). Generating (a) + (b) is also an indication of a conceptual systemic flaw, a strategic disaster.
* The above was just an abstraction of my own reactions to a couple of incidents, both slight & run-off-the-mill, with the police personnel of Central & Eastern Europe.
If this argument were an ocean liner, I’ve no idea what icebergs it could come across, I’ve no idea how far it could go, what space it could cover.
But I’m pretty sure it’s better than thoughtless placidity about security staff rudeness.
Eh, I thought the purpose was twofold:
1) To indulge in their power over you; they can be rude and you can do nothing about it
2) To provoke you into escalating the situation to the point where they can use violence, which again you can do nothing about.
Thinking while typing here, so this isn’t particularly coherent.
Law enforcement as a career appeals to a number of different types of people; some are the ‘protect and serve’ mindset, while others are of the ‘respect my authority’ mindset. Some law enforcement jobs are going to be better than others, with more pay or prestige but requiring more skills and effort to obtain, so there’s going to be some sorting with the best law enforcement officers (skill and effort, not necessarily mindset) being predominantly found at the jobs that require their skills.
At the top, the federal agents. If I recall right, at one point you required a degree in law or accounting to be a FBI agent. Below that, it’s a little murky; I can’t say if a NYPD detective is generally more prestigious than a Secret Service Uniformed Division officer. In most cases, I’d say that those trained (however loosely) to make arrests and carry a service weapon out-status glorified night watchmen who sit and monitor a metal detector day in and day out.
I think, at some level, that it’s good that society can find a productive use for people with the ‘respect my authority’ mindset, especially one where that mindset can be controlled. There are always people that want to ‘indulge in their power over others’, and they will always be drawn to jobs that let them carry that out.
I think the number of people that want to use violence against others is rather rare these days, especially in the ‘respect my authority’ mindset, and it’s a good thing we’ve bred that out. However, I think that the stresses inherent in that mindset, coupled with the fact that the TSA is staffed with people from the lower skills and effort end of the potential law enforcement distribution means that mistakes, rudeness and even violence is unavoidable.
It’s very true that the TSA has much lower recruiting standards than law enforcement or investigation agencies, but I think it’s hard to say how much of the negative press is due to that versus the fact that the TSA process umpteen bajillion people per day while most metal detector posts rarely have a queue.
In some sense, it’s a perfect storm.
Flying is stressful even without the security theater. The TSA has a lot higher chance to make a mistake than the security guy at your local courthouse due to the high stress, and the higher traffic means more opportunities to make a mistake. Further, a lot of people have flown, and have had to deal with the TSA’s indignities, meaning stories about TSA screw-ups are things people can identify with. For many people, the TSA is the only real security they have to deal with; I’ve worked at two jobs which required me to go through a metal detector every day, and I’m used to it. Someone that isn’t used to it, especially someone having to hustle kids with them, is a prime grounds for something going wrong.
At some level, it’s a companion to all those ‘jobs going away thanks to automation’ stories. We have a case where too many jobs seem to be defined by requirements unobtainable by a significant fraction of the workforce, especially unwritten requirements. It would be great to weed out the ‘respect my authority’ mindset people from taking jobs with law enforcement, but there’s no way to do that and if we did we wouldn’t have enough people interested in taking the jobs.
I also have SOME sympathy for the TSA, based on how most people just completely ignore them. Pay close attention to what people around you are doing. No matter how many times the TSA lady rudely yells “EVERYONE HAS TO TAKE THEIR SHOES OFF” my estimation is that up to 1/3 of people will still try and go through with their shoes on. No wonder they’re grouchy…
I have some sympathy for individual TSA workers, many of who are probably reasonably nice and responsible people. I have no sympathy for the organization.
They have set things up so that their employees get to go through my luggage when I am not present. That’s an obvious opportunity for both theft and vandalism. The simplest solution would be for the note they put in your suitcase saying they have searched it to include an ID number for the employee who did so. That way, if there were a lot of complaints about one employee, they could investigate.
The private organization that they subcontract security to at SFO does that. TSA, as of the last time I got such a note, doesn’t. The obvious explanation is that they don’t care if their employees rob or vandalize the luggage–perhaps even that they prefer not to know about it.
As some further support for that view, when it actually happened to me and I tried to report it to the local TSA office I called many times, never got anyone to answer, never got a call back.
That seems like a perfectly reasonable stance.
The TSA is sort of the ultimate nuisance; it’s annoying to deal with at the airport and you can’t really pretend that it’s in service of any real purpose, given how consistently it fails tests to measure how good it is at catching weapons. Heck, waiting in line at the DMV, I can at least tell myself that the whole system of licensing and registration serves some positive end.* The TSA just feels like the system forcing me to take my shoes off for the sake of annoying me.
The only other time I had problems at a checkpoint was when I took a trip to visit relatives in Canada. The border guards started by asking some pretty reasonable questions about weapons and contraband, then got weirdly fixated on the fact that we were planning to give the relatives a home-made quilt and kept asking for more details about it, staring at it suspiciously. Maybe they thought the quilt was worth enough to assess a gift tax or something.
*Honestly I have no idea if it does or not.
There’s a real problem in trying to evaluate the performance of someone you don’t want to deal with. What does a positive interaction with a police officer look like? Perhaps “I was speeding, but he let me off with a warning,” but in most cases, if you’re interacting with a police officer, it’s not a good thing and you’re not going to be in a mood to rate the officer’s behavior well even if he does nothing wrong.
The other side of the evaluation process is that any system that penalizes employees for poor performance based on evaluations by ‘customers’ (loosely used) incentivizes bad behavior by ‘customers’. An obvious example is tips; if you know your tip depends on tolerating a poor customer, you accept behavior you wouldn’t otherwise tolerate. The one time you can count on a poor evaluation is a dispute between the customer and the employee, even if the customer is at fault.
The TSA by its nature is victim of both problems. If they’re doing their job, you don’t notice them. Nobody wants to interact with the TSA, therefore almost any interaction is going to be regarded poorly. Any legitimate complaint is going to be lost in a sea of frustrated travelers that blame the TSA for something beyond it’s control, and the TSA’s reputation is in the sewer anyway, so there’s no reason to worry about customer service reputation.
Someone who was much better acquainted than I about getting into fistfights with strangers told me that the worst thing you can say to someone who is acting threatening is “I don’t want any trouble”. That always guarantees a fight.
This is because the type of person who would get into fights with strangers is always looking for weakness. If they find it, they are encouraged to lash out. Police always make sure to never project weakness for this reason. Some people would mistake politeness for weakness so most police are ruder than they need to be.
Some security personnel are trying to act like police in a situation that does not call for it.
There is certainly an aspect of that.
Between working in EMS and in the service industry I’ve had occasion to deal with quite a few belligerent drunks and the most reliable way to deescalate that sort of thing was to project calm.
Interesting! So if “I don’t want any trouble” is the worst thing to say, what’s the best?
Getting aggressive may work but also carries a significant risk of further escalation if you misjudge so I’d recommend against it unless you’re absolutely sure of your position.
As I said above IME the most reliable method of deescalation is to project calm confidence (even if you don’t feel it). More often than not they’re either trying to intimidate or get a rise out of you and if you don’t seem intimidated or risible they’ll either back off or switch tactics.
Just posting to say that I really like that use of “risible”.
What sort of things would one say while projecting calm?
Depends on the context, I’d say the main thing is you don’t want to be perceived as, weak or afraid, belligerent, contemptuous or indifferent. So acknowledge them, their apparent grievance, then offer a response that provides an out to deescalate.
An example from personal history: I’m leaving a bar when a large gentleman follows me outside and accuses me of stealing his girlfriend’s bag. Looking back it was kind of like a CRPG with the following options up on screen:
a) *panic and run*
b) “FUCK YOU I DIDN’T STEAL SHIT”
c) “Really? You think I look like someone who’d grab a knock-off Prada? As if.”
d) Looked at the bag I was holding, saw he was correct, apologized profusely, went in with him, gave it back to his girl, grabbed my bag which I’d left in the adjacent booth,wished them both a good night and went on with my life.
My guess is a-c would have ended badly, and I’m pretty sure the dude was expecting b, he was kinda confused by how I handled it as I recall. If d hadn’t been an option, maybe I would of offered to help him find it or think of who else might have grabbed it or some-such.
I would like to solicit the community for some career advice, if I may. A friend very recently brought to my attention the need for people to enter the field of cyber security, and the great number of high-paying jobs available in that field.
I’m in my early 30’s with an undergraduate degree in Finance, and I’ve worked in that field for years but I’m ready for a change. I’m reasonably intelligent, and I would say a little above average when it comes to meddling with computers and technology, but I have no coding/programming knowledge up to this point.
I like the idea of working in cyber security, but I also wonder if this is a field for the type of person who has been writing computer programs since their teen years, and I would be hopelessly over my head trying to get started now.
Does anyone here with related experience/knowledge have any advice?
I grew up as a programmer, and now I manage a team of developers. I need to consider security concerns all the time, and work closely with our Information Security department. So from that perspective…
The field of “computer stuff” has grown immense. When I was just starting out, in the mid-80s, it was small enough that one could imagine a person (maybe Wozniak) being so gifted as to know pretty much everything. That’s not the case anymore. The field has grown so much that to be of any value, one must concentrate on a relatively narrow aspect of it. One can’t really even be said to be “a programmer” anymore, because there are so many different disciplines involved. As a result, nobody’s got anything anywhere near the whole picture, at least in any detail, and they don’t have deep skills across many areas.
None of the security people I work with are programmers at all, nor are any of the programmers I work with security experts.
Being successful as a computer security expert is going to require (in my estimation) a surface understanding of programming and development methodologies. You’d also need some understanding of communication theory. Most significantly, how the layers of the modern networking stack work, in terms of how they’re accomplished in the various devices and software involved.
So no, there’s not particular requirement that you have significant programming experience. But there still is a goodly amount of very technical stuff that you’d need to learn to be effective.
Even then it was an illusion. Wozniak was a whiz at everything low level, but I don’t think he ever showed any talent at, say, databases; he didn’t write the upper levels of Apple DOS, for instance.
I don’t have related experience and knowledge, so I’m sorry to be the first person posting here.
But I CAN give you information gleaned just from being older than you and having gone through a major career change myself. I’ve got two points to keep in mind:
1. If this is something you want to do, or you think you want to do, jump right in. There is absolutely nothing on the face of your plan that looks concerning. It’s a good, reasonable plan; the only thing holding you back would be the fear of starting something new. https://xkcd.com/1768/. I suspect you’ll be glad you did.
2. The, I don’t know, general tenor of these times occasionally seems to suggest that “computer programming” is easy. At least that’s the impression I get every time I read something suggesting that we can help people whose careers have been offshored by “teaching them to code”. Judging by my friends in the industry, that’s not true. It’s like anything else – you’re going to go learn how to do it, and then you’re going to start with the simpler jobs and work your way up, learning more as you go. Nobody ever suggests that we handle unemployment by offering courses on building suspension bridges. The career you’re talking about is complicated, hard work. That’s why it pays well. I only mention this on the off chance that you think you’re going to jump in and start leading a team that designs security systems or something. Otherwise, don’t worry – you won’t be over your head, you’re plenty young enough to make this move, so get started and have fun!
This is a tangent and I hope not to hijack Alyosha’s query. But to stick in my two cents –
The task of coding to program computers really is easy, or at least it is for certain people. Nevertheless, you’ll notice that there’s a lot of really bad software out there.
The thing is that the coding is just the tip of the iceberg of software development. There are other facets to the process of developing software that are much more difficult. Two things in particular stand out in my mind.
First, before you even start to contemplate how you’re going to write the code, you must first determine exactly what the program is going to need to do. There’s a really significant engineering process involved here, optimally involving the determination and writing of requirements; investigating user interaction models to ensure usability; documentation; and testing. Unfortunately, most programmers get there either by studying computer science (which teaches the programming side involving symbolic logic, etc., but completely ignores the engineering side – although this picture is now improving somewhat); or through a certification program which, deals mainly with the pragmatics of writing workable code and less so on the engineering aspects.
Second, most development efforts are a team activity, extending over time through many successive releases. This demands an understanding of software lifecycle and development methodologies, that try to help us work together without stepping on each others’ feet; progress toward a goal as expeditiously as possible; and maintain quality as the system evolves. This is largely separate from the actual coding, and the best practices for all of it seem to evolve even more rapidly than artifacts like programming languages.
Computer security* is a huge area with a ton of niches. However, I’d say there are three general clusters based on the background and mindset of the people that dominate each. One of those clusters is formed around programmers including, but not limited to hackers. One around network and system administrators. The third is around those with accounting, legal, human resources, and physical security backgrounds.
In terms of trying to break in without a programming (and presumably with out admin) experience the third is probably the best bet. That’s the world of certs, and online masters degrees, and giant multinational consultant operations as employers (some in-house too). There’s certainly plenty of money in it, I know IT security auditors that do very well, but it seems kind of dull to me.
*Cyber to my ear connotes government or giant government contractor. Plus companies like Walmart.
I have a book recommendation. Ross Anderson’s Security Engineering, webbed for free. I really enjoyed reading it, even though security is only a peripheral interest and nothing to do with my job.
For a fun view into the programming-oriented part of computer security, you could do worse than trying out a CTF (capture-the-flag). The idea is that a vulnerable system of some sort is set up, and you are invited to try to find a way in. The flag-capturing comes in when experienced security folk race to see who can figure it out first, but CTFs are frequently left online to be completed later at your leisure. There are a number of CTFs that are designed as educational exercises. My first recommendation, picoCTF 2014, has unfortunately been taken offline due to funding constraints; I’m not sure whether picoCTF 2017 is still available, but you could try signing up to see. I scrolled back a bit in their twitter feed, and found a link to angstromCTF, which does still seem to be up.
My favourite CTF, and the only one I’ve had the patience to work through in its entirety, is microcorruption, which simulates a low-level device and asks you to hack it using carefully chosen passwords. The user interface is top notch, although it might be a bit much if you’ve never programmed before.
Your friend is correct, and no, in my experience you do not need a lifetime’s experience in programming to be a solid security analyst. Experience: 3 years at a security consultancy.
If you genuinely think you would enjoy it, I would point you toward application security (as opposed to information security). AppSec is basically all about composing your application the way that it should be. As an analyst, you could have a toolkit of 10 things and cover, probably 80% of AppSec problems. Actually, there’s a link for that. If you familiarized yourself with the OWASP top ten and could speak cogently to what to do about them, you’d acquit yourself well in any AppSec interview.
AppSec is a better path (I would say) because it’s more recent than infosec–which has been around as long as people have been trying to get into computers they weren’t supposed to be. InfoSec has become so robust and well managed (er… usually) that intruders have turned their attention from directly attacking the hardware and data (infosec) to instead try to dupe an application into accidentally divulging information or changing data.
My major caveat: talk to an appsec person. In my experience it includes a LOT of staring at obtuse application scans and trying to figure out what the scanner actually saw.
You probably don’t need to know programming for computer security work, but you might want to learn anyway–it’s a fun hobby. It may also give you an unfair advantage against other security people.
Gonna go ahead and advertise Agora again. It’s seeing a little bit of use now, so you can see what it looks like in practice. Any thoughts?
https://agora-2866.nodechef.com/
I hope this isn’t too controversial for the comments, and apologize in advance if it is.
—-
So let’s talk Islamic terrorism.
I’ve been thinking on this for a long time. The story doesn’t make sense.
The following statements are facts that I believe to be true and reliable:
* Islam is the motivating factor for the overwhelming majority of terrorist attacks worldwide.
* Islamic terrorism poses a grave and urgent threat to the safety of the western world.
* The vast majority of Muslims (or possibly ‘Muslims in the western world’) are totally normal, happy, friendly, peaceful people, who want nothing to do with violence or terrorism.
* The powers that be are acting creepily Orwellian in their attempt to downplay the fact that this is Islamic terrorism, to the point that direct lies are routinely published in major media sources.
* Factions who are incredibly opposed to specifics of Islam, for weird inexplicable reasons, defend it. (eg. people who hate the patriarchy but support a philosophy that explicitly subordinates women).
And I think I can square these seemingly contradictory facts with the following:
“There are internal divisions in Islam, such that the violence is perpetrated by one faction, not the whole of it. The people who appear to be defending the violent faction are actually attempting to draw this distinction, and exonerate the other factions, but are very bad at it. The violent factions, on the other hand, are actively muddying these waters to smokescreen their actions”
To attempt to draw an analogy, it’s as if, say, (1) Calvinists started a global campaign of terrorism; (2) the Muslim world characterized this as “Christian terrorism” and started bringing consequences indiscriminately against all Christians; (3) factions friendly with Catholics tried to defend themselves but the best they could do is “this is not Christian terrorism” when it clearly is Calvinist terrorism (which is a branch of Christianity); and (4) the Calvinists actively muddied this distinction to confuse critics.
So now I would like to learn more about the specific internal distinctions within the Islamic faith and polities, so I can follow up on this hypothesis and better understand the scenario. I’ve tried to do some reading but it’s all sufficiently foreign to me. One thing that has started to come up a lot are Wahhabism and Salafism. These appear to be radical minority factions, similar to, say, hard line evangelical conservatives in the US. They appear to be NOT representative of the Islamic mainstream, but also appear to be fairly dangerous and actively responsible for much of the terrorism. These are some kind of highly politicized, hyper-conservative, hyper-authoritarian branches of Islam that are stoking the fires of nationalism powering things like ISIS.
Given that I was able to research this in about four hours on wikipedia, it’s really weird to me that nobody ever seems to make this distinction in the public conversation. Like, lots of people shout “Not All Muslims” but this never really comes across as reasonable or convincing when people hear terrorists talking about their Islamic faith. It would be really easy to say “Not All Muslims, just Salafists” or whatever on the end. It would help to make this distinction concrete in the minds of Westerners, and it might re-assure Muslim communities that they aren’t going to do their part to keep the peace, only to be turned on by overzealous white folks concerned with safety and security.
If I am correct and this small faction does pose a credible threat to the west, this might also help convince people of the necessity of defending ourselves appropriately. I imagine the thought process of most people on the left is something along the lines of “I know plenty of muslims and they are all great folks, they would never do this”. If you could show them that, no, actually people _*are*_ doing this, but we know it’s not your friends, and we are not going to retaliate against them for something they didn’t do, it might allow people to be more realistic about these things.
Anyways, these are my scattered thoughts on this subject, and any feedback (especially from people who are familiar with the details of this subject) would be muchly appreciated
I think that distinction is made fairly frequently and explicitly.
Here’s a Judiarcy Committee report from 2003 entitled: “TERRORISM: GROWING WAHHABI INFLUENCE IN THE UNITED STATES.”
From that report, Chuck Schumer (Democratic Senator from NY):
Googling Wahhabism + Terrorism, the first link is a Huffington Post article entitled “How Saudi Wahhabism is the fountainhead of Islamist Terrorism.”
Also on that page are pieces from PBS Frontline, New Statesman and a facebook group with 20,000 followers called Muslims against Wahhabism/Terrorism. There’s also an NYT article stating that the West has (wrongly) deemed Wahhabism as responsible for Muslim radicalization.
I could be mistaken, but I was under the impression that the terrorist attacks against the west were generally committed by people who were radicalized later in life and sought out militant sects.
When I read about these, the ‘standard’ story is: Muslim immigrants come to the UK to escape some regional conflict, or just go get higher wages. Their kids grow up culturally Muslim and feel separate from the UK mainstream culture. Europe has high youth unemployment in general, and especially for children-of-immigrants.
As a result, the kids and their peer group hold a certain amount of resentment for the UK. Eventually, they start returning to Islam out of a desire to reclaim a sense of identity. At that point, they kids are looking for people who appear to both ‘authentic’ (read: conservative) and critical of the west.
If this is true, then there’s a sense in which we could blame the ISIS-specific sects. But it’s not really people who are born into those small fractions who are the threat.
Instead, there’d be a large number of people who aren’t personally members of the zealous sects but see those sects as people who are devoting a large and sincere amount of energy into Islam as a religion.
It would be similar to how the median Calvanist would be moderate in his personal life. But, deep down, they’d recognize that their moderate pastor is making practical compromises. They might not want to follow a strong fire-and-brimstone preacher. But they’d respect what the person is doing.
This would make it very hard to single out one group as ‘the bad ones’.
This is more or less correct.
Except there is another aspect involving the middle east. A number of Gulf states, most notably, but not only, Saudi Arabia, have a lot of Muslims who got rich through basically no effort on their part besides living at the right time in the right place that happens to contain oil. Contrast this with the economic situation in the rest of the Islamic world. As such I suspect they feel vaguely guilty about this, and just as the stereotypical “limousine liberal” supports radical socialists “over there” to assuage his guilt, these rich Muslims support radical clerics in the west to assuage their guilt. Thus the imam in the mosque the ordinary Muslims go to is likely to be radical as is the imam at every other mosque in the neighborhood.
@Drew:
The median homegrown (born in Europe or wherever) terrorist seems to be a guy who feels both disconnected to whatever European culture it is and to the culture of his ancestry. So he responds by adopting a really extreme form of Islam.
I’m not sure what you mean by this exactly. Does it mean a grave an urgent threat to the safety of each and every individual in the western world? Most of them? A grave and urgent threat to the continued existence of the nations of the western world in their current forms? Something else?
Regarding Islamic terror as an existential threat was all the rage 15 years ago.
When it came to nuclear attacks and dirty bombs, we were told “Not ‘if’, but ‘when’.”
“When” never came, and the losses were deemed acceptable, so we moved on to other things.
Nobody’s nuked a city (yet), so that’s good. On the other hand, we now have de facto and sometimes de jure prohibitions against blaspheming Islam in nearly all Western countries. There are different kinds of existential threats.
Was the actual explicit de jure prohibition against blaspheming Christianity (and only Christianity) an existential threat in the UK before 2008? What about the current similar law in Greece? Does application of Germany’s blasphemy law to Christians constitute an existential threat, or is it only a problem when used in service of Islam?
Always factor the opposition to a thing in as part of the threat of the thing. Part of the threat of Islamic terrorism is the inevitable and slowly growing recourse to something fascist-like as a solution, since nobody seems to want to do anything about it.
The fact that terrorism kills comparitively few people compared to other things is a fact that has by now, time and time again, empirically been shown weak as a way to deconvert anti-Islamic radicals. They yet persist, and grow more radical over time. Aesthetics are what attracts people towards movements like Islam, and it’s also what attracts people to movements like National Socialism. There is a radicalizing nationalism along with a radicalizing Islam. A unilateral solution where only the nationalists disarm won’t work, so there has to be some multilateral solution that adresses the problems of both parties without invoking oppression of either side as a solution. Difficult.
Terrorism is an existential threat because if you get enough terror attacks for a long enough period of time, you gradually break down people’s faith in the prevailing system. It feels like a betrayal. Then at some point you need a trigger, a moment where you get so many terror attacks in a row, or some image, something so heinous that you can ratchet the right up to the next level of radicalization. We’ve already been through several periods of “stepping up”, and at some point if not literally fascism, then at least a fauxcism near enough awaits. First you start getting white nationalist lone wolf attacks, as we’ve seen, and then in turn this creates more Islamic terrorism, and then you’ve got something like a low level civil war going.
Whether you think that’s rational or reasonable is irrelevent, the only things that matter are what the masses of the right think, and where we are in terms of mass radicalization, and tit for tat attacks. The moment you start getting nationalist attacks tit for tat with Islamic attacks, we’re already on a road to a dark place.
The alt-right simply didn’t exist back in 2010 in a way that would allow it to be name dropped by a Presidential candidate as a rising threat. Even on SSC, we have a fair few commenters floating mass deportation and executing the imams of radical mosques and so on. The fact that an ostensibly rationalist place like SSC that would have leaned progressive in the ’00s now has commenters espousing positions that would have got you censure on conservative websites back then, must be some evidence in the “holy shit, the right is radicalizing” pile. Throw Trump on there too.
This is the real threat of a radicalized minority group launching psychologically jarring attacks on the majority group. About half of every society seems to be right wing, and that side of the majority group is getting all the more ready to launch some attacks of its own, whether terroristically or politically.
The number of deaths isn’t the critical factor. On one end of the scale you have de-politicized deaths from car crashes and so on, and on the other you have Franz Ferdinand. How many deaths of what form can the system survive?
The very fact that the left is desperately trying to cool the right down about Islam is part of Islamic terrorism being a problem. The lack of realisation of this stems from the delusion that the right can be cooled down by the use of statistics on death rates. No, you have to offer a different solution, or you’ve got nothing, and this will simply continue. It’s a failed tactic. It’s a dud. It’s not going to convince anyone save a tiny tiny rational minority of people.
@Wency
Deemed acceptable by whom? Who’s “we” here?
That is really an excellent analysis.
Two things that generally accepted to be true about terrorism are:
1. The [game end goal] object of terror is to break the compact of protection between the government and the governed. Islamic Terrorists are saying, “see your government cant protect you” to their target population. Ta-Nehisi Coates has written something on this, and he is working it out through the medium of the Black Panther comic over the last year. I can see if I can find the reference if anyone is interested…I think it was the Atlantic.
2. Terrorism works. The sans-culottes were terrorists, the American revolutionaries were terrorists. I think you made that point in a comment upthread. We need to make a distinction between islamic terrorism and the sort of general principles of terrorism. The end goal of Islamic Terrorists is a world ending storm that pits all the believers against the non-believers.
The very fact that the left is desperately trying to cool the right down about Islam is part of Islamic terrorism being a problem
That isnt really why the Left is doing that. Its more that the Left knows that RW attacks on muslims play right into islamic terrorists goals. Of course islamic terrorism is part of Islam. In complexity science, we use the analog of the human body to model complex social systems. Jihad is in the DNA of the Quran. What type of jihad gets expressed depends on what the environmental triggers are. A complexity science solution would be to change the environment.
That is why the left pushes the idea of stop bombing muslims on the other side of the world to force them to accept your preferred form of representative government. They are trying to change the environment that causes expression of the violent type of jihad.
By saying islamic terror isnt part of Islam, well they are doing that for the same reason Bush did…because if you are going to fight all the muslims in the world, and try to get them to stop reading Quran, you will fail. So the idea that somehow there are these moderate muslims that are going to follow a version of Quran that US wants to push…wont work in the current environment.
I thought your summary was excellent, and your list of “foundational claims” serves the discussion well.
The move from “Islam is the problem” to “Salafism/Wahabism is the problem” is a necessary but insufficient step in the right direction, in my view. What we are interested in w.r.t minimising harm from terrorism is identifying specific beliefs which motivate specific behaviours, which in this case are 1) Martyrdom and 2) Jihad. These beliefs are nested within Islam, as outlined in the Qu’ran and it’s supporting texts, and are central to the ‘practice’ of Salafism.
There are ISIS-inspired terrorists who know nothing about Islam, have emigrated to the middle east from rich western countries, who have no cultural upbringing in the Muslim world – they are simply attracted to the doctrines of martrydom and jihad. So they effectively come into the system at the lowest level of nesting, completely ignorant of Salafism/Wahabism above them and Islam above that.
So when Majid Nawaz gets on twitter to criticise western liberal schmucks denouncing “terrorism” in the wake of [insert recent muslim terrorism episode], this is what he is getting at. Denouncing terrorism is trivial. Identifying and debasing the specific beliefs responsible for motivating violent action is what’s necessary.
Okfine.
If “salafi-wahhabism” is the problem, why isnt Trump doing anything about it?
Conservatives should actually pay close attention to this constructed adaptive invasive strategy as a model for “Taking Back America”.
Obama’s game theoretic strategy was “Let’s you and him fight” (KSA v Iran).
Our current President just put his thumb on the scales for KSA in the Qatar crisis.
If I can believe what I hear on the BBC, it’s not even all Salafists. There are quietist Salafists who believe they should stay out of all politics. I think they don’t even vote.
I thought the quiet Salafists just didn’t think now was the right time for the Caliphate. So they’re all for what ISIS is doing, just not yet guys.
Two points:
One, the Wahhabi sect, while small, is exceedingly influential due to their ties to the house of Saud, which controls both the money inflow from the Saudi oil sales and access to Mecca. Wikipedia contains numbers that suggest that some 90% of funding for Islamic religious causes is Wahhabi.
Two, it’s not just the Wahhabi sect. The US has had a beef with Iran for a while. Hezbollah has carried out a number of attacks against the West, some of which have been outside the Middle East.
As one data point against the hypothesis that the Democrats were hacked more during the election, not because there was any preference in targeting, but because the Republicans are better at keeping their data safe: the RNC kept their voter database, containing information on 198 million potential voters, in a publicly accessible AWS bucket. Oops.
What does that have to do with the security of email accounts?
Come off it, dude. There’s more to infosec than emails. PII is not a joke. From TFA:
There are certainly arguments that could be had here, but your out-of-hand dismissal is decidedly non-constructive.
The non-security of the database is troubling. However, Iain’s connecting of that to the hacking of the DNC was just political snark. One can have secure email hosting (the things that were being targeted by the hackers) while having a wide open voter database that nobody knew about or bothered to attack.
Eh, I disagree. I think it was presented fairly rationally. Additional evidence relevant to previous discussion. As I perceived it, the closest that came to snark is “Oops” and even that’s low-key (and appropriate) enough that I assumed I was just being oversensitive due to Iain’s status as a Prominent SSC L*.
Highly doubtful they were the only things. Both a successful breach and turning up material worth leaking is required to make the news. So we haven’t heard much about failed attempts or successful breaches that only revealed e.g. catering plans.
Security Through Obscurity is no excuse. If somebody had found it during the campaign and wanted to use it, they could have. You can argue it’s not as big a deal as the email server (and I’d probably agree) or that really we should not be surprised at shit infosec from all big orgs (and I’d still agree), but neither of those absolves this of being a Major Fuckup.
I do not think it is unreasonable to suspect that an organization’s attention to security in one area is correlated with its attention to security in other areas.
Podesta’s emails were hacked not because of an insecure email system, but because he was the target of a phishing attack — that is to say, social engineering. If you manage to build an organization that is not susceptible to phishing, you do so by having an extremely robust security culture, with dedicated security people poking around looking for problems. If you are leaving your databases full of PII unsecured, then maybe you need more security people poking around.
In particular, the Podesta phishing attach succeeded due to an incompetent IT security person, who mixed up “legitmate” and “not legitimate” in his response. That’s likely to show up elsewhere in an IT security scheme.
Also, as I’ve pointed out before, at least some RNC emails were hacked, just not leaked for some reason. Apparently, none of them enjoyed Pizza.
link text
So on 6/17 Scott posted a link about a correlation between higher education and brain tumors. That reminded me of this research showing that thinking appears to cause DNA strand breaks in mouse neurons. (Summaries here and here.)
It sure seems like brain cells somehow use DNA to store state, possibly using one of the epigenetic mechanisms we discovered recently. And then perhaps a primary function of sleep is to repair the DNA damage? Maybe.
That’s a surprisingly contentious assertion among electrophysiologists of my acquaintance.
A later study, Activity-Induced DNA Breaks Govern the Expression of Neuronal Early-Response Genes, found that the DNA strand breaks pretty much all happened in the promoters of a small set of early-response genes and helped them be expressed faster. The DNA breaks are repaired within a maximum of 2 hours.
So the connection you noticed between learning, DNA strand breaks, and tumors probably has something to it – surely there’s always some increased cancer risk when you start breaking DNA strands? – but it looks like the strand breaks aren’t being used to store state. They’re being used to help speed up learning. (And then quickly being returned to normal.) If I’m reading this part correctly:
…they’re hypothesizing that the DNA is being cut in order to free it from the chromatin loops that keep it nicely organized but slow down access to it. Neurons are cutting through the usual procedures for DNA access in order to speed up the job.
Good find, BTW. I enjoyed digging into that!
Interesting, but I’m not sure if it could explain the tumor thing. Don’t brain tumors usually grow from glial cells? Can neurons become cancerous in the adult brain?
Distinguished readers, commenters, lurkers and others of Slate Star Codex!
Further to an entanglement I have gotten into regarding bintchaos and their perception that I was threatening them personally, either directly or by implication, to doxx, harass and generally out them via an attempt to locate universities offering a course in socio-physics, I wish to appeal to a jury of my peers!
I promise, upon my solemn word of honour (and if that is not sufficient I am willing to take an oath compatible with my religion) that if a simple majority (e.g. if ten people respond, four say “no I did not think you meant that” and six say “yes I did think that”, then the six are deemed to win) respond to the question: Did you think, perceive, or take it to be meant that Deiseach intended to doxx or otherwise harass bintchaos by talking about what universities they might be attending for a course on socio-physics, then I will voluntarily absent myself and abstain from commenting on this site for a period of four weeks, commencing with the end of the vote.
Anyone who wants to say “yes you were” or “no you weren’t”, please reply to this. I’ll give it a couple of days.
I think bintchaos is being over-sensitive (and frankly, I think they’re not entirely honest in their allegations of being genuinely terrified by the hatred I’m spewing at them) but I recognise and admit that I may be under-sensitive to how I come across and may be more aggressive in tone than I intend to be. Intention doesn’t count so although I wasn’t trying to doxx bintchaos (and don’t even know how to do that even if I wanted to), what matters is if I sounded as though that were what I was doing.
I’m serious. This is a matter of honour with me: I have been accused of a scandalous behaviour that I personally consider cowardly and dishonorable, and so I must answer this charge as best I can, and trial by jury will have to suffice.
Yes or no, and four weeks’ guaranteed silence from me if “yes” wins. Start voting now!
No, but making a big to-do of it makes me wonder if a few weeks’ cooloff would not be such a bad idea.
No. It may have been a bit further than you should have gone, but there was a fairly obvious inference that could have been drawn from the information you posted, and you didn’t even attempt to hint at it.
I am inclined to agree with Gobbobobble. While I do not think you meant any actual harm I do feel that your interactions with Bintchaos have been unnecessarily antagonistic. I see no need for “four weeks’ guaranteed silence” but I would urge you to simply disengage from her and perhaps take a few days to cool off.
This is also a friendly reminder that your perfectly welcome to join us in the Naval Gazing or Cooking threads. 😉
Edit: Might I also suggest that an apology may be in order at a later date but that for moment discretion is the better part of valor.
Might I also suggest that an apology may be in order at a later date but that for moment discretion is the better part of valor.
I’m too steamed right now to offer a sincere apology. I will try to get into a charitable and repentant frame of mind and get myself to a point where I can do so, without mentally tacking on (“and….” not so charitable sentiments).
If bintchaos wants to stick around and engage with everyone else while I’m engaging in “silence, exile and cunning” and is prepared to accept an apology when I’m back, then that’s probably a good time to do it.
I have a conflict of interest, since I enjoy your posts, but I’ll take a look and vote as honestly as possible.
Without reading the posts in question, my first thought is (a) you know whether you intended to threaten to doxx the other person; (b) they know whether they interpreted you to be doing so. It’s possible that either of you are lying, but isn’t the whole situation best resolved by “I apologize if you understood me to be threatening to doxx you – I assure you that wasn’t what I intended to express and that I would not have done so.”?
No, you didn’t intend to doxx, unless you are Moriarty from the Sherlock revival.
That said, bintchaos has said before that she isn’t confident in her ability to read context, so I’d probably just leave it at that rather than pile on. I find your forthrightness refreshing and charming, but you and bintchaos probably aren’t a very productive mix in large quantities.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ssc-block/omoblondlbpljpjpegjknicfhoicjfnk?utm_source=chrome-app-launcher-info-dialog
I can’t speak to your interactions with user bintchaos because I made wise use of this Chrome add-on. Use it yourself, and soon you will be able to say the same thing!
…seriously, user bintchaos pretty much confirmed that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about and doesn’t care to find out because it would be too hard. If you want to engage with his perspective, there are plenty of places you can find it, but why bother?
My reaction to Bintchaos’ comment was that she was paranoid–nothing you posted implied any desire to dox her or organize an online mob against her.
I didn’t bother to say so, both because I’m arguably biased and because she seemed to be announcing her departure.
Well, if we are to have a jury, we should have the opportunity to debate.
The instructions from the judge indicated the question we should answer is:
I submit that Deiseach did intend to “otherwise harass” the complainant. It is not required that the question of doxxing be answered in the affirmative for the jury to return a guilty verdict.
Less cleverly, I think it’s pretty clear you were attempting to antagonize bintchaos and disparage the seriousness of the academic field they chose to highlight. Had the location of study been Cambridge or Oxford, I don’t think you would have referenced it. So I do see the reference to geography as a part of “otherwise harass”.
Fair points.
On the other hand, I do think the geography was at least somewhat relevant. Bintchaos was talking in a difficult-to-understand manner about a field that none of us understood very well, and claiming that strong conclusions could be drawn from it. This isn’t necessarily proof that the field is useless/irrelevant, and one part of doing due diligence on this is looking at who else may believe this field/be doing work there. When the sum total of apparent academic work is two universities which are not particularly prominent, this is relevant information.
I think you are now using “harass” in a sense weak enough so that many posters, Bintchaos among them, would be guilty of harassment. There is a large difference between “trying to make someone you are arguing with look bad” and “trying to organize an online mob attack on someone you are arguing with.
By your definition, wasn’t Bintchaos’ post accusing Deiseach a clearer case of harassment than Deiseach’s post?
Go read everything Deiseach posted to bintchaos and examine the pattern. It’s not merely one comment that establishes the harassment.
I would say bintchaos could be read as (generally) insulting, but not harassing. More in a casual manner based on assumptions she is making about the competence of her interlocutors. As to her response to Deiseach’s “doxxing” post, I really don’t see how you get harassment from that.
Can you expand on the distinction? I would have said that Deiseach was insulting to Bintchaos.
Doxing people and organizing internet flash mobs against them are forms of behavior that most people here strongly disapprove of. Confidently claiming that someone else is doing so when she isn’t looks like an attempt to get other people angry at her, which is what I thought was considered harassment in this context.
@David Friedman:
So, I am going off of a sense of meaning that maps with the dictionary definitions:
– subject to aggressive pressure or intimidation.
– make repeated small-scale attacks on (an enemy).
All of those things seem to match what D did, but, if bint was pressuring or intimidating it was defensive (it could also simply have been genuine).
D was aggressively and repeatedly specifically targeting bint. Not so the other way around.
Given: I was raised in a bubble of wealth and privilege that I completely understand. I had a graduated set of welsh ponies growing up (section A, section B, section C). My ponies all had fucking permanent cards if you know what that means. I have ridden with The Hunt multiple times, which is magnitudes more exclusive than a golf club or a yacht club. So how do you think my parents or my university would feel if I’m exposed as an “Islamist apologist” on the inter-webs?
But I also perfectly understand what stalking is. I have been stalked. So I get @Deiseach subtly implied threat at a visceral level, fight or fight level.
The very worst thing about stalking imho is how you question yourself…it must be my fault somehow…should I have been nicer…should I have been meaner…should I have ever made eye contact… should I have run away like a scalded cat in the beginning …did I draw this on myself…
This commentariat just validated my anxiety hormonal cascade.
“I have ridden with The Hunt multiple times, which is magnitudes more exclusive than a golf club or a yacht club. So how do you think my parents or my university would feel if I’m exposed as an “Islamist apologist” on the inter-webs?”
Is this a joke?
If not, I don’t imagine that it’d be any worse than for anyone else, and maybe better?
@Mark
Maybe it wouldn’t be…but it might because I’m a defector from a very rich and powerful tribe.
Not a convert.
@bintchaos
If you’re really worried about being doxxed, I’d suggest that you don’t give details like ” I have ridden with The Hunt multiple times, which is magnitudes more exclusive than a golf club or a yacht club.” Being charitable, you’re freaking out over a speck Deiseach has placed in your eye after you’ve shoved a log there.
@Bean
good advice probably.
I have to admit that one thing D said that really stung was something about my privileged bubble upbringing– that was just the first thing that came to hand. Its incredible the investiture in equestrian sport for the kids of the well-off. What would be great for American culture would be for every child to have a pet, to have exposure to nature, exposure to training and manners and honor and discipline. And I’m not just in the meritocratic bubble due to ancestry, I’m also in the bubble of what Dr. Haier and others call “genetic luck” for IQ and g.
Would you guys call that white guilt?
@bintchaos
You’re wandering off-topic. This isn’t wrong, but it’s not going to do anything to improve your reputation, which could use a bit of polish at this point.
HBC said earlier that the high-status act here is to explain something clearly, the highest-status being to do so so clearly that people change their mind. I have many political disagreements with HBC, but on this, he is spot-on.
So, if you want to start to earn status here, my advice:
Pick one topic. Something non-political that you like and know a lot about. For me, that’s battleships. For you, maybe hunting and Welsh ponies. Write something on it, that someone who has been on a horse once (me) can enjoy. Do your absolute best to make it comprehensible and accurate. You are trying to make people understand, not to impress them with how smart you are. Post it. Answer any questions, and be polite. Keep doing this until it’s become a habit to write to make people understand. Over time, you can venture into more political topics as you learn to express yourself clearly.
(And whatever you do, don’t attempt to do this with a topic you don’t really understand. I’m still dubious of your claims of expertise in several areas, and doing this is a good way to expose any gaps in your knowledge, because you’re throwing away the ability to hide them by being difficult to understand.)
@Bint
Maybe it’s time to pack it up and stop digging?
Someone from the upbringing you describe, of all people, should understand that if you have to tell people that you have high IQ, g, class, taste, style, etc, you probably don’t.
So perhaps try using that high g to avoid being ridiculous, rather than just telling people about it.
Status as a Smart Cookie, worried about personal security, continuing to give personally identifiable details: pick no more than two.
I’m just going to repeat what I said before I put that ass on hide: bint, until you’re willing to grow politically, you’re not going to do well when discussing political topics.
This isn’t even just about you being wrong – it’s about you being dime-a-dozen. I can find the “reality has a liberal bias” perspective wherever I want it. The SSC perspectives aren’t quite as rarified as some might think, but they’re certainly harder to find than yours. So why bother?
@ AnonYEmous
You’re not helping.
I’m offering good advice in an unpalatable way. If bint can’t take it, that’s honestly fine by me. If he takes it, great!
But the bottom line is that, until he stops it with that attitude, or at least starts learning to cloak it, he will not fit into the political conversation, no matter how much respect he gets for posting about battleships or whatever. At best people will just ignore it out of courtesy.
Unpalatable advice is rarely taken even when it’s good, which suggests to me that offering advice was not the primary purpose of your post.
Like I said, not helping.
@AnonYEmous
I concur with hlynkacg that your comments are unhelpful, and in fact less productive than anything bintchaos has posted. Calling her “he” is childish and petty, and trying to gatekeep which political perspectives people post is pretentious.
Personally, I like bintchaos’ comments (and I say that despite having had a long argument with her previously). If you find them worthless, I think that is due to your mindset not their content.
eh
I had a comment all written out, but on reflection this really is meaningless. I’m going to cease engaging entirely, as I had planned to before Deiseach’s comment. If you enjoy engaging with user bintchaos, I urge you to continue, or not as you desire.
I agree that that describes Deiseach’s rhetorical stance towards Bintchaos. It wasn’t the meaning I was thinking of.
Bintchaos makes repeated small-scale attacks on her enemies too, but I’m not sure any of the targets are present, although she may think they are. Thus she has repeatedly attacked high IQ conservatives for what she sees as their failure to educate low IQ conservatives, which seems to mostly mean their failure to join the left-wing crusade against Trump, although issues such as evolution and climate are presumably mixed with that. I think she thinks I’m a conservative, although it’s hard to be sure.
I interpreted Bintchaos’ charge, pretty much out of the blue, that Deiseach was trying to dox her and raise a mob against her as an attempt to intimidate Deiseach. I gather your view is that it wasn’t aggressive because Bintchaos really believed she was being attacked.
That’s possible, but given the past record, in particular the point when she made two demonstrably false statements about the evidence she had linked to and, called on them, made no attempt to either defend what she had said or retract and apologize for error, I’m not willing to take her claims as gospel.
@David Friedman:
Both John Schilling:
and Trofim Lysenko:
brought up doxxing before @bintchaos did.
Bintchaos is not on trial. I find HBC’s argument compelling, and vote to convict Deiseach.
I dont want her convicted.
I just want her to acknowledge that the real reason she attacked me was because she looked stupid in front of her tribe on Ghazali.
Another thing I know about Mean Girls is when they cross a line (like doxxing) they immediately round up their posse of loyal tribalists to execute a public out-group shaming of the victim and absolve themselves of any ill intent.
I really do have a lot of personal experience with Mean Girls…they put me ahead a grade in 3rd grade and I’m a nerd by temperment and appearance.
Uhh…. And what if she denies this because it isn’t true? I re-read the relevant exchange, and I don’t see either of you coming out as looking particularly stupid. I’m not sure who is right, but I’m also totally ignorant of Islamic philosophy.
This board runs basically 100% nerd. You aren’t going to get much in the way of special status with things like this. (Yes, I was also gradeskipped.)
Had the location of study been Cambridge or Oxford, I don’t think you would have referenced it.
No, I would indeed have done so. In fact, I was going to say “Well, okay, Princeton and Harvard offer courses in this, so it’s legit” but then I saw that they were not currently offering such courses (they did social physics back in the day, I can’t remember what the dates were but certainly not “I am studying this now in 2017”).
Mentioning BYU and Warsaw was not trying to say “and these podunk outfits are the only ones dumb enough to think this is worthwhile”, it was meant to be humorous “bintchaos could be commenting from Poland! Or Utah! (Or Australia, Antarctica, the Moon, Mars, you get the drift)”.
Please do me that much credit for honesty in an argument, and if you can’t, then I ask you to at least allow that in our exchanges where we have been at loggerheads, I have not pulled the “Why is this big, rough man being so mean and horrid to me?” stunt, and that is the last critical word I will utter about bintchaos.
Deiseach, I don’t think you’re trying to doxx, but now that people have pointed out that bintchaos values her pseudonymity and that posting details has the potential to identify her, I do think it would be appropriate to treat identifying information with caution.
So I don’t think you’re doing it on purpose, but I do think you should quit doing it.
If the edit window is still open, recommend you remove the names.
You guys are making this way too complicated.
D just went to bitch-slap me/ “slang a bottle upside my head” because she tried to reference “Incoherence of the Philosophers” to call me an “incoherent philosopher” without having a nanowafer of knowledge about al_Ghazali and got her bigself called out for it.
Do you honestly think I haven’t been bitch-slapped by a bigger, stronger, older, more popular Mean Girl before? I’m a nerd! I’m used to that. It was the segue into stalking/creeping on my blog and the exposed naked hatred that scared me.
Then SSC circled the wagons.
end of story.
And you’re still circling the wagons.
If SSC supports a duty to believe the most schoolgirlish accuser, SSC will spend all its time rehashing The Prime of Miss Jean Bintchaos. Or Miss Deiseach. Anyone think they will find a Welsh Pony under this pile?
What Deiseach has been expressing towards you isn’t hatred, it’s contempt. Both negative emotions, but different ones.
It is probably both…but I’m not scared by contempt like I am by hatred…
Still, I think I can tell a Mean Girl when I see one at this point.
All due respect, David, but you have no relevant experience to base your judgement on.
OTOH now that I understand your attitude towards me wasn’t witchtesting but an honest search for data you hoped I might have on islamic jurisprudence. I apologize.
I misjudged you.
So you once said to me that if I claim to be a witch I should expect to be tested!
hahahah
I get it.
Four days cooling down might be good for your mental health, and an apology good for your relations with bintchaos, but that’s up to you. All I saw, and all I called you out on, was a minor unintentional foul in the heat of an argument and no harm done unless someone pursues the matter further. The calling-out was to ensure that such pursuit could not happen except by overt malice, which I think is rare here and which I didn’t see from you.
Yes, you were trying to otherwise harass bintchaos (at the very least, it is reasonable for bintchaos to feel harassed). Bintchaos had expressed concern about keeping her academic and family life as private as possible from the personal life in a thread you replied to. After that, you read through her blog, find an old reference to a textbook, research what schools it is linked to, and post the names of the schools without seeming to make a point (e.g. it would have read quite differently if you had cited the schools to show that she was lying about her field of study).
I believe the clear and sincere intent was to show that the field of study was one not highly regarded by the academic community at large on account of having been taken up only by a handful of third-rate universities. Absent the (not unreasonable from the other side) perception of doxxing, the obvious path for the discussion to follow would have been whether the same field was being pursued elsewhere under a different name, or with different textbooks, or whether there were concentrations of true academic excellence at those normally unremarkable schools.
post the names of the schools without seeming to make a point
Okay, I accept – looking back on it – that I shouldn’t have mentioned the name of the schools. I was trying to find out if socio-physics was a real thing and by Googling found a site giving lists of universities where socio-physics or social physics were taught, and those two were the only universities (on that site) currently offering such courses.
I meant it to be a light-hearted throwaway line but bintchaos seems to have taken it as an attempt to track them down and then do something to cause them harm personally or in their reputation. Ouch. Well, that joke died on its arse!
This isn’t how people ask genuine questions. It can be how people signal “More attention, please!”. So: Here you go, I guess.
I phrased it like that to show that I am taking this seriously. bintchaos accused me of trying to doxx them and claims to be frightened of, and threatened by, me. I take that as seriously as an accusation that I stole their money or smashed in the windshield of their car.
This is not a “ha ha only joking guys” offer, it’s genuine and sincerely meant. Unless we are to take it that bintchaos is only tossing chaff about and claims of feeling afraid/being triggered/attempts at harassment are part and parcel of The Discourse, so they need no more be responded to than “I saw you with the Martians in that flying saucer last night stealing cattle”, then I have to take their assertions seriously and respond to them in kind.
It is a matter of my honour. I am making a solemn promise and I intend to abide by it: if people in the majority think that was, or could be interpreted as, an attempt at doxxing or harassment by threat, then I will take my lumps. Else, people can accuse anyone on here of anything they like, and repeat elsewhere that “The SSC crowd do this, that and the other”, and it’s a free-for-all in the slander stakes.
My reply in that thread would’ve been made some hours ago, but I am unable to post at work.
Deiseach, I didn’t take your posts to be threatening. However, I believe that we should take Bintchaos’ statements about her own emotional state as sincere, absent evidence to the contrary. Whether that says anything damning about your words or her ability to engage in the back and forth of online debate is left to the interpretation of individuals.
So, that said, I think that you were definitely venting spleen. Not hatred, but certainly pique, and to someone unused or unequipped (whether by inclination or experience) to deal with that in an open and uncontrolled forum, that was probably hard to handle. I think at the very least the “I feel afraid/threatened” statement should be taken as a big red flashing TIME OUT on the discussion and a chance to let things settle, and I think that even if it wasn’t sincere it was thrown out as precisely that sort of signal because in certain sociopolitical circles that’s the ultimate rhetorical trump card.
I’m not going to tell you you need to take a personal time out, but I strongly recommend not replying to any more of Bintchaos’ posts for a very long time, even if they come back.
That said, if I was going to be uncharitable and take a hostile point of view towards your conduct, I would frame this very subthread as an attempt to leverage your popularity to shame and ostracize her and “win”. I won’t go so far as Skef does below, but it seems somewhat uncharitable. On the other hand, this blog doesn’t have any sort of private message system you could use to reach out to anyone here you trusted to -privately- ask “Hey, back me up here, am I being a dick?”, so I understand the desire for vindication of your conduct.
So, in summary, having rambled on, I think that you should:
A) not engage Bintchaos in any future posts for at least the next month or two or until she has somewhat acclimated to the climate of SSC, whichever is longer.
B) let -this- sub-thread die as well. You’ve heard from several regulars stating that they didn’t think you were being intentionally malicious. Take whatever comfort you need from that, and take the opinions about tone for what -they- are worth, too.
I enjoy your posts, and I value you as part of this commentariat, if that’s not too presumptuous for me to say given my own relatively brief time here, but this is an instance where discretion and forbearance are better going forward.
I would frame this very subthread as an attempt to leverage your popularity to shame and ostracize her and “win”.
Your point is apposite and only something that dawned on me afterwards. I do not want this to be a popularity contest or to come across as “regular trying to get noob kicked out”. I do want it to be an even-handed “is it reasonable to read this as an attempt at doxxing?” evaluation by third parties.
Plainly bintchaos and I can’t sort this out between us; I say “I wasn’t trying to doxx you”, they say “oh yes you were!”; they say “I feel scared of you”, I say “oh pull up your big girl panties and stop with the ‘poor little me’ act”. So for the sake of the site – so nobody can come around later on and say “Hey, I hear you guys like doxxing people!”, I don’t want to let this go as “And you see what that gang over at SSC are like – somebody tried to doxx me and nobody said or did anything about it!”
If the answer is a majority “yes, this reads like doxxing”, then I’ll abstain for four weeks and if there is any kickback, then people can point to “No, look, we made a decision and there was punishment” about it.
My vote is “no.” I like to think that in this house are many mansions.
No, but in your posts you come across as being upset at bintchaos, yet very invested, which is a poor combination that has IMO led to unproductive and unkind back-and-forths.
So I suggest you voluntarily abstain from commenting on the offending threads or to bintchaos if she comes back, for at least a week.
I definitely will stop engaging with bintchaos, as there seems to be nothing fruitful resulting from it and I get crotchety about what I perceive as them dancing around the question and then I verbally smack their knuckles.
Biting my tongue is good advice, thanks!
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ssc-block/omoblondlbpljpjpegjknicfhoicjfnk?utm_source=chrome-app-launcher-info-dialog
seriously, it’s a lifesaver.
Wasn’t doxxing, or even anything close to doxxing. Attempted victory by moral authority.
That said, since the open threads are xbox hueg, I’ve taken to navigating them by skipping through new comments from a few specific folks. Deiseach is one of these, and has been consistently entertaining these past few threads, but it’s largely been at the expense of beating the same drum. The tune is pretty simple – “bintchaos is neither as educated nor knowledgeable as they present”.
I could march to a couple more verses, especially given the consistent violations of community norms, but I could also see where binti’d be feeling some pressure.
Attempted victory by moral authority.
Yeah, probably. I was trying to find out if there really was such a course as socio-physics being run anywhere in a third-level institution, and I can’t deny part of that was as much “I know they’re trying to make themselves look big and important but I’ll take them down a peg” as it was “so what the heck is socio-physics anyway when it’s at home?”.
I think you’re fine.
Really I don’t think they’re being terribly productive to conversation in general, so the best tack might just be to roll your eyes and move on.
Agreed. There’s no profit in having this fight.
Remember when Scott suggested two reporters who disagreed write an article together? Could we get politicians to do this? I am thinking of writing an email to some representative of mine encouraging them to do this. I want the commentariat to give me any ideas they think will boost the odds of this actually happening.
Current ideas:
Get people to sign a petition.
Suggest a specific, nonthreatening issue.
Send the idea to my state representative, instead of my federal representative.
—
Does this have any chance of working? Will the idea even make it past spam filters?
My recommendation: find others who would like to see the project happen and are willing to donate money (split evenly) to the campaigns of those who participate. Bonus points for somehow crowdfunding the idea.
(Alternate suggestion: make it a charity drive, donating the cash raised to a very nonpartisan cause, encourage participants to raise campaign contributions independently by advertising their participation in the project).
(Also, congratulations on posting the comment that got me to register an account.)
That is an excellent idea. Cursory googling shows that a site called Crowdpac is capable of raising enough money to attract attention in some state races. And the fundraiser could attract some media attention, which would help even more than the money.
Other than pitching my idea there, I am wholly ignorant of how to raise political money, and having it attached to a separate charity runs into the similar problem that I have no idea how to raise charitable money. Would I spam companies in the relevant district, put up fliers, or set up a lemonade stand?
Yeah, I don’t have great knowledge on that front. I just know that petitions are mostly worthless, phone calls and letters can work if you get enough of them, but willingness to part with your own money (and especially convince other people to part with theirs) over an issue/event/whatever sends a strong signal of seriousness and commitment.
Don’t really have much to contribute but encouragement 🙂 This is a great idea and I would really like to see it work.
What state are you in?
Indiana. But in a few months I will be moving to Ohio. I think I will try a quick and sloppy attempt here in Indiana, and use the likely failure to inform my attempt in Ohio.
My version of the idea was to get two statisticians with very different political views to collaborate on an attempt to estimate the false positive rate in the criminal justice system–what percentage of the people convicted of crimes are innocent. But it never happened. It’s a crucial fact about the system, and nobody knows it.
What torpedoed the attempt?
Wouldn’t adversarial collaboration be even more difficult on this subject than most? The justice system is already supposed to separate the guilty from the innocent. If we have a reliable method of figuring out when it was wrong, we should be using that method for the justice system.
There have been some attempts to figure it out after the fact, using the introduction of DNA testing, and a few people have published estimates, but on weak evidence. There are other possible approaches based on evidence not available at trial.
I’ve tried to get people interested in the idea on and off for a long time. One of my colleagues is involved with an innocence project, so I talked to her about it. She wasn’t interested. I wasn’t sure if the reason was that she was already busy with other things or that she was afraid the false positive rate would turn out to be low. It’s not the sort of work I do myself, so it’s just been a matter of floating the idea to law professors and getting no answer.
The problem is surely that crimes differ (greatly), which probably impacts their false conviction rates substantially.
For example, for murder we generally know that a crime occurred and the only point of contention is whether the suspect did it. For rape, the point of contention can (also) be whether a crime occurred at all. So I would expect certain types of mistakes to be more common for rape cases.
Honestly, how does one go about determining the rate of false positives? If you can do that, doesn’t that implicitly mean that you can tell who did the crime or not? And if you can do that with certainty, why can’t the justice system?
@AnonYEmous
Some measurements are fairly accurate on the aggregate level, but not on the individual level. If those exist for false convictions, they can be used to assess the correctness of the legal system, but not the correctness of individual cases.
Imagine a weighted coin. For a single coin flip, I couldn’t tell you if it is wrong. But if I flip a million times and it lands on ‘heads’ 80% of the time, I can be highly confident that the coin is unfair. But then I still can’t say that any specific coin flip among those 1 million ought to have been different.
Similarly, we might be able to determine that X% of convictions are wrong, but not the specific convictions that are wrong.
Sure. How do you acquire one which works for this problem?
Your given example relies on prior knowledge of coin flip probabilities. We don’t have that for criminal convictions, so that’s a no-go. Got any other ideas?
As a first cut, would it make sense to interview selected prisoners and ask them to explain how they ended up in prison? That’s not perfectly reliable, but it’s at least a good starting point.
If you could start with all (say) rape convictions in the days when DNA tests werent yet available but semen samples were kept, you could get a really good estimate of false positives in rape cases. The confounder there would be whether more careful investigations were the ones that kept samples.
Sure, but this is just a subset of “being able to tell who really did the crime”.
This is fine for determining the number of rape cases where it really happened but they got the wrong guy. On the other hand, you miss out on all of the cases of consensual sex or even nonexistent sex claimed as rape, which are conveniently the hot-button issues. That also means you’re not getting the full story vis-a-vis false positives, but I guess you could establish a baseline rate of sorts.
Yes.
More specifically, almost all convictions in the U.S. criminal justice system are the result of plea bargains, not jury trials. If you have gotten in a fight and the prosecutor threatens to try you for attempted murder if you are not willing to accept a plea bargain for assault, it may make sense to accept the deal, even if you think you are innocent of both.
So we would expect false convictions via bargained guilty pleas to be more common for less serious offenses. But most of the evidence used to try to establish the false positive rate is from DNA testing on convictions from before DNA testing was available, and that’s most likely to be murder and/or rape cases. So the estimates from that, which run around 3%, may be much too low.
Method one: (Risinger, 2007))
1. Count up the number of people convicted of rape+murder over a period before DNA testing was available, that being a crime likely to leave tissue evidence.
2. Count up how many were found to be false convictions by later DNA testing.
3. Assume that all dubious cases got tested (this is the weakest part of this particular attempt).
4. Take the ratio. Deduce a minimal factually wrong error rate of 3.3%.
Method two: (Roman et. al. 2012)
Take advantage of a random collection of tissue evidence that happened to have survived in Virginia, covering a variety of crimes. Test it all. In each case, conclude whether the result of the testing would have been evidence for or against conviction. In about 16% of the cases the evidence would have made conviction less likely. (My analysis of their results)
Method Three (Gross et. al. 2014):
Look at the statistics of people awaiting execution who got their convictions reversed, and try to use statistics to figure out how many would have eventually been. This one struck me as the weakest. Conclusion: 4.1%
My proposal:
Get a friendly jurisdiction to let you test tissue evidence for every case for which it survives from before DNA testing. If that’s too costly, test a random sample.
There are two obvious problems. One is that a jurisdiction willing to let you do this may be one that correctly believes it rarely convicts innocents. The other is that offenses for which tissue evidence survives are themselves a non-random sample of all offenses.
Method I have thought of but not really worked out in detail:
Look at the statistics on cases where A was convicted of a crime to which B later confessed. Try to use fancy statistics to figure out the probability of this happening conditional on A being innocent.
Those are a few examples. The critical point is that you are using information not available at trial, whether due to a new technology or due to events, such as the confession of B, that occurred after the trial.
What is the difference between Roman et al and your proposal?
Why do you call Roman et al “weak”?
Why do you quote 3%, when Roman et al get 18%?
I think academics papers should be written more like a dialogue. When you write from one perspective, you only have to do the bare minimum to engage your critics. But adding another person, just as knowledgeable and intelligent, really forces you to be the best you can be.
If Plato’s anything to go by, this would just give us a lot of “clearly you’re right, Socrates, and I am a blithering idiot”.
Okay, here is a first draft of the letter. Since the faster way to get help on the internet is to post the wrong answer, I haven’t put too much thought into the structure or formatting of the letter. Anyone who wants can post comments.
In case we want a coordinated email campaign, does anyone have a clever date in mind?
I really dislike your second paragraph. A legislator isn’t going to see legislation as a method to ‘find the truth.’ That argument is anti-persuasive, as it exposes you as a starry eyed idealist.
A more persuasive argument is that it is hard to find a compromise when starting off from what divides, rather than what binds people; and that this method has a far better chance to result in legislation that is supported by both sides and that gets approval from swing voters (<- this is the bit where you appeal to the naked self-interest of the politician).
And don't call it something distinct from bipartisanship, because 'a better form of bipartisanship' is an excellent way to sell this plan. By painting this as not being bipartisan, you are anti-persuasive, because if the politician is to gain from this, (s)he needs to be able to connect this to an existing meme. By isolating adversarial collaboration from the most appropriate near meme, you are lowering the value to the politician.
As hog^5 says below, the incentives are wrong — this requires a politician to announce respect for someone with a contrary opinion. Later, they get hammered in primary for softness.
It seems to be pretty common for two legislators from opposite sides to jointly sponsor a bill for something both approve of. The Rohrabacher-Farr (originally Hinchey-Rohrabacher) Amendment, later introduced into the Senate by Rand Paul and Corey Booker, would be an example.
Dana Rohrabacher has been accused of a variety of things but not, I believe, softness towards Democrats.
I can’t imagine this working with politicians – all the incentives are wrong. But this has not even been accomplished with journalists/pundits/speechwriters/whatever Steve Bannon is, and these sorts can be easily motivated by paying them. This is a good enough gimmick for a quarterly magazine. Has any progress been made in this direction? Assuming not, there are concrete things to do right now:
1) Write a standard contract that can be used when commissioning writers who probably hate each other.
2) Call up Current Affairs or N+1 to find out what they did. AFAIK the editorial staffs of both publications have an average age of 14, so presumably running a magazine isn’t that hard. Still, we shouldn’t reinvent the wheel.
3) Kickstarter.
4) Begin compiling a list of thoughtful people who already have established intellectual commitments but who don’t have a regular writing gig (e.g. Freddie deBoer), or who are so unbelievably productive that they will write for cheap.
I think I will try this instead of Witness’ idea. I will try it after the petition/letter campaign, because that takes very little effort.
by my best guess tell, since 10 different people have commented in this thread, 50 to 100 people are watching it. I am going to tap those people for information. Does anyone have any opinions on what such a magazine should look like, or how it should operate?
Again, posting the wrong answer in hopes that someone will correct me:
I think that there would be a small staff of writers would contractually write a few articles per quarter (What is the right price here? $50/article? $200?). If there was a large demand for a particular topic with particular authors, the magazine would reach out to them for a one off deal.
I have no idea what the right editor/word ratio is, or how much an editor needs to be paid. I assume it would start out small enough that only one editor (me, though I think I would be rubbish) would be needed.
Most articles would be posted online as soon as they were written, and all of them would be in the quarterly magazine available only to subscribers. After being in the magazine, every article which hadn’t been online yet would slowly trickle onto the website.
If a lump some of cash was needed quickly after the initial kickstarter money ran out, a dollar auction could be held for particular adversaries and topics.
When is it all right to feel afraid? What about acting on that fear?*
I’m referring to non-obvious conditions, not like falling from a tall height or actually being attacked/in danger.
Terrorism is fairly rare in the US, but the government does and spends a lot to try and mitigate it. Campus rape is also fairly rare, but activists and the government do a lot to try mitigate it too. Most black people aren’t criminals, most white people aren’t seeking to oppress and hurt minorities. Yet in certain circles you have people cultivating a culture of fear
, where many lives are at stake, and those who don’t take it seriously are then considered “part of the problem”.
Another example is Muslims. IIRC, most Muslim Americans don’t want to impose sharia law on the US, and most Americans don’t want to kick out/attack Muslim Americans. However, if you go to certain groups/tribes you get a lot of fear about either the former or the latter.
Also, is it all right to have different standards for individual vs group in terms of fearing things/acting on that fear? think of a person who would cross the street if they saw a teenage male walking towards them at night. Is it all right for the individual to avoid that male, but not ok for society to advocate for teenage males making themselves “less threatening”?
*I think Scott has posted about this, but I can’t recall it.
I think you need to distinguish between the emotional experience of fear, the involuntary and unaware behavioral biases due to emotional fear, and the deliberate behaviour of perceived-harm-avoidance (or whatever you want to call it).
IIRC, most Muslim Americans don’t want to “impose sharia law on the US.” They want, at most, Islamic law for themselves. It was pretty normal, in past Muslim societies, for different ethnic groups to be under different law.
To impose it on the U.S. they would need to control the government, and they are currently a very small minority.
Weren’t the Muslims basically always at the top of the ladder, though? I don’t relish the idea of imposing Jizya or Janissaries much more than I do sharia.
In Muslim ruled societies, I believe that a controversy between a Muslim and a non-Muslim went to a Muslim court unless the parties agreed to a non-Muslim court, but I’m not certain. And the penalty for killing a non-Muslim was, I think, usually less than for killing a Muslim.
On the other hand, various features of Muslim law applied only to Muslims, such as the prohibition on drinking wine.
My point was rather that, just as Muslim ruled societies allowed non-Muslims to conduct their activities under their law, it wasn’t unreasonable for them to want societies ruled by non-Muslims to do the same for them.
You also have to differentiate between hardcore support for and engagement in Bad Thing, tacit approval of Bad Thing, indifference to Bad Thing, and opposition to Bad Thing. Consider various pieces of rhetoric:
When Hitler took power, only ~3% of Germans were members of the Nazi party.
Only 5-6% of colonists took up arms against the British in the American Revolution.
“It’s not just that Trump is a racist, sexist, xenophobic, islamophobic, transphobic, homophobic and arachnophobic bigot, it’s that his supporters don’t care!” — everyone on /r/politics
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” — Margaret Mead
“The vast majority of Muslims are peaceful so it’s stupid to get worked up over terror.”
It’s hard to reconcile these observations. I’m tempted to say the “peaceful majority” doesn’t matter. The vast majority of Nazis were peaceful. 99% of Nazis never gassed a Jew. The problem was the peaceful majority supported, enabled, or didn’t oppose the ideology and political structure that eventually led to the gassing of Jews.
A few Americans, 7% according to a survey, are being mocked for believing that chocolate milk comes from brown cows. But these Americans are of course correct as brown cows exist, produce milk, and milk is by far the main component of chocolate milk. (From Nate Silver’s 538 podcast.)
Are you suggesting that 3% of Americans enjoy pedantically answering surveys (and 4% are lizardmen)? That does seem plausible.
That’s kind of what Nate Silver was suggesting, minus the lizardman part.
I think Overly Pedantic Respondent can be considered a subtype of lizardman.
I don’t think so. One is intent on being technically right and the other enjoys being flagrantly wrong.
I tried to find the text of the question. From the comments:
So basically the dairy industry did a survey for a campaign about milk. Various news outlets reported ” … Milk … ” and Nate Silver responded with ” … Milk … ” prompting you to note that ” … Milk … ” and me to clarify that ” … Milk … “.
So we should treat this as a public relations learning experience.
Yep.
This seems apt, somehow.
And probably a good one after that recent hullabaloo about milk being a symbol of white supremacy.
So it wasn’t a serious survey, it was an “interesting and fun facts” survey? If it was phrased in that manner (i.e. the questions were all light-hearted and humorous), then no wonder some people responded in kind: “sure, brown cows give chocolate milk! ha! ha! okay, do I get my Moo Cow Cap now?”
I’m relatively new here, so I don’t know if even mentioning this guy is off limits since he’s a culture-war lightning rod, but I found these two podcast episodes with Jordan Peterson to be excellent:
Joe Rogan podcast #877 and #958 with Jordan Peterson:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04wyGK6k6HE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USg3NR76XpQ
Those are nearly 3-hours each, and I’m finding each one worth multiple listens. The guy’s a genius with a great ability to speak extemporaneously.
Culture-war things are banned (or at least supposed to be) on specific hidden open threads, but if the post doesn’t mention it you can talk about anything (as long as you do so vaguely truthfully, kindly and necessarily, and don’t use banned words).
I think he is indeed a great speaker; very passionate, articulate, and engaging. I think his opposition to compelled speech laws is commendable, and perhaps even courageous. At the same time, though, I find his religious/philosophical positions to be mostly bonkers. Sad, but true.
I completely agree that his weak spot is his religious/mythical fascination. For a while I was really put off from him after his difficult conversations with Sam Harris highlighted these weak spots. But after listening to him on the two Rogan podcasts, I’m a fan again. He’s more clear than anyone right now on the way our currently PC culture war is just rebranded Marxism in a new guise, and he’s more courageous than just about any public intellectual I can think of. Despite his shortcomings, I wish we had a hundred more like him.
Trivial observation: while I don’t honestly find Peterson all that interesting as a thinker/speaker, my YouTube app keeps recommending me videos of him, and I find the overly dramatic titles hilarious, along the lines of:
“AN INTELLECT TOO GREAT FOR THE SENATE TO EVEN COMPREHEND!!!”
“JORDAN PETERSON: BEAST MODE ENGAGED!”
“JORAN PETERSON: THE ONE MAN ARMY!”
“Dr. Jordan Peterson TRUTH BOMBS everyone in a Harvard audience!”
And it’s funnier because the videos in question tend to be, to me at least, rather underwhelming in terms of the actual alleged evisceration/disembowelment/crucifixion of Peterson’s opponents.
I first heard of Peterson through Sam Harris’s podcast and actually just in the past week listened to both of those Joe Rogan interviews. I agree he’s an excellent speaker with a lot of charisma. His ability to explain things simply and with uncanny clarity reminds me a lot of Sam Harris, actually, which makes the semi-disasters of his appearances at Harris’s podcast quite ironic in retrospect. I also couldn’t help but notice that both Peterson and Harris seem to elevate “telling the truth” as the highest virtue or perhaps the most important thing one can do for the betterment of humanity.
I do find Peterson’s obsession with religion and mythology to be a little hooey. He seems to connect dots which it’s not clear are actually connected, constantly coming back to things like “the hero myth,” “slaying the dragon,” “saving your father from the underworld,” “the snake in the garden,” etc. What makes this easier to swallow than otherwise is that he makes it explicit to the listener that he’s not talking about these in literal terms – unlike actual cult leaders, he says that these myths can be useful even if you don’t have an iota of belief in them.
And I think that connects with the fact that he’s a clinical psychologist rather than an academic or religious leader. He’s not concerned with discovering things about reality, he’s concerned about helping his patients accomplish their goals, and he defines “truth” around that concept – what’s useful for that goal, rather than what reflects empirical reality? That’s where I start to lose him a little, and that’s what made his 1st appearance on Harris’s podcast so bad, but I can appreciate where he’s coming from.
His explanation of social justice warriors seems a little bit of an ad hoc just-so story, but I can’t deny that it’s 100% consistent with their observed behavior. I think not enough research has been done about how this group came about to really confidently assert any explanation, but the way he speaks, he seems quite sure of himself. I admit, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he’s a clinical psychologist, Bret Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist, Erika Christakis is an early childhood educator, all professions where you’d expect them to have some empirically based understanding of how people and groups of people work.
I do highly recommend anyone to check it out if they’re interested in modern culture war issues. I expect he’s not going anywhere anytime soon, since he sees YouTube and online platforms like it as the future of education where he can do more to teach than traditional avenues like universities (which he sees as too corrupted, or in an inevitable slide towards being too corrupted) or books, and I think he’s got a point there.
actually him being a psychologist makes a lot of sense in that regard
basically as I understand it he subscribes to the consequentialist notion of truth: you should believe as true what will be good for you, and society should believe as true what will help society
the problem is: who makes that call? And it can’t be the members of the society themselves, or they won’t actually believe it, which defeats the whole purpose. For example, Christianity: people like Petersen may convince themselves to believe for the greater good, but if everyone’s just pretending does it really work? Probably not, so it has to be decided by some elite or whatever, and that makes it highly vulnerable to being wrong about what people should believe, both accidentally and purposefully
but as a clinical psychologist it makes sense on two axes: first, your patients are in some sense not fit to judge what they need, since they need psychological help, and second, you as a clinical psychologist are in a position to be that elite, and be a responsible one with enough learning and experience to usually be correct, plus you can consult other clinical psychologists and professors and so forth
don’t think this works for society as a whole though. At best it demands the enlightened leader, and that usually ends poorly.
So, for about half the day, this open thread was blocked by my workplace’s filters (Our Internet AUP allows for personal use during breaks, but software blocks a lot of sites and content), but ONLY half the day, as “Content: Gaming”. As of yesterday OT 77.75 was suddenly blocked for “Content: Marijuana”.
Is it tripping on keywords or somesuch? If so, it can’t be that sensitive because that entire discussion of, well, gaming, E3, and Steam accounts didn’t trip the ‘Gaming’ block the way something did today…
Color me confused.
Is “gaming” on the filter as being about games as we understand them, or is it filtering to keep out online poker and sports betting? Perhaps someone was discussing prediction markets?
I’m able to access wikipedia articles and even online general articles about betting/table games topics (I work at a casino and have used wikipedia to explain Blackjack and Baccarat to my team during slow times for example), so I’m guessing not, though I suppose there could be a whitelist.
The bit that confuses me is the page suddenly becoming -unblocked-, after being blocked for hours. I can only assume that a post was deleted.
There’s a perception that police in the US shoot unarmed people more than they used to and/or are less likely to face punishment than they used to. This is usually tied in with the idea that police have become militarized. This isn’t just from left-wing activists – I’ve seen more than one criminal defence blogger make the claim, and they, uh, tend to hold a lot of opinions that would make them unfit to be left-wing activists.
Is this the case? Is there a way to quantify it? I know from doing light Google research that US police shooting numbers are often rather sketchy and speculative – record keeping seems to vary a lot from place to place.
Assuming the answer is yes: what could be done to reduce the number of people killed due to police overreaction/screwups/etc?
I think at least one of the arguments made is that the degree of danger associated with being a police officer is both low and falling, which suggests that police should act in ways less tailored to minimising the risks they face and more tailored to keeping the people they interact with alive and healthy.
As for reducing it: our general response to seriously socially undesirable activity is to criminalise it, work to catch the people who are doing it and gather evidence of their infractions, and then punish them. That feels like a decent starting point here, too.
There’s probably a balance to be struck between treating shootings by police as a matter of occupational negligence (you will be disciplined/fired) and treating them as flat-out crimes, not dissimilar to shootings by not-police. I’ve got some sympathy for the view that the punishment should be fairly certain but not excessively severe (for a lot of crimes, actually) if only because that makes it more likely that police will be willing to enforce the rules against their colleagues.
Radley Balko’s “Rise of the Warrior Cop” is worth reading if you haven’t yet.
I don’t think there is good data on police shootings nationwide, which makes it hard to know if the shootings are becoming more common or just get reported more often.
The FBI’s homicide reports show justifiable homicide by police officers, and I don’t think there was an uptrend in those numbers, but they also didn’t get reports from all police departments. The Washington Post and the Guardian have collected data on when civilians are killed by the police for the last couple years, and both have websites where you can see the data. The Washington Post even has a very nice web frontend for simple queries on the data. But that doesn’t tell you much about long term trends–it only goes back to 2015.
Washington Post fatal police shootings database
This lets you drill down a bit. In 2016, they counted 963 fatal police shootings. About a quarter (233) of the people shot were black. More than half were claimed in the police report to have a gun. (I don’t know how often the police threw down a gun after the shooting to justify it–I suspect that would be a bad strategy, given the extremely low fraction of poiice shootings that end up with the cop prosecuted, but I really don’t know for sure.). There is a lot more detail if you dig around.
For reference: blacks are about 13% of the population, so they’re shot at about twice the rate you’d expect if police shootings were random. However, blacks also get arrested at a disproportionate rate. From this data you get blacks accounting for about 28% of arrests. (This reflects the much higher black crime rate.) The most plausible model to me is tha more hostile interactions with the police = more opportunities to get shot.
I think you can get far more out of spending half an hour digging through the numbers on the Washington Post website and doing simple calculations than reading or listening to almost any debate or news story about police shootings.
There’s this study done by a Harvard economics professor on the subject, where he looks at the likelihood of blacks being shot given comparable circumstances relative to others races. The findings: police officers are more likely to use force in general in apprehending blacks, but their likelihood of shooting blacks, specifically, is the same as it is for other races.
However, this doesn’t mean that blacks aren’t unfairly, disproportionately shot. The author admits that his study doesn’t cover the likelihood of blacks being accosted in the first place, and suggests it’s this area where blacks could be getting screwed over.
So, not a greater likelihood of being shot once pulled over, just a greater likelihood of getting pulled over in the first place.
Relevant: Philando Castile was pulled over 52 times before the incident that resulted in his death. “Driving while black” is a phrase for a reason.
Some time ago Scott urged skeptics to “look through the evidence that Russia was involved in the hacking” of Democrats during the 2016 elections. So I looked and ended up finding something very interesting instead: evidence that someone is trying to make it look like Russia hacked the Democrats. The best part is that this evidence is out there and can be verified by anyone. It is not difficult but not completely trivial either, and having some CS/IT experience would probably be helpful. And that’s why I thought of coming here: the place with the highest concentration of very smart, very techy people that I regularly attend. I would like you to look at the evidence and tell me what you make of it.
Some background. On June 15, 2016 – three days after Julian Assange stated he’d be releasing some “great” Hillary emails and the same day CrowdStrike (a company hired by the DNC) made a claim about Russian injection of malware onto the DNC servers – Guccifer 2.0 published some DNC documents that he claimed to have obtained by hacking. Guccifer 2.0, who named himself after a hacker recently in the news, said he was a Romanian hacker responsible for the upcoming leaks. Pwn All The Things, with his 10s of 1000s followers on Twitter, did some quick analysis and concluded that Guccifer 2.0 left accidental Russian fingerprints on the files. His work was then cited by numerous journalists and today Wikipedia authoritatively states that Guccifer 2.0 was “a persona that created by Russian intelligence services to cover for their interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”
Now, in February 2017, /u/tvor_22, with his 24 followers on Medium, published a much more detailed analysis of the metadata in Guccifer 2.0’s files. He discovered that what Guccifer 2.0 actually did was first create a Russian stylesheet template using a copy of MS Word registered to “Warren Flood”, and then copy-paste the contents of the original DNC documents into the pre-tainted template while changing the author name to “Felix Edmundovich [Dzerzhynsky]”. Now, Warren Flood used to be a White House employee, but he is actually not the author of any of the actual DNC documents. (We know this because the documents were later published by Wikileaks in the Podesta emails batch. Not all of the Guccifer 2.0 documents ended up in the actual Wikileaks but the first three did.)
This is it, in short. There is much more information, misinformation and speculation surrounding Guccifer 2.0, and it’s all highly interesting. But what I’d like to focus on today is /u/tvor_22’s and Adam Carter’s analysis of the metadata. I inspected the Guccifer 2.0 files myself and tried to come up with an alternative explanation for all of it, but so far have been unable to. (I’m hoping some people here will be interested enough in this subject to play with it themselves and either verify or poke holes in the analysis.) The most important part of the argument is that docs 1, 2, and 3 all contain the same Russian stylesheet RSIDs. They also have the same author and creation timestamps (afternoon of the day the docs were published.) Given that RSIDs are random numbers generated upon save whenever an element is added or edited, this means that all 3 docs derive from the same document.
Anyway, I hope people do have a look for themselves. The documents leaked by Guccifer 2.0 are still up on his website! Links for those who are interested, containing all the sources and reference material information needed:
Minimally guided version for people who want to do all the work themselves.
A slightly more guided version.
Thanks for taking the challenge and digging through to the primary sources!
While /u/tvor_22’s analysis is clever and interesting, it doesn’t really shift my opinion from when I first read about the documents’ author being “Felix Edmundovich” – on balance more likely to be a frame job than a Russian state-sponsored leak, but the frame-job was done so incompetently that there’s a high probability of trolling or some sort of triple-bluff n-dimensional chess going on that I don’t understand.
Do you have the sense that this is the strongest or most important evidence for Russia’s involvement in the DNC hacks? Or did you pick the piece of evidence you thought was weakest? Not accusing you of cherry-picking, I’m genuinely curious: Scott seemed to refer to some publicly available, well known body of evidence, but I’ve yet to find one. Most people I’ve seen arguing for the Russia-hacking connection cite the consensus of the intelligence community rather than specific evidence.
I’m bringing up Guccifer 2.0 and the metadata in his files for two reasons. First, I believe he is central to the claim that Russia actually interfered with the US elections by releasing DNC documents to the public as opposed to just hacking the servers. And second, I think the detailed metadata analysis showing that Russian fingerprints were left on purpose is virtually unknown. It took me hours of digging to come across it. (Since it hasn’t received a lot of scrutiny, there very well might be some errors in it. I’d like more eyes on it to see if people come up with better interpretations of all the available metadata.)
Now, if the analysis is correct, then, in itself, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it wasn’t Russia. As you mention, it could have been some sort of a triple bluff thing. But if so, then it was awfully bizarre in itself and very unsuccessful. Bizarre, because, say, why choose the obscure name of Warren Flood, who wasn’t even a DNC employee at that time?
Unsuccessful, because, as far as I understand, Pwn All The Things, with his 10s of 1000s of followers on Twitter, took the fingerprints at face value. He called it a Russian opsec fail. His analysis was then repeated by journalists. Moreover, /u/tvor_22 says he got blocked when he questioned Pwn All The Things’ view of things. This could have been for variety of reasons. For all I know, /u/tvor_22 may have been asking his questions in a rude way or something, but the bottom line is that most people don’t seem aware of the additional evidence he uncovered.
There is much more to this story that seems worth discussing and that I plan to go over with people here in the future, but for now I’m hoping to get some opinions on whether or not the available metadata, including the matching Russian style RSIDs, means that the original DNC documents were copied pasted into a pre-prepared Russian stylesheet template prior to being published on Guccifer 2.0’s website.
I just started a blog which I hope is vaguely in the same style as SSC. I plan on reading about a different random topic I’m interested in every week and writing my thoughts on it.
My first article is a comparison between Dr. Stephan Guyenet and Gary Taubes on nutrition and weight gain: https://randomreadingtopics.wordpress.com/2017/06/16/first-blog-post/
Second article is a critique of the way scientists tend to view politics by examining Guyenet’s political recommendations: https://randomreadingtopics.wordpress.com/2017/06/19/dr-stephan-guyenets-default-scientific-statism/
Bookmarked. Thanks for sharing. Looking forward to reading your thoughts on other subjects.
The season finale of the TV series American Gods was on Sunday, and this episode featured Jesus or rather Jesuses since there were a lot of them, matching different conceptions of what this fellow was all about. But still, Jesus was portrayed as a god like all the other gods we saw in the series. And that’s a big no-no for a monotheistic religion.
Anyone know what the reaction to this series has been among Christians? I’m not hooked into the ecosystem of Christian commentary.
Lot of interesting material in the Democracy Fund’s Voter Study Group’s report “Political Divisions in 2016 and Beyond“, but what I found a bit surprising, and which I think may of be particular interest is Figure 2, a scatterplot on a standard two-axis model with an economic axis and a social axis. What first really stood out was the economically “conservative”, socially “liberal” quadrant — the “libertarian” corner. While I expected it to be less populated than it’s neighbors, I didn’t expect it to be so sparse. Nor the opposite corner — the “populist” corner — to be as dense as it is. Also interesting is where the centers of the Clinton voter and Trump voter clusters lie.
(The comparison to 2012, for the analysis of the “swing” voters, in both directions, and the data as to what motivated the “Romney to Clinton” and “Obama to Trump” groups to make those shifts is also a point to note, as is the analysis of the major divisions within each party’s current constituency.)
This is interesting. Obviously, libertarianism, like certain other philosophies, is much larger on the Internet than in the world. Still, I’d be interested in comparing that quadrant map to 2012, if it existed. Anecdotally, it seems that libertarianism’s heyday has passed, if the abundance of ex-libertarians in certain circles is any indication. But as an ex-libertarian myself, I’m sure my perception is biased.
I recently (last 15 minutes) submitted a rather long, somewhat personal comment that seems to have disappeared shortly after being posted. Did the blog eat it? Did I get flagged (either by a machine or by Scott) as a spammer? I haven’t been active at all recently, but I have made sporadic comments here over the last couple years, and I don’t think my community impact was negative. I have the contents copy and pasted elsewhere, so no harm no foul, but I am curious about what happened.
Weirdly, just before refreshing the page to find it gone, I saw “You can longer edit this comment” (or some such) in place of the blue edit link that normally shows up at the bottom of comments.
You probably used a banned word. No, I don’t have a list.
Test: Muslim Muhammad.
Well, not sure what caused it, but I’ll try posting again.
My posts are very frequently swallowed up by the comment system for no reason at all. I have made it a habit to cntl+c my posts before submitting.
WordPress, or the shoggoths, or something seems to eat comments at times. I think it might have to do with length, or number of links. Or maybe the phases of the Martian moons 🙂
It’s not pure links. Unlike my normal method, I posted the latest battleship index straight into the system. It was ‘awaiting moderation’ for most of a day, but I could still see it while logged in, and it didn’t disappear.
Somehow it ended up in spam. Since it looks like you posted it successfully since then, I haven’t taken any action.
Thanks! You can delete this thread if you’d like.
I’ve been going through an interesting time personally in the last year, and this seemed like the right community to reach out to and see if there’s anyone else with a similar experience. Apologies for how long and meandering this ended up; it touches on a lot of ideas that haven’t yet had time to crystallize in my mind. In one sentence, I would describe it as my personal journey towards a philosophy of defaulting to kindness.
Imagine you are jogging on a trail just wide enough for two people to walk abreast of each other. At every entry point onto the trail is a sign that says walkers should keep right so that people moving at a faster pace can pass them. You approach (from behind) a pair of women walking lackadaisically next to each other, wandering back and forth on the trail, etc. You might be considering one of the following three options:
1) Jog around them (perhaps even going off the trail briefly); say nothing.
2) Gently address the problem (“I don’t know if you saw, but the sign says…”; “Could you please move over?”; On your left!”) while continuing on your way without significant delay.
3) Jog past them, or even stop to confront them, and say something aggressive (“Can’t you see the sign says…”, “You’re in the way!”).
For most of my life I would have taken option 3 in a heartbeat, perhaps justifying it to myself as follows: I do not have to feel guilty about breaking social norms, since the social contract is already being breached. Worse, their obliviousness makes other people hesitate to correct them for fear of being rude. If the women cared to think about others they would realize that they were being inconsiderate; they should be told off for not thinking along these lines. Even skeptics who disagree with my approach should agree that I am doing a service for the community. Once they admit that, then they’re just showing that they’ll let the confines social roles prevent them from doing what is right.
My choice is not merely the best one: it also shows that I am abnormally righteous and intelligent. I am willing to shoulder the burden of performing weird antisocial behaviors for the benefit of my community, and I do this because I can see through heuristics (“don’t be unpleasant to strangers”) and use cost-benefit analyses instead.
In truth, I think I just enjoyed being mean, and was good at coming up with excuses to do so when it couldn’t come back to bite me.
We don’t know that the women are *actually* negligent here. Maybe one of them is grieving the sudden loss of her husband, and they didn’t quite notice where they were because they were focused on more important matters. Even if they are negligent, I can accomplish my goals in a socially better way. If I run off the trail to pass them, that may even be enough to give them the hint they need; if not, a few “On your lefts!” from my fellow joggers will probably get the message across, and they’ll feel a bit embarrassed when they finally get it (or see one of the signs!).
I think this serves as an illustrative example of what, in my head, I thought of as being a grizzled cynic.
It’s easy for naive liberals to feel sorry for rent-controlled grandmas whose landlords want to hike up their rents. The cynic sees that Grandma is living alone in a two-bedroom apartment in the middle of Manhattan, that other people need somewhere to live too, and Grandma is actively harming the as-yet-nameless future tenants who would live there and make better use of it than she does. Not to mention that Grandma has no real claim to that place—the landlord owns it, remember! The cynic doesn’t merely want the market to come in and work its magic; he sees that Grandma is a selfish person who’s willing to harm others because she’s too lazy to move, and the naive liberals paint her as the victim.
The wise cynic is no fan of his fellow college students who are there due to athletic scholarships or affirmative action. They took seats away from more qualified students; who knows how those faceless students’ futures will be impacted by going to a worse school? Not to mention the anguish the rejection put them through. As willing participants in a system that takes away what other people deserve, the athletes have Fired The First Shot. It is therefore acceptable to remind them that they don’t belong, and that they should feel Very Guilty if they struggle academically.
(I’m not making any object-level claims about what social / economic policies are correct in either of the above cases, just outlining my motivated reasoning in both.)
The cynicism pill was a powerful drug. Anyone can come up with good arguments for obvious statements; I could show off how smart I was by coming up with “good” arguments for statements most people disagreed with. This combined favorably with the allure of cynicism, which feels like a mark of maturity, and I was hooked.
I’m not sure where I’m headed now; I do think I had a bias towards meanness (sometimes disguised as “honesty”), and I’m working to counteract that now. I’ve given some thought to volunteering at the local soup kitchen, just to work my Niceness muscles, but have always managed to come up with excuses why it’s too inconvenient. I don’t know how many of my political opinions had motivated “find good excuses to do things others would call mean” reasoning behind them, but there’s probably a lot down there that I need to reexamine.
I do feel myself changing, more quickly than I remember changing at any previous point in my life. On trigger warnings, I’ve gone from “make the crybabies broaden their horizons” to “unsure and somewhat uncomfortable” and to “meh, I don’t really understand it, but the people asking for them seem sincere enough, so just help build Community“. I used to be the kind of person who would gleefully go to a Draw The Prophet event (if I knew how to draw), and would laugh off “imagine your [monotheist] friend was here” objections as attempted emotional manipulation.
If I had to pick one common thread uniting all of these changes, it would be “lower your prior probability that you are being hoodwinked”. The trail girls aren’t taking advantage of social norms to get away with being inconsiderate, they’re just oblivious. Grandma’s not playing with our heartstrings to stop us from kicking her out. Student athletes are not evilly rubbing their hands together over how they don’t deserve what they have. Not nobly rejecting their scholarships is just them seizing an opportunity for a better life for themselves, which is a pretty low bar to start demonizing people for. When I was applying to schools I remember desperately hoping my legacy status would get me in to one of my top choices, which was pretty un-noble of me and yet somehow I didn’t care.
I’m told that caring about / trusting / not being hoodwinked by other people makes me a bleeding-heart liberal, but is there a better word for the set of concepts I’ve been trying to point at?
Generosity?
Congratulations on making this journey. Very few people, I think, are capable of changing in this way. If you happen to be in North Carolina or DC I’d be happy to meet up with you sometime.
I think “giving people the benefit of the doubt” is maybe what you are looking for? Also “forgiveness” maybe? Or “Solidarity?”
If I had more than one word to describe it, I’d say that you seem to be shifting from blaming individuals to blaming systems in which individuals are embedded. Individuals are often misguided, oblivious, and self-interested. The way to fix societal problems is to promote norms that reduce misguidedness and obliviousness (and self-interestedness when possible, though often that’s asking too much) and to try to design institutions that work around and with people’s flaws.
We’re all on the same team. If we handle the next century right, astronomical quantities of resources and technology will be at our disposal, and as long as everyone gets a slice of the pie–even if the size of the slices differs by many orders of magnitude–we all can be satisfied.
(More or less. Of course there will still be conflict and rivalry and jealosy, especially in the long run as people get used to the initial windfall. But for a while at least we’ll have peace and celebration, and in that time we can set the groundwork for what comes later.)
*blush*
Thanks! I didn’t post here for congratulations, just as a place to find other…”rational-minded noncynics”? Yeah, rational-minded noncynics, who might have some perspective for me. But I’ll take your positive reinforcement too.
Unfortunately I’m rather far from both those places. Currently in California, visiting from New York.
That’s an interesting take. I hadn’t put it in those terms at all.
I’m okay with your other examples, but this one still bugs me. Why should people get a free pass to being generally oblivious to social norms? I feel like I don’t, in most cases.
I don’t really care whether they are engaged in some vast conspiracy to violate social norms and get away with it or not. “Being aware of the social norms” is, itself, a social norm. Obliviousness is not an excuse.
Enforcement of social norms is only permitted against those of lower or the same status. If you are on the bottom in status, you may not enforce any norms, but all norms may be enforced against you (even those invented in the moment by higher-status people).
this is a tee-up to a sick burn
Just Kidding. Look, how about this: I hereby give you one. Pass it on, and then the next person passes it on, and then everyone is a little bit happier. And that should suffice to answer your question, as well.
That’s not the strongest line in what I wrote.
I could see an argument for telling off the two girls if we knew they were acting maliciously, since “you’re inconveniencing other people” is apparently something they already knew. There are Nicer ways to still handle the situation if there’s no malice in what’s going on.
It seems to me that one thing you’ve noticed is fundamental attribution error. It’s a general default tendency for most people to think that poor behavior of others is caused by their character, while poor behavior of yourself is caused by circumstance. I think identifying and attempting to overcome this bias is an important part of empathy (though I wonder if it’s ever possible to fully overcome it).
Believing that one’s opponents are just insincerely trying to increase their own power will usually lead one down the wrong path, yeah. Most people are sincere about what they believe. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a good idea to let them get away with acting on those beliefs, though, such as in the case of:
It is upsetting to see your religion mocked, absolutely. But in a nation based on Enlightenment principles, you have to tolerate it, and people who refuse to tolerate it are far more dangerous than the people who do the mocking.
I do not dispute this.
You seem to be undergoing a personal transformation in order to be a more caring person.
However, don’t fall into the trap of assigning motivations to political issues and then judging the issues based on motivations. Maybe you were enforcing norms out of the joy of being mean, but that does not mean norms should not be enforced. You don’t have to think that the women blocking the path are awful people to ask them to move so that the path is not blocked. Likewise you can understand why a grandmother would not want to move and still think it is a bad idea to control rents.
I tried to make it clear that I wasn’t declaring any particular solution to be right in any of the political cases I brought up. Just that my old feelings were probably colored by the fact that I enjoyed thinking of clever reasons to be mean to people.
One can derive correct conclusions from faulty premises.
It makes me sad to read things like this. :/
#3 seems like the correct behavior. #2 is also acceptable, I suppose. I usually do #1, because I hate and fear interacting with people (especially confrontationally, especially strangers)—but this is a personal failing of mine! I try to overcome it (sometimes successfully). I admire people who don’t share my character flaw. When I see someone confronting bad actors, standing up for social norms, it gives me visceral relief and reassurance about the state of our society.
Norm violators should be punished. That you went from being one of the few people in today’s society willing to shoulder the responsibility of norm punishment, to no longer being willing to do this, makes me sad indeed. It makes me even sadder to see this change held up, and supported, as an improvement.
Please consider that this change may not be nearly as positive as you suggest.
(N.B. the “Grandma” example is a bad one, imo, but the other two are spot-on)
If someone non-maliciously breaks a rule, why should they be punished when a gentle correction will work just as well?
I think “bad actors” is an exaggeration for the trail example.
Political examples are less about what is correct and more about what sorts of arguments I was motivated to think of. I tried to include variety.
If you ignore the trail blockers and go around them, they will get annoyed at all these other people going by them, and use their status to push for some sort of rule against this sort of behavior on the trail.
If you gently admonish the trail blockers, they will get all huffy and self-righteous and question you on why it’s so important that YOU get by at that particular time.
If you harshly admonish them, they’ll be shocked by your rudeness and you’ll be gone before they have a response. While they will never, ever, believe they are in the wrong, they may then decide the trail is full of assholes, stop using it, and tell their friends the same. A win of sorts.
> While they will never, ever, believe they are in the wrong
This seems like a harsh judgment for two people who are just being a bit inconsiderate about trail space.
I’m not sure what the severity of the offense has to do with my judgement on how resistant they will be to believing they have committed one.
There is a certain moral threshold for how bad a person you have to be to be inconsiderate about trail usage, and another moral threshold for how bad a person you have to be to get angry at other people pushing back on your encroachment of a public good. I think knowing someone is below the first threshold is only weak evidence that they are below the second.
More broadly, to us outside observers the evil-women and the good-women are equally counterfactual. I don’t mind trading off some chance of antagonizing away the evil women (which I think is unlikely anyway) in order to be nicer to the good women (who are not bad people and don’t deserve to be treated as such).
And the second threshold is lower than the first.
I don’t think there’s a general right answer. Norms exist for a reason, and the proper respect for a given norm depends on the reason it serves and how well it serves it: I’m a lot happier with #3-style responses, especially from random people who aren’t getting paid to enforce the norm, when a violation could e.g. actually get someone killed (failing to do proper safety checks on climbing or diving equipment; negligently pointing live weapons at people). If it’s there for e.g. aesthetic or convenience reasons, or if its usefulness is unclear, then I’m happier with #2-style responses and even then mainly from people with actual authority.
Chesterton’s fence is a good argument for giving established norms the benefit of the doubt, though.
Wondermark gave me a nice heuristic a while back, which I’ve tried to remember:
http://wondermark.com/c1293/
You’re looking at the gap between stages 5 and 6 of Kolhberg’s theory of moral development.
Stage 5 is rights-based social contract thinking. People imagine moral conflicts a civil trial. Each party states their position. They lay out the rights / duties that support their case. Moral reasoning is about ranking the rights, and deciding in favor of the person who’s able to appeal to the most-central principle.
Apply that to the Grandma augment. Stage 5 reasoning might be something like:
Stage 5 is emotionally satisfying because there are “correct” answers. You find the highest-precedent right and uphold that. You’re not denying someone’s lower-order rights. You’re just noticing that they’re trumped, so don’t apply.
The big limit of Stage 5 reasoning is that, per the trial metaphor, you need identifiable parties. And you’re appealing to ‘rights’, which are binary in a way that our true goals are not.
Stage 6 is closer to “social optimization” in the sense of economics. Instead of routing everything through rights, you try to reason in terms of a social utility function that takes everyone’s well-being into account.
So, the Grandma Argument would go:
In theory, Stage 6 could be joyful. The solutions are higher net-utility than Stage 5 (since you’re optimizing for max net-utility, instead of min right-violations).
And, in theory, we could imagine clever trade-offs that re-distribute these utility gains so everyone’s better off. But, in practice, it’s almost impossible to find policies that actually do that.
Instead, you’re often shifting harms around. Often from an unidentified and disparate group (‘people who haven’t moved in yet’) onto an known and sympathetic individual. This feels like Triage. Necessary, useful, but grim.
To go through the other examples:
Stage-5 approach to running is, “look for a correct set of rights and duties.” And then the debate is if the women have the right to occupy the whole path until they know someone’s coming. Or if the runners have a right to a clear left lane.
People don’t always want to derive things from 1st principles, so I’d expect a bunch of analogies about cars or boats.
Stage-6 was your concern for the minimizing the net harm summed over all interactions. Rather than a rule, you’re looking for some policy that would make individual interactions go as well as possible.
To really see the difference, propose the scenario to a group of friends. Then suggest a $1 ‘fine’ for walking left.
I think you’ll get a split between, “Fines are a penalty for for breaking social duties. It’s immoral to treat them like indulgences,” and “How do we optimize the value of the fine so that widows can pay it — like an indulgence — but rich people can’t?”
The first one is a Stage 5 argument about rights. The second one is a Stage 6 argument that financial penalties are a bad proxy for utility loss.
College admissions is also a Stage 5 vs Stage 6 splt.
The standard Stage-5 argument for affirmative action is that a duty to promote racial equality trumps a duty to have equal treatment by the state.
This leads to people arguing that a given school’s affirmative action policy is just, without discussing the magnitude of the race-based ‘boost’ that the college wants to give.
From a social-optimization perspective, it would be surprising to suggest that an 800-point SAT boost was wise. And similarly surprising to suggest that a 5-point SAT boot was particularly important.
Ziglar v. Abbasi
I have to say I really love Part II of the Thomas concurrence. Briefly, it suggests that modern qualified immunity doctrine is completely unmoored from any kind of statutory or common law basis and is essentially made up out of whole cloth. This seems to me to be very hard to dispute as a factually matter.
It’s unfortunate that every last liberal member of the court is so enmeshed in the culture of stare decisis that they wouldn’t even consider joining. It’s hard to overstate the difference on this axis between Justices like Douglas, Brennan, Marshall, and even Stevens on the one hand and your Kagans and Breyers on the other. If you look at Breyer’s dissent on the main Bivens question, it’s pretty milquetoast – “In my view, these claims are well-pleaded, state violations of clearly established law, and fall within the scope of longstanding Bivens law.” Where is the forthright and passionate advocate for returning to “the heady days in which this Court assumed common law powers to create causes of action”?
Is it just me, or does this sound like a play-by-play of blernsball?
I’d be curious to know what you’re getting at though, if you’re able to dumb it down 1-2 notches.
I don’t know what blernsball is, though maybe that’s your point.
I can try to elaborate.
The case I linked at the top of my post came down from the Supreme Court yesterday. A group of people that had been detained after 9/11 sued a variety of federal government officials both for being detained and for being mistreated while being detained. At issue was whether or not that lawsuit could go forward.
In order to understand the exact issue you need some background. During Reconstruction, Congress passed a law called the Klu Klux Klan act. Among its other provisions was this one, today codified at 42 USC 1983 and often just referred to as 1983:
Although pretty broad on its face, this provision mostly languished in obscurity until the 1961, when the Supreme Court interpreted it to allow plaintiffs to sue state police officers that they claim had violated their constitutional rights. (Monroe v. Pape) Today it is the primary vehicle used for such lawsuits. (More on that later.)
However, if you go back and look at the language it pretty clearly doesn’t apply to officials acting under color of federal law. And indeed there is no other parallel statute that does apply to federal officials. In 1971, the Supreme Court held that a case could nonetheless be brought against Federal Bureau of Narcotics agents that had conducted a search and made an arrest in violation of the Constitution. It held that the Constitution implied a cause of action. That case was Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents and cases brought under it are sometimes referred to as Bivens actions.
Eventually the 70s ended and the court got some new justices — Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, O’Connor, with Rehnquist elevated to Chief. These justices did not care for the notion that the Constitution implied any sort of cause of action. They thought (in some cases think) that if there is going to be a cause of action, it is up to Congress to create it.
The Court never quite got rid of Bivens actions but the case decided yesterday was one in a long line narrowing the doctrine and/or refusing to extend it to new circumstances. In this case the Court ruled the 9/11 detainees could not sue the high level government officials for ordering them detained and frequently strip searched, and while they held that they might be able to sue the prison guards for mistreatment, they set a high barrier for the lower court to judge the issue.
In terms of my second paragraph, part of what I was saying is that the liberal wing of the Court today is qualitatively different from the Justices that were on the Court that originally created Bivens and many other pro-civil-liberties doctrines. Breyer wrote a dissenting opinion in yesterday’s case but it argued on a relatively narrow grounds dealing with individual prior cases. It was essentially defensive in nature, rather than a full throated defense of the correctness of implying causes of action from the Constitution in general.
The first paragraph referenced Thomas’ concurring opinion. In it he begrudgingly agreed with the controlling opinion on the main Bivens issue — he would prefer to all but eliminate Bivens actions altogether. However, he wrote an entire second section on the issue of qualified immunity, inviting the bar to bring a case asking that it be struck down.
Qualified immunity is a doctrine that grew out of 1983 cases and was then imported into Bivens cases. The doctrine has to do with what standard a state official should be held to when he is sued for violating someone’s constitutional rights. Under the current rules it is not enough that constitutional rights be violated, there is a much higher bar involving proof, among other things, that the officer violated clearly established law as determined by the Supreme Court.
What Thomas’ concurrence said is that this extensive qualified immunity doctrine, which makes it much harder for a plaintiff to win a 1983 case, ought to be tossed out because it isn’t based on the statute or the Constitution but was put in place by Justices on the basis of their own views of public policy.
While in one sense this is a very “conservative” viewpoint because it sounds in judicial restraint and political branch supremacy, in another sense it could appeal to the “liberal” wing of the court because they tend to be more solicitous of the rights of the people as against the police, prison guards, and other state officials. However, as I lamented, all the current liberal justices are so myopically focused on precedents and reasoning from them that I don’t think any will accept Thomas’ invitation.
Hope that was both clearer and interesting.
Indeed! Thanks! And best of luck to Justice Thomas, qualified immunity IMO is basically quasi-legalization of the Nuremberg defense.
agree with Wency
understand if you don’t want to put in the effort though
🙂
Bivens has been in trouble for decades now, and there is not one on the Court who will step up to champion it. It saddens me. Where there is a right, there must be a remedy, people!
For those software developers out there, here is a somewhat-tongue-in-cheek blog post with interesting stats purporting to show that developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs.
The stats used were taken from the raw data from the Stack Overflow 2017 developer survey.
From the post:
I suspect it’s causal, but the causation goes the other way. The Google style guides (except for go, because Rob Pike is such a troll) calls for spaces; I imagine many later tech company guides are based on them, especially for C++. I’m pretty sure Apple’s code uses spaces (IIRC the Darwin source uses spaces). So chances are if you’re at a high-salary tech company you’re using spaces, leaving tabs for the riff-raff :-).
Doesn’t matter nowadays. If you’re not using an automatic formatting tool you’re wasting your time. I haven’t even bothered to get my emacs style approximately correct; I just write what I want, let it make a mess of my code and run clang-format over it. There was an ongoing war at my previous company over 80 vs 100 (or other) columns; at one point I suggested it would be simple enough for the heretics to solve it by reformatting it on open to 100 columns and back to 80 on save. This was barely practical at the time (there would have been a significant amount of code for which that process would introduce spurious changes) but it’s probably eminently practical now.
!!
Shades of Silicon Valley (the HBO comedy)– my friends that work there always say that isnt a comedy, but a reality show.
I can’t speak to the dynamics of the tech world, but I grew up a couple miles from the house the characters live in, and the portrayal of the local culture hysterically on point. I nearly lost it the episode where everything goes to hell because the weather was slightly below freezing.
I love it so much…I laugh so hard I cry sometimes.
Especially Guilfoyle and Richard.
But Guilfoyle the best of all…in their different aspects they are the Hero-Nerds of nerddom.
The correct answer is tabs then spaces, each in the right amount. Set the background color on tabs to be slightly different if it worries you. If you have a column length restriction (generally a good idea, although 80 seems increasingly crotchety), pick a tab length and enforce by that.
It amazes me how many times I’ve begun this conversation with the other person mystified as to what I could even be talking about, and ended it with the person admitting that is, in fact, the correct approach but it’s “too hard”, as if he was some kind of super-producer.
Seconded.
I don’t know IFF I have standing to ask this…but could we restart the discussion of islamic jurisprudence between DAVIDFRIEDMAN and QAYS without all the culture war stuff?
I would very much like to ask Qays what his interpretation of mutawatir is…I was told that it was something like “unbroken transmission and continuous signaling”. Arabic is hard.
Now that I understand David’s reasons behind his questions I’m more interested in his approach…but to reiterate a caveat I’m way more focused on theory (tafsir) than practice (islamic jurisprudence).
A couple of weeks ago, I inadvertently took a rather large dose of 5-HTP.
Later while at work, I was listening to music on headphones (a daily occurrence) and had a just utterly transcendent reaction to an album that is something that I normally just play as background music.
5-HTP is supposed to be a seratonin precursor, so I’m wondering, is there a link between seratonin and how much you will enjoy music?
The album, in case any one cares, was In Return by Odesza.
What does everyone think about cargo delivery with rockets? Elon Musk gave a presentation on Making Humans a Multi-Planetary Species:
If we find a way to commercialize the Mars Vehicle for terran use, we could reduce the ticket price for a trip to Mars even further. Rocket Spacelines, anyone?
This has been around since the 50s, and hasn’t gotten anywhere. Concorde hasn’t been repeated, and a rocket is going to be a lot less efficient. The transatlantic market is probably your best bet for this, and I expect someone to have tried it if it looked even remotely viable anywhere other than Musk-land.
to add to what bean said, there’s a real limit in terms of practical utility of fast transport based on the cost/time of packing and unpacking. If it takes you a day to load your cargo vessel, the value of the difference in transit time between 10 minutes and 10 hours is pretty marginal. In order to actually be useful, very vast cargo delivery (e.g. anywhere on earth in less than an hour) almost by definition, has to operate at the retail level. Above that level, processing delays rapidly wipe out and advantage in transit speed, even before you consider cost.
I have to say, sometimes it seems like Musk is trying so hard that it looks like not-trying. I mean, this is the sort of idea a 10-year-old would sketch on a napkin. I have seen cartoons where this method of transport is employed. At what point does “Hey, dig a giant bank deposit partial-vacuum tube – but for people!” (see also Futurama) or “We could get it there faster by rocket!” (see also The Incredibles) no longer qualify as helpful?