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Last night I wrote a follow up post to my Inferential Distance post from a month ago However in the hopes that it will get a bit more engagement I've decided to put on lay-away till the new thread is posted on Monday. That said, today is also Easter Sunday, and I feel that is worth commenting on in itself.
While admittedly there is some disagreement between calendars as well as much quibbling over precise historical dates, for the vast majority of people in the english-speaking world today marks the two-thousandth and twenty-third anniversary of the founding of Christianity. Regardless of whether you consider yourself a Christian or even consider yourself religious, the simple fact is that Christianity is one of the foundational pillars of Western Civilization. It is perhapse even the central one without which there would be no concept of "Western Civilization", as it is arguably the spread of Christianity from it's birthplace in modern day Isreal to Greece, Rome and beyond, coupled with the debates between Europe and Asia that rocked the early church that ultimately set "The West" apart as "Western".
Unless one has spent a lot of time immersed in a foreign culture or really dug into pre-Christian texts, I think it's hard for modern thinkers to truly appreciate just how radical Christianity was at the time of it's introduction and just how thoroughly it's concepts and parables underpin what we now think we know.
A classic example of this is the concept of there being a delineation between worldly questions of wealth and power and the more divine questions of morality and truth. (Rendering unto Ceasar that which is Ceasar's) The exchange described in Mark 12:13-17 is a brilliant bit of verbal and philosophical Jujitsu that is difficult to appreciate if you're coming from a mind-space where some sort of separation between the "church" and "the state" or "clergyman" and "politician" is assumed to be the default. Something that was emphatically not the case in the ancient world.
Likewise, the idea that a man might be wealthy or powerful for reasons other than being favored by Fortune/God (or gods as required) was borderline seditious back in the day. Wealth and Power were supposed to be a manifestation of one's inherent superiority and right to rule. The idea that it might be attained through intelligence, diligence, guile, or luck, was seen by many as a genuine threat to social order.
These ideas and others carried with them whole rafts of social and cultural implications with them.
For all the talk of Christianity's waning influence, something people seem to forget or otherwise ignore is the effects of path dependance. Even if you identify as an Antinatilist Marxist Post-Human Gay Trans Furry Neo-Pagan Atheist, the fact remains that if English is your mother-tongue the social and cultural implications of Christianity are the water you've been swimming in your whole life.
You're welcome.
As He has risen so may we.
Happy Easter all.
Edit to add: For those interested the follow up to my inferential distance postes referenced above has since been posted. See...
https://www.themotte.org/post/440/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/85475
Regarding that Mark quote, there absolutely was a separation, the separation between Jews and Romans. To read the separation of church and state into that is anachronistic. Jesus didn't want the Jewish temple separate from the Jewish state. If you look at that quote practically, it is obvious in the context of the bible that taxation was a big deal at the time, and Jesus is weighing in on paying the Romans, which he almost certainly wasn't the only one to do so. If you look at it in the context of apocalypse, of which both Jesus and Paul believed was coming very soon, it adds another dimension that it doesn't really matter because God is coming to bring revelation soon anyway. And finally, if you look at the division between the Earthly world and the heavenly world in this statement, that is entirely an innovation by Paul (not Jesus who thought he would be king on Earth), and Paul was clearly influenced by Plato. So your classic example completely falls apart to support your argument that Christianity stands as an entirely new way of thinking apart from those before it.
I would love to hear from a Christian a compelling argument for why western civilization owes it such a great debt, but this is just not convincing.
I'm not necessarily defending the post you are replying to, but the influence of Christianity on Western civilisation is so obviously self-evident that it's hard for me to take such a proposition seriously. If anything, the burden on proof should be on the argument that Christianity isn't influential on Western civilisation or doesn't 'owe it such a great debt'. Whatever your opinion of Christianity is as a religion, the reality is that for many centuries (let's say, from 400 to 1800) Christianity was the belief system of virtually all 'Westerners' (Europeans). Even post-1800 which I'm demarcating as the point where political ideologies took centre stage and God took a backseat, Christianity still remained extremely influential. I'm not sure how you could have the primary belief system of your civilisation for centuries not be influential. The only caveat is that I would say that Western civilisation is not merely Christianity, but also the Greco-Roman tradition of 'reason'. Indeed, much of the history of philosophy of the West can be seen as attempts to reconcile the two (the most obvious example being Thomas Aquinas).
Virtually all intellectual thought during this period was intertwined in Christianity. The distinction between natural philosophy and theology was paper thin at best, really only becoming distinct magisteria (sorry Gould) during the Enlightenment. The vast, vast majority of European philosophers and thinkers were unavoidably intertwined wtih Christian theology, and even those who explicitedly avoided or criticised Christianity (e.g. Machiavelli or Spinoza) were still necessarily working in and shaped by a Christian society. Saint Augustine, Aquinas, Luther were explicitly Christian, and those like Descartes and Kant were still heavily influenced by Chrisitian (Kant (catagorical imperative) is sometimes described as trying to construct a secular reason-based version of Christian ethics to complement but not conflict with Christianity). Even those not engaged in what today we would describe as religious and theological endeavours still explicited said their goal was to study God's creation or similar. Nietziche believes that the West's development of natural science was a evitable consequence of Christianity for this reason (though it would ultimately destroy Christianity, a snake eating its own tail). Some have even described Marxism as the last 'great' Christian heresy.
Of course, we can't neglect the political consequences of Christianity and debates over Christianity. The Investiture Controversy, the Thirty Years War, both the Great Schism and the Western Schism and soon. These political consequences in turn resulted in political outcomes which further in turn resulted in further developments in political and non-political philosophy. The Thirty Years War resulted in the Peace of Westphalia, often cited as the origin of modern notions of statehood and international relations.
Liberalism and the concept of natural, individual and human rights - inventions of Western civilisation - have their clear origins in Christianity theology - we are all made in the image of God, and everyone is a sinner. This is hardly a novel argument. When the US Declaration of Independence states - "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" - it's not immediately obvious to an atheistic/materialist or non-Christian view how these truths are 'self-evident' but they are to a Christian worldview, it literally states men are endowed these rights by their (Christian) Creator. The speeches, personal letters etc of the US Founding Fathers basically confirm that this was their belief.
I agree it's obvious that Christianity was intertwined with intellectual pursuits, the enlightenment etc. But to be clear I am looking for evidence that Christian ideas substantially influenced things in moving things forward, instead of holding us back.
I think without Christianity you can still have Kant (maybe that's a controversial take) because you still have Plato, ideas of "heavens" and the divine, and of key importance, you still have Judaism. These ideas would be around, especially in intellectual circles. There were also other movements towards monotheistic thought in antiquity, we didn't need a Christ cult for philosophy to necessarily see that become more prominent.
That kind of thought experiment of a world without Christianity can get kind of bewildering because of how ingrained it was, but consider that without the fervor it may have secularized sooner. Without the sin of greed, we may have discovered capitalism sooner, and with it liberalism. How many ways did the institution of Christianity resist that (many) and how does it compare to the sliver of insights it gave in return?
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Imagine knowing a great guy, he's really very swell, a scholar and an athlete, helps everyone in need; a bit neurotic and guilt-ridden though, and drinks more than a bit. Adorably, he's mad in love and talks of his wife often. You get invited to the 20th anniversary of their marriage, and for the first time see her; she's less than what one might think he deserves. Pudgy and high-strung, adorned with weird new age artifacts, woke, visibly obsessive and controlling, and once he starts musing aloud about some high-minded fancy, she pinches him quite viciously. They withdraw; you happen to overhear her berating him in a shrill voice, and even hitting him with a frying pan, Acme-style. Then in the open, bloodied a little – «I just stumbled!» – he gives a speech where he tearfully attributes all peaks he has achieved and all the good he's ever done to her. She's fuming, but accepts it as a given, and snorts that he should focus more on charity and less on greatness: she still has work to do; if only he could neuter his pride and listen more, and perhaps donate all that they owe to her guru, publicly committing now.
How would you feel about his confession?
You may assume I'm talking about, say, Andrei Sakharov and Yelena Bonner or my own family or whatever, but my point is that sunk cost fallacy is a thing, and that people can have false consciousness. People grow invested in their partners and ideologies, especially if they can't sever the relationship; and religions in particular are partners of civilizations that are so molded by selection pressure as to consume the logos of the people under their yoke; to teach those people to construe their virtues as following from religious practices and precepts, and their vices as failures to comply. In an attempt to avoid incoherence, Christian scholarship interprets non-Christian civilizations too as created by their religions, and holds that any major social form is downstream of some founding creed (with «good» creeds of successful forms tending to be Christian in their ultimate origin). This is generalized transubstantiation, and it should be suspect for any unbiased observer.
It's a chicken and egg question: did the Church build the West, or did the West create Christianity that can be taken seriously? Hlynka's motivated reasoning is as good an example as any, he deeply wants to tie what he likes about the West (actually just Red-Tribe USA) to Christianity, and it doesn't matter for him how accurately he gets the details (just as it doesn't matter for him whether everything he loathes, from progressivism to HBD bros, is truly part of the same bundle); what is clearly Christian of all these proceedings is, perhaps, only Hlynka's obsessive thinking in absolutes and morally laden dualities.
Do they?
One of the most misunderstood parts of Genesis, I believe, is Jacob's wrestling with God. ISV 32:28 «“Your name won’t be Jacob anymore,” the man replied, “but Israel, because you exerted yourself against both God and men, and you’ve emerged victorious.”». I happen to like the inaccurate Russian Synodal translation more. «И сказал: отныне имя тебе будет не Иаков, а Израиль, ибо ты боролся с Богом, и человеков одолевать будешь». «And said: henceforth your name will be not Jacob but Israel, for you have wrestled with God, and will be overcoming humans too».
It's undeniable that Christianity has influenced the West. And people can grow tough through wrestling with their faith. But the interesting aspect of such supposedly academic inquiry by theists is that they never ever assume the root of their success lies in some compensation for the trauma, or in ugly aspects of said faith: it's only ever the most noble interpretation of its words, applied directly.
I fear this is unprincipled charity.
Galkovsky on Rome and Christianity:
There are three features of Christianity that catch the eye of any open-minded observer.
The first is the gloomy, depressive nature and fixation on the subject of death and the deceased. The basic religious ritual of Christians is a funeral; funerals are the crowning glory of the Christian saint, and his life itself is the PREPARATION OF THE CORPSE. [...]
Of course the motives of death and barbaric veneration of corpses are subdued in churches before the congregation. For example, relics are often kept «under wraps» - in closed boxes. But Christianity as a whole imparts on the culture an incredible longing and sadness. This finds expression in everything – in architecture, painting, music. Sometimes it turns out solemn and even bittersweet – because tears can bring relief and can be an expression not of physical pain, but of nostalgia, of love, of high sorrow. […]
Secondly, Christianity is a very short and narrow religion. The entire content of the Christian legend amounts to one medium-sized ancient myth. They try to conceal this by turning the Bible into a telephone book or by supplementing it with stories about the saints. But these additions are artificial, uninteresting, and even as such they already create great problems for the basic legend. In general, no one knows them. The Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary in the «Ineffabilis Deus of 1854» is the bureaucratic apotheosis of such «improvements». It is not artistic creativity, but rectification of paperwork by an office of cadaver accounting in a morgue or city cemetery. Take just one minor myth of ancient religion: the myth of the radiant Eos.
Eos is a beautiful girl with pink fingers. Every morning she ascends to heaven in a chariot drawn by Lampos and Phaeton and illuminates the Earth. Eos is a very naughty girl, so her cheeks always blush after the night. When Eos's kingdom comes in the morning, men get erections. Eos is kind, but forgetful. She fell in love with the beautiful young man Tithonus and married him, asking Zeus to make him immortal. But she forgot to ask to keep him young, and Tithonus eventually turned into an old man. In order not to see him, Eos locked Tithonus up in a separate room, from where he complained in a squeaky voice about his unhappy fate. Then, out of pity, Eos turned Dmitri Evgenievich into a cricket.
It's just ONE little story, and this story alone creates a massive opportunity for successful human contacts. It's AMUSING. You can joke about it, you can innuendo, you can relate – to teenagers, to young people, to mature people, to old people. You can laugh, and if you want you can cry too. In moderation, without cruelty.
Now, what can a Christian tell? Well... An attendant came home from the morgue, decided to entertain his wife with a cool story.
A normal person is shocked. And the Christian goes on:
This is… HARD. Very.
The only plausible upside to all this is that Christian culture is quickly causing the secularization of society. People avoid talking about religious topics in everyday life, they stop using religious analogies, and they avoid contact with cult servants. It is no coincidence that it is bad luck to meet a priest in the street. A lot of icons in the house is bad luck. A vacuum quickly forms around a person who is preoccupied with religion. People scatter. The religious community and the state strive to substitute the sacred functions of priests with institutions for moral preaching, statistical accounting, medical and social assistance, art and philosophy – anything but Christianity itself. «Anything but the toenail».
This is why atheism originated and gained the significance of a coherent doctrine only in the Christian world. Other cultures just don't get it, can's see the problem. Imagine an uncle who runs around school plays and combats the belief in Santa Claus. He shouts from the audience: «Don't believe it, kids, it's all a lie!» or he writes a complaint to the Local Education Authority. Or even pounces on poor Santa Claus with his fists and tears up the gift bag. In general, he acts like a complete fool and a retard. But if Santa Claus is furtively showing the children a dried cat from his bag, then we can empathize with the strange man.
Third, there is a ridiculous confusion in the basic doctrine of Christianity that discourages neophytes. […] Christian theologians are literally lost between three pines with their doctrine of Trinity. How this is possible is completely incomprehensible. This creates enormous difficulties for initial propaganda. No other world religion is so difficult for neophytes to grasp. With great effort, the European empires in the 19th century converted a pristine Africa to Christianity at a power ratio of 1000:1. And what? Now Islam is successfully supplanting Christianity there. […] While the Muslim doctrine is very clear. One god is Allah. His prophet is Mohammed. And there are two witnesses for conversion into Islam. PERIOD. A person can be converted in one day and that conversion is honest and strong. […]
In fact, it is unclear how a religion with such a defective doctrine could have spread quantitatively. Chain reaction is difficult in Christianity. This religion conducts effective propaganda only when it already has political and military dominance and is funded by the state.
Also a related discussion in the old place.
Hajnal Christianity is the egregore for Hajnalism. I assume it is similar with Orc Christianity and Orcishness. Perhaps that's all there is to it.
That's funny when you just got finished talking about Islam. How did Christianity bootstrap to its first state support, vs how Islam?
Naturally I believe that all there is to your argument (assuming you speak from a Hajnali perspective) is perfectly explained by what I've written. «I am an Elf because Yelena Bonner has civilized me». False consciousness.
Egregore is supposed to have some independent motive power, it's not an epiphenomenon. Are South Americans, those consummate Catholics, Orcs or Elves in your book? They are almost indistinguishable from Russians in all their characteristic failings, sans baseline depression level perhaps; their pious mafia dons are the spitting image of our vors. Are Orthodox Western converts somehow defective? Are there any interesting correspondences between denominations and lifestyles in Africa?
Funny? You don't know the half of it. The sudden punchline of Galkovsky's shitpost is alt-historical, namely that Christians have falsified the record and they're basically a gravedigger cult that has «bootstrapped to state support» via an accidental military coup.
I don't think this is true. But I also think Hajnali egregore is not meaningfully religious. Christianity has altered their original metaphysics but has not enriched it.
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That argument at book length is Tom Holland's Dominion. I am about 2/3 of the way through, and the book is excellent. Unfortunately part of why it is excellent is that it can't be condensed to a tl;dr, but the most important single idea is the way that the idea of Christ crucified (which has no equivalent in other religions) changes the nature of the religion, particularly viz-a-viz the paganism of the early Principiate, where the idea of the Emperor as a God was still being taken seriously. This leads into a number of things, including Christian asceticism (and thus indirectly the Christian intellectual tradition and the University), the Christian idea of martyrdom, and the (limited by modern American standards) degree of separation between civil and religious authority that we see in Christian society.
Also important is the idea of the Peace of God - the idea that multiple legitimate Christian rulers can co-exist and they should ideally not fight each other. Islam and Temple Judaism believe that the faithful should form a single political entity under a single ruler. In so far as it is tied into Chinese political thought, Chinese spirituality does the same thing. Most paganisms including Roman paganism, Judaism, and most traditions within Hinduism are non-universal - they teach that most people are outside the protection of our gods because of who they are, and that therefore whether we fight them or not is a matter of pure prudential calculation. All "other things being equal, war is bad" thought in today's world is downstream of Christianity. (And, obviously, not ancient Rome).
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I don't think it's anachronistic at all.
Like I said...
...but to the average Roman or Judean in the first century there was no clear delineation between the Roman Nation State and the Roman Gods/Religion. The Consul and the High Preist were by definition the same guy. That it might be possible to both pay your Roman taxes while remaining loyal to the God of Abraham was indeed a radical concept at the time, which is why the crowd was astonished/taken aback. Similar to my response to @Supah_Schmendrick below, i kind of feel like your objection is really only illustrating my point.
...and as for Paul being influence by Plato, Jesus himself makes references to Homer and Aeschylus, we all stand on others' shoulders do we not?
The point I'm making is the idea of a Jewish person paying taxes to gentiles ruling over them was not at all new and is well trodden in the old testament. To turn that into separation of church and state is anachronistic, and I feel like I'm repeating myself to explain why.
Yes people stand on the shoulders of giants, but they add something too. My point is that nothing in that quote was new or interesting at the time.
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Which is better, other things being equal, peace or war?
This is the fundamental place where we depart from Rome. In Western modernity, peace is better, and the purpose of war is to preserve peace by threatening it or to restore peace by winning it. That comes from the medieval Church - in particular the Peace of God movement. Mainstream historiography holds that the first International Peace Conference was hosted by Cardinal Wolsey in 1518 (history does not reveal whether he had help from Alec Baldwin and the Film Actors' Guild), and the Treaty of London signed there purported to ban war between European Christians. The Romans would have considered Wolsey a pussy for thinking that this was a good idea, as well as an idiot for thinking it might actually work. But somehow the Christians keep trying.
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Like I said, something people seem to forget or otherwise ignore is the effects of path dependance.
As far as I know there've been only one or two Christian masses held in Hagia Sophia in the last 500 years, it's been a Mosque since the 1400s.
Atheists in general and RETVRN types in particular like to claim that Constantine's conversion was a cynical ploy to ensure the loyalty of his army and the support of the plebs. That a claim may even be factually correct. But if it is it kind of undermines much of their broader rhetoric about Christianity being imposed, wouldn't the would-be emperor feigning conversion to gain a political advantage imply that "the masses" already been converted?
The Vatican is the seat of the Catholic church because the Visigoths who sacked Rome in the 5th century were themselves Christian. For the most part they respected claims of sanctuary and honored the Bishop of Rome's request to spare the library. Would anything of Rome or classical Greece have survived to this day in the absence of Christianity? I'm not so sure. It's not like we see the Chinese or Maratha or the Comanche going out of their way to preserve the writings and culture of conquered peoples.
The Arabs inherited the bureaucracy of Rome and also famously transmitted a lot of Greek philosophy back into Christian Europe. Though, the Sunnis largely turned against Greek philosophy, the Shiites are still Platonists.
The Chinese did in fact preserve the writings of conquered peoples. They preserved Buddhist writings that they received from central Asian peoples who they would come to conquer. Buddhism was at it's peak in China under the Tang Dynasty that had conquered the Iranian and Tocharian peoples in the Tarim Basin.
And yet the wealthiest bits of the Roman Empire (by the end of the 3rd century constitutional crisis, it was clear that the core was the east and the periphery was the west, but this was the politics coming to reflect an economic situation that predated the rise of Rome) are now basket cases under Islamic rule, whereas the bits which stayed Christian are "Western Civilization". This requires explanation.
As a quibble, the Shiites largely operate in former Persian territory, not former Roman territory. Until the Khomieni regime repudiated the Persian inheritance in favour of pure Islam, Shia Iran made a big deal out of its claim to historical continuity with Achaemenid and Sassanian Persia - i.e. explicitly not Rome.
The bits that stayed Orthodox Christian are also basket cases. Look no further than Ukraine and Russia. Nations that only stay relevant due to fossil fuel reserves.
Actually Shiites largely operated in Egypt under the Fatamid dynasty in the medieval period. Iran was actually overwhelmingly Sunni before the rise of the Safavid Empire in the Early Modern period. They weren't Shia before that.
Your claim is laughably bad.
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The Arabs preserved a Christian Roman bureaucracy, Christianity still forms a bridge of several centuries, and indeed it's not entirely clear that either the proto Muslims of the time or the Romans they conquered thought of Islam as a distinct concept versus a fresh sect of Christianity.
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TIL, can you point me towards a specific time period and/or examples?
https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/buddhism-early-tang
That's the first google search result. That China and East Asia more generally preserved Buddhism, despite it dying off in India, is well known.
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Notably, the distinction between "church" and "state," "clergyman" and "politician" was not really a thing in most of the Christian world for a long time, either. Technically still isn't in places like England. And, insofar as you take the Yarvinite position that modern progressivism is a protestant heresy, the tendency is back towards the combination of secular and ideological authority.
The distinction is absolutely a thing. The American idea of a "wall of separation" between Church and State doesn't exist until the United States (and even then it evolves gradually - at the time the Constitution was written, the point of the 1st amendment was to protect State-level established Churches such as Massachusetts puritanism from federal interference, not to abolish them).
But the idea that spiritual and temporal power are different and that a separation between them is logically possible is Christian. The concurrent jurisdiction of Kings and Popes in Catholic Europe is a real thing with real negotiations between Church and Crown a constant of European politics over about 1200 years. Even in England (which is unusual in the degree to which the Church is subordinate to the State - it definitely isn't the typical pre-1st amendment case), Charles III is not a priest, and it would be unthinkable for him to celebrate a sacrament on behalf of the nation. This is very different to the role of a Roman or Persian emperor, or a Caliph.
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I was under the impression that religious tests to hold public office or serve in the government/military had gone out of style some time in in the late 17th century but if you have a citation for non-Anglicans currently being barred from participating in English politics please provide it.
I was thinking more along the lines of Anglican bishops having seats in the House of Lords and the monarch being the head of the national church. I was also thinking of things like the spending of public tax money on religious institutions as in Germany
I feel like the fact that you're taking it for granted that any tax money at all would not be spent on religious institutions is kind of illustrating my point for me.
It's one thing for religion and politics to be intertwined and entirely another to deny the existence of any distinction between the two in the first place. I can see how someone could argue that "England is a religious state" but in the end all that argument really tells me is that this person has never been to (or really sat down and talk to someone from) a place like Saudi Arabia. That over the last 800 years or so theocracy has gone from being the default form of government to the exception is largely a product of western dominance.
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He's probably just referring to the fact that King Charles is technically both the head of state and Supreme governor of the Church of England. Even if that sort of a relic at this point.
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America is still a Christian nationalist state and hope it will be forever. Even CRT and woke have Christian roots and are arguably atheist Christian religions.
Christianity is at its core a slave religion. States eventually formed and modified it to project power.
Judaism at its core and why I’ve become a little anti-Semitic lately in real ways is an ethnic tribal religion. They don’t for the most part invite others to be Jews.
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I think religious and moralisticly we are Christian. Even the atheists are a-theistic about the Christian god concept specifically. Any person raised Western and who tries to conceptualize “god” is wrestling with the memes of the Christian God specifically, which included things like monotheism (omnipotent and omniscient monotheistic god specifically) a god who is active in history and sends messages and is interested in your live and obedience and will be the judge of your eternal soul.
But philosophically, I think we owe much more to Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and the Stoics. Our political ideals didn’t com3 from Israel, they came from Greece and Rome. Our scientific method, our reliance on reason, and so on grew out of Greek philosophy, Israel had nothing similar. Israel didn’t invent theories of logic, physics and metaphysics, and never claimed that the human mind could understand the universe by reason.
So we’re an amalgam of two civilizations, the Semitic and the Greek.
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This seems obviously wrong. The Greeks and the Romans had a conception of themselves as something apart from both rough-edged northern barbarians and decadent easterns.
You're probably right that separation of church and state and egalitarianism have ultimately Christian roots though.
Sure tribes are going to be tribal. My point is that the notion of the concept of being "Greek" or "Roman" as something Independent of having been born in Latinum and worshiping Jupiter or having been born on the Peloponnese and worshipping Apollo. That that the Greek, Roman, and Gaul might all be "of a shared sort" was actually fairly unique at the time and not something that would show up outside of Europe until centuries later.
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Do we have a compelling moral obligation to make our dogs a little fat from their favorite treats?
A dog’s sense of smell and taste are a thousand times greater than our own, and thus so is their enjoyment.
Dogs live in sensory deprived conditions relative to their exposure to scents and tastes in the wild.
When left to their own devices, dogs and their owners routinely choose tasty treats. Men with infinite resources in history usually became fat, and exercise for the sake of health improvement is an historic anomaly among the upper classes.
It follows that the happiness increase that a dog receives from perfect cardiovascular health probably does not exceed the happiness increase received from tasty treats, given how much we can assume they value these treats. The extremes of both end are deleterious to canine fulfillment, but we can probably say that a dog is most happy if made a little fat from treats.
Humans have only recently begun to value perfect health, and in all previous eras were quite happy with drinking (or smoking) and lounging if they could get away with it. The wealthiest kings with the smartest advisors loved their liquors and candies. The ancient Chinese figure of contentment and joy was Budai, a happy Buddhist figure with a large figure. The Romans considered mead the drink of the gods, the Muslim conception of Heaven entails rivers running with sweet wine, and the Christians conceive of a heavenly banquet in the afterlife.
There’s something telling about us, that we think canine felicity lies in austerity. Maybe we are imbuing dogs with our own notions of social competition. We know that we would be more attractive if we looked like Chris Pratt (not in Super Mario Bros), and we know that this entails attractive social rewards like a hotter partner and superiority over peers. Yet we struggle with this, choosing other enjoyments instead. In our shame, we make our dogs ascetic warrior monks: only the driest of foods, only water, exercise once a day at the least. Is this for our dog, or is it for us? Do you look at other dog owners with a sense of superiority that their genetically unfit fat pug is no match for our slim athletic German Shepherd?
There is one alluring argument for not giving our dogs tasty treats, and this is that they live longer. But this is an illusion. Food-motivated beasts don’t care about total sum days of mortal life. They care about chasing potential foods and eating tasty foods. They care about smelling a lot of good smells, especially of things that taste good. Their food motivation is so intense that it’s the only way to motivate them in training absent painful punishment. No rational being should consider three extra years of limited joy superior to one year of great joy. No human values “mere days alive” in hospital beds and prisons or in states of depression, and humans generally consider times of low pleasure to be write-offs. But this is how we apparently see the life our canine friends!
fatter dogs are probably less aggressive too, so fewer worries about biting strangers or other dogs.
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I feel like the main difference with this to the modern era is that growing fat on amply available tasty foodstuffs used to be an actual accomplishment/indicative of wealth and resources. You'd need the wealth to acquire the good stuff plus avoiding actual hard labor required resources and skill. These days the default state is prettymuch obesity so now fitness is a hard-to-acquire virtue.
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This is actually a really interesting question that sounds superficial. Because what is “best” for humans, and how do we know that, and can we possibly map that to animals?
In particular…Labrador Retrievers. They have a mutation that really, really, really makes ’em hungry chonkers. But does that mean they “want” to eat? Do they desire it? Does it make them fulfilled, whatever that means for a dog, or does that just make them not starving?
And, is it “best” for them to get a lil’ fat? Even if their blood calls out for it, they also want to fetch and fetch and fetch, which is hard when the pounds are packed on, especially when it’s hot outside. And, they are extremely prone to hip dysplasia, which extra body fatness can make far worse.
I don’t particularly have answers. But it is fun to consider.
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When I think about the times in my life I have been happiest, it isn't when I've eaten the most tasty food and drank the most alcohol. It's more like a combination of seeing my friends regularly, sunny weather and a general feeling that my life was going in a good direction. Pure sensory pleasure doesn't seem to have any lasting effect on happiness.
I imagine a dog's happiness would be based on exercise, socialising with other dogs and people, learning and being outdoors more than food reward.
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I don't think this follows. Enjoyment and sensitivity are different things, and I don't see any reason why they'd need to have such tight correlation. If you're just comparing between humans, you might be able to argue that someone with greater sensitivity to taste has the potential to enjoy tasting food more, but only in potential, and only with low confidence, and only because we're comparing somewhat similar brains. A dog's brain isn't wildly different from our own, but certainly it's much more different than between 2 humans, making the correlation even more tenuous. There are factors other than sensitivity at play here when dealing with the qualia we call "enjoyment," and those (rather difficult-to-measure) factors could easily be more dominant.
I think it follows, because enjoyments appear to increase from increased sensitivity (ability to discern and contrast, let’s say) in relation to the object of experience for every category I can imagine. The enjoyment of a soft blanket is reduced from calloused or numb hands. Someone who has trained their sense of taste can generally recognize more flavors and thus enjoy more. Someone who is familiar with different wines can enjoy a good wine more. Someone who can hardly hear will not enjoy bird sounds as much as someone who can hear every nuance of them. It’s actually hard to think of any enjoyment that isn’t increased from increased ability to discern, compare, and understand the object(s). This is what the whole idea of being a connoisseur is about. I can certainly appreciate music more on better headphones, and certainly appreciate it more with the more sensitivity I’ve gained from listening/understanding pieces. When Covid reduced people’s ability to discern flavors, it reduced people’s enjoyments. When people with poor eyesight get glasses, they usually note that they can enjoy what they see more. So I think this is a fine assumption for me to make but I’m open to examples of where the correlation fails.
I don't think any of this is true. I think someone who is familiar with different wines can convince themselves that they enjoy a good wine more than a layman who isn't. They might be able to appreciate certain specific aspects of the wine than a layman without a refined palette, but whether or not they actually enjoy it more is an open question. Similarly, someone who can hear every nuance of a bird song might be able to appreciate certain aspects of it more than someone who's nearly deaf and can only hear some dull muffled noises, but whether or not they get actual greater enjoyment out of it is an open question. Enjoyment and appreciation aren't the same things.
It's also impossible to generalize from individuals comparing the enjoyment from 2 different states of sensitivity, because that's vastly different from comparing enjoyment of 2 different entities. I might enjoy the same song more when I hear it through clear headphones instead of through a muffled speaker in another room, but all that tells me is that I enjoy that music more with increased sensitivity. Someone else could just as easily get far greater enjoyment out of the percussive music of 2 random rocks being struck together as I do from listening to Beethoven's 5th symphony through high-end headphones. Someone else could just as easily get far greater enjoyment out of some grilled roadkill as I do from a finely prepared and seasoned steak from a fancy restaurant. Connoisseurs might have more dimensions to appreciate certain aspects of whatever they're enjoying, and that might give them the language and excuse to convince themselves that they enjoy it more, but that doesn't mean that they actually do enjoy it more.
I think this is stretching relativism a little too much. A person who prefers listening to a low quality version of a song over a high quality version is someone who is odd, or interested in it for non-musical reasons like nostalgia. The vast majority of people prefer high fidelity music (that they can perceive). Sites like YouTube and phones like the iPhone make the default audio card high quality because so many people enjoy this. Similarly, only a very rare person enjoys watching videos on 480p, or collecting lo-res images.
There really seems to be a clear association between greater sensitivity/detail/perception (whichever word we want to use, they refer to the same cognitive antecedents) and increased enjoyment. Why go see a symphony in person if the experience is not greater? Why bother with greater graphics?
Is it really open? What bird song enjoyer would not desire to hear bird songs in maximum fidelity? It’s considered a tragedy when bird song enjoyers have reduced hearing sensitivity
You're comparing the difference within an individual and the difference between individuals in terms of enjoyment from different fidelity. Different individuals have intrinsically subjective experience of what they enjoy, and this difference is even more pronounced when comparing different species. The leap in how a dog's taste sensations translate to the dog's experience of "enjoyment" is something that's not really understood, even worse than how the leap exists in humans. So positing a sort of straight-up relationship between the higher sensitivity to higher enjoyment (or potential for such) isn't justified.
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To a point, sure. But too much sensitivity can lead to something pleasurable becoming painful. I think that @07mk is right, and it's an oversimplification to say that more sensitive = more pleasure.
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Why not give your dog treats and also take them for runs? Many breeds seem to enjoy running just fine anyway and some proper exercise allows them to enjoy tasty snacks without unhealthy weight gain.
Of course, this is the exact same advice I'd give to humans. I just ate some Girl Scout cookies. They're delicious, but not very healthy. I'm also about to walk out the door and run about 20-25 kilometers depending on mood, so spiking my system with some sugar ain't so bad. The same would be true for a four-legged friend as a two-legged one.
Of course dogs should go on runs and play catch, as this is an enjoyment. But even after going on runs and playing catch (which I doubt the median dog owner is doing daily, maybe 1-2x a week), we still have the question of choosing tasty food or optimal fitness. If I give you a small bite of steak, you aren’t satisfied and would prefer more steak. We’re ultimately left with the same question: should we give our favorite beasts (who are 1000x more sensitive to food-related pleasure remember) more of the tasty food that they desire? Or do we choose extending life? If the simple state of being overweight is so deplorable, why did so many of history’s most privileged monarchs become fat, and did not exercise for primarily health-related reasons?
Yeah, I think the median owner is a bad owner. Presumably we're discussing how to be a good owner. Dogs enjoy daily runs and play.
Because we evolved in a much different environment than the current one and that's done nothing but become more exaggerated in recent years. Gluttonous eating is viscerally satisfying for good evolutionary reasons, but has bad results when it's feasible to just keep doing it every day.
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I don't think anyone thinks this. Rather, we just make better decisions for our pets than we do for ourselves (much like parents will make better decisions for a child than they might for their own health). It's just easier to do the right thing when you don't personally feel the pain of it.
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If your dog spends 23 hours doing nothing and then has to eat boring food it is miserable. I don't think the treats are the issue, the issue is that dogs are supposed to engage in long distance hunting. After being out playing, running, chasing things and exploring nature there is no issue giving dogs treats. Treats should be rewards for achievement. When the wolf gets the moose he gets to stuff himself. When the dog has done well he should get to eat.
A few short walks on a leash don't satisfy dogs and don't keep them healthy either.
As for health, healthy dogs are happier. They can move better, have less pain and can enjoy life more.
Once again, this is the same story for humans. I have seen obese people argue that they gain so much joy from eating that it's worth it to them on balance. I think they're deceiving themselves and have lost the ability to appreciate how much better their lives would be if they could move comfortably, climb stairs without huffing and puffing, go for bike rides with friends, and so on.
I mean, yeah of course it's true for humans. I'm not under any illusion (nor are most obese people) that I'm happier at my current weight. I would be a lot happier if I lost weight. My failing is one of discipline and willpower, not one of being too foolish to understand that I'm worse off as I am.
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Epistemic status: cherry-picked predictions for ego stroking.
We are now nearly four years past the beginning of the George Floyd era of BLM activism, so I wanted to check my initial impressions and positions, to see how I'd done in retrospect. This is from the old site, in the immediate aftermath of the Minneapolis riots, and it was interesting to see how people's concerns and predictions played out. Must have been in a cautious mood that day.....
https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/gq50mo/comment/fsbmtje/?context=3
Core here:
On the other hand, some people Bought Large Mansions, and I imagine otherwise benefitted from millions poured into the myriad of BLM-affiliated NGOs. So it's not a total waste, a lot of people got worse off, but a small number of people got much better. That's called "politics". Or "community organizing"? Not sure about the proper terminology here.
oh I see what you did
I didn't invent this of course, it has been around for a while now.
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I've spent a lot of time bashing BLM over the years. I think it's because it was such a waste. A great moment for change and reform was wasted, turned racial and political, for division instead of unity. All that energy was spun by the political, corporate and media machines into bizarre ideological idiocy. rather than sober analysis and practical reform efforts. "Defund the police" my ass. Just like Trumpism, just like Occupy, just like Code Pink. By signal boosting the crazies and granting them legitimacy, any chance for reform was pissed away in a fury of "Black Trans Lives Matter" and "Showing up to work on time is white supremacy".
A little prodding and they all promptly delegitimize themselves (at least in the media/popular imagination).
I've been saying it for years, but I'll say it again Id-Pol makes people stupid. Id-Pol destroys relationships and corrodes societies. The combination of Secular Academia and post-moderism is the immunodeficiency disorder that allows the ordinarily benign bacteria of in-group preference to turn into "Dying of AIDs".
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Mission accomplished, then.
So far as the social and political elites are concerned, yes.
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I'll echo @JarJarJedi here. What is the problem BLM might have reasonably addressed with reasonable methods? That two digits of unarmed people are killed per year by US police? That blacks have worse social outcomes than whites?
Those issue are unsolvable without ripping up the basic social constitution. And to be fair to progressives, that's what they've been trying. They've been trying to gut the 2nd and disarm the populace, decreasing violent crime and making police-civilian interactions safer. They've been trying to decrease the number and funding of the militarized police. They've been try to enact DEI to give status and wealth to blacks regardless of meritocratic outcome. They've been trying keep blacks out of jail by non-prosecution.
Of course, the costs they'd inflict on society to achieve their ends is unconscionable, and their methods wildly contradict my personal values. But what is the approach you'd recommend that's not "bizarre" or "crazy" but would actually put a dent in these problems?
This one is a rounding error, and no rounding error can ever be solved without extreme, ridiculous measures.
This one, however, may be plausible. Just by doing, uh, sort of the opposite of what they've been doing. Every 'explainer' about the disparity starts with schools, only they just get the facts completely wrong. They claim that schools in poor/black areas have less funding, but that hasn't been the case since the 80s. A great moment where they've noticed that there is a problem (schools), but just flatly ignore the data concerning the cause of said problem. Instead, if we break from the woke-crazy teachers unions and give parents the option to choose what schools are suitable for their children, the marketplace is likely to deliver better results.
Then, instead of
we ensure that there are plenty of police, plenty of surveillance, and plenty of places safe to live, study, and work free of crime (like many of the black people in that video actually want). They can go about living, studying, and working successfully in peace. Of course, after they've been able to build skills through education and work, they need to be able to clearly demonstrate, and have it clearly acknowledged, that they do, in fact, have those skills. Unfortunately, if we
then, that chain of reasoning is severed. Instead of seeing their success in education and work and immediately being confident that such success is a product of skills and effort, people might see it as mere DEIBS. You can just give out wealth, to the extent that you can convince others to join you in your project to just give out wealth, but you can't just give out status. There's probably a significant post to be made about how the femininization of society, and the feminization of the woke movement in particular, has a different conception of status than masculine, testosterone-d biology does. But the latter simply rejects the idea that you can just declare high status for some individual/group without significant quantities of hard power backing it up. That level of hard power would require extreme, ridiculous measures, of that type you are concerned about.
Instead of that (doomed to fail) route, just do the above suggestions, and then just stop. Stop imagining that low expectations will magically produce high status. Just see the incredible skills and achievement that people will have once you've gotten out of their way. Some of the most downtrodden people in the world have become some of our highest achievers.
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I think there’s a faulty assumption here. I don’t think many NGOs in the western world are meant to solve problems. They might claim so, but looking at their behavior, their choice of tactics, and the people running them, it’s basically a money laundering and make work project for the children of the elite.
First of all, if you walk into the offices of any of these groups, they are not local, ordinary people. They’re rich people with college degrees. They’re not there because they care about the communities they’re working in. They’re there for the donations they can get and the visibility for their cause. And the stuff they propose they’re proposing because it’s the kind of stuff that makes white liberals clap.
Those solutions don’t work. Low arrest rates means that the people living there get robbed and mugged, that no businesses want to be there because of thefts, and that property values remain in the toilet. Disarming and disbanding the police force makes them more likely to escalate as they know there aren’t enough resources for backup if they need it.
Until you deal with the lack of education and training I don’t see an answer. People who can’t read can’t command a high salary. And if nobody in the areas making money, there’s no way to attract businesses even if you got the thefts down.
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I disagree with that. The problem of warrior police is addressable by other means (and it is obvious that people suffering the most from the warrior police are the poor people, both justifiably - violent crime usually happens around poor people - and not justifiably, as it's safer to victimize poor people, they wouldn't hire an expensive lawyer and the chance of them playing golf with your boss is none). There are many approaches, some (like not prosecuting minor crimes) more stupid than others, but I think there are ways to approach it without destroying the whole society.
The problem of worse social outcomes is harder to solve - but I think there are fruitful ideas how to approach it too. The thing is if black people start to have the same social outcomes as white people, they also start exhibiting same voting patterns as white people. And that's something that would be very bad for some of the current politicians. Granted, not all of them - some very white places are happy to elect very woke politicians - but overall the shift will be pretty noticeable, I think.
Oh no, they've been trying to do only the first part - the disarming. It doesn't decrease violent crime any (as it is obvious from the fact the places with the strictest gun laws still feature a ton of violent crime) and it doesn't make interaction with the police any safer as the police still has guns.
Which, of course, directly contradicts the previous sentence - if you get less police, you get more crime. Also, for each specific policeman, each interaction would be more dangerous - both because of more crime and because they can't rely on suppressing the criminals by sheer mass anymore, thus laying the burden on the shoulders of the individual policeman - who would, as expected, by more likely to feel threatened, and thus more likely to respond violently to the perceived threat.
Except of course DIE does not work this way - you can't make a drug-infested ghetto into a middle-class suburb by adding two more VP DIEs to Goldman Sachs roster. You can make those two black persons that are appointed VP DIEs at Goldman Sachs to move out of the ghetto - but there are many many more people in ghetto than VPs in Goldman Sachs, so that approach is obviously not scalable. Also, the opposite of meritocracy is dependence - and I don't think there's any example of hand-outing a populace into prosperity.
Which, again, contradicts the first sentence - and on the other side, makes the lives of non-criminal blacks so much more hell. While subtly suggesting to them that they shouldn't be bothering doing anything socially useful - since meritocracy is dead anyway - but instead should try their hand in something that brings easy money and not prosecuted anymore. Thus completing the circle of societal destruction.
The worst part is not even that, but that the bulk of these costs is borne by the same people they are supposedly "helping". As I noted at the start - they are promoting a tiny minority well beyond what they deserve (those VP DIEs) at the cost of further demoting and destroying the society for all the rest.
Is that obvious? The states with the most violent crime also have very loose gun laws (the top 5 states for murder rate are MS, LA, AL, MO, and AK, for example), while states with strict gun laws tend to have lower murder rates (IL is an obvious counterpoint, but, e.g. contrary to popular perception NY's murder rate is fairly low by American standards). Now, correlation is not causation and it's very probable that some of this is really due to an endemic culture of violence in the South that drives both homicide and weapon ownership (and, perhaps more importantly, weapon carrying), but I don't think you can at all conclude that efforts to curtail violence via gun regulations have failed. People may kill people, but firearms are a lubricant to violence.
Oh that's a fun dodge. Big democratic cities with substantial underclass black communities are the prime driver of murder rates, but let's look specifically at the ones in red states, while blaming the gun laws, at an arbitrary number that cuts off our Counterexamples: The next five states on your list.
Loose gun laws like Maryland and Illinois.
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"State" is big. At least most of US states are big (sorry, WY and RI). Thus, applying whole-state statistics to concentrated and heterogenеic phenomena is very misleading. San Francisco and Oakland are very different from Tahoe City and Napa Valley, despite both being in California. Martha's Vineyard and Springfield, MA are rather different places too. We can't just average them out and pretend gun laws and crime works the same way over all the California, for example.
Also, you may notice that your "objection" does not object to anything I said actually. I say "Decreasing X does not decrease Y, since we can witness data points with low X and high Y". And you say "we can also witness data points with high X and high Y". Well, yeah, OK. You got me. We can. That's not an objection to the lack of correlation between X and Y, you see.
Even more the lack of correlation is not causation. You see, for correlation you need that high X comes with high Y, and low X comes with low Y. We have that high X comes with high Y (let's assume that, I won't for the sake of argument here fight you on that) and low X comes with high Y. That's not even correlation.
Yes I can, if I look at the places where these efforts were effective, as to taking legal guns away, and we still have plenty of violence. That's empiric data - if I change X and Y does not move substantially, then I can conclude the attempt of changing Y by changing X failed. We can debate why it failed, but the failure is plain in the data.
I can refer you to the case of CashApp founder, just recently murdered in SF in a very un-lubricated manner. He is still as dead as any other murder victim.
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It’s funny that this is obvious to you. I think it makes total sense the increasing the likelihood that someone has a gun makes police more jumpy. You might be interested in this graph I made in 2021
/images/1681087903738361.webp
Edit: found the other version of my graph with slightly different axes if it's interesting to anyone: link
In most interactions with the police, they happen in circumstances where a knife is as deadly (or more deadly) than a gun. So if the police are trained to shoot you for twitching wrong, they'd shoot you in any case (also they can't rely on laws to ensure the absence of guns, since they are already dealing with a person that they suspect is a criminal). Of course, there are marginal cases but in the general picture you can't gun control you way out of it unless you disarm the whole nation (good luck doing it to Red states) and Mexico too (because we don't have the Southern border anymore, so guess what would happen if the price of a gun on internal US market shoots up?). You can compare US to Japan as long as you want, but US is not Japan, and never will be.
Obviously every policy only acts on the margins. I'm not arguing it will make police shootings go to zero, or even that it's a good policy. Only that I think your original claim
is wrong.
To be honest I don't like focusing on police shootings. The fact that people whose job is to apprehend dangerous criminals shoot people 20 times more than the national average doesn't strike me as obviously reprehensible, especially since 89% of the time they (the police) were being threatened, attacked, or having a gun pointed at them.
But I absolutely believe reducing gun ownership would reduce fatal police shootings.
You're welcome to make conjectures like
I don't really have an RCT to solidly refute you, but so long as the only data I've seen supports the idea that greater gun accessibility correlates strongly with more fatal police shootings, I'm going to go with the data over your personal beliefs on how policies affect police interactions.
If you mean "reducing it to the levels of Japan" - yes, it probably would. Except that's not happening. As I said, US is not Japan, and no amount of magic thinking will turn US into Japan. You just can't do that. What you can do however, is to make gun ownership much more expensive and cumbersome - they'd been trying in California for years - so that for the lawful citizen, it would be almost un-attainable, while for a criminal, whose very life frequently depends on it, it still would be worth it, despite the costs. Which would still require the police to carry guns, since the criminals still have them. Thus, you would keep the problem around, while hurting the very people you have set out to protect - the lawful citizens (since the criminals, being the only people carrying guns, would seek to recover the costs of having them by imposing those costs on the lawful citizens with impunity). You see, you can't just wave a magic wand and transform the society wholesale. It moves in certain ways responding to the certain incentives, and has to move gradually. And any move directed at reducing gun ownership per se, now in US, would make the lawful citizens strictly worse without improving anything. It won't turn US into Japan.
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My prior is that gun ownership by right with proper firearm education increases politeness, and that owning a gun as a flex increases shootings. Make guns less legal, they’ll be owned as a flex more.
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BLM is literally a grift. Occupy at least had legitimate grievances...things like too student loan debt or how Wall St. was seemingly unscathed 2008, and afik money was not wasted to enrich its founders, unlike BLM. So called systemic racism against blacks in policing can be refuted by merely looking at the stats.
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But was it though? I mean, which exactly change and reform we needed that BLM was supposed to usher? If we had the (--true socialism--) Saintly BLM, untainted by all the grift and hate and politicking, what would it do? Until the wokes and DIE grift complex came in, the racism in the US was on its last legs. I mean sure, there are some Nazis hiding around in the forests and mountains, steeping in their hate. BLM wouldn't fix that. All the rest have pretty much moved beyond that in the 2000s. The whole "systemic racism" is an obvious grift and bullshit, there's nothing to fix there - neither can it be fixed, the "systemic" definition prevents any attempt at rational consideration of it. The squalid conditions of some black communities are real, but BLM never tried, or intended, or had any plan, or idea how to fix it (I don't count "defund the police" as a plan because really...).
You say this energy was "wasted". I say that's the whole point of the whole charade - to "waste" this energy, which otherwise could be directed - maybe, don't hold me back here, I'm dreaming - towards figuring out how comes the squalid conditions are there, who is responsible for them continuing for decades and maybe even - that's the most ridiculous part of all - it is time for some accountability for people that held the power there for these decades and presided over it. There was absolutely no indication of any sliver of such ideas anywhere in BLM. It's all "white supremacy that" and "systemic racism this" and the rest is just open grift. The whole thing was created for directing the frustrations of people into a convenient outlet, and harvest them. It's not "waste" - it's how it was supposed to work, and it worked just as it was supposed to. There was no "reform efforts" because the whole thing was meant to prevent any reform (really needed for the police, for example, but impossible in current environment). It's not some "idiocy", it's a clever and careful and effective and very evil design. Of course, not by thugs mostly peacefully setting fire to the businesses of the very people they're supposed to be "supporting", but by those who enable and support and organize all that.
Maybe a general movement against police brutality or the Drug War?
Formulating a movement about police brutality in strictly racially antagonistic terms (remember, "white lives matter" is a Nazi slogan) is about the worst way to approach it one could think of. It automatically loses half of the political spectrum, confuses the message (should we be against brutal cops who are black? What if they are brutal against whites?) and assigns the blame to people which have no control over the problem. The execution of course was way worse - "let's convince people to fight police brutality by setting their city on fire and robbing Amazon trucks, so they'd run screaming to the police and beg them to please save them from this savagery".
As for the Drug War, I don't remember any BLMers ever asking for any legalize or other anti-DW measures. Not even medical marijuana (which is the basic of basics). They pushed for shorter sentences and such, but again strictly on racial grounds - if you are of a correct race, no matter if you are murderer, rapist or just smoked a joint in a wrong company, you need to be released.
Yes, fighting both causes would be a good thing. Unfortunately, BLM by its inception, design and ideology is completely incapable of doing either - not because they were stupid, or lazy, or dishonest, but because it is impossible to do it in a setup like that, like it's impossible to walk to the Moon.
Well, yes. I assume that's why OP said it "was wasted, turned racial and political, for division instead of unity."
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On the Abbot pardon and I think he’s in a tough place. I kept finding articles like this:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/will-texas-governor-pardon-army-sergeant-sandbagged-soros-da-self-defense-shooting
I keep seeing this of evidence withheld in the grand jury. Probably true. But I kept noticing I never heard anything about the jury trial. Suddenly got around to doing some googling and came up with this:
https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2023-04-07/might-have-to-kill-a-few-people/
He had some really bad texts about wanting to kill protestors and triggering self defense. The first article does seem like a gun was at a minimum partially raised against him. So looks to me like he at a minimum tried to find himself in that situation and then found an obliging gun toting person raising it at him.
Thoughts
I don’t like overturning a jury verdict and especially since it was in Texas even though it was Austin I don’t think he got railroaded. And I’m saying it as someone who thinks Chauvin deserves a pardon.
Kind of looks like mutual combat which Chicago actually declared on a case. Not sure if that law is in place in Texas but reading the statute in Texas for stand your ground you can’t provoke the other side before declaring self defense. So even then you would get an issue of whether his driving constituted provocation.
It’s largely better when the government maintains a monopoly use of violence. This was not the case in 2020. A lot of these cases to me looks like the government abdicated its monopoly and created The Purge like situations where either said could claim mutual combat.
Even for my ideological enemies I feel it’s important to give them justice when wronged. I wouldn’t have hated a not guilty verdict on the grounds I can’t sort out the self defense claim. But from what I can see it looks like a reasonable decision.
How about this analogy for the situation?
A robber walks into a bank, shows a gun to the teller, and demands to be given money. (they don't actually point the gun at anyone, and later it's determined that the gun had the safety on and did not have a round chambered.)
A security guard sees the gun and shoots the robber. Earlier that day, they had posted to social media, "man, my job is so boring. I wish someone would try to rob the bank so I could shoot them".
Is the security guard guilty of murder?
The analogy fails. Foster was in a public space where he had every right to be. Texas is an open carry state, so he had every right to carry a rifle in public. The basis for Perry's self-defense argument is that Foster threatened him, but as far as I can tell the only evidence for that is Perry's claim (and which appears to be contradicted by other eyewitnesses).
There's a photo of Foster pointing an AK at Perry.
I've been looking around for this and unable to find anything. The jury apparently either didn't see this or didn't find it compelling. If you can link it to me, I'd appreciate it.
edit: the only picture I've been able to find, cited as "showing" Foster pointing a gun merely shows him holding a rifle in the vicinity of Perry's car. As I mentioned before, Texas is an open carry state. Foster was allowed to walk around carrying a rifle. Under such legal circumstances, simply approaching someone while carrying a gun can't reasonably considered a threat without creating insane outcomes (i.e. if we were to consider Perry justified in shooting Foster, we'd also have to consider Foster justified in shooting Perry if he had done so). Of course, this could have been avoided if they'd simply left their guns at home.
looking closer I think he's not actually pointing it in the photo, sorry it's quite dark and grainy.
https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1644518046784995331/photo/1
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Isn't it the whole point of the pardon power - to override the (presumed) excesses of the jury process?
Driving on the public street open for driving? That'd be stretching "provocation" beyond any reasonable boundary. I didn't read the details so maybe he did some "come at me, bro" stuff beyond driving, and that'd make a difference. A vehicle can be used as a weapon no less than a gun can. But driving alone in a legal manner is not.
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There’s a lot of obfuscation about this case - it’s quite simple.
Did Perry have a right to drive on the street?
Did Garrett Foster have a right to blockade a road with his friends and then detain people driving down that road who didn’t wish to be detained.
Upon being detained, did Perry have justifiable belief that his detainers might use their firearms against him this allowing him to claim self-defense.
To help us decide- consider another scenario - Foster & friends stood outside Perry’s front door with a gun without permission and attempted to detain him as Perry walks out the door. Is Perry justified in defending himself?
Another scenario for consideration - Foster and friends attempt to detain the President on Pennsylvania Ave and point guns in his general direction - what would the Secret Service do in that situation?
Im trying to move convo to pardon power which I think is interesting. I don’t think anyone won on guilty or innocent but regardless the pardon power is interesting.
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Well if you were detaining people by using said truck to block people in, then I think the people you’re attempting to detain have the right to ram the truck to escape the situation.
We disagree on whether Perry was intentionally driving into the crowd.
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But you can't stand in the middle of the road and expect to avoid being hit by a car, I don't care if the car is there legally or not, and similarly you can't imprison a stranger, I don't care if they are in a car, it is illegal - so that's an initiated assault without any angle for self defence. So they transformed into violent criminals first by stepping into the road, and clearly he was afraid of the violent criminals detaining him, and responded in self defence.
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I’ll shut this down because I read some. He apparently stopped for 6 seconds. There’s no evidence he was running people over. I agree with the point but there’s no evidence shooter rammed people.
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A lot of case discussion. I’m honestly bored with that. But there’s a few other issues.
I think I’ve established there’s a plausible chance this guy was guilty. Maybe not reasonable doubt. Abbott is facing a lot of political pressure to overturn it. But 12 in Texas said he’s guilty.
Protestors are annoying. If you convict one who killed a protestor then they will feel like they have immunity to be annoying or worse loot and arson. Is it better to just pardon a killer so the protestors don’t come out?
Re #2 I don't think pardon or imprisonment is likely to play a large role in protestors decision theory. Small probability of extreme punishments generally don't do much to dissuade, and it's not like no one's ever died or been injured at a protest before.
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Wow. We've lowered the standards of criminal conviction here down from "guilty beyond reasonable doubt" to NOT "not-guilty beyond reasonable doubt".
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On 1) Texas has very limited amounts of control over local DA’s(who are elected locally), so ‘he got railroaded because blue prosecutor’ is entirely possible.
I agree on the DA. But he got 12 bad jurors? Like Chauvin had BLM acti it’s on his jury. I don’t think he had those people as the dominant force in his jury.
Austin is very blue. They get tribal when things get politicized.
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Seems to me there is a difference between “looking for an excuse” and creating the situation. That is, if you instigate a fight and then use deadly force you’re fucked. If on the other hand you wander around a BLM riot wearing a MAGA hat you (unless the city issued some stay at home order) had every legal right to be there and if someone physically attacks you in a way that puts your life in danger can use deadly force.
The second isn’t advisable (optics are bad and you could easily die yourself). But I do think there is a legal difference.
There is definitely a legal difference in actively provoking a fight. And if there isn't, there should be. Counter-protesting is protected speech. Speech isn't really protected if doing so negates your basic rights.
There is. All the statutes I’ve seen allow an aggressor to regain his right to self defense after he effects a retreat, though.
Yes, that's generally true.
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The problem in this case for “looking for an excuse” which is legal is you better have damn good video evidence. As is we don’t know if the victim didn’t point the gun at him, larped a bit with his gun, or really threatens him with it.
This is called “reasonable doubt” and means that the defendant should be found not guilty.
If that’s the standard then I’d probably lean not guilty.
But from the evidence I think there’s a 50% chance or somewhat more he murdered this guy because he wanted to.
Once more, there is a difference between “hoping to be in a situation where one can use deadly force” and “provoking”.
The first is still self defense.
Also, there is a difference between talking tough to buddies and wanting to go murdering. This guy wasn’t randomly driving around. He was ubering. He had just dropped off a fare. Using his “shit talking” to prove his state of mind at the particular moment is a leap.
Agree. After posting this then reading more. Here’s my gut feeling for what happened.
The victim raised his gun a little and talked a little tough. The shooter probably didn’t actually fear for his life but saw the opportunity to shoot and claim self defense. The victim may have actually fully pointed his gun at the shooter.
I think either legally or in the eyes of god this guy did murder someone without an excuse but legally might be not guilty.
I just have a feeling this guy was shooting the second he thought he had a legal right to as oppose to not wanting to shoot.
I said in my initial thing a lot of the problems here is the state abdicating their monopoly on violence.
You're now at the point that your "gut feeling" says that a guy having a rifle pointed at him by a hostile person is not in fear for his life. I think your gut needs a check.
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Yet the burden of proof isn’t on the defendant. If the only video evidence we have is someone pointing a gun at him, I’m at least having responsible doubt…
Actually it is or it’s 50-50 depending how you read these Under Texas law, you need to prove the following elements to successfully claim self-defense:
You used an adequate amount of force.
You reasonably believed that the use of force was immediately necessary.
You did not provoke the other person.
You were not attempting to commit a crime when using force.
I think for this case he had to reasonably believe a use of force is necessary. I’m not sure how that compares to reasonable doubt of guilt.
No, in Texas, as in pretty much every state, once the defendant has produced some evidence that he acted in self-defense, the prosecution has the burden of proving, beyond a reasonable doubt, that he did not act in self-defense. Saxton v. State, 804 S.W.2d 910 (Tx Ct of Crim App, 1991); Hernandez v. State, 804 S.W.2d 910, 910 (Tx Ct of App, 2020).
Then if that’s standard he’s not guilty but I still believe at a greater than 50% chance that this guy probably was wanting a chance to kill a protestor and took his chance.
"Hoping he would be the victim of an unjustified assault" doesn't make it into a justified assault.
It doesn't matter whether the assault was justified -- note that it is perfectly possible for both sides in a conflict to be acting in self-defense. That is, it is perfectly possible that both sides to honestly and reasonably believe that the other poses a risk of imminent danger. It doesn't matter whether the danger actually exists. And, if I am not actually in fear, it doesn't matter that a reasonable person would have been in fear, nor that the other person was acting unlawfully.
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Then you would have qualified for the jury. But just going out where trouble happens hoping that trouble finds you isn't "provocation" according to the law.
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Damn, this Army vs. Air Force rivalry is pretty hardcore.
cthulhu swimming left. It does have the feeling of government enabling and encouraging anarchy, then shortly thereafter enforcing anarcho-tyranny.
From the article:
Bad opsec for his sake, but an understandable and even based sentiment.
If we'll be operating under Purge-rules, might as well orient oneself under Purge-rules.
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Ah, hell. I hadn't heard about this. Either a tragedy or an outrage, not sure which.
Can a pardon be issued before the trial is actually complete? He was indicted, not convicted, on murder and assault charges, and the trial may well reveal any or all of that alleged exculpatory evidence. Watching the video, there's plenty of ambiguity. I don't want to jump to conclusions based off two Twitter clips and two sets of media spin, and neither should the Board.
As a side note--there's some dark humor in juxtaposing these claims about Soros DAs with the claims downthread.
Yeah, I don’t see it as a “gotcha” so much as a footnote. The problem is that the initial complaints don’t bother including the footnote because their audience already knows what Soros is supposed to represent.
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I guess Texas could have some real weird rule, but generally yes. You're usually pardoned for crimes committed, not to overturn the conviction.
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It’s only like a day old. You probably heard about it back then.
So there’s also video of the guy killed with AK saying the people that hate them are too much of a pussy to do anything. So both sides have statements making them look guilty.
I guess the car was stopped for 6.2 seconds so maybe that’s long enough for him not to have “provocation issues”. And tough guy with AK certainly could have raised it.
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It does not not make him look good, but the evidence still suggests his life was in danger and he acted in self defense. It's the same thing as the Rittenhouse case or George Zimmerman. Putting oneself into danger or risk taking behavior does not invalidate the self defense argument.
This isn't the same as the Rittenhouse case, at all. It amazes me that the misinformation still floats around...
part of the problem is that had I argued the opposite, then I'd have people tell me it is like the Rittenhouse case. TBH I don't care that much anyway, given I strongly dislike BLM I hope he is pardoned, the contravening details or facts are otherwise irrelevant to me
So it's OK to use a bad example (pulling from misinformation) because other people would of?
Am I understanding you correctly?
(sorry for the late response)
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It’s both correct? One key difference is Rittenhouse clearly retreated. And then after the first shot you had mutual combat where honestly depending who died both sides could claim plausible self defense.
But the same in that it’s late at night. Armed people on both sides who don’t trust each other. Both cases had behavior I guess I would describe as wilding behavior so it’s tough to tell what’s a threat. Kenosha I would describe a lot of the action terroristic/violent (burning buildings). Both took place where normal people had legitimate interest in the area. The Uber driver apparently had dropped off a passenger. Kenosha residents had their public square and often businesses being attacked.
I think one big difference is in Kenosha the guy who initiated with Rittenhouse was not a good guy and was attacking him. This incident I think the victim was more of a larper walking around with a rifle acting tough.
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https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/PE/htm/PE.9.htm#C
9.31.2
Did not provoke the person whom the force was used
So I think the case comes down to did he knowingly try to provoke the encounter. Did he speed into the crowd too fast. And where his prior texts of talking about triggering an encounter gives a lot of information on his state of mind.
It's hard to say, which is why this is so hotly contested still.
He drove his car into the crowd at 10mph, but slowed down, stopping and then was approached by Garrett Foster, who may have raised his gun at him just 18 inches from the driver side window. Being an Uber driver, his motive could have been he was in a hurry.
as someone on twitter notes:
I looked into it more. I think before provoking you have to asks whether the victim ever actually crossed into threatening. There’s no video evidence. A bad picture with gun not entirely parallel. Basically a he said/she said. And I’m not sure on the legal definition he needs for proving self defense. It’s a different standard I believe than reasonable doubt.
With him sitting their 6 seconds I’m not seeing the provocation before the issue now.
I agree on the not loaded. He wouldn’t know that and if some points a gun at me I am going to assume it’s loaded.
Was it really unloaded? The article said it was found without a round in the chamber, which makes me think he probably had a loaded magazine or they would have mentioned that. If he actually had an unloaded gun that would make me think it was more likely he was looking for trouble, since would be useless for self defense and only good for threatening people.
I’m not a gun guy. But I think you are correct. Which I’m guessing meaning he could have quickly done something to pull a round into chamber.
Either isn’t important for the other persons view of risks.
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I can't seem to find a discussion on this yet, and I'm very curious to hear this site's interpretation of events. Yesterday, judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ruled that the FDA should rescind it's approval for a commonly-used pill for abortions, mifepristone. The narrative I'm reading in mainstream media frames this decision as so cartoonishly insane that I'm struggling to see how it can be accurate. However, I'm also struggling to see where exactly the narrative is misleading.
First, the civics-101 explanation of how an agency like the FDA or the Fed should work is that certain regulatory problems are too technical and change too quickly based on new science for lawmakers to deal with them directly. Therefore, Congress delegates its power to a group of skilled experts who can react to the cutting edge of research and make reasonably policy. Of course, this is the civics-101 explanation and reality is presumably much more complicated, but the point is that laypeople who don't really understand the subject matter, like judges or members of Congress, should not be the ones making the final decision on technical questions.
Kacsmaryk's decision is framed as exactly this happening---the FDA made a complicated judgement about the safety of mifepristone based on their expertise and a non-expert judge decided to invalidate it based on their personal disagreements with the technical science. Articles emphasize quotes from the judgement where he explicitly disagrees with the FDA's interpretation of studies: "“Here, F.D.A. acquiesced on its legitimate safety concerns — in violation of its statutory duty — based on plainly unsound reasoning and studies that did not support its conclusions.", etc. Unfortunately, the actual decision (Edit: better link from ToaKraka) is very long with most of the pages being about legal details like establishing standing, making it hard to find the true reasoning behind it (though props to NYT for emphasizing the primary source so prominently, beat my expectations for news sources).
There has to be more going on here than a random judge deciding that they are more qualified to decide technical medical questions than actual experts; as a general rule, political opponents aren't ever this insane. What are the details I'm not understanding in the decision that make this more reasonable?
The reasonable interpretation of his court decision is that he has taken umbradge at the FDA's choice to use an expedited approval process where the typical use of the pill does not meet the criteria for expedited approval. That is, most of the problem he is pointing out is not with the underlying science and cost-benefit analysis of the FDA, but rather is a procedural problem.
Just to clarify this interpretation, do you think the judge would accept if a new non-expedited/properly-justified expedited approval process happened over the next few months that reapproved the drug (this isn't rhetorical)? There might be some important legal reason I don't understand for why if there was in fact incorrect procedure the first time around, the agency shouldn't be allowed to redo things in the proper way.
Also, under this interpretation, what was the point of all the language in the opinion specifically disagreeing with the underlying science and cost-benefit analysis? Was it not actually doing that?
It certainly depends on your conflict/mistake theory thesis of the world. The opinion, as written, is mistake theory. The rest is just showing how badly the FDA made a mistake.
If you are pure conflict, there is no reason to respect this if you are an abortion enthusiast.
But if you're pure conflict, there's also no reason to believe the FDAs own decision was apolitical.
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I recently read most of the decision after this came up in another forum. The most convincing part of the argument I found was:
mifepristone can lead to severe complications if used at too high a gestational age, or in the case of ectopic pregnancy
if delivered in the mail, there is often no ultrasound, so the gestational age or the presence of ectopic pregnancy is not checked
potential users can include people who don't check this themselves, and then sometimes die or experience severe adverse effects
while the data shows this is rare, it's undercounted because the FDA removed reporting requirement for non-fatal adverse effects, and also when the women go into emergency services the side effects are misdiagnosed as side effects from miscarriages instead of from mifepristone (because the doctor doesn't know they've taken it).
this implies the need to ban sending the drug through the mail, or to impose an ultrasound requirement to check for the dangerous conditions
The judge goes further and tries to ban mifepristone entirely.
There is some mention of strange bureaucratic interpretations:
Whether this is true or not I don't know.
There's some heavy shenanigans about the Comstock Act, which prevents sending abortifacients through the mail, which was rendered null and void by Griswold v. Connecticut but not overturned and so still shambles on, offering a zombie-like ability to infect any cases about sending abortifacients through the mail.
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Congress does not (and cannot) fully delegate carte blanche authority to administrative agencies. Any delegation is limited and often governed by things like the APA.
Under the APA, decisions of agencies are reviewed under the arbitrary and capricious standard. I haven’t reviewed this case (and I don’t practice in the FDA area so not sure the particulars there). But courts can look at the record and if it is clear the agency clearly just ignored data or otherwise fucked up, the court can say set aside the agency decision. That is, delegations are still subject to checks and balances.
Haven’t read this case so have zero opinion.
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This is a commendable attitude but in this case it is leading you astray. Kacsmaryk granted relief to Plaintiff's who (1) lack standing and (2) even if they had standing their claims are statutorily time-barred and (3) even if they weren't time barred are barred by lack of exhaustion of administrative remedies. You don't have to take my word for it either. Indeed, the lead plaintiff in this case (the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine) was formed three months after Dobbs was decided last year and incorporated in Amarillo Texas specifically so they could file this suit and be assured that Matthew Kacsmaryk is the judge who would hear it.
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Pretty unfortunate timing of this top level post. The one just below it, shows the partisanship of allegedly purely fact-based federal agencies. So I would support more oversight and protection against human rights violations, in this case right to life, that are perpetrated under the guise of science.
You understand that if this drug is banned, women who suffer miscarriages have to carry the dead fetus and risk sepsis (whereas before they could take the pill to pass the tissue) correct?
Definitely not the case. This is a chance for you to ask where you heard that, why they're lying to you, and what else you might have believed from them.
I’m no doctor, but a brief search online shows that doctors routinely prescribe mifepristone for miscarriages. Maybe there are alternatives that are just as good, but I presume doctors aren’t using their second choice.
You need to bring more evidence to this disagreement. As it is, this comment is bad.
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What is the evidence that they are repeating a lie?
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That is not true. The judge rescinded approval of the abortifacient part of the drug course, not the labor-inducing part.
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The FDA was only in charge of saying whether the drug itself is safe and effective (or safe enough technically I suppose) though. Whether the drug SHOULD be used is outside the FDA's purview. The FDA isn't committing the (proposed) humans rights violations itself.
You could outlaw most abortion and still have the FDA sign off on the drug as safe but it only to be legal to use for cases where the legislature thinks it needs to happen (incest/rape etc.).
The science says this drug ends pregnancies X% of the time with A B and C side effects Z% of the time when taken in Y dosages under Z circumstances. Whether ending a pregnancy should happen is not something the FDA has any say in. So that isn't a human right violation perpetrated under the guise of science.
The FDA says you CAN use this to terminate a pregnancy. But they can't tell you if terminating the pregnancy is legal or moral. Assuming abortion is a human rights violation and is allowed then that would be the fault of the state and federal legislatures for not outlawing it rather than the FDA, surely? Or arguably the fact that enough people don't agree that it is a human rights violation so as to elect politicians who would carry out that agenda.
Otherwise the ATF is on the hook for any human rights violations carried out by firearms they have deemed legal under the relevant statutes as well. Which doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.
Don't give them ideas...
That does raise a question, though, is it really necessary to strike at mifeprestone specifically, then? Roe already is striking at the sort of higher echelons of law on this issue. I guess the 2022 midterms did show that there still isn't quite enough pressure all around to just formally illegalize abortion, but still.
Its always better to have multiple angles of attack practically i would say. Especially if the public doesn't seem to be entirely onboard. Banning abortion isn't popular but if you feel its murdering millions of babies then morally you probably should not let that stop you. Same with the getting rid of gas cars or whatever to prevent the (putative) end of the human race.
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Better link
Standing is important, though.
Anyway, it may be easier to understand the decision if you have a table of contents open in another window.
And here's an article from a law professor who criticizes both this decision and an almost-simultaneous decision in the other direction from a different district court.
Thanks for the links! It's surprisingly hard to find primary sources about current events these days since for whatever reason search engines decided five years ago to heavily prioritize low-quality news articles instead. I really hate this---you have to basically be in the field and know the name of the database/repository where things are held, otherwise you're doomed. That's why I'm so happy when the news articles actually provide the source, even though they also didn't give a link to the official court-decision repository that I'm sure exists somewhere.
The official PACER repository is paywalled (though downloading a document costs only a few cents). The links that I provided are to the unofficial RECAP repository.
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E.P.A. Is Said to Propose Rules Meant to Drive Up Electric Car Sales Tenfold.
...
To me this looks like they failed to make electric vehicles attractive to consumers compared to gas ones, so they're giving up on that and instead are going to effectively make gas vehicles illegal to manufacture. It's absolutely insane to me that the EPA can just destroy a major industry like this, and have a massive effect on the lives of every American, and they don't have ask anyone. Congress doesn't vote on it, the president doesn't sign it, it just happens because they said so.
I think that's a trend that's common with environmental regulations. Whether it's CFL bulbs, paper straws, gas stoves or low flow toilets, consumers get stuck with an inferior substitute and the alleged crisis never seems to actually get solved. It's always just a prelude for the next demand. And by doing it through the administrative state elected officials never have to take any flack for it. If congress had to pass a bill outlawing incandescent bulbs and the president had to sign it then voters would have someone to get mad at. But when it's a new DOE regulation that just appears, people don't know who to blame. Nobody ever has to argue for it or stake their career on it.
So I don't think things will change. Just like the CDC can declare themselves dictators of all apartment rentals because of the Covid crisis, the EPA can declare itself king of all energy because of the climate crisis. Year after year, more things will be banned, prices will go up and life will get worse. But most people will either not realize the reason or will have entirely forgotten that things used to be different.
These laws are clearly counter-productive and a case of "missing the forest for the trees". The easiest way to reduce demand for petroleum cars, is not to target the petroleum, but to target the cars.
The discussion has to begin with overturning obvious loopholes. The zero cost changes include:
Remove the "light truck" exception. All cars smaller than a semi/ RV must meet the same emissions requirements.
Allow 'electric subsidies' to be used for all electric vehicles. Including e-bikes & e-scooters.
Allow all hybrids of a certain range to be eligible for electric subsidies. (It can be as simple as extra tariffs not applying, or using median-emission numbers to apply tariffs)
Universal removal of zoning regulations within walking distance of transit centers
When it comes to things that cost $$, Infrastructure investments are simply more effective than 1 time car subsidies. The electric car subsidies would soon reach the 100s of billions if we keep seeing electric car adoption.
Indirect dis-incentivization can also be done through long overdue good-faith mechanisms.
Road safety regulations must include safety outcomes for all people involved in a collision. Including pedestrians and the secondary vehicle.
Liability coverage should be mandatory nationally, and cover all costs medical or otherwise for those in the car crash.
There is so much that can be done, before draconian 'petrol cars are illegal' laws ever have to be passed.
Yes ! It is hard to tell what the true cause of this is. (lobbyists ?) But it is seems to pervade all American society.
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I've soured on the concept of ubiquitous electric vehicles very quickly in the past few months.
https://prospect.org/environment/2023-01-26-firefighter-hell-electric-car-battery-fire/
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/11/1162732820/e-bike-scooter-lithium-ion-battery-fires
Comparatively, internal combustion engines are probably the most well-understood tech on the planet and thus one of the safest.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221721009140
https://whyy.org/articles/septas-cracking-battery-buses-raise-questions-about-the-future-of-electric-transit/
https://twitter.com/christofspieler/status/1643325106368704514
https://twitter.com/DavidZipper/status/1643261155106799616
Let us not even speak of Semitrailers, Boats, and Jet Airplanes.
https://www.topspeed.com/the-rivian-r1t-is-considered-the-most-off-road-capable-electric-pickup-truck-yet-but-is-it-really/
https://twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/1636023947224555520
They're also heavier because of the battery weight, and consider the aforementioned fire issue. Add in that if your area experiences a blizzard, hurricane or other disaster that takes down the power grid, you're double fucked if your only transportation is an EV.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/making-the-entire-u-s-car-fleet-electric-could-cause-lithium-shortages/
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a42417327/lithium-supply-batteries-electric-vehicles/
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Qf85EuQKWeQ
And finally:
In short, it is hard to see the heavy push for full electric vehicles as anything other than a virtue signal (since it is a very visible sign of 'progress' even if it does little to address the alleged problem) and a bit of a punishment for industries that would otherwise probably resist the Cathedral's will.
But nobody I've seen is willing or able to make the compelling case that the goals being set are likely to be achieved on schedule, nor is anyone willing to suffer any consequences if they're not.
So basically for this plan to work it's going to assume some incredible leaps in technology and resource availability in the next 5 or so years. OR for people to accept a major decrease in their standard of living in order to afford new EVs. HMMMMMMMM.
And if EVs are going to be more expensive than internal combustion vehicles (they are) it just slams the poorest with an expense they can't easily handle.
If it proceeds as I expect, then they'll maintain the strict requirements on emissions but just add in various carveouts on the basis of various favored groups 'needing' to keep using ICE or for 'equitable' reasons.
But these are not things that will actually confront the Biden Administration. They won't have to accept responsibility for consequences that are nearly 10 years off, nor will any of their constituents take them to task over this, and for some reason the major auto manufacturers seem to be rolling over and playing along.
So I guess I just plan to keep my little gas powered car working for as long as possible, and assume they won't make gas powered vehicles that are already on the road illegal just yet.
I think auto manufacturers are taking EVs as an opportunity to change what owning a car even means. Which is to say, you don't. Ever. EVs will increasingly have all but the most core functionality, and possibly even that, tied to monthly subscriptions. Which might sound like a lease, except it'll be far, far worse. You'll still need to pony up the $40,000 for the EV, plus the subscriptions that make it a car you'd actually want to drive like you used to own, plus you are still responsible for replacing the $20,000 DRM'ed unrepairable OEM batteries in it after 10 years.
There is plenty in it for auto manufacturers. They aren't rolling over, they are slathering at the mouth to make more money off doing way less, and effectively abolishing meaningful car ownership forever.
I could see them trying to adopt Apple's business model, in that event.
Making cars into something that you EXPECT to replace every 5 years (if that) rather than something you drive until the wheels fall off or that you pass on to your kids so they can drive it until the wheels fall off.
And, like Apple products, make them near impossible to repair on your own or through third-party shops, so you're locked into their environment from the time you first buy, and then eventually 'force' you to upgrade to keep receiving support.
And of course the fact that with electric cars you can make people pay to unlock certain performance capabilities once they already own the car.
Seems like the goal would to dissuade aftermarket modification of any kind.
I actually do expect to see 'kit cars' make a resurgence in the relatively near future.
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Charging shouldn’t be much of an issue. The busses just need to be designed so that batteries can be swapped in a few minutes. That kind of quick battery change is common in factories and warehouses that have even a small number of electric forklifts in constant use. Busses would probably be more difficult due to the larger size, but I don’t see any reason to think that’s an insurmountable problem.
This understates the actual challenge given the location, size, and complexity of batteries which hold enough charge for Buses. You're assuming away the hardest part of the process.
https://www.heavydutyslide.com/upload/Admin/images/OREOS-4X-batteries.gif
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ko5z6M_o85U/UQBMK4IhNbI/AAAAAAAAAZA/sqOsGUv53dk/s1600/Laval+electric+bus.jpg
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a668f1080bd5e34d18a7e76/1562049452197-F6CDV67PWQ8TSOMSH5PL/TS_How_Electric_Bus_Works_InfoGraphic_02.jpg?format=1000w
Also see the link about the busses literally cracking due to the increased weight.
And solving for those issues increases the expense of the product. Surmountable does not, in any way, mean practical when there's an obviously superior solution already in use. It's literally a choice between gas pumps, which are, again, one of the simplest and well-understood techs, vs. new battery swap tech, which even in the best case is ADDITIONAL infrastructure that must be maintained.
It's closer, comparatively, to having to swap out the engine on an ICE bus every day. It's laughable to suggest such an option when the existing tech works well.
If Tesla hasn't even got that tech working yet I'm not particularly expecting it to reach adoption for busses anytime soon.
And, I cannot overemphasize the issue of spontaneous fires
So this still falls on the "counting on massive tech innovations in short order" problem.
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That's sort of the point of gov't intervention in the market to address market failures resulting from externalities. It is no different from requiring cars to have catalytic converters or smokestacks to have scrubbers; in both cases most of the benefits flow to people other than the buyer, so the market will sell "too few" (i.e., the maket fails to maximize utility). This particular intervention might be poor policy or it might be sound policy, but simply saying that consumers are not buying enough of the product is not much of a point, since it is implied.
I've definitely seen it argued frequently that electric cars were straight upgrades to gasoline cars and that it was inevitable that almost everyone would voluntarily switch to electric cars over time. The federal subsidies for electric cars were somewhat based on this idea, that once you got production ramped up and economies of scale kicked in that people would want to switch. That's a very different type of government intervention from straight up banning the competition. And even if it wasn't a different type of government intervention it's certainly on a different scale. Gas cars are so common that banning them (or 60% of them) is just completely unprecedented in my lifetime at least.
That said I think that requiring catalytic converters on cars or scrubbers on powerplants are also massive government interventions that should have been mandated by acts of congress and not unelected department head.
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They should just tax emissions, but it's very important to Democrats that a) they be seen by their base as sticking it to corporations, and b) the increase in the cost of owning and operating a vehicle be seen by the base as caused by corporations raising prices, rather than by Democrats raising taxes.
Do you have a gas tax in the US? If so, what’s the difference?
There are gas taxes, but they're mostly to fund roads, so they may cover the cost of roads (though I'm not 100% sure of even that), but they don't also cover the social cost of carbon emissions. There also aren't generally taxes on other uses of fossil fuels.
I’m not sure I understand the difference. What matter does it make if the tax is used for one purpose or another?
It's not about what the revenues are used for. It's about internalizing the externalities. When you use roads, that imposes a certain cost on society, because it costs money to build and maintain the roads, and only so many people can use them at the same time. When you burn fuel, you impose a certain cost on society by contributing to global warming, and also emitting other pollutants.
US gas taxes might be high enough to cover one of these, but are probably not high enough to cover both of them. So maybe burning a gallon of gas has a total social cost (including the cost of extracting the gas, road upkeep, and pollution) of $3.50, but you only have to pay $2.75. Or whatever. This means that if you get $3 of value out of burning a gallon of gas, you'll do it, even though it does $3.50 worth of damage. That's a bad outcome. We want an incentive structure in which you only do $3.50 of damage if you get at least $3.50 in value from it.
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True, if they made electric cars more attractive, that would only be via some kind of subsidy which still costs money. Either way it comes out of people's pockets. And there will probably be many unintended consequences.
In Australia there were and still are subsidies for solar power. So we get a glut of power around midday and wholesale power prices actually go negative fairly often. This is not good for producers who can't easily increase or decrease their power production, which is just about everyone except gas. Peak energy consumption comes later in the afternoon and evening, when solar diminishes. Prices rise then and consumers suffer. Overall electricity prices have been rising nearly continuously since 2007.
Price variability generally is not good for anyone, since it effectively means periods of wasted production and scarcity.
There's talk of getting massive, expensive, batteries to store this energy. I'd always known batteries were expensive but couldn't put a number to it until now. A Tesla Powerwall costs over $10,000 and stores about $3 worth of power, in AUD. As more coal power plants are decommissioned without replacement, the situation will deteriorate further.
This is the key problem with solar. Electricity is hard to store. If someone (eg Tesla) solves the storage use problem solar plants overnight become super affordable and useful. If they don’t, solar plants are terrible.
I remember talk about just using the excess power to pump water up hill during the day and running it through turbines coming down at night.
Did anything ever come of that?
The physical conditions necessary to make hydro storage practical aren't common.
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How is this possible? Surely a Tesla car can’t go O(100) miles on $3 of electricity… can it? How can the Powerwall (apparently) be so inefficient compared to the batteries in Tesla cars?
According to wikipedia, the range of a Tesla Model 3 is 491 km. It costs $43,490 USD. Its usable battery capacity is 57.5 kilowatts.
Electricity in Australia (NSW specifically) costs 28.7 cents per kilowatt hour AUD, or 19.15 cents USD. So a Tesla stores 11 USD worth of electricity at the cost of $43,490 USD. There might be a bit of complication in that the battery transformation of stored energy to output electricity isn't perfectly efficient but it'll do for my purposes. 1$ of power needs $4000 of Tesla to store it, which is roughly the same as the battery.
Teslas have economies of scale on their side vs powerwalls (which also have to be installed and hooked up to solar which is different in each house) but with a Tesla you get a whole car as well.
Whatever holes there are in my maths, I conclude that batteries are very expensive relative to the power that they store. I think I'm going to put 'Just build nuclear plants' in my flair.
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It's true. The powerwall has about 13 kWh of capacity. At $0.15 per kWh that comes out to around $2 in my electricity to charge. It would also last maybe 90-120 minutes running my household with the AC and Oven on. It wouldn't scratch the surface of my needs. My solar array when it's really humming along in the spring, summer and fall generates over 60 kWh a day, at a peak of 11.4 kW, most of which gets dumped back to the grid. I'd probably need at least 40 kWh of battery capacity to bank enough power to get me through cold nights, or just not waste it, if I didn't have net metering with my power company. It would cost almost as much as the entire rest of my solar array and inverter. Probably around $30k-40k.
When my solar installer was trying to sell me on the batteries, he had me come out to another site he was working on. That homeowner had a battery system which was already failing inside of 2 years, and the manufacturer was fighting him tooth and nail on the warrantee. I was unimpressed.
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According to random web sources, it takes 34kWh to go 100 miles in a Tesla, which would cost about AUD9.18 at retail in 2021. Wholesale electricity costs seem to vary considerably.
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Good, shows consumers are still relatively smart.
I want to like electric vehicles. But they're expensive, and their batteries predestine them for become e-waste in about 10 years. I know, I know, the claims are that most EV batteries last "10-20" years. Even so, I wouldn't want to roll the dice on needing a $20,000+, planned obsolescence repair within what I consider the usable lifespan of the vehicle. I drive my cars into the ground. I drove my 2007 Honda Civic until a tornado/down burst (meteorologist couldn't make up their mind) dropped a tree on, totaling it. I got a solid 15 years of use out of it, with only standard maintenance. I never had to spend more than $1000 in a single year on it.
Then you have cases where manufacturers decide, fuck it, we don't want to support the batteries for that vehicle anymore. I saw that happened to one particular model a while ago, although now I can't seem to find a reference.
To add insult to injury, batteries are one of the hottest battlegrounds for right to repair right now. A lot of them are aggressively locked down with DRM, so they cannot have dead cells swapped out, or be worked on at all. You must buy the $20,000+ OEM replacement.
Add in all the nonsense a lot of EVs are doing, turning even cars you ostensibly own into a subscription service, and it's a convergence of lots of terrible things I hate, utterly ruining a technology I would want to be enthusiastic about.
Agreed. I've noticed there's a lot of politically-motivated fudging of costs when it comes to gas-powered vehicles.
Gas-powered vehicles are incredibly cheap to own and operate if that is what you want. People can and do drive old, reliable vehicles and it costs very little to do so. My first car cost $6000 (in 2001) and I drove it for 10 years with essentially no maintenance getting nearly 40 miles to the gallon. I'm currently on year eight of my current car, and have put almost no money into it other than the cost to purchase.
"But the average car costs $XXX per year. Look at the data." says the chorus.
That's because cars serve multiple purposes, mainly transportation and status symbol. A person who buys a $120,000 G-Wagon is not purchasing transportation. Yes the cost of expensive new vehicles is counted as "transportation cost" and used to argue that gas-powered cars are expensive. They are not.
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Agreed on all points.
If we had sci-fi battery technology, then electric vehicles would be ideal. Electric motors are in every way vastly superior to gas motors. A tiny motor that is ultra-low-maintenance, ultra-high-torque-starting-at-0-RPM, etc.
But the batteries are in every way horrible. Very heavy, expensive, wear out with use, require rare minerals to make, take a long time to charge, etc.
Even if we had the magic battery, we'd need the upgraded electric grid. Which the same environmentalists who want to ban gas cars want to prevent from happening.
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I think honestly electric cars wouldn’t do just fine if there was enough infrastructure to support them. If you get away from urban areas, you simply cannot find a charger. There’s one or two on the route between Memphis and St. Louis (my brother drives his electric on that route), and a lot fewer in rural areas away from highways. It’s just not possible without a major push to build the infrastructure in rural areas. Maybe they’ll revert to horses?
Interesting. My friend drove a Tesla, or rather had the Tesla drive him, from California to Vermont. But yeah I'm pretty sure he stayed on interstate 80 for most of that.
Boring! There are so many awesome intermediate routes, with enough gas stations.
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I'd expect the WaPo's liberal bias to cause it to overrate the likelihood of these regulations actually working. Pledging dramatic action on climate change at some point in the future is very popular with left leaning institutions. Promising to dramatically cut emissions in the future and then constantly pushing back the date is how this stuff works.
Also the Supreme Court overturned the CDC's eviction ban and the EPA's attempt to regulate carbon dioxide.
LED's are great and Home Depot still stocks Incandescent lights. You can still get a gas stove. I got plastic straws even on my trip to California last week. I guess low flush toilets were tyrannically imposed on us but I'm having trouble remembering the last time I had to use a plunger so I think they're fine. I get the principle of not interfering with consumer choices but the whole 'life keeps getting worse' seems like an overstatement.
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The banning of Juul, an e-cigarette, was an eye-opener. No legal pretext, no bans of similar/identical products, just one company that was chosen to be crushed by an unaccountable bureaucracy. It’s really not that different from the common conception of the CCP’s level of market interference; all American companies and products exist at the will of bureaucrats.
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There was a minor media circus about them, but they haven't actually been banned, have they?
Anyway, induction is amazing and I hope both gas and conventional electric stoves get banned.
The CPSC dropped their plans, but they switched to the Department of Energy, which isn't going to ban them but just limit the amount of gas they are allowed to use so they will be crappy enough that people won't buy them.
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Not sure how true it is, but it's said that induction stoves screw with pacemakers. If true, that would make them unfit for universally mandated use.
Apart from the policy being misguided in the first place. What's the justification?
OK, pacemakers are the only good argument against the ban I've seen so far. The only research paper that I can find is this one from 2006:
I don't know what that means TBH.
Having exhausted the scientific literature, I tried the next best thing: Reddit. There are anecdotal reports from people with pacemakers cooking with induction and people with pacemakers who were told by their doctors not to cook with induction. No reports from people with pacemakers who tried cooking with induction and died.
Edit: And what about people who have embedded metal fragments that can't be removed? I guess my ban isn't a very good idea after all.
An induction stove can affect some pacemakers if someone is COMPLETELY up against the stove and the pot is not covering the pad completely. Touching the pot creates a circuit (a long touch), and the pace maker will switch modes.
Interesting share.
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A very literal example of survivorship bias.
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No, that's not how this works. It's a free country. I don't need to make any argument against banning gas or electric stoves, whomever wishes to ban them needs to make an argument for it. And the bar is very high. Frankly, no supposed harm of stoves is likely to convince me that adults shouldn't be able to choose what they do or don't want to cook with.
See my other comment for why gas and conventional electric are bad.
What about the children who live in the same household? Indeed, children are the ones most affected by pollution from gas stoves.
If it's not clear, I was actually mostly joking when I suggested banning gas and conventional electric stoves. Did anyone take my claim that using conventional electric stoves is "basically a human rights violation" seriously? I was slightly in favour but I didn't really care. A complete ban is well beyond the Overton window anyway. I have now changed my mind and am slightly against it unless it can be demonstrated that they are 100% safe for people with pacemakers (and metal fragments!). Presumably this question will come up if a ban becomes remotely plausible. If it is a real danger, politicians will want to avoid being responsible for cooking someone's grandpa.
You have to be joking about that pollution thing right? Gas stoves burn almost completely efficiently meaning they produce CO2 and water almost exclusively. The char on your steak generates hundreds of more times indoor pollution in 2 minutes than just letting the stove burn all day would.
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What about the possible bad ideas the parents could instills in their children? Activists can do information campaigns, individuals can shame people but at some point we're just going to have to let people parent and not try to get the state to it for them.
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I agree induction is great. I had an induction stove and loved it. My wife is an immigrant and induction doesn't work with the kinds of pans she likes. We bought a new stove.
Please don't ban things without a compelling reason. Your and my personal preference are not valid reasons.
What kinds of pans? What's wrong with ferromagnetic pans?
See my other comment for why gas and conventional electric are bad.
Nothing, other than they don't sell them at the Asian market. We have a large collection of pans from Asian markets and all of them are coated aluminum.
If I had my way I'd have an induction stove. But I have a wife.
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"I like X, not X should be banned", without elaboration or reasoning, is childrens cartoon villain logic.
I thought the downsides of gas and conventional electric stoves were well-known.
Gas stoves cause indoor air pollution (I believe this is what the aforementioned media circus was about) and require gas, which is a fossil fuel – do I need to explain why fossil fuels are bad? And they require either a network of gas pipelines, which are an additional bit of infrastructure that needs to be built and maintained (and they tend to explode), or distribution in individual tanks, which is very wasteful. Induction just needs the existing electrical grid.
Conventional electric stoves are extremely inefficient, so they waste a lot of energy. And they are horrible to work with, it's basically a human rights violation. If conventional electric stoves are Americans' perceived alternative to gas, then I can understand the overreaction to the mere suggestion that gas stoves might be banned. In fact, in that light, it was probably an underreaction.
I think you do. And if your explanation is "because they'd be out someday" you'd have to do better than that because "someday" is doing a real lot of work here and it's not practical worrying what would happen in 3000 years - in 3000 years the people might be all living in the Matrix anyway.
If they are properly maintained, they don't. If they are maintained by PG&E, then well, that's a whole different business.
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Gas stoves are burning gas to produce heat. This is dramatically more efficient than burning gas to turn a turbine to produce electricity to send over the electric grid before turning into heat. (Even the couple percent of gas lost to leaks is less than the 6% loss on sending electricity over the grid.) It's not like an electric car where power plants are much more efficient than a portable gasoline engine (plus regenerative braking) so electric cars end up being more efficient. Making heat is inherently very efficient because you're not fighting thermodynamics, making electricity isn't. As a result, under the electricity-generation mix currently typical in the U.S., induction stoves cause more CO2 emissions than gas stoves.
https://home.howstuffworks.com/gas-vs-electric-stoves.htm
Now, maybe the higher CO2 emissions to power induction stoves is worthwhile for whatever indoor air quality benefits there are. And maybe power-generation will change so that generating marginal electricity rarely involves spinning up a gas turbine. But remember stoves don't last forever, if this change doesn't happen for a while then the induction stove will emit more CO2 over its lifespan regardless. I get the sense that a lot of people are vaguely anti-gas-stove because they assume it causes more CO2 emissions due to directly burning a fossil fuel, even though this is the opposite of the case.
Regarding the indoor air quality aspect, it would be nice if there was a decent literature review of the issue, like Scott's "Much more than you wanted to know" series. As a matter of common-sense, it seems like gas stoves must be at least marginally worse. But from what I've read this doesn't seem dramatic enough to show up in aggregate health outcomes for more rigorous studies. The main difference is only in terms of nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide, not the particulate matter you might expect. Most particulate matter comes from the food, so it's plausible that consistently using a range hood that vents to the outside is actually much more important than gas vs. induction. But it's hard to synthesize the available information into a general sense of how much of an issue it is.
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Curious if this increases gas prices in the short run.
Also I wonder if there is a major questions doctrine challenge here.
It would seem to cause gas price increases. If you are an Oil & Gas producer in the U.S., your best play here is to stop all capital investment immediately.
Yes my thought as well. Only question is how much capex impacts gas production in the relative short run.
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Lest someone conclude that environmental regulation never works and only serves to make people's lives worse without addressing the actual problem:
CFC refrigerants are banned, the ozone layer is recovering, and modern fridges are perfectly fine.
Leaded petrol is banned, lead is no longer being constantly spewed in people's faces, and modern petrol cars are perfectly fine.
SO2 and NOx emissions are restricted, acid rain has been greatly reduced, and modern vehicles are perfectly fine.
DDT is banned, bird populations have recovered, and food production is perfectly fine.
These aren't just random examples – these four were some of the biggest environmental problems of the 20th century, and they have all been solved with minimal harm to consumers. (The others were nuclear energy (which wasn't a problem at all, the only problem with nuclear powerplants is that we don't build enough of them) and anthropogenic climate change (which hasn't been solved because no laws that would actually solve it have been enacted).)
Regulators were overeager to promote CFLs which ended up not being very good, but in time LED technology was developed and incandescent lightbulbs have now been completely phased out in favour of much more efficient lighting, so the original goal has in fact been achieved. LED lighting is still not a perfect substitute due to colour problems, but this is a technical problem that will be solved eventually.
It's good to point this out, but I'd also say that the existence of sensible environmental regulation doesn't make batshit insane regulation any less awful.
This proposal, if enacted, would involve a significant decline in the American standard of living.
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Isn't the primary use of this for killing carriers of malaria? And malaria is controlled in America... from extensive past use of DDT? Isn't this still a huge active problem in Africa? A cursory search suggests that it is, with articles as recent as last year about the ongoing conflict.
That's the only thing it's used for today. Back in the old days they sprayed that shit on everything.
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LED lights should still go in the 'against' column, as their significant advantages could have easily lead to adoption even without regulation. And unlike your positive examples, the primary cost of incandescents wasn't external.
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Not to mention these guys and these guys and smog in Los Angeles
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As a professional in the relevant fields, the replacement refrigerants lead to significantly more mechanical failures and for hydrocarbon refrigerants an added safety hazard. Also, letting the cat out of the bag just leads to more refrigerants getting phased out seemingly to generate market demand through planned obsolescence- r-134a and r-410a are themselves replacements for older refrigerants phased out for environmental reasons which have phaseout dates set, themselves for environmental reasons.
It’s also annoying and leads to more consumer downtime to have 10+ kinds of refrigerants floating around- I have had to leave customers with non-working equipment because their unit used an oddball refrigerant for environmental reasons.
How big is the harm overall? From an outside perspective, things seem to be working fine. Is there a possibility the field will converge on a smaller number of standard refrigerants?
It seems the replacement refrigerants are being replaced because they contribute to global warming. I would expect that once ozone depletion and global warming are dealt with, there won't be any reason to introduce new refrigerants any more.
Edit: Is the danger from hydrocarbons theoretical or are they actually regularly exploding or catching fire?
Not hydrocarbons, but ammonia leaks in big plants (like hockey rinks) kill workers with some regularity.
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The issue is that every time the industry reaches a consensus on a smaller number of standard refrigerants, they get replaced for ostensibly environmental reasons. Some of these refrigerants are strictly speaking inferior to their predecessors(eg R-410a is a much worse refrigerant than R-22 because higher operating pressures cause more leaks and also prevent temporary repairs from holding), and for others the difference is merely arbitrary. Commercial refrigeration tends to feel it worse than HVAC or domestic applications because technical reasons plus a wider variety of manufacturers(due to factories for many different types of equipment buying and selling each other for decades), so walk in product loss and outside ice purchases- which can both be near-ruinous for a small business- are at higher than normal levels with equipment new enough that the actual repair is covered by warranty.
In operation? No. While being worked on? Yes, they are significantly more dangerous to open the system.
I offer no particular judgement as to whether all of the above stuff is worth it or not- omelets and eggs and all that- but this particular example of successful environmental regulations does not happen to be frictionless.
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Courts around the western world have been remarkably deferential to this nonsense. And the US courts are (uncharacteristically) more timid and deferential than those in other common-law countries. This is driven in part by a progressive belief in an activist, technocratic state and in part by conservative distrust of judicial activism.
Conservative jurists seem to be slowly coming to their senses. And ithelps good if there is a broader groundswell to support them. I'm glad to see your post -- it's part of that groundswell. But don't be too disheartened - there's incremental progress to be made, and you are helping.
Don't you think that the USA actually has the most aggressive judicial review and interventionist courts of common law countries?
Yes, it does.
But the US judiciary also has explicit doctrines (the most famous is Chevron) that give enormous deference agencies administering statues. That's what makes it uncharacteristically submissive against the administrative state while being pretty robust against actual legislation.
Other countries also allow parliaments to delegate a lot of their power to agencies, and courts are pretty timid about the delegation itself. But they do a more serious job of reviewing the agency decisions in the light of their enabling legislation. This is not some extraordinary activism, it's just common sense. It is America that has a weirdly deferential doctrine.
I'm not sure I agree with that sentiment. The student loan forgiveness plan for example which relies on an overly broad (but textual maybe) definition of what debt relief and emergency mean is likely going to be struck down by the courts. In other countries that plan likely goes through without interference from the courts.
I'd be surprised. But it's more likely that governments would just pass legislation, since Parliaments are less independent of the executive. It's not 100% -- e.g. in Australia minor parties tend to have the balance of power in the Senate. But in general you don't see executive orders being used as an end-run around Parliament.
What you do see is ministers being granted enormously broad powers by existing legislation. These powers are broad enough that they don't need help from the judiciary to get away with acting arbitrarily. Although when they but up against the constitution, the courts might conveniently forget that the constitution exists.
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I blame Woodrow Wilson for the administrative state, as I do for most other woes of the 20th Century.
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It depends. It all goes back to that blasted footnote in carolene products (ie economic rights receive effectively no protections; political rights absurd amounts of protection)
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I can’t go into detail on how I know this, but 2 years ago I saw a major auto mgf’s long term plan and by 2030 (I forget exactly) ICE was estimated to be 30% of sales.
I have no doubt that the majors have known this was coming down the pipe.
It’s happening.
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On the one hand, this is horrible.
On the other hand, I'm glad that we Euros are no longer alone with this kind of horrible policy.
Misery loves company.
They're nowhere near as screwed as us yet. The EPA is part of the executive branch. The next president can simply order them to change it back.
As for the EU, decision making has been moved pretty much entirely out of the remit of anyone who is elected, and the only legal, democratic way to put a halt to it at this point is if everyone all at once were to vote to install national governments that leave the EU.
The next president can change it back but I'm not sure how much good it would do. You can't invest billions of dollars in R&D and building a factory if the next election turns it into a hole in the ground. Once you shut down the factories and all of the people with ICE experience move on to different careers that's not all just going to come back 4 years later when a Republican comes into office, with the knowledge that you'll probably just get shut down again after the next election.
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Nope, there's "anti-backsliding" provisions in the law; the regulations can only become stricter, not less strict.
The EPA is making law an elected body can’t overturn? Where and under what authority?
An elected body can overturn it, but that elected body is Congress. Basically some previous Congress passed a law saying "The EPA can turn up the heat on the frog, but can't turn it down". And now the EPA can start boiling the frog under a Democrat and the next Republican can't stop it without having a clear majority Congress also.
What is that law?
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I am not familiar with the full gamut of EU legislation, but in the area I am most familiar with professionally (bank capital adequacy), this is the opposite of the truth. In the EU, the bits of technical detail of bank capital regulation which are not expected to change a lot are included in the primary legislation (the Capital Requirements Regulation). You can see the key financial regulations on the European Banking Authority's Single Rulebook - "Regulations" and "Directives" are two types of EU primary legislation. The ratio of primary legislation to EBA rules implementing it is such that it makes sense to display the implementing rules as footnotes to the primary legislation.
EU regulations and directives are made by the European Parliament, which is elected, and by the Council of Ministers, which consists of the relevant minsters of the elected governments of the Member States (finance ministers in the case of banking regulation). It is a trope of anti-EU ranting that this is a smokescreen and that legislation is actually written by the Commission (effectively the EU executive). This is simply false. The Commission does have the exclusive power to produce the first draft of legislation, but the Parliament and Council have an unlimited right to amend it, and do so extensively. They are no more cut out of the process than the US Senate is cut out of the budget process by the Constitutional requirement that money bills originate in the House.
Regardless of the de jure situation, if the Commission had a de facto power to write banking regulations, the banks would spend more time lobbying it. I have spent many happy hours lobbying the European Banking Authority in person. I have worked on Powerpoint decks that were used by professional lobbyists to lobby the Parliament and Council. I am not aware of any serious attempt by my employer to lobby the Commission.
In most other jurisdictions, very much including the UK and the US, the basic structure is that the primary legislation effectively says "The regulators have the power to make bank capital adequacy regulations. They are required to take the following aims into account when doing so...", and then the entire bank capital rules are in agency regulations. When we lobby the UK authorities, we only talk to the PRA. The Treasury have to come and talk to us (which a particular gunner civil servant is keen to do) - since the Tory government cut free coffee in government offices, it is no longer worth our while to take the tube three stops to talk to them.
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What controversial environmental decisions has the EU made? What Mr Kraut is probably complaining about is the increased cost of electricity in his country, which is entirely caused by his government's moronic decision to shut down perfectly safe nuclear powerplants before their intended shutdown date out of an irrational fear of nuclear energy. (Is that right, @Southkraut?) Last I heard, the EU was actually considering classifying nuclear energy as "green".
One EU policy I do object to is the promotion of "organic" agriculture, including occult agriculture, but I have literally never seen anyone else complain about this.
Edit: And this bullshit is also largely due to Germany, just look up a map of "biodynamic" agriculture by country. Beware Germans bearing ambitious plans to reshape the world.
As to your edit and general blame assigned to Germany: Yes.
Looking up newer information on this, it seems it hasn't actually been adopted yet. Apparently, it is being stalled by the transport ministers of Germany and a few other countries.
The person I was replying to was claiming these sorts of regulations are imposed unilaterally by unelected Eurocrats. This is clearly not true given that EU legislation requires approval by a qualified majority of the European Council, consisting of ministers from the member states. As demonstrated in this case, they can in fact block legislation from being passed.
@theory
Ministers are unelected bureaucrats, though.
Does that include the prime minister? Really then, who isn't an unelected bureaucrat?
To me at least, "bureaucrats" are usually non-political career civil servants, people who you rarely hear about in the news except in extraordinary situations, e.g. Fauci. Ministers are politicians, appointed directly by the parliament. They feature in the news regularly, their names are well known, and they get voted out regularly, albeit by the parliament and not by some kind of recall referendum.
That one depends on the country.
This is also not true depending on the country.
And appointments are not elections.
The thing is European democracies have a pretty diverse range of democratic control and procedures to form governments, so where say an Italian government might be mostly made of career politicians and MPs, a French one could be made almost entirely of party men and administrators who do not hold elected office.
I understand the point you're trying to make is that of the classical opposition between the civil service and elected politicians which is so prominently displayed in Yes, Minister. But I question the relevance of it these days and specifically in the context of an organ so removed from democratic checks.
Some of the people who sit on this Council could not be removed by any vote, and formally none of them sit on it by election. Calling it any sort of democratic body seems silly to me.
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Someone else here mentioned one or two roundup threads ago that Germany has been pushing back on the plan because they were all for the ICE ban before Russia invaded Ukraine and cheap Russian gas was now no longer on the table.
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I would think @SouthKraut is talking about "EU ministers pass 2035 car engine ban law", which is basically the same policy, rather than more distantly related one of energy in general.
Which has been scrapped?
Germany recently negotiated an exception for "synthetic fuels" which can mean practically anything.
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Exactly, yes.
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