cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
11mo ago
There are some things in culture that are a little pointless to define because they shift so much with sentiment.
"anti-left" would be a very nebulous concept, because the views of "leftists" and those who oppose them can change drastically based on time and place.
But there are social tactics that are mostly not going to change over time. Killing political opponents is a constant through much of history, and the stated reasons for why have changed many times. But killing is killing and there is no reason to mark it as undefinable.
If there is a spectrum from "pointless to define" things like "anti-left" to easily definable things like "killing" then I believe "cancel-culture" is closer to "killing". The reasons for doing it might change, the targets might change, and the methods might change. But it is still the same underlying strategy/tactic.
The ancient equivalent of "cancel culture" is probably exile which has also been pretty popular throughout history.
cjet79
11mo ago
Exactly, and if everyone followed this rule cancel culture would not be a major problem.
cjet79
11mo ago
I think the problem with adding "action out-of-proportion to the perceived transgression" is that it sort of absolves everyone of responsibility and doesn't really solve the cancel culture problem.
@YE_GUILTY also discusses this point below.
If someone says something that annoys me, its not really out of proportion for me to say "hey that thing you said annoyed me, and I don't really want to talk with you anymore".
Now, imagine a million other people also say what I said. And the person that said the naughty thing has a public facing job where they need to talk to random people. The company would probably be justified in firing them, since they will be worse at their job if they ever run into one of these million people that refuse to talk with them.
No one individually took an action that is out of proportion to the transgression. The million people only expressed their right to not associate with people they don't like. And the employer responded appropriately to mildly pissing off 1 million people. But the person who said something naughty still gets punished in a way that is out of proportion. So how do you stop the out of proportion punishment? My answer is that you need to avoid the point where a million people are saying "I'm never gonna talk with you".
cjet79
11mo ago
I don't see why cultural things are undefinable. The edges might be fuzzy, and the definition may shift in the future, but it doesn't mean we can't generally point out where those edges are in a specific time period.
cjet79
11mo ago
There is some ambiguity and gray area in A7 and A8 that partly depends on your normal behavior. If it is normal behavior for you to review stuff then it is probably not cancel culture. Or if you are a journalist of some type that typically reviews video games, then your absence of opinion would be more notable than the presence of a bad opinion. Or finally if someone directly asks you for your opinion. Going out of your way to say 'fuck you in particular' seems more cancel culturish.
To post the review as a comment on the podcast I don't think it is cancel culture. To go back and edit an old post that recommends the podcast with some more recent review of "this now sucks" is not cancel culture.
But to draw attention to something that people might not have naturally noticed, and to draw attention to you disassociating with it is cancel culture. Its just the tiniest bit of cancel culture. But when millions of people do it then it is clearly recognized as cancel culture.
And we probably wouldn't have an issue with "cancel culture" if that is all people did. But sometimes correcting a problem requires swinging back hard in the opposite direction.
cjet79
11mo ago
Scott posted Lukianoff And Defining Cancel Culture. He takes one of the given definitions of cancel culture and tries to see how it applies to edge cases, and whether it makes sense as a definition. I thought the comments on the slatestarcodex reddit thread were pretty good. I tried to post a synthesis of the ideas I got while reading the comments:
Cancel culture is speaking about and coordinating your disassociation with a person.
You have the right to not associate with people. You should feel free to exercise that right when you personally notice them doing something you don't like.
To avoid being a part of cancel culture:
- If you choose to disassociate with someone you should not try and get others to pile on as well.
- If someone else notices a reason to disassociate with someone and tells you, then you should ignore that, or possibly try to mentally dismiss it like it is bad evidence presented to a court.
- Spread these two things as politeness norms, and resist attempts to undo them.
Supplemental section.
Applying these to Scott's examples:
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A1-A6 are not cancel culture. The actor is taking personal steps to change their association with someone they don't like.
-
A7-A12 are cancel culture. The actor is trying to coordinate and spread their disassociation with someone.
The other ones are a bit more complex.
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B1-B2 The university admin isn't really the prime source of "cancel culture" in this example. It is the newspaper that is trying to publish a juicy story. I think the university admin is fine to resist as much as they feel comfortable resisting, but is not obligated to resist at all. The newspaper is bad, and you should cancel your subscription from that newspaper (and only tell the newspaper why you are cancelling).
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B3-B5 It is cancel culture to write the article and focus it on the grad student or any particular person as the problem. If you are able to anonymize the grad student and others involved then it is not very cancel culture. If others then dig deeper and de-anonymize the grad student, they are cancel culture. If you wish to be part of the anti-cancel-culture alliance, probably don't write it at all. If you just wish to follow politeness norms anonymize the people involved to the best of your ability. If you want to be a part of cancel culture make the article entirely about the grad student.
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C1 The New York Times was doing cancel culture against Scott. His friends did cancel culture against the New York Times. Scott in his articles about the situation did not encourage cancel culture. Tit-for-tat strategy can be good for getting people to not do things. But it needs to be handled carefully. Retaliate for specific instances against exact people. Do not retaliate for general attacks by generally attacking the other direction.
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C2 Scott can personally cancel his subscription and never associate with the Atlantic again. That is not cancel culture. Telling us about it is cancel culture.
cjet79
11mo ago
I'm planning to coach a rec sports team at my local college. The sport is underwater hockey. Its real and it's awesome, look it up.
Anyways I made some good progress on getting ready for the semester. Mostly that meant getting through the bureaucracy of the university. I attended the mandatory class, and got some of the forms filled out. But I also got to the more interesting part of writing some basic coaching plans and figuring out goals for the coming season. I .mostly want to make sure the club survives, it's in a rough spot from COVID. The kids who found underwater hockey before COVID are mostly graduated or about to graduate. So we desperately need a bumper crop of new people to try out. I'm hoping for just two good players that want to keep the sport going. And only one of them needs to stay around and be willing to do extra paperwork so the club won't collapse next year.
cjet79
11mo ago
Its always been quite easy to become a monopoly. The trick is to get government to make it happen for you. The post office still jealously guards its first class mail monopoly.
The history of Standard Oil is very frustrating to learn. They were an efficient modern business way before its time. If there were kickbacks along the rail line it was because everyone had to do some version of that. They were something like 90% market share when the government brought a case against them for monopoly. By the time the case resolved against them they were about 60% market share. There was also a war about to happen and the government wanted access to the resource for cheap so they nationalized part of standard oil. Standard Oil created most of the Oil byproducts that we have today. All of their competitors were dumping toxic waste chemicals into rivers. They thought 'how can we use this "waste" instead of throwing it out?'
But the 8th grade textbook of monopoly still owns an unreasonable amount of mindshare in the minds of activist politicians and bureaucrats. Lina Khan loves to get up in the morning and begin the next chapter of her "I'm the main character heroine fighting evil money dragons" autobiography.
I was on capital hill briefly about a decade ago. And yes they are constantly looking for badies to fight. Back then they kept complaining how google has a "search" monopoly. Which showed a hilarious lack of understanding of google's actual business model (advertising), and an insulting level of paternalism assuming that people were somehow "stuck" with google search.
Inflation, inefficiency, and capital appreciation malaise are what has and will continue to kill the middle and working classes. Government do-gooders operate under the flawed assumption that they can (a) understand the complexities of the dynamic system that is the economy and (b) craft laser precise legislation or regulation that will target only "the bad thing" and have zero unanticipated or secondary effects. It really is an alarming level of intellectual hubris.
I went more in depth on the history back in my college days. And the only thing that has really changed is the ability of government propaganda to cover things up. They've gotten worse at that. Even when the economy was much simpler they routinely failed to bring in good regulations.
cjet79
11mo ago
I think it sort of exists, or at least it did a while ago. The price was just much higher at like $5 million. Basically there was a green card path via being a small business owner.
I like the idea, but I generally like immigration. I suspect the objections people will bring up will be about regression to the mean for the kids of these wealthy immigrants.
cjet79
11mo ago
That is a very expansive take away from that book.
I'd say its thesis was that protectionism worked for East Asian countries during a brief time period.
There has always been a theoretical case that tariffs can work as protectionist trade policy. Economists stopped telling people this about a century ago, because what consistently happened is that countries would just start applying tariffs to everything and tank their economy. (or spark trade wars that tanked everyone's economy)
Its as if some people heard that radiation therapy can be good for you if you need to remove a cancerous tumor, so they all went and sat inside of nuclear power plants.
cjet79
11mo ago
I know the food production end of things (not the stores) is highly consolidated into a couple of big companies that therefore own most of the food market. Breaking up those monopolies seems like a good way to get grocery priced down a bit.
I strongly don't believe breaking up these "monopolies" will do anything other than raise prices.
In order to be an entity with monopoly powers you need to be the only game in town. An oligopoly can imitate monopoly power if they are all coordinating (and punishing defectors).
The problem with calling single producers of a product a monopoly is that substitution is a thing that exists. There could be a single company that produces strawberries and all strawberry related products and they would not have a single bit of monopoly power. Hell, they could probably expand to all fruit products and still not have much monopoly power. Because people can eat different kinds of food. Even if someone cornered the entire grocery market they would still not have monopoly power. Because restaurants and fast food exists and some of the larger chains are their own suppliers.
It is basically impossible to gain any level of monopoly power in the modern day food market. If anyone says there are food monopolies they are either lying, or using a non-economic definition of monopolies. Its fine if they use a non-economic definition of monopolies, economists don't own the word. But these people often say "this company is a [non-economic] monopoly, so we need to do what economists say to do about [economic] monopolies".
cjet79
11mo ago
Never underestimate the ability of government regulations to ruin a functioning market. We have an ongoing housing shortage, many rich western countries have to wait months for medical care, and finding a rental unit in a rent controlled city can be impossible.
Middle class people won't be the problem. It will be poor lower class people that are stuck in "food deserts" that lack personal and public transportation.
cjet79
11mo ago
That impacts less than three percent of households. And notably does not impact young teenage men who are most likely to participate in riots.
Apples and oranges
cjet79
11mo ago
Things don't necessarily get solidified in law for a few years.
There is also the phenomenom where politicians will propose policies A, B, and C. Where C is the most unreasonable and controversial. The opposition will exhaust themselves arguing against C, and the politicians will just drop it after they have accomplished A and B.
I see the grocery anti-gouging laws as the "C" in the this Kamala policy list.
cjet79
11mo ago
A localized shortage is more than enough to cause a riot in this day and age. The riot and looting will then make the situation worse.
You'd start seeing cases of state level emergencies being declared in cities as they run out of food, everyone rushes the stores for what's left, and then suddenly nothing is left.
Most nations outside of third world countries have learned not to mess too heavily with grocery prices.
cjet79
11mo ago
Food shortages in the US. Lovely. I do have an economist friend who was annoyed with this. I suggest him and his buddies look into making estimates about how many people will starve to death given different food pricing laws.
Of course people like free money, but the free money leads to the inflation that leads to the calls for price controls. The price controls lead to shortages. The shortages lead to government takeovers, or onerous regulation that forces private entities out of business. Its happened before in a dozen different leftist/socialist/communist countries. It would be nice to not repeat the cycle here.
I mostly have hope in the legal structure and republican opposition stopping the craziest parts of this slide into a leftist dystopia. Of course they have to spend political effort and will to stop these things, and while they are busy stopping things from getting worse things certainly aren't going to get better.
cjet79
11mo ago
Eh, I'd keep it limited to government. Because many people suck at saving for retirement, even with social security as a guaranteed minimum income.
If anything, just change the way laws work with respect to age discrimination. Legalize discrimination by age for people that are over the retirement age.
cjet79
11mo ago
TBH I think creating social security may have been the #1 political blunder of the last century. Just an incredibly awful decision. I can understand where it was coming from but oof... it has crippled us economically.
I think it could be salvaged to be a great policy. We just need to tie political positions to a maximum age that is the same as the retirement age. If you are eligible for social security, then you are ineligible for office.
Older politicians would have an incentive to raise the retirement age, but voters and younger politicians would have an incentive to block it. Raising it solves the fiscal crisis, lowering it keeps the old fogies out from running our government further into the ground.
cjet79
11mo ago
That 25% drop is a 25% increase in the cost of the program as a burden on individual payers. If the program previously made up 40% of the budget then it would now make up 50% if nothing else changed. Seems like a big difference to me when that is basically a trillion dollars.
Its why small changes to social security basically make or break the US budget. Raising the retirement age is one way to help the ratio, and they've started doing that. They can also undercount inflation and then the program gets an effective paycut. They've been doing that.
cjet79
11mo ago
There was a previous attempt to do this during the Reagan years. It was called the Grace Commission.The Report they generated was mostly about non-partisan ways to cut government spending. Things like saving money by using a single personnel management system (rather than unique personnel management systems for every agency). It mostly went unimplemented.
I do feel that you can get something out of trying to cut the costs of government. But the real issue is an underlying disconnect of incentives. So someone can put in a lot of effort to do all the cost fixing, and then a decade later its like they basically did nothing. Because no one in government fundamentally cares about saving money.
Credentials seem to matter most when the output of workers is not legible to their bosses.
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