MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
20d ago
Seconded. It really is a hoot. If the guy had been alive today his YouTube channel would be popping.
Not really - he wasn't a self-promoter in that way. SYJ happened because Leighton and Sands made it happen, not because Feynman wanted to do the work of writing a memoir.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
19d ago
I'm equally sure that pro-Israel Jews would prefer someone who moves aid forward while delivering a mild dressing-down for PR purposes to someone who praises Netanyahu to the skies while using aid as a lever to extract concessions elsewhere from his domestic political opponents. The Biden administration is significantly less critical of Netanyahu's policy in Gaza than the Israeli opposition, which most centrist American Jews find a lot more sympathetic than Likud.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
I don't think the events we are seeing now change the basic structure of US (or Anglosphere more generally) opinion on Israel-Palestine:
- The anti-establishment left has always been pro-Palestinian to an extent which skirts the boundaries of cancellable anti-Semitism.
- The pro-establishment left are basically pro-Israel, but need to hold their noses to support an Israel led by the current Likud/religious right coalition, which they hate for essentially the same reasons that secular Jews in Israel hate it.
- The pro-establishment right are basically pro-Israel - previously they were willing to throw Israel under the bus in limited ways in to make nice to the Gulf Arabs, but they no longer need to because the Gulf Arabs are allied with Israel against Iran.
- The anti-establishment right are split between Islamophobes (who support Israel on enemy-of-my-enemy grounds) and Christian Zionists (who support Israel in order to immanentize the escheaton) on the one hand and America Firsters (who think that US military aid to Israel is a waste of money) and anti-Semites on the other side.
With a Democrat in the White House, the pro-establishment left controls the government. If support for Israel on the pro-establishment left was weakening, we would see a change in government policy. What we actually see is the bog standard pro-establishment line on Israel since before Oslo - give them everything they ask for (modulo aid being blocked in Congress) while gently pointing out that American Jewry would prefer a more secular Israel, and that Israel could provide its allies with political cover by pretending to support a two-state solution at some unspecified future date.
While it is true that the core groups making these interruptions are small and heavily concentrated among muslim and "POC" demographics, along with a few white leftists, what's remarkable to me is the wider silence among the broader progressive coalition. Many Jews have remarked upon this, that sympathy seems to be muted or even absent. There is an unwillingness to police these radicals among the wider liberal public, which seems to suggest a hidden reserve of silent sympathy which is not being publicly expressed.
Or it suggests that the pro-establishment left isn't willing to engage in a public intra-left slap-fight in an election year when they can just support Israel quietly.
The UK Labour party's Keir Starmer may try to resurrect matters after the Corbyn years, but one gets the sense he is fighting against his own base which is usually not ending well for leaders in the long run.
Conventional wisdom in British politics is that the median voter hates the anti-establishment left sufficiently that a Labour leader can only win an election if he is visibly fighting against his own base. (This is most obvious viz-a-viz Blair, but the conventional wisdom dates back to the Foot era). Every Labour Prime Minister except Atlee is a hate figure on the activist left.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
23d ago
FWIW, there is a lot less persecution of gingers in the UK now than there was when I was a kid. My red-headed son is the most popular kid in his class. Was gingerism ever a big deal in the US?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
I worry about you, @KulakRevolt. That was a long post - it must have taken several days to research and write. And despite ample opportunity, you seem to have managed to write the whole post without once thinking about the Roman Empire.
Are you okay?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
This is sensible. Given the nature of IQ 100-115 normies, allowing them to run arbitrary code on a machine is equivalent to allowing the GRU or Lockbit to run arbitrary code on that machine.
God did not intend every individual to have access to a universal Turing machine. On the other hand, Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds did, and the GNU/Linux ecosystem isn't going anywhere because the internet backbone runs on it. In addition, a huge part of the value proposition of the Microsoft ecosystem (particularly relative to Apple) is that it supports organisations doing their own computing without needing to ask Microsoft's permission. Satya Nadella may not want every worker drone to have a universal Turing machine in their pocket, but he wants every enterprise customer's IT guy to have easy access to one. And in practice that means building machines which offer universal functionality to anyone who knows what they are doing.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
For example, a huge reason the California high speed rail has been a disaster is because inland state politicians forced the state to reroute the railroad (which should have taken the direct coastal route from Los Angeles to San Francisco) via a bunch of shithole cities nobody wants to go to, delaying the project by decades by compounding with both of the above issues.
CAHSR did make bad routing mistakes, but going up the Central Valley is not one of them. There is a reason why I-5 goes up the Central Valley, as does the existing freight railway. The Central Valley route is actually straighter (roughly 450 miles vs 470 for the coastal route) and there is a lot more space to build straight and flat.
The big mistakes were how you cross from the Central Valley to the coast at each end of the line. The correct route goes over Tejon and Altamont passes, for the same reasons that I-5 does. In the south, CAHSR proposed to go over Tehachapi Pass - adding 34 miles in length, 15-20 minutes in journey time, and $5-7 billion in tunneling costs. I can't anyone making the case for Tehachapi apart from "relitigating this will just kill the project" fatalism, so I don't know why the decision was made. In the north, CAHSR proposed to go over Pacheco Pass and enter San Francisco via San Jose and the Caltrain route (which would need to be extensively 4-tracked because Caltrain are already using the existing tracks) because Ron Didion wanted direct service to his hometown. You can find people willing to defend Pacheco, but it only makes sense if Caltrain and CAHSR are willing to work together to avoid unnecessary construction, which they are not.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
19d ago
Anyway, I’d argue that colleges still pursue the latter goal. Even for pie-in-the-sky pure science. But I suppose I’m rather biased, seeing as my sister and I both did our Master’s degrees in these kind of labs. There are two media narratives about university research. And neither “breathless futurism” nor “absurd political sinecures” captures the quiet tide of NSF and corporate money.
I agree with you that there are plenty of people doing good research in hard science departments - in my foolish youth I wanted to join them* and I still have both the PhD and the physical and emotional scars of getting it. But even in the noughties, most of the good university scientists I worked with were complaining that the incentives were increasingly borked and were driving them towards running their research groups like Fordist paper-factories. There is a lot of useful work that can be done in Fordist paper-factories (the research group next to mine were generating multiple drug leads a year using sweated grad student and postdoc labour), but it is the comparative advantage of government and commercial labs, not universities.
The story I was told by my mentors was that in some unspecified pre-lapsarian golden age the academic career structure had given all scientists the level of academic freedom that (for example) Watson and Crick used to discover DNA even though Bragg would have preferred Crick to work on haemoglobin, but that this was no longer the case and the only way to get that level of research flexibility was to join one of a small number of special institutions like the Cambridge Laboratory of Molecular Biology (the famous LMB, aka the "Nobel Prize factory"). Based on what people are saying online things have got significantly worse since then.
* Solid state physics - the area I worked in (although not the specific problem I was working on) was widely considered cool-but-useless at the time, but is now being used by multiple commercial fusion startups.
I am going to call bullshit on this study. There are already a couple of posts in the thread pointing out that children of strict parents won't give honest answers to the survey which reflects on their parents, and that parents won't give honest answers to questions about their kids' mental health that reflects badly on their parenting. Given the existence of social desirability bias, I don't even trust parents reporting their own parenting practices - the reported high quality of "very conservative" parenting could be interpreted as "Very conservative parents are more likely to know the correct answers (as determined by a conservative think-tank) on a how-to-parent quiz."
But even if they have 100% honest answers (which they don't) I don't think this study does what it says on the tin:
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Child response bias. They spoke to 6643 parents, of whom 2956 had one or more teenage children who could have been included. (Were the other 3687 parents included in the study? They don't say). Only 1580 children were included - that is a 52% response rate. Are the teens who responded representative of the whole sample?
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Over-reliance on parental reports. The published results just don't use the child questionnaire data that much. It is used as part of a mostly parent-reported "index of mental health", and as one item out of six on a mostly parent-reported "index of relationship quality". The methodology section of the paper doesn't say how they combine households with child and parent questionnaires with households with only parent questionnaires to get a single set of results - this seems like the key step in the process to me, and it could mean that the published results are almost entirely parent-reported. "Parents who think they are good parents also think they have well-adjusted kids" doesn't seem like an interesting response to me, and could be Dunning-Kruger just as easily as actual parenting quality.
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Chart-crime. The correlations between parenting practices and mental health, and the correlations between adverse experiences and relationship quality on mental health, are shown on different graphs with different scales, concealing the fact that the impact of relationship quality dwarfs the impact of parenting practices. The text points out that the impact of relationship quality is larger. This isn't that bad - I have put out worse charts myself, with the excuse that I was running for public office at the time.
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Missing regression. They have the data to compare parenting practices to relationship quality, but they don't. Given that "does authoritative parenting improve child mental health by improving relationship quality or via some other mechanism" is an interesting question, I assume they ran the regression and didn't report the results because they didn't like them. The text even asks the question, saying that the large impact of relationship quality on mental health is evidence that parenting style works via relationship quality. But it isn't the evidence you are looking for - you need to show more of the correlation matrix.
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Reverse causation and how. The aspects of "authoritative parenting" which correlate best with mental health are "My child completes priorities I set for them before they are allowed to play or relax" and "My child follows a regular routine", and "I find it difficult to discipline my child" (reversed). Those are measures of a parent's success at implementing authoritative parenting, not their commitment to doing it. And when you correlate that with parent-reported mental health, the direction of causation is obvious to anyone who has parented a difficult child. (I have a diagnosed ASD son - I speak from experience). IFS are putting out an "umbrellas cause rain" study.
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Genetic confounding. They mention this possibility, but dismiss it. I am not going to try to work out whether the stuff they cite to say that this study isn't genetically confounded does in fact say that, but my prior is that everything is genetically confounded. Grading on a curve, at least they considered the possibility.
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Talking around the 1 vs 2 parent question - WHY? This is the IFS we are talking about, 2 parents being better than 1 is a big part of their raison d'etre. But I can't find a clear discussion of it anywhere in the paper. They show breakdowns based on divorced/married/never-married status and high-low quality relationship with current partner (not co-parent!), but not the straightforward is the kid still living with both biological parents test. Do they have a dataset which shows that 2 parents are not, in fact, better than 1 and chose to hide it? (This is consistent with the small impact on child mental health of "Has a parent who used to live with you stopped living with you?")
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Inconsistent data presentation. The way the correlations between parenting style and parent demographics, and relationship quality and parent demographics are presented is completely different to the way the correlations between child mental health and parenting style, and child mental health and relationship quality are presented, in a way which confuses the fact that they are effectively different cells in the same correlation matrix, and also makes it hard to compare effect sizes.
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Missing regression. Why not compare adolescent mental health with parent demographics directly? You have the information. Haidt did it - he found conservative adolescents are healthier (particularly daughters). Again I unfortunately have to be specific.
I don't think this is unusually bad for a think-tank writing up some survey research - I do think they made more mistakes than usual because the underlying study is more complicated (there are four major groups of variables with unknown causal links between them - mental health, relationship quality, parenting practices, and parent demographics). But there is enough hinkiness that I can't trust the results, and I don't have a good response if I try and beat a tofu-eating attachment parent with the study and they say "correlation is not the same as causation". I do wonder why the main author (who is an economist at Gallup) didn't run the paper past a professional statistician - Gallup must have them on staff.
Haidt's work is much better at explaining why he thinks his theory is causally correct.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
19d ago
I don't. Jews who are paying attention can see the rising anti-semitism on the right. (And in particular, Jews who care about Israel know who was blocking the aid bill). Left-wing anti-semites are more dangerous individually (because they are more violent) but the anti-semitic right arguably includes people like Elon Musk and has far more access to the corridors of power than the Columbia protestors do.
Will more anti-semites be invited to the White House in a second Trump term or a second Biden term (not counting Gulf Arab diplomats etc. who are discreet about their anti-semitism)? It is a surprisingly difficult question to answer.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Quant refers to anyone working in a job in finance which requires Masters or PhD-level maths skills on a regular basis.
The original quants built the computer models that allowed banks to efficiently trade and risk manage derivatives. These jobs still exist, and are still well-paid, but they are no longer as prestigious in geekworld as they used to be when derivatives were a largely unexplored growth area for the banks. Nowadays, and particularly on this forum, quant is likely to refer to someone who uses high-end maths or computing skills working for a hedge fund (or a proprietary trading firm like Jane Street, which is functionally similar) - effectively they are trying to build computer models that beat humans at playing the stock market. These buy-side quant jobs are the best-paying jobs you can get as a pure shape-rotator who sucks at office politics, which is why a lot of quants are quokkas.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
20d ago
Whatever it takes to get rid of the Dolores Umbridges, the Carol Beers, even the Hermes Conrads.
It is worth noting that Dolores Umbridge and Carol Beer are very different phenomena, and the only thing they have in common is that they use femininity as a way of making their obnoxiousness less obvious. But you are not the first person to lump them together - the comments to Scott Aaronson's "blankface" post are a dumpster fire because Scott chooses a word that suggests he is talking about Carol Beer and then writes a long post insisting he is talking about Umbridge.
The basic difference is that Dolores Umbridge does, in fact, have agency, and is abusing it. In Order of the Phoenix Umbridge is a senior official who is given broad discretionary authority by Fudge to root out Hogwarts-based opposition to the regime, and does in fact try to do that (ultimately unsuccessfully) while treating the opportunity to sadistically abuse Harry as a fringe benefit. In Half-Blood Prince she fails upwards to become Senior Undersecretary to the Minister of Magic - which to someone familiar with British bureaucratic titles is a high-level policy making role at the same level on the org chart as a Deputy Secretary or Assistant Secretary in the US executive branch. (The equivalence is complicated by the complete absence of political appointees in the Ministry of Magic), although in so far as we see the internal workings of the Ministry she actually appears to be functioning as Scrimgeour's chief of staff. Umbridge is useful to Power, and Power supports her in her abuse of Harry, and would continue to do so even if they knew everything.
If Curtis Yarvin or Peter Theil was critiquing Fudge's performance, they would see his decision to appoint Umbridge and let her get on with it (including backing her up as necessary when she is e.g. accused by Dumbledore of sadistically abusing students) as a relative high point in his career - he actually tried something that could have worked, and would have worked if Fudge hadn't been forced to resign because Voldemort showed up in person around the time Umbridge was completing her takeover of Hogwarts.
Carol Beer, on the other hand, is a shit-tier grunt with no authority. Her only source of power is that she can refuse to do her job some non-zero fraction of the time without getting fired - and it isn't even clear if she is refusing to do her job, or if she is unable to do it because she does not even have sufficient authority to override the computer. But assuming the unfavourable interpretation, Beer is useless to everyone, and the only reason she gets away with her petty sadism is because her uselessness is beneath the notice of Power. If Karen managed to speak to the manager, Beer would be fired. I suspect if Curtis Yarvin wrote a review of Little Britain, he would say that someone in Beer's reporting line was asleep at the wheel, and needed some encouragement.
The two failure modes (evil backed by Power, and evil operating beneath the notice of Power) both function in the same way regardless of whether Power is personal or bureaucratic. The fundamental case for the Rule of Law and bureaucratic process is that it constrains Dolores Umbridge. The case being made against it in this thread is that it creates Carol Beers. This is a trade-off, and the trade-off is real and is not one-sided in the real world. To give a recent notorious example in the UK, Dominic Cummings noticed and has repeatedly blogged about the legal-accountability-driven incompetence of UK government procurement, including how it was likely to kill people during the COVID-19 pandemic. So during the pandemic he used emergency powers to throw out procurement law and allow the government to just buy PPE from willing sellers. The result was a spectacular feeding frenzy of peculation as people with the right connections realised that selling to the government was now a pure matter of getting into the ministers' in-tray, and that anyone who could do that could buy non-working PPE at retail from dodgy Chinese websites and mark it up even further to the government. The total loss to the taxpayer was c. £4 billion, with the £200 million paid to shell companies linked to lingerie entrepreneur and Tory peer Michelle Mone for unusable PPE being the headline example
There are two sayings I sometimes to use to think about this trade-off:
The Cossacks Work for the Czar. To paraphrase Brad de Long, it isn't immediately obvious if the Cossacks who raided your village are:
- working for the Czar, and fucking with you because the Czar wants them to
- working for the Czar, and fucking with you because they want to, and fucking with people like you is within the scope of their delegated authority
- bandits who the Czar has for some reason failed to hang, who are fucking with you because they can.
What de Long means by "The Cossacks work for the Czar" is that above a certain level of sophistication (which a band of raiding Cossacks crosses), Carol Beers have been weeded out, and you can assume that what the system does or fails to do is the result of (often foolish) choices made by the people in charge of it.
It cannot deal with plain error. The full quote from Conrad Russell's An Intelligent Person's Guide to Liberalism is about the necessity for both political and legal accountability.
Political accountability must deal with gross errors of judgement, unworkably drafted legislation, and measures which cannot be enforced. Legal accountability can deal with gross abuses of power and with breaches of clear legal principles. It cannot deal with plain error.
Not firing Carol Beer is an example of plain error. An awful lot of what goes wrong with modern bureaucracies (State and private sector) is that trying to create legal remedies for plain error creates more problems than it solves. But the world where the local Boyar enjoys a de facto droit de seigneur over the peasants as long as he remains useful to the Czar is worse.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
Americans thought that America represented the spirit of humanity long before they were plausibly correct to do so. Novus Ordo Seclorum is definitely making that claim. Arguably Americans thought that America represented the spirit of humanity long before there was an America - John Winthrop's City upon a hill speech is arguably making the claim in 1630.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
In general the interplay of devolution and the judiciary is fascinating. It’s like the UK is cherry-picking bits and pieces of US- or Canadian-style federalism without a real guiding principle of who exactly has authority over what. No British constitution indeed.
Not really, no - that England and Scotland have had separate legal systems despite being part of the same sovereign state predates US-style federalism - the Act of Union was in 1707, and it explicitly left Scots law unchanged. The fact that Scotland had its own legal system but no legislature pre-devolution was one of the constitutional weirdnesses that so offended Tony Blair.
Technically the Supreme Court of the UK (mostly just England, Wales and NI) has ultimate jurisdiction over the Scottish Courts, but cases are vanishingly rare and generally relate to ‘devolution issues’ where controversy over the Scottish government’s authority lies.
The Supreme Court of the UK can't hear direct appeals of Scottish criminal cases (this was part of the deal made in 1707), but you are right that this one could be litigated as a devolution issue - the powers of the Scottish Parliament (like every other UK body with delegated legislative powers) are limited by the Human Rights Act, so if the Scottish law JK Rowling was being prosecuted under violated a ECHR right, it would be ultra vires. If the bad actor here was activist Scottish judges rather than politicians and she was prosecuted under Scots common law then there would be no appeal to a UK court, only to the ECtHR in Strasbourg.
That's Tony Blair for you. Same reason the UK now has a "Supreme Court" despite doing just fine without one for centuries.
"Doing fine without one" is misleading. The UK Supreme Court doesn't have a materially different role to the old Judicial Committee of the House of Lords (i.e. the Law Lords) - it just meets in a different building. I agree with you about Tony Blair feeling the need to rationalise things when there was no practical benefit.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
The thing I have been noticing recently is, when a project inevitably blows past all budgets and timetables, people are like "we should just finish it, the cost won't matter decades from now".
Given the politics of Anglosphere infrastructure projects, this is a rational defensive measure. The main way special interests block projects is by using one set of proxies to drive up the cost by lobbying for scope creep (particularly through the environmental review process) and then using another set of proxies to blame the project's proponents for uncontrolled cost escalation and demand that the project be killed for cost control reasons.
If project supporters commit to going ahead regardless of cost escalation, then this doesn't work (until the cost reaches macro-economically significant levels like CAHSR of HS2).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
As a Brit who has bought two houses, sold one, and walked several friends and work colleagues through the process, the attached articles about the English process (Wales is basically the same, Scotland and Northern Ireland are very different) are accurate. Some thoughts about how the system works in practice:
- Even before you look at the 2nd commission for they buyer's agent, England has lower % commissions - admittedly based on higher average house prices. "Standard" commissions for a full service bricks-and-mortar agent are 2% outside London, 1.5% in London, and are negotiable down on large transactions so in practice the commission is a flat £7,500-£10,000 for houses in the £500k-several million price range. (In all cases add 20% VAT on top). Discount agencies like PurpleBricks or Yopa charge a flat fee of roughly £1,500, but as far as I can see they do the bare minimum work not to get kicked off the property websites (which don't accept FSBOs).
- Given the existence of Zillow-style property websites (the main ones in the UK are Rightmove, Zoopla and OnTheMarket), I don't see what MLS or buyers' agents add to the house-hunting process. Before property websites, a thorough house hunt with no buyer's agent involved speaking in person to 5-10 estate agents in your target neighborhood to see what was on the market.
- I can see the advantages of both parties being represented in complex negotiations - but if you are in complex negotiations you are probably in a chain, and the norm in the English system is that all of the estate agents in the chain are supposed to work together to keep things moving forward - in practice this means that the agent I hired to sell my first house acted as an informal buyer's agent on the purchase of my second house. And I wouldn't trust someone being paid by the seller to represent me in any case!
- If you hire a cheap lawyer to do the conveyancing, it costs about £1,500 for the buyer and £1,000 for the seller. This is usually fixed-price work, not hourly. A licensed conveyencer (i.e. a paralegal who specialises in uncomplicated real estate transactions) would cost about half that. De facto this goes up sublinearly with price because people doing bigger transactions tend to use fancier lawyers. Some of this covers work that would be done by realtors in the US (negotiating the non-price parts of the contract) and some covers work that is done by the title company (like local searches and organising the closing).
- Solicitors get paid anyway, so they feel less urgency about closing transactions than estate agents do - particularly the cheap ones. (At the price level where people have family solicitors, the solicitor will feel the amount of urgency appropriate to the quality of the client relationship).
- A major bogosity of the English system is that it takes a long time to actually close a sale after an estate agent tells you the seller has accepted your offer. The traditional target is 6 weeks from acceptance to exchange of contracts - closing is traditionally 2 weeks after exchange but can be delayed further to fit around removal arrangements etc. The actual average from acceptance to closing is 12 weeks. Obviously delay creates the risk of the seller (in a rising market) or the buyer (in a falling market) opportunistically renegotiating the offer - something referred to by the lovely technical terms gazumping and gazundering respectively (both of which are generally understood by the housing-obsessed English public). It isn't clear why this is, and multiple attempts to fix it have failed.
- England has a Torrens-like registered title system, so a single Land Registry fee covers deed recordation and title insurance (including for any mortgages).
So the total cost of an English residential transaction (excluding the mortgage broker and taxes) looks like:
For a £300,000 semi in the burbs outside London (full service/discount):
- Estate agent £6,000/£1,500
- Seller's solicitor £1,000/£500
- Buyer's solicitor £1,500/£750
- Local search fees £300
- Land Registry fee £150
- Total £9,000/£3,200 (3%/1%)
For a £1-2 million London townhouse:
- Estate agent £7,500-10,000
- Seller's solicitor £1,500-£3,000
- Buyer's solicitor £2,000-£5,000
- Local search fees £500
- Land Registry fee £500
- Total £12-19k (slightly over 1%)
For a US comparison, you would need to add the title company fee and any county deed-related fees to the realtor commission to compare to the UK total.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
It is a running joke in British sports policy that we can only win Olympic medals in sports where you compete sitting down (rowing, canoeing, sailing, equestrianism and cycling). This isn't entirely fair - the modern UK is diverse enough that sometimes a Caribbean immigrant like Linford Christie wins a sprinting event or an East African immigrant like Mo Farah wins a long distance race. It also looks like we have been picking up medals in swimming since Rio.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4mo ago
Now I'm seeing Ingsoc everywhere.
This is deliberate. Nineteen eighty-four (Orwell always spelt out the title) was intended to be a self-preventing prophecy about what was, in 1948 when he wrote the book, a plausible future. In particular, he deliberately set out to write about the nature of totalitarian socialism, rather the accidents of any particular form of it, in order to provide a fully general warning. The name Ingsoc suggests that it evolved from a form of "national socialism" but there are also a lot of hints in the book that Ingsoc actually evolved from some kind of communist-adjacent movement. But by 1984 it has lost almost all traces of the original cover story (economic egalitarianism for communism, racial-national renewal for national socialism) and has gone mask-off about the purpose of power being power, as O'Brien so memorably puts it.
As Eliezer Yudkowsky points out re. superintelligent AI, acquiring power is an intermediate goal of almost all optimisation processes. And totalitarian socialism is the best way for a movement that has or can reasonably hope to achieve control of a state to consolidate and extend its power in the medium term. So every political movement that doesn't have guardrails against it "wants" to become totalitarian. At the time Orwell wrote the book, the western democracies had weakened their guardrails deliberately in order to mobilise against the Axis, and a lot of people (cough, Joe McCarthy, cough) wanted to weaken them further, at least notionally in order to defeat the Soviet Union. A well-targetted memetic immune system in the minds of the elite (the "High" in Goldstein's theory of oligarchy) and potential counter-elites (the "Middle") is a powerful new guardrail. And it still works.
You should be seeing tendencies towards Ingsoc everywhere - Orwell wants you to be on your guard against totalitarian tendencies, regardless of whether they wrap themselves in the Bible, the Flag, the Constitution, the Universal Brotherhood of Man, or Martin Luther King's burial shroud. And he wants you to have the language to call them out. Above all, he wants you to focus on the correct target. Newspeak and doublethink should be scarier than swastikas or hammer-and-sickles.
You will notice that when we want to call out totalitarian tendencies, we still use language taken from Nineteen eighty-four. Orwell was very good at what he was doing.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
23d ago
The step-up basis makes sense to avoid double taxation in a world where there is a meaningful inheritance tax - the estate pays IHT instead of CGT on the gain from acquisition to death, and the heir's cost basis is the value on which IHT was paid.
In a world with no inheritance taxes, there is a reasonable argument that heirs should have zero cost basis in inherited assets - they didn't pay anything for them!
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
23d ago
The big deal here is salmon fishing, which is a perennial (though again, died down in recent years) tussle between the holder of the fishing rights on the river (who is selling them as part of the package of tourism to overseas fishermen for the whole experience) and the local guys fishing the river (poaching) and selling on the salmon.
There is a reason why the UK will send you to jail for 2 years for handling a salmon in suspicious circumstances.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
At world market prices, HFCS was more expensive than cane sugar, so the only products which contained HFCS are ones that are intentionally made to American recipes. HFCS was an originally an American work-around for a cockamamie government sugar policy, and is now the driver for that policy (because of the lobbying power of Archer-Daniels-Midland).
This is starting to change as cane sugar prices have increased since 2010 and the Chinese are getting into the HFCS business in response.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
13d ago
On one hand this is fair. Elon definitely has more strings to pull than the protestors right now, but that's a pretty short-sighted view. In 20 years, the current class of Columbia isn't going to have access to the corridors of power, they're going to occupy them. The attitudes at Columbia are going to be beltway consensus in 20 years. That's a much bigger issue than people mouthing off on twitter.
If the situation in the Ivies is anything like my experience of Oxbridge, students who are going to grow up as pillars of the establishment have always LARPed as anti-establishment rebels on campus, and "Free Palestine" has been the hardy perennial of anti-establishment left issues since I was in primary school. The views of the pro-establishment left in the US on the I-P conflict have not materially changed during this time, despite the modern pro-establishment left incorporating a generation of kids who went on Free Palestine marches for campus-left clout as undergraduates 20-40 years ago. There is a lot of media coverage indicating that the average non-Arab attendee at the pro-Palestine protests doesn't understand the conflict and is just showing up in order to support the Current Thing - this is an example of social copying, not successful indoctrination.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
There were fewer 'instant fail' conditions that would render you unable to continue as a functional member of society.
Probably only true for men. If you were a woman, getting pregnant out of wedlock pre-Roe (and pre-modern contraception) was an instant fail, as was marrying a shit-tier guy (drunks, criminals, drifters etc.) There were also a lot of ways a young woman could breach propriety which were in effect instant fails because they made it unlikely that a non shit-tier guy would want to marry her.
It is also worth remembering that the point at which a 100-IQ hard-working guy can come back from a serious injury (even one under sympathetic circumstances like battlefield injuries or workplace accidents) that leaves him unable to do heavy manual work was post-WW2 in most places.
Older whites with below-average education are now the core right-wing constituency in every historically-white democracy, and hatred for people like Hilary Clinton is a large part of the reason they got that way. In the US, non-College whites started swinging to Republicans as soon as Obama was elected. Taking advantage of a pre-existing trend is exactly the sort of thing empty suits are good at.
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