anti_dan
4mo ago
One thing I often find annoying about this sort of conversation is we are often talking about someone's internal state of mind. I find that irrelevant. See also trans/gay and "groomer." When your outward actions are indistinguishable from the person that thinks the thing I think they think, they have to bring the chits. This is true whether you are a teacher talking to 13 year olds in private about how anal is great and they don't need to share this conversation with their parents, or whether you are a legislator voting for an arcane and complex regulatory system that will commandeer 1/10th of the economy instead of a simple flat tax.
Edit: And by the way, the suspicion gets worse because you, Mr. Legislator, always want the arcane and complex regulatory system whether it is carbon, or medicine, or banking... Very suspicious.
anti_dan
4mo ago
A) Global Warming is true and humans contribute: 99%
B) That is bad: 95% (addendum to B) How bad? Coastal areas become flooded. Increased deaths due to heat. Increased frequency of natural disasters. Risk to food production due to unstable weather. We're talking potentially millions of deaths.
C) That due to the severity estimates of B, if proposed policies won't work, increased attention must be given to come up with policies that will.
Those number are just bonkers, and makes reasonable people want to just write off environmentalists (if true).
Alternatively, their confidence levels of capitalism solving societal problems are low as a general rule, and in this particular instance capitalism literally has negative incentives to solving this problem. How does one monetize the ability to bring the global temperature of Earth down? How do you monetize clean air? The only thing I can think of are carbon credits, and Republicans oppose implementing such a system in the first place. Conversely, you make money by producing things which pollute the air as a byproduct, and putting in effort to mitigate pollution costs money for no monetary benefit.
But despite the failure of environmentalists to implement their preferred policies, capitalism has brought down carbon emissions in the US quite a bit. So this part is just them screaming that reality is wrong. And actually, its easy to use the market to monetize reducing carbon usage. You put a carbon tax at a per ton basis and then you cut taxes elsewhere to make sure that the carbon tax doesn't cripple the economy. Notably when such a proposal was made in Washington State, environmentalists were part of the coalition that killed the proposal. The fact that they have this specific bundle of beliefs appears problematic for your thesis. The central planning thesis is actually strengthened here.
This strikes me as comparable to saying that pro-life people should be shooting up abortion clinics. Your average environmentalist believes they have 0 influence on India's policies because they are not Indian, and India's government gives every impression they don't care. People believe lots of things they don't follow through fully on, even assuming the assertions that if they believe X they should do Y are reasonable. Do all the people complaining about western fertility have 10 kids?
Valid to an extent. But, what if this is just another irrational part of their bundle of beliefs. That being that being an environmentalist and anti-capitalist is also highly correlated with being...anti-white/western? Perhaps all these beliefs are in conflict for achieving each seperate stated goal, except as to the part where all the policies trend toward...more central planning.
That's incredibly boo outgroup. How many people out there actually hate that people have things, as a primary motivation?
Lots? There are a bunch of large subreddits dedicated to these beliefs like /r/fuckcars, and the mods of those are typically powermods that also control super large subs like /r/politics and /r/askreddit.
anti_dan
4mo ago
In the eight decades since Lewis coined the term, the popularity of this fallacious argumentative strategy shows no signs of abating, and is routinely employed by people at every point on the political spectrum against everyone else. You’ll have evolutionists claiming that the only reason people endorse young-Earth creationism is because the idea of humans evolving from animals makes them uncomfortable; creationists claiming that the only reason evolutionists endorse evolution is because they’ve fallen for the epistemic trap of Scientism™ and can’t accept that not everything can be deduced from observation alone; climate-change deniers claiming that the only reason environmentalists claim that climate change is happening is because they want to instate global communism; environmentalists claiming that the only reason people deny that climate change is happening is because they’re shills for petrochemical companies. And of course, identity politics of all stripes (in particular standpoint epistemology and other ways of knowing) is Bulverism with a V8 engine: is there any debate strategy less productive than “you’re only saying that because you’re a privileged cishet white male”? It’s all wonderfully amusing — what could be more fun than confecting psychological just-so stories about your ideological opponents in order to insult them with a thin veneer of cod-academic therapyspeak?
Your post is overall good, but I think you take this part too far. There are questions, indeed including on issues you've listed here, where a genuine issue of material fact exists, and is not and likely cannot be resolved in the near term.
My example would be climate change. I have slight confidence, approximately 65%ish that the climate is warming faster than it would without human CO2 emissions. This is hardly the sort of confidence level one should have if you are deciding major issues. It gets even lower when I ask the question, "assuming it is true the climate is warming because of human CO2 emissions, is that bad?" On even that question we are at 50% max, most credible people I have looked at seem to indicate slight warming is probably good for the earth and humanity. And then there is the next question of, will the policy proposed by this politician/advocate meaningfully change the outcome, and there I estimate abysmal results in the 1-5% range.
So I am left with a confidence chart of(when being favorable to environmentalists): A) Global Warming is true and humans contribute: 70% B) That is bad: 50% C) The proposed policies can fix it: 5%
For a composite confidence level of 1.75% that environmentalist proposals will solve the problem they are purporting to solve.
And yet, environmentalists act as if they have 100% confidence, and they commonly reject market solutions in favor of central planning. The logical deduction from this pattern of behavior is that the central planning is the goal, and the global warming is the excuse. It is not bad argumentation to say to the environmentalist, "you are just a socialist that wants to control the economy, and are using CO2 as an excuse" because a principled environmentalist would never bother raising a finger in America. They'd go to India and chain themselves to a river barge dumping plastic or go to Africa and spay and neuter humans over there. If you are trying to mess with American's cars, heat, and AC, its because you dont like that Americans have those things, because other concerns regarding the environment have been much more pressing for several decades at this point, and that isn't likely to change.
anti_dan
4mo ago
I do accept the value inherent to human life, I just dont see how it translates into the moral argument for charity. PEPFAR in particular I dont see the argument for the extreme reaction to its removal when it obviously re-counts its "lives saved" every year. There is probably someone who did some math regarding something like QALs/$ or something similar and pitched PEPFAR as super effective or something (I am guessing this is where they are laundering in "effective"?), but if you aren't heavily discounting the "quality" in those QALs for an African PERPAR recipient as opposed to the children of a fallen US Veteran your brain is a bit bamboozled.
anti_dan
4mo ago
Yeah, I don't think that sort of thinking is held by anything close to a majority of Americans.
anti_dan
4mo ago
So an essential part of EA is extreme blank slatism to such extremes they even apply it to adults.
anti_dan
4mo ago
That is still wholly unrelated to PEPFAR. You aren't alleging that PEPFAR recipients are at the bleeding edge of HIV-cure research are you?
anti_dan
4mo ago
I suppose if you place zero or negative value on the lives saved by PEPFAR, then yeah, obviously. End it yesterday.
Not sure I'd agree with that proposition, however. I'm not much of a Christian, but I do think George W. Bush had his heart in a charitable place when he got the program going.
I mean, the market puts little to no value on their lives. I am simply pointing out that there is nothing different about keeping people alive for the sake of keeping them alive in PEPFAR than any other boring charity like food stamps or Medicaid. I suppose these people kept alive can also threaten to immigrate, which is a bad thing. So yeah. Why is this "effective?"
Congress allocating funds? Is all foreign aid unconstitutional by definition? Generally, the constitution is far more free-wheeling on doing things for foreign policy than it is for domestic policy.
Foreign aid is arguably unconstitutional, but the inception of PEPFAR was not approved by Congress. They may arguably have adopted it later on, but the inception was just GWB going rogue.
And being able to build houses would also be bad? Like what on earth do you think you're arguing by comparison here?
No the point of the comparison is that my house building program IS actually good and effective, so long as you keep it small in scope. You scout 10 potentially talented homebuilders and spend time, money, and resources training them. Then they go out and make their world better by building homes. PEPFAR does nothing of the sort. It just lets anyone who contracted a deadly STD keep on living with no scrutiny as to whether they can or will make the world better by their continued existence, and past performance indicates not so.
You can argue that PEPFAR is not just ineffective, but bad for reasons of sexual deviancy or whatever else without talking about African housebuilding, I think.
I was posing a hypothetical charitable educational program that had the potential for being effective, not just a self licking ice cream cone.
anti_dan
4mo ago
That's like saying that medical care is pointless, because even I save a child from dying of anaphylactic shock, they'll grow old and die anyway. Then they might have kids, who will, if they're not prone to atopy, still inevitably die.
That makes little sense. The child has great potential, if saved, to do things that are positive and good, like have children of their own, like start a business or work at a business. If you are talking about old age care, correct. The government should not be in that business, medicare, despite being highly popular is probably the worst program ever implemented by the US Government.
I'm not an EA, and I don't particularly care about people with HIV in Africa, but I still find this a weak criticism at best. They believe that extending/saving lives is good, which I can't disagree with on a general principle. I'm certainly not on the shrimp welfare train, but I must concede that if you care about that inane cause, you might as well make sure your money is as effective as it can be.
But keeping people alive with money is just bog standard charity. If you want a modifier like "effective" you should earn it.
anti_dan
4mo ago
So its just like a normal charity. It keeps people alive who cant keep themselves alive. Its a charity you anticipate will no longer exist in 70 years due to scientific advances wholly unrelated to the charity and the people who benefit from it, other than the fact they will also incidentally benefit from those advances.
anti_dan
4mo ago
The abrupt end with little chance for handover to a different org/funding source.
How does this change the problem of the program being bad? PEPFAR is bad. It keeps people alive for the sole purpose of spending money to keep them alive.
How something is ended can matter quite a lot. This was not done gracefully. Or constitutionally, but that's a procedural issue.
Its end was at least as legitimate as its illegitimate beginning. The program is obviously unconstitutional.
I don't think PEPFAR and home construction training programs are a worthwhile comparison.
Why not? These are both hypothetical subsidies to Africans. In one scenario you subsidize sexual deviancy, in the other you subsidize housing. This is a worthwhile comparison in that obviously subsidizing sexual deviancy is bad.
anti_dan
4mo ago
What was needless? PEPFAR can either be cancelled or continued. If it is continued, there is needless suffering on those providing the funds and the marginal increase in prices in paying markets for the drugs. If it is discontinued the people getting the free shit suffer. There is always suffering. The only way you are reducing suffering is if you have an EV+ outcome, like if you teach a guy how to make houses, then he makes a lot of good houses, now he gets money for making houses, other people get houses.
The issue with the house-building-teaching-charity is it isn't scalable. You have to be judicious and wise who you teach to build houses. Not only are there diminishing returns on house-builders in any economy, there also is the issue of many people being unable to learn to be good house builders. So you have to keep your program small and admissions must be selective.
anti_dan
4mo ago
Requiring outside subsidies is an issue because your program turns into a self licking ice cream cone. This seems true for PEPFAR. The purpose of PEPFAR is to keep the people on PEPFAR alive which then demands more money to keep the same people alive in the future. There is no expectation that PEPFAR recipients will erect an anti-retroviral factory anytime soon so they can provide themselves the drugs, nor any other factory that will allow them to be productive enough to actually buy them at market price. The expectation, rather, is this program will be a moneysink for the remainder of my lifetime. This is, of course, a problem with most large charities. Effective charities are almost always more targeted and more discriminatory. An adoption program that places kids with well vetted parents, a financial support network for widows of fallen soldiers and police officers, etc. Such programs are effective in that they are targeted towards an end: creating functional adults who can be independent, positive contributors to society. Public schools are an example of a failed attempt at effective altruism. In theory educating the public could have positive externalities. In practice, they have proven to be moneysinks because the reality of schooling is it is related to, but is not actually education, and human teaching ends up approximating a garbage-in-garbage out model. You can predict the outcomes of an incoming kinder-garden class with fairly good accuracy with just the demographics of the children, while ignoring the teachers almost entirely.
anti_dan
4mo ago
Some things may be straw men of EA, but IMO it has made a lot of obvious errors as a movement, stretching its reputation to the point I don't think it maintains much credibility with people who are not already bought into charity qua charity. That most of EA freaked out about the PEPFAR cancelling is a great example. Its a 22 year old program that still requires massive outside subsidies, and there is no visible point on the horizon where that will not be true. You can call it many things, but "effective" is not one of them. Thats like calling a family where, after 22 years all the kids are still in the house, barely passing classes, and with no jobs and no prospects "effective parenting."
anti_dan
4mo ago
This is actually a major problem I have with Hanania. Wokes are not the Japanese holding out in 1960, they are (strategically not morally) much more like the US as MacArthur fled the Philippines. "I shall return" wasn't just a promise, it was a threat and prediction based on the reality of America's industrial might and determination. Woke has no such iconic statement and figure yet, but they do have the cultural equivalent of the 1940s American industry, that being the media, schools, civil services, NGOs, etc. This is why Hanania's "woke right" project has always been very stupid.
anti_dan
4mo ago
The Sidney Sweeney commercial.
AKA, why nutpicking is not a valid defense. And probably hasn't been in a while.
The Sidney Sweeny "Good Jeans" commercial has gone viral as many here probably know. Of course, with a commercial featuring a conventionally attractive white woman making a double entendre about how she is hot and wears cool pants was sure to be. But, perhaps more than the merits of the original commercial, the backlash to the commercial has vaulted it into an even higher tier of virility than even the most optimistic American Eagle marketers could have projected.
Of course, it is being called fascist, eugenicist, white supremacist, dog-whistling, etc. So, just about everything normally happening on the internet. Right? Well, sure there is your token tic tok users making such accusations. The usual suspects like Salon.com immediately seized upon this narrative, along with someone who is apparently famous called Doja Cat. And MSNBC to complete the set of entities that pick up anything they can regarding online outrage.
But it doesn't stop there, what one would call mainstream, respectable, left of center publications went with it. The Times, Post, and ABC all threw their hats in the outrage ring. ABC especially went deep with Good Morning America bringing on an "expert" to rail against the ad as "Nazi Propaganda" (the host's words), "The American Eugenics Movement" and "White Supremacism" (the expert's words).
Where does this leave us? For me its another data point that the accusation of "nutpicking" whenever one of these woke controversies emerges is kinda a bad faith argument to make. People who see these things aren't nutpicking, they are being presented with a lot of nuts, often in prominent positions or positions of power. This particular controversy had me feeling sympathetic cringe on behalf of the reasonable center-leftists. But then I fisk that feeling and have to ask when they are actually going to police their crazies the way the right's mainstream does. Candace Owens employment status at the Daily Wire is terminated. Tucker Carlson's status at Fox is terminated. The guys who got fired at NPR and the NYT? For NPR its the guy who was saying they were too biased towards the left. For the Times, its the guys who let a Senator write a fairly bland Op-Ed about how to police riots.
As for the politicians, most have seemingly stayed away. I doubt many will answer any questions on this directly (Democrats I mean, obviously many Republicans have already made hay with yet another unforced error by the left's activist class). The reason is clear, they know the right answer, particularly for most general elections, is to laugh at the activists and "nuts" on things like this. But they cannot actually seem to bring themselves to actually express that in public. The nuts are their staffers and their boots on the ground and so it seems keeping them happy is more important than being able to say, "sometimes its just a cute girl making a pun". I don't know what the math on this actually is, but there it is. You are what you do, and this is no longer nutpicking, its mainstream. I dont know if nutpicking was ever valid, but I don't think it can reasonably be said to still be so for this category of things.
anti_dan
4mo ago
They have not been doing those things as evidenced by the millions of living humans in the Gaza strip
anti_dan
4mo ago
Full blockade of all supplies. Bombing of any building with credible intelligence that a fighter or weaponry is in. Creeping artillery barrages of the entire territory. Things like that
anti_dan
4mo ago
The reason it looks aimless is because we are preventing them from taking effective measures though. You're presenting a catch-22
anti_dan
4mo ago
Afghanistan is instructive only in the fact that it shows that weak occupations will not be successful. If you are arguing using Afghanistan as an example, the only logical argument is that Israel should be more brutal, allow in less aid, bomb every building they have credible intelligence houses a Hamas agent, etc, etc. In short, if you are referencing the failure of Afghanistan, the most logical argument vis-a-vis Israel becomes that the US should authorize total war, a blockade of all supplies, and a creeping artillery barrage until nothing is left.
If that is not what you think is a good idea, perhaps use some other example.
anti_dan
4mo ago
So basically conflating events happening in 2 completely separate countries at this point.
anti_dan
4mo ago
Why are Gaza and West Bank non-viable? I am quite confident that if Gaza was repopulated with a bunch North Dakotans and West Bank with a bunch of South Dakotans both would quickly become prosperous countries.
Also, I am consistently confused by the "2 state solution" rhetoric (depicted in you post with the phrase "keeping them split"). The "Palestinian" territories are non-contiguous and have been for almost a century now. There is no good reason for them to be a united state! That stupid idea proved a failure with Pakistan and Burma and would be stupid in the current situation as well. When you talk about a 2 state, instead of 3 state, solution you make yourself seem unserious IMO.
anti_dan
4mo ago
What does this look like? I don't know. But directionally, perhaps it's something like the British Raj. A civilizing mission is basically the only way to turn things around.
Who would do such a thing? Would it even be effective? India, after all, is still a neigh-ungovernable amalgamation of warring peoples. The US just got done trying something like that in Afghanistan and Iraq, to miserable failure. In my opinion your hypothetical Raj would have to be significantly MORE brutal on the population than the current military operations conducted by Israel are to have any hope at success.
Its a record, typically on paper of purchases or debts. They are less common now, but a typical example would be when you go to the dry cleaner and drop off a suit, the carbon paper they hand you is commonly called a chit.
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