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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25564 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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I guess I'll start us off with a quick one:

https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2024/03/17/trump-gop-must-endorse-three-exceptions-for-abortion-to-get-elected/

This isn't an article so much as a clip-n-quote of something Trump said. I'll copy paste here because it's not long and this way you won't have to click the link:

When asked about the rape, incest and life of mother exceptions, Trump said, “If you look at France, if you look at different places in Europe with, if you look at a lot of the civilized world, they have a period of time. But you can’t go out seven months and eight months and nine months. If the Republicans spoke about it correctly, it never hurt me from the standpoint of elections. It hurt a lot of Republicans. I think you have to have, you have to have the three exceptions.”

He added, “I tell people, number one, you have to to with your heart. You have to go with your heart. But beyond that you also have to get elected, OK? And if you don’t have the three exceptions, I think it’s very, very hard to get elected. We had a gentleman from Pennsylvania who was doing pretty well. He refused to to go with the exceptions, and he lost in a landslide for governor. Nice man lost in a landslide. You have to go with the exceptions. The number of weeks, I’ll be coming out with a recommendation fairly soon. I think it’ll be accepted.”

I'm pro-life and believe life begins at conception, not just as a Christian, but much more importantly because I consider it the cleanest and most sane policy from a secular perspective. Because to me it seems obvious the only way to avoid making Tenochtitlan-sized mistakes at some point along our path is to avoid meddling with the primeval forces of nature and attempting to play God in the first place.

Once you start introducing 'exceptions,' you're just immediately back to condoning all abortion. "My health is at risk because if I'm not permitted to abort I might harm myself" is a free at-will golden ticket as long as you're able to memorize and repeat a sentence of that length.

Trump, quite obviously, doesn't really feel strongly about abortion and is attempting to pick the most palatable position. That's the problem about integrity in politics - none of the voters have any so it's almost always counterproductive for your electability if you do.

But taking the tack that "the GOP must accept exceptions" instead of "the issue must be returned to the states" is another huge own goal from the New York liberal Trump. If you're going to have a slippery real estate mogul as your standard bearer, you're going to end up with some very ugly and counterproductive wheeling and dealing for the movement.

The problem with 'returning it to the states' is if you're a purple state Republican, you get questions about what Alabama is doing, and how can we trust you not to do the same?

The normal voter does not care about federalism.

All they know is they hear a lot about Republican's wanting to ban abortion, and perhaps more importantly, every prominent Republican, outside of the 10 most liberal states, have talked their whole careers about abortion. It's kind of hard for a voter to suddenly believe candidates they only want reasonable exceptions when they've desperately tried to get the endorsement from every organization that talks about all abortions being murder since Roe v Wade.

It also doesn't help that those restrictions may be popular in theory, but not when people believe they're the first step to total bans.

"My health is at risk because if I'm not permitted to abort I might harm myself" is a free at-will golden ticket as long as you're able to memorize and repeat a sentence of that length.

I have a simple solution - allow abortion doctors and psychiatrists and hospitals to be sued by the patients if they have buyers remorse pre-menopause. Same with the ones that transition kids before they are 18 of age. If those are the unadulterated goods that proponents say they are - there won't be issues. People will think twice before rubberstamping one. There should be a skin in the game for the medical personal if they play fast and loose with life altering decisions

Such a policy would be quite interesting.

If abortions are an unalloyed good and women would surely never lie (#BelieveWomen), then allowing "doctors and psychiatrists and hospitals to be sued by the patients if they have buyers remorse" shouldn't move the needle on MD, hospital, or insurance company profitability or risk-profile.

So all you would have to do is say "I regret my abortion" and you get a free payout? There's a rather obvious downside to this policy...

I'm pro-life and believe life begins at conception, not just as a Christian, but much more importantly because I consider it the cleanest and most sane policy from a secular perspective.

I don't think there is a perfectly clean policy here.

There are many evils in the world which due to prudence may not be made illegal, either because the state is not the correct level at which to deal with the problem; or because the state simply lacks the capacity to enforce the law; or because the state lacks the legitimacy to enforce such a law.

I believe that life begins at conception, but I think that the parents have sovereignty over the child while it is in the womb. Murder is evil, but there is no international law or federal law against murder, because we believe that the state government has sovereignty over murder committed within a single state. If the state does not want to punish someone, or wrongfully punishes someone, there is no recourse to a higher sovereign. Analogously, I think that the parents have sovereignty over the unborn child. To kill the child is evil, but they answer to God for that evil, not to the state. However, I am ok with regulating what doctor's can do, since they are already regulated by the state in every aspect. So I think it would be reasonable to rescind the medical license of doctor's who perform D&E's for women with non-medical reasons for wanting an abortion. Doctors have their license to heal, not to kill. But I don't think it would be prudent to pass a law mandating life-in-prison for women who take an abortion pill.

The problem with legally treating the unborn child the same as a two-year-old child is that it opens up a whole can of worms of "child protective services" over-reach. It's not crazy to image a a world where a mother who is on a carnivore diet, or doing something else medically controversial and unconventional gets prosecuted for negligent homicide if she has a miscarriage. Or we could imagine the state simply micromanaging what pregnant women do and eat, the same way the state micromanages what kinds of cribs and baby formula and cars-seats you can buy. (Did you know its basically impossible in America to buy baby formula with animal fat instead of seed oil fat in it, due to government regulation?). There are also some more far out philosophical and legal questions -- for instance imagine a woman who's uterus simply cannot support a baby so all fertilized eggs fail to attach and are passed out of system. Is she committing crimes by having sex since it will result in fertilized eggs that are certain to just die? Catholic morality has some well-developed answers here, but the government bureaucracy does not run on Catholic morality.

Once you start introducing 'exceptions,' you're just immediately back to condoning all abortion. "My health is at risk because if I'm not permitted to abort I might harm myself" is a free at-will golden ticket as long as you're able to memorize and repeat a sentence of that length.

I think it is better to be prudent and play the long game. I think it would be better to have more lose laws that minimize the chances of cases that produce really bad PR. Cases that produce really bad PR are going to undermine support the law and ultimately produce more abortion. There is only so much you can do to prevent evils that happen in private.

Well, I have to congratulate the success of the abortion movement. In my own life time I've seen the change from "the unborn child in the womb" to "it's just a clump of cells, and my convenience trumps everything". Most of the comments on here are that it's not human life, not in the sense that matters, and that whatever the pregnant person wants to do is okey-dokey. The clump of cells has no rights and needs no rights.

If you're old enough, that's a big change in attitudes to pregnancy. And the abortion side have won, no doubt about it, they've changed the Zeitgeist so people do think "just a clump of cells, no biggie, it's not killing".

We don't "attempt" to play god. We are really really really good at it! You can chose to go live in a state of nature any time you wish. It is pretty terrible. Infanticide used to be pretty popular back then.

Because to me it seems obvious the only way to avoid making Tenochtitlan-sized mistakes at some point along our path is to avoid meddling with the primeval forces of nature and attempting to play God in the first place.

This is not as consistent a position as you imagine, unless you intend to bite the bullet all the way to rejecting the polio vaccine.

Polio vaccine was contaminated with a potentionally carcinogenic monkey virus.

Population level studies show no evidence of any increase in cancer incidence as a result of exposure, though SV40 has been extensively studied. A thirty-five year followup found no excess of the cancers commonly associated with SV40.

Emphasis on "potentially" I guess.

It causes cancers in other animals for sure.

but much more importantly because I consider it the cleanest and most sane policy from a secular perspective.

Clean yes, sane no.

Most fertilized eggs never make it to the blastocyte stage, just by the totally natural functioning of the body. If you actually count every one of those as a full human with full rights and moral consideration, that's a single cause of death prematurely killing over 50% of the entire human population worldwide, every generation. The only morally sane thing to do if you accepted that premise is to stop all other forms of humanitarian programs and focus the entire world's resources on saving those lives.

That's not a sane outcome.

And that's to say nothing of more practical stuff like IVF, or whether it's negligent homicide to drink when conception happened yesterday and you have no possible way to know that and what that would mean for society, or etc.

Absolutist stances are often the most clean, yes, but they're rarely the most sane.

One thing that bothers me in the abortion debate is that I personally see a lot of granularity within the worth of a human life. If I imagine a hypothetical where I have to pick between saving two eighty-year old men or one eight-year old boy, I will save the boy every time. More over, I would honestly think less of the two men if they advocated for their own lives while understanding the full situation. I do not see any incongruity with my moral intuitions as outlined above, and the moral intuition that it would be wrong to kill one of those eighty year old men. Similarly, I think a fertilized egg is a human life in a very straightforward and technical sense such that I think it is wrong to kill it, but I would not pick to save a fertilized egg over saving the eight year old boy, either(I also wouldn't pick it over the eighty-year old man). As such I generally find most of the extreme claims about the implications of treating a fertilized egg as a life overblown. I am fine with having a category of thing where I think it is wrong to kill it but which I do not think our entire society must upend itself in an effort to protect. Especially not when that protection would be against what would commonly be understood as the 'natural order' of things.

We currently think of full humans as being ... full humans, and yet 100% of them die. How much of our humanitarian efforts are dedicated to immortality research? I think your hypothetical reflects more than anything a poor understanding of how humans actually behave and the kinds of moral intuitions people are mostly running on. I would propose that a huge number of people would see nothing incongruous in holding a funeral for a miscarriage while simultaneously not donating 50% of their income to R&D on how to reduce the number of fertilized eggs that fail to attach.

Ultimately I find health of the mother concerns to be valid, but I can understand why some would worry about the category being stretched too far. Beyond that, I think abortion is very popular and the best case real world policy I could hope for would be something like, safe, legal, and rare.

And of course, I am a hypocrite who purchased a morning after pill for my girlfriend one time after a broken condom, such is life.

So I think in a perfectly sane world it would be safe to say 'Yes, this is murder, but it's the type of murder that's not a very big deal compared to other types of murders, so we can rationally trade it off against other interests at a reasonable rate'.

But in the actual world we live in, I think once you've agreed to call a thing 'murder,' any hope of rational policymaking is pretty much DOA. Anyone who disagrees with anything you propose, no matter how reasonable or attenuated, can just say 'oh you SUPPORT MURDER' and rely on the context of the word to do their work for them.

I am not sure I buy it.

It seems to me that almost every government that was able to pass pro-abortion laws did so directly in the face of this accusation and under the exact same framing you outlined above. That is, they thought abortion was 'wrong' in some sense but the lesser of two evils and advocated for it specifically by presenting it as a rational trade off against other interests.

The recent spread of euthanasia laws seem to have also come about under similar circumstances.

I think the, abortion is a necessary evil, framing was pretty much universal until relatively recently when the ever ratcheting up US centric culture war got to the point that pro-abortion advocacy was specifically calling for no questions asked, no shame or stigma attached, infinite access to abortion, in response to conservative states trying to limit access. If by real world you mean, current moment, then I agree in the abstract that it would be hard to pass national abortion laws as restrictive as the median EU member state (and said as such), but I suspect this has almost nothing to do with the rhetorical tactic of accusing people of supporting murder.

I guess a lot of this hinges on what you mean by 'calling it murder', but the impression I get is that people are very good at and comfortable using euphemisms for murder.

If I imagine a hypothetical where I have to pick between saving two eighty-year-old men or one eight-year-old boy, I will save the boy every time. Moreover, I would honestly think less of the two men if they advocated for their own lives while understanding the full situation.

I think a fertilized egg is a human life in a very straightforward and technical sense, such that I think it is wrong to kill it, but I would not pick to save a fertilized egg over saving the eight-year-old boy, either. (I also wouldn't pick it over the eighty-year-old man.)

What does your function for the "default value" of a human look like? (Time since conception) × (time until natural death as estimated by a neutral doctor), generally measured in units of daa2 (decayears squared)?

While I am generally in favor of consequentialist reasoning and am I fan of utilitarianism as a way to think about morality, I am pretty far from having rigorously mathed out my various moral/ethical beliefs.

Something like the formula you outline seems at least directionally similar, but insufficient. I tend to value women over men, children over adults (for reasons not fully captured in age), good people over bad people, etc. While I endeavor to formulate principals and consistency in my thinking around issues of morality, I often feel like the complexities of reality are such that I do not trust my ability to construct a formula that would properly capture the shape of my preferences.

Once you start introducing 'exceptions,' you're just immediately back to condoning all abortion. "My health is at risk because if I'm not permitted to abort I might harm myself" is a free at-will golden ticket as long as you're able to memorize and repeat a sentence of that length.

This is completely incoherent and, though I hope to not fall afoul of the rules, inhumane to me. "Zero exceptions" means that you're going to have to own every single one of the nasty and truly horrific instances that show up. When an 11 year old girl shows up pregnant because she was raped by her uncle, you're going to have to look her in the eyes and tell her that actually if we abort the deformed and most likely non-viable foetus that's going to have a 100% chance of killing her upon delivery it might encourage other people to have unnecessary abortions - so she should write her will now. This isn't a hypothetical I plucked out of the ether, either - I feel like it is important to point out that the three exceptions are generally understood to be rape, incest and the life of the mother. That's what you're ruling out when you say no exceptions - that it is better for an underaged rape victim to pointlessly suffer and die because to do otherwise would be "meddling with the primeval forces of nature and attempting to play God".

Of course the issues don't end there - when you actually have a "no exceptions" policy, you're going to have to do some vigorous enforcement. Whenever a woman miscarries or has a stillbirth, you're going to have to send the police in while she grieves to make sure she didn't do anything untoward - after all, maybe that miscarriage was the result of taking a herbal abortifacient or engaging in risky behaviour to induce the death of the child. Every stillbirth and miscarriage becomes a potential crime scene, and if you're serious about "no exceptions" then you're going to have to have a police investigation every single time.

For the record, I'm personally a traditionalist when it comes to abortion - i.e. it is totally fine to get an abortion or simply leave the baby on the side of a wolf-covered mountain until they're a few years old (if they survive, great. if not, the gods didn't favour them anyway).

When an 11 year old girl shows up pregnant because she was raped by her uncle, you're going to have to look her in the eyes and tell her that actually if we abort the deformed and most likely non-viable foetus that's going to have a 100% chance of killing her upon delivery

How do you know it's deformed? You can't assume problems down to inbreeding if the parties are not the result of inbreeding themselves, it takes a few generations to reach Spanish Habsburg levels.

Also it isn't 100% likely to kill her, while this story seems very dubious, maybe it's true. If a precocious puberty five year old could survive, so can an eleven year old.

I am now going to sit back and wait for the mods to scold you for using emotive language and being heated and obsessed with this topic. I've gotten rebukes before for my hobbyhorses, so let's share the love.

EDIT: If pro-abortion types would stick to "abortion for incestuously raped 11 year olds", I'd take that bargain. But they don't and they won't. How many of the people having conniptions over "forced birth" in Texas are at risk of being incestuously raped 11 year olds? But those are the cases that get trotted out when it comes to legal abortion, the same way that trans activists use intersex people as "there is no gender binary, bigot" shields.

This survey comes from 2005, I'd really like to see an updated version, but the vast majority of abortions are for financial reasons. Rape/incest are so miniscule, if we only permitted abortions for those reasons, that would be 1% of all abortions carried out. This is why the pro-abortion side are so hysterical; if the bargain was "we pro-lifers will give in on rape/incest/life of the mother, if you pro-abortion say those are the only permitted abortions", then they would lose the majority of the abortions carried out. No more "oops, I got drunk and we fucked without precautions, I'm not ready for a baby" fix-ups.

The reasons most frequently cited were that having a child would interfere with a woman's education, work or ability to care for dependents (74%); that she could not afford a baby now (73%); and that she did not want to be a single mother or was having relationship problems (48%). Nearly four in 10 women said they had completed their childbearing, and almost one-third were not ready to have a child. Fewer than 1% said their parents' or partners' desire for them to have an abortion was the most important reason. Younger women often reported that they were unprepared for the transition to motherhood, while older women regularly cited their responsibility to dependents.

•Reasons in 2004. Among the structured survey respondents, the two most common reasons were "having a baby would dramatically change my life" and "I can't afford a baby now" (cited by 74% and 73%, respectively—Table 2). A large proportion of women cited relationship problems or a desire to avoid single motherhood (48%). Nearly four in 10 indicated that they had completed their childbearing, and almost one-third said they were not ready to have a child. Women also cited possible problems affecting the health of the fetus or concerns about their own health (13% and 12%, respectively).‡ Respondents wrote in a number of specific health reasons, from chronic or debilitating conditions such as cancer and cystic fibrosis to pregnancy-specific concerns such as gestational diabetes and morning sickness.

The most common subreason given was that the woman could not afford a baby now because she was unmarried (42%). Thirty-eight percent indicated that having a baby would interfere with their education, and the same proportion said it would interfere with their employment. In a related vein, 34% said they could not afford a child because they were students or were planning to study.

In the in-depth interviews, the three most frequently stated reasons were the same as in the structured survey: the dramatic impact a baby would have on the women's lives or the lives of their other children (32 of 38 respondents), financial concerns (28), and their current relationship or fear of single motherhood (21). Nine women cited health concerns for themselves, possible problems affecting the health of the fetus or both as a reason for terminating the pregnancy.

And it's why I won't give an inch on any "but surely only a monster could object" appeals, because I've seen it doesn't stop there. "Oh, life of the mother, but what if it's not an immediate physical risk? Okay, what if it's not physical, how about mental? Okay, what about if the mother threatens suicide? Okay, what if the mother threatens suicide because she would have to drop out of college to have the baby?" and every time the new "just this one little concession" is given, then the next "just this one little concession" is immediately on the table for "but surely only a monster could object".

Apologies for the late reply - I've been busy with work recently.

How do you know it's deformed?

Because this is a hypothetical example meant to show the absolute worst case for a "no exceptions" policy. I'm not an expert but I believe we do have tests for this kind of thing - and in this particular case it'd just be something easily visible on an ultrasound.

I am now going to sit back and wait for the mods to scold you for using emotive language and being heated and obsessed with this topic. I've gotten rebukes before for my hobbyhorses, so let's share the love.

I didn't feel particularly heated or emotive - it's just that when you say "no exceptions" you open the door to every single horrifying outcome that can result from a policy like that. I chose my example as one that would be allowed if any of those three exceptions were being used, and less so for emotional reasons. But that said, if you think that victims of incestuous rape should carry their trisomy-18 foetus to term and risk their life delivering it, you should come out and say it - because that's what no exceptions means.

EDIT: If pro-abortion types would stick to "abortion for incestuously raped 11 year olds", I'd take that bargain.

I personally am not hiding or trying to be deceptive about my position - I flat out said that I personally believe that abortion should be legal. It isn't a particularly nice thing to have happen, but there are absolutely times when a couple is better off not having a child (especially if said child ended up with a debilitating and permanent medical condition) or delaying having a kid until they're in a less tenuous position. I'll even agree with the pro-lifers that abortion is effectively an evil - but it is in some cases a lesser evil compared to the alternative.

This is a very touchy topic and one where I do have strong opinions, so I'm so hardened by the fake-sobbing "only a monster could possibly object!" emotional manipulation over the decades, that I go "Very well then, I'll be that monster".

I think it's human life. I think we don't have a right to kill humans (self-defence is a different matter, and there we're talking about the lesser of two evils). I don't think abortion is self-defence. The cases most touted are rape/incest/life of the mother. They are also the rarest, maternal mortality is the largest one here, and we've already had a post on how maternal mortality is calculated where figures might be too great.

There are people willing to go online and shout about how abortion is safer than pregnancy. When did we start treating being pregnant like a deadly disease, you want to avoid it the same way you'd try to avoid cancer or being sliced up in a woodchipper?

Hard cases make bad law, and the hard cases are never going to be the stopping point, they're the shield for "I'm healthy, I could have a baby, I could afford to have a baby, it just doesn't suit my plans right now". And as I've said, the mood has changed so drastically on abortion, due to the work of the pro-abortion advocacy over the decades. It truly did start out as "this is something very extreme that should be rare and only a last-ditch approach", and is now "no different to getting your tonsils out".

It truly did start out as "this is something very extreme that should be rare and only a last-ditch approach", and is now "no different to getting your tonsils out".

I can understand the impetus behind destigmatizing abortion, to some extent, even absent any political or ideological motivation. Stigmatize too much and the hard cases you outlined above have their lives ruined, but stigmatize too little and people treat it as form of delayed contraception. There's probably no practical optimal level of stigmatization.

I mean, the problem for pro-lifers is the vast majority of moderates are OK with "oops, the condom broke or I forgot my birth control" when it's their daughter, sister, et al whose about to go to college, and tells them they missed their period. Which is why in every single vote on the matter, no matter how extreme the pro-choice bill is written, it passes. Even in places like Kentucky, Kansas, and Montana.

Because yes, American's may not like 'up 'til birth' extremists like me (because I trust women and doctors not to be crazy), but if given a choice between me or the median pro-lifer who wants to ban abortion after six weeks, they'll choose no limits every damn time.

Trump to his credit does not flip flop too much on abortion. He has never been pro-life, and will not cave to this issue despite pressure from religious organizations. Trump is right to ignore this issue and focus on immigration and the economy, as is Richard Hanania that abortion hardliners turn off moderates.

The problem is Trump regularly talks about being the one who put the three judges who turned Roe on the court during speeches, since he's been told it's a big deal, and he like that he did a big thing. Not because he's a committed pro-lifer, but because he likes having accomplishments. It's why he still talks about the vaccine, even though it's unpopular among his own base.

Plus, to a certain extent, it's actually the reverse, among say, secular non-college educated Obama/Trump voters in the Midwest. You remind them a lot of the Republican Party they're now voting for are weirdos who want to stick their noses in your sisters or daughter's personal life, and go from there. Maybe you don't get them to vote for Biden, but you get them to stay home.

Isn't Hanania full open borders? Maybe i'm mixing him up with someone else but I don't think he's focused on immigration.

Hanania has flip flopped on immigration more times than one can count. His current position is that diversity essentially makes whites more capitalist and less socialist because of tribalism, or something, so immigration is a guard against socialism. He also opposes mass immigration from Africa iirc, he just thinks Hispanics aren’t substantially below the US average so won’t make much of a deleterious difference. I may be misremembering his position.

In around 2016 Trump said that women who get illegal abortions should be punished, it was a big controversy at the time.

It was one of my favorite Trump moments because you could sort of watch him reasoning out his new pro-Life position in real time on camera, and all the pro-life activists were cringing and trying to insert their epicycles of morality that explained how Abortion is Murder but that mothers should not be prosecuted.

It's why I believe that Trump isn't a blathering moron and is, at worst, a clever amateur who is intelligent enough to see the end result of policy that its own proponents have cleverly ducked around. If abortion is murder, then why not arrest the mother? We arrest infanticides and infant abandoners, don't we? That it is politically unpalatable and bad optics is one thing, but perhaps it is a natural consequence of unpopular policy.

"Not a blathering moron" is a pretty low bar for a presidential candidate.

I think Trump is right here and has framed it in a good way as well.

Americans (liberal and conservative) are pretty ignorant about how Europe actually works, conceptualizing it merely as a more-liberal version of the U.S.

Thus, they are shocked when they go to the Duomo in Milan and get told they have to wear something less slutty. Or, on a different note, that abortion rules in most European countries are actually much stricter than in U.S. blue states.

Republicans need to flip the script. Instead of being forced to defend a blanket ban on abortions, they need Democrats to defend their (frankly pretty insane) beliefs that a woman should be allowed to terminate a viable pregnancy one second before delivery.

That said, the fact that many Republicans are willing to defend a losing strategy is somewhat admirable. If you believe life begins at conception, then a blanket ban on abortions follows naturally from that. And you don't consent to the murder of millions just so you can get re-elected and lower the marginal tax rate by 2% or whatever.

Why is any abortion insane? Where you you personally draw the line? There is only no limit in 7 states btw.

Going by just moral revulsion, the idea of a aborting a couple of cells seems like no big deal.

On the other hand, imagine a newborn baby. A living, crying, perfectly healthy baby. Only a monster would kill that baby. But wait, rewind the clock 1 day. Now they are in the womb. Same baby, one day earlier, looks like 99.9% the same. Now, it's totally okay to kill. Go ahead and murder them for any reason, no matter how capricious. That is an insane belief system.

Where you you personally draw the line?

First trimester as in the original Roe v. Wade decision seems like a good Schelling point.

How often are 9 months minus 1 day abortions happening, though? This always seems like a questionable argumentative tactic because all the data shows that it almost never happens. Even most liberal doctors in NYC or San Francisco would refuse to abort a healthy third trimester baby as a matter of conscience.

This is sort of the problem for the pro-life argument. There are basically zero 'oops, let's not have a baby' decisions in month eight of pregnancy, and as you said, there are basically no doctors willing to do that. Almost all late term abortions are terrible tragedies and incredibly sad situations, and pro-lifers look bad when they try to make some poor woman jump through a bunch of hoops to appease their religious beliefs, instead of trusting a couple (far more women with partners have abortions than you think) and a doctor all not to be blood hungry monsters desperate to kill a baby.

Even most second trimester abortions outside of medically necessary ones are because a lack of money to afford the abortion in the first trimester or some sort of waiting period or lack of access, as opposed to somebody suddenly deciding they don't want a baby after four months.

First trimester as in the original Roe v. Wade decision seems like a good Schelling point.

From a purely technocratic perspective, this is a bit hairy. You can only do an initial screening for certain genetic anomalies starting at 10wks (which, incidentally it's itself a borders-on-magic-technology that's fairly new). The test itself takes a couple of days to process and then a confirmation test is performed before scheduling a termination.

Reliably fitting that in under 13-14wks is quite hard. A realistic schedule (one that assumes mothers will schedule everything within a week but are not min-maxing-it-to-the-day) under the technology that we have would yield most terminations for genetic anomalies by the 16-17th week of pregnancy. After all, some small fraction of mothers will be traveling, some small fractions of samples will be lost or contaminated.

And FWIW, the anomalies revealed tend to be awful. Some are either incompatible with life or incompatible with living beyond 1-2yrs.

That all said, I understand that a technocratic-type approach is not palatable across the political spectrum for obvious reasons. Just a comment about the best we can do for genetic screening.

Let's say a child was missed in screening and was born alive with Trisomy 18. Is it ok to kill the child then and there?

If the argument jeroboam is making is that after the first trimester the child is old enough to resemble what we value in a human, and therefore should have a basic right to life, then why would the presence of a disease change that?

No, but I would be in favor of a supportive-care type model that realizes that there is no long term potential to that life and eschews aggressive-but-futile medical intervention. I'm not holier than the Pope.

Yes, I am in favor of more palliative care options and honest counseling. But the question isn't whether you would let the child die but rather would you let the parents kill the child? Maybe the distinction is meaningless to your ethical system, but it is not to many people's ethical systems.

I thought I answered that clearly in the first word: No.

Honestly, that distinction is meaningful in most contexts but is a lot less distinct for a newborn, especially one with serious medical problems.

Most countries let the parents surrender the child if they don't think they can care for it themselves, though with severe conditions nobody else is really able to either.

I knew some teen girls who were basically pressed into service from a young age caring for their disabled younger sister who needed around the clock care or she would die (it sounded like the government had approved funds to hire a carer, but it was difficult and unstable to actually find one), and it didn't seem very good that they were doing that instead of having more normal childhoods themselves.

I'm not sure that I could care for a highly disabled baby very well, with two children already. It wasn't even that trivial to get them to learn to eat at first, and they were healthy. Newborn babies are unbelievably dependent on their mothers taking active steps to keep them alive. My expectation would be that babies with very severe problems mostly weren't up to breastfeeding before modern medicine, and usually couldn't get enough nutrition to survive. It's not a clear win to then hook them up to a feeding tube and oxygen or something if their parents don't even want that and the prognosis is basically hopeless.

I would not object.

In reality, I would be constrained by legal concerns and my desire to maintain my job and good standing with the medical licensing boards of two different nations. But in that case, I would object only because I'm forced to, not because I want to.

I've seen plenty of babies born for whom the kindest option would be a pillow over the face, if an overdose of morphine wouldn't suffice. Thankfully most of them just die on their own when the "acceptable" option of extending minimal supportive care or simply withdrawing it is possible, which is thankfully accepted in the UK.

Very good points. Let me refine my position.

Abortion for any reason should be allowed during the first trimester. After that, abortion should be banned except for specifically enumerated reasons. I know it might be difficult to arrive at a reasonable middle ground, but apparently some European countries have done it. I think we could do it too, or at least we should try.

I respect that. I don't know that liberals will trust conservative states to govern those reasons or vice versa.

I’d say this is a pretty uncharitable way of describing the pro-abortion position.

More importantly, there’s a symmetry. Why shouldn’t pro-lifers have to defend their beliefs? Why is it obvious that conception is the important point, and not implantation, heartbeat, brain activity, premature viability, birth, sexual maturity, or first tax return?

You could go the other direction, too, and insist that it’s the potential to create life which matters. The Catholic position that sex should be reserved for procreation is too weak. Onanism? Mass murder. Menstruation, one murder a month. God obviously intended for women to use each and every egg they can.

Some of these positions are frankly pretty insane. Others are just unreasonable. I’d say both “conception” and “birth” are in the latter category. Not coincidentally, policy tends to fall somewhere in between, because it’s not actually an obvious question.

100% agree. The Republicans are being forced to defend their most insane beliefs while the Democrats are not being forced to defend theirs. Neither should be exempt.

Personally I'd say the Democratic beliefs (killing a baby t-minus 5 minutes) is the most insane, but that's just me.

On the flip side, I agree that "life begins at conception" doesn't seem to be supported by common sense. We certainly don't mourn a first-trimester miscarriage as we would a child. And, of course, IVF polls positively despite its destruction of embryos. Forcing a woman to carry a child with serious birth defects to term also seems incredibly cruel.

Trump's position here is actually considerably more reasonable than the mainstream Democratic and Republican positions, and is closer to what the average person actually thinks. First time for everything I guess, amirite?

Onanism? Mass murder.

"Every sperm is sacred".

I mean, any smart pro-choice person can make the late term abortion argument - "Almost all late term abortions are tragic situations where there is no other choice, and it's sad religious extremists want to make these women jump through hoops to appease their own doctrines. Like most American's, I trust women and their doctor to make the right choice for them, as opposed to thinking they need to fulfill whatever those who have already openly said they want to ban all abortions want them to do."

Then, depending on the audience, maybe throwing in a crack that Republican's want it to be more difficult for a woman and a doctor to come to a conclusion about an abortion than for a teenager to get an assault rifle.

I think the Democrat argument is a good one, but would fall flat in the face of the actual realities of a late-term abortion. I don't know what late-term abortions look like, but I imagine it's a lot like killing a baby.

If those images were seen by people, I doubt many would actually countenance it.

But why stop at late-term abortions? In early Roman times, a man had the right to kill his wife and children. Even in later Roman times, infanticide was widely practiced. Why should the state get between man, the gods, and his right to kill his family? It's downright un-Roman.

The reality is that the state already controls all areas of our life. Personally, I think this is wrong. But I find it bewildering that you can't cut hair without a license but terminating a 8.99 months pregnancy is totally fine. If you're going to allow unlimited abortion on libertarian grounds, fine. But only if you also want to dismantle like 99% of existing laws and regulation. Otherwise it just feels like an unprincipled argument.

There is a license for terminating pregnancies - the medical license.

I mean, the pro-life side has tried the whole "show pictures of fetuses after abortions" in ads and such, and it hasn't seemed to work. Even low-info people understand that medical procedures are messy. Hell, if I was an enterprising liberal media type, I'd take a video of some perfectly benign medical procedure, chop it in a way it could be seen as possibly a late term abortion, then go to a pro-life rally, and see what reactions I could get.

Because once a baby is born, the rest of society can step in, not while it's still in the mother's womb, and we've decided it's bad to force a woman to go through a pregnancy when it might affect her mentally or physically, only for a child to barely survive or only survive for hours or days.

Well, I'm not a doctrinaire libertarian, but neither are most American's, but most Americans have an undercurrent of 'don't tell me what to do', which makes life difficult for both lefties like me and social conservatives. But, I'm happy to use the libertarian-style argument when it's to my advantage.

Ironically, though, government licensure is why people both want the government to make sure a hairdresser isn't a fly by night operator (especially for more complicated things a guy like me with short hair doesn't understand) and why they think it's OK for a doctor, who has been licensed by the government to make a decision, with a woman when it comes to reproductive choice, instead of getting the OK from a panel of conservative politicians who were formerly used car salesmen, dentists, and McDonald franchise owners.

Pro-lifers do have to defend our beliefs, it’s pro-choicers that usually don’t and aren’t asked to. Red state governors who’ve banned abortion get asked about this all the time. Politicians who go out of their way to defend the legality of partial birth abortion virtually never are. Yes, partial birth abortion doesn’t happen very often, but that’s not actually an argument against banning it.

Catholic doctrine isn’t opposed to masturbation as murder, but as disordered. The only permissible sex is the kind that occurs between a married man and woman and that is open to life.

See CCC 2352.

Right. I was suggesting that someone with the murder-position would find the Catholic stance too weak.

You could go the other direction, too, and insist that it’s the potential to create life which matters. The Catholic position that sex should be reserved for procreation is too weak. Onanism? Mass murder. Menstruation, one murder a month. God obviously intended for women to use each and every egg they can.

I don't really think anyone has to go that far. What century was it when the scholastics thoroughly did the whole mereology thing? A whole being conceptually different from the sum of its parts is not, itself, that complicated. What happens to an object when you just leave it alone and don't take any human action with intentionality? A trolley rolling down the tracks may invite questions of which humans designed and built the trolley, placed it there, or either intentionally/negligently started rolling it down the track. But other questions don't really implicate that. A tree mechanically grows and dies in a forest, and one can take different positions on whether it is right to cut it down without also taking a position on what one is obligated to do with acorns that fall on the concrete in the street in front of his house.

A spermatozoon, of its own, with no intentional human action, will be produced in the male body. Some will eventually just die and be reabsorbed, for example. An intentional action of masturbating results in that spermatozoon dying outside the body. One could take different particular moral stances on this, but it could be viewed as akin to kicking an acorn out of the concrete driveway and into the concrete street, perhaps. Most people think it changes little of import; it simply dies in a different concrete location, and nothing was to come of it in either case. Add an intentional human activity of sex, and it may join with an egg. Now, it is sort of a conceptually different thing. Now, if you just don't do anything, if you just let mechanical things operate mechanically, with no human intentionality, it will grow to be a human. One might see a sapling in the forest and think that it has very conceptually different import than an acorn in a driveway. If one simply doesn't touch it, it is likely that it will grow into a full tree. Not guaranteed, of course; time and chance happen to all trees, too (I have no idea about the probabilities). But it is now a conceptual whole that is differently situated.

You can see some acknowledgement of this on the pro-choice side, too. They want to say that their human intentionality was not the important factor. That they're not "killing" it, that it's not the fault of their intentional action that it is unable to survive outside of the uterus. I think they want to say this, because they do have internalized in there some sense of the role of human intentionality.

So then, it seems eminently reasonable that someone might say that, when faced with an entity that will simply, mechanically, grow to be a human in the absence of human intentionality, then the way that humans intentionally interact with it is relevant in a way that is different than the way humans interact with things that don't mechanically grow to be a human, things like worms or acorns or spermatozoa.

It’s the same reasoning that makes the “but for” test so common in law. Lots of normal intuitions about causation and liability are covered, but you can still get to some pretty perverse results.

Something like 30-50% of eggs fail to implant. That probably compares favorably to acorns, but the fact remains: those failed implantations could not occur but for the intentional action. They interfered with the normal, mechanical progression of ovulation to menstruation, and now it’s an embryo dying instead of a lone egg. Are they immoral for taking the action?

Similar reasoning applies to congenital diseases. An intentional action has some chance of creating a being which will die horribly in utero, as an infant, or otherwise early. Those deaths may all be perfectly mechanical with no further action from the parents. How much of that responsibility still rests on the parents?

Maybe the specific chances matter. The expected outcome of sex might be a healthy child. But that’s abandoning the bright line. It also opens up questions about contraception. If the expected mechanical outcome is no longer pregnancy, can the parents justify a return to the status quo?

A similar line can be used to support rape exceptions, since the victim took no intentional action. Demanding she let the mechanical process continue looks unjust. But so does killing the child for the sins of the literal father. Hence the disaster that is “victim blaming” discourse.

Combine the two, and you end up with something like the Violinist argument, where the victim had no expectation of being used to support another human. Pulling the plug is framed as a return to the last state she expected.

those failed implantations could not occur but for the intentional action. They interfered with the normal, mechanical progression of ovulation to menstruation, and now it’s an embryo dying instead of a lone egg.

Sorry, please spell this out. What was the intentional action, and how did it result in what outcome versus what other outcome?

Similar reasoning applies to congenital diseases. An intentional action has some chance of creating a being which will die horribly in utero, as an infant, or otherwise early. Those deaths may all be perfectly mechanical with no further action from the parents. How much of that responsibility still rests on the parents?

Where in the process did they have a choice to take an intentional action that is conceptually related to the death, and how is it related?

Maybe the specific chances matter. The expected outcome of sex might be a healthy child. But that’s abandoning the bright line. It also opens up questions about contraception. If the expected mechanical outcome is no longer pregnancy, can the parents justify a return to the status quo?

Most contraceptives are not magic. They have relatively well-known rates of pregnancy occurring. The expected mechanical outcome of such sex is some probability of pregnancy, where that probability is reduced compared to sex without contraception.

A similar line can be used to support rape exceptions, since the victim took no intentional action.

Very plausibly. I could at least see the sketch of an argument along these lines, though I'd have to work at it to see if I think it goes through or not. In any event, to get to this point, people would have to come to some agreement about the general contours of the arguments, and soooo many people aren't there right now. They're at shit-tier arguments like "masturbation must be murder".

Violinist argument

I kind of can't believe it, but I cannot find my previous comments on the Violinist argument, either here or at the old site. Perhaps I should give another full comment here that I can save somewhere for future reference, but the short version is that the Violinist argument is a master class in how to do intentionality exactly the wrong way 'round. Nobody thinks for nanosecond that there is just some purely mechanical, no human intentional action, process that resulted in the person waking up, attached to a machine that is using them to provide life support for a famous violinist. Everybody immediately intuits what's really going on - a cabal of the violinist's fans kidnapped the person in the middle of the night and intentionally chose to hook them up, because they preferred the violinist's health over anything about the person providing said life support.

My preferred analogy is rock climbing. When two people go rock climbing, they intend to have a little fun. They 'hook up', using the best safety equipment possible, intending to make the probability of an issue be as low as possible. But Murphy's law happens, snake eyes come up, and your partner ends up dangling at the end of a rope attached to you. Maybe that rope is causing you a little discomfort; maybe it's threatening minor rope burn; maybe it's threatening one of your limbs; maybe it's threatening your life. Lots of possible variations to handle a variety of scenarios people want for abortion. I don't think people are nearly as likely to say that you can choose to pull out your pocket knife and intentionally cut the rope, knowing that it will surely lead to your partner's death, completely regardless of what the danger is, all the way to the case where there is literally no real danger, just that they are relying on you to not cut the rope. This gets intentionality the right way 'round and also neatly handles the question of contraceptive use to reduce the probability of the undesired outcome, as well as the question of danger to the physical body of the woman.

I do remember our previous discussion regarding the rope. With Reddit’s decisions to cripple search tools, I can’t find it either. I remember having some objections to the metaphor, but I’ll agree that it avoids the main pitfall of the violinist.

That said, the only reason I mentioned the violinist was to point out that a careless intentionality argument can be contorted into almost anything. Especially if one wants to account for expected outcomes. But at the same time, expected outcomes are really important.

In the case of a couple genuinely trying to conceive, they can still expect a >30% chance of failure to implant. They’re increasing the chance of a dead embryo from 0% to 30%. The only way to avoid that outcome is abstinence. But it’d be outrageous to assign blame based on that reasoning. Why?

Is it because they’re trying their best? We don’t have any way to create children without that 30% rate. A necessary evil. I am very uncomfortable with this line of reasoning, which still doesn’t provide a good way to decide which ends merit such a gamble.

I think it’s worth considering whether those embryos really are as valuable as their implanted—or born—cousins. Or that intentionality isn’t enough to settle the argument.

a careless intentionality argument can be contorted into almost anything.

Agreed. We definitely need to take care in how we do things. I joked a bit about trolley problems, but there is a lot of genuine work to try to figure out how to be careful with these concepts.

expected outcomes are really important

Also agreed, and again a point of significant professional work. Expectation, foreseeability, etc. are all concepts that can come into play, and we can't just casually choose something willy nilly, not think about it too much, and declare everything done.

You bring up good points in the rest of your comment, as well. I don't have a complete theory in mind. Some sense of constrained optimization seems reasonable, where there just is no currently known way to do anything better. I wouldn't say that it's impossible for someone to take a strong anti-natal, abstinence-only stance on these grounds, but it would definitely be a strong motivating question for future work. Akin to how "why not suicide" motivated substantial philosophical developments, "why not end the human race via abstinence" could have potential as a major work. Maybe it's been done, and I just haven't read it yet. Perhaps there is room for something here other than "the other ends are worth it", but I don't know. And of course, moral value is always lingering. I often say that I think the outcome from the rock climbing scenario is not that we can immediately conclude that abortion is impermissible, but that it shows that if we do intentionality the right way 'round, the strong argument from bodily autonomy doesn't seem nearly as strong, and that it throws the main question back to the moral value of and beginning of human life. For sure, if the thing on the other end of the rope were a worm or something for which we believed there was no moral prohibition on killing, then it would be perfectly permissible to cut the rope. I don't think intentionality single-handedly solves the problem, but it is absolutely a vital component to think about if we're going to do anything other than spin our wheels.

Hey, somebody in the other thread pointed me to search.pullpush.io! I wanted to share the existence of a working search tool.

I found my previous conversation on the violinist here. Not sure if you're any of the other participants.

Thanks for being a good sport about this discussion.

So, the Europe thing is a dodge.

In a sense, some Western European countries are more strict about abortion, but not in reality. As a 'up until birth' pro-choicer, if the GOP position on abortion was unlimited abortion on demand in the first three months at any hospital paid for by the government, then basically incredibly socially liberal judges giving OK to later term abortions via giant loopholes, then yes, that'd be an election winner.

The problem, is Republican's idea of 'moderate' restrictions are all the downsides of European restrictions plus the supply side restrictions that make it difficult to keep a clinic open plus waiting periods and so forth.

If the choice was European abortion laws vs blue state abortion laws, European abortion laws would win. But, the GOP isn't putting forth European abortion laws. It's putting forth unpopular restrictions, being backed by people who have talked about completely banning abortions.

Plus, again, there is a very American-style libertarian defense of expansive abortion laws - 'we trust women and doctors with their reproductive freedom. Have an abortion or don't have an abortion, that's your choice. Meanwhile, the Republican's want to make a government small enough to get between your doctor, yourself, and your own beliefs, because they think they know better than you.'

I wonder if this turns out to be good electoral politics or not. Abortion compromises always strike me as a trust question. What line you draw is just the first step in the game, the far more important question is do I trust you not to take more?

Medical exceptions are often non-starters for Pro-Life activists because they don't trust doctors to draw the line narrowly as to what is an acceptable exception. They are fine, conceptually, with an abortion to actually save the life of the mother, but they worry that medical exceptions will be expanded to the point where it becomes a rubber stamp allowing an abortion wherever requested, regardless of any actual risk to the life of any actual mother. Equally rape, what's to stop any woman from claiming she was raped to abort a child she doesn't want? Because, in all honesty, requiring a conviction before an abortion is so stupid that I don't think anyone can get behind it.

Pro-Abortion types won't trust Republican admin teams to not try and restrict abortion further once they get their foot in the door.

Trump has the advantage that his base trusts him to an absurd extent, probably more than anyone has trusted any American politicians since, what JFK? So even if Pro-Lifers oppose this compromise, they're more likely to turn out and vote for him anyway figuring he won't do it. But will this stop the bleeding among people who are pro-Abortion? Do they trust Trump to pursue a limited compromise?

Equally rape, what's to stop any woman from claiming she was raped to abort a child she doesn't want? Because, in all honesty, requiring a conviction before an abortion is so stupid that I don't think anyone can get behind it.

You don’t need to require conviction, just an accusation to the police. Most supposed rape victims aren’t even willing to do that, which makes their claims slightly suspicious.

"I was raped by a stranger entering my home last night. He wore a ski mask, put a bag over my head immediately, was approximately average height and build."

Does she get the abortion?

Sure, and the police should be able to use the DNA to track down the supposed rapist. If it turns out she lied, then she can face the legal consequences for filing a false police report. Looks like up to a year in prison in my state, plus whatever additional penalty she may face for getting an illegal abortion.

Ok, so I'm dating my girlfriend, she gets raped, gets pregnant. Do I have to hazard the odds that I'm raising the rapist baby at risk of sending my girlfriend to prison?

In a certain sense, yes, but only insofar as our legal system isn’t perfect. You also have to hazard the odds that your girlfriend will die from complications arising out of the abortion.

Edit: Of course, even should she choose not to abort the baby, there’s nothing forcing her (or you) to raise it. Adoptions are a thing.

But will this stop the bleeding among people who are pro-Abortion? Do they trust Trump to pursue a limited compromise?

Re-phrased slightly: Will people who are pro-abortion trust the guy who appointed three of the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe? I'm thinking the answer is no.

Trump doesn't have to persuade blue abortion voters who were never going to vote for him, he just has to avoid alienating voters who might vote for him but like abortion. This is probably actually a lesson the GOP could learn from Trump.

Sure, big is the target population here? My impression is this only works for people who think (1) Roe was too permissive on abortion and (2) many Republican proposals are too strict. Not sure how many people that describes.

Pro-Abortion types won't trust Republican admin teams to not try and restrict abortion further once they get their foot in the door.

I'll toss in another one - I don't trust pro-choice hospital attorneys to not just lie about what they think the medical exemption constitutes in order to make their opponents look bad for political reasons. If this sounds unbelievably evil, I am willing to bite that bullet when it comes to my opinion of hospital attorneys.

But yeah, I concur, the chances of getting anyone even slightly to the left of center to trust Trump is very low, and they're not even wrong to think he's a flimflam man that'll say whatever he thinks is popular.

Do we not, to use your words, "meddle with the primeval forces of nature" routinely? Fill in relevant medical practice/research. It may be prying, but are you, as well, against contraception? Or the onanist spilling of the seed, aka jacking off? These, too, depending on the scope of the term "primeval forces," may fit the category, particularly if we're talking about propagation of the species.

This is not an attempt at gotcha. It may be that you do not want to rest on the statement that you abhor abortion for religious reasons (I understand if you are hesitant) and felt the need to add caveat in order to be taken seriously. For my part you don't have to do that, and I'd also agree that in most ways Trump is a huckster. He's also not wrong in his logic regarding electability here, it's just that he, in his typical style, has the gall to say it out loud.

The electorate is not, in my experience discussing the topic, consistent in its collective view on abortion.

I wish that more society transforming policies had exceptions the way Anabaptists are excempted from Social Security.

avoid meddling with the primeval forces of nature and attempting to play God in the first place

I truly believe that God wants us to play God. We didn't get a paradise on earth. There are all kinds of blind chance BS that wrecks people - cancer, random accidents, horrible parasites from the rainforest, earthquakes and volcanoes. I don't think God is benevolent in an earthly, human sense and I lean towards Deism rather than Christianity. You don't leave your beloved children in the snake pit and watch as some inevitably get eaten by snakes, you wouldn't structure the universe that way - just don't make the snakes in the first place! You wouldn't send an earthquake against your devout Lisbon Christians on a feast day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake

But we do have the tools to fix our problems, if we are determined and committed. There's no law of the universe that says cancer remains forever. If we're wise and efficient, we could cure it. Mole rats live without cancer, it's not impossible. For earthquakes, we could still the Earth's core or disassemble the planets and stars directly.

If God didn't want us to kill, he wouldn't have allowed for weapons, strangulation, bone-breaking... Our skin could be infinitely tough. If God didn't want us to live forever, he could have some mechanism that annihilates souls at a predetermined age. If God didn't want people to sin, he could send down legions of angels or lightning bolts. If God didn't want abortion, he could render fertilized embryos invulnerable.

In reality we have incredible freedom of action, the physical properties of the universe are very permissive. We are encouraged to advance down certain pathways, those who advance are rewarded with wealth and power while those who lag behind are rewarded with humiliation and expropriation. Some choices are of course dead ends - Aztec sacrifice was uncompetitive. These choices are where God's will is most apparent. Our role is to accept the challenge and choose wisely, we can't shrink away from the powers already within our control.

Abortion isn't going away, we can't uninvent the pill, retroactive action may be one of the few things that God really doesn't want. We need to choose how to use this technology such that it improves rather than detracts. You know that it can't be effectively banned, people don't want it, countries can't coordinate on this for a global and effective ban. US states can't even coordinate on banning it, it makes only a marginal difference in outcomes if it's legal in one state, illegal in another. Better to manipulate structures so that children are valued more, that people don't end up in situations where they want to abort, that the abortions that do take place get rid of antisocial or unhelpful people.

That is still more religion than I'm comfortable with, but I agree with your sentiments.

The putative Abrahamic God is god-awful at his job. Leaving aside it doesn't exist, we're better served by Man creating our own Gods in Our image.

One reason I'm so antitheistic is because it's a soporific musk that dulls people to very real pain and suffering and makes them attribute it all to a higher, inscrutable purpose.

What. The. Fuck.

Solve your damn problems. Only if all else fails is choosing to accept them the valid option.

As I've said before, Marx was correct in calling religion the opiate of the masses. I can't knock it on those grounds because I certainly prescribe my own share of opioids, but as always, our intent is to cure, and keeping someone in a morphine haze indefinitely is acceptable only when all efforts fail.

And we're working on that. An actual cure for cancer, aging and other diseases that have plagued us for all of history is in sight, I'd expect it to happen in my lifetime even in the counterfactual world where we weren't making our own superhuman deities that could (if they don't kill us) solve most of our problems. Efforts to make peace with that which should be put down with all the force we can muster is a crime against humanity itself. All the worse that this peace is built off the assumption that the torture and suffering we undergo is because of hidden benevolent meddling.

I'm doing my part. Are you?

Solve your damn problems.

The Gay Science, I.24:

Different forms of dissatisfaction. - The weak and, as it were, feminine discontented types are those who are innovative at making life more beautiful and profound; the strong discontents - the men among them, to stick with the metaphor - are innovative at making it better and safer. The former show their weakness and femininity by gladly letting themselves be deceived from time to time and occasionally resting content with a bit of intoxication and gushing enthusiasm, though they can never be satisfied entirely and suffer from the incurability of their dissatisfaction; they are also the promoters of all who know how to procure opiates and narcotic consolations, and consequently they resent those who esteem physicians above priests - thus they assure the continuance of real distress! Had there not been a surplus of these discontents in Europe since the middle ages, the celebrated European capacity for constant transformation might never have developed, for the demands of the strong discontents are too crude and basically too undemanding not eventually to be brought to a final rest. China, for example, is a country where large-scale discontentment and the capacity for change became extinct centuries ago; and in Europe too the socialists and state idolaters, with their measures for making life better and safer, might easily establish Chinese conditions and a Chinese 'happiness', provided they are first able to extirpate that sicklier, more tender, more feminine discontentment and romanticism that is for the moment still superabundant here. Europe is a patient who owes the utmost gratitude to his incurability and to the perpetual changes in his affliction: these incessantly new conditions, these no less incessantly new dangers, pains, and modes of information have finally generated an intellectual irritability that approximates genius and that is in any case the mother of all genius.

I guess I'm more Deist-by-Simulation-Hypothesis, though I've been wrestling with what simulation means for our ability to understand reality.

putative Abrahamic God is god-awful at his job

In a literal sense, sure he's terrible as an omnibenevolent omnipotent being, as Lisbon discovered. But in a practical sense, He has His uses! A God that suppresses marriage between relatives, a God that demands monogamy, a God expected to uphold oaths and enforce pro-social behaviour via punishment in the afterlife, that deity has great power. We could easily list the flaws too. Like all other technologies, religion has pros and cons depending on how it's configured. Many Christians do good work in charity, others do bad work. The suppression of incest alone might have pushed up IQ a couple of points, an inestimable boon for the devout! Anyway, the Christian God is dying, other deities are emerging, including god-machines.

I think there might be some kind of conservation of religiosity going on. Religion is such a powerful entity. Traditionally people had religious feelings about celestial bodies, their dead ancestors and spiritual entities. Environmentalists have religious feelings about plants, animals and industry. Nationalists have religious feelings about their co-ethnics.

You and I have vaguely religious feelings about trends in computing and scientific development. They provide eschatology. There will be semidivine beings soon capable of reading our thoughts and memories (plus trawling through our digital history), capable of vast cruelty or benevolence. We're actually right and have by far the strongest physical/technical forces on our side.

But most people find this laughably silly. I tried to convince some friends of mine about this stuff and they politely suggested I was mentally ill. I'll enjoy gloating to them later on. Most people don't think like we do, they're rooted in aesthetics. They see soy-looking techbros and are repulsed. It's like that cringey kid with the 'In this moment I am euphoric, I am enlightened by my own intelligence' quote that did such terrible damage to atheism. It had nothing to do with metaphysics, yet it was more powerful than 10,000 logical arguments. Even Marxism-Leninism has more pull than our AI-singularitarian beliefs have, it speaks to most people far better than we do. There's great power in these social forces that I wish understood.

Most people don't think like we do, they're rooted in aesthetics.

I accept the premise that some people are more motivated by aesthetics than others, but I also think that many of those who claim to "not care about aesthetics" aren't as entirely free of of the grasp of aesthetics as they imagine themselves to be. If you resonate with this particular vision of infinite power, as opposed to all other competing visions of infinite power, then that clearly reveals an aesthetic preference on your part.

There's great power in these social forces that I wish understood.

I experience the revulsion you noted quite strongly, so I'm happy to answer questions about it.

It's broadly caused by some combination of 1) the general smugness that often accompanies techno-optimism, and 2) the content of the beliefs themselves. I can tolerate somewhat more arrogance from people I already agree with, but even then there's a limit, and past that limit I start to sour quickly. You chose a fitting example - I'm an atheist, but if an atheist starts getting too euphoric in an internet argument then I absolutely start to root against him. I have an instinctual aversion to people who lack humility and I imagine I'm not alone in that.

When Sam Altman styles himself as being at the center of the most important events in human history, all I can think is... dear God, please don't let these people win. Don't let reality be like that.

As for the actual object-level issues, opinions will vary widely, but you should at least be aware that not everyone will find your personal vision of utopia to be very utopian.

as opposed to all other competing visions of infinite power, then that clearly reveals an aesthetic preference on your part

The key thing is that there are no other competing visions of immense power, not in the material physical sense.

I can appreciate the aesthetics of other scenarios and yet I know they won't come about just because I find them cool and superior. I said this before and I'll say it again, the tradbros who say stuff like 'Cool story Roko but your vision of an earth populated by trillions of bugmen has no relevance - the good life is best achieved by an aristocratic band of horseback warriors riding out on the plains'. There is a certain aesthetic quality to the trad lifestyle. I believe it fits human needs quite well. But if it goes up against self_made_human's vision, it gets smashed into paste and trivialized to the point of being pathetic, surviving only on reservations if that. Hey, it already got smashed into paste by 19th century armies.

Imagine the Qing courtier who deeply resented the foreign devils, bringing disharmony with their weird gadgets and disrespectful mercantile practices. Surely China knew better, with all the millennia of philosophy? Well, no they didn't. They fell behind and suffered severely for it. China learnt a very valuable lesson that I fear we've neglected.

Humility and subjective ideas of moral virtue can't save you from superior firepower. I think the greatest kind of humility is respecting the structure of the universe. If the universe favours the cruel, brutish, horseback archer to the hard-working, peaceful peasant - there's nothing we can do about it, the rules hold. If the regimented, robotic columns of riflemen beat the noble, free horsemen, then so be it. If swarms of tiny robots overmatch the manly courage and patriotic zeal of all human warriors, that's that. There can be change on the margins (who gets uploaded, what distribution of resources happens) and these changes are supremely important! But we still go through the phase-change even if we think it's ugly and depraved that clusters of jumped-up graphics cards become so powerful.

The key thing is that there are no other competing visions of immense power, not in the material physical sense.

A literal god wouldn't have to engage in deep space exploration, if he didn't want to. He could furnish himself whatever sort of environment he wanted, for whatever activities he wanted. That's what I meant by competing visions.

The preoccupation with planets and supernovae and immense distances reveals, as I said, an aesthetic preference.

Humility and subjective ideas of moral virtue can't save you from superior firepower.

Your use of this sort of language may be related to why your ideas aren't "speaking to people" the way you want them to.

But we do have the tools to fix our problems, if we are determined and committed. There's no law of the universe that says cancer remains forever. If we're wise and efficient, we could cure it. Mole rats live without cancer, it's not impossible.

Not directly related to your post but this part made me think of one of my favorite blog posts (about small pox eradication): 500 million but not a single one more.

Is that Jaibot? Did they move away from their own blog and onto Substack?

It is! I suspect so. I recall the original link I had to the article on their blog went dead some time ago but I found the link to the substack via an EA forum post.

That's the problem about integrity in politics - none of the voters have any so it's almost always counterproductive for your electability if you do.

It's not that none of the voters do, it's that the electorate as a whole does not (and essentially cannot).

Americans like abortion. They don't like extreme cases where kooky feminists are getting a dozen per while doctors kill viable fetuses. But Americans really don't like restrictions on illness or rape.

If you're an American politician who wants to restrict abortion, you have two options: talk about moderate restrictions Americans like, or stand principled and lose.

But taking the tack that "the GOP must accept exceptions" instead of "the issue must be returned to the states" is another huge own goal from the New York liberal Trump.

Setting aside preferred abortion policies (I seem to care less than most people, so I'm happy to set it aside), I disagree that this is bad electoral politics. I think Republicans that probably do personally share your robust pro-life position have attempted to thread the needle with the latter statement and have mostly found that people just interpret that as them wanting to ban it but knowing that it's unpopular at the federal level. They don't seem like principled federalists to the median voter, they seem like religious fanatics that don't even have the courage to state their position openly. In contrast, pretty much everyone knows Trump isn't principled, but the pro-lifers are unlikely to discard him in any great number and more centrists may well grumble and go along with him if he says, "look everyone, we're going to do the best laws, we're going to have a new Roe, and it's going to be great again, everyone will have their rights, and we're also going to protect the babies".

More generally, this is just an issue where standing on principle results in taking an L. I understand that some people are sufficiently principled that they're willing to take that L and lose on a whole raft of other Republican priorities because they're against compromise. To some extent, I admire the conviction, even though I think it's foolish.

One part of this that I also think flies under the radar a bit is that Biden seems somewhat like the flip side of the coin - while he might not be the most stringently adherent Catholic (lol) I do think he has the cultural memory of an old Irish-American Catholic and has just never much liked abortion on a personal level. His private position probably basically remains the old-school "safe, legal, and rare". When he speaks about this, I get no sense that he's in favor of the most extreme pro-abortion policies. If you pit Biden against Trump on abortion, Biden's probably a slight winner on electoral politics, but if you put Biden against a more staunch conservative, I think it's a huge disadvantage for the pro-lifer.

“Return it to the states” is actually most unpopular with pro-lifers since it guarantees that New York, California and other highly populous states will never ban abortion, which is deeply unacceptable to them.

It guarantees that no state can ban abortion for any intelligent or sophisticated woman, any woman who can afford a bus ticket. You can only force births of children you'd probably prefer hadn't been born.

You can only force births of children you'd probably prefer hadn't been born.

Given the existence of the pill, condoms, IUD, implant, cycle trackers etc (which most high functioning women will avails themselves of if having sex without the intention of having children) some would say this already the case for all pro-life activism.

Not as though I've been appointed spokesman of all the pro-lifers, but maybe re-read my OP where I explicitly stated the general preference would have been for Trump to stick with 'leave it to the states' instead.

Kind of difficult to have a productive conversation when Person A says 'this is my preference and here's why' and Person B says 'no actually, that's deeply unacceptable to you'

I respect that, I’m just saying that most pro-life activists I’ve discussed this with online have said leaving abortion to the states isn’t long term acceptable to them.

I can entertain that our reading past each other is from me saying 'Pro-lifers think Trump should have left it to the states [as the next move in the long-term game]' and you saying 'return it to the states [as a long-term permanent solution] is unpopular with pro-lifers' and that both are true.

If Trump weren't Trump he might've thought to punt it down the road so the judiciary could work on it for another generation or two, rather than think he was clever enough to make 'the best deal' that everyone's gonna love. But long-term, the idea that New York, California, etc would continue having late-term abortion on demand because it had been 'left to the states' is deeply unpopular among pro-lifers, for sure

I see perfect moderation has been achieved.

* golf clap * Top-level low-effort snark just so you can whine about how we proved your point if we mod you. Bravo, sir, well played. (And yeah, you got three reports for "low effort" and 1 AAQC.)

Now go be the change.

Believe it or not, a lot of effort goes into brevity. I rewrote that snark countless times, and left and came back to give it more of a think hour after hour. Debating what references to include. Perhaps "They created a wasteland and called it moderation"? Maybe "Did someone forget to cycle a GPT instance?"

At once point I was certain I'd missed my window for it, trying to strike the perfect balance between mocking the increasing ossification of discourse here, but not being too trigger happy about it. When midday began to give way to evening, and the moment still seemed ripe, I decided I practically had an obligation to snark. The silence demanded it.

For what it’s worth, I thought it was tasteful :)

What does this mean?

At the time he posted this comment, there had been no other posts in this thread, despite it having been up for several hours. I believe the joke is that the mods’ idea of “perfect moderation” is “no posts allowed at all.”

Your magic worked because I immediately set out to make a top-level thread but there were already 3 others by the time I finished writing it.

It was nice while it lasted.

There's a model of Biden foreign policy that's very simple and predictive. I will present it in full.

"The foreign policy of the Biden administration is whatever will make the price of gasoline go down before the election."

It's super effective!

For example, what is Biden's policy towards Venezuela, a brutal dictatorship which is responsible for a large chunk of the U.S. border crisis, and which has threatened to seize the territory of neighboring Guyana? Why, ease the sanctions, of course.

What about Biden's position on Iran, a country which funds terror throughout the world, supports the Houthis in Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and is rapidly progressing on its goal to build nuclear weapons? Why, ease the sanctions, of course.

But surely Russia, the Greatest Threat to Democracy Since Hitler, will feel the wrath of U.S. sanctions. We have spent hundreds of billions of dollars fighting them in Ukraine. We help send hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men into the meat grinder to die. Because it's worth it. With stakes this high, there's no way that Biden would let his lust for cheap gasoline affect the conflict. Right, Anakin, right?

Today, Biden has urged Ukraine to stop its strikes on Russian oil infrastructure. It was causing gasoline futures to increase.

That's it boys. We've found the red line that Ukraine musn't cross. Biden is not very bright, and he's certainly lost a step. But an old dog still knows some tricks and he knows one. If you want to get re-elected you need cheap gas. As usual, the U.S. will support pretty much any tinpot dictator as long as they have oil. Sometimes, it really is that stupid.

For example, what is Biden's policy towards Venezuela, a brutal dictatorship which is responsible for a large chunk of the U.S. border crisis,

When Ukraine is everything but democratic because they are in a state of war it is excused. Yet, those under threat from the US are supposed to be completely democratic despite America's long history of sponoring terrorist groups, assassinating leaders and trying to colour revolution countries. If Venezuela didn't hold a tight ship they would have ended up like Iraq, Syria, or Libya. Putting countries in a state of perpetual state of semi war in order to destabilize them increases migration. The US has sanctioned Venezuela, funded an armed coup attempt and continuously worked to undermine the country. As with most of America's foreign policy misadventures it ends up with a massive flood of migrants. The best way to stop the migrant flow is to stop the aggressive posturing. Stealing Venezuelan assets makes the situation in Venezuela worse which encourages emigration.

What about Biden's position on Iran, a country which funds terror throughout the world,

When Ukraine gets invaded we all have to help them. When Iraq gets invaded, Iran is supposedly supposed to just quietly accept it. Why would they? It is a neighbouring country with deep cultural ties to Iran. Of course they are going to help them defend themselves. Iran has given support to groups under direct military threat. Destablizing Iran would mean another giant refugee crisis. Iranians are the most similar people to westerners in that part of the world and if anything they should be our natural allies. Stealing their assets is not only immoral and absurd, it is directly damaging to Europe. When Hillary Clinton was sponsoring Jihadists in Syria which flooded Europe with migrants Iran was helping Syria stay together. We should thank Iran for their support against ISIS.

American policy has been aggressively attacking countries that aren't subservient to the United States and causing continuous blowback.

It is a neighbouring country with deep cultural ties to Iran. Of course they are going to help them defend themselves.

"Funding terrorist networks to destabilize the government" is a funny way to phrase "help them defend themselves."

@Dean's takedown of your understanding of Venezuelan history is pretty thorough, but this is a truly impressive howler. Iran hates Iraq. It's not just Sunni vs. Shia (though that is a huge source of animosity.) The Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s began with Iraq's invasion of Iran.

Iranians are the most similar people to westerners in that part of the world and if anything they should be our natural allies.

... Yeah, Iran used to be a Western ally. We propped up the Shah for that reason, and you may recall, there was a revolution. Which is where we are now, with an implacably hostile religious theocracy in charge as a result of our earlier "alliance" with them.

You seem to have a thesis ("American imperialism is the root of all evil") to which you are attempting to fit every conflict in the world. Believe it or not, other countries are quite capable of starting armed conflicts, suffering coups and instability, and turning themselves into economic basket cases, without America being behind it.

Iran hates Iraq

Iran has good relations with Iraq's shia population and has offered Iraq both help with rebuilding and military aid. Iranians definitely don't get along with Baathist and the Sunnis, but there are strong ties to groups living near Iran. Parts of Iraq are ethnically similar to Iran and the current Iraqi government enjoys good relations with Iran. Regardless, when Iran's neighbour is attacked by an aggressive power that could very well invade Iran it makes sense for Iran to offer support.

there was a revolution. Which is where we are now, with an implacably hostile religious theocracy in charge as a result of our earlier "alliance" with them.

I wonder why the Iranians revolted against a corrupt foreign puppet who siphoned off natural resources to British petroleum. British petroleum was the most profitable British company in the beginning of the 1900s. Iran had been invaded in 1941 and then had a dictator installed in 1953. There was good reason for supporting revolution. Despite sanctions and despite living in a continuous state of semi war Iran has managed to create a stable state that produces few refugees.

You seem to have a thesis ("American imperialism is the root of all evil") to which you are attempting to fit every conflict in the world.

Americans have an exceptional ability to get involved in every corner of the planet. If there is a village in Afghanistan that isn't ruled by them, they will bomb it for 20+ years. The US is in a league of its own when it comes to starting wars and meddling in other countries. Not all problems are caused by the US but the US is a driving force behind instability.

Actually quite a large percentage of illegals migrants to the UK crossing on small boats are Iranians. They certainly do produce refugees.

Americans have an exceptional ability to get involved in every corner of the planet.

This is the motte, and yet not the same as an implicit claim that the Americans are exceptionally involved in every corner of the planet, let alone in every administrative decision of the planet, let alone vis-a-vis the ability of local actors.

That the Americans have more ability to project power to distant corners than others is quite different than that Americans have more ability to be involved than local powers who may not be able to project far, but are actually local.

Given that the exceptional US ability to get involved in every corner of the planet is dependent on having allies and partners in every corner of the planet able or willing to facilitate their involvement, the ability of the US to effectively influence needs to be compared to places where it lacks critical enablers- and thus who they are.

If there is a village in Afghanistan that isn't ruled by them, they will bomb it for 20+ years.

Interesting claim. Identify the villages, please, and why the bombings were on grounds of not being ruled by the Americans, as opposed to other reasons that other non-US powers wouldn't emulate if placed in equivalent contexts.

The US is in a league of its own when it comes to starting wars and meddling in other countries.

Are we conflating wars and meddling as the same category, and are we comparing to historical trends?

If it's just in terms of starting wars, the US is unexceptional in historical terms. The only interesting point in relative terms is its relative ability in the Pax Americana, which is notable for being one of the most peaceful periods in human history precisely because the US had- and exercised- unique ability to pick conflicts.

If the argument is simply in ability to meddle in non-war-instigating forms, this is a reflection of evolving technology and economic growth over time, which the American system coincided with and encouraged, but which is not a uniquely American pathology in nature. The Americans certainly conduct more cyber-espionage than the colonial empires of old ever did- this is because the colonial empires lacked computer networks to spy on, not the willingness.

If the argument is simply about the size and capability of the US, because it's big, that's neither an argument of moral inclination nor an argument that the size and capability actually have been disproportionate in starting wars and meddling relative to the size and capability of other actors.

Not all problems are caused by the US but the US is a driving force behind instability.

'Driving force' is a meaningless term bar a relative comparison of forces, which you have not and consistently do not provide comparisons to.

It's a pretty common thesis, but one mostly associated with the left and Noam Chomsky in particular. It's weird seeing it coming from the right.

What is weird is to see an attempt to go back to the neocon consensus when part of Trump's appeal was to criticize their failures, including their over the top hostility towards other great powers.

I don't think being a fanboy of Russia, China, Iran is the way to go, but it is healthy in general, including for the right wing in particular to be skeptical of American imperialism. Especially since modern American militarism is of a woke empire that is increasingly hostile to right wingers.

If some people on the right have a more mature take after decades of neocon failures that they have experienced, and also due to that hostility then that is a good thing.

And of course, from the time of George Washington to today, it is a legitimate and correct agenda to not want your country subordinate to foreign lobbies. This is an aspect of American involvement in foreign conflicts. Imperial overreach and war with Iran is not in the interest of the American people.

From a broader perspective than just American interest, I prefer the time Russians and other Europeans traded with each other, over the current situation and while sane protectionism, or reacting to harmful trading and other practices against you is fine, I am skeptical of what I see as the sentiment of cutting off other powers. Or plans that lead us into war.

It is better for the world to try to work with them, than escalate things into conflict and topple heir countries. This isn't just a right wing take, but it is certainly the case that right wingers in western countries should not let themselves be sacrificed for a global empire that is against them both ideologically and even as ethnic groups. Plus, pragmatically there isn't an existential threat from Russia, nor China, and certainly not from Iran and warmongering raises risks.

Deescalation and an attempt of a modus vivendi between different power blocks is the better idea. Especially in the current circumstances. Part of that does include having a capable military incidentally. Being strong while choosing a good deal over both one sided appeasement nor trying to topple other countries and their leadership is the better alternative than what American elites did, especially when looking at China. Which is to be pro China as China was growing in power, and turn against it when it had already exceeded USA in productive capacity and became the richest country when accounting for purchasing power parity.

It is better for the world to try to work with them, than escalate things into conflict and topple heir countries.

And this is all fine rhetoric if you believe in the Chomskyite "everything is the USs fault" point of view. But looking at how things actually happened instead, we note that it was not the US or the West that tried to topple Russia, but Russia which tried to topple Ukraine.

I don't believe everything is the US fault, but I do believe neocon agenda USA is a bad actor that holds zero respect for international law and doesn't even respect its own people. That the neocon faction acts in an obviously machiavelian manner and even promotes such arguments from a might is right perspective then plays a motte and bailey with moralism.

Whether in Iraq, Syria, Libya, or wanting to bomb Iran, Israel, or yes Ukraine as well, the American foreign policy has been a destructive one that shows little respect to international law.

It isn't the only bad actor. Actually one of the problem with being maximally beligerent is that is infectious, and gives others the excuse to act likewise. In my ideal world great powers would try to constrain each other bad behavior and also due to their own interest oppose each others imperialistic tyrannical behavior against other countries. While cooperating in win win ways.

but Russia which tried to topple Ukraine.

You are forgetting the color revolution in Ukraine with American participation, and Ukrainian shelling of Russian areas and laws against Russian language. While the USA has been training Ukrainians and Ukraine have been having their Azov regiments. There is also American support for removing Assad, and toppling Gaddafi, Saddam, talking of bombing Iran and a big history of warmongering and regime change worldwide. And the rhetoric about removing Putin and supporting opposition. Then there are the coups of the CIA worldwide, of which Putin is especially aware of.

People are not going to be gullible and not take this in mind just because it would be in the interest of neocons to do so.

Also, the extreme far leftist agendas promoted by the USA that relate to their hatred of Putin for not going along, and to an extend to his opposition to them. Not to mention the fact that some of the oligarchs that looted Russia that left from Putin, fled to the USA and have been advocating for regime change.

Of course Russia and China have their own belligerence and imperialistic agendas. Russians are responsible for their invasion and previously supporting rebels. If China invades Taiwan they would be responsible for that as they have their responsibility for the bullying of their neighbors in terms of fishing rights and more.

This still doesn't make American imperialists any less bad. Nor does it make sense to support them under the guise of pro west sentiment.

Importantly, in addition to their other sins, neocon elites are people who aren't at all respecting national self determination and dislike the people they rule. They don't respect freedoms neither and are supportive of cancel culture and authoritarianism at home while pretending to be bringing liberation abroad when they bomb other countries or try to escalate conflicts. They don't value the interests of the people they rule as a group and try to enforce national self hatred and prioritization of foreign immigrants, and are following tyrannical policies that lead to the destruction of european ethnic groups.

the West

The neocon agenda sharers are fundamentally anti west. In that they and Dugin, or Chomsky are all in the same side. They only differ on the type of tyrant they want the west to be ruled by, and maybe in regards to some of the details about which groups should be on top. But neither are for the west as a civilization and western peoples. Nor do they respect their rights.

They are further from being the west, than the Communists were Russia/Ukraine and all other countries under their rule.

I see a lot of rhetoric here, but nothing about the facts on the ground that no Western country invaded Russia, but Russia invaded Ukraine.

It is quite possible to have a more nuanced position than the extremely simplistic way you paint things

Often times, "nuance" is a way to attempt to use small second, third, and fourth order effects as an excuse to ignore enormous first-order effects.

Unlike you who want an one sided perspective, I am not going to defend the Russian invasion. I am just going to condemn American imperialists for invading multiple countries and trying to engineer proxy war and overstep deliberately on the red line of countries like Russia, knowing this would cause war. And even justifying it after the fact as a worthy investment since they see the meat grinder as good if Russians are dying.

Also the rhetoric about toppling Putin and dismantling Russia, which when it comes from GAE that has done this throughout the world, it has teeth.

Although Russia has become more militarily capable and built further its industry and their alliance with China and economic ties grew, and moreover multiple other countries have started increasingly trading without using the dollar.

It is anti-neocon not Pro China invading Taiwan or Russia invading Ukraine. In fact i would rather that China avoids invading Taiwan in the future and would consider that a world destabilizing move. One that should be dissuaded.

It is your perspective that tries to create a simplistic Russia bad, GAE good here.

Often times, "nuance" is a way to attempt to use small second, third, and fourth order effects as an excuse to ignore enormous first-order effects.

You have been consistently ignoring American invasions of various countries, color revolutions, and American attempts to engineer the conflict that happened.

The reality is that neocon USA is not the defender of world peace against the evil Chinese and Russians but a menace in its own right. One that had been a bigger menace after fall of soviet union than the other two, although that is also because of the weaker position of Russia and China. And that also also encourages the elites of such countries to act in a similar manner, bringing things closer to WW3. One could also argue that further imperialism by China or Russia, also encourages more bad American behavior.

The correct take is to favor elites that see their interest in undermining each others warmongering and also see some value in cooperation. Things were closer in that direction in regards to Russian, American and Chinese relationship at one point. And it wasn't the Russian invasion that started changing this. This came after the color revolution in Ukraine and after the destruction of various countries and after rise of rhetoric about bringing the same recipe to China and Russia. Of course the rise of China has played its role too.

More comments

Would you agree that Russia invading other countries is, in a vacuum, bad?

And that an invasion is less likely to happen if the invader expects an economic and human bloodbath?

Because it sounds like you’re arguing against continued U.S. support. But that’s an incredibly perverse incentive for Russia. To any would-be invader, really.

Yes for the first question.

To see things only from the perspective of dissuading Russian aggression and not American aggression against other countries is flawed and usually comes from bias.

Because it sounds like you’re arguing against continued U.S. support. But that’s an incredibly perverse incentive for Russia. To any would-be invader, really.

It doesn't sound like I am arguing about either more or less US support actually. What I am arguing is that American foreign policy is not about dissuading aggression but machiavelian and willing to both invade countries, commit coups, and also instigate proxy wars.

I do believe that supporting a negotiated peace is the better alternative than the continued meat grinder. American influence over Ukraine is such to be able to push things in that direction and in fact it seems that it was the UK (likely acting with USA support) that stopped the real possibility of a peace between Ukraine and Russia.

It is in fact a perverse incentive to focus only on Russian aggression and excuse American aggression. American behavior is going to affect the behavior of countries like Russia too.

In general, I don't see only dangers from American imperialism but also from China and Russia becoming more beligerent. My preference and advice for trying to deescalate is therefore not only directed towards the USA. Although certainly I am going to focus more about where there is more pushback and what is more relevant to the audience I am talking to. There aren't here any sizable number of Chinese imperialists arguing that China should invade Taiwan because of getting revenge over century of humiliation or by promoting only America bad narrative while pretending that Chinese imperialism would be no problem. Or arguing for China to invade multiple of its neighbors because they are in an American led coalition to destroy China. The bad behavior of each power also affect each other, just like a willingness to not push past certain red lines and having trade which is consistent with some protectionism and showing some willingness to compromise which can also incentivize more pro cooperation behavior.

Ultimately, the faction of American imperialists are not out to dissuade imperialism but themselves are a threat to world peace, and additionally to the rights of peoples under their rule. To only focus on Russia, and not acknowledge the problem of American foreign policy in terms of destructive coups, color revolutions, including what resulted in aggressive moves including shelling of more Russian areas in Ukraine and in theaters such as Iraq, Syria, Lybia, Israel, with promises of further escalation in places like Iran, is not how you avoid moral hazard but how you ensure it remains there. Both in terms of American bad behavior, and encouraging other countries. Especially when the rhetoric of escalation building towards a situation closer to WW3 is there. This isn't Iraq where the destructive incompetence of belligerent tunnel vision is important but still lower stakes. The stakes, especially when one also considers nukes, couldn't be higher.

I believe in the milder claim that sometimes American adventure abroad is negative sum leading to bad results in local countries but not all bad things come from American adventure (and sometimes American adventure does good things though less often).

That's a MUCH milder claim than the kind of analysis which looks at a problem, finds a way America (or some other Western power) affected one of the parties in the past, and places the blame there.

There are good reasons for leftists and rightists to share the belief that third-worlders don't have moral agency.

If Chomsky emerged into the public sphere now with the set of views that he holds, chances are good that he would quickly be branded right-wing.

Isn't he still around?

Yeah, but he's barely active anymore and really seemed to be at death's door in his most recent appearances. I imagine he gets a pass because of that and because how much of a childhood idol he was for many elites.

The Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s began with Iraq's invasion of Iran.

I feel like this is often just a footnote for Americans, particularly those of us that are millennial or younger, but it's worth noting that this wasn't some mild skirmish or even a moderately large war, it is one of the largest, deadliest wars of the past 75 years. While other civil and intrastate conflicts rival or exceed it, Iran-Iraq is probably the most deadly post-WW2 interstate conflict. The use of chemical weapons and prolonged exchanges give it a WW1 vibe, but with the addition of cruise missiles and attacks on nuclear facilities.

The post-Saddam era has thawed those old hatreds, but referring to these nations as having "deep cultural ties" is quite the turn of phrase to use.

The post-Saddam era has thawed those old hatreds, but referring to these nations as having "deep cultural ties" is quite the turn of phrase to use.

Depends on the parts you are talking about. The shia in Iraq hated Saddam and didn't want a war with Iran. Iraq is a highly diverse country, and Iran's ties to the different groups aren't uniform. There are groups that Iran has strong ties to and there are groups that Iran has strong hatred for.

It's also the origin point of suicide bombing as an accepted technique of islamic terrorism according to some. Curtis makes this point in Hypernormalization.

Iran's culture of martyrdom combined with war propaganda and mechanized warfare created an islamic equivalent to the kamikaze phenomenon (complete with pilots crashing their planes into targets), and its exportation to sunni radical groups has unfortunately shaped much of the XXIst century.

The US has sanctioned Venezuela, funded an armed coup attempt and continuously worked to undermine the country. As with most of America's foreign policy misadventures it ends up with a massive flood of migrants.

Venezuelans are fleeing because 25 years of catastrophic socialist policies have completely destroyed the economy. Leaving the current government in power is the single biggest cause of migrant outflows, and they will continue as long as the Chavistas are in control.

And how do you think running Venezuela into the ground by sanctioning them will impact migrant flows? Migrants flee Venezuela because it is bad, so making it worse should lead to more migrants. Clearly, the US hasn't been able to topple Venezuela's government, and the US has made it worse in Venezuela. In other words, foreign meddling once again lead to a migrant crisis.

The US has a long history of backing coups in Latin America, funding militias and creating banana republics. This has made the region less stable and created more incentives for people to leave.

I would agree that the current US approach to Venezuela isn't working, and sanctions rarely do work (see Cuba, Spain, Iran, Russia, so on). But the US is entitled to refuse to trade with anyone it feels like. Maybe if Venezuelans were actually starving and dying in large numbers, there might be an obligation to send food, but AFAIK things aren't that bad in VZ.

But the US is entitled to refuse to trade with anyone it feels like

Maybe it is, but it shouldn't be.

Why you think so?

There is an argument that, as the de facto economic hegemon, the US should let as many people as possible come to the table to deal, but at the same time, as expressed elsewhere, there are fairly valid reasons for why the US has done the economic-warfare things it has done.

Venezuela’s collapse since 2014 has very little to do with US sanctions. At high oil prices, the socialist system implemented by Maduro could just about function due to oil exports. After prices crashed in 2014, Venezuela’s shitty, hard to refine oil became much less valuable (much like Canada’s tar sands).

Again, US policy had very little to do with it. Refugee outflows from Venezuela will continue until the socialist system is dismantled. That is not necessarily an argument for forced regime change, only an observation as to the reality of migrant dynamics.

And how do you think running Venezuela into the ground by sanctioning them will impact migrant flows?

Why should anyone believe that US sanctions are 'running Venezuela into the ground' relative to the effect of the Venezuelan governance?

The Venezuelan government even 20 years ago was led by a clique who struggled with basic concepts like 'if you dictate that private businesses sell items at or below cost of procurement, private businesses will stop stocking items' or 'if you send people with guns to take over specialized businesses, the business people with specialized knowledge will leave.' It instituted a deliberate system of personality cult, attacks (literal and legal) on opposition actors and political opponents, and cultivating gangs as a national security strategy who then went on create a domestic security climate on par with Iraq. It routinely picked diplomatic and economic fights with its biggest trading partners while willfully and eagerly trying to align with countries less known for their quality of governance and far more known for their police states and party-empowering corruption. These were all chosen through the agency of Venezuela's own governmental leaders, for two arguably three political generations now. The same general clique of incompetents is still in power, and has been for long enough for an entire demographic cohort to have grown up under their management.

By contrast, you believe the relative impact of the US sanctions is...?

(This is a direct question, by the way.)

For all that you regularly like to cite US malfeasance as the cause of whatever cause of whatever blowback of the hour, I don't believe I've ever seen you actually provide a position of relative blame of US actions vis-a-vis other actors. Without any sense of relative allocation of input to output, this is just the cliche hyperagency/hypoagency paradigm that leaves agency with the US while everyone else is a passive recipient of their will, where even their own policy decisions are forced upon them by the US rather than, well, chosen both in response to and to shape US policy themselves.

While this is certainly flattering to US prowess in the same way that anti-semetic propaganda is empowering for the mythical Jew, it's not particularly well informed, and rather patronizing to the many invested and career anti-american politicians around the world who work hard to make their own policy disasters with hefty externalities but do so without American direction or demands. Give them their credit!

The sanction argument often comes up with Cuba (ie Cuba’s communism would be successful but for the sanctions). I always find this argument funny because it is saying “if communism could participate in the capitalist system it would be better proving communism works!”

It’s a valid critique. Protestantism didn’t do so well in 1700s France, either, but not because Protestantism isn’t a viable culture; but because the surrounding system intentionally prevented it from functioning.

If capitalists don’t care to distinguish between “we actively sabotaged your system” and “your system doesn’t work”, perhaps by a tacit appeal to social Darwinism, then sure, I’ll accept that; but by the same token, I’ll point to the birth rates and say “just wait.”

I’ll point to the birth rates and say “just wait.”

African subsistence farmers have the superior system?

I don’t think the appeal to Protestantism is the same. It is like saying “Protestantism would’ve succeed in France if the Protestants agreed to recognize the supremacy of the Pope”

There are three general sets of US sanctions / trade restrictions on Cuba, which for political convenience/tradition are often grouped together under the misnomer of 'blockade.'

Group one, and the longest and the original source of the blockade moniker, is the Embargo. The Embargo restricts US citizens, companies, and foreign subsidiaries of US companies from doing trade with Cuba outside of specific Humanitarian niches (i.e. food). The Embargo doesn't legally stop others from doing so, and while there have been arguments to the effect that it was a soft-ban- mainly because of past US threats to stop giving foreign aid to countries that did non-food business to Cuba- this is neither a blockade nor an obstacle to those who saw greater value from business with Cuba than in aid from the US. Foreign companies, including European ones integrated with (and thus at risk to) the US economy can and have done trade with Cuba without sanctions retaliation, especially in the last 3 decades since the Cold War. Rather, the reason the Europeans and Chinese and others don't invest much in the Cuban is that Cuba is notoriously bad at paying back its loans, and has been since the cold war when it was a regular frustration of the Soviets, and the early-2000s belief that foreign companies could get into the Cuban market before the American companies did but reap the American money flowing into Cuba weren't worth the steady losses. The countries continuing to offer Cuba loans or sell things in exchange things for IOUs are typically doing so for ideological interests / strategic concessions (Venezuela, Russia, China), rather than economic.

Group two, and sometimes cited but rarely carried further on inspection, are the more targeted sanctions, typically on senior leaders and for humanitarian abuses. These are not massive impacts on the broader economy, but do limit the ability of Cuban party elites and security officials to establish themselves as Russian-style oligarchs in the international system, as they become non-viable business interests even as they monopolize business opportunities at scale, but few people seriously argue that a Venezuela or Russian oligarchic model is some moral imperative as a step forward and that non-sanctioning these people would create some significant material change for the population.

Group three, and the one that modern Cuba actually would have the most grounds on saying impacts them but which is the furthest from the traditional Embargo rhetoric, is Cuba's status as a state sponsor of terrorism under post-9-11 counter-terrorism-finance legislation. For those unaware, that's the actual and wide-reaching legislation which unlike the Embargo isn't just for US-actors, but very much an international 'if you want to do business with or through the US, you won't with the countries on this list' dynamic. No one actually denies that Cuba's Cold War history of waging revolution would qualify, or that Cuba hosts people or groups that qualify for the list, there's just irregular (and usually weak) pressure that it just shouldn't matter that much / that Cuba is really hosting them to facilitate peace. Cuba was on the list pretty much from the start of the post-9-11 changes, but since the state list is as much a political tool as anything else, Obama dropped Cuba in 2015 when it was pursuing normalization with the expectation of a Hillary hand-off (which, implicitly, would have meant an election win where the Cuban vote in Florida didn't derail the Democrats), but Trump won and... didn't actually re-apply it until 2021, right before leaving office, and the Biden administration has maintained the same core assessment for upholding it that Cuba wasn't cooperating to general expectations. So not actually a partisan wedge issue, and not a 'anything but the predecessor' American policy decision.

Overall, the US Embargo had an effect but was mostly a propaganda deflection for the Communist system, general sanctions aren't particularly relevant, but the state sponsor of terrorism restrictions have real teeth... but, of course, have to compete with the point that Cuba is still run by the same sort of people who believe state control of the economy is a moral as well as strategic security for the party-state.

No one actually denies that Cuba's Cold War history of waging revolution would qualify, or that Cuba hosts people or groups that qualify for the list,

For those who don't know- Cuba doesn't just host the odd American criminal who can mouth far left ideology(Asata Shakur). It literally hosts a Hezbollah base, among other features in a collection of not really caring about the past history of people who show up making anti-American noises.

The US has a long history of backing coups in Latin America, funding militias and creating banana republics. This has made the region less stable and created more incentives for people to leave.

American involvement also helped produce the two most stable, productive South American countries in Chile and Uruguay. I have plenty of negative things to say about the CIA, but backing the guys that throw communists out of helicopters is actually a good solution to communist rule. Not good for the communists, of course, but it's in everyone's long-run interest to remove communists from governance.

The most stable and productive Latin American country is Costa Rica, which has a nice business allowing upper-middle class boomers to retire in luxury. Anti-communist but not due to US coups.

American involvement also helped produce the two most stable, productive South American countries in Chile and Uruguay.

Defining "stable" and "productive" is a headache all by itself, but even if I assume you mean "political stability" and "economic prosperity", I think that thanking the USA for those in the two countries you mentioned makes little sense.

What happened in Chile was a series of quasi-fortunate events. Unlike leftists would like you to believe, Pinochet began his regime being just as much socialist as Allende; the CIA trusted him merely because he hated commies, but that's about it; he had no economic ideas for the country at all, so basically continued doing the same as his predecesor but with an CIA stamp of approval (he even met with Fidel Castro! Seriously!). The only reason why things took a free market turn was due to Milton Friedman (who at that time was advising Xiaoping's China to end communism there) meeting with Pinochet once and writing him a letter explaining what he should to turn things around. That's it. Never did the CIA or the Pentagon had anything to do with the so-called "Chilean Miracle". If it wasn't for that visit and the involvement of the Chicago Boys (José Piñera, Hernán Büchi, etc.) in Pinochet's rule, the CIA would've merrily go along with whatever crap Pinochet would've thought that made things better as long as he continued throwning tankies off helicopters.

While I myself consider the Chilean model to be a very good example of how to achieve economic well-being, there's no doubt it that caused signifcant social unrest that climaxed in the 2019 protests, and even if you consider to be the protests to be unworthy of merit (just because people dislike economic policies doesn't necesarily mean they're bad, even if legitimitate concerns like the massive unemployement in the just-out-of-college-with-student-debt demographic and the privileges the goverment continued to hand over to the military elite where there), it shows there are consequences that go beyond economics to take into consideration when a country formulates policies.

I can't comment much on the country's political stability, and it's true that there wasn't any dictatorship after Pinochet, but social unrest, justified or not, is never a sign of it, and even if we assume stopping communism justifies a strongman with an iron fist, I don't think the 3000 people killed during his regime were all a threat to the country.

Regarding Uruguay, as someone who was born and lives there...please. First of all, lumping those two countries together makes it sound that the CIA was also involved in the country's military junta rule, and it wasn't at all. It's true that they collaborated with the democratically elected National Party goverment of the sixties and the following presidency of Jorge Pacheco Areco's as part of the Condor Plan by training our military and police forces in counter-subversion techniques including torture (one of the most famous murders carried out by left-wing guerillas in that turmoil of an period was of a CIA operative named Dan Mitrone, who had also worked in Brazil with the military junta that was there at the time), but by the time the tanks rolled in 1973 and the dictatorship started, the buck had already ended for the US; the left wing guerrillas were completely defeated, and the military junta began its rule with no foreign involvement of any kind (why it happened deserves a post of it's own).

So why is Uruguay so politically stable? We...just sort of are that way, I guess? Democracy and the rule of law is in our DNA: the military junta was an anomaly, and in 200 years there were only two other dictatorships in the country, which were resolved as peacefully as the last one and which shed little blood. Our parties institutional resilience is both a cause and proof of this: of the four major political parties in the country, just one (CA) started recently; Broad Front, the main left-wing coalition, started over 50 years ago, while both the aforementioned National Party and Colorado Party have been around ever since the country's beginnings. There are cracks which are starting to show however; ever since the end of the pandemic, the tripartite coaltion led by the NP, which won in no small part due to several corruption scandals by the Broad Front, has been mired on scandals of its own which are arguably worse, one of which involves a very important Senator who has been prosectued for a long history of sexual assault of minors, while the Colorado Party, which once was pretty much the country's dominant party, has become a shell of its former self and lives off its memories, has plenty of candidates for their next primary but no leadership (their leader shockingly resigned and left politics during the pandemic due to disagremeents with the goverment, which considering the guy's reputation I suppose had much to do with its lack of care for accountability and transparency). Add the fact that we have become more polarized, and yeah, we got problems.

As for "productive", we're like the third world that everyone would like to live in if they had to live anywhere in the third word, but that's it; our economy isn't doing horribly but it isn't doing that great either. The fact that we're considered both one of the most "stable" and "productive" countries in Latin America speaks little of us and volumes of how fucked up the region is.

Thanks for this, I appreciate the corrective effort, particularly regarding Uruguay. Duly noted and internalized.

Venezuela’s situation is due to it being run by socialists, not due to to American sanctions. While Venezuela may not be literally communist in the sense of Eastern block collective farms and shit, they’re making the kind of constant macroeconomic mistakes you would associate with having leaders who studied Marxist economics and ruined their own economy that way, combined with a healthy dose of short-sighted populism.

The counter factual to ‘Venezuela, but competently governed’ is Iran, which is also an oppressive petrostate heavily sanctioned by the USA, and it’s in much better shape than Venezuela even if it’s not quite as nice a country to live in as the US or Western Europe(notably few Iranians decide to try to walk to the EU the way Venezuelans walk to America, after all).

What is US supposed to do to get Maduro out of power that would work better than what it hasn't done already and wouldn't leave to a huge amount of migrants? Because to me all it seems there's left would be either an invasion or endless Cuba-style "well, if we keep the sanctions on a bit longer then surely they'll work this time".

Coup the country and replace him with a friendly dictator with a lighter hand?

Not that I support more adventurism. But keep in mind, this is Venezuela we're talking about, having less people try to escape the country than at present isn't as high a bar as in many places.

That’s already been tried, and it didn’t work.

I don't remember them trying. Unless that one dude and his handful of mercenaries were actually CIA, but it seemed far fetched. Did I miss a larger effort?

They briefly tried soon after Chavez was first elected but it failed pretty quickly.

Feels like a rather isolated demand for rigor, no?

I’m thinking along the same lines as @Walterodim here. We attribute anything that remotely involves the executive branch to Biden’s personal action. In reality, the branch is a nebulous blob, one under pressure from every friendly and hostile interest. Sometimes you get a compromise—Bush Sr. did end up signing a tax increase. The ACA is a mess, but it still hasn’t been repealed. That border wall is still looking pretty rough. We can’t always get what we want.

Biden is not very bright, and he's certainly lost a step

Biden is not in charge of Biden's foreign policy. Biden is not in charge of much of anything anymore.

Ah yes, as opposed to the neocon rallying cry of "kick their ass and take their gas" or those stupid stickers that rednecks were putting on gas pumps when gas got to 5 dollars a gallon with biden saying "I did this!"

Speak plainly. What is the point of this post? Is it just to point out some realpolitik? Because America always watches out for some oil interests. Regardless of which party is in power.

This is also the classic... our enemies are stupid and weak and ugly but also smart, tricky and strong.

  • -15

It's a classic, but it's also wrong, and I'm tired of seeing it repeated as an aphorism.

Take Einstein, who is good at physics but bad at designing refrigerators and being President of Israel. If you care about keeping your food cold and being an effective advocate for Israeli interests, he'd seem pretty stupid to you. If you judged a doctor on his handwriting or a parapalegic on his ability to run, they'd seem stupid, too.

Outside of partisan politics, it is indeed possible for someone to be incredibly stupid in something and incredibly smart in another. Linus Pauling recommending superdoses of vitamin C. Noam Chomsky in anything that has to do with politics. Ben Carson in literally every category but neurosurgery. We know that these contradictions exist in real life, that these nuances do happen, not just with people, but with groups.

But then the quippy liberal says 'fascists blah blah, weak and strong', as if it means anything, if it isn't just them quoting something trite and banal and passing it off as wisdom if you don't think about it for more than a minute.

Why is it a "quippy liberal"? Do conservatives care not about doublethink? I hold quite a few beliefs that would be marked conservative. Conservatives will point out the same kind of thing is happening when liberals trot out narratives that trump is too stupid to run a casino yet also somehow the greatest threat to democracy the world has ever seen.

It isn't a trite and banal one off. It is a pretty effective test to notice when a piece of media is propagandizing for one side or another.

I wouldn't say mentioning it is inherently pointing to fascism, although reductio ad hitlerum has clearly linked it in many people's minds. That and being on Umberto Eco's list, but basically all political discourse is on that list. So I would discount that entirely.

I'm also confused as to your conflation of this particular bon mot with domain specific expertise. That is not what it is trying to point out at all.

or those stupid stickers that rednecks were putting on gas pumps when gas got to 5 dollars a gallon with biden saying "I did this!"

Those were pretty funny, you have to admit.

This is what my boomer relatives used to say to me when I pointed out fake news or forwards they used to post and send me. "I don't care, it is funny anyway", "I agree with what they are trying to say even if this is a lie (boo outgroup)".

If Biden wanted to reduce petrol prices, he wouldn't have banned keystone XL on day 1. January 20th, the first thing he did was block a pipeline. Then he put a moratorium on exploration in public lands. Just recently he froze export permits for natural gas (imagine being European at this point, trusting in an 'ally' that behaves like this).

Trump was genuinely pro-oil and gas, thus US oil production reached record highs under Biden due to delayed-action investment. But Biden has been relatively anti-fossil fuel.

Trump was genuinely pro-oil and gas, thus US oil production reached record highs under Biden due to delayed-action investment.

That's not at all evident in the data. It looks like we need to thank Obama for the upward trend in US oil production. That or people are overcrediting their favorite president for trends that are mostly driven by things other than US executive policy.

Hmm, on balance it looks like a rather complicated story of leases v permits by each president. There are of course non-executive factors involved, the fracking boom for one.

However, I maintain that Trump was more pro-fossil fuel than Biden. Oil companies voted with their pockets:

Little wonder that Trump Victory, the joint fundraising committee of Trump’s campaign and the RNC, has raked in $9.3m from fossil fuel donors in 2019-2020, while its counterpart Biden Victory has raised a meager $40,465 from fossil fuel donors in the same period, according to Open Secrets.

Bill Miller, a major industry lobbyist and consultant in Austin, told the Associated Press that while many fossil fuel companies were hurt by the pandemic, parts of the industry had begun to recover. “It’s the kind of industry that remembers their friends through thick and thin, and Trump is their friend.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/09/big-oil-trump-campaign-donations-fossil-fuel-industry

The export permits for natural gas thing was retaliation for Texas’s defiance at the border, and the rest of it was before the rise in oil prices.

When Biden entered office in January 2021, oil prices were like $50/bbl, historically cheap and well below the point at which you might lose an election because of expensive oil. Dems don’t - as you note wrt the change under Trump - always prioritize oil price, and will push through environmentalist policies where they can. But if oil is at $90/bbl after having been low for a while, for the politically capable ones (and Biden is or was such an operator), cheaper oil temporarily overtakes global warming in priority since it might prevent an actual election defeat.

And to steelman Biden here, there's an argument that goes something like this:

"I want to help the environment, but I can't do that if I lose the election, therefore I have to hurt the environment temporarily to win the election".

Taken to its logical conclusion, this argument is a fully generalizable superweapon to anything you want. But in this case, it's probably fair enough.

Sure which is pretty shitty. Pretend to be for A to trick the voters so you can do B.

I do not think it is particularly shitty. If Biden was making campaign promises of keeping the price of gas low, with no intend to keep them, that would be shitty. Instead, this is just an election gift targeting that part of the population which is still undecided. My model of the world says "At least 90% of the US voters are aware of the fact that Trump is more pro oil than Biden". But most voters are not perfectly rational beings who carefully consider the terms of slowing climate change with having to pay more for gas in their utility and then vote for whomever is more likely to satisfy their preferences over the next term.

It is common knowledge that advertisements use hot people because they make ads work better than ads with median people in them. In a perfectly rational world, everyone would adjust for that whenever they see an ad with a hot person in it and there would be no advantage left to such ads. This is not the world we live in because most people don't work that way.

Yes. Environmental goals come with serious tradeoffs. The path to decarbonization will be difficult and make us poorer. The climate activists understand that and are fine with that. But most voters are not.

There is a propaganda effort to make it seem that there are no tradeoffs, that EV's and solar panels will make use richer and Create Jobs. It's simply not true.

Biden's environmental and foreign policy goals are entirely subservient to the price of gasoline.

For example, in 2022, when oil was over $100/barrel the Biden administration was chiding U.S. producers for not drilling more. That's when the administration decided to sell about 50% of the strategic petroleum reserve to lower prices before the midterms.

On the other hand, it's unclear if Keystone would lower U.S. pump prices at all. It was mostly designed to connect Canadian production with U.S. Gulf Coast ports.

Just recently he froze export permits for natural gas

This is a great example that demonstrates my model. Freezing exports lowers U.S. natural gas prices, prioritizing cheap energy for U.S. voters at the cost of foreign relations with allies. U.S. natural gas is the cheapest it has ever been.

Note that none of this makes Biden "pro oil and gas". He doesn't want energy producers making money. He just wants cheap gas before the election, whether it comes from Russia, Venezuela, Iran, or the Permian.

Use my model and U.S. foreign policy makes a lot more sense.

That's when the administration decided to sell about 50% of the strategic petroleum reserve to lower prices before the midterms.

To be fair to Biden, this was actually a good use of reserves as he sold high and then refilled it at a lower price

At the very least, this is a case of a stopped clock being right once

EDIT: I accept the correction below.

To be fair to Biden, this was actually a good use of reserves as he sold high and then refilled it at a lower price.

That's fake news unfortunately.

The SPR has NOT been refilled. There were some trivial purchases but you can barely seem them on the graph: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=mcsstus1&f=m

The major sales came to a conclusion after the midterms, but they were still draining the SPR until May of 2023, with prices below $80/barrel.

It’s also possible that supporting a small increase in the price of gas is political digestible but having gas prices get back to 4 dollars a gallon is it

Note that blocking Keystone was explicitly about getting Americans to stop using oil:

(d) The Keystone XL pipeline disserves the U.S. national interest. The United States and the world face a climate crisis. That crisis must be met with action on a scale and at a speed commensurate with the need to avoid setting the world on a dangerous, potentially catastrophic, climate trajectory. At home, we will combat the crisis with an ambitious plan to build back better, designed to both reduce harmful emissions and create good clean-energy jobs. Our domestic efforts must go hand in hand with U.S. diplomatic engagement. Because most greenhouse gas emissions originate beyond our borders, such engagement is more necessary and urgent than ever. The United States must be in a position to exercise vigorous climate leadership in order to achieve a significant increase in global climate action and put the world on a sustainable climate pathway. Leaving the Keystone XL pipeline permit in place would not be consistent with my Administration's economic and climate imperatives.

More recently, he celebrated blocking Russian oil as part of an overarching strategy to force people to stop using oil:

Biden added, though, that the crisis "should motivate" the United States to "accelerate the transition to clean energy." For American families, though, Biden admitted investments in clean energy "will not lower energy prices for families," but said that transforming the economy to "run on electric vehicles powered by clean energy with tax credits to help American families winterize their homes, and use less energy, that will help." "If we do what we can, it will mean that no one has to worry about the price of gas in the future," Biden said.

The administration has been very clear that it is important to get Americans to stop using so much oil and one of the ways to do that is to constrict the supply. You probably won't hear this rhetoric much during the election, but it's not exactly been some secret plot.

Yes, I agree that his rhetoric and actions don't match up. That's kind of my point.

Keep in mind that Russian oil isn't blocked, nor is the U.S. trying to block it. They are trying to "price cap" Russian oil - allowing Russia to sell it but hopefully make less money. Success has been mixed at best. Oil and gasoline are fungible and globally traded. So even if we don't buy Russian oil directly it keeps prices low.

And how would you explain Biden telling Ukraine to stop bombing refineries?

There are certain actions, like massive subsidies for EV's, can achieve Biden's decarbonization goal while ALSO lowering gas prices. This is fully compatible with my model. I believe that Biden does care somewhat about the environment and foreign relations.

But when the administration must choose, they choose lower gas prices every time.

They choose lower gas prices in proximity to elections, sure. It's a cynical strategy, but a common one.

Note that both of us are using "they" in a fashion that isn't actually how these things work. When we talk about "the Biden Administration", this shorthand misses that there are actors with conflicting interests in the administration. Without even being overly cynical about Biden's current mental capacity, there's just no way for a President to be personally invested in the details of every policy that they're signing off on. Adding this internal conflict into the picture explains why there are policies that are clearly intended (and even stated!) to be kneecapping American energy production while other policies try to create short-run stopgaps that avoid Americans getting too wound up about $5/gallon gas.

I suspect that there's overlap between people who accuse Trump of inciting the riot on January 6th despite his explicit call for 'peace' and people who believe that the 'bloodbath' comment is evidence that Trump is ready for a civil war even though he was clearly talking about the automotive industry.

I think that Trump should be in the past for the good of this country, but when we can't even agree on what words mean anymore, I don't know that I think there's a lot of hope.

Sometimes I think about how we got here. Something I've seen a lot of leftwing people talk about recently is: "The system is what it does." The left is what it does, not what it says it does. The postmodernism, the communism: there's this sense in which I just want to say we can see you. But there's always equivocation about 'the left.' They call it 'essentializing' the left even as they apply their reductive reasoning to Trumpism.

And I'm old enough to remember that Obama came in on backlash to the Bush administration. "Cthulhu swims left" is the sort of thing neophytes say on encountering politics for the first time: it follows that Cthulhu swims right in a great drumbeat. Much of the surveillance apparatus that creates our authoritarian present was built during the Bush administration.

I'm afraid of what people will turn to if Trump isn't enough.

Maybe there aren't firm conclusions in here, but there's no one else talking today, so here I am.

'Trump said there will be a bloodbath for the country' is still less of a lie than 'the election was stolen.'

/shrug. Both sides are largely stupid and dishonest, because people are largely stupid and the incentives around politics reward dishonesty.

  • -11

Which election, 2000, 2004, 2008, 2016 or 2020?

2000 is the most objectively stolen election in recent memory, the rest are fine.

Not what I was asking.

You said the "bloodbath" quote was "less of a lie" than the election one. Now, in context, that refers to 2020. Now you say 2000?

You were comparing Trump to Al Gore, and positively? That reframes the whole thing!

I think we're getting confused.

I thought you were making a joke, I was replying with a joke.

If your original comment wasn't a joke then I don't know what you mean.

The causes of inflation

Having recently finished Cochrane's Fiscal Theory of the Price Level, I was primarily struck by how contrived all modern macro-economic models are, whether Monetarist, New Keynesian, or Fiscal. New Keynesian models, for example, imply bizarre outcomes such as spiraling deflation when interest rates are at or near zero, yet rather than discarding the model economists instead warn of spiraling deflation at the zero bound. From a methodological standpoint, there appears to be a tradition of "fixing" a model by declaring a variable to be stochastic or subject to regime-change; yet without going back and re-deriving the model with these additional assumptions. Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) models jointly estimate macro-economic variables and policy parameters, despite policies being a choice; rendering predictions of potential policy impact on relevant economic variables futile.

Indeed, I posit that all three frameworks are missing a key element that drives inflation: the fact that the representative inter-temporal discount factor is non-constant, and that the discount factor is directly impacted by fiscal policy.

Background

First, some background. The representative agent (let's say me) prefers consumption now than consumption in the future. There are many philosophical reasons that this may be so, but the existence of debt appears to be ample empirical evidence for this assumption. The amount by which I prefer current consumption to future consumption is called the "discount factor", and can be modeled in a variety of ways. In discrete time, it is often symbolized using the Greek letter "beta" (not to be confused with the CAPM beta) and is typically somewhat less than 1 (perhaps in the .85-.99 range). Micro-economic models call the rate at which I prefer current consumption to future consumption the "elasticity of inter-temporal substitution", and typically model the impact of interest rates on this inter-temporal substitution effect. In equilibrium, the interest rate is directional proportional the negative log of the discount factor: r = a - log(beta), or if beta is modeled as exp(-delta), r = a + delta.

In a simple economic model with no government spending, no Federal Reserve, and no banks (frictionless financial markets) (and oh, to live in such a world!), the discount factor is directly related to the savings rate and amount of investment in "physical" (though intangible in the case of software and innovation) capital. Having a long term view implies a high savings rate. Savings are invested in capital. Capital is the primary driver of long-term economic growth, as it allows economies to produce more goods with greater efficiency. If the aggregate discount factor is at .95, then any capital investment with a (risk-adjusted) return greater than 5% would be financed, leading to more economic growth than if only capital investments with returns greater than 10% were financed.

Government spending, a central bank, and retail banks throw this simple model into flux. Unlike mutual funds, which act as a true intermediary by taking investors money and directly putting the money into portfolios of stocks and bonds, retail banks lend "safe" and thus cheap deposits. This cash has to go somewhere, and eventually makes its way back to a bank as a deposit...which is then lent out again. This cheap borrowing, and subsequent rise in the broad deposit base, artificially lowers the lending rate. Austrian economics correctly states that this leads to over-investment: investment is unbacked by corresponding saving, causing a bubble and mis-allocation of economic resources. A much more economically straightforward approach (and one also suggested by Cochrane) is for banks to be financed entirely by equity: investors can buy stocks in a bank, who then uses the money raised by an equity issuance to fund lending. This approach would let retail banks truly act as intermediaries, being rewarded for expertise in credit risk management and identification of wise investments, without introducing investment distortions.

Government spending is also a distortion. The government has to spend on something: either they hire private companies (a form of consumption or investment, depending on the nature of the spending) or directly create consumer or investment goods. Since this investment is also not tied to savings, distortion is introduced (Ricardian equivalence not-withstanding).

Finally, central banks control the interest rate either via the rate at which they allow retail banks to borrow or by directly creating money and purchasing government bonds on the open market. Purchasing government bonds increases the demand for bonds directly, giving the government more capacity to borrow and spend and facilitating more distortion.

Mainstream theories

Monetarists, New Keynesians, and Fiscal theories are aware of all the above, yet don't directly introduce these facts into their canonical models. Loosely speaking, Monetarists consider inflation to be driven in the long run by changes in the money supply: "Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon" according to Friedman. Mathematically, MV = PY, where Y is economic output, P is the price level, M is the money supply, and V is the velocity of money (how frequently it changes hands). Under the assumption that V is a stationary process (conceptually, mean reverting) and that Y is long-run exogenous, the only impact on P comes from M. Unfortunately, M is not well defined, especially, as Cochrane correctly points out, in the presence of increasing financial innovation and removal of financial frictions. If I can purchase a television by an immediate transfer from my investment portfolio with no conversion to cash, then M is not only all cash and deposits, but also all bonds and stocks. Central bank open market operations, where money is created to purchase bonds, then has no impact on the money supply. Cash is created, but bonds are removed from the market, which is net-neutral for the money supply.

New Keynesians, in the tradition of the original Keynesians, consider inflation to be caused by excess demand. This is explicit in their canonical models, where the inflation rate is a function of the output gap and expected future inflation. New Keynesian theories struggle to explain the lack of inflation from 2009 to 2020, where fiscal and monetary policy were both accommodating, but in which inflation stayed stubbornly low.

Finally, Fiscal Theorists consider inflation to be the result of government deficits that are not backed by corresponding future surpluses. In this theory, government debt is valued by the present value of future primary surpluses (cash flows excluding interest expenditure). Government can either credibly promise to pay back new debt (in which case the current value of debt remains constant), or the price level will increase to deflate the current level of debt. This theory is relatively simple and has many advantages that Cochrane articulates in detail. My biggest issue with the theory is that the mechanism for inflation is opaque. The government can issue debt and promise future surpluses, leading to Ricardian equivalence. But if the government doesn't promise future surpluses, people are free to spend the money, driving up the price level. This theory does not, to my knowledge, tie consumer behavior back to the representative agent's utility function.

What about the discount factor?

And now I can finally get back to my own theory. Each of the three theories posited above assumes that the discount factor is constant. I believe that the discount factor is dynamic and that this dynamism directly leads to inflation. Fiscal policy can directly impact the discount factor, while monetary policies can stimulate inflation by decoupling interest rates from the discount factor.

An immediate shift to higher discount rates (lower discount factor) will cause immediate price level increases. As I now prefer current consumption even more over future consumption, I will spend more today and save less for tomorrow. Since higher discount rates lead to less economic growth, there is less room for supply side easing of inflationary pressure. Populations that have higher discount rates will also tend to vote in myopic governments who focus on short-term benefits while ignoring long-term structural and financial concerns.

Expansionary fiscal policy puts additional cash in consumers or investors hands. The presence and continued growth of additional cash will have an impact on savings rates: why should I bother to save if I will simply receive more government cash in the future? The discount rate will rise as a result. Cochrane does have a point: debt that is backed by future surpluses will not have the same impact on the discount rate, since eventually the gravy train will stop. However, Cochrane does not allow discount rates to change, robbing the model of a key mechanism for inducing inflation.

Expansionary monetary policy does not necessarily impact the discount rate. While in a frictionless society with no government, an interest rate decline can only happen when discount rates also decline, in an expansionary monetary episode lower interest rates can lead to higher “real” discount rates. The availability of cheap money relative to discount rates leads to increases in borrowing and current consumption which leads to demand-side inflation. This is a standard Keynesian argument, but I go one step further: long periods of low interest rates can lead to a lethargic population that assumes that money will always be free. How this manifests in a utility function is ambiguous: it could be that this actually lowers the discount rate in the long run (raises the discount factor). If this is the case, then a sudden interest and fiscal shock to the system can causes an even larger increase in the discount rate.

2021 was a time of fiscal excess, supply shortages, and post-pandemic YOLOing. Discount rates shot through the roof, as evidenced by both heightened consumption and declines in workforce participation, hitting both the demand and supply side of the economy, funded by accommodating fiscal policy. It is a testament to the American people that we seem to a large extent to have come back to our senses. Despite continued deficits, inflation has come down as the discount rate has dropped to near previous levels. However, it is clear how easy it would be to devolve into a South American-style economy, characterized by short-termism and fiscal irresponsibility at both the individual and government levels.

Why is this culture war material?

To what degree are low discount rates driven by culture? Americans were originally positively selected for long-termism. By definition, they had an unusually high capacity for adventure, exploration, hard work, and desire to create a better world for their descendants. Most of the immigrants to the United States since have had similar positive selection. Even the Irish and African populations, who may have been negatively selected on certain attributes (by the potato famine and by defeat/capture by rival tribes respectively), there isn't anything to suggest that their discount rate was negatively selected for. When America was a melting pot, they were assimilated into a culture that favored long-termism.

When considering modern immigrants in light of discount rates, I come to a surprising conclusion. Whatever issues illegal immigrants have (and I have many concerns!), they may well be positively selected on discount rate. They risk danger and uncertainty for a better and brighter long-term future. On the other hand, while seemingly the most successful immigrants, Indians could very well be negatively selected on discount rate. Rather than stay in India and help transform it into a fully developed nation, they come to the United States to enjoy immediate success. Indians (Brahmins) have administrative and managerial talents that often far outpace the mean American and they enjoy great success navigating the PMC (the growth of which could also be a consequence of higher discount rates). Yet in my experience, these high-capacity Brahmins do not actually drive innovation or change. If I'm correct about this, the current surfeit of Indian executive talent could contribute to American economic stagnation.

Austrian economics correctly states that this leads to over-investment: investment is unbacked by corresponding saving, causing a bubble and mis-allocation of economic resources.

I was waiting for this. The rest of the post prior has all of those usual """dog-whistles""" that it was like a twist in a movie you can see coming from miles away.

Is it 2008 again? I remember the internet being full of this kind of thing (and being one of the contributors!).

Anyway, it's important to point out that 'full reserve' theorizing is not 'Austrian' economics, it's Rothbardian Austrian economics. The original ABCT doesn't require it to avoid business cycles and Hayek's formulation can be re-cast in essentially monetarist terms as about the interplay of the supply and demand for money without much modification. The supply of loanable funds (a nominal quantity) does not necessarily represent the full production possibilities of the underlying economy (a real one). That is, there are 'real' savings that are not represented by nominal savings at a given price level/quantity of money. The demand for money will be driven, in part, by the investment possibilities created by real savings, so a full reserve banking system will under invest in production, while the fractional reserve system the Rothbardians are against would be able to invest enough for the economy to reach its production possibilities frontier without going beyond it and generating a business cycle.

As to the rest of your post: a lot of what you're talking about with population discount rates would probably be covered in post-war Keynesian literature on the propensity to save/consume. The empirical validity of a lot of it varies, I'm sure, but I can't imagine it's any more questionable than your last two paragraphs.

The supply of loanable funds (a nominal quantity) does not necessarily represent the full production possibilities of the underlying economy (a real one). That is, there are 'real' savings that are not represented by nominal savings at a given price level/quantity of money.

From within the Austrian framework, I think this claim does not hold. I think what you are saying—and please correct me if I’m wrong—is that there may exist savings held (e.g.) in the form of dollar bills in a deposit box at a bank. These bills cannot be lent out as part of the bank’s operations, and hence the real wealth which they represent can never participate in the economy as “investment”.

However, an Austrian would say that those dollar bills are not savings in the sense of forming part of the supply of loanable funds. Savings-as-loanable-funds are a subset of savings-as-deferred-consumption; the former entails the assumption of some risk, while the latter (as in the case of bills in a deposit box) need not.

If you like, holding money qua money, rather than allowing it to be lent out for investment purposes, could be called “exercising demand for money” or less charitably, “hoarding money”, as distinguished from “saving”. An Austrian would say that such hoarding is economically no different from exercising demand in any other way (e.g., through consumption of real goods/services).

You are reading too much into what I wrote. I am not Austrian. 100% reserves will not resolve business cycles, nor is that prescription practicable. I think even the New Keynesians have more interesting things to say on economics than Austrians. I happen to work for a large-ish bank that practices fractional reserve banking (as all retail banks do), and I can sleep at night.

I think Cochrane is the closest to being correct of the three that I laid out. I also think his proposal for 100% equity funded banks is both practicable and better aligns savers and borrowers, and will definitively end bank runs. I think all three are closer to being "correct" than the Austrians, whose main claim to fame is thoroughly debunking Marxist economics (admittedly not a high hurdle to clear).

I would love to hear more from you on the post-war Keynesian literature and how it is relevant to the rest of my post; that is the part that actually interests me.

I want to congratulate you on writing one of the greatest motteposts of all time. 2000 word summary of different economic schools of thought, mostly correct (econ major, can confirm, though your notion that discount factors are assumed constant is not necessarily so in the schools you ascribe it to), followed by 500 words of "Actually, Scientific Racism would explain this better".

Truly an quintessential example of a mottepost. Showcasing that you've done the work to at least try to understand modern scholarship, but discarding it in favor of whatever flavour of phrenology is in this week.

I can't imagine a better example of a mottepost.

  • -10

I don't think that it's fair to describe the whole post as racism. There is more of general conservative vibe to it(the past was better and you should invest in your country). And also obviously Austrian school signs all over it.

I can't imagine a better example of a mottepost.

Then read some of the better ones. I could as easily say your post is a classic sneerclub post: full of sneering condescension that exhibits a surface-level appreciation of someone's point but then reduces it to an uncharitable straw man.

It's been 11 months since you caught your last ban. Maybe you've been on vacation since then, but if you haven't mellowed after all, then just to let you know, if you decide you're going to flame out in one last hurrah, I will not only ban you permanently, as I promised, but I will take the rare step of deleting your post to deny you the satisfaction of getting your last digs in.

Or, you know, you could try participating in good faith. Just a suggestion.

On the mainstream theories

I don't see how the Monetarist model can be seen as contrived. It is the simplest model and the one most in line with standard economic principles without bells and whistles. All prices are relative and we can think of the "price" of money relative to other goods. Money is a (durable) good with well-defined demand and supply. (Sure, the demand and supply functions must be described in "real" rather than "nominal" terms, because dollars are valued according to what they can buy not just for themselves). Demand and supply determine the relative price of money. If supply is increasing relative to demand—a monetary expansion— the price of money will be going down and we have inflation. Granted, there are a lot of important details: what should count as money, how substitutable bank deposits and cash are, how should we aggregate them into a single composite measure of total money; but the core of the framework is just that. Just basic supply and demand analysis.

The New Keynesian model recognizes this, but it gets hidden in their "cashless limit" so that the standard textbook version has no mention of money quantities at all. But it is there in the background. The contrived parts of the New Keynesian model comes from their decision to select and rule out certain types of equilibria and not being careful with working directly with the limit version of the model rather than solving the model first and taking the limit later.

On the discount rate

The fact that the discount rate matters for saving decisions does not mean that the discount rate changes with the environment. If the government has some expansionary fiscal policy, my budget constraints will change and I might substitute consumption intertemporally even if my discount rate is the same.

In the theory of (consumption-based) asset pricing, economists generally talk about the stochastic discount factor which takes into account the marginal utility in the future (in the different possible futures, hence stochastic). For instance, changes in this stochastic discount factor are used to explain the changes in the value of the stock market. But the idea there is that my rate of time preference between 1 utility unit today and 1 utility unit tomorrow remains the same, I just have a different rate of preference between 1 unit of consumption today and 1 unit of consumption tomorrow. If this is your point, then it makes sense. But it is not a point that is missed by the mainstream theories, it is literally taught in the first-year classes of any mainstream school.

See, to me this feels odd because it leaves out one crucial point. People being primarily motivated by social status. It's not, why should I bother to save if government money is coming in the future? It's why should I bother to save if I'm going to take a significant hit to my social status and image today? Lockdown and stimulus basically served as a sort of supercharger for this competition. People are not going to like the solution however, which is essentially that the middle class/upper middle class has too much discernable income, and probably should be taxed significantly more.

That was Robert H. Frank's argument for a steeply progressive consumption tax. It would reduce zero sum status competition while keeping savings/investment high.

I was primarily struck by how contrived all modern macro-economic models are

1000 times yes. I have a BS in economics. Macro still seems like voodoo magic to me. The only model I sort of like is the "sustainable patterns of specialization and trade" kind of model.

[discount rate]

Do you not think the discount rate stuff was sorta covered by the OG Keynesian "animal spirits"?

I get the sense that they kind of figured this out, but economists just really don't like having an unmeasurable thing in their models. Much of the modern profession is filled with math nerds who earned their PhD by doing some fancy math manipulations on theoretical and completely impractical models. The economists that prefer to actually model the real economy get paid the big bucks on wall-street.

I don’t think Wall-Street hirers those guys anymore. Maybe a Bill Gross or Gundlach but to be honest those guys spend probably more time think about small market structure edge to squeeze an extra 20 bps versus absolutely hammering the economic outlook right and getting 10 year up or down right.

The big macro funds are going to be thinking about a lot of other things too than getting the macro call right. The guys in those shops getting the economy right just isn’t that important when your levered and have risks limits on everything. Pays much better just figuring out a sentiment shift or a trigger for a price (like at etf entrance or some quant allocation that will happen).

Any macro interview is going to start with returns and Sharpe ratio stuff not whether your calls are right. Getting calls right is just too volatile.

One example I would use is when oil when -50 (and an extreme example) it only traded negative for like 90 minutes and the entire next day was positive entire day. Even if you knew the price next day and traded that you wouldn’t make money because is in between for those 90 minutes a nice security guard came to your desks and escorted you out. What happened is some Chinese banks were long some derivatives linked to that days oil close and blasted it negative (probably illegally) causing billions of losses on those banks. But if you had mapped out all the fundamentals and macro and absolutely nailed the value of a barrel of oil you would in fact not be rich.

The only place I think kind of sometimes takes a big macro swing (usually on bearish side) is Bridgewater but they overall haven’t had great performance but somehow are a marketing powerhouse.

Another scary AI is Becoming Racist article from the media.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/16/ai-racism-chatgpt-gemini-bias

The title is pretty comical. As AI tools get smarter, they’re growing more covertly racist, experts find

Hummm...seems problematic.

It goes on about how ebonics is judged harshly by the AI models. Without doing comparisons to other low status language markers such as WV dialects. The title implies that the smarter and more predictive the model becomes the more secretly racist it becomes.

There is also this gem-

"In response, groups like OpenAI developed guardrails, a set of ethical guidelines that regulate the content that language models like ChatGPT can communicate to users. As language models become larger, they also tend to become less overtly racist.

But Hoffman and his colleagues found that, as language models grow, covert racism increases. Ethical guardrails, they learned, simply teach language models to be more discreet about their racial biases.

“It doesn’t eliminate the underlying problem; the guardrails seem to emulate what educated people in the United States do,” said Avijit Ghosh, an AI ethics researcher at Hugging Face, whose work focuses on the intersection of public policy and technology.

“Once people cross a certain educational threshold, they won’t call you a slur to your face, but the racism is still there. It’s a similar thing in language models: garbage in, garbage out. These models don’t unlearn problematic things, they just get better at hiding it.”

It ends on this note from Avijit Ghosh https://evijit.io/assets/pdf/Avijit_CV.pdf

“Racist people exist all over the country; we don’t need to put them in jail, but we try to not allow them to be in charge of hiring and recruiting. Technology should be regulated in a similar way.”

He almost says the quiet part out loud. This is coming from someone that earned their phd LAST YEAR and moved to the USA in 2019. He is a quick learner, getting on that Gender Identity and Racial Equity grift right out of the gate! Much easier than working for a living.

His peer reviewed conference publications.

Perceptions in pixels: analyzing perceived gender and skin tone in real-world image search results WWW ’24

Bound by the Bounty: Collaboratively Shaping Evaluation Processes for Queer AI Harms AIES ’23

When Fair Classification Meets Noisy Protected Attributes AIES ’23

Queer In AI: A Case Study in Community-Led Participatory AI FAccT ’23

Subverting Fair Image Search with Generative Adversarial Perturbations FAccT ’22

FairCanary: Rapid Continuous Explainable Fairness AIES ’22

Algorithms that “Don’t See Color”: Comparing Biases in Lookalike and Special Ad Audiences AIES ’22

When Fair Ranking Meets Uncertain Inference SIGIR ’21

Building and Auditing Fair Algorithms: A Case Study in Candidate Screening FAccT ’21

Public Sphere 2.0: Targeted Commenting in Online News Media ECIR ’19


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