The last paragraph of the OP gets it exactly, exactly right. We are squeaking through by the skin of our teeth, and we're not totally out of the woods yet.
...further to that point: DOJ just announced charges against a Lancaster County man who was caught driving to DC with weapons to murder two Democratic US senators (unnamed).
Victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan.
I haven't read the linked article yet, but, to violate the analogy ban, the OP makes me think the key question is whether you think Trump is the political equivalent of a 100-year flood or if you note that, thanks to climate change, 100-year floods are happening a lot more frequently, and that our sense of what are reasonable flood preparations needs to shift.
"Failed miserably" is, as you so, a ridiculous overstatement.
I is so ridiculous overstatement?
I guess it depends on what your baseline expectation is. If Drum was worried about the possibility of a successful coup, then he's allowed to be relieved that it didn't happen. But I don't think Drum was ever predicting that.
I think failed miserably is an understandable take. My counter would be: if Trump had had either courage or follow through, he would likely have won.
If he had led the mob storming the capitol and a number of Democratic representatives had been killed he could have conducted the count with a solid Republican majority cowed by immediate physical danger.
We can all be relieved that the coup was not successful, yet. Trump is going to be acquitted, and Trumpismo will continue. The political sorting based on correlated with education is going to continue, or maybe accelerate, which looks just fine in a place like Orange County, but isn't all that great in the middle of the country.
Roger, I don't think 'it was a near run thing, and Trump, if he had a different personality, might just have pulled it off' is at all what Drum means. I think he means 'the system is strong, and all the asshole's efforts couldn't beat it.'
10- I'm aware. No he didn't mean that. But a leaderless mob doesn't look like much. Lots of people are treating it like it isn't serious. I think mostly the people in the mob weren't serious people, but next time might be different. I'm just saying his take is understandable given his priors.
I don't think this stuff has that much to do with education. It is more about motivated reasoning.
https://newrepublic.com/article/161266/qanon-classism-marjorie-taylor-greene
Oh, of course, there are educated people who are dopes and/or assholes. But the changing composition of the two coalitions is pretty obvious here in Montana.
One thing that really bugs me is the vast amount of progressive energy that has to go into preventing bad things from happening. Like, what if we could spend that energy on something positive that would make the world better? Instead we fight tooth and nail to prevent everything going to shit.
Je maintiendrai.
Me too. I feel like I'm constantly having conversations with my kids are where they say "I have a great idea to solve X!" and I say "there are already well-understood solutions, but they lack political will." I try to say it in a less demoralizing way, though.
14: Yes. I had four straight years in which every single immigration conference call I was on elicited two overwhelming emotions: Pride in the extraordinary ingenuity, commitment, and dedication of the public interest community coming together to fight against terrible policies -- and absolute fury that that hundreds of thousands of hours of human genius was being diverted to defense instead of building. I'm never going to forgive it.
(It happens in lots of other policy areas too, and long predates the Trump administration. That was just the highest-profile, most sustained example in my experience.)
A whole lot of effort by many orgs went into lobbying against a harmful regulation that (I'm told at many removes) ultimately succeeded in killing it through a three-sentence conversation orchestrated between a GOP governor and Trump.
Maybe this belongs back in the Drum is naïve thread, but he also estimates today that If we'd had a competent president instead of Trump we'd only be have 5-10% fewer deaths. Basically his whole approach to politics recently is lol nothing matters.
I sometimes wonder if a competent US could have spared the whole world a significant amount of this tragedy. We seem to have pulled pandemic-watchers out of China, for instance.
I agree with the hive mind here, Drum is being way too optimistic, but I am pleasantly surprised by how many Republicans didn't side with Trump. The Republicans siding with him in Congress are disappointing, obviously, but I wouldn't have thought Pence or Georgia's Secretary of State would be on the right side of all this.
21 Yes, but they'll be drummed out of the party.
I do want to thank everyone for not asking me how proud I am of our congressman who, not a month into being in the House, has played a leading role in efforts to discipline Rep. Cheney. (This is the guy that Tester beat in 2018). He thought he had the votes, which shows that he's not just an asshole but a dope.
I truly had no idea that such a concerted effort was going on in the back end. I wonder if Trump would have been kicked off FB and Twitter without the work of these guys, and I think that ended up being singularly important in heading off more large-scale violence.
(I'm just saying that I didn't explicitly post this as another referendum on Drum. A referendrum, if you will.)
I was surprised at how few judges and secretaries of state were willing to go along, also that McConnell was pretty vocally against the various coup attempts. The big exception here is McCarthy, who fully backed the attempts to overturn the election and backed out of his promise to McConnell to recognize the winner of the election.
Before I bother reading the thing, does Time actually do journalism? Is it worth the time?
14 is the thought that keeps depressing me. I can afford to make the same commitments in time and money that I made in 2020 for future elections, but it is coming at the expense of basically anything else political. Which is why Republicans who aren't Trump are doing it.
Of course, I didn't do much before. But other people did.
One aspect that particularly haunted me after Trump's election was the complete erasure in memory of anything bad happening the last time we had a Republican president. It made me realize that you factually cannot solve climate change, because the human species can't hang on to a truth for ten years, at the most, before someone successfully profits off selling the opposite and undoes everything.
Think of it from the point of view of the other side. They've gone to enormous effort to turn everything to shit, and they only managed to turn a few things to shit, and a bunch of those things are going to be fixed with the stroke of a pen.
We're in a cold civil war. All we can do is outlast them, the way we outlasted the Soviets, and hope that the war doesn't turn hot.
But I like to keep a nice big fence around things not turning to shit, and they got perilously close.
21: it really is striking how non-corrupt the vote-counting process is. From red-state county clerks right up to the secretaries of state, everyone seemed to take pride in doing things right. [obviously I'm leaving out the legislative voter suppression at the state level and Brian Kemp, just talking about when the election actually happens. OK, leaving out legislators at every level].
I am haunted similarly to 30 with regard to climate change, as the obvious case where keeping a nice big fence around the status quo doesn't help.
I am haunted similarly to 30 with regard to climate change
Me too. I've mostly come to accept that it can't be fixed* and won't be fixed. I try not to think about it too much.
*not necessarily from a technological standpoint, but humans being what they are.
I resolved on my personal strategy (send my kid as far north for college as possible) and gave up. I tried for decades and made no difference.
If I saw an avenue that would matter, I would try but I don't really believe in those anymore. I hate how cynical I've become. In most circumstances the best I can do is keep my mouth shut so I'm not pouring poison into the conversation.
I met a psychologist from the University of Trondheim.
UAF is a pretty good school, as underfunded state universities go.
Ilisagvik College is hard to beat if "northern" is your major criterion, though.
I genuinely don't understand how it is the Georgia GOP picked Raffensperger after Kemp.
I thought Ilisagvik might literally be the northernmost college in the world, but it turns out there is one in Svalbard.
Well, our senate voted 31-18 today to table a resolution calling for a US Constitutional convention. All the Dems, a handful of partially sane Republicans, and a handful of Republicans who think that the current constitution was divinely inspired. This isn't a coalition that can do much good, but at least this is something.
On the climate, I kind of feel like we can periodically flatten the curve while scientists make progress on various fronts. Progress on solar and batteries hasn't moved as quickly as it might have in the last 40 years, but there has been a lot, and there promises to be more over the next decade.
University of Tromsø is slightly south of Ilsagvik, but it has 16K+ students!
Back when it was still warm enough outside to have friends, we'd made friends with a new faculty member here who has her undergraduate degree from UAF.
Don't just think latitude; you want an altitude component as well.
MSU Northern touts its mobility stats -- no. 15 in the nation -- and their athletic teams are the Lights.
I'm curious what kind of constitutional changes would be approved by Democrats and enough Republicans to get it to 38 states. I can't see Citizens United reform; except maybe in a weak way while preventing further. Supreme Court term limits, I could see.
(It's -12F in Havre Montana right now. That's a windy part of the country and you don't even want to think about the windchill. Oh, -29F. Sen Tester's wife posted their temp reading from their farm (half an hour away?) this morning: -36F. So, things are definitely looking up just right now.)
Balanced budget, term limits, birthright citizenship, some narrowing of "liberty" in the 14th amendment.
(Tonight they're calling for wind chills in Havre down to -55F, and tomorrow, during the day, down to -60F. That's kind of cold.)
University of Tromsø is slightly south of Ilsagvik, but it has 16K+ students!
A friend (camp counselor from my middle school years) who was on the philosophy/religion faculty at Tromsø for most of the last decade but since 2019 is at, of all places, Wuhan University.
Balanced budget, term limits, birthright citizenship, some narrowing of "liberty" in the 14th amendment.
Democrats would vote for those? And we already have birthright citizenship. If you mean abolish it, I'm even more confused.
After reading this article, a friend has started referring to the behind-the-scenes organization, not unkindly, as a kind of "paramilitary electoral commission" or "Los Electorales" and I can't get the idea out of my head.
Democrats would vote for those?
There are plenty that would.
54, yes, abolition.
There was a strong sense in the debate today that at the convention it would be one-state one-vote. Then after the convention, you'd need 38 state legislatures. Your state. Minivet, would be expected to be among the 12 whose approval wasn't expected or sought.
I've gotten muddled with what you're saying, but you have to mean that the Democrats and sane Republicans are opposing the exciting new constitutional ideas, right?
The Montana senate Republican caucus, like Gaul, is in three parts: whacky, whackier, whackiest. On this issue, Dems, whacky, and whackiest came together to defeat the merely whackier.
(Our senate is 31-19 Republican.)
I think there's a hell of a lot to learn from the Time piece and that effort. I took this up on the blog, but it bears repeating:
- it's very very reminiscent of the old colour revolution playbook, just pre-emptive rather than reactive
- it was centred around the unions and the organized left but it was absolutely explicitly the biggest possible coalition and its leaders were determined to turn nobody away at the door
- it didn't have a face or a brand and it kept well out of the....*Discourse*, and as a result nobody could pin a hostile definition on it or get a stupid NYT style page goes political row going
- it speaks well of some of the most argumentative, discourse-y people that they were able to turn it off and cooperate, although it follows that the forum drama is largely an act, and that speaks less well of them
- it also speaks well of everyone involved that they were able to practice some fire-discipline and not just contribute to general forum drama and the Trump strategy of hyping an impression of chaos
- it's an interesting question as to how to do it again. being a network without a face or a brand was an important strength but trying to preserve that runs into all kinds of Tyranny of Structurelessness fun. building an institution with an advisory board and a human resources function and whatnot means having a handle Trump prime can tweet at.
61: I found the comment by "Chris S." on your blog to be closest to my take on the TIME piece:
If one wanted to write the description of events in the way that was calculated to heighten to feed conspiratorial thinking and to maximise the feelings of the MAGA crowd that the election had been stolen, then one would be hard pressed to do a better job.
Actually, another part of my "take" is that we're damned lucky it was Trump, because almost everyone hated him, even those who voted for him. Imagine a re-run with a less hyper, non-ADHD, non-narcissist.
There are plenty that would.
Not enough to give it a shot, I should think.
50: It's the regional university for northern Norway, which is almost half-a-million people.
The weather in coastal Norway is laughably mild by US standards, thanks to the ocean currents. For example, right now it's 28 degrees F in Tromso, while it's a balmy -45 degrees in Point Barrow. When Norwegians emigrated to Minnesota (-6 F now), they must have thought "We have fucked up."
62 To me, the question, which we're going to get answered in the next decade or so, is whether you can get the same cult-like devotion to a less goofy character. I think his indiscipline and lack of planning is a feature not a bug to a significant part of his following. Half of what he says can be laughed off as joking, if it doesn't fly, and the other half is joking.
Everyone understood there wasn't going to be a great new healthcare plan released in two weeks. He paid no price for not having one: his people loved that he didn't have one. The kind of guy who could (will?) pull off a successful transition to dictatorship is going to actually have a plan that gets released in 2 weeks.
There's a comment from me in TFA from 2016 where I say that I think there's a constituency for cattle cars, but a much larger constituency for someone willing to say 'cattle cars' out loud even, especially, if he doesn't mean it. I don't think this has changed.
a plan that gets released in 2 weeks
And it won't be funny.
Hitler was a Trump who actually did infrastructure week.
Hitler wouldn't have danced to YMCA. He would have had all copies of YMCA destroyed.
This really isn't the time to start defending Hitler.
I am surely playing the straightman in a bit I don't get, but oh well: I didn't know that Trump danced to YMCA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zph7YXfjMhg
He danced to it while making blowjob motions. The man is not subtle.
He misses the 70s, when he was happy and free and giving blowjobs in the YMCA locker room.
I can't click through because I'm giving a test. After that, I can't click through because the man makes me vomit.
Can't click through once, shame on me. Can't click through--don't make me vomit again.
62
If one wanted to write the description of events in the way that was calculated to heighten to feed conspiratorial thinking and to maximise the feelings of the MAGA crowd that the election had been stolen, then one would be hard pressed to do a better job.
Eh, you and he aren't wrong, I had a similar reaction to a line or two early on, but trying to avoid antagonizing Trump supporters is an exercise in futility.
Imagine a re-run with a less hyper, non-ADHD, non-narcissist.
It's hard to imagine the exact same situation (I guess the technical term is "self-coup" or "autogolpe"?) with a more sane totalitarian. If Trump had handled the pandemic better - not disbanded the pandemic response team in 2018, not lied about it so much, sent consistent messages about mask usage, supported stronger relief packages, basically anything other than sadopopulism - he probably would have been reelected. If not with a popular majority, than with the decisive margin in swing states again. He failed politically due to his well-known personal failings. I'd call it tragic if it wasn't the first bit of good news in all 2020.
This story of the Trump/McCarthy call seems like... not nothing? It's presumably being leaked by someone close to McCarthy, if not at his behest. If anything were to make Republicans swing you'd think it would be that one of their stalwart leaders was telling Trump how bad it was at the time and he was explicitly refusing to do anything. But of course nothing is likely to make them swing in the first place.
Thinking about this, maybe there's really only one person who could take Trump completely down, in a way that ends the Trump era, and restores the pre-2015 Republican party. That person is Mike Pence. And he doesn't want to do it.
I think 79 is correct. The McCarthy call was reported at the time, but more details have come out over time.
Looks like some of this same conversation was shared last month attributed to Rep. Herrera Buetler, one of the GOP who voted for impeachment, implying McCarthy is just recounting it to the whole caucus.
Didn't this just get interesting.
The whole thing has been too interesting the whole time.
Lindsay Graham voted no on witnesses before changing his vote to yes. Was that a parliamentary move or is he drunk again?
IANAL, but the strategy chess must be in highest gear right now and my judgment of the relative ability of each set of lawyers sure seems like this is bad news for the defense.
I wonder if they could wangle something where they disqualify him from future office without calling it a conviction. They could use some sports metaphor.
Should that really be the goal, though? If Trump is the Republican nominee in 2024, they lose.
85: It's so he can be a fuckhead about Speaker Pelosi testifying.
90 Right, and Republican legislators aren't going to let people of color in big cities outvote "real" Americans.
It is cute that Sen. Graham thinks that a threat to depose Rep Pelosi scares anyone at all. Her testimony would be a home run for impeachment.
92: God, no kidding. Or Kamala Harris. Pleeeeease don't throw me in that briar patch.
My wife is in the despair-land that acquittal is inevitable and prolonging the trial (with witnesses or whatever) just reinforces, in the mind of the right part of the public, how much it is possible to get away with. Pelosi's testimony can't be a "home run for impeachment"; that implies something other than partisan loyalty will be thought important.
Well, you can hit home runs and still not win the game.
Acquittal is still all but inevitable (unless Pence decides that he wants a future in Republican politics).* So, they're making a record for history, and for suburban women voters for 22 and 24.
* Did folks read the Haley profile in Politico?
Oh, so maybe there won't really be witnesses?
This might be it for me and the democrats. Why would they do this. I didn't understand.
Maybe Manchin thinks his constituents care more about getting a covid bill out than punishing Trump? He'll have to prove that by making sure the covid bill gets passed.
It is professional malpractice that Manchin and Sinema have denigrated the methods that have any shot at passing voting rights legislation. They better be bullied out of it.
I think if they had just wrapped up the trial, it wouldn't have even registered with me. But to win the vote for witnesses and then shut down the trial, I'm just beside myself. I think my head might explode. Have I ever hated the Democrats more than I do right now?
I don't understand what anyone was expecting to accomplish with witnesses. For those that want to know it's perfectly clear what Trump did.
There are all kinds of potential behind-the-scenes reasons that a thing like this could happen. Herrera Beutler deliberately waited until the decision to not call witnesses had been made before she talked publicly. If she backed out, it wouldn't be the first time a witness got cold feet in the face of a credible threat of violence. And of course, there are political calculations she no doubt had to make.
I would have liked to have seen witnesses, but I do understand that impeachment wasn't being conducted for my entertainment, and that there are other considerations.
This might be it for me and the democrats.
I'm not sure how this is meaningfully different from saying "This might be it for me and the United States of America," which is more or less the rage-thought I have when stuff like this happens. There just isn't a political alternative other than committing more fully to non-electoral means to various ends...
However, I am truly astonished that the Republicans can unite to this extent on getting DJT off the hook for everything. That's what he wants, but how is it also what every single one of them wants? All of the explanations for their prostrations before this one man seem inadequate. I've never seen anything else like it in my life, honestly. The only angle that makes any sense of it for me is various degenerate forms of American religion.
106 last -- Exactly. It's a cult. It's more than a year away, and obviously lots can/will change, but I won't be surprised if Liz Cheney ends up in a tough primary.
And 57 is better than seemed likely at the start.
It was only after I examined comment 57 in this thread, that it occurred to me that you were referring to the number of Senators that voted to convict.
106: Ditto. Especially Senators like Mulligan Mike Lee who has absolutely no reason to bow to Trump. His dad ran BYU or something. He's Mormon. He's Utah's Senator. There is no credible fear of a primary challenge because enough Democrats will register as Republicans to block crazies from the right in the primary, and the state blindly votes for anyone with an R after their name in the general. The only safer seat is Romney, who is discovering that he has a spine. I mean, Jesus Christ, guys, you were one quick-thinking police officer from being lynched by the mob. What the hell does Trump have on him? The Stop the Steal money can't be that good.
This (short) thread is good at capturing the feeling of outrage: https://mobile.twitter.com/drvolts/status/1359979536885030913
The only angle that makes any sense of it for me
Wait. He pulled an insane victory out of certain defeat in 2016 and they have no one else who could have done anything like it. He isn't a good option, but he's is the best one they have. Now, of course, he's entrenched and half the R voters (or more) are very credibly saying Trump or no one. They have no exit from him.
He pulled an insane victory out of certain defeat in 2016 and they have no one else who could have done anything like it.
Can we be sure of that hypothetical? Who knows, maybe Cruz or Rubio could have coasted just as much on the Hillary-hate and Comey's surprise.
114:. Yes, there was no intrinsic reason that 2016l was a sure win for the Democrats. The only reason everyone was so certain that Hillary would win was that Trump appeared to be such a horrible candidate.
The real horror is the fellow Americans you meet along the way.
Speaking of horrible fellow Americans, I'd heard of Slate Star Codex but never read it and always assumed it was affiliated with Slate. I am happy to testify on the latter's behalf in a trademark infringement case.
We definitely had at least one thread about SSC, because I think that's where I learned how to differentiate various Scotts A., notwithstanding the claim (put forth by essear, possibly?) that they're all terrible.
118: I sent in this guest post (and got some criticism in the comments): http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2019_02_24.html#016823
Impeachment would have been great but never was likely. Any number of Republicans between 3 (the minimum to beat the previous impeachment vote, if I remember correctly) and 16 doesn't really matter. It's nice to be able to say things like "86 percent of Republicans supported a coup attempt", as opposed to 84 or 82, but that's about it. I continue to be somewhat optimistic about criminal prosecution. Even aside from recent statements by Senators there's a mountain of evidence of crimes in dozens of jurisdictions.
I'm not trying to sugarcoat things. This sucks. And I'm still confused about what happened to the idea of calling witnesses. But a sucky outcome was always likely, and on the other hand it's not the end of democracy or whatever, or if it is, only in a "straw that breaks the camel's back" sense. Let's see how Biden's term or, hell, the next 6 months goes before worrying all that much about this.
Final comment on the thread linked in 119 is, from Walt:
After catching up on this thread, I just spent a couple of hours aimlessly reading about the two Scotts and the Culture War thread. I regret every second.
Fair warning!
I remember the Culture Club Wars. You never could rest because you couldn't see the attack. If the Karma Chameleon was deployed, you'd step over it without noticing.
You'd come and go. You'd come and go.
113 with the "insane victory out of certain defeat" point is very astute. Graham, Cruz, and other senior figures in the party felt terrible about Trump for most of 2016. It doesn't matter how improbable his victory was - the fact that one of the world's 500 most dumb pieces of shit won the presidential election gave a lot of credit to the R cause, just because he flew the R flag. They imagine total victory forever if anyone else would have flown it, despite a lot of evidence to the contrary.
Anyway, the Culture War is over. The losers decided not to worry about having a culture.
I don't think any of the other guys would've beaten Hillary, and I certainly don't think any of them would have vastly increased their vote totals after such a dismal term. But then any of them would have done a whole lot better with the coronavirus, so who can know what the alternate timeline looks like.
125: On to a thousand Psychic Wars. Blue Öyster Cult >>>> DJT Cult
121: Hah! I completely forgot that I learned about all that through here. It's in the news again because the SSC guy has a substack now where he revealed his real name, and in reaction the NYT published an article about him. I was sad to discover that I immediately knew what it was all about.
yikes to that SSC article. I've definitely linked him before, before realizing he was problematic.
But that NYT article is unnecessarily dickish about exposing his real name. "It wasn't that hard for me, a reporter, to discover his name, so I must publish it!". This, ah, is a take on pseudonymity that makes me jumpy.
I wonder how much effort it would take an outsider to unmask anyone here. I mean, if you downloaded the whole history of comments and filtered by pseudonym you'd have a pretty easy time establishing age, location, family status, and job for several people, but I still think it's hard without understanding some additional context.
Anyway the NYT and several people I read and mostly respect discussing it is why I mentioned it in 117. Saiselgy (speaking of easy to decipher pseudonyms) has several bad takes on it, going so far as to push out a post to his readers at 11:30pm on a Saturday.
130: Saiselgy is a professional. I do think it would require a certain level of commitment to understanding the tone and context which would be hard for a data extracted to get, but maybe I'm wrong.
Saiselgy
I'm almost sure I know who that is, but I'm keeping it quiet.
Let's all agree that anyone that reveals Saiselgy's secret identity is banned from Unfogged. Same rules apply for Superman, Batman, and Opinionated Grandma.
130- sure but he doesn't come here since going pro. When he did I think he was pretty much just another blogger.
CharleyCarp, circa 2005, figured out who I was by matching the cadence of my speech here to the cadence of my speech on a small local news clip that I happened to make my way onto.
But also, ten years later, CharleyCarp solved a generations-old mystery of my grandfather's secret identity and reunited a split family.
Then 23andme and gene banks started generating a huge volume of similar solve-mysteries, but ours was slightly before the curve and was far more delicious, from my perspective.
In turn, I sent him a fruit basket, IIRC.
Are we going to require genetic testing for commenters?
134: Do you count the American Prospect as going pro? He and Ezra still came by here some then.
Ezra, btw, seems to have abandoned Twitter now that he is at the Times.
Like, are we asking their permission before we stealthily remove a used starbucks cup or cigarette from the trash and have the residual spittle sequenced?
Fortunately, I've never written anything that could be misinterpreted out of context.
128: The NYT clearly had the article all "researched" and written, and they dusted it off and published it to punish him for his effrontery in coming back with a new blog.
129: Did you go beyond the NYT article on SSC? SA has written a response on his Substack, which is worth reading. Also (among others) Matty Y. (hmm) and Glenn Greenwald (Hmmm) have responded. Example: the NYT article says SA agrees with Charles Murray on race. No: he agrees with Charles Murray on providing income support for families with children. There a fair amount of "xxx-adjacent" type thinking and out of context quoting in the article.
The Charles Murray example is weird. The actual except (as pulled out by SA) is:
The only public figure I can think of in the southeast quadrant with me is Charles Murray. Neither he nor I would dare reduce all class differences to heredity, and he in particular has some very sophisticated theories about class and culture. But he shares my skepticism that the 55 year old Kentucky trucker can be taught to code, and I don't think he's too sanguine about the trucker's kids either. His solution is a basic income guarantee, and I guess that's mine too.
It's true that coding is dumb as a solution to poverty, and UBI is a much better solution, but that's not the extent of what SA is saying he agrees with. He's also shitting on the 55 year old trucker's intelligence and potentially, ambiguously agreeing that the trucker is just too genetically dumb to learn to code.
More charitably, not genetic dumbness but a lifetime of doing other work.
The quote in 142 shows what's so frustrating about this: the Times article is mendacious, but what SA's saying there is still quite objectionable and the only reason to bring up Murray specifically in the context of genetics and intelligence is if you're racist or trying to get cozy with racists.
Right. It's not that literally everything Murray has ever said is racist, but it is pretty close to true that everything interesting that Murray ever said is racist -- if you want to talk about something non-racist and interesting, Murray isn't going to be your best source for it. At which point referencing Murray for anything carries a strong implication that you're trying to give some credibility to the racist parts of his arguments.
SA is clearly saying that he thinks some class differences are hereditary.
Yes I read that and felt the same. That's one of the quotes that he seemed to think was a defense and really was just digging the hole deeper. Murray "has some very sophisticated theories about class and culture" is pretty much Andrew Sullivan's defense of publishing him and it's bullshit.
I generally have a lot of sympathy for the idea that it's worthwhile listening to and arguing with people who are wrong about stuff, even if they're kind of bad people, so long as they make sense themselves. At a minimum, people like that are helpful for finding problems with your own ideas, in a way that people who agree with you aren't.
Scott Alexander specifically, although he seems as though he should fit in that niche, I've never read anything he wrote and gotten the impression that I'd find out anything interesting if I read more.
He wrote one thing on how there really were Dark Ages. Since I think medievalists are engaged in a long-term process of gaslighting us into thinking that the Middle Ages weren't garbage, I was sympathetic to it.
He's written other stuff that I could completely believe is code for a racist agenda. He wrote a thing about the famous Hungarian scientists who came to the US before WW2, and he pointed out that they were all Jewish, so it wasn't something amazing about Hungarian culture that produced it. Hungarians are all fascists now who want to take credit for the scientists that they drove out by their Jew-hating, so fair enough. But either the text or subtext was that it was genetic. I could imagine it as the first step in a road to full-blown scientific racism, but he doesn't actually go down that road. So who knows?
The most charitable explanation is that he's not a racist, but racists don't bother him. Which seems bad, but trying to make that point involves a bunch of guilt by association that in general is not particularly attractive. The NYT article also has an additional angle that you see frequently -- the idea that Silicon Valley is right-wing. I used to think that the media pushed this line for some cynical pro-conservative reason (the way they push the idea that economists are all right-wing), but they seem to be shifting to using as an angle of attack on Silicon Valley. So I'm not sure what it means.
135
A fellow claiming to be the TOS used to email me from time to time, and more than once (I think) offered conclusive declarations that he had broken HG's pseud. Incorrectly.
In a generation, no one will believe that anyone would have tried, or have been taken in by, the deception practiced by HG's ancestor.
I think there's some value in reminding people that Silicon Valley types aren't systematically left wing. SV is a collection of highly educated people, and that usually means lefty, if you're looking at a broad population group. Because SV is both rich, which pushes people right, and has an idiosyncratic libertarian streak, it's less left-wing than most comparably well-educated groups.
One of the Scott Alexander posts, I think the one where he was being sad about the Culture War thread, he talks about how it's nuts to think of him sympathizing with Nazis, he's Jewish with gay friends and he dated a trans woman once. And he's right that those would be personal facts that would in most contexts mean that someone was very unlikely to be aligned with the political hard right, but as a matter of fact that sort of thing is much less true in the "rationalist"/SV kind of community. (Not that all "rationalists" are Nazi sympathizers by any means, but the kinds of personal correlations you'd rely on in other contexts don't work the same way for them.)
Why doesn't reason ever lead avowed rationalists to be somebody one wouldn't crawl through a trap door to escape sharing a stuck elevator with?
Oh, I think there are decent people who have rationalismed themselves into donating a lot of money to malaria prevention and the like. They're not all bad by any means.
Dylan Matthews is a prominent example of someone rationalist-adjacent who seems pretty great as far as I can tell.
That's a pretty common belief in Rationalist/libertarian thought, isn't it? Individually they have no problem with marginalized groups so how can you say anything they do is racist/sexist/transphobic even if it's promoting people who are "just asking questions" about whether Blacks are intellectually inferior due to genetics? The "prove it with math" approach leaves so many blind spots about systemic issues because none of them personally experience systemic discrimination- they think a system is just a sum of individual actions, and individually they have good intentions, so the system is fine.
In case folks have forgotten, the ancestor claimed to have French Canadian heritage, rather than Eastern European Jewish heritage.
I remain amazed by the extent to which our DNA makes this sort of thing preposterous. I've been working at identifying a fraction the 30k people I match on ancestry, and, because I'm 1/8th French Canadian, a great many are of that ilk (either completely, or less so than me). I keep finding people whose closest common ancestor to me is someone who lived in Quebec in the 17th or early 18th centuries. People who are descended from 18th century Metis trappers in Manitoba, from 18th century free people of color in then-Spanish Louisiana, from 18th century French Detroit, even pre Seven Years War Fort Vincennes. One wouldn't have a DNA match with every person who shares that specific ancestry -- one can possibly have no match to even a 4th cousin, and should generally expect to have no match to an 8th cousin -- but the database already includes tens of thousands of 8th-10th cousins with identifiable matching segments. (And yes, I am always trying to find an alternative explanation for the relationship, but with shared matching in a big database, one can often rule a lot out/in.)
I think Neiwert's term "transmitter" may be a useful one here.
I am saying this ex recto, but I think Silicon Valley is on average far to the left of any other group with comparable demographics. It's a wider spread, and there are high profile right-wingers, like Thiel, but I would say on average Silicon Valley is to the left of Unfogged, for example.
And in the pre-DNA testing era, I worked out who a majority of my fourth cousins are -- a set that includes at least one billionaire and a clutch of actual tattooed carnies. The idea of a genetic component to class seems pretty ridiculous.
158: I know you said that was ex recto, and god knows what I've been saying has been, so I'm not asking for proof or polling or anything. But I'd be interested in specifically what you mean there -- is it more like "Scott Alexander fans are as a group to the left of Unfogged commenters" or "Scott Alexander fans aren't to the left of Unfogged commenters, but they're also not typical of Silicon Valley."
I'm saying nothing about Scott Alexander fans as a group, who I know nothing about. I guess the latter? I know lots about Silicon Valley, and very little about Alexander.
Yeah, I have no idea how one would even get a baseline for that. We don't classify political opinions by particular industries much, other than manufacturing, so it feels like all you're going to have to feed into your Bayes-machine is miscellaneous individuals' voices and occasional ambiguous workplace-political events like Damore, or employees organizing against corporate GOP contributions. Do you compare them to biotech workers in Pittsburgh? What are their opinions?
I think of Silicon Valley politics as similar to mathematicians. Well to the left of center on average, but well to the right of most academic disciplines or unfogged. For one thing there's too many ex-soviets so you get a certain amount of far right stuff you wouldn't get in other areas.
161: Yeah, I was using "Scott Alexander fans" as shorthand for "people who post things on the internet that I associate with the 'rationalist'" community, in an I-know-it-when-I-see-it kind of way. If you don't have a sense of those kind of people, then my question doesn't mean much.
There's this econ gossip site. It didn't have much moderation, so for the usual reasons it became completely overrun with deranged right-wingers. This has the effect of largely driving economists out. So now, it's a haven for deranged right-winger mathematicians (among others), so it's a better gossip site for mathematics than for economics.
Oh, that explains why an Econ rumors site is the only place that comes up when I try to google whether a certain mathematician got denied tenure for being a misogynist asshole. I was so confused!
When you cite Charles Murray's "very sophisticated theories about class and culture" without meaningfully elaborating, you run the risk of people reading those words and deriving from them the obvious meaning. When you talk about "some feminists" being like Voldemort because of their criticism of "Nice Guys," you're inevitably going to be read a certain way -- both by decent people and by assholes -- and both will be right.
Here's the Voldemort piece for the record. (Please don't read it, and don't blame me if you do.) It's about as eloquent a defense of "Nice Guy-ism" as you could imagine. It's very long and empathetic and admirably specific, and it's a bunch of crap. The foundational error is pretty much the same as for all Nice Guy-ism. He points to "Henry," who has had five wives, most of whom he has beaten. And he talks about Henry's enviable success with women.
Henry has four domestic violence charges against him by his four ex-wives and is cheating on his current wife with one of those ex-wives. And as soon as he gets out of the psychiatric hospital where he was committed for violent behavior against women and maybe serves the jail sentence he has pending for said behavior, he is going to find another girlfriend approximately instantaneously.
And this seems unfair. I don't know how to put the basic insight behind niceguyhood any clearer than that.
So who is at fault for the Nice Guy's bad feelings about all of this? Spoiler Alert: It's the feminists.
I haven't read much of this guy, but I did read this whole goddam thing. His mission -- every time I have encountered him -- is to provide a safe space for self-justifications for a certain type of mind.
He's good at it. I bet he makes a ton of money -- much more than a nice guy like me. I still don't envy him, and I wouldn't dream of blaming his critics for causing him.
Anyone that self-consciously "reasonable" must be peddling something monstrous. And you don't cite someone, be it Charles Murray or whoever else, unless they're either 1) literally the only person in human history to have made a particular point, or 2) you want to include them in the circle of acceptable people. Fuck this clown.
What a steaming pile of crap that article is. Certainly reinforces my opinion that there's a huge difference between the two ScottA's (the other one is an interesting thinker who's basically a good person, but has jumped the shark because he puts too much weight on whether people were nice to him or mean to him during the time he accidentally became the main character of the day on twitter).
I think the overall failure of the Metz article is that it's "adjacent" to 20 page posts about Harry Potter that concentrate on how stupid and wrong the rules of quidditch are*. This is what we call "missing the target," though judging from some of the Twitter responses it's pretty much exactly what a big fraction of the NYT audience wants to see.
* And I have read such posts, alas.
The more I think about it the more amazing it is that the Voldemort piece is as long as it is and that at the same time it fails to make even one interesting point that adds anything to the subject. There's not even interesting wrong stuff. It's all just boring rehash that mistakes "controversial" for interesting.
Also the analogy ban is the greatest innovation in the history of human argument.
Oh, I think there are decent people who have rationalismed themselves into donating a lot of money to malaria prevention and the like.
There's something deliciously ironic about the fact that the same people who are super into arguing that there are genetically determined differences between human populations that are useless to try to solve through public policy are also super into eradicating malaria.
173: I'm not sure I see why it's ironic. They also tend to support UBI so that the people destined to drudgery by their supposed genetic stupidity at least won't suffer for it.
175: Just that malaria resistance is one of the best examples of genetic diversity in modern human populations, way better supported than the intelligence stuff they like to point to, and yet they (correctly!) don't think twice about supporting policy interventions to try to eliminate the selective factor leading toward it. Whereas with social policy interventions they're much more cautious, though it is true that they don't reject all possible policy approaches. It's not actually hypocritical, since not all genetic differences have the same implications, it just struck me as funny that it's a lot of the same people involved in both.
167, 171 -- I know I was warned, but I went ahead and read the thing, having managed to pretty much avoid this whole subculture for all these years. And now I never have to read any of this stuff again. One doesn't want to be cruel to the sad and lonely, but I'm not sure I can think of anything right now that's more pathetic than blaming women for not curing these guys' lack of relationship-forming skills.
Wil Wilkinson wrote a great piece on the SSC story, which is funny in that it replicates the SSC style -- long and peppered with personal anecdotes and philosophical references.
Kieren Healy says, "This is like a throwback to the golden age of blogging, in that it is well-written, rather long, and features a group of nerds convinced they are robot geniuses but whose somewhat obsessive views and brittle temperaments should be at least a little worrying to any sober observer."
I've also always been more than a little bemused by the reductive, psychologically and sociologically naive way that economists, finance quants, engineers and analytic philosophers (the ones from the more a priori, less naturalistic side of the tradition) tend to go about thinking about these questions. But those are, without question, the types most attracted to the Overcoming Bias/Less Wrong/Slate Star Codex style of rationalism.Over time, my bemusement grew to annoyance and frustration over what I began to see as a self-congratulatory, increasingly ideological inclination to conflate the idiosyncratic ethos of their homogenous, self-selected community with the generally necessary conditions for intellectual freedom, scientific discovery, and technological innovation. I've observed a tendency to slip into the under-baked assumption that the marketplace of ideas just can't work, and therefore can't bestow its blessings upon humanity, unless it operates along lines that SSC-style rationalists find comprehensible and congenial. The deeper this assumption sinks in, the more it generates wariness verging on hostility toward institutions that traffic in ideas and information on terms rationalists dislike.
178.1: (When I write fact-heavy opinion pieces for the Times, they get fact-checked, which is not pretty rare.)
This is exceptionally ambiguous!
178: Yeah, the journalistic principle involved in the anonymity thing seems obvious to me. You don't write a story focused on a public figure without including his name. It's a no-brainer. The question is: Was Siskind a public figure under his name? I don't think the answer to that is as simple as Siskind makes it out to be -- but it is, in fact, as simple as the NYT writer makes it out to be. Siskind's name wasn't in the NYT until long after he was entirely, truly, unquestionably out of the closet.
Online, I used to be a lot more sensitive than I am now about my identity -- precisely because there was a time when doing otherwise could have gotten me into a lot of trouble professionally. Those days are (mostly) gone, but even now, it's still much tougher to track me down than it was Siskind. Had I embarked on Siskind's path, I would have done so with the understanding that I was going to be outed -- which he was, long before the NYT got involved.
I'm still pretty sympathetic to his underlying anonymity concern: being a therapist really is different from other jobs and therapists tend to be on the rather extreme end in terms of having no public personal internet presence. And I don't think I could continue seeing a therapist if I found out he was Scott Alexander.
181: One solution would be to not be a dick in the first place. The other solution is to take pains to be an anonymous dick. He did neither.
I'm still pretty sympathetic to his underlying anonymity concern: being a therapist really is different from other jobs and therapists tend to be on the rather extreme end in terms of having no public personal internet presence.
Sure, that's a sympathetic desire. What I believed from the Wil Wilkinson piece is that Scott Alexander hadn't thought much (or, at least, didn't do a good job of explaining his thinking) about (1) what were his motivations/emotions motivating his desire for anonymity, (2) what did he want to ask of other people in terms of maintaining anonymity, (3) how should he conduct himself such that his requests would be reasonable and understood.
None of those elements are unsympathetic; they are all perfectly normal elements of irrationality, but together they created a much more dramatic situation than would have happened if he'd been more prepared in advance.
182 is a succinct version of what I had in mind in my (3) above.
I think what makes it not unjust is your last sentence there. You couldn't keep seeing a therapist if he were Scott Alexander, I am guessing because you would know things about him (the issues he's committed to debating, the people whose opinions he values) that would mean he was a bad therapist for you. His keeping that secret wouldn't mean he was a good therapist for you, it would just mean that you didn't know the facts that would let you assess that he's a bad therapist for you.
I think he had a choice between being a charismatic internet figure and being able to assure himself that his patients wouldn't know things about him that would let them form opinions about him, but the right way to resolve that in terms of being fair to the patients isn't to give him expanded privacy rights.
I don't know, I think one can envision the initial story perfectly well without using the guy's real name.
I've read almost nothing by the guy, but even the Voldemort piece linked above has him talking about patients -- maybe in anonymized and composite enough form that it elides professional restrictions, but out beyond what patients actually want. It's not unreasonable to think that a patient might feel differently about confiding in a famous blogger who uses his excerpts from patients' stories to make broader points about society.
I shouldn't take so long writing comments, and should definitely preview before posting. It's a good thing that I'm posting with a pseud so no one will know what a dope I can be.
Oh, I agree with 182. I think also that if at the initial interview with the reporter the guy had said 'I think it's important for my patients that my real name not appear in the story' the journalist would have probably just nodded. Because, as Wilkinson speculates, the original point of the thing wasn't to out this specific guy for being a dick, but to tell a story about a weird subculture. Turns out the subculture was more toxic that the reporter had thought at first, but that's certainly all on the blogger.
The Wilkinson piece is quite good and quite long, as advertised. Thanks, Nick.
I think also that if at the initial interview with the reporter the guy had said 'I think it's important for my patients that my real name not appear in the story' the journalist would have probably just nodded.
In fact, unless I've missed something, this is more or less what happened. Siskind wigged out, sicced his flying monkeys on the journalist (and the editor!), and they didn't publish his name. I'd go a little further than Wilkinson on this and say that the NYT, in the face of real provocation, bent over backwards to cut Siskind a break. (But I don't think the NYT would ever have published a story like this without the name.)
If I were to do like Wilkinson and try to get into the minds of the NYT folk, I'd characterize their thinking this way:
1. This guy seems really pissed about having his name in the newspaper.
2. We obviously can't run a story about a public person without his name.
3. But the guy does have a legit point about there being a difference between being an easily identified person in a public forum and being a public figure whose name is in the NYT.
4. Fuck it. It's not an important enough story to wade into this morally ambiguous territory.
I think they can and do run stories all the time about public figures known to the public under different names. John Wayne and Groucho Marx come to mind. The Flophouse story, which I had occasion to revisit not long ago, mentions Becks and her keeping her identity from her employer. The question here would be what the story is actually about. Once the guy was acting pissed, and not giving much of a justification, I think Wilkinson's got it right.
John Wayne and Groucho Marx come to mind.
I don't know this reference, and I don't know the how The Flophouse story came about. (And don't remember it well.) At that point, I was waaaay too concerned about my own anonymity to get involved with meetups.
But as a guess, I'll propose that maybe the Flophouse reporter was interested in getting access that was only available by promising anonymity. And the story wasn't meaningfully about Becks.
That wasn't the case with Siskind. This story amounted to a personality profile, placing him in a public milieu and discussing his public positions -- and the story didn't require his cooperation.
Different thing. On a better blog, analogies like this would be banned.
John Wayne and Groucho Marx are both professional names, although I don't know if either continued to use their birth names in private life.
Oh. I thought that was code for something. John Wayne's name was John Wayne. Marion Robert Morrison's identity was never concealed from the public.
185: I don't think I agree with that. People can be good in a professional setting while having personal opinions which they keep separate from their professional behavior. I know mathematicians who I think are good and admirable mathematicians (and I don't just mean that they are good at research, I mean they're a positive influence on the profession, who I would happily recommend as an advisor) who have reprehensible private political beliefs that they do not let interfere with their professional behavior. I think it would be much easier to be such a person's student if their political opinions were kept secret. I can imagine that someone who would be a good therapist for me has private opinions or beliefs which would not affect the therapeutic relationship so long as I'm not aware of them. But I think once I knew about those opinions it would effect the therapeutic relationship.
At any point in his career, John Wayne could have been destroyed if his fans discovered his real name. It was only because the press was as invested in his mythos as everyone else that his secret was preserved.
Just reread the flophouse story, and it is really weird that anonymity was freely granted there but not for Alexander. 193 is probably right though, on twitter people have been saying that reporters really care about the distinction between a "subject" and a "source" and that sources can be anonymous for basically any reason while subjects can't ever be anonymous. To me this is one of these weird technical rules of journalism that I don't think makes any sense (and which is never going to sound convincing to non-journalists), but apparently it's something they care a lot about.
subjects can't ever be anonymous
As Siskind himself explains, subjects are anonymous all the time. Siskind cites the example of sex workers, because he's a clever and evil fuck who wants to convey that he wasn't given the common courtesy one would afford to a prostitute. But it's routine with rape victims, for instance.
Whoops, that was me. I was pondering writing something else that needed to be ... pseudonymous.
Ha, here's Scott Alexander defending racism in an email and adding "(I will appreciate if you NEVER TELL ANYONE I SAID THIS, not even in confidence. And by "appreciate", I mean that if you ever do, I'll probably either leave the Internet forever or seek some sort of horrible revenge.)"
(As usual, linking is not an endorsement.)
I think this is a pretty essential difference between the ScottA's, I'm pretty confident that Aaronson's private views are exactly as problematic as his public views and that he's always being sincere and honest, while Alexander pretty clearly has private views that are even worse than his public ones and is often being mendacious and insincere. This means that when Aaronson says ridiculous wrong things you at least learn something about where these problematic beliefs are coming from (e.g. his recent bizarre post about The Queen's Gambit), whereas with Alexander you just learn some tricky bullshit for how to justify problematic beliefs.
I think the NYT would have been completely in the wrong to out Alexander back when he was anonymous, and it isn't even close. I'm actually shocked to hear people make excuses for it, that "it's a rule". It's a rule that they need to carry water for the Republican Party, too, but that doesn't make it a rule.
Alexander was entirely famous for blogging under that name, and nothing else. Just because he's an asshole doesn't make it okay. If people want to Google him after the article and figure out who he is, that's not the NYT's problem, but they were completely out of line It's the one thing that makes me feel sympathetic to Alexander.
Obviously Adams is even worse than Alexander.
I hadn't been familiar with Aaronson, but the Queen's Gambit thing cracked me up. I liked the show a lot, and am prepared to defend it against (entirely reasonable) claim that it's fundamentally sexist, but Aaronson view is that the sexism is what makes it so great.
205: You, me and the NYT agree that it was best not to out Siskind when the publication first approached him about the story. (I would also let Google off the hook for outing him long before the NYT considered it, and you seem to agree, but I would be curious what your logic is on that.)
The question where I bet we disagree is: Who decides? I think that Siskind doesn't get to decide (for example) whether there are obvious racist implications of his writing, but I think it's okay for the NYT to examine that issue if it wants to. Siskind likewise doesn't get to decide whether he is portrayed as anonymous -- and I think the NYT did a fine job of examining that issue.
205: You, me and the NYT agree that it was best not to out Siskind when the publication first approached him about the story.
Is that true? I thought the NYT was going to out him and only altered course after (and because) he deleted the blog.
209: I'm not aware of any reason to believe that the NYT called off the story because of the blog deletion. But if that were the case, I don't see how it changes my point.