Apparently, a lab in china has created a virus with a 100% kill rate in humanized mice. Combined with the fact that there's a decent chance that COVID was a lab leak, this sort of thing is extremely dangerous to be doing.
I'm not sure how best to make it so that people are not incentivized to do things like this, but ceasing to fund this variety of research (it looks like the US ended one program that was pushing this sort of thing last year), and instating some sort of legal liability on those who do this, and especially if they dispose of it badly, probably seem like good decisions.
Extremely dangerous diseases are among the top few things in being both disastrous to humanity (unlike climate change) and also relatively likely (unlike a massive asteroid hitting earth). Development of them is also something that is not excessively difficult to do. This is probably the closest thing we have so far to Bostrom's black ball metaphor. People joke about Yudkowskian airstrikes on data centers; would airstrikes on labs be similarly warranted? More seriously, though, there should be far more effort put into preventing this sort of thing than there currently is.
Bostrom's concerns should probably be something more important to be aware of. The ideal is just to not develop technology in specific fields to the point that killing millions is a cheap and easy thing to do. Of course, the tradeoff is totalitarianism, a terror of its own.
EDIT: Some of the comments have argued, relatively convincingly, that this particular news story was overblown and misleading.
Felagund
4mo ago
And in her resignation, she doesn't acknowledge the plagiarism, pinning it rather on racism:
Amidst all of this, it has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor – two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am—and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.
Felagund
11mo ago
I'd posted a while back about how Wizards of the Coast was making Aragorn black in the soon-to-be released Lord of the Rings Magic set.
Since then most of the new cards have been released.
There were several more race swaps—see, for example Theóden, along with many other Rohirrim, was made black, but not Éomer. If they had made them all black, this would have been closer to my original suggestion—that they change races, if they really must, do so in ways that make sense in the world. But they did not do that for some reason, and keeping Éomer white makes no sense, if you're changing the rest of the Rohirrim.
Nevertheless, I was surprised at how good the set was, if you ignore the race changes in the art, for fans of Lord of the Rings. They referenced all sorts of relatively obscure things, had cards that had thematic abilities, (for an especially fun example, see how Merry+his blade or Eowyn can defeat the Witch King, who is ordinarily rather invulnerable), or just had fun flavor text quoting from the book, or nice art. And was faithful to the lore in another respect where Rings of Power was not, although I don't remember such a character actually existing…
Ignoring the race issue, I was very impressed overall. I think it's interesting that they were willing to put so much effort into it, while at the same time having unnecessary race changes. I suppose it's not entirely the same people making the various decisions. But I had read it as first as "we don't care that much about Lord of the Rings," which now seems to be false. They must have cared both about signaling leftist politics and about making a good product, and so this was the result.
I might be willing to overlook the problems, because Tolkien is dearer to my heart.
The broad scale picture of two enemies at war flows fairly naturally from our election system, as it forces there to be two parties. As it exists specifically, it's due to differences in values. The right is a mixture of pro-religion and pro-liberalism forces (though the latter is waning post-Trump) while the left's predominant concern is about fairness and oppression.
I second what @07mk said about it being taught in schools—one of the big moral things that they push in schools is that slavery, racism, etc. are bad. And justifiably so. But that lends itself to the support of the left, whereas the right's values are less likely to be taught. Social media of course contributes, in the further emphases on flaws, and in the spreading of ideas within each other and the formation of a culture.
The left doesn't see things as them having power and oppressing the right. They see it rather as them, with their institutions, trying to combat a vast societal undercurrent of evil. Remember, every disparity is a sign of oppression, of failure—the wealth of the wealthy, racial gaps, everything. They are people struggling against the racism and oppression everywhere. Everyone wants to be the underdog.
And they see the right as legitimately evil. To side with the slavers over the slaves! What do the billionaires need? Why are you supporting the white people, who have perpetrated centuries of harm upon others, and (as is evident by the disparities) are still profiting? Would you treat half the world as lesser, merely because they are female, as if they needed to depend on men? Why would you let our pristine world go to waste, in the pursuit of selfish profit? They see society as a bundle of flaws and problems, and take the good it does for granted.
You point out that the left is punching down. Yes, they do. But they see themselves as attacking human scum.
To answer your three questions directly:
-
It's kind of a mix. The red tribe does genuinely have contempt for the blue tribe, it's not merely defensive.
-
The red tribe hates the blue tribe because it sees evil. A world of injustice, where people (they could be the victims) are mistreated because they are white, where the institutions that our society runs upon are being subverted or torn down, where the children are slaughtered by the millions. A place of debauchery, where people promote the ugly and disordered everywhere, from piercings to art to the disordered gender relations that LGBT consists in to the assault on the justice system. People lose jobs for having views like them. Christianity is attacked. Why would anyone prefer the ugly over the beautiful, or disarray to health?
-
As I said above, the left hates the right, because it promotes oppression and injustice. Why would you side with those perpetrating harm, with the selfish, rather the with the victims?
Felagund
10mo ago
Alternatively, many people, as they make more money, use the opportunity to spend more money, instead of to be more fiscally secure.
Felagund
11mo ago
I think the setting may be more important to Lord of the Rings than it is to Romeo and Juliet, maybe?
Felagund
2mo ago
Human biodiversity is actually pretty low - Homo sapiens has been through a number of bottlenecks and when compared to other species, such as our closest relatives like chimpanzees, we'd look like inbreeds.
Sure, but this isn't super relevant, since there clearly is variation? We know a bunch of traits are heritable and vary between individuals.
Human migrations over the last thousand years have been such that literally everyone on Earth is a descendant of literally everyone that lived 7000 years ago whose offspring didn't die out. This is known as the Identical Ancestors Point (google it) and it's pretty uncontroversial if unintuitive. You can easily derive it by reasoning the other way around: simply put, the probability that anyone lived 7000 years ago and wasn't one of your ancestors given the amount of potential ancestors you'd be supposed to have (which is 27000/generation time) is low enough to be considered negligible. And 7000 years ago is a pretty conservative estimate.
This is obviously false. Consider someone living in brazil, 7000 years ago. Their only real chance of spreading genes outside the americas came in the 1500s. That's certainly not enough time. Secondly, it's irrelevant—that everyone at some point shared ancestry doesn't mean everyone is the same along any particular trait. This is really obvious when you consider that this would apply just as much to visual racial markers.
Africans have more genetic diversity than literally every other ethnicity on earth taken together, so any classification that separates "Africans" from other groups is going to be suspect.
People conflate a small handful of groups (Khoekhoe, Hadza, Pygmies, etc.) that are actually very diverse and different with subsaharan Africa as a whole. Nevertheless, I believe it is still true of subsaharan Africa that it's more diverse. But I don't think it matters. When the question is "can I treat this as a group to run statistics on", you can pretty much always do that, with whatever group you care about (left handed people would work just fine, and they aren't even endogamous). But it's also closer than that, as my impression was that in general, most subsaharan africans were more closely related to other (non-exotic) subsaharan africans than they are to the people who left Africa. That could be wrong, though.
Race isn't a valid construct, genetically speaking. It's not well defined; even HBD proponents disagree on how to classify people beyond Blacks/Whites/Asians. Most of the definitions are based on self reports or continents of origin, when we know what is considered "black" in the US may not be so in, say, Brazil, or that many people from Africa can very well be considered "white". Of course most HBD proponents are from the US and are hardly aware of other countries' existence apart from their national IQ so they just handwave it away.
Okay? Two different responses to that. (1) If race is just something we made up, that doesn't stop us from doing statistics on it, and that doesn't mean that the stats can't tell us averages of the people who happen to be in whatever made-up categories we throw them into. This is especially relevant when people are already drawing up racial stats on representation or whatever—there should be no problem with using the same categories, to show that it's actually not all discrimination! (2) Race isn't perfect, but it does act as a proxy for genetically closer clusters of people.
Intelligence is not well-defined and not construct valid. There's no single definition of intelligence on which people from different fields can agree. (Among other things, this is why AI specialists have been struggling with "general AI" for the better part of a century)
I've been led to believe that g is one of the psychological findings that holds up best. IQ tests are meant to measure "that statistical thing over there that shows up in everything."
IQ has a number of flaws that would make anyone outside the field of psychology not touch it with a ten foot pole. For starters, it is by definition Gaussian for no apparent reason. The g construct itself has no neurological basis and is purely an artifact of factor analysis.
I'm not familiar with how the Gaussian-by-construction biases things; I do find this a plausible concern but don't know enough stats to figure out what things like that would do. But that doesn't void it as a measure entirely, that just means that you can't really compare gaps very well. One standard deviation might mean different things at different places along the scale, but that doesn't mean that the order is invalid.
Evolution isn't just mutations + natural selection. To assume that diversity just arose from different populations adapting to different environments is already a pretty huge assumption that none of the HBD proponents cares to back up. Not every trait is an adaptation.
Okay? Your point?
There's no single genetic explanation that was ever put forward to account for traits purported to be "genetic" in origin by HBD proponents. This is because HBD proponents do not care about genes, and because they do not know about anything related to genetic mechanisms. Epistasis alone fucks up many behavioral genetics models and this is just scratching the surface of the complexity involved.
A whole lot of traits are very polygenic, and it makes sense that intelligence would be one of those. I don't get the point of your last sentence. Are you really arguing that "genetics is complicated, therefore it can't be genetic"?
Heritability does not imply genetic determinism. Many things are heritable and do not involve genes. These include epigenetic mechanisms, microbiota, or even environmental stress on germinal cells (this can carry over two generations if someone is pregnant - the stress then applies to the cells that would become the germinal cells of the foetus). That's not even addressing the environmental confounding factors. When confronted with their lack of an actual genetic explanation, HBD will fall back to utterly bizarre retorts like "uuuh you don't need to find genes for something to be grounded in genetics".
It was my impression that the epigenetics stuff was pseudoscience. Sure, microbiomes could be heritable (I think?), but I don't think "it could be different microbiomes, so it must not be genes, at all" is a valid conclusion.
Literally every public HBD proponent operates outside academia and is virtually unknown in the genomics community. They are known to make up their own journals (from Mankind Quarterly to OpenPsych) so they can publish in them instead of trying to get accepted in mainstream ones. "Everyone is in a conspiracy against me" only goes so far as an argument. On the other hand, literally every public figure in the genomics community has spoken against HBD. Generally speaking, HBD proponents are unqualified. Their understanding of genetics and evolution does not go beyond high school, none of them hold a degree in a discipline relevant to genetics and none of them has ever published in a high profile journal. (I'm going to be charitable and assume that high profile means IF > 4). HBD proponents are more interested in shitposting on the internet than publishing genetics papers and going to conferences.
And why, exactly, do you think they are outside of academia? Why are you putting the blame on them, and not academia? There's obviously a taboo. Noah Carl was ousted from academia for trying to do things like this, I believe. Is Razib Khan not a figure in the genomics community? I'm also pretty sure I've seen some survey showing that most academics in the relevant communities believe that the IQ gap is partly due to genetic factors. Talking about journal publications is problematic for the same reason.
Literally anyone who's been working on HBD stuff has been receiving funding from shady organizations like the Pioneer Fund whose express purpose is to prove a hierarchy of races and justify eugenics since the 1930s so their neutrality can be questioned.
Oh, and mainstream academic institutions are perfectly neutral. Tu quoque aside, "motivated people donated to them" is not the same as saying they're wrong, it just means you need a bit more caution.
Many public HBD figures have been found guilty of fraud. Cyril Burt would literally forge results, while Lynn would take the average of two neighbouring countries' IQ in order to derive "data" from a country's unknown national IQ. HBD proponents actually doubled down on this practice. People like Rushton would attempt to transpose pleiotropy mechanisms from some species to humans, despite the explicit insistence that such mechanisms were not adaptable because the genetics behind skin colors in humans are completely different from that of species governed by pleiotropy. Other people like Kanazawa would write a paper literally assuming the Earth was flat, and it was accepted in a "high profile" journal like Intelligence in three weeks.
Yeah, you shouldn't be extrapolating data and then treating that as if it were additional information, which is what I'm led to believe Lynn did. I'm not familiar with the other people.
Each one of those should be a debunking, but of course HBD proponents don't really care about any of those; as I said, none of them has ever been really involved in the actual scientific community. The whole point is to give an appearance of scholarship under the guise of clever sounding citations and lengthy papers, nevermind that those are in bogus journals from fields that are virtually unknown of the broader genomics community.
No, most of those were mostly irrelevant, and the rest were wrong.
I'd be open to being convinced that HBD is wrong, or at least, closer to being wrong, but it would need to be with better arguments, actually engaging with the data. Nothing that you've mentioned here has even addressed the point that these statistics vary by race, and attempted to explain it. Evidence of the effects of environmental factors, especially culture, could be helpful.
Felagund
3mo ago
Looking forward to seeing the fuller version. This looks pretty terrible.
I hadn't realized that this was a thing that had stopped in this form, though I'm sure that that sort of thing is still happening everywhere, even if not this exactly.
Disparate impact needs to go.
Felagund
4mo ago
There is a clear and compelling need right now for clarity that only the Supreme Court can provide
Not quite only the supreme court—if they can get the votes, Congress can suspend the whole issue, in this and all future cases, as the amendment says as much.
Felagund
4mo ago
Profit-maxxing businesses with leadership and investors that make a lot of money have already calculated the best way to generate profit, so they’ve hired the exact amount they think allows them to make the most profit, and scaled up the exact amount. The fact that there is still such high income inequality and still so many billionaires in America shows that there’s a lot of money not going to these things, but instead given to those “at the top.” (I don’t like this phrase but it’s easy shorthand).
Okay, what's your model here. How much do you think Bezos' salary is?
After looking it up quickly, it was $81,840 in 2019, plus benefits like travel and security expenses. The benefits aren't nothing, but they are just a few million, a drop in the bucket compared to his net worth. Where does his enormous wealth come from, then? From holding onto his Amazon stock, generally, which he can sell or use as backing for a loan when he needs cash. What does Amazon do with all that money that it gets then, if it's not going to Bezos' pockets? It doesn't pay dividends, so it gets reinvested in the business. This sounds a lot like what I was saying.
But if I'm wrong, how exactly, what is the mechanism, by which all this money is going to the top, when it could be going to the workers? Are those at the top misreporting? Is it really the couple million dollars of Bezos' salary and benefits that you are concerned about? Amazon has like 1.5 million employees, that's maybe 2 bucks per person.
Are you saying Amazon should scale down what it's doing, to accommodate the lower profits, given that it currently reinvests in itself? Are you really confident that the concentrated benefit of higher wages to its workers is better than the diffused benefit of cheaper, faster shipping to everyone?
I do not think this is how real life works for corporations. The competition between two hairstylists at a strip mall is not the large-employee company competition where people sit on years or decades of institutional knowledge, are entrenched in public consciousness and so difficult to compete against, are luxury goods like Nike, etc.
Yeah, that's fair enough, they do profit because of those. There's bounds on that, because trying to raise prices will cause people to switch, but on the whole, that's right.
There’s one industry that I think sheds light on this, where a “middle class person” can bring home top 2% earnings: fine dining. It’s fantastic to have the wealthy pay more here, because they’re just giving their money to people who need it more. We can imagine a future scenario where tipping is banned, and what will happen is that the owners of the restaurant and the wealthy patron will simply keep more money, wait staff be damned. An example that economic efficiency can sometimes be bad for the median person. This is why eg bar tenders in America make more money.
This is funny to me, because I despise that tipping is a thing. (Fear not! I do it. Social pressure works.) How the default values have been trending upwards, and how tips are expected everywhere now, is clearly predatory, attempting to socially coerce people into paying higher costs. Anyway, you are aware that restaurants are ordinarily run at pretty narrow margins, right? But okay, you're saying, ban tipping, and everyone is worse off, except the owners and patrons. So, then, you would expect wait staff to want to leave, as it's a worse deal, right? And they need the workers, right? So wages would go up? Maybe not to the level of with tipping, because tipping exploits the fact that people ignore it and then are surprised with an extra, mostly theretofore ignored, expense, but restaurant wages would change, once they realize they need to raise them to keep the workers (as well as the change in quality of service decreases the value to customers of the tips). Prices should also go up, so the patrons wouldn't recoup the full cost of no longer tipping.
Who is going to buy overpriced coconuts?
Maybe people who need coconuts? Do you think inflation means people stop buying everything? Anyway, what makes them overpriced? It's at the market price. Supply and demand.
Wealthy people will literally go to the store and refuse to buy an overpriced steak. They will pass a gas station if it’s too high, they will haggle on contractors. Wealthy people very rarely will buy a coffee more expensive than a Starbucks,
Habitually being frugal is probably not unrelated to them remaining wealthy, instead of wasting it all on luxuries. Of course, as you pointed out, this isn't always the case.
which tells us something very important here: a huge number of businesses cannot increase their prices past a certain amount perceived as fair by the consumer independent of the consumer’s income.
Yes, and good. Buying things is good for you because what you're buying is worth more to you than what you're giving up. Where companies always charge you exactly what you're willing to pay is a hellscape, there's negligble benefit to you, it all goes to the company. This is Nate Silver's guess as to why the economy feels bad despite that one good metric. It's why people are so mad about college debt, for example. Their financial aid systems are set up to extort as much out of you as you can afford. Price discrimination does happen as much as companies can manage it, because it leads to bigger profits. I don't get why your entire analysis is concern about what you think greed, but here you wish there were more of it.
What I’m saying is that I cannot sell overpriced coconuts. It’s either that I sell coconuts, or I leave the coconut industry entirely.
The coconuts are not overpriced, as everyone, not just you, has to raise the price of coconuts, due to higher labor costs. Yes, that does contract the industry, but it does force prices up, contra what you're saying. Unless there's some reason that you alone have higher labor costs.
If I leave it entirely because I demand to be super rich
What?? I don't get the logic here at all.
someone can swoop in and become upper middle class!
I don't get what you're saying at all. Is it profitable or not? If so, then why would you leave (at least, if more profitable than the alternatives)? If not, then there's no "swooping in" possible, they'll be losing money.
This is not the easy rational choice that the economist thinks it is.
You agree that your view is contrary to ordinary economic analyses? What do you think the root causes of their (and my) mistakes are? I would assume they would be aware of every argument you have made, since it's generally low-hanging fruit, not super complicated cases? So why are they not persuaded, and why are they wrong?
I would need to compare my loss in wages because Amazon caused hundreds of thousands of small businesses to die. Even if I never intended to work at one of these businesses, some of my coworkers may have, which means that the loss of these businesses increased competition for me, ie reduced my wages. Amazon is convenient and obviously pleasurable, like online gambling. The negative consequences of using Amazon are hidden whereas the positive consequences are obvious, also like online gambling.
Wait, why are you assuming that your wages went down, as compared to only the small businesses? Are you sure that Amazon buys less labor than the businesses it replaces? Secondly, why doesn't this just apply to every company? You buy from them instead of competitor->competitors have harder time->those competitors hire fewer workers. But surely you don't think that every company is bad, just because they are bad for that company's competitors?
Not necessarily, because humans work on habit, and Amazon is the current exclusive habit of many Americans. What’s more, Amazon is so institutional now that I don’t think you can just “compete” with it.
Literally every store that has things that can be sold on Amazon, or has substitutes for things you can buy on Amazon, competes with it. Every item you buy in person is competition with Amazon. It needs to be good enough to beat those other options out, if it wants their sales.
Frankly, I think a zero-sum understanding of the economy, which you seem to hold, is disastrous. There are not a fixed quantity of resources that we just need to spread equitably. People, in every economic trade they make, better both parties, creating wealth that wasn't there before. Yes, people get rich. But that tends to be by creating such an overwhelming amount of value, benefitting huge amounts of people by substantial amounts. Their wealth is a reward for the massive societal gains that they gifted everyone. Trying to remove too much of the benefit the wealthy get by doing things people pay them for dampens the whole system, slowing down economic growth. Further, putting profit where it doesn't belong incentivizes people to do unproductive behaviors, destroying value, making us all worse off.
Think of what the world was like a millennium ago. Why are we so much wealthier now? Because people worked their asses off for the rewards society allocates, via the market system, to those who provide value. And we all have benefitted. When you think that the poor people aren't benefiting, consider that poor people are now stereotypically fat, not starving. Consider that cell phones can be had for cheap, allowing things that would have been unthinkable just 100 years ago. Consider the running water everywhere, the electric lights found cheaply and easily. Food is cheaper than it once was. Skyscrapers. Cars. Planes. Our everyday life is in a great many ways more luxurious than our forefathers could have dreamed.
Okay, you might be thinking, if everything's so great, then why are people so gloomy about the economy? Aside from the fact that we haven't been alive for a thousand years, there are several sectors with serious problems (e.g. healthcare, education), and one of the biggest things is housing. Housing isn't cheap, due in large part to zoning restrictions and regulations everywhere, and especially where it is most valuable, in cities and suburbs, making it hard to build where housing is desperately needed (but keeping the property value a little higher for those who live there), and housing is something that people need.
For one current topic showing the importance of not having zero-sum thinking, consider Argentina. Per wikipedia, Argentina was among the top ten richest countries back in 1913. Why are now 40% below the poverty line? Realistically, some of that loss was due to corruption, and some due to the Panama canal, but surely not all of it? Redistributist policies seem to play a key role in that. I'm glad Milei won, and am fairly optimistic on Argentina at the moment, accordingly.
Now, applying that to the current situation. We have land where wages are astronomical, compared to, say, impoverished Africa. That is a giant sign saying to everyone, far and wide, "WORK HERE, IF YOU CAN! WE NEED WORKERS!" And when they do, they are enormously benefitted, because they have so much more wealth. The companies are enormously benefitted, because they can do so much more (remember, most companies reinvest), or their shareholders, because they have that profit (remember, there are limits to this—competition keeps it from getting out of hand). The people buying the things from the company are enormously benefitted, because there is so much more available to them for the same prices. It makes the whole country better off, because it has more human capital to do good economic things. The only people who might lose out are the workers in the fields where they're competing for the jobs, but that lower pay needs to be weighed against the benefits of being able to buy things for lower cost. And I do think that they often aren't competing in the same fields as the native population prefer to be in.
Compare a city and a small town, in the United States. One has a large labor market, and one a smaller one. Which do you expect to be wealthier and easier to make a good living in, for the average worker? (Hint: the fact that the population is progressively more in cities over time probably says something)
Now, overall, am I open-borders? I'm probably more sympathetic to it than most on here, but there are serious competing concerns. It'd be a drain on our current, already too costly, welfare state. Their politics might not be great, which really matters, or people will implement too many policies like the ones you would like, and we would all be worse off, along with all the social concerns. The loss of US culture would be bad. (I'm in the US, not the original example of Canada.) And so on.
The fact that, at the time of my last checking, your top comment is sitting at 26 votes for, and 4 against, despite some people pushing back, concerns me a little about the quality of this forum. I thought people here were pretty knowledgeable, that this was among the highest quality political discussion readily available online, but I'll have to do more mental filtering of opinions for economic literacy going forward. I'm not quite sure what to make of that, given that posts like this one were insightful and helpful to me.
Once again, I probably made mistakes here or there in this, but really, I think the overall point is important.
Seek to create value, not seize it. Companies are not your enemies; they are your friends.
Felagund
8mo ago
I think what's seen as the default really matters, as seen in the contrasting blender examples.
A lot of people who choose red see it as the default—"you're throwing away your life to try to save everyone else who does the same, when we could just not do that"
A lot of people who choose blue see it as the default. "We're all working together to save everyone, and you selfishly choose to guarantee your own life by throwing all of us under the bus."
Further, people will often prefer the default, so this also affects the chance of success.
Convincing 10000 people to vote blue is a great thing if you succeed and a tragedy if you fail. Convincing 10000 people to vote red is terrible if it tips the balance, and maybe socially predatory if blue succeeds anyway, but really good if blue would fail anyway.
The chance that blue reaches the threshhold matters. For this reason, the threshhold itself also really matters. A 1% blue to save everyone makes the case a lot stronger that you should pick blue. A 90% blue to save everyone means you probably should go with red.
Felagund
10mo ago
The way the vessel was built and operated embodied the SV ethos. There are reports that it was not certified or audited by anyone, that the hull testing procedures were not adequate, that the company moved fast and broke things. So right now said ethos is having torn a new one.
How important this is probably depends a lot on how bad it is if this fails.
The death of everyone inside probably warrants the caution.
Felagund
1mo ago
When there are unenforced laws that can be used but they don't feel like using them, what you'll find is that they suddenly start getting used a lot more for political reasons.
It's better just to have laws that are clear, instead of a double standard.
Felagund
1mo ago
Libertarians often want a state powerful enough to create and enforce property rights, and to raise a defensive military when needed, and not really anything else.
This would need taxes, of course, but much less.
Somalia doesn't do a good job with maintaining property rights.
Felagund
2mo ago
Are you still doing these, @Soriek? Yours were always great.
Anyway, among the recent news that I've seen was that Milei was able to cut Argentina's spending across the board by passing what amounts to a continuing resolution unilaterally, without needing to consult the legislature, to the point that the budget is now balanced. The reason why this is a cut is because of inflation—if you pay people the same number, but it's now worth half as much, then you're effectively paying less (and since the taxes scale, it works out).
I'm not sure how this affects things politically, but having the option of this seems to avoid some of the problems of government shutdowns that we hav. in the US. I hadn't considered that continuing resolutions could act as a way to constrain spending, whel inflation is so high, as I thought of them rather as a part of the current, problematic US system.
Felagund
3mo ago
You don't matter, but if enough people think like that it really matters.
Felagund
11mo ago
I don't think South Africa is a perfect example. I can't tell whether your South Africa % is too high or too low, depending on whether you are including the Coloured population, which is of mixed ancestry.
In any case, my impression is that South Africa has been in a pretty dramatic decline, that I don't think is due to the mere percentage ancestry. Zuma's presidency was, as far as I understand, pretty terrible and corrupt, and the same party remains in power. People leave the country. Affirmative action is in place for employment.
At this point, they're having routine power outages, when that wasn't a thing in the past.
And, of course, they have the highest unemployment rate in the world.
Not exactly a fair measure.
Felagund
2mo ago
Then you doom us to antagonism. Every division of spoils cannot be neutral, it is an assault against you by the other group who could give you just a little more.
You may say there is some fair division, but you literally just argued that you can't trust any such argument.
Felagund
2mo ago
I don't understand why conservatives want to repeal section 230.
Won't that lead to crackdowns on speech, and so forth? Like, isn't that just the direct effect? This is especially bad considering the already existing power differentials—it'll be somewhat lopsided.
This clearly seems like a terrible move, unless I'm missing something.
Felagund
9mo ago
A 126 page legal analysis of section 3 of amendment 14 of the constitution was released yesterday, arguing that Donald Trump, among others, is ineligible for public office, including the presidency. The authors are conservative, active in the Federalist society.
For reference, the relevant part of the constitution is
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
Among the arguments made were that it is legally self-executing—that is, it applies, like the 35 year old minimum age, without an explicit system to handle it to be set up by congress. Further, they think that people at almost every step along the process, from state officials deciding who goes on the ballots, to those capable of bringing an Amendment 25 complaint have a duty to ensure that this provision is fulfilled.
In reference to Trump, they argued that the events on and surrounding January 6th intending to overturn the election would constitute "insurrection or rebellion" as understood at the time of the passing of the amendment.
I can't see this not being important, but I'm not sure how exactly it'll play out—we could get court cases, possibly going up to the supreme court (no idea how that would play out). We may see state officials refuse to put Trump on the ballot. I expect this to lead to a substantial increase in support for Trump if this is seen as illegitimate, as it undoubtedly will be. At the same time, if this happens during the primary elections, and Trump is not even on the ballot in some states, it might make it significantly easier for another candidate to become the Republican nominee, unless the national Republican party interferes with it.
Note on the link: the pdf isn't opening for me right now and the wayback machine isn't helping. It was fine earlier, not sure what the issue is.
Felagund
9mo ago
This is a pretty good response.
He makes it clear that he doesn't hold the same views, and finds them repugnant. At the same time, he doesn't back off from his current writings, and avoids grovelling.
It won't sate those who can't be sated, of course, but it will probably be sufficient for those who aren't put off by his current views, but who would be repulsed by his former ones, and aren't fans of cancelling when views have changed.
South Africa's Election
Since the 1994 election, the ANC (African National Congress) has been in power, and been running South Africa into the ground. Unemployment is sky-high, crime is rampant, power outages are now common (and usually scheduled), by the name of "load shedding", corruption is ubiquitous.
For the first time, in the election occurring one month from now, the ANC risks losing power. But this may not be a good thing, as more radical groups will be eager to form a coalition.
Some background on racial history may be needed.
There are four racial categories used by the government for people in South Africa:
White people are of European descent, of course. There are two main populations: people of British ancestry, who more frequently speak English, and Afrikaners, who are descended mostly but not entirely from a mix of Dutch, German, and French ancestry, and speak Afrikaans, a language descended from Dutch. White South Africans have a distinct group identity. They don't think of themselves as European imperialists, or something. Afrikaners in particular see the Great Trek when they traveled inland after the coming of the British as important ethnic history.
Currently, white people make up about 8% of the South African population. This is the largest population of European descent anywhere in Africa. Demographically, they are relatively older and have lower fertility rates, so expect this percentage to shrink. Per wikipedia's data, they make up about 5% of those in the 2011 census who were under 15.
Also of note is that white South Africans are disproportionately wealthy. South Africa has one of the highest levels of inequality in the world. Some portion of this is due to legacy from Apartheid, as whites were privileged economically and lived in regions closer to economic activity, by statute. And, of course, European institutions were better set up to lead to economic prosperity.
(To prevent economic competition with black workers was actually one of the driving factors behind the establishment of Apartheid.)
Unlike in the US, where colored is taken to be a slur of sorts, in South Africa, coloured is a distinct racial classifier. Coloured people are mixed race, descended from a variety of groups. They are the most ethnically and genetically diverse ethnic group on earth. Among the genetic influences are: the Khoekhoe pastoralists that once lived in western South Africa prior to the arrival of the Europeans, white European ancestry, ancestry from the black Bantu groups, both from eastern South Africa and from slaves imported from elsewhere in Africa, and east and south asian ancestry, especially Malaysians. This population is not homogeneous; different places may have different ratios. Coloured people primarily speak Afrikaans, and make up a large portion of the population in the Northern and Western Cape, the two westernmost provinces. They make up about 8% of the population.
Black refers to the portion of people who have ancestry primarily from the Bantu ethnic groups of Africa. South Africa has many such groups—of the 11 official languages, 8 are Bantu. The largest and most important Bantu populations are the Xhosa and the Zulu peoples, who together are about half of the black population. (The Zulu have existed in their current form for surprisingly little time: the Zulu empire was built in the early 1800s, when the small Zulu clan, under Shaka, violently conquered and incorporated all their neighbors, before being conquered by Britain decades later.) About 81% of South Africa is black.
And Asians, who make up about 2% of the population.
I'm not really entirely familiar to what extent more fine-grained ethnic distinctions matter to group identity and decision-making, as I don't live in South Africa.
Some Relevant History
Apartheid (pronounced uh-par-tate, not -tide) is infamous, of course. Running up until 1994, the Afrikaner National Party was in power, and had regulations keeping racial separation and government-backed privilege of whites in place. Among the key causes in its formation was white Afrikaners wishing not to compete for employment with black people in the early 20th century.
1994, with the end of Apartheid and the election of Nelson Mandela was a key moment. South Africa managed to transition relatively peacefully and democratically, as these things go, though not without incident.
The ANC, or African National Congress, was formed under Apartheid. It was communist (the Soviets trained them), and participated in violence. Nelson Mandela, though a peacemaker late in life, was much less of one earlier. And his wife, Winnie Mandela, was far more violent: she was known for necklacing, that is, drenching tires in gasoline, putting them around the necks of victims, and setting it on fire. But nevertheless, the transition in the 1990s was generally peaceful, with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and so forth. Since then, the ANC has remained in power. The ANC remains economically left-leaning. It has implement several racial programs, including Black Economic Empowerment, a form of affirmative action, which pushes black ownership and management, especially, among companies. (You may think that this would lead to whites struggling to find work, but this seems not to be the case; white unemployment is far lower than the national average, though still higher than in the US). The ANC has struggled with high levels of corruption.
Under the ANC, South Africa has struggled. Among the more visible parts of this is the electricity situation. Eskom, the state utility apparatus, has had pervasive issues with corruption. Contributing further to this is issues with crime: stealing electricity (that is, illegally hooking up lines to the power grid, to get free power) is common in the slums, increasing the load on the system, and people have been known to steal the copper from the power infrastructure in order to sell it.
Further, much of South Africa is doing poorly economically more broadly. The unemployment rate is somewhere around 32%, which is the highest in the world, slums exist, roads are often poorly maintained, and overall things aren't great. There has been some inflation of the rand (their currency), though certainly nowhere near hyper-inflation levels.
Crime rates are high in South Africa. Several South African Cities are listed as among the cities with highest murder rates in the world. Of course, the same could be said of the US cities, and it requires that you have a government capable enough of tracking and releasing those statistics even to show up, so that may not be the best measure. Nevertheless, crime rates are still high by any standard. People have gates with bars in front of their doors, and often fences around their property, at least, among the well-to-do. Many live in gated communities, with private security. There is four times as much private security as police officers.
All this said, South Africa is still among the most prosperous African countries, so there is illegal immigration.
Since 1994, South Africa has had four presidents, all of the ANC. First, and most famous, Nelson Mandela. Second, was Thabo Mbeki. Under both of these people, corruption was common, but it was under the third, and most controversial, Jacob Zuma (president 2007-2017), that it became the most extensive and well known.
While most of those in leadership in the ANC were Xhosa, Jacob Zuma is Zulu, which has made him fairly popular with much of the Zulu populace. He has been known for sexual license, for more rampant and open corruption, most notably, with the India-born Gupta brothers, and pushed for left-wing economic populism and racial grievance.
Since 2017, Cyril Ramaphosa has been in power. While some were hopeful that he would be better than Zuma, South Africa has not done especially well. Controversy has continued with Zuma, with him spending some time in jail, before being released early.
The ANC is currently polling at around 40% nationally, under 50% for the first time since 1994. This makes this election a little unstable, as some coalition will have to be formed.
Enough of history of South Africa and the ANC, now to the opposition parties.
Opposition Parties and the Election
The largest such party is the Democratic Alliance (DA). The DA has long held power in the Western Cape province, where there are fewer Black Africans, and has also managed to govern some cities in the province of Gauteng, where the largest city (Johannesburg) is, and one of South Africa's three capitals. Otherwise, though, it has been the largest opposition party.
The DA is generally considered to be much more competent. The Western Cape has been doing the least badly of all the provinces. The DA is fairly centrist, economically, and opposes affirmative action and the radical redistribution programs suggested by more extreme elements within South African politics. Unfortunately, it also has something of a reputation of being the "white people's party." Its base is certainly not entirely white, as it has been getting around 20% of the vote, of late, which is more than double the entire white population, but that is not entirely unfounded. The leadership is more white, at least, and white people are disproportionately likely to vote DA. It's also relatively popular among the Coloured community. But this isn't good for getting elected. Helen Zille, the leader of the DA from 2009 to 2019, also had the scandal of saying that colonization was a net good for South Africa, which, while maybe true, is probably something you should try to avoid saying when you're a minority party trying to hold together a coalition of like-minded people. The DA would like to have more power less centralized, and more at the provincial level, presumably so that they can get to manage more of the western cape and be less hamstrung by the national government.
The EFF (Economic freedom fighters) was formed in 2013, when Julius Malema and his friends broke off from the ANC. The EFF is very far left wing: they advocate for confiscating land and wealth from white people. If you saw online the discourse about the "Kill the boer!" chants, these were those people. Malema has said that he is not calling for white people, for now. (Yes, the "for now" was part of what he said.) They are communist in ideology, like the ANC. Malema has advocated for aid to Hamas. They wish to (quoting wikipedia here), "expropriate White-owned farmland, nationalise the mining and banking sectors, double welfare grants and the minimum wage, and end the proposed toll system for highways." (Remember, South Africa is at 30% unemployment, and economically relatively stagnant.)
It would be bad if the EFF ended up in power. Because in this upcoming election, the ANC is likely to fall belower 50%, the DA has been worrying about a "doomsday coalition" between the ANC and the EFF.
The EFF has drawn most of its voting from young black men. It received about 11% of the vote in 2019, and was feared to be polling at maybe 17% of the population for this upcoming election, up until a few months ago, but is now back down to around 10%.
A few months ago, Jacob Zuma announced the formation of the MK, (uMkhonto we Sizwe), named after the old paramilitary wing of the ANC. Zuma has wished to be eligible, which is constitutionally questionable because of a 2021 conviction. Nevertheless, he still has had courts rule in his favor, though the process is ongoing.
The EFF and MK are fairly aligned, and seem to be willing to cooperate after the election. The MK supports such things as "expropriating all land without compensation and transferring ownership to the people under state and traditional leadership custodianship," change to a more African-based legal system, replacing the constitution, making college (including through post-graduate) free and compulsory, and providing permanent jobs to everyone capable and willing.
MK is most popular among Zuma's base, so it is doing best in KwaZulu Natal, the Zulu homeland. It has been polling overall at about 10%, taking votes primarily from the ANC and EFF.
The Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) is affiliated with the Zulu monarchy. Historically, they've done well with Zulus, though that was less the case when Zuma headed the ANC. They support power being transferred to provincial governments rather than the national government, and don't seem crazy. They are polling at only 5% or so.
ActionSA, my vague sense is, like the DA, but more black, and is polling at maybe 3% or so. They left the DA in 2020.
The VF+ (Freedom Front plus) are right leaning, and most popular with Afrikaners. They are in favor of the rights of minority groups, such as Afrikaners and Coloureds, and are against affirmative action, and in favor of free markets and small government. They are in favor of Cape Independence. I think they may have something of a reputation of right-wing racist extremists, because they're Afrikaners disproportionately, and Apartheid was a thing. This perception is funny, because they are policy-wise one of the parties least in favor of racial discrimination. I think they're currently my personal favorite, but I haven't looked excessively deep. They're only polling at 2% or so.
There are more parties.
Of course, all the parties are also gesturing at how Their One Plan Will Work to fix the electricity situation, reduce crime, lead to more jobs, etc.
The DA has organized a Multi-Party Charter to work against the ANC, EFF, and MK, including all the other parties listed above. I haven't yet worked out what exactly that's supposed to accomplish.
It is still unclear what coalition will be formed, and what policies that will result in. I could imagine the EFF or MK being in a ruling coalition could lead to many whites seeking to leave the country.
Provinces
A few provinces are also up in the air. The Western Cape, governed by the DA for the last 15 years, looks like there is a chance that it loses control of the province, or at least has to enter into coalition. This would be bad, as the Western Cape is the province doing least badly. The Referendum Party was recently formed, and is running in the Cape, in the hopes that the DA will need them to enter into coalition to run the province, in order to hold a referendum for cape independence, to get the Western Cape to secede from South Africa. The VF+ also supports cape independence. There were polls not long ago indicating that it is also relatively popular with the people of the cape, with at least a referendum agreed to be worthwhile by the majority. If any such thing happened, it would be strongly disliked by most of the country. The referendum party and VF+ support it, under the right of self-determination, and in order to stop South Africa from dragging down the Western Cape. The Western Cape is the only province that is not majority black, which means that many think cape independence is racist. Of course, even if a referendum occurs, and passes, which are both not especially likely, it's still probably unlikely South Africa just lets them go, and international politics isn't going to want to help the white-coded people by the imposition of pressure.
KwaZulu-Natal, the Zulu homeland, is also uncertain. The MK is doing well, but the ANC, DA, and IFP will all also be relevant.
Gauteng, the most populated and most urban province, containing Johannesburg, Pretoria, Soweto, etc. could also end up governed by a coalition other than the ANC. It was barely won by the ANC in 2019, so it will probably need to be some coalition after this election, but who knows the constituents.
All the others should be taken by the ANC, I imagine.
I guess I'll have to report back later (no idea how long coalitions will take to sort out) how that all turns out. It's looking like we will have a situation where the ANC, DA & co., and MK+EFF will each have enough of a block that any two of them would be able to coalition, but none on their own. I'm not sure what will be most likely to form from that.
If anything radical happens, like the Western Cape seceding, or South Africa Zimbabweing itself, that'll be sure to have an effect on the discourse around the country. (And of course, more importantly, on the people themselves.)
More options
Context Copy link