How to Make Me Instantly Distrust an Article: Part 1

21 comments - 2461 thread views 1yr ago by Sam_I_am (open.substack.com) Edited 1yr ago

One of the ways I pass my free time is to scroll through Twitter or Reddit looking for interesting or controversial articles to read. Occasionally, I only make it a paragraph or 2 in before I decide that I don’t trust the author, and that I can’t take anything they write seriously. This can happen even if the article is taking a position I already agree with. Sometimes there’s just something about the article’s style that seems like it can’t be trusted. I was originally going to write a post that contained all the pet peeves that would cause that to happen. However, after I got part-way through, I decided that if I included everything, then this entry would be too long. So instead, I’m writing about each one separately. Pet peeve #1: Portraying your opponent as a caricature.

The thing that inspired me to write about this topic was an article I saw on twitter. It’s an article about a proposed regulation that would force companies to make cancelling subscriptions easier. More specifically, it was about those companies’ reaction to it.

Companies Think Their Idiot Customers Will Accidentally Cancel Their Subscriptions if It's Too Easy

It begins:

The Federal Trade Commission’s recent proposal to require that companies offer customers easy one-click options to cancel subscriptions might seem like a no-brainier, something unequivocally good for consumers. Not according to the companies it would affect, though. In their view, the introduction of simple unsubscribe buttons could lead to a wave of accidental cancellations by dumb customers. Best, they say, to let big businesses protect customers from themselves and make it a torment to stop your service.

Those were some of the points shared by groups representing major publishers and advertisers during the FTC’s recent public comment period ending in June. Consumers, according to the Wall Street Journal, generally appeared eager for the new proposals which supporters say could make a dent in tricky, bordering-on deceptive anti-cancellation tactics deployed by cable companies, entertainment sites, gyms, and other businesses who game out ways to make it as difficult as possible to quickly quit a subscription. The News/Media Alliance, a trade group representing publishers, tried to refute those customers in its own comments to the FTC. The Alliance claimed its members actually receive “very few complaints” about cancellations. Consumers, according to the Association of National Advertisers, may actually benefit from annoying cancellation friction.

To be clear, I absolutely hate difficult to cancel subscriptions. I also hate so-called “free trials” that bill you if you forget to cancel. Some cancellation processes I’ve encountered were so difficult that they certainly seemed criminal. When I first heard about this proposal, I thought to myself “Finally, someone is going to do something about these predatory practices!”

I agree with the with the article’s apparent position on the proposal. The new rule is a good idea, and it’s needed. Even so, something about the article still managed to rub me the wrong way. Even before I started reading the article, I already disliked it just from the headline alone. By the time I had finished it, I was already trying to find out how the article was deceiving me.

The first sign of trouble was the headline:

Companies Think Their Idiot Customers Will Accidentally Cancel Their Subscriptions if It's Too Easy

This reads like a headline from the onion. You can tell just from reading it that it’s caricature of what they actually said. Companies don’t call literally their customers “idiots” like this. At least, certainly not out in the open.

The article continues:

In their view, the introduction of simple unsubscribe buttons could lead to a wave of accidental cancellations by dumb customers. Best, they say, to let big businesses protect customers from themselves and make it a torment to stop your service.

Again, this message is nothing like what you’d expect a large company to put out. Large companies don’t openly insult customers like this. Large companies also don’t refer to themselves as “Big Business”. This passage even has a little of embedded argument in it. It tells you that it’s a torment to stop your service. Nobody embeds counterarguments in their statements just so you can use it against them. This is supposedly based on what the companies said, but it’s been warped in obvious ways, and it’s hard to tell what the actual statement probably was.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. The article is full of this kind of thing.

Caricature itself isn’t bad if your audience already knows the subject matter, but it’s not a good way to introduce your audience to an opposing position. A caricature, by definition, distorts it’s subject by exaggerating it’s most ridiculous attributes. A caricature of someone’s argument is an exaggerated version of the most ridiculous parts of that argument. In their real statements, there may or may not be nuance and context that make the argument work, but if there is, I can’t expect to find that nuance and context in a caricature. Including it would undermine the idea of caricature itself.

A caricature of a statement is more than just a Straw Man, it gives a sense that the author doesn’t think it’s worthwhile to even check for context. Perhaps they don’t even think context can matter.

Some authors try to weasel their way out of such straw-man accusations by telling you “it’s just a joke”, even though they’re clearly trying to persuade you. A humorous poorly-reasoned argument is still a poorly-reasoned argument. If you have to fall back on “it’s just a joke” in order to defend it, then your point might not be on solid ground to begin with. Saying “It’s just joke” might as well be outright admitting that your argument is without merit.

If you want to actually be convincing, then you should instead, steel man your opponent. Essentially, you provide the best version of their position that you can. Include the nuance and context that makes it work. Then, you can explain why it is wrong.

This way might not feel very good. After all, why help out your opposition by presenting the best version of their argument? But doing so is actually helpful for you. It shows confidence in your own position. If it looks like an argument a real person would believe, then it doesn’t trigger as much skepticism. Perhaps more importantly, it protects you in case your reader learns the real argument from somewhere else. Learning your opponent’s real position won’t sway them as much because you’ve already told them about it. It gives your argument more sticking power.

You can still joke around about the opposing position. Just make sure that I know what that position actually is first. I don’t want to have to guess what their real position probably is.

About Half-way down the article, the author finally included an actual quote,

“If sellers are required to enable cancellation through a single click or action by the consumer, accidental cancellations will become much more common, as consumers will not reasonably expect to remove their recurring goods or services with just one click,” the Association said in a statement.

But at this point, it was too late, the distrust had already started to creep in. The author had already shown that he didn’t care very much how the companies’ actual statements worked.

I looked a bit further into it to figure out what the companies’ real statement was. The quote above, comes from a statement made by the Association of National Advertisers Their full statement can be found here.

This is the part where they talk about “click to cancel”

Requiring “simple” cancellation is a difficult standard for businesses to implement, as there is little detail provided to guide them to understand its meaning and how to comply with this ambiguous requirement. If sellers are required to enable cancellation through a single click or action by the consumer, accidental cancellations will become much more common, as consumers will not reasonably expect to remove their recurring goods or services with just one click. Such accidental cancellations could cause consumers to miss out on essential deliveries of food, water, or medical products, and could create the inconvenience of requiring the consumer to register again for a service they did not intend to cancel in the first place. The possibility of accidental cancellations could be greater in the mobile environment, which may be less optimized to manage complex processes such as account administration. Consequently, in many instances, it may be reasonable for sellers to require some form of customer authentication, or redirection of the consumer to a medium that best facilitates account administration, before processing a cancellation. As a matter of public policy, permitting reasonable customer authentication prior to cancellation helps to minimize mistaken or fraudulent cancellation actions, which lead to customer frustration and undesired lapses in the provision of needed goods or services. Several state-level negative option laws permit reasonable authentication procedures prior to cancellation,17 and the proposed amendments to the Current Rule should similarly allow companies to verify consumer identities prior to effectuating a cancellation choice.

This statement does make some reasonable points about why you might not want a literal 1-click cancel button. If I click a “Cancel” button in the navigation, at minimum, I would expect to see a confirmation page first. One that says “Do you want to cancel your subscription?” and a button that says “Confirm Cancellation”. That’s at least 2 clicks, one to get to the cancel confirmation page, and one to cancel. If my account was cancelled out of the navigation bar, that would be very surprising to me. Something like that really would lead to unintended cancellations. It also makes total sense to force users to log in, in order to cancel. I don’t want some random unauthenticated person messing with my account settings!

There is, however, one major problem with this statement. The proposed rule doesn’t actually require you to make a 1-click cancel button. “Click to cancel” is just a nickname. The actual requirement is a cancellation process that is at least as simple as the sign-up process, and through the same medium:

The proposal also requires sellers to provide a simple cancellation mechanism through the same medium used to initiate the agreement, whether, for instance, through the internet, telephone, mail, or in-person. On the internet, this “Click to Cancel” provision requires sellers, at a minimum, to provide an accessible cancellation mechanism on the same website or web-based application used for sign-up. If the seller allows users to sign up using a phone, it must provide, at a minimum, a telephone number and ensure all calls to that number are answered during normal business hours. Further, to meet the requirement that the mechanism be at least as simple as the one used to initiate the recurring charge, any telephone call used for cancellation cannot be more expensive than the call used to enroll ( e.g., if the sign-up call is toll free, the cancellation call must also be toll free). For a recurring charge initiated through an in-person transaction, the seller must offer the simple cancellation mechanism through the internet or by telephone in addition to, where practical, the in-person method used to initiate the transaction.

This rule requires a 1-click cancel only if you had a 1-click sign up in the first place. If a company requires authentication in order to sign up, then they can require authentication in order to cancel. If it takes you more than one click to sign up, then it can take more than 1 click to cancel. I sure hope these companies don’t have literal 1-click confirmation-less signup buttons, and I certainly hope they aren’t signing you with no authentication either!

But then again, maybe I shouldn’t be too hard on the The Association of National Advertisers for this oversight. The author of the Gizmodo article apparently didn’t catch it either. That would have been quite a good opportunity to make fun of the original statement, and it would have addressed the real statement too.

I’m not very forgiving when it comes to deceptive tactics. Once I get the sense that you’re trying to deceive me, I become suspicious about the whole thing. After all, if the author has already revealed that they don’t care about informing me accurately, how can I trust anything they say? Even if I already agree with their position, I can’t use it as a source. It’s just too unreliable; the people I’m citing it to would, rightly, mock me for it. It’s just not very useful, and mostly makes me dislike the author and maybe even their publication.

Friday Fun Thread for August 11, 2023

54 comments - 2594 thread views 1yr ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

How Japan Lost the Battle of Midway, pt. 2

2 comments - 1354 thread views 1yr ago by drmanhattan16 (open.substack.com)

Transnational Thursdays 12

16 comments - 1081 thread views 1yr ago by Soriek (text post)

This is a weekly thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or IR history. I usually start off with coverage of some current events from around the world. Feel free to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the Ukraine War, or even just whatever you’re reading.

Ecuador

Fernando Villavicencio, a Presidential candidate for the upcoming August 20 race, was [tragically assassinated yesterday](Fernando Villavicencio). He wasn’t really a front runner or anything, though he was pretty outspoken about crime and narcotics trafficking. For now President Lasso is blaming it on organized crime (certainly plausible) and has declared a state of emergency for the country for 60 days. He’s previously declared a state of emergency in two of Ecuador's provinces so this will now temporarily extend the suspension of civil liberties to the entire country. For now the election will continue as normal.

Niger

Last week ECOWAS threatened an intervention if the Nigerien military wouldn’t back down after their coup. Senegal, Benin and Ivory Coast were all willing to intervene but much depended on Nigeria, which holds the largest military in ECOWAS, over 20 times the size of Niger’s. Nigerian President Bola Tinubu was indeed one of the most prominent advocates for intervening, however (thanks to @random_ranger for bringing it up) Nigeria recently held a vote on the intervention and Tinubu’s own party handily overruled him and voted against intervention. The Sunday deadline has now passed without incident and for now a West African war seems to be off. Niger remains heavily sanctioned, with overseas assets frozen, and much of their electricity cut off from Nigeria.

Spain

Recapping from last week, the Spanish election ended with a perfect stalemate between two coalitions: the center right PP and far right Vox vs the left PSOE and the farther left Sumar. The coalitions are both competing for tie breaker parties: the EH Bildu, the Basque Nationalist Party, the Republican Left of Catalonia and Junts (the Catalan independence party), but the nationalist Vox is disliked by these, especially the historically secessionist parties, putting PP at a big disadvantage. PSOE leader and current Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has taken advantage of this and has been trying to court a deal with the Catalans and Basques without offering them too much in the way of concessions. Currently PSOE and Sumar have been offering to update the regional financing system, or to allow them to speak their regional languages in parliament, but what Junts in particular wants is for their fugitive leader Puigdemont to be allowed to return to the country with legal immunity for the last Catalan independence referendum - a nonstarter for both sides, at least for now.

Vox, surprisingly, has responded in reasonable fashion by now offering their full support to a conservative coalition even if their own members aren’t included in the new government. This has got the right wing coalition…at least one more vote, but at least opens up long shot negotiations to get a separatist party to abstain from voting. With both sides competing for the basque and Catalan parties, they are certainly going to leverage their position to demand as much as is possible.

Pakistan

Imran Khan has officially been jailed for three years and banned from politics for five years. This was followed by huge protests with over a thousand people arrested. President Arif Alvi has now disbanded the National Assembly and an interim government (not yet formed) will take charge till elections. Speaking of which, elections are supposed to happen in three months but a government spokesperson has said it may be more like four months as they do a census recount and redraw electoral boundaries. Two controversial bills enhancing the power of the military and the intelligence services have also been passed in the now defunct National Assembly and await Alvi’s signature:

Proposed amendments to the century-old Official Secrets Act will broadly empower the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and Intelligence Bureau (IB) to arrest citizens over "suspected breach of official secrets". In addition, a new bill recommends a three-year jail term for anyone who discloses the identity of an intelligence official.

Thailand

If you’ve followed the coverage in previous weeks, you’ll know the general outline that two anti-military, anti-monarchy parties won big in the last election. They tried to form a coalitional government but the military objected strongly to the more radical party, Move Forward, and rejected its leader Pita from the Prime Ministership. His party has now been ejected entirely from the coalition and the less radical party, Pheu Thai, seems to have shelved its most serious criticisms of the monarchy-military axis and has been making forward strides forming a government, with the Bhumjaithai Party and the much smaller Chart Thai Pattana Party joining their coalition. They’re now thirteen seats away from a majority but their remaining options are rough. They can either work with the pro-monarchy Democrats, or violate their pledge not to coalition with the military and ally with Palang Pracharath Party or the United Thai Nation, the ruling pro-military parties that led the last coup in 2014. Both options would incur pretty serious backlash from their more committed members.

Italy

Italy’s rocky road to chart an economic course continues. They’ve been pushing a series of reforms, including raising taxi licenses by 20% and formally ending Covid restrictions; now they’re back on taxes. Banks have been pulling record profits, up 64% from the previous year, and the Italian government has now proposed a 40% tax on “ the difference between the interest they pay customers on deposits and the interest they earn on loans.” This is in the same vein as a measure Spain has pushed last year and the funds would be redistributed downwards (funny hearing Matteo Silvini talk about promoting “social equality”) to make up for some of the effects of European Central Bank interest rates. Stocks responded in decisive fashion by falling across the board. Italy already seems to be backing down.

Where Have All the Good Men Gone and Where Are All the Populists?

61 comments - 3029 thread views 1yr ago by ScrimbloBimblo The Loveable Scrunko (text post) Edited 1yr ago

When it comes to the spicier cultural issues that generate flame wars online, I tend to find myself falling on the side of the conservatives. The exceptions to this are LGBT rights and drug use, but these days, these issues seem to divide more on old/young lines than conservative/liberal lines anyway.

I'm strongly against all forms of gun control. I believe that nations often have the responsibility to get involved in the affairs of other nations, including militarily. My diet consists mostly of red meat and I have a longstanding beef with vegans. I find media that overtly panders to minorities irritating whether or not I'm in said minority. I believe that wealthy liberals are intentionally and maliciously fanning the flames of race and gender conflicts to break down community bonds to make people easier to manipulate. Yadda yadda.

In short, when it comes to cultural views, I'm a milquetoast example of exactly what you'd expect to find from a young, online, cultural conservative, or at least libertarian.

And yet, despite all of this, I'm a Socialist. Not a Socialist-lite or Social Democrat in the vein of Bernie Sanders, but a dyed-in-the-wool Socialist.

I believe corporations are fundamentally evil to the core. I believe the overwhelming majority of working people in the US (and probably the world) are being ruthlessly exploited by a class of nobles we'd all be better off without. As a result, I believe we have an ethical responsibility to favor trade unions, strikes, and literally anything that protects workers from corporations. I believe the only realistic long-term result of unchecked Capitalism with rapidly improving technology is a dystopia. Yadda yadda.

Now, neither my cultural beliefs nor my economic beliefs are particularly unusual. The proportion of people in the US identifying as an Economic Leftists or Socialists has gone up every year since 1989, and the cultural conservatives, reactionaries, anti-progs, and anti-woke types are growing rapidly as well. Yet, I've never met anyone else in the overlap.

The combination of cultural Conservatism and economic Socialism is what's historically been called Populism, so that's how I'll be using that word. (I'm clarifying this because some people call Trump a "populist", but he's about as anti-socialist as someone can be, so I'm not using that word the same way as these people.)

Looking to the past, I can see lots of examples of this kind of Populism, especially in the first half of the 20th century, but practically nothing in the present. Libertarians are culturally liberal and economically conservative, and there's loads of them, so you'd think the opposite would also be true, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

With this in mind, I have 3 questions for this community:

Why are there drastically fewer Populists today than there were in the past?
Besides "Populist", what are some other names for the belief system I'm describing?
Where are all the Populists that are left? I assume there's not literally zero, and that some of them hang out online together somewhere, so where are they? Are there populist blogs? Populist forums? Populist subreddits?

Wellness Wednesday for August 9, 2023

57 comments - 2377 thread views 1yr ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

The Motte Moddes: HighSpace (August 2023)

72 comments - 2349 thread views 1yr ago by ArjinFerman Tinfoil Gigachad (text post) Edited 1yr ago

The goal of this thread is to coordinate development on our project codenamed HighSpace - a mod for Freespace 2 that will be a mashup between it and High Fleet. A description of how the mechanics of the two games could be combined is available in the first thread.

Who we have

@FCfromSSC - 2D/3D artist
@netstack - developer, tester, and suggester of great ideas
@Mantergeistmann - writer
Me - developer

Who we need

The more the merrier, you are free to join in any capacity you wish! I can already identify a few distinct tasks for each position that we could split the work into

developers: “mission” code, “strategic” system map code
artists: 2D (user interface), 3D (space ships, weapons explosions)
writers: worldbuilding/lore, quests, characters

What we have

Concept art for a long range missle cruiser, curtesy of @FCfromSSC
A proof of concenpt for “strategic” system map we jump into on start of the campaign. It contains a friendly ship and 2 enemy ships, you can chose where to move / which enemy ship to attack.
A somewhat actual-game-like workflow. Attacking a ship launches a mission where the two ships are pitted against each other. If you win, the current health of your ship is saved, and you can launch the second attack. If you clean up the map you are greeted with a “You Win” message, or “You Lose” if you lose your ship.
A “tactical” RTS-like in-mission view where you can give commands to your ships.

Updates

The System Map and the Tactical View got minor pimp-ups. The System Map now shows the ship names, and the Tactical View has a grid to help with orientation, draws ship icons if the ships are too far away to see, and draws waypoint, and target icons to give some indications of the ship's current goals.
The System Map now supports Battle Groups, and the player is now in charge of one - the original GTC Trinity cruiser, and a wing of fighters.
We now have “just in time” mission generation. Like I mentioned in the previous thread, the scripting API gives you access to the file system, so it was pretty easy to generate a mission file on the fly. This has some advantages over using a “blank” mission file and setting up the mission via the API, because not all mission features are exposed to the API. The most obvious example here will be how there's no longer an “extra” player ship, just the ones explicitly declared for the System Map (in the previous versions you'd be flying a fighter, even though in theory there were no fighters in the System Map).
Thanks to the fighters and their current load-out it's actually not that hard to win the game at the moment. Your cruiser will easily dispatch the Shivan one, and as to the corvette, you can order your ships to run away, and take out the turrets yourself, then order your ships to attack. It will take a while, but with a defenseless enemy it's only a question of time.

What's next

The System Map didn't get a lot of attention so far, so I'd like expand it. It would be nice to move around an actual star system, add camera movement, and split/merge mechanics for fleets.
The Tactical View is somewhat functional, but still needs to give a player handle on what's going on, and better control over their ships. I wanted to add subsystem status, beam cannon charge status, and a handier way to give advanced commands.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

1752 comments - 30213 thread views 1yr ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

1752

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

Shaming.
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
Recruiting for a cause.
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 6, 2023

94 comments - 3429 thread views 1yr ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

Friday Fun Thread for August 4, 2023

105 comments - 3017 thread views 2yr ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

Transnational Thursdays 11

14 comments - 857 thread views 2yr ago by Soriek (text post)

Spain

Last week I reported that the socialists had clinched a surprise win insofar as the center right PP and the far right Vox had failed to win a majority, leaving the leftists better positioned to find a coalition partner (because Vox is toxic to many other parties). Votes have now been counted up from overseas and have propelled the right wing forward, placing both the left and right flanks at exactly 171 out of 350 seats. Now either party needs to secure only five more votes and the remaining parties are awkwardly in between. PSOE’s remaining hope for a third coalition party is now Junts, the Catalan independence party, which leans right but has had a good relationship with PM Pedro Sanchez in the past. Things are complicated by Sanchez’ thus-far refusal to entertain their demands. PP has also reached out to Junts for negotiations, but are constrained in what they can offer by their partnership with Vox, whose very existence was partially inspired by a nationalist backlash to Catalan independence. Worse case scenario nobody is elected, and they have to have another election in two months.

Italy

Watchers have been wondering for a while how Meloni will address Italy’s relationship with China, as Italy seeks to balance sustaining its economy with their alliances. The government has now formally said joining China’s Belt and Road was a mistake with scant economic benefits for the country. Italy will now make moves towards leaving the agreement, if possible without damaging their relationship with China.

After a White House meeting with the US president, Joe Biden, on Thursday, the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, said her government had until December to make a decision on the BRI, and also announced she would soon travel to Beijing.

I know a lot of readers here have an impression that American foreign policy is oriented around spreading progressivism or some such - I highlight this to make the point that no, really America’s goal is hegemony and it’s more than willing to tolerate right-populist governments like Italy, Hungary, or Poland if they give meaningful support against American enemies. Speaking of which:

Thailand

The Thai elections in May were a major upset for the military-monarchy axis that rules Thailand, bringing two populist, anti-corruption parties, Move Forward and Pheu Thai, into the forefront. Despite winning a majority in the House, Move Forward was blocked by the military dominant Senate and has now been excluded from the coalition by Pheu Thai, which has decided that it now it supports the monarchy, will coalition with the military appointed MPs, and wants a smarmy real estate mogul to lead their anti-corruption party. The courts are reviewing whether it was unconstitutional to block Move Forward but no one expects them to defy the military. In the meantime the King has allowed Chan-Ocha, the former Army Commander who has ruled since the 2014 coup, to continue to rule as normal.

You may have noticed the US hasn’t formerly condemned this anti-democratic measure by a government dominated by ostensibly our two least favorite things: kings and soldiers. America and the Thai military have actually had a very close relationship for a long time, one that was damaged by the 2014 coup because it saw Thailand buying more military equipment from China. Since then Thailand has shifted back in our orbit, losing confidence in the benefits of the unfinished Belt and Road projects and joining the US-backed anti-China alliance, the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework. While (to the extent they follow it) American civil society and media may support Move Forward, the American government is indifferent/opposed. It is much more important that Thailand balance towards us and away from China (and they weren’t thrilled with our recent refusal to sell them F-35s), so the US is unlikely to oppose them here.

Haiti

Of all places, Kenya has offered to send a military force to Haiti to bolster security and also train local police forces. Haiti (uh, whoever still represents them diplomatically), the US and other Latin American nations have endorsed the plan and will bring it up as a formal UN Resolution, where Sec General Antonio Guterres has already given his support. Keep in mind Haitian President Jovenel Moise was assasinated two years ago and Haiti has been largely in a state of anarchy since, so it’s somewhat astounding it took the world this long to agree on a half hearted intervention, and one from a country with a serious police brutality problem and that speaks an entirely different language no less. Things have gotten especially bleak lately as more and more aid organizations have left the island due to attacks on their staff; Tuesday featured a huge Haitian protest against the kidnapping of an American nurse and her child. America will likely help fund the intervention effort to some extent but it’s unclear to what degree.

Colombia

Over the past few months there has been something of an internecine war in the Colombian government. Unlike many countries, the Attorney General is neither appointed by the President nor elected but instead appointed by the Supreme Court. Because prior to the current left wing Administration Colombia had basically only been governed by the right/center-right, the Supreme Court is conservative as well, and thus so is current Attorney General Francisco Barbosa Delgado. Delgado has made it somewhat of a personal mission to root out corruption/stop President Petro from doing anything at all, and has targeted several other high ranking members of the Administration with investigations. From the outside it’s very hard to tell what is actually corruption vs what is politically motivated, but things have now culminated in the arrest of Petro’s son who was accused of taking cartel money by a seemingly credible source, which is to say: his wife. The wife (Petro’s daughter in law) has now been arrested as well and an ongoing investigation remains on Petro’s brother. Many of Petro’s primary reforms were unable to pass in the previous legislative session and the weight of these corruption scandals is unlikely to make things any easier in the upcoming session.

Niger

The hypothetical coup seems very much to have turned into a full military coup in Niger. The West African regional body ECOWAS responded by sanctioning Niger, freezing all of their assets, and demanding that the military relinquish power. In a twist, Mali and Burkina Faso (which both recently also had military coups) responded by actually threatening war if ECOWAS intervened. This is a semi-laughable threat as, despite literally being ruled by the military, neither Mali nor Burkina Faso have much in the way of a meaningful military, hence their reliance on French/Russian forces (and remember, these countries are basically already at civil war with Islamist insurgents). Still, it’s unlikely that the other West African states, many of them dealing with instability of their own, have much appetite for a real conflict. On the other hand, the US has announced its support for ECOWAS, has invested a lot in Nigerien security, and is increasingly worried about growing Russian influence, so they may be a factor as well. If the Niger coup remains it will likely join the ranks of Burkina Faso and Mali in kicking out the French military (France is already evacuating its citizens after attacks on its embassy) and becoming closer with the Wagner Group instead.

Lebanon

Significant violence has broken out in the Lebanese Palestinian refugee camps between supporters of the PLO (the nominal government of Palestine, in charge of the West Bank) and Fatah (the Islamist faction that runs Gaza), causing thousands to flee (as an aside, a Palestinian woman once told me that people joked the Israeli Palestinian refugee camps were five star resorts compared to the Lebanese camps.) Both Hezbollah and the PLO have called for an end to the violence.

Riad Salameh, looong time head of the Lebanese Central Bank, has finally stepped down in disgrace for mismanaging the crisis and for embezzlement charges. Three years after the explosion in Beirut, Lebanese citizens still have limits on how much they can withdrawal from their bank accounts to prevent a bank run, inflation is rampant and 80% of the country lives in poverty.

The factional Lebanese government has struggled to formerly appoint a replacement. Wassim Mansouri will take over as the interim Governor in the meantime, and has promised to oversee reforms, including “setting up a capital control law, a financial restructuring law and a 2023 state budget within six months”

Wellness Wednesday for August 2, 2023

60 comments - 2104 thread views 2yr ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

Nice Things and Why We Can't Have Them: How Some People Ruin 10% of Things for Everybody - By Marcel Gautreau

21 comments - 3440 thread views 2yr ago by faceh (mgautreau.substack.com)

How Japan lost the Battle of Midway, pt. 1

40 comments - 1894 thread views 2yr ago by drmanhattan16 (drmanhattan16.substack.com)

Quality Contributions Report for July 2023

20 comments - 5021 thread views 2yr ago by naraburns nihil supernum (text post)

[META] A Whole Host Of Completed Minor Changes

79 comments - 4217 thread views 2yr ago by ZorbaTHut (text post)

This is essentially a followup to the last meta post.

Big scary updates are done and seem to be fine, but our volunteers have been going absolutely mad with minor updates. Which is great! We have a bunch of people contributing tons of valuable tweaks and fixes and improvements to the codebase, thank you, I literally could not do this without you.

I'm just gonna repost this again because it worked the last time:

Are you a software developer? Do you want to help? We can pretty much always use people who want to get their hands dirty with our ridiculous list of stuff to work on. The codebase is in Python, and while I'm not gonna claim it's the cleanest thing ever, it's also not the worst and we are absolutely up for refactoring and improvements. Hop over to our discord server and join in. (This is also a good place to report issues, especially if part of the issue is "I can't make comments anymore.")

Are you somewhat experienced in Python but have never worked on a big codebase? Come help anyway! We'll point you at some easy stuff.

Are you not experienced in Python whatsoever? We can always use testers, to be honest, and if you want to learn Python, go do a tutorial, once you know the basics, come join us and work on stuff.

(if you're experienced in, like, any other language, you'll have no trouble)

Rules Changes

Thank you for discussion on the rule proposals! Here's what we ended up with.

Courtesy: Keep to a single account

We strongly discourage people from making alt accounts without good reason, and in the absence of a good reason, we consider alt accounts to be bannable on sight. Alt accounts are almost exclusively used for mod evasion purposes and very rarely used for any purpose that helps the community; it makes moderation more difficult and it makes conversation more difficult.

If you do feel you need an alt account (most commonly, if you're a well-established user who wants to post something that can't be linked to their public persona), please ask the mods.

If you don't want the mods to know about it either, be aware that there's a good chance we'll find out about it anyway.

Content: Post on multiple subjects

We occasionally have trouble with people who turn into single-issue posters, posting and commenting only on a single subject. We'd like to discourage this. If you find yourself posting constantly on a single subject, please make an effort to post on other subjects as well.

This doesn't mean you need to write megaposts! This can be as simple as going to the Friday Fun Thread once in a while and posting a few paragraphs about whatever video game you last played. But this community is fundamentally for people, and if a poster is acting more like a propaganda-bot than a person, we're going to start looking at them suspiciously.

This rule is going to be applied with delicacy; if I can find not-low-effort comments about three different subjects within your last two weeks or two pages of comments, you're likely fine.

These are still prototypes, if you have objections they can still be changed, without objections they'll get added to the Official Rules probably in a week or so.

Private Profiles

Again, thank you for discussion! I refined the planned system a bit (original plans: "remove private profiles".) The current system is that private profiles are available to established users or on request. We're leaving "established" intentionally vague, but it's basically a measure of how much you've been contributing. If the system considers you established, the checkbox will be in your settings; if the system doesn't consider you established, it'll be there, but grayed out and have a link to contact us.

(This is using roughly the same standard as our filtering system, but with much bigger numbers.)

We've also grandfathered in everyone who had a private profile, even those who don't meet the bar. This was definitely a carefully-considered decision! It has nothing to do with me not wanting to write the SQL query to revert profiles.

That said, if you're a newbie account that gets yourself banned, don't be surprised if a mod also resets your private flag.

Long Comments

A while back there was a meta post where I proposed relaxing the comment character limit. I came up with a proposal, people on the dev discord convinced me to relax it even further, then it just sorta sat there and moldered in the Issues queue for a bit because it wasn't the priority. Then I wrote an effortpost and said "shucks, this is over the limit! Okay, I'm going to just go and implement that long-comment request now ~~so I can post my megapost~~ for the good of the community. Aaaaand also so I can post my megapost."

Then one of our volunteers, without any knowledge whatsoever of the above decision, sniped it out from under me and implemented it, like, two days before I was going to sit down and do it.

Anyway, it's in now! The new limit is . . .

. . . a little more complicated.

The new limit is 50,000 characters if you don't want to be filtered. Are you okay with your comment being filtered as if you were a new user? Well, good news, the new limit is 500,000 characters. Yes, this is literally enough to post an entire novel, albeit a short one, as long as you're OK with the mods seeing it before the rest of the userbase does.

This is experimental; if it gets abused, don't be surprised if this gets changed.

This is now a general-purpose feedback post. Let me know how things are going!

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

1692 comments - 29809 thread views 2yr ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

1692

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

Shaming.
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
Recruiting for a cause.
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

In which I pine for a monastic escape from the sexual rat race

143 comments - 6909 thread views 2yr ago by Hoffmeister25 American Bukelismo Enthusiast (text post)

I live pretty close to the university I attended roughly a decade ago, and I’m very frequently on or near campus. Over the past couple of years, especially since we’ve had some nasty hot summers here in San Diego, it has become somewhat common for me to see young women walking on public sidewalks wearing skimpy bikinis, including occasionally thong swimsuit bottoms. Like, ass cheeks fully out for the world to see. When I see this, obviously my lizard brain is thoroughly captivated, but my higher-functioning brain is then immediately scandalized and appalled.

When I attended this same university, it was strange and tantalizing enough to see so many women walking around in sheer leggings and booty-shorts. This was not allowed at my high school, and I doubt that many of the girls would have availed themselves of the option even if it had been allowed. So, for me, being surrounded by women in (compared to what I was used to) revealing clothing made me feel frustrated and constantly distracted. It also, as I continued through college without having any romantic/sexual success with women during that time, began to make me feel desperate and invisible. Look at all of these hot people all around me! Am I the only person on campus who is not attractive? Does anyone even notice that I exist? Like a penniless man walking down a bustling commercial boulevard arrayed with shiny advertisements of wonderful products I couldn’t hope to purchase, I felt like having all of these unattainable women showing off their bodies to me but not giving me the time of day was infinitely worse than not having women around at all.

Still, it would have been unheard of at that time for one of those young women to walk around in public in broad daylight wearing nothing but a thong bikini. Regardless of any legal penalties or school policies regarding such an action, it would have been seen, by both women and men, as simply unacceptably slutty. I can imagine that such an act would have led dozens of captivated male passers-by to walk head-first into trees or crash their cars while rubbernecking, like when Sue-Ellen Mischke walked down an NYC sidewalk wearing a bra as a top. Now apparently this is normal behavior in 2023.

When I see one of these women, I’m struck by the thought, “The Taliban are right about women.” Now, this is not a rational and considered policy endorsement. It’s just an atavistic cri de couer of a man who does not want to have such a thing dangled in my face unexpectedly while trying to have a normal public outing. It honestly makes me a tiny bit sympathetic to the Middle Eastern and African guys who come into Europe and end up sexually assaulting local women because they misinterpreted the women’s loose and revealing manner of dress for an obvious and intentional public invitation to sexual contact. Where those men come from, no woman would dream of dressing like that, unless she were a particularly brazen prostitute. Having made it to adulthood without cultivating any coping mechanisms for dealing with the level of sexual frustration generated by being surrounded by countless beautiful unaccompanied women in revealing outfits, they lash out in a brutish act of desperate catharsis. Now obviously I do not actually condone the actions of these men, and I wish to see them punished unimaginably harshly for their depraved violations of European women; I also wish that immigration policies were such that these men were not in Europe in the first place to experience such a brutal culture shock.

Still, I can’t help but think that the Islamic world basically has the right idea in terms of their approach to strictly enforcing conservative female attire. I can quibble with the specifics - certainly a burqa is excessive, and I’m not sure that things like niqabs and hijabs are really necessary. But, of course, that’s my western culturally-liberal background talking; I’ve been born centuries after the multiple turns of the ratchet which normalized women walking about with exposed hair and legs and arms, so it seems normal to me, and with the way things are going it looks like in a few more decades the ratchet will have turned here in America such that people will be seen as wildly prudish for thinking it off to see women with their entire asses out on the sidewalk. Hell, perhaps by 2050 American women will be strutting around like the women of the early Bronze Age Minoan civilization, -titties out for the world to see, if their vases are accurate - and the prudes of that era will be asking why we can’t just go back to when women were classy and didn’t wear anything more revealing than a bikini.

Speaking of the Minoans, they are one of the few ancient civilizations for which we have any concrete persuasive evidence that a matriarchal order may have prevailed for a substantial length of time. In Neolithic European civilizations, prior to the Indo-European (Aryan) conquests, a harsh sexual order appears to have prevailed in which the vast majority of men did not reproduce, and may have simply been worked to death in salt mines or massive farm complexes while the women could spend their time advertising their beauty and sexual competitiveness to a small elite of men. I’m far from the first commentator to notice that our societies appear to be lurching in a similar direction; the woman strutting around my local sidewalk in a thong, with no fear of repercussions nor even social censure, content that any frustration or angst she generates in nearby males is highly unlikely to redound negatively toward her, strikes me as symptomatic of this development.

In such a sociosexual regime, assuming we don’t have any massive salt mines for all of our sexually-unsuccessful beta males to expire in, it seems that it may be high time to reintegrate into our society a male archetype which has decidedly fallen by the wayside over the past few centuries: that of the monk or ascetic. While rightwing Twitter (uh, sorry, “X”) embraces the total hegemony of the conquering warrior archetype, it remains the case that there are hundreds of millions of men like me who are never going to ride a chariot into battle or build a homestead from the ground up. For guys like us, maybe it’s time to look toward the monastic lifestyle as an alternative option.

I recently spent a week visiting the U.K. I spent a substantial amount of my time there visiting cathedrals and abbeys. While all of them were breathtaking, I found myself particularly captivated - haunted, really - by Tintern Abbey. Walking within the shattered exoskeleton of a once-thriving monastery is a truly unique experience. Reading more about the Cistercian brotherhood of Monks who founded and operated Tintern for centuries, much about their lifestyle sounded quite appealing to me. To live apart from the world of carnality and temptation, sequestered away with your geeky and serious-minded brothers, translating old Greek and Latin texts, tending a garden, eating simple meals and enjoying simple but meaningful pursuits while the outside world roils and burns around you… what’s not to like? I can imagine how I would fit in with the other monks; I think I’d have a solid chance of being the best singer in the Gregorian chant choir, and I bet I’d be appreciated for giving the most spirited reading of Bible passages during dinner of any of the monks there. I wouldn’t conquer any lands or hear the lamentation of my enemies’ women - ideally I wouldn’t encounter women at all - but maybe I’d end up being the primary author of some groundbreaking historical compendium that would still be useful to people a millennium in the future.

Of course, no such life is really available for western men in our age. Sure, Buddhist monks still exist, as do the Hare Krishnas and other assorted oddball ascetic cults, but they remain the sole province of foreigners, and only the oddest of western oddballs would join one of them. Far more importantly, I have already tasted the fruits of modernity. I have been with women. I know what it’s like to have an infinite universe of porn and other superstimuli at my fingertips. Giving that all up to go withdraw into the monastic life would be impossibly difficult and depriving, because I would know what I’m missing. Sure, it would be a blessed release from the sexual rat race, in which I have fallen far behind, but I would never be able to escape the nagging feeling that I could have done better for myself. The only way to make the monk life work is to identify, early in life, the boys who would be best served by that life path, and plucking them away from the temptations of the world before they’ve developed any strong taste for them. For those of us who’ve already been exposed to modernity, the genie is out of the bottle and he’s not going back in.

If the monastic option is going to make a real return in our culture, it will have to be undergirded by a genuine status infrastructure undergirding it. Such men must not be seen as losers and washouts, crawling in shame away from a life of failure and grasping tightly a pathetic consolation prize. It must be seen as a noble and important life path, every bit as valid as the warrior’s role, and genuinely rewarding in and of itself rather than simply an escape from suffering. It seems like for shape rotators, the life of the shut-in programmer, the “digital nomad”, or the mad scientist are still viable life paths that offer real status and material rewards, but for male wordcels who wish to check out of the lottery lifestyle of academia or entertainment, the pickings seem significantly slimmer. What is the modern wordcel monk to do? AI seems to be rapidly devouring what few paths had remained, leaving beta wordcels no path forward but to cope and seethe, dreaming of living a simple but failure-proof life in an abbey which now lies in ruins.

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 30, 2023

151 comments - 4523 thread views 2yr ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

The Bailey Podcast E033: Jad Slays Journalism

10 comments - 1321 thread views 2yr ago by ymeskhout (text post)

Friday Fun Thread for July 28, 2023

207 comments - 3324 thread views 2yr ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

Transnational Thursdays 10

13 comments - 1642 thread views 2yr ago by Soriek (text post)

Transnational Thursdays 10

Happy 10th TT guys, feels like some kind of accomplishment.

Spain

Observers expected Spain’s elections to bring a right wing government into power. However, the ruling socialist PSOE did better than expected (given their recent large losses in municipal and local elections) and the far right Vox did far worse. The center right PP pulled ahead of PSOE, but Vox’s loss of 19 seats prevents the two parties from together forming a majority. PSOE and the farther left Sumar together are smaller still, but probably have better odds of finding a third coalitional partner due to Vox’s toxicity for third parties. This probably means that current PM Sanchez would need to coalition with the Basque or Catalan independence parties, who he has decent relations with but would still likely require playing to some of their demands.

Niger

Niger’s president Mohamed Bazoum yesterday announced the presidential guards had locked him inside the palace in what seems to be an attempted coup. He says the army stands ready to defend him but apparently not so - the military has now taken him prisoner and announced they’ve taken power of the country. Niger is legendary for their coups and no one would pretend Bazoum was a great leader, but coming on a string on military coups across West Africa it’s mostly just depressing.

Ecuador

Violence has been bad in Ecuador for a while now, culminating in the high profile assassination of a mayor last week. President Guillermo Lasso, who a few months ago dismissed Congress and has ruled by decree since, recently declared a state of emergency in two affected provinces suspending freedom of assembly and movement. You may remember also Honduras declaring a state of emergency after a prison riot and giving control of the prison system to the military. Ecuador has now done the same for Ecuador's own prison system following a strangely similar prison riot. Lasso has said that he will not run for reelection but his increasing authoritarianism has kept watchers skeptical.

Guatemala

As of now it looks like Bernardo Arévalo will be legally allowed to participate in the runoff election but the Attorney General has been cracking down however possible, recently issuing a police order to raid his campaign headquarters. Semilla supporters and civil society groups have been protesting in response. The US has now added several related prosecutors to the Engels targeted sanction list along with officials who participated in the politically motivated crackdown against the journalist José Rubén Zamora for criticizing government corruption.

Argentina

Argentina and the IMF are supposedly near to reaching yet another agreement to help pay back the $44 billion they took on under the previous administration. The payments were conditional on Argentina doing some fiscally responsible stuff like shoring up reserves and moderating their deficit, which they definitely didn’t do, but they have now demonstrated some reform willingness by announcing a new preferential exchange rate for export goods and raising some import taxes. This is a five month deal so it would last until a new president takes office in December.

Kenya

President William Ruto, who took office last year as a progressive champion of the poor, recently raised taxes to help Kenya pay back its debts. Coming during a period of prolonged inflation, this spurred waves of protests against the government, led by the opposition coalition Azimio and their leader Raila Odinga. Police brutality has responded in turn and things have spiraled further. The protests have grown increasingly looting-filled, but the allegations about police brutality aren’t a joke either:

More than two dozen rights groups including Amnesty International last week said they had evidence of 27 “extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions” in July alone.

Ruto has formerly offered to have a sitdown meeting with Odinga but the latter has refused. Odinga was the opposition candidate in the last two elections and feels 2017 was stolen from him (it probably was), so is now unwilling to deal with current government.

Burkina Faso

France has withdrawn its troops as well as its ambassador yesterday following the demands of Burkina Faso’s military junta. This is despite the fact that almost half of Burkinabe territory is considered to be dominated by radical groups, whether Taureg secessionists from Mali or Islamist fundamentalist groups. The conflict has been especially bad lately and over a tenth of the population has been displaced, causing the Norweigan Refugee Council to rank Burkina Faso as the world’s most neglected displacement crisis. Still, the new government has made an anti-French stance a central plank of their governance and has alo suspended French owned media channels. Following their departure from Mali, also at the behest of a military junta, France only has about 3000 troops left, mostly in Niger and Chad.

India

You may remember previous coverage of the escalating ethnic violence in the Manipur region. Opposition parties in India are now initiating a vote of no confidence against Modi for his refusal to address the conflict, which has displaced over 60,000 people. The vote is assuredly stillborn against a BJP majority.

Modi has “revealed” his plank for a third term. Unfortunately I can’t really find details but it’s completely oriented around development. India was the tenth largest economy when Modi took office and is now the fifth; Modi has promised to raise it to third place. Obligatory pinging of /u/self_made_human.

Cambodia

Cambodian President Hun Sen, who has ruled essentially since the collapse of the Khmer Rouge, claimed another landslide win a few days ago in a completely farcical election. A tragedy for the good people of Cambodia but a huge W for dedicated Hun watchers hoping for their boy to hold onto his high score:

Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Sen, 70, has been in power since 1985 – only the leaders of Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea, both also authoritarians, have held office longer.

I wonder if when you reach this level you feel like you’re in a competition with the other heavy hitters.

Perhaps not, because shockingly yesterday he announced his formal resignation, ending his tenure as Asia’s preeminent dictator. That said, Hun has said that he will stay on as leader of the communist party and his son - who was literally only just elected as an MP - will now become Prime Minister, so we certainly haven’t heard the last of him yet.

The Case for Ignoring Race

83 comments - 2837 thread views 2yr ago by cjet79 (text post)

The Case for Ignoring Race

There are two arguments I want to push forward. The first is about ignoring race in your personal life. Ignoring your own race, and ignoring the race of others around you. And the second argument is to ignore race in the policy space. Ignoring race in college admissions, immigration, crime, etc. I also don't want to make the case that only white people should ignore race. I think it is generally beneficial for everyone to ignore race, but I'm guessing that most of the racial identitarians (people who place great importance on racial identity) that are here on themotte are white racial identitarians.

Ignoring Race in Your Personal Life

This is perhaps the less culture war loaded argument so I'll start with it first. I consider this section mostly good advice, and none of the advice is what I'd call "original". Smarter people than me have provided free advice to the masses, and this just feels like a synthesis of that advice.

Taking Responsibility

There is a certain mindset that treats genetics like destiny. And the mindset does not just apply on matters of race, but on broad characteristics like intelligence, athleticism, and charisma. I think this kind of mindset is harmful for the individual and those around them. Genetics does have an impact on your life, you aren't gonna be in the NBA if you were born with some short genes. You are still human, you are going to be similar to your parents in many ways. But it is most helpful to think of genetics as creating a set of boundaries around a wide field of possibilities. Where you wind up within that wide field of possibilities is up to you, and the field is probably much wider than you realize. In any field you look at you can often find surprisingly examples of standout performers that violate the expected norms. Like Stephen Curry being not very tall for the NBA, but being a star player. Or professors that are not that smart/brilliant, but still having prolific writing outputs of interesting material. The advice here is to take personal responsibility for where you end up within a large field of possibilities, and to stop blaming the often distant fences of genetics.

The restrictions placed on people by race are mostly imaginary social constructs. Somewhat facetiously: Rachel Dolezal is the story of a white girl becoming a respected black professor and NAACP member. Race has a loose relation with some of the very real limitations imposed by genetics, but most of the limitations of race come from social constraint. A person of a given race is not expected to do x, y, or z, and the person internalizes those expectations and lives up to them. What is important to remember here is that like with traffic, you are not just in a society, you are society. You are a part of creating and accepting the limitations that are merely social constructs. My simple advice is to stop doing that.

Information and Stereotyping

Our racial makeup is often one of our most visible characteristics, with the most visible characteristics often being clothes, gender, and age. I'd suggest to everyone that race is a mostly useless piece of information about people, and almost all of the information people claim to get from race is actually information that they get from other sources.

There are many variations on a joke about a race blind man refusing to cross the street as a black youth is walking towards him, he then gets mugged by the black youth. In more recent times the joke is often subverted to turn the race expectations on their head. Anyways, it is a good example for my purposes. Let us break the situation down:

Context - Walking down a dark street at night in a bad section of town.
Age - young, teen to late twenties. A time when humans are often physically at their peak, and a time when males are more prone to violence.
Gender - male, as mentioned above more prone to violence and physicality.
Clothes - You are often left to paint the picture for yourself in the joke. But imagine a dark hoody and well worn jeans.
Demeanor - fixated at you, arrogant walk, one hand holding something in their hoody pocket.

At this point, without race ever being a factor, you can make an informed decision that interacting with this person is a bad idea. If you can't tell their race, and then are suddenly able to see it at the last moment, no result should change the informed decision you already made.

I won't make the very strong claim that Race is never a useful deciding factor. But I am making the claim that it is rarely useful. It is rarely useful because as I mentioned above it is mostly only a limitation by being an imaginary social construct. The actual correlations between race and very real limiting genetic factors are not very strong. The usefulness of race as a piece of information is proportional to the degree to which race is a commonly accepted limitation. The less people accept race as a limitation on their behavior, the less useful it is in predicting their behavior.

In general if you want to get better at reading situations with other people I would never suggest doing an in-depth reading of all the various stereotypes associated with different races. Instead I would suggest:

Learning some biology related to human aging and gender. (I do believe gender stereotypes are very useful)
Learning about clothing and fashion. In the above mugging example if the person you see happens to be wearing a dark Taylor Swift concert hoodie, and the jeans appear artificially aged then you might significantly downgrade the threat they pose.
Learning to read body language. In the mugging example, maybe they are holding a phone, and maybe they are fixated on something behind you.
Being more aware of context. Maybe before you start walking at night in the bad neighborhood of town you should realize how the situation might end up, and try to find a way to avoid it altogether. Some young people can sort of have their head in the clouds, and I'd suggest they play a sport that requires better situational and contextual awareness.

Policy

This is the more culture war laden section of this argument. I'm not going to claim this section is exhaustive or comprehensive. I simply picked two policy topics that are heavily enmeshed with racial politics. The college section will probably not be controversial to anyone on themotte. The immigration section will probably be very controversial here on themotte.

Universities

Universities and Colleges have been using race as a criteria for admission for quite some time now. I believe this is a bad policy, and doesn't accomplish their goals. One of their stated goals in doing this is to promote diversity on campus, which makes for a more interesting learning environment, and a better college experience.

I think race is a lazy selection criteria for diversity. It continues to be used because it is easily legible on a college admission form, and has somewhat of a correlation with diversity.

It is helpful to see how this approach is lazy, by imagining a stark contrast: a college that wants diversity and what approach it would take while expending the most amount of effort.

This imaginary college admissions would want to know as much as possible about their prospective students, and they would not want the students themselves to be the sole providers of that information. The admissions process might look more like the security clearance process. The student would fill out an exhaustive set of forms about their past life circumstances. Every sport, social group, vacation, and major life event would all be fair game. The university would assign a case worker for each student, who would then go interview the family and friends of that student to build an exhaustive profile of who they are. Then the students would be evaluated for their personalities, political beliefs, and viewpoints. With tens of thousands of profiles in hand the university would then run an exhaustive set of statistics and winnowing on the student profiles. Any prospective students with rare experiences or backgrounds would get additional weight. In this imaginary admissions process race would be almost a useless criteria, because there would be multiple other criteria that would make it obsolete or redundant.

Back to the real world. There are obvious problems with race based admissions when it comes to producing a diverse campus. As I said in the personal section, race is not actually a hard and fast genetic restriction, it is only loosely correlated with those genetic restrictions. So it is quite easily possible that you could have two suburban candidates that are next door neighbors and nearly identical in every category except race. Taking both of these students would not make the campus more diverse, except in the most superficial and meaningless sense of a skin color diversity. Imagine the opposite scenario of two identical twins separated at birth. One into a rich family of doctors in a big city, and another into a poor farming family in a small town. Admitting both of these students would not alter the racial diversity of campus at all, but it would make for a more interesting and diverse student body.

A lazy solution for colleges that want diversity and don't want to use race: create categories that you want to fill. For example, "person that has lived in a different country", or "person from a rough neighborhood", or "person from a big city", or "person from a small town", or "person that has lived in both". Then get students to fill in which categories they fit into. Then try to fill out the incoming class with a range of diverse experiences and backgrounds. This would be a slightly superficial take on 'diversity', but it would still be way better than a race based admission criteria. (some universities already do minor versions of this for other purposes, like asking if they are alumni / military child / etc.)

Immigration

If you have read the rest of my post some of what I'm about to say will be unsurprising. Race is generally an indirect sorting mechanism for the things we care about from immigrants, and more direct sorting mechanisms exist. I'd claim that the main things we care about in immigrants are: Intelligence, hard-work, cultural fit, criminality, and "buy in". Most of those are self-explanatory. I'd consider language skills under cultural fit. The "buy in" is how willing any immigrant is willing to engage in joining a country.

I think the easiest way to determine an immigrant's fit is to just look at their country or citizenship of origin, and ask for their reason for immigrating. Which is generally what the US immigration policy already does. Certain countries are better fits, and though Race correlates highly with country of origin it is not the same thing. And although there could be potential gaming of the system by asking people why they want to come to the country, some reasons are transparently obvious. For example, marriage into the country is an obvious reason for immigration, as well as a decent signal of some degree of "buy in".

Some quick thought experiment that suggests Race is a bad proxy measurement:

Imagine two immigration candidates. From two hypothetical nations. Candidate 1 is of the green race, but coming from redstan. Candidate 2 is of the red race, but coming from greenstan. They have both been in their countries for a full generation. Redstan is a war torn mess it has a failed government and the streets are regularly the sight of sectarian violence. Redstan is also ideological enemies with your country, Tealstan. Greenstan is your country's fatherland. Tealstan used to be a colony of Greenstan, but they peacefully split apart. They share a people, a culture, and are on friendly terms with one another. I would think Candidate 2 from Greenstan is clearly the better candidate.

Imagine two other immigration candidates. One is of your exact race. In fact they are your distant ancestor frozen in ice and revived in the modern era, but they have a cultural mindset from 200 years ago, they hate what the nation has become, and their lack of modern skills makes them highly likely to resort to crime. The other candidate is your neighbor, but a race very different from yours. They have been living next to you for five years, they had planned to just stay here a bit for work and then leave to their home country. But they fell in love and the prospect of marriage and starting a family has made them want to stay. I would think the second candidate is clearly the better choice.

Summary

Race is clearly a thing that exists. Genetic differences exist across races. The simplest proof is in people's skin pigmentation. However, genetics doesn't have to dictate anyone's destiny. Genetics can be barriers to unlimited possibilities, but your final place within a large set of possibilities is up to you.

And because race and genetics do not fully dictate who a person is, those characteristics do not provide good information about an individual that isn't obtainable in a myriad of other more reliable ways.

Review of Yes Minister – televising the British deep state (in 1980)

29 comments - 3909 thread views 2yr ago by RandomRanger Just build nuclear plants! (text post)

Firstly, I wholeheartedly recommend that you watch the show. Both Yes Minister and the sequel, Yes Prime Minister are amongst the greatest sophisticated satires of all time. The wordplay is excellent. The acting is superlative. It is a very funny show. You can also get the books, they’re nearly as good as a faithful representation of everything that happened in the show and have their own little additions. The very first episode is a little more dull and the pixels are few - those are the only problems with quality. This is one of the BBC’s greatest achievements. I imagine many if not most here have seen Yes Minister but younger people probably haven’t.

Secondly, I think it’s interesting politically.

The premise is that of a fundamentally good-natured, albeit egotistical, indecisive and self-deceiving politician (Jim Hacker), leading the fictitious Department of Administrative Affairs facing constant suppression from the Civil Service (represented by Sir Humphrey Appleby). The bureaucrats nearly always win, assisted by Bernard, Hacker’s Private Secretary who must tread a fine line between serving the interests of the Civil Service and Hacker.

The Civil Service create a system where they get all the power to decide and total freedom from responsibility. They draft all the papers, select all the information that flows through to ministers, listen in on all the telephone calls, excel at creating media crises they can use to extract quid-pro-pro deals. Their goal is to housetrain their ministers, coax them into seeing the Department’s interests as their own interests and act as disposable political shields for any errors. When the Civil Service errs, they want Ministers to pay the price.

They’re characterized as unashamedly corrupt, firmly anti-democratic, anti-meritocratic, self-interested bunglers who appease every interest group at public expense in the name of ‘harmony’ and ‘stability’. Lovable, sympathetic bunglers but bunglers nonetheless. Government spending is, in their minds, symbolic. There is no need for a hospital to actually heal the sick, it is just a nexus where bureaucratic activities can take place. Military spending is to delude the British public into thinking Britain is defended. Education is a method used to keep unemployment statistics down and appease teacher’s unions…

This is all pretty relevant to today’s world IMO.

There’s one rather illuminating episode where Sir Humphrey has to go lay down the law on a local council run by a mad middle-class socialist white woman who threatens to refuse funding to the local police force until they’re 50% black (this episode aired on 7 January 1988). They are initially in total opposition – but there is no true ideological disagreement. Her desires are to ban ‘sexist calendars’ since it’s ‘colonialism against women’, encourage adoption of children by lesbian single mothers since ‘children should not be brought up in an atmosphere of irrational prejudice in favour of heterosexuality’, allow only free-range eggs in her borough for animal rights…

In fact, she’s prepared to allow the breakdown of law and order generally, yet draws the line at allowing true democracy (which is the other plot thread of the episode). Later in the episode she cooperates with Sir Humphrey to squelch a proposal that would make local council elections more democratic, a tactic that would weaken her power. This involved street representatives, voting communities of 200 households and selection of candidates by the whole electorate.

‘Of course they would want our policies if they could understand all the implications. But ordinary voters are simple people… The people don’t always understand what’s good for them.’ Neither she nor Humphrey believe in democracy, they seek to hollow out elections so they can implement their own chosen policies rather than let people decide things for themselves. The episode ends with them in heartfelt agreement, each decrying the other as a great loss for the militant revolution/civil service.

It’s rather prescient for them to characterize the radical left and the bureaucrats as two heads of the same anti-democratic coin, potential allies. I think it shows how little the political climate has changed in over 30 years. I was also reading P. J. O’Rourke’s writing from the late 80’s and 90’s, he identifies eerily contemporary aspects of what we’d now call wokeness, liberalism and so on.

Yes Minister is also a story of asabiyyah, where the superior coordination abilities of the Civil Service let them run rings around the politicians. They’re all of the same Oxbridge class, they can freely cooperate while poor Jim Hacker has no such ability to work with his Cabinet colleagues. Half of the Cabinet are ‘house-trained’ by the Civil Service, assimilated into their worldview. All of them are competing with Hacker for power. Hacker complains in the books that the Private Secretaries and Civil Servants generally have a great grapevine but the Minister’s network is hopeless.

Perhaps the most obsolete part of the show is that the Civil Service they portray is uniformly intelligent white male Oxford graduates who hobnob at the Opera and sneer at those who aren’t fluid in Latin or Greek. There’s one episode where Hacker tries to bring in more women, only to be successfully sabotaged by Sir Humphrey. The show gives the impression that efficient, effective women are much happier working in industry where they get things done as opposed to pushing paper around.

In terms of the writer’s political views, the show seems rather unusual. While seeking more women and less Oxford classicists in the bureaucracy, the writers also seem fairly keen on conscription and the build-up of Britain’s conventional forces, vaguely Euroskeptic. Meanwhile they seem to favour school choice, joke about the excesses of political correctness. The abiding theme is a distrust in the competence of politicians and the alignment of the bureaucracy with British interests.

The show highlights the national decline that took place in the Age of Bureaucracy. The show constantly references British decline. The pound is always plunging, there are issues with inflation and high unemployment. The state-owned national industries are failing, the economy is deteriorating from disastrous to catastrophic. The army is a joke. And yet, the Civil Servants constantly remind Bernard (who has vague leanings towards democracy) that he’s naïve:

“This is the system that made Britain what she is today!”

From their vantage point, Bureaucratic government is great. They get high salaries, inflation-proof pensions, knighthoods and honours, cushy Quango sinecures for when they retire and face no responsibility for their own errors. But for everyone else it’s disastrous – after all Britain is in gross decline throughout the period. That’s the joke they’re making.

In comparison to modern political comedies like The Thick of It or Veep, it’s much less crude. Standards for vulgarity are much lower today than they were. Yes Minister also feels more political, in that it presents actual perpetrators and conspirators behind government dysfunction. While a modern show might show government to be dysfunctional, careening from crisis to crisis, they don’t home in on a reason why things go so badly other than ‘these leaders are really terrible, stupid, malign people’. The plot threads in an episode are all cleaned up nicely by the end, there’s so sense of ‘how can these people possibly stay in government if there are all these endless disasters.’

Some clips of the best parts are here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=QurCB1lCHp0&list=PLRAJSUF2MG_wI0MmTPPZOzcuEI85OKXfT

Wellness Wednesday for July 26, 2023

95 comments - 2612 thread views 2yr ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

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