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PaperclipPerfector  26d ago (text post)   2947 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 17, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Shameless hijacking of the SSQ for a Wellness/Fun topic, because I just can't wait till the middle of the week. Forgiveness requested in advance.

Ahhhh. The exam is over. Is it over for good? I don't know. The Royal College usually takes about 5 weeks to release results, uncannily close to how long you spend waiting on a new antidepressant before you can tell anyone whether it's working.

By this point in my career, I've made peace with the fact that my anxiety and post-exam nihilism do not correlate particularly strongly with exam performance. I've done well (or at least passed) every test to date, even when the emotions actively present while I'm staring at the screen are some mixture of incredulity, frank confusion, and mild despair.

I dare say I felt less actively homicidal during this year's Paper B than its predecessor. The majority of questions seemed reasonable. There might be one or two utter stinkers in there, but unlike last time, my frank confusion is just as likely to be the product of my ignorance as it is incomplete information or bad phrasing. Progress, of a sort.

Working myself to near-meltdown did pay off, even if the last week and change was spent un-teaching myself what SPMM taught me.

When I first saw them reference NICE/SIGN guidelines from 2019/2020 many months ago, I assumed they did this because the guidance hadn't meaningfully changed since then. This was wrong. Badly wrong. About 20% of the material is out of date. The core management of psychiatry has not undergone any fundamental upheaval (haha, no), but NICE does its usual cost-benefit/utility analysis and pushes out minor updates whose effects ripple through the decision trees. I spent my last week of revision correcting these dangerous errors instead of actually being able to study. I pay these fuckers to do that for me. They haven't updated jack-shit since at least 2022.

Can you give methylphenidate to a child with ADHD and comorbid tic disorders? SPMM (quoting older NICE) says no. New papers by 2025 say: uh, actually, probably fine. No need to condemn the poor bastards to guanfacine, which doesn't help with inattentiveness. This precise question came up in my exam, and I chose methylphenidate, praying that if the College demands its trainees stay up to date, it has the courtesy to do the same.

I said I was tired. I still am. Nervous energy and the upper limits of Ritalin intake only go so far. I came out of the exam hall craving a drink. Craving two, maybe, or three and four if time allowed. Six seven? What, do I look Italian?

This means I have not bothered to sit down and do a proper post-mortem to see whether my answers were correct. I couldn't be arsed. Still can't be. Maybe tomorrow, if I haven't forgotten everything by then.

The most exciting event during the exam was the fire alarm going off, prompting a rapid evacuation of the test center. Nobody seemed to be in a position to answer reasonable questions like "is the building actually on fire?" or "can we pause our fucking tests while you figure this out?" or "what if I'm willing to fight the fire with water (coolers and actual extinguishers) if that's the price of a pass?" We spent half an hour in the rain, grumbling and despairing in equal measure.

It turned out to be a false alarm. We were allowed back to our seats, and after an interminable wait, the invigilators managed to get hold of the RCP and wrangle extra time on the test for us. I consider this an absolute personal win. I stretched my legs, drank some water, and took an ibuprofen for the mounting headache. If the exam had actually been cancelled or postponed, I was angry enough to sue, and so were most other trainees. Some intend to lodge a formal complaint anyway.

I used the extra time to revise my revision, changing a grand total of 2 questions to another, equally plausible answer. Idk, the vibes were better. I was exhausted, it had been 4 hours in there, and ibuprofen and nicotine gum only go so far.

I left with time to kill and went to the seedier, smaller parts of Glasgow. Always a good way to get a feel for the place. At a tiny pub the size of my living room, I had a pleasant time with the bartender and his geriatric buddies. I fielded multiple questions about the accent (I have a mental script handy) and explained that their guess on its provenance was as good as mine. They suggested Canadian, which is... maybe? Some of them had actually visited Toronto, so they might be onto something. I'll continue calling it a mongrel for now.

Then a haircut. Not strictly necessary, but I needed to treat myself. I treated myself to a hefty bill: £38 for a cut and shave at a Turkish barber, where my actual barber was a pleasant enough Scottish man with ADHD and depression (we had a productive discussion that changed nothing; it was idle conversation). At least it's a great haircut, done super quick. Maybe ADHD can be a superpower, if that superpower is running a trimmer at speed? Whatever. I got a nice hot towel waterboarding experience (probably billed) and coffee and nicotine gum (entirely free, thank god).

Then a sinfully delicious meal at a pub. Goan venison with rice and a whole-ass femur cracked open to let the marrow out. I could have had seconds. Instead, I settled for a helping of Vietnamese later from somewhere cheap and cheerful.

Then a train back, where I had the opportunity to debrief my parents before it got too late in India. To my pleasant surprise and bemusement, I'd received another arranged marriage proposal. Daughter of dad's medical colleague, a fully qualified dentist. I would like to claim I used to have a slight crush on her when we were kids meeting every year or so, but I could be imagining things entirely. Apparently she'd been stalking my Instagram and liked what she saw? Good for her, girl, but I live in a different country and like my teeth the way they are. If I didn't, I'd go talk to those Turkish gents. They'd hook me up.

I was also bombarded with an unusually high number of likes on dating apps, those technically-still-on-my-phone shrines desperate to remind me of their existence. I suppose my sunny disposition suits Glasgow, which lacks any solar insolation for most of the year. Certainly for as long as I was in it. Someone claimed I had a contagious smile, which is probably the better kind of very local endemic condition.

Not a bad day. Managed to take the train home uneventfully, managed to crawl into bed, and also managed to dread going back to work tomorrow. My sleep cycle is in dire need of new tyres. I'm tired. Adios.

Then a haircut. Not strictly necessary, but I needed to treat myself. I treated myself to a hefty bill: £38 for a cut and shave

I will reiterate: If there is anything good about being a nigger, it is that the simple buzz/brush cut is literally the only option for a reputable haircut.

The disclosure that you're black comes as a surprise to me. I clearly haven't been as scrupulous with keeping up with the ToaKraka lore as I ought to be. The mental image of you I had in my head looked like one of those 1960s pencil pushers at NASA, including the pocket protector and white shirt. Now it's closer to a better version of Steve Urkel, though I am sure you're an actual human being and not a walking caricature.

My hair is pretty nice. Just short of unmanageable East Asian straight, though I suspect that I've settled into a pompadour and fade that I'll keep well past the point it goes out of fashion.

My hair is pretty nice. Just short of unmanageable East Asian straight, though I suspect that I've settled into a pompadour and fade that I'll keep well past the point it goes out of fashion.

Count yourself lucky. My hair is the most unmanageable chink hair you can possibly imagine; it stands up so straight that it looks like I've been electrocuted, even when grown out relatively long. It's impossible to style and gives me painful hair splinters that I'm constantly picking out of my fingers. I just get it all buzzed off (which poses its own problems, since short hair needs to be cut very often and my hair grows blisteringly fast).

How are you coping with the fact that they're now going to "non-prioritise" people who don't have UK degrees or strong UK links for consultant training posts? I'd be super extra double pissed off in your position, especially when they say this is to ensure "a level playing field" when it actually does the opposite and gets rid of the level playing field.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that, since I'm only aware of planned changes to the UK training pathway. Last time I checked (all of a week or two back), the fact that I'm already in training and will (hopefully) acquire a British degree makes me quite safe. Even if I want to go through the pain of becoming a senior registrar and then fight for a substantive consultant post. Not perfectly safe, since things are up in the air. To be specific, the number of years of NHS experience you need to be treated as on-par with British medical graduates.

Am I missing something? If yes, then the main way I cope with this is by ignoring the problem till I can't put it off. Worst case, I'll end up a perma-reg or a locum consultant, or join a private company. That's not glamorous work, but it pays the bills, and I already live well below my means. If the UK isn't an option, then I think there's a chance I have an out in the form of NZ. If my USMLE issues clear up, that opens doors I'd rush through like they lead to nirvana. In the worst case? I can leave for India, rather unhappy about everything except the increased vitamin D production. All of this was half the point of the pain and suffering, I retain some optionality, even if it's not as much as I'd like.

Ah, I was talking about this: https://www.bma.org.uk/advice-and-support/career-progression/training/what-the-new-law-means-for-uk-graduate-prioritisation

Surely you must have seen this? I'm nowhere near medicine and in my circles people have been complaining about it.

Any doctor who has completed or is currently on the relevant qualifying UK training programme (for example, foundation doctors applying for core training or doctors who are completing or have competed core training applying for higher training).

Yay. ☺️

What ‘significant NHS experience’ means is still up for debate in 2027. But analysis from NHS England has projected that a two-year NHS experience threshold (as per original 2025 BMA ARM policy) would have minimal impact on reducing training bottlenecks over forthcoming recruitment years, negating the purpose of the Act.

Nay. 😒

I know about this, as I should, since my future hinges on it. But I'm not seeing anything about consultant posts, which is why I was perplexed. If they were discriminating against me on that basis, I haven't heard about it, and it's not covered by the BMA article

I'm a core psychiatry trainee. That means I'm "completing" core training. It's in the name, unless they have very serious opinions on ab workouts.

As far as I can tell, I'm safe. About 90% confident saying so. I caught the last chopper out of Saigon, or the last C-17 Globemaster out of Kabul. Sacrificing my sanity or my will to live to get there was a small price to pay. I tell new Indian doctors who want to train abroad not to waste their time aiming at the UK, and not just because of recent developments.

Yeah, the UK has issues. I tell people who want to become quants as well that they shouldn't prioritise the UK: you pay crazy tax while getting basically nothing in return + you don't even have the lower tax for X years incentive plans the European nations have to entice people like us to come over. It's like the UK believes that by virtue of being the UK it can bring high talent people over plenty of other options that only look better and better every year. That may have worked in the past, I'd be surprised if it still works 10 years down the line.

In finance there is no real QOL difference between NYC and London and even some reasons to prefer the latter. Sure, Texas is much lower tax, but finance is pretty small in Texas. Singapore and Hong Kong increasingly prioritize locals / Chinese.

All in pay for my job is maybe 30% higher in NYC. Once you factor in state and local taxes the tax burden is pretty similar. Groceries, restaurants, rent are 50-70% more expensive in NYC. Consumer goods are the same, but one can only buy so many iPhones and big TVs. High end fashion and luxury goods are subject to import and luxury taxes that make them ~30% more expensive than they are in London. Vacation time is half of what it is here. Property is about the same although NYC prices are steady while London’s are falling. The weather is a mixed bag, NYC is sunnier but London has a far better climate. A ski vacation in the Alps is half of what it is in Aspen at the same tier.

The main jobs where it seems to make sense to move to the US are in tech and medicine, although the latter is very difficult. In finance, though? Compare what $6000 rent gets you in lower Manhattan vs the pound equivalent in London. My parents’ local Italian restaurant in NYC (once you factor in taxes and tip) costs the same as Cipriani here. (Cipriani in NYC is at least double). And when you factor in much higher crime, crazy homeless psychos, far more dangerous and dirty subways, tropical swamp summers and freezing winters, worse storms etc etc it really is no contest for me - London wins, at least for now.

They have the balls to expect me to pay taxes on my Indian income/capital gains. That wasn't true when I moved here, but I believe it applies even to immigrants without an ILR. I think that goes into full force either yesterday (metaphorically speaking) or somewhere around 2028. I don't know, I don't care. That's my accountant's problem, or it would be, if I had one.

The US can pull off that move, but the UK is huffing paint thinner. Why yes, make it even less appealing to move here, when your economy is clearly thriving and your weather pulls tourists from Ibiza. I love paying 50% taxes on my salary past £current figure (that I crossed a while back). I love regressive tax systems and cliffs.

They have the balls to expect me to pay taxes on my Indian income/capital gains

You think this is bad? If you own a piece of ancestral village farmland with a small house on it anywhere in the world and it's worth more than £40k in total (or even if you have a share in such land worth over this limit, not a high bar these days) even if you'd never ever think of ever living there and only visit like once every year because social ties force you to do so then when you buy your first house in the UK it's technically counted as a "second home" and you have to pay 5% extra stamp duty on top for the privilige of owning your actual home. And btw, if you're married and either you or your spouse satisfies this condition, yep, pay an extra 5%: HMRC want their pound of flesh £50,000.

The UK really suffers from a bad case of thinking it's like the US. It doesn't have the job market or salaries or even any remaining international goodwill to engage in these indulgences and after Brexit Ireland is looking more and more like a smaller but better version of the same thing (full EU access has genuine value). Apparently student visa applications are down 40% this year compared to the same stage last year as people realize there's no need to pay 3x what locals pay for mediocre education if it doesn't buy you a decent chance at a passport from a western country (compare once again to Ireland, international fees are usually just 1.5x local fees and their post study + work visa options are generally better), lets see how long the govenrment continues trying to deny reality.

The only migrants I'd recommend the UK to these days are those who seek to arrive on a small boat.

You know, you've given me a lot of reasons to feel depressed and these are better than any that came before.

Fortunately, I don't own any property in India. At least none that I know of. Second home? I don't even own a first one, at least not till my parents hand theirs over. Which they won't, for the next 30 years at the least (which I am perfectly happy with, because the alternative would be that they've passed away). My mother was seriously contemplating buying a nice little house in India in my name, which I turned down because I have no concrete plans of moving back. Not if I can help it.

I don't wish to look down on the average Britisher. I don't. I detest their government, which has delusions of grandeur, or at least of empire. If you have an economy that stagnant, a system this unsustainable, you shouldn't be fucking up a high speed rail network or building tunnels for bats. You shouldn't be doing your utmost to make the best and most talented avoid you. I dare not call myself the best, let alone the most talented, and that's why my sorry ass is here. Could be worse. It could also be much better.

My general advice is to speak softly or carry a big stick. The current UK's political class are loud-mouths with limp dicks. I pity the average citizen, and I'm sad that I actually have it better than they do. At least I can pack my bags and leave if it gets too much to handle. Such squandered potential. It would be so easy to love the country, all I can really say is that its people don't deserve what they're going through.

You mentioned Ireland, and I've actually considered it as a perfectly viable alternative. Compared to Scotland? Similar weather, similar alcohol intake, and I suppose I can learn to love redheads instead of fake blondes. I'm a little more iffy on the EU and its value proposition, but I'll take more cash in hand most days of the week. I'm not sure why you're still there, but I suppose finance works differently.

More comments

I only just got around to watching 2012's Documentary The Act of Killing and it's struck me pretty hard. I'm in neighboring Malaysia which had vastly smaller scale versions of the communist purges and ethnic unrest (in terms of death toll) than Indonesia, but still there's a ton of cultural awareness around it.

Just a bunch of guys who committed hundreds of murders in cold-blood with their own hands kinda having misadventures in moderate corruption and bumming around as mid-tier organized crime figures

It's surreal watching Anwar Congo sort of reenact how he would cut people's throats with wire in the chairs they had rigged up. I was also not particularly moved by what some viewers say was his epiphany of the brutality of his own behavior.

Can anyone recommend a good history book on the Chinese communist revolution? I am specifically interested in how they defeated the guomintang and less so in the cultural revolution.

Ideally this would be a politically neutral book (I don't like it when the author feels it's necessary to tell me someone is good or bad, I can decide for myself)

I read origins of the Chinese Revolution by Lucien Bianco a few years ago and I was looking to find something more modern and preferably with the Pinyin spellings of names as they are easier for me to pronounce in my head.

The closest thing I've read is The Tragedy of Liberation by Frank Dikötter, but it focuses more on the period immediately after 1949 than the Chinese Civil War itself.

Does anyone have a simplified explanation of why the Protestant Bible is shorter/different than the Catholic Bible? I know a lot of the difference is Masoretic Text vs. Septuagint, but I've read other facts like Martin Luther considering ditching Revelations. I imagine other early reformers like Calvin had their own opinions of Canon. Was there a point where, at least for least Mainline Protestants, the Canon was stabilized and a justification given for the choice?

@urquan's comment was great. Some additional complications:

In the early church, not everyone agreed. If you look at canon lists, most (but not all) of the fathers who wrote in Latin included deuterocanonical books. But the fathers who wrote in Greek tended instead to exclude those books, and follow more closely the Hebrew canon as their exemplar for the old testament (at least, with regard to what they considered canonical; some of them put the deuterocanonical books into a "profitable but not fully scripture" category, if I remember correctly). They'll often say that there are 22 or 24 books of the old testament (numbering things fairly differently from the current 39 in a Protestant OT canon.)

That said, when we're talking about a Greek-style list, that doesn't mean that it exactly matches the Protestant canon. The book most likely to be included that Protestants do not accept is Baruch (though it can be hard to tell whether it's included or not, as some authors treated it just as part of Jeremiah). Esther was the OT book that was most likely to be left out.

And yes, on the whole the Greek fathers mostly followed the Septuagint (the book of Daniel excepted), but Jerome's translation was from the Hebrew. (And I believe Syriac Christianity tended also to use translations derived from the Hebrew instead of the Septuagint.)

In the New testament, early canon lists would sometimes say that some books were canonical, others not, and some were disputed, with some churches receiving them, and others not. The books that took the longest to be received were, in the west, Hebrews, and in the east, Revelation, but you also had authors questioning some other books earlier on. But eventually everyone in both places accepted both.

As urquan mentioned, Jerome, despite being a Latin father, followed a Greek-style list. Jerome was extremely influential, due to being the author of the vulgate. His preferred list is in at least one of the prefaces to the books of the Vulgate. Accordingly, there are a number of theologians in the Latin tradition over the next millenium who follow Jerome in holding to a shorter list of what is canonical (and of course, others who disagree). This continued to be the case up to and subsequent to Luther. The famous cardinal Cajetan, for example, a contemporary of Luther (and one who argued against Luther's views on other issues), held to what would later become an exclusively Protestant position on the deuterocanon—that the deuterocanon is profitable to read, but not part of the canon proper, nor inspired.

At the time of the Reformation, Luther (if I remember correctly), thought the shorter list was better. He also questioned four NT books—all ones that had had some level of dispute in early Christianity: James, Revelation, Hebrews, Jude. These were still published in his translation of the bible, but they had prefaces indicating his doubts about them. For some of these, his doubt about them were due to theological or aesthetic concerns. (I find his comment on Revelation ridiculous: "For me this is reason enough not to think highly of it: Christ is neither taught nor known in it.") Subsequent Lutherans were mostly more moderate, but Lutherans continued to distinguish between more and less disputed books of the New Testament—typically accepting both as canonical, but recognizing that some's canonical status might be more doubtful.

Among the Reformed churches (Calvin etc.) it was standard to adhere to what is still the standard Protestant canon, that is, the Hebrew canon for the OT, and the standard Christian NT canon.

Revelation is singular. The Greek term apokalypsis it was originally named is also singular.

Someone once told me that it's great when people call it Revelations because it's an immediate clue that they're not actually informed about the material. I thought that was a handy trick for a while, but over the years I've found that actually people just call it that all the time, including those who should know better.

There are some things in the books of the Maccabees that could look like the intercession of saints if you squint, and there’s some level of arguments about that.

But also, the main difference in the OT canon is that Protestantism ended up holding as canonical only the books that were known to the 16th century in Hebrew. At that time, Tobit, Maccabees, Sirach, Wisdom, etc were known from ancient sources only from the Septuagint, which is of course the Greek Hebrew Bible known and used by Hellenistic Jews in the first century, including many Christians. It's important to note that the Septuagint (the 70, for its 70 translators) was the book referenced by New Testament authors, and the quotations from the OT in the NT demonstrate its textual differences from the Masoretic texts.

It’s also relevant to note that these books known in Hebrew were the precise ones that made up the Masoretic Text of Judaism, as rabbinical Judaism had gone through its own winnowing of the Biblical text and these books were available in Hebrew principally because Judaism had preserved them. Many Protestant Biblical translations are based on the same Hebrew texts used by Jews. They're numbered differently, but the texts are often the same.

Because Protestantism included a strong belief in going back to the sources, the availability of these books in Hebrew from Jewish sources made them the natural starting point, and thus the Protestant Bible ended up with only the 39 books that could be sourced in Hebrew.

This was not a unique concept of Protestantism, and Jerome's Latin translation, the Vulgate, regularly referenced the Hebrew texts in addition to the Septuagint, a principle for which he was sharply criticized by contemporary Christians who held the Septuagint to be, itself, strictly canonical. That said, there is a long custom of seeing the books totally unavailable to the ancient world in Hebrew as part of a different category than the Hebrew-available books. Protestantism didn't invent this. Jerome himself had complicated views on the Old Testament canon, and in particular thought that including the non-Hebrew books in the text was harmful to Christian dialogue with Jews, and that founding doctrine on these books was questionable. He was incredibly controversial in his day for his views on the canon, but in many ways his views do approximate the views of more "apocrypha-friendly" Protestant churches, though he quoted the extra books with great frequency and respect, as did Luther, occasionally. It should be noted, of course, that when Jerome was questioned by other Christians for his views on the canon, he stated firmly that if a Church authority contradicted him, he would accept the judgment of the Church.

Because some of the readings of the Septuagint lend themselves to a Christological interpretation of the messianic prophesies more than some of the Hebrew readings (Isaiah 49 is an infamous example), it was a not-infrequent accusation among early Christians that the Hebrew texts used by post-second-temple Judaism had been altered from the originals as a manner of deflecting from the application of these texts to Jesus of Nazareth. Archaeological study has shown that there was a considerable diversity of Hebrew texts in ancient times and it's likely that both the Septuagint and the texts that would ultimately become the Masoretic Text were pulling from Hebrew sources of equal vintage and ancient authority. No modern Christian source informed on the matter would make an accusation of deliberate post-Christian defacement against the Jewish Tanakh.

I should also note that many of the books in what Protestants would call the apocrypha were not necessarily considered bad by magisterial Protestantism; it's just that they weren't considered authoritative for the establishment of doctrine.

A good example of the approach of magisterial authorities to them is found in the Anglican Thirty-nine Articles, which lists the Protestant canon of the Old Testament, and then states:

And the other Books (as Hierome saith) the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine

and then lists the extra books from the Catholic canon. I presume the justification for this choice was basically "all the good Protestants are doing it," based largely on the Hebrew Masoretic tradition custom.

That's not a massively satisfying answer to you, but as far as I know it just kind of... happened this way, and justifications were back-filled in to justify what was essentially a ressourcement movement that used the Masoretic Text as a basis because it was available in Hebrew. The Protestant take on this wasn't radical and wasn't new, but what was new was how firm Protestantism as a whole would ultimately take the rejection of the deuterocanonical books. It's one of the many areas where 16th century Protestantism and 21st century Protestantism are very distinct.

The truth is that, with the Old Testament, there really isn't a canon, other than the 39, and this is a reality that goes back to ancient times. Just about the only thing that can be conclusively said by the Christian tradition is there are between 39 and infinity texts written at some point by Hebrews under divine inspiration.

What were the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches using instead of the Hebrew texts? Generally the Vulgate or the Greek Septuagint/Greek New Testament.

The Vulgate has a strong authority in historical Catholicism, and many of the canonical and doctrinal principles of Catholicism are based on its unique readings (for instance, 2 Corinthians 2:10 being translated roughly, "What I have forgiven, if I have forgiven anything, has been for your sake in the person of Christ", which relates to the doctrine of the confessor as being in persona Christi). It's also notable that the Catholic Bible does not contain the entire Septuagint, and Trent's formal holding of the Catholic canon did not include some books like the books of Esdras and 3 Maccabees.

The Septuagint and original-language New Testament have a privileged position in Orthodoxy, as the Orthodox churches (Eastern and Oriental) trace their theological lineage to the Hellenistic world, where ancient Greek was a sacred language. I have joked, considering the long history of the Septuagint's authority in Christianity and especially eastern Christianity, that in the same way many American Bible Churches are King-James-Version-Only churches, the Eastern Orthodox Church could be described as a Septuagint-Only Church -- don't be quoting the Vulgate or the Hebrew to them.

There is no good English translation that follows this mode of the EOC's Biblical canon, and "Orthodox Study Bibles" generally just launder a Protestant translation. I've heard, however, rumblings that there is a push inside the growing English-speaking Orthodox community to make a genuine Orthodox critical text of the Old Testament.

Various Orthodox Churches have various numbers of Greek books they add to the 'standard' canon, with the Ethiopian Orthodox famous for having a lot. This plays a very minor role in inter-Orthodox dialogue because the Biblical canon is not a first-order issue against the reception of tradition. It's also my understanding that many of the Septuagint's additional books have been found in ancient Hebrew or Aramaic as part of archaeological finds, but those are not considered authoritative in the churches that include them.

You asked about the New Testament, and I've been neglecting it thus far.

There are no canonical differences in the New Testament among mainstream Christian churches, which is nice.

Luther, particularly initially, pushed for some, and personally demoted the so-called "catholic epistles", which have nothing to do with the RCC and are called that because they aren't written to a particular group or individual like Paul's letters and were addressed to all Christians ("the Church Catholic"). Luther had a particular misgiving about the book of James, which he once described as "an epistle of straw", because of the way James 2 discusses justification. Ultimately he pushed James and some other books to an appendix, but his views cooled, and Lutheranism and Protestantism as a whole accepted them as fully canonical.

I'm unfamiliar with Luther having an issue with the book of Revelation/Apocalypse of John, and in fact Luther could be called the most creative interpreter of this text in history. Because the subject, to secular and serious Christian scholars, of the book of Revelation is the Roman Empire, the book makes frequent references to things that are intended in code to reference Rome, like the whore of Babylon being seated upon the "seven hills" which John wink wink nod nods to us in order to communicate this means the seven famous hills of Rome. Since Luther's project was to sharply criticize the Bishop of Rome, who of course resided in and ruled a meaningful portion of Italy from the very city of these seven hills, it was incredibly rhetorically useful to him to describe the Pope as the very "whore of Babylon" and the "Beast," and yes, the antichrist. Similarly, it was rhetorically useful of Luther to speak of Catholicism as "the Babylonian Captivity" of Christianity, in reference to the Old Testament event.

You can actually trace the history of 'modern' debates over the book of Revelation to these fierce disputes between Luther and the other reformers and Catholicism.

Ancient Christians were actually fairly slow to accept the Apocalypse as canonical, and it was in many respects the 'last' book of the New Testament to be fully accepted. This has a lot to do with its intense scenes, obviously coded nature, and cryptic predictions, which of course are the subject of considerable theological debate. It was, in fact, so slow to be accepted that the ancient calendars of Biblical readings still used by some churches like the Orthodox Church do not include it -- not because they reject it, but because they had a good rhythm going before it was universally regarded.

Ancient Christian sources reference it, and sometimes give their own interpretations that often rhyme with the later syntheses, but Revelation was not the subject of great theological debate in ancient Christianity and interpreting prophesy wasn't a matter of great import.

The claim of anti-Papal reformers like Luther, Calvin, and Cranmer that the Pope was the antichrist dropped a thermonuclear bomb in the middle of apocalyptic interpretation, and the Catholic Counter-reformation sprung into action, with many of the approaches to the book theologians recognize today -- futurism, amillenialism, preterism, etc -- being developed in response by Catholic theologians and especially Jesuits, to provide a coherent reply based on a fresh interpretation of Biblical prophesy.

Also as far as the early development of the canon, there was never really a “one moment” where a truly universal decision as to which books should be included in the Bible was made. It was a process of development that took over a century of the proliferation of numerous writings, before anyone even bothered to start picking and choosing, and by then it was largely a cumulative, individual and happenstance event, that was more-so guided by chance and vibes more than objective and scholarly research. That was until priests and academics began pronouncing what was authoritative and holy, and even they weren’t unanimous. Every church had its favored books, and since there was nothing like a clearly defined orthodoxy until the fourth century, there were a lot of simultaneous literary traditions. The idea that it was otherwise created is by the fact that the church that came out on top simply preserved texts in its favor and destroyed (or let disappear) opposing documents. What we call “orthodox” is simply the church that won.

But, the story also isn't quite that simple. The Catholic Church never had any extensive control over the Eastern churches, which were in turn divided even among themselves (with Ethiopian, Coptic, Syrian, Byzantine, and Armenian canons all riding side-by-side with each other, and with the Western Catholic canon, which itself was never perfectly settled until the fifteenth century at the earliest), but it was essentially established by the middle of the fourth century.

The current Catholic Bible is largely accepted as canonical from fatigue. The details were so ancient and convoluted that it was just easier to simply accept an ancient and enduring tradition than to bother actually questioning its merit. That was further secured by the fact that the long habit of time dictated the status of the texts, because favored books were more scrupulously preserved and survive in more copies than those that are unfavorable, so even if some unfavorable books happened to be earlier and more authoritative, in a lot of cases we can’t reconstruct them with a great deal of accuracy.

We know there are very early books that didn’t survive at all, Ancient fragments of others that we never knew existed, because no one’s even mentioned them. To give a quick example: the first Christian text that didn’t become canonized but was respected as authentic, is the First Epistle of Clement of Rome, which was dated to around AD 95-96 and was contained in a lot of ancient Bibles and was frequently read and regarded as Scripture in several churches. It’s significant because even at this late date, Clement never refers to any Gospel, but frequently refers to various epistles of Paul. He calls them “wise counsel,” not Scripture, and he reserves this authority for the Old Testament, which he cited over a hundred times.

Catholic Answers Apologist Jimmy Akin has argued that the Church has declared the 73 books cannon, but that it has not closed the cannon, meaning that other books could still enter cannon if they picked up a following.

But also I think this is one area that no one really found too important to get 100% correct until the proliferation of Bibles with the printing press.

I personally think 1 Clement should’ve been kept. It’s doctrinally very cohesive with dogma, and orthodox theology. Most Catholics accept though that divine inspiration and miracles came to a close at the end of the Apostolic Age, which is why we don’t see them as much anymore, though you’ve still got Marian apparitions and everything else.

The apostles had a very specific charisim of miracles happening all the time, but there are plenty of miracles that have happened since then and are still happening today. St. Padre Pio's life is a more modern example of someone who had "apostolic" things happen all the time around him. There's the guy who's leg grew back, the Life of Christina the Astonishing, St. Joan of Arc, that one guy who could fly, etc. Does dying after consuming the Eucharist for the first time count as a miracle? I don't know.

It seems to me that there has been no end of miracles and miracle claims in the Catholic Church, though of course the sum total might be large but each individual person might not see one in their lifetime.

Actually if you are willing to wait in line and have upper middle class American level resources, you can see a miracle in person if it’s important enough for you. There are pilgrimages specifically to go look at miracles- most famously the tilma of Juan Diego, or the incorrupt saints. The blood of st januarius liquification is also open to the public. Unlike the Easter fire, many of these miracles have been examined scientifically and found not to have another explanation.

many of these miracles have been examined scientifically and found not to have another explanation.

This is a very ambiguous statement. It could mean either of two things:

  1. There were scientific investigations of the phenomenon, but none of it reached the level which would allow to claim, with scientific rigor, that a certain explanation is definitely correct. There are myriad of phenomena like this, from ball lightning to migraines, where nobody has a satisfactory rigorous explanation, that's a common thing. There are theories, of course, but none of them has enogh evidence and explanatory power behind the theory to establish it beyond reasonable doubt.
  2. There were rigorous scientific investigation (or several) that somehow concluded that no natural phenomena, neither presently known nor possible to discover in the future, could explain the observed result, and it is established that a natural explanation of it is impossible. This would be highly abnormal and if that indeed happened I would very much like to hear about it and understand how such thing could be established.

Yeah, I think a lot of atheists just don't really look into it, or assume religious people don't actually experience scientifically evaluated miracles in the modern age, because it would be really challenging to their worldview.

Scott Alexander did a review of Fatima recently where he almost started to get worried, but then decided that there are other less clear claims of similar "Sun-dancing" miracles, which makes the first, most widely-attested and most inexplicable natural somehow? Whatever he needs to do to stay sane I guess.

Yeah, I think a lot of atheists just don't really look into it, or assume religious people don't actually experience scientifically evaluated miracles in the modern age, because it would be really challenging to their worldview.

Or we look into them after reading a post like this and find a bunch of hallucinations and poorly-investigated crap that passes for natural phenomenon. Dare you to go start a top-level about your scientifically evaluated miracles and how good the evidence is.

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I am not an atheist, but my main problem with those "miracles" are that they are... weird. I mean let's say God, the Lord and Creator of the Universe, wants to communicate with people. How does He establish His creds? Look in the Bible - he appears in a huge column of fire with a booming voice. Clear enough? Want more proof? How about turning your whole river into blood? How about producing water from stone and food from nothing? Those are miracles that make sense. Here's God's power, here's something comprehensible to people - not in how but in what happened and why. Bible's miracles may be not believable to a skeptic as an empirical fact, but they usually make a lot of sense as a narrative, if you understand what I mean. They aren't just random weird unexplained things occurring, they make sense.

Now, producing two vials of blood that change aggregate state, who is supposed to have belonged to a random third century bishop and that now randomly changes its aggregate state at certain times (or maybe other times, or maybe not)? What's that supposed to mean? Why this bishop? Why blood? Why only two vials? Why liquefaction? I know Lord's ways are unfathomable and all that stuff, but we can't just say it every time something doesn't make sense. Catholicism is largely a rational religion, as far as I know, and avoids "shit happens, move along, it's not for you to understand" kind of things. And that's my main problem. Natural phenomena don't have to make any sense. They are just random - the nature has no goals, no intent, no message for us. We're not always supposed to understand them, they are not there for us to understand some message, at least most of them, they're just there.

But the Supernatural is not random. It's supposed to have His Intent behind it. And if you look in the Scripture, you find it all over it, everywhere. But these "miracles" just feel so random for any comprehensible intent... It just does not compute.

Also, Wikipedia (I know, I know, but allow me) has a curious paragraph about this:

While the Catholic Church has always supported the celebrations, it has never formulated an official statement on the phenomenon and maintains a neutral stance about scientific investigations.

I mean, if it's a genuine miracle, why not come out and say so? Why keep neutrality? Looks like the Church's position is much closer to mine: if you folks want to have your fun, go full steam ahead, no harm in that, but when it goes to claiming it's the Lord's hand in action, let's not be so hasty.

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I would be far more interested in reading his take on the holy tilma.

This isn’t the first time he’s delved into Catholic miracles and used some combination of just so stories and coincidence to write them off. I kinda respect him for addressing the question, even if he gets a bit lazy about epistemic weights.

AAQC. Thank you for that post. I find it interesting how arguments of sourcing for the Canon existed both before the Reformation, and how the policy of treating the Deuterocanonicals changed a lot after. I suppose the drift towards a more "conservative" Canon makes sense from a Sola Scriptura standpoint; if you are unsure of the canonicity of a given book, it's better to list it as relevant but not divinely inspired than accidentally list it as an authoritative book.

I think that’s exactly right. The canon wasn’t a huge deal, people had arguments over it, various books were read liturgically and some weren’t, Jerome had opinions but translated most books to latin when he was asked. Ultimately figuring out a solid canon wasn’t a priority in antiquity, they were far more concerned with Christological debates. They were interested in what the Word of God was, not what the Word of God was.

The last point of appeal for doctrine was a church council, local or ecumenical, and so having a definitive selection of canonical texts in an exact, harmonized critical version was more of a hobby of Jerome than a church-wide project. He was influential, of course, and it would be fair to say that the entire history of Western theology of the canon is a debate over how to read Jerome in much the same way the entire history of Western soteriology is a debate over how to read Augustine.

But putting an exact number on the canonical texts didn’t become a major issue until the Latin church and Orthodoxy drifted apart and tried to hammer out differences, finding that the Vulgate and the Septuagint had different OT texts. But this was in the background, massively, compared to the question of the authority question, particularly about the Papacy. The Orthodox counter position to the Papacy was “we have the Sacred Tradition” not “we have the Holy Bible.”

When Protestantism came about and placed the highest of premiums on Scripture as the place of final appeal, it became urgent to have a solid OT canon — the authority question moved in one sense from “which councils are ecumenical and which bishops are ecumenical” to “which texts are authoritative and which readings are divinely inspired.” The only texts accepted absolutely universally and available in original languages were the Hebrew edition books, and of course the fact that Judaism had a harmonized edition in the Masoretic text made it widely available. So this became Protestantism’s alternative to the Papacy as a source of authority.

They were interested in what the Word of God was, not what the Word of God was.

Did you mean for the first "what" to be "who"?

Great post. One thing you didn't mention: Protestant printings of the Bible did once have the deuterocanonical books. They were in a separate section, with a note that they were edifying reading but not the inspired word of God, but they were in there. Then in the 1800s publishers started to omit those books (to save costs), leading to the status quo where Protestant editions of the Bible don't have the deuterocanonical books.

Short answer. Long answer. The real split for the Protestants came at the point of the Reformation itself. Cool fact since you pointed out Revelations: Catholics actually refer to it as “The Apocalypse of John,” although many of them will call it Revelations still.

Indeed, with the original meaning of "apocalypse" being "revelation".

So, what are you reading?

I'm finally done with Christie's And Then There Were None. Didn't have much preamble, it just goes straight into it. Seems like a book written to an audience already very familiar with her work. It was enjoyable enough, and the characters worked. I've more or less given up on the desire to figure out who the killer is beforehand in these kinds of books, and I find that it is pleasant to read them like that. I'm afraid that the only other thing which I can say is that my favourite character died.

Going to give another stab at Sayers' Whose Body?

Just started Machiavelli's "The Prince". Man, it is dry, but it's fun to read about someone hundreds of years ago giving advice on imperalism. Some of the doctrine you can still see in action today so I guess certain things haven't changed.

Finished Eyes of the Void. Liked it, but still kind of upset of how wasted is the whole rich worldbuilding compared to how little the action advanced. Basically not even worth the spoiler tag - they set out to defeat the bad guys and to find a mcguffin that will allow to defeat Very Bad Guys, and by the end they did. It wasn't bad, just it could be some much more I feel...

Also re-read (or, properly saying, re-listened) all Father Brown stories I could find on Hoopla eventually, because once I start on those I just can't get enough.

Reading Morning Star. I'm not there yet but I have a hunch I need Brown to be a little more subtle with the nick names Darrow get's in the book. Golden Son: "Icarus". I wonder where "Morning Star" could be headed?/s

Finished The Moon is a Harsh Mistress finally. Enjoyed it. At this specific moment the character of Mike seems eerily close to being a realistic possibility.

Mysteries are better once you understand they are not homicide investigations, but manners comedies. The solution is unimportant, and is often shoe-horned in to wrap up the real story, which is uncovering all the dastardly details of rich people's lives. The murder is forever in august company, never a drug addict shivved by feral teenagers. The parade of red herrings are inevitably the dirty laundry of the social elite. While pretending to denounce this poor behavior, the focus of the story reinforces to middle-class mass consumers that their social betters are really worse, but also that this is the aspirational life. Working class people are maudlin cartoons no closer to reality than step-n-fetchit blackface is to real black people.

The murder mystery is a middle-class fantasy that rich people are corrupt in the ways that middle class people look down on in the poor. In reality of course, getting rich, famous or powerful means you don't need to murder people to get what you want, and the crime rates bear this out. The corruption of a class is generally invisible to those below, who generate conspiracy theories to explain the obvious dissonance. One of those conspiracy theories is the murder mystery.

Agreed: they are escapist fantasies, often about lives of rich people and often moralistic in a way to appease genteel middle class tastes. Even more true for later adaptations, such as ITV Poirot and BBC Miss Marple, because they double as nostalgic period shows.

Disagreed: it says anything about what middle class think of rich people in a psychologically or culturally relevant manner. A generic Christie murder mystery includes a cast that includes a few rich people but rest of the cast (suspects) are servants, rich-adjacent or simply middle-class people who hang around for plausible or implausible reasons. I am confident that identity of culprit is statistically random, and thus usually not the rich upper class heir. Christie wrote puzzle pieces which are supposed to surprise the reader with a technically possible but usually unexpected solution.

Rich upper class people are there because by virtue of being rich, one can conjure many superficially plausible reasons for many people to want them dead. None of the reasons interrupt the puzzle with inconvenient social realities unless the author wants so. Their other function is to introduce other interesting plot devices, like an exotic locale, or an exotic murder weapon, or an exotic motive, or both. Sometimes other decidedly non-rich people serve some or all the same functions, such as archeologists or middle-rank military officers who have served in exotic places.

Consider some highlights of Christie's oeuvre. "Why was the victim murdered in the shadow of pyramids? ...he was an archeologist." "Nobody has written a good murder mystery about an airplane yet. Why was the murder victim found dead in an airplane? ...obviously, for starters, he was a rich enough to travel in business class." "Why would a murder victim be killed in an enclosed place, filled only with his family and friends who all had reason to kill him and no distracting possibility that someone else did it?" "...obviously, he was weird and rich, and was killed in his yacht." "Why would my detective receive a summons to solve a murder before it has happened, and I am bored of the setup where it is the murderer who invites the detective to watch his crimes happen? Naturally, the task is given by a weird, quirky millionaire in his last will and testament ... who previously was upstanding guy who solved murders together with my detective and found something weird just before he died!" "How can my quirky detective afford all the quirks and luxurious lifestyle I have written for him? "...he is a crime-solving consultant for the government and rich people." "Why is my detective in an exotic locale in order to board this famous train? ... as I said, he works for the government, on secret military stuff." "Why was the murder weapon an unusual arcane object? ... the victim was a rich antique collector." "Why was he murdered in a closed room together with a group of highly esteemed citizens, yet nobody saw anything? ... he was a rich antique collector and they were all playing bridge. Actually, one of the clues for the detective is to work out everyone's bridge game strategy. My readers love that game."

It all makes much more sense as "rich guy was there to make the plot happen" (not too different from "a wizard did it") than for "let's look at the depravities of the rich people". She also tried her luck in writing some books where "secret spy stuff made the plot happen", but those don't play so well. Considering "depravity", Christie's mysteries are chaste enough to child-friendly. The gruesome murders are abstract enough to be almost cozy. There is surprisingly little depravity, and the little of it's mild. Jealously, vengeance, greed, blackmail about something not too shocking are the common motives for murder. Sex is nearly always presented in very abstracted way: an affair, a romance.

"Social critique" homicide fiction post-date the classic murder mystery fiction. It was pioneered by Raymond Chandler (who was all about showcasing the general depravity of the rich people, and vibes are considered more important than consistent puzzle-like mystery.) Scandinavian noir does the same thing, but with more explicitly left-ward values valence.

Cute theory, but…no?

Sherlock Holmes: yes to Hound of the Baskervilles, no to Valley of Fear, Study in Scarlet, or Sign of Four. There are too many short stories to cover; plenty of them have neither a high-class victim or perpetrator.

Dupin: yes to Purloined Letter, no to Rue Morgue and the forgettable Marie Roguet.

Poirot: I actually haven’t read any of these, and I don’t want to spoil them, so sure. Maybe they’re shameless class envy.

I think a better explanation would be that mysteries demand drama, and two hoboes shivving it out in an alley isn’t dramatic unless there’s some extra spice. A treasure from India worked just as well as an English inheritance.

For a murder mystery to be a mystery you need the murderer to be competent enough to hide their crime. I think this excludes drug addicts and the feral teenagers who would probably commit the crime out of impulse, leave tons of evidence at the scene, and already be suspected by the police.

This is hardly an interesting story. For that you need a villain with the foresight to plan the murder, the intelligence and knowledge to do a competent cover-up, and the self-control to stick to the plan. It seems very unlikely that such a person would not be either middle-to-upper-class or in a position of power in the criminal underworld. Especially if the crime requires an accomplice who must necessarily be loyal to the murderer.

I don't think this is a remotely accurate portrayal of Christie's oeuvre. In the most recent Christie novel I read, for example, the killer turns out not to be a member of the landed gentry, but rather a penniless physician who resorted to blackmail to maintain his standard of living.

Retrying Joel Baden's The Historical David from the start.

I started to rewatch Kings to torture myself about that what-if, and thought it'd make a good companion (since the show basically plays the legend straight).

I read that a couple years ago. It’s a great book that applies the historicist logic. I tend to be a maximalist and give the benefit of the doubt to tradition, accepting the historical-critical method; but that isn’t the dominant position in Biblical studies as I understand it; it’s considered “conservative.” To me it shouldn’t be beyond the perch to presume historicity for at least some of the figures, even if you think they’re highly mythologized; but built off a core of tradition. Not a lot of people know we have zero direct historical evidence for King Josiah in the OT, despite historians confidently concluding he existed. Anyway, JB’s multiple interviews on Mythvision is always interesting.

I mean the biggest problem is that it’s almost impossible to know what is true or false about a person who lived several thousand years ago. Most of the physical evidence would be gone just by virtue of people building over and reusing materials and land, plus the difficulty of preserving written materials for that long even under ideal circumstances.

I find it a rather interesting thought experiment to imagine just what our distant descendants would think true or false about our current era. Would they find the Trump ballroom thing likely a myth? Would we question whether or not there was a “historical Barack Obama?” Would we find historical parallels between a future president JD Vance and some mythological legend and thus conclude Theres no evidence such a man actually existed? He does sort of parallel “Mr. Smith goes to Washington”, given his poor background and quick rise to power. Obviously no one should take the historical JD Vance seriously.

One movie I really enjoyed watching years ago was The Man From Earth. There’s a line in that movie that goes (I’m paraphrasing), “The people back then [in ancient times] weren’t any more or less intelligent than we are. They just didn’t know as much…” We tend to look back on history as if the human beings who lived then weren’t really humans but were some kind of aliens. It’s why I’ve always rejected the whole “… everyone before ‘us’ we’re all ignorant and bigoted savages…” notion that pseudo-intellectual blowhards love to lead with. Of course they laughed. Of course they had sex. Of course they had institutions like the military, marriage, inheritance, etc. even Joseph wanted to divorce Mary in the Bible because he knew perfectly well where babies come from. These people weren’t gullible fools. Look around and consider all the things in the world that for all intents and purposes you lack such sufficient knowledge that you’d conclude, “This thing here works by magic.” Beneath it all you surely know there’s something mechanistic to it, but the world is still a very mysterious place.

The questions they would ask would likely be very different but I think on a basic level they’d acclimate over time. I tend to think we’ll always be slightly more well adjusted to adapt to the future than if a hard reset took place and we had to go back living in the distant past.

I’m sure it would, but my point is mostly about the plausibility of finding records of any type thousands of years in the future. David, or whoever David was based on lived 2500 years ago. Even if you assume the archeologists of 4526 are great at their jobs and have more sophisticated techniques, if paper records are lost or the hard drives storing the data are compromised, and the buildings referenced are destroyed, piecing all of that back together and finding the historical evidence of a human being, or knowing what that human did at the time is going to be tough.

One of my favorite examples of the arrogance of modern humans (including myself in the past, and I'm sure in the present as well, just in different ways) is thumbing our noses at people using the awkward 12 for so many things, instead of the simple, elegant 10 of the metric system. Of course, the beauty of 12 is that it's easy for dividing things evenly among 2, 3, 4, 6, or 12 people. And also any multiple of 12 with an even number is easy to divide among 8 people, and with a multiple of 3 is easy to divide among 9 people, due to 4 and 3 being factors. When not everyone knows long division or even the concept of decimals, Arabic numerals or fractions, having such a flexible number as a standard makes a lot of sense.

Paper and video on how binary is better than both decimal and duodecimal

Try doing complex mental computations off Roman numerals. It’s even harder. I used to wonder how the artisans and craftsmen of the time made such beautiful architecture and how they performed their measurements to calculate things. It’s always baffled me.

As a layman I think David is usually where both more conservative and more skeptical scholars can agree we can start looking for historicity. Some others push it till the Omrides but I think it's hard to argue that the mythicist side wouldn't have used the lack of anything like a stele as an argument so what's good for the goose and all that.

I guess I'm more of a mainstreamer here: things like the Exodus and Patriarchs seem like a total mess historically. Even if you grant there is some historic core you'll never agree on what it is. David's time seems like a good enough point to say the figures in the Bible have slipped out of myth.

I have seen some of Baden's interviews online, and read his Composition of the Pentateuch which is why I picked up the book. It's early days but I tend to lean towards what I think is Baden's own conclusion: there's a lot more explaining things in a more flattering light in David's legend than you'd expect if he didn't exist.

Which makes a good contrast with the show.

I finished Mage Errant, it was pretty good but dropped down to a 3.5/5 by the end. I actually made a Youtube review if anyone is interested: https://youtube.com/watch?v=8XjM93SfXTE

Started reading Spellslinger on the advice of the author of Mage Errant, and it's fun so far. My biggest gripe with it though is that it has that retarded trope where the protagonist gets in intense magical battles and always just happens to knock people unconscious instead of actually killing them. So incredibly stupid, though I get why authors are tempted to use it.

Science fiction was always an important part of my reading diet whenever I felt like I had to add fiction to the mix. Fantasy always caught my interest from a young age but for some reason I always found it very difficult to search for.

What are your favorite fantasy books that you might recommend?

The cold fire trilogy by CS Lewis is a fun one.

For light fun fantasy I like Earthsea and Narnia.

Edit: sorry I meant cs Friedman not Lewis!

Mage Errant was way too YA for me.

Yeahhhh that was my biggest complaint. I mean at least they had real killing and stakes and a truly epic scale. But the YA therapy dialogue was the lowest point of the series.

I've managed to listen to your review and I think I can sympathize with the idea that first book is such a great pull into the fantasy universe that you just compelled to see how it will turn out. But I quit somewhere at start of book 3.

Hey glad to hear man! At least one person has listened then, hah.

Yeah it's always sad to read series with a lot of potential that don't fulfill it, but hey that's more common than not. I still enjoyed reading it.

The new Dungeon Crawler Carl book just came out. Book 8, A Parade of Horribles.

So far it hasn't been thrilling me. Book 7 featured the conclusion of multiple long running storylines. Book 8 starts with Carl and Donut isolated from the supporting cast. I probably just wasn't in the right mood, I'll give it another shot in a week or so.

I'm at chapter 55 but I'm not that engaged, it feels a bit formulaic and at this point both me and the characters in the story are numb to the horror and gore of the setting, but there have been a few fun lines and moments. There have been a few awkward PC lines though that felt like unfunny moral hedging. That has not really been the case in previous books but perhaps Dinnieman is getting nervous from the fame.

Maybe it picks up though. The climax of the bedlam bride was great for instance, there is one setup I'm looking forward to the conclusion of.

Honestly I'm pretty glad to hear that. 7 was good but it was pretty tough to keep everyone straight.

Glad you enjoyed Ten Little Redacted. The impression I get is that the people who read mystery novels in the thirties and forties were for the most part well-versed in the conventions and "meta" of the genre. Aside from her books' sheer entertainment value, part of the reason Christie is so admired is because of how intimately acquainted she was with these conventions, and how skilled she was in subverting them and manipulating her audience.

About one-third of the way through The Matriarch.

Wrapped up Locke Lamora. Overall 6/10 - the plot holes became too big to ignore by the end (why the fuck did Barsavi not make sure Locke was dead before putting him in the barrel? How could the bondsmage guild exist in the form that it does without totally upending any semblance of political stability?).

Started on Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. I'm a little concerned that it's just going to glorify exercises in intellectual masturbation but it has a touch of Borges that makes me willing to stick it out.

Glass Bead Game is way overrated imo, I couldn't even finish it. I hope it's better for you idk, it gets a lot of love, but I was incredibly bored by it. Cool concept though.

GBG is awesome. My non-spoiler advice for enjoyment/depth is to keep in mind that it is explicitly narrated.

Anybody know a utility for Linux that can spam-click? As in, I want to be able to set it up so that if I hold a key while holding down LMB, it delivers a click every frame.

https://github.com/robiot/XClicker

It works! Thanks.

(I did take a look before asking, but I didn't know the right search terms; I used "turbobutton" (the console equivalent) and "turboclick" but didn't think of "autoclick".)

What kinds of pets do you all have? And why are dogs the best?

I grew up with and like dogs but I think modern people have concerning relationships with them where they let them define their lives and sink way too much medical care into pets for their own good. Hence I've never really felt any need to own one as an adult

I'll go a step further and confess what I likely never will overtly say IRL: I don't like dogs. I don't hate dogs, I tolerate them to some extent, but I think they are smelly and gross, generally parasitical on the finances of most owners, annoying to be around due to barking/leaping at you/bothering guests, enormously disruptive for personal travel and to a lesser extent daily routine that I think I would resent, their QoL is often quite poor, and although somewhat useful for generalized companionship/mindless adoration and they empirically seem to fill child-sized emotional holes in people with decent efficiency, I don't really think the comparison is fundamentally sound.

I have yet to find the right balance of bringing this up when dating as sadly all too many women my age are dog-crazy and frankly it is actually a deal-breaker to me. Call me selfish but I don't want to be eternally second fiddle.

I have yet to find the right balance of bringing this up when dating as sadly all too many women my age are dog-crazy and frankly it is actually a deal-breaker to me. Call me selfish but I don't want to be eternally second fiddle.

It would be easier to tolerate if the dog was ever an acceptable breed or well-trained, but it's always a poorly-behaved kick dog.

I really like @bonsaii's comment below for a mixture of reasons.

  1. I (still) love dogs (see below)
  2. Bonsaii's factual observations are mostly right, although his normative judgments stemming from them are more extreme. He admits this, which is laudable.
  3. My love for dogs, although intact, has been systematically challenge over the past decade or so.

Story time...

Several years ago (COVID, lol) I fled from a leafy suburb that had lost its damn mind. Previously, it was purple in the neo-lib/neo-con sense; while people were accepting of the gays, abortion, and whatnot, they wanted low taxes and weren't quite alright with the heavy-handed presence of gov't. Of course, COVID removed all of that reticence. Paired with George Floyd's Amazing Awokening Medicine Show, 2020-21 had masked Karens roaming the streets with the other members of the religious police to ensure that all Red Hat wearers, be they MAGA voters or Catholic Cardinals, were appropriately verbally pummeled for their lack of conviction to the One True Faith.

Being fully and permanently remote work and financial quite mobile, I exited my lease and started a new one sight unseen in a small town in a deep red area of my state about 90 minutes away. The place I rented then was quite nice on its own. A solo developer had bought up a foreclosed house at a bargain price and so could put in real money for renovations and upgrades while keeping the rent roughly in an acceptable range for the area. To be sure, however, he was targeting re-locating out of towners like me and COVID turned into somewhat of a bonanza for him.

The neighborhood within which my new pad was located was .... "transitioning." Spoiler alert, it still hasn't finished.

More honestly and directly, the neighborhood was shitty although not exactly unsafe in terms of humans. It was mixed country black and redneck white with a literal dividing avenue. The residents were a mix of about three or four groups depending on how you count; elderly black and white folks who had been living in the town for 30+ years and never left. Some of them were now living in quite large and legitimately "historic" homes too big for their needs. Others had a rotating cast of grown children, grown grand-children, nieces, nehphews, and boyfriends and girlfriends rotating in and out. The second group was a corps of local rednecks who moved into the town from the county when the housing prices got attractive. This group was the most aesthetically blighted; yards (on less than 1 acre plots) full of BBQ grills, kids toys, kiddie pools and adult hottubs, abandoned outdoor projects, broken down motorcycles and cars. The final group was magical junkies. Roughly every fifth house was in a state of disrepair and inhabited by heavily tattooed and questionably skinny men and women below forty and of all races. Color my suspicious that they were related. My theory is that one "pilgrim" junkie would inherit a home from a relative, move into it after that relative died or was relocated to a senior living center, and then gradually invite their junkie friends to flop. These places had tin foil and garbage bags on the windows, broken roofs, security cameras (?!) and ..... dogs.

And so did the rednecks.

(A short but important tangent)

I grew up in a very safe suburb that had lots of dogs. But these were suburban dogs. Lots of golden retrievers and black labs. Every dog, even from the "mean" breeds (Dobermans, German Shepherds) had been picked up either from a breeder or that special kind of suburban shelter that only seems to have Sarah McLaughlin level pitiable dogs with the kindest of souls. No pitbulls. No problem dogs.

Therefore, my default approach to dogs has always been "Awesome! A Dog!"

In my new neighborhood, back in the turn of the decade, however, I quickly update my priors.

My nextdoor neighbor had a large Doberman he had named "Orion" because that's fucking cool, bro. The dog was constantly menacing anyone who got close to the yard. Which was everyone because, as I said, this was a clump of mostly .5 acre homes with small, fenced in yards. I never saw him leap over the fence, but I always assumed it was possible if he got riled up enough. The yard was full - full - of Orion's feces every day of the year. The owner simply didn't care to clean it up.

Down the street, at one of the junkie houses, was a pitbull mix of some sort. This was an evil dog. Though it was, thankfully, chained to a wall without exception, it still managed to kill several semi-stray cats in the neighborhood, another dog that had tempted fate by getting just a little too close, and mauled a pizza delivery man who got the address wrong and walked up to the front door without realizing the pitbull was under the porch.

Before any dog absolutists jump in with "those are both mean breads" the final example I'll use is one of a rather kind looking hound of some sort (he had the classic "baying" sound, which I still actually like). Although I never saw him actually harm another living thing, he was the worst harasser of the bunch. For some reason, he was permitted off leash constantly, albeit with a rather sadistic looking double shock collar on. He routinely pushed passers by into the street due to his aggressive stance and loud baying. It a lot of ways, he was scarier than the pitbull because of the incongruity of appearance to behavior. The pitbull was a very obvious murder machine. This hound looked like me might teach you life lessons, but then began schizophrenically wailing at you for no reason.

Challenges

The dog defenders out there will look at my little story and say "Well, obviously those owners are all incompetent. They are the problem, not the dogs!" And I do agree with this but only as far as it goes. I'm not holding dogs culpable in a legal or moral sense. I don't really think they have agency in the way we say humans have agency. I also know dog behavior can be shaped very well or very poorly early in the dogs life.

The problem is, past a certain point, I don't think the dogs can be "un-fucked-up." Sure, maybe with constant, daily interaction from hardcore dog re-trainers or something. But the overwhelming majority of fucked up dogs are simply timebombs. Eventually, they'll hurt someone or some other thing (cat, dog, squirrel, chicken etc.) And the correlation between people who have fucked up dogs and people who cannot be trusted to responsibility manage fucked up dogs is probably > 0.99. Thinking back to my own childhood in Suburbia, those families nearly universally prioritized safety and pleasantness and were highly conscientious of their neighbors. Therefore, any dog with even the hint of aggression wouldn't even be adopted, let alone tolerated.

But in the 'hood (such as it was) that pro-social consideration doesn't exist and so now you have these random violence machines in the hands of the careless, stupid, and self-absorbed.

Which has made me less sympathetic to dogs in general because I can't afford to be. I see them, sometimes, as uninsulated live wires. Yes, someone should be blamed for not doing their basic job with them long ago but, now, we have to turn off the power, remove the damaged section, and replace it with what is intrinsically far safer.

Implications

  1. I support breed specific bans, legislated at the local level. Pitbulls around small children is pants-on-head insane.
  2. I'd support a "shall issue" regime of dog ownership licensing. All you have to do is go down to your local municipal building and fill out a form that says "I want a dog." That's it and you get it, per dog, for life. It's free. This is enough friction that the truly incapable won't go to the trouble, will get illegal dogs, and then can be prosecuted for it. Furthermore, if an illegal dog hurts a person, the illegal "owner" is held liable for the same offense.
  3. Dogs without collars / ownership identification can be immediately held in a local shelter for X amount of days, then euthanized.
  4. Off-leash without fencing / outside of private property is the rough equivalent to a speeding ticket. Repeated offenses become more and more punitive
  5. No dog friendly businesses anymore. This is mostly a health and hygiene issue, but also saves the business from what could be catastrophic liability claims in edge cases.

Some of these come dangerously close to violating a lot of my small c-conservative "the government should not do stuff" principles. But the common good interest of public safety, imho, totally and obviously outweighs it. Bad Dogs are like grenades with pulled pins and delayed fuses rolling around the street. After a bad mauling or bite, saying "this was an unavoidable tragedy!" is an epistemically bankrupt thing to say.

On #2: I doubt illegal dog-owners will ever be prosecuted, unless it's in tandem with another offense. In my city, code enforcement is responsive - not proactive. I would expect minimal enforcement until a violent offense happens, and then two charges to be brought up instead of one. Which feels like a piling-on of trumped up charges to create Death By Multiple Cuts.

It doesn't seem like a good process, this. I don't work in the legal system, but I wish there were a better way of doing things.

I think it would have some effect if the consequences of owning an illegal dog were the same as owning an illegal firearm. I believe, in most jurisdictions, having an illegal firearm is either a felony or the "worst" misdemeanor. And yes, if piled on other charges, it gets serious in a hurry.

"Are you serious? Illegal dog the same as an illegal gun? Get out of town, man..." The haters will say.

But let me ask this; besides a gun, what "thing" can you own that can do the same level of damage / death that an off leash (large) dog could do? Perhaps a car (which we have lots of licensing and registration regimes around). Knives and power tools are a little more shaky, but not a totally bad argument. The key, however, becomes that dogs, unlikely any of the things just listed, have (literally) a mind of their own. If I lock my power tools inside my car and lock that in my garage and throw away the keys, the probability of maiming or killing others is effectively 0.

If I do that with my dog, ironically enough, that's called animal abuse.

Yeah. Tons of shitty owners out there. I grew up with dogs and I'm broadly pleasant with them but 95% of dog owners have an inherent 'my dog is wonderful' affectation where they don't consider optics, other peoples' feelings or that it's fundamentally an animal that can act more aggressively than you'd expect. I also did a stint in pizza delivery and the amount of people that just figured 'oh my medium-large dog is fine with me I should make zero precautions for the pizza guy' was one of my biggest issues with the role.

People have also gotten downright ridiculous with expecting to take dogs everywhere. I'm sure you like the thing but it's injecting potential volatility into everybody's lives and probably part of the forces keeping the fertility rate down.

I support breed specific bans, legislated at the local level. Pitbulls around small children is pants-on-head insane.

I think your proposals are reasonable except for this one. Pit bulls are fine in and of themselves. I've known more than one very chill, very friendly pit bull in my day who was that way because the owner cared and put in the work to teach the dog as a puppy. While it's certainly true that irresponsible dog owners disproportionately choose pit bulls, a bad owner can ruin any breed (as you yourself pointed out). The problem is not the breed, it is the owner, and I don't support outlawing something which responsible people handle perfectly fine just because a minority of people are irresponsible jerks.

A better proposal imo would be to strike this one altogether and let the revocation of someone's dog license do the work. If some underclass guy gets a pit because he wants to have a "tough" dog and he fucks it up, well, he won't have any dog any more. Sucks to suck.

'Pit bull' isn't a thing. Purebred American Pit Bull Terriers are mostly fine around humans, but there's plenty of mixes involving fighting breeds or whatever that are also called pit bulls. If you want a pit, get it from a reputable breeder. Most 'pit bulls' in America are mixes whose ancestry isn't well enough known to say if they tend towards aggressive or not.

Wife has a cat, we get along well. I do love a well-trained dog, but those are rare.

I have three cats. Being a cat lover is like becoming an Epicurean, or a eunuch; you don't go back.

I’ll always love the quote, “A dog is a creature that assumes if you bring it food, you are a God. A cat assumes if you bring it food, they are Gods.”

It's not about food though. I mean sure, dogs need to eat, but beyond basic needs the level of food motivation varies very widely among dogs. What is much more common is a need for connection and socialization. So in dogs you get someone who is always glad to socialize with you, and in cats you get somebody who occasionally tolerates you socializing with them. If they're in the mood.

Funny enough, my neighbors recently got a Cane Corso.

My brother, being a... bit of a worrying person, wanted to make sure said dog was friendly with us, so made it a point to introduce and be friendly with it on our weekly walks.

Said dog ended up liking us so much that we damn near kidnapped it at one point, much to it's owners worry and consternation.

They no longer bring it out during the hours we're typically on our walks, now.

This is not the only case of local dogs absolutely loving us when we're out and about, weirdly enough.

I have cats. One is a cuddle, the other a mouser; a good balance.

I want to get backyard chickens again, but do not feel up to building them an enclosure. When I had them before, they kept getting killed by dogs, and there are also mountain lions, so it might not work out. Too bad, since it solve the sad layers problem. They were very happy layers while alive. Or I could just commit to getting new not very secure hens every year? They start laying fairly quickly. I could eat them myself and also solve the sad meat chickens problem locally, but butchering is a lot of work.

Dogs are fine, but not worth the effort of boarding them when we're away. The cats just stay home for up to two weeks together, and seem OK with it

Islam is right about dogs.

Muslims hate dogs? Just another reason not to like them.

So are korean cookbooks.

💀. Ah shit, you just had to go there, didn’t you?

I have a female cat, and have so far been resistant to other pet project ideas. I do cooperate with the neighbors to make sure there's food out for the neighborhood strays, but that's mostly not on me, it's a village cats policy.

Your kids don't want puppies???

Of course they do. I'm simply not onboard with the idea(or my wife's many other pet ideas).

How come? What's the block for you? With dogs specifically.

Though I am curious about your wife's other ideas now, lol.

Dogs of the sort I would be ok with smell bad, and I don't want to add to my list of yard chores by cleaning up after them, and they're expensive to get one I'm ok with having. They are also loud, and unlike cats(which strictly speaking need water, food, and litterbox- and that can be delayed for a day or two) we would need to make arrangements for walking etc if we went out of town. It's possible that someone I know might rehome a dog because of moving and I would be ok with getting it, but I'm not trusting a shelterpet, not with a dog(that's where cats come from though), and I do not wish to spend hundreds of dollars on a purebred, nor am I thrilled about the puppy stage.

My wife grew up in a veritable zoo, and I am, needless to say, not as onboard with the wide variety of animals. She’s more or less ok with this, although I suspect when our kids get older she’ll push a bit harder to let them have bunnies and fish tanks and caged birds. Some of these sound like worse ideas than the other.

Curious effect of the way people have become more conscientious pet owners over the last few decades - fewer random puppies about. When I was a kid, the main way you got a dog was because a neighbor or friend of a friend had a dog that had puppies, and they put out a "free to a good home" call through the grapevine. More people now do the "responsible" thing and get their animals fixed, so your choices are either a paid breeder or rolling the dice on some irresponsible person's shelter dog instead of being blessed by middle class serendipity.

I have a very realistic looking houseplant. The fact that I haven't watered it since I moved in a year ago suggests that it's probably plastic. (Or that I've stumbled onto a hardy new species of Scottish cactus.)

Back home? A Labrador and a Golden. The former has two brain cells, both currently on lunch break. The latter is too smart for his own good. I adore them both, and I look forward to being settled enough to justify getting a dog here. I grew up with more dogs than I can count, which is unsurprising given that we also had more parrots than I could count, or that my grandfather once owned a tiger. (Yes, a tiger. A different time, a different country, very different ideas about what constitutes a reasonable household animal.) I think my kids should enjoy that same privilege, even if I've concluded that a single animal is perfectly adequate. This is probably the consequence of a serial injection of pragmatic genes into the family. The men in my ancestry tend toward pleasant eccentricity, the women toward laudable sanity. I'm not sure where I land.

My personal benchmark for canine intelligence is the ability to open doors. The Golden could do it from the moment he was tall enough to reach the handle on his hind legs. My Lab can't, and just stares at them mournfully until someone takes pity. An earlier German Shepherd managed it too, though less consistently than his mother. She was a rescue (so is the Golden), and she came into our house with a profound distrust of menfolk. It took over a year for her to accept that I wasn't going to hurt her, and then assent to scritches behind the ears. She'd graduated to begrudgingly accepting belly rubs a year or so before she passed. Her son, and every dog since, seems to gravitate toward me. Maybe it's because I'm unusually considerate of their needs, while my younger brother has been known to wield a chancla when they misbehave. My father is the living archetype of the "we are absolutely not getting more dogs" to "I cannot live without them" pipeline. My mother is usually the one who talks us into the original transgression.

Honestly, I'm glad that most of my dogs passed away suddenly, and painlessly. I support euthanasia in principle, but taking an animal I love to the vet with full knowledge that they aren't coming back with me would break parts of me I'd prefer to keep intact. Dogs live unfortunately short lives. Parrots live far too long.

Some say we don't deserve dogs. I find that farcical. They're one of humanity's greatest achievements: without anything resembling a modern understanding of genetics, we managed to turn a ravenous pack predator into a creature that will, more often than not, lay down its life for you. We made dogs. We deserve them. (If anything, the dogs got the better end of the bargain, though I doubt they'd phrase it that way.)

Cats? I don't mind them. I'm slightly fond of them. Some can be cute, and they seem to like me in particular because I don't go out of my way to fuss over them. I've irritated quite a few of my female cat-loving friends by being the lap of choice. While renting elsewhere, I once had a stake in a kitten who would always climb up into my bedsheets and snooze on my feet. I'd wake up every morning, and before I could panic-dress and run off to catch the bus, I had to make sure she was safely disentangled. I could have stepped on her without noticing, which is probably also why she enjoyed sleeping inside my shoes. I felt awful the one time I forgot to let her out of the bedroom, coming back from work to see her practically leap ten times her body length over my shoulder to escape. Oh well, at least she kept coming back. I wonder how she's doing these days. She was on the smaller side, and lived a semi-outdoor lifestyle in an area where cats go missing with distressing frequency. I hope she's fine, and that she has kittens who've found smaller shoes to fill.

Funny you mention door opening as an intelligence test. All of my family's dogs have been able to pull that off, thought they've all been of a very specific breed. I have fond memories of them doing their daily patrols to check and make sure everyone was present before wandering back out.

I agree we deserve dogs, and your intelligence test is great. Our dog is great at opening doors and it's a pain, but we love him.

I'm the same with cats, they're ok but nowhere near as lovable as dogs. Kind of like, less variance though since they tend to be less annoying.

I've been feeding a local stray cat for a number of years. She's very affectionate.

Dogs are subjectively the best because they are easier to read, and should have some loyalty to you as a member of their pack/family. Very untrained dogs suck, dogs that need stimulation and room should not be denied it, and I'd honestly make pet liability insurance mandatory until the pitbull population goes into the low thousands.

Aesthetically I prefer cats. Biologically I'm allergic to cats (and allegedly anti-allergic sphinx cats are ugly, the furriness is the whole point of a cat). Preferentially, I don't want to nurture and care for anyone who will never learn to remove their own shit or hold up their end of a conversation.

It's not the cat or even the dander you're allergic to. It's the protein Fel d 1 in the cat's saliva that is transferred to their fur/skin when they groom themselves. Some cat food companies claim to make a kibble that supposedly has anti Fel D 1 antibodies, creating hypoallergenic cats. I have no idea to what degree this works. This won't help with the shit removal or improve the conversation. (Though my black cat will talk to me if I cough.)

Thoughts on some recent pets:

Black cat. Black cats are surprisingly good at hiding in a home environment. He liked to curl up on a black towel / jacket / backpack and become invisible. Watching the humans look for him provided immense entertainment. I got him a black throw blanket and a window bird feeder and he'd spend all day staring at the birds who only saw two golden floating orbs. After pouncing at the window a few too many times he learned to squint at the birds to remain hidden.

Toy poodle. Adorable. High energy with extreme demands for attention. Likes cat wands more than cats do. Does not get along well with cats, who just want to sleep. Stubborn. Thinks the world will end if he's ever more than ten feet away from a human. Thinks he can win at tug if he just finds the right leverage despite being 11lbs. He likes sitting on the back of the couch and resting his head on my shoulder during Zoom calls.

Outdoor Maine Coon (cat). Friendly and adorable. Conned me into thinking he was a starving stray despite living in a large house. Could eat shocking amounts of tuna.

For some reason raccoons keep populating my YouTube feed. They are damn cute creatures, I must say; but I think I’d be hesitant ever getting one. Are they even domesticable? Or are they just friendly “until the time is right?”

Last pets I recently had were three cats. Two of them passed away a few years back and were up there in age, the last one is up there in age now and is being taken care of by a relative. One was a most neurotic calico that was insane and hilarious, but I loved her. I actually caught her playing with my gun once after I finished cleaning it and forgot to put it away. The other was a Norwegian forest cat that had a perfectly colored Adolf Hitler mustache (and actually burned his litter box down in our garage once). I love how arrogant cats can be.

They can be tamed but they aren’t domesticated. My dad had one or two growing up.

So a lot like those people that keep tigers in their house. I wouldn’t be afraid to keep a raccoon around but I’d be very hesitant leaving it alone in the house with the cat.

Are they even domesticable? Or are they just friendly

Kinda, my father raised a couple growing up in the backwoods, so I hear the stories. They are super friendly when young but become pretty mean and grouchy as adults. N of 3 so take it with some salt. But I agree they are super cute and adorable with their antics.

Well humans become mean and grouchy when they become adults; I don’t find that a formidable objection.

I too love how cats get indignant at any perceived slight.

Are they even domesticable?

No. Raccoons make worse pets than wolves, bobcats, foxes, raptors, etc. It's actually difficult to think of a carnivore which makes a worse pet without resorting to ones that produce man eating individuals regularly.

So then there really was cause for concern watching this?

Dog culture is just a unique form of brood parasitism. They are like any other superstimulus. What porn is for sex, what streamers are for friendship, what dramas are for romance, etc. That is what dogs are for raising children. They grab the relevant hardwired reward systems without any of the messy complications of dealing with actual people who can have their own lives and develop their own agency. Nothing more than a low-stakes, ersatz sense of fulfillment.

Objectively, I can't feel much more than disgust for dog culture when I see the shit and piss covering my city, the daily cacophony of barking, the glimmer of slobber residue lining products in grocery stores, the stories of bites and maulings. Dog ownership is easily one of the highest negative externality hobbies that society just accepts without question (see even this thread: "And why are dogs the best?" "Literally nobody can raise an ethical objection to giving dogs healthier, longer lives, right?"). I would put so much money on the table to live in a city that completely bans dogs and actually enforces it.

More importantly, dogs have evolved their behaviors and appearances to most effectively hijack our instincts. You look at a golden retriever and it looks like it's smiling. It hops around and wags its tail and it looks like it's happy. But is any of that actually a reflection of its internal mental state or are these just behaviors we subconsciously selected for because it's pleasant to us. Do they play with us because they enjoy it or because we programmed them to obsessively need it? Maybe it's both, but if they were actually miserable on the inside because we bred them to crave human attention the way an addict craves heroin there's no way for us to know.

To me it seems akin to a putting a smiling face on a robot or setting ChatGPT to max sycophancy. We are just more susceptible to projecting human assumptions onto dogs because on some level we know that we made robots and LLMs, but we rarely think about what we've done to dogs. They seem constantly anxious and bored, because we wanted them to always be willing and able to play whenever we feel like it. We've stripped away so much of their basic instincts they don't even realize it's not the best idea to eat their own shit or lap up their own vomit. In some cases we've actively bred for deformities because some find them "cute."

They are craven, pathetic creatures that only exist to feed into our narcissism. It would be hard to convince me that the world wouldn't be better if dogs never existed. For us, and maybe even for them.

Do they play with us because they enjoy it or because we programmed them to obsessively need it

Same question can be asked about humans. p-zombies and all that. Do other people really like you, or only pretend to like you to get on your good side (and eventually betray and hurt you, of course). It's a long stairway down to hell this way. I'd rather stay up here out of it, and pet the dog.

We've stripped away so much of their basic instincts they don't even realize it's not the best idea to eat their own shit

You need to do a bit of reading. Eating shit has very little to do with stupidity and lack of instincts and very much to do with nutrition. Of course, modern house dog rarely needs it as a proper owner already provides them necessary nutrients in much better form, but this is not depravity, and measuring different species by standards of modern Western hygiene is only a step away from "my dog/cat is a vegan" (those kinds of people need to be isolated on a barren island where there's nothing to eat but each other).

If you go for a ragebait, at least make it not an ignorant one maybe?

Dogs eating their own shit is not an evolved nutritional instinct, they aren't rabbits. Dogs will eat some quite nasty things because they think they taste good- used menstrual products, rotting meat, creepy crawlies, etc- but not poop. Poop eating is actually a den-cleaning behavior which can usually be prevented by providing a clean environment.

As I said, I personally never witnessed any dogs eating their own shit, so I can only go by literature, not empirical data. Your reason is mentioned among others, but I can not also exclude others. In any case, it's not an evidence of some kind of depravity of the dogkind (even if in the case of your explanation, it is an evidence for depravity of the owner).

I think the fact that you would consider P(other humans are p-zombies) even on the same order of magnitude as P(dogs are essentially p-zombies) is essentially the point I'm making.

Eating shit has very little to do with stupidity and lack of instincts and very much to do with nutrition.

I'm aware of animals that eat others' shit that has been through a different digestive tract and therefore has a different nutritional remnants, but please do enlighten me if the prevalence of eating one's own feces is more common than I thought.

Also, I see you left out the part about the vomit. Is there some nutritional value to that I'm also ignorant of?

Yes. First of all, a lot of what you call "vomit" isn't, it's regurgitation. That can happen when the dog expels food that hadn't reached the stomach yet. That can happen from time to time, though if it happens frequently there might be some problem with the plumbing somewhere on the way. But could be just biting more than they could chew, or stomach, quite literally. Obviously, there's no reason to waste good food just because it's slightly wet. Second, regurgitating is a frequent way for a parent to make food more easily palatable to children, and a dog may occasionally return to this childish behavior. Third, dogs have a chemical analyzer that most of us can't even dream of, and with that, if they see something that has viable nutrients mixed together with iffy substances, they could separate one from the other and eat the good parts without eating the bad ones. Just like eating carryon, for example. You probably would be revolted at the thought, but for many species - including dogs - it's a perfectly good meal, if you know what you're doing. There's also an instinctive behavior to clean up after themselves (to hide one's smell, for example, which both protects the dog and does not let the prey know the dog is near) and since the dog doesn't exactly have pockets... It could also be that a particular dog is unwell, of course, or is unable to realize eating something that smells good is not necessarily good for them - same as happens to many people too, just visit any local McDonalds store. Generally, if the dog vomits or regurgitates a lot, then that's the actual health problem. If it happens once in a while, usually not a big deal, and tells no more of their degeneracy than having an occasional quarter-pounder with cheese tells about human's.

Again, I must remind you that dogs are not humans, and what is disgusting and maybe harmful for you, is not necessarily so for a dog. If you started trying to lick your own butt as a means to maintain hygiene, your relatives probably would have you committed, but for a dog it is normal (and for many other animals too).

but please do enlighten me if the prevalence of eating one's own feces is more common than I thought.

Coprophagia happens a lot in herbivores, because plants are tough to digest (I think you can continue this line of thought). Eating their own feces in dogs is actually not that common, but happens from time to time - though other species' feces are usually more appealing to them, for reasons you pointed out (though for a well-fed domestic dog there's no serious nutritional reason, but again the dog might not know that). One of the reasons puppies might do it is microbiome transfer (the gut has a lot of beneficial microbes, and guess what's the most efficient way for a mother to transfer some to the child). On the other hand, the pups may not have good hygiene habits yet, and in the absence of Pampers... But this is not that common in adult dogs actually. Of all dogs I knew well (about a dozen), none had any interest to their own poop. Research I saw shows only about 1/4 of dogs engage in this behavior, and it could be caused by various causes - from bad nutrition to bad training to psychological problems (anxiety->drive to hide->drive to remove one's smell->you can guess). But this specific thing is not universal for dogs at all.

Appreciate the deep-dive, though it certainly hasn't done anything for my utter disgust at being licked by them.

tells no more of their degeneracy

In case it wasn't clear, I wasn't trying to assign any sort of moral degeneracy to the dogs themselves. Rather, I believe we've warped their neural circuitry in ways that are cruel and maladaptive, much like we've done to the limbs and airways of certain breeds.

With the licking, you do need to be careful, it is understandable. Since dogs pretty much have the only way of cleaning themselves, their mouth may not be always as clean as one would prefer, and also a lot of owners neglect dental hygiene because it's impossible to teach the dog to brush their own teeth and floss, and they often dislike those procedures quite intensely, so it could be an expensive visit to a veterinarian to get their mouth in order. And dogs are as poorly evolutionary adapted to modern refined-sugar high-carbs diets as humans are. So being licked by a random strange dog is not always a good experience.

This is a very impoverished way of seeing the world. You could use the same reductionist logic to say that love is nothing but chemicals firing in the brain, or that morality is nothing but dressing on cold, utilitarian game theoretical outcomes to push cooperation.

It's one way of looking at life, that has perhaps some truth to it, but is ultimately deeply flawed.

This is a very impoverished way of seeing the world. You could use the same reductionist logic to say that love is nothing but chemicals firing in the brain, or that morality is nothing but dressing on cold, utilitarian game theoretical outcomes to push cooperation.

This is orthogonal to my point. I'm basically talking about p-zombies. My disagreement is not about the value of love, morality, loyalty, etc. I just take issue with dog owners who insist that these are qualities that one can find in dogs. I consider humans to have all been produced in a similar enough mold to go about my life assuming that they aren't all p-zombies. Dogs come from a very different path. One that I interpret as producing something closer to a p-zombie. I believe Jane Doe when she says she loves to ski. I have doubts Fido loves playing fetch any more than Claude loves to code.

If you were to suddenly go comatose with only your dog around, how long do you think before it starts eating your face and gnawing on your ribs? Is that what you call love and loyalty?

If you were to suddenly go comatose with only your dog around, how long do you think before it starts eating your face and gnawing on your ribs?

Various very unfortunate experiments show to us humans frequently resort to cannibalism once starved enough. Including consuming their own offspring, for example. As I said, if you step on this stairway and walk on it consistently, with open eyes and cold logic, it won't lead you to a happy place.

For a bonded dog? Your corpse would stink and the city would show up before it started to eat you. They’ll eat feces first.

Seconded. If you break everything down to its molecular structure, then yeah life is pretty goddamned stupid and no one should try for anything. "The only philosophical question is suicide" and all that.

Sometimes you just have to let fun, stupid things be fun and stupid. I do this all the time with sports, Christmas, raising kids, etc.

This is the most Motte post I've read all week. It's also the first thread I've read so there's that.

I grew up with dogs, but mostly very well-trained dogs. I get your intolerance for dogs, or at least I get your intolerance for dogs that run amok. Dog people (a term I use loosely) often think if they have you over you'll be fine with the dog nuzzling up against you as you're trying to eat the bean burrito. Isn't Buster cute? Look he's hungry. There is also an unquestionable smell of dog in most every indoor dog house. Not necessarily feces, but definitely dog.

I do like dogs and I get that, too. Except most of the dogs in Japan, which I consider odd mutations of what may have once been noble strong breeds but are now tiny, yappy, dew-eyed over-coiffed and overdressed trip hazards. As in you'll trip over them.

We have cats now. Entire different animal type requiring an entirely different mindset. I won't belabor the obvious that everyone already knows when I write that.

I do get your impatience for dogs, though. Though yours is more a hatred and disgust. My own impatience is mostly for the owners. One of the many reasons I quit reddit was the fawning subculture of cat people who would post what they imagined were adorable videos of their cats innocently destroying some expensive tchothcke, or grabbing their McDonald's nugget or whatever embarrassing fast food they were eating, usually in bed. I would typically bite my tongue/typing fingers regarding their questionable hygiene, and instead post a benign "Train your animal, please" and be downvoted to kitty hell. Ok maybe once I said "WTF Train your fucking cat."

I feel as if you were in the wilderness or countryside and had a loyal dog you might change your mind. I could be wrong, though.

Except most of the dogs in Japan

I wonder if dog culture in Japan is more considerate of non-dog lovers than in the US, or if lack of consideration and assumption that dogs are some unalloyed good is just a feature of dog owners that transcends local culture.

I do get your impatience for dogs, though. Though yours is more a hatred and disgust. My own impatience is mostly for the owners.

I would say my hatred and disgust is mostly for the owners as well. My feeling towards the dogs themselves I would liken mostly to how you might feel about a dog-sized cockroach or tarantula that people could not stop shoving into your face so it can rub its secretions on you. For whatever reason (probably a heavier than usual dose of autism, even for a place like this), I'm largely immune to the wiles of most dogs and find them rather ugly (the ones that basically look like wolves can be cute, but the more obviously their appearance has been selectively bred by humans the more off-putting I find them).

I feel as if you were in the wilderness or countryside and had a loyal dog you might change your mind. I could be wrong, though.

I have a hard time ascribing "loyalty" to a dog. Their behaviors are compulsions that humans chose for them, some because they give the appearance of loyalty and that makes humans feel good. I could see how a dog might be useful in a wilderness scenario, but my feelings toward it would be no different from those for ChatGPT sycophantically praising me when I ask it for code. They do what we programmed them to do and don't have the agency to do otherwise.

ChatGPT sycophantically praising me when I ask it for code.

That's the best part of my workday right there. Some hours I use more tokens self-glazing than solving the problem.

By "programmed", do you mean conditioned via training or something like selected through breeding?

Both, but with more emphasis on the latter. Owners tend to anthropomorphize dog psychology in a way that I think is in contradiction to their unique evolutionary history. A human was more likely to keep and breed a dog that not only followed commands but exhibited behaviors we instinctively pattern-match to things like happiness and loyalty while doing so. Over generations, these became as hard-coded as the instinct to eat. Modern owners don't consider this and assume that these are genuine displays of affection (I can't definitively say that isn't the case, but I don't think it's the most likely one). From the outside looking in, it feels like watching a bunch of people who are convinced that an LLM really is their best friend - some sort of twisted mass psychosis.

Are you saying you don't nuzzle up to your ChatGPT?

Regarding tarantulas and cockroaches, kill them with fire. We used to have quite large (big-ass) cockroaches in Alabama, and once I felt the hair on my neck stand up when I saw one launch itself from a high wall and flutter its infernal wings as it glided to the floor. As for spiders I am a lifelong arachnophobe. The camel spiders of the Kalahari (yes yes not arachnids) compounded that trauma tenfold.

That is what dogs are for raising children.

My malamute used to earn her keep by killing rattlesnakes in the wood pile. I'm pretty sure I'd get a visit from the county if I made my kids do that.

Shades of this classic essay: https://mattlakeman.org/2020/03/21/against-dog-ownership/

I think dogs if you have a sizable piece of land (or even big yard) are totally fine. Or if you already have kids. I absolutely have some internal judgement towards any couple I see that has a dog and no kids (probably should go to confession)

I'm certainly not the first or only one to come to these conclusions. I genuinely believe dogs have some sort of mind virus effect. They've found an exploit in our circuitry that blinds many to the obvious. People are defensive of their dogs right to slobber on you with a ferocity I haven't even seen for children.

I absolutely have some internal judgement towards any couple I see that has a dog and no kids

I do wonder if pet culture has an appreciable suppressive effect on fertility rates the way that porn addiction can cause withdrawal from attempting real-world relationships.

There's some evidence that pet ownership makes childbearing more likely.

Anecdotally, I've observed similar among friends in the US, but I think for them it had more to do with a confounding desire to nurture that made them more likely both to want pets and to want children. Pets being relatively low-stakes makes it more sensible to try them first before children.

Also once you're used to taking care of a dog every day, a child seems more manageable. You've already adopted a lifestyle that involves being home on a regular schedule.

Caesar [Augustus] once, seeing some wealthy strangers at Rome, carrying up and down with them in their arms and bosoms young puppy-dogs and monkeys, embracing and making much of them, took occasion not unnaturally to ask whether the women in their country were not used to bear children; by that prince-like reprimand gravely reflecting upon persons who spend and lavish upon brute beasts that affection and kindness which nature has implanted in us to be bestowed on those of our own kind.

With like reason may we blame those who misuse that love of inquiry and observation which nature has implanted in our souls, by expending it on objects unworthy of the attention either of their eyes or their ears, while they disregard such as are excellent in themselves, and would do them good.

Plutarch: Pericles

I don't love the implication that you need pets to have a fulfilling life. Other choices are valid too and right for other people. My wife and I have a baby who is more than enough for us. We don't need pets.

Not all choices are equally valid and right. That's some woke bs. Dogs are superior and you and your wife would be better off with dogs. You're leaving happiness on the table, as @faceh says.

In Botswana there were many stray dogs. Probably some mix of Rhodesian Ridgebacks and whatever other feral dogs roamed the Kalahari. They were docile enough when alone and well fed, but wild enough that I wouldn't want to encounter a pack of them in the bush. There was an Afrikaner phrase which basically meant Get out of here which was, if I recall correctly, Vootsak! This--or ar least this was how it was explained to me--was a reduction of the sentence Voort se ek which meant "Forward, I say."

If you shouted "Vootsak" at a dog it seemed to get your meaning, and would fuck itself off. A hand gesture as if flinging seed like someone in a Van Gogh painting helped the message, if you were willing.

I only learned this term because Vootsak, if said to a human, was considered very much fighting words. Unless the human also fucked off, in which case job done, if rather rudely.

I'm just joking if it wasn't clear.

I have a black male rescue cat that I've taught a handful of tricks to (sit, shake, look, spin, lay down, up, down, shoulders, boop). They recently discontinued his kibble brand, so I've been trying to find him something else he likes before I run out of the stockpile of the good stuff.

I have mixed feelings on dogs. They are pretty great to own/be close to, especially if you have a bit of land that they can be on. Unfortunately a lot of people don't train their dogs (doesn't need to be formal, just basic etiquette is sufficient). They destroy property, they are capable of violence and often threaten it, they are loud enough to disturb neighbors, and they do all this with strong social cover that it isn't the owner's fault/responsibility. I think if your dog threatens someone, you should be held responsible as if you had done so. Good dogs are great though.

I much prefer cats; they are fluffier and don't slobber on you.

My cat Boots used to crouch and sit down like a donut directly on my head when I would go to sleep, so it looked like I was wearing a turban. Whenever I woke up I would try and get him off with my hand and he would very aggressively swat or bite at my fingers, and he would dig his paws into my head to avoid moving. Feeding him first thing in the morning was the only way I got him off.

You got lucky. My one cat drools like a Saint Bernard when she's happy.

Oh, I don't have a cat; I was just referring to my experience with others' pets.

Dogs are the best because thousands upon thousands of years of co-evolution has made humans and dogs biologically optimized for companionship with each other and mutually beneficial cooperation.

I like to say that if you don't have a dog in your life (not necessarily owning one, mind) you're leaving 'money on the table' in terms of personal happiness, you can improve your own mood for basically free just by petting one.

I have a medium-small mixed terrier rescue. With a diagnosed anxiety disorder. He's gotten a lot better since I got him. Already dreading the eventual day he'll leave me, but haven't regretted a minute of having him around. Okay, maybe a few hours here and there.

Anyway, here's hoping they solve dog longevity in the next 5 years. They deserve it more than us. Literally nobody can raise an ethical objection to giving dogs healthier, longer lives, right?

Currently, we have two male cats, both around six years of age.

So is anyone planning on doing an effortpost on "Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC" that dropped last week?

Transport brokers lost immunity for hiring trucking companies with bad safety track records. It's causing some chaos and loops in the CDL and foreign driver discussion.

The important thing is that the trucking industry didn't prepare and because it came into full force immediately there's some chaos.

I'm asking because if someone with more legal and shipping knowledge than me does a write up, anything I write will look pretty half assed.

This should link to the twitter trend: https://x.com/i/trending/2055714473541771375

Not an effort post, but two paragraph in a weekly brief my team writes:

In a unanimous ruling, the US Supreme Court ruled that a trucking freight broker could be sued for arranging freight shipments using trucking companies they hired negligently, e.g., ignoring red flags. This ruling upends the freight trucking industry and could push many smaller motor carriers and freight brokers out of business and many drivers out of trucking. Insurance costs for brokers are expected to increase by a factor of 5 to 10, and some brokers may not be able to obtain insurance at all. Truckload spot rates are spiking. At least some companies with spotty track records can no longer get loads to drive as brokers are already making more careful selections. Increasing trucking freight prices are likely to drive additional inflation faced by both producers and consumers.

A shortage of synthetic industrial lubricants is anticipated to start affecting the US and Europe over the coming weeks. Production at the Shell Pearl GTL facility in Ras Laffan, Qatar was halted after the facility was struck by Iran in March. The Shell Pearl facility, together with far smaller facilities in the UAE and Bahrain, produced 20-30% of the world’s supply of Group III base oils. These base oils are used in a variety of applications, including synthetic motor oils and automatic transmission fluid. Lower-quality base oils can be substituted for Group III base oils in some of these applications better than in others. Shortages of products containing Group III base oils can be expected to start appearing by June and July, as retailers face losses of new supplies; price increases are expected, and some products are likely to be reformulated.

This ruling upends the freight trucking industry and could push many smaller motor carriers and freight brokers out of business and many drivers out of trucking.

I heard that the influx of cheap "no-questions-asked" carriers already did it with many existing businesses. So maybe if those carriers are forced out, the previous ones would come back? This indeed could cause some raise of the prices, but the question is would it be a panic raise or "going back to the level of 10 years ago" raise?

the previous ones would come back?

Here I'm just speculating, but there are frictions. You can't just boot up a relatively capital intensive business just like so?

The rigs that are driven by cheap foreigners are rarely owned by them I imagine. Somebody owns them. That somebody could keep the rigs and start hiring natives?

I was considering doing an effort post on the the decision and the DoT audits as sort of post-mortem/follow-up to my post from 3 months ago

But have been busy with normal life stuff.

I would recommend Freightwaves.com if you want an inside view.

I don't have much shipping knowledge but I can make some predictions based on my knowledge of personal injury litigation generally. Suppose a trucker gets into a crash with an automobile, the trucker is at fault, and the injured driver of the auto sues the trucking company. Let's say the driver got rear-ended while waiting at a stoplight, and the driver is employed by the trucking company. The trucking company will be responsible for the driver's negligence, and thus the entirety of the judgment, since in this case a jury would be likely to find the trucker 100% at fault. The broker's, however, is not directly liable for the negligence of the trucker; they are only liable to the extent that they knew or should have known that using that particular company was unjustifiably risky. If the trucking company in the example was a reputable outfit with a safety record typical of the industry, it's unlikely that the broker would be at fault. If it was a disreputable company with a terrible safety record or a fly-by-night outfit that they didn't properly vet and hired because they came in with the low bid, then it's more likely that they will be found responsible. But in the event that they are responsible, their share of the settlement is going to be much lower than that of the trucking company.

The extent to which this will affect the industry is hard to judge, because it all depends on custom, and how likely the ruling is to affect custom. The most immediate effect I can see is that every PI case involving a truck will name the broker as defendant if there is one, even in cases where the broker has no liability. While the ultimate result of many of these will be that the plaintiff agrees to voluntarily dismiss the broker from the suit, the broker will still incur defense costs, which will be reflected in insurance premiums. Here's where custom comes in: It could be the case that PI lawyers are already suing brokers in these cases, but the brokers are settling before the issue can be decided. The brokers may have heretofore taken an official stance that they were immune to such suits, but they may have been willing to settle them anyway, or they may have been let out of the case after discovery didn't uncover any evidence of negligent hiring.

If this seems odd to you, keep in mind that litigating a case to verdict is very expensive, the potential for huge losses exists in the event of an unfavorable award, the broker's share of the damages is relatively low in a fair trial, and one defendant can't force another defendant's hand. Take the example above. Suppose that both defendants take the case to trial, and the jury awards the plaintiff $3 million, apportioned 80% to the trucking company and 20% to the broker. During the trial, plaintiff's counsel has to argue that both the trucking company and the broker are negligent. Now suppose that the trucking company settles before trial, which is likely to happen, especially since the case isn't that unusual. The broker will file a motion for summary judgment arguing that the case is preemted by Federal law, but it's not likely to be granted, especially in state court. Unless the issue is well-settled, most judges are unlikely to boot a case entirely at the summary judgment stage over a technicality. So long as the Plaintiff can make a plausible argument that the case should continue, a judge is likely to grant it. And even if they get dismissed sometimes, sometimes isn't all the time.

Now the situation is quite different. At trial, the plaintiff no longer has to prove that the trucking company was negligent, and they have every incentive to try to stick the broker with as much of a share of the verdict as possible. Now the broker's situation gets a lot more complicated since in addition to their usual defense they have to now put on a negligence case against the trucking company, which would be difficult enough if they weren't also trying to argue that they had no idea how irresponsible that company was. And if by some miracle you get a defense verdict, that doesn't resolve the immunity issue, so you'd have to try the whole thing again next time.

Given that resolving the issue would involve going to trial, losing, and getting it overturned on appeal, there's significant incentive to settle, especially when the threat of the case being overturned on appeal may put downward pressure on the settlement. Extra especially when you aren't even the target defendant. Cases usually only go to trial when something goes completely off the rails. The point I'm making is that if it's already customary for brokers to get sued and pay settlements in these cases, then clarification isn't going to have much of an effect other than that the settlement amounts may go up a little. The effect on legal fees is likely to be minimal. If the broker being sued here was a novelty, then the effect will be much bigger. That being said, time-limited searches of PI attorney websites seem to suggest that going after brokers was a common practice well before this case was decided.

Possibly, if I have time (which has been in short supply lately), but I would have to do research and anything I produce is going to be half-assed. I dispatch for a mid-sized trucking that's a subsidiary of a larger company (meaning that they're very risk averse, as anything trucking screws up exposes the company as a whole to liability). I don't handle brokering.

The company I work for exclusively does tanking and (limited) hazmat tanking, so we're not really exposed to competition from the cardboard nameplate crowd. That said, compliance and litigation costs have been brutal in the last 5 years, as have been the effects of our efforts to enhance safety on driver retention. Fatalities aside, trucking companies have also been subject to the same issues as the rest of the auto industry in terms of property damage liability (Everything is expensive and costs more to repair.).

Fatal truck accidents were up something like 30% in the last 10 years as of 2024, but it's worth noting that overall accident fatalities spiked from 2020-2024, and only now do we have early estimate data for 2025 suggesting that we're back to the pre-pandemic trend (I wasn't able to find truck fatality data for 2025.). That said, while truck fatalities did spike during the pandemic and have fallen some since peaking in 2022, they were also increasing before the pandemic at the same time that car fatalities were falling, so it seems that truck fatalities are something of their own issue not strictly correlated with traffic fatalities as a whole (Note, much of the increase in traffic fatalities concerning cars has been from pedestrian deaths.).

Non-domiciled CDL holders (aka. foreign drivers) have been involved in a rash of high profile accidents, prompting a crackdown on non-domiciled CDLs, but the federal government doesn't track accident rates based on CDL type, so there is no data that presents a smoking gun suggestion that non-domiciled CDL holders have a higher crash rate than US citizen drivers.

This Supreme Court ruling stabs at a related but different and potentially more meaningful problem, so-called "chameleon carriers" and companies like Super Ego that hire them.

Non-domiciled CDL holders (aka. foreign drivers) have been involved in a rash of high profile accidents, prompting a crackdown on non-domiciled CDLs, but the federal government doesn't track accident rates based on CDL type, so there is no data that presents a smoking gun suggestion that non-domiciled CDL holders have a higher crash rate than US citizen drivers.

Interestingly, Canada has a similar, or maybe even worse, issue. Ontario's truck licensing program is in the hand of a company that has a major corruption scandal. Of course the CBC is carefully avoiding mentioning it but the main beneficiaries of the corruption are recent Indian arrivals, hence why the trucks in question (Ontario plates and Indian drivers) are called "flying carpets". Now if Ontario doesn't care that's one thing, but Ontario trucks find themselves all over North America, especially since these practices make them undercut other Canadian trucking companies.

Which safety measures cause the most driver resistance?

Driver facing cameras: We don't have them, but even rumors about us getting them causes drivers to look for other jobs.

Most generally, "safety scores" generated by the on-board ELD that penalizes for things like speeding (mostly problematic on not always correctly mapped rural roads), harsh braking, following too closely (This one can be a pain in major cities.), etc. The company recently tightened up the guidelines without notice, applied them retroactively (much to the chagrin of operations), and cost a bunch of drivers their quarterly safety bonuses.

Thirdly, collision avoidance/lane departure tech on company trucks. Apparently these have a false trigger rate somewhere above zero. Of course, most of the drivers I hear from wish we'd go back to manual transmissions (I guess the ones who don't care/like the automatics aren't as vocal about it, but our drivers are also a fairly old bunch for the most part.).

Finally, I don't think drivers are seriously opposed to ELDs as a concept, but many of them have trouble working with the (rather bug prone, in my experience) tablets.

Thirdly, collision avoidance/lane departure tech on company trucks. Apparently these have a false trigger rate somewhere above zero. Of course, most of the drivers I hear from wish we'd go back to manual transmissions.

I wouldn't dismiss their concerns so quickly. The collision-avoidance "feature" on my Mitsubishi Mirage (just a beeping/flashing warning, not a newfangled one that brakes automatically) had something like one false positive per hour on the six-hour drive that I took earlier today (taking a non-Interstate scenic route, so maybe less relevant for truckers).

Honestly, I suspect that the drivers are right, and if it were up to me we'd buy manual transmissions and as little of that stuff as can be ordered. The non-safety electronics on these trucks are frequently unreliable trash, so why would the safety systems be any better? I say this as one of our brand new trucks with 30K miles on it randomly went into derate or something and had a sudden and complete loss of power going 65 miles an hour down the road this afternoon and is now dead on the side of the road waiting for a tow.

On a more broad perspective (including auto safety), I do find it discouraging that all this expensive technology has accomplished precisely nothing in terms of safety (at best, enabling keeping a worse class of driver on the road; I suppose one could argue that we'd have even more deaths without the new tech given the current state of drivers).

Speaking for myself, the only safety device I appreciate on newer cars is the backup cameras (They really do make parking a pickup truck easier.), and even that's compensating for the fact that cars are built like tanks these days with frequently poor outward visibility.

This should link to the twitter trend

Note: This link works only for people with Twitter accounts, and is not supported by Nitter.

Text of opinion

Kavanaugh concurrence:

As I see it, the conflicting contextual considerations make this a close case as we determine how to construe and where to draw the line on the statutory phrase “with respect to motor vehicles”. In the end, I do not believe that Congress, through such oblique language in an economic-deregulation statute, simultaneously (i) allowed state tort suits against negligent trucking companies and (ii) categorically preempted state tort suits against upstream brokers who negligently select an unsafe trucking company. The brokers and their amici raise serious concerns about the repercussions of state tort liability against brokers, and they may of course (among other possibilities) ask Congress and the President to change federal law. But, as of now, federal law does not preempt state tort liability against brokers for negligent selection of trucking companies.

Industry news source:

The Supreme Court just told every freight broker that it can be sued

The legal standard is ordinary care. The question a jury will now be permitted to ask in every state in America is whether the broker exercised reasonable care in selecting the carrier. That means: Did you check the carrier’s safety record? Was the carrier’s FMCSA data available to you? Did the data show elevated crash rates, conditional safety ratings, high out-of-service percentages, or prior enforcement history? Did you have a documented process for evaluating carrier safety? Or did you book the cheapest truck and move on?

If you are a freight broker operating in the United States today, the preemption defense you have been relying on since 2023, when the Seventh Circuit decided Ye v. GlobalTranz, is gone. You are now subject to state tort law in every jurisdiction where you arrange transportation. The carrier you select, the safety record you ignore, the data you decline to check, all of it is discoverable. All of it is admissible. All of it can be presented to a jury.

This decision removes the federal shield that was blocking an old theory. Negligent hiring is a tort theory that has existed for generations. The Restatement (Second) of Torts, Section 411, imposes a duty of reasonable care in employing a contractor for work carrying a risk of physical harm. Barrett cited it in the opinion.

Plaintiffs' attorneys who handle commercial motor vehicle crash cases have been building these case files for years, waiting for the preemption question to resolve. The dockets are ready. The carrier safety data is public. FMCSA’s SAFER system is free. A broker’s carrier selection history is discoverable in litigation. The inspection records showing which carriers a broker habitually dispatched, and what those carriers’ safety profiles looked like at the time of dispatch, are all federal records.

The first wave of post-Montgomery negligent-hiring suits against brokers will be filed within the next few weeks. They will name brokers who selected carriers with known safety deficiencies, conditional ratings, elevated BASIC percentile scores, prior out-of-service orders, and authority less than 18 months old. The discovery requests will seek the broker’s carrier vetting policies, internal screening criteria, communications with the carrier prior to dispatch, and any safety data the broker reviewed or failed to review.

If a broker has no documented carrier vetting process, that absence is itself evidence.

Kavanaugh flagged this in his concurrence, and it deserves its own discussion. The FAAAA mandates minimum insurance coverage for motor carriers. It does not mandate comparable coverage for brokers. The existing broker surety bond requirement under 49 U.S.C. Section 13906 is $75,000. That is not liability insurance. That is a financial responsibility bond intended to ensure payment to carriers and shippers. It does not cover tort claims.

Most freight brokers carry some form of general liability and contingent cargo coverage. Very few carry the kind of excess liability coverage that would respond to a catastrophic negligent-hiring verdict. The nuclear verdict environment in trucking litigation has produced eight-figure and nine-figure outcomes against motor carriers. Those same jury dynamics now apply to brokers.

The insurance industry has not yet priced this exposure. When it does, freight broker premiums will adjust. The adjustment will be significant for brokers who cannot demonstrate a documented, data-driven carrier selection process. The adjustment will be less severe for brokers who can show that their vetting methodology is systematic, repeatable, and grounded in publicly available safety data.

The carriers a broker habitually selects, their safety profiles, their authority ages, their crash histories, their inspection outcomes, all of that is now part of the risk profile that an underwriter will evaluate.

This is not complicated. The court did not rewrite the rules of physics. It removed a procedural shield. The underlying obligation to exercise reasonable care in selecting a carrier is the same standard every other industry participant already operates under. Shippers exercise care in selecting carriers. Carriers exercise care in hiring drivers. Brokers are now held to the same standard.

Montgomery v. Caribe Transport is not just a broker case. Kavanaugh acknowledged this implicitly when he discussed 3PLs, freight forwarders, and digital freight platforms that make carrier selection decisions. The opinion is written about brokers because C.H. Robinson is a broker. But the logic applies to anyone in the supply chain who selects a carrier and has access to publicly available safety data showing that the carrier presents an elevated risk.

The court said that requiring a party to exercise ordinary care in selecting a carrier concerns motor vehicles. That is a principle. It does not stop at licensed broker authority holders.

Shippers who select carriers directly are not preempted and never were. But shippers who relied on the assumption that their broker’s preemption defense would insulate the entire transaction from negligent-selection liability need to rethink that assumption. The broker can now be sued. The broker’s defense will include evidence of what the shipper knew, what the shipper required, and the shipper’s own carrier-selection criteria.

Associated Press:

Supreme Court revives suit against major logistics company with potentially big effects on industry

The Trump administration and companies such as Amazon had argued that letting the suit go forward would expose logistics companies to liability under a “patchwork” of state laws.

Montgomery’s appeal was backed by more than two dozen states. They said a win for him would help bolster safety in an industry that moves billions of tons of goods across billions of miles every year.

The ruling could have far reaching effects if brokers can be held liable for the actions of the trucking companies they hire, said Brian Watt, who runs a freight logistics company in Florida.

Brokers will now have to focus more on the safety records of the truckers they contract with to haul all kinds of goods, including hazardous materials, instead of just looking for the cheapest and fastest option.

The Transportation Department has been cracking down on the trucking industry over the past year by trying to force unqualified drivers, trucking companies and schools out of the industry.

This is going to play merry hell on owner-operators. Nobody's going to want to underwrite one guy with one truck.

I think owner operators will be fine. They already have to carry their own insurance, and it's much easier for a broker to vet a single driver than a company with a revolving door of people who couldn't get hired anywhere else. The law that putatively granted immunity to brokers was enacted in 1994; it's not like owner-operators didn't exist before then.

Yes, but we have 30 years more of technological development in lawfare now. Think of how many doohickeys and doodads you can bring up to the jury.

Did you ask whether the engine was governed at 70mph? "No"

Did you ask whether the 80,000 pound truck you hired was equiped with a collision detection system like you have in your personal Kia? "No"

Did you ask whether the truck was equiped with a lane depature warning system? "No"

Was it a red flag that the carrier you hired barely spoke English? "No"

Most brokers are probably already asking those questions, and if they aren't, I'd wonder why their attorneys haven't developed a standardized form yet. The only suspect one is the last one, since English comprehension would only be relevant if the driver misread a sign or something. You could still ask at the deposition, but probably not at trial.

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