HaroldWilson
2yr ago
(Well isn't that real and important, then? Yes, yes, it's a fair point. But I still think jobs that exist solely to push unnecessary government paperwork are inescapably bullshit jobs. Hiring government actors--executive and judicial--to punish universities for failing to meet politically-imposed quotas on social engineering goals, so that universities must hire administrators to give themselves cover, is the very picture of government stimulating the economy by paying one group of people to dig holes, and another group to follow behind them, filling the holes back up again. But this is not the point of my post.
Is this just bullshit jobs or is it just that you disagree with the thrust of the work being done? After all they aren't, in fact, just digging up and filling in holes, they are presumably collecting real data which is checked, setting up grievance procedures which can actually be used etc. and even if you think it's in pursuit of a pointless or harmful goal it is actual things being done and work produced. Indeed in one sense this is no different to say all of the legal/regulatory work a food company must do to ensures that all of its products comply with the regulations of all the relevant agencies, it just so happens that whereas in latter case the goal of the regulations is relatively uncontroversial in the former it isn't.
And, of course, there is the evergreen fact that one of the most crime-ridden part of the country is the Deep South, which has permissive gun laws and a hoplophilic culture. With that in mind it's hard to take idea that the solution is yet more guns seriously.
That wasn't my comment.
Chicago is such a useful example of the people who claim to want to solve the nations' problems absolutely failing to achieve any of their stated goals, though!
No isn't because one data point cannot prove that. For all we know, Chicago may well have even more violence than it does already if gun control was relaxed. It may not of course, but simply pointing to one city proves nothing. Numbers are your friend.
Also, I will reiterate that it's very difficult for cities to control guns on their own, national or at least state level action is much more effective.
If you want to save lives, THAT is where you need to start.
I agree that gun suicides are very important to tackle! That why I support ERPOs and waiting periods which have been shown to effectively prevent suicides.
And there are multiple countries that have strict gun laws and much higher suicide rates. Japan and South Korea as glaring examples here.
Again, this proves nothing.
This suggests that, again, guns are not the driving or decisive factor here, and it would probably be better to investigate root causes rather than going after firearms directly.
Are they mutually exclusive? Governments aren't limited to one policy response per issue.
Would you support a ban on matches, lighter fluid, and fireworks, or other implements that can be used for arson
Probably not because the social cost of the arson facilitated by those items probably doesn't outweigh the value we get from their benign applications.
There's little evidence that a person who is legally carrying a firearm on their person imposes a 'wider social cost' in this respect, incidentally
Well they do, in part a) firearms are not tied to a person and more firearms in general circulation is bad for public safety, and more importantly b) even if they were SDGUs aren't that great compared to the average, and in consequence the expected utility for even a legal owner is negative given the facilitation of an easier suicide, accidents etc.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
This is definitely true, and Hemenway has actually also done some good work on this front, but in fairness high-end DGU estimates go way higher than 'several hundred thousand'. The one I see a lot is 2.5 million which originates from a rubbish Kleck and Gertz study from the 90s.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Is it? Would it be too much to ask for some substantiation of what is quite an outlandish and uncharitable characterisation?
And even the innocent ones who have done nothing yet are completely disposable if a woman finds them inconvenient.
There is almost no-one anywhere is the West who would agree that this at all resembles their view.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
The problem isn't guns, the problem is that there are millions of disaffected people living in a country founded on the idea of individual human rights
Why are they mutually exclusive? I don't have strong views on your proposed explanation, but we have plenty of disaffected people in Britain yet manage to keep our mass shootings down to single figures per decade.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
From this one sees the impulse to curtail liberty, using events which on average only minutely influence crime statistics, let alone lives of the average person, as an excuse is universal.
People say this a lot but it's hardly unique to guns and not necessarily a bad thing. When events like mass shootings get used as rationale for policy decisions I don't think it's so much a direct response to only that kind of event but something targeted more broadly but for which a particular mass shooting might stand out as a particularly worrisome manifestation of the broader problem that captures the public imagination. See George Floyd, James Bulger, Sarah Everard etc. Indeed, one can see from your summary of the various responses from politicians that each to an extent sees the shootings as the consequences of wider social ills, whatever they might be.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
woman who presents a firearm to a would-be rapist very likely doesn't have an actual crime to report. Likewise for a host of other crimes, from muggings to assaults to murder.
Presumably they have an attempted rape/mugging/etc. to report to the survey?
More generally, every crime successfully completed is an instance where lawful self-defense would deliver a likely-superior outcome
Is it? Maybe I'm just too soy but if an armed mugger demanded my wallet etc. I'd rather give in than take my chances trying to defend myself, a lot of tail risk involved there, not to say that people shouldn't defend themselves though.
If self-defense rates are really this low, why aren't we trying to improve them?
Well I guess we can but the point is that increasing gun usage doesn't seem like it would actually achieve that goal.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
This tends to more old left rather than the super woke left.
This is all very much at the margins of political discourse here but at least in Britain anti-NATO sentiment, which there isn't really that much of anymore, seems to come as much from Sultana-esque young left-wingers as it does from older Galloway-esque ones.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Most other Western countries seem to be dealing with that problem adequately.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
the driving force of violence in any given nation is NOT the availability of weapons.
So? It would be absurd to suggest never taking any action on one cause of an ill just because it happened not to be the most important cause. As long as it's a significant factor it's worth doing something about.
How is a nation actively choosing to separate itself from a government that it no longer wishes to participate in, and to thus secede from participation in said government "pro-tyranny?"
I don't think he was saying the action of secession was pro-tyranny, merely that rebellions can incidentally also be 'pro-tyranny', which is hard to dispute in the case of the U.S. Civil War, given what was being fought over.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
You literally can't get much stricter than Chicago in restricting firearms, and you also can't find many places with a higher murder rate
Speaking of, NH has some of the most permissive laws and also a negligible homicide rate. Again kinda makes the point for me.
This is ridiculous. One cannot prove anything with one or two data points. To take just one example, here is some tentative evidence that permitting decreases homicides, and RTC laws have the opposite effect. I'm obviously not saying that just because there's a study here you have to agree with me, but at least engage with the literature rather than saying 'look at Chicago' and calling it a day.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29785569/
The odds of a fire extinguisher protecting you from a house fire of any kind, let alone an arsonist, is incredibly low...
You see the subtle error in reasoning here?
Fire extinguishers do not impose wider social costs.
And because those instances are intentionally given outsized attention by the media who has every intention of maximizing the fear felt by their viewership.
Different thing, but you seem to be framing this as a fault of the media but surely if there is blame to be assigned here it has to go to the consumer, given that the media is surely just satisfying the demand for such news which we all demonstrate by consuming it as much as we do.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
General self-defense via firearm happens, at best estimate, somewhere in the range of several hundred thousand times a year.
True, but firearms don't seem to be a uniquely effective self-defence weapon, or at least there is some tentative evidence in that direction.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0091743515001188?via%3Dihub#s0010
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
True of course, but then the working classes still came out in support of it; they at least cared about something. And it's hardly like working class agitation for enfranchisement stopped in 1832; 1867, 1884 and 1918 didn't come from nowhere.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Obviously true but also not necessarily relevant. Sure, members of the Commons were only seeking the votes of a very small section of the population, and many seats were not seriously contested, but nevertheless many were at least seeking the votes of an electorate, and an electorate that by modern standards was probably pretty ignorant in 1688, say. The few constituencies where the franchise was quite large and something approaching the ordinary person did get to vote even pre-1832, Westminster standing out as a notable example, hardly returned worse candidates than the average. Westminster yielded Hobhouse, Burdett and most famously of course Charles James Fox.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Now imagine that tomorrow, their parliaments abolish themselves and return to them perhaps not absolute power, but the significant degrees of power their ancestors had a few hundred years ago. Would life really get much worse for the average Brit, or Spaniard, or Dane?
Maybe not loads worse, but I find it hard to believe that it would be a good thing for governance. Did their 'ancestors a few hundred years ago' do much better? Not really, after all the last British monarch who in my estimation was truly active, George III, is best known in that regard for dismissing Pitt for having the temerity to support Catholic emancipation. Brilliant.
In any case, in Britain it was really Parliament that was master of the country at the latest from 1688 onwards. Was pre-1688 Britain notably better governed than after that time? No, surely the opposite is true.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Why would anyone normal care about other people’s genitalia or a war in a country they can’t find on a map and only became independent in 1992? Why am I, a relative nobody, worried about policing? And my suspicion is that the average person, because of the vote, is often forced to pretend to care, is policed for the ways they pretend to care, when they’d much rather spend time on kids’ education and sports, their jobs, their family, and whatever hobbies they choose to enjoy. I think almost everyone would actually be happier to never worry about cultural affairs ever again.
If this is true, why did the lack of representation for the working classes occasion such dissatisfaction in, say, nineteenth century Britain? The failure of what would become the First Reform Act in 1832 brought Britain if not actually to the brink of revolution then certainly to an acute crisis, over a bill that only expanded the franchise a little. The meeting of the BPU in that crisis supposedly brought out 200,000 people, an astonishing figure considering that it exceeded the entire population of Birmingham. These were people with far less time and energy to devote to political causes than most of today's people, yet they did so anyway, because they knew how important representation was.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
I don't think this notion requires quite so much cynicism about Macron's attitude towards the average Frenchman; I would suggest that his view comes closer to Burke's famous saying that "his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. ... Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion."
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
People are wasting 5-15 years of their lives on a very expensive vacation, at best, when they could be having kids. We want them to make that important decision early, and nothing sobers a young man quicker than staring decades of drudgery in the face.
I mean, you can call it a 'vacation' if you really want to, but the market has spoken, and it has said that the better educated command much better salaries.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Back in 2019 Alex Byrne wrote one of my favorite essays on the incoherence of gender identity and as far as I can tell no one has managed to offer a solid refutation.
FWIW I think the main problem with his article, as with many other similar ones, is that he frames the issue as about determining the Truth about gender and gender identity when in fact for all practical purposes the problem is actually a policy one. The right question is not 'are transgender men really men' (or in the case of Byrne's essay 'do Transgender people have gender identities that do not match their sex'/'does a mismatch between gender identity and sex cause dysphoria', or more broadly 'what is gender identity'), but 'does treating transgender people as their transitioned gender in X circumstance make those people happier with little damage done to the rest of society?' Because if the answer to that question is yes, then who gives a damn what the Truth of their gender is. Obviously there would still be arguments to had over the costs and benefits in every specific circumstance.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Specialization is for insects.
Not sure I get this. If anything surely specialisation is the root of civilisation, and so if there is anything that separates from the animals it is that.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
I think that the term 'government funded media' clearly takes on a negative implication that extends beyond the strict meaning of the words. If I owned twitter and slapped 'Murdoch owned media' on Fox twitter accounts, it would be indisputable but it clearly implies something about what I think about Fox and its biases. Similarly, Musk/twitter surely thinks that the fact that a particular outlet is government funded in some way impinges negatively upon its content because otherwise there would be no point putting it there.
I agree that there's nothing wrong with wrong with being government funded, but the label still carries unfortunate implications. After all, there are plenty of twitter users who will not be attuned to the difference between the Russian or Syrian regime shills labelled 'government affiliated media' and the state broadcasters labelled 'government funded media', and if not putting them in exactly the same bucket twitter does seem to be putting them in the same region, or at least that is the impression some people will take.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
This seem far too conspiratorial. Comprehensive educations in the 50s weren't basic because they were afraid people might be less compliant, it was simply felt that that was all they needed if they were going to go and work in a mine or steel mill, and resources are always scarce.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Hitler was perhaps the greatest case study in the power of a classical education and self-directed study, as well as its weaknesses (should have studied logistics and naval warfare (every other battle would have been decided if he’d won the battle of the Atlantic))
And to this day post war education is built around preventing anyone from learning the lessons he learnt (which now extends to 2+2=4 in some classrooms).
Of course no American, English, or German school boys learns anything resembling classical military history any more, no one studies classical languages, even geography is notably lacking —though there in the American case, its seems geography isn’t taught so that Americans might be compliant with their wars instead of concluding, as every generation of Americans did pre-1945… that Eurasia is entirely irrelevant to them.
The western world responded to the Nazis by burning down all the cultural institutions of western civilization, since some aspect of western civilization must have been to blame… somehow
Aside from other things I disagree with, I think this is a complete misdiagnosis of the causes of the decline of classical education. At least in Britain, the main driver in that regard was surely economic, not just in the sense that giving people such an education is expensive but more pertinently that in the post-war political environment education fundamentally became about preparing students for the modern economy, hence the tripartite system; a basic comprehensive education for unskilled workers, a technical education for those doing skilled manual labour, and grammar schools for managers and administrators (indeed, grammar school students often did, and to some extent still do where they still exist, get a fair amount of 'classical' education).
Moreover, plenty of the current British political class did have a firmly classical education. Boris was Eton educated and an Oxford classicist, but his speeches, while occasionally having some of the bizarre Trumpish quality are generally pretty rubbish, while for my money the best political speaker in 21st century Britain, Gordon Brown, was comprehensive educated. While I do think there has probably been a decline in the quality of political speech-making (though not nearly to the extent you suggest, and certainly not across the whole post-war era; see for instance just wrt Britain, in various decades, Heath's speech against the death penalty, White Heat of the Technological Revolution, Weapons for Squalid and Trivial Ends, Brown's famous conference speech and his speech on Scottish independence, Howe's resignation speech, Winds of Change and, outside of politics, Tim Collins' eve of battle speech), I don't think the decline in classical education is really the cause.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
This is just sort of politics though, and it happens on every other issue. Gun owners like to use phrases like 'one more inch' quite a lot but the reality is that these things do go back and forth. Sometimes they lose inches, sometimes they gain them back (see Heller, Assault Weapons Ban, NYSRPA v. Bruen etc. etc.).
I mean this sort of thing really does seem like an unequal compromise because it amounts to putting a hard cap on gun control but still allowing very lax states. Why would Democrats agree to that, especially when all polling indicates that gun control is a winning issue for them?
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