HaroldWilson
2yr ago
The falsification of an incident or, more broadly, treating false information about an incident as true, for purposes of claiming a threat exists and thus a policy response is required?
Not quite, and this is why Gulf of Tonkin isn't really false flag in my view. A classic false flag incident would be something like the Mukden incident, where the Japanese blew up a railway themselves and then blamed it on the Chinese. Gulf of Tonkin is different because if it was anything it was the zhuzhing up/misunderstanding of a real incident, and citing it as cause for a war that they wanted anyway. They didn't actually do anything themselves with a view to blaming it on someone else, which is surely required to call something a false flag.
The Ukraine pipeline perhaps gets a bit closer if certain things which may not be the case are. If the Americans did do it, and hoped it would be blamed on Russia, then ok we are closer to false flag, but if they did it and it was because they thought there was a strategic advantage to be had in stopping the flow of gas then not really.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
This is hardly the place for a discussion of a topic so broad as the 'rights of citizens', but suffice to say that we do that all the time and always have done.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
If there was some very compelling public health rationale for banning larger footballs I would say that yes that would be a reasonable line of argument.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
I'm not here to relitigate the entirety of Graeber's theory,
Neither am I of course, but on the face it does seem a little silly to suggest that a worker must know the overall significance of their role to make their job worthwhile. I'm certainly not excluding the possibility of bullshit jobs in general, and I do agree that just because someone works hard that doesn't mean their job is at all important or meaningful.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Re: Haidak I have to plead ignorance on how much of the UMass grievance procedure is shaped by Title IX requirements, but either way I don't think it is really that important to the broader point.
I feel like you are telling me that you don't understand bullshit jobs without telling me you don't understand bullshit jobs. A job in which the cost of the job outweighs the benefits of the job just is a bullshit job.
If 'government jobs where I feel that the cost outweighs the benefit' comes under 'bullshit jobs' then it's a stupid and pointless framework. Look at it this way, I would say that the work Islamic morality police do in Iran or wherever is an instance where the negatives clearly outweigh the (in my mind, non-existent) positives, but surely calling that a 'bullshit job' makes no sense. They fulfil their intended function pretty well, just as Title IX administrators probably do/did fulfil the function of expanding women's sport, changing sexual allegation grievance procedures etc. etc. There surely has to be some distinction between 'jobs where nothing meaningful happens' and 'jobs where something happens but I don't like the thing'.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Gulf of Tonkin Incident
speculation that the U.S. blew up that oil pipeline, despite ya know, not being in a declared war
domestic policy goals
I never realised that Vietnam and Ukraine were inside the United State, huh.
The one that tends to stick in my mind is when they used a dubiously sourced Dossier to justify investigating a Presidential Candidate during his campaign and extensively during his term as President, even as it's veracity was genuinely questionable.
How does this count as a false flag, even if you think the dossier was rubbish?
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Oh I appreciate that specific restrictions might make some forms of sport shooting harder or impossible, the point is that in general it could continue as a widespread activity, just in slightly altered form.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
You also still have mass shootings in Britain even with the limited type of firearms you can legally acquire there
A few per decade.
All I can do is once again point you to the literature on the effectiveness of gun control measures, which you haven't engaged with.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
That just seems like a function of specialisation though, in a highly specialised world is clearly going to be quite difficult for a lot of workers to see how they fit into the entire economy/organisational bureaucracy.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
including the U.S., have used false flag tactics to achieve or advance domestic policy goals?
When?
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
'we can win, so why compromise ' is part of why gun owners are so "uncompromising".
Well that's just politics on both sides though. If I have policy preference X, and think I can get it done, why would I compromise for less than X? I wouldn't begrudge the same behaviour from pro-gun activists..
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
which were an item the ATF sought to ban, shortly after the event.
How does this suggest anything conspiratorial? High-profile mass shooting uses X implement, government responds with ban. Just seems like they were impelled to action by the shooting.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
He lost by nine points in an R+5 PVI state in a Democratic presidential mid-term. Shocking.
Republicans won the House elections by 20 points overall.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Almost all the polling you're talking about is vague preference polling
No. AWB, ERPOs, safe storage laws, licensing and raising minimum ages all consistently get comfortable majorities.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
So what would you estimate the 'social cost' of those 15 or so million people who use firearms without harming anyone being unable to hunt is?
Hard to say of course, but bear in mind none of the potential restrictions mooted by any mainstream figures in the U.S. would seriously damage hunting or shooting for sport in the U.S. After all we still have both of those in Britain.
This seems obviously confounded by factors that contribute to suicide and accidents independently of gun ownership.
So I find it doubtful that for the median gun owner it turns into a net negative, even if we see on the lower end of the bell curve that accidents and suicide are an actual risk.
In the same way that owning a pool makes it WAY more likely you or a loved one will die of drowning, and yet there are fairly easy precautions one can take to mitigate those chances (learn to swim, learn CPR, fence in the pool, provide life vests) to almost zero.
We make policy for aggregates, not individuals. Whether for some people owning a gun might be a net positive is irrelevant, society-wide they seem to do more harm than good which is the relevant point.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
It's almost like they just want to ban the guns irrespective of any direct statistical justification
Absurd strawman. Whether you find it convincing or not there is plenty of literature on the benefits of various gun control policies, and more generally on the benefits of low firearm ownership rates. Not saying you have to agree with its conclusions, but don't pretend there isn't any such literature.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
If it's not the most significant factor, then almost by definition you shouldn't be prioritizing it.
My position is that there are at least a couple more significant factors that are studiously ignored when it comes to this issue.
This circles back to our comments above on tractability.
well you're hardly going to suggest that slaves enjoyed expansive gun rights, are you?
No but the point is that an armed population, if they are ever able to resist the state, will not always be doing so to benefit of the population. As another commentor has observed, the latter and post-Reconstruction era South would have been a much freer place were the entire population disarmed.
tyrannical powers generally prefer disarmed populaces
Maybe true, but I don't think it holds any lessons for modern day America.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Well if you think that side of things is tractable, what plausible policy responses do you think would meaningfully move us in that direction that actually have a chance of being implemented?
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Insofar as in toto most Western governments control the supply of guns pretty well despite the apparent threat of 3-D printed guns. Some individual instances of them being used hardly disproves that picture.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
If that's the case I don't think the 'bullshit jobs' framework adds anything useful, because then it really just is a substitute for 'I don't agree with the policy goals the work being done aims toward'.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Why the hell was Haidak kicked out in the first place? Because Title IX has been interpreted to require universities to referee adolescent relationships!
Can't say for certain of course but I am fairly confident that universities would want to punish rape/sexual assault quite harshly even without Title IX.
The key question is whether the benefits of Title IX outweigh the costs
Well sure but that doesn't really address the question of the bullshit-ness of the jobs, that's then just an ordinary policy debate.
Did it hasten an ongoing process? If so, then the regulatory cost was onerous and the fact that we're still paying it is stupid. Did Title IX instead fundamentally re-engineer a piece of American society, forcing a change to which Americans would have otherwise never consented? If so, then the price was even more onerous, paid in liberty instead of dollars. As far as I can tell, Title IX itself can only either have been unnecessary (in which case: it spawned mostly bullshit jobs), or necessary, in which case it is seriously objectionable on other grounds.
I suspect that as you suggest the growth of women's sports was happening anyway but nonetheless Title IX accelerated and shaped those changes (same for the other areas that Title IX impacts).
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
just in case someone else files a lawsuit that will make no substantial difference to anyone except, maybe, a successful plaintiff in search of an easy payday
I'm not settling on either side here, but this seems a little uncharitable. For one, in one sense even if no-one ever reads most of the stuff produced, and if (and I accept this may not be the case but nevertheless, if) lawsuits filed are on relatively substantive grounds rather than trivial procedural matters then the work is still important. Because, presumably, if a Title IX coordinator felt that a particular aspect of college administration did not comply the college would be anxious to make the appropriate changes, which if one agrees with the thrust of Title IX is a good thing.
This is a bit of a cumbersome explanation so here's a instance of a Title IX lawsuit that came up in a cursory google search. James Haidak was a student who recently sued his university for having a biased procedure when it expelled him following accusations by his ex-girlfriend, and on appeal he won on the grounds that he was never given a chance to defend himself in any kind of hearing etc., and now presumably it is the role of Title IX coordinators to ensure the their own universities have adequate procedures in this regard so they don't get hit by similar suits. So even if all their work now sits in a drawer forever they were actually doing something.
The key question of course is whether that many of the lawsuits they spend their time protecting against are substantial, or mostly trivial. Now this seems very hard to assess given that presumably the ones covered in the media are selected for the most interesting and meaningful ones, but a cursory search does throw up lots of cases that do seem at least somewhat worthwhile. Plenty of cases on the need for a fair shake to be given to accused students prior to expulsion, one about a kid who died from alcohol poising following an initiation (the parents demanding tighter restrictions on such) and yes lots of cases about women's athletics. Not, I appreciate, a life or death issue but a 'real' thing in the sense that Title IX cases etc. did actually increases access to college sport for women, which seems to indicate that more than box-ticking is being done, even if in some instances the work is over something that one could consider rather trivial in the grand scheme of things.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Well not really because gun control is, at least from a policy perspective, relatively tractable, and from a political perspective many good measures are well inside the Overton window. 'Reworking America into a more conservative culture' will never happen, at least not whole cloth and not in a way where the results will be easily predictable and definitely translate into a more stable society.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Canada in particular is very "iron fist in velvet glove" about it.
And then they do shit like shut off your bank account if you protest.
You're theory being that if the truckers were armed the Canadian government would have been... less harsh? If anything that would surely make them come down like a ton of bricks.
In fairness I conveyed my point rather badly wrt Haidak; all I meant to argue is that sexual harassment procedures in universities would be meaningfully different (or indeed non-existent) absent Title IX and its administrators which it does seem like you agree with even if the changes have been for the worse.
As for the second point, when I said that the growth of women's sport was happening away, I did add that Title IX accelerated it and pushed it further than it would have gone otherwise, so it does add something in that regard. We're moving towards going in circles here, but if you include things 'actively harmful' I think the concept is worthless. If that's out of step with Graeber's intention then fair enough, but I would suggest that bullshit jobs is a terrible phrase if that's how he meant it.
Edit: to be more specific what I mean is that if his intention (though I think Graeber's book was more geared towards the private sector) was to class as bullshit jobs any government or government-required employee pursuing a goal than is held to be unwise, then I could start calling all sorts of jobs 'bullshit' just because I think they exist with a view to pursuing unwise policy.
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