Gdanning
1yr ago
How is this post anything more than "boo outgroup"? There is no attempt to define democracy, nor to seriously engage with the purported question of whether most democracies will become less democratic in the future. Instead, we get things like this:
Even in India, the progressive pressure has generated a lot of culture wars of its own, where the ruling BJP's base perceive liberals as being sympathetic to Pakistan while levelling every epithet against India which would also be relevant to their archrival, and have reacted strongly.
It seems to me that if someone is blaming the excesses (to put it mildly) of the BJP on "progressive pressure," he might be under the sway of a bit of confirmation bias.
Gdanning
1yr ago
It's ludicrous for the show to keep those elements of Valyrian racial supremacy and blood purity obsession while making the Velaryons black, with the black Velaryons even proposing marriage to the Targaryen king on the grounds that it would "keep the bloodline pure".
In a show in which fire breathing dragons exist, is it really so impossible that race might be defined differently than how we define race? Or that skin color might be irrelevant to how they perceive pure bloodlines? Or that the affinity between the Valyrians and the Velaryons traces to a mythical past in which the progenitors of each allied to oust some malefactor, and that "purity" is defined as descent from one of those two heroes. Far from being "ludicrous," it is trivially easy to imagine a world in which is makes perfect sense.
He said he ultimately decided against it because it would be problematic, since many of the Targaryens were corrupt, evil and/or insane - in other words, if you're going to write about black people in positions of power, they can only be paragons of virtue
That inference is both logically and empirically incorrect. Logically, the statement, "I do not want to portray all the black characters as evil or insane" does not imply, "therefore, all black characters must be paragons of virtue." Empirically, there are tons of shows -- The Wire and Empire leap to mind -- in which black characters in position of power are not paragons of virtue
Gdanning
1yr ago
They were left alone to focus totally on naval power
This was explicitly the reason that the leaders of the 13 colonies wanted to create a single country, rather than 13 separate countries: Separate countries meant standing armies, and standing armies were a threat to liberty.
democracy and liberalism managed to snowball their way to global dominance despite being less competitive than authoritarian/totalitarian systems.
Can you explain the basis for this claim? Democracy and liberalism are associated with greater wealth, and it is well known that that democracies are very successful at war; the only question is why.
Gdanning
1yr ago
One problem with the defensive gun use data is that it relies on self-reporting, and one person's "I defended myself with a firearm" is another person's "you needlessly escalated a conflict." For example, these two gentlemen both believed that they were acting in self-defense, yet both were convicted of murder
Of course, that type of problem is not unique to that question and that issue, but rather is a problem that is inherent to this type of research, and one which should be kept in mind, regardless of the topic at hand.
Gdanning
1yr ago
The biggest danger from American perspective would be an united socialist Arab nation which could nationalize oil production and stop easy Western access relatively inexpensive and guaranteed supply of Middle Eastern oil, not mainly because US needs it, as such, but because it concurrently works as a control factor that keeps Europe on US leash.
I have never quite understood this argument. All of those countries need to sell oil in order to finance various state projects (including the all-important state project of ensuring that spoils go to the people whose support the leader needs to stay in power). So, the idea that in any realistic scenario the West will be unable to buy oil doesn't make much sense.
Gdanning
1yr ago
As a libertarian, I don't see much difference between a government and a sufficiently competent/potent drug cartel.
It is hardly a new observation that non-governmental actors can sometimes exercise state functions. Just one subset of such actors has been the subject of voluminous research , and the argument that, in Europe at least, the state developed when violent actors sought to extract resources from the people under their control so they could continue fighting wars was first popularized in 1975 by Charles Tilly, and his 1982 article, Warmaking and Statemaking as Organized Crime, is required reading in pretty much every comparative politics course.
But to infer therefrom that there can be no distinction between a government and a cartel ignores differences in types of governments; in order to stay in power, the leaders of cartels and the leaders of non-democratic governments need only keep a small group happy, so they have incentives to provide relatively few public goods. Instead, they use the money extracted from the populace to provide spoils to members of that small group. In contrast, governments in democracies must provide public goods, because the number of people they must keep happy is so large. See here
PS: I second those who criticize your use of a video from who knows where, with obviously cherrypicked excerpts and your own dubious inferences therefrom*, and representing n=2, to make generalizations about what life is like under the two types of regimes.
*Eg, you say there is a lack of businesses in the Philadelphia neighborhood, but the video does not show the main thoroughfares of North Philadelphia.
Gdanning
1yr ago
If you follow the links in your link, the article is here. It is behind a paywall, but note that the abstract does NOT say that bias is not a major contributor to discrepancies in leadership roles, and it does NOT say that differences in preferences is a larger contributor than bias. All it says is that differences in preferences contribute in some degree to the differences in leadership roles. Indeed, the finding, as stated in the abstract, is quite modest: "there is a small but significant gender difference in the predicted direction."
So, unless the body of the article says something more, it might be a bit premature to get that upset.
Gdanning
1yr ago
I did, in fact, live through both of those incidents. But the latter was the result of a drop in production as a result of conflict; it was not an embargo. As for the former, it was short-lived, and that is the point: It is unsustainable for those states to employ an embargo for very long. Note, also, that the US is not reliant on imported oil anymore, unlike in 1973; moreover the vast majority of current imports come from non-OPEC countries, esp Canada.
Gdanning
1yr ago
? The OP's entire point is that the article supposedly disproves the bias argument.
Gdanning
1yr ago
Not that it wasn't positively proven, but rather that it was not addressed by the study, one way or the other, at least based on the abstract. The study certainly implies that previous estimates of the effect of sexism are overstated, but there is no way to determine how much, based on the abstract.
Gdanning
1yr ago
"Small but significant" usually means statistically significant, rather than practically significant.
Re Hedge's g, this says that a rule of thumb is "Small effect (cannot be discerned by the naked eye) = 0.2," so 0.22 sounds pretty small.
However, I obviously agree that the study implies that previous studies which did not control for preferences must have overstated the effect of bias somewhat. But that seems to me to be a much more modest claim than what was made originally.
Gdanning
1yr ago
I don't know about sexism, but a principal component of feminism is that society asserts gender norms that can affect, usually negatively, both women and men. Eg when my aunt went to law school 80 years ago, there were 3 women in her class. Now, women made up more than half of law students. Similarly, male nurses were almost unheard of years ago. Those changes were the result in part of changes in preferences, but those preferences were, and are, shaped in part by norms.
Gdanning
1yr ago
The suicide rate was lower in the nineties than in the 50s-70s, so I am skeptical that issues around masculinity are likely to be causal.
Gdanning
1yr ago
Censorship in the name of public health and safety has been a component of the progressive platform going back to Woodrow Wilson and FDR . . For the record it wasn't conservative republicans pushing the Comics Code in the 50s and 60s
I'm not sure why you are implying that "not conservative republicans" = progressives, since the most conservative politicians in that period were southern Democrats (there were, of course, essentially no elected Republicans from the deep South in that period; see here, here, here and here )
As for the Comics Code, it grew out of the 1954 investigation by the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. The subcommittee members during the hearing were : Robert Hendrickson (R-New Jersey),Estes Kefauver (D- Tennessee), Thomas C. Hennings, Jr. (D-Missouri), and William Langer (R-North Dakota). By the time the linked report was issued, Olin D. Johnston (D- South Carolina) and Alexander Wiley (R-Wisconsin) were on the committee, but they did not participate in preparing the report.
Anyhow, the idea that moral censoriousness around images of sex and violence is the sole province of progressives, rather than conservatives, is very odd: Moral objections to that sort of material is pretty much a part of the definition of being "conservative" in the USA, and certainly when you look at efforts to remove books from schools and libraries, the pattern is clearly that liberals object to books that are ostensibly racist, and conservatives object to books that depict sex, nudity, or violence. And, of late book challenges are most common for the latter reasons.
Gdanning
1yr ago
I read the NYT every day, and I can say that every time I see a post here, or elsewhere, about "why isn't the media covering X," I had seen several NYT articles on the subject (eg: supposed noncoverage of Tigray; the claim that the media really wasn't covering Ukraine much any more). As it happens, the NYT is one of four US newspapers which still have foreign bureaus (the others are the Wash Post, the Wall St Journal, and the LA Times), and according to Wikipedia they have 2000 staff writers - twice what the WaPo has. So, yes, you are likely to see coverage there that is not going to show up elsewhere.
Gdanning
1yr ago
As noted above, Tipper Gore was hardly a member of the "Left." As for her husband, per his Wikipedia page:
During his time in Congress, Gore was considered a "moderate" once referring to himself as a "raging moderate"[41] opposing federal funding of abortion, voting in favor of a bill which supported a moment of silence in schools, and voting against a ban on interstate sales of guns.[42] In 1981, Gore was quoted as saying with regard to homosexuality, "I think it is wrong", and "I don't pretend to understand it, but it is not just another normal optional life style." In his 1984 Senate race, Gore said when discussing homosexuality, "I do not believe it is simply an acceptable alternative that society should affirm." He also said that he would not take campaign funds from gay rights groups.[43] Although he maintained a position against homosexuality and gay marriage in the 1980s, Gore said in 2008 that he thinks "gay men and women ought to have the same rights as heterosexual men and women...to join together in marriage."[44] His position as a moderate (and on policies related to that label) shifted later in life after he became Vice President and ran for president in 2000.[45]
Gdanning
1yr ago
If you are saying that, in order to determine the effect of norms of masculinity on suicide rates, all potential independent variables must be considered, that is my entire point. But, you seem to be implying that the reduction in suicide in the 90s was the result of advances in medicine, yet the linked chart shows no reduction in suicide rates from 1944 to 1986. Were there no improvements in medicine in that time period? That seems unlikely. It is certainly possible that advances in medicine explain all or most of the decline, but in order to demonstrate that, you need to bring evidence, rather than just making the assertion.
Gdanning
1yr ago
No, none of those were remotely left positions, even 30-40 yrs ago. The left has been pro-gun control for decades, and there was a pro-gay rights plank in the 1980 Democratic platform
Gdanning
1yr ago
Well, I do not read every tweet that is in existence, of course. And much of what I do see on twitter is a link to reporting, including to reporting by the Times. Anyhow, much of what they report is not simply facts ("x soldiers were killed in town y") but analysis, discussion of strategy, etc, etc. I am sure there are political scientist or military historians who tweet similar things; indeed, I follow some of them. But, most people don't. And, of course, the NY Times covers all sorts of other stories, from business to the arts. And it publishes long-form articles as well Could I in theory get that same information from my Twitter feed? Maybe, but probably not in practice.
Gdanning
1yr ago
Dude, I didn't say they were rightwing. I said they were not part of the left. Geez, both were heads of the Democratic Leadership Council
, which was explicitly formed to move the party away from the left. A guy who opposed gun control and gay rights in the 80s simply wasn't on the left, just because he has a D next to his name. It is pretty common knowledge, after all, that the parties were far more ideologically heterogeneous in the past
Gdanning
1yr ago
Entering a country and requesting asylum is, in fact, following the rules.
Gdanning
1yr ago
What he literally says is "US lab technology," which is odd phrasing for a native English speaker if he meant a lab in the US. And here he is quoted as saying that it "quite likely emerged from a U.S.-backed laboratory research program," which is of course not the same as saying it came from a lab in the US.
Gdanning
1yr ago
And you have evidence that that is the case here? And, btw, how, exactly, can an asylum request be "facially invalid" unless the requestor cites an invalid reason (eg, economic hardship, rather than persecution)? Anyone who did that would not be admitted, so it is almost certain that none of the claims are "facially invalid." Nor are any of these people likely to be particularly conversant with what constitutes persecution (esp persecution based on a "particular social group," an area of the law which is in constant flux). So,the assumption that these people must be cheating somehow does not seem to be based on a dispassionate analysis of facts and law.
Fundamentals models that attempt to predict the 2-party share of the popular vote based on "fundamentals" that are independent of the specific candidates (eg: the fact that one party had been in office for 8 years; economic indicators; whether the country was at war, etc) were very accurate. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/ps-political-science-and-politics/article/abs/recap-of-the-2016-election-forecasts/47D0EEDD5030B5F152AEB9B92A94DCE1. They average 50.6% for the Democratic candidate (actual result: 48.2/(48.2+46.1) = 51.1). From that I infer that Clinton did about as well as a generic Dem candidate would have.
As for performance in swing states, here are some comparisons of the pct changes from 2012 to 2016:
PA Dem - 4.5; Rep +1.6
MI Dem -7.2; Rep + 2.6
WI Dem -6.3; Rep + 1.3
FL Dem - 2.2; Rep -0.1
In all of those states, Trump failed to attract the vote of most of those who decided to switch from supporting the Dem candidate. And, of course, the pct of support for third parties in 2016 was indeed unusually high. From that I infer that there is no evidence that Trump was unusually appealing to swing votes, and that Trump performed worse in those states than would a generic Rep candidate, the direct opposite of what the media narrative holds.
Edit: So, I tried to follow the formatting help re inserting a link, but it did not work. Does anyone know how do to that properly?
More options
Context Copy link