MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
No bio...
User ID: 896
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.
Boris is intelligent. Unfortunately many British politicians studied PPE (Politics, Philosophy and Economics) at Oxford, which is notoriously an easy subject. (Why doesn't a PPEist get up in the morning? Becuase then they wouldn't have anything to do in the afternoon) Boris studied Greats, which is basically a broad-based course in Ancient Roman and Greek society based on reading the primary sources in the original languages. It is traditionally seen as the hardest course Oxford has to offer, although the mathematicians and physicists naturally disagree. His tutors said he could have got a First if he applied himself.
Boris's vices are laziness and incuriosity, not stupidity.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
This is classic social psych bullshit in a right-wing wrapper. There are two lying-with-statistics tricks going on here:
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Non-standard terminology. The definition of "elite 1%" excludes the vast majority of elites who live in rich suburbs. They define elite 1% as meeting all 3 of postgraduate degree (this covers 14% of the population), household income over $150k (trivial for a two-income PMC couple in a HCOL city - two schoolteachers with masters degrees would probably qualify) and living in a zip code with a population density over 10k/square mile (only a few % of the population - looking at zipatlas.com these zip codes are mostly downtown districts, prisons and campuses with their own zip codes, NYC, and dense inner suburbs of LA.) So the most restrictive condition is the population density one, which is not a measure of eliteness - it is a proxy for alignment with the tribe Rasmussen wants to bash.
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Garden of forking paths. The authors switch between "the elite 1%", "elite 1% graduates of a semi-arbitrary list of 12 schools" and "politically obsessed members of the elite 1%" as needed to make the point they are making. We don't know how many other cuts of the data they ran before they chose those ones.
Rasmussen are saying that they have surveyed the elite and found that they are out of touch with America. What they have actually done is surveyed the subset of the PMC that chooses to live in the densest 2% of zip codes, and their interns played with crosstabs until they found some subsets of that group who are, indeed, profoundly out of touch with America. This is about as meaningful as doing some vox pops with stoners in downtown Portland.
See this Arnold Kling post and comments for more details.
I think it’s clear that these are the people with actual power and influence, the ones who set the agenda, the key actors in tech, media, government and law. They create outcomes, or lack thereof. Just about every judge would be elite by this definition, along with nearly all AI workers (OK maybe not the work-from-home guys in the Colorado mountains). All lobbyists, the heads of most NGOs, the most important lawyers – everyone except the right-wing politicians who seem unable to achieve any of their goals.
Apart from Manhattanites, quite the opposite. Who has more power and influence - the residents of DC or the government officials who commute in from the burbs? The people of Anaheim and Inglewood or the people of Beverley Hills? 90210 is by the definition used in this study a non-elite zip code.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
10mo ago
Ironically, it leads to a case for an interesting question - if Trump had merely attached his vibe to Ted Cruz' political platform in 2016, would he still have won?
No, if Ted Cruz's platform includes monkeying about with Social Security (which he supported as a Senator, but went quiet about once he started running for President). The fact that Trump was not affiliated with the traditional right wing of the Republican party and was therefore credible when he promised to protect Social Security and Medicare was critical to his ballot box success.
DeSantis can't win the presidential election even if he takes the primary, Trump can.
Trump would have lost to an empty suit in 2016 in the Democrats had managed to run one and did lose to an empty suit in 2020. Thinking that Trump is unusually popular with the median voter is "How could Nixon have won? Nobody I know voted for him" level stupid. DeSantis, on the other hand, was re-elected by a landslide in what used to be considered a purple slate.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3mo 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
6mo ago
I'm not going to begrudge anyone the schadenfreude of watching the other tribe beclowning themselves, and this is absolutely fucking hilarious for anyone with a functioning sense of humour even if they are basically pro-Ukraine and pro-Trudeau, but I don't think this means very much.
Legislatures get a lot of requests from members to do small favours for a constituent (see this Atlantic article about the plethora of bills to rename Post Offices for the US version) and generally operate an assumption of good faith as long as the request doesn't come across as partisan. The most famous example is the Texas Legislature being pranked into honouring a serial killer. The US Congress begrudgingly allocates a certain amount of staffer time to vetting post office renamings to make sure they don't honour anyone unsuitable, but the actual legislators wave requests through as long as the home-state delegation are onside. Other legislatures have less staff support than Congress, so they can't even do that level of vetting.
This is a case where you shouldn't have needed to do the vetting - anyone with a clue should know that "Ukrainian patriot fighting Soviets in WW2" implies "Nazi collaborator", but the only person I would expect to do even the bare minimum is Speaker Rota as the constituency MP honouring a constituent. So I think he deserves to go. But I don't think the Canadian Parliament as an institution is more blameworthy than the Texas Legislature was in 1971.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6mo ago
The relationship between McCarthyism and The Crucible is more complex than this, in a way which explains why 1950's anti-communism is as thoroughly discredited as it is.
The Crucible begins with allegations, backed by evidence, that a group of young women including Betty Parris and Abigail Williams were dancing naked in the trees (which was clearly illegal and considered dangerous in Puritan Salem, even if we moderns don't see it that way), that Tituba appeared to be casting spells on them (something everyone in 17th century Salem agreed was possible and dangerous, even though it isn't), and that they suffered strange symptoms as a result (which we now believe to be ergotism caused by rotten grain, but nobody knew that at the time). So the first batch of witchcraft allegations are serious and true in-universe. It then moves on to random accusations against low-status easy targets as Tituba and Abigail try to deflect blame (we don't know who most of the women called out are, but we are later told that Goody Good and Goody Osburn were dubiously sane old maids and that Goody Osburn had been homeless at one point). And then in the second act we get the bad-faith accusations against respectable middle-class Salemites. Miller is deliberately vague as to whether these are motivated by factional politics (there was an ongoing feud between the Putnams and the Nurses in real Salem, and Miller's Giles Corey thinks the whole thing is a plot by the Putnams to steal his land), personal beefs (like Abigail being butthurt after Proctor dumped her), or attempts to silence opposition (like the arrest of Proctor).
This is supposed to mirror the decline and fall of 50's anti-communism. McCarthy starts out by going after actual communists like the Rosenbergs, moves on to people on the left who are a bit weird, acquires a reputation for using bad-faith accusations of communist sympathy to silence opposition, and eventually ends up using bad-faith accusations of communist sympathy to pursue personal beefs. Remember the reason that McCarthy ultimately fell is that he dishonestly denounced various army officers who refused to give his lawyer's catamite a cushy job.
So the message Miller is trying to present is twofold:
- Like witches, communist fellow travellers are probably not as dangerous as you think they are (which did not age well)
- If you promote overzealous witch-hunters, you end up with a culture where dishonest allegations of witchcraft are a routine political tool (which did - with swapped partisan valence it is the core argument of liberal anti-SJWism)
Although his first targets are now known to be guilty, there is zero doubt that by the end McCarthy was spamming dishonest allegations of communist sympathy as a political tool, and that the anti-communist movement in the country fully supported him in doing so. This should have, and did, discredit anti-communism, and boost anti-anti-communism as an organising principle for the radical left - with the unfortunate side effect of partially rehabilitating communist fellow travellers. If McCarthy didn't want that to happen, then he should have admitted that George Marshall was a patriot and that Peress' promotion was routine based on the number of years since he graduated dental school.
Although anti-fascist movements spamming allegations of "fascist" against non-fascists are a dime a dozen on the anti-establishment left, they never had an HUAC/SSCI-sized platform until the Great Awokening (I also think they were idiots spamming "fascist" against almost everyone, rather than using it as a calculated tool against political opponents the way McCarthy did with "communist" or the ADL increasingly do with "Hate"). We are already seeing the consequences - organised anti-fascism is seen as a bad joke on the anti-establishment right, and the anti-establishment right is increasingly losing its desire to avoid looking fascist. In Italy, we have an actual fascist Prime Minister, in the sense that Fratelli d'Italia's predecessor party claimed spiritual continuity with Mussolini's Fascist Party and received the endorsement of the Mussolini family on that basis. We are also starting to see the pro-establishment right treat organised anti-fascism as a partisan grift, although they are still afraid of it. We are even starting to see (so far unsuccessful) attempts by the pro-establishment left to neuter woke-stupid the way the Army neutered anti-communism in the Army-McCarthy hearings.
If woke-stupid and dishonest anti-fascism fail, then even the good anti-fascism is going to be caught in the collateral damage, and there will be some inevitable (and unfortunate) rehabilitation of fascism and fascist fellow travellers, and Planet of Cops will have the same kind of reputation that The Crucible does now.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
10mo ago
In the 1980s and well into the 1990s the Holocaust was on the back burner in the UK for the same reason - as long as significant numbers of people who remembered the Blitz were still alive, no Briton was going to bellyfeel that anything else was Hitler's worst crime. The way history was taught in British schools was that Hitler was the evil Lord of Evil because he was bent on Alexander the Great/Genghis Khan style world conquest long after this had ceased to be acceptable behaviour. This became a Problem that required large-scale British military intervention to stop him several years before anyone came up with the Holocaust.
During the heroic period of WW2 (for the UK, from the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939 to El Alamein in July 1942), we couldn't have been fighting Hitler in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent the Holocaust, because the Holocaust hadn't started yet.
FWIW, I still think that the traditional British view is correct (which was also the view of the Nuremberg prosecutors), and that the Holocaust lobby is wrong - Hitler's worst crime was starting WW2. He isn't uniquely evil compared to other warmongering megalomanicas, just uniquely deadly because of the large European population in the 20th century.
Interestingly, I think the difference between the Special Olympics and the Paralympics is a very good intuition pump for the trans and intersex in women's sports issue.
The purpose of the Paralympics is to increase the range of body types that can experience elite athletic competition - in particular to include disabled ones. So once you qualify, the competition is as intense as it is in the Olympics. So naturally you need rules which are hard to cheese - including about eligibility. Someone who does not have the type of body that the Paralympics are for entering the Paralympics defeats the purpose of the event. (The London 2012 Paralympic programme featured a Paralympian joking that "Paralympians spend as much time trying to get classified as more severely disabled than they actually are as Olympians spend trying to conceal their performance-enhancing drug use" - gaming eligibility is considered the same tier of filthy cheating as doping.)
The purpose of the Special Olympics is to showcase the achievements of an underrepresented group. Although it is still competitive, and people still try to win, the stakes are intentionally lower and the aim is to encourage an atmosphere of friendly competition, sportsmanship, and health and social benefits to non-winning participants. As a corollary, the Special Olympics can be less careful about eligibility. (They allow anyone with a relevant diagnosis from their own doctor to participate without them having to be formally "classified" by a Special Olympics doctor the way Paralympians are.)
Are women's sports more like the Paralympics or the Special Olympics? People involved in elite women's sports are 100% clear that they are like the Paralympics - the aim is to allow a wider range of bodies (i.e. female ones) to compete at an elite level. So allowing male-bodied people who count as women to enter defeats the purpose, because they don't have the right type of bodies. The only question about allowing trans women is whether taking cross-sex hormones that stabilize your testosterone in the female-typical range makes your body effectively female. (And the answer varies by sport) But a lot of advocates for women's sports think of them as more like the Special Olympics - the aim is to showcase the achievements of female athletes in a way which encourages women and girls to exercise more. And in that case, if you think that trans and intersex "women" are part of the underrepresented group you are trying to showcase, then of course they should be able to participate.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5mo ago
I remember the Nyberg story at the time, and a large part of the pushback was that some of the evidence proving that Nyberg was a paedophile was posts it had made under its previous male identity, which made it easy to shout about gamergaters "outing trans people".
Something similar happened with Aimee Challenor, except on a grander scale.
The serious point here is that "trans people deserve to have their pre-transition identities memory-holed under penalty of strong anti-discrimination laws and norms" and "people can self-identify as trans" implies that anyone can memory-hole their past. And this is particularly attractive to paedophiles and other scum.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6mo ago
I'm not seeing a real vibe shift here. The pro-establishment left in the US has always been pro-Israel (anti-Israel views are the only left-wing views people were ever cancelled for in establishment institutions, with Steven Salaita the most famous example) and the anti-establishment left has always been anti-Israel, and often rabidly so. The pro-establishment left have always despised the anti-establishment left with the same level of vitriol and for the same reasons that the pro-establishment right despise the MAGA right, and anti-anti-Semitism is used to enforce the left edge of the Overton window in the same way that anti-racism is used to enforce the right edge. It's just that they kept quiet about it for a while after the George Floyd asphyxiation because they were afraid of being called racist.
"The left are cheering Hamas" on your social media dashboard because the people you follow are signal-boosting a small number of idiots, some of whom are tenured academics or leaders of usual-suspects lefty student groups, but most of whom are randos. This is the usual suspects coming out in force - anyone on the pro-establishment left who are surprised by this is an idiot, and I suspect most of the pro-establishment lefties claiming to be surprised are faking it.
The number of Democratic office-holders, university administrators at Dean/Deputy Provost level or above, NYT journalists, or woke corporate executives who are saying these things is negligible. I'm sure that Jewish-American elites don't like the fact that the Squad have called for de-escalation and said that the US should not fund Israeli war crimes in Gaza, but this is the kind of milquetoast stuff that anti-establishment figures who are testing the edges of the Overton window say, not "The left are cheering Hamas". Rashida Tlaib has gone further than the rest because she is Palestinian - again the fact that she is rabidly anti-Israel should surprise zero people who are paying attention.
Another interesting side of the discourse is what will happen in Europe
In Western Europe, normies ran out of sympathy for both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict decades ago. Everyone except the usual suspects on the anti-establishment left is lining up to condemn the latest round of Hamas atrocities because they are unusually barbaric, but in a month's time we are going to be back to "Hundreds dead in Middle East. Bear shat in woods. Football scores to follow." I can't tell Arabs from Europeans in the dark, but the pro-Hamas protest outside the Israeli embassy in London looked like it was majority south Asian Muslim.
A stirring speech, but the paean to martial honour that it is built around has always been the minority view among those who fought and bled in industrial-age warfare. The politics of Reconstruction-era America, like the politics of inter-war Europe, was defined by never again. So, in a more uplifting way, was the politics of post-WW2 Europe. War is the price we pay to preserve peace, not something valuable in its own right. This view, too, is in the old books, because things change less than you think. I think it is most eloquently put by John Adams in a letter to his wife:
The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.
The virtues of American (and before it, British) commercial culture are deep and wide - and, incidentally, unmatched on the battlefield. They should be celebrated for what they are, not compared unfavourably to the martial virtues that we appear to have given up for them. And we remember those who died to preserve them for what they gave up, not what they represent.
If the dead of Gettysburg could talk, would they agree with OWH or John Adams? Mass literacy continued to advance over the intervening decades, and the dead of Flanders speak to us through their letters. Famously, they agree with the living of their generation - war is hell, and war on that scale should only be fought to end all wars.
We men of the factories and counting-houses are not without honour (serial bankrupt Donald Trump excepted). "Dictum Meum Pactum" - "My word is my bond" - the motto of the London Stock Exchange. "The full faith and credit of the United States Government". These mean something (although unfortunately less than they would have done to John Quincy Adams), and people sleep more soundly at night knowing that they will not be ruined because of them. What are Mensur scars or the broken necks of the polo ground which OWH so admires when compared to the skills and spills of modern football (Association or gridiron) - whether you compare the quality of the spectacle at the top of the sport or the ratio of characters built to bodies maimed at the grassroots. Mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture are advanced wonderously.
And perhaps we should be more gracious if our granddaughters want to waste some of their time on painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain. Rome, after all, is remembered as much for her achievements in those areas as for her battlefield victories.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
Not to mention the fact that Nature is British. I suspect they see themselves as global (and therefore American, or at least entitled to comment on American domestic politics), but the journal is historically British, the company that publishes it is the London-based subsidiary of a German corporate parent, and the editor-in-chief and most of the editorial team are based in London.
Foreign endorsements almost always hurt the endorsee. The most notorious examples are Putin's endorsement of Donald Trump and Obama's endorsement of remain in the Brexit referendum - both elections were close enough that there is an outside chance that the foreign endorsement flipped the result in the opposite way to the one intended.
I would expect Science to endorse an American political candidate and (to a lesser extent, because Science is published by the AAAS but Nature is not published by the BAAS, Nature to endorse a British political candidate) if science was actually at stake - for example if one candidate was expected to dramatically cut science funding or introduce political litmus tests for receiving it. Nature sort-of endorsed remain, reflecting the (correct) views of the vast majority of British scientists that Brexit would be bad for science. But for Nature to endorse a candidate in a non-British election is stupid.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
This hilarious Noahopinion essay says that modern Tankies are about 2000 people on Twitter who get more attention than they deserve because they are so good at trolling other prominent left-Twitter factions.
I don't know about the 2000 Twitter trolls theory, but I agree with Noah that the root cause is anti-Americanism taken to the level where the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
I think the same applies to the increasingly numerous "right-Tankies" (such as the one who took over the CPAC twitter account), who see the American government and American-led alliance system as part of the woke enemy. I am not sure what you call right-wingers who express Tankie-like sentiments - Quisling seems unfairly harsh, although this really is the kind of sentiment that enabled people like Quisling and Petain in WW2.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5mo ago
The issue for the US's current recruitment woes comes from how the generational transition has matched to politics. The 9-11 recruitment cohort is dead, dead, dead. If you look at age averages, the vast majority of US service members were born after 9-11. If you joined just after 9-11, you are that tiny minority of people who serve a full 20 (for a pension) or go beyond. That means people who joined during the Bush years, have gradually and progressively lost during the Obama years / saw the Trump years / are back in the Obama 2.0/Biden years. There's any number of things that could justify a feeling of disenchantment, from perceptions of futility of the wars, to the progression culture war aspects into military culture/life, and so on.
AARGH. I have lived longer since 9/11 than I had lived before 9/11. I am OLD. I will DIE. NOOOOOO. Why did you have to point this out?
Seriously, middle-aged people underestimate how long ago the worldview-forming events of their youth are. The Boomers used to be the main culprits - Vietnam is about equidistant between WW1 and the present, let alone WW2 - but it is starting to hit Xers and Millenials like me. I work as a risk manager, and my number 1 piece of advice to noobs is "The next Great Crash will happen when the people who remember 2008 look like old fogies. And I am part of the youngest cohort who remember 2008, so be very careful if you think I am an old fogie."
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5mo ago
Agreed. Wikimedia is a hugely profitable business, operated on a pay-what-you-want business model. It is impossible to tell just how profitable because the published accounts don't distinguish between spending that supports the encyclopedia and community (paying the salaries of the Wikimedia software developers, subsidising conference attendance for Wikipedia editors from poor countries etc.) and spending which is actually distributing profits to the pro-establishment leftist causes that Wikipedia's stakeholders like.
Per this 80,000 hours article, fundraising for ineffective charities (or for-profits masquerading as charities) is one of the most destructive things you can legally do because it reduces donations to effective charities. The Wikimedia Foundation know that their appeals are deceptive and that their marginal grantee is ineffective, so I have no qualms about calling them an evil organisation. (This is despite the fact that, unlike most Motteposters, I do not consider the pro-establishment left to be per se evil).
The English Wikipedia community who are actually editing the encyclopedia are eccentric but not evil, and produce a pretty good encyclopedia.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6mo ago
It's more that the OG Bill of Rights was only enforceable against the Federal government, not the States.
It is more likely than not that the Reconstruction Congress intended the privileges and immunities clause of the 14th amendment to make the Bill of Rights enforceable against the States ("No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States") but the corrupt pro-South Supreme Court ruled otherwise in the Slaughterhouse Cases. Rather than doing the sensible thing and just overruling Slaughterhouse alongside Plessey as bad Jim Crow law, the Civil Rights era SCOTUS used substantive due process to enforce these rights - as late as 2010 SCOTUS rejected the argument that the 2nd amendment was directly enforceable against the states under the privileges and immunities clause. So there is a whole line of silly doctrine that takes the 14th seriously while claiming not to.
In my view, there is a good originalist argument against incorporating the 2nd amendment against the States. The corresponding argument against incorporating the Establishment clause of the 1st amendment has been endorsed by Clarence Thomas in some of his dissents and concurrences. Based on the text, the original purpose of the 2nd amendment was to protect the State militias against Federal interference. (This is perfectly compatible with the idea that the 2nd amendment created an individual right enforceable against the Federal government - State militias were not required to and often did not keep membership rolls at the time, so many militia members were "just private gun owners" on paper). Incorporating the amendment against the States takes away the States' right to regulate their own militias, so it changes the nature of the right protected, whereas incorporating a right like trial by jury only changes the scope of the remedy available. Similarly, the Establishment clause was intended to protect State-level established religions (like Massachusetts puritanism) from Federal interference, not ban them.
Obviously nobody is going to make that argument, because it gores both sides' oxen.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6mo ago
For the avoidance of doubt, the "Slovak Republic" in question was a puppet state set up following the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. Tifo was a Nazi collaborator and was quite properly hanged for treason by the short-lived democratic government that ruled post-war Czechoslovakia before the Soviets consolidated thei control.
Everything the "Slovak Aryanization agency" and suchlike did was more or less enthusiastic implementation of decisions taken in Berlin.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
10mo ago
Progressivism is the ideology of the PMC centre-left in the Anglosphere. You can see a certain commonality of thought, as well as an unbroken lineage of individual progressives, back to the turn-of-the-century capital-P Progressives like Teddy Roosevelt and Bob La Follette. The key constant ideas as I see it are:
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Society is improving over time both materially and morally because of technocratic elites making correct decisions. We should strive to be on the right side of history.
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Planning is possible and desirable.
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Educated people should rule. Decisions which can be reduced to technical questions should be left to appropriately-qualified technical experts, decisions which have an unavoidable political component should be made by people with a broad education in morally correct thinking.
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Education is good. More education is better.
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There is too much economic inequality in the US c. 1900 or 2000. Slightly less economic inequality would be better, but not so much equality that the upper-middle-class can no longer enjoy an upper-middle-class lifestyle. 1950s US or modern Scandinavian levels of inequality are fine.
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Separately from the inequality issue, real material deprivation (starvation/homelessness etc.) is very, very bad and we should try to eliminate it, first in our own countries and then globally.
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Political violence (including war between countries) is very, very bad and we should try to eliminate it. (Lots of intra-progressive disagreement about the best way to do this)
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Highbrow art is a public good and should be subsidised. Lowbrow art and the preferred intoxicants of the working class are corrupting and should be banned if possible. (Also lots of intra-progressive disagreement about what is possible)
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Traditional religion is bad.
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Bigotry is bad. (Lots of intra-progressive disagreement over which discrimination is bigoted and which is justified - pre-WW2 progressives being pro-eugenics is the most famous example)
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These ideas are culturally universal and good people all over the world are already American progressives, even if they don' t know it yet.
Because Marxist socialism never managed to build a mass working-class movement in the Anglosphere, Marxism in the Anglosphere is a weird sub-sect of progressivism. (This isn't true in Continental Europe, where most countries had nominally Marxist parties with mass working-class memberships organised through the unions.) There is clearly a correlation between weird sectarian progressivism (including, but not limited to, being a Marxist in the Anglosphere) and weird lifestyle experimentation such that Orwell as able to say, correctly, that
One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England
and still be mostly correct a century later. (He also includes teetotallers and vegetarians in the list in other writings). But most progressives wear suits to their boring middle-management job and listen to NPR/Radio 4 while commuting from their suburban homes where they raise 1.6 children in a monogamous traditional family.
Wokism is the specific hobby-horse that organised progressivism has taken up in the 2010's.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5mo ago
The big idea of sex-positive feminism is that women should be able to pursue sexual pleasure in the same way men do (ignoring the fact that men who pursued sexual pleasure freely were considered rakes and being shot by the girl's father or brother was a real risk). From this perspective, the sexual revolution has failed because women are not in fact getting off on the casual sex they have been liberated to have - the "orgasm gap". The Big Lie of the Sexual Revolution was that women were leaving a lot of sexual pleasure on the table pre-Revolution by abstaining from casual sex. At a marginally more cynical level, it was that the average 20-something woman was leaving a truly humungous amount of sexual pleasure on the table, because she could get X amount of casual sex if she wasn't sexually repressed, and a man getting X amount of casual sex was a superstud.
If you can't admit that men and women are different in ways which mean that normal women were never going to get off on the kinds of casual sex available in a competitive sexual marketplace, then the cope is to blame men for being selfish and inconsiderate in bed. This is a big part of why the "campus rape crisis" and related debates about sexual ethics are so insane - the mischief the sex-positive feminists actually want to deal with is poor technical performance in the bedroom, but the only language they have to deal with it is consent.
Religious conservatives and sex-negative feminists both agree that casual sex in the society that exists is inherently degrading to women, that women should choose not to engage in it, and that men should be punished for engaging in it. Their inability to admit that they are allies on this point was a running joke among libertarians and sex-positive feminists since at least the 1990s - I first came across it in PJ O'Rourke's 1994 book All the Trouble in the Word
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6mo ago
You have to feel for him, ever so slightly, in that he was elected on a peace platform of negotiating with Russia and the breakaway republics... and then was forced into the war by the Ukrainian ultranationalist in the Ukrainian perma-government who would have 100% assassinated him if he'd actually negotiated agreeable terms or peace the Russian tanks rolling across the border and the associated demands for concessions from NATO that Zelensky wasn't in a position to make.
FIFY
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
Landlords in poorer areas earn “basically double” those in more affluent districts — an extra $50 per apartment per month, after expenses. The outperformance, calculated from national surveys, held even when researchers factored in faster price rises in richer areas.
They have to do a lot more landlording for the money. Renting to non-fuckups is easy - you just advertise the property and cash the rent cheques. If you need a repair done, you can usually give the tenant your handyman's number and tell them to sort it out and send you the bill. Renting to fuckups is painful. Even Desmond points out it is high risk (trash-outs, drug dens, long-term nonpayers whose evictions get dragged out), but it is also more work - chasing late rent, arranging repairs around uncooperative tenants, making sure the place isn't being trashed. And if you rent at the bottom end of the market in your metro area, most of your tenants are fuckups.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4mo ago
Upvoted for capital-T Truth.
We can argue about the allegorical meaning of Genesis 2 and how it relates to human sexuality until we are blue in the face, but you should always start with the literal meaning.
The literal meaning of Genesis 2, if you give it its usual context in the Christian story (as, for example, represented by its use as the first lesson in a standard Christmas carol service), is that the original sin was independent moral discernment. Satan's promise is not money, or sex, or power - it is to possess the moral wisdom of God. There are plenty of other scriptural passages reinforcing this. And certainly when I was taught Christian morality, both as child in nominally-Christian schools in the UK and as a potential convert in university, the key message was that the only real sin is rebellion against divine authority, and the drinking and sabbath-breaking flows from that.
All the Abrahamic religions are fundamentally about total submission of human will to God's. Judaism, Islam, and Protestantism all have a tradition of religious scholarship where all moral wisdom that humanity will ever have is already written down in a closed canon of fundamental works (either directly from divinely-inspired authors, or preserved commentary based on lost divinely-inspired sources) and the work of religious scholars is just to interpret it. Catholicism and Orthodoxy both claim that there is a still-living tradition capable of generating new moral wisdom, but that there is no access to God outside it.
This is why "Abrahamic religion bad" comes so easily to non-religious Americans - the great American social experiment is fundamentally about allowing independent moral judgement at the lowest possible level.
First, torture including torture as part of military intelligence gathering as well as counterinsurgency was used for thousands of years probably in every war humans fought.
And here is the rub. The argument the anti-torture crowd are making is not "Torture is useless for all purposes." It is "Statements made under torture are unusually unreliable, and therefore interrogation under torture does not produce actionable intelligence." The premise has been a principle of English evidence law since time immemorial (the first explicit documentation that torture evidence is never admissible in English courts is as late as the 1460's, but Fortescue implies that the rule was old in his day), and the conclusion follows from it as night follows day.
The famous medieval civil and ecclesiastical torturers did not use torture to extract intelligence - they used it to extract confessions (usually true ones, as is the case with all corrupt policing, but frequently false ones) - because this worked in Roman-law inspired systems including Canon Law everywhere and Civil Law in most of Continental Europe.
In wartime, we don't have as much visibility because military law isn't a thing until modern bureaucratic states. We do know that medieval knights liked to "get medieval" on defeated peasants and townsfolk, but this doesn't look like torture for intelligence gathering - based on my knowledge it is a combination of sadistic revenge and torture as a terror-weapon to deter future rebellions. "Getting medieval" on knightly POWs was prohibited by the rules of Chivalry (which doesn't mean that it didn't happen, of course, but it does mean that it was not seen as a usual incident of warfare).
When military law does become a thing, the first written prohibition of torturing POWs appears to be included in the 1863 Lieber Code (issued by Abraham Lincoln to govern Union troops in the Civil War - again the Lieber code states that it is formalising a rule that has existed for a long time. The Lieber Code formed the basis of the 1907 Hague Convention which was the first international treaty prohibiting torture in wartime. The Hague Convention was agreed by military leaders who all agreed that aggressive war was legal and sometimes ethical, and from the records of the debates leading up to the Convention we know that they would not have banned torture if they thought it had military utility.
The reason for this is obvious. Telling someone in a position to inflict pain on you truth they don't want to hear is a bad idea (just like speaking truth to power in any other context), and we all know this viscerally. The only way to make the torture stop is to work out what the torturer wants to hear, and tell them that. So the only truth you can extract under torture is the truth you already know. In theory you could develop a technique of interrogation under torture where you "calibrated" the victim's response by asking questions you did know the answer to and punishing incorrect answers before switching to the information you actually wanted. In practice, nobody has done this, and the people who have the expertise required to do it are unanimous that you would be better off offering a hot meal and a cigarette in exchange for sincere co-operation.
The most famous example of systematic use of torture for intelligence gathering in a counterinsurgency was the French in Algeria. They lost that one. The most recent example was the waterboarding of KSM and a small number of other high-value Al-Quaeda captives at CIA black sites. Eventually KSM realised that what he needed to say to stop the torture was that Saddam Hussein was helping him. Obviously, that was believed stat by the Bush administration. They lost that one too.
To me, the proximate cause of the shitshow is that Boris has character flaws which made him a bad Prime Minister (and would make him unsuitable for any kind of executive leadership in any organisation) but which never became obvious to the Tory grassroots. Boris is lazy, intellectually incurious and lacks attention to detail. He lies constantly, and thinks rules don't apply to him (or his mates). He is willing to beclown himself to get an attractive woman into bed, or to get invited to the right high society parties. And according to Dominic Cummings he has difficulty saying "no" to people, which is utterly fatal in an executive. To make matters worse, he found himself entering Downing Street with a ruinously expensive divorce and a ruinously expensive trophy wife, so he needed a side hustle on top of his PM's salary.
All this was familiar to people who had worked with Boris, including Tory MPs. Much of the dishonesty and sexual immorality was public record. And it wasn't just Labourites saying this - immediately after David Cameron resigns following the 2016 referendum Michael Gove publicly refuses to back Johnson, saying that he is unsuitable to be PM (and torpedoing has campaign, getting us Theresa May). Max Hastings (probably the most distinguished right-wing journalist in the UK, and Boris's editor at the Telegraph) wrote multiple articles calling out his unsuitability (this Guardian article being the best non-paywalled example). After the fact, Dominic Cummings notoriously brings receipts re. how badly these flaws affected Johnson's administration in practice.
Given these handicaps, how does Boris get elected Tory leader (and therefore PM) in 2019? The vast majority of the Tory grassroots supports hard Brexit (i.e. the whole UK, including Northern Ireland, completely out of the EU Single Market and Customs Union), as do about 1/3 of the MPs, whereas Theresa May has negotiated a deal which leaves the UK in the EU Single Market for goods in order to avoid the need for a customs border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Some of the hard Brexit MPs vote against the deal, scuppering it. At this point there is a series of catastrophic election defeats for the Conservative party - it isn't obvious whether Tory voters dislike May's deal and prefer a harder Brexit, or if they simply want any deal to get done so that Brexit is over, the UK is out of the EU, and we can get on with life. But the Tory activists are clear that their problem is that May's deal is "not real Brexit", which allows the hard Brexit faction of the MPs to win the internal party debate. Johnson is elected leader because he is by far the most charismatic hard Brexit supporter, and the Tory MPs and members think they need a charismatic leader to rebuild the Party.
At this point, a kind of epistemic closure sets in among the Tory grassroots. The pro-hard-Brexit MPs and their supporters in the media know that supporting Johnson is the only way to deliver hard Brexit, so they don't talk about his character flaws. The pro-hard-Brexit grassroots won't listen to anyone else, because they interpret attacks on Johnson's character as a Remoaner plot to scupper Brexit. And Johnson delivers by negotiating a different bad deal to May (Johnson's deal effectively leaves Northern Ireland in the EU), lying to the voters that it is a good deal, fighting and winning a general election on the basis of his deal, and then promptly trying to rat out of it. At the end of January 2020, Britain leaves the EU. Brexit is now effectively irreversible (to reenter the EU would require a formal application process taking several years, and unanimous support from the other EU member states), but hard Brexit supporters remain paranoid about Remoaner plots to reverse it, so they still are not willing to take the issue of Johnson's character seriously. There is also an "evaporative cooling" dynamic going on, where Conservative activists who are not hard Brexit supporters drift away from the party. Something similar happens with the MPs, because a lot of remained MPs are forced out of the Conservative party during the shenanigans in late 2019 (and then lose their seats in the election) and almost all the new intake are hard Brexit supporters because activists control candidate selection in UK political parties.
Sometimes people with these flaws and sufficient charisma can be effective leaders. One way of doing it is to appoint good people who don't need managing, and then not manage them. This worked well at the Spectator (talented journalists are almost impossible to manage anyway) and tolerably well as Mayor of London (everything Boris got personally involved in went to shit, but the Greater London Authority is deliberately set up to stop the Mayor getting involved in the operational details of policing or public transport, which are the main things the Mayor is responsible for). It The other is to be a hands-off CEO who focusses on motivational speeches and appoint a trusted COO to actually run things. This worked as PM until Boris's sycophants (probably including his new wife) convinced him that he didn't need Dominic Cummings.
After Cummings is sacked in November 2020, Boris Johnson has to actually govern, and he does so poorly. In particular, we never learn what "levelling up" (the key promise to the new Conservative voters in the north of England) actually means, and there is no serious attempt to capture any benefits of Brexit. His supporters don't try to defend his record, they change the subject by saying he is uniquely able to connect with voters, and that he deserves the gratitude of the Conservative party for delivering Brexit.
Partygate breaks in December 2021, and Boris Johnson rapidly loses public support because he didn't obey his own lockdown rules. There are two disastrous by-election defeats to the Liberal Democrats. (Amersham & Chesham is an affluent commuter town outside London, North Shropshire is a rural seat). This is mostly because of Partygate, but there are also local issues, including the fact that the government has botched post-Brexit farming policy meaning that farmers (who are mostly Brexit-supporting Tories) feel betrayed. Around this time we also see football crowds chanting "Boris Johnson is a cunt" and Boris is booed by the (presumably Royalist and therefore Conservative-sympathetic) crowds outside the Queen's Platinum Jubilee service.
So we now have two problems both caused by Boris Johnson's character flaws: the scandals (of which Partygate is far from the only one, but it is the one which cuts through to ordinary voters) and the policy drift. Both are hurting the Tories with the electorate. Tory MPs can see all this because they have to work with Boris, and start moving against him. In June 2022 a formal confidence ballot is triggered, and 41% of Conservative MPs vote against Johnson - normally this would cause a party leader to resign because you need supermajority support to lead effectively, but Johnson carries on. Two weeks later there are another two by-election disasters (Tiverton & Honiton is another rural seat lost to the Lib Dems, Wakefield is one of the new "red wall" seats going back to Labour), and another scandal in which it becomes clear that Boris Johnson appointed a known groper as deputy Chief Whip.
At this point Boris Johnson is forced out of office by a series of co-ordinated ministerial resignations. The Tory grassroots still don't believe that the problem is character - they know Boris is unpopular, but they see the scandals as due to media bias, remoaner plots etc. and the real problem being the policy drift which is caused by Boris not being right-wing enough. If you think this, it obviously follows that any of the resigning ministers falls under suspicion of being some kind of remoaner plotter. So to be acceptable to the membership (who get the final say on the new leader, after MPs reduce the contenders to 2), a candidate must be sufficiently right-wing (which by this point mostly means promising tax cuts) and not implicated in the removal of Johnson. Rishi Sunak fails on both counts, so we get Liz Truss.
I don't need to repeat the other posts in this thread about how Truss fails, because it is all obvious and in public. The only additional point I want to make is that epistemic closure is a huge part of how Truss and Kwarteng screwed up - Truss was selected for being willing to treat accurate criticism of Boris Johnson's character as remoaning, and she selected her cabinet for willingness to go along with this. So it isn't surprising that she deliberately and publicly ignored all the possible sources of expert advice that might have told her the mini-budget was risky.
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