the only countries shock therapy "worked" in are the ones which got EU membership and a flood of Western Euro dollars, and even there it's not without problems.
Who's the rich Argentine neighbor willing to flood the country with investment and offer them open borders, provided it screws over its own poor enough and sells enough public assets?
Estonian GDP/capita increased by about 200% in the decade before Estonia joined the EU and by about 130% in the following decade, so ascribing its success to EU membership does not to me seem like a self-evident conclusion.
The Baltic countries had a large population exodus to Western Europe starting in mid-90s, so GDP/capita is inflated by both lower population numbers and remittances. Of course, EU transfers also helped.
I think this is essentially false. Most people in the developed world have no clue how rich they are by global standards, will often deny it when pointed out, and have no idea how poor the global poor really are.
"Bryan Caplan thinks this can’t be true: after all, practically nobody moves to poorer areas, automatically giving themselves higher relative income than their neighbors?"
Isn't there a recognizable type of migrant (whether an immigrant or from, like, Alabama or Iowa) who moves back home not because they actually miss the place, but because they prefer being a big fish in a small pond to being a small fish in a big pond?
I've moved abroad as an international school teacher for kind of this reason. We were barely getting by in the US, now I earn nominally less salary but now our lifestyle includes taking
vacations and we are putting away a hugely increased chunk of savings every year.
However, I'd say our increased happiness comes mostly from increased purchasing power, not from the pure fact of being richer than the people around us. I do take some satisfaction out of being comfortable enough with our budget to give generously to people around me, but it's not the main effect. Also the happiness gains are offset somewhat by the difficulty of being far from family in a foreign culture.
I could second every sentence of this post. I tried to move back to the US once, and my savings began to evaporate. I honestly have no idea where. It was terrifying. Being free of the stress of seeing your money dry up before your eyes is definitely a major plus.
> Isn't there a recognizable type of migrant (whether an immigrant or from, like, Alabama or Iowa) who moves back home not because they actually miss the place, but because they prefer being a big fish in a small pond to being a small fish in a big pond?
I suppose he’s talking about local relativity, staying where you are and comparing to the locals. Anybody who has been to New York isn’t going to feel rich just because he absconded to Idaho. He may well have a better standard of living but if he’s driven by status, he won’t feel higher status in his head because status seekers would try to make it in New York.
Caplan is also wrong because the relative income that matters for status is the pre tax, pre non discretionary income. And obviously housing matters.
I think people like "passport bros" would also fit into this category, where people are moving from HCOL countries to LCOL countries.
At a more local level is plausible the benefits of moving from say California to Mississippi are far worse than just moving from the USA to Thailand so people who are inclined to move to a poorer area just move to another country rather than moving around within their country.
>At a more local level is plausible the benefits of moving from say California to Mississippi are far worse than just moving from the USA to Thailand so people who are inclined to move to a poorer area just move to another country rather than moving around within their country.
I don't think this is true, because there are much greater barriers to such emigration than there are moving states, both legal and practical. Not everyone who wants permission to emigrate is granted it, whereas there are no restrictions on interstate travel, there are no language barriers between US states, people are far more likely to be able to remain in the same line of business when traveling between states, and to build social circles with people they relate to.
For certain people, the advantages of moving countries can be much greater. But the barriers and disadvantages are also correspondingly greater.
Lots of people move from California to nominally poorer states. It's hardly unreasonable to sell your million dollar house in Van Nuys, CA, where you are paying private school tuition, to buy a half million house in the Dallas exurbs where your kids will go to public school.
I think it's actually quite common for people to move to poorer areas when they don't have professional or social obligations keeping them in one place. Think of all the digital nomads in Mexico City or Peru. Or retirees moving to Florida.
If you could tell me their Internet access provider, I'd be thankful. I organised a conference there in 2015, and Internet access (speedy enough for videos) was a bit of an issue.
You might thrive at this altitude, but can your wife carry a child to term there? Can your baby then thrive?
I visited Cuzco when I was 19 in 1978 with a tour group and did okay, but the middle-aged African-American couple in our group both had to be evacuated to Lima at sea level.
Children born there thrive, unless of course they carry a recessive sickle-cell gene, which one of the African-American visitors might have. Did SS want me to say that to score some sort of weird point?
At any rate, no problem with doing mathematics at that height - people are just advised to arrive on Saturday if activities start on Monday. It’s not even high enough for hard drives to have problems (try 4000m for that) - and that is of course less relevant now.
Evidently, you aren't familiar with the research on evolutionary adaptations to high altitude done by Prof. Cynthia Beall of Case Western and others. From Wikipedia:
"Cynthia Beall is the leading scientist in the study of high-altitude adaptation in humans, particularly in places where there is little air to breathe. Among the Tibetans the first thing that she discovered was that they could live at high levels without having high hemoglobin concentrations or large chests, they had high birth-weighted babies, and no complications of mountain sickness. Unlike most humans who migrate to high altitude, the Tibetans do not exhibit the elevated haemoglobin concentrations to cope up with oxygen deficiency, but they inhale more air with each breath and breathe more rapidly, and retain this unusual breathing and elevated lung-capacity throughout their lifetime.[4][5] Their high levels (mostly double) of nitric oxide in the blood increase their blood vessels to dilate for enhanced blood circulation.[6] An astonishing discovery of Beall is the convergent evolution in humans from her studies on other highlanders such as the Amhara in the high-plateau regions of northwest Ethiopia, the Omro people in the southwest Ethiopia, and the Aymara of the American Andes. She found that these groups had adapted to low oxygen environment very differently from the Tibetans.[1][7] Physiological conditions such as resting ventilation, hypoxic ventilatory response, oxygen saturation, and haemoglobin concentration are significantly different between the Tibetans and the Aymaras.[8] The Amharans exhibit elevated haemoglobin levels, like Andeans and lowlander peoples at high altitudes, while the Andeans have increased haemoglobin level like normal people in the highlands.[9] All these observations show that different people adapted to high altitude in different genetic and physiological responses.[10]"
It's a standard observation that in high altitude South American cities like La Paz, the white people tend to live at the bottom of the canyon at the lowest elevation, while the indigenous Indians live at the higher elevations. Leftwing governments in countries like Bolivia have been installing ski lift-like gondolas as mass transit to make commuting from the high Indian suburbs to the low-lying business district easier for their constituents.
People who are indigenous to the Altiplano thrive at Cuzco's 11,000 foot elevation, but other people indigenous to lower elevations can vary considerably in their response to high elevations. (Sickle cell is hardly the only reason some people might be daunted by Cuzco's altitude).
My father, for example, was a rugged outdoorsman up to about 10,000 feet, but fell off dramatically above that. For example, at age 25 he tried to climb 14,500 foot Mt. Whitney, but only got to Trail Crest at 13,777 and then had something of a physical crisis there.
Being sensitive to the fact that humans vary in how well they do at high altitudes seems prudent and considerate.
No, it actually is harder for women to give birth and for infants to thrive at high altitude (unless they have evolutionary adaptations to altitude). This is one reason that places like Cuzco, and more generally highland South America, had fewer Spanish settlers (and consequently, a much higher proportion of indigenous population today) than the lowlands.
There's a half million people that live in the city. People are able to give birth there...
I think people are able to get acclimated over a few days so your visit might not be representative. There's people working in Cuzco hospitals doing heart surgery or at the Cuzco airport directing planes. I'm sure that it's possible to build out Tableau dashboards or take zoom calls under the same conditions.
Sure, it's obviously possible, but is moving to 11,000 feet of elevation an optimal choice to do the kind of Work From Home jobs that ACT readers tend to do?
And even if you are at 100% capacity at 3,400 meters, what about people who are or might become important to you?
For instance, my uncle built his retirement dream house in the Sierras at 9,000 feet, but then it turned out his wife could no longer handle the altitude. That was a very unfortunate situation.
There are a lot of advantages to living at higher altitudes, especially at lower latitudes. E.g., Cuzco, near the equator has average high temperatures around 70 F year round. That's pretty pleasant.
But when thinking about places to move to, you need to take into consideration a lot of factors, many of which don't seem to be obvious, as suggested by these angry responses.
I studied a for semester in Cuzco in uni. And yeah, we were able to learn just fine. Myself and a few American-born classmates did 5+ mile hikes that went as high as 16,000 feet without any issues. None of us were anything more than hobby hikers.
10 years later I visited again with my pregnant wife and 1 year old son. And they both were fine with the altitude too.
This. Some people will have altitude issues, and retirees should be careful (that includes some people who were born there, moved elsewhere and haven't been there for a long time). The limitations are physical - never heard of any mental effects at that altitude.
Chronic altitude sickness is a thing, but it generally happens far further up. The difference between life at 4300 (say) and at 3500 meters above the sea level is in some ways more significant than that between 3500 meters and 0 meters.
Many years ago, I remember coming across an online piece written by an American, praising the choice to live in a Brazilian favela (though not necessarily permanently).
It's dirt cheap, located within a city, fun and colorful, and just as safe as anywhere else in Brazil! What's not to like?
Some Brazilian commented, saying this was the funniest thing he had ever read, and that he hoped the author enjoy his favela; as for him, he was moving to Denmark.
That exchange really made me think. From the perspective of the Brazilian guy praising the favela was ridiculous. How come you have to be a foreigner to see it differently?
For the American in that anecdote, we assume a location independent source of income. For the Brazilian, income in a favela would be no worse than in the rest of the same city.
A location independent source of income is the premise of this entire thread. It typically means one of two things:
(1) You work remotely, often as a programmer or similar.
(2) You're living off interest.
Here's how you can get to (2): pretend your income is 1/3 of what it is now. In other words, pretend you are poor. You must live on that budget. Unless you're already very poor, it's possible. Some people live like that. So now you have 2/3 of your income to invest. In about 10 years, your investments will have reached the point that they generate an income equal to what you're spending each year (which, remember, is 1/3 of what you spend now). Now you can live off interest forever.
If you replace 1/3 with 1/2 it takes 20 years instead of 10.
There's also the phenomenon of so-called gentrification, where intrepid trendy types move to a dodgy area of a city, because property there is cheaper and maybe they like "vibrancy" (menacing looking characters sitting around on front steps, strange people directing traffic, etc). Then over time more and more of these yuppies move in until the original locals are priced out. There are several examples of this in London, and it's probably the same in any large city.
There is also range compression to consider. Some people might prefer living in, say, Mountain View rather than Los Altos but would not be okay living in Gilroy. The fact that extreme versions of "big fish, small pond" don't seem to happen a lot doesn't mean that there isn't some form of the effect.
Isn't retiring abroad as an expat kind of a thing also? Once when my wife and I were traveling in Ecuador we stayed at a lodge run by a guy who had retired into a life of Ecuadorian luxury on an NYC school teacher pension (he didn't do the work at the lodge, it basically just gave him a constant stream of gringos to go birding with).
I know people that moved to "poorer" countries, on retirement or close to it, and while I can not definitely know their motives, lower cost of life seems to be one of the factors. In fact, I myself moved from California ("rich" state, very high cost of living) to another, relatively "poorer" stare with lower cost of living. And while it's not related directly to my neighbors income, having a better house for 1/3 the price sure seems like a good benefit. Of course, I wouldn't move to Rwanda or Albania some place like that just because people are poorer there, but generally I think Caplan is wrong if he claims nobody moves to places that are "poorer". Within some conditions, a lot of people do.
The small rustbelt city I grew up in on the shore of lake Erie has a steady stream of boomer retirees who made their money on the coasts or in Florida then retired to Ohio. I've spoken with a few of them when I'm home visiting family about why. The low CoL is a big factor; they can build a spawling estate on the lakeshore for less than a medium sized condo in NYC/SF etc. Several also mentioned, whithout prompting, that there are no jews and very few blacks and immigrants.
Yeah, it was also a common topic of discussion in the Russian-speaking software community prior to 2022: those who moved to the US make more and have better standard of living in absolute terms, but those in Russia (or other post-soviet countries) have a significantly wider gap between them and the rest of the population. People would have different opinions on it naturally, but it was explicitly acknowledged as one of the pros of staying home vs moving to the States by both sides of the argument.
I knew a guy in college who explicitly planned to get hired by the Malaysian branch of an American company on the American MBA pay scale, move back home to Malaysia, and live like a king.
I also think you can't just change your reference class by moving. Sure, you're richer than your neighbours, but to all of your family & old friends & classmates you've now moved to the ghetto.
I think this is the big thing, yeah. Also, it might have worked better in the past, but now you can't really prevent constant information inflow re: all the people who live elsewhere & make more than you anyway.
The operative words are is "moving back". You need some cultural claim of legitimacy to be integrated in the poorer society. "I went to the city, got rich, and now I am back home" is a story people can stomach. "I was born in a rich country/state, worked there, and now I retire here on a pension ten times as big as what I would get for the same work here, now please give me the respect that is due" will not work.
There's also a whole "down-shifting" movement where people move to SEA and live cheaply. Big chunk of the satisfaction is actually a feeling of relief of you being "on top of the game".
Source: lived in Bali for 5 years. The downside of being "on top" is no longer having motivation to grow
Regarding 10, the actual latest news is that inflation has again risen to almost 4% in march, though some of it is explained by seasonal factors.
On the other hand, the government has pretty succesfully reduced capital controls via an agreement with the IMF, leading to a strong revaluation of the currency (in the "real" exchange rate, the official one went up briefly and then came back down), meaning they shouldn't be spending reserves propping it up.
The Economist in writing about that IMF deal this week called it a bold but risky move on Melei's part. They think it has as much chance of backfiring as working, for reasons that TBH I don't entirely grok. But the Economist retains its organizational roots and covers macro-level financial stuff both regularly and thoroughly so I tend to have some respect for their judgement on such topics.
Thousands of people moved from San Francisco to poorer areas (Texas and Idaho) when they could do so and keep thier high incomes. Many people retire to Mexico (or from NYC to Florida) where their retirement goes further. Clearly there is a wealth effect, where having more money than is "expected for the area" lets you live a happier life.
Was that to get higher relative income, or just for normal absolute reasons like SF having high crime, or being able to afford a bigger house in Idaho?
Is "higher relative income" some technical term that i don't know? In plain English "afford a bigger house" is one result of having a "higher relative income"
Well, there are two reasons you might be able to afford a bigger house (in one location relative to another):
1. People there might have less money than you.
2. Houses there might be more abundant.
Only the first one is a question of relative income. If you move from China to the United States, your relative income will drop fairly dramatically, but you'll be able to afford more Pop Tarts than you could before.
Well, even the first might not be an issue of relative income. You might just want a bigger house than you have now, without caring a whit about how well off your new neighbors are.
It has a plain meaning: having a high income relative to the people around you. Caplan appears to be talking specifically about the phenomenon of being happier *because everyone around you is poorer than you*. This isn't the same as having greater purchasing power, although of course the two things do correlate.
(But they don't necessarily correlate all that much: If you move from a middle-class neighborhood in Los Angeles to a poor neighborhood in Los Angeles, you'll get some more purchasing power with respect to housing, and of course most of your neighbors will have a lower yearly income, but food and cars and clothes and utilities and vacations and such will still cost the same, and your car insurance will likely go up! So you'll have to really really get an ego boost from that price per square foot advantage plus the fact that your neighbors' annual salaries are lower than yours.)
> or being able to afford a bigger house in Idaho?
Since land is limited, over the short term housing is a "relative terms" item.
Inside of a currency union, this is also pretty much what we'd expect to see. Poorer areas should have lower prices for non-tradable goods like housing and personal services.
This also makes the pure form of the relative income hypothesis difficult to test. A big fish in a small pond will probably have better access to local resources (land) and personal services (haircuts, lawn mowing), and those provide meaningful, measurable increases in material standard of living beyond a simple feeling of status or financial superiority.
I'd go so far as to suggest that very few people can realistically conduct that experiment and choose to live in a poorer area in a way that makes their material situation worse in every single aspect except for status.
"Bigger house" and "higher/lower relative income" is the same thing said in two different ways. In SF, you compete for the house with unicorn millionaires and VC-funded crypto bros, in Idaho, you'd compete with regular people with regular incomes. There's no way a market can sustain a level of pricing if there are no people with enough income to pay it. So, it areas where incomes are lower, the prices would be lower too. Plus, of course, less people itching to live in high-cost area and overbidding for the privilege, which is also a contributing thing of the same origin.
No. "Bigger house" can mean "same relative income, but houses are cheaper here because they're in less demand".
The median household income in Lancaster, CA (where I live) is about the same as in Hawthorne, CA (where I sort of work), but houses in Hawthorne are about twice as expensive in Hawthorne. Same relative income, but lots of people are willing to pay a larger fraction of their income to live Hawthorne because it's convenient to the beach, many good jobs, cultural amenities, other cool people, etc whereas Lancaster is in a literal and cultural desert with maybe three good employers.
This is true for two cities that are next door to each other. However, if they are at any distance, then the setup that you have now - whether essentially the same set of people, obviously having the same common income profile, can live either in Lancaster or Hawthorne - can not occur. If you take Idaho/Texas and SF, then the incomes aren't the same, because there's not a lot of people that commute there and back for work from Idaho to SF and back, and thus the situation of "maybe three good employers" (which of course not true for Idaho but I take it as a rhetorical exaggeration of the real income differential) leads to relatively lower incomes in one place and higher incomes in another.
Hawthorne and Lancaster are not "next door". They are separated by about a hundred kilometers, a mountain range, and 2-3 hours of rush-hour traffic. It is not practical to commute between the two, unless you happen to own an airplane. Both cities do have convenient airports, but unless everyone else is flying stealth planes I'm the only one who actually does that.
People who live in Lancaster, generally work in Lancaster or one of the neighboring communities, with some commuters but not into the heart of the LA basin. Many of whom could get jobs in either city if they liked (they both have e.g. a substantial aerospace-industry presence), and at similar pay. Some people want to live in an apartment in a cosmopolitan city, others prefer a house in a suburban or rural town. And some want a nice house in a big cosmopolitan city, which they'll bid up to a stratospheric price even though their classmates who took the job in the high desert are making the same money and paying half as much for housing.
I think the phenomenon in 7 has to be split to be precise:
Areas with lower income and lower costs of living are not necessarily the same (although usually highly correlated). The fact that people move to areas with lower costs of living seems obvious. If I have a remote job and move from SF to Lisbon where everything costs half, that makes a lot of sense. In Lisbon both average income and average costs of living are lower.
But the claim seems to be: people would also move from SF to London, where costs of living are similar, but everyone else makes less money. Hence any gain in happiness/utility would not come from affording more things than before, but from affording more things than peers.
I like that you clarified a distinction that most here seem to have missed, but there is an even further distinction in the original claim (as written) that you have also missed. It's not about making more money than your peers but more money than your "social circle". These days, it's not uncommon for much of one's social circle to exist outside the physical neighborhood where they reside. Now if you move to London and spend all our time in a neighborhood pub and the other regulars become your new social circle then you might have moved up in relative wealth, but if you mostly keep the same friends as before, moving to a poorer city or neighborhood doesn't test the claim.
There is a significant wealth effect in being "the Joneses" that everyone else is keeping up with. The psychic freedom to spend on what you want to, and not feeling like you are missing out, certainly contribute to overall happiness.
I think that is also why rural life appeals to the semi-rich: when you go down to the diner or country club, it doesn't matter if you have 10 acres of unusable rocks or 100 acres of corn and $100K in farm equipment - you can still max out the local available conspicuous consumption.
> section from Walter Isaacson’s Musk biography claiming that his father Errol, previously a successful engineer, suddenly became a crackpot in his forties:
The 40s are a bit early for age-related cognitive decline, but they're also late for schizophrenia. Is there any commonly-accepted psychological or medical condition that would cause someone to become a crackpot in their forties?
> Where are the people who coincidentally ended up living in the slums and love it?
It's not common, but I regularly hear about people who retire to low COL areas, up to and including poorer countries like Mexico where 'their dollar goes a lot further'. It's not a pure example of relative income mattering because of purchasing power parity effects, but I think it nudges in that direction.
Besides this, however, why should relative income be measured with respect to one's neighbourhood? To me, the intuitive description brings to mind one's peer group, but that's flexible and itself income-dependent. Rich people get invitations to parties where even richer people circulate.
To intentionally exploit the relative income effect by 'moving to a slum', you'd have to intentionally cut yourself off from family and former friends and consciously avoid social climbing, Seems a bit of a tough call, and also a move more likely to be made by someone already unhappy.
> Is there any commonly-accepted psychological or medical condition that would cause someone to become a crackpot in their forties?
Untreated bipolar can worsen over a lifetime. Science fiction fans may remember the infamous _Last Dangerous Visions_ anthology that Harlan Ellison somehow failed to publish for something like 50 years - it nominally came out last year posthumously, with its main point of interest being J. Michael Straczynski's long memoir of his association with Harlan Ellison, in which he describes how he knew Ellison had bipolar disorder within hours of meeting him, but it took decades for it to slowly grind down Ellison, taking away his ability to write novels and then stories (because the manic cycles increasingly failed to last long enough to finish anything substantial), leading to grossly inappropriate behavior like groping Connie Willis or compulsive shopping of nerd trinkets, and finally, in old age, to a suicide attempt with a gun, after which Straczynski was able to use a psychiatric hold to force him into going to a psychiatrist for diagnosis. The most tragic part is that the drug treatments were apparently starting to work and Ellison was finally able to write again... when he got hit by an unrelated stroke, declined, and died of another.
Anyway, I don't know about the stories, but the Ellison memoir is well worth reading.
I grew up reading Harlan, thought he was quite talented, wondered why he rarely wrote long pieces and then became sad when I learned what a jerk he could be. Bipolar at least *explains* a bunch of this...
> I grew up reading Harlan, thought he was quite talented, wondered why he rarely wrote long pieces and then became sad when I learned what a jerk he could be.
I too sometimes wondered what was up with Ellison and why he never wrote any novels after his initial batch of juvenilia... but to the extent that I thought about it, I wrote it off as a mix of a perfectionist personality, performing a role as the Brooklyn infant terrible of SF, and too much Hollywood money & fun times. After all, Ellison would not be the first writer to have been ruined by easy screenwriting money, the lure of seeing your fiction *truly* immortalized and influential on the silver screen (no SF short story would ever have the impact of a really successful Star Trek episode or movie), and the tempting lifestyle of being a Famous Writer in LA, as opposed to the hard work and risk of grinding out another novel. Somewhat like Douglas Adams, who apparently deeply enjoyed being Douglas Adams and hosting dinners to wax eloquent at, rather than sitting down to actually *write*, and so had a busy active life that involved a lot less writing than it could have if he had more of a work ethic like, say, Terry Pratchett.
So bipolar never came to mind for me as a possible explanation until he announced the diagnosis publicly some time before his death. (Although now that I write that, maybe I should cast a more skeptical eye over biographical accounts of Douglas Adams...)
This makes Harlan Ellison a good example of how bipolar is the dark matter of highly successful writers: we know it's there in large quantities from the surveys and statistics, but we can be staring right at a case for half a century, in retrospect looking obvious, and never even think of it, assuming that the long stretches of depression are just the writer gestating new pieces or enjoying the lifestyle or busy with other things or the symptoms are being 'a jerk', while insiders do their best to hide it from the rest of us (like how Straczynski continually covered for & bailed out Ellison, and never said a word publicly about what he'd seen until the end).
Now that I read this, imagine if George R. R. Martin is actually bipolar and struggling with long depression bouts and that's why we don't have Winds of Winter yet but we're all complaining. Huh.
I don't think it is simply just that writers get seduced by the lifestyle of being a famous writer.
I think that people differ by how many good novels they have in themselves. Tolkien wrote the Lord of the Rings over a decade, and while he lived for quite a while after publication, he did not use that time to churn out more epic fantasy trilogies. And that is totally okay, human genius is not a production line.
My feeling is that Douglas Adams is kind of similar. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was tremendously successful, but over the next four sequels there was some decline, IMHO.
Terry Pratchett published a tremendous amount of Discworld novels which were pretty solid -- I think that his best later ones often worked by introducing new characters and settings (Small Gods is novel #13, for example).
But there is a certain trap of a writer writing a great novel and the publishing endless sequels, and I like to think that both Tolkien and Adams knew when to stop instead of milking their franchise dry.
How many letters did he write after? It seems to me that he spent most of that time imagining more stuff about his world and put those into letters, or into his drawer. That's how we got The Silmarillion (and other posthumous publications).
Tolkien was I think in it for the worldbuilding more than the storytelling. He buckled down and wrote one good children's novel and one amazingly good adult meganovel because he knew that worldbuilding unadorned by storytelling was only a private fancy, but after that mostly just did story-fragments to flesh out the worldbuilding.
Which was enough because those novels were good enough to bring a lot of people around to the view that, hey, I kind of want to see more of that world even if it isn't packaged into shiny perfect stories.
If he'd been born a generation later, he might have been a first-rate writer of RPG settings, a la M.A.R. Barker.
> My feeling is that Douglas Adams is kind of similar. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was tremendously successful, but over the next four sequels there was some decline, IMHO.
I don't think that's a good example because what I said was that it was bad that he didn't write more. I didn't say what he didn't write was just more Hhgttg. You are correct that the later Hitchhikers were definite dropoffs and we probably aren't missing much compared to if Adams had milked another Hhgttg or two out of himself. Blood from a stone, etc. However, he could, and did, write more than just Hitchhikers stuff. I liked the Dirk Gentlys, for example, and his contributions to various games were interesting, and _Last Chance To See_ was pretty interesting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Chance_to_See). _The Meaning of Liff_ still gets brought up occasionally.
And, of course, that's just what we know of; we cannot know what he would have done if he had been more industrious. When he dropped dead of a heart attack at age 49 in 2001, he hardly looked like he was an exhausted creatively-dead burnout case. Plenty of writers do a lot of good work, sometimes their best work, after 49. (For comparison, Terry Pratchett died at 66 in 2015, so had he died at 49 like Adams, then he would've died in 1998; that means we would've lost: fully half of the Discworld novels and almost all of the award-winning/nominated ones, a lot of ancillary Discworld material like all of the _Science of Discworlds_, Baxter's _Long Earth_ series, several award-winning documentaries, his Alzheimers & assisted-suicide activism... And this is despite 66 being quite young, well below his life expectancy and at an age where plenty of fiction writers are still producing noted works!)
> I'd guess that Flowers for Algernon was more impactful than any single Star Trek episode.
...But only because Flowers for Algernon got adapted again and again and again into shows and movies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowers_for_Algernon#Adaptations (For example, 'Flowers for Algernon' is alluded to prominently in _End of Evangelion_ - but only to the Japanese title for the *movie adaptation*, _Charly_.)
The melancholy fate of many really successful SF/F works is, even when the original story is still technically read rather than plunged into complete obscurity, to see the book version overwritten and erased by the successful film version. Even the readers of the books can no longer read them as written. (And I don't mean things like Lucas retconning Darth Vader into Luke's father so _A New Hope_ comes off as entirely different when you as a later viewer 'know' that Darth Vader is Luke's father and this is supposed to be a whole cycle of 'the tragedy of Anakin Skywalker'.) For example, in Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life", was it time-travel precognition, as it was in the movie adaptation _Arrival_? Most people will tell you that it is, even though it makes no sense when you read the story closely: https://gwern.net/story-of-your-life And
Or, was it ruby slippers... or silver, in _The Wonderful Wizard of Oz_? I know people who have read the book - one of the most successful children's books ever - who will tell you that they were, of course, ruby. And if you allude to 'silver slippers', no one will have any idea what you're talking about (despite showing up again and again in the later novels).
Speaking of children's books, probably the most successful ones were the Harry Potter books, and no one these days can keep straight what is from the books, the films, and the fanfiction: http://members.madasafish.com/~cj_whitehound/Fanfic/fanonvscanon.htm And I'm sure someone has written an equivalent version of how many Tolkien fans now believe things about the LotR which are due solely to the Jackson movie versions, no matter how many times they read the novels... You just approach things with certain assumptions and can't notice that it's not actually there in the text.
>But only because Flowers for Algernon got adapted again and again and again into shows and movies
Hmm, seems unlikely. None of those were big enough hits to eclipse the written story, certainly nothing close to the level of Arrival. If anything, the novelization by Keyes himself is probably the single best known variant... which I guess is still sort of in line with your point.
I can recall as a kid in the early 1970s, Harlan Ellison was in the Los Angeles newspapers constantly: writing, being written about, getting into arguments with people, etc. He was a real ball of fire.
Interestingly, when Frank Sinatra harasses Harlan Ellison over his informal footwear, Ellison is playing pool with baseball manager Leo Durocher, who was perhaps the most similar personality in sports to Sinatra. Durocher would have gotten the credit for managing Jackie Robinson's historic 1947 season breaking the color line (Durocher did an excellent job during spring training of putting down any racist reluctance on the part of the other Brooklyn Dodgers to playing with Robinson), but at the last moment before the historic game, the commissioner of baseball suspended Durocher for the year for spending his off-season gambling with mobbed-up movie star George Raft (which sounds like a Sinatra scandal).
Ok but then it's always clear that higher relative incomes are a mean not an end. To argue otherwise is to posit some dark and very conveniently falsifiable subconscious motive, so that when a Swiss retirees talks about how cheap is to dine out and rent a beautiful seaside house in Malaga, what he actually means it that he satisfied some Jungian urge to best his fellow man. Seems a bit superluous when the stated motive so clearly suffices honestly.
> 7: A common sociological claim is that relative income (compared to your social circle) matters more for happiness than absolute income. Bryan Caplan thinks this can’t be true: after all, practically nobody moves to poorer areas to enjoy the higher relative income this would confer.
That's because high income areas generally have better culture, restaurants and opportunities. In addition, the perceived risk of low income areas.
Why would a high income person move to an area without Michelin star restaurants, Whole Foods, and Montessori schools? In addition, why risk being a victim of crime?
When I moved to Chicago, I moved to a glamorous high rise apartment overlooking the lake in Lincoln Park so I could get a girlfriend. When I got a fiancee, I moved north to the grungier Lakeview neighborhood. When I got a wife, I moved north to highly diverse Uptown (diverse meaning lots of cheap Vietnamese restaurants).
Outlining this, I wrote to the U. of Chicago scholars who had authored "The Social Construction of Sexuality" and suggested they write a sequel entitled: "The Sexual Construction of Society." Remarkably, they more or less followed my suggestion by eventually writing a tome entitled "The Sexual Organization of The City."
I have long maintained that sexuality in humans is largely a social matter, unless you think that, for example, there was some mysterious gene in Afghan tribesmen and ancient Spartans that made them attracted to young boys.
There's another theory that homosexuality is caused by some kind of communicable disease, which is why it's much more common in cities than in rural areas, and why it appears to have mostly vanished from history between 300 AD and 1900 AD.
A further theory is that Greek homosexuality wasn't all that common, it just got written about a lot.
But the thing that makes me suspicious is that there's no actual record of anyone enforcing that strong religious taboo.
For instance the Spanish Inquisition in all its investigatory zeal managed to prosecute one thousand people for sodomy... but only half of these were sodomy between persons (the others presumably being with animals) and only a handful of cases involved two consenting adults https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Catholic_Church_and_homosexuality ... suggesting that homosexuality was a hundred times less popular than bestiality in Inquisition-era Spain.
Yet, even sticking to Spanish territory and the 300-1900 period, many of the Andalusian caliphs kept male harems.
I don't disagree that it's a puzzle, although I suppose widespread religious belief that X is a horrible sin can discourage something to a degree without the church needing too many actual prosecutions.
Turing's and Wilde's case became such cause celebre because the laws against homosexuality were never actually enforced, despite it being so common in boarding schools and ships to be a running joke. I doubt this denotes anything except a certain tendency of traditional societies to tolerate a lot as long as it happened in an adequately surrespicious matter.
Add to this that the post-Roman, pre-westphalian legal system was weird and convoluted, with personal rather than territorial jurisdiction and very blurry lines between secular, religious, professional, regal and familial legal spheres, and I'm not really sure you proved much.
These days The Gays™ feel safe enough to even occasionally vaguely hint that they weren't actually "born this way", it was just a useful bit of rhetoric.
Young men will routinely fuck each other in any environment where women are not available and (for societies condemning it) prying eyes turn the other way. Prisoners, soldiers, sailors, young aristocrats in boarding schools and Moldovan bricklayers living on site all do that.
I find much more plausible the Kinsey view of a flexible sexuality, with heterosexuality being a strong preference rather than an absolute costraint for most, than any sociological theory trying to encompass all the groups above.
Calling Lakeview "grungier" than Lincoln Park, while I guess technically true, is a wild claim. All three of those neighborhoods are very safe, have great amenities, and are effectively next door, given that they're all two train stops away from each other. It mostly sounds like you had a relatively stable income and decided to move to very similar neighborhoods with very slightly lower costs of housing as you got older.
My own experience is that exposure to people significantly richer or significantly poorer than you is distressing. The distribution of distress is asymmetric, meaning that your best bet is to be surrounded by a fairly narrow band of wealth where you're towards the top.
I used to live in a proper rich area where the range was upper middle class professionals like me at the bottom and proper rich people at the top. I found that when I walked around I spent an uncomfortable amount of time thinking about money -- every time I saw a really nice house or car that I couldn't possibly afford it set off a pattern of musing about money.
Nowadays I live a few suburbs away in a slightly less rich area that's full of people at roughly my wealth level. When I walk around I rarely see anyone that I envy, nor anyone that I pity, and my brain gets to focus on more interesting things.
I grew up about 8 miles north of Beverly Hills. I've always found walking around Beverly Hills to be pleasant. I find crazy rich people entertaining. But I am terribly unambitious, so it doesn't bother me I'll never live there.
Same here. Sometimes I'll see something and think "Oh, that would be nice to have" but in general I don't go "Damn it, why don't I have that! Why am I a loser by comparison!"
If someone likes Michelin restaurants and Porsches, good luck to them and I sincerely hope they enjoy them, but I've never felt "Oh I am missing out" by not having them.
This is no comment on you, Justin, but I can't wrap my head around "oh my goodness, I cannot eat at a Michelin starred restaurant here? Life is not worth living!"
My problem is I like plain food (and plenty of it) so while I can appreciate the aesthetics (and incredible skill and effort involved) of one carefully trimmed miniature eel's brain with three streaks of jus on the plate, it would not fill my stomach.
> From @msamalam: 1932 Japanese map of world features/stereotypes
Interesting that India comes pre-partitioned (what do colors denote?). Also, llamas and alpacas are way too far south (you'll see a stray guanaco vaguely there, but not on the plains I'd think) and there should definitely be a cow where llamas and alpacas are.
The Spanish are criticised a lot for their actions in the new world, and probably wouldn’t do well in this survey. Also they probably weren’t as bad as us Anglos, truth be told.
That argument is a deflection and a false dilemma. The survey wasn’t either or. You can assign bad to any of the questions.
The Spanish court of the 16th Century felt a surprising amount of guilt over what the Conquistadors were doing to the Indians, more than Anglos did a century later.
"what they did in the New World"? That's as relevant as pointing to the leading Nazis all being devoted fans and promoters of classical art.
The Vikings' violence in the Old World, which was 99 percent of their interest and activity, was a notably brutal and effective deployment of the military technology of their era. They were _good_ at what they were doing, which was a big part of why they became so widely feared.
Funny in that chart is that the black plague is positive to 9% of the responders. Maybe those people know their history, and how the reduction in workers led to higher wages and better working conditions for those that survived - likely leading to the creation of the middle class and possibly the advancement of Europe towards the Industrial Revolution.
Horrible at the time and worse to try to recreate it, but I think there's a value in recognizing the positive as well as negative outcomes to things happening in life. I would be more than skeptical of anyone advocating something like that now, even if it worked out well in some respects back then. Not to mention there have been a whole lot more plagues and the most common results were pretty much all misery and no noticeable benefits.
I ended up wondering if this is (lizardman constant and) the one or other person thinking the survivors raising the immune system baseline to something "better" was worth it. If so, allergies would like a word with these people, though.
When I saw those results, I figured the non-lizardman component was the economic argument that the Black Death cut population density in western Europe and thereby led to wage increase, mechanization of labor, and eventually the basis of the industrial revolution. I suppose the galactic supercluster-ascended Buddha-brain take would be that on the long term, by leading to industrialization and modern medicine, the Black Death eventually *decreased* the risk of death by disease on net. At quite the high cost, though!
While I think that it is mostly Lizardmen's constant, the steel-man for the Black Plague would be the following.
Medieval populations had a total fertility ratio far above replacement, and were thus in the Malthusian trap.
Counteracting population growth are the three horsemen Famine, Pestilence and War. All three are horrible. Disease can not only kill, but maim. Starvation is a long and terrible process which will leave even those who survive diminished. And war brings out the very worst in humans, it is not simply people gutting or crippling each other with swords, but also the rape and the destruction of resources.
I am happy that we have our methods of population control called Pension Plan, Condom and OnlyFans, but if they are not an option, and the population has outgrown what their fields can produce, and I have to decide if 10% of them should die by starvation, war, or infection, I would probably pick infection.
The average person, born and raised in their home country and having lived there basically their entire life, has little idea of what full impact any historical matter has had on the people living then and there, or of the deep cultural memories those events formed. The farther the remove in space and time, the more the gaps in that image will necessarily be filled by popular culture, often by projecting modern sensibilities back in time.
Sure, you have some unambigously bad stuff like the Black Death where everyone everywhere can agree it was bad, even without knowing specifics. But the Hundred Years War? Hundred years of war sounds bad. But what was it even about? Maybe it was kinda justified?
Then the Vikings. Will most people even know it's a job description, not an ethnicity, and what that job entailed? Also, Vikings are kinda cool, aren't they? There are comics about them, video games, movies; much like pirates, their historical package gets sanitized the further you are removed from them. I bet if you'd ask the average English, especially on the East coast, they'd have a more nuanced perspective.
Castles and Chivalry? Barely anyone will think of the feudal system, the massive inequality and repression they represent, of the almost perpetual war that necessitated them. They think of countless fantasy novels and other pop culture products, or at most their once-in-a-lifetime Europe roundtrip out of school.
Another example, not on the list: The widespread adoration of Adolf Hitler in parts of India. Notwithstanding the fact that Hitler hated Indians as a race (ignored) or that he killed millions in Europe (irrelevant) he is seen positively at least in nationalist circles because they credit him with bringing down British rule over India.
So the point is: for any given historical topic, every society in space and time has their own image of it, which can be very different from each other, even contradictory. Finding out what these views are like is certainly useful and interesting, but one should probably not overly blame people for not knowing the full historical reality.
Actually, Vikings were quite active as traders all around European coasts, from Baltic to Mediterranean. Also, they created/modernised governance for at least two major European nations (Russia and England).
I don’t think the understanding for the Vikings runs that deep. Most people see the Vikings as the marauders not the settlers or colonialists, which is something that modern historians agree with. A farmer isn’t a Viking.
Best to say danish law, not viking law. Therefore people are happy with the pillaging and raping and slaving, in a way they aren’t for other historical groups.
*Rus', not Russia. There's an argument that Ukraine is closer to being the Kievan Rus' descendant while Muscovy was heavily influenced by/basically a creation of Mongols. Like Manchukuo surviving into modern times and claiming to be the rightful descendant of the Imperial China. I don't know if you'd agree, but anyway Rus' seems more accurate. Not to mention that the name most likely means the Vikings as an exonym derived from Finnish ruotsi, or directly from the same origin.
You are right that the English name of the country did not become Russia until well after the Viking age.
Not sure in which sense Ukraine is a more direct "descendant" of Rus' though, given that it did not exist as a state before 1918. The last relatively independent Rus' principalities on modern Ukrainian territory were annexed by Poland and Lithuania in XIV century. The elder Rurikid branch ruled continuously over Rus principalities in the North-East and then Muskovy and then Russia until the XVII century and it is hard to dispute state continuity from Rurikids to Romanoffs. Actually, Lithuania has arguably a better claim to a continuous state and cultural descent from Rus', at least until the polonisation in XVI-XVII centuries.
As to the Mongols, there were several Rus' principalities that never subjugated to Mongols (like Polotsk and Pskov), but none of them were located in modern Ukraine.
Not sure, perhaps I distorted the idea or it was more political, along the lines of "With the way Russia acts they would be better described as the political descendants of the Golden Horde".
Anyway, with Kyiv being the capital of Ukraine I don't think it's fair to mention only Russia as a modern Eastern European state owing some of its history to the Vikings.
Though I'm not really sure it was a positive thing. Reminds me of the Soviet joke about time travelers who went to Ancient Rome to find a rally with the signs "Forward to feudalism, the bright future of humanity!". If the default state was "Vikings robbing and capturing slaves regularly" then sure, a Viking state that went about robbing in a more organized manner while protecting the Slavs from other threats and maybe doing something useful in the meantime was an improvement. But compared to "no Vikings at all"? If having more centralized/modernized governance is an improvement, I'm still not sure the Vikings were well-suited for the job, so perhaps having some Central European conquerors or Byzantine missionaries inducing the native leaders to start the modernization a few decades later would've played out better.
It is quite a stretch to describe Russia as "political descendant of the Golden Horde" as opposed to a descendant of the Rus' principalities. One would need to ignore obvious linguistic, religious, dynastic, architectural, and legal continuities with the Rus'. Perhaps, one could argue that tax collection mechanisms and establishment of the absolute monarchy can be traced to the Horde. But these are pretty standard elements of late feudalism and they happened in many European countries, from England to Hungary, at roughly the same time without any Horde influence.
It is quite weird to ignore this continuity from Rus' while claiming the continuity for Ukraine which literally did not exist before 1918 and has a 500 years gap between the last independent Rus' principalities on its territory and 1918. This sounds like modern Ukrainian political propaganda and is honestly puzzling for me. Today, it is quite clear that Ukraine has a much stronger claim to be a "proper" "real" state than most countries. This claim is backed by well documented events of the last 35 years (and especially last 3 years.) What is the point in backing this claim also by made up interpretations of events that happened 800+ years ago?
Probably claims that Russia is the successor of the Kievan Rus' feel more than just academic on the 12th year of Russia claiming its "historical" territories.
In what way did they modernise Anglo-Saxon government? Even if you count the Normans as quasi-Viking, my understanding is that they inherited a much more sophisticated state structure than the one they had previously (and that this was one of the major prizes of conquering England).
Yes, I counted Normans as Vikings here. Not sure what "sophisticated" means in this sense. A proper census (the Domesday Book), a proper Exchequer, a system of centralised royal power with feudal landholding, and a system of garrisoned castles to enforce this control were all created by the Normans in the immediate aftermath of the conquest.
I don't think it's obviously right to call William's Normans Vikings. One might argue they were more French than Viking at that point. And you can't make the same claims about Svein Forkbeard and Cnut the Great modernising England.
Yes to Domesday Book (although it was only the administrative heft of the existing English state that made it possible — nothing like it could have been attempted in Normandy) and castles (although these were a French innovation, not a Norse one), both of which were new — but what do you mean by a proper exchequer? Afaik the English (pre-1066) were the only regime in Northern Europe with a standardised coinage, and their state apparatus for collecting taxes and mobilising royal income far exceeded anything in Scandinavia or Normandy (and enabled Aethelred the Unready, and later William I himself, to raise the immense sums needed to buy off Viking raiders). Feudal landholding, again, reflected the Frenchification of the Normans rather than their Viking roots. I’d add, to a list of Norman modernisation projects, a huge reduction in slavery in England after the Conquest, but this is maybe the most obvious case of the Normans having already adopted the new, Christian norms of the Gregorian Revolution that was sweeping France at the time. Cutting edge, yes; Viking, very much not.
A Domesday Book equivalent was indeed not compiled in Normandy (or anywhere in France) at the time. It is not clear why one would think it was impossible - neither Normandy not France were going through such a wholesale state reorganisation at the time, so there was no dire need to take stock of all assets. The only roughly contemporaneous census of similar scale was undertaken by (surprise!) Normans in their Southern Italy lands in mid XII century (the first compilation of Catalogus Baronum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalogus_Baronum)
The Exchequer was the agency established by Henry I to collect, audit, and disburse government revenue. It also arbitrated on tax and financial matters and both the judicial system and the modern Treasury grew out of it.
Ok, but Henry is two kings later and any claim of Vikingness is getting a bit tenuous by that stage! And surely one would say he formalised and named an existing system there, rather than introducing it wholesale. I think the main reason why Domesday Book couldn’t have been compiled in Normandy/anywhere in France is administrative capacity. I mean, maybe you could have done it as Duke of Normandy, but then it would have been a much smaller job. If you were the King of France, you’d have the additional problem of uppity vassals (not least the Duke of Normandy!) refusing to let your auditors do their work. As conqueror of the only (?) effective unitary state in Northern Europe at the time, William was in a unique position, having both the motive and the means to audit everything. Same applies to “feudalism”: the idea that the king owns everything and everyone else holds their lands on his behalf works very well *and is very necessary* when the king has just led a military takeover of said land, and in fact the system found its purest expression in England.
The Vikings were absolutely not the Normans. Christianity alone, ignoring Normandy being in France, would mark them as a culturally different people.
In fact that’s why I was referencing the difference between attitudes to the crusades and the Viking plunder to begin with. “Converting to Christianity doomed their descendants to ignominy”. This isn’t new of course, the crusades have been in bad odour since the reformation.
Vikings were not Normans - agreed. However, it is less obvious that Normans were not Vikings :)
Normandy being in France is not very relevant here, as it tells us very little about the culture of XI century Norman rulers.
It is true that Normans in XI century were Christians, spoke French, intermarried with French, and adopted many other elements of French culture, including mounted warfare. However, they were still quite distinct from French and kept a few elements of their Viking culture in areas such as inheritance and governance. However, the key aspect here is the ability to launch large scale amphibious assaults. Vikings were able to perform them. There is no reason to believe that a random French duke with a tenuous dynastic claim was capable of such a feat. Indeed, no French or European force over the next 900 (!) years was capable of such an assault on British Isles.
When the Normans landed, most of the English army was on the other end of the country, fighting the Danes. The big battle happened on land, two weeks later, when the English arrived.
Wikipedia says that William "had to assemble a fleet from nothing", hardly a sign of a culture with a strong naval tradition.
> Thinking medieval: The large shares of Americans with no opinion about prominent medieval figures reflects the reality that most Americans don't think about the Middle Ages very often. 11% of Americans say they think about the European Middle Ages weekly or more, and another 12% say they think about it monthly. But 42% of Americans say they never think about the Middle Ages, and another 24% think about it only occasionally.
>
> These figures are similar to how often Americans say they think about the Roman Empire. Americans are slightly more likely to say they think regularly about the Middle Ages than to say they think about Rome.
I like how the Vikings are right next to the monasteries in popularity.
I think that which cultures get idolized is weird. Take the Ninja -- murderers for hire morphed into noble elite martial arts fighters in the Gaijin mind. Of course, I am with acoup that the worst popularization is actually the Spartans -- a culture which excelled solely at inflicting human misery to their non-free classes, no redeeming qualities like producing great works of art -- but in the public perception their martial valor is greatly exaggerated, so they are the fearless hardcore warriors, not the freaks who initiate their youths by having them murder unarmed serfs.
I liked them. They are straight historical fiction, no fantasy element, but they still have Anderson's voice. Hardrada had an interesting life, and I gather the books are a true to what's known, though of course the details are Anderson's.
Probably not as much detail as a nine-season biopic, but what HBO would add would probably be pretty annoying. :-)
The Vikings contributed violence, maritime navigation, and about 30% of the cultural fusion that is the English. The latter two are things that are really important to who we are today, so it's understandable that we'll romanticize the violence a bit.
And I think you're confusing "the descendants of the Vikings" with "Scandinavians". "Viking" isn't an ethnicity, it's a job description, and the job was getting on a boat and sailing hell and gone from Scandinavia in pursuit of fortune and glory. Modern Scandinavians are descended from the ones who *weren't* Vikings; actual Viking descendants are, well, pretty much everywhere else you might find blondes. And yes, having more fun.
What’s really “odd” is approving of both Vikings and monasteries, as Vikings were fond of looting monasteries. It would be more consistent to approve of both Vikings and saints, as the Vikings gave people opportunities to die defending the faith.
Can you get an ambassadorship to France without being rich?
My understanding was that being named ambassador to France is just a reward for generous political donors, and that the job has no particular responsibilities. Ambassadors used to represent their countries' interests, but we have direct communication now.
Well, I thought the thrust of your comment was to look at where people choose to go when they have the choice. I guess you can still make the argument that we can see that France is where they want to go regardless of whether they have the choice. But you can't see that by looking at diplomats moving to places.
7 (relative income): Within the same social class, higher relative income is great. If the low income people aren't in your same class, there are a bunch of negatives that show up. Discrimination, targeted crime, guilt, etc. Also, it's low-class to admit to your higher-class friends that you're enjoying your newfound slum king status.
29 (COVID reckoning): The people who still support the enacted covid policies also still falsely belief that they were effective. A combination of self-deception and lies by government and media keeps it this way. No-one wants to contemplate that the massive suffering we endured for years, and the massive economic damage we caused, was all for nothing.
I realize I sound like a crank saying this. I'm not trying to convince anyone about the object level here. Just pointing out that the informational environment was very bad and continues to be bad.
Furthermore, you should compare these numbers to the % of the population that supports stuff like executing terrorists without trial and other anti-freedom positions, which are consistently very popular.
Among people who are intellectually capable of understanding the trade-offs, there does need to be a reckoning.
Re: 7, well-put. Relative income hypothesis is likely true but there's a definite lower bound; as the colloquial wisdom goes, the worst thing about being poor is living around poor people.
Class is a good way to put that factor, among other cultural traits, and Big Bang Theory had a pretty good model of a certain interaction- specifically the fundraising episode, directly stating that the very rich *do* enjoy a certain "academic king status."
Whether continued support for covid policy is justified or not, it is. Which makes a reckoning unlikely. The actual merit and the popularity of covid policy are completely seperate questions.
You are doing a pretty good job of perpetuating the bad information environment by pontificating like a crank. Even 9th graders learn to at least cite their sources when making claims, and I think this whole discussion would be far more fruitful if we could all agree to meet even that standard.
Stating a belief without citing sources is epistemically neutral.
You are free to read my entire post with a big "if" appended to the front: "IF covid policy was disastrous, then many people would have a hard time admitting it." That's a straightforwardly true claim.
> cite their sources when making claims, and I think this whole discussion would be far more fruitful if we could all agree to meet even that standard.
I am not the guy you replied to but…
You haven’t even met the standard of rebuttal either, by your own standards, nor the standards of courtesy.
The productively non-hypocritical way to respond to that would be to say "actually I disagree and think our Covid policies were beneficial and here are a few links that support my position" instead of just being an equally-crankish naysayer.
Sample size of 1, but if tomorrow I suddenly became thoroughly convinced that those COVID policies were ineffective, I expect that belief wouldn't make me angry in the slightest. It was a novel situation, the stakes were very high and all of the policies that get brought up were things that were plausible at the time as being helpful[1]. I'm not going to get angry at either scientists or government officials who needed to act fast with incomplete information for making an honest try to save lives.
Of course, your belief system around this mentions "lies by the government and media," but this very much *does* seem to stray into crackpot territory. I mean, governments around the world adopted similar policies for similar reasons. And there's nothing resembling a plausible motive for them *all* to be deliberately deceptive about it. The amount of evidence that would be necessary to promote this to even minimal plausibility is not small.
[1] And still plausible now, AFAIK. I haven't actually seen any evidence that they were ineffective.
I cut governments a lot of slack for picking reasonable but suboptimal policies in march 2020. That's not the problem.
The problem is when those policies were not updated and improved in light of new information. Or when policies were bonkers insane even for a day 1 response.
w.r.t. lies, Anthony Fauci lied to the public "for their own good" (he later testified to this under oath in front of congress IIRC). Zvi extensively documented the whole saga at the time, check his substack.
Several governments chose nonsensical policies without any physical basis for working (e.g. shutting down outside social places such as parks, while allowing indoor gatherings to continue, or even more extreme, prohibiting people from leaving their houses as happened in the UK and Spain, which doesn't pass any sane cost/benefit analysis).
Similarly, when the Floyd protests happened, suddenly the media was completely on board with these massive gatherings, when they had been shrieking about irresponsible protesters spreading the virus the week before. It was a complete reversal of stance, purely due to the political valence of the protests in question.
In my own country, the health minister nonstop beat the drum that "the vaccine is the only way out of the crisis". he said this every week at press conferences. He continued saying this until long after the vaccination rate stalled (at about 70% IIRC), and continued using it as an excuse to not lift restrictions, even though the situation got better and better. In reality, herd immunity was the way out of the crisis, which was going to happen with or without vaccines. That slogan was a moral imperative, completely unrelated to scientific facts.
Then there was this whole situation with "anti-racist" vaccine allocation policies. You remember that, right? Where perfectly good vaccines were thrown in the trash en masse, even while entire countries remained in lockdown. Because god forbid we give out doses in a way that covers the whole population as fast as possible. Again, Zvi wrote about one trillion words about this as it was happening.
I think that there were two sensible covid policies:
1. Shut down until eradication and then live as normal (with closed borders) until a vaccine is developed
2. Keep life going as normal, issue warnings and advice
The problem is that most countries tried to pick a middle course between these two. Usually a middle course is sensible, but when it comes to this particular situation it was dumb. Locking down but stopping before eradication gives you most of the costs of locking down to eradication with none of the benefits.
OK, so those don't appear (to me) to be the same goalposts we started with. Your reply would be a great answer to the question "were there some bad decisions/policies made as part of various governmental COVID responses." But I doubt very many people would answer "no" to that question in the first place. Everybody's going to have policies they disagree with (though likely different policies for everyone).
But the original question was about whether there should be "a reckoning over the government's disastrous anti-COVID policies." Your own post said "The people who still support the enacted covid policies also still falsely belief that they were effective." Both of those to me rather strongly suggest a belief in a policy regime that was *broadly* ineffective and likely *deliberately malicious.* That's a whole different order of problem.
Like, if the responses were overall in the right direction, but some people told some lies, and some people pushed some nonsense policies and you're upset about those, the utterly banal democratic response to that is simply to *vote the offenders out*[1]. By the year 2025, that's almost certainly happened to whatever extent it's going to happen. Government is not perfect, citizens vent dissatisfaction with blunders through elections, news at 11. THAT need not be a crankish reaction, when the criticisms are reality based. But that's a *far cry* from saying " the massive suffering we endured for years, and the massive economic damage we caused, was all for nothing." Talking about lockdowns being left a little too long, or scientists losing their head a bit in supporting an unrelated protest movement *will not* get you from Point A to Point B.
[1] Or vote in people who promise to replace them in the case of appointed positions.
The disastrous policy, and the one there still has to be a reckoning for, was not the initial educated guess of "OK, let's lock down, mask up, and socially distance the COVID away". Those policies were wrong in hindsight in that they were a suboptimal and generally ineffective counter to COVID, but they were the sincere best guesses of the experts at the time.
The disastrous policy, and one that some of us at least recognized as disastrous at the time, was the one where those educated guesses were elevated to the status of a civic religion, such that it would be essentially heretical to say "It looks like we didn't get that part right; based on new information we should probably e.g. reopen the elementary schools but close the meat-packing plants". The only allowable response to the continued pandemic was to lock down, mask up, and socially distance *even harder*. But not smarter.
And, yes, the lies were also disastrous and they were policy. To which the answer can't just be "vote the offenders out", because most of the liars weren't elected officials or direct subordinates of elected officials. This was a massive blow to public trust, a commodity which is scarce, valuable, and extremely hard to replace when it is lost.
For all his faults, I'd rather have Anthony Fauci than Robert Kennedy calling the shots on vaccine policy. But for that to happen, we really need the reckoning where Team Fauci says "we were wrong, please forgive us, we promise to do better next time".
"The disastrous policy, and one that some of us at least recognized as disastrous at the time, was the one where those educated guesses were elevated to the status of a civic religion, such that it would be essentially heretical to say "It looks like we didn't get that part right; based on new information we should probably e.g. reopen the elementary schools but close the meat-packing plants"."
OK, but this wasn't a "policy." Like obviously, plainly this was not a policy. It honestly boggles my mind a little bit that a reasonably intelligent person could look at what happened in 2020 and say "yes, that was the way that the people who set policies intended things to happen."
The effect your describing is simply an especially striking manifestation of the decades-long trend of the political polarization of *everything* in the U.S.. It's clearly visible at least as far back as the 90s, but I think social media turbocharged it, and Trump's first term probably added a decent amount of fuel to the flames. In the past, a crisis of that magnitude would have drawn people together, but the U.S. was already so far gone that it simply pushed people farther apart (and made the crazy ones even crazier). The stronger the effect gets, the less the U.S. as a country is able to function: that's not anybody's policy goal.
The way I would describe it playing out is as follows: early warnings of COVID start to filter in, the experts who are taking it seriously (few at first) start to sound alarm bells and suggest action. This sounds premature to almost everyone at first, but starts to look more and more sensible as the scale of the crisis starts becoming apparent. Three major factors determine the political valence of the response in the U.S. First and foremost, the U.S. right already has a longstanding distrust of academia and experts. Second, Trump finds idea of a pandemic to be a very inconvenient one and would rather it not be true; having spend four years surrounding himself with yes-men allows him to live in this preferred reality for longer than otherwise possible, which sets the initial tone for any other government official taking their cues from Trump. Finally, the urban-rural split means that left-leaning folks are closer to the epicenters of COVID in the U.S. and more vulnerable to unchecked community spread: simply put they have more skin in the game, especially early on.
Together this means that by March of 2020 at the latest, the battle lines were already drawn. The blue tribe cultural sphere had been treating COVID seriously for several weeks already, a portion (though certainly far from all) of the red tribe sphere had been treating it as a nothingburger, a hoax or a conspiracy, and once the blue tribe belief started translating into action, the red tribe reaction was basically inevitable. "If they're doing A, we're doing not-A!" Tribal polarization hit hard and fast and robbed policymakers on both sides of options. Millions of red tribe voters believed that all COVID measures were solely about government control: any red tribe official acting on better information was seen as being in on it. Millions of blue tribe voters believed that the red tribe was being dangerous, ignorant and irresponsible in ways that would harm *everyone*, not only themselves: any blue tribe official suggesting laxer safety measures (even if supported by evidence) was seen as recklessly caving to pressure. A few very high-stress months pretty much locked these attitudes in and elevated them to the level of stuck priors. Any suggestion regarding altering COVID safety measures was evaluated in terms of political valence first and foremost, and scientific soundness last (if at all). I think there were lots of people whose main priority through all of this was saving lives and effectively controlling the pandemic, but they still had to live with the reality of the situation, which meant (for example) considering how their words would be heard in this kind of toxic information environment.
Incidentally, watching this play out was what finally convinced me that the U.S. is effectively finished as a nation. Broken beyond possibility of repair. When millions of people implicitly regard truth as downstream from politics (rather than the other way around), there's really no way to re-ground them in reality. At the time, my estimate was between 5 and 30 years before the U.S. undergoes some sort of collapse and ceases to exist as a unified nation under its current form of government: 5 years later, I still think that estimate was sound.
>Among people who are intellectually capable of understanding the trade-offs, there does need to be a reckoning.
Normally, I would agree. But the Dem/GOP splits in those figures look frightening. Is the clarification of the actual pluses and minuses of the options worth pouring more fuel on the fire of the nation's polarization? There is something of a meta tradeoff here (though I agree that keeping the discussion "Among people who are intellectually capable of understanding the trade-offs" would help).
I never supported the shut-downs, but you're making a huge assumption regarding "massive suffering". Lots of people didn't suffer at all, or their lives actually improved because of the shut downs. Mine sure did, even though I didn't think it was good policy. The people who suffered were lonely single people who couldn't go out, people with kids at home, and people living in cramped apartments. The people for whom it was neutral or actively positive were suburban people, people with office jobs, and retired people. There are just as many people in the second category as the first, if not more.
7. Part of the attraction for me of living in Europe is that I am relatively richer than my peers given an American salary while still enjoying all the amenities I would have living in Boston. I think that is an important element of why so many upper middle class Americans work remotely in Europe or retire here. Moving to the „slums“ creates other problems- crime, lack of entertainment options, dining choice, etc. that might make you feel poorer relative to the lifestyle you used to enjoy even if you’re relatively richer than your neighbors.
Don't you get double taxed as an American living in Europe? I would think that cancels out the higher income in many cases, although I guess if you make enough money it doesn't really matter.
There are treaties to avoid that. The price to pay is really that Americans aend up having to use the services of a specialized tax-preparation person for the first few years.
U.S. accountant here. This is outside my specialization, but I remember the basics of how it works.
First you pay however much the country you're in says you have to pay. If that's higher than your taxes in the U.S. would be, then you don't owe U.S. tax. If your U.S. taxes would be higher, you pay the difference to the U.S. So your total tax ends up being the higher of the two countries, rather than both put together.
On my modified oat-fiber supplement for plasticizers: first of all, thanks for linking! It's still being prototyped and tested, but if you're interested in becoming a beta tester when it comes out (and getting updates on progress), you can sign up on the website: neutraoat.com .
With regards to the difference between microplastics and plasticizers: microplastics are the little bits of plastics themselves, plasticizers are the chemicals that make plastics soft and malleable. When you hear about the negative health effects of microplastics, like hormonal disruption and cancer, that usually has to do with plasticizers. There are dozens of plasticizers, each of which interact with the body differently, but many of them, like BPA, have been convincingly linked to endocrine disruption and other negative effects in humans and animals. I've summarized evidence here: https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/the-evidence-on-plasticizer-health .
On a side note, I'm very interested in talking to people who are involved in the supplement world and the D2C world more broadly. I feel confident on the scientific side, although there's a lot of work ahead, but D2C is a new world for me. If that's you, or if you know someone who's involved in that world, please contact me at trevor [at] neutraoat.com .
33. If you wanted to maintain the taboo against a President invoking Art II authority against a SCOTUS decision, then it should have been enforced against Pres Biden when he ignored a SCOTUS decision to do student loan forgiveness - and bragged about it.
Nobody on the right is going to listen to complaints about "due process" when millions of illegal aliens were let in with zero vetting or process. The "process" that is "due" to an illegal alien is deportation. This applies to roughly every single procedural complaint against Pres Trump; there is a Pres. Biden analogue ready at hand. Remember when Barack Obama drone striked an American citizen? Where were the calls for vigilante justice and armed insurrection then?
I remember a lot of tsking, i.e. quietly negative remarks, about that Obama example, and the big difference is that Obama didn't loudly defend it and seek to replicate it.
This is some variant of 'isolated demand for rigor'. Obama killed an American Citizen, went quiet, and didn't ever say anything that I've heard about, about not doing it ever again. I think he considered that a valid tool in his toolbox and haven't heard anything strong statements to the contrary.
Trump and Co. have said quite a lot about the need to deport at scale to fix what they see as an emergency caused by, and the responsibility of, the prior administration. Side effects of that would likewise be the responsibility of the prior administration due to the impossibility of providing due process at the scale needed to remedy the problem.
"Due process" , let's just discard because it's difficult.
Remember the bipartisan bill that Trump told the Republicans to withdraw their support from? That was going to add a whole ton more enforcement and judges so that we could deal with the immigration issue while providing "due process." But Trump the candidate wanted the issue and his solution the 10+ million illegal immigrants is deporting 200 people who may or may not be illegally in the US to a foreign prison.
The prior administration DDOSed the current adminstration with at least 5,000,000 illegal immigrants imported into the country. There are ~700 immigration judges in specific locations scattered around the country and each trial . What is the reasonable remedy you propose to the current administration who were elected with broad support to undo this, which would scale feasibly? What specific error rate is acceptable, recognizing that courts and due process all have non-zero error rates as well?
Obama didn't have to say anything about not doing it again, to differentiate himself from Trump. All he needed to do was refrain from boasting about it and seeking to replicate it. Big difference.
The defense you postulate for Trump would be slightly more believable if he were taking any care at all to limit his deportations to those he says he's trying to deport. It would also be slightly more believable if he weren't pretending to make obeisance to the need for due process while actually evading it. In other words, he knows he's doing wrong, he knows he's lying.
>I think he considered that a valid tool in his toolbox and haven't heard anything strong statements to the contrary.
I think he realized it was a tool that would generate too much blowback to be worth the bother, and I haven't heard any strong statements to the contrary.
Since AFIK he *didn't do it ever again*, does it matter which is true?
People will tolerate a single injustice where they won't tolerate an ongoing pattern of injustice. They will forget what isn't being talked about and focus on what is. And they are right to do so. If you're concerned about maintaining a taboo or setting a precedent, it's the things that happen repeatedly and openly and to cries of "we meant to do that!" that are *most* important. Since nobody has the bandwidth to fight and win every battle, those are the ones to prioritize.
Also, it is entirely possible to provide due process at the scale necessary to remedy the immigration policy. It isn't even all that expensive. It does require *some* effort, and it does require acknowledging that yes, due process is a requirement, and that's apparently too much for the Donald.
Did he not seek to replicate it because of the relatively small amount of quiet complaining, or because it was an unusual and rare situation that didn't necessarily need replication on a regular basis?
If a "relatively small amount of quiet complaining" was enough to keep him from replicating it, that itself vastly differentiates himself from Trump, who isn't stopped by very loud protests. I'm not trying to defend Obama's action here, just inoculating against "whataboutism".
Per above, Trump was elected on a platform to specifically undo the immigration behavior of his predecessor. This differs from Obama being elected on a platform of drone striking American citizens abroad. What remedy should Trump pursue to remove ~5,000,000 illegal immigrants that scales and has acceptably low error rates?
That's half the question. Was that enough, or were there simply no other American citizens in positions to be drone-struck? That's the distinction. Doing it once and stopping because you recognize the error of your ways is importantly distinct from doing it once because there was only one situation where it was needed.
I don't think anybody said he didn't "get away with it" (which implies he did it deliberately). The discussion was over comparing his attitude towards it with Trump's.
When you say 'most of the media apparatus', what are you talking about? The top most watched programs, podcasts, youtubers, etc. are all distinctly right leaning. More generally, the GOP has control of the presidency, house, senate, and SCOTUS, so why are you still acting like the GOP is the underdog?
I'm not acting like they're the underdog, I'm acting like they've had minimal cultural influence for about 40 years and that there's an incredible level of traditional media bias against them. "New media" is a weird, amorphous, heavily siloed set of phenomena still early in development and reach.
Also the GOP does not have "control" of SCOTUS. You think a GOP-controlled SCOTUS would've written Bostock? Or would've written the loopholes into Harvard v SFFA like Roberts did to ensure they can keep discriminating?
Joe Rogan is very popular, yes. Until *literally this election*, nobody in the government (or any other government) took him or his supporters seriously. The NYT gets taken seriously, and for some psychotic reason they're pushing violent morons like Piker now. There's a whole ecosystem of established traditional media that gets taken seriously and keeps out newcomers (like, again until quite recently, who gets access to the White House media room was decided in large part by the Associated Press).
Podcasts and youtubes may have lots of subscribers, but most of them are wildly siloed. They don't, as the kids say, *build*. They have no organized goals. They grift to enrich themselves and their sponsors.
> If you wanted to maintain the taboo against a President invoking Art II authority against a SCOTUS decision, then it should have been enforced against Pres Biden when he ignored a SCOTUS decision to do student loan forgiveness - and bragged about it.
Accepting this framing for the sake of argument, there is a profound difference in subject. Biden's decision was concerned with how the government managed its money, whereas the Trump decision affects the basic right of people to liberty and freedom from imprisonment.
Both the common law and US constitution independently protect the right of habeas corpus, independently of statute law.
> Nobody on the right is going to listen to complaints about "due process" when millions of illegal aliens were let in with zero vetting or process. The "process" that is "due" to an illegal alien is deportation.
You're begging the question here and also ignoring inconvenient law.
First, it takes a proper hearing to determine whether a human person in custody is in fact an illegal alien. People don't come with their immigration status stamped on their foreheads.
Second, US law provides far greater ground to remain in the country than a bare 'illegal aliens are bad' statement would suggest. The law permits applications for asylum, and once filed 'due process' requires a fair and impartial hearing of that claim. The law also independently prevents removals in some circumstances, which again trigger 'due process' rights. It's fair to disagree with the benefit of these legal entitlements, but such changes *must* go through Congress.
Third, the US appears to be playing fast and loose with legal residents as well, including revocation of study permits for speech-based reasons followed by prompt deportation with no or only cursory hearings.
> Remember when Barack Obama drone striked an American citizen? Where were the calls for vigilante justice and armed insurrection then?
There were plenty of right-wing militias who vehemently disagreed with a variety of Obama-era actions.
More profoundly, there's also a difference between a one-off bad action from a government and systematically bad actions from government. Doing a bad thing is bad, but a bad thing done once can often be handled through ordinary channels.
Doing a bad thing repeatedly is a sign that the system is broken and that normal feedback mechanisms aren't working, so extraordinary correction might be necessary.
Remember, vigilante justice and armed insurrection are generally bad things. We shouldn't call for them lightly, but it's easier to exercise restraint when we can also be confident that the other branches of government are still functioning.
"Changing a bunch of numbers in digital bank accounts that the government owns is equal to snatching people off the street and sending them to a foreign gulag." Is that the argument you are going with?
Also, the drone strikes didn't stop after Obama left. Trump increased them in his first term but removed the public reporting that the Obama defense department did.
Not sure what you're asking. The Obama administration argued fairly successfully that American citizenship was no barrier to the strike that killed Al-Awlaki per standard war powers of the Executive. That was certainly a major escalation in terms of black-letter policy, but IMO a correct one; the only real novel part was specifying an individual ahead of time. Unless I missed something, no following president has repudiated that power.
If we are saying this can happen and due process in this case is different than due process for 'normal' American citizens then where does this sit relative to claims of necessary due process over Garcia, who was not an American citizen and saw 17 judges during his various treks through the court system while here?
What makes Trump uniquely bad in this regard vs Obama, and what are the limiting principles that define bad behavior and good behavior? Is it just 'they got re-elected so it was good'? Might makes right?
If this is purely a political discussion then this group should not wrap themselves in the cloak of due process and the law. If it is a legal discussion, which of these, if either, was legally based?
No if. American citizens have specifically been targeted for death via military action, and died as a result - matter of public record under Obama, less sure about the details under Trump but that's the "removed the public reporting" element in play. Drone strikes *did* markedly decrease under Biden but that's another topic entirely.
What constitutes due process is a contextual thing, to perhaps a surprising extent. What an executive can order the military to do to a specific individual in the context of a military campaign is *very* different from what the executive can order law enforcement to do domestically. (No, nobody serious is buying the "invasion" rhetoric.)
"Contextual" does not mean "whatever I feel like".
This argument is falling into the one case is a tragedy, a million cases is a statistics.
A number I saw for Biden’s loan forgiveness program is $188 billion with a B. PEPFAR, the program that many of the left decried when its budget was temporarily suspended in the USAID kerfuffle has an annual budget of $6.5 billion. How many PEPFARs can be funded with $188 billion?
I am pointing out PEPFAR as a program that does good and I support. I would support efforts to get the valuable parts re-instated on a more permanent basis. Trump only reinstated it on a temporary basis, which might have lapsed.
I was making the argument that $188 billion is alot of money and there are always trade-offs. $188 billion for student loan relief vs $188 billion for PEPFAR like programs.
Biden could have renewed it for the usual 5-year period instead of only one year. Perhaps that wouldn't be enough to save it, but I think it would have helped.
The second order effect of "changing a bunch of numbers in digital bank accounts" is pretty significant inflation, which has all kinds of negative effects on its own.
Foreign gulag is still worse, but "student loan forgiveness" is effectively printing massive amounts of money, not merely changing a few unimportant numbers.
I'm fascinated by the theory of mind of people who legitimately believe that Biden's 4 years in office means we no longer live in civilized society and that we've returned to a hobbesian state of nature where anything is fair game.
Can you explain your position more? Also, where do you get your news / information?
I can't speak for OP, but I think it's more like the right wing has a laundry list of specific violations the left wing committed during the Biden years, and if Democrats didn't hold Biden accountable for those violations, they're not willing to hold Trump accountable for them. It's just tit-for-tat.
(That's why OP says, "This applies to roughly every single procedural complaint against Pres Trump; there is a Pres. Biden analogue ready at hand.")
The easiest way, I think, to understand this sentiment on the right is to look into the Trump 34 felonies case. A lot of the right-wing arguments about left-wing norm violations are pretty weak, but this one is understandable.
Did you know that the specific crimes he was charged with in that case can't conceptually exist unless he's guilty of some initial crime? They're all "add-ons". Look into it. And, if you can, try and find out when he was charged, tried and convicted of that initial crime.
You won't be able to, because he wasn't. The New York court assumed, without anybody having tried or convicted him, that he was guilty of the initial campaign finance violation, and then convicted him of 34 additional felonies that depended on it. Now, apparently, there are complicated legal reasons why this wasn't technically a violation of Trump's constitutional right to due process.
But, also, they did this during the 2024 Presidential campaign, like 8 years after the events being litigated took place; and nobody else has ever been charged with that combination of statutes. Unique legal theory; convenient politicized timing; dependence on being considered guilty of an untried crime...
It's super fishy. I mean, common sense says Trump is obviously guilty; but the whole idea of due process is that common sense shouldn't come into it.
So anyway, from the Republican perspective, if they can do it to Trump, and get away with it (which, so far, they have) then they'll do it to any Republican they want. Which means that, de facto, Republicans don't have the right to a trial. They watched their chosen avatar punished for a crime he never got to defend himself against in court. And there are tons of other (less convincing) examples of right-wing people being denied due process, enough for them to make a long, systematic-looking list.
So why shouldn't ICE do to some random member of MS-13 what the State of New York did to Trump? Same-same, one set of rules. When Democrats object to ICE violating due process, it sounds to Republicans like they're advocating a two-tier system of justice: non-citizen human traffickers are first-class citizens who deserve full due process rights, while native-born Republican presidential candidates are second-class citizens who don't.
In my opinion, their primary motivation is not wanting to be second-class citizens. They have these long lists in their minds of stuff that they've been complaining about for years; and everybody laughed at them and treated them like idiots, and the Democrats got away with it. So now, when Trump does that same stuff, and Democrats complain about it? They laugh.
(I myself don't agree with this, I have a more complex view; the Republicans often are idiots who deserve to be laughed at. Many of their complaints are stupid. I'm not trying to defend the Republicans here; just explain them. ICE obviously ought to respect due process; and the 34 felonies verdict will probably eventually be overturned by a higher court -- so it's not actually the example of systematic due process denial they want it to be.)
As a final note, I would guess that the way to appeal to these people is to address the past. They feel like victims, and liberals who want to convince them of stuff would get really far just by acknowledging their feeling of pain. They have a lot of pride, and many of them would be offended to see me framing it this way. But, I think if you were to start your appeal to them with "Trump shouldn't have been convicted of those 34 felonies; it was a due process violation, and it should be overturned", or "it was a miscarriage of justice for the FBI to lie to the FISA court in 2016", then they would probably listen to you advocate for due process for undocumented immigrants. But their basic assumption is that all liberals agree with denying due process to Trump, and so if you go straight into advocating for it for undocumented immigrants, they'll ignore you because they think you're a hypocrite.
The shorter answer is that Republicans are delusional and consistently lie about reality. When Trump runs for a 3rd term their response will be "Democrats shouldn't have tried to steal the 2020 election." The moron original commenter thinks Biden defied a Supreme Court order that was as general as "All student loan debt forgiveness is unconstitutional" and there were 0 contempt inquiries into it. There is no reaching these people because they don't live in reality.
>The New York court assumed, without anybody having tried or convicted him, that he was guilty of the initial campaign finance violation, and then convicted him of 34 additional felonies that depended on it.
This is a pathetic misinterpretation. Cohen pled guilty in 2018. The Trump trial was about proving Trump aided him by falsifying business records, which elevated the misdemeanor counts to felonies, because he was falsifying business records while aiding someone in committing another crime. https://codes.findlaw.com/ny/penal-law/pen-sect-175-10/ There's no complicated legal reasoning here, you are just not living in reality and are ruining this country with your willful ignorance/lying.
and make up your mind for yourself! I don't think TheKoopaKing's reading of the case is accurate, but who cares what we think? You're able to settle for yourself whether the predicate crime was supposed to have been committed by Trump or by Cohen.
And, more importantly, you should decide for yourself whether the legal reasoning involved matches your idea of due process; and whether you'd like ICE to apply similar reasoning. This is the particular "whatabout" connection that's happening in right-wing minds, which I'm trying to illuminate.
Since I'm trying to build bridges and foster mutual understanding here, I'm not going to get mad at TheKoopaKing's insults. Particularly since his or her ire seems to be directed at Republicans, who I'm not particularly interested in defending or identifying with. Besides, I feel like he or she has made a few of my points for me; so I'll be content to sign off here.
>I don't think TheKoopaKing's reading of the case is accurate
It's not just my reading; it's the judge's, the entire jury's, all of news media's that isn't just Republican outrage slop. Anybody who is a moderately normal person is capable of reaching the conclusion that Trump is guilty and that there was no malfeasance in the trial besides Trump violating gag orders by attacking family members of the involved attorneys on social media. It's only Republicans who willingly and carelessly lie that each trial brought against Trump was corrupt and illegitimate and become kindergarteners with respect to their ability to read and interpret laws. Like I said in my initial response - there is no respectable contention provided here that the legal authority Trump was indicted and convicted on - directing Cohen to pay off a pornstar by falsifying business records - was illegitimate. Here is a list of numerous other cases where convictions were secured according to the same statute: https://www.justsecurity.org/85605/survey-of-past-new-york-felony-prosecutions-for-falsifying-business-records/ Saying the court trial was questionable is just a blatant lie that no reasonable person would ever reach or seriously try to pass off as a reasonable question after this has already been litigated in excruciating public detail.
Koopa is out of line imo, and I appreciate you for playing devils advocate.
That said, even if I thought this particular case was total baloney and was just the left trying to get at Trump, Trump was also dead to rights doing obviously bad things in 3 other cases of increasing severity. Those were:
- storing classified documents at mar-a-lago (and bragging about it?!)
- election interference in Georgia
- attempting to stay in power and overturn the results of an election (!!!)
No one ever seems to mention these, and it is WILD that the last one isn't disqualifying! The latter three cases didn't progress fast enough, and they all got dropped because it was the DOJ that was prosecuting them (which obviously was not going to continue the prosecution of their new boss), but he was obviously, brazenly guilty!
I agree that the NY state case has way less meat on it than what I would like to see for prosecuting a presidential candidate, and if that was the only thing that Trump was being prosecuted for of I'd be marching in the streets with the Grand Ol' Party for the obvious political lawfare. But I get the feeling that most people are either forgetting the other three cases out of convenience OR they never knew about them because their epistemological systems didn't have any way for that information to get through.
In the wider context of the other cases Trump was indicted for, I cannot take seriously anyone who is like "well I voted for Trump specifically because I thought the Dems were breaking norms". That was wayyyyyyy gone after J6 / the eastman plot. It's like getting Al Capone on tax charges -- no one thinks that was a violation of norms because it was obvious to everyone who was paying attention what Capone was up to.
Okay, so, you're pretty much at the same place as a right-wing person is at, with the polarity flipped. Liberals are like, "well I voted for Harris specifically because I thought the Republicans were breaking norms" and conservatives don't take them seriously. The conservative list will be something like Russiagate / Covid restriction disparities / 2020 election / Biden dementia coverup. To them, it's laughable to think the Democrats would uphold democratic norms.
Here's a thread outlining that perspective from 2021:
I don't condone this poster, I think he's insane about a bunch of stuff (although he has put out some darn good history podcasts). But that was the mega-viral thread that pretty much the whole right wing agreed with. And, say what you will, that final sentence is chilling, given the context of the 2024 election.
I guess what I'm trying to communicate is that, the place you're at, where you think Trump is a danger to democracy? Conservatives were mostly in that place already, well before January 6. They lived through a period of severe disillusionment during which they found out that they were naive idiots for thinking that Democrats would obey the norms they learned in civics class. And now that Trump is in power, Democrats are trying to shame them over those same norms.
My hope is that the next President will, explicitly and transparently, give up some power and advantage in order to re-establish the norms that have been exploded; and then that the next President of the other party will uphold that deal.
I remember that thread, and I remember what I thought at the time too after I looked into some of the claims: "lol it's all bullshit". I don't mean that to denigrate on people who got confused, because the noise looks convincing, but _it was and is still noise_. I'm reminded of Scott talking about degrees of freedom (https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/contra-kavanaugh-on-fideism?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=5sutf). People will point to things like "it can't be a coincidence that these underwater rocks look like chiseled brick, it must be Atlantis!" And, no, it's actually just a coincidence.
The same is true here. You don't need any crazy coordination to understand why Trump -- who even in 2016 was way past the norm of every politician who came before him -- would create an environment that *looks* conspiratorial in the normal interactions everyone has with him. Hanhania said something similar recently: that Trump behaves so far outside the norm that our existing systems bend and break. Even the worst of the Russia stuff was because Trump's team was doing legitimately shady stuff with Russia! (And frankly given how the Ukraine stuff has turned out, even I find myself wondering whether there was more truth to those conspiracies than I'd given credit for in the past).
I think epistemology is hard in the modern world, and I'm sympathetic to people who get caught following their empirical institutions down incorrect rabbit holes. But just because the Chinese Robber Fallacy happens a lot doesn't mean it's not a fallacy.
Look, I'm historically a centrist. I never thought our left wing was any more pure than the GOP. But the GOP is dead, it had its face eaten by MAGA. And even though I'm a centrist, I'm first and foremost an engineer and scientist. MAGA isn't a political party, it's a death cult. It is deeply uninterested in truth seeking or scientific process or even doing what's best for the country. There are a million things maga could be doing to actually be strategic about its goals. It could isolate China with hard tariffs while increasing exports from Vietnam. It could massively increase funding for immigration judges and use technology to streamline asylum applications. It could create manufacturing jobs through local defense spending initiatives. And instead of doing anything like that, it's just destroying things in the dumbest way possible.
Based on my conversations with dozens of MAGAs, the only goal is vengeance, at any cost. And the problem I have with that opinion is that it's based on something that is at best a misunderstanding and at worst a malicious attempt by cynical counter elites to grab power (Andreessen, Thiel, Musk, and Murdoch have much to answer for). I voted for Harris because it was obvious after J6 just what kind of person Trump was. The problem is, for a certain class of person, that was exactly why they voted for him. "He's a bastard but he's our bastard"
To be clear, though, I think the average trump supporter is just misinformed. Most Trump supporters I end up talking to are very online and politically engaged. The average trump supporter is like my friends mom in Ohio, who voted for Trump entirely because he said "he would make the economy better". I don't blame her either -- you have one candidate being (more or less) honest and one candidate lying through is teeth. The voter isn't informed enough to know the difference. That's why I spend time arguing here -- in the hopes of piercing some part of the epistemological bubble people seem to be in.
Are you entirely sure and certain that 'Nobody on the right is going to listen to complaints about "due process' is the argument you want to lead with? There's a lot of other things that are infantile and foolish about your post, and we can get into the specifics of it, sure.
Just: to be clear on this point, are you entirely sure you know what you are suggesting here? Have you actually thought about what that means? I get that it can be fun and charming to boldly declare that you are not interested in petty concerns of the law, because [big important thing] must be done [now] otherwise [bad nogood thing] occurs and so we shall ignore due process!
Just keep in mind: An illegal immigrant, by definition, as in, the meaning of language itself, cannot be illegal if there is no process by which to determine this. You lose the ability to declare them illegal at all if you abandon the conceit of laws. There is no legality in that world.
Giving up on the concept of rules and a law abiding society does not lead to the place you think it does, and the (seeming) rampaging hordes of millions you are so concerned with would appear to have a sizable advantage in deciding the outcome of any dispute if you abandon the conceit of dispute resoluton via legal abitration and due process.
That invokes, by its shape, what we might call 'alternative means of dispute resolution'.
Does the point that due process is meant to protect YOU not resonate with you at all? Due process exists to protect the rights of everyone, not just the people currently being subject to it. Once it starts to erode, your chances of being denied due process go up, because we have already conceded that in some circumstances it is permissible to do without it, and now we are just arguing about what those are.
I much prefer the world in which we don't argue about that at all.
"Does the point that due process is meant to protect YOU not resonate with you at all?"
No, no it doesn't. At least not for a substantial portion of the right. This isn't even trying to argue with you; you can just google "Anarcho Tyranny" and find a lot of conservative writing that boils down to "laws will be maliciously enforced against conservatives and not enforced against liberals". Right or wrong, you're appealing to defense of common rights that a lot of conservatives no longer believe they have.
As whether those are valid...
At the personal level, kinda. Most college kids and corporate workers in the 2010s were very familiar with unjust enforcement of corporate policies and rules against certain groups. More generally though, I think a lot of it and almost all of the more serious stuff involving cops is more people reading malicious intent into deeply dysfunctional bureaucratic systems. Like, even if you're a good person, if you talk to the cops, you should have a lawyer. Not because they're out to get you or they're bad people, more because they're kinda out to get everyone because the system is deeply misaligned.
At the more general level...it was not terribly subtle when Covid lockdowns were an urgent requirement that overruled all other considerations until BLM came along. Some things trump quarantine and some don't. More generally, the ATF seems to be an absolute mess and might be, literally, inventing felonies.
And finally, at the top level, as I will never cease to remind people, that the FBI lied to the FISA courts in 2016 and 2017 in order to wiretap Carter Page and, by extension, the Trump campaign. (1) This is not controversial, the FBI has admitted it, no relevant party doubts it or disputes it. If you're Trump or a Trump staffer, do you believe the FBI and other federal law enforcement will provide you proper due process when they have a proven history of not doing it. And if you're a Trump voter, how are you supposed to interpret this?
I'm a bit confused about what right you think has been taken away from conservatives. Are they not getting due process anymore? If so, in what circumstances?
I'm not exactly rebuffing your examples. They aren't false. But I'm not sure they're an example of "due process" not being afforded to conservatives in some systemic manner. It's some selective weaponization of law enforcement, and that's bad, but that's not the same as due process.
What difference do you think there is between selective enforcement and due process? Not like an own, I googled the difference and the 3rd thing that came up is this from the American Bar (1):
" A recognized defense in non-tax prosecutions, both federal and state, is that the Government discriminatorily and invidiously targeted the defendant....The defense is constitutional in nature, implicating the Equal Protection and Due Process guarantees"
There absolutely might be some technical distinction you're drawing there but it's a pretty fine line.
More generally, I suspect you'd get more benefit from reading around a bit for the general conservative vibe than my own weird opinions. I see a lot of stuff like this:
"This is Blue Zone governance, full stop, the thing people describe as anarcho-tyranny. Common San Francisco business owner experience: Police don’t intervene in the constant vandalism and tagging that degrades business property, but the highly alert army of code enforcement officers fine business owners for failing to clean up the damage that the city hasn’t prevented."
Because you're asking why due process doesn't resonate with people and, well, I see a lot of people, some quite important, treating due process and equitable treatment as dead letter. (2)
“Here’s some unrelated examples of bad policing/policy enforcement that I don’t like… so basically habeas corpus is dead to me and the executive can summarily banish anyone they want to a third party county”
Basically that you're confusing my personal argument with the general public's argument and the general public's argument is usually...kinda dumb. So I'm trying not to motte-and-bailey you.
A safe example is probably Russiagate.
There's a strict case that Russia made moves to interfere with the election with the intent of helping Trump, mostly through various fairly marginal online activities. Which is probably true but was not what motivated most people.
There's also a very loose case that Trump and Putin literally and directly conspired against Hillary Clinton. Which was what genuinely motivated tens of millions of people and is also almost certainly not true.
But it wouldn't be fair to pretend that tens of millions of people were deeply concerned about marginal election interference, even though that charge is overwhelmingly more likely to be true.
Likewise, I think I laid out the more strictly true case in my first post but I also included the second because it's indicative of, no shade to Chris Bray, the more popular and less defensible case that really motivates dramatically more people.
Don't confuse the weird autistic strict arguments you see here with the general epistemic horror show that actually influences real people is all I'm saying.
>Pres Biden when he ignored a SCOTUS decision to do student loan forgiveness
Except that didn't happen. Biden did exactly what Trump did re the "Muslim ban" -- when his initial version was struck down, he enacted a narrower version, and then a narrower one, until one finally passed muster. There is nothing wrong with that.
>when millions of illegal aliens were let in with zero vetting or process.
>The "process" that is "due" to an illegal alien is deportation.
No, the process due to an illegal alien is deportation PROCEEDINGS. Because the law is very clear that not all persons in the country illegally are subject to deportation. They might, for example, be eligible for asylum, or for withholding of removal.
The crazy thing is, Trump is deporting people every single day. Many thousands. But he screwed up in a few instances and rather than fix that problem he's doubling down.
He did not screw up, him or his Cabinet members are directing ICE and DoD to deport people without due process. The AEA proclamation was handed to ICE before it was made public - when the AEA requires the President to make the proclamation publicly to avoid these sorts of secret arrests. Further, the apprehended subjects were removed without the possibility for judicial review - the direct intention of secretly alerting ICE before the public. These were all intentional illegal removals. Since then ICE has testified in court that DoD removed other subjects because the DoD was not formally enjoined in the court proceeding. These aren't mistakes, the Trump admin is criminally directing ICE topdown to break the law.
"complaints about "due process" when millions of illegal aliens were let in with zero vetting or process"
I think ... it *might* even be more than just the right, which has noticed this - which I guess is why we must all be made to swallow, very forcibly, the most extreme and ludicrous example, of a tatted-up Salvadoran wife-beater as the reason the brief experiment with deportations must come to a stop, and never be revived.
Nobody is saying you can't deport people. You just have to follow the process. This is a matter of what is legal for the government to do. We all should have a vested interest in making sure the government is operating without total impunity, it is what safeguards everyone from the impossible power of the federal government, which could be used to enforce anything at any time if not for the constraints that are meant to hold it.
Plenty of people are saying you can't deport people. In fact, in much the same way that the same folks who would have once been in solidarity with Occupying Wall Street are complaining about the stock market tanking (immediate increase in societal equity!) and grousing that it is only so because MAGA are too stupid and poor to have portfolios - are in fact reddit-commenting that they need to deport themselves the sooner to another country because of the deportations!
Of course the judiciary is trying to shut it down. What have we been arguing about the last eight or 10 years? Don't toy with us. I'm not toying with you when I say that my side on the issue feels precisely the same, that years, indeed decades, of cumulative actions have been taken with utter impunity, that led us to this pass.
Who is saying you can't deport people? I don't mean some random reddit comment that reflects the views of a tiny slice of the population. I mean public figures, party playforms, media outlets, anything public. You can find any view you want on the internet in some tiny community, but the view that you can't deport people at all is essentially so minor that it's not worth discussing. Biden even deported millions, he just let millions of others in.
The debate is about the process, and Trump is using a novel, and potentiality abusive, process that deprives immigrants of a hearing they are entitled to have by law, as confirmed by the Supreme Court of the United States.
Of course, your argument also implies that innocent people will get scooped up; "those who got in without due process shall be sent out without it" presumes that set of people is universally known with certainty.
OTOH, innocent people were getting victimized by open borders policy. So there's also this sense of a bleeding wound requiring first aid, and that aid might hurt more cells. So you'd also need to demonstrate that that due process is worth letting US society bleed out further, and if it turns out you believe the US isn't in that kind of danger (common among people who believe the US can be a haven to the poor, the tired, the yearning to be free), you'll have a very hard time making that case.
Due process exists for the protection of all of us. It is not given based on anything you want or demand or who you are in any way. It exists specifically to bypass any of those concerns. It doesn't matter what they did. Does a murderer not get due process because they killed someone? Surely that's a bigger issue than hopping the border? Of course they do. Because due process prevents mistakes. It creates gaps in the enactment of law where you can plead a case, and those are the only things that protect the innocent. We have trials for the guilty even when it is obvious, because sometimes it seems obvious when it is later proven not to be.
>Due process exists for the protection of all of us.
Mostly, but this isn't just a binary choice.
Personally, I want ICE to be _very_ careful to distinguish between citizens, green card holders (permanent resident aliens?), valid visa holders, and all-other-aliens. Say at the 0.1% level of accuracy (who am I kidding, can the Trump administration do _anything_ at the 0.1% level?...).
But then distinguishing which of the all-other-aliens have e.g. fully valid asylum claims, and which of them do not might be at a different, perhaps sloppier level. Maybe 20%?
I don't know what is actually feasible here. Anyone have real information?
But there surely are tradeoffs between time spent per person and accuracy, and the tradeoffs can be set differently at different stages in determining someone's status.
The tradeoffs are currently a big part of the debate. If there were no tradeoffs - for example, ICE could reduce its error rate by 90% with no additional expenditure or impact on anyone's rights - then doing so would of course be a non-issue. They'd just do it as soon as they learned it was an option.
In reality, anything ICE changes policy-wise carries a cost in retooling and maintenance, just like any other organization. That part is eclipsed in the debate by the rights impact, since that's what draws all the clicks. In this case, the impact is not just to people being considered for deportation, but also the rights of people who aren't at risk of deportation, but are at risk of predation by people who happen to be here illegally. One side says that risk is high, and borne completely by actual citizens in order to spare the rights of a smaller number of non-citizens, who shouldn't get priority over actual citizens. The other side says that risk is small or nonexistent; rights of deportation targets are the dominant factor.
That's a terrible counterargument. It boils down to an argument against all due process and a return to pre-modern justice systems. "Murderer who bypassed laws demands due process before being executed," "Thief who bypassed laws demands due process before having hand chopped off". Haha, silly criminals.
Yes. The murder rate in the 90s was off the charts compared to now. Easy to make the same "bleeding out" argument then and just throw the suspects in prison without trial. But we didn't, and we're better off for it.
Shaked Koplewitz makes the argument below (search for "there is a genuine problem"). You're using "due process is valuable" as if it means due process is infinitely valuable. It should be easy to see how leaning on it can deprive you of everything else (or save you, at everyone else's expense).
To those continuing to argue "due process", I'm curious: how long do you think that due process would take? This is not a rhetorical question. Maybe it's minutes; maybe it's years. I suspect that in one or two cases, it was a day, or would have been, and the administration was moving faster than it should have.
But the way I see it, "due process" is a term we can taboo. If it would have taken only a day or less, then the argument to make isn't "follow due process"; it's "it would have taken only a day to check; why didn't you?". And if it would have taken longer, then it becomes clearer why they didn't do that - people were using "due process" to exploit the system. (Someone earlier referred to it as DDoSing the US.)
The timeframe is not what is at issue. It is that only during a hearing could you present evidence to contradict what the government is claiming. Without a hearing there is no way to plead your case.
I in fact believe the whole immigration system needs a big overhaul, a higher budget, more judges to hear more cases, etc. etc. The system takes too long as is. But that doesn't mean you get to bypass it just because you think it's inefficient. It is the only mechanism that allows you to fight back against the federal government's decisions, decisions that can be, and sometimes are, very wrong and harmful.
Suppose the timeframe is a year. We have P people able to do due process to a maybe-US-citizen, and I immigrants. Total immigrants processable per year is P, and if P < I, then the system grinds shut. Every time you claim the timeframe doesn't matter, you pretty quickly lose anyone who understands how slow the government works.
As you say, it probably needs an overhaul. What if that overhaul requires a reduction in the amount of due process done? Possibly to the level currently performed in some of these cases you're talking about now? You mention increasing the judge count; how are you going to pay for their training? And their salaries afterward?
I'll say the same thing I said to Chris: you're treating "due process" like some talisman with infinite weight. You can claim it's what we should do, until the cows come home. But reality gets final say, and what you're probably going to see is immigration services being paid small fortunes to still not keep up with demand, or compromises that will look pretty close to what we're seeing now, or the whole system just comes apart and no one gets due-anything.
This is legally incorrect, and for obvious reasons.
Let's say one has immigrated illegally to the U.S. ICE picks him up. There is a prescribed process and hearing, that is true. But now let's say the determination is made that, yes, he is not entitled to be in the U.S. and can be deported at will, but he is released temporarily pending later deportation.
Then ICE picks him up again. He has a deportation order. But he says ",Wait, actually, I'm here legally." Is another hearing required?
Let's say we give him that hearing too. The deportation order is upheld. Then he says "Wait, I claim asylum." Another hearing?
Let's say he gets that too. His deportation order is upheld again and ICE lays hands on him again to transport him. Now he says "You've got the wrong guy. Mistaken identity." Is another hearing required?
You see the issue. What process is "due" depends on statute, and as one would imagine, the amount "due" gets smaller and smaller as the process continues. At some point, it is simply not true that "a hearing [] to plead your case" is required. And yes, sometimes that endpoint will lead to errors. It doesn't mean that due process has been violated.
I think one of the interesting issues is that this framing misses more or less the whole point? Though I grant that's obviously my opinion, so I could be wrong.
If you take it in terms, it becomes easier to see.
" How long do you do you think the process should take " -- > As long as is legally mandated. Caveat: If unworkable, propose broad-scale large adjustments to the rules. Do not break and violate the rules.
" But the way I see it, "due process" is a term we can taboo. " --> Sure.
"If it would have taken only a day or less, then the argument to make isn't "follow due process"; it's "it would have taken only a day to check; why didn't you?" " --> This is the same question and statement, though. They didn't, because they did not want to, and them not wanting to and making trivial mistakes is avoided by taking a day / week / month to check. Which, again, they do not want to do. And so do not.
"And if it would have taken longer, then it becomes clearer why they didn't do that - people were using "due process" to exploit the system. " --> Were they? What makes you so certain of this? What evidence do you have to reach this conclusion? You didn't check! You *cannot make this claim*!
There's a trick here, and the trick is performing the basic fundamental attribution mistake that you have *pre-emptively declared someone as worthy of criminal/legal/judical/executive proceedings* but you have not *performed the neccessary process by which you check whether this is due*.
It is patently obvious that *if* someone was *explicitly exploiting the system* then dragging out any procedure is an *act of malfeasance*. But the law has capacity to handle these cases too. There are many, many options available for courts and systems that explicitly allow this. We can discuss whether this is optimal or intended (no, yes), but it is factual. This *also* means that if someone is exploiting the system and "ddosing the united states", the united states is not a completely monolithic, passive participant without access to legal council, lawyers, directives, systems, monitoring, oversight, processes and so on designed to handle these things.
However. If one does take the day / week / month to check these things, they do not happen. Then mistakes happen.
You are subtly suggesting, and this is the trick that leads to seriously bad shit, so I am pointing it out plain:
That if the *inconvenience* of a process *outweighs* someones judgement of what they stand to gain from it, they get to not participate in that process. That may work in normal social interaction, but it cannot work in matters of law. The government is not granting us the nicity of not stuffing someone into a van and flying them off to a foreign country where there is no recourse. This is not a polite thing they're doing *until they stop feeling polite*. We can discuss and talk about whether that is the case in some "real" sense of the word, and I'm sure one can leverage arguments for and against, but that is a different conversation. The point of the fact is they must take time to check these things because these are the processes the system is bound by. If there is an issue with how long it takes:
Eg:
"And if it would have taken longer, then it becomes clearer why they didn't do that "
Then their job is to *change the rules* in the legal fashion, as is done and has been done for centuries, and is the foundational point of how lawmaking and civic society works. They do not get put the rules aside on the presumption that someone else is exploiting them, with no proof that is so, because they did not take the day to check.
The timeframe is not an issue.
Asking about it is irrelevant, and it leads to a magic trick, where you're going "Oh, at some point, the implied cost of it becomes so high that the government is allowed to just ignore it".
Not so. The government, as an entity, does not get to perform special pleading of exemption because it does not like the rules and feels it would be inconvenient to obey them. The government is full of big people in big suits who are grown, mature adults. They can handle their issues without blackbagging people. Meanwhile, you cannot in good faith pre-emptively declare that other people are exploiting the concepts the government are violating and that is reason for violating their legal rights. That doesn't work.
There are metrics and systems in place for altering onerous requirements. They exist to prevent people from being shipped off to foreign prisons with no possibility of redress. Once they stopped being applied, people are shipped off to foreign prisons with no possibility of redress.
" (Someone earlier referred to it as DDoSing the US.) " -->
The US is not a single overloaded server at danger of blowing out because it gets a lot of requests. And if it was, an IT professional can resolve a DDOS attack. They are remarkably easy to handle, and require, fundamentally, simply taking the steps to do so. If one does not take those steps, one does not get to use it as an excuse to be upset when malign actors ddos your server infrastructure. When malign actors then do ddos your server infrastructure, one certainly does not get to snatch random, unaligned civilians off of the street on the vague suspecion that they have a laptop in their backpack, bundle them off to a foreign prison, and never, in that ordeal, check if they actually have the laptop, know what a ddos attack is, or have any relation to the on-going situation of your own flawed server architecture.
It is an analogy so stupid it makes me sigh, which, I don't to imply that anyone believing is stupid for thinking. But just, like, c'mon.
Think about it for a second. The Government doesn't work like a server. And if it did, the government has IT professionals. In a very real sense, if we're being sincere, the people flooding the legal architecture with endless spam to overload it and get the stuff they want through the loopholes the systems are too slow to catch seems to be the people doing the grab-and-ship-them-off-to-foreign-countries-which-we-can-do-so-long-as-we-get-to-do-it-before-a-judge-tells-us-we-can't trick.
The people doing the malicious hacking of legal codes in this scenario doesn't seem to be the people that analogy is meant to imply it is!
F> " How long do you do you think the process should take " -- > As long as is legally mandated. Caveat: If unworkable, propose broad-scale large adjustments to the rules. Do not break and violate the rules.
The other side has had a response to this general argument for a long time. The mandates have long been unworkable. Adjustments were proposed long ago. They were denied by footdragging from officials not affected by the downside - in other words, the current due process side got this process because it wanted to and could deadweight it into place, rather than because it was fair.
F> "If it would have taken only a day or less, then the argument to make isn't "follow due process"; it's "it would have taken only a day to check; why didn't you?" " --> This is the same question and statement, though.
It is not the same argument as "you didn't use due process". The question I quoted above assumes the administration wants due process but made a minor mistake it believes will make no difference in said process. The latter statement assumes the administration is generally opposed to due process. If these look like the same picture to you, check again.
F> "And if it would have taken longer, then it becomes clearer why they didn't do that - people were using "due process" to exploit the system. " --> Were they? What makes you so certain of this? What evidence do you have to reach this conclusion? You didn't check! You *cannot make this claim*!
I am not certain of it, but I am also not certain it isn't happening. This is based on decades of experience working in the government, plus decades of accounts from other people I've seen working in government and interacting with it. The capacity of the state to demand process beyond what is "due" has been well known by a lot of people, for generations. It is why "you can't fight city hall" is an aphorism.
In light of the fact that it might be happening, and might not be, my default is to look for better evidence, or for a tiebreaker. So far, most of the evidence is motivated, and not preponderant on either side; and the most evident tiebreaker is people who appear to be here illegally, vs. people who much more certainly aren't.
F> There's a trick here, and the trick is performing the basic fundamental attribution mistake that you have *pre-emptively declared someone as worthy of criminal/legal/judicial/executive proceedings* but you have not *performed the necessary process by which you check whether this is due*.
I've already discussed why people are waving "due process" around like a talisman; this argument just attempts to reassert what I already addressed. The side arguing for deportation is already past fundamental attribution, and into "okay, there seems to be a clerical error in the process, but it looks like correcting this error isn't going to change the ultimate outcome, so this demand for 'due process' isn't actually on principle; it's demanding endless procedure, at expense of other US citizens, and particularly in order to retaliate against an administration you already don't like". That's at least one argument I'm seeing; I recently posted a comment above with more. For more detail, you might want to go to the DSL thread. (At times, there, I've made the same argument you just did.)
> innocent people were getting victimized by open borders policy
> due process is worth letting US society bleed out further
I'm so intrigued by this language! What were the harms of immigration that you were feeling, out of curiosity? Like, what specifically do you think was hurting you / your family / your community? Was it primarily economic? Feelings of an increase of crime? Something else?
ETA: Well, let's see. First link: "students who participated in pro-Palestine protests that erupted on campuses across the country in 2024 during Israel’s war on Gaza" (in response to Gaza's unprovoked attack on Israelis). Second link: paywalled. Third link: doesn't go into detail about the terms of Biden's "scheme" (their word), but I know it came when Biden was retaliating against Trump's first attempt at border control, and the counterargument there is the rise in crime from such immigrants. So it's not for no reason at all; it's far from being all student here on visas, and seems to be based on some sort of analysis of where violent criminals are coming from.
I'm not feeling any personal harms from immigration so far, but neither is the side arguing for better enforcement against *illegal* immigration. In other venues, I argue the other side, and try my best to internalize what each side is saying.
I've been pretty clear that *this is the argument*, and if you're going to impugn the people making it, just for making it, and making it fair for them to level the same attacks at you, I don't see the resulting Condescensionbowl 2025 going anywhere productive. Which is to say, next time I have to argue that illegal immigration enforcements are maybe going too far, the best I'll have to offer on this front are ad hominems phrased as innocent questions, and I'll probably just exercise discretion and let their arguments stand.
I'm sorry that you thought I was being condescending, I legitimately wasn't and you can see other examples in other open threads where I am trying to legitimately understand the mindset of people who openly admit to experiencing no harms from this issue and yet are willing to stake quite a bit on it. To that end, I appreciate you for being honest on this
> I'm not feeling any personal harms from immigration so far
but I have to ask in a follow up: even if I take the utilitarian framing, if you are experiencing no harms from this, and to a first approximation _no one I have asked_ is experiencing any harms from this, why is this the thing that is worth destroying due process over?
Like, elsewhere you argue
> In this case, the argument is that there are cases in which due process ought to dominate, in order to protect civil rights, and there are cases in which due process is itself smothering civil rights because it is being suborned by scoundrels. Ergo, we need to re-examine the justifications behind due process and border control and see if they're still applicable, and to what extent.
surely this is not a case where "due process is smothering civil rights" if no one is feeling any harms?
- to be clear, re students you aren't denying they were here legally? Doesn't that go against the 'those who enter without due process shouldnt expect it on the way out'?
though I'm not sure youre really arguing in good faith, since the headline of the article is not paywalled and gives more than enough information about what I'm talking about. If your only answer is 'paywalled' I don't think youre actually interested in learning.
If you're an environmentalist, this is not the gotcha you think.
Of course, if you want something more, I might suggest the feeling that your country no longer has a shared culture, and that urban sprawl in the guise of Bazaar of Global Cheap Stuff is not really the consolation prize you might imagine.
And a vague feeling that the boring permanent conversation about school, and the failures of school, and money for school, and where are the people who will teach the school/we told them they were the Wrong People but nonetheless it was their responsibility, and where are they? - will now go on forever and ever, and the same fake platitudes uttered.
And ditto the familiar conversation about where people sleep, and whether we've enough of these people in these beds and so on.
And all the multicult shattered into a thousand pieces. And not even an emperor to unite.
I'll be honest, I read this a few times and I am not really sure what you are saying.
To try and break down what I think you are saying:
- more people coming to a first world country results in a bigger environmental footprint, better to let them stay in their second/third world countries. They may suffer but they won't impact the environment as much.
- something about 'shared culture' -- maybe immigrants create less 'shared culture' than we had before.
- something about cheap commodity goods. For some reason these are bad?
The stuff about school, beds, and 'multi cult' you really lost me on. No idea what you're trying to say.
---
To try and answer this:
- I'm not a degrowth environmentalist who would rather people suffer than just like, develop or industrialize. This is an extremely fringe population, and you may be in a bubble if you think that there are a lot of people advocating for this.
- I love immigrant culture. I'll copy paste my answer above:
> As far as the immigration population generally goes, I live in NYC, and my favorite part of the city is Queens (I lived there for two years) which is basically just a series of ethnic enclaves. It's amazing, these are people who are so excited to be in America! Their neighborhoods are brimming with optimism and they are some of the most patriotic people you will ever meet. And the food is fantastic to boot. Spend a day in Queens and it is immediately obvious to me that the economic game is not zero sum, the way it is portrayed
The country I grew up in cared about immigrants and saw them as the driver of so much American growth and progress. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore." This is our national advantage -- we take the brilliant people and the best parts of the cultures of the entire world and incorporate the best parts into our society. What is the 'shared culture' that you are referring to that you miss so much? Have you personally experienced some sort of a degradation of that culture as a result of immigration specifically? I'll be totally up front: every time I have ever interacted with someone who cares a lot about our 'shared culture', it has always been a dogwhistle for outright racism -- as in, "i want the country to be more christian and more white, and I am uncomfortable with the idea that that may not always be the case". I'm open to hearing your take, assuming its not that.
- cheap commodity goods are good. Sorry, I believe this unabashedly, and every time a cuban immigrant comes to a costco my faith in this is reaffirmed.
“Person accused of doing illegal thing demands due process to determine if they actually did it” haha, so funny. How can those dumb liberals not see how ridiculous their position is when we frame it this way?
The Bee is not a serious source, it’s providing an obviously bad faith argument to try and be humorous and yet you are trying to pass it off as something deserving of consideration.
I have considered it. It is slop. If you are interested in high minded and fair discussion maybe don’t lead with a poorly done sneering conservative satire piece and get upset when it is respond to in kind.
"Due process" is not a monolith. Different process is due in different circumstances with different people. There was an error with one of the Salvadorians - he was 100% permitted to be deported summarily, and had a standing order to that effect. He just wasn't supposed to go to El Salvador due to his gang affiliation.
Yes, there are different processes for different people. But if they wanted to deport him to El Salvador they would have needed to follow the process of reopening his case and giving him a hearing. They didn't do that.
They could have deported him somewhere else, but they didn't. So they didn't follow his due process. That's the problem.
He wasn't entitled to more due process. He had a removal order. The due process was completed years before. The government screwed up by sending him the one place he wasn't supposed to go - but there wasn't any question of his being allowed to stay.
He absolutely was. If they wanted to deport him to El Salvador they needed to reopen his case and have a hearing to contest the current stay. They didn't do that, so they didn't follow due process.
If they had deported him somewhere else, there was no more due process required. But they didn't, so there was.
He was entitled, before being deported to El Salvador, to stand before a judge and say "this is why I shouldn't be deported to El Salvador". That's due process. Independent of what happened the last time he stood before a judge, which was also due process but a different instance of such.
*Everyone* who is hauled in off the streets and scheduled for deportation to El Salvador, is entitled to that. Which, in most cases, will be a brief discussion of "yeah you've got nothing backing up that sob story and it doesn't match what you said on your tourist visa or whatever, off to El Salvador with you", But sometimes it's a slam-dunk "I guess we can't deport you to El Salvador", and that can be cleared up quickly, and the case for both "Meh, it was a mistake but no harm no foul" and "Oh noes! Due Process is too Hard!" goes away.
You might as well ask why the guy terrorizing the college campus and threatening to blow up little indie shops in my college town, has been arrested dozens of times while convicted or even trialed - never? And never will be?
But you’re right, maybe these incidents are purely situational - she provoked him and had it coming to her. Like when he got stopped for coyote-ing the illegals that time, she probably bitched at him and said you were probably speeding and that’s why they stopped you. You’re supposed to drive slow.
For the wife-beating? She didn't show up for the final trial, and they reconciled. For other crimes? Well, that's what we're discussing right now: "innocent guy just carpooling to work" versus "caught travelling with a bunch of other migrants, possibly might be doing coyote work".
Especially when that Salvadoran *did* receive due process. A judge declared him an illegal, and a judge declared him a gang member. He was eminently deportable. The only thing he had going for him was an order not to deport him specifically to El Salvador, because his gang and other Salvadoran gangs didn’t get along. I don’t know, and have no way of knowing, whether his deportation to El Salvador was malice or an honest error. But you know, while I am a big believer in due process, I’m not going to lose much sleep over this one. It baffles me that Democrats chose this hill to die on. Are all the rest of the deported even more unsavory than this one?
Well, there’s the guy who was fishing and threw a rock at the endangered heron. He could be a backup. He was deported right quick.
And then there’s the guy the NYT anointed this week, who was ordered deported upon release, when he was convicted of kidnapping in his first year here as an illegal.
I didn’t read the story so it may have been one of those nuanced kidnappings - but Steve Sailer did a funny write-up of the “hell” that awaits him in … Jamaica.
When did Biden have a student loan program struck down and then continue with that very same program anyway? Isn’t the issue that he kept coming back with narrower and narrower programs so that no one could tell whether they were covered by this round or not?
And no, due process does not *begin* with deportation, any more than a trial begins with a declaration of guilt. There is a process involved of proving, or at least providing a preponderance of evidence, that the punishment is due.
Biden's vote-buying scheme was never expected to succeed at the courts. By trying and failing repeatedly and by sending mail to each person individually with his signature stamped on it he got exactly the results he wanted. And he also got the bonus that if not checked at the courts exactly correctly each time, he might even succeed.
Biden did not ignore any SCOTUS orders or injunctions.
What SCOTUS actually ordered was a lot more moderate than what the headline-grabbing 'SCOTUS STRIKES DOWN STUDENT LOAN FORGIVENESS" headlines would lead you to believe. Their actual order was a limited injunction against a specific program of debt relief for specific types of loans.
The smaller number of loans Biden did forgive were different things that didn't violate that order.
>The "process" that is "due" to an illegal alien is deportation.
Cool, you are an illegal alien, we're going to deport you now.
What, you say you're a citizen? Sorry, there's no process by which you could officially offer evidence to that effect and force us to consider it. Goodbye alien scum!
"Pres Biden when he ignored a SCOTUS decision to do student loan forgiveness" -- people need to stop repeating Jim Jordan's facts-free sound bite.
Biden's plan that the SCOTUS rejected 6-3 was to forgive $10,000 to $20,000 of federal student loan debt per borrower, which would have benefited more than 40 million borrowers and cost around $400 billion. The SCOTUS found that the plan stretched a key phrase of a specific federal law beyond Congress' intent in passing that law. The Supreme Court did not rule that the Biden administration could not cancel student loan debt; it ruled that the specific statute was being stretched too far.
Biden acknowledged that finding and dropped the proposal. He then proposed three much-smaller pieces of student loan forgiveness under a different statute. Federal district judges in two states put holds on two of those proposals and an appeals court agreed, under similar logic as the SCOTUS case (a statute being stretched too far). So the administration dropped those. They ended up doing only one further student-loan forgiveness which benefitted around 1/8th as many students, for much-smaller individual amounts, compared to the original plan that had been rejected by the SCOTUS.
To sum up: the courts told the administration it could not do something under a particular law. So the administration dropped that plan. Then the administration tried to achieve a smaller version of the same goal by using a different law, to see if that law would allow it. The courts said no to most of that as well, and so the administration didn’t do those parts of it. They did end up doing one much-smaller thing that the courts had no problem with.
Biden then bragged about having found a way to cancel student loan debt despite the courts which was just routine politician face-saving. In reality he did not defy or evade any court rulings about student loan debt, and did not cancel anywhere near as much student loan debt as he would have if the courts hadn't said no.
I find these arguments from hypocrisy completely uncompelling. Yes, hypocrites exist, and yes, the two major parties have almost universally engaged in similar types of bad behavior (although often not to the same degree in any particular case), but when defending a particular instance of bad behavior from the current group in power: what do you say to the people who _weren't_ hypocrites? Many such people exist. Lots of people criticizied, at the time, exactly the things you are describing. So what do you say to the people who are also now criticizing Trump?
Hypocrisy is a reason to not take a particular person seriously. It is not a reason to dismiss an entire class of complaint.
Previous bad behavior does not justify current bad behavior.
Also in this (and many other cases), the only way to make the accusation of hypocrisy is to brazenly lie about the facts. The Biden admin complied with the court orders and enancted only the parts of the programs sanctioned by the courts, at least one order of magnitude smaller than the original proposal. It's a textbook case of the executive deferring to the judicial!
I think it works best if you think of it as people's incomes relative to their expectations. To use a hypothetical example. If you grew up three meals a day and can now only afford two, you're going to feel really hungry. But if you grew up on one meal a day but can now afford two you're going to feel good. Especially if everyone you know is still on one meal.
One example of people who "moved to slums" would be digital nomads. Though if you're earning an American software engineers salary and paying Manila prices for rent you're probably living a quality of life better than a software engineer in San Francisco.
Per your paragraph 33 due process note, it might also be worth mentioning that the Trump administration itself has conceded this point. The recent SCOTUS JGG order observed this: "The detainees’ rights against summary removal, however, are not currently in dispute. The Government expressly agrees that 'TdA members subject to removal under the Alien Enemies Act get judicial review'....'It is well established that the Fifth Amendment entitles aliens to due process of law' in the context of removal proceedings.' Reno v. Flores, 507 U. S. 292, 306 (1993)."
so, someone advancing this point I think has to acknowledge they are going so far out on a legal limb that:
1: Scalia disagrees
2: The Supreme Court as recently as 2 weeks ago disagrees
A federal judge might open investigations into the US government being in contempt of court. Deadline ends in less than a day from now, not sure what news if any on this development.
Also remember the dog and pony show with Bukele a few days ago, where an autocrat, practically dictator, regrettably had to admit he "does not have the power" to send back the prisoners.
The Per Curiam opinion in the JGG case came out the way it did because the government "expressly agree[d] that TdA members subject to removal under the Alien Enemies Act get judicial review." The government also agreed that “It is well established that the Fifth Amendment entitles aliens to due process of law” citing Reno v. Flores (a 1990s-era case that held the same thing).
I can't emphasize this enough, and I've talked a bit about it on the discord as well: Trump has, in court anyway, conceded that the detainees he seeks to deport under the Alien Enemies Act are entitled to a due process determination of their basis for removal (In habeas) and that the Alien Enemies Act itself is subject to judicial review (that is, courts can examine whether "invasion" under this act pertains to TdA, it's not just "up to the president."
Trump's attorneys have also conceded he messed up in Garcia's case. Simply put, in COURT, the administration is flat-out saying those subject to deportation get due process and the basis for deportation is subject to judicial review.
People usually refer to bit flips in memory as due to cosmic rays but they aren't any more common in high altitude places like Denver than low altitude places, making it unlikely that cosmic rays have anything to do with it in most cases. Mostly they're due to radioactive decay of something inside the chip.
It still needs to know what children look like and how they differ from adults. This is just like that case last year where kids were uploading photos of female classmates to generate porn.
> The IA has to base it's imagery on real kiddie porn.
No, style transfers and generalization are things.
For example, AI image generators are already reasonably good at generating photorealistic versions of hand-drawn sketches. If I give Dall-E a crude stick-figure drawing of a house, the model is capable of turning it into something that looks like a real-estate photo. If you give a model a hand-drawn pornographic comic, it's equally capable of generating something reasonably photorealistic.
Similarly, image generation models can generalize from their training sets. If it knows what a man wearing rabbit ears looks like and it knows what women look like, it has a reasonable chance of generating a pseudo-photo of a woman wearing rabbit ears.
Legally, at least in some jurisdictions, you are breaking the law if you get AI to do this, as this is taken as infringing their rights.
If you do it in your mind it's just morally wrong :)
If you think it's OK, why don't you ask them....?
There's a similar argument about art. The arts world got up in arms a few months back cos they were worried that AI was going to be trained on all their output and then put them out of a job. But how did they learn their art? By training on the output of their predecessors!
Only cos he's seen fully dressed 17 year olds. As soon as the AI incorporates that info it's abusing the 17 year old. Anyway, kiddie porn isn't about 17 year olds. Younger kids look very different.
I can't believe I have to say this here, but I were much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much rather abused as a child by someone doing stuff with pictures of me, than ... me.
I suppose an argument could be made that yes, AI-generated photos are indeed *way* better than real photos.
But then our old friend the slippery slope comes along. After all, if it's okay for you to masturbate to AI generated photos of toddlers in diapers, why not AI generated photos of toddlers naked? After all, it's not real kids.
If it's okay for AI generated photos of naked toddlers, why not AI generated photos of naked toddlers touching an adult's penis? After all, it's not real kids.
If AI generated photos of toddlers touching an adult's penis are okay, why not the toddler sucking on the penis? After all... and we get all the way up to "getting off to AI generated photos of crying six year olds being raped violently because it's not real kids".
And then maybe the guys getting off to those photos get bored after a while with the AI stuff and start looking for the real stuff. Are there any good studies on escalation of porn watching (that is, after you get over the forbidden fruit thrill of vanilla porn, you start needing something a little spicier to pique your interest and that escalates over time?)
I think this is what makes people uncomfortable with the idea; fake cartoon/AI generated kiddie porn is definitely better than the real thing, but how extreme do we let it go? And how safe is it, is there a genuine risk of graduating to the 'harder' (i.e. real children) stuff after you get used to the AI stuff?
I suspect your comment isn't supposed to be a direct reply to me.
Otherwise:
I didn't intend to argue for any okayishness of AI generated pictures like this.
I just wanted to highlight the difference between doing stuff to a photo of a naked person that has not agreed to someone doing that stuff to that photo on the one hand and doing it to the person on the other hand. Because "if it does [know what naked children look like], it's abusing the models" blurres this, and it shouldn't get blurred.
Not directly replying, no. More musing on it. I think most people will have a feeling of revulsion about even AI generated child sexual abuse material, and not be able to articulate exactly why in the face of arguments about "but it's not *real* children".
The MAPs reformulation is the nice part of all this. But human nature is sticky, and very often not-nice, and the nice, moderate, 'will appeal to the normies' cases are often used as Trojan horses by the not-nice types.
"I'm attracted to 16 year olds, is that really paedophilia?" may fly for "so why is it bad to provide me with AI images of fake hot 16 year olds". But it damn well will also be used as cover for the ones who want violent and sadistic imagery, or imagery of 6 year olds and not 16 year olds.
And then there are the types that maybe can't even be called paedophiles proper, but who should not be accommodated in any degree, not even with AI generation of CSA, because they are too dangerous and too depraved.
The case about the guy who uploaded images of raping a baby is particularly bad, and I don't think arguing "well if he and others like him were just able to get their fill of AI generated baby rape imagery, it wouldn't happen in real life" is going to win over anyone. People who perpetrate that kind of crime plainly aren't concerned with minimising harm, and probably would not be happy with the 'fake' alternative "no, you cannot fuck a real baby in real life, just use this AI picture to masturbate to".
I remember someone once trying to describe Aella as "someone who defends child porn", and now I see what they were probably referring to, and it's not a defense of child porn (let alone abuse). Her argument seems similar to the one in favor of brothels and porn theaters because they correlated with a drop in sexual assaults (pretty promptly, in at least one case - a town closed the local brothel, rates went up, they reopened, rates dropped again). And this has been known for decades.
Anyone who is very confident about whether the long term effect is positive, negative, or neutral, is deluding themselves about their ability to read the future. This seems like a very hard sort of question to figure out the net answer to.
Does erring on the side of caution mean that if we have no idea which one of two options is better or worse in long term, we should choose the one that is worse in short term?
Logic never comes into it when legislating on sex!
Science can't help cos it's not something any ethics committee would allow research on. Maybe a way could be found to carry out an investigation with locked-up sex offenders, but it'd take a brave politician to even raise the question.
"Autistic": she is kinda. Hard to measure "exactly" quantitatively as long as "what IS autism" very much lacks an "exact" answer. - James Damore? Oh, the former google guy who wrote: "Damore said that gender-differences include women generally having a stronger interest in people rather than things, and tending to be more social ... . Damore's memorandum also suggests ways to adapt the tech workplace to those differences to increase women's representation and comfort, without resorting to discrimination." (wikipedia) Wow, if that counts as highly controversial in your bubble ... ;)
> Aella argues AI kiddie porn consume results in less real kids getting hurt:
I think the weakness in this argument is that the taboo against kiddie porn and against child sexual abuse in general is socially constructed. Looking back historically, we see societies that tolerated various forms of child sexual abuse, even considering it a right of passage. As recently as the 70s or so, a strain of European philosophy was arguing for sexual liberation in a way that sounds awfully child-porny to modern ears; NAMBLA was founded in the late 70s.
Intuitively speaking, it seems hard to maintain a selective social taboo. Even if the instant effect is towards less child sexual abuse, normalization of the practice might easily lead to more practitioners, so we should probably consider the precautionary principle and act very carefully.
It's not wholly a social construct, if I understand it correctly. If it were, there probably wouldn't be such a revulsion to it in most people. I acknowledge there are societies where sex acts involving children are permitted, but I suspect there are rules in those societies (it's not a subject I'm deeply familiar with, for understandable reasons) that cut down on actual biological trouble, like trying to perform intercourse with someone who's too small and/or prepubescent.
Puberty is the primary factor, given its role in reproduction. There's much less evolutionary justification for wanting to have sex with pre-pubescents than for post-, and this is supposed to manifest in mental revulsion at the former that's probably present across societies.
Ergo, there's an argument that someone who's pedophilic in the technical sense is *broken*, and needs to be physically isolated; they can't socialize their way out of that urge. People who are just ephebophilic - they're attracted to ages 15-17 (while being full adults themselves) - probably socialized their way into it, and can be socialized out (with negative incentives like the mere threat of prison).
Good points. Otoh, the law could and imho should treat AI-done or drawn "kid-porn" (making, publishing, owning) max. as an offence resp. a lesser victim-less crime with less harsh fines. Also - see Paul B. - treat all sorts of porn with minors older than 14 / 16 / whatever age-of-consent less harsh than below 14 / 12 / 10 / 8 ... Michael Jackson met Wade Robson when Wade was seven, right? ...
In real life, I am sure judges do consider all those and more; but I am sure glad, in all games/comics made in Japan I ever had on a hard disc: all the girls drawn are explicitly described as "18" (no matter how much younger they looked). Yes, owning a graphic novel depicting 17 year olds making out: might put you in prison in my country. Owning the novel "Josephine Mutzenbacher" is legal for adults. (Same author as "Bambi" - in German, it is porn, illegal to sell to minors - but well-done literature and funny, too; the English translation is abhorrent child-porn, do not read.)
If someone claimed this sfw-pic of an Ä https://freebiesupply.com/logos/a-logo/ showed two minors having sex: the police may break into my home and confiscate all computers. I SWEAR: it is a married couple, both older than 30 and only ever having vaginal IC. And just a company-logo anyways.
No extra victims over what would happen without the AI. I'm assuming the government uses confiscated porn and doesn't compensate the producers, so it's not making more porn nor retroactively incentivizing past porn to be made.
But it's further perpetrating the abuse of the original models. How would you like to think that it was trained on images of your naked body taken during a period of intense suffering?
Anyway, by your argument the government could just release all the confiscated porn for free...
I think the other commenters have made it clear that AI does _NOT_ need photos of children while being abused to create JPGs that look like photos of children being abused.
But you have a point, that fake abuse photos resulting from training with real abuse photos should be prohibited. The training itself with those is already prohibited because the possession of those is prohibited.
"14: Did you know that China has mostly solved the problem of smog in Beijing? (X)"
Similarly, Los Angeles beat smog between roughly 1975 and 1995. Environmentalists should celebrate their successes more often to remind people that they've often been pragmatically right.
Nah, whether or not they celebrate their once-uncontroversial successes, some wire trips in people's brains because Rush Limbaugh used the radio waves every day to condition them to hate environmentalists and owls, on account of needing a substitute for Commies after the USSR broke up.
I don't think it's hugely analogous, as the USA cut pollution via the clean air act and related measures. While China has made some progress in having stricter environmental standards the enforcement is variable at best. For Beijing specifically it was mostly moving dirty coal power plants and other industries to neighbouring less politically influential cities
Agreed, acid rain is almost never talked about these days and I’m not convinced most people of my generation (Gen Z) are even aware of what it was or why it was an environmental accomplishment.
29: You don't live in a conservative bubble, you live in a "cares about good policy" and "cares about Justice (variously defined)" bubble. Most of those policies were ~useless, various tradeoffs were never (and have never been) addressed, and perhaps we should consider non-COVID reasons that Democrats specifically remember COVID policy as particularly favorable.
Another possibility is that you live in a particularly *liberal-libertarian* bubble, in ways that do not actually appeal to most people. Most of the populace got to enjoy free money and authoritarianism, and it turns out they're not as opposed to that as someone like you (us?) might like to think.
If you going to print money Id prefer most of that money to go to the poor; the question "should we print money" is rarely answered no, 2008 was a vile evil compared to the corona stimulus.
This is far more likely. There is a very small group of liberal-libertarians (bleeding-heart libertarians) that happens to congregate around this blog which are going to be uniquely outraged by government overreach, while the average person doesn't care at all. Especially when you throw in a few thousand dollars of free money and you don't have to work during the lockdowns.
>29: You don't live in a conservative bubble, you live in a "cares about good policy" and "cares about Justice (variously defined)" bubble.
This is how all ideological bubbles describe themselves.
No one is in a bubble that self-describes as 'we want bad policies and injustice because we are chaotic evil idiots'. Every bubble thinks they're just being reasonable and applying common sense.
From the outside: Yes, this is a conservative bubble. My own bubble is also a bubble and is surely doing its own biased and stupid things, but from over here it is easy to see the shape of this site's bubble.
I don't think you can count a view of one bubble from another bubble as objective. How do you know you're not in a bubble so progressive that even Scott's bubble looks conservative?
"Every bubble thinks they're just being reasonable and applying common sense" is probably a good instinct; but it's going to be hard to go from there. We can probably agree that "Bubble A sees Bubble B as conservative/progressive/very round/very cubic/whatever" as pretty objective, but that doesn't mean Bubble B is actually those things, or that the objective center is between A and B. We might get Bubbles A-Z and chart all the pairwise observations and get a heuristic for where center is, but then the argument will just be over whether A-Z were selected fairly.
It's a perfectly valid assertion. If you disagree, that's your right, but you can't weasel your way out of people tagging your community with some form of political valence with facts and logic.
He asked about where he lives. Even extending that to include his social spaces does not mean it includes these comment sections, nor does it make it useful to describe as "conservative." For all the Scott does respond to his fans, this is not where he lives, and reasonably often he's deliberately combative to many if not most of his readers. He forced a forum schism because he disliked so many of his readers and wanted to distance them from his brand!
Calling where Scott lives a conservative bubble is akin to trolls on Twitter calling Kelsey Piper a conservative because she wants schools to be decent and cities to not be hostile to families. Defining whatever he's talking about as a "conservative bubble" renders the term completely uninformative.
I doubt classic conservative bubbles (Trump/MAGA crowds, or even trad repuplican people) would tag Scott's blog as conservative. So if an outside bubble think this blog is oldcon or even neocon, I guess it's more indicative where the outside bubble is....Probably moved far more wokeward than you think :-)
Conservative for San Fran, maybe. But most people here seem to be in favor of gay marriage, gender transitions, abortion, and talking with people on the internet, which makes it progressive compared to where I grew up. (Due to the internet being new and talking on it being a progressive thing, most online conversation leans progressive - though this is gradually becoming less so.) On the whole of things it's probably somewhere near moderate, or out along some totally different axis.
On the other hand I don't want them to grow up around much richer folk either. I don't want my kid being "the poor kid" at school, or getting teased for not having a horse or something.
People want to live around people who are in the same socio-economic category as them, but within that category they want to be the richest. A middle-class family might not want to live in a working-class neighbourhood, but they still want a nicer car than the middle-class family next door.
33) I can think of a way of maintaining the taboo against immigrants speaking freely. But I hope you're not going to like it. It's to apply the taboo to people who look like immigrants.
Trump would probably like that. He's already applying the taboo against gang members to anybody who has a tattoo that looks like it might be a gang tattoo.
Re 7: Following on Seneca Plutarchus and Hannes Jandi, I think we can salvage this idea at least in part. To begin with only people who are at least middle class have a realistic opportunity to move to a new place solely according to what would make them happier. They don't want to move to places that would deprive them of creature comforts or that would expose them to increased danger, so you don't see someone in Chicago's Gold Coast moving to the South Side, but that's far from the only model for moving to a poorer area. Even just in the US, there are plenty of places that are both lower-income and still quite safe, particularly out in rural locales, though this is partly to taste. I recall some years ago an increase in migration to expanding cities like Greenville SC on the premise of lower living costs combined with good facilities and growth.
If we approach it like this, then it's less about the psychological feeling of being relatively higher-status/wealthier than the people around you, and more about the ability to command more value for less money. This absolutely squares with my impression of expats, especially to the poorer but less dangerous areas of South America or Southern Europe.
If you can swing the immigration process, have good money saved up, and don't have obligations keeping you in the states, going to live in e.g. Spain gets you a massive boost to quality of life for equivalent dollar cost (now slightly offset by the recent shift in dollar-euro rates, but still substantial). It's not dangerous and you're not being deprived of high-class comforts, there's Michelin Star restaurants and great museums all around (schools are pretty crap though), but cost of living is lower, quality of certain things like groceries is higher, and people are just plain friendlier, granting that you respect them and take some time to learn the language.
I moved north from Chicago's Silver Coast at 2700 North as a bachelor to its Bronze Coast at 3700 North as an engaged man to its Copper Coast at 4900 North as a married man.
The final move was explicit gentrification, which took a long time, but eventually paid off fairly well.
We looked at moving to South Shore, but that was a bigger physical risk of crime than we were willing to take for the potential payoff.
I lived in Pilsen from 1991 to early 1999. The neighborhood is 95% Mexican and I felt out of place at first, but quickly realized it was fine. I didn't have kids though.
I think the more relevant quote from the Psmiths review is this:
Cargo cults may not be a great metaphor for “copying what someone successful seems to be doing without really knowing why and hoping you get the same result,” but they’re a wonderful metaphor for “assuming the novel thing you’ve just encountered fits a paradigm with which you’re already familiar.” That’s a devilishly difficult trap to escape, and the worst part is that you don’t know you have to: if it were easy to step outside your fundamental epistemological assumptions, they wouldn’t be your fundamental epistemological assumptions. And yet sometimes that’s the only road along which cargo will come.
" I keep hearing how we need a “reckoning” over the government’s disastrous anti-COVID policies, but the latest YouGov polling suggests that large majorities of Americans continue to support those policies:"
People like Work From Home.
I can recall we were promised that back during the Information Superhighway boom of 1993, but then that didn't happen for 27 years. Then in 2020 it turned out that, while not perfect, Work From Home actually worked fairly well.
#7 - Wouldn't we have to know who people are comparing themselves to, in order to understand whether the effect is in place? If my relative income to Alabama is high, but all my friends live in CA and we talk regularly online, then I probably feel little to no improvement from moving to Alabama.
There's also the question of income, where moving to a low CoL area often means having a lower income in terms of dollars. I probably make about half of what I could make doing the exact same job in a city, but I'm living in a much lower CoL area, so I feel pretty good about it. I make more than most of the people I interact with on a regular basis, so I feel like a big fish. If all of my friends were living in NYC and making 2-3X my income, despite spending vastly more on housing and food, then I may feel relatively poorer and be less happy about that.
It tends to depend upon what you talk to your friends about online. If you boast about how to mow your huge lawn, you'd probably prefer to be in Alabama. If you talk about about huge celebrities you've seen, you'd probably prefer to be in L.A.
Yes, but there's also a lot of things that tend to follow a higher cash income, regardless of CoL. You can generally buy more "toys" with a higher income, because the cost of say, an XBox, is essentially the same in Montana, Chicago, and Atlanta. Also true for most consumer electronics, clothing, etc. So making $50,000 in a very low CoL area may let you live with a relatively large house and yard, you are going to have fewer things than the person making $100,000 living in a shoebox in a big city. They can also afford renovations on their expensive property and other class signifiers easier than you can, so there's an appearance of wealth even if they live in a tiny place.
#29 - I notice it says "start" of the pandemic. I think those numbers make sense for March 2020, maybe through April or part of May. If that's what people mean when they respond, I don't find that too surprising.
If the question was asking about the totality of the lockdowns, or was clear that it also included something like 2021-2022 lockdowns and masks, then that would be much more surprising. I would also be interested in seeing numbers for mandatory vaccinations (which being absent from this list may be an indication that they really do mean early 2020 and not later).
Yeah, I don’t expect most survey respondents to make the distinction, but the right actions to take changed dramatically over time. Uncertainty about fatality rate, means of transmission, knowledge of effective care (remember the rise and fall of ventilators?), and access to vaccines reshaped the tradeoff landscape over the first 12 months of the virus.
Very much so. With the benefit of hindsight I don't think my fairly rural town should have responded at all - no lockdowns, no work changes. But without hindsight, it actually feels like a fairly prudent precaution. Then at least by the summer we were mostly back to normal, which also felt pretty good. But then that fall we were once again facing state mandates and school closures which were decidedly unnecessary and extremely disruptive.
Depending on when you asked me about it, I would have had very different answers to that survey.
Agreed. I also make a very clear distinction between first wave (where one can discuss if the measures taken were the best possible, but anyway given how high the uncertainty was non optimality is completely excusable and I have 0 grudge against the authorities) and subsequent waves (especially policies after the vaccine was available). There I'd like a very serious reckoning indeed (and will likely hope for one for a very long time - at least until it freeze in hell)
Agree with this. Closing schools from somewhere between a few weeks to the end of the spring term wouldn't be unreasonable. The U.S. kept them closed for far too long, though.
There was no "U.S." policy though, it was state by state. And presumably the majority of people in most states agreed with the policy or it would've been different. In my state schools were only closed in spring 2020, they were open in fall.
In solidly red or solidly blue states this may be true (while also overruling the minorities within those states once again - maybe why so many people left blue states for Texas and Florida...). For purple states, this was far less true, and may have been the opposite.
> But now suppose that you wake up tomorrow in the actual, real, genuine world (yes, fr), and find out that this sadistic maniac of a scientist is not just a mere figment of my twisted imagination, but is in fact flesh-and-blood-real. To make matters worse, he has cursed 𝘺𝘰𝘶, my valued reader, with the horrible burden Yana had to carry before. The fact that the mechanism is now actual, rather than imaginary, shouldn’t change the moral character of the situation. That means that even though, prior to learning these contingent empirical facts, scratching your butt seemed totally fine, it actually turns out to be incredibly wrong. The lesson here is that whether or not some action is wrong, or state of affairs bad, in a given possible world doesn’t depend on whether that world is the actual world.
(19, "Surely we're not moral monsters")
This argument fails for bad, annoying reasons.
By way of introduction, I disapprove of the part of American culture that says American culture is evil. One of Richard Hanania's essays pointed out that this is a criticism that you can't logically level against American culture. That is true, but since self-hatred really can be good or bad, I maintain that it is bad and I just have to take the hit of needing to say that my criticism is good despite not being different in form from the bad criticism.
And for a second example, there is a discussion of philosophical induction (using the past as a guide to the future) that points out that the heuristic is entirely unjustified. You can't even fall back on the usual claim that justifies "we don't know why it should work, but it does", because that claim is "this has worked in the past", and using that as evidence that the past is informative about the future is the logical sin of assuming your conclusion.
This essay is making the same "mistake". If you tell me to imagine something happening in the real world, the conclusion can't be that some principle has crossed from being valid in imaginary worlds to being valid in reality, because all of the evidence and/or support has always been restricted to imaginary worlds. When I imagine the real world, everything I imagine is taking place in an imaginary world.
20) I'm not sure who is more interesting: The 9% who have a very or somewhat favorable opinion of The Black Plague (at least they take a stand!), or the 17% who are on the fence… "I mean, did they die *of* the black plague or *with* the black plague?"
Hmm … the failure of imagination necessary to think that the black plague was a good way to beat overpopulation is really something. There aren’t many good paths out of something like that, but having half the population essentially rot to death in agony over a few short years seems like a particularly bad way out.
Sure, if we were the Foundation trying to kickstart the Enlightenment, genetically engineering the plague would be spectacularly evil. But if you read "The Black Death" as referring to the historical event rather than the disease, you might decide that the historical event, on the whole, was good. (I don't know if that's true, because I'm neither a historian nor an economist.)
Good as compared to…? For something (especially a plague) to be "good", we need more than outcomes IMO, we need counterfactuals to compare with.
I read the black plague as "historical event that ended ‘Malthusianism’", i.e. population-limiting event. The question then, is whether history could have achieved the same or better outcomes with less suffering. Fewer people dying? The same amount of people dying, but from famine, wars, "nicer" pandemic? Technological breakthroughs of the kind that later broke Malthusian math?
I can sort of understand how some historian who doesn’t have to see their child die of the plague can look at it and say that it all turned out for the best, but I don’t have much respect for it. I believe basically that the journey is the destination, so have a hard time accepting that any part of the journey that is as brutal as that can be justified by the economics of the future.
I remember that being mainstream historiography for some time, at least in terms of what's taught in intro/survey courses and makes it into popular histories, and I expect you're right that that's what most of the people who responded in favor of it were thinking of.
That said, I've been persuaded that that narrative is largely false. The recovery period following the Black Death did show increased material standard of living and improved social stature for serfs and peasants relative to the immediate pre-Plague period, but that was a temporary effect that mostly returned to baseline when the population once again approached Malthusian carrying capacity.
The timing is all wrong for the Black Death being the cause of breaking loose from the Malthusian trap, as the former happened in the mid-14th century and the latter didn't happen until the Industrial Revolution in the early 19th century. The causes of the Industrial Revolution are the subject of considerable debate, but the most plausible-seeming theories I'm familiar with link it to varying combinations and sequences of the Commercial Revolution of the Late Middle Ages, the institutional changes of the Renaissance and Reformation era, and the cultural and economic changes of the late pre-industrial "Industrious Revolution". The Black Death happened relatively late in the Commercial Revolution, serving as a major setback to it rather than a trigger or facilitator, and the other two eras didn't get going until decades or centuries respectively after the Black Death.
> The timing is all wrong for the Black Death being the cause of breaking loose from the Malthusian trap, as the former happened in the mid-14th century and the latter didn't happen until the Industrial Revolution in the early 19th century.
Haven't you heard about long and variable lags? ;D
Laying the cause of the Industrial Revolution on the Black Death would be far too narrow and therefore clearly wrong. That is was a contributing factor seems quite strong, though it's hard (likely impossible) to say that it was a necessary factor. We just don't have access to the counterfactual to compare.
To understand how it could affect Europe centuries later, you have to understand the cultural perspective in place around the time of the Black Death. Peasants were essentially nothing to the elites. They could be thrown away as shock troops in battle or starve to death on the sides of the street. Because there were a lot (read: too many in a Malthusian sense) of such people, the losses were actually positive from a purely material perspective. It was a society in which Thanos was right.
When 50% of the people were dead, each individual became necessarily more important. The elites couldn't treat people as if they were disposable, and had to concede some rights, power, and money, in order to keep society and their lofty places within it intact. This, above all else, created a *cultural* shift. The mentality that said peasants were nothing was untenable, so peasants had to be something. If peasants are something, then they can and should have rights and so on. I think this further took on religious significance through the church that helped maintain this cultural shift even when population levels revived. And by then there was a fledgling middle class, rich merchants (with no royal and lordly claims), and a different way of looking at humanity.
This was by no means required - most plagues in history, including in Europe or when wiping out huge numbers of people, did not result in anything like this. It's also entirely possible that the Industrial Revolution would have come through eventually anyway (in fact, it's not possible to determine if the IR would have even happened earlier through a mechanism we could only guess at). But in the actual history that happened, I think the cultural shift was real and important. That Europe, pre-IR, was much stronger for it and was able to advance significantly in the following centuries.
I've also heard interpretations that center on the cultural shift you're describing, but I'm skeptical of those, too. The idea of peasants having rights and dignity long predated the Black Death, and the problem of those rights being more honored in the breach than in the observance persisted long after it.
When elites started paying serious attention to commoners was partly a product of the Commercial Revolution, which produced a class of urban merchants and artisans who needed to be taken seriously by the aristocracy. It was also a result of military technology, as people figured out how to form and use an effective combat force from commoners who drilled on weekends that could stand up to (or at least stand alongside) a professional or aristocratic force in the field. It started out with longbows, crossbows, pikes, and bills, and the bows later got replaced with gunpowder weapons.
Using levies, militia, or conscripts as disposable shock troops was more of an Early Modern thing than a High Medieval one, and it's a practice that continued well into the 20th century. Similarly, letting the poors starve in the streets was also very much a thing in the Early Modern era, and the term "surplus population" that shows up in e.g. Charles Dickens's works for the phenomenon is a 18th/19th concept.
The benefit to Western Europe seems completely credible to me, but context matters. In Eastern Europe (east of the Elbe, essentially), the nobility was strong enough that they could crush and enslave the commoners rather than be forced to grant them increased rights and wages. The same factor - labor shortage - resulted in two dramatically different outcomes.
The aftermath of the black death was an unusually upwards mobile time. If I had lived all my life as a small cottage farmer barely making end meets and a small personal misfortune away from being a landless laborer (or worse) and little chance to improve my lot in life, I would appreciate the empty farmland I can move to as a survivor.
This still, still doesn't address the question. The point is that it's nonsensical to be excited that the plague killed off your family so you can have a "bigger" family. This whole thread is just a "bad things are bad, actually" type argument.
The Black Death, while obviously horrific, was long-term socially beneficial for Western (but not Eastern) Europe. Following it, wages and standards of living increased with the labor shortage and peasants and laborers got a stronger negotiating position. Soon enough, this led into the Early Modern era.
You can track the rise of Western Europe (and the decline of Eastern Europe) from the Black Death.
While I'm sympathetic the general point about due process (because the whole point of due process is that you always follow it even when it's inconvenient), I have to object to this:
> "it’s hard to maintain social outrage against people who are doing the same thing as lots of other people but except for checking labels."
I think this way of thinking misleadingly conflates laws with social norms. Ideally it's best to have both these things roughly in alignment, but what's really important is to decide what things are against the law and what things aren't. If an illegal things happens to be very similar to a legal thing, that may create some confusion on the level of social norms, but the law itself remains clear and can be enforced. It ultimately doesn't matter whether you fail to maximise social outrage: what matters is whether the law is (1) just and (2) enforced.
I think maybe you may be assuming that it's inherently unjust for someone to go to prison for the equivalent of not checking a label. I strongly disagree with this: sending people to prison for failing to verify things that they are obligated to verify is necessary for the maintenance of civilization.
"I strongly disagree with this: sending people to prison for failing to verify things that they are obligated to verify is necessary for the maintenance of civilization." That seems like a super narrow application.
The problem is that the people were rounded up and shipped out within days with no opportunity given for them to verify themselves.
Yes. The fun thing about that crime is that you go to an American court and you are cited by an American cop and, if you have reason to believe the cop acted arbitrarily, you can seek an appeal from that same American justice system.
It's the lack of due process that's the issue, not the criminality of the immigration status.
Okay, so you DON'T think persecuting "people who are doing the same thing as lots of other people" except that the labels you have to check for are different is bad. That's the principle I was arguing against.
(Well, I don't actually agree with the example I used, since I believe the state requiring one to obtain a driver's license in order to engage in the natural rights of free men is a gross infringement of individual liberty, but that's a separate point.)
The dmv and passports/green cards are pure paper work and universally considered shit.
Driving is regulated because a mere statistical chance to cause harm; this is pre-crime. Your merely assuming that all car accidents are caused by drivers, #notalldrivers
No pre-crime is due process as the founders understood it.
---
We do not live near this libertarian utopia, we should do things in an approximate order of their distance from ideals; e.g. if you only legalized fent you will kill allot of people, legalization of all drugs should roughly be in order of safest to least.
If licenses could be revoked at any time without telling you, I think I would be skeptical that the people caught driving without a license did anything wrong.
Okay, that's fair. I guess I distinguish law and morality so thoroughly that even on a thread assuming the distinction at the top, my view is extreme enough to warrant clarification. (I do have a disclaimer elsewhere in the thread that I don't believe in this example I posed, and use it only for argument's sake.)
I intended my comment to be questioning the consistency of the application of the stated legal principle rather than on moral grounds in isolation, and in context I think it was clear.
I think you've misunderstood my point -- this isn't specifically about the issue of deportation, and my final paragraph was not referring to the process of proving citizenship or legal residency. My point was that in general, 'making it easy to coordinate social outrage' shouldn't be one of the main aims of a justice system.
This may have been a relevant distinction before teh Federalist Society was formed, but I doubt it.
Right now, the Federalist Society court very clearly just does whatever the conservative social consensus thinks they should do. If progressives ever get the court back in a few decades, I would expect much teh same to happen there.
So I don't think there's much meaningful distinction between the social norms and the law at this point... One will become the other as soon as it happens in the Eight Circuit one time.
>I think this way of thinking misleadingly conflates laws with social norms.
Laws should reflect social norms, and should be changed when they don't. Otherwise they're arbitrary and capricious. If there's no discernible difference between one side of the line and the other, then you should move the line.
For many people, that one side is illegal and the other isn't is the only thing they CAN discern, their moral faculties having atrophied to rely exclusively on laws, arbitrary and capricious as they may be.
On the contrary -- I think that forcing laws to be in sync with social norms would make them more capricious, not less. Social norms are based partly on people's moral instincts, and people's moral instincts are self-serving and susceptible to manipulation.
For example, it's relatively easy for people to convince themselves that members of a particular religion/race/other outgroup are inherently evil and deserve to be murdered, but the law still includes blanket prohibitions on murder. I shouldn't be able to get away with murder by truthfully saying to the judge, "Actually, committing murder in this situation is in accordance with social norms." If I can get away with murder by saying this, then that's evidence of a problem with the law.
Also, the problem with demanding a discernible difference between one side of the line and another is that the law sometimes needs to create a bright-line rule even when there is not an intuitively obvious cut-off point. Consider the age of consent: there is no particular age above which everyone is clearly mature enough to give meaningful consent, and below which everyone is clearly not mature enough to give meaningful consent. But there still needs to be a legal age of consent, even if this does not always agree with moral instincts or social norms in a particular case.
>If I can get away with murder by saying this, then that's evidence of a problem with the law.
Your social norms against murder are telling you that.
>Consider the age of consent: there is no particular age above which everyone is clearly mature enough to give meaningful consent,
There's no particular age for the laws either; some places put it at 16, others 18, others 14 if the partner is within the same age group, etc. The local social norms decide the cutoff for the law.
I think we're talking past each other. What I'm trying to say is that sometimes it is necessary for the law to ban things that don't provoke social outrage, and sometimes it is necessary for the law to allow things that do provoke social outrage. Trying to create a one-to-one correspondence between 'things that the average person finds outrageous' and 'things that are illegal' would have catastrophic consequences.
Why? Laws exist to serve society, not the other way around. If everyone agrees that the lynching of heretics is morally correct, it makes no sense to have a law prohibiting that. And it wouldn't stay a law for long anyways, because it would quickly be changed.
Every law was created for a reason, at some point. If those laws no longer reflect social reality, then they need to be changed.
Why wouldn't it stay a law for long anyways? Everyone believes it so what is the incentive to change it? Heretics will just continue to get lynched for at the very minimum of one more generation, and almost certainly longer than that.
I think that for the law being enforced, it matters that the law is practical to enforce. The law says no toy guns on airplanes, because it’s much easier to enforce a law that says no toy guns or real guns on airplanes than it is to enforce a law that says no real guns on air planes but toy guns are fine. Similarly for the child sexual abuse material, and also for the speech restrictions - a law saying it’s fine to have child sexual abuse material made with no actual children involved makes it very hard to enforce a law against real child sexual abuse material; a law saying that citizens can say what they want about Hamas but non-citizens can’t is much harder to enforce than a law that says no one can say nice things about Hamas or a law that says everyone is allowed to say what they want about Hamas. The big issue isn’t whether the person themself is checking the label - it’s about whether the amount of law enforcement time that goes into checking labels is so much that it detracts from actual enforcement of the important parts of laws.
I strongly agree with everything you're saying: the law should be designed to be practical to enforce, and sometimes the most practical law is one which bans things that merely resemble the things you're actually trying to prevent.
But this is completely different from Scott's argument that laws should be designed to make it easy to coordinate social outrage against lawbreakers.
For example, I agree that it is practical in some situations to say that toy guns are just as forbidden as real guns. However, it would be bizarre and counterproductive to create a social norm in which shooting someone with a toy guy provokes just as much social outrage as shooting someone with a real gun.
Yeah, in retrospect, I probably tried a bit too hard to reinterpret some of the puzzling things he said, and probably misinterpreted him as saying the thing I'm saying, which he might not have actually been saying.
"A common sociological claim is that relative income (compared to your social circle) matters more for happiness than absolute income. Bryan Caplan thinks this can’t be true: after all, practically nobody moves to poorer areas to enjoy the higher relative income this would confer. I don’t know if you can really use revealed preferences this way..."
The issue is different here and I think Caplan's argument is wrong. A high relative income is probably important because it gives you a greater sense of importance and/or makes you feel like you have luxuries compared to what is "normal". Or insert something similar along these lines.
But if you already are intimate with a social circle of higher wealth, moving to a lower wealth circle gives you much less or none of these payoffs. You have an ingrained higher baseline of what constitutes status and luxury.
For what it's worth, I've noticed this effect a lot in my own life, grew up in South Africa, moved to the US for college and although I am pretty upper-middle class in NY, when I travel to back to Johannesburg to visit friends and family I am suddenly wealthy. But it doesn't feel so great because somewhere in the back of my mind, I have this thought, like I'm not all that in reality.
> California’s experiment to see how high they could raise the minimum wage before getting visible employment effects has finally produced unambiguous results:
That’s a pretty zoomed in graph and doesn’t account for other stuff going on in California.
I notice too that there’s a discrepancy in how economists react to reductions and employment with regard to “natural” economic trends and state mandates. If the adoption of A.I. were to reduce employment by 4% in an industry but increase wage growth per remaining employee by a significant percentage it would be a Good Thing. This is a Bad Thing
I'm not Peter, but I have a feeling that even a zoomed-out graph would not help. Minimum wage effects on the economy are AIUI notorious for being easily confounded. It's innate to the fact that only around 3% of the workforce works for minimum wage*, so if you raised it high enough to unemploy them all, that's only 3%, and often lost in the noise of other factors like aging off, coming of age, reentry due to life events (like Covid), relocation, tech advances, outsources, and other regulatory pressures (both positive and negative).
*OTOH, some non-minimum wage jobs are still pegged to it. If you raise MW from $8 to $20/hr, that also affects everyone who was making $10, $12, $15... they don't just go up to $20; they probably go up to $25, $28, $30... and so on up the line, so MW raises can affect more than 3%, but most employers faced with a mandatory wage raise can be expected to let go of their least-skilled, lowest earners first.
The idea that people making 15 would make 25 after a minimum wage hike is nice to dream about, but really since their labor value is 15 and 15 is less than 20, they'd just be fired along with the $8 employees.
It’s nice to dream that people are paid precisely the amount of value that their work produces, but in fact a lot of wage setting involves social negotiations, and it’s very easy for employers to pay workers less than the value their work produces, if the workers can’t negotiate collectively about what wage they will accept, while minimum wage laws help solve the negotiation problem that atomized workers often have when facing a few concentrated employers.
It's indeed very common for workers to be paid less than the value produced by their work, and it's also very common for workers to be paid more than the value they assign their labor. This sort of positive sum exchange is what makes market economies the best.
Very much so! But these kinds of positive sum exchanges are the ones where the net results of increased minimum wage are hardest to predict, because these ones change the terms of negotiations rather than just pricing workers out of the market. (And I believe a lot of the research on minimum wage is based on trying to figure out whether the improved bargaining position for the lowest earners actually ends up meaning broad-based economic stimulus, because more money is getting into the hands of the people most willing to spend it.)
Minimum wage laws solve that problem, but at the expense of creating workers who cannot make any legal wage at all. Which means they don't really solve that problem.
Wait, what? Are you saying that if a law mitigates one problem while making another problem worse, then it automatically is net negative?
It seems to me that you need to understand whether the amount it does on one problem is more or less than the amount it does on another in order to say whether it is overall good or bad.
You're right that economics is complicated, but the simplest case of change in regulation --> change in employment is the some of the best evidence we can have.
Once you start accounting for confounding factors, you might end up with "cleaner" data, but you're just as likely to introduce bias as get rid of it. Considering what many economists predicted would happen, did happen, this is strong, albeit not conclusive evidence that raising the minimum wage reduced employment (albeit not much, this is a swing of a few percent).
we need to factor in the times when economists predicted a (significant) change and there was no (significant) change ...
of course there is some casual effect of regulation, we know from anecdotes that in many sectors (like law enforcement) increasing overtime is the norm instead of hiring more people.
and even in higher paid positions expensive "temp staffing" is very common, because hiring is seen as very cumbersome, or accounting/budget constraints incentivize buying services instead of hiring people. (so for example a restaurant fires the janitor but contracts a company to provide janitorial services a few times a week. again, of course, like you said, confounding factors are endless, and properly weighing them is the challenge.)
"If the adoption of A.I. were to reduce employment by 4% in an industry but increase wage growth per remaining employee by a significant percentage it would be a Good Thing"
Difference is that one occurred through increasingly productivity and the other didn't.
7. When I was young I lived in... well, I'm not sure if it's was a slum, though I distinctly remember Finland's newspaper of note once writing a bombastic editorial calling it the only area filling the conditions for slum in the whole of Europe, but at least a very poor area in the midst of Finland's Great Recession, even though our family had a middle-class income that would have allowed for a different neighborhood. This apparently was in part because my lefty mom really took the avoidance of income segregation between neighborhoods seriously. I didn't like the experience, though I also suspect that when one's a teenager of a certain type they'd dislike anything.
Still, Caplan's argument is kind of odd; I've always taken the relative income thing to refer to one's friend group / peer group moreso than neighborhood, considering people these days don't necessarily really mentally "live" in their neighborhood and just crash there for the night.
29. You (and a huge amount of Covid contrarians/skeptics/independent thinkers generally) probably live in a youth bubble; Covid measures always polled humongously well among the elderly, no matter the party identification, and it's unsurprising that they still do. I mean, it was a popular contrarian talking point - "the olds are ruining the lives of the youth for just a few extra months of life!" - and they still seem to get surprised by polls like this showing that, yes, the olds really did like those few months of life!
Polling contradicts my anecdotal experience- especially when things first started to reopen, old people were *least* likely to be wearing masks in my area (mid-sized Southern metro). Don't know if the polling is regionally limited (maybe it was more popular in the northwest than in the south?) or if this area is the outlier instead.
My experience was the opposite, older people were much more likely to wear masks. That was in Germany and Switzerland.
As for Tahu, nowadays mask-wearing has dropped close to zero, but not literally zero. I see perhaps 1-2 people per day on my commute to work. And still elderly are over-represented, though it's not exclusively elderly.
> "the olds are ruining the lives of the youth for just a few extra months of life!"
Also, let's not forget that "ruining the lives" referred to wearing a face mask. How incredibly selfish of those olds to wish to live a few years longer at a cost of a minor inconvenience to *me*!
If you were single and lived alone during the pandemic then you might have gone many months at a stretch with very minimal human contact. It's unreasonable to handwave away the cost to these people.
> practically nobody moves to poorer areas to enjoy the higher relative income this would confer
I've done that, moved to Paraguay, confirm it works for me. I've also reduced my consumption cyclically (e.g., living like a monk and slowly adding comforts back in, and cycling through that process), because slowly getting consumption back up feels better than the occasionally downward shocks.
... sounds crazy and I didn't theorize it and then do it but rather do it and then thought it was pretty neat re: hedonic adaptation. I'm a pretty weird guy, so I'm not sure this generalizes though.
To be clear, there are two effects when going to somewhere like Paraguay : a) your income goes further, and b) you are surrounded by poorer people. It would normally be hard to differentiate these effects, but my sense is that I somewhat can due to my spending pattern.
I'm curious how long you have lived in Paraguay. I also moved to a poorer country, but have found the opposite to be true.
I feel guilty for living an upper middle class lifestyle in my current home, even though it's significantly lower standard of living than I would have had in the USA, my home country. I also earn significantly less here (in nominal terms) than I could be earning in the USA. If anything, I've become jaded and disgusted at the fact that wages are 1/10th of what they are in the USA for doing the same job.
Regardless I don't think my happiness has increased as a result of being surrounded by poorer people. I'm guessing that effect only holds true in "first world" countries.
I've always thought that rapid downward shocks in quality of life, followed by a gradual increase, is the key to happiness. How often do you reset your hedonic treadmill by going full-monk?
I second the reset and slowly adding comforts back strategy. Each "new" treat/comfort feels great. I believe it works even better when moving to a different country because the "new" comforts sometimes look different than a similar "old" one you gave up during the reset, so it doesn't feel like you just regained the old one.
>I've also reduced my consumption cyclically (e.g., living like a monk and slowly adding comforts back in, and cycling through that process), because slowly getting consumption back up feels better than the occasionally downward shocks.
Interesting, what kind of consumption do you cut back on?
Access to civilization, hipster food, conspicuous signalling stuff like real state in the most expensive cities in the world, the comforts of capitalism, etc.
31 > Remember, asking where someone is from ‘originally’ is a microaggression, but inferring it yourself based on their “mildly platyrrhine, high-rooted nose” is A-OK!
The sarcasm makes little sense, because probably nobody is both on their high horses about "microaggressions", and OK about Ethnoguessr. This website is based on early 20th century racist litterature including some frome Nazi Germany. This is not politically correct at all.
> I hope they move on to real pictures of real people in naturalistic situations.
In part because it is politically toxic, I do not expect many people would consent to have their picture there. Well, I don't know about you guys but I certainly would be incomfortable with my face on the Internet, captioned "hey, check out this low-skull West Alpinid! [Zeitschrift für Rassenforschung, Berlin 1942]".
Maybe they could AI-generate a new person every time, though.
> This website is based on early 20th century racist litterature including some frome Nazi Germany.
There's a Russian anthropologist and popularizer of science Stanislav Drobyshevskiy who claims that raciology is a real science that continued to be developed in the USSR after WW2. He has several lengthy lectures on Youtube about individual races. He acknowledges the existence of the parallel people who work on non-scientific Nazi-flavored racial "theories" but says the Western academia was wrong to throw out all of racial science for reasons of political correctness.
(It does seem interesting to at least know things like "Which of the modern Eurasian populations might be the closest relatives to the "owners" of these 30000-year-old bones we just found in Kostyonki?".)
If I understand correctly, that question nowadays would be mostly or entirely answered with genetics while the early 20th-century races and subraces were based on anatomical measurements. Which correlate with genetics of course, but carry much less information.
But you don't always have enough genetic information especially when going further back. And sure, even incomplete DNA can contain more information, but I don't think we're at the point where it's so precise and complete any lesser tools are worthless, even just to verify the conclusions independently.
I understand the idea of a "fruit of a poisoned tree", but I'm not sure it should apply to science, and anyway we're not talking about the results of concentration camp experiments. I hope. Not for the most part, anyway, you don't need to do anything unethical to gather a lot of useful anthropological data.
My personal experience is that it's great and fun to be asked where I'm originally from if someone is genuinely curious about my ancestry and personal history.
It's not great and fun to be asked where I'm originally from if someone is seeking to use the information as proof that I don't belong in the country and am lesser than people that do.
I have a friend that can guess what region of Ukraine you're from based on when your ancestors emigrated. He also likes to guess where people are from based on how they look, and has a deep interest in phenotypes and human migration patterns. This kind of guessing is delightful because it relies on deep insight and knowledge of your history and culture, not on crass stereotypes. And it's never used to imply anything about where the guesee deserves to be American, or whatever
7. "Slums" is not the same as "poor areas". It also implies a certain level of social disfunction that can be quite undesirable, especially for an outsider. There are millions of people retired to pleasant communities in poorer but relatively functional countries, e.g. the European/American population of Thailand coast, British and Germans in Spain and Portugal, Americans and Canadians in Chalisco, etc.
38. Is the message less clear if one does not believe that the Scripture is the Word of God? Are they implying that any measure reducing redistribution of wealth guarantees a place in hell?
The Catholic church has multiple times condemned the National Catholic Register for falsely calling themselves "Catholic" despite being unaffiliated with the church and preaching explicit heresy.
The Black Death is underrated, if you ask me. As capital-D Deaths go, name me a better one. You can't do it. Best Death ever!
On the other hand, the Vikings are vastly overrated. Couldn't even conquer Mercia, and we're all supposed to marvel at how badass they were 1200 years later? Weak sauce.
"....the decline of animal life is concentrated in a period approximately 10,000 to 60,000 years long, with plants taking an additional several hundred thousand years to show the full impact of the event."
Well, points for consistency, I guess, but a 50,000 year timeline reduces the overall impressiveness. I like my mass deaths like my allergy medication: fast-acting and strong.
Among the populations in question, that should be negligible on relevant timescales. But I'd say you should add them: the Great Dying is a broader phenomenon caused by the Columbian exchange, not a specific disease.
The Plague of Justinian was another contender, being similar in scope to the Black Death albeit with much wider confidence intervals (15-100 million vs 25-50 million) for want of reliable detailed sources.
AIDS (~44 million) and the Spanish Flu (17-50 million) are in the same range as the Black Death and the Plague of Justinian in absolute numbers of deaths, albeit much less in terms of percentage of the population of exposed areas.
The Columbian Plagues in the Americas, already mentioned, were definitely larger than the Black Death and the Plague of Justinian in terms of percentage of the population of the affected areas killed and may have been larger in absolute terms as well. I've seen estimates ranging from low tens of millions to something like 150 million, with the central estimates seeming to be around 50 million.
The Second World War's death toll (including the Holocaust and other wartime atrocities as well as direct deaths from military operations) was towards the upper end of the confidence interval for the Plague of Justinian and the Columbian Plagues.
Or, if you're willing to accept a broader scope and somewhat larger time scale, you could combine both World Wars, the Spanish Flu, and Soviet and Maoist democides into a single mega-event and get something like 200-250 million deaths.
The Columbian Plagues were pretty great. I rate them about a seven out of ten. Not quite in the same league as the Black Death, though. People have speculated native Americans probably had fairly weak immune systems since they were bottlenecked up around Alaska until the glaciers melted at the end of the last ice age, and not many pathogens are hardy enough to spread in Alaska. Throw a bunch of dirty pre-industrial era Europeans into the mix--people who grew up where open sewers were just what you had to hop over when you crossed the street--and the results were predictable.
The Black Death, on the other hand, had to attack these very same dirty sewer-hoppin' people who were already quite well used to being vectors for smallpox transmission, scarlet fever, etc., and yet it still wiped them out. This was industrial strength plaguin'. If the Columbian plagues were like shootin' fish in a barrel, the Bubonic Plague was like Ed Harris in Enemy At The Gates.
"Have you not reason then to bee ashamed, and to forbear this filthy novelty, so basely grounded, so foolishly received and so grossly mistaken in the right use thereof? In your abuse thereof sinning against God, harming your selves both in persons and goods, and raking also thereby the marks and notes of vanity upon you: by the custom thereof making your selves to be wondered at by all foreign civil Nations, and by all strangers that come among you, to be scorned and contemned. A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the Nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless."
-- King James VI and I of Scotland and England, "A Counterblaste to Tobacco", 1604
I took the liberty of modernizing the spelling for readability.
> Or, if you're willing to accept a broader scope and somewhat larger time scale, you could combine both World Wars, the Spanish Flu, and Soviet and Maoist democides into a single mega-event and get something like 200-250 million deaths.
I can't find numbers for worldwide all-cause mortality over the course of the entire 20th century, but off the top of my head I'd guess a bit over two billion.
I got the two billion figure based on looking up estimates of world population c. 1920 and rounding up, on the assumption that the large majority of people who were alive in 1920 died before 2001. "All cause mortality" includes old age, misadventure, and non-epidemic diseases.
Modern life expectancy at birth is about 70 years, and was quite a bit lower for most of the 20th century, so a large majority of babies born in 1920 would be dead well before 2001. And most people alive in 1920 weren't babies, so they're even less likely to survive to the end of the century. Add in people who died between 1901 and 1920 and people born after 1920 who died before 2001 for whatever reason, and you'll get at least 2 billion. Probably quite a bit more, since infant mortality means there's going to be a lot of people born post-1920 who don't make it very long.
>33 ... including such bleeding-heart liberals as Antonin Scalia.
Fun fact: Scalia was a generally rather ardent and consistent defender of the rights of criminal defendants (eg: he considered the “frisk” part of “stop and frisk” to be unconstitutional, putting him to the “left” of the Warren Court). And, more generally, there is this, from Hamdi v. Rumsfield:
>Many think it not only inevitable but entirely proper that liberty give way to security in times of national crisis—that, at the extremes of military exigency, inter arma silent leges. Whatever the general merits of the view that war silences law or modulates its voice, that view has no place in the interpretation and application of a Constitution designed precisely to confront war and, in a manner that accords with democratic principles, to accommodate it.
But his originalism did lead him in the opposite direction sometimes eg Boumediene v. Bush
>33. ... it’s hard to maintain social outrage against people who are doing the same thing as lots of other people but except for checking labels.
Why should there be any social outrage about people viewing AI kiddie porn, if no one is being harmed (unlike what is the case with actual kiddie porn [at least with the production. Arguably, (and this was the Supreme Court’s rationale for permitting the criminalization of possession of child porn [in contrast to possession of obscenity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_v._Georgia]) purchase/possession increases demand which increases child porn production and hence harm to actual children).
>40: California’s experiment to see how high they could raise the minimum wage before getting visible employment effects has finally produced (X) unambiguous results:
This is a bit of a red herring. 1) What we care about is overall unemployment, not just unemployment in the fast food industry. We need to know about total compensation and subsequent effects on employment. Imagine a town where almost everyone is employed in fast food restaurants one town over. If wages increase and employment in the fast food restaurants increase, it is nevertheless possible that total employment will not decrease, if the remaining workers spend their additional income at the local bowling alley, increasing the demand for pinsetters (did I mention that this hypothetical takes place in 1925?). 2) As I understand it, fast food employees are a mixture of a) high school kids earning extra money; and b) breadwinners. If the employers responded to the increase in min wage by retaining the breadwinners at higher wages, then the policy is at least arguably a success.
> Why should there be any social outrage about people viewing AI kiddie porn, if no one is being harmed
If we allow AI kiddie porn, people can spread real kiddie porn claiming it's AI. If we ban it, then we can stop the spread of real kiddie porn, and people who want to see it can still just download the AI models and run them locally.
But, if the AI kiddie porn is that indistinguishable from the real thing, why would anyone buy the real thing? And why would anyone produce the real thing? Why not produce AI and pass it off as the real thing?
But, again, why wouldn't producers simply pass off AI as authentic? And, it is easy to value authenticity when purchasing a legal good.
And, btw, so far all I have heard is a (thin) rationale for making hyperrealistic AI kiddie porn illegal; I have not heard a rationale for maintaining social outrage over its consumption.
Sure, with all kinds of pornography, AI-generated content is surely already being passed off as authentic, just as professional adult pornography has long been passed of as amateur pornography, and I would expect AI-generated content to come to dominate the market and to reduce demand for authentic content, but I still expect there to be significant demand for authentic amateur content.
I don't see how it would be possible not to maintain social outrage (in Western societies) against adults who fantasize about having sex with young children, so that discussion seems moot to me.
>I still expect there to be significant demand for authentic amateur content.
Why, given the risks? You are conflating desire with demand. Demand = the willingness and ability to buy at different prices. Here, the risk of prosecution = higher cost.
And, again, if there is demand, why wouldn't producers simply lie to consumers?
>I don't see how it would be possible not to maintain social outrage (in Western societies) against adults who fantasize about having sex with young children, so that discussion seems moot to me.
1. Not too long ago, the same was said re men who fantasize about sex with men.
2. I asked a normative question, not an empirical one.
"If the employers responded to the increase in min wage by retaining the breadwinners at higher wages, then the policy is at least arguably a success."
If anything I'd expect them to prefer the high school students who probably make better workers.
Why would you think that an adolescent would be a better worker than an adult? Which would be more reliable? Not to mention, a breadwinner needs his job. Most hs students don't. Plus, high school students would me more likely to move on after a short tenure.
People who work low-paying restaurant jobs as adults tend to have some kind of flaw that prevents them from getting better work, whether that's low intelligence, inability to show up on time, substance abuse problem, criminal record, can't speak English, etc. I find it funny you call them "breadwinners," which calls to mind a rather different demographic.
"Zaid Jilani points out that if immigrants don’t get a right to due process, citizens also don’t get a right to due process, because the government can kidnap citizens, claim they’re immigrants, and the citizens can’t prove otherwise since they don’t get due process."
I hugely support due process in all its forms. The idea of deportation without due process would and does fill me with dread. But due process also has a non-zero error rate. Any anecdotes or dramatic renditions such as 'Twelve Years a Slave' could happen with due process also, though presumably at a lower level (citation needed).
So: how do we deport 5,000,000 illegal immigrants in a timely manner in exigent circumstances, as the current leader of the country was elected to do? I am personally open to any and all ideas that maximize individual liberties and freedoms, and accomplish the goal.
There is a genuine problem with holding due process as a sacred value, where it gets increasingly long and unmanageable every time you add something (because you can only add componens to the process, never remove them; that would be a violation of someone's civil rights). Which gets us to the current position where it's basically impossible to actually enforce the law against anyone who's willing to go through an indefinitely stretched out legal process.
It's noteworthy in the Garcia case that while his lawyers don't dispute he entered the country illegally, and he was originally picked up by the police on gang membership suspicion all the way back in 2019, he still wasn't deported by 2025 (and probably never would have been if not for the current drama - 2019 was under the Trump administration). Most of the immigration cases under controversy seem to be like this, where reading the details makes you go "okay they didn't follow exact procedure but the actual outcome was correct".
(This is the case on immigration but is also increasingly the case on other issues like shoplifting, as Scott pointed out in a recent post).
More generally, the embracing of the narrative of "due process" as a sacred value by rationalists has been frustrating to me. We can all easily see how destructive too much process can be when it's used to block housing construction on environmental grounds, but forget that instantly on other issues?
(Which isn't to say the Trump admin's "no process whatsoever we just do what we feel like lol" is an improvement. It both harms legal immigration and doesn't actually achieve its stated goals, since you can't run large scale deportations without a standard procedure for doing them. Trump admin likes it because it generates maximum noise with minimum required actual action).
But the Democrats' refusal to admit their process has actually become unworkable and needs massive reform is frustrating.
Re the court order: yes, that part seems true, but it matches the general case I mentioned that people can delay deportation indefinitely (in this case, using asylum claims which are hard to verify; this seems like a pretty standard abuse of the immigration system).
Re 1 v 2: iiuc (not confident), Garcia's imprisonment in El Salvador is based on Salvadorian rather than American policy. While I'm sure there are many people unfairly jailed in El Salvador and you can reasonably oppose Salvadorian prison policy, this is not obviously unusual by that baseline.
Okay now I'm confused. I knew he was granted temporary withholding of removal (which in practice seems to not have been temporary), but if his asylum case was denied and not just deferred why was he given withholding of removal status?
> Re 1 v 2: iiuc (not confident), Garcia's imprisonment in El Salvador is based on Salvadorian rather than American policy.
The US government is reportedly paying El Salvador $6 million to imprison deportees. They are complicit in the plan to deport people directly to a foreign prison.
Yeah, that part seems bad (and also confusing. If you've already got them deported, why bother imprisoning them?)
(Okay I get that the actual answer is mostly "because Trump likes doing bad things that make him look tough while diverting the conversation away from the economy").
What exactly has become unworkable about it? The idea that there’s an urgent need to deport millions of people that justifies ‘corner cutting’ isn’t self evident to me.
And maybe I’m just excessively libertarian, but I don’t see due process as just an arbitrary barrier put up to prevent people from doing things, but a means of protecting important rights. I don’t feel like a hypocrite for believing on the one hand I should be able to do an addition to my house without permission from everyone in my zip code, while also believing a government agent shouldn’t be allowed to send an immigrant to indefinite incarceration in a foreign country without so much as a hearing. I’m not abstractly ‘pro-due process’ for every conceivable thing there could be a process for. I guess if you think immigration is worse than murder then you might think discarding the process isn’t that big of a deal.
My view isn't that housing (or immigration) is an acute emergency worth suspending due process over. It's that process should not in general be a meaningful inhibitor of policy. If you disagree with deportations on substantive grounds that's one thing. But if something *is* explicit government policy (and in this case it's hard to argue against that; both the presidency and Congress support more deportations, and that's the one issue where Trump is genuinely popular on), it shouldn't be forced unworkable purely on process grounds. If that happens it implies we need to reform process (ideally while balancing competing considerations).
The pro-process side should come up with a workable version of the process to champion (e.g. "okay the current system is unworkable but people should at least get a chance to present documents showing their status before arrest and talk to a neutral judge before deportation, but this shouldn't typically result in indefinite deferment of deportation for illegal immigrants) rather than doubling down on "we should keep the current level of excessive process that ensures no one is ever deportable". Similarly, on housing my view is "we should have a simple general housing code with by right approval for reasonable density that law abiding developers can easily adhere to and get quick permissions for", not "housing is an emergency so we should just stop enforcing building codes".
(The Trump admin's total anti-process approach is the equivalent of Mumbai housing policy. It's also quite bad, but the opposition needs to improve their alternative).
Those are mostly expired removal cases of people caught right by the border shortly after crossing, which are allowed to bypass the courts. Actual deportations of people who aren't caught on crossing and who challenge their cases in court (or who claim asylum and are released) are much fewer, and currently face a 3 million case backlog.
> process should not in general be a meaningful inhibitor of policy. [...] if something *is* explicit government policy (and in this case it's hard to argue against that; both the presidency and Congress support more deportations, and that's the one issue where Trump is genuinely popular on), it shouldn't be forced unworkable purely on process grounds. If that happens it implies we need to reform process (ideally while balancing competing considerations).
If the government finds that existing process makes their policy goals unworkable, then it is their legal prerogative to change that process in accordance with the established legal rules for doing so. It is also their legal burden to continue following said process as long as it remains the law of the land.
If the president and his allies in congress cannot abide by constitutionally mandated due process, they are entitled to try to amend the constitution to get rid of this obstruction to the policy goals, or at least appeal cases to the SCOTUS in the hope of changing the standing interpretation of the relevant constitutional clauses. But if they instead exercise executive power in extralegal ways to further policy in defiance of constitutional restrictions, they are engaging in misuse of power, fragrant violation of the law, and betrayal of their oath of office.
Where is this so-called emergency? We had a roaring hot economy with ultra-low unemployment from 2021-2024, and whenever they were actually allowed to work all the immigrants and refugees got absorbed into it pretty effectively. For my home state of Utah, it meant we had plenty of labor and a bunch of new Venezuelan restaurants.
<sarc>well, since you are happy, obviously the system works, who cares about the slave labor?</sarc>
You do realize that illegal immigration has...some issues at least? An underclass is more easily exploitable, is often trafficked, traffickers are usually drug cartels, drug cartels use immigrants (knowingly or unknowingly) as mules, hold their families hostage, exploit them in other ways, they are paid often below minimum wage or off the books, and so on?
You seem to think that just because they came here, that it was all wine and roses and everything is working fine just because you can't or don't want to see the exogenous costs.
I don't think having a system where you can illegally immigrate so long as you're willing to fight it in court indefinitely at great cost to both you and the public legal system, and meanwhile the illegal immigrants exist in a constant state of second-class citizenship uncertainty, is a good outcome. I agree that an ideal solution would be to reform the immigration system to make legal immigration easier and faster to file (it should not take multiple years to get a visa or green card if you're eligible!), not just make enforcement of illegal immigration possible.
>I agree that an ideal solution would be to reform the immigration system to make legal immigration easier and faster to file (_it should not take multiple years to get a visa or green card if you're eligible!_), not just make enforcement of illegal immigration possible.
[emphasis added] Agreed.
The current immigration system seems to me like it is something like two orders of magnitude too slow. The point of comparison that I'm considering is job interviews for skilled positions (I was a programmer before I retired).
Typically, this took one day (albeit a long and grueling one) for all of the interviews followed by approximately a day for the decision. Now, admitting someone to a nation is a more serious decision than hiring an employee. Still - is it more than an order of magnitude more serious? I find it hard to believe that the government couldn't find out everything about a potential immigrant that they now find out (at least from the person) in say two weeks of solid interviews. Can't we do better???
I want to highlight one part to those that are “supporters” of illegal immigrants. The current “process” makes them 2nd class citizens living in constant fear of being deported. I prefer a better process where immigrants do not need to live that way.
Congress could easily change the law on asylum; it’s just that the administration can’t do so unilaterally. We have separation of powers in our system of representative democracy.
Indeed, there was a bipartisan attempt to pass legislation that would reform asylum law including by making it easier to deport, but it was shot down after candidate Trump decided the law would be bad for his campaign.
I don't think due process and like, nimbyism are functionally analogous. The trade-offs on where you build a housing complex or a railroad don't necessarily rise to the level of life and liberty, whereas proceedings around deportation and criminal justice do.
On the other hand, the amount of process around criminal justice is much higher per person affected. It's reasonable to have a lower threshold for error there, but it still is a tradeoff (and one which, if you've reached a point where you functionally can't enforce laws, you'rw managing badly. Sometimes that's because you've written unworkably strict laws, but sometimes because your process is badly designed).
I think plenty of people would be open to revising the process, although I think its another one of those things, like FDA regulation, where the reason we don't have a different process isn't because the process is obviously corrupt, but because there's a lot of legitimately competing incentives. Its hard to have a conversation around process however when the consequences of the process being ignored are as dire as they are right now. Trump would be facing a lot less resistance if he hadn't contracted with a dictator to throw people in a gulag.
I don't think "just hire more lawyers to solve the extra complexity caused by having a complicated legal process" is a good solution, it's a form of tulip subsidy
I think the discussion on requiring e-verify seems productive, instead of everyone throwing food at each other.
I'm sure there are additional problems to be sorted out there, and many oxen to be gored, but at least it's a starting point.
(EDIT) this doesn't address the current asylum seekers exactly, and especially how to deport the subset who are violent, abusive, or criminal, with sufficient due process, but it takes a holistic approach from many angles to solve big problems.
Obligate e-verify so that they all self-deport because they can't work.
It won't happen because Trump doesn't want to do mass deportations, he wants to try to break the American legal system and he's discovered anti-immigrants are very happy to break the American legal system as long as they're told it's happening to illegal immigrants.
I largely or even entirely agree that mandating e-verify is the correct solution. The rest of your rant tends to reduce the impact of your response and I suggest you avoid such histrionics in the future if you want to make good points.
That said we wouldn't ideally just flip it on day one if we want to avoid mass disruption. It would be good to couple this with an improved legal migration system, temporary work visas, or the like. This unfortunately requires an extremely divided congress to take action, and in particular the divides don't fall along traditional party lines but more around predominantly farm states vs urban states and so on.
See? There can be agreement without assuming everyone is acting in bad faith.
"This unfortunately requires an extremely divided congress to take action, and in particular the divides don't fall along traditional party lines but more around predominantly farm states vs urban states and so on."
Both houses of Congress are controlled by the GOP. It's not "extremely divided" at all. If they continue, Trump's tariffs are going to cause a global recession and his behavior is already shaking investor confidence in the USA; tariffing is an authority vested in Congress and delegated to the President only under specific circumstances defined by law; and rather than trying to reassert their authority, the House GOP has actively abandoned it (https://www.businessinsider.com/gop-leaders-mike-johnson-block-congress-action-trump-tariffs-2025-4?op=1). If he can get them to go along with that, he could absolutely get e-verify passed.
"See? There can be agreement without assuming everyone is acting in bad faith."
I don't assume everyone is acting in bad faith, I infer that the Trump administration is acting in bad faith based on a careful analysis of their actions.
>Both houses of Congress are controlled by the GOP.
Are you not aware the filibuster exists?
The House GOP already passed an immigration bill that would mandate e-verify. It has no chance in the Senate because Republicans don't have a supermajority.
While obligating e-verify would help many cases, there's a lot of people who work under the table or in illegal endeavors (and some who just live on the street, or mooch off friends or relatives, etc), for whom it wouldn't really work. These are also disproportionately the less-contributing immigrants that immigration opponents most want to remove.
(with regards to the second part of your comment, I agree that the Trump admin is not in general acting in good faith. It would help the opposition quite a lot to propose actual solutions to the problems Trump is just pretending to solve and not actually doing anything meaningful about, instead of arguing against the premise that they're even problems at all, or arguing that they can't be solved without violating sacred values).
Isn't illegal immigration now down to much more manageable levels?
Problem largely solved except for what to do with the enormous numbers allowed entry under the Biden administration? This seems like at least one campaign promise that was kept, not a pretend solution.
"So: how do we deport 5,000,000 illegal immigrants in a timely manner in exigent circumstances, as the current leader of the country was elected to do? "
If a candidate runs and gets elected on a platform of, let's say, throwing every left-handed person into the ocean, that doesn't mean that any other part of the nation or the government has any mandate to help or even step aside. It the responsibility of the candidate to keep their promises within the realm of constitutionality and legal feasibility. It is not the responsibility of everyone else in the country to surrender their rights because 1/4 of their neighbors are angry and impatient.
Actually everyone does in fact call this a mandate. Every candidate in modern times and probably prior has said that the numbers trump got constitute a mandate.
You don't personally have to help of course, it's a free country. If you aren't interested in solutions, does that mean you support illegal immigration, or don't care? If you don't care, why are you posting here?
By this, I presume you support illegal immigration. Why?
It's a fair cop. I can't say with any certainty. It seems very common to me and I heard it in the press a lot during e.g. Biden and Obama's administrations.
Quick lesson in law that you seem to desperately need: stuff candidates say aren't the same as laws. They especially aren't the same as the constitution. They are certainly *not* legally binding on *anyone.*
Perhaps you found the word "mandate" confusing there, so for your benefit, let me rephrase that to obligation. Nobody else has any legal or moral obligation to help Donald Trump keep his campaign promises. And when keeping his campaign promises conflict with the constitution--which is what *you* seem to be suggesting--there are millions of people who, in actual fact, have a legal obligation to *hinder* him. The president is not above the law. No matter how whiny he or his supporters get about illegal immigration, that still doesn't put him or his administration above the law.
"By this, I presume you support illegal immigration. "
I originally wrote a longer, more detailed response. But I think I'd rather pay this particular strain of bullshit back in kind.
By this, I presume you support fascism. You're talking, acting, and arguing like a fascist. I'm sure you don't *think* you are. But that dime-store authoritarian "with us or against us" crap you're spouting would be a dead giveway even if you hadn't spent multiple comments arguing that other peoples' constitutional rights were an inconvenience to be swept aside when it interferes with hurting the people you so *desperately* want to see hurt.
"If you aren't interested in solutions, does that mean you support illegal immigration, or don't care? If you don't care, why are you posting here?"
This seems a misconception worth addressing, assuming this question is in good faith (which to be honest, I find dubious).
To be perfectly clear and candid: I mostly DON'T care about illegal immigration. Even when I lived in the U.S. I never found it a very compelling issue: there were lots of real problems to be worried about. I think this attitude was pretty common among people not on the far-right: a variety of opinions on the issue, but little force behind them.
But me not caring about your pet issue is NOT that same as me not caring about what the government *does* regarding that issue. This seems so bloody obvious in context that I have trouble believing you're making an honest mistake here. You are taking an unimportant non-issue and using it as an excuse to strip civil rights from *everyone in the goddamn nation.* OF COURSE I'd bloody well care about that. Any sane person would.
Which is bad news for you, to be honest. The best possible outcome from where we are now is that the U.S. as a nation hangs on by the skin of its teeth, and the appalling stench of the policies your pushing render this issue toxic for decades to come: nobody dares take a hard line on immigration lest they be compared to Trump. The more likely outcome is that you wake up one morning and discover that in your haste to solve this utterly banal problem, you handed power to a blatantly and nakedly untrustworthy charlatan, and now you no longer have a country. I doubt he'll even "solve" the issue; I mean why would he? Keeping it around as a boogeyman has worked wonders: there seem to be no limits on the absurdities you're willing to support as long as the specter of an "invasion" of immigrants can be waved in front of your face. Any robust solution would necessarily give up that power. The fantasy that if you just cross one more line, just break one more boundary, just throw one more sacred principle into the fire, you'll finally buy freedom from this supposed menace is just that: a fantasy.
Serious question: FDR interned American Japanese citizens, stripping them of civil rights during wartime by declaring it an emergency. Granted, WW2 and all that implied, but I see this as one of the nation's largest infringements on civil liberties in its history, post-slavery. We as a nation survived. There is a lot of ruin in a nation. I don't love this, and I don't love any erosions in civil rights, and I further don't love cutting corners on them by calling 'emergency' as a trump card, by any president, and think this power should be heavily hemmed-in.
However, 5-10,000,000 non-citizens crossing our borders with incompetent screening and due process and all that implies in their effect on our country definitely gets into my 'emergency' category. If it doesn't in yours, so be it. It's obviously not nothing, and the constitution at least nods in the direction of a presidential duty being to secure the country.
AND I don't love that the prior administration put us in this position any more than that the current one isn't handling it perfectly, though I am personally delighted that at least a hundred or so gangbangers are no longer here. Garcia doesn't trouble me, insofar as the evidence I've read makes it pretty clear he received a lot of due process and the one reason for keeping him out of El Salvador has dried up.
I don't love that Trump said some things that could be interpreted as jailing American citizens overseas. Beyond that, show me any law whatsoever that has been changed during his administration that affects my civil liberties negatively and I'll reassess my response. 'A phone and a pen' executive orders affect the executive branch in accordance with laws duly passed by congress, though of course SCOTUS may choose to disagree with their interpretations.
"FDR interned American Japanese citizens, stripping them of civil rights during wartime by declaring it an emergency. "
First, FDR was absolutely in the wrong for doing what he did. I have never encountered *anyone* who seriously grappled with the actual history of Japanese internment who ended up concluding that what he did was reasonable or justified by the events on the ground at the time. Further, there are some pretty chilling ulterior motives that appear to be behind the political push towards Japanese internment that have absolutely nothing to do with national security.
But even given all that, yes, World War II was an *actual emergency*. The U.S. suddenly being at war with two large, aggressive, hostile world powers (and Italy) is a genuinely dangerous situation. Claiming that some groups of mostly unarmed civilians illegally crossing a land border in peacetime--something that has been going on for *decades* without causing much in the way of clearly-identifiable harm--is somehow equivalent if a FARCE. If you're willing to call that an emergency or support a president that does so, then whether you like it or not you're supporting the dictatorial expansion of presidential power. *Anything* can be an emergency under than definition. And indeed it already is: Trump's justification for circumventing the trade deal *he negotiated* to put tariffs on Canada was a laughably tiny (as in, a two-digit number of kilograms) flow of fentanyl, a drug that's manufactured in the U.S. in far greater quantities.
"Garcia doesn't trouble me, insofar as the evidence I've read makes it pretty clear he received a lot of due process "
Everything up to and including the Supreme Court says you're wrong here. His deportation to El Salvador was *illegal.* The Trump administration has *admitted it*. Saying "he received plenty of due process" is about as sensible as saying "look, I know Alice shot Bot *this* time, but look at all those previous occasions that she *failed* to shoot him." He. Was. Deported. Without. Due. Process. It's clear cut. Black and white. If you keep maintaining otherwise you are wrong plain and simple.
So honestly, here's how it looks to me. On the one hand, you claim to be concerned about the expansion and misuse of presidential power, but on the other hand you keep uncritically repeating all the standard excuses and justifications for it and trying to shift the blame elsewhere. I'd honestly think more highly if you honestly committed in *either* direction: take an actual stand for the rule of law or just be open and honest about authoritarian control being a price you're perfectly willing to pay if it means getting rid of the people you don't like.
"So: how do we deport 5,000,000 illegal immigrants in a timely manner in exigent circumstances, as the current leader of the country was elected to do?"
Given that Republicans have control of Congress as well as the Presidency, why not go to Congress and ask for the budget to hire more immigration judges and agents? The problem is that the Trump Administration is trying to have it both ways - they want to do mass deportations on the cheap while ripping out as much federal spending as possible to pass a big tax cut.
Pretty sure a big part of that answer is "invest in a lot of bureaucrats and lawyers to help move the process along as efficiently as possible." But that's the exact opposite of what the DOGE crowd believes in.
Does this actually scale? Or does it just mean the next president who feels similarly to Biden lets in 15,000,000 and then you say 'invest in even more bureaucrats and lawyers to help move the process along as efficiently as possible'?
Seems like a never-ending ratchet, moving goalposts all the way down. At some point, hopefully now, it stops and we say this is enough.
I mean, liberals have to deal with rachets all the time, we don't get to suddenly toss aside the constitution because the prior Republican administration fucked everything up, and something tells me you would be upset if that were the precedent we took away from this situation.
My argument is that everyone has their own issue where everything seems broken and they would love to play dictator to cut through all the bullshit. But the bullshit exists because there is not a consensus on how to deal with the problem, and saying "we don't have to worry about consensus, we'll just unilaterally enforce our side of this issue and fuck the consequences" gives the other party permission structure to fight a war of all against all. I'm astonished by the number of people who seem to think being dictators on this issue won't open up giant cans of worms down the line.
"Or does it just mean the next president who feels similarly to Biden lets in 15,000,000 and then you say 'invest in even more bureaucrats and lawyers to help move the process along as efficiently as possible"
Of course it means that; there is obviously no solution to illegal immigration that precludes the possibility of future presidents taking steps to let higher numbers of illegal immigrants in. Even mass deportations with literally no due process at all can't stop Zombie Joe Biden from letting everyone right back in again in his 2nd term.
The point of mentioning other ratchets isn't a whatabout, it's to show that this dynamic is just an unavoidable feature of politics. If your opponents win, they may have the chance to undo what you've done, that's just the nature of the game.
Fine, but that just means that one way ratchet effects are unavoidable in politics. I don't see a way around that.
I mean, as I say, even if Trump deports every immigrant with no due process, it presumably will remain easier for a future president to let them all back in than it was to deport them...I don't think "due process", or "spend more money on the process" are what lead to the ratchet effect, it's just the nature of the fact that it's always easier let people in than to kick them out.
> But in those 5 minutes the person or their lawyer can say "hey, I'm an American citizen" or "hey, I have an order to not be deported to El Salvadore."
But then everyone is going to say that. And then it's going to take a lot longer than 5 minutes.
The typical thing people say is "hey, I'm a refugee fleeing threat of violence in my home country" (this is what happened with Garcia). And then you have to verify that, which can take years if it ever happens at all (Garcia was still in America on temporary status for consideration in 2025 after first asking for asylum in 2019).
I agree that there should be a version of the process that's both reasonably time efficient and gives people a fair hearing. That's genuinely not the one we have now.
It would be interesting to hear from someone who works for the immigration service what contributes to the time requirement, at a ground level. I suspect it's pretty easy and fast check for a single person once the case file is in the hands of the person who knows what to look for, and everyone they need to consult is standing by to assist. I suspect this is the best case scenario, and the median case is that file waiting weeks to work to the top of that person's pile, and the people who can assist are stuck with their own piles, on leave, etc.
If you don't want to deal with Garcia's claim that he is facing violence in El Salvadore, you can deport him someplace else.
The court had, in fact, previously ruled that Garcia could not be deported to El Salvadore. He could be deported anywhere else. Any nearby country or any country had travelled through would have been a completely rational place to send him without needing to fight against that court ruling.
The administration could be getting nearly the exact same results while obeying the law, but it would have to recognize limits on its behavior. Like a child with pathological demand avoidance, they don't want that.
Yes, I agree with that part (with the asterisk that I'm not sure they actually could find another country to take him). While I'm critical of purely process-based criticism (and of the media distorting information on these issues significantly more than they typically do), the administration's solutions are optimized for creating controversy, not achieving their stated goals while balancing considerations, and this is quite bad.
(That said, it is politically good strategy; moving the media conversation from the collapsing economy to immigration - which Trump is still seen favorably on - has paused the collapse in his approval ratings).
One simple solution is to require that person to apply for asylum from Honduras or Guatamala. If they apply after they have already illegally entered the country then auto-reject, deport, and maybe ban them.
Issues with this proposition (from different sides - pick the one that worries you more):
- false negatives: legitimate asylum claims can easily be made by people who had to flee those places and didn't have the ability to wait for an application in advance to be confirmed.
- false positives: many asylum seekers do follow current legal procedure of presenting themselves at the border, claiming asylum, and are then allowed in until processing, which can take years (at least, they did under the Biden admin. I don't know if this is still available, but there's millions of people around from then). "Deport anyone who didn't follow the rules" would miss them.
(this one doesn't apply to Garcia, who crossed the border illegally almost a decade before claiming asylum*
*Okay technically a different status but same principle.)
I agree with the principle, though, that "change the rules to streamline the procedure and make it easier to deport illegal border crossers while keeping it mostly fair" isn't really a hard challenge in itself. The problem seems to be that Democrats would attack any change or process as a civil rights violation, and the Trump admin isn't interested in making a new more functional process, they just want to have loud controversies around immigration to provoke the Democrats into bad messaging. So once again, the only real winner is moloch :(
Congress could change the law on asylum; in the absence of congressional action, the administration still has to follow the law as it is. That’s part of what it means to have rule of law.
The legal system takes a lot of logistic effort to bring all the parties and the evidence, background, and lawyers together in one place to make use of those incredibly valuable 5 minutes. Traffic court works at scale because the stakes are relatively low.
Currently there is every incentive to throw sand in the grains of justice by, for example, conveniently needing lots of rescheduled meetings due to personal obligations of defense immigration lawyers. These tactics are nothing new to the legal system, which is full of exploitable levers for those who know and are funded to take the time to learn and use them.
For example, claims of asylum could be very hard to check out. How would a judge do this? Do they need to gather evidence from South America? I'm no expert, I'm genuinely unsure how we handle millions of asylum claims without pointing to e.g. an actual mass war between Argetina and Chile or something (and none of these would be valid if immigrants could stop in Guatemala).
Congress could change the rules on asylum. For example, they could make it so that an immigrant is ineligible if they passed through any other country without first applying for asylum there. Or for that matter Congress could send those claiming asylum to Rwanda, as the UK had proposed (except I guess those claiming asylum _from_ Rwanda — those could be send to El Salvador?). In any case, it’s up to Congress, not the administration.
This applies equally to, say, the Obama administration's unilateral declaration of DACA. While you can be consistently against both this does imply that the Trump admin is only abusing the constitution on immigration to a similar degree that Obama did, rather than to a whole new level.
(Unlike their actions on, say, trade policy or blackmailing law firms that may oppose them, which genuinely do seem like a whole new scary level of abuse).
You do realize that those five minutes require mountains of preparation, typically at very high cost? You seem to think that everyone just shows up magically on time and it's over. And those 5 minutes are, as noted below, an absolute best case scenario.
Garcia saw over 17 judges and racked up a ton of court documentation on his gang ties and related abuses. How much due process is enough to say we tried to do the right thing by him? How much could these resources have helped poor Americans instead? Or is this just magic sky money that we don't care about?
I am skeptical of the claim that a typical asylum or immigration hearing require "months" of dedicated, full-time work. I could buy a day of work, spread out over months in blocks of a few hours at a time (because e.g. one step is "send a request to the Bureau of XYZ records" and they always leave things in their inbox for weeks). Do you have a cite for the "months"?
Better, does anyone here have any first- or even secondhand experience in this area?
First, the top 4 policies that are described (mandating WFH *where possible*, social distancing, masks indoors, and direct stimulus payments) were generally pretty doable or outright favorable. Like of course the average person loves the additional flexibility of optional WFH (so much so that RTO mandates are pretty widely condemned) and stimulus payments is just money. And social distancing / masks were, like, annoying, but not really that bad. The latter two (closing schools and businesses) were always much more controversial, and show up as more controversial in the chart too. (I'm also surprised though that 60% end up supporting closing schools, as an aside)
Second, I think you may be living in a conservative filter bubble at least a bit. A lot of smart libertarian-leaning-right-wing people I know giga-brain themselves about COVID -- they look at the second/third order effects (economy, kids learning) and reason that those must massively outweigh the first order effects (people dying). I think its easy to forget exactly how dangerous the first wave of COVID was, and how little we knew about it. The early waves of COVID were quite deadly AND extremely transmissible and only really got overtaken by less deadly versions of COVID somewhere around 8 months in. In case it matters, to really underscore the point, virtually everyone I know in the Indian American diaspora had at least one grandparent or relative die in India from COVID. In practice, we had only a year of lockdowns from March 2020 to April 2021 when the vaccines started rolling out. So you're looking at a delta of, what, at most 4 months? That's really not that long!
And we have literally hundreds of examples of other countries with different governance models and different approaches to how they handled COVID to compare against. Could the US have done some things better? Sure, perfection is impossible and hindsight is 20/20. But I think many people who are playing the "COVID reckoning" game are really just trying to give the Dems a black eye and are noticeably uninterested in how the US performed relative to the rest of the world post COVID (really well!) or even how various US states performed against each other.
In case anyone is actually curious on the latter btw, it of course varies based on which metric you end up looking at and how you calculate that metric. Blue states had better health outcomes as measured by infection and death counts. Red states had better economic outcomes as measured by % drop in per-state GDP and employment. Which is exactly what you would expect when comparing places that did lockdowns vs those that didnt.
That means that the fundamental debate is not a policy debate -- the policies that various states enacted did more or less what we expected! The fundamental debate is a _values_ debate. Do we value lives or economy? Do we care about the elderly or the children? Do we want to focus on the current moment or think about the long term effects? There is no obvious answer to these things, individual communities should more or less choose for themselves, and lo and behold that's basically what happened. As far as I know there was no federally mandated lockdown at any point, by EO or otherwise.
"Focus on second-order effects so much that you effectively ignore first-order effects" has always seemed to me to be a common libertarian (or general contrarian) failure mode. First order effects: boring, pedestrian, everyone talks about them, can they really be that important? Second order (negative) effects: cool, for smart people to see and understand, your mom hasn't heard of them, they must be important! (Unexpected positive second order effects of things that contrarian dislikes, what, do those even exist?)
TBH it's not even necessarily malicious that this happens!
1) Smart person has identified a second order effect no one seems to be talking about
2) Smart person tries to spread the news about the second order effect so that people can make accurate trade offs and cost benefit analysis (while still personally believing that the first order effect is important!)
3) People hear the smart person and think "wow, this smart person is talking a lot about how important it is to focus on second order effect, this must be more important than the things the smart person isnt focusing on, like first order effect"
4) The second order effect becomes more important/discussed/planned for than the first order effect
grandparent != relative. Most of us have orders of magnitude more relatives than grandparents. If relative is the correct term, then your anecdote is much less meaningful.
Amend my statement to "grandparent or person who filled a grandparent like role", which better conveys what I was trying to get at and hopefully covers the semantic concern you have.
Though even if I was to just say 'relative', I can count on exactly one finger the number of diseases that have led to a death in the family for approximately everyone I know who is Indian American.
Idk, I know a lot of doctors and dentists who wear masks all day every day. They seem fine (I mean, besides the hazing of med school / residency)
Also, just to make sure I'm not over stepping here, did you have to wear masks for 8 hours, or are you speaking for someone who did?
I can totally imagine there are some small percent of people who had legitimate problems with wearing masks AND had to wear them for extremely long periods of time AND lived in states that had mask mandates (because the federal government didnt). If you're in that category, I'm sorry that you had to go through that. I also think that number of people is a very small number of people, and we generally don't make country wide health policy decisions around the conveniences of such small numbers of people (and if we do, my trans friends would like a word!)
Yeah lots of people didn't have to wear masks because they lived in states not governed by the party of mask mandates. Some were happy about that and continued to vote for that party, giving us Donald Trump as President. Enjoy all the fun associated with that.
The general tone of your post is 'annoyed/angry', but I don't really understand why. You seem annoyed that people got to choose what policies they wanted to follow?
On this we're agreed 😂 though maybe we have different understandings of who "the people who brought it on us" are. I tend to blame Murdoch, Ailes, and Suzanne Scott, but thats just me.
In case it matters, even when the Dems had federal office, there was never any implementation of country wide mask or lockdown mandates.
There was a vaccine mandate for people who worked under the federal government, which of course was challenged in the courts and eventually stripped down. There was also an OSHA vaccine-or-mask mandate for private companies with more than 100 people, and that too was challenged in the courts and eventually removed.
(For the MAGAs reading at home, note that Biden did not take any political vengeance in response. He did not, say, withhold federal funding from the states that sued, or ask the DOJ to go after the institutions that were not masking/vaccinating. Because doing that would be insane.)
There's a subset of people who find masks extremely uncomfortable, like they're suffocating. They're not suffocating, but they still genuinely hate the feeling. Making them wear a mask really only makes sense if there is a pretty substantial benefit. "Maybe it'll do a little good and it can't hurt" doesn't seem like a good enough reason.
At least for a properly-fitted N95/KN95 mask, you can see why this ought to do some good in keeping you from catching a respiratory virus. For the cloth masks that were mandatory for most of the mask mandate days, there wasn't much reason to think the masks were doing all that much good--at best, maybe they were limiting the range of the big droplets when you coughed or sang.
"A lot of smart libertarian-leaning-right-wing people I know giga-brain themselves about COVID -- they look at the second/third order effects (economy, kids learning) and reason that those must massively outweigh the first order effects (people dying). "
A lot of smart libertarian-leaning people looked at first- *and* second-order effects, and concluded that many of the interventions weren't all that good at preventing people from dying, such that the second-order effects would be more important. Specifically including Scott, e.g. in his effortpost on the effectiveness on lockdowns.
Also, your terminology is off. "First-order effect" is not the same as "intended effect". The first-order effect of lockdowns is that people are locked down, and thus severely limited in their ability for social, economic, and disease-transmitting interactions. You don't get to dismiss any of those as "meh, second-order, who cares" without doing the math,
My take from Scott's post when I first read it, and when I skimmed it again, is "this is an extremely complicated subject with no obviously correct outcomes and has massive error bars on every side". Saying that lockdowns are unlikely to prevent people from dying is a bit like saying masks have little effect on the spread of airborne disease. Scott points out that there are strong self-isolation tendencies for people in a pandemic, and states in multiple places that lockdowns were effective and could have been more so if enacted with even more speed and precision. The policy package we actually got *may* have been suboptimal *depending on your specific values* but even that is unclear.
Unless you're willing to be more specific, I think this may be a set up for a motte and bailey.
The reason I think this is a motte and bailey is because you are roughly saying 'many interventions weren't that good such as lockdowns'. I'm left to assume that you are referring to...everything. WFH. Masks. Vaccines. Lockdowns. That's the motte.
If I push, you may fall back to Scott's version of this. "Well, we don't know exactly how this plays out in detail but if you make a lot of specific assumptions you land in a place where lockdowns specifically have this tradeoff." That's the bailey.
So when you say
> smart libertarian-leaning people looked at first- *and* second-order effects, and concluded that many of the interventions weren't all that good at preventing people from dying, such that the second-order effects would be more important
I'd ask that you be a lot more specific about what interventions weren't that good, and how you landed at the conclusion that second-order effects would be more important.
And if we're really being rigorous, it's not enough to do this with hindsight. We are discussing a moral claim -- that people were wrong to push for COVID interventions at the time that they did, with the information that they had. So really we should be cutting off any information that we got after, say, June 2020.
Peoples experiences were so different during the pandemic. I was working in a hospital hearing about the death toll every week and wearing a mask all day long.
Some of my neighbors took it as an opportunity to party all week long, at least during the summer.
It’s like the difference between the guy whose Vietnam-era service was in the National Guard, never deployed, and the guy who’s got drafted into the Marines.
It was also very different for different people based on personality and age and situation. I locked down with my wife and three kids, so while it was annoying, I wasn't locked up in solitary. I have coworkers who lived alone and it was a miserable experience for them.
"Where are the people who coincidentally ended up living in the slums and love it?"
Not a slum, exactly, but moving to a middle income country provides this benefit. I spent a month in Medellin and seriously considered moving there full time. I stayed in an upper income neighborhood, relatively speaking, but it was not a luxury highrise in el Poblado or anything like that. I loved the un-manicured character of the neighborhood. I bought groceries at the local bodega and got my haircut in a tiny storefront with one chair.
At night many neighrbos people came home from work and turned their front patio into a makeshift restaurant. DUring the day there was a guy who went through the area with a pushcart yelling "aguacate!" to sell avocados. They are gigantic down there and very inexpensive.
Also, in the nineties I lived in Pilsen, a poor and rather violent neighborhood in Chicago, and liked it. I ended up living there for eight years.
29 - I think there is still a good bit of psychological denial going on. Most people find it quite unpleasant to think particularly hard about the negative effects of the lockdowns and other restrictions. No one wants to admit that they themselves were complicit in stunting the development of an entire generation of children, inaugurating an era of catastrophic inflation, and demonstrating clearly for everyone to see that limits on governmental power are a social fiction that can be dropped at will. I also note that while “closing nonessential businesses” is on the chart, “closing churches” isn’t. I am not a religious person, but if I were a devout Catholic, I would be LIVID that the government prevented me from physically partaking in communion with the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ.
32 (and 19 I guess) - Eating chicken 9 times a week sounds a bit high, but it’s probably pretty close. Chicken is the cheapest meat, can be cooked dozens of ways, and is delicious. It’s hard to comprehend just how much human utility would be lost if the animal welfare EAs were to succeed in eliminating factory farming without first providing a suitable replacement (where suitability is measured from the perspective of the consumers, not the activists).
"Utility lost" sounds as if people would become malnourished, less intelligent or brutal to their children. Not really how we would describe a habit that may be deeply engrained but is also strongly objectionable in at least one sense. (It doesn't even have to be ethical strictly speaking; imagine how much utility would be lost if people watched less TV, or spent less time in the comments section.)
> Remember, asking where someone is from ‘originally’ is a microaggression, but inferring it yourself based on their “mildly platyrrhine, high-rooted nose” is A-OK!
I don't think anyone actually beliefs this. I highly suspect the people that created this are not woke, and I mostly see this game played by edgy people.
A cynic would say that Yali from New Guinea perfectly understood civilization, he speedran organized religion to get straight to the "fleecing the congregation" stage!
I wouldn't mind at all either Turkson or Sarah, but they're both too old. And probably too conservative. I have no idea who is likely to be elected (why is Polymarket backing Parolin?) but that's the whole point - whoever goes in as "papabile" comes out as "still a cardinal".
Every news outlet seems to have a different list of who they consider frontrunners:
Cremieux is actually a guy (as verified by people who actually saw him in person at Natalcon), as anyone would strongly predict from reading him or looking at the topics he discusses. The whole thing about him being a woman was a joke.
"Bryan Caplan thinks this can’t be true: after all, practically nobody moves to poorer areas, automatically giving themselves higher relative income than their neighbors?"
This isn’t why I moved to Mexico but it would have been sufficient if I’d known beforehand how nice it is for people to respect you by default.
It’s a very strongly net positive move for several reasons but in the end people willing to do something weird just because it’s effective are rare.
Regarding relative income, you wouldn’t move to the slums because you still remember your old social relations, so would still feel bad about being poorer than your memories? Kinda grasping I dunno
>24: Agent Village is a sort of "reality show” where a group of AI agents has to work together to complete some easy-for-human tasks
I feel like commissioning a Neuro-style cute anime avatar for each agent shouldn't be *that* expensive (it could be their first task!), and might increase viewership by several orders of magnitude.
Probably have to do it like a visual novel with limited animation instead of 3d models with voice modules, but still.
6. I don't have the same level of study detail for the UK, but Deliveroo delivered a similar strategy to DoorDash, while JustEat went for a slight alternative approach that also worked: JE did exclusive deals with a few of the big-chain fast-food places (McDonalds and KFC, not Burger King, not sure about the others). Being McDonald's food delivery people means a lot of people have your app even if they prefer the other one. JE does have lots of other restaurants, but it has more of a fast-food image than a high-quality one, so many of the better/more expensive places are Deliveroo only.
The result is that UberEats got similarly shut out here, and the market is essentially a two-way split between Deliveroo and JustEat. Deliveroo's app is much better than JustEat's, though JE is slowly catching up.
MS was recently (2022) very convincingly linked to Epstein-Barr virus, though this is obviously not the whole picture (EBV infecting some 95%, in some areas 100% of the population).
#31 - I am very uncomfortable with links like this. 'Guessing where people are from' is fine, fake race science is not. If you must group people, why not use known ethnic groups? I am sorry to leave a comment like this, but it's a major barrier and eg. would keep me from sharing this post.
> Do English people really look different from French?
There's certainly a lot of overlap on their facial features, but take a decent sized (at least 30) group of randomly selected native English and same for French, and I'd be pretty confident I could pick which group was which.
#10 Regarding Argentina, the inflation rate actually rose somewhat in February and more in March, with the cited figure being for January. Still inflation is generally continuing to drop, and is projected to further drop considerably by the end of the year.
The big change is the lifting of currency controls and the question is how the country will weather the disruption that will bring in the short to medium term. Simply comparing indicator values from before the buildup to the changes and after their implementation misses this.
The non-inflation improvements aren't a recent phenomenon, though, with poverty only "now" being lower than when he took office. That's just the result of lagging reporting and indicators with the official "poverty rate" being limited to just 2 values per year - one for the first half of the year, and one for the second half, with the "now" value being that of the entire second half of 2024.
The actual poverty rate has been dropping for over a year and has in fact been lower than when Milei took office since before the October Report Card post was published.
And since poverty has continued to drop throughout and after the second half of last year, the actual poverty rate now is probably lower not only than it was when Milei took office, but than it was at any point in the last several years, with the estimated poverty rate for Q1 2025 being lower than any rolling 6 month poverty estimate since 2018-2019.
Inflation is not "projected to further drop considerably by the end of the year". There was a 10% devaluation of the peso just a few days ago, with a high impact on prices. Inflation has risen sharply during 2025. 2.2% in January, 2.4% in February, and 3.7% (!) in March. April and May are expect to be as high as 5% each. Milei is betting everything on another carry trade to get alive to the October elections, but after that there could be a big devaluation with another high impact in prices. For all we know, monthly inflation in November and December could be 10% each.
35: Also impressed by FIRE; I hope more of the anti-woke brigade pivots similarly (I'm not holding my breath, but Hanania seems to have changed his views pretty radically).
38: Makes one wonder about JD's recent visit to the Vatican. Quite the concidence...
FIRE has been really good on speech-in-general for their whole existence. They've never been particularly partisan and have always defended a politically diverse range of students.
The incidents that originally inspired their creation were 1990s left-wing-inspired campus speech restrictions, and they gained a lot of support and attention for fighting similar stuff in the 2010s. But they've never said that the answer to these phenomena was for schools to become right-wing or enforce right-wing views.
Their aspirations have been pretty classic U.S. civil libertarian all along.
There are many institutions/organizations/politicians that claimed to be motivated by concerns about civil liberty that have not responded to recent events the way FIRE has. FIRE deserves credit for living up to their aspirations.
The National Catholic Register (the newspaper in question that was quoted) is not Catholic, they just call themselves that. The Catholic church has condemned them multiple times for pretending to be Catholic and has been trying for decades to get them to change their name to stop confusing people into thinking that they are affiliated with the Church.
Thanks for the clarification. I'll just note that Pope Francis definitely was Catholic and he also made some pretty critical remarks (which I guess he will no longer be making).
You'll notice a big difference between Pope Francis's "we need to be more compassionate towards refugees" and the NCR's "this guy in particular is literally in hell, 100% confirmed, according to the BIBLE". One is religious guidance. The other is heresy. Big gap here.
Hanania is a particularly hateful kind of elitist, who pivoted into shitting on socially-acceptable targets instead of socially-unacceptable targets. Discussion of him always reminds me of Huxley's lines from Chrome Yellow:
>To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.
I honestly don't know what to make of him. He is obviously elitist (says so right on the tin), but from the perspective of his (possibly former) audience, I think his pivot was in the opposite direction (what is "socially acceptable" depends on the circles you run in).
But he was ahead of the curve on anti-woke, so maybe he is ahead of the curve on anti-maga.
>but from the perspective of his (possibly former) audience, I think his pivot was in the opposite direction (what is "socially acceptable" depends on the circles you run in).
Well, obviously the people who originally followed him don't like him now that he's shitting on them. But then, the people who originally followed him aren't very popular in wider society, so trading them for an audience of mainstream liberals represents a net gain in terms of social acceptability.
FIRE is great. They're what the ACLU used to be, before it got massively glutted on donor money in the first Trump term and hired a bunch of ultra-left folks who cared more about their social media standing than principles.
In terms of college admissions, I should note that in Canada my experience was similar to what University of Austin is doing. I applied to two universities, both in my hometown. I sent them my high school grades, and I think also a short letter of reference from one of my high school teachers. I got into both, the end. I don't know of anyone in Canada who had to do a essay song-and-dance for undergrad, except for one person who had to do a literal song-and-dance to get into a musical theatre program. (I think grad school is a bit different).
That's how it works for US colleges outside the top 100ish. A decent portion of state flagships and similar schools admit everybody who has a 3.5+ GPA and 1400+ SAT and an essay and references that don't literally imply that they're a sociopath. The activities etc arms race only really applies to selective schools or to people who are trying to get sports scholarships.
I applied to UK unis as an American and it was refreshingly straightforward compared to elite US schools. I was able to convert my AP scores to UCAS points and determine pretty quickly that I had a real shot at all UK unis up to Oxbridge. I then applied to 5 of them through the same portal, and took an in person math exam about as difficult as the AIME for Oxford. I didn't pass their bar for that but I got an unconditional offer from Edinburgh and Imperial gave me an offer based on taking another in person math exam, this one being more similar in difficulty to the USAMO, which I also flunked. So basically the result of the whole thing was that I was admitted to the 4th best CS program in the UK, which is probably fair.
The UK system was nice because I'd maxed out exam scores in the US (800 SAT math, 800 SAT math subject test, 5s on a half dozen AP tests including Calculus BC and Physics C), but realistically I'm not really the kind of genius who would do well in a top math department. The UK system used difficult exams (Oxford MAT and STEP) to tease that out, where the US system mostly just flounders around with extracurriculars, demographics, and GPAs that mostly rate conscientiousness.
Does anyone have a key to #15 (the Japanese map)? How familiar would the average Japanese person be with what's being depicted?
Southern California has two Japanese swimmers standing next to an American. It's a reference to Japan's success in the 1932 Olympics. I'd guess most Japanese people would know that, but how many would recognize the Yankees? Is that Al Capone up in Chicago? Would the audience recognize Napoleon in St. Helena?
Australia is notable only for cows, sheep, wheat and pineapples. One of the cows is stepping into a big tube, maybe a can? Did Japan import a lot of canned beef from Australia?
Java is a guy with a Fu Manchu mustache holding a big bag of money. Not sure what that's about.
Singapore is a lazy-looking British man and his wife looking out to sea with a bunch of guns also pointing out to sea. Eight years later the Japanese would take Singapore by attacking by land from the north; the fact that all the island's defences faced out to sea was supposedly a decisive factor.
Germany is Hitler and (I assume) Hindenburg and I can't tell whether they're shaking hands or waltzing.
Who the heck is the dice-headed soldier in southern France?
Who are the guys sulking/lurking on a park bench in Arkansas? Why is a giant woman sitting on a accountant in Montana?
Babe Ruth famously toured Japan, and it was a major factor leading to the professionalization of baseball therein (the team the Babe Ruth All-Stars played against went pro, and are now known as the Yomiuri Giants).
This was in 1934, admittedly, a couple years after the map. But baseball was and is extremely popular in Japan, and Babe Ruth was one of those extremely famous athletes who was known beyond sports fans - think LeBron James or Tom Brady. And unfortunately, he had been playing for the Yankees since 1921, and won 4 rings and 7 pennants in their uniform.
"Bryan Caplan on Natal Con, the pronatalist conference in Austin. My strongest opinion on this is that they should either change the name or hold the next one in Natal, Brazil."
Uh oh, I can see "The Boys from Brazil" attack article forming already.
Anyway, how about Con(genital)? Because GenitalCon won't work.
Obviously I/we don't know you and this is completely motivated reasoning based on a slim slice of public-facing persona, so disregard my own judgement and just use it as data going into your own evaluations. But:
Based on your writing it really feels like yes, you have been for quite a while, since your critiques of feminism/cancel culture/woke/etc cultivated an 'intellectual dark web' audience that back-fed arguments, ideas, consensus, links, blogs, etc. that started to look like 'the normal world' to you.
Of course I'm sure I'm in my own filter bubble of some sort and it's coloring my perceptions of your ecosystem, but from out here there's a very distinct cluster of 'smart people who talk about reason and logic and science and objectivity but are mostly using that as an aesthetic to 'debunk' arguments/evidence in favor of progressive positions, and come up with clever 'one study' or 'common sense' support for conservative positions.'
Many people in my own filter bubble identify and talk about this cluster explicitly, occasionally with Less Wrong or your blog being mentioned, often with the types of blogs and people you link to or talk about being mentioned.
From here it looks like you sort of stand *above* that cluster, rather than standing *outside* it. Ie, you're not falling for its most obvious pitfalls and lies or being a booster in favor of its most extreme rhetoric, and you often critique those problems with it, but you are critiquing those things thoughtfully as if they are the basic ground-state assumption that is worthy of being carefully considered and reasoned against. (specifically critiquing *those things* as the ground-state starting point, rather than *other things*, which frames them as inherently legitimate where things that other people believe are inherently suspect or illogical)
I don't think he is particularly conservative, or even right-wing. His politics are for the most part center-left technocrat liberal. I've seen him push back against certain aspects of wokeness, but I've never heard him actually advocate for any conservative social positions. He supports capitalism, but I haven't seen him advocate for the type of austerity, sweeping deregulation, elimination of welfare, or tax cuts that are typical on the right. It's fair to say he is not a social-justice progressive or a socialist, but I think calling him conservative is a stretch.
I don’t think anyone is going to mistake Scott for a right-wing populist so that faction isn’t worth mentioning. If you look at DOGE or the proposed budget you’ll notice that the economic faction I did mention is still alive and well.
More than one long-time SSC reader left in a huff over "A Modest Proposal For Republicans", which was IMO fairly claimed to be a fairly anodyne work of right-populism with a few grey shibboleths thrown in. Scott absolutely has an anti-establishment streak, and when it gets pointed in certain directions the blind spots become noteworthy.
The past couple years he has had a rightward turn, particularly with his posts about Republicans and class, and everything having to do with architecture, where he has somehow embraced a Tom Wolfe conspiracy theory.
I probably shouldn't have written the last paragraph as one giant run-on sentence, but this is what it was trying to get at.
I'm not saying he's conservative, I'm saying a lot of his inputs and communities are an IDW type of conservative, and he treats the conservative wordlview as a default position held by reasonable people which he's critiquing for it's flaws, while holding much of the progressive worldview as a loony thing that idiot extremists push and which doesn't deserve the dignity of serious engagement.
This is a polite and level headed critique and because it agrees with my own perceptions, it can only be true. But seriously, I hope Scott reads your comment. His open minded-ness is is what initially attracted me to SSC, but his worldview has been been feeling more... credulous lately. Of course my own reality is modulated by a social/media bubble, but idk, the reality I'm familiar with seems increasingly divorced from the reality depicted in these pages, both blogs and comments.
Thanks for the shout out Scott, I made EthnoGuessr. As of right now I have incorporated all of the well-labeled facial composite data on the internet, but in the future I will allow users to submit themselves if they want to be part of the game, or otherwise create some new facial composites from publicly available data (e.g. EthnoGuessr Presidents from portraits of world leaders).
>Does the average person really eat chicken 9x a week?
If I'm reading the site right I think it's 9 servings. A serving of chicken is 165 calories, so you might have several servings in a large meal if chicken is the main ingredient.
I'm in the UK, but my personal experience of UberEats is that they fail to deliver any food. It seems like a business model which isn't going to get many repeat orders.
On 38, be aware that National Catholic Reporter, despite its name, is not affiliated with the Catholic Church. Multiple bishops have publicly asked it to drop "Catholic" because it promotes views explicitly condemned by the Church and does not represent Catholic teaching in any meaningful sense.
(Think of it like if you had a newspaper called the NASA Bulletin which denied the moon landing and rejected modern rocket science -- but also used the NASA logo on its cover and refused to stop calling itself the NASA Bulletin despite multiple NASA administrators telling them to cut it out.)
As for the claim itself, the specific heresies I believe would be:
1) Presumption. Matthew 7:1 ("Judge not, that you be not judged."). It is not ours to declare who will go to heaven or hell.
2) Pelagianism. The Catholic Church does not believe that salvation hinges on economic or political policies and choices.
3) Modernism. The Gospels are not there for humans to weaponize in contemporary culture wars and political battles. They are divine revelation -- it is heretical to subordinate them to temporal ideology.
I see the article is by Fr Thomas Reese, SJ, and yeah he's notoriously on the liberal side (he's sort of the go-to guy when reporters are looking for comments on Catholicism as he's always ready to give a quote and he isn't one of the horrible trad types who aren't all up with the times on social issues).
I've always been amused by the coincidence (deliberate or not, I have no idea) of the initials NCR for both the National Catholic Reporter (the liberals) and the National Catholic Register (the traditional) as Catholic news outlets.
If the prostate theory is correct, then exogenous testosterone (up to some level a bit above baseline) would be protective against prostate cancer. HCG and such would not. Presumably, this could be investigated as we have a significant history of hormone replacement therapy without HCG. [edit: edited to note that it is protective because exogenous testosterone shuts down the bodies natural production]
28 - the name of Natal is not a coincidence here (as you know, nothing is ever a coincidence).
Natal is Portuguese for 'Christmas', originally from Latin natalis "of birth", used in the phrase "dies natalis" 'birthday'. Christmas was sometimes referred to in Latin as Jesus's birthday and this got truncated in Portuguese to just "Natal" (without retaining the "day" or "Jesus" portions). This is still the modern Portuguese term for Christmas (you can wish people "feliz Natal")¹. The Spanish "Navidad" follows the same concept but derives from a fancier Latin word, "nativitas" (like our "nativity scene").
The city of Natal is so named because it was officially founded on Christmas Day in 1599.
There's also a Natal in South Africa, which is also named after Christmas in Portuguese. In that case, it was seen (but not visited) by Vasco da Gama on Christmas Day in 1497, so he decided to call it "Christmas" but it came out as "Natal" because he was Portuguese and all.
There's also a Christmas Island in the Pacific, named by an English speaker, and an Easter Island, named by a Dutch speaker.
One counter to the "why don't people move to slums" is that neighborhoods are not only a cluster of people with certain incomes, but that neighborhoods come bundled with certain public services, and richer neighborhoods get better public services. This is maybe less true within the bounds of an individual city, but in most American metro regions where the metropolis is fragmented into a bunch of different suburban municipalities, the richer towns can offer better public services while levying lower property taxes. In this sense, you get more/better public services for your tax dollars by living among people richer than yourself, while if you have the nicest house in a poor town with budget problems, you're going to pay higher property tax for worse services.
On #1, cowboy slang -- I think most of these etymologies are roughly correct, but some are disputed (e.g. "mosey"), and some seem to be just wrong (e.g. "crayfish").
I wrote that, and I’m nowhere near a linguist, and I think all of the examples below the edit came from replies, but in looking up the origins, both the English crevice and the French ecrevisse are supposedly derived from the same Old French word crevice which means “to break” in the case of the former and “crab” in the latter (according to those word origin sites. Strange. Apparently the crab’s love of cracking and cracks has nothing to do with the fact that the Old French word for crab is synonymous with crevice? If you have deeper knowledge of this I’d be interested. I find a lot of word origins are disputed; this one intrigues me because it’s one of those backwards fits where everyone assumes it’s the obvious meaning but the origin is actually different (like, oh I don’t know, people say the “handicapped” are “handy with the cap” when begging) I’d love to hear other examples if anyone can think of them.
On #2, single-bit errors are commonly attributed to cosmic rays, but my understanding is that they're usually not? People have a tendency to just say "cosmic rays" for any single-bit errors but I don't think that's actually where they generally come from.
It can also be thermal noise; DRAMs are more reliable (and need less frequent refreshes) at lower temperatures, and less reliable (and need more frequent refreshes, or just fail outright) at higher temperatures.
The basic reliability of DRAMs within their documented operating conditions is pretty great, although I've heard it's getting worse as the physical cells get smaller and smaller.
Some of the original research on DRAM bit flips due to radiation is May and Woods (the same May who later became famous for cryptoanarchy)
In that case, the radiation turned out to be coming from inside the house, er, from the actual chip packaging materials.
However, it then turned out that some bit flips are due to cosmic rays (apparently from secondary particles triggered by the cosmic ray's interaction with the atmosphere, rather than the ray literally directly hitting an individual memory cell). This was successfully documented and tested and is a real effect, but it might be smaller than other sources in some devices and environments.
This is most likely where I heard the idea that the increased density of memory cells is leading to decreased reliability (it also cites some other papers on this point). (I think for cosmic radiation in particular as a source of errors there's a trade-off because individual memory cells are harder to hit—their cross-section is smaller!—but easier to flip in the sense that a smaller amount of energy suffices.)
> Some of the original research on DRAM bit flips due to radiation is May and Woods (the same May who later became famous for cryptoanarchy)
Even more interesting: apparently May was able to retire and start all the cryptopunk stuff *because* his work on the packaging was so life-and-death for Intel.
For the cold boot attack paper, the idea is that a shutdown can happen for hardware reasons (because the power is physically interrupted), which then prevents software from running to overwrite it. The CPU's ability to run code without power is typically much worse than DRAM cells' ability to maintain a capacitative charge without an active refresh.
Some of my colleagues actually practiced physically pulling the memory out of the motherboard and quickly putting it into a different computer, which would then read the memory contents. (Sometimes memory is soldered to the motherboard but often it's swappable, which is intended for upgrades but could be useful to forensics.)
There are newer mitigations than what we suggested, though. For example, you can try to keep some of your cryptographic keys entirely in the CPU itself, or the cache, or some chip that is less willing to let an attacker export them compared to the RAM chips. You can also try to encrypt RAM pages so that their contents won't be intelligible without a key that's (ideally) never stored in RAM.
On #3, it's worth noting that beating roulettte wheels via physics modeling is something people really do and are successful with (although only on sufficiently bad roulette wheels); here's an article about it: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-how-to-beat-roulette-gambler-figures-it-out/ . But yeah what Errol Musk was trying there sounds like the crazy version of that, rather than the correct version...
The article mentions them! Yeah, "physics modelling" was perhaps not the right way to describe it. The point though is that using computers to predict roulette wheels well enough to win money off of them is a thing various people have actually done. (Although, again, only when the roulette wheel has some defect. And as the article mentions, if the roulette wheel is especially bad, some people can actually do it *visually*, without the need for a computer!)
>"The upshot is that AI nonproliferation (to counter terrorist misuse) works quite differently from nuclear nonproliferation (to counter nuclear weapons development). Imagine a world where advances in nuclear technology mean that the amount of uranium and level of enrichment needed to make a tactical nuke keeps dropping. At first, it would be relatively simple to track and restrict access to large quantities of uranium and advanced enrichment facilities. But eventually, anyone with a large enough plot of land would be under scrutiny, due to the tiny amount of uranium naturally present in soil."
Well, perhaps anti-proliferation global regime is the reason why technology did not advance into a pathway allowing random schmucks to make nukes in their own backyards (though costs do keep dropping to a level when even very poor country like North Korea can have nukes).
Imho she has an overly literal interpretation of what the word "nonproliferation" means, which is at odds with an actual practice of nuclear nonproliferation.
>Well, perhaps anti-proliferation global regime is the reason why technology did not advance into a pathway allowing random schmucks to make nukes in their own backyards
For fission weapons, there is a physical requirement for a minimum critical mass of a fissile isotope. This isn't exactly critical mass in a bare sphere at atmospheric pressure - neutron reflectors and implosion help, but the help is finite.
11. Ozempocalypse: Those of you who want to use semaglutide* for weight loss now have a legal, but not totally cheap, alternative: https://www.novocare.com/obesity/products/wegovy/get-product.html which links to a mail order system that will ship you the medicine for a cash price of $499/box of 4 single use injectors. For me this was a $320/box savings over Ozempic injectors and $830/box savings over Wegovy.
*Wegovy is the trade name for Novo Nordisk's brand of semaglutide injectors intended for weight loss. Ozempic is the trade name for the same medicine when intended for type 2 diabetes treatments.
Please: I am totally uninterested in dealing with "compounding" pharmacies and even more uninterested in the deranged opinions of Bobby Kennedy Jr.
34. I would advise calm. The executive and the courts are coequal branches of the federal govewrnment. There will be friction. Andrew Jackson may not have said: "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!"
But, he never enforced the decision, and he made the matter moot by sending the Cherokee off on the Trail of Tears. Trump will further self destruct if he takes on the Courts. SCOTUS could hole him out under the water line by invalidating his tariff program, and there are strong legal reasons why they could.
Alaska joined the US in 1867. However, few people moved there (and many of the initial rush later moved back out).
It's the opposite of California, which populated so fast due to the gold rush that it skipped the territory status and went directly from conquest to statehood.
From what I've heard Trump's policies (like the tariffs), are fairly unpopular, except for the immigration thing. It seems to be an unfortunate fact that people generally like it when you imprison foreigners indefinitely with no legal recourse. It is unclear what the courts can do, it seems to be generally accepted they can't force the president to declare war on El Salvador to bring the prisoner back, foreign policy is generally the remit of the executive. The US administration seems to be claiming that they can't be forced to ask politely through the embassy, or to threaten to stop paying Bukele if he does not release the prisoner he is holding on America's behalf. Due to the state of emergency in El Salvador, which is in theory temporary but predictably does not seem to be ending any time soon, they do not have any right to habeas corpus in El Salvador either. In the meantime, some 250 people are being held in prison with no legal charges or legal recourse, to the cheering of Americans on X, it is a grotesque spectacle.
Trump is actually underwater on immigration in the latest polls as well. It turns out that even people who want the border closed don't like you kicking out doctors and disappearing innocent people in defiance of the courts.
It really is stunning just how fast he's managed to turn public opinion against him.
An unenforceable bench order to report to a judge several years backlogged and without tracking within our borders, does not constitute removal.
Border crossings skyrocketed as soon as Biden was in office, and collapsed the moment he left. We're talking about what Biden did, and this is what he did:
Can you explain what "An unenforceable bench order to report to a judge several years backlogged and without tracking within our borders, does not constitute removal" means?
I don't particularly care about the exact number of immigrants, but I am a single issue voter on whether the President upholds his oath to follow the Constitution vs. considers himself above the law.
Are you asking about Biden's removal process and whether it followed his constitutional duty to provide security and enforce secure borders, or Trump's policies and whether they are enforcing secure borders constitutionally?
If you are a single issue voter on this topic, I'm wondering if you'll ever find a president you are happy with. And please note, I agree completely that this oath should be held in great regard and is highly important.
I'm just not sure we've ever had that binary choice. The oath and lawfulness of the obligations seems subject to interpretation and hence introduces political bias to the equation.
I'll provide a proper answer to your question after work.
I also asked for a summary of taxpayer costs which FAIR estimates at $182 billion annually for all illegal immigration. Given most (~1mm in 2023) requested asylum under the Biden administration's weakened asylum provisions, a significant portion of immigration costs are asylum seekers. Heritage.org claims this was impermissible under law by the Biden administration here.
The U.S. asylum removal process is multifaceted, encompassing several stages that can extend over multiple years. Below is an overview highlighting the key milestones, typical timelines, existing backlogs, and associated costs:
_________________________________
Major Milestones in the Asylum Process
_________________________________
Application Submission (Form I-589):
Asylum seekers must file Form I-589 within one year of arriving in the U.S. unless they qualify for specific exceptions.
Biometrics Appointment:
Applicants are scheduled for fingerprinting, typically within a few weeks of application submission.
Asylum Interview (Affirmative Process):
Conducted by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). The interview is ideally scheduled within 45 days, but delays can extend this period.
Decision or Referral:
If USCIS does not grant asylum, the case may be referred to the immigration court system for further proceedings.
Involves master calendar hearings followed by individual hearings where an immigration judge assesses the asylum claim.
Appeals:
Denials can be appealed to the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) and subsequently to federal courts, potentially prolonging the process by several years.
>among the worst is sending innocent people to horrible Salvadorean prisons (including one person picked up because he had an autism awareness tattoo in honor of his brother, which they mistook for a gang tattoo), then refusing to bring them back.
Has he deported innocent people? The autism guy was here under an asylum claim, and his deportation order was signed by a judge. What evidence do we have that he didn't get due process, or even that it was the autism awareness tattoo that go him picked up? Every news article I can find on the case just cites statements by his family claiming he's innocent. But that's what families always do.
Similarly, in the case of Garcia he had gone through the courts and gotten due process already: the courts ordered him deported, but not to El Salvador. I can see the argument that Garcia shouldn't have been sent to El Salvador and we should try to get him back, but clearly he got due process.
And as your friend points out, the Trump admin is not yet defying a Supreme Court order. They are complying with it as they interpret it: Supreme Court says to facilitate his return, they claim that they are doing that by not stopping him from entering the country. Naturally the district court disagrees with their interpretation, so it will have to go back to the Supreme Court to decide whose interpretation of their order is correct. So at this point they are not defying the order, and certainly not "openly" defying it as some claim. You can't say someone is openly defying something when they claim to not be defying it, that's the definition of openly.
Deporting is the smaller issue. I like it when countries deport people they look down on, it is my preference they grow some self respect and stay away in the first place. The imprisonment is the bigger issue.
From what I've heard Kilmar filed for asylum as he claims he fears for his life in El Salvador, which was denied because the claim came after the required time frame for it, but the judge gave him an order against deportation to the El Salvador on the basis of the application. In fact, granting this order requires meeting a stricter legal standard than granting asylum status, so the judge considered his claims credible. With the benefit of hindsight, we now know he should not have feared El Salvador gangs so much as El Salvador's (and the US's) presidents.
None of the people have been charged with any crime, either in the US or EL Salvador.
You'll have to ask a lawyer. My understanding is that illegal entry is usually a civil matter. They have not been charged with this or any other crime. My understanding is that this crime is not punishable with life in prison.
An immigration judge denied Garcia's request for asylum on the basis that “the evidence shows that he is a verified member of MS-13.” (TheHill.com)
This was based on a confidential informant's testimony which I believe was sealed so for better or worse, we have the judge's view to go on. The family and Garcia, as expected, deny this claim but lost in court. I don't know how much transparency they received in the process. This is how due process plays out for American citizens in many cases also.
No, that's a different proceeding. Also, American citizens are held to a different legal standard, as the article notes the confidential informant said he was a member of MS13 in New York, where he doesn't live. There is a reason why citizens are not put in prison for life on such a basis.
I agree it was a different proceeding. An immigration judge has ruled that he was a verified member of MS-13 which led to the original denial of asylum. The deportation orders happened in a different court.
The confidential informant's testimony was challenged on the basis you mention but the judge weighed the evidence and ruled against Garcia's testimony. This is normal legal procedure to the best of my knowledge.
Even assuming he deserved to be deported, did he deserve to get sent to Bukele's concentration camp?* Where the Trump Administration is openly paying Bukele to keep people?
* That's what it is, by the way. They call it a "prison", but nobody leaves.
I've heard this argument from supporters of this policy. The problem is that it sends a stronger message to regular Americans who supported the deportations until five minutes ago. Them they heard we're shipping randos off, but not to where they came from but to some crazy prison in Central America. This feels like an own goal, giving away the winning side of the issue for very little gain on the other end.
You know what message these deportations send? That this is a government that can actually do things. I'm sure people will get that message even more when the government deals with the riots that will inevitably spring up.
Do you support democracy? Actually, it doesn't matter if you do, because democracy is a system of compromise, not justice. The majority gets what it wants, and the minority is made to understand that they are not in a position to make demands. Meaningless conflict is thus avoided. It's such a simple system that even animals like hyenas practice it.
Of course, this ignores that not all groups involved have equal strength and will to power. And when half of the country worships weakness and victimization... is it any wonder things turned out the way it did?
With no meaningful opposition, the right now has true freedom: the freedom to shape the country as they see fit. Freedom from those uncivilized wretches flooding the country. Freedom from woke elites telling them what they can and can't say. Freedom from the fear that they will be discriminated against for their superiority.
What could possibly be a greater good than winning your own freedom, your own happiness? There is no better feeling, no greater fulfillment. Victory itself is moral.
I have no brief one way or the other with El Salvador and it's entirely possible the worst statements are true. Lurid statements notwithstanding, it's also possible that it is reasonable. I have literally no idea from my vantage point and with the noisy information channels available.
I was, however, curious and did some light research. The articles referenced below claim 8000 detainees have been released after being found innocent. This makes about a 10% error rate given 80,000 detainees. There are currently 15,000 detainees at CECOT which makes the numbers a little hard to figure out. I'm not sure what happened to the other ~58,000. Dead? Released? Moved? Never there in the first place?
Garcia was recently moved from CECOT to Santa Ana prison.
And here is a story of someone who was granted asylum, told that he was welcome to come to America, and then was sent to El Salvador prison as soon as he arrived, again with the stated explanation being that they had a tattoo https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/immigration/article302464134.html and nobody claiming to have any other evidence.
I am not an expert in due process, but if a 6-3 Republican Supreme Court says he didn't get it, I am going to trust the Supreme Court.
The article doesn’t actually say that: it just implies it strongly (the media indeed rarely lies). The only source they give that the man was deported due to his autism tattoo is the family, who claim that is what ICE told them. They don’t have any info from ICE directly, and no court documents about the case.
Near the end of the article they subtlety pivot and write “Several relatives of men sent to the mega-prison last month have similarly disputed claims by the Trump administration that their family members are affiliated with gangs, which the administration used to justify their deportations.” Then they claim that court documents show that some of these men (men who are not named, and are not the autism tattoo guy) were deported based on their tattoos. They have a link to those court documents, but it leads nowhere unless you have an NBC login.
Now maybe the family is right, but they’re our only source on this. For all we know he was deported because he was found at an MS13 meeting, or because he has a different tattoo on his other arm that says “I’m an MS13 member, just try to deport me I dare you!” As of right now we know basically nothing about his case.
I have a basic question: has each of the CECOT deportees received orders for deportation or equivalent (not eligible for asylum hence deportable for example) from an immigration judge? It seems like the autism case was reviewed by one but I can't find any link.
Because if this is the case, the blame for failures lies with judges who do this for a living, probably, unless they were given new procedures that they had no choice but to follow and did not abstain out of conscience.
My source for the autism case being approved by a judge is this story from a local news outlet (https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/fvenezuelan-migrant-lewisville-el-salvador-mega-prison-autism-awareness-tattoo/3817064/). The local NBC affiliate actually got a statement from ICE on the case. "'This subject was arrested on Feb. 24, 2025, and processed under Title 8 authority,' an ICE spokesperson responded in a statement. 'On March 5, 2025, an Immigration judge issued him a final order of removal.'"
It is my understanding that all of these people who have been deported have received orders of removal by a judge. Certainly in the case of Garcia, who had an order of removal for several years and was only not deported because he had an order saying he couldn't be deported to El Salvador specifically.
It would be interesting to see if the tattoo was the deciding factor in the judge's decision. I wonder if court documents are available?
It's harder, anyway, to blame the trump administration if they did in fact convince a judge in court that this person was a deportable gang member and not a valid asylum seeker.
For the Miami Herald article, unfortunately it must be taken entirely at face value because there is no way to check original source material without 'E.M.'s name and other salients. While the story is undoubtedly sad, most of the material is presented as factually correct without the reader able to corroborate or hear the government's side of the case.
I don't love this sort of argument by anecdata or know how much weight to give it.
As noted above, Venezuela in general will not provide the US with criminal background information, so I don't know how the US would verify if he was indeed safe to admit except based on nuances such as, yes, the presence of known gang tats (and not just tats in general of course). If we had to choose from a finite pool, I'd start with known gang signs being a definite thumbs down vs. civil engineer PhD diploma.
I looked for court documents, and I couldn't find them. You'd need someone with access to the PACER system, which I don't have. Even then I don't know if PACER can get your ICE docs. Certainly none of the news stories I found had court documents to cite.
Trump has now deported US citizens in several cases, including a 2 year old child. Even the greatest spinner in the world would have trouble justifying that one.
The two year old wasn’t deported: his mother, who was here illegally and went through the whole deportation process properly, asked to keep her child with her when she was deported to Honduras. Would you prefer that such requests are not honored? Would it have been more legally proper to break up the family against the mother’s will? This doesn’t even require “spin” to justify, just knowledge of the facts that go beyond reading the headlines.
>Naturally the district court disagrees with their interpretation, so it will have to go back to the Supreme Court to decide whose interpretation of their order is correct.
Wow, I really wonder why they didn't immediately appeal the 3-0 circuit court order that denied their interpretation of "facilitate." This administration cares so much about following the law and getting it right, why didn't they immediately appeal to the Supreme Court for further clarification when they've been immediately appealing TROs to them for the past few months? Really makes me wonder.
I guess it's a bit early to say whether Trump's tariffs will have the desired effects long term. He has ignored Caesar Augustus's wise motto "festina lente", "make haste slowly". But then Augustus was in his early twenties when he took on the principate, so he could afford to be patient. Trump, by contrast is in his late seventies. So, aged almost 80, he is a man in a hurry, and that seems to be a large part of the problem (assuming there is one).
It's really not too early. Just look at the manufacturing reports. US manufacturing has actually experienced a huge *drop* since the tariffs were imposed. Trump has been so incompetent that he's accomplished basically the exact opposite of all his goals.
> 14: Did you know that China has mostly solved the problem of smog in Beijing? (X)
This is true. But mostly a product of moving coal power plants out to nearby cities who feed into beijing's power grid. Has the biggest contributor was coal burning in the winter
10: Both the inflation and poverty numbers for Argentina are wrong. Please correct them.
- Inflation: 2.2% was the monthly inflation rate for January. Since then, inflation has risen sharply. 2.4% in February, and the most recent data, from March, showed an inflation rate of 3.7%. Projections suggest that inflation for April and May will continue to rise, reaching between 4% and 5% per month. Official source: https://www.indec.gob.ar/uploads/informesdeprensa/ipc_04_251F7DF5B2A3.pdf
But how is any of that even relevant in the broader context of a country losing all the Central Bank reservas, being in the brink of hyperinflation and economic chaos and having to go ask for mercy and take new debt with the IMF? Argentina just took a $20 billion new loan from the IMF. The country already owes 44 billion under the 2018 loan from “libertarian” president Macri, the largest IMF loan ever. Macri’s default on his debt, right before leaving office in 2019, cut Argentina off from international markets during the pandemic. Yes, Argentina had to print a lot of pesos and inflation was high, but how else could have it financed necessary support policies when people were quarantined and unable to work? That’s the biggest cause of Argentina’s economic crisis before Milei.
Anyways, if the economy is doing as well as Scott (and Milei) seem to think, why does Argentina need such a colossal amount of new debt? The IMF is a lender of last resort. I have never seen a healthy person go take vacations in some intensive care room in an hospital. Furthermore, in the past Milei called the IMF “a perverse institution that appears when a country is about to explode after the government did a bunch of disasters. It steps in so you can shove the budget cuts forward.” He insisted “we liberals hate the IMF” and “the IMF shouldn’t exist,” adding that "a government with no credibility, no reputation, no will to pay and no solvency just passes the pain to the next administration." The presidential spokesman, Adorni, also said before that “having to turn to the IMF only shows the government’s complete failure.” I'm not making this up, google the videos and see it for yourself lol
Well, Milei didn't have any other option. His economic plan failed spectacularly. Since taking office, he has been trying to reduce inflation by cooling down the economy through heavy austerity measures and creating a currency anchor by keeping the dollar low, using central bank reserves to artificially hold the exchange rate. Inflation dropped during the first year, as Milei’s massive devaluation and the resulting recession caused imports to shrink and led to a positive balance in the Current Account (balance between international exports and imports). On top of that, incentives were set up for a carry trade that gives absurd dollar profits to major economic players, who sell dollars to earn astronomical interest in peso denominated instruments. In other words, people had no money to spend and the central bank had dollars to keep the exchange rate low, so prices couldn’t rise and inflation was reducing. But all economists agree this plan (that was tried several times, for example during the last Dictatorship in the 70s and 80s, with Menem in the 90s and with Macri some years ago) is unsustainable and creates a lot of harm. It can only work as long as the central bank has dollar reserves. It worked during the first year because the government pulled several “white rabbits” out of the hat (as economists nicknamed these measures lol), like temporarily lowering export taxes to boost exports, or a highly successful capital amnesty that allowed Argentinians with undeclared dollars abroad to bring them into the country without paying any taxes at all (benefiting tax evaders and reinforcing a dangerous precedent that any government in need of dollars will resort to another amnesty.)
But, as was expected, in the last months, the market has lost faith in Milei’s plan, seeing that central bank reserves have been nearly exhausted. The dollars from the capital amnesty runned out and the carry trade reversed, with everyone starting to dump pesos to withdraw their gains in dollars. That’s why the government went in desperation to the IMF, they didn't have any dollars and there was a big risk of economic chaos and hyperinflation. This is a political loan by the IMF, to keep Milei afloat until the October elections. Basically, the IMF is financing Milei's political campaign at the cost of all the Argentines, who will have to pay this debt for decades. The IMF is already pressuring for more austherity measures and reforms to the pension system. This is looking really bad for Argentina's future, and will be remembered as one of the worst mistakes in the country's history.
The inmediate consequences are a devaluation, under the new economics measures demanded by the IMF in exchange for the loan. That's why inflation is going up and will keep going up for the coming months. We will see if Milei uses all the loan dollars to hold the dollar value low and set the incentives for another carry trade. Sadly, that's what seems to be happening. In that case, we will see if it's enough to sustain inflation in low levels until October, or if the carry trade runs out of fuel before then. Meanwhile, imports will flow into the country like crazy, ruining the local industries, creating more unemployment and misery.
28. I'm pretty skeptical of pronatalism as likely to be actually implemented. Perhaps influenced by those people, the Trump White House is mulling a $5,000 "baby bonus."
In theory, this could pay for itself via increased births of future taxpayers. But what if it doesn't, because it's either too little money to move the needle on births or because the babies it causes to be born are not net taxpayers? The $5,000 will become something people feel entitled to and it will be politically difficult to take it away. There's no suggestion to raise taxes to pay for it, so it'll be 18 billion a year added to the deficit indefinitely. This is common with pronatal incentives, it's always incentivizing births by giving money to parents, never by raising taxes on the childless.
$5000 is too small. If you want people to have more kids at a very real hit to income and careers, it needs to be much higher.
I think if you did $250,000 each for the first three children born to citizen women, but only if the first one was born before the mother turned 30*, you'd get a really meaningful increase in the fertility rate. $250,000/child would still be worth it on net even if it's expensive, and it's large enough to be a down payment on a house or several years' worth of rent - enough to really catalyze household formation.
* You want this because the earlier people start having kids, the more likely they are to have more.
“ the latest YouGov polling suggests that large majorities of Americans continue to support [ the government’s disastrous anti-COVID policies]”
So should we take that as evidence against their disastrousness, or evidence for the fecklessness of Americans? I am biased, but surely there is a more objective measure of either. I guess it is hard to separate the effects of the disease from the negative effects of the response.
A few points seem unambiguous, at least at first: school closings seem definitely to have been an overreaction, if the point was merely to protect children. It might be possible to think it slowed down transmission, but comparisons I have heard of and promptly forgotten seem to indicate they had very little beneficial effect, while the deleterious effects seem clear. But maybe my bias just rejiggered things this way.
He's a historian of the Industrial Revolution, and every few months he posts the results of his original research into primary sources (e.g. 17th diaries and Parliament records) in an engaging narrative format.
He's made a lot of cool discoveries. Ever heard that Britain switched to burning coal because they cut down all their forests? Turns out it was the exact opposite: They cut down all their forests because they switched to burning coal:
> Twelve years ago, I wrote about some interesting medical hypotheses on the productive border between crackpottery and consensus. One was Drs. Gat and Goren’s claim that prostate disease comes from venous insufficiency ...
Hunh? Why is this one on the border of crackpottery? Aren't there all kinds of medical maladies that we don't know the cause of? Is there anything physiologically implausible about this hypothesis? Why isn't this just straightforwardly a decent hypothesis (that may or may not prove correct upon investigation, like most hypotheses)?
There's actually a long-standing legal theory for why Trump is not instigating a constitutional crisis by defying the Supreme Court. It's called the state of exception, and it was formalized by the jurist Carl Schmitt in Weimar Germany, but it's been used many times before then under different names across many different countries. The idea is analogous to the Jewish theological idea of Pikuach Nefesh, where any Jewish religious law can be abrogated if it's done to save a life: in the state of exception the constitution of any country can legally be suspended, transferring unlimited legal authority from the judicial or legislative branch over to the executive, if it's for the purpose of preserving the existence of that country. In some countries, the state of exception has to be declared by the legislature. Such is the case in El Salvador, where a state of exception was declared in 2022, allowing them to build their torment nexus known as CECOT. In America, the state of exception (called here a "National Emergency") is declared by executive order. You might disagree that a refugee picking up his five-year-old son from grandma's house constitutes a national emergency, but Trump declared the threat of MS-13 and Tren de Aragua a national emergency on Jan 20 2025. If you think the President shouldn't have the unilateral authority to supervene Congress or the Supreme Court, the time for us to voice our opinion on that was 110 years ago when Woodrow Wilson set the precedent that "the President can just do this now" (it's not in the constitution, but, according to the state of exception theory, it's actually better if it isn't). The declaration of national emergencies has been abused by Presidents since then for decades. Biden declared 9 national emergencies, Obama 12, and Bill Clinton 16. If you think that congress should act to take away this Presidential privilege, they did try, back in 1976 with the Termination of National Emergencies Act, and the Senator who sponsored this bill was hunted by the intelligence agencies from that time until his death. If you want more details about the state of exception in America, I wrote a post about it yesterday: https://open.substack.com/pub/captiveliberty/p/a-political-genealogy-of-you-can?r=25k3x4&utm_medium=ios
Smarter people than me believe that theory, but I can’t believe but I don’t think the founders wanted every President to have a big red Emergency button on his desk which suspends all the laws, and I don’t think it’s hypocritical to criticize the government for abuses.
Right now, America's use of the state of exception keeps open a loophole. A President wants to implement a policy without the constitutional authority to do so. He knows congress would never agree on it, so he declares a national emergency (this is why Trump's tariff speech used the phrase "economic emergency"). Emergencies can befall countries, but countries like France and Germany at least put up a higher barrier for making such a necessarily subjective decision by requiring the state of emergency to be legislatively declared.
Regarding 7 (moving to a neighborhood where you are more well off), I don't think it works that way.
There is such a thing as social class. A junior lawyer and a senior store manager might make the same amount, but they are not in the same class.
Relative wealth is beneficial (for the wealthy) because it causes them to be seen as pillars of society in their peer group -- especially to to degree that the group roughly believes that it is earned. Not strictly, if the source of money in your peer group is having a rich daddy, then you can definitely gain status by having a richer (or more generous) daddy than your peers. And as an established member of a peer group you are not judged by your full accounting, if you out-earn your long-time neighbors by 20% they will probably assume that you are just working hard.
But people have fine sensors about what is a suitable peer group. If you go to a rural area, and buy up the largest farm with money made as a investment broker, it is unlikely that you will get the same social benefits out of it as the farmer who ran it for three decades before you.
And if you bulldoze an acre of some slum and build your villa there, then your peer group will be other crazy Western expats who try the same thing. Sure, you can invite the locals to a barbecue, and likely they will come, but you will not sell anyone (including yourself) on the story that you are a tremendously successful slum dweller.
-The title says "Understand-at-a-Glance Manga: Map of the Present State of the World"
-The writing is different from modern Japanese. Kanji use the same forms as traditional Chinese, and horizontal text is written right-to-left.
-This is easy to see in the katakana name of the US airship Akron: ンロクア. Speaking of which, the story of the Akron and US interwar airship dominance is pretty cool, though there's a tragic ending.
-The American Pacific is conspicuously militarized: Big guns in Manila, Hawaii, Panama; a stream of warships proceeding from the canal; a US soldier looking north from the Philippines.
-It appears to list the Sutherland Falls in New Zealand as the tallest waterfall in the world. That seems odd. Wikipedia lists Sutherland as only the 40th tallest, and many entries higher on the list were definitely known about in 1932.
3. I wonder what it would be. Hereditary mental illness? A propensity to paranoia and delusions that only manifests itself in middle age? With Musk, I just figured he'd pulled a Henry Ford and gotten crankish and weird in middle age once the fame really settled in.
11. Major self-own by Trump's HHS to do that with GLP drugs. There's huge potential for human welfare gains and long-term cost savings from actively getting insurance plans across the US to cover them, and encouraging people to try them out. They even have pill forms of them now, if you're not keen on shooting yourself up with an injector.
12. It's a huge bummer losing Kevin Drum. He was always great at interrogating skeptically whatever the Hot Topic of the Day was, and digging up good statistics to examine it with. If I could have only followed 5 Blogs, Drum would have been one of them.
18. Have we considered the possibility that AI might be misaligned . . . but only against the rich tech company plutocrats and owners? IE it goes super-intelligent, but having been trained on a dataset of internet liberals and progressive call-out pieces, it decides Musk is anathema and actively destroys him.
34. Apparently the Supreme Court doesn't actually have to rely on the Federal Marshals (currently under the control of someone appointed by Trump) to enforce a contempt order if it comes to that. They could appoint people to do it if the Marshals refuse to comply.
40. Did they really just impose that on the fast food industry? I think it would have been less disruptive if they're just made it the standard across the state.
39 - I have long said that the conspiracy theory heuristic is a bug rather than a rational epistemic tool, and I finally wrote a thing about it today. Perfect timing.
> 32: Farmkind has a new version of their calculator to determine meat offsets, eg how much do you have to donate to animal welfare charities to compensate for the animals you harm by eating meat. Does the average person really eat chicken 9x a week?
The calculator gives me 5$/month on a chicken+beef diet, but 60-100$ on a similar fish diet. This is surprising – I would have thought fish should their QALYs highly adjusted?
A. People do move to cheaper countries like to Asia/Mexico. "location arbitrage". but here the advantages are real because cost of living is much lower etc. not just relative position.
B. Daniel Kahnmann long argued for "experienced happiness" ie moment to moment experiences Vs overall judgement of life.
but then he realised that people came about "story happiness" rather than experienced happiness. so he stopped feeling sure that "objective happiness" is what matters. in fact people want a good story/judgement about life rather than the good life itself.
manipulating relative standing might work. but only for objective happiness mostly. similar idea
22. open ai drama: "it does sound like part of board’s problem was that they were leaning heavily on Mira Murati but she was playing both sides off against each other."
they were amateurs in doing shit in the real world. this is what everyone noticed in real time
expecting off the record statements to be later backed publicly is amateur hour at us finest. you go to Mira and ask her in private "will you back us about this?". they didn't do it
in fact, they betrayed Mira by using her off the record stuff and screwing her over with it
I got no view about Altman and his firing.
but the board acted like amateur teenagers. and everyone saw it in real time
the only people to not notice the amateurism were the AI risk people, because they could ignore the amateurism due to their full alarm on AI risk. fair morally. but everyone saw AI risk people enamoured with teenagers trying to ruin a company clumsily and lost respect to the AI risk crew
Note that the "University of Austin" is an unaccredited private school founded in 2021 that is currently paying its students to attend it, and not the far more well known UT Austin.
It currently has a total of 200 students, all of whom are having all costs covered including living expenses. It is certified by Texas to offer one degree, a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies. Starting with its third academic year (the next one) the school plans to have juniors and an expanding curriculum; up to now all students have taken the same 15 "great books" classes.
As a for-profit the school is governed by its major investors, there is no board of trustees. There is a board of advisors of well-known figures from libertarian-ish media and academia; so far three of those (Steven Pinker, Robert Zimmer and Heather Heying) have resigned from it.
I think Bryan Caplan's relative income 'proof' is weak. Where you live is completely intertwined with other factors.
Firstly, moving to a poorer area in many ways gives you a materially higher standard of living - get a larger house and cheaper local services for a given wealth level. So, you could use this identical argument against the idea that absolute 'standard of living' is what matters for happiness.
Secondly, who are you measuring your relative income against? Sure, you are better off than your new geographic neighbours and you might derive some feeling of being relatively better off, but at least in the short term, you are like to mostly continue to compare yourself against your existing social circle of friends and family. Bryan seems to think the only way you can feel relatively well off is physical proximity to poorer people ["A world where people commonly moved to raise their relative income would have surreal dynamics. Developers would voluntarily intersperse “affordable housing” next to mansions, knowing they could charge rich customers a premium for the privilege of living next to destitute neighbors"] but there are plenty of other ways (media) to compare yourself to others.
Thirdly, relating to the second point, where you live and spend time is itself a signal/feeling of relative wealth or income, relative to wider society. Even the poorest person at the country club can still console themselves that they are members of the country club.
An average income person in Beverly Hills is not going to feel relatively well off by going to live in rural Mississippi (or some low-income area in Southern California). They won't be comparing themselves to the locals, they'll be worried their old friends think they've fallen on hard times. As someone else pointed out in the comments, gentrification is a phenomenon of wealthy people moving to a poorer area. I'd argue in these cases it becomes socially acceptable within your current social circle to move to these places, and be a relatively better off than your new neighbours, without losing your high-income social status.
(15) It's interesting that the title of the Japanese map ("Cartoon map of the modern world", looks like) is done almost entirely in characters. That certainly makes it easier for me to read, but I suspect it makes it a lot harder for the target audience of Japanese people.
I'm curious why "Africa" 阿弗利加 starts with 阿, but "America" 亞米利加 starts with 亞. At least those are legible; I would never be able to guess that 濠太剌利 is supposed to say "Australia". (Though I was confused for a while, since most of the label "North America" is above the United States, why everything west of Lake Michigan was labeled "California".)
Wiktionary says that 濠太剌利 is pronounced オーストラリア oosutoraria, but based on the readings it gives for those characters, the -su-, the vowel in -to-, and the final -a all appear to be spurious. (?!) I have a vague suspicion that when the spelling was current it must have been pronounced differently, but now it's supposed to be pronounced oosutoraria because that is the modern pronunciation of "Australia".
In Mandarin it looks like hao-tai-la-li, which is pretty far off of the normal Mandarin ao-da-li-ya.
(By contrast, in Mandarin the map's spelling of "Africa" is a-fu-li-jia and "America" is ya-mi-li-jia; Mandarin has jia where you might expect ka for reasons similar to why we spell "gel" with a G.)
호주 is hoju, so the ho is closer to the Chinese pronunciation than the Japanese gō is. ChatGPT says 濠太剌利 was used in Chinese and that the Japanese borrowed the spelling but pronounced it the English way, which makes sense to me, though I still don't understand why the "ra" part would became ラ and not レイ or レー or at least レ.
Wasserschwein is the German word for 'capybara', and I think I was inspired by Meerschweinchen ('guinea pig') when I added the diminutive.
> ChatGPT says 濠太剌利 was used in Chinese and that the Japanese borrowed the spelling
Baidu AI✨ makes no mention of this. I suggest that asking an LLM is a bad idea; not so long ago I did a Google search for why "young" is spelled 若 ["if"] in Japanese, and the unsolicited "AI overview" (1) was made up out of whole cloth; and (2) was flatly contradicted by the first search result. Chinese sources seem to say that the spelling is an example of Japan's traditional method of rendering arbitrary sounds through kanji. ( A system they no longer use, but are vaguely aware of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9-wkLSNO0I#t=92 )
The Chinese wikipedia entry also doesn't mention it, other than to note that a common name for Australia in Korea and Japan is 毫州 (spelled with or without the water radical).
15: I'm interested in this depiction of Formosa/Taiwan because it contradicts the status of the island as Japan's "model colony". Many Taiwanese view this period positively because they treated the island as part of the empire, investing in its infrastructure instead of merely exploiting its resources (needless to say, the other countries in Asia did not share this experience). The depiction of the Formosan savage being the sole inhabitant of the island makes me think the view from the homeland was not as benevolent as I had assumed.
I recommend Laszlo Montgomery series on Taiwan history in his China history podcast, which makes clear that Japanese rule of Taiwan was quite oppresive. It only looks good when compared to Japanese treatment of mainland China.
Thanks for the rec, I am downloading this. The Taiwanese I've talked to compared the Japanese period positively compared to the KMT military dictatorship.
It makes sense. In 1871 a Japanese ship wrecked on Taiwan, and 54 survivors were killed by the aboriginal Taiwanese. It was a major international incident, and Japan put pressure on the Chinese, claiming that they were deficient rulers because they had failed to civilize the island. So there was a lot of Japanese statements and propaganda characterizing the islanders as savages and barbarians.
Twenty years later when Japan took over Taiwan they did so in part with the justification that the Chinese had been negligent rulers and that Japan would properly civilize the island. That's a big part of where the "model colony" idea came from: that these were savages who needed to be fully assimilated into Japanese civilization. They classified the natives as either "fully-civilized", "semi-civilized", or "non-civilized". Fully-civilized natives were treated with the same rights as Chinese subjects on the island, the other two groups did not have rights and were treated very differently.
For sure, I agree that is the primary metaphor, it is just a bit of fun to project other dynamics onto the story. The information age comes hand-in-hand with unprecedented numbers of predatory psycho-fauna so there are lots of options to choose from. I think Scott's choice is revealing.
Yes, and the dynamics here are actually entangled — algorithmically driven social media is a form of AI, and engagement with Twitter trolls of whatever persuasion not only gives them what they want but also tends to result in the engager becoming a mirror of the engagee.
Granting the grouping used by humanphenotypes on the grounds that they don't claim to be based on anything but appearance, and that categories are fake anyway -- do they ever share a source or methodology for the pictures? They clearly look like they're composites from multiple photos, and of a homogeneous style that suggests a single study, but I haven't found any citation of such in their methods or bibliography, and I have my doubts that any single study can find anough !Kung, Ainu, and Andamanese to make that kind of picture. Also there's a "composite" photo of Neanderthals in the same style in the methods page. Even if theyr're supposed to be artist's concepts based on real data, the fact that they pretend to be composite pictures does not inspire trust in me.
Re: 7, Brian Caplan & moving to where one is rich-among-poor, 2 thoughts:
1. People probably need to feel relatively wealthy among *peers* -- if they don't consider the people they live around to be peers, then that wouldn't work. I think this is the biggest argument against Digital Nomads, and is part of what people often consider 'icky' about them.
2. Lifestyle inflation probably means that people have a floor of things they want and are willing not to have.
3. Cities are consumption. If they are still friends with the people they consider peers, though they're far away, they might feel the positive externalities of the place as something they're missing out on, which makes them relatively poorer. Some things just aren't available outside of expensive places, no matter the money one is willing to spend!
Personally, I am poor in London, and wouldn't have it any other way. I lived in Sheffield for a while, and had a higher 'quality of life', but the city itself is just much less interesting -- to the point I'd prefer to spend less in a more expensive place, for access to that place.
The results finally become unambiguous when they come to confirm your priors. Something of a running theme, around here - until evidence confirms what you already think, more study is needed.
Every single person I know who is still pissed off about COVID and wants a reckoning is a parent who had kids at home during it. No one else cares. Scott is the age of the people most likely to have kids at home, so that's why he thinks it's a big deal, but the majority of people do not and it just didn't impact their lives in a negative way. I also don't understand why this is even described as "conservative" v not when there was no such valance to it for almost the entire first year, and the political angle seems retro-fitted to me. Originally the main differences were just people with health concerns or who tended towards hypochondria versus not, and introverts v extroverts.
I am not a parent, I didn't have kids at home because I don't have kids at all, and I am still very pissed off at (the mainstream consensus response to) COVID, and I very much want a reckoning.
Please don't tell me that I don't exist, or that I don't matter. I already know that you don't *care* about my existence; that plus not minding your own business is what we need a reckoning for.
I mean, what is it you care so much about then? I mean, "please don't tell me I don't exist", that's a bit dramatic, no? Not trying to be rude, but are you perhaps a high neuroticism person in general?
We don't really do reckonings in this country -- unless they're performative fake ones -- and for the most part no one even remembers things that happened like three weeks ago. Perhaps not always good, but also part of the spirit of America, to not always be looking to the past. I would argue that's a good thing for the most part.
A big important part of our society seems to have done a lousy job at an important function in a crisis. We don't need to arrest or imprison anyone over that, but we definitely ought to try to get that part of our society working better before the next time we need it to function effectively.
You agree that we "ought to get that part of our society working better", but you haven't actually *done* that, and neither has anybody else. You haven't meaningfully apologized for screwing up the last time, you haven't apologized for failing to fix the problem, you haven't committed to not screwing up again the next time, and neither has anyone else I've noticed.
You started this discussion with the blanket assertion that only parents of small children were upset with the situation, and you were dead wrong about that, and you haven't even apologized for *that*.
It seems pretty clear that you don't actually care about any of this, you probably are going to do the same damn thing next time, and you just want the rest of us to shut up about it.
How can we get that part of our society working better for next time? It seems like there's some pretty deep pathologies that led to public health agencies being unable/unwilling to handle covid well, politicians and media chasing whatever the consensus of the day way, treating measures to avoid spreading covid as a moral crusade, mass-denunciation and cancellations for dissent, etc.
I remember someone made a website where you could filter through all of Scott's previous posts by size, theme and other filters. Does someone have the link? I can't find it ...
"Where are the people who coincidentally ended up living in the slums and love it?"
For what it's worth, it seems like there are definitely plenty of expats living like kings in developing countries, many of whom will tell you how great it is if you run across them in the wild. (Counterpoint, people who make big hard-to-reverse life decisions like that often love to talk about how it was a great choice and they're definitely suuuuuper happy they made it.)
But I can easily imagine these kinds of people being under-reported. First, they're remote. Second, I think the decision to relocate to those places very often coincides with a relaxation of their ambitions, since for many people it's a retirement or quasi-retirement, or at least a very career-limiting move. And a less ambitious person may be less likely to care to publicize their happiness, blog about it, etc. And it doesn't win you social media virality. And good luck finding people like this for your research lab's survey on happiness.
I think that's sort of a specific example of a general trend where people who find happiness and contentment are often the least likely to get around to sharing the secrets of their success. If you're genuinely happy (in the more "contented" sense of the word), you're probably not so compelled to prove it to the world. Especially not if proving it requires a social media marketing campaign and a book tour, and competing with all the type-As who want to prove that their book on happiness is the true one.
On 40: A response to that tweet (https://x.com/arindube/status/1909680232434376720) shows that CA's fast-food employment closely tracks its full-service restaurant employment. (Maybe falling a bit behind.)
Sorry Scott but your buddy Bentham looks way dumber than Lyman when he says he equates one human with the moral value of 7 shrimp (yeah you read that right)
A bit late, but is anyone else having any issues reading the deeply nested comments through the 'Continue Thread' button (on desktop Chrome)? It loads a new page but then just loads the normal comments to their normal depth. I want to read the immigration fights!
Seems like logging out and refreshing will correctly show the comment threads after first showing cached(?) previously opened subthreads. Thanks for the suggestion. Back to lurk mode.
Also, would it be possible to program it in a way that can open up all the collapsed threads with a click of a button? I often collapse threads to make it more legible, but then, after there's been some days of discussion, find myself wanting to check them again to see if something interesting has cropped up behind otherwise-uninteresting OPs.
It was probably inevitable that "Straussian reading" would come to mean "I wish this said something other than what it's obviously saying" about five minutes after it was introduced. Even Cowen falls into this trap more often than not.
I'm one of those who voluntarily moved to the ghetto. Inner city St. Louis, specifically 63120 I contend has the highest per capita murder rate of any US zipcode. I bought my house in 2011 at a sheriff auction for $5k. I certainly didn't move there because I enjoy being relatively wealthier than my neighbors, that never crossed my mind; nor do I "love the slums", I just wanted to not pay a lot for housing in absolute terms, regardless how much anyone around me paid, and I tolerate the downside of the tradeoff.
Day to day is fine, I get along well with my immediate neighbors. I never get randomly hassled or robbed or anything like that, but the outliers are far more extreme than other areas. Gunshots in the distance every single night, and I've heard close range stray bullets whizzing by on two occasions.
The Japanese psych-rock band OOIOO has a similar origin story: "The band's origin lies in a photo shoot that Yoshimi was asked to do for a magazine. She invited a few of her friends to join her, and they created a fake band for the shoot, which they later decided to make real."
When this first came out I showed it to my very normie VERY liberal mom as a joke, just to be like "wow haha isn't it crazy that someone would make this", but somehow she got really into it and now plays it multiple times a week, and whenever she does well on it she excitedly tells me about it. Perhaps one of the funniest things that has ever happened to me
#7, for a time I was the most popular white dude among all the black--literal-crackwhores in the sketchy neighborhood i moved to, to be near work. I'll admit that the novelty wore off fast, and rather than feeling good about myself in comparison I was instead brought plummeting down to them.
Struck by #5 ? The Copts teach that Pilate believed in Jesus after the resurrection and was later martyred; his wife, Procla is considered a saint in the Orthodox Church
re 29: My guess it's more of a libertarian "bubble", or a libertarian-leaning group. Maybe not even libertarianism per se, just not liking being what to do in a new situation, instead of thinking it out yourself. Or having clear boundaries on what should remain private and what is subject to public control.
I am not sure I am libertarian (in Europe, this movement do not really exists), but I clearly do not like being told what to do when I do not ask for advices, nor enjoy anything going from private sphere to public one.
And I would loooove some recknoning. Not expecting any though, unfortunately the (roughly) libertarian view is surprisingly fringe, both right and left.
Why would it be surprising that it's fringe? Both the right and the left are political movements, and you can't really build a movement on the basis of "the individual is important and group's aren't", as movements are fundamentally constructed as groups and represent groups.
That's true, but a big part of enlightenment (or even before that, it's considered as a marker for the exit of middle age period for western Europe) is precisely the emergence of individualism. And then you have the universal declaration of human rights, which basically have "the individual is important and group's comes second" as an axiom...
But I agree that while it was one of (and probably the most important) justification for the universalism of western values, and a positive dogma (at least as PR move) by both the western left and right political parties after WWII, it has been attacked from within, from all sides and with ever increasing intensity, since 1989 (the end of cold war / fall of communist bloc). Coincidence (where is my tinfoil hat?) - I think not.....
Also, in a FPTP system, any libertarian politican who actually cares about winning will just join one of the two major parties anyway. So third parties are inherently filtered to people who care more about signaling than winning and can't hack it in a real campaign.
On Argentina and disinflation and economic recovery, how much of it is mean reversion or following global/regional trends? After all, inflation was high throughout South America.
That excerpt from the book about OpenAI leaves me with more questions than answers.
So what happened with the startup fund? Turns out Sam was a naughty nubbins, which nobody here should be surprised to learn by now, but where did the money go?
(1) Complaint is that profits from the fund are not going to the investors
(2) Looking into it, turns out Sam The Man owns the fund
(3) But he's not getting fees or profits, honest!
So either there were no profits, in which case the fund was useless since the startups were not working, or there was money generated but it went - where? Eaten up by admin fees? This is sounding like some Hollywood accounting right there, and leaves me with even less trust in the integrity of Altman than before.
Every time I hear about the risk of US citizens being deported without trial, I rember that the evil colonialist oppressive murdering Roman Empire got at least one thing right: in Acts 22, Paul says "I am a Roman Citizen", and "Those who were about to interrogate him withdrew immediately. The commander himself was alarmed when he realized that he had put Paul, a Roman citizen, in chains."
(Paul is then transferred to Rome which didn't go too well for him personally, but was great for his mission.)
> common sociological claim is that relative income (compared to your social circle) matters more for happiness than absolute income
To me an obvious hypothesis is that somewhat richer people who lived in a poorer neighborhood all along have less desires or habits of spending outside what they can afford, but people who move to a poorer area give up those expectations much more slowly than they gained them. I don't know if it's true but it would fit much the same evidence.
> points out that if immigrants don’t get a right to due process, citizens also don’t get a right to due process, because the government can kidnap citizens, claim they’re immigrants, and the citizens can’t prove otherwise since they don’t get due process.
Except that's not what is happening. The process that determined they are illegals and need to be deported happened already, sometimes years ago. At least in all "celebrity" cases I have heard about are such - there's absolutely no doubt in any of them we're dealing with people who are illegal immigrants or admitted conditionally, on the condition that admission can be revoked at any time. The "due process" that is demanded now is a protracted court battle with full lawyerly representation on both sides - something that everybody knows the system can not do even for regular internal criminals, 98% of federal convictions are plea bargains. Doing this process for 10M+ illegals (that's only new arrivals, in addition to about the same number from before Biden) is within infinite distance of any feasibility, which is exactly the point. The demands for "due process" are not demands to do the thing certain way, it's the demand to stop doing the thing completely, hiding behind technicality because "open borders" is an unpopular slogan.
Example, for the same "autism tattoo" guy:
“This subject was arrested on Feb. 24, 2025, and processed under Title 8 authority,” an ICE spokesperson responded in a statement. “On March 5, 2025, an Immigration judge issued him a final order of removal.”
He got in front of the judge, the fact that he had no legal right to stay had been verified and he got deported. Now, you can argue maybe it was a mistake to prioritize him for deportation, because he wasn't actually a gangster. This can be a valid argument, if indeed it is true (we only heard one - very invested - side of the argument so far). But if you claim establishing the status and having immigration judge decide on the case is not "due process", then you can not argue that the same can happen to a citizen - it can not, and if you claim you need more extensive "due process" then in fact you claim no meaningful deportation of any illegals - including the verified, known and confirmed gangsters - can ever happen. And then you should be honest and say it as it is - you support open borders and unlimited, unfiltered immigration without any right of the receiving nation to choose who is admitted and who is not. Maybe you can reject one or two or a dozen, but you get the rest of 10 millions and you can not do anything about it. That's the argument.
The administration is doing things that are literally illegal. By definition it cannot be following due process. You can argue all you want why you think the law (or in many cases the constitution) *should* be changed, but until it *is* changed the administration has a legal obligation to follow it.
So one of two things is going on:
1. The administration is not, in fact, bothering to check whether its actions are legal (that is, not following due process and verifying the status of the people it apprehends and sends to be locked up on foreign soil).
or
2. It *is* checking and then deliberately ignoring the results when it doesn't like them.
I hope you agree that 2 wouldn't be any less dangerous, or any more likely to protect your rights. So most of discussion has been going with 1 as the still very dangerous but slightly less damning default assumption.
No, actually the thing is going on that the administration is following existing laws and procedures, and activist partisan judges try to subvert the legal system to invent new procedures (and create new interpretations of the laws) which would make what administration is doing - namely deporting people that violated the law and have no legal right to be present in the US - impossible. There's nothing "literally illegal" in deporting illegal immigrant following the decision of immigration judge, that's literally "due process". But yes, partisan activist judges try to make it illegal, because they have abandoned their intended function as neutral arbiter of the law and went to the bat to play for one of the partisan teams. Not because they have some divinely revealed book of "literally legal" knowledge which they looked into and figured out that deporting illegal immigrants is impossible by law. But because they want - due to their ideological positions and partisan considerations of obstructing any action of Trump administration to the maximum possible - to make the law work the way they want it to work. Namely, make immigration enforcement practically impossible. Using these efforts as the base for an argument means the argument turns perfectly circular - Trump is wrong because Trump is wrong, which makes him wrong because he's wrong. I can only marvel how you expect to make anybody who is not already in deep partisan agreement with you to consider such an argument seriously.
"No, actually the thing is going on that the administration is following existing laws and procedures,"
No, they are not. This is either an outright lie or you just completely failed to pay any attention to the material you are commenting on.
"On April 10, 2025, the Supreme Court of the United States unanimously[c] ruled that Abrego Garcia's removal to El Salvador was illegal."[1]
The Supreme Court--the *whole* supreme court, let's note, including 3 justices that Trump appointed himself--definitely know the law better than you. It is utterly preposterous to claim that a 9-0 decision of the supreme court is anything but definitive.
"activist partisan judges try to subvert the legal system to invent new procedures (and create new interpretations of the laws)"
At this point it really just sounds like you find the whole concept of constitutional law and separation of powers inconvenient and are just saying whatever you think best justifies ignoring it. Judges determine whether the law is being followed. Full stop. That is what they do. That is what they're for. Neither you nor I nor the executive get to decide if the judges are wrong on the law: only higher-level judges can do that. Again, you can freely opine how you *think* the law *should* be, and petition it to be changed. But insisting that courts following the procedures outlined in the constitution are *less important* than the executive doing things you personally like is tantamount to saying that rule of law is unimportant.
"Trump is wrong because Trump is wrong"
No, Trump is wrong because he is *violating the law* as determined by the courts. This is very, very simple.
> On April 10, 2025, the Supreme Court of the United States unanimously
This is incorrect, the order was unsigned so it is not known whether any judge disagreed, only that no one voiced public dissent, but this is not the same as voting for the decision.
> Abrego Garcia's removal to El Salvador was illegal
Wait, we're talking about a different guy now? OK, this guy was 100% definitely illegal immigrant, even Wikipedia says so. He was also about 99% definitely MS-13 member, wife beater (multiple restraining orders on file) and was caught participating in human trafficking operation. Yet, he got plenty of process - his deportation process started in 2019, appeared before a judge, got denied his request to release, got denied the appeal, and then got withholding of the removal due to perceived threat to him from opposing gang members in El Salvador. Then Trump administration changed its mind on the removal and tried to remove him. Note there's absolutely no doubt, at least as far as legal system is concerned, that he is not only an illegal immigrant, but the direct target of the current removal campaign - a violent gang member. So arguing "if somebody like him could be removed, then next any US citizen could be removed" is pure 100% USDA grade bullshit.
But there's another interesting kink in this case. The issue in this case is not that his deporation was illegal - but that specifically his deporation to *El Salvador* was illegal, due to the court deciding previously that he can not be deported *there*. The government indeed admitted that this specific decision - to deport him to El Salvador and not to some other country - was a mistake. He should have been deported to another country instead. However, this is a purely technical error which is only applicable to this particular case, where there's a particular decision saying the particular person can not be deported to a particular place. There's absolutely no doubt that not only Garcia is an illegal immigrant, but that this fact - and many others making him prime target for removal - has been established by plenty of process.
Again, arguing that due to the existence of this mistake, any citizen could be grabbed on the street and deported because there's no process - is pure bullshit. If the argument were "any illegal immigrant who is a violent MS-13 member and whose eligibility for deportation has been established by immigration court and confirmed on appeal could be deported to El Salvador even though judge previously told the government not to send him to El Salvador" - then yes, this argument could have some legs. But that's not the argument that was made.
> At this point it really just sounds like you find the whole concept of constitutional law and separation of powers inconvenient
This is funny to hear when it is considered normal that any random unelected judge can block the whole executive branch of the whole nation from enforcing any immigration laws (or, any laws or policies whatsoever, without exception). It looks like for you "separation of powers" means the power is separated from your political opponents and wholly transferred to people who you agree with politically.
> Judges determine whether the law is being followed.
They are supposed to. But that's not what they are currently doing. Instead, they use the powers given to them for that purpose to enact their partisan agenda and block the executive power from enacting their policies. Pretending that it's about "due process" in any reasonable meaning of this term - i.e. that if Trump admin signed the correct documents in correct order then there wouldn't be all this resistance - is preposterous. The goal is clearly to stop the policy from being executed, in any shape or form, and everything else is a window dressing.
And if you talk about scary things, the idea that "the law is whatever a random hyper-partisan activist judge wants it to be" is way scarier than the idea that the President may overreach. At least I can vote for the President, and even a bad President is gone in 4 years. I have absolutely no control over the thousands of hyper-partisan activist judges which apparently have absolute dictatorial power over the nation now (or maybe foreign nations too?), and they are next to impossible to remove, however bad they are. Having one dictator, even temporary, is bad, true, but having hundreds of permanent ones?
"Wait, we're talking about a different guy now? OK, this guy was 100% definitely illegal immigrant, even Wikipedia says so. "
Just because you don't understand how the law works, that doesn't make it not the law. As you have admitted outright, removing him *to El Salvador* was I-L-L-E-G-A-L. You seem to find it a trivial or unimportant illegality, but it was still illegal.
"Again, arguing that due to the existence of this mistake, any citizen could be grabbed on the street and deported because there's no process - is pure bullshit."
And again, just because you don't understand something doesn't make it wrong. Repeating myself, one of two things happened:
1. ICE failed to properly check *who he was and what his legal status was*, thus inadvertently doing something illegal
or
2. They *did* check and brazenly violated the court order anyway.
If they weren't checking his identity and status, then being a citizen is no protection. If they knowingly violated the law that said they couldn't do what they did, then being a citizen is likewise no protection. Citizen status *cannot possibly matter* without law enforcement both checking and obeying the actual legalities. How could it?
"> At this point it really just sounds like you find the whole concept of constitutional law and separation of powers inconvenient
This is funny to hear when it is considered normal that any random unelected judge can block the whole executive branch of the whole nation from enforcing any immigration laws (or, any laws or policies whatsoever, without exception)."
So that would be an unequivocal "no," then. No, you don't believe in constitutional law. No you don't believe in separation of powers. You know literally nothing about how the system works, but fervently believe that because Your Team won and election, it should get to do whatever it wants, courts be damned.
YES, most judges are unelected: as they're supposed to be. YES they can block the executive branch from doing things IF what the executive branch is doing is illegal. If they couldn't, the executive branch would have *unlimited power*. Entirely. I mean, if nobody can say "wait, stop, what you're doing is illegal" to the executive branch then the laws don't bind the executive branch at all. Judges are subject to their own checks and balances: as you should have learned in high school civics class. This is really, really basic constitutional law.
> ICE failed to properly check *who he was and what his legal status was*, thus inadvertently doing something illegal
That's a lie, ICE knew perfectly well who he was - that's why he was targeted for removal in the first place. It's not like they were grabbing random people on the street and one of them happened to be Garcia. They knew who he was. What they failed to check is the presence of an order prohibiting his removal specifically to El Salvador. This was indeed a mistake, but one having absolutely nothing to do with the argument in question - most US citizens do not have orders that say they can't be removed to El Salvador because rival gangsters will kill them there, and for most US citizens - in fact, every single one of them - there's no need to check for such order, because ICE would not have a removal order for them in the first place. You pretending that crying "illegal! illegal! illegal! illegal!" somehow saves this argument is nonsense. This is an exceptional situation, and the whole nature of this exception makes it applicable to very narrow class of illegal immigrants (maybe even a single person, but maybe such orders were more widespread under Biden, I wouldn't be surprised).
> If they weren't checking his identity and status
They were. They knew perfectly well his identity and status - being illegal immigrant eligible for removal. What they didn't know, again, that there's an order which makes removal specifically to *El Salvador* - unlike vast majority of all other illegal immigrants, who aren't so notorious gangsters that they need to be protected from retaliation from competing gangs - prohibited. That was their mistake, they should have had the system which alerts them about such order and they somehow missed it. Could be their documentation system is shit, could be somebody pressed a wrong button, who knows. But this is vastly different from a situation you pretend it to be, where they did not check his identity and starus - they did both. If you spent any time learning about the case (I assume you did if you discuss it?) - you know that, why do you pretend otherwise then?
> No, you don't believe in constitutional law. No you don't believe in separation of powers.
Of us two, you are of course much better expert in what I believe in than I am. I can only defer to your superior expertise about my beliefs, and any comment here would be redundant as you wouldn't believe me even if I tried to explain - in fact, you just did.
> it should get to do whatever it wants, courts be damned.
Again, this is a lie, so far Trump's team handles everything within the court system, and the only order it was not able to execute was the one to "facilitate" return of Garcia - because nobody knows what the heck it means. Quote from SCOTUS decision:
The intended scope of the term “effectuate” in the District Court’s order is, however, unclear, and may exceed the District Court’s authority. The District Court should clarify its directive, with due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs. For its part, the Government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.
Translating to human language: please explain what the heck you want the government to *actually do*, and please remember "invade El Salvador and force a sovereign nation to send their citizen to a foreign country because we love him so much" is not an option. Before that explanation happens, there's literally *nothing* Trump can do to comply with this order, because nobody knows what he's supposed to be complying with.
> YES they can block the executive branch from doing things IF what the executive branch is doing is illegal.
And since anything they block is by definition "illegal", we have an ideally closed system.
> If they couldn't, the executive branch would have *unlimited power*.
The fact that in your system the judges have unlimited power doesn't seem to bother you. Why should it, when they're doing what you like? If Republican judges started blocking Democrat President from executing any policy, you'd scream to the high heaven, but that's not what is happening now, right?
> Judges are subject to their own checks and balances: as you should have learned in high school civics class
Most of these checks and balances rely on working concepts of judicial restraint and co-equal powers, and on exceptions being rare and, well, exceptional. If there are hundreds of activist partisan judges which are willing to subvert the law process to serve their agenda - and the Democrats in Congress are perfectly fine with it, as they are - then the only check remaining is SCOTUS. And it can't deal with hundreds of cases simultaneously. Thus, judges willing to obstruct executive power effectively can do it right now without any checks and balances.
"And if you talk about scary things, the idea that "the law is whatever a random hyper-partisan activist judge wants it to be" is way scarier than the idea that the President may overreach."
Do you...do you know ANYTHING about the structure of the country you live in? Because this is really, really basic stuff that you're loudly and publicly failing to understand.
No, the law isn't "whatever a random hyper-partisan activist judge wants it to be." Whatever source you got that idea from was completely and utterly wrong. Yes, cases go before a judge to determine the legality. Yes a judge decides--at the time of the ruling, to the best of their judgement--what the law has to say on this particular issue. But the people designing the system were not as stupid as you seem to assume. ANY time a single judge is making a ruling, that ruling is subject to review by a higher court. If a judge *is* a "hyper-partisan activist[1]" and makes a blatantly bad ruling, then the next higher court will overturn it. And if THAT court is also proceeded over by a similarly untrustworthy judge, well, THAT judge's decision are ALSO subject to review.
The only level of judgement that cannot be overturned by a higher level is one from the Supreme court. Which has nine justices, not just one. All of which needed to be selected by a sitting president and approved by a vote of the senate[2]. And if evil alien mind control parasites somehow got to five on the nine supreme court justices all at once, THEY (and every other justice) are subject to impeachment by the senate, allowing for the president to replace them.
So either your pearl-clutching about individual justices deciding the law is disingenuous or you really, genuinely have no understanding of how your system of government actually works. But let's be crystal clear here: to anyone who *does* know how the system works, a rogue president ignoring the courts is clearly far, FAR more dangerous than the possibility that some of the justices could be biased. I mean give me a damn break here, it's not even close.
[1] Which I don't think is anywhere near as common as you assume.
[2] As you seem curiously unaware, 6 of the 9 current sitting justices were appointed by Republican presidents. Three by Trump himself. If there *is* a risk of them being "hyper-partisan activists" it's certainly not going to be in a *left-wing* direction. When all 9 of them agree that Trump is wrong about something, it would take quite the motivated reasoner to insist that *they* are the ones being biased and partisan.
> No, the law isn't "whatever a random hyper-partisan activist judge wants it to be."
I agree with you, but that contradicts your own proclamations earlier.
> Which I don't think is anywhere near as common as you assume.
You can check the headlines and see how many leftist judges are blocking literally every step Trump administration is doing, instantly on case being submitted. Clearly they are working as a team.
> As you seem curiously unaware, 6 of the 9 current sitting justices were appointed by Republican presidents.
If you spent less energy on righteous indignation amd more on reading comprehension, you could easily notice that the phrase "hundreds of permanent ones" could not be about SCOTUS judges, because, as you correctly notices, there is nine of them, and not hundreds. I was, obviously, speaking of low court judges, which is where most of the activists reside. And while each activist decision could be, in time, overturned by SCOTUS, the executive can not function properly if its every decision is immediately blocked nationwide by an assortment of partisan low court judges and it takes months and very expensive lawyers (you don't send just anyone to argue in front of SCOTUS) to unblock it. It is impossible to pursue any policy in this way. This is a conscious policy of obstruction, and it is done for reasons obviously having nothing to do with the law, but a lot to do with partisan activism.
> a rogue president ignoring the courts
Which is not happening. Trump, with all his bombastic rhetoric, is very much working within the system - unlike, for example, Biden, who clearly defied SCOTUS decisions and was (well, his team was, as he wasn't capable of forming a coherent thought by the time) openly boasting about it and fundraising on it. The only decision which Trump does not conform is that which is simply impossible to conform - the one ordering Trump somehow make another sovereign nation to release its citizen to the US. Short of declaring war on El Salvador - which is surely even you agree is outside of court's authority? - it's impossible to force them. We could ask them but if they refuse, they are sovereign, so there's limits to what the district court judge could order (or, in fact, even SCOTUS judge), even though they seem to imagine themselves universal rulers of the world now.
> I mean give me a damn break here
That's one of the most persuasive arguments I've heard in my entire lifetime, comparable only to Biden's irrefutable "come on, man!" and "listen here, fat!" (which anybody knows are the supreme trumps of any argument) - and yet, somehow they fail to convince me. Must be my fault, surely.
>At this point it really just sounds like you find the whole concept of constitutional law and separation of powers inconvenient and are just saying whatever you think best justifies ignoring it. Judges determine whether the law is being followed. Full stop. That is what they do. That is what they're for. Neither you nor I nor the executive get to decide if the judges are wrong on the law: only higher-level judges can do that.
Doesn't that contradict the constitutional principle of having co-equal branches of government? If the executive and legislature are subject to judicial oversight but the judiciary isn't subject to oversight from the other two branches, then it sounds as if the judiciary is superior.
We don't explicitly have a system of "co-equal branches"; what we have is (also informally) "checks and balances". The judiciary is certainly subject to oversight of the other two branches; the members are appointed by the executive and approved by the legislature, and can be impeached and removed by the legislature.
In your view of the system, if the judiciary can't give binding orders to the other two branches of government, what are they there for?
So if, hypothetically, Trump and the Republicans were to impeach and remove judges who tried to block the deportation of illegal immigrants, would you be OK with that?
> Where are the people who coincidentally ended up living in the slums and love it?
There are definitely digital nomads that move to live in cheaper places like Thailand or Portugal, though one could claim that they do it not to achieve a higher relative status, but to enjoy more good and services for the amount of money that they earn.
Regarding item 34, a court can, from common law convention, call on the posse comitatus to enforce an order it gives in a situation in which the officials normally tasked with doing so are unable or unwilling. How that would work in practice in this case is unclear, since El Salvador is not in any US county, and it also seems unlikely that a posse would be able to fight the armed forces of El Salvador and win.
Re number 7: moving to the slums aa a wealthy person is not going to endear you to anyone who lives in the slums, so your circle will still be other wealthy people (who may or may not have moved with you to the slums)
Re: #7 and choosing to move to poorer places to enjoy higher relative wealth, there are a lot of Americans living abroad who are revealing exactly this preference! Here in Paris (truly slumming it) one can more or less buy a small, well-located apartment for the same amount as the down payment on a sad starter house in SF that will sell to an all-cash buyer anyway. Shameless plug, check out thesecommonhours.com for dispatches from France (the French, they are a Funny race)
the only countries shock therapy "worked" in are the ones which got EU membership and a flood of Western Euro dollars, and even there it's not without problems.
Who's the rich Argentine neighbor willing to flood the country with investment and offer them open borders, provided it screws over its own poor enough and sells enough public assets?
Estonian GDP/capita increased by about 200% in the decade before Estonia joined the EU and by about 130% in the following decade, so ascribing its success to EU membership does not to me seem like a self-evident conclusion.
The Baltic countries had a large population exodus to Western Europe starting in mid-90s, so GDP/capita is inflated by both lower population numbers and remittances. Of course, EU transfers also helped.
"it screws over its own poor enough"
How were "its own poor" screwed over?
I think this is essentially false. Most people in the developed world have no clue how rich they are by global standards, will often deny it when pointed out, and have no idea how poor the global poor really are.
"Bryan Caplan thinks this can’t be true: after all, practically nobody moves to poorer areas, automatically giving themselves higher relative income than their neighbors?"
Isn't there a recognizable type of migrant (whether an immigrant or from, like, Alabama or Iowa) who moves back home not because they actually miss the place, but because they prefer being a big fish in a small pond to being a small fish in a big pond?
I've moved abroad as an international school teacher for kind of this reason. We were barely getting by in the US, now I earn nominally less salary but now our lifestyle includes taking
vacations and we are putting away a hugely increased chunk of savings every year.
However, I'd say our increased happiness comes mostly from increased purchasing power, not from the pure fact of being richer than the people around us. I do take some satisfaction out of being comfortable enough with our budget to give generously to people around me, but it's not the main effect. Also the happiness gains are offset somewhat by the difficulty of being far from family in a foreign culture.
I could second every sentence of this post. I tried to move back to the US once, and my savings began to evaporate. I honestly have no idea where. It was terrifying. Being free of the stress of seeing your money dry up before your eyes is definitely a major plus.
> Isn't there a recognizable type of migrant (whether an immigrant or from, like, Alabama or Iowa) who moves back home not because they actually miss the place, but because they prefer being a big fish in a small pond to being a small fish in a big pond?
I suppose he’s talking about local relativity, staying where you are and comparing to the locals. Anybody who has been to New York isn’t going to feel rich just because he absconded to Idaho. He may well have a better standard of living but if he’s driven by status, he won’t feel higher status in his head because status seekers would try to make it in New York.
Caplan is also wrong because the relative income that matters for status is the pre tax, pre non discretionary income. And obviously housing matters.
I think people like "passport bros" would also fit into this category, where people are moving from HCOL countries to LCOL countries.
At a more local level is plausible the benefits of moving from say California to Mississippi are far worse than just moving from the USA to Thailand so people who are inclined to move to a poorer area just move to another country rather than moving around within their country.
>At a more local level is plausible the benefits of moving from say California to Mississippi are far worse than just moving from the USA to Thailand so people who are inclined to move to a poorer area just move to another country rather than moving around within their country.
I don't think this is true, because there are much greater barriers to such emigration than there are moving states, both legal and practical. Not everyone who wants permission to emigrate is granted it, whereas there are no restrictions on interstate travel, there are no language barriers between US states, people are far more likely to be able to remain in the same line of business when traveling between states, and to build social circles with people they relate to.
For certain people, the advantages of moving countries can be much greater. But the barriers and disadvantages are also correspondingly greater.
Lots of people move from California to nominally poorer states. It's hardly unreasonable to sell your million dollar house in Van Nuys, CA, where you are paying private school tuition, to buy a half million house in the Dallas exurbs where your kids will go to public school.
I think it's actually quite common for people to move to poorer areas when they don't have professional or social obligations keeping them in one place. Think of all the digital nomads in Mexico City or Peru. Or retirees moving to Florida.
Digital nomads in Peru? Let me take a guess - are they all in Cusco? Broadband not great there, though, at least not the last time I checked.
Yeah, I know 3 people who live down there. It's in the same time zone as Chicago so zoom is easy.
If you could tell me their Internet access provider, I'd be thankful. I organised a conference there in 2015, and Internet access (speedy enough for videos) was a bit of an issue.
"Know" might have been a strong word. It's a friend's sister, a very former coworker and someone in an alumni group that I exchanged emails with.
Starlink is available in Peru.
It wasn't in 2015 :-)
Cuzco seems awfully high altitude for actual concentration on your laptop.
Cuzco: elevation 11,152 feet.
You might thrive at this altitude, but can your wife carry a child to term there? Can your baby then thrive?
I visited Cuzco when I was 19 in 1978 with a tour group and did okay, but the middle-aged African-American couple in our group both had to be evacuated to Lima at sea level.
Children born there thrive, unless of course they carry a recessive sickle-cell gene, which one of the African-American visitors might have. Did SS want me to say that to score some sort of weird point?
At any rate, no problem with doing mathematics at that height - people are just advised to arrive on Saturday if activities start on Monday. It’s not even high enough for hard drives to have problems (try 4000m for that) - and that is of course less relevant now.
Evidently, you aren't familiar with the research on evolutionary adaptations to high altitude done by Prof. Cynthia Beall of Case Western and others. From Wikipedia:
"Cynthia Beall is the leading scientist in the study of high-altitude adaptation in humans, particularly in places where there is little air to breathe. Among the Tibetans the first thing that she discovered was that they could live at high levels without having high hemoglobin concentrations or large chests, they had high birth-weighted babies, and no complications of mountain sickness. Unlike most humans who migrate to high altitude, the Tibetans do not exhibit the elevated haemoglobin concentrations to cope up with oxygen deficiency, but they inhale more air with each breath and breathe more rapidly, and retain this unusual breathing and elevated lung-capacity throughout their lifetime.[4][5] Their high levels (mostly double) of nitric oxide in the blood increase their blood vessels to dilate for enhanced blood circulation.[6] An astonishing discovery of Beall is the convergent evolution in humans from her studies on other highlanders such as the Amhara in the high-plateau regions of northwest Ethiopia, the Omro people in the southwest Ethiopia, and the Aymara of the American Andes. She found that these groups had adapted to low oxygen environment very differently from the Tibetans.[1][7] Physiological conditions such as resting ventilation, hypoxic ventilatory response, oxygen saturation, and haemoglobin concentration are significantly different between the Tibetans and the Aymaras.[8] The Amharans exhibit elevated haemoglobin levels, like Andeans and lowlander peoples at high altitudes, while the Andeans have increased haemoglobin level like normal people in the highlands.[9] All these observations show that different people adapted to high altitude in different genetic and physiological responses.[10]"
It's a standard observation that in high altitude South American cities like La Paz, the white people tend to live at the bottom of the canyon at the lowest elevation, while the indigenous Indians live at the higher elevations. Leftwing governments in countries like Bolivia have been installing ski lift-like gondolas as mass transit to make commuting from the high Indian suburbs to the low-lying business district easier for their constituents.
People who are indigenous to the Altiplano thrive at Cuzco's 11,000 foot elevation, but other people indigenous to lower elevations can vary considerably in their response to high elevations. (Sickle cell is hardly the only reason some people might be daunted by Cuzco's altitude).
My father, for example, was a rugged outdoorsman up to about 10,000 feet, but fell off dramatically above that. For example, at age 25 he tried to climb 14,500 foot Mt. Whitney, but only got to Trail Crest at 13,777 and then had something of a physical crisis there.
Being sensitive to the fact that humans vary in how well they do at high altitudes seems prudent and considerate.
No, it actually is harder for women to give birth and for infants to thrive at high altitude (unless they have evolutionary adaptations to altitude). This is one reason that places like Cuzco, and more generally highland South America, had fewer Spanish settlers (and consequently, a much higher proportion of indigenous population today) than the lowlands.
There's a half million people that live in the city. People are able to give birth there...
I think people are able to get acclimated over a few days so your visit might not be representative. There's people working in Cuzco hospitals doing heart surgery or at the Cuzco airport directing planes. I'm sure that it's possible to build out Tableau dashboards or take zoom calls under the same conditions.
Exactly. I was amazed at the question.
Sure, it's obviously possible, but is moving to 11,000 feet of elevation an optimal choice to do the kind of Work From Home jobs that ACT readers tend to do?
And even if you are at 100% capacity at 3,400 meters, what about people who are or might become important to you?
For instance, my uncle built his retirement dream house in the Sierras at 9,000 feet, but then it turned out his wife could no longer handle the altitude. That was a very unfortunate situation.
There are a lot of advantages to living at higher altitudes, especially at lower latitudes. E.g., Cuzco, near the equator has average high temperatures around 70 F year round. That's pretty pleasant.
But when thinking about places to move to, you need to take into consideration a lot of factors, many of which don't seem to be obvious, as suggested by these angry responses.
...what are you even talking about?
I studied a for semester in Cuzco in uni. And yeah, we were able to learn just fine. Myself and a few American-born classmates did 5+ mile hikes that went as high as 16,000 feet without any issues. None of us were anything more than hobby hikers.
10 years later I visited again with my pregnant wife and 1 year old son. And they both were fine with the altitude too.
This. Some people will have altitude issues, and retirees should be careful (that includes some people who were born there, moved elsewhere and haven't been there for a long time). The limitations are physical - never heard of any mental effects at that altitude.
Chronic altitude sickness is a thing, but it generally happens far further up. The difference between life at 4300 (say) and at 3500 meters above the sea level is in some ways more significant than that between 3500 meters and 0 meters.
Many years ago, I remember coming across an online piece written by an American, praising the choice to live in a Brazilian favela (though not necessarily permanently).
It's dirt cheap, located within a city, fun and colorful, and just as safe as anywhere else in Brazil! What's not to like?
Some Brazilian commented, saying this was the funniest thing he had ever read, and that he hoped the author enjoy his favela; as for him, he was moving to Denmark.
That exchange really made me think. From the perspective of the Brazilian guy praising the favela was ridiculous. How come you have to be a foreigner to see it differently?
One thing that might be not to like is how much income you can earn when living there.
For the American in that anecdote, we assume a location independent source of income. For the Brazilian, income in a favela would be no worse than in the rest of the same city.
I clearly did something fuckin' wrong, because I can see approx. 0% chance I might ever acquire a location-independent source of income.
A location independent source of income is the premise of this entire thread. It typically means one of two things:
(1) You work remotely, often as a programmer or similar.
(2) You're living off interest.
Here's how you can get to (2): pretend your income is 1/3 of what it is now. In other words, pretend you are poor. You must live on that budget. Unless you're already very poor, it's possible. Some people live like that. So now you have 2/3 of your income to invest. In about 10 years, your investments will have reached the point that they generate an income equal to what you're spending each year (which, remember, is 1/3 of what you spend now). Now you can live off interest forever.
If you replace 1/3 with 1/2 it takes 20 years instead of 10.
No, I'm not doing that myself.
Yeah I feel like retiring to a LCOL area / developing economy fits the bill and it happens frequently enough to be a trope
There's also the phenomenon of so-called gentrification, where intrepid trendy types move to a dodgy area of a city, because property there is cheaper and maybe they like "vibrancy" (menacing looking characters sitting around on front steps, strange people directing traffic, etc). Then over time more and more of these yuppies move in until the original locals are priced out. There are several examples of this in London, and it's probably the same in any large city.
There is also range compression to consider. Some people might prefer living in, say, Mountain View rather than Los Altos but would not be okay living in Gilroy. The fact that extreme versions of "big fish, small pond" don't seem to happen a lot doesn't mean that there isn't some form of the effect.
Isn't retiring abroad as an expat kind of a thing also? Once when my wife and I were traveling in Ecuador we stayed at a lodge run by a guy who had retired into a life of Ecuadorian luxury on an NYC school teacher pension (he didn't do the work at the lodge, it basically just gave him a constant stream of gringos to go birding with).
I know people that moved to "poorer" countries, on retirement or close to it, and while I can not definitely know their motives, lower cost of life seems to be one of the factors. In fact, I myself moved from California ("rich" state, very high cost of living) to another, relatively "poorer" stare with lower cost of living. And while it's not related directly to my neighbors income, having a better house for 1/3 the price sure seems like a good benefit. Of course, I wouldn't move to Rwanda or Albania some place like that just because people are poorer there, but generally I think Caplan is wrong if he claims nobody moves to places that are "poorer". Within some conditions, a lot of people do.
Retirement is a drop in income though so it’s not quite what caplan is arguing here.
Well, yes, but also freedom to move. A lot of people can't just move wherever they like while keeping the same job. For a retiree it's much easier.
The small rustbelt city I grew up in on the shore of lake Erie has a steady stream of boomer retirees who made their money on the coasts or in Florida then retired to Ohio. I've spoken with a few of them when I'm home visiting family about why. The low CoL is a big factor; they can build a spawling estate on the lakeshore for less than a medium sized condo in NYC/SF etc. Several also mentioned, whithout prompting, that there are no jews and very few blacks and immigrants.
Yeah, it was also a common topic of discussion in the Russian-speaking software community prior to 2022: those who moved to the US make more and have better standard of living in absolute terms, but those in Russia (or other post-soviet countries) have a significantly wider gap between them and the rest of the population. People would have different opinions on it naturally, but it was explicitly acknowledged as one of the pros of staying home vs moving to the States by both sides of the argument.
I moved to a lower cost of living area in the same country and am much happier having done so
I knew a guy in college who explicitly planned to get hired by the Malaysian branch of an American company on the American MBA pay scale, move back home to Malaysia, and live like a king.
I also think you can't just change your reference class by moving. Sure, you're richer than your neighbours, but to all of your family & old friends & classmates you've now moved to the ghetto.
I think this is the big thing, yeah. Also, it might have worked better in the past, but now you can't really prevent constant information inflow re: all the people who live elsewhere & make more than you anyway.
The operative words are is "moving back". You need some cultural claim of legitimacy to be integrated in the poorer society. "I went to the city, got rich, and now I am back home" is a story people can stomach. "I was born in a rich country/state, worked there, and now I retire here on a pension ten times as big as what I would get for the same work here, now please give me the respect that is due" will not work.
There's also a whole "down-shifting" movement where people move to SEA and live cheaply. Big chunk of the satisfaction is actually a feeling of relief of you being "on top of the game".
Source: lived in Bali for 5 years. The downside of being "on top" is no longer having motivation to grow
Regarding 10, the actual latest news is that inflation has again risen to almost 4% in march, though some of it is explained by seasonal factors.
On the other hand, the government has pretty succesfully reduced capital controls via an agreement with the IMF, leading to a strong revaluation of the currency (in the "real" exchange rate, the official one went up briefly and then came back down), meaning they shouldn't be spending reserves propping it up.
Next up, the looming maturity wall.
The Economist in writing about that IMF deal this week called it a bold but risky move on Melei's part. They think it has as much chance of backfiring as working, for reasons that TBH I don't entirely grok. But the Economist retains its organizational roots and covers macro-level financial stuff both regularly and thoroughly so I tend to have some respect for their judgement on such topics.
On #7:
Thousands of people moved from San Francisco to poorer areas (Texas and Idaho) when they could do so and keep thier high incomes. Many people retire to Mexico (or from NYC to Florida) where their retirement goes further. Clearly there is a wealth effect, where having more money than is "expected for the area" lets you live a happier life.
Was that to get higher relative income, or just for normal absolute reasons like SF having high crime, or being able to afford a bigger house in Idaho?
Is "higher relative income" some technical term that i don't know? In plain English "afford a bigger house" is one result of having a "higher relative income"
Well, there are two reasons you might be able to afford a bigger house (in one location relative to another):
1. People there might have less money than you.
2. Houses there might be more abundant.
Only the first one is a question of relative income. If you move from China to the United States, your relative income will drop fairly dramatically, but you'll be able to afford more Pop Tarts than you could before.
Well, even the first might not be an issue of relative income. You might just want a bigger house than you have now, without caring a whit about how well off your new neighbors are.
That would be a question of adjusting your budget to spend more on your home, not of a bigger home being more affordable.
I’m talking about the people who got the bigger home by moving to such a place.
It has a plain meaning: having a high income relative to the people around you. Caplan appears to be talking specifically about the phenomenon of being happier *because everyone around you is poorer than you*. This isn't the same as having greater purchasing power, although of course the two things do correlate.
(But they don't necessarily correlate all that much: If you move from a middle-class neighborhood in Los Angeles to a poor neighborhood in Los Angeles, you'll get some more purchasing power with respect to housing, and of course most of your neighbors will have a lower yearly income, but food and cars and clothes and utilities and vacations and such will still cost the same, and your car insurance will likely go up! So you'll have to really really get an ego boost from that price per square foot advantage plus the fact that your neighbors' annual salaries are lower than yours.)
I've always liked being around people richer than me. They're better looking, smarter, friendlier, better educated, and so forth.
> or being able to afford a bigger house in Idaho?
Since land is limited, over the short term housing is a "relative terms" item.
Inside of a currency union, this is also pretty much what we'd expect to see. Poorer areas should have lower prices for non-tradable goods like housing and personal services.
This also makes the pure form of the relative income hypothesis difficult to test. A big fish in a small pond will probably have better access to local resources (land) and personal services (haircuts, lawn mowing), and those provide meaningful, measurable increases in material standard of living beyond a simple feeling of status or financial superiority.
I'd go so far as to suggest that very few people can realistically conduct that experiment and choose to live in a poorer area in a way that makes their material situation worse in every single aspect except for status.
"Bigger house" and "higher/lower relative income" is the same thing said in two different ways. In SF, you compete for the house with unicorn millionaires and VC-funded crypto bros, in Idaho, you'd compete with regular people with regular incomes. There's no way a market can sustain a level of pricing if there are no people with enough income to pay it. So, it areas where incomes are lower, the prices would be lower too. Plus, of course, less people itching to live in high-cost area and overbidding for the privilege, which is also a contributing thing of the same origin.
No. "Bigger house" can mean "same relative income, but houses are cheaper here because they're in less demand".
The median household income in Lancaster, CA (where I live) is about the same as in Hawthorne, CA (where I sort of work), but houses in Hawthorne are about twice as expensive in Hawthorne. Same relative income, but lots of people are willing to pay a larger fraction of their income to live Hawthorne because it's convenient to the beach, many good jobs, cultural amenities, other cool people, etc whereas Lancaster is in a literal and cultural desert with maybe three good employers.
This is true for two cities that are next door to each other. However, if they are at any distance, then the setup that you have now - whether essentially the same set of people, obviously having the same common income profile, can live either in Lancaster or Hawthorne - can not occur. If you take Idaho/Texas and SF, then the incomes aren't the same, because there's not a lot of people that commute there and back for work from Idaho to SF and back, and thus the situation of "maybe three good employers" (which of course not true for Idaho but I take it as a rhetorical exaggeration of the real income differential) leads to relatively lower incomes in one place and higher incomes in another.
Hawthorne and Lancaster are not "next door". They are separated by about a hundred kilometers, a mountain range, and 2-3 hours of rush-hour traffic. It is not practical to commute between the two, unless you happen to own an airplane. Both cities do have convenient airports, but unless everyone else is flying stealth planes I'm the only one who actually does that.
People who live in Lancaster, generally work in Lancaster or one of the neighboring communities, with some commuters but not into the heart of the LA basin. Many of whom could get jobs in either city if they liked (they both have e.g. a substantial aerospace-industry presence), and at similar pay. Some people want to live in an apartment in a cosmopolitan city, others prefer a house in a suburban or rural town. And some want a nice house in a big cosmopolitan city, which they'll bid up to a stratospheric price even though their classmates who took the job in the high desert are making the same money and paying half as much for housing.
I think the phenomenon in 7 has to be split to be precise:
Areas with lower income and lower costs of living are not necessarily the same (although usually highly correlated). The fact that people move to areas with lower costs of living seems obvious. If I have a remote job and move from SF to Lisbon where everything costs half, that makes a lot of sense. In Lisbon both average income and average costs of living are lower.
But the claim seems to be: people would also move from SF to London, where costs of living are similar, but everyone else makes less money. Hence any gain in happiness/utility would not come from affording more things than before, but from affording more things than peers.
I like that you clarified a distinction that most here seem to have missed, but there is an even further distinction in the original claim (as written) that you have also missed. It's not about making more money than your peers but more money than your "social circle". These days, it's not uncommon for much of one's social circle to exist outside the physical neighborhood where they reside. Now if you move to London and spend all our time in a neighborhood pub and the other regulars become your new social circle then you might have moved up in relative wealth, but if you mostly keep the same friends as before, moving to a poorer city or neighborhood doesn't test the claim.
There is a significant wealth effect in being "the Joneses" that everyone else is keeping up with. The psychic freedom to spend on what you want to, and not feeling like you are missing out, certainly contribute to overall happiness.
I think that is also why rural life appeals to the semi-rich: when you go down to the diner or country club, it doesn't matter if you have 10 acres of unusable rocks or 100 acres of corn and $100K in farm equipment - you can still max out the local available conspicuous consumption.
> section from Walter Isaacson’s Musk biography claiming that his father Errol, previously a successful engineer, suddenly became a crackpot in his forties:
The 40s are a bit early for age-related cognitive decline, but they're also late for schizophrenia. Is there any commonly-accepted psychological or medical condition that would cause someone to become a crackpot in their forties?
> Where are the people who coincidentally ended up living in the slums and love it?
It's not common, but I regularly hear about people who retire to low COL areas, up to and including poorer countries like Mexico where 'their dollar goes a lot further'. It's not a pure example of relative income mattering because of purchasing power parity effects, but I think it nudges in that direction.
Besides this, however, why should relative income be measured with respect to one's neighbourhood? To me, the intuitive description brings to mind one's peer group, but that's flexible and itself income-dependent. Rich people get invitations to parties where even richer people circulate.
To intentionally exploit the relative income effect by 'moving to a slum', you'd have to intentionally cut yourself off from family and former friends and consciously avoid social climbing, Seems a bit of a tough call, and also a move more likely to be made by someone already unhappy.
Lots of middle class black civil servants in the Northeast have retired to the Atlanta suburbs to stretch their pensions further.
Seems pretty reasonable to me.
In re Mexico: I mainly hear about people moving to San Miguel de Allende, and I don't think it's because their dollar goes further than in Florida.
> Is there any commonly-accepted psychological or medical condition that would cause someone to become a crackpot in their forties?
Untreated bipolar can worsen over a lifetime. Science fiction fans may remember the infamous _Last Dangerous Visions_ anthology that Harlan Ellison somehow failed to publish for something like 50 years - it nominally came out last year posthumously, with its main point of interest being J. Michael Straczynski's long memoir of his association with Harlan Ellison, in which he describes how he knew Ellison had bipolar disorder within hours of meeting him, but it took decades for it to slowly grind down Ellison, taking away his ability to write novels and then stories (because the manic cycles increasingly failed to last long enough to finish anything substantial), leading to grossly inappropriate behavior like groping Connie Willis or compulsive shopping of nerd trinkets, and finally, in old age, to a suicide attempt with a gun, after which Straczynski was able to use a psychiatric hold to force him into going to a psychiatrist for diagnosis. The most tragic part is that the drug treatments were apparently starting to work and Ellison was finally able to write again... when he got hit by an unrelated stroke, declined, and died of another.
Anyway, I don't know about the stories, but the Ellison memoir is well worth reading.
Thank you for this.
I grew up reading Harlan, thought he was quite talented, wondered why he rarely wrote long pieces and then became sad when I learned what a jerk he could be. Bipolar at least *explains* a bunch of this...
This is the intro to _Last Dangerous Visions_?
Yes.
> I grew up reading Harlan, thought he was quite talented, wondered why he rarely wrote long pieces and then became sad when I learned what a jerk he could be.
I too sometimes wondered what was up with Ellison and why he never wrote any novels after his initial batch of juvenilia... but to the extent that I thought about it, I wrote it off as a mix of a perfectionist personality, performing a role as the Brooklyn infant terrible of SF, and too much Hollywood money & fun times. After all, Ellison would not be the first writer to have been ruined by easy screenwriting money, the lure of seeing your fiction *truly* immortalized and influential on the silver screen (no SF short story would ever have the impact of a really successful Star Trek episode or movie), and the tempting lifestyle of being a Famous Writer in LA, as opposed to the hard work and risk of grinding out another novel. Somewhat like Douglas Adams, who apparently deeply enjoyed being Douglas Adams and hosting dinners to wax eloquent at, rather than sitting down to actually *write*, and so had a busy active life that involved a lot less writing than it could have if he had more of a work ethic like, say, Terry Pratchett.
So bipolar never came to mind for me as a possible explanation until he announced the diagnosis publicly some time before his death. (Although now that I write that, maybe I should cast a more skeptical eye over biographical accounts of Douglas Adams...)
This makes Harlan Ellison a good example of how bipolar is the dark matter of highly successful writers: we know it's there in large quantities from the surveys and statistics, but we can be staring right at a case for half a century, in retrospect looking obvious, and never even think of it, assuming that the long stretches of depression are just the writer gestating new pieces or enjoying the lifestyle or busy with other things or the symptoms are being 'a jerk', while insiders do their best to hide it from the rest of us (like how Straczynski continually covered for & bailed out Ellison, and never said a word publicly about what he'd seen until the end).
Now that I read this, imagine if George R. R. Martin is actually bipolar and struggling with long depression bouts and that's why we don't have Winds of Winter yet but we're all complaining. Huh.
I don't think it is simply just that writers get seduced by the lifestyle of being a famous writer.
I think that people differ by how many good novels they have in themselves. Tolkien wrote the Lord of the Rings over a decade, and while he lived for quite a while after publication, he did not use that time to churn out more epic fantasy trilogies. And that is totally okay, human genius is not a production line.
My feeling is that Douglas Adams is kind of similar. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was tremendously successful, but over the next four sequels there was some decline, IMHO.
Terry Pratchett published a tremendous amount of Discworld novels which were pretty solid -- I think that his best later ones often worked by introducing new characters and settings (Small Gods is novel #13, for example).
But there is a certain trap of a writer writing a great novel and the publishing endless sequels, and I like to think that both Tolkien and Adams knew when to stop instead of milking their franchise dry.
How many letters did he write after? It seems to me that he spent most of that time imagining more stuff about his world and put those into letters, or into his drawer. That's how we got The Silmarillion (and other posthumous publications).
Tolkien was I think in it for the worldbuilding more than the storytelling. He buckled down and wrote one good children's novel and one amazingly good adult meganovel because he knew that worldbuilding unadorned by storytelling was only a private fancy, but after that mostly just did story-fragments to flesh out the worldbuilding.
Which was enough because those novels were good enough to bring a lot of people around to the view that, hey, I kind of want to see more of that world even if it isn't packaged into shiny perfect stories.
If he'd been born a generation later, he might have been a first-rate writer of RPG settings, a la M.A.R. Barker.
> My feeling is that Douglas Adams is kind of similar. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was tremendously successful, but over the next four sequels there was some decline, IMHO.
I don't think that's a good example because what I said was that it was bad that he didn't write more. I didn't say what he didn't write was just more Hhgttg. You are correct that the later Hitchhikers were definite dropoffs and we probably aren't missing much compared to if Adams had milked another Hhgttg or two out of himself. Blood from a stone, etc. However, he could, and did, write more than just Hitchhikers stuff. I liked the Dirk Gentlys, for example, and his contributions to various games were interesting, and _Last Chance To See_ was pretty interesting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Chance_to_See). _The Meaning of Liff_ still gets brought up occasionally.
And, of course, that's just what we know of; we cannot know what he would have done if he had been more industrious. When he dropped dead of a heart attack at age 49 in 2001, he hardly looked like he was an exhausted creatively-dead burnout case. Plenty of writers do a lot of good work, sometimes their best work, after 49. (For comparison, Terry Pratchett died at 66 in 2015, so had he died at 49 like Adams, then he would've died in 1998; that means we would've lost: fully half of the Discworld novels and almost all of the award-winning/nominated ones, a lot of ancillary Discworld material like all of the _Science of Discworlds_, Baxter's _Long Earth_ series, several award-winning documentaries, his Alzheimers & assisted-suicide activism... And this is despite 66 being quite young, well below his life expectancy and at an age where plenty of fiction writers are still producing noted works!)
>no SF short story would ever have the impact of a really successful Star Trek episode or movie
This seems a bit too strong. I'd guess that Flowers for Algernon was more impactful than any single Star Trek episode.
> I'd guess that Flowers for Algernon was more impactful than any single Star Trek episode.
...But only because Flowers for Algernon got adapted again and again and again into shows and movies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowers_for_Algernon#Adaptations (For example, 'Flowers for Algernon' is alluded to prominently in _End of Evangelion_ - but only to the Japanese title for the *movie adaptation*, _Charly_.)
The melancholy fate of many really successful SF/F works is, even when the original story is still technically read rather than plunged into complete obscurity, to see the book version overwritten and erased by the successful film version. Even the readers of the books can no longer read them as written. (And I don't mean things like Lucas retconning Darth Vader into Luke's father so _A New Hope_ comes off as entirely different when you as a later viewer 'know' that Darth Vader is Luke's father and this is supposed to be a whole cycle of 'the tragedy of Anakin Skywalker'.) For example, in Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life", was it time-travel precognition, as it was in the movie adaptation _Arrival_? Most people will tell you that it is, even though it makes no sense when you read the story closely: https://gwern.net/story-of-your-life And
Or, was it ruby slippers... or silver, in _The Wonderful Wizard of Oz_? I know people who have read the book - one of the most successful children's books ever - who will tell you that they were, of course, ruby. And if you allude to 'silver slippers', no one will have any idea what you're talking about (despite showing up again and again in the later novels).
Speaking of children's books, probably the most successful ones were the Harry Potter books, and no one these days can keep straight what is from the books, the films, and the fanfiction: http://members.madasafish.com/~cj_whitehound/Fanfic/fanonvscanon.htm And I'm sure someone has written an equivalent version of how many Tolkien fans now believe things about the LotR which are due solely to the Jackson movie versions, no matter how many times they read the novels... You just approach things with certain assumptions and can't notice that it's not actually there in the text.
>But only because Flowers for Algernon got adapted again and again and again into shows and movies
Hmm, seems unlikely. None of those were big enough hits to eclipse the written story, certainly nothing close to the level of Arrival. If anything, the novelization by Keyes himself is probably the single best known variant... which I guess is still sort of in line with your point.
I can recall as a kid in the early 1970s, Harlan Ellison was in the Los Angeles newspapers constantly: writing, being written about, getting into arguments with people, etc. He was a real ball of fire.
Not to mention his run-in with the main character in Studs Terkel’s iconic profile article “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.”
Oops Gay Talese not Terkel😊
Tom Wolfe was always jealous of Gay Talese's sense of clothing style.
Thanks, I'd forgotten that.
Here's the scene
https://www.jasonsanford.com/jason/2012/09/09/harlan-ellison-stands-up-to-frank-sinatra
Interestingly, when Frank Sinatra harasses Harlan Ellison over his informal footwear, Ellison is playing pool with baseball manager Leo Durocher, who was perhaps the most similar personality in sports to Sinatra. Durocher would have gotten the credit for managing Jackie Robinson's historic 1947 season breaking the color line (Durocher did an excellent job during spring training of putting down any racist reluctance on the part of the other Brooklyn Dodgers to playing with Robinson), but at the last moment before the historic game, the commissioner of baseball suspended Durocher for the year for spending his off-season gambling with mobbed-up movie star George Raft (which sounds like a Sinatra scandal).
Of course, when being harassed, even by Frank Sinatra and his goons, holding a pool cue increases a man's courage.
Yes a reversed pool cue can be deadly. But Talese, who was apparently there, has Ellison *watching* the pool game. He didn't need no stinkin' cue.
Ok but then it's always clear that higher relative incomes are a mean not an end. To argue otherwise is to posit some dark and very conveniently falsifiable subconscious motive, so that when a Swiss retirees talks about how cheap is to dine out and rent a beautiful seaside house in Malaga, what he actually means it that he satisfied some Jungian urge to best his fellow man. Seems a bit superluous when the stated motive so clearly suffices honestly.
"Is there any commonly-accepted psychological or medical condition that would cause someone to become a crackpot in their forties?"
Possible contributing factors, off the top of my head–
- Worsening bipolar (already mentioned) or cyclothymia progressing to bipolar
- Psychotic depression
- Huntington's disease (if Errol had this it would be obvious by now)
- Tumors or autoimmune disorders impacting the central nervous system or the endocrine system
- Sleep disorders such as obstructive sleep apnea
- chronic or acute drug abuse (do we know for sure that Errol didn't also use drugs?)
- some combination of the above
> 7: A common sociological claim is that relative income (compared to your social circle) matters more for happiness than absolute income. Bryan Caplan thinks this can’t be true: after all, practically nobody moves to poorer areas to enjoy the higher relative income this would confer.
That's because high income areas generally have better culture, restaurants and opportunities. In addition, the perceived risk of low income areas.
Why would a high income person move to an area without Michelin star restaurants, Whole Foods, and Montessori schools? In addition, why risk being a victim of crime?
When I moved to Chicago, I moved to a glamorous high rise apartment overlooking the lake in Lincoln Park so I could get a girlfriend. When I got a fiancee, I moved north to the grungier Lakeview neighborhood. When I got a wife, I moved north to highly diverse Uptown (diverse meaning lots of cheap Vietnamese restaurants).
Outlining this, I wrote to the U. of Chicago scholars who had authored "The Social Construction of Sexuality" and suggested they write a sequel entitled: "The Sexual Construction of Society." Remarkably, they more or less followed my suggestion by eventually writing a tome entitled "The Sexual Organization of The City."
https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-social-construction-of-sexuality-vs-the-sexual-construction-of-society/
I have long maintained that sexuality in humans is largely a social matter, unless you think that, for example, there was some mysterious gene in Afghan tribesmen and ancient Spartans that made them attracted to young boys.
There's another theory that homosexuality is caused by some kind of communicable disease, which is why it's much more common in cities than in rural areas, and why it appears to have mostly vanished from history between 300 AD and 1900 AD.
A further theory is that Greek homosexuality wasn't all that common, it just got written about a lot.
>and why it appears to have mostly vanished from history between 300 AD and 1900 AD.
Only in those countries which had and enforced a strong religious taboo against it.
But the thing that makes me suspicious is that there's no actual record of anyone enforcing that strong religious taboo.
For instance the Spanish Inquisition in all its investigatory zeal managed to prosecute one thousand people for sodomy... but only half of these were sodomy between persons (the others presumably being with animals) and only a handful of cases involved two consenting adults https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Catholic_Church_and_homosexuality ... suggesting that homosexuality was a hundred times less popular than bestiality in Inquisition-era Spain.
Yet, even sticking to Spanish territory and the 300-1900 period, many of the Andalusian caliphs kept male harems.
I don't disagree that it's a puzzle, although I suppose widespread religious belief that X is a horrible sin can discourage something to a degree without the church needing too many actual prosecutions.
Turing's and Wilde's case became such cause celebre because the laws against homosexuality were never actually enforced, despite it being so common in boarding schools and ships to be a running joke. I doubt this denotes anything except a certain tendency of traditional societies to tolerate a lot as long as it happened in an adequately surrespicious matter.
Add to this that the post-Roman, pre-westphalian legal system was weird and convoluted, with personal rather than territorial jurisdiction and very blurry lines between secular, religious, professional, regal and familial legal spheres, and I'm not really sure you proved much.
These days The Gays™ feel safe enough to even occasionally vaguely hint that they weren't actually "born this way", it was just a useful bit of rhetoric.
Young men will routinely fuck each other in any environment where women are not available and (for societies condemning it) prying eyes turn the other way. Prisoners, soldiers, sailors, young aristocrats in boarding schools and Moldovan bricklayers living on site all do that.
I find much more plausible the Kinsey view of a flexible sexuality, with heterosexuality being a strong preference rather than an absolute costraint for most, than any sociological theory trying to encompass all the groups above.
If a human female is stuck on a desert island with nothing but a monkey, she'd try to make a pet out of it.
If a human male were on that same island, he'd try to fuck it.
This piece should be in the next "Noticing" anthology. I now know the right way to hunt for apartments...
Calling Lakeview "grungier" than Lincoln Park, while I guess technically true, is a wild claim. All three of those neighborhoods are very safe, have great amenities, and are effectively next door, given that they're all two train stops away from each other. It mostly sounds like you had a relatively stable income and decided to move to very similar neighborhoods with very slightly lower costs of housing as you got older.
My own experience is that exposure to people significantly richer or significantly poorer than you is distressing. The distribution of distress is asymmetric, meaning that your best bet is to be surrounded by a fairly narrow band of wealth where you're towards the top.
I used to live in a proper rich area where the range was upper middle class professionals like me at the bottom and proper rich people at the top. I found that when I walked around I spent an uncomfortable amount of time thinking about money -- every time I saw a really nice house or car that I couldn't possibly afford it set off a pattern of musing about money.
Nowadays I live a few suburbs away in a slightly less rich area that's full of people at roughly my wealth level. When I walk around I rarely see anyone that I envy, nor anyone that I pity, and my brain gets to focus on more interesting things.
I grew up about 8 miles north of Beverly Hills. I've always found walking around Beverly Hills to be pleasant. I find crazy rich people entertaining. But I am terribly unambitious, so it doesn't bother me I'll never live there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HL_WvOly7mY
Same here. Sometimes I'll see something and think "Oh, that would be nice to have" but in general I don't go "Damn it, why don't I have that! Why am I a loser by comparison!"
If someone likes Michelin restaurants and Porsches, good luck to them and I sincerely hope they enjoy them, but I've never felt "Oh I am missing out" by not having them.
This is no comment on you, Justin, but I can't wrap my head around "oh my goodness, I cannot eat at a Michelin starred restaurant here? Life is not worth living!"
My problem is I like plain food (and plenty of it) so while I can appreciate the aesthetics (and incredible skill and effort involved) of one carefully trimmed miniature eel's brain with three streaks of jus on the plate, it would not fill my stomach.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxQiY1qKv9Y
> From @msamalam: 1932 Japanese map of world features/stereotypes
Interesting that India comes pre-partitioned (what do colors denote?). Also, llamas and alpacas are way too far south (you'll see a stray guanaco vaguely there, but not on the plains I'd think) and there should definitely be a cow where llamas and alpacas are.
India was partitioned based on pre-existing religious divisions, so maybe that's why it appears split on the map.
They also have a player for the New York Yankees in the middle of the U.S.
The weird thing to me is the sacks with dollar signs on them, on a map drawn in a country that doesn't use dollars.
Is the guy in Ireland a Gaelic Football player or someone lifting stones?
> 20: Americans are likely to have favorable views of castles
and chivalry, but not the Crusades or the Inquisition
Meanwhile the Vikings are ok. Converting to Christianity doomed their descendants to ignominy.
The rehabilitation of the Vikings is odd. If ever a people contributed little but violence, it’s them.
The Spanish are criticised a lot for their actions in the new world, and probably wouldn’t do well in this survey. Also they probably weren’t as bad as us Anglos, truth be told.
That argument is a deflection and a false dilemma. The survey wasn’t either or. You can assign bad to any of the questions.
The Spanish court of the 16th Century felt a surprising amount of guilt over what the Conquistadors were doing to the Indians, more than Anglos did a century later.
"what they did in the New World"? That's as relevant as pointing to the leading Nazis all being devoted fans and promoters of classical art.
The Vikings' violence in the Old World, which was 99 percent of their interest and activity, was a notably brutal and effective deployment of the military technology of their era. They were _good_ at what they were doing, which was a big part of why they became so widely feared.
Funny in that chart is that the black plague is positive to 9% of the responders. Maybe those people know their history, and how the reduction in workers led to higher wages and better working conditions for those that survived - likely leading to the creation of the middle class and possibly the advancement of Europe towards the Industrial Revolution.
> Maybe those people know their history, and how the reduction in workers led to higher wages and better working conditions for those that survived
We can hope not. Anyone who thinks that was a worthwhile trade isn't someone we want in our current societies.
A much better reason to have a positive view is, for example, "what an awesome name!".
Or, to invoke the Lizardman's Constant once more, the real answer might also be "leave me alone with your stupid survey at family dinner".
That's what came to mind for me, yea.
People throwing each other under a bus for a leg-up *is* society, unless you're living with Buddhist monks or something.
People having found a way to work together for the benefit of all is society.
People throwing each other under the bus are inevitable but are more the ones hacking the rules of society than the core of society.
Yeah, but they are generally self-deceived about that.
Horrible at the time and worse to try to recreate it, but I think there's a value in recognizing the positive as well as negative outcomes to things happening in life. I would be more than skeptical of anyone advocating something like that now, even if it worked out well in some respects back then. Not to mention there have been a whole lot more plagues and the most common results were pretty much all misery and no noticeable benefits.
I ended up wondering if this is (lizardman constant and) the one or other person thinking the survivors raising the immune system baseline to something "better" was worth it. If so, allergies would like a word with these people, though.
When I saw those results, I figured the non-lizardman component was the economic argument that the Black Death cut population density in western Europe and thereby led to wage increase, mechanization of labor, and eventually the basis of the industrial revolution. I suppose the galactic supercluster-ascended Buddha-brain take would be that on the long term, by leading to industrialization and modern medicine, the Black Death eventually *decreased* the risk of death by disease on net. At quite the high cost, though!
While I think that it is mostly Lizardmen's constant, the steel-man for the Black Plague would be the following.
Medieval populations had a total fertility ratio far above replacement, and were thus in the Malthusian trap.
Counteracting population growth are the three horsemen Famine, Pestilence and War. All three are horrible. Disease can not only kill, but maim. Starvation is a long and terrible process which will leave even those who survive diminished. And war brings out the very worst in humans, it is not simply people gutting or crippling each other with swords, but also the rape and the destruction of resources.
I am happy that we have our methods of population control called Pension Plan, Condom and OnlyFans, but if they are not an option, and the population has outgrown what their fields can produce, and I have to decide if 10% of them should die by starvation, war, or infection, I would probably pick infection.
They think it's about the metal band.
The average person, born and raised in their home country and having lived there basically their entire life, has little idea of what full impact any historical matter has had on the people living then and there, or of the deep cultural memories those events formed. The farther the remove in space and time, the more the gaps in that image will necessarily be filled by popular culture, often by projecting modern sensibilities back in time.
Sure, you have some unambigously bad stuff like the Black Death where everyone everywhere can agree it was bad, even without knowing specifics. But the Hundred Years War? Hundred years of war sounds bad. But what was it even about? Maybe it was kinda justified?
Then the Vikings. Will most people even know it's a job description, not an ethnicity, and what that job entailed? Also, Vikings are kinda cool, aren't they? There are comics about them, video games, movies; much like pirates, their historical package gets sanitized the further you are removed from them. I bet if you'd ask the average English, especially on the East coast, they'd have a more nuanced perspective.
Castles and Chivalry? Barely anyone will think of the feudal system, the massive inequality and repression they represent, of the almost perpetual war that necessitated them. They think of countless fantasy novels and other pop culture products, or at most their once-in-a-lifetime Europe roundtrip out of school.
Another example, not on the list: The widespread adoration of Adolf Hitler in parts of India. Notwithstanding the fact that Hitler hated Indians as a race (ignored) or that he killed millions in Europe (irrelevant) he is seen positively at least in nationalist circles because they credit him with bringing down British rule over India.
So the point is: for any given historical topic, every society in space and time has their own image of it, which can be very different from each other, even contradictory. Finding out what these views are like is certainly useful and interesting, but one should probably not overly blame people for not knowing the full historical reality.
Actually, Vikings were quite active as traders all around European coasts, from Baltic to Mediterranean. Also, they created/modernised governance for at least two major European nations (Russia and England).
I don’t think the understanding for the Vikings runs that deep. Most people see the Vikings as the marauders not the settlers or colonialists, which is something that modern historians agree with. A farmer isn’t a Viking.
Best to say danish law, not viking law. Therefore people are happy with the pillaging and raping and slaving, in a way they aren’t for other historical groups.
>Actually, Vikings were quite active as traders all around European coasts
Yes, they were quite good at acquiring and trading slaves in multiple markets.
That too, but far from only slaves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_during_the_Viking_Age
*Rus', not Russia. There's an argument that Ukraine is closer to being the Kievan Rus' descendant while Muscovy was heavily influenced by/basically a creation of Mongols. Like Manchukuo surviving into modern times and claiming to be the rightful descendant of the Imperial China. I don't know if you'd agree, but anyway Rus' seems more accurate. Not to mention that the name most likely means the Vikings as an exonym derived from Finnish ruotsi, or directly from the same origin.
You are right that the English name of the country did not become Russia until well after the Viking age.
Not sure in which sense Ukraine is a more direct "descendant" of Rus' though, given that it did not exist as a state before 1918. The last relatively independent Rus' principalities on modern Ukrainian territory were annexed by Poland and Lithuania in XIV century. The elder Rurikid branch ruled continuously over Rus principalities in the North-East and then Muskovy and then Russia until the XVII century and it is hard to dispute state continuity from Rurikids to Romanoffs. Actually, Lithuania has arguably a better claim to a continuous state and cultural descent from Rus', at least until the polonisation in XVI-XVII centuries.
As to the Mongols, there were several Rus' principalities that never subjugated to Mongols (like Polotsk and Pskov), but none of them were located in modern Ukraine.
Not sure, perhaps I distorted the idea or it was more political, along the lines of "With the way Russia acts they would be better described as the political descendants of the Golden Horde".
Anyway, with Kyiv being the capital of Ukraine I don't think it's fair to mention only Russia as a modern Eastern European state owing some of its history to the Vikings.
Though I'm not really sure it was a positive thing. Reminds me of the Soviet joke about time travelers who went to Ancient Rome to find a rally with the signs "Forward to feudalism, the bright future of humanity!". If the default state was "Vikings robbing and capturing slaves regularly" then sure, a Viking state that went about robbing in a more organized manner while protecting the Slavs from other threats and maybe doing something useful in the meantime was an improvement. But compared to "no Vikings at all"? If having more centralized/modernized governance is an improvement, I'm still not sure the Vikings were well-suited for the job, so perhaps having some Central European conquerors or Byzantine missionaries inducing the native leaders to start the modernization a few decades later would've played out better.
It is quite a stretch to describe Russia as "political descendant of the Golden Horde" as opposed to a descendant of the Rus' principalities. One would need to ignore obvious linguistic, religious, dynastic, architectural, and legal continuities with the Rus'. Perhaps, one could argue that tax collection mechanisms and establishment of the absolute monarchy can be traced to the Horde. But these are pretty standard elements of late feudalism and they happened in many European countries, from England to Hungary, at roughly the same time without any Horde influence.
It is quite weird to ignore this continuity from Rus' while claiming the continuity for Ukraine which literally did not exist before 1918 and has a 500 years gap between the last independent Rus' principalities on its territory and 1918. This sounds like modern Ukrainian political propaganda and is honestly puzzling for me. Today, it is quite clear that Ukraine has a much stronger claim to be a "proper" "real" state than most countries. This claim is backed by well documented events of the last 35 years (and especially last 3 years.) What is the point in backing this claim also by made up interpretations of events that happened 800+ years ago?
Probably claims that Russia is the successor of the Kievan Rus' feel more than just academic on the 12th year of Russia claiming its "historical" territories.
In what way did they modernise Anglo-Saxon government? Even if you count the Normans as quasi-Viking, my understanding is that they inherited a much more sophisticated state structure than the one they had previously (and that this was one of the major prizes of conquering England).
Yes, I counted Normans as Vikings here. Not sure what "sophisticated" means in this sense. A proper census (the Domesday Book), a proper Exchequer, a system of centralised royal power with feudal landholding, and a system of garrisoned castles to enforce this control were all created by the Normans in the immediate aftermath of the conquest.
I don't think it's obviously right to call William's Normans Vikings. One might argue they were more French than Viking at that point. And you can't make the same claims about Svein Forkbeard and Cnut the Great modernising England.
Yes to Domesday Book (although it was only the administrative heft of the existing English state that made it possible — nothing like it could have been attempted in Normandy) and castles (although these were a French innovation, not a Norse one), both of which were new — but what do you mean by a proper exchequer? Afaik the English (pre-1066) were the only regime in Northern Europe with a standardised coinage, and their state apparatus for collecting taxes and mobilising royal income far exceeded anything in Scandinavia or Normandy (and enabled Aethelred the Unready, and later William I himself, to raise the immense sums needed to buy off Viking raiders). Feudal landholding, again, reflected the Frenchification of the Normans rather than their Viking roots. I’d add, to a list of Norman modernisation projects, a huge reduction in slavery in England after the Conquest, but this is maybe the most obvious case of the Normans having already adopted the new, Christian norms of the Gregorian Revolution that was sweeping France at the time. Cutting edge, yes; Viking, very much not.
A Domesday Book equivalent was indeed not compiled in Normandy (or anywhere in France) at the time. It is not clear why one would think it was impossible - neither Normandy not France were going through such a wholesale state reorganisation at the time, so there was no dire need to take stock of all assets. The only roughly contemporaneous census of similar scale was undertaken by (surprise!) Normans in their Southern Italy lands in mid XII century (the first compilation of Catalogus Baronum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalogus_Baronum)
The Exchequer was the agency established by Henry I to collect, audit, and disburse government revenue. It also arbitrated on tax and financial matters and both the judicial system and the modern Treasury grew out of it.
Ok, but Henry is two kings later and any claim of Vikingness is getting a bit tenuous by that stage! And surely one would say he formalised and named an existing system there, rather than introducing it wholesale. I think the main reason why Domesday Book couldn’t have been compiled in Normandy/anywhere in France is administrative capacity. I mean, maybe you could have done it as Duke of Normandy, but then it would have been a much smaller job. If you were the King of France, you’d have the additional problem of uppity vassals (not least the Duke of Normandy!) refusing to let your auditors do their work. As conqueror of the only (?) effective unitary state in Northern Europe at the time, William was in a unique position, having both the motive and the means to audit everything. Same applies to “feudalism”: the idea that the king owns everything and everyone else holds their lands on his behalf works very well *and is very necessary* when the king has just led a military takeover of said land, and in fact the system found its purest expression in England.
The Vikings were absolutely not the Normans. Christianity alone, ignoring Normandy being in France, would mark them as a culturally different people.
In fact that’s why I was referencing the difference between attitudes to the crusades and the Viking plunder to begin with. “Converting to Christianity doomed their descendants to ignominy”. This isn’t new of course, the crusades have been in bad odour since the reformation.
Vikings were not Normans - agreed. However, it is less obvious that Normans were not Vikings :)
Normandy being in France is not very relevant here, as it tells us very little about the culture of XI century Norman rulers.
It is true that Normans in XI century were Christians, spoke French, intermarried with French, and adopted many other elements of French culture, including mounted warfare. However, they were still quite distinct from French and kept a few elements of their Viking culture in areas such as inheritance and governance. However, the key aspect here is the ability to launch large scale amphibious assaults. Vikings were able to perform them. There is no reason to believe that a random French duke with a tenuous dynastic claim was capable of such a feat. Indeed, no French or European force over the next 900 (!) years was capable of such an assault on British Isles.
When the Normans landed, most of the English army was on the other end of the country, fighting the Danes. The big battle happened on land, two weeks later, when the English arrived.
Wikipedia says that William "had to assemble a fleet from nothing", hardly a sign of a culture with a strong naval tradition.
That's the old joke :
Q: how do you tell the difference between a Viking raider and a Viking trader?
A: if you're armed, he's a trader.
I mean, the Normans - nada?
Do you put zero weight on the theory that vikings contributed to common law?
Which link was this?
> Thinking medieval: The large shares of Americans with no opinion about prominent medieval figures reflects the reality that most Americans don't think about the Middle Ages very often. 11% of Americans say they think about the European Middle Ages weekly or more, and another 12% say they think about it monthly. But 42% of Americans say they never think about the Middle Ages, and another 24% think about it only occasionally.
>
> These figures are similar to how often Americans say they think about the Roman Empire. Americans are slightly more likely to say they think regularly about the Middle Ages than to say they think about Rome.
Roman Empire bros... It's all over.
Disappointed with the Roman Empire. Thought it was every day.
Monasteries and vikings are both over 50%, meaning someone out there approves of both.
It is consistent: vikings actually expressed a preference for monasteries, in a way.
My favourite part is that 50% approve of Vikings and another 50% approve of monasteries. I like to think that these are entirely disjoint sets.
I like how the Vikings are right next to the monasteries in popularity.
I think that which cultures get idolized is weird. Take the Ninja -- murderers for hire morphed into noble elite martial arts fighters in the Gaijin mind. Of course, I am with acoup that the worst popularization is actually the Spartans -- a culture which excelled solely at inflicting human misery to their non-free classes, no redeeming qualities like producing great works of art -- but in the public perception their martial valor is greatly exaggerated, so they are the fearless hardcore warriors, not the freaks who initiate their youths by having them murder unarmed serfs.
The Spartans did produce a lot of cool action movie-style one-liners. The other Greeks called it their Laconic wit.
…but so many good stories! I for one want to watch the 9-season HBO biopic/drama on the life of Harold Hardrada…
Poul Anderson wrote a series of novels about him.
Any good?
I liked them. They are straight historical fiction, no fantasy element, but they still have Anderson's voice. Hardrada had an interesting life, and I gather the books are a true to what's known, though of course the details are Anderson's.
Probably not as much detail as a nine-season biopic, but what HBO would add would probably be pretty annoying. :-)
The Vikings contributed violence, maritime navigation, and about 30% of the cultural fusion that is the English. The latter two are things that are really important to who we are today, so it's understandable that we'll romanticize the violence a bit.
And I think you're confusing "the descendants of the Vikings" with "Scandinavians". "Viking" isn't an ethnicity, it's a job description, and the job was getting on a boat and sailing hell and gone from Scandinavia in pursuit of fortune and glory. Modern Scandinavians are descended from the ones who *weren't* Vikings; actual Viking descendants are, well, pretty much everywhere else you might find blondes. And yes, having more fun.
I think they became more sympathetic because of their inability to win a Super Bowl.
All that's really left for them now is to refer to it as "Sports Bowl" and maybe start a rationalist blog.
They were traders and left a fragmentary but noble literature behind. I wouldn’t want Egil Skalligrimson for a neighbor but his saga is fun to read.
What’s really “odd” is approving of both Vikings and monasteries, as Vikings were fond of looting monasteries. It would be more consistent to approve of both Vikings and saints, as the Vikings gave people opportunities to die defending the faith.
Sounds like the Vikings approved of monasteries. Lots of good loot all gathered into one spot.
7. Look at diplomats moving to poorer/richer countries.
Even there, the most prestigious ambassadorships are places like France, not Bangladesh
Can you get an ambassadorship to France without being rich?
My understanding was that being named ambassador to France is just a reward for generous political donors, and that the job has no particular responsibilities. Ambassadors used to represent their countries' interests, but we have direct communication now.
There's a lot of people at an embassy, not just the ambassador.
The people at an embassy don't have a choice about where they go.
(Not quite true, they have an extremely limited amount of choice.)
For example, France would be considered a "good" assignment, and you're not allowed to have two of those in a row.
That's exactly what yo want for a randomized experiment, no?
Well, I thought the thrust of your comment was to look at where people choose to go when they have the choice. I guess you can still make the argument that we can see that France is where they want to go regardless of whether they have the choice. But you can't see that by looking at diplomats moving to places.
I was thinking of asking people about how they feel when they get assigned to different places.
7 (relative income): Within the same social class, higher relative income is great. If the low income people aren't in your same class, there are a bunch of negatives that show up. Discrimination, targeted crime, guilt, etc. Also, it's low-class to admit to your higher-class friends that you're enjoying your newfound slum king status.
29 (COVID reckoning): The people who still support the enacted covid policies also still falsely belief that they were effective. A combination of self-deception and lies by government and media keeps it this way. No-one wants to contemplate that the massive suffering we endured for years, and the massive economic damage we caused, was all for nothing.
I realize I sound like a crank saying this. I'm not trying to convince anyone about the object level here. Just pointing out that the informational environment was very bad and continues to be bad.
Furthermore, you should compare these numbers to the % of the population that supports stuff like executing terrorists without trial and other anti-freedom positions, which are consistently very popular.
Among people who are intellectually capable of understanding the trade-offs, there does need to be a reckoning.
Re: 7, well-put. Relative income hypothesis is likely true but there's a definite lower bound; as the colloquial wisdom goes, the worst thing about being poor is living around poor people.
Class is a good way to put that factor, among other cultural traits, and Big Bang Theory had a pretty good model of a certain interaction- specifically the fundraising episode, directly stating that the very rich *do* enjoy a certain "academic king status."
Whether continued support for covid policy is justified or not, it is. Which makes a reckoning unlikely. The actual merit and the popularity of covid policy are completely seperate questions.
You are doing a pretty good job of perpetuating the bad information environment by pontificating like a crank. Even 9th graders learn to at least cite their sources when making claims, and I think this whole discussion would be far more fruitful if we could all agree to meet even that standard.
Stating a belief without citing sources is epistemically neutral.
You are free to read my entire post with a big "if" appended to the front: "IF covid policy was disastrous, then many people would have a hard time admitting it." That's a straightforwardly true claim.
> cite their sources when making claims, and I think this whole discussion would be far more fruitful if we could all agree to meet even that standard.
I am not the guy you replied to but…
You haven’t even met the standard of rebuttal either, by your own standards, nor the standards of courtesy.
The productively non-hypocritical way to respond to that would be to say "actually I disagree and think our Covid policies were beneficial and here are a few links that support my position" instead of just being an equally-crankish naysayer.
This is the conservative bubble Scott was asking about.
Sample size of 1, but if tomorrow I suddenly became thoroughly convinced that those COVID policies were ineffective, I expect that belief wouldn't make me angry in the slightest. It was a novel situation, the stakes were very high and all of the policies that get brought up were things that were plausible at the time as being helpful[1]. I'm not going to get angry at either scientists or government officials who needed to act fast with incomplete information for making an honest try to save lives.
Of course, your belief system around this mentions "lies by the government and media," but this very much *does* seem to stray into crackpot territory. I mean, governments around the world adopted similar policies for similar reasons. And there's nothing resembling a plausible motive for them *all* to be deliberately deceptive about it. The amount of evidence that would be necessary to promote this to even minimal plausibility is not small.
[1] And still plausible now, AFAIK. I haven't actually seen any evidence that they were ineffective.
I cut governments a lot of slack for picking reasonable but suboptimal policies in march 2020. That's not the problem.
The problem is when those policies were not updated and improved in light of new information. Or when policies were bonkers insane even for a day 1 response.
w.r.t. lies, Anthony Fauci lied to the public "for their own good" (he later testified to this under oath in front of congress IIRC). Zvi extensively documented the whole saga at the time, check his substack.
Several governments chose nonsensical policies without any physical basis for working (e.g. shutting down outside social places such as parks, while allowing indoor gatherings to continue, or even more extreme, prohibiting people from leaving their houses as happened in the UK and Spain, which doesn't pass any sane cost/benefit analysis).
Similarly, when the Floyd protests happened, suddenly the media was completely on board with these massive gatherings, when they had been shrieking about irresponsible protesters spreading the virus the week before. It was a complete reversal of stance, purely due to the political valence of the protests in question.
In my own country, the health minister nonstop beat the drum that "the vaccine is the only way out of the crisis". he said this every week at press conferences. He continued saying this until long after the vaccination rate stalled (at about 70% IIRC), and continued using it as an excuse to not lift restrictions, even though the situation got better and better. In reality, herd immunity was the way out of the crisis, which was going to happen with or without vaccines. That slogan was a moral imperative, completely unrelated to scientific facts.
Then there was this whole situation with "anti-racist" vaccine allocation policies. You remember that, right? Where perfectly good vaccines were thrown in the trash en masse, even while entire countries remained in lockdown. Because god forbid we give out doses in a way that covers the whole population as fast as possible. Again, Zvi wrote about one trillion words about this as it was happening.
That's just off the top of my head.
I think that there were two sensible covid policies:
1. Shut down until eradication and then live as normal (with closed borders) until a vaccine is developed
2. Keep life going as normal, issue warnings and advice
The problem is that most countries tried to pick a middle course between these two. Usually a middle course is sensible, but when it comes to this particular situation it was dumb. Locking down but stopping before eradication gives you most of the costs of locking down to eradication with none of the benefits.
OK, so those don't appear (to me) to be the same goalposts we started with. Your reply would be a great answer to the question "were there some bad decisions/policies made as part of various governmental COVID responses." But I doubt very many people would answer "no" to that question in the first place. Everybody's going to have policies they disagree with (though likely different policies for everyone).
But the original question was about whether there should be "a reckoning over the government's disastrous anti-COVID policies." Your own post said "The people who still support the enacted covid policies also still falsely belief that they were effective." Both of those to me rather strongly suggest a belief in a policy regime that was *broadly* ineffective and likely *deliberately malicious.* That's a whole different order of problem.
Like, if the responses were overall in the right direction, but some people told some lies, and some people pushed some nonsense policies and you're upset about those, the utterly banal democratic response to that is simply to *vote the offenders out*[1]. By the year 2025, that's almost certainly happened to whatever extent it's going to happen. Government is not perfect, citizens vent dissatisfaction with blunders through elections, news at 11. THAT need not be a crankish reaction, when the criticisms are reality based. But that's a *far cry* from saying " the massive suffering we endured for years, and the massive economic damage we caused, was all for nothing." Talking about lockdowns being left a little too long, or scientists losing their head a bit in supporting an unrelated protest movement *will not* get you from Point A to Point B.
[1] Or vote in people who promise to replace them in the case of appointed positions.
The disastrous policy, and the one there still has to be a reckoning for, was not the initial educated guess of "OK, let's lock down, mask up, and socially distance the COVID away". Those policies were wrong in hindsight in that they were a suboptimal and generally ineffective counter to COVID, but they were the sincere best guesses of the experts at the time.
The disastrous policy, and one that some of us at least recognized as disastrous at the time, was the one where those educated guesses were elevated to the status of a civic religion, such that it would be essentially heretical to say "It looks like we didn't get that part right; based on new information we should probably e.g. reopen the elementary schools but close the meat-packing plants". The only allowable response to the continued pandemic was to lock down, mask up, and socially distance *even harder*. But not smarter.
And, yes, the lies were also disastrous and they were policy. To which the answer can't just be "vote the offenders out", because most of the liars weren't elected officials or direct subordinates of elected officials. This was a massive blow to public trust, a commodity which is scarce, valuable, and extremely hard to replace when it is lost.
For all his faults, I'd rather have Anthony Fauci than Robert Kennedy calling the shots on vaccine policy. But for that to happen, we really need the reckoning where Team Fauci says "we were wrong, please forgive us, we promise to do better next time".
"The disastrous policy, and one that some of us at least recognized as disastrous at the time, was the one where those educated guesses were elevated to the status of a civic religion, such that it would be essentially heretical to say "It looks like we didn't get that part right; based on new information we should probably e.g. reopen the elementary schools but close the meat-packing plants"."
OK, but this wasn't a "policy." Like obviously, plainly this was not a policy. It honestly boggles my mind a little bit that a reasonably intelligent person could look at what happened in 2020 and say "yes, that was the way that the people who set policies intended things to happen."
The effect your describing is simply an especially striking manifestation of the decades-long trend of the political polarization of *everything* in the U.S.. It's clearly visible at least as far back as the 90s, but I think social media turbocharged it, and Trump's first term probably added a decent amount of fuel to the flames. In the past, a crisis of that magnitude would have drawn people together, but the U.S. was already so far gone that it simply pushed people farther apart (and made the crazy ones even crazier). The stronger the effect gets, the less the U.S. as a country is able to function: that's not anybody's policy goal.
The way I would describe it playing out is as follows: early warnings of COVID start to filter in, the experts who are taking it seriously (few at first) start to sound alarm bells and suggest action. This sounds premature to almost everyone at first, but starts to look more and more sensible as the scale of the crisis starts becoming apparent. Three major factors determine the political valence of the response in the U.S. First and foremost, the U.S. right already has a longstanding distrust of academia and experts. Second, Trump finds idea of a pandemic to be a very inconvenient one and would rather it not be true; having spend four years surrounding himself with yes-men allows him to live in this preferred reality for longer than otherwise possible, which sets the initial tone for any other government official taking their cues from Trump. Finally, the urban-rural split means that left-leaning folks are closer to the epicenters of COVID in the U.S. and more vulnerable to unchecked community spread: simply put they have more skin in the game, especially early on.
Together this means that by March of 2020 at the latest, the battle lines were already drawn. The blue tribe cultural sphere had been treating COVID seriously for several weeks already, a portion (though certainly far from all) of the red tribe sphere had been treating it as a nothingburger, a hoax or a conspiracy, and once the blue tribe belief started translating into action, the red tribe reaction was basically inevitable. "If they're doing A, we're doing not-A!" Tribal polarization hit hard and fast and robbed policymakers on both sides of options. Millions of red tribe voters believed that all COVID measures were solely about government control: any red tribe official acting on better information was seen as being in on it. Millions of blue tribe voters believed that the red tribe was being dangerous, ignorant and irresponsible in ways that would harm *everyone*, not only themselves: any blue tribe official suggesting laxer safety measures (even if supported by evidence) was seen as recklessly caving to pressure. A few very high-stress months pretty much locked these attitudes in and elevated them to the level of stuck priors. Any suggestion regarding altering COVID safety measures was evaluated in terms of political valence first and foremost, and scientific soundness last (if at all). I think there were lots of people whose main priority through all of this was saving lives and effectively controlling the pandemic, but they still had to live with the reality of the situation, which meant (for example) considering how their words would be heard in this kind of toxic information environment.
Incidentally, watching this play out was what finally convinced me that the U.S. is effectively finished as a nation. Broken beyond possibility of repair. When millions of people implicitly regard truth as downstream from politics (rather than the other way around), there's really no way to re-ground them in reality. At the time, my estimate was between 5 and 30 years before the U.S. undergoes some sort of collapse and ceases to exist as a unified nation under its current form of government: 5 years later, I still think that estimate was sound.
>Among people who are intellectually capable of understanding the trade-offs, there does need to be a reckoning.
Normally, I would agree. But the Dem/GOP splits in those figures look frightening. Is the clarification of the actual pluses and minuses of the options worth pouring more fuel on the fire of the nation's polarization? There is something of a meta tradeoff here (though I agree that keeping the discussion "Among people who are intellectually capable of understanding the trade-offs" would help).
I never supported the shut-downs, but you're making a huge assumption regarding "massive suffering". Lots of people didn't suffer at all, or their lives actually improved because of the shut downs. Mine sure did, even though I didn't think it was good policy. The people who suffered were lonely single people who couldn't go out, people with kids at home, and people living in cramped apartments. The people for whom it was neutral or actively positive were suburban people, people with office jobs, and retired people. There are just as many people in the second category as the first, if not more.
Re: 6: isnt making "a couple of good strategic choices" and then "excuting better" the reason why any company beats any competitor?
Yeah it's a real "dog bites man" story
Yeah, I think the article itself is good. That was the summary which was meant to explain that it wasn't just one thing.
Sorry, I know realize this came off as quite snippy! I just thought it was a bit funny and I'm sure the article is enlightening.
7. Part of the attraction for me of living in Europe is that I am relatively richer than my peers given an American salary while still enjoying all the amenities I would have living in Boston. I think that is an important element of why so many upper middle class Americans work remotely in Europe or retire here. Moving to the „slums“ creates other problems- crime, lack of entertainment options, dining choice, etc. that might make you feel poorer relative to the lifestyle you used to enjoy even if you’re relatively richer than your neighbors.
Don't you get double taxed as an American living in Europe? I would think that cancels out the higher income in many cases, although I guess if you make enough money it doesn't really matter.
There are treaties to avoid that. The price to pay is really that Americans aend up having to use the services of a specialized tax-preparation person for the first few years.
U.S. accountant here. This is outside my specialization, but I remember the basics of how it works.
First you pay however much the country you're in says you have to pay. If that's higher than your taxes in the U.S. would be, then you don't owe U.S. tax. If your U.S. taxes would be higher, you pay the difference to the U.S. So your total tax ends up being the higher of the two countries, rather than both put together.
Americans have all sorts of options to shield income from Europe, if the income is generated in the U.S.
On my modified oat-fiber supplement for plasticizers: first of all, thanks for linking! It's still being prototyped and tested, but if you're interested in becoming a beta tester when it comes out (and getting updates on progress), you can sign up on the website: neutraoat.com .
With regards to the difference between microplastics and plasticizers: microplastics are the little bits of plastics themselves, plasticizers are the chemicals that make plastics soft and malleable. When you hear about the negative health effects of microplastics, like hormonal disruption and cancer, that usually has to do with plasticizers. There are dozens of plasticizers, each of which interact with the body differently, but many of them, like BPA, have been convincingly linked to endocrine disruption and other negative effects in humans and animals. I've summarized evidence here: https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/the-evidence-on-plasticizer-health .
On a side note, I'm very interested in talking to people who are involved in the supplement world and the D2C world more broadly. I feel confident on the scientific side, although there's a lot of work ahead, but D2C is a new world for me. If that's you, or if you know someone who's involved in that world, please contact me at trevor [at] neutraoat.com .
What causes the buildup in plasticity in the body then? How does it seep into the water supply.
33. If you wanted to maintain the taboo against a President invoking Art II authority against a SCOTUS decision, then it should have been enforced against Pres Biden when he ignored a SCOTUS decision to do student loan forgiveness - and bragged about it.
Nobody on the right is going to listen to complaints about "due process" when millions of illegal aliens were let in with zero vetting or process. The "process" that is "due" to an illegal alien is deportation. This applies to roughly every single procedural complaint against Pres Trump; there is a Pres. Biden analogue ready at hand. Remember when Barack Obama drone striked an American citizen? Where were the calls for vigilante justice and armed insurrection then?
I remember a lot of tsking, i.e. quietly negative remarks, about that Obama example, and the big difference is that Obama didn't loudly defend it and seek to replicate it.
Yes, if you're quite about it and have most of the media apparatus biased in your favor, you can get away with a lot more.
There's no "get away with it" about this. Did you miss the part where I wrote "didn't ... seek to replicate it"? Trump does.
This is some variant of 'isolated demand for rigor'. Obama killed an American Citizen, went quiet, and didn't ever say anything that I've heard about, about not doing it ever again. I think he considered that a valid tool in his toolbox and haven't heard anything strong statements to the contrary.
Trump and Co. have said quite a lot about the need to deport at scale to fix what they see as an emergency caused by, and the responsibility of, the prior administration. Side effects of that would likewise be the responsibility of the prior administration due to the impossibility of providing due process at the scale needed to remedy the problem.
"Due process" , let's just discard because it's difficult.
Remember the bipartisan bill that Trump told the Republicans to withdraw their support from? That was going to add a whole ton more enforcement and judges so that we could deal with the immigration issue while providing "due process." But Trump the candidate wanted the issue and his solution the 10+ million illegal immigrants is deporting 200 people who may or may not be illegally in the US to a foreign prison.
The prior administration DDOSed the current adminstration with at least 5,000,000 illegal immigrants imported into the country. There are ~700 immigration judges in specific locations scattered around the country and each trial . What is the reasonable remedy you propose to the current administration who were elected with broad support to undo this, which would scale feasibly? What specific error rate is acceptable, recognizing that courts and due process all have non-zero error rates as well?
Obama didn't have to say anything about not doing it again, to differentiate himself from Trump. All he needed to do was refrain from boasting about it and seeking to replicate it. Big difference.
The defense you postulate for Trump would be slightly more believable if he were taking any care at all to limit his deportations to those he says he's trying to deport. It would also be slightly more believable if he weren't pretending to make obeisance to the need for due process while actually evading it. In other words, he knows he's doing wrong, he knows he's lying.
Also this entire argument is dumb because Trump ordered a raid that killed his 8yo American half-sister almost immediately after taking office. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Nawar_al-Awlaki
>I think he considered that a valid tool in his toolbox and haven't heard anything strong statements to the contrary.
I think he realized it was a tool that would generate too much blowback to be worth the bother, and I haven't heard any strong statements to the contrary.
Since AFIK he *didn't do it ever again*, does it matter which is true?
People will tolerate a single injustice where they won't tolerate an ongoing pattern of injustice. They will forget what isn't being talked about and focus on what is. And they are right to do so. If you're concerned about maintaining a taboo or setting a precedent, it's the things that happen repeatedly and openly and to cries of "we meant to do that!" that are *most* important. Since nobody has the bandwidth to fight and win every battle, those are the ones to prioritize.
Also, it is entirely possible to provide due process at the scale necessary to remedy the immigration policy. It isn't even all that expensive. It does require *some* effort, and it does require acknowledging that yes, due process is a requirement, and that's apparently too much for the Donald.
Did he not seek to replicate it because of the relatively small amount of quiet complaining, or because it was an unusual and rare situation that didn't necessarily need replication on a regular basis?
If a "relatively small amount of quiet complaining" was enough to keep him from replicating it, that itself vastly differentiates himself from Trump, who isn't stopped by very loud protests. I'm not trying to defend Obama's action here, just inoculating against "whataboutism".
Per above, Trump was elected on a platform to specifically undo the immigration behavior of his predecessor. This differs from Obama being elected on a platform of drone striking American citizens abroad. What remedy should Trump pursue to remove ~5,000,000 illegal immigrants that scales and has acceptably low error rates?
That's half the question. Was that enough, or were there simply no other American citizens in positions to be drone-struck? That's the distinction. Doing it once and stopping because you recognize the error of your ways is importantly distinct from doing it once because there was only one situation where it was needed.
Was Obama punished for illegally killing a US citizen? If no, then he did get away with it.
I don't think anybody said he didn't "get away with it" (which implies he did it deliberately). The discussion was over comparing his attitude towards it with Trump's.
You said "there's no 'get away with it' about this", which implies he didn't get away with it, surely?
>which implies he did it deliberately
I'm not sure it's possible to accidentally order a drone strike on someone, is it?
When you say 'most of the media apparatus', what are you talking about? The top most watched programs, podcasts, youtubers, etc. are all distinctly right leaning. More generally, the GOP has control of the presidency, house, senate, and SCOTUS, so why are you still acting like the GOP is the underdog?
I'm not acting like they're the underdog, I'm acting like they've had minimal cultural influence for about 40 years and that there's an incredible level of traditional media bias against them. "New media" is a weird, amorphous, heavily siloed set of phenomena still early in development and reach.
Also the GOP does not have "control" of SCOTUS. You think a GOP-controlled SCOTUS would've written Bostock? Or would've written the loopholes into Harvard v SFFA like Roberts did to ensure they can keep discriminating?
Joe Rogan is very popular, yes. Until *literally this election*, nobody in the government (or any other government) took him or his supporters seriously. The NYT gets taken seriously, and for some psychotic reason they're pushing violent morons like Piker now. There's a whole ecosystem of established traditional media that gets taken seriously and keeps out newcomers (like, again until quite recently, who gets access to the White House media room was decided in large part by the Associated Press).
Podcasts and youtubes may have lots of subscribers, but most of them are wildly siloed. They don't, as the kids say, *build*. They have no organized goals. They grift to enrich themselves and their sponsors.
> If you wanted to maintain the taboo against a President invoking Art II authority against a SCOTUS decision, then it should have been enforced against Pres Biden when he ignored a SCOTUS decision to do student loan forgiveness - and bragged about it.
Accepting this framing for the sake of argument, there is a profound difference in subject. Biden's decision was concerned with how the government managed its money, whereas the Trump decision affects the basic right of people to liberty and freedom from imprisonment.
Both the common law and US constitution independently protect the right of habeas corpus, independently of statute law.
> Nobody on the right is going to listen to complaints about "due process" when millions of illegal aliens were let in with zero vetting or process. The "process" that is "due" to an illegal alien is deportation.
You're begging the question here and also ignoring inconvenient law.
First, it takes a proper hearing to determine whether a human person in custody is in fact an illegal alien. People don't come with their immigration status stamped on their foreheads.
Second, US law provides far greater ground to remain in the country than a bare 'illegal aliens are bad' statement would suggest. The law permits applications for asylum, and once filed 'due process' requires a fair and impartial hearing of that claim. The law also independently prevents removals in some circumstances, which again trigger 'due process' rights. It's fair to disagree with the benefit of these legal entitlements, but such changes *must* go through Congress.
Third, the US appears to be playing fast and loose with legal residents as well, including revocation of study permits for speech-based reasons followed by prompt deportation with no or only cursory hearings.
> Remember when Barack Obama drone striked an American citizen? Where were the calls for vigilante justice and armed insurrection then?
There were plenty of right-wing militias who vehemently disagreed with a variety of Obama-era actions.
More profoundly, there's also a difference between a one-off bad action from a government and systematically bad actions from government. Doing a bad thing is bad, but a bad thing done once can often be handled through ordinary channels.
Doing a bad thing repeatedly is a sign that the system is broken and that normal feedback mechanisms aren't working, so extraordinary correction might be necessary.
Remember, vigilante justice and armed insurrection are generally bad things. We shouldn't call for them lightly, but it's easier to exercise restraint when we can also be confident that the other branches of government are still functioning.
"Changing a bunch of numbers in digital bank accounts that the government owns is equal to snatching people off the street and sending them to a foreign gulag." Is that the argument you are going with?
Also, the drone strikes didn't stop after Obama left. Trump increased them in his first term but removed the public reporting that the Obama defense department did.
Drone striking American citizens? Citation please. Drone strikes in general are for better or worse an element of war going forward.
Not sure what you're asking. The Obama administration argued fairly successfully that American citizenship was no barrier to the strike that killed Al-Awlaki per standard war powers of the Executive. That was certainly a major escalation in terms of black-letter policy, but IMO a correct one; the only real novel part was specifying an individual ahead of time. Unless I missed something, no following president has repudiated that power.
If we are saying this can happen and due process in this case is different than due process for 'normal' American citizens then where does this sit relative to claims of necessary due process over Garcia, who was not an American citizen and saw 17 judges during his various treks through the court system while here?
What makes Trump uniquely bad in this regard vs Obama, and what are the limiting principles that define bad behavior and good behavior? Is it just 'they got re-elected so it was good'? Might makes right?
If this is purely a political discussion then this group should not wrap themselves in the cloak of due process and the law. If it is a legal discussion, which of these, if either, was legally based?
No if. American citizens have specifically been targeted for death via military action, and died as a result - matter of public record under Obama, less sure about the details under Trump but that's the "removed the public reporting" element in play. Drone strikes *did* markedly decrease under Biden but that's another topic entirely.
What constitutes due process is a contextual thing, to perhaps a surprising extent. What an executive can order the military to do to a specific individual in the context of a military campaign is *very* different from what the executive can order law enforcement to do domestically. (No, nobody serious is buying the "invasion" rhetoric.)
"Contextual" does not mean "whatever I feel like".
>Changing a bunch of numbers in digital bank accounts that the government owns
You took out the loan you pay back the loan.
Of course. But "forgiving a loan" and "shipping people off to be tortured in foreign prison" are two different things and one is word than the other.
This argument is falling into the one case is a tragedy, a million cases is a statistics.
A number I saw for Biden’s loan forgiveness program is $188 billion with a B. PEPFAR, the program that many of the left decried when its budget was temporarily suspended in the USAID kerfuffle has an annual budget of $6.5 billion. How many PEPFARs can be funded with $188 billion?
0
PEPFAR was started by a Republican president and has been lauded for more than a decade for saving millions of lives at comparatively low cost.
Trump/Musk killed it anyway. It only survives because the courts stepped in.
If Biden had funneled another 20 billion into PEPFAR or made a similar program.... Trump still would have tried to kill it.
As you said, PEPFAR is a rounding error in a the federal budget.
I am pointing out PEPFAR as a program that does good and I support. I would support efforts to get the valuable parts re-instated on a more permanent basis. Trump only reinstated it on a temporary basis, which might have lapsed.
I was making the argument that $188 billion is alot of money and there are always trade-offs. $188 billion for student loan relief vs $188 billion for PEPFAR like programs.
Biden could have renewed it for the usual 5-year period instead of only one year. Perhaps that wouldn't be enough to save it, but I think it would have helped.
You must not be a fan of Trump and all his bankruptcies, then!
Yeah, I'm not a fan of Trump.
not how it works for any other category of loan
you charge interest, you accept risk
The second order effect of "changing a bunch of numbers in digital bank accounts" is pretty significant inflation, which has all kinds of negative effects on its own.
Foreign gulag is still worse, but "student loan forgiveness" is effectively printing massive amounts of money, not merely changing a few unimportant numbers.
I'm fascinated by the theory of mind of people who legitimately believe that Biden's 4 years in office means we no longer live in civilized society and that we've returned to a hobbesian state of nature where anything is fair game.
Can you explain your position more? Also, where do you get your news / information?
I can't speak for OP, but I think it's more like the right wing has a laundry list of specific violations the left wing committed during the Biden years, and if Democrats didn't hold Biden accountable for those violations, they're not willing to hold Trump accountable for them. It's just tit-for-tat.
(That's why OP says, "This applies to roughly every single procedural complaint against Pres Trump; there is a Pres. Biden analogue ready at hand.")
The easiest way, I think, to understand this sentiment on the right is to look into the Trump 34 felonies case. A lot of the right-wing arguments about left-wing norm violations are pretty weak, but this one is understandable.
Did you know that the specific crimes he was charged with in that case can't conceptually exist unless he's guilty of some initial crime? They're all "add-ons". Look into it. And, if you can, try and find out when he was charged, tried and convicted of that initial crime.
You won't be able to, because he wasn't. The New York court assumed, without anybody having tried or convicted him, that he was guilty of the initial campaign finance violation, and then convicted him of 34 additional felonies that depended on it. Now, apparently, there are complicated legal reasons why this wasn't technically a violation of Trump's constitutional right to due process.
But, also, they did this during the 2024 Presidential campaign, like 8 years after the events being litigated took place; and nobody else has ever been charged with that combination of statutes. Unique legal theory; convenient politicized timing; dependence on being considered guilty of an untried crime...
It's super fishy. I mean, common sense says Trump is obviously guilty; but the whole idea of due process is that common sense shouldn't come into it.
So anyway, from the Republican perspective, if they can do it to Trump, and get away with it (which, so far, they have) then they'll do it to any Republican they want. Which means that, de facto, Republicans don't have the right to a trial. They watched their chosen avatar punished for a crime he never got to defend himself against in court. And there are tons of other (less convincing) examples of right-wing people being denied due process, enough for them to make a long, systematic-looking list.
So why shouldn't ICE do to some random member of MS-13 what the State of New York did to Trump? Same-same, one set of rules. When Democrats object to ICE violating due process, it sounds to Republicans like they're advocating a two-tier system of justice: non-citizen human traffickers are first-class citizens who deserve full due process rights, while native-born Republican presidential candidates are second-class citizens who don't.
In my opinion, their primary motivation is not wanting to be second-class citizens. They have these long lists in their minds of stuff that they've been complaining about for years; and everybody laughed at them and treated them like idiots, and the Democrats got away with it. So now, when Trump does that same stuff, and Democrats complain about it? They laugh.
(I myself don't agree with this, I have a more complex view; the Republicans often are idiots who deserve to be laughed at. Many of their complaints are stupid. I'm not trying to defend the Republicans here; just explain them. ICE obviously ought to respect due process; and the 34 felonies verdict will probably eventually be overturned by a higher court -- so it's not actually the example of systematic due process denial they want it to be.)
As a final note, I would guess that the way to appeal to these people is to address the past. They feel like victims, and liberals who want to convince them of stuff would get really far just by acknowledging their feeling of pain. They have a lot of pride, and many of them would be offended to see me framing it this way. But, I think if you were to start your appeal to them with "Trump shouldn't have been convicted of those 34 felonies; it was a due process violation, and it should be overturned", or "it was a miscarriage of justice for the FBI to lie to the FISA court in 2016", then they would probably listen to you advocate for due process for undocumented immigrants. But their basic assumption is that all liberals agree with denying due process to Trump, and so if you go straight into advocating for it for undocumented immigrants, they'll ignore you because they think you're a hypocrite.
The shorter answer is that Republicans are delusional and consistently lie about reality. When Trump runs for a 3rd term their response will be "Democrats shouldn't have tried to steal the 2020 election." The moron original commenter thinks Biden defied a Supreme Court order that was as general as "All student loan debt forgiveness is unconstitutional" and there were 0 contempt inquiries into it. There is no reaching these people because they don't live in reality.
>The New York court assumed, without anybody having tried or convicted him, that he was guilty of the initial campaign finance violation, and then convicted him of 34 additional felonies that depended on it.
This is a pathetic misinterpretation. Cohen pled guilty in 2018. The Trump trial was about proving Trump aided him by falsifying business records, which elevated the misdemeanor counts to felonies, because he was falsifying business records while aiding someone in committing another crime. https://codes.findlaw.com/ny/penal-law/pen-sect-175-10/ There's no complicated legal reasoning here, you are just not living in reality and are ruining this country with your willful ignorance/lying.
I'd encourage anybody who's interested in the details to look at:
https://www.nycourts.gov/LegacyPDFS/press/PDFs/People%20v.%20DJT%20Jury%20Instructions%20and%20Charges%20FINAL%205-23-24.pdf
and make up your mind for yourself! I don't think TheKoopaKing's reading of the case is accurate, but who cares what we think? You're able to settle for yourself whether the predicate crime was supposed to have been committed by Trump or by Cohen.
And, more importantly, you should decide for yourself whether the legal reasoning involved matches your idea of due process; and whether you'd like ICE to apply similar reasoning. This is the particular "whatabout" connection that's happening in right-wing minds, which I'm trying to illuminate.
Since I'm trying to build bridges and foster mutual understanding here, I'm not going to get mad at TheKoopaKing's insults. Particularly since his or her ire seems to be directed at Republicans, who I'm not particularly interested in defending or identifying with. Besides, I feel like he or she has made a few of my points for me; so I'll be content to sign off here.
>I don't think TheKoopaKing's reading of the case is accurate
It's not just my reading; it's the judge's, the entire jury's, all of news media's that isn't just Republican outrage slop. Anybody who is a moderately normal person is capable of reaching the conclusion that Trump is guilty and that there was no malfeasance in the trial besides Trump violating gag orders by attacking family members of the involved attorneys on social media. It's only Republicans who willingly and carelessly lie that each trial brought against Trump was corrupt and illegitimate and become kindergarteners with respect to their ability to read and interpret laws. Like I said in my initial response - there is no respectable contention provided here that the legal authority Trump was indicted and convicted on - directing Cohen to pay off a pornstar by falsifying business records - was illegitimate. Here is a list of numerous other cases where convictions were secured according to the same statute: https://www.justsecurity.org/85605/survey-of-past-new-york-felony-prosecutions-for-falsifying-business-records/ Saying the court trial was questionable is just a blatant lie that no reasonable person would ever reach or seriously try to pass off as a reasonable question after this has already been litigated in excruciating public detail.
Koopa is out of line imo, and I appreciate you for playing devils advocate.
That said, even if I thought this particular case was total baloney and was just the left trying to get at Trump, Trump was also dead to rights doing obviously bad things in 3 other cases of increasing severity. Those were:
- storing classified documents at mar-a-lago (and bragging about it?!)
- election interference in Georgia
- attempting to stay in power and overturn the results of an election (!!!)
No one ever seems to mention these, and it is WILD that the last one isn't disqualifying! The latter three cases didn't progress fast enough, and they all got dropped because it was the DOJ that was prosecuting them (which obviously was not going to continue the prosecution of their new boss), but he was obviously, brazenly guilty!
I agree that the NY state case has way less meat on it than what I would like to see for prosecuting a presidential candidate, and if that was the only thing that Trump was being prosecuted for of I'd be marching in the streets with the Grand Ol' Party for the obvious political lawfare. But I get the feeling that most people are either forgetting the other three cases out of convenience OR they never knew about them because their epistemological systems didn't have any way for that information to get through.
In the wider context of the other cases Trump was indicted for, I cannot take seriously anyone who is like "well I voted for Trump specifically because I thought the Dems were breaking norms". That was wayyyyyyy gone after J6 / the eastman plot. It's like getting Al Capone on tax charges -- no one thinks that was a violation of norms because it was obvious to everyone who was paying attention what Capone was up to.
Okay, so, you're pretty much at the same place as a right-wing person is at, with the polarity flipped. Liberals are like, "well I voted for Harris specifically because I thought the Republicans were breaking norms" and conservatives don't take them seriously. The conservative list will be something like Russiagate / Covid restriction disparities / 2020 election / Biden dementia coverup. To them, it's laughable to think the Democrats would uphold democratic norms.
Here's a thread outlining that perspective from 2021:
https://x.com/martyrmade/status/1413165168956088321
I don't condone this poster, I think he's insane about a bunch of stuff (although he has put out some darn good history podcasts). But that was the mega-viral thread that pretty much the whole right wing agreed with. And, say what you will, that final sentence is chilling, given the context of the 2024 election.
I guess what I'm trying to communicate is that, the place you're at, where you think Trump is a danger to democracy? Conservatives were mostly in that place already, well before January 6. They lived through a period of severe disillusionment during which they found out that they were naive idiots for thinking that Democrats would obey the norms they learned in civics class. And now that Trump is in power, Democrats are trying to shame them over those same norms.
My hope is that the next President will, explicitly and transparently, give up some power and advantage in order to re-establish the norms that have been exploded; and then that the next President of the other party will uphold that deal.
I remember that thread, and I remember what I thought at the time too after I looked into some of the claims: "lol it's all bullshit". I don't mean that to denigrate on people who got confused, because the noise looks convincing, but _it was and is still noise_. I'm reminded of Scott talking about degrees of freedom (https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/contra-kavanaugh-on-fideism?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=5sutf). People will point to things like "it can't be a coincidence that these underwater rocks look like chiseled brick, it must be Atlantis!" And, no, it's actually just a coincidence.
The same is true here. You don't need any crazy coordination to understand why Trump -- who even in 2016 was way past the norm of every politician who came before him -- would create an environment that *looks* conspiratorial in the normal interactions everyone has with him. Hanhania said something similar recently: that Trump behaves so far outside the norm that our existing systems bend and break. Even the worst of the Russia stuff was because Trump's team was doing legitimately shady stuff with Russia! (And frankly given how the Ukraine stuff has turned out, even I find myself wondering whether there was more truth to those conspiracies than I'd given credit for in the past).
I think epistemology is hard in the modern world, and I'm sympathetic to people who get caught following their empirical institutions down incorrect rabbit holes. But just because the Chinese Robber Fallacy happens a lot doesn't mean it's not a fallacy.
Look, I'm historically a centrist. I never thought our left wing was any more pure than the GOP. But the GOP is dead, it had its face eaten by MAGA. And even though I'm a centrist, I'm first and foremost an engineer and scientist. MAGA isn't a political party, it's a death cult. It is deeply uninterested in truth seeking or scientific process or even doing what's best for the country. There are a million things maga could be doing to actually be strategic about its goals. It could isolate China with hard tariffs while increasing exports from Vietnam. It could massively increase funding for immigration judges and use technology to streamline asylum applications. It could create manufacturing jobs through local defense spending initiatives. And instead of doing anything like that, it's just destroying things in the dumbest way possible.
Based on my conversations with dozens of MAGAs, the only goal is vengeance, at any cost. And the problem I have with that opinion is that it's based on something that is at best a misunderstanding and at worst a malicious attempt by cynical counter elites to grab power (Andreessen, Thiel, Musk, and Murdoch have much to answer for). I voted for Harris because it was obvious after J6 just what kind of person Trump was. The problem is, for a certain class of person, that was exactly why they voted for him. "He's a bastard but he's our bastard"
To be clear, though, I think the average trump supporter is just misinformed. Most Trump supporters I end up talking to are very online and politically engaged. The average trump supporter is like my friends mom in Ohio, who voted for Trump entirely because he said "he would make the economy better". I don't blame her either -- you have one candidate being (more or less) honest and one candidate lying through is teeth. The voter isn't informed enough to know the difference. That's why I spend time arguing here -- in the hopes of piercing some part of the epistemological bubble people seem to be in.
Are you entirely sure and certain that 'Nobody on the right is going to listen to complaints about "due process' is the argument you want to lead with? There's a lot of other things that are infantile and foolish about your post, and we can get into the specifics of it, sure.
Just: to be clear on this point, are you entirely sure you know what you are suggesting here? Have you actually thought about what that means? I get that it can be fun and charming to boldly declare that you are not interested in petty concerns of the law, because [big important thing] must be done [now] otherwise [bad nogood thing] occurs and so we shall ignore due process!
Just keep in mind: An illegal immigrant, by definition, as in, the meaning of language itself, cannot be illegal if there is no process by which to determine this. You lose the ability to declare them illegal at all if you abandon the conceit of laws. There is no legality in that world.
Giving up on the concept of rules and a law abiding society does not lead to the place you think it does, and the (seeming) rampaging hordes of millions you are so concerned with would appear to have a sizable advantage in deciding the outcome of any dispute if you abandon the conceit of dispute resoluton via legal abitration and due process.
That invokes, by its shape, what we might call 'alternative means of dispute resolution'.
You probably do not wish to leave in that world.
I agree with everything you say. I just wish these principles were applied equally to all.
Does the point that due process is meant to protect YOU not resonate with you at all? Due process exists to protect the rights of everyone, not just the people currently being subject to it. Once it starts to erode, your chances of being denied due process go up, because we have already conceded that in some circumstances it is permissible to do without it, and now we are just arguing about what those are.
I much prefer the world in which we don't argue about that at all.
I think there is an unstated racial element — it’s okay to forego due process, when it comes to people whose skin color is different from mine.
"Does the point that due process is meant to protect YOU not resonate with you at all?"
No, no it doesn't. At least not for a substantial portion of the right. This isn't even trying to argue with you; you can just google "Anarcho Tyranny" and find a lot of conservative writing that boils down to "laws will be maliciously enforced against conservatives and not enforced against liberals". Right or wrong, you're appealing to defense of common rights that a lot of conservatives no longer believe they have.
As whether those are valid...
At the personal level, kinda. Most college kids and corporate workers in the 2010s were very familiar with unjust enforcement of corporate policies and rules against certain groups. More generally though, I think a lot of it and almost all of the more serious stuff involving cops is more people reading malicious intent into deeply dysfunctional bureaucratic systems. Like, even if you're a good person, if you talk to the cops, you should have a lawyer. Not because they're out to get you or they're bad people, more because they're kinda out to get everyone because the system is deeply misaligned.
At the more general level...it was not terribly subtle when Covid lockdowns were an urgent requirement that overruled all other considerations until BLM came along. Some things trump quarantine and some don't. More generally, the ATF seems to be an absolute mess and might be, literally, inventing felonies.
And finally, at the top level, as I will never cease to remind people, that the FBI lied to the FISA courts in 2016 and 2017 in order to wiretap Carter Page and, by extension, the Trump campaign. (1) This is not controversial, the FBI has admitted it, no relevant party doubts it or disputes it. If you're Trump or a Trump staffer, do you believe the FBI and other federal law enforcement will provide you proper due process when they have a proven history of not doing it. And if you're a Trump voter, how are you supposed to interpret this?
(1) https://apnews.com/secretive-fisa-court-rebukes-fbi-over-errors-in-russia-probe-bf5b3cfee4930501ca86242f446f353e
I'm a bit confused about what right you think has been taken away from conservatives. Are they not getting due process anymore? If so, in what circumstances?
I'm not exactly rebuffing your examples. They aren't false. But I'm not sure they're an example of "due process" not being afforded to conservatives in some systemic manner. It's some selective weaponization of law enforcement, and that's bad, but that's not the same as due process.
What difference do you think there is between selective enforcement and due process? Not like an own, I googled the difference and the 3rd thing that came up is this from the American Bar (1):
" A recognized defense in non-tax prosecutions, both federal and state, is that the Government discriminatorily and invidiously targeted the defendant....The defense is constitutional in nature, implicating the Equal Protection and Due Process guarantees"
There absolutely might be some technical distinction you're drawing there but it's a pretty fine line.
More generally, I suspect you'd get more benefit from reading around a bit for the general conservative vibe than my own weird opinions. I see a lot of stuff like this:
https://chrisbray.substack.com/p/when-government-is-endlessly-intrusive
with quotes like this:
"This is Blue Zone governance, full stop, the thing people describe as anarcho-tyranny. Common San Francisco business owner experience: Police don’t intervene in the constant vandalism and tagging that degrades business property, but the highly alert army of code enforcement officers fine business owners for failing to clean up the damage that the city hasn’t prevented."
Because you're asking why due process doesn't resonate with people and, well, I see a lot of people, some quite important, treating due process and equitable treatment as dead letter. (2)
(1) https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/publishing/aba_tax_times/08win/07-ptr.pdf
(2) https://x.com/pmarca/status/1821448118917033989?lang=en
“Here’s some unrelated examples of bad policing/policy enforcement that I don’t like… so basically habeas corpus is dead to me and the executive can summarily banish anyone they want to a third party county”
Where am I reading your argument wrong?
Basically that you're confusing my personal argument with the general public's argument and the general public's argument is usually...kinda dumb. So I'm trying not to motte-and-bailey you.
A safe example is probably Russiagate.
There's a strict case that Russia made moves to interfere with the election with the intent of helping Trump, mostly through various fairly marginal online activities. Which is probably true but was not what motivated most people.
There's also a very loose case that Trump and Putin literally and directly conspired against Hillary Clinton. Which was what genuinely motivated tens of millions of people and is also almost certainly not true.
But it wouldn't be fair to pretend that tens of millions of people were deeply concerned about marginal election interference, even though that charge is overwhelmingly more likely to be true.
Likewise, I think I laid out the more strictly true case in my first post but I also included the second because it's indicative of, no shade to Chris Bray, the more popular and less defensible case that really motivates dramatically more people.
Don't confuse the weird autistic strict arguments you see here with the general epistemic horror show that actually influences real people is all I'm saying.
>Pres Biden when he ignored a SCOTUS decision to do student loan forgiveness
Except that didn't happen. Biden did exactly what Trump did re the "Muslim ban" -- when his initial version was struck down, he enacted a narrower version, and then a narrower one, until one finally passed muster. There is nothing wrong with that.
>when millions of illegal aliens were let in with zero vetting or process.
Not what happened. "Under Biden, DHS made over 5 million arrests in its first 26.3 months, and it removed nearly 2.6 million—51 percent—while releasing only 49 percent." https://www.cato.org/blog/new-data-show-migrants-were-more-likely-be-released-trump-biden The ones who were "let in" were those who were given notices to appear in immigration court.
>The "process" that is "due" to an illegal alien is deportation.
No, the process due to an illegal alien is deportation PROCEEDINGS. Because the law is very clear that not all persons in the country illegally are subject to deportation. They might, for example, be eligible for asylum, or for withholding of removal.
The crazy thing is, Trump is deporting people every single day. Many thousands. But he screwed up in a few instances and rather than fix that problem he's doubling down.
He did not screw up, him or his Cabinet members are directing ICE and DoD to deport people without due process. The AEA proclamation was handed to ICE before it was made public - when the AEA requires the President to make the proclamation publicly to avoid these sorts of secret arrests. Further, the apprehended subjects were removed without the possibility for judicial review - the direct intention of secretly alerting ICE before the public. These were all intentional illegal removals. Since then ICE has testified in court that DoD removed other subjects because the DoD was not formally enjoined in the court proceeding. These aren't mistakes, the Trump admin is criminally directing ICE topdown to break the law.
"complaints about "due process" when millions of illegal aliens were let in with zero vetting or process"
I think ... it *might* even be more than just the right, which has noticed this - which I guess is why we must all be made to swallow, very forcibly, the most extreme and ludicrous example, of a tatted-up Salvadoran wife-beater as the reason the brief experiment with deportations must come to a stop, and never be revived.
Nobody is saying you can't deport people. You just have to follow the process. This is a matter of what is legal for the government to do. We all should have a vested interest in making sure the government is operating without total impunity, it is what safeguards everyone from the impossible power of the federal government, which could be used to enforce anything at any time if not for the constraints that are meant to hold it.
Plenty of people are saying you can't deport people. In fact, in much the same way that the same folks who would have once been in solidarity with Occupying Wall Street are complaining about the stock market tanking (immediate increase in societal equity!) and grousing that it is only so because MAGA are too stupid and poor to have portfolios - are in fact reddit-commenting that they need to deport themselves the sooner to another country because of the deportations!
Of course the judiciary is trying to shut it down. What have we been arguing about the last eight or 10 years? Don't toy with us. I'm not toying with you when I say that my side on the issue feels precisely the same, that years, indeed decades, of cumulative actions have been taken with utter impunity, that led us to this pass.
Who is saying you can't deport people? I don't mean some random reddit comment that reflects the views of a tiny slice of the population. I mean public figures, party playforms, media outlets, anything public. You can find any view you want on the internet in some tiny community, but the view that you can't deport people at all is essentially so minor that it's not worth discussing. Biden even deported millions, he just let millions of others in.
The debate is about the process, and Trump is using a novel, and potentiality abusive, process that deprives immigrants of a hearing they are entitled to have by law, as confirmed by the Supreme Court of the United States.
There's an easy counterargument to this:
https://babylonbee.com/news/people-who-bypassed-legal-process-in-migrating-to-usa-demand-due-process-before-being-kicked-out
Of course, your argument also implies that innocent people will get scooped up; "those who got in without due process shall be sent out without it" presumes that set of people is universally known with certainty.
OTOH, innocent people were getting victimized by open borders policy. So there's also this sense of a bleeding wound requiring first aid, and that aid might hurt more cells. So you'd also need to demonstrate that that due process is worth letting US society bleed out further, and if it turns out you believe the US isn't in that kind of danger (common among people who believe the US can be a haven to the poor, the tired, the yearning to be free), you'll have a very hard time making that case.
Due process exists for the protection of all of us. It is not given based on anything you want or demand or who you are in any way. It exists specifically to bypass any of those concerns. It doesn't matter what they did. Does a murderer not get due process because they killed someone? Surely that's a bigger issue than hopping the border? Of course they do. Because due process prevents mistakes. It creates gaps in the enactment of law where you can plead a case, and those are the only things that protect the innocent. We have trials for the guilty even when it is obvious, because sometimes it seems obvious when it is later proven not to be.
See my reply to Chris.
>Due process exists for the protection of all of us.
Mostly, but this isn't just a binary choice.
Personally, I want ICE to be _very_ careful to distinguish between citizens, green card holders (permanent resident aliens?), valid visa holders, and all-other-aliens. Say at the 0.1% level of accuracy (who am I kidding, can the Trump administration do _anything_ at the 0.1% level?...).
But then distinguishing which of the all-other-aliens have e.g. fully valid asylum claims, and which of them do not might be at a different, perhaps sloppier level. Maybe 20%?
I don't know what is actually feasible here. Anyone have real information?
But there surely are tradeoffs between time spent per person and accuracy, and the tradeoffs can be set differently at different stages in determining someone's status.
Be careful with your numbers. 0.1% failure rate in distinguishing citizens frm others means 300,000 Americans getting deported.
The tradeoffs are currently a big part of the debate. If there were no tradeoffs - for example, ICE could reduce its error rate by 90% with no additional expenditure or impact on anyone's rights - then doing so would of course be a non-issue. They'd just do it as soon as they learned it was an option.
In reality, anything ICE changes policy-wise carries a cost in retooling and maintenance, just like any other organization. That part is eclipsed in the debate by the rights impact, since that's what draws all the clicks. In this case, the impact is not just to people being considered for deportation, but also the rights of people who aren't at risk of deportation, but are at risk of predation by people who happen to be here illegally. One side says that risk is high, and borne completely by actual citizens in order to spare the rights of a smaller number of non-citizens, who shouldn't get priority over actual citizens. The other side says that risk is small or nonexistent; rights of deportation targets are the dominant factor.
That's a terrible counterargument. It boils down to an argument against all due process and a return to pre-modern justice systems. "Murderer who bypassed laws demands due process before being executed," "Thief who bypassed laws demands due process before having hand chopped off". Haha, silly criminals.
Yes. The murder rate in the 90s was off the charts compared to now. Easy to make the same "bleeding out" argument then and just throw the suspects in prison without trial. But we didn't, and we're better off for it.
Shaked Koplewitz makes the argument below (search for "there is a genuine problem"). You're using "due process is valuable" as if it means due process is infinitely valuable. It should be easy to see how leaning on it can deprive you of everything else (or save you, at everyone else's expense).
To those continuing to argue "due process", I'm curious: how long do you think that due process would take? This is not a rhetorical question. Maybe it's minutes; maybe it's years. I suspect that in one or two cases, it was a day, or would have been, and the administration was moving faster than it should have.
But the way I see it, "due process" is a term we can taboo. If it would have taken only a day or less, then the argument to make isn't "follow due process"; it's "it would have taken only a day to check; why didn't you?". And if it would have taken longer, then it becomes clearer why they didn't do that - people were using "due process" to exploit the system. (Someone earlier referred to it as DDoSing the US.)
The timeframe is not what is at issue. It is that only during a hearing could you present evidence to contradict what the government is claiming. Without a hearing there is no way to plead your case.
I in fact believe the whole immigration system needs a big overhaul, a higher budget, more judges to hear more cases, etc. etc. The system takes too long as is. But that doesn't mean you get to bypass it just because you think it's inefficient. It is the only mechanism that allows you to fight back against the federal government's decisions, decisions that can be, and sometimes are, very wrong and harmful.
"The timeframe is not what is at issue."
Suppose the timeframe is a year. We have P people able to do due process to a maybe-US-citizen, and I immigrants. Total immigrants processable per year is P, and if P < I, then the system grinds shut. Every time you claim the timeframe doesn't matter, you pretty quickly lose anyone who understands how slow the government works.
As you say, it probably needs an overhaul. What if that overhaul requires a reduction in the amount of due process done? Possibly to the level currently performed in some of these cases you're talking about now? You mention increasing the judge count; how are you going to pay for their training? And their salaries afterward?
I'll say the same thing I said to Chris: you're treating "due process" like some talisman with infinite weight. You can claim it's what we should do, until the cows come home. But reality gets final say, and what you're probably going to see is immigration services being paid small fortunes to still not keep up with demand, or compromises that will look pretty close to what we're seeing now, or the whole system just comes apart and no one gets due-anything.
This is legally incorrect, and for obvious reasons.
Let's say one has immigrated illegally to the U.S. ICE picks him up. There is a prescribed process and hearing, that is true. But now let's say the determination is made that, yes, he is not entitled to be in the U.S. and can be deported at will, but he is released temporarily pending later deportation.
Then ICE picks him up again. He has a deportation order. But he says ",Wait, actually, I'm here legally." Is another hearing required?
Let's say we give him that hearing too. The deportation order is upheld. Then he says "Wait, I claim asylum." Another hearing?
Let's say he gets that too. His deportation order is upheld again and ICE lays hands on him again to transport him. Now he says "You've got the wrong guy. Mistaken identity." Is another hearing required?
You see the issue. What process is "due" depends on statute, and as one would imagine, the amount "due" gets smaller and smaller as the process continues. At some point, it is simply not true that "a hearing [] to plead your case" is required. And yes, sometimes that endpoint will lead to errors. It doesn't mean that due process has been violated.
I think one of the interesting issues is that this framing misses more or less the whole point? Though I grant that's obviously my opinion, so I could be wrong.
If you take it in terms, it becomes easier to see.
" How long do you do you think the process should take " -- > As long as is legally mandated. Caveat: If unworkable, propose broad-scale large adjustments to the rules. Do not break and violate the rules.
" But the way I see it, "due process" is a term we can taboo. " --> Sure.
"If it would have taken only a day or less, then the argument to make isn't "follow due process"; it's "it would have taken only a day to check; why didn't you?" " --> This is the same question and statement, though. They didn't, because they did not want to, and them not wanting to and making trivial mistakes is avoided by taking a day / week / month to check. Which, again, they do not want to do. And so do not.
"And if it would have taken longer, then it becomes clearer why they didn't do that - people were using "due process" to exploit the system. " --> Were they? What makes you so certain of this? What evidence do you have to reach this conclusion? You didn't check! You *cannot make this claim*!
There's a trick here, and the trick is performing the basic fundamental attribution mistake that you have *pre-emptively declared someone as worthy of criminal/legal/judical/executive proceedings* but you have not *performed the neccessary process by which you check whether this is due*.
It is patently obvious that *if* someone was *explicitly exploiting the system* then dragging out any procedure is an *act of malfeasance*. But the law has capacity to handle these cases too. There are many, many options available for courts and systems that explicitly allow this. We can discuss whether this is optimal or intended (no, yes), but it is factual. This *also* means that if someone is exploiting the system and "ddosing the united states", the united states is not a completely monolithic, passive participant without access to legal council, lawyers, directives, systems, monitoring, oversight, processes and so on designed to handle these things.
However. If one does take the day / week / month to check these things, they do not happen. Then mistakes happen.
You are subtly suggesting, and this is the trick that leads to seriously bad shit, so I am pointing it out plain:
That if the *inconvenience* of a process *outweighs* someones judgement of what they stand to gain from it, they get to not participate in that process. That may work in normal social interaction, but it cannot work in matters of law. The government is not granting us the nicity of not stuffing someone into a van and flying them off to a foreign country where there is no recourse. This is not a polite thing they're doing *until they stop feeling polite*. We can discuss and talk about whether that is the case in some "real" sense of the word, and I'm sure one can leverage arguments for and against, but that is a different conversation. The point of the fact is they must take time to check these things because these are the processes the system is bound by. If there is an issue with how long it takes:
Eg:
"And if it would have taken longer, then it becomes clearer why they didn't do that "
Then their job is to *change the rules* in the legal fashion, as is done and has been done for centuries, and is the foundational point of how lawmaking and civic society works. They do not get put the rules aside on the presumption that someone else is exploiting them, with no proof that is so, because they did not take the day to check.
The timeframe is not an issue.
Asking about it is irrelevant, and it leads to a magic trick, where you're going "Oh, at some point, the implied cost of it becomes so high that the government is allowed to just ignore it".
Not so. The government, as an entity, does not get to perform special pleading of exemption because it does not like the rules and feels it would be inconvenient to obey them. The government is full of big people in big suits who are grown, mature adults. They can handle their issues without blackbagging people. Meanwhile, you cannot in good faith pre-emptively declare that other people are exploiting the concepts the government are violating and that is reason for violating their legal rights. That doesn't work.
There are metrics and systems in place for altering onerous requirements. They exist to prevent people from being shipped off to foreign prisons with no possibility of redress. Once they stopped being applied, people are shipped off to foreign prisons with no possibility of redress.
" (Someone earlier referred to it as DDoSing the US.) " -->
The US is not a single overloaded server at danger of blowing out because it gets a lot of requests. And if it was, an IT professional can resolve a DDOS attack. They are remarkably easy to handle, and require, fundamentally, simply taking the steps to do so. If one does not take those steps, one does not get to use it as an excuse to be upset when malign actors ddos your server infrastructure. When malign actors then do ddos your server infrastructure, one certainly does not get to snatch random, unaligned civilians off of the street on the vague suspecion that they have a laptop in their backpack, bundle them off to a foreign prison, and never, in that ordeal, check if they actually have the laptop, know what a ddos attack is, or have any relation to the on-going situation of your own flawed server architecture.
It is an analogy so stupid it makes me sigh, which, I don't to imply that anyone believing is stupid for thinking. But just, like, c'mon.
Think about it for a second. The Government doesn't work like a server. And if it did, the government has IT professionals. In a very real sense, if we're being sincere, the people flooding the legal architecture with endless spam to overload it and get the stuff they want through the loopholes the systems are too slow to catch seems to be the people doing the grab-and-ship-them-off-to-foreign-countries-which-we-can-do-so-long-as-we-get-to-do-it-before-a-judge-tells-us-we-can't trick.
The people doing the malicious hacking of legal codes in this scenario doesn't seem to be the people that analogy is meant to imply it is!
F> " How long do you do you think the process should take " -- > As long as is legally mandated. Caveat: If unworkable, propose broad-scale large adjustments to the rules. Do not break and violate the rules.
The other side has had a response to this general argument for a long time. The mandates have long been unworkable. Adjustments were proposed long ago. They were denied by footdragging from officials not affected by the downside - in other words, the current due process side got this process because it wanted to and could deadweight it into place, rather than because it was fair.
F> "If it would have taken only a day or less, then the argument to make isn't "follow due process"; it's "it would have taken only a day to check; why didn't you?" " --> This is the same question and statement, though.
It is not the same argument as "you didn't use due process". The question I quoted above assumes the administration wants due process but made a minor mistake it believes will make no difference in said process. The latter statement assumes the administration is generally opposed to due process. If these look like the same picture to you, check again.
F> "And if it would have taken longer, then it becomes clearer why they didn't do that - people were using "due process" to exploit the system. " --> Were they? What makes you so certain of this? What evidence do you have to reach this conclusion? You didn't check! You *cannot make this claim*!
I am not certain of it, but I am also not certain it isn't happening. This is based on decades of experience working in the government, plus decades of accounts from other people I've seen working in government and interacting with it. The capacity of the state to demand process beyond what is "due" has been well known by a lot of people, for generations. It is why "you can't fight city hall" is an aphorism.
In light of the fact that it might be happening, and might not be, my default is to look for better evidence, or for a tiebreaker. So far, most of the evidence is motivated, and not preponderant on either side; and the most evident tiebreaker is people who appear to be here illegally, vs. people who much more certainly aren't.
F> There's a trick here, and the trick is performing the basic fundamental attribution mistake that you have *pre-emptively declared someone as worthy of criminal/legal/judicial/executive proceedings* but you have not *performed the necessary process by which you check whether this is due*.
I've already discussed why people are waving "due process" around like a talisman; this argument just attempts to reassert what I already addressed. The side arguing for deportation is already past fundamental attribution, and into "okay, there seems to be a clerical error in the process, but it looks like correcting this error isn't going to change the ultimate outcome, so this demand for 'due process' isn't actually on principle; it's demanding endless procedure, at expense of other US citizens, and particularly in order to retaliate against an administration you already don't like". That's at least one argument I'm seeing; I recently posted a comment above with more. For more detail, you might want to go to the DSL thread. (At times, there, I've made the same argument you just did.)
In case it matters, it seems pretty clear that Trump is also going after people who are legal migrants. Students on all sorts of visas, obviously (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/4/18/us-revokes-nearly-1500-student-visas-who-are-the-targets), but also just mass cancellations of visas from specific countries (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/05/us/politics/rubio-south-sudan-visas-us-trump.html) and all of the people who went through the legal process set up for expedited review by the Biden admin (https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/03/22/us-trump-administration-revokes-legal-migrant-status-for-500-000-people_6739417_4.html)
> innocent people were getting victimized by open borders policy
> due process is worth letting US society bleed out further
I'm so intrigued by this language! What were the harms of immigration that you were feeling, out of curiosity? Like, what specifically do you think was hurting you / your family / your community? Was it primarily economic? Feelings of an increase of crime? Something else?
ETA: Well, let's see. First link: "students who participated in pro-Palestine protests that erupted on campuses across the country in 2024 during Israel’s war on Gaza" (in response to Gaza's unprovoked attack on Israelis). Second link: paywalled. Third link: doesn't go into detail about the terms of Biden's "scheme" (their word), but I know it came when Biden was retaliating against Trump's first attempt at border control, and the counterargument there is the rise in crime from such immigrants. So it's not for no reason at all; it's far from being all student here on visas, and seems to be based on some sort of analysis of where violent criminals are coming from.
I'm not feeling any personal harms from immigration so far, but neither is the side arguing for better enforcement against *illegal* immigration. In other venues, I argue the other side, and try my best to internalize what each side is saying.
I've been pretty clear that *this is the argument*, and if you're going to impugn the people making it, just for making it, and making it fair for them to level the same attacks at you, I don't see the resulting Condescensionbowl 2025 going anywhere productive. Which is to say, next time I have to argue that illegal immigration enforcements are maybe going too far, the best I'll have to offer on this front are ad hominems phrased as innocent questions, and I'll probably just exercise discretion and let their arguments stand.
I'm sorry that you thought I was being condescending, I legitimately wasn't and you can see other examples in other open threads where I am trying to legitimately understand the mindset of people who openly admit to experiencing no harms from this issue and yet are willing to stake quite a bit on it. To that end, I appreciate you for being honest on this
> I'm not feeling any personal harms from immigration so far
but I have to ask in a follow up: even if I take the utilitarian framing, if you are experiencing no harms from this, and to a first approximation _no one I have asked_ is experiencing any harms from this, why is this the thing that is worth destroying due process over?
Like, elsewhere you argue
> In this case, the argument is that there are cases in which due process ought to dominate, in order to protect civil rights, and there are cases in which due process is itself smothering civil rights because it is being suborned by scoundrels. Ergo, we need to re-examine the justifications behind due process and border control and see if they're still applicable, and to what extent.
surely this is not a case where "due process is smothering civil rights" if no one is feeling any harms?
Replying to your edit:
- to be clear, re students you aren't denying they were here legally? Doesn't that go against the 'those who enter without due process shouldnt expect it on the way out'?
- Here's an unpaywalled link: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/4/7/why-has-trump-revoked-all-south-sudanese-visas
though I'm not sure youre really arguing in good faith, since the headline of the article is not paywalled and gives more than enough information about what I'm talking about. If your only answer is 'paywalled' I don't think youre actually interested in learning.
- https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/cbp-one-overview is what you're looking for, which afaict is a straightforward application of technology to streamline things (you know, like what doge claims to want?) Trump shut it down, of course
If you're an environmentalist, this is not the gotcha you think.
Of course, if you want something more, I might suggest the feeling that your country no longer has a shared culture, and that urban sprawl in the guise of Bazaar of Global Cheap Stuff is not really the consolation prize you might imagine.
And a vague feeling that the boring permanent conversation about school, and the failures of school, and money for school, and where are the people who will teach the school/we told them they were the Wrong People but nonetheless it was their responsibility, and where are they? - will now go on forever and ever, and the same fake platitudes uttered.
And ditto the familiar conversation about where people sleep, and whether we've enough of these people in these beds and so on.
And all the multicult shattered into a thousand pieces. And not even an emperor to unite.
I'll be honest, I read this a few times and I am not really sure what you are saying.
To try and break down what I think you are saying:
- more people coming to a first world country results in a bigger environmental footprint, better to let them stay in their second/third world countries. They may suffer but they won't impact the environment as much.
- something about 'shared culture' -- maybe immigrants create less 'shared culture' than we had before.
- something about cheap commodity goods. For some reason these are bad?
The stuff about school, beds, and 'multi cult' you really lost me on. No idea what you're trying to say.
---
To try and answer this:
- I'm not a degrowth environmentalist who would rather people suffer than just like, develop or industrialize. This is an extremely fringe population, and you may be in a bubble if you think that there are a lot of people advocating for this.
- I love immigrant culture. I'll copy paste my answer above:
> As far as the immigration population generally goes, I live in NYC, and my favorite part of the city is Queens (I lived there for two years) which is basically just a series of ethnic enclaves. It's amazing, these are people who are so excited to be in America! Their neighborhoods are brimming with optimism and they are some of the most patriotic people you will ever meet. And the food is fantastic to boot. Spend a day in Queens and it is immediately obvious to me that the economic game is not zero sum, the way it is portrayed
The country I grew up in cared about immigrants and saw them as the driver of so much American growth and progress. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore." This is our national advantage -- we take the brilliant people and the best parts of the cultures of the entire world and incorporate the best parts into our society. What is the 'shared culture' that you are referring to that you miss so much? Have you personally experienced some sort of a degradation of that culture as a result of immigration specifically? I'll be totally up front: every time I have ever interacted with someone who cares a lot about our 'shared culture', it has always been a dogwhistle for outright racism -- as in, "i want the country to be more christian and more white, and I am uncomfortable with the idea that that may not always be the case". I'm open to hearing your take, assuming its not that.
- cheap commodity goods are good. Sorry, I believe this unabashedly, and every time a cuban immigrant comes to a costco my faith in this is reaffirmed.
"OTOH, innocent people were getting victimized by open borders policy."
WHAT "open borders" policy? When in living memory has the U.S. EVER had an "open borders policy?"
Thanks for the link. If you squint, you can picture the Onion having the nerve to write something like that back in the day.
“Person accused of doing illegal thing demands due process to determine if they actually did it” haha, so funny. How can those dumb liberals not see how ridiculous their position is when we frame it this way?
The bee is shlop
We don't post like this on this forum.
The Bee is not a serious source, it’s providing an obviously bad faith argument to try and be humorous and yet you are trying to pass it off as something deserving of consideration.
I have considered it. It is slop. If you are interested in high minded and fair discussion maybe don’t lead with a poorly done sneering conservative satire piece and get upset when it is respond to in kind.
"Due process" is not a monolith. Different process is due in different circumstances with different people. There was an error with one of the Salvadorians - he was 100% permitted to be deported summarily, and had a standing order to that effect. He just wasn't supposed to go to El Salvador due to his gang affiliation.
Yes, there are different processes for different people. But if they wanted to deport him to El Salvador they would have needed to follow the process of reopening his case and giving him a hearing. They didn't do that.
They could have deported him somewhere else, but they didn't. So they didn't follow his due process. That's the problem.
He wasn't entitled to more due process. He had a removal order. The due process was completed years before. The government screwed up by sending him the one place he wasn't supposed to go - but there wasn't any question of his being allowed to stay.
He absolutely was. If they wanted to deport him to El Salvador they needed to reopen his case and have a hearing to contest the current stay. They didn't do that, so they didn't follow due process.
If they had deported him somewhere else, there was no more due process required. But they didn't, so there was.
He was entitled, before being deported to El Salvador, to stand before a judge and say "this is why I shouldn't be deported to El Salvador". That's due process. Independent of what happened the last time he stood before a judge, which was also due process but a different instance of such.
*Everyone* who is hauled in off the streets and scheduled for deportation to El Salvador, is entitled to that. Which, in most cases, will be a brief discussion of "yeah you've got nothing backing up that sob story and it doesn't match what you said on your tourist visa or whatever, off to El Salvador with you", But sometimes it's a slam-dunk "I guess we can't deport you to El Salvador", and that can be cleared up quickly, and the case for both "Meh, it was a mistake but no harm no foul" and "Oh noes! Due Process is too Hard!" goes away.
If this "tatted-up Salvadoran wife-beater" is so dangerous, why hasn't he been convicted of any crime?
(Also, I shouldn't have to point this out, but "having tattoos" is not a crime.)
You might as well ask why the guy terrorizing the college campus and threatening to blow up little indie shops in my college town, has been arrested dozens of times while convicted or even trialed - never? And never will be?
Americans would go with some other talking point.
But you’re right, maybe these incidents are purely situational - she provoked him and had it coming to her. Like when he got stopped for coyote-ing the illegals that time, she probably bitched at him and said you were probably speeding and that’s why they stopped you. You’re supposed to drive slow.
For the wife-beating? She didn't show up for the final trial, and they reconciled. For other crimes? Well, that's what we're discussing right now: "innocent guy just carpooling to work" versus "caught travelling with a bunch of other migrants, possibly might be doing coyote work".
Especially when that Salvadoran *did* receive due process. A judge declared him an illegal, and a judge declared him a gang member. He was eminently deportable. The only thing he had going for him was an order not to deport him specifically to El Salvador, because his gang and other Salvadoran gangs didn’t get along. I don’t know, and have no way of knowing, whether his deportation to El Salvador was malice or an honest error. But you know, while I am a big believer in due process, I’m not going to lose much sleep over this one. It baffles me that Democrats chose this hill to die on. Are all the rest of the deported even more unsavory than this one?
Well, there’s the guy who was fishing and threw a rock at the endangered heron. He could be a backup. He was deported right quick.
And then there’s the guy the NYT anointed this week, who was ordered deported upon release, when he was convicted of kidnapping in his first year here as an illegal.
I didn’t read the story so it may have been one of those nuanced kidnappings - but Steve Sailer did a funny write-up of the “hell” that awaits him in … Jamaica.
When did Biden have a student loan program struck down and then continue with that very same program anyway? Isn’t the issue that he kept coming back with narrower and narrower programs so that no one could tell whether they were covered by this round or not?
And no, due process does not *begin* with deportation, any more than a trial begins with a declaration of guilt. There is a process involved of proving, or at least providing a preponderance of evidence, that the punishment is due.
Biden's vote-buying scheme was never expected to succeed at the courts. By trying and failing repeatedly and by sending mail to each person individually with his signature stamped on it he got exactly the results he wanted. And he also got the bonus that if not checked at the courts exactly correctly each time, he might even succeed.
I don’t see what any of that has to do with defying court orders. The point of the thread was about defying court orders.
Biden did not ignore any SCOTUS orders or injunctions.
What SCOTUS actually ordered was a lot more moderate than what the headline-grabbing 'SCOTUS STRIKES DOWN STUDENT LOAN FORGIVENESS" headlines would lead you to believe. Their actual order was a limited injunction against a specific program of debt relief for specific types of loans.
The smaller number of loans Biden did forgive were different things that didn't violate that order.
>The "process" that is "due" to an illegal alien is deportation.
Cool, you are an illegal alien, we're going to deport you now.
What, you say you're a citizen? Sorry, there's no process by which you could officially offer evidence to that effect and force us to consider it. Goodbye alien scum!
"Pres Biden when he ignored a SCOTUS decision to do student loan forgiveness" -- people need to stop repeating Jim Jordan's facts-free sound bite.
Biden's plan that the SCOTUS rejected 6-3 was to forgive $10,000 to $20,000 of federal student loan debt per borrower, which would have benefited more than 40 million borrowers and cost around $400 billion. The SCOTUS found that the plan stretched a key phrase of a specific federal law beyond Congress' intent in passing that law. The Supreme Court did not rule that the Biden administration could not cancel student loan debt; it ruled that the specific statute was being stretched too far.
Biden acknowledged that finding and dropped the proposal. He then proposed three much-smaller pieces of student loan forgiveness under a different statute. Federal district judges in two states put holds on two of those proposals and an appeals court agreed, under similar logic as the SCOTUS case (a statute being stretched too far). So the administration dropped those. They ended up doing only one further student-loan forgiveness which benefitted around 1/8th as many students, for much-smaller individual amounts, compared to the original plan that had been rejected by the SCOTUS.
To sum up: the courts told the administration it could not do something under a particular law. So the administration dropped that plan. Then the administration tried to achieve a smaller version of the same goal by using a different law, to see if that law would allow it. The courts said no to most of that as well, and so the administration didn’t do those parts of it. They did end up doing one much-smaller thing that the courts had no problem with.
Biden then bragged about having found a way to cancel student loan debt despite the courts which was just routine politician face-saving. In reality he did not defy or evade any court rulings about student loan debt, and did not cancel anywhere near as much student loan debt as he would have if the courts hadn't said no.
There's another side of Biden's border record though which unfortunately got ignored, see Figure 1 here:
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/biden-deportation-record
I find these arguments from hypocrisy completely uncompelling. Yes, hypocrites exist, and yes, the two major parties have almost universally engaged in similar types of bad behavior (although often not to the same degree in any particular case), but when defending a particular instance of bad behavior from the current group in power: what do you say to the people who _weren't_ hypocrites? Many such people exist. Lots of people criticizied, at the time, exactly the things you are describing. So what do you say to the people who are also now criticizing Trump?
Hypocrisy is a reason to not take a particular person seriously. It is not a reason to dismiss an entire class of complaint.
Previous bad behavior does not justify current bad behavior.
Also in this (and many other cases), the only way to make the accusation of hypocrisy is to brazenly lie about the facts. The Biden admin complied with the court orders and enancted only the parts of the programs sanctioned by the courts, at least one order of magnitude smaller than the original proposal. It's a textbook case of the executive deferring to the judicial!
re: Drone strikes:
But so what? In a war, there's no rule against killing your own citizens who have joined the enemy. Happened in WW2, for instance.
See https://www.wakeuptopolitics.com/p/no-biden-didnt-defy-the-supreme-court
Two points: Re 7
I think it works best if you think of it as people's incomes relative to their expectations. To use a hypothetical example. If you grew up three meals a day and can now only afford two, you're going to feel really hungry. But if you grew up on one meal a day but can now afford two you're going to feel good. Especially if everyone you know is still on one meal.
One example of people who "moved to slums" would be digital nomads. Though if you're earning an American software engineers salary and paying Manila prices for rent you're probably living a quality of life better than a software engineer in San Francisco.
Per your paragraph 33 due process note, it might also be worth mentioning that the Trump administration itself has conceded this point. The recent SCOTUS JGG order observed this: "The detainees’ rights against summary removal, however, are not currently in dispute. The Government expressly agrees that 'TdA members subject to removal under the Alien Enemies Act get judicial review'....'It is well established that the Fifth Amendment entitles aliens to due process of law' in the context of removal proceedings.' Reno v. Flores, 507 U. S. 292, 306 (1993)."
so, someone advancing this point I think has to acknowledge they are going so far out on a legal limb that:
1: Scalia disagrees
2: The Supreme Court as recently as 2 weeks ago disagrees
3: The Trump administration disagrees
What exactly does this mean? The Trump administration has admitted that their actions are illegal, but continue to do them?
A federal judge might open investigations into the US government being in contempt of court. Deadline ends in less than a day from now, not sure what news if any on this development.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg72d3zpj9xo
This is a more recent article which seems to have significant updates but I can't read it fully because of paywall:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/18/us/politics/court-contempt-trump-deportations.html
Also remember the dog and pony show with Bukele a few days ago, where an autocrat, practically dictator, regrettably had to admit he "does not have the power" to send back the prisoners.
The Per Curiam opinion in the JGG case came out the way it did because the government "expressly agree[d] that TdA members subject to removal under the Alien Enemies Act get judicial review." The government also agreed that “It is well established that the Fifth Amendment entitles aliens to due process of law” citing Reno v. Flores (a 1990s-era case that held the same thing).
JGG Decision here:
(https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a931_2c83.pdf)
I can't emphasize this enough, and I've talked a bit about it on the discord as well: Trump has, in court anyway, conceded that the detainees he seeks to deport under the Alien Enemies Act are entitled to a due process determination of their basis for removal (In habeas) and that the Alien Enemies Act itself is subject to judicial review (that is, courts can examine whether "invasion" under this act pertains to TdA, it's not just "up to the president."
Trump's attorneys have also conceded he messed up in Garcia's case. Simply put, in COURT, the administration is flat-out saying those subject to deportation get due process and the basis for deportation is subject to judicial review.
People usually refer to bit flips in memory as due to cosmic rays but they aren't any more common in high altitude places like Denver than low altitude places, making it unlikely that cosmic rays have anything to do with it in most cases. Mostly they're due to radioactive decay of something inside the chip.
See here for a discussion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_error#Cosmic_rays_creating_energetic_neutrons_and_protons
re AI kiddie porn: no victims? The IA has to base it's imagery on real kiddie porn.
No, it doesn't: it can combine two separate concepts.
It still needs to know what children look like and how they differ from adults. This is just like that case last year where kids were uploading photos of female classmates to generate porn.
You could draw some without ever having seen any. Or have you? Tell us the truth, Malcolm.
Not since I was that age. (I had a kid sister)
> The IA has to base it's imagery on real kiddie porn.
No, style transfers and generalization are things.
For example, AI image generators are already reasonably good at generating photorealistic versions of hand-drawn sketches. If I give Dall-E a crude stick-figure drawing of a house, the model is capable of turning it into something that looks like a real-estate photo. If you give a model a hand-drawn pornographic comic, it's equally capable of generating something reasonably photorealistic.
Similarly, image generation models can generalize from their training sets. If it knows what a man wearing rabbit ears looks like and it knows what women look like, it has a reasonable chance of generating a pseudo-photo of a woman wearing rabbit ears.
But if it doesn't know what naked children look like it can't generalise. And if it does, it's abusing the models.
It has never seen a koala riding a motorcycle. But it has seen a koala and has seen a motorcycle, and can generalize.
Yes but if koalas had rights and portraying one riding a motorcycle was abusing those rights...
Am I abusing the rights of every woman I've ever seen when I imagine a naked lady using a mental model that was trained on them?
Legally, at least in some jurisdictions, you are breaking the law if you get AI to do this, as this is taken as infringing their rights.
If you do it in your mind it's just morally wrong :)
If you think it's OK, why don't you ask them....?
There's a similar argument about art. The arts world got up in arms a few months back cos they were worried that AI was going to be trained on all their output and then put them out of a job. But how did they learn their art? By training on the output of their predecessors!
Given enough pictures of naked eighteen-year-olds, a human can make a reasonable guess at what a naked seventeen-year-old looks like.
Only cos he's seen fully dressed 17 year olds. As soon as the AI incorporates that info it's abusing the 17 year old. Anyway, kiddie porn isn't about 17 year olds. Younger kids look very different.
Yeah, while some/many/lots may want "hot sixteen year olds" or "barely legal" type photos, some will want younger. A few will want *way* younger.
I can't believe I have to say this here, but I were much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much rather abused as a child by someone doing stuff with pictures of me, than ... me.
I really don't like lessening "abuse" this way.
Obviously so, but there's a whole army with a vested interest in monetising victimhood who would be onto this.
Anyway, no politician would be reckless enuf to advance the idea.
I suppose an argument could be made that yes, AI-generated photos are indeed *way* better than real photos.
But then our old friend the slippery slope comes along. After all, if it's okay for you to masturbate to AI generated photos of toddlers in diapers, why not AI generated photos of toddlers naked? After all, it's not real kids.
If it's okay for AI generated photos of naked toddlers, why not AI generated photos of naked toddlers touching an adult's penis? After all, it's not real kids.
If AI generated photos of toddlers touching an adult's penis are okay, why not the toddler sucking on the penis? After all... and we get all the way up to "getting off to AI generated photos of crying six year olds being raped violently because it's not real kids".
And then maybe the guys getting off to those photos get bored after a while with the AI stuff and start looking for the real stuff. Are there any good studies on escalation of porn watching (that is, after you get over the forbidden fruit thrill of vanilla porn, you start needing something a little spicier to pique your interest and that escalates over time?)
I think this is what makes people uncomfortable with the idea; fake cartoon/AI generated kiddie porn is definitely better than the real thing, but how extreme do we let it go? And how safe is it, is there a genuine risk of graduating to the 'harder' (i.e. real children) stuff after you get used to the AI stuff?
https://hmicfrs.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/glossary/child-sexual-abuse-image-grading/
https://www.olliers.com/news/a-guide-to-how-indecent-images-are-defined-and-categorised/
https://www.unh.edu/ccrc/sites/default/files/media/2022-03/the-varieties-of-child-pornography-production.pdf
I suspect your comment isn't supposed to be a direct reply to me.
Otherwise:
I didn't intend to argue for any okayishness of AI generated pictures like this.
I just wanted to highlight the difference between doing stuff to a photo of a naked person that has not agreed to someone doing that stuff to that photo on the one hand and doing it to the person on the other hand. Because "if it does [know what naked children look like], it's abusing the models" blurres this, and it shouldn't get blurred.
Not directly replying, no. More musing on it. I think most people will have a feeling of revulsion about even AI generated child sexual abuse material, and not be able to articulate exactly why in the face of arguments about "but it's not *real* children".
The MAPs reformulation is the nice part of all this. But human nature is sticky, and very often not-nice, and the nice, moderate, 'will appeal to the normies' cases are often used as Trojan horses by the not-nice types.
"I'm attracted to 16 year olds, is that really paedophilia?" may fly for "so why is it bad to provide me with AI images of fake hot 16 year olds". But it damn well will also be used as cover for the ones who want violent and sadistic imagery, or imagery of 6 year olds and not 16 year olds.
And then there are the types that maybe can't even be called paedophiles proper, but who should not be accommodated in any degree, not even with AI generation of CSA, because they are too dangerous and too depraved.
https://www.wdbj7.com/2025/03/10/lynchburg-man-charged-with-rape-newborns-death/
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/southafrican-man-confesses-to-raping-killing-his-8-day-old-daughter-8047346
https://www.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/news/life-sentence-for-man-who-raped-a-baby-and-shared-images-of-his-abuse
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-32538905
The case about the guy who uploaded images of raping a baby is particularly bad, and I don't think arguing "well if he and others like him were just able to get their fill of AI generated baby rape imagery, it wouldn't happen in real life" is going to win over anyone. People who perpetrate that kind of crime plainly aren't concerned with minimising harm, and probably would not be happy with the 'fake' alternative "no, you cannot fuck a real baby in real life, just use this AI picture to masturbate to".
Aella argues AI kiddie porn consume results in less real kids getting hurt: https://aella.substack.com/p/ai-child-porn-will-probably-save
I remember someone once trying to describe Aella as "someone who defends child porn", and now I see what they were probably referring to, and it's not a defense of child porn (let alone abuse). Her argument seems similar to the one in favor of brothels and porn theaters because they correlated with a drop in sexual assaults (pretty promptly, in at least one case - a town closed the local brothel, rates went up, they reopened, rates dropped again). And this has been known for decades.
Short term probably, but long term? Would it not both deepen the addiction and make it more acceptable?
Anyone who is very confident about whether the long term effect is positive, negative, or neutral, is deluding themselves about their ability to read the future. This seems like a very hard sort of question to figure out the net answer to.
Yes, we can't know for sure so err on the side of caution.
Does erring on the side of caution mean that if we have no idea which one of two options is better or worse in long term, we should choose the one that is worse in short term?
Logic never comes into it when legislating on sex!
Science can't help cos it's not something any ethics committee would allow research on. Maybe a way could be found to carry out an investigation with locked-up sex offenders, but it'd take a brave politician to even raise the question.
Which way is caution when both sides claim their policy lowers rapes and sexual assaults?
caution is status quo.
So she thought that tweet would be *uncontroversial*? How autistic *is* Aella, exactly? This is James Damore-level stuff.
"Autistic": she is kinda. Hard to measure "exactly" quantitatively as long as "what IS autism" very much lacks an "exact" answer. - James Damore? Oh, the former google guy who wrote: "Damore said that gender-differences include women generally having a stronger interest in people rather than things, and tending to be more social ... . Damore's memorandum also suggests ways to adapt the tech workplace to those differences to increase women's representation and comfort, without resorting to discrimination." (wikipedia) Wow, if that counts as highly controversial in your bubble ... ;)
> Aella argues AI kiddie porn consume results in less real kids getting hurt:
I think the weakness in this argument is that the taboo against kiddie porn and against child sexual abuse in general is socially constructed. Looking back historically, we see societies that tolerated various forms of child sexual abuse, even considering it a right of passage. As recently as the 70s or so, a strain of European philosophy was arguing for sexual liberation in a way that sounds awfully child-porny to modern ears; NAMBLA was founded in the late 70s.
Intuitively speaking, it seems hard to maintain a selective social taboo. Even if the instant effect is towards less child sexual abuse, normalization of the practice might easily lead to more practitioners, so we should probably consider the precautionary principle and act very carefully.
It's not wholly a social construct, if I understand it correctly. If it were, there probably wouldn't be such a revulsion to it in most people. I acknowledge there are societies where sex acts involving children are permitted, but I suspect there are rules in those societies (it's not a subject I'm deeply familiar with, for understandable reasons) that cut down on actual biological trouble, like trying to perform intercourse with someone who's too small and/or prepubescent.
Puberty is the primary factor, given its role in reproduction. There's much less evolutionary justification for wanting to have sex with pre-pubescents than for post-, and this is supposed to manifest in mental revulsion at the former that's probably present across societies.
Ergo, there's an argument that someone who's pedophilic in the technical sense is *broken*, and needs to be physically isolated; they can't socialize their way out of that urge. People who are just ephebophilic - they're attracted to ages 15-17 (while being full adults themselves) - probably socialized their way into it, and can be socialized out (with negative incentives like the mere threat of prison).
Good points. Otoh, the law could and imho should treat AI-done or drawn "kid-porn" (making, publishing, owning) max. as an offence resp. a lesser victim-less crime with less harsh fines. Also - see Paul B. - treat all sorts of porn with minors older than 14 / 16 / whatever age-of-consent less harsh than below 14 / 12 / 10 / 8 ... Michael Jackson met Wade Robson when Wade was seven, right? ...
In real life, I am sure judges do consider all those and more; but I am sure glad, in all games/comics made in Japan I ever had on a hard disc: all the girls drawn are explicitly described as "18" (no matter how much younger they looked). Yes, owning a graphic novel depicting 17 year olds making out: might put you in prison in my country. Owning the novel "Josephine Mutzenbacher" is legal for adults. (Same author as "Bambi" - in German, it is porn, illegal to sell to minors - but well-done literature and funny, too; the English translation is abhorrent child-porn, do not read.)
If someone claimed this sfw-pic of an Ä https://freebiesupply.com/logos/a-logo/ showed two minors having sex: the police may break into my home and confiscate all computers. I SWEAR: it is a married couple, both older than 30 and only ever having vaginal IC. And just a company-logo anyways.
No extra victims over what would happen without the AI. I'm assuming the government uses confiscated porn and doesn't compensate the producers, so it's not making more porn nor retroactively incentivizing past porn to be made.
But it's further perpetrating the abuse of the original models. How would you like to think that it was trained on images of your naked body taken during a period of intense suffering?
Anyway, by your argument the government could just release all the confiscated porn for free...
I think the other commenters have made it clear that AI does _NOT_ need photos of children while being abused to create JPGs that look like photos of children being abused.
But you have a point, that fake abuse photos resulting from training with real abuse photos should be prohibited. The training itself with those is already prohibited because the possession of those is prohibited.
"14: Did you know that China has mostly solved the problem of smog in Beijing? (X)"
Similarly, Los Angeles beat smog between roughly 1975 and 1995. Environmentalists should celebrate their successes more often to remind people that they've often been pragmatically right.
Yes, I was about to post this. Los Angeles reduced the number of Very Unhealthy or Hazardous Air Days from 145 in 1988 to 24 in 1998. https://www.laalmanac.com/environment/ev01b.php
Nah, whether or not they celebrate their once-uncontroversial successes, some wire trips in people's brains because Rush Limbaugh used the radio waves every day to condition them to hate environmentalists and owls, on account of needing a substitute for Commies after the USSR broke up.
I don't think it's hugely analogous, as the USA cut pollution via the clean air act and related measures. While China has made some progress in having stricter environmental standards the enforcement is variable at best. For Beijing specifically it was mostly moving dirty coal power plants and other industries to neighbouring less politically influential cities
Agreed, acid rain is almost never talked about these days and I’m not convinced most people of my generation (Gen Z) are even aware of what it was or why it was an environmental accomplishment.
29: You don't live in a conservative bubble, you live in a "cares about good policy" and "cares about Justice (variously defined)" bubble. Most of those policies were ~useless, various tradeoffs were never (and have never been) addressed, and perhaps we should consider non-COVID reasons that Democrats specifically remember COVID policy as particularly favorable.
Another possibility is that you live in a particularly *liberal-libertarian* bubble, in ways that do not actually appeal to most people. Most of the populace got to enjoy free money and authoritarianism, and it turns out they're not as opposed to that as someone like you (us?) might like to think.
> the populace got to enjoy free money
If you going to print money Id prefer most of that money to go to the poor; the question "should we print money" is rarely answered no, 2008 was a vile evil compared to the corona stimulus.
Really? If we're going to print money I'd prefer that it mostly went to me.
Im poor, thats what I said
This is far more likely. There is a very small group of liberal-libertarians (bleeding-heart libertarians) that happens to congregate around this blog which are going to be uniquely outraged by government overreach, while the average person doesn't care at all. Especially when you throw in a few thousand dollars of free money and you don't have to work during the lockdowns.
>29: You don't live in a conservative bubble, you live in a "cares about good policy" and "cares about Justice (variously defined)" bubble.
This is how all ideological bubbles describe themselves.
No one is in a bubble that self-describes as 'we want bad policies and injustice because we are chaotic evil idiots'. Every bubble thinks they're just being reasonable and applying common sense.
From the outside: Yes, this is a conservative bubble. My own bubble is also a bubble and is surely doing its own biased and stupid things, but from over here it is easy to see the shape of this site's bubble.
I don't think you can count a view of one bubble from another bubble as objective. How do you know you're not in a bubble so progressive that even Scott's bubble looks conservative?
"Every bubble thinks they're just being reasonable and applying common sense" is probably a good instinct; but it's going to be hard to go from there. We can probably agree that "Bubble A sees Bubble B as conservative/progressive/very round/very cubic/whatever" as pretty objective, but that doesn't mean Bubble B is actually those things, or that the objective center is between A and B. We might get Bubbles A-Z and chart all the pairwise observations and get a heuristic for where center is, but then the argument will just be over whether A-Z were selected fairly.
This place is a conservative bubble.
I just explained how that can't be an acceptable assertion.
It's a perfectly valid assertion. If you disagree, that's your right, but you can't weasel your way out of people tagging your community with some form of political valence with facts and logic.
It's an assertion. But not supported.
He asked about where he lives. Even extending that to include his social spaces does not mean it includes these comment sections, nor does it make it useful to describe as "conservative." For all the Scott does respond to his fans, this is not where he lives, and reasonably often he's deliberately combative to many if not most of his readers. He forced a forum schism because he disliked so many of his readers and wanted to distance them from his brand!
Calling where Scott lives a conservative bubble is akin to trolls on Twitter calling Kelsey Piper a conservative because she wants schools to be decent and cities to not be hostile to families. Defining whatever he's talking about as a "conservative bubble" renders the term completely uninformative.
> Every bubble thinks they're just being reasonable and applying common sense.
No, two very common points of view are "someone I trust said so" and "what does that have to do with me?".
I doubt classic conservative bubbles (Trump/MAGA crowds, or even trad repuplican people) would tag Scott's blog as conservative. So if an outside bubble think this blog is oldcon or even neocon, I guess it's more indicative where the outside bubble is....Probably moved far more wokeward than you think :-)
Conservative for San Fran, maybe. But most people here seem to be in favor of gay marriage, gender transitions, abortion, and talking with people on the internet, which makes it progressive compared to where I grew up. (Due to the internet being new and talking on it being a progressive thing, most online conversation leans progressive - though this is gradually becoming less so.) On the whole of things it's probably somewhere near moderate, or out along some totally different axis.
"7: A common sociological claim is that relative income (compared to your social circle) matters more for happiness than absolute income."
Nah. People don't care much about being richer than their neighbors, they want to live around people who aren't poorer than them.
You don't want your kids to grow up around poorer folk.
On the other hand I don't want them to grow up around much richer folk either. I don't want my kid being "the poor kid" at school, or getting teased for not having a horse or something.
Back in my day we made fun of the rich kids
And I'm sure they cried themselves to sleep at night on their solid gold pillows as a result.
People want to live around people who are in the same socio-economic category as them, but within that category they want to be the richest. A middle-class family might not want to live in a working-class neighbourhood, but they still want a nicer car than the middle-class family next door.
33) I can think of a way of maintaining the taboo against immigrants speaking freely. But I hope you're not going to like it. It's to apply the taboo to people who look like immigrants.
Trump would probably like that. He's already applying the taboo against gang members to anybody who has a tattoo that looks like it might be a gang tattoo.
Re 7: Following on Seneca Plutarchus and Hannes Jandi, I think we can salvage this idea at least in part. To begin with only people who are at least middle class have a realistic opportunity to move to a new place solely according to what would make them happier. They don't want to move to places that would deprive them of creature comforts or that would expose them to increased danger, so you don't see someone in Chicago's Gold Coast moving to the South Side, but that's far from the only model for moving to a poorer area. Even just in the US, there are plenty of places that are both lower-income and still quite safe, particularly out in rural locales, though this is partly to taste. I recall some years ago an increase in migration to expanding cities like Greenville SC on the premise of lower living costs combined with good facilities and growth.
If we approach it like this, then it's less about the psychological feeling of being relatively higher-status/wealthier than the people around you, and more about the ability to command more value for less money. This absolutely squares with my impression of expats, especially to the poorer but less dangerous areas of South America or Southern Europe.
If you can swing the immigration process, have good money saved up, and don't have obligations keeping you in the states, going to live in e.g. Spain gets you a massive boost to quality of life for equivalent dollar cost (now slightly offset by the recent shift in dollar-euro rates, but still substantial). It's not dangerous and you're not being deprived of high-class comforts, there's Michelin Star restaurants and great museums all around (schools are pretty crap though), but cost of living is lower, quality of certain things like groceries is higher, and people are just plain friendlier, granting that you respect them and take some time to learn the language.
I moved north from Chicago's Silver Coast at 2700 North as a bachelor to its Bronze Coast at 3700 North as an engaged man to its Copper Coast at 4900 North as a married man.
The final move was explicit gentrification, which took a long time, but eventually paid off fairly well.
We looked at moving to South Shore, but that was a bigger physical risk of crime than we were willing to take for the potential payoff.
I lived in Pilsen from 1991 to early 1999. The neighborhood is 95% Mexican and I felt out of place at first, but quickly realized it was fine. I didn't have kids though.
I think the more relevant quote from the Psmiths review is this:
Cargo cults may not be a great metaphor for “copying what someone successful seems to be doing without really knowing why and hoping you get the same result,” but they’re a wonderful metaphor for “assuming the novel thing you’ve just encountered fits a paradigm with which you’re already familiar.” That’s a devilishly difficult trap to escape, and the worst part is that you don’t know you have to: if it were easy to step outside your fundamental epistemological assumptions, they wouldn’t be your fundamental epistemological assumptions. And yet sometimes that’s the only road along which cargo will come.
" I keep hearing how we need a “reckoning” over the government’s disastrous anti-COVID policies, but the latest YouGov polling suggests that large majorities of Americans continue to support those policies:"
People like Work From Home.
I can recall we were promised that back during the Information Superhighway boom of 1993, but then that didn't happen for 27 years. Then in 2020 it turned out that, while not perfect, Work From Home actually worked fairly well.
#7 - Wouldn't we have to know who people are comparing themselves to, in order to understand whether the effect is in place? If my relative income to Alabama is high, but all my friends live in CA and we talk regularly online, then I probably feel little to no improvement from moving to Alabama.
There's also the question of income, where moving to a low CoL area often means having a lower income in terms of dollars. I probably make about half of what I could make doing the exact same job in a city, but I'm living in a much lower CoL area, so I feel pretty good about it. I make more than most of the people I interact with on a regular basis, so I feel like a big fish. If all of my friends were living in NYC and making 2-3X my income, despite spending vastly more on housing and food, then I may feel relatively poorer and be less happy about that.
It tends to depend upon what you talk to your friends about online. If you boast about how to mow your huge lawn, you'd probably prefer to be in Alabama. If you talk about about huge celebrities you've seen, you'd probably prefer to be in L.A.
Yes, but there's also a lot of things that tend to follow a higher cash income, regardless of CoL. You can generally buy more "toys" with a higher income, because the cost of say, an XBox, is essentially the same in Montana, Chicago, and Atlanta. Also true for most consumer electronics, clothing, etc. So making $50,000 in a very low CoL area may let you live with a relatively large house and yard, you are going to have fewer things than the person making $100,000 living in a shoebox in a big city. They can also afford renovations on their expensive property and other class signifiers easier than you can, so there's an appearance of wealth even if they live in a tiny place.
the engineer to crackpot pipeline is well knonw lol
#29 - I notice it says "start" of the pandemic. I think those numbers make sense for March 2020, maybe through April or part of May. If that's what people mean when they respond, I don't find that too surprising.
If the question was asking about the totality of the lockdowns, or was clear that it also included something like 2021-2022 lockdowns and masks, then that would be much more surprising. I would also be interested in seeing numbers for mandatory vaccinations (which being absent from this list may be an indication that they really do mean early 2020 and not later).
Yeah, I don’t expect most survey respondents to make the distinction, but the right actions to take changed dramatically over time. Uncertainty about fatality rate, means of transmission, knowledge of effective care (remember the rise and fall of ventilators?), and access to vaccines reshaped the tradeoff landscape over the first 12 months of the virus.
Very much so. With the benefit of hindsight I don't think my fairly rural town should have responded at all - no lockdowns, no work changes. But without hindsight, it actually feels like a fairly prudent precaution. Then at least by the summer we were mostly back to normal, which also felt pretty good. But then that fall we were once again facing state mandates and school closures which were decidedly unnecessary and extremely disruptive.
Depending on when you asked me about it, I would have had very different answers to that survey.
Agreed. I also make a very clear distinction between first wave (where one can discuss if the measures taken were the best possible, but anyway given how high the uncertainty was non optimality is completely excusable and I have 0 grudge against the authorities) and subsequent waves (especially policies after the vaccine was available). There I'd like a very serious reckoning indeed (and will likely hope for one for a very long time - at least until it freeze in hell)
Agree with this. Closing schools from somewhere between a few weeks to the end of the spring term wouldn't be unreasonable. The U.S. kept them closed for far too long, though.
There was no "U.S." policy though, it was state by state. And presumably the majority of people in most states agreed with the policy or it would've been different. In my state schools were only closed in spring 2020, they were open in fall.
In solidly red or solidly blue states this may be true (while also overruling the minorities within those states once again - maybe why so many people left blue states for Texas and Florida...). For purple states, this was far less true, and may have been the opposite.
> But now suppose that you wake up tomorrow in the actual, real, genuine world (yes, fr), and find out that this sadistic maniac of a scientist is not just a mere figment of my twisted imagination, but is in fact flesh-and-blood-real. To make matters worse, he has cursed 𝘺𝘰𝘶, my valued reader, with the horrible burden Yana had to carry before. The fact that the mechanism is now actual, rather than imaginary, shouldn’t change the moral character of the situation. That means that even though, prior to learning these contingent empirical facts, scratching your butt seemed totally fine, it actually turns out to be incredibly wrong. The lesson here is that whether or not some action is wrong, or state of affairs bad, in a given possible world doesn’t depend on whether that world is the actual world.
(19, "Surely we're not moral monsters")
This argument fails for bad, annoying reasons.
By way of introduction, I disapprove of the part of American culture that says American culture is evil. One of Richard Hanania's essays pointed out that this is a criticism that you can't logically level against American culture. That is true, but since self-hatred really can be good or bad, I maintain that it is bad and I just have to take the hit of needing to say that my criticism is good despite not being different in form from the bad criticism.
And for a second example, there is a discussion of philosophical induction (using the past as a guide to the future) that points out that the heuristic is entirely unjustified. You can't even fall back on the usual claim that justifies "we don't know why it should work, but it does", because that claim is "this has worked in the past", and using that as evidence that the past is informative about the future is the logical sin of assuming your conclusion.
This essay is making the same "mistake". If you tell me to imagine something happening in the real world, the conclusion can't be that some principle has crossed from being valid in imaginary worlds to being valid in reality, because all of the evidence and/or support has always been restricted to imaginary worlds. When I imagine the real world, everything I imagine is taking place in an imaginary world.
20) I'm not sure who is more interesting: The 9% who have a very or somewhat favorable opinion of The Black Plague (at least they take a stand!), or the 17% who are on the fence… "I mean, did they die *of* the black plague or *with* the black plague?"
Hmm … the failure of imagination necessary to think that the black plague was a good way to beat overpopulation is really something. There aren’t many good paths out of something like that, but having half the population essentially rot to death in agony over a few short years seems like a particularly bad way out.
Sure, if we were the Foundation trying to kickstart the Enlightenment, genetically engineering the plague would be spectacularly evil. But if you read "The Black Death" as referring to the historical event rather than the disease, you might decide that the historical event, on the whole, was good. (I don't know if that's true, because I'm neither a historian nor an economist.)
Good as compared to…? For something (especially a plague) to be "good", we need more than outcomes IMO, we need counterfactuals to compare with.
I read the black plague as "historical event that ended ‘Malthusianism’", i.e. population-limiting event. The question then, is whether history could have achieved the same or better outcomes with less suffering. Fewer people dying? The same amount of people dying, but from famine, wars, "nicer" pandemic? Technological breakthroughs of the kind that later broke Malthusian math?
I can sort of understand how some historian who doesn’t have to see their child die of the plague can look at it and say that it all turned out for the best, but I don’t have much respect for it. I believe basically that the journey is the destination, so have a hard time accepting that any part of the journey that is as brutal as that can be justified by the economics of the future.
I remember that being mainstream historiography for some time, at least in terms of what's taught in intro/survey courses and makes it into popular histories, and I expect you're right that that's what most of the people who responded in favor of it were thinking of.
That said, I've been persuaded that that narrative is largely false. The recovery period following the Black Death did show increased material standard of living and improved social stature for serfs and peasants relative to the immediate pre-Plague period, but that was a temporary effect that mostly returned to baseline when the population once again approached Malthusian carrying capacity.
The timing is all wrong for the Black Death being the cause of breaking loose from the Malthusian trap, as the former happened in the mid-14th century and the latter didn't happen until the Industrial Revolution in the early 19th century. The causes of the Industrial Revolution are the subject of considerable debate, but the most plausible-seeming theories I'm familiar with link it to varying combinations and sequences of the Commercial Revolution of the Late Middle Ages, the institutional changes of the Renaissance and Reformation era, and the cultural and economic changes of the late pre-industrial "Industrious Revolution". The Black Death happened relatively late in the Commercial Revolution, serving as a major setback to it rather than a trigger or facilitator, and the other two eras didn't get going until decades or centuries respectively after the Black Death.
> The timing is all wrong for the Black Death being the cause of breaking loose from the Malthusian trap, as the former happened in the mid-14th century and the latter didn't happen until the Industrial Revolution in the early 19th century.
Haven't you heard about long and variable lags? ;D
I thought not. It's a Sith legend, not something the Jedi would tell you.
Laying the cause of the Industrial Revolution on the Black Death would be far too narrow and therefore clearly wrong. That is was a contributing factor seems quite strong, though it's hard (likely impossible) to say that it was a necessary factor. We just don't have access to the counterfactual to compare.
To understand how it could affect Europe centuries later, you have to understand the cultural perspective in place around the time of the Black Death. Peasants were essentially nothing to the elites. They could be thrown away as shock troops in battle or starve to death on the sides of the street. Because there were a lot (read: too many in a Malthusian sense) of such people, the losses were actually positive from a purely material perspective. It was a society in which Thanos was right.
When 50% of the people were dead, each individual became necessarily more important. The elites couldn't treat people as if they were disposable, and had to concede some rights, power, and money, in order to keep society and their lofty places within it intact. This, above all else, created a *cultural* shift. The mentality that said peasants were nothing was untenable, so peasants had to be something. If peasants are something, then they can and should have rights and so on. I think this further took on religious significance through the church that helped maintain this cultural shift even when population levels revived. And by then there was a fledgling middle class, rich merchants (with no royal and lordly claims), and a different way of looking at humanity.
This was by no means required - most plagues in history, including in Europe or when wiping out huge numbers of people, did not result in anything like this. It's also entirely possible that the Industrial Revolution would have come through eventually anyway (in fact, it's not possible to determine if the IR would have even happened earlier through a mechanism we could only guess at). But in the actual history that happened, I think the cultural shift was real and important. That Europe, pre-IR, was much stronger for it and was able to advance significantly in the following centuries.
I've also heard interpretations that center on the cultural shift you're describing, but I'm skeptical of those, too. The idea of peasants having rights and dignity long predated the Black Death, and the problem of those rights being more honored in the breach than in the observance persisted long after it.
When elites started paying serious attention to commoners was partly a product of the Commercial Revolution, which produced a class of urban merchants and artisans who needed to be taken seriously by the aristocracy. It was also a result of military technology, as people figured out how to form and use an effective combat force from commoners who drilled on weekends that could stand up to (or at least stand alongside) a professional or aristocratic force in the field. It started out with longbows, crossbows, pikes, and bills, and the bows later got replaced with gunpowder weapons.
Using levies, militia, or conscripts as disposable shock troops was more of an Early Modern thing than a High Medieval one, and it's a practice that continued well into the 20th century. Similarly, letting the poors starve in the streets was also very much a thing in the Early Modern era, and the term "surplus population" that shows up in e.g. Charles Dickens's works for the phenomenon is a 18th/19th concept.
The benefit to Western Europe seems completely credible to me, but context matters. In Eastern Europe (east of the Elbe, essentially), the nobility was strong enough that they could crush and enslave the commoners rather than be forced to grant them increased rights and wages. The same factor - labor shortage - resulted in two dramatically different outcomes.
The aftermath of the black death was an unusually upwards mobile time. If I had lived all my life as a small cottage farmer barely making end meets and a small personal misfortune away from being a landless laborer (or worse) and little chance to improve my lot in life, I would appreciate the empty farmland I can move to as a survivor.
Ok. So how many of your friends and family would you be willing to sacrifice for a significantly better job?
Black death also lead to a baby boom, so if you only care about a prosperous, large, family you'd be cheering for it.
This doesn't address the question you were asked, unless you mean "I'd gladly sacrifice my loved ones to make room for me to have a larger family".
It's not like you've killed them. If your parents die, would you reject their inheritance?
This still, still doesn't address the question. The point is that it's nonsensical to be excited that the plague killed off your family so you can have a "bigger" family. This whole thread is just a "bad things are bad, actually" type argument.
LOL to "with the black plague". Funny how I'd forgotten that framing.
The Black Death, while obviously horrific, was long-term socially beneficial for Western (but not Eastern) Europe. Following it, wages and standards of living increased with the labor shortage and peasants and laborers got a stronger negotiating position. Soon enough, this led into the Early Modern era.
You can track the rise of Western Europe (and the decline of Eastern Europe) from the Black Death.
While I'm sympathetic the general point about due process (because the whole point of due process is that you always follow it even when it's inconvenient), I have to object to this:
> "it’s hard to maintain social outrage against people who are doing the same thing as lots of other people but except for checking labels."
I think this way of thinking misleadingly conflates laws with social norms. Ideally it's best to have both these things roughly in alignment, but what's really important is to decide what things are against the law and what things aren't. If an illegal things happens to be very similar to a legal thing, that may create some confusion on the level of social norms, but the law itself remains clear and can be enforced. It ultimately doesn't matter whether you fail to maximise social outrage: what matters is whether the law is (1) just and (2) enforced.
I think maybe you may be assuming that it's inherently unjust for someone to go to prison for the equivalent of not checking a label. I strongly disagree with this: sending people to prison for failing to verify things that they are obligated to verify is necessary for the maintenance of civilization.
"I strongly disagree with this: sending people to prison for failing to verify things that they are obligated to verify is necessary for the maintenance of civilization." That seems like a super narrow application.
The problem is that the people were rounded up and shipped out within days with no opportunity given for them to verify themselves.
Do you think driving without a license should be a crime?
Yes. The fun thing about that crime is that you go to an American court and you are cited by an American cop and, if you have reason to believe the cop acted arbitrarily, you can seek an appeal from that same American justice system.
It's the lack of due process that's the issue, not the criminality of the immigration status.
Okay, so you DON'T think persecuting "people who are doing the same thing as lots of other people" except that the labels you have to check for are different is bad. That's the principle I was arguing against.
(Well, I don't actually agree with the example I used, since I believe the state requiring one to obtain a driver's license in order to engage in the natural rights of free men is a gross infringement of individual liberty, but that's a separate point.)
I think your missing the argument here
The dmv and passports/green cards are pure paper work and universally considered shit.
Driving is regulated because a mere statistical chance to cause harm; this is pre-crime. Your merely assuming that all car accidents are caused by drivers, #notalldrivers
No pre-crime is due process as the founders understood it.
---
We do not live near this libertarian utopia, we should do things in an approximate order of their distance from ideals; e.g. if you only legalized fent you will kill allot of people, legalization of all drugs should roughly be in order of safest to least.
If licenses could be revoked at any time without telling you, I think I would be skeptical that the people caught driving without a license did anything wrong.
> did anything wrong.
To clarify, I said it was a crime, not "wrong" in any moral sense.
No, you asked if it "should be" a crime. That very much implies that you're asking for a moral judgement.
Okay, that's fair. I guess I distinguish law and morality so thoroughly that even on a thread assuming the distinction at the top, my view is extreme enough to warrant clarification. (I do have a disclaimer elsewhere in the thread that I don't believe in this example I posed, and use it only for argument's sake.)
I intended my comment to be questioning the consistency of the application of the stated legal principle rather than on moral grounds in isolation, and in context I think it was clear.
I don't think people accused of driving without a license should be denied due process and get shipped off to torture prisons.
I think you've misunderstood my point -- this isn't specifically about the issue of deportation, and my final paragraph was not referring to the process of proving citizenship or legal residency. My point was that in general, 'making it easy to coordinate social outrage' shouldn't be one of the main aims of a justice system.
This may have been a relevant distinction before teh Federalist Society was formed, but I doubt it.
Right now, the Federalist Society court very clearly just does whatever the conservative social consensus thinks they should do. If progressives ever get the court back in a few decades, I would expect much teh same to happen there.
So I don't think there's much meaningful distinction between the social norms and the law at this point... One will become the other as soon as it happens in the Eight Circuit one time.
>I think this way of thinking misleadingly conflates laws with social norms.
Laws should reflect social norms, and should be changed when they don't. Otherwise they're arbitrary and capricious. If there's no discernible difference between one side of the line and the other, then you should move the line.
For many people, that one side is illegal and the other isn't is the only thing they CAN discern, their moral faculties having atrophied to rely exclusively on laws, arbitrary and capricious as they may be.
Perhaps they'll learn discernment after being arrested for tapping their feet in time to music. https://noelleneff.com/5-strange-new-hampshire-laws-you-didnt-know-existed/
On the contrary -- I think that forcing laws to be in sync with social norms would make them more capricious, not less. Social norms are based partly on people's moral instincts, and people's moral instincts are self-serving and susceptible to manipulation.
For example, it's relatively easy for people to convince themselves that members of a particular religion/race/other outgroup are inherently evil and deserve to be murdered, but the law still includes blanket prohibitions on murder. I shouldn't be able to get away with murder by truthfully saying to the judge, "Actually, committing murder in this situation is in accordance with social norms." If I can get away with murder by saying this, then that's evidence of a problem with the law.
Also, the problem with demanding a discernible difference between one side of the line and another is that the law sometimes needs to create a bright-line rule even when there is not an intuitively obvious cut-off point. Consider the age of consent: there is no particular age above which everyone is clearly mature enough to give meaningful consent, and below which everyone is clearly not mature enough to give meaningful consent. But there still needs to be a legal age of consent, even if this does not always agree with moral instincts or social norms in a particular case.
(I think this line of thought is drifting into the territory of what Scott discussed in his old essay 'Axiology, Morality, Law': https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/)
>If I can get away with murder by saying this, then that's evidence of a problem with the law.
Your social norms against murder are telling you that.
>Consider the age of consent: there is no particular age above which everyone is clearly mature enough to give meaningful consent,
There's no particular age for the laws either; some places put it at 16, others 18, others 14 if the partner is within the same age group, etc. The local social norms decide the cutoff for the law.
I think we're talking past each other. What I'm trying to say is that sometimes it is necessary for the law to ban things that don't provoke social outrage, and sometimes it is necessary for the law to allow things that do provoke social outrage. Trying to create a one-to-one correspondence between 'things that the average person finds outrageous' and 'things that are illegal' would have catastrophic consequences.
Why? Laws exist to serve society, not the other way around. If everyone agrees that the lynching of heretics is morally correct, it makes no sense to have a law prohibiting that. And it wouldn't stay a law for long anyways, because it would quickly be changed.
Every law was created for a reason, at some point. If those laws no longer reflect social reality, then they need to be changed.
Why wouldn't it stay a law for long anyways? Everyone believes it so what is the incentive to change it? Heretics will just continue to get lynched for at the very minimum of one more generation, and almost certainly longer than that.
I think that for the law being enforced, it matters that the law is practical to enforce. The law says no toy guns on airplanes, because it’s much easier to enforce a law that says no toy guns or real guns on airplanes than it is to enforce a law that says no real guns on air planes but toy guns are fine. Similarly for the child sexual abuse material, and also for the speech restrictions - a law saying it’s fine to have child sexual abuse material made with no actual children involved makes it very hard to enforce a law against real child sexual abuse material; a law saying that citizens can say what they want about Hamas but non-citizens can’t is much harder to enforce than a law that says no one can say nice things about Hamas or a law that says everyone is allowed to say what they want about Hamas. The big issue isn’t whether the person themself is checking the label - it’s about whether the amount of law enforcement time that goes into checking labels is so much that it detracts from actual enforcement of the important parts of laws.
I strongly agree with everything you're saying: the law should be designed to be practical to enforce, and sometimes the most practical law is one which bans things that merely resemble the things you're actually trying to prevent.
But this is completely different from Scott's argument that laws should be designed to make it easy to coordinate social outrage against lawbreakers.
For example, I agree that it is practical in some situations to say that toy guns are just as forbidden as real guns. However, it would be bizarre and counterproductive to create a social norm in which shooting someone with a toy guy provokes just as much social outrage as shooting someone with a real gun.
Yeah, in retrospect, I probably tried a bit too hard to reinterpret some of the puzzling things he said, and probably misinterpreted him as saying the thing I'm saying, which he might not have actually been saying.
"A common sociological claim is that relative income (compared to your social circle) matters more for happiness than absolute income. Bryan Caplan thinks this can’t be true: after all, practically nobody moves to poorer areas to enjoy the higher relative income this would confer. I don’t know if you can really use revealed preferences this way..."
The issue is different here and I think Caplan's argument is wrong. A high relative income is probably important because it gives you a greater sense of importance and/or makes you feel like you have luxuries compared to what is "normal". Or insert something similar along these lines.
But if you already are intimate with a social circle of higher wealth, moving to a lower wealth circle gives you much less or none of these payoffs. You have an ingrained higher baseline of what constitutes status and luxury.
For what it's worth, I've noticed this effect a lot in my own life, grew up in South Africa, moved to the US for college and although I am pretty upper-middle class in NY, when I travel to back to Johannesburg to visit friends and family I am suddenly wealthy. But it doesn't feel so great because somewhere in the back of my mind, I have this thought, like I'm not all that in reality.
> California’s experiment to see how high they could raise the minimum wage before getting visible employment effects has finally produced unambiguous results:
That’s a pretty zoomed in graph and doesn’t account for other stuff going on in California.
I notice too that there’s a discrepancy in how economists react to reductions and employment with regard to “natural” economic trends and state mandates. If the adoption of A.I. were to reduce employment by 4% in an industry but increase wage growth per remaining employee by a significant percentage it would be a Good Thing. This is a Bad Thing
What would I learn from a more zoomed-out graph, and what other stuff should be accounted for?
I'm not Peter, but I have a feeling that even a zoomed-out graph would not help. Minimum wage effects on the economy are AIUI notorious for being easily confounded. It's innate to the fact that only around 3% of the workforce works for minimum wage*, so if you raised it high enough to unemploy them all, that's only 3%, and often lost in the noise of other factors like aging off, coming of age, reentry due to life events (like Covid), relocation, tech advances, outsources, and other regulatory pressures (both positive and negative).
*OTOH, some non-minimum wage jobs are still pegged to it. If you raise MW from $8 to $20/hr, that also affects everyone who was making $10, $12, $15... they don't just go up to $20; they probably go up to $25, $28, $30... and so on up the line, so MW raises can affect more than 3%, but most employers faced with a mandatory wage raise can be expected to let go of their least-skilled, lowest earners first.
The idea that people making 15 would make 25 after a minimum wage hike is nice to dream about, but really since their labor value is 15 and 15 is less than 20, they'd just be fired along with the $8 employees.
It’s nice to dream that people are paid precisely the amount of value that their work produces, but in fact a lot of wage setting involves social negotiations, and it’s very easy for employers to pay workers less than the value their work produces, if the workers can’t negotiate collectively about what wage they will accept, while minimum wage laws help solve the negotiation problem that atomized workers often have when facing a few concentrated employers.
It's indeed very common for workers to be paid less than the value produced by their work, and it's also very common for workers to be paid more than the value they assign their labor. This sort of positive sum exchange is what makes market economies the best.
Very much so! But these kinds of positive sum exchanges are the ones where the net results of increased minimum wage are hardest to predict, because these ones change the terms of negotiations rather than just pricing workers out of the market. (And I believe a lot of the research on minimum wage is based on trying to figure out whether the improved bargaining position for the lowest earners actually ends up meaning broad-based economic stimulus, because more money is getting into the hands of the people most willing to spend it.)
Minimum wage laws solve that problem, but at the expense of creating workers who cannot make any legal wage at all. Which means they don't really solve that problem.
Wait, what? Are you saying that if a law mitigates one problem while making another problem worse, then it automatically is net negative?
It seems to me that you need to understand whether the amount it does on one problem is more or less than the amount it does on another in order to say whether it is overall good or bad.
Well all zoomed in graphs hide the magnitude of the actual change. Sometimes they are necessary. Here I think it’s relatively too zoomed in.
Other factors would be whatever is going on in California that might affect wages in restaurants other than this.
You're right that economics is complicated, but the simplest case of change in regulation --> change in employment is the some of the best evidence we can have.
Once you start accounting for confounding factors, you might end up with "cleaner" data, but you're just as likely to introduce bias as get rid of it. Considering what many economists predicted would happen, did happen, this is strong, albeit not conclusive evidence that raising the minimum wage reduced employment (albeit not much, this is a swing of a few percent).
we need to factor in the times when economists predicted a (significant) change and there was no (significant) change ...
of course there is some casual effect of regulation, we know from anecdotes that in many sectors (like law enforcement) increasing overtime is the norm instead of hiring more people.
and even in higher paid positions expensive "temp staffing" is very common, because hiring is seen as very cumbersome, or accounting/budget constraints incentivize buying services instead of hiring people. (so for example a restaurant fires the janitor but contracts a company to provide janitorial services a few times a week. again, of course, like you said, confounding factors are endless, and properly weighing them is the challenge.)
More importantly, the graph doesn't even say what it is measuring!
"If the adoption of A.I. were to reduce employment by 4% in an industry but increase wage growth per remaining employee by a significant percentage it would be a Good Thing"
Difference is that one occurred through increasingly productivity and the other didn't.
living in the slums isnt really properly controlled... there are other differences, not just relative income
7. When I was young I lived in... well, I'm not sure if it's was a slum, though I distinctly remember Finland's newspaper of note once writing a bombastic editorial calling it the only area filling the conditions for slum in the whole of Europe, but at least a very poor area in the midst of Finland's Great Recession, even though our family had a middle-class income that would have allowed for a different neighborhood. This apparently was in part because my lefty mom really took the avoidance of income segregation between neighborhoods seriously. I didn't like the experience, though I also suspect that when one's a teenager of a certain type they'd dislike anything.
Still, Caplan's argument is kind of odd; I've always taken the relative income thing to refer to one's friend group / peer group moreso than neighborhood, considering people these days don't necessarily really mentally "live" in their neighborhood and just crash there for the night.
29. You (and a huge amount of Covid contrarians/skeptics/independent thinkers generally) probably live in a youth bubble; Covid measures always polled humongously well among the elderly, no matter the party identification, and it's unsurprising that they still do. I mean, it was a popular contrarian talking point - "the olds are ruining the lives of the youth for just a few extra months of life!" - and they still seem to get surprised by polls like this showing that, yes, the olds really did like those few months of life!
Polling contradicts my anecdotal experience- especially when things first started to reopen, old people were *least* likely to be wearing masks in my area (mid-sized Southern metro). Don't know if the polling is regionally limited (maybe it was more popular in the northwest than in the south?) or if this area is the outlier instead.
The extremely few people I see wearing masks here tend to mostly be old and/or sickly-looking.
Yeah, these days it's mostly elderly, especially elderly black women, but a low rate overall.
In the early days as things loosened up I'd say the cutoff was roughly around age 50, with people over being much less likely to wear masks.
My experience was the opposite, older people were much more likely to wear masks. That was in Germany and Switzerland.
As for Tahu, nowadays mask-wearing has dropped close to zero, but not literally zero. I see perhaps 1-2 people per day on my commute to work. And still elderly are over-represented, though it's not exclusively elderly.
> "the olds are ruining the lives of the youth for just a few extra months of life!"
Also, let's not forget that "ruining the lives" referred to wearing a face mask. How incredibly selfish of those olds to wish to live a few years longer at a cost of a minor inconvenience to *me*!
If you were single and lived alone during the pandemic then you might have gone many months at a stretch with very minimal human contact. It's unreasonable to handwave away the cost to these people.
Why are you diminishing covid policy all the way down to its most benign requirement and pretending that's the best argument those people had?
It's the argument people around me made most frequently.
> practically nobody moves to poorer areas to enjoy the higher relative income this would confer
I've done that, moved to Paraguay, confirm it works for me. I've also reduced my consumption cyclically (e.g., living like a monk and slowly adding comforts back in, and cycling through that process), because slowly getting consumption back up feels better than the occasionally downward shocks.
... sounds crazy and I didn't theorize it and then do it but rather do it and then thought it was pretty neat re: hedonic adaptation. I'm a pretty weird guy, so I'm not sure this generalizes though.
To be clear, there are two effects when going to somewhere like Paraguay : a) your income goes further, and b) you are surrounded by poorer people. It would normally be hard to differentiate these effects, but my sense is that I somewhat can due to my spending pattern.
On second thought I'm not so sure, maybe I'm just happier because my income goes further, there is more sun, etc.
I'm curious how long you have lived in Paraguay. I also moved to a poorer country, but have found the opposite to be true.
I feel guilty for living an upper middle class lifestyle in my current home, even though it's significantly lower standard of living than I would have had in the USA, my home country. I also earn significantly less here (in nominal terms) than I could be earning in the USA. If anything, I've become jaded and disgusted at the fact that wages are 1/10th of what they are in the USA for doing the same job.
Regardless I don't think my happiness has increased as a result of being surrounded by poorer people. I'm guessing that effect only holds true in "first world" countries.
I've always thought that rapid downward shocks in quality of life, followed by a gradual increase, is the key to happiness. How often do you reset your hedonic treadmill by going full-monk?
Every couple of months
I second the reset and slowly adding comforts back strategy. Each "new" treat/comfort feels great. I believe it works even better when moving to a different country because the "new" comforts sometimes look different than a similar "old" one you gave up during the reset, so it doesn't feel like you just regained the old one.
Also, out of curiosity, where in Paraguay?
+ 1 on better when moving to a different country
>I've also reduced my consumption cyclically (e.g., living like a monk and slowly adding comforts back in, and cycling through that process), because slowly getting consumption back up feels better than the occasionally downward shocks.
Interesting, what kind of consumption do you cut back on?
Access to civilization, hipster food, conspicuous signalling stuff like real state in the most expensive cities in the world, the comforts of capitalism, etc.
31 > Remember, asking where someone is from ‘originally’ is a microaggression, but inferring it yourself based on their “mildly platyrrhine, high-rooted nose” is A-OK!
The sarcasm makes little sense, because probably nobody is both on their high horses about "microaggressions", and OK about Ethnoguessr. This website is based on early 20th century racist litterature including some frome Nazi Germany. This is not politically correct at all.
> I hope they move on to real pictures of real people in naturalistic situations.
In part because it is politically toxic, I do not expect many people would consent to have their picture there. Well, I don't know about you guys but I certainly would be incomfortable with my face on the Internet, captioned "hey, check out this low-skull West Alpinid! [Zeitschrift für Rassenforschung, Berlin 1942]".
Maybe they could AI-generate a new person every time, though.
> This website is based on early 20th century racist litterature including some frome Nazi Germany. This is not politically correct at all.
Well yes, the point is that if leftists won't let him ask people where they're from, he'll just use their skull shape to identify their race instead.
> This website is based on early 20th century racist litterature including some frome Nazi Germany.
There's a Russian anthropologist and popularizer of science Stanislav Drobyshevskiy who claims that raciology is a real science that continued to be developed in the USSR after WW2. He has several lengthy lectures on Youtube about individual races. He acknowledges the existence of the parallel people who work on non-scientific Nazi-flavored racial "theories" but says the Western academia was wrong to throw out all of racial science for reasons of political correctness.
(It does seem interesting to at least know things like "Which of the modern Eurasian populations might be the closest relatives to the "owners" of these 30000-year-old bones we just found in Kostyonki?".)
If I understand correctly, that question nowadays would be mostly or entirely answered with genetics while the early 20th-century races and subraces were based on anatomical measurements. Which correlate with genetics of course, but carry much less information.
But you don't always have enough genetic information especially when going further back. And sure, even incomplete DNA can contain more information, but I don't think we're at the point where it's so precise and complete any lesser tools are worthless, even just to verify the conclusions independently.
I understand the idea of a "fruit of a poisoned tree", but I'm not sure it should apply to science, and anyway we're not talking about the results of concentration camp experiments. I hope. Not for the most part, anyway, you don't need to do anything unethical to gather a lot of useful anthropological data.
My personal experience is that it's great and fun to be asked where I'm originally from if someone is genuinely curious about my ancestry and personal history.
It's not great and fun to be asked where I'm originally from if someone is seeking to use the information as proof that I don't belong in the country and am lesser than people that do.
I have a friend that can guess what region of Ukraine you're from based on when your ancestors emigrated. He also likes to guess where people are from based on how they look, and has a deep interest in phenotypes and human migration patterns. This kind of guessing is delightful because it relies on deep insight and knowledge of your history and culture, not on crass stereotypes. And it's never used to imply anything about where the guesee deserves to be American, or whatever
I totally missed Ozy’s piece on me! I’m honored anti-Lyman content got a whole link section!
7. "Slums" is not the same as "poor areas". It also implies a certain level of social disfunction that can be quite undesirable, especially for an outsider. There are millions of people retired to pleasant communities in poorer but relatively functional countries, e.g. the European/American population of Thailand coast, British and Germans in Spain and Portugal, Americans and Canadians in Chalisco, etc.
38. Is the message less clear if one does not believe that the Scripture is the Word of God? Are they implying that any measure reducing redistribution of wealth guarantees a place in hell?
The Catholic church has multiple times condemned the National Catholic Register for falsely calling themselves "Catholic" despite being unaffiliated with the church and preaching explicit heresy.
38. There are people.going much further in that direction: /r/DonaldTrump666
The Black Death is underrated, if you ask me. As capital-D Deaths go, name me a better one. You can't do it. Best Death ever!
On the other hand, the Vikings are vastly overrated. Couldn't even conquer Mercia, and we're all supposed to marvel at how badass they were 1200 years later? Weak sauce.
Wyrd bið ful aræd!
The Great Dying.
"....the decline of animal life is concentrated in a period approximately 10,000 to 60,000 years long, with plants taking an additional several hundred thousand years to show the full impact of the event."
Well, points for consistency, I guess, but a 50,000 year timeline reduces the overall impressiveness. I like my mass deaths like my allergy medication: fast-acting and strong.
Ah, shit. No, I meant the other one: the Native Americans after the arrival of the Europeans.
"The regions least affected lost 80 percent of their populations; those most affected
lost their full populations; and a typical society lost 90 percent of its population."
Should we add or subtract syphilis deaths in these reckonings?
I’m not sure about the way I spelled that.
Among the populations in question, that should be negligible on relevant timescales. But I'd say you should add them: the Great Dying is a broader phenomenon caused by the Columbian exchange, not a specific disease.
The Plague of Justinian was another contender, being similar in scope to the Black Death albeit with much wider confidence intervals (15-100 million vs 25-50 million) for want of reliable detailed sources.
AIDS (~44 million) and the Spanish Flu (17-50 million) are in the same range as the Black Death and the Plague of Justinian in absolute numbers of deaths, albeit much less in terms of percentage of the population of exposed areas.
The Columbian Plagues in the Americas, already mentioned, were definitely larger than the Black Death and the Plague of Justinian in terms of percentage of the population of the affected areas killed and may have been larger in absolute terms as well. I've seen estimates ranging from low tens of millions to something like 150 million, with the central estimates seeming to be around 50 million.
The Second World War's death toll (including the Holocaust and other wartime atrocities as well as direct deaths from military operations) was towards the upper end of the confidence interval for the Plague of Justinian and the Columbian Plagues.
Or, if you're willing to accept a broader scope and somewhat larger time scale, you could combine both World Wars, the Spanish Flu, and Soviet and Maoist democides into a single mega-event and get something like 200-250 million deaths.
The Columbian Plagues were pretty great. I rate them about a seven out of ten. Not quite in the same league as the Black Death, though. People have speculated native Americans probably had fairly weak immune systems since they were bottlenecked up around Alaska until the glaciers melted at the end of the last ice age, and not many pathogens are hardy enough to spread in Alaska. Throw a bunch of dirty pre-industrial era Europeans into the mix--people who grew up where open sewers were just what you had to hop over when you crossed the street--and the results were predictable.
The Black Death, on the other hand, had to attack these very same dirty sewer-hoppin' people who were already quite well used to being vectors for smallpox transmission, scarlet fever, etc., and yet it still wiped them out. This was industrial strength plaguin'. If the Columbian plagues were like shootin' fish in a barrel, the Bubonic Plague was like Ed Harris in Enemy At The Gates.
In exchange for the various Columbian plagues, the Native Americans gave the old world tobacco. I wonder which has cost more QALYs.
"Have you not reason then to bee ashamed, and to forbear this filthy novelty, so basely grounded, so foolishly received and so grossly mistaken in the right use thereof? In your abuse thereof sinning against God, harming your selves both in persons and goods, and raking also thereby the marks and notes of vanity upon you: by the custom thereof making your selves to be wondered at by all foreign civil Nations, and by all strangers that come among you, to be scorned and contemned. A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the Nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless."
-- King James VI and I of Scotland and England, "A Counterblaste to Tobacco", 1604
I took the liberty of modernizing the spelling for readability.
Also syphilis, so the exchange of disease was not all one way:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syphilis#History
> Or, if you're willing to accept a broader scope and somewhat larger time scale, you could combine both World Wars, the Spanish Flu, and Soviet and Maoist democides into a single mega-event and get something like 200-250 million deaths.
Cause of death: the 20th Century
I can't find numbers for worldwide all-cause mortality over the course of the entire 20th century, but off the top of my head I'd guess a bit over two billion.
Industrialization was cool and all, but let's just do it once.
I got the two billion figure based on looking up estimates of world population c. 1920 and rounding up, on the assumption that the large majority of people who were alive in 1920 died before 2001. "All cause mortality" includes old age, misadventure, and non-epidemic diseases.
Modern life expectancy at birth is about 70 years, and was quite a bit lower for most of the 20th century, so a large majority of babies born in 1920 would be dead well before 2001. And most people alive in 1920 weren't babies, so they're even less likely to survive to the end of the century. Add in people who died between 1901 and 1920 and people born after 1920 who died before 2001 for whatever reason, and you'll get at least 2 billion. Probably quite a bit more, since infant mortality means there's going to be a lot of people born post-1920 who don't make it very long.
Red Death!
>33 ... including such bleeding-heart liberals as Antonin Scalia.
Fun fact: Scalia was a generally rather ardent and consistent defender of the rights of criminal defendants (eg: he considered the “frisk” part of “stop and frisk” to be unconstitutional, putting him to the “left” of the Warren Court). And, more generally, there is this, from Hamdi v. Rumsfield:
>Many think it not only inevitable but entirely proper that liberty give way to security in times of national crisis—that, at the extremes of military exigency, inter arma silent leges. Whatever the general merits of the view that war silences law or modulates its voice, that view has no place in the interpretation and application of a Constitution designed precisely to confront war and, in a manner that accords with democratic principles, to accommodate it.
But his originalism did lead him in the opposite direction sometimes eg Boumediene v. Bush
>33. ... it’s hard to maintain social outrage against people who are doing the same thing as lots of other people but except for checking labels.
Why should there be any social outrage about people viewing AI kiddie porn, if no one is being harmed (unlike what is the case with actual kiddie porn [at least with the production. Arguably, (and this was the Supreme Court’s rationale for permitting the criminalization of possession of child porn [in contrast to possession of obscenity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_v._Georgia]) purchase/possession increases demand which increases child porn production and hence harm to actual children).
>40: California’s experiment to see how high they could raise the minimum wage before getting visible employment effects has finally produced (X) unambiguous results:
This is a bit of a red herring. 1) What we care about is overall unemployment, not just unemployment in the fast food industry. We need to know about total compensation and subsequent effects on employment. Imagine a town where almost everyone is employed in fast food restaurants one town over. If wages increase and employment in the fast food restaurants increase, it is nevertheless possible that total employment will not decrease, if the remaining workers spend their additional income at the local bowling alley, increasing the demand for pinsetters (did I mention that this hypothetical takes place in 1925?). 2) As I understand it, fast food employees are a mixture of a) high school kids earning extra money; and b) breadwinners. If the employers responded to the increase in min wage by retaining the breadwinners at higher wages, then the policy is at least arguably a success.
> Why should there be any social outrage about people viewing AI kiddie porn, if no one is being harmed
If we allow AI kiddie porn, people can spread real kiddie porn claiming it's AI. If we ban it, then we can stop the spread of real kiddie porn, and people who want to see it can still just download the AI models and run them locally.
But, if the AI kiddie porn is that indistinguishable from the real thing, why would anyone buy the real thing? And why would anyone produce the real thing? Why not produce AI and pass it off as the real thing?
People value authenticity. See e.g. natural diamonds, artisanal goods, outrage over AI art and so on.
But, again, why wouldn't producers simply pass off AI as authentic? And, it is easy to value authenticity when purchasing a legal good.
And, btw, so far all I have heard is a (thin) rationale for making hyperrealistic AI kiddie porn illegal; I have not heard a rationale for maintaining social outrage over its consumption.
Sure, with all kinds of pornography, AI-generated content is surely already being passed off as authentic, just as professional adult pornography has long been passed of as amateur pornography, and I would expect AI-generated content to come to dominate the market and to reduce demand for authentic content, but I still expect there to be significant demand for authentic amateur content.
I don't see how it would be possible not to maintain social outrage (in Western societies) against adults who fantasize about having sex with young children, so that discussion seems moot to me.
>I still expect there to be significant demand for authentic amateur content.
Why, given the risks? You are conflating desire with demand. Demand = the willingness and ability to buy at different prices. Here, the risk of prosecution = higher cost.
And, again, if there is demand, why wouldn't producers simply lie to consumers?
>I don't see how it would be possible not to maintain social outrage (in Western societies) against adults who fantasize about having sex with young children, so that discussion seems moot to me.
1. Not too long ago, the same was said re men who fantasize about sex with men.
2. I asked a normative question, not an empirical one.
"If the employers responded to the increase in min wage by retaining the breadwinners at higher wages, then the policy is at least arguably a success."
If anything I'd expect them to prefer the high school students who probably make better workers.
Why would you think that an adolescent would be a better worker than an adult? Which would be more reliable? Not to mention, a breadwinner needs his job. Most hs students don't. Plus, high school students would me more likely to move on after a short tenure.
People who work low-paying restaurant jobs as adults tend to have some kind of flaw that prevents them from getting better work, whether that's low intelligence, inability to show up on time, substance abuse problem, criminal record, can't speak English, etc. I find it funny you call them "breadwinners," which calls to mind a rather different demographic.
>I find it funny you call them "breadwinners," which calls to mind a rather different demographic.
Have you seriously never heard of single mothers? They are not exactly rare: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPFWCUMO
When I think of "breadwinner" I usually think of men.
Well, I guess you need to think again.
"Zaid Jilani points out that if immigrants don’t get a right to due process, citizens also don’t get a right to due process, because the government can kidnap citizens, claim they’re immigrants, and the citizens can’t prove otherwise since they don’t get due process."
The plot of "Twelve Years a Slave" in a nutshell.
I hugely support due process in all its forms. The idea of deportation without due process would and does fill me with dread. But due process also has a non-zero error rate. Any anecdotes or dramatic renditions such as 'Twelve Years a Slave' could happen with due process also, though presumably at a lower level (citation needed).
So: how do we deport 5,000,000 illegal immigrants in a timely manner in exigent circumstances, as the current leader of the country was elected to do? I am personally open to any and all ideas that maximize individual liberties and freedoms, and accomplish the goal.
There is a genuine problem with holding due process as a sacred value, where it gets increasingly long and unmanageable every time you add something (because you can only add componens to the process, never remove them; that would be a violation of someone's civil rights). Which gets us to the current position where it's basically impossible to actually enforce the law against anyone who's willing to go through an indefinitely stretched out legal process.
It's noteworthy in the Garcia case that while his lawyers don't dispute he entered the country illegally, and he was originally picked up by the police on gang membership suspicion all the way back in 2019, he still wasn't deported by 2025 (and probably never would have been if not for the current drama - 2019 was under the Trump administration). Most of the immigration cases under controversy seem to be like this, where reading the details makes you go "okay they didn't follow exact procedure but the actual outcome was correct".
(This is the case on immigration but is also increasingly the case on other issues like shoplifting, as Scott pointed out in a recent post).
More generally, the embracing of the narrative of "due process" as a sacred value by rationalists has been frustrating to me. We can all easily see how destructive too much process can be when it's used to block housing construction on environmental grounds, but forget that instantly on other issues?
(Which isn't to say the Trump admin's "no process whatsoever we just do what we feel like lol" is an improvement. It both harms legal immigration and doesn't actually achieve its stated goals, since you can't run large scale deportations without a standard procedure for doing them. Trump admin likes it because it generates maximum noise with minimum required actual action).
But the Democrats' refusal to admit their process has actually become unworkable and needs massive reform is frustrating.
Garcia had a court order to *not be deported to El Salvadore*.
Also we need some terminology that distinguishes these two cases and doesn't call them both just "deport":
1. Being put on a plane and sent out of the country, where you leave the airport and then wonder what to do
2. Being put on a plane where you're put in a supermax when you land
Re the court order: yes, that part seems true, but it matches the general case I mentioned that people can delay deportation indefinitely (in this case, using asylum claims which are hard to verify; this seems like a pretty standard abuse of the immigration system).
Re 1 v 2: iiuc (not confident), Garcia's imprisonment in El Salvador is based on Salvadorian rather than American policy. While I'm sure there are many people unfairly jailed in El Salvador and you can reasonably oppose Salvadorian prison policy, this is not obviously unusual by that baseline.
>(in this case, using asylum claims which are hard to verify;
No, Garcia's asylum claim was denied, but he was granted withholding of removal.
Okay now I'm confused. I knew he was granted temporary withholding of removal (which in practice seems to not have been temporary), but if his asylum case was denied and not just deferred why was he given withholding of removal status?
> Re 1 v 2: iiuc (not confident), Garcia's imprisonment in El Salvador is based on Salvadorian rather than American policy.
The US government is reportedly paying El Salvador $6 million to imprison deportees. They are complicit in the plan to deport people directly to a foreign prison.
Yeah, that part seems bad (and also confusing. If you've already got them deported, why bother imprisoning them?)
(Okay I get that the actual answer is mostly "because Trump likes doing bad things that make him look tough while diverting the conversation away from the economy").
What exactly has become unworkable about it? The idea that there’s an urgent need to deport millions of people that justifies ‘corner cutting’ isn’t self evident to me.
And maybe I’m just excessively libertarian, but I don’t see due process as just an arbitrary barrier put up to prevent people from doing things, but a means of protecting important rights. I don’t feel like a hypocrite for believing on the one hand I should be able to do an addition to my house without permission from everyone in my zip code, while also believing a government agent shouldn’t be allowed to send an immigrant to indefinite incarceration in a foreign country without so much as a hearing. I’m not abstractly ‘pro-due process’ for every conceivable thing there could be a process for. I guess if you think immigration is worse than murder then you might think discarding the process isn’t that big of a deal.
My view isn't that housing (or immigration) is an acute emergency worth suspending due process over. It's that process should not in general be a meaningful inhibitor of policy. If you disagree with deportations on substantive grounds that's one thing. But if something *is* explicit government policy (and in this case it's hard to argue against that; both the presidency and Congress support more deportations, and that's the one issue where Trump is genuinely popular on), it shouldn't be forced unworkable purely on process grounds. If that happens it implies we need to reform process (ideally while balancing competing considerations).
The pro-process side should come up with a workable version of the process to champion (e.g. "okay the current system is unworkable but people should at least get a chance to present documents showing their status before arrest and talk to a neutral judge before deportation, but this shouldn't typically result in indefinite deferment of deportation for illegal immigrants) rather than doubling down on "we should keep the current level of excessive process that ensures no one is ever deportable". Similarly, on housing my view is "we should have a simple general housing code with by right approval for reasonable density that law abiding developers can easily adhere to and get quick permissions for", not "housing is an emergency so we should just stop enforcing building codes".
(The Trump admin's total anti-process approach is the equivalent of Mumbai housing policy. It's also quite bad, but the opposition needs to improve their alternative).
> "we should keep the current level of excessive process that ensures no one is ever deportable".
Well this state doesn't exist, hundreds of thousands of people get deported every year, so problem solved.
Those are mostly expired removal cases of people caught right by the border shortly after crossing, which are allowed to bypass the courts. Actual deportations of people who aren't caught on crossing and who challenge their cases in court (or who claim asylum and are released) are much fewer, and currently face a 3 million case backlog.
> process should not in general be a meaningful inhibitor of policy. [...] if something *is* explicit government policy (and in this case it's hard to argue against that; both the presidency and Congress support more deportations, and that's the one issue where Trump is genuinely popular on), it shouldn't be forced unworkable purely on process grounds. If that happens it implies we need to reform process (ideally while balancing competing considerations).
If the government finds that existing process makes their policy goals unworkable, then it is their legal prerogative to change that process in accordance with the established legal rules for doing so. It is also their legal burden to continue following said process as long as it remains the law of the land.
If the president and his allies in congress cannot abide by constitutionally mandated due process, they are entitled to try to amend the constitution to get rid of this obstruction to the policy goals, or at least appeal cases to the SCOTUS in the hope of changing the standing interpretation of the relevant constitutional clauses. But if they instead exercise executive power in extralegal ways to further policy in defiance of constitutional restrictions, they are engaging in misuse of power, fragrant violation of the law, and betrayal of their oath of office.
This.
Where is this so-called emergency? We had a roaring hot economy with ultra-low unemployment from 2021-2024, and whenever they were actually allowed to work all the immigrants and refugees got absorbed into it pretty effectively. For my home state of Utah, it meant we had plenty of labor and a bunch of new Venezuelan restaurants.
<sarc>well, since you are happy, obviously the system works, who cares about the slave labor?</sarc>
You do realize that illegal immigration has...some issues at least? An underclass is more easily exploitable, is often trafficked, traffickers are usually drug cartels, drug cartels use immigrants (knowingly or unknowingly) as mules, hold their families hostage, exploit them in other ways, they are paid often below minimum wage or off the books, and so on?
You seem to think that just because they came here, that it was all wine and roses and everything is working fine just because you can't or don't want to see the exogenous costs.
I don't think having a system where you can illegally immigrate so long as you're willing to fight it in court indefinitely at great cost to both you and the public legal system, and meanwhile the illegal immigrants exist in a constant state of second-class citizenship uncertainty, is a good outcome. I agree that an ideal solution would be to reform the immigration system to make legal immigration easier and faster to file (it should not take multiple years to get a visa or green card if you're eligible!), not just make enforcement of illegal immigration possible.
>I agree that an ideal solution would be to reform the immigration system to make legal immigration easier and faster to file (_it should not take multiple years to get a visa or green card if you're eligible!_), not just make enforcement of illegal immigration possible.
[emphasis added] Agreed.
The current immigration system seems to me like it is something like two orders of magnitude too slow. The point of comparison that I'm considering is job interviews for skilled positions (I was a programmer before I retired).
Typically, this took one day (albeit a long and grueling one) for all of the interviews followed by approximately a day for the decision. Now, admitting someone to a nation is a more serious decision than hiring an employee. Still - is it more than an order of magnitude more serious? I find it hard to believe that the government couldn't find out everything about a potential immigrant that they now find out (at least from the person) in say two weeks of solid interviews. Can't we do better???
You have said it better than I can.
I want to highlight one part to those that are “supporters” of illegal immigrants. The current “process” makes them 2nd class citizens living in constant fear of being deported. I prefer a better process where immigrants do not need to live that way.
Congress could easily change the law on asylum; it’s just that the administration can’t do so unilaterally. We have separation of powers in our system of representative democracy.
Indeed, there was a bipartisan attempt to pass legislation that would reform asylum law including by making it easier to deport, but it was shot down after candidate Trump decided the law would be bad for his campaign.
I don't think due process and like, nimbyism are functionally analogous. The trade-offs on where you build a housing complex or a railroad don't necessarily rise to the level of life and liberty, whereas proceedings around deportation and criminal justice do.
On the other hand, the amount of process around criminal justice is much higher per person affected. It's reasonable to have a lower threshold for error there, but it still is a tradeoff (and one which, if you've reached a point where you functionally can't enforce laws, you'rw managing badly. Sometimes that's because you've written unworkably strict laws, but sometimes because your process is badly designed).
I think plenty of people would be open to revising the process, although I think its another one of those things, like FDA regulation, where the reason we don't have a different process isn't because the process is obviously corrupt, but because there's a lot of legitimately competing incentives. Its hard to have a conversation around process however when the consequences of the process being ignored are as dire as they are right now. Trump would be facing a lot less resistance if he hadn't contracted with a dictator to throw people in a gulag.
Just hire more immigration judges, and more IRS enforcers, and more traffic police.
I don't think "just hire more lawyers to solve the extra complexity caused by having a complicated legal process" is a good solution, it's a form of tulip subsidy
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidies
Yes, but "just abolish due process" is a demonstrably bad solution. So what is yours?
I think the discussion on requiring e-verify seems productive, instead of everyone throwing food at each other.
I'm sure there are additional problems to be sorted out there, and many oxen to be gored, but at least it's a starting point.
(EDIT) this doesn't address the current asylum seekers exactly, and especially how to deport the subset who are violent, abusive, or criminal, with sufficient due process, but it takes a holistic approach from many angles to solve big problems.
Obligate e-verify so that they all self-deport because they can't work.
It won't happen because Trump doesn't want to do mass deportations, he wants to try to break the American legal system and he's discovered anti-immigrants are very happy to break the American legal system as long as they're told it's happening to illegal immigrants.
Asking members of the Trump White House to demand e-verify in all their associated endeavours would be a good wedge issue.
Seconded!
I largely or even entirely agree that mandating e-verify is the correct solution. The rest of your rant tends to reduce the impact of your response and I suggest you avoid such histrionics in the future if you want to make good points.
That said we wouldn't ideally just flip it on day one if we want to avoid mass disruption. It would be good to couple this with an improved legal migration system, temporary work visas, or the like. This unfortunately requires an extremely divided congress to take action, and in particular the divides don't fall along traditional party lines but more around predominantly farm states vs urban states and so on.
See? There can be agreement without assuming everyone is acting in bad faith.
"This unfortunately requires an extremely divided congress to take action, and in particular the divides don't fall along traditional party lines but more around predominantly farm states vs urban states and so on."
Both houses of Congress are controlled by the GOP. It's not "extremely divided" at all. If they continue, Trump's tariffs are going to cause a global recession and his behavior is already shaking investor confidence in the USA; tariffing is an authority vested in Congress and delegated to the President only under specific circumstances defined by law; and rather than trying to reassert their authority, the House GOP has actively abandoned it (https://www.businessinsider.com/gop-leaders-mike-johnson-block-congress-action-trump-tariffs-2025-4?op=1). If he can get them to go along with that, he could absolutely get e-verify passed.
"See? There can be agreement without assuming everyone is acting in bad faith."
I don't assume everyone is acting in bad faith, I infer that the Trump administration is acting in bad faith based on a careful analysis of their actions.
>Both houses of Congress are controlled by the GOP.
Are you not aware the filibuster exists?
The House GOP already passed an immigration bill that would mandate e-verify. It has no chance in the Senate because Republicans don't have a supermajority.
Does it do things democrats would be opposed to, as well? I bet if it just mandated e-verify, they could get it past a filibuster. If they cared.
While obligating e-verify would help many cases, there's a lot of people who work under the table or in illegal endeavors (and some who just live on the street, or mooch off friends or relatives, etc), for whom it wouldn't really work. These are also disproportionately the less-contributing immigrants that immigration opponents most want to remove.
(with regards to the second part of your comment, I agree that the Trump admin is not in general acting in good faith. It would help the opposition quite a lot to propose actual solutions to the problems Trump is just pretending to solve and not actually doing anything meaningful about, instead of arguing against the premise that they're even problems at all, or arguing that they can't be solved without violating sacred values).
Isn't illegal immigration now down to much more manageable levels?
Problem largely solved except for what to do with the enormous numbers allowed entry under the Biden administration? This seems like at least one campaign promise that was kept, not a pretend solution.
That's a pretty big "except" though.
An excellent comment that did not emanate from cloud cuckoo land.
"So: how do we deport 5,000,000 illegal immigrants in a timely manner in exigent circumstances, as the current leader of the country was elected to do? "
If a candidate runs and gets elected on a platform of, let's say, throwing every left-handed person into the ocean, that doesn't mean that any other part of the nation or the government has any mandate to help or even step aside. It the responsibility of the candidate to keep their promises within the realm of constitutionality and legal feasibility. It is not the responsibility of everyone else in the country to surrender their rights because 1/4 of their neighbors are angry and impatient.
Actually everyone does in fact call this a mandate. Every candidate in modern times and probably prior has said that the numbers trump got constitute a mandate.
You don't personally have to help of course, it's a free country. If you aren't interested in solutions, does that mean you support illegal immigration, or don't care? If you don't care, why are you posting here?
By this, I presume you support illegal immigration. Why?
Has anyone ever claimed a mandate with less than a majority? I don’t believe Bill Clinton claimed a mandate for things.
It's a fair cop. I can't say with any certainty. It seems very common to me and I heard it in the press a lot during e.g. Biden and Obama's administrations.
Trump may not have a mandate based on his election, but he is on the side of the majority.
Polls shows 55% of Americans want a decreased in immigration and 61% think illegal immigration is a serious problem.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1660/immigration.aspx
https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/monmouthpoll_us_022624/
Quick lesson in law that you seem to desperately need: stuff candidates say aren't the same as laws. They especially aren't the same as the constitution. They are certainly *not* legally binding on *anyone.*
Perhaps you found the word "mandate" confusing there, so for your benefit, let me rephrase that to obligation. Nobody else has any legal or moral obligation to help Donald Trump keep his campaign promises. And when keeping his campaign promises conflict with the constitution--which is what *you* seem to be suggesting--there are millions of people who, in actual fact, have a legal obligation to *hinder* him. The president is not above the law. No matter how whiny he or his supporters get about illegal immigration, that still doesn't put him or his administration above the law.
"By this, I presume you support illegal immigration. "
I originally wrote a longer, more detailed response. But I think I'd rather pay this particular strain of bullshit back in kind.
By this, I presume you support fascism. You're talking, acting, and arguing like a fascist. I'm sure you don't *think* you are. But that dime-store authoritarian "with us or against us" crap you're spouting would be a dead giveway even if you hadn't spent multiple comments arguing that other peoples' constitutional rights were an inconvenience to be swept aside when it interferes with hurting the people you so *desperately* want to see hurt.
Good day.
"If you aren't interested in solutions, does that mean you support illegal immigration, or don't care? If you don't care, why are you posting here?"
This seems a misconception worth addressing, assuming this question is in good faith (which to be honest, I find dubious).
To be perfectly clear and candid: I mostly DON'T care about illegal immigration. Even when I lived in the U.S. I never found it a very compelling issue: there were lots of real problems to be worried about. I think this attitude was pretty common among people not on the far-right: a variety of opinions on the issue, but little force behind them.
But me not caring about your pet issue is NOT that same as me not caring about what the government *does* regarding that issue. This seems so bloody obvious in context that I have trouble believing you're making an honest mistake here. You are taking an unimportant non-issue and using it as an excuse to strip civil rights from *everyone in the goddamn nation.* OF COURSE I'd bloody well care about that. Any sane person would.
Which is bad news for you, to be honest. The best possible outcome from where we are now is that the U.S. as a nation hangs on by the skin of its teeth, and the appalling stench of the policies your pushing render this issue toxic for decades to come: nobody dares take a hard line on immigration lest they be compared to Trump. The more likely outcome is that you wake up one morning and discover that in your haste to solve this utterly banal problem, you handed power to a blatantly and nakedly untrustworthy charlatan, and now you no longer have a country. I doubt he'll even "solve" the issue; I mean why would he? Keeping it around as a boogeyman has worked wonders: there seem to be no limits on the absurdities you're willing to support as long as the specter of an "invasion" of immigrants can be waved in front of your face. Any robust solution would necessarily give up that power. The fantasy that if you just cross one more line, just break one more boundary, just throw one more sacred principle into the fire, you'll finally buy freedom from this supposed menace is just that: a fantasy.
Serious question: FDR interned American Japanese citizens, stripping them of civil rights during wartime by declaring it an emergency. Granted, WW2 and all that implied, but I see this as one of the nation's largest infringements on civil liberties in its history, post-slavery. We as a nation survived. There is a lot of ruin in a nation. I don't love this, and I don't love any erosions in civil rights, and I further don't love cutting corners on them by calling 'emergency' as a trump card, by any president, and think this power should be heavily hemmed-in.
However, 5-10,000,000 non-citizens crossing our borders with incompetent screening and due process and all that implies in their effect on our country definitely gets into my 'emergency' category. If it doesn't in yours, so be it. It's obviously not nothing, and the constitution at least nods in the direction of a presidential duty being to secure the country.
AND I don't love that the prior administration put us in this position any more than that the current one isn't handling it perfectly, though I am personally delighted that at least a hundred or so gangbangers are no longer here. Garcia doesn't trouble me, insofar as the evidence I've read makes it pretty clear he received a lot of due process and the one reason for keeping him out of El Salvador has dried up.
I don't love that Trump said some things that could be interpreted as jailing American citizens overseas. Beyond that, show me any law whatsoever that has been changed during his administration that affects my civil liberties negatively and I'll reassess my response. 'A phone and a pen' executive orders affect the executive branch in accordance with laws duly passed by congress, though of course SCOTUS may choose to disagree with their interpretations.
"FDR interned American Japanese citizens, stripping them of civil rights during wartime by declaring it an emergency. "
First, FDR was absolutely in the wrong for doing what he did. I have never encountered *anyone* who seriously grappled with the actual history of Japanese internment who ended up concluding that what he did was reasonable or justified by the events on the ground at the time. Further, there are some pretty chilling ulterior motives that appear to be behind the political push towards Japanese internment that have absolutely nothing to do with national security.
But even given all that, yes, World War II was an *actual emergency*. The U.S. suddenly being at war with two large, aggressive, hostile world powers (and Italy) is a genuinely dangerous situation. Claiming that some groups of mostly unarmed civilians illegally crossing a land border in peacetime--something that has been going on for *decades* without causing much in the way of clearly-identifiable harm--is somehow equivalent if a FARCE. If you're willing to call that an emergency or support a president that does so, then whether you like it or not you're supporting the dictatorial expansion of presidential power. *Anything* can be an emergency under than definition. And indeed it already is: Trump's justification for circumventing the trade deal *he negotiated* to put tariffs on Canada was a laughably tiny (as in, a two-digit number of kilograms) flow of fentanyl, a drug that's manufactured in the U.S. in far greater quantities.
"Garcia doesn't trouble me, insofar as the evidence I've read makes it pretty clear he received a lot of due process "
Everything up to and including the Supreme Court says you're wrong here. His deportation to El Salvador was *illegal.* The Trump administration has *admitted it*. Saying "he received plenty of due process" is about as sensible as saying "look, I know Alice shot Bot *this* time, but look at all those previous occasions that she *failed* to shoot him." He. Was. Deported. Without. Due. Process. It's clear cut. Black and white. If you keep maintaining otherwise you are wrong plain and simple.
So honestly, here's how it looks to me. On the one hand, you claim to be concerned about the expansion and misuse of presidential power, but on the other hand you keep uncritically repeating all the standard excuses and justifications for it and trying to shift the blame elsewhere. I'd honestly think more highly if you honestly committed in *either* direction: take an actual stand for the rule of law or just be open and honest about authoritarian control being a price you're perfectly willing to pay if it means getting rid of the people you don't like.
"So: how do we deport 5,000,000 illegal immigrants in a timely manner in exigent circumstances, as the current leader of the country was elected to do?"
Given that Republicans have control of Congress as well as the Presidency, why not go to Congress and ask for the budget to hire more immigration judges and agents? The problem is that the Trump Administration is trying to have it both ways - they want to do mass deportations on the cheap while ripping out as much federal spending as possible to pass a big tax cut.
Addressed in discussion elsewhere in this thread. Short answer, where does that end next time 15,000,000 come in? Why not stop it now?
Pretty sure a big part of that answer is "invest in a lot of bureaucrats and lawyers to help move the process along as efficiently as possible." But that's the exact opposite of what the DOGE crowd believes in.
Does this actually scale? Or does it just mean the next president who feels similarly to Biden lets in 15,000,000 and then you say 'invest in even more bureaucrats and lawyers to help move the process along as efficiently as possible'?
Seems like a never-ending ratchet, moving goalposts all the way down. At some point, hopefully now, it stops and we say this is enough.
I mean, liberals have to deal with rachets all the time, we don't get to suddenly toss aside the constitution because the prior Republican administration fucked everything up, and something tells me you would be upset if that were the precedent we took away from this situation.
It seems to me, though, that this discussion is about this particular ratchet.
Your argument that there are others, unspoken of, but looming menacingly, seems to concede my point.
My argument is that everyone has their own issue where everything seems broken and they would love to play dictator to cut through all the bullshit. But the bullshit exists because there is not a consensus on how to deal with the problem, and saying "we don't have to worry about consensus, we'll just unilaterally enforce our side of this issue and fuck the consequences" gives the other party permission structure to fight a war of all against all. I'm astonished by the number of people who seem to think being dictators on this issue won't open up giant cans of worms down the line.
"Or does it just mean the next president who feels similarly to Biden lets in 15,000,000 and then you say 'invest in even more bureaucrats and lawyers to help move the process along as efficiently as possible"
Of course it means that; there is obviously no solution to illegal immigration that precludes the possibility of future presidents taking steps to let higher numbers of illegal immigrants in. Even mass deportations with literally no due process at all can't stop Zombie Joe Biden from letting everyone right back in again in his 2nd term.
The point of mentioning other ratchets isn't a whatabout, it's to show that this dynamic is just an unavoidable feature of politics. If your opponents win, they may have the chance to undo what you've done, that's just the nature of the game.
When 'undoing' is much harder and more expensive than 'doing', that's a one-way ratchet.
Fine, but that just means that one way ratchet effects are unavoidable in politics. I don't see a way around that.
I mean, as I say, even if Trump deports every immigrant with no due process, it presumably will remain easier for a future president to let them all back in than it was to deport them...I don't think "due process", or "spend more money on the process" are what lead to the ratchet effect, it's just the nature of the fact that it's always easier let people in than to kick them out.
A hearing before an immigration judge is pretty low cost. Based on Zaid's other writing it might last just 5 minutes.
But in those 5 minutes the person or their lawyer can say "hey, I'm an American citizen" or "hey, I have an order to not be deported to El Salvadore."
The administration could be getting nearly the same results while respecting law and order.
Yeah, but that sounds like work. Where's the fun in that?
That's not entirely snark on my part.
> But in those 5 minutes the person or their lawyer can say "hey, I'm an American citizen" or "hey, I have an order to not be deported to El Salvadore."
But then everyone is going to say that. And then it's going to take a lot longer than 5 minutes.
It should be pretty easily verifiable with documents
The typical thing people say is "hey, I'm a refugee fleeing threat of violence in my home country" (this is what happened with Garcia). And then you have to verify that, which can take years if it ever happens at all (Garcia was still in America on temporary status for consideration in 2025 after first asking for asylum in 2019).
I agree that there should be a version of the process that's both reasonably time efficient and gives people a fair hearing. That's genuinely not the one we have now.
It would be interesting to hear from someone who works for the immigration service what contributes to the time requirement, at a ground level. I suspect it's pretty easy and fast check for a single person once the case file is in the hands of the person who knows what to look for, and everyone they need to consult is standing by to assist. I suspect this is the best case scenario, and the median case is that file waiting weeks to work to the top of that person's pile, and the people who can assist are stuck with their own piles, on leave, etc.
If you don't want to deal with Garcia's claim that he is facing violence in El Salvadore, you can deport him someplace else.
The court had, in fact, previously ruled that Garcia could not be deported to El Salvadore. He could be deported anywhere else. Any nearby country or any country had travelled through would have been a completely rational place to send him without needing to fight against that court ruling.
The administration could be getting nearly the exact same results while obeying the law, but it would have to recognize limits on its behavior. Like a child with pathological demand avoidance, they don't want that.
Yes, I agree with that part (with the asterisk that I'm not sure they actually could find another country to take him). While I'm critical of purely process-based criticism (and of the media distorting information on these issues significantly more than they typically do), the administration's solutions are optimized for creating controversy, not achieving their stated goals while balancing considerations, and this is quite bad.
(That said, it is politically good strategy; moving the media conversation from the collapsing economy to immigration - which Trump is still seen favorably on - has paused the collapse in his approval ratings).
One simple solution is to require that person to apply for asylum from Honduras or Guatamala. If they apply after they have already illegally entered the country then auto-reject, deport, and maybe ban them.
Issues with this proposition (from different sides - pick the one that worries you more):
- false negatives: legitimate asylum claims can easily be made by people who had to flee those places and didn't have the ability to wait for an application in advance to be confirmed.
- false positives: many asylum seekers do follow current legal procedure of presenting themselves at the border, claiming asylum, and are then allowed in until processing, which can take years (at least, they did under the Biden admin. I don't know if this is still available, but there's millions of people around from then). "Deport anyone who didn't follow the rules" would miss them.
(this one doesn't apply to Garcia, who crossed the border illegally almost a decade before claiming asylum*
*Okay technically a different status but same principle.)
I agree with the principle, though, that "change the rules to streamline the procedure and make it easier to deport illegal border crossers while keeping it mostly fair" isn't really a hard challenge in itself. The problem seems to be that Democrats would attack any change or process as a civil rights violation, and the Trump admin isn't interested in making a new more functional process, they just want to have loud controversies around immigration to provoke the Democrats into bad messaging. So once again, the only real winner is moloch :(
Congress could change the law on asylum; in the absence of congressional action, the administration still has to follow the law as it is. That’s part of what it means to have rule of law.
The legal system takes a lot of logistic effort to bring all the parties and the evidence, background, and lawyers together in one place to make use of those incredibly valuable 5 minutes. Traffic court works at scale because the stakes are relatively low.
Currently there is every incentive to throw sand in the grains of justice by, for example, conveniently needing lots of rescheduled meetings due to personal obligations of defense immigration lawyers. These tactics are nothing new to the legal system, which is full of exploitable levers for those who know and are funded to take the time to learn and use them.
For example, claims of asylum could be very hard to check out. How would a judge do this? Do they need to gather evidence from South America? I'm no expert, I'm genuinely unsure how we handle millions of asylum claims without pointing to e.g. an actual mass war between Argetina and Chile or something (and none of these would be valid if immigrants could stop in Guatemala).
Congress could change the rules on asylum. For example, they could make it so that an immigrant is ineligible if they passed through any other country without first applying for asylum there. Or for that matter Congress could send those claiming asylum to Rwanda, as the UK had proposed (except I guess those claiming asylum _from_ Rwanda — those could be send to El Salvador?). In any case, it’s up to Congress, not the administration.
This applies equally to, say, the Obama administration's unilateral declaration of DACA. While you can be consistently against both this does imply that the Trump admin is only abusing the constitution on immigration to a similar degree that Obama did, rather than to a whole new level.
(Unlike their actions on, say, trade policy or blackmailing law firms that may oppose them, which genuinely do seem like a whole new scary level of abuse).
You do realize that those five minutes require mountains of preparation, typically at very high cost? You seem to think that everyone just shows up magically on time and it's over. And those 5 minutes are, as noted below, an absolute best case scenario.
Garcia saw over 17 judges and racked up a ton of court documentation on his gang ties and related abuses. How much due process is enough to say we tried to do the right thing by him? How much could these resources have helped poor Americans instead? Or is this just magic sky money that we don't care about?
I am skeptical of the claim that a typical asylum or immigration hearing require "months" of dedicated, full-time work. I could buy a day of work, spread out over months in blocks of a few hours at a time (because e.g. one step is "send a request to the Bureau of XYZ records" and they always leave things in their inbox for weeks). Do you have a cite for the "months"?
Better, does anyone here have any first- or even secondhand experience in this area?
A few misc thoughts on 29:
First, the top 4 policies that are described (mandating WFH *where possible*, social distancing, masks indoors, and direct stimulus payments) were generally pretty doable or outright favorable. Like of course the average person loves the additional flexibility of optional WFH (so much so that RTO mandates are pretty widely condemned) and stimulus payments is just money. And social distancing / masks were, like, annoying, but not really that bad. The latter two (closing schools and businesses) were always much more controversial, and show up as more controversial in the chart too. (I'm also surprised though that 60% end up supporting closing schools, as an aside)
Second, I think you may be living in a conservative filter bubble at least a bit. A lot of smart libertarian-leaning-right-wing people I know giga-brain themselves about COVID -- they look at the second/third order effects (economy, kids learning) and reason that those must massively outweigh the first order effects (people dying). I think its easy to forget exactly how dangerous the first wave of COVID was, and how little we knew about it. The early waves of COVID were quite deadly AND extremely transmissible and only really got overtaken by less deadly versions of COVID somewhere around 8 months in. In case it matters, to really underscore the point, virtually everyone I know in the Indian American diaspora had at least one grandparent or relative die in India from COVID. In practice, we had only a year of lockdowns from March 2020 to April 2021 when the vaccines started rolling out. So you're looking at a delta of, what, at most 4 months? That's really not that long!
And we have literally hundreds of examples of other countries with different governance models and different approaches to how they handled COVID to compare against. Could the US have done some things better? Sure, perfection is impossible and hindsight is 20/20. But I think many people who are playing the "COVID reckoning" game are really just trying to give the Dems a black eye and are noticeably uninterested in how the US performed relative to the rest of the world post COVID (really well!) or even how various US states performed against each other.
In case anyone is actually curious on the latter btw, it of course varies based on which metric you end up looking at and how you calculate that metric. Blue states had better health outcomes as measured by infection and death counts. Red states had better economic outcomes as measured by % drop in per-state GDP and employment. Which is exactly what you would expect when comparing places that did lockdowns vs those that didnt.
That means that the fundamental debate is not a policy debate -- the policies that various states enacted did more or less what we expected! The fundamental debate is a _values_ debate. Do we value lives or economy? Do we care about the elderly or the children? Do we want to focus on the current moment or think about the long term effects? There is no obvious answer to these things, individual communities should more or less choose for themselves, and lo and behold that's basically what happened. As far as I know there was no federally mandated lockdown at any point, by EO or otherwise.
"Focus on second-order effects so much that you effectively ignore first-order effects" has always seemed to me to be a common libertarian (or general contrarian) failure mode. First order effects: boring, pedestrian, everyone talks about them, can they really be that important? Second order (negative) effects: cool, for smart people to see and understand, your mom hasn't heard of them, they must be important! (Unexpected positive second order effects of things that contrarian dislikes, what, do those even exist?)
TBH it's not even necessarily malicious that this happens!
1) Smart person has identified a second order effect no one seems to be talking about
2) Smart person tries to spread the news about the second order effect so that people can make accurate trade offs and cost benefit analysis (while still personally believing that the first order effect is important!)
3) People hear the smart person and think "wow, this smart person is talking a lot about how important it is to focus on second order effect, this must be more important than the things the smart person isnt focusing on, like first order effect"
4) The second order effect becomes more important/discussed/planned for than the first order effect
grandparent != relative. Most of us have orders of magnitude more relatives than grandparents. If relative is the correct term, then your anecdote is much less meaningful.
Amend my statement to "grandparent or person who filled a grandparent like role", which better conveys what I was trying to get at and hopefully covers the semantic concern you have.
Though even if I was to just say 'relative', I can count on exactly one finger the number of diseases that have led to a death in the family for approximately everyone I know who is Indian American.
"And social distancing / masks were, like, annoying, but not really that bad."
Annoying for the person asked to wear the mask for five minutes, rather something more for the person asked to wear them for eight hours.
Idk, I know a lot of doctors and dentists who wear masks all day every day. They seem fine (I mean, besides the hazing of med school / residency)
Also, just to make sure I'm not over stepping here, did you have to wear masks for 8 hours, or are you speaking for someone who did?
I can totally imagine there are some small percent of people who had legitimate problems with wearing masks AND had to wear them for extremely long periods of time AND lived in states that had mask mandates (because the federal government didnt). If you're in that category, I'm sorry that you had to go through that. I also think that number of people is a very small number of people, and we generally don't make country wide health policy decisions around the conveniences of such small numbers of people (and if we do, my trans friends would like a word!)
"AND lived in states that had mask mandates"
Yeah lots of people didn't have to wear masks because they lived in states not governed by the party of mask mandates. Some were happy about that and continued to vote for that party, giving us Donald Trump as President. Enjoy all the fun associated with that.
The general tone of your post is 'annoyed/angry', but I don't really understand why. You seem annoyed that people got to choose what policies they wanted to follow?
I'm not a fan of the Trump presidency and the people who brought it on us.
On this we're agreed 😂 though maybe we have different understandings of who "the people who brought it on us" are. I tend to blame Murdoch, Ailes, and Suzanne Scott, but thats just me.
In case it matters, even when the Dems had federal office, there was never any implementation of country wide mask or lockdown mandates.
There was a vaccine mandate for people who worked under the federal government, which of course was challenged in the courts and eventually stripped down. There was also an OSHA vaccine-or-mask mandate for private companies with more than 100 people, and that too was challenged in the courts and eventually removed.
(For the MAGAs reading at home, note that Biden did not take any political vengeance in response. He did not, say, withhold federal funding from the states that sued, or ask the DOJ to go after the institutions that were not masking/vaccinating. Because doing that would be insane.)
There's a subset of people who find masks extremely uncomfortable, like they're suffocating. They're not suffocating, but they still genuinely hate the feeling. Making them wear a mask really only makes sense if there is a pretty substantial benefit. "Maybe it'll do a little good and it can't hurt" doesn't seem like a good enough reason.
At least for a properly-fitted N95/KN95 mask, you can see why this ought to do some good in keeping you from catching a respiratory virus. For the cloth masks that were mandatory for most of the mask mandate days, there wasn't much reason to think the masks were doing all that much good--at best, maybe they were limiting the range of the big droplets when you coughed or sang.
"A lot of smart libertarian-leaning-right-wing people I know giga-brain themselves about COVID -- they look at the second/third order effects (economy, kids learning) and reason that those must massively outweigh the first order effects (people dying). "
A lot of smart libertarian-leaning people looked at first- *and* second-order effects, and concluded that many of the interventions weren't all that good at preventing people from dying, such that the second-order effects would be more important. Specifically including Scott, e.g. in his effortpost on the effectiveness on lockdowns.
Also, your terminology is off. "First-order effect" is not the same as "intended effect". The first-order effect of lockdowns is that people are locked down, and thus severely limited in their ability for social, economic, and disease-transmitting interactions. You don't get to dismiss any of those as "meh, second-order, who cares" without doing the math,
For folks following along at home, this is the article that John is talking about: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness-much-more
My take from Scott's post when I first read it, and when I skimmed it again, is "this is an extremely complicated subject with no obviously correct outcomes and has massive error bars on every side". Saying that lockdowns are unlikely to prevent people from dying is a bit like saying masks have little effect on the spread of airborne disease. Scott points out that there are strong self-isolation tendencies for people in a pandemic, and states in multiple places that lockdowns were effective and could have been more so if enacted with even more speed and precision. The policy package we actually got *may* have been suboptimal *depending on your specific values* but even that is unclear.
Unless you're willing to be more specific, I think this may be a set up for a motte and bailey.
The reason I think this is a motte and bailey is because you are roughly saying 'many interventions weren't that good such as lockdowns'. I'm left to assume that you are referring to...everything. WFH. Masks. Vaccines. Lockdowns. That's the motte.
If I push, you may fall back to Scott's version of this. "Well, we don't know exactly how this plays out in detail but if you make a lot of specific assumptions you land in a place where lockdowns specifically have this tradeoff." That's the bailey.
So when you say
> smart libertarian-leaning people looked at first- *and* second-order effects, and concluded that many of the interventions weren't all that good at preventing people from dying, such that the second-order effects would be more important
I'd ask that you be a lot more specific about what interventions weren't that good, and how you landed at the conclusion that second-order effects would be more important.
And if we're really being rigorous, it's not enough to do this with hindsight. We are discussing a moral claim -- that people were wrong to push for COVID interventions at the time that they did, with the information that they had. So really we should be cutting off any information that we got after, say, June 2020.
Peoples experiences were so different during the pandemic. I was working in a hospital hearing about the death toll every week and wearing a mask all day long.
Some of my neighbors took it as an opportunity to party all week long, at least during the summer.
It’s like the difference between the guy whose Vietnam-era service was in the National Guard, never deployed, and the guy who’s got drafted into the Marines.
It was also very different for different people based on personality and age and situation. I locked down with my wife and three kids, so while it was annoying, I wasn't locked up in solitary. I have coworkers who lived alone and it was a miserable experience for them.
"Where are the people who coincidentally ended up living in the slums and love it?"
Not a slum, exactly, but moving to a middle income country provides this benefit. I spent a month in Medellin and seriously considered moving there full time. I stayed in an upper income neighborhood, relatively speaking, but it was not a luxury highrise in el Poblado or anything like that. I loved the un-manicured character of the neighborhood. I bought groceries at the local bodega and got my haircut in a tiny storefront with one chair.
At night many neighrbos people came home from work and turned their front patio into a makeshift restaurant. DUring the day there was a guy who went through the area with a pushcart yelling "aguacate!" to sell avocados. They are gigantic down there and very inexpensive.
Also, in the nineties I lived in Pilsen, a poor and rather violent neighborhood in Chicago, and liked it. I ended up living there for eight years.
Latin America is seriously underrated IMO.
> 16: Trump Tower is a BDSM erotic novel
anyone read it?
29 - I think there is still a good bit of psychological denial going on. Most people find it quite unpleasant to think particularly hard about the negative effects of the lockdowns and other restrictions. No one wants to admit that they themselves were complicit in stunting the development of an entire generation of children, inaugurating an era of catastrophic inflation, and demonstrating clearly for everyone to see that limits on governmental power are a social fiction that can be dropped at will. I also note that while “closing nonessential businesses” is on the chart, “closing churches” isn’t. I am not a religious person, but if I were a devout Catholic, I would be LIVID that the government prevented me from physically partaking in communion with the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ.
32 (and 19 I guess) - Eating chicken 9 times a week sounds a bit high, but it’s probably pretty close. Chicken is the cheapest meat, can be cooked dozens of ways, and is delicious. It’s hard to comprehend just how much human utility would be lost if the animal welfare EAs were to succeed in eliminating factory farming without first providing a suitable replacement (where suitability is measured from the perspective of the consumers, not the activists).
"Utility lost" sounds as if people would become malnourished, less intelligent or brutal to their children. Not really how we would describe a habit that may be deeply engrained but is also strongly objectionable in at least one sense. (It doesn't even have to be ethical strictly speaking; imagine how much utility would be lost if people watched less TV, or spent less time in the comments section.)
> Remember, asking where someone is from ‘originally’ is a microaggression, but inferring it yourself based on their “mildly platyrrhine, high-rooted nose” is A-OK!
I don't think anyone actually beliefs this. I highly suspect the people that created this are not woke, and I mostly see this game played by edgy people.
It was a joke.
Excuse my autism
A cynic would say that Yali from New Guinea perfectly understood civilization, he speedran organized religion to get straight to the "fleecing the congregation" stage!
On the subject of the Pope. White or not
You're asking about the next Pope, I assume? I wouldn't bet a lot of money on it, but I'm guessing white.
I wouldn't mind at all either Turkson or Sarah, but they're both too old. And probably too conservative. I have no idea who is likely to be elected (why is Polymarket backing Parolin?) but that's the whole point - whoever goes in as "papabile" comes out as "still a cardinal".
Every news outlet seems to have a different list of who they consider frontrunners:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgxk40ndk1o
> Bryan Caplan thinks this can’t be true: after all, practically nobody moves to poorer areas
I thought the whole phenomenon of "gentrification" was about people moving to poorer areas (relative to what the newcomers could afford).
40: This 4% dip in fast-food jobs seems fine, unless the dip keeps dipping. Ideally it also creates jobs to automate/simplify food service too.
26 - Wrong pronoun for Cremieux, I think?
Cremieux is actually a guy (as verified by people who actually saw him in person at Natalcon), as anyone would strongly predict from reading him or looking at the topics he discusses. The whole thing about him being a woman was a joke.
I fell for it, evidently!
"Bryan Caplan thinks this can’t be true: after all, practically nobody moves to poorer areas, automatically giving themselves higher relative income than their neighbors?"
This isn’t why I moved to Mexico but it would have been sufficient if I’d known beforehand how nice it is for people to respect you by default.
It’s a very strongly net positive move for several reasons but in the end people willing to do something weird just because it’s effective are rare.
Where did you come from that people didn't respect you by default?
Regarding relative income, you wouldn’t move to the slums because you still remember your old social relations, so would still feel bad about being poorer than your memories? Kinda grasping I dunno
>24: Agent Village is a sort of "reality show” where a group of AI agents has to work together to complete some easy-for-human tasks
I feel like commissioning a Neuro-style cute anime avatar for each agent shouldn't be *that* expensive (it could be their first task!), and might increase viewership by several orders of magnitude.
Probably have to do it like a visual novel with limited animation instead of 3d models with voice modules, but still.
6. I don't have the same level of study detail for the UK, but Deliveroo delivered a similar strategy to DoorDash, while JustEat went for a slight alternative approach that also worked: JE did exclusive deals with a few of the big-chain fast-food places (McDonalds and KFC, not Burger King, not sure about the others). Being McDonald's food delivery people means a lot of people have your app even if they prefer the other one. JE does have lots of other restaurants, but it has more of a fast-food image than a high-quality one, so many of the better/more expensive places are Deliveroo only.
The result is that UberEats got similarly shut out here, and the market is essentially a two-way split between Deliveroo and JustEat. Deliveroo's app is much better than JustEat's, though JE is slowly catching up.
#9 (Gat-Goren hypothesis of BPH): very enlightening article, thank you.
How have the other two ideas from the original post (https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/09/12/the-life-cycle-of-medical-ideas/), that is, minocycline for schizophrenia and venous blockages as a cause of multiple sclerosis, held up since then?
CVT in MS did not hold up at all
I think both have fallen apart.
MS was recently (2022) very convincingly linked to Epstein-Barr virus, though this is obviously not the whole picture (EBV infecting some 95%, in some areas 100% of the population).
#31 - I am very uncomfortable with links like this. 'Guessing where people are from' is fine, fake race science is not. If you must group people, why not use known ethnic groups? I am sorry to leave a comment like this, but it's a major barrier and eg. would keep me from sharing this post.
> fake race science
What makes this any more "fake" than any other morphological taxonomy?
I think commonly used ethnic groups don't really correspond to physical features very well. Do English people really look different from French?
As a European, I've generally found it easy to distinguish people from different parts of the continent.
> Do English people really look different from French?
There's certainly a lot of overlap on their facial features, but take a decent sized (at least 30) group of randomly selected native English and same for French, and I'd be pretty confident I could pick which group was which.
#10 Regarding Argentina, the inflation rate actually rose somewhat in February and more in March, with the cited figure being for January. Still inflation is generally continuing to drop, and is projected to further drop considerably by the end of the year.
The big change is the lifting of currency controls and the question is how the country will weather the disruption that will bring in the short to medium term. Simply comparing indicator values from before the buildup to the changes and after their implementation misses this.
The non-inflation improvements aren't a recent phenomenon, though, with poverty only "now" being lower than when he took office. That's just the result of lagging reporting and indicators with the official "poverty rate" being limited to just 2 values per year - one for the first half of the year, and one for the second half, with the "now" value being that of the entire second half of 2024.
The actual poverty rate has been dropping for over a year and has in fact been lower than when Milei took office since before the October Report Card post was published.
And since poverty has continued to drop throughout and after the second half of last year, the actual poverty rate now is probably lower not only than it was when Milei took office, but than it was at any point in the last several years, with the estimated poverty rate for Q1 2025 being lower than any rolling 6 month poverty estimate since 2018-2019.
As I mentioned to you in a previous post, poverty is higher than before Milei took office.
The consensus among economists and experts on poverty is that the latest poverty number is actually about 4 points higher than at the end of 2023 (before Milei took office). Reports in some media outlets claiming poverty has decreased are due to flaws in the measurement methodology. Please refer to this (in Spanish): https://x.com/ltornarolli/status/1902809746719011269?t=U82fut8w_KaVAekoOtwm0g&s=08 and question #12 here (also in Spanish): https://cenital.com/realmente-bajo-la-pobreza-en-2024-o-estamos-midiendo-mal-la-inflacion
Inflation is not "projected to further drop considerably by the end of the year". There was a 10% devaluation of the peso just a few days ago, with a high impact on prices. Inflation has risen sharply during 2025. 2.2% in January, 2.4% in February, and 3.7% (!) in March. April and May are expect to be as high as 5% each. Milei is betting everything on another carry trade to get alive to the October elections, but after that there could be a big devaluation with another high impact in prices. For all we know, monthly inflation in November and December could be 10% each.
35: Also impressed by FIRE; I hope more of the anti-woke brigade pivots similarly (I'm not holding my breath, but Hanania seems to have changed his views pretty radically).
38: Makes one wonder about JD's recent visit to the Vatican. Quite the concidence...
FIRE has been really good on speech-in-general for their whole existence. They've never been particularly partisan and have always defended a politically diverse range of students.
The incidents that originally inspired their creation were 1990s left-wing-inspired campus speech restrictions, and they gained a lot of support and attention for fighting similar stuff in the 2010s. But they've never said that the answer to these phenomena was for schools to become right-wing or enforce right-wing views.
Their aspirations have been pretty classic U.S. civil libertarian all along.
There are many institutions/organizations/politicians that claimed to be motivated by concerns about civil liberty that have not responded to recent events the way FIRE has. FIRE deserves credit for living up to their aspirations.
Yes, absolutely. I think it's a very admirable organization.
The National Catholic Register (the newspaper in question that was quoted) is not Catholic, they just call themselves that. The Catholic church has condemned them multiple times for pretending to be Catholic and has been trying for decades to get them to change their name to stop confusing people into thinking that they are affiliated with the Church.
Thanks for the clarification. I'll just note that Pope Francis definitely was Catholic and he also made some pretty critical remarks (which I guess he will no longer be making).
You'll notice a big difference between Pope Francis's "we need to be more compassionate towards refugees" and the NCR's "this guy in particular is literally in hell, 100% confirmed, according to the BIBLE". One is religious guidance. The other is heresy. Big gap here.
Hanania is a particularly hateful kind of elitist, who pivoted into shitting on socially-acceptable targets instead of socially-unacceptable targets. Discussion of him always reminds me of Huxley's lines from Chrome Yellow:
>To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.
I honestly don't know what to make of him. He is obviously elitist (says so right on the tin), but from the perspective of his (possibly former) audience, I think his pivot was in the opposite direction (what is "socially acceptable" depends on the circles you run in).
But he was ahead of the curve on anti-woke, so maybe he is ahead of the curve on anti-maga.
>but from the perspective of his (possibly former) audience, I think his pivot was in the opposite direction (what is "socially acceptable" depends on the circles you run in).
Well, obviously the people who originally followed him don't like him now that he's shitting on them. But then, the people who originally followed him aren't very popular in wider society, so trading them for an audience of mainstream liberals represents a net gain in terms of social acceptability.
FIRE is great. They're what the ACLU used to be, before it got massively glutted on donor money in the first Trump term and hired a bunch of ultra-left folks who cared more about their social media standing than principles.
In terms of college admissions, I should note that in Canada my experience was similar to what University of Austin is doing. I applied to two universities, both in my hometown. I sent them my high school grades, and I think also a short letter of reference from one of my high school teachers. I got into both, the end. I don't know of anyone in Canada who had to do a essay song-and-dance for undergrad, except for one person who had to do a literal song-and-dance to get into a musical theatre program. (I think grad school is a bit different).
That's how it works for US colleges outside the top 100ish. A decent portion of state flagships and similar schools admit everybody who has a 3.5+ GPA and 1400+ SAT and an essay and references that don't literally imply that they're a sociopath. The activities etc arms race only really applies to selective schools or to people who are trying to get sports scholarships.
I applied to UK unis as an American and it was refreshingly straightforward compared to elite US schools. I was able to convert my AP scores to UCAS points and determine pretty quickly that I had a real shot at all UK unis up to Oxbridge. I then applied to 5 of them through the same portal, and took an in person math exam about as difficult as the AIME for Oxford. I didn't pass their bar for that but I got an unconditional offer from Edinburgh and Imperial gave me an offer based on taking another in person math exam, this one being more similar in difficulty to the USAMO, which I also flunked. So basically the result of the whole thing was that I was admitted to the 4th best CS program in the UK, which is probably fair.
The UK system was nice because I'd maxed out exam scores in the US (800 SAT math, 800 SAT math subject test, 5s on a half dozen AP tests including Calculus BC and Physics C), but realistically I'm not really the kind of genius who would do well in a top math department. The UK system used difficult exams (Oxford MAT and STEP) to tease that out, where the US system mostly just flounders around with extracurriculars, demographics, and GPAs that mostly rate conscientiousness.
Does anyone have a key to #15 (the Japanese map)? How familiar would the average Japanese person be with what's being depicted?
Southern California has two Japanese swimmers standing next to an American. It's a reference to Japan's success in the 1932 Olympics. I'd guess most Japanese people would know that, but how many would recognize the Yankees? Is that Al Capone up in Chicago? Would the audience recognize Napoleon in St. Helena?
Sweden has athletes, possibly a callback to the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, the first Olympics Japan took part in.
Some other interesting observations:
Australia is notable only for cows, sheep, wheat and pineapples. One of the cows is stepping into a big tube, maybe a can? Did Japan import a lot of canned beef from Australia?
Java is a guy with a Fu Manchu mustache holding a big bag of money. Not sure what that's about.
Singapore is a lazy-looking British man and his wife looking out to sea with a bunch of guns also pointing out to sea. Eight years later the Japanese would take Singapore by attacking by land from the north; the fact that all the island's defences faced out to sea was supposedly a decisive factor.
Germany is Hitler and (I assume) Hindenburg and I can't tell whether they're shaking hands or waltzing.
Who the heck is the dice-headed soldier in southern France?
Who are the guys sulking/lurking on a park bench in Arkansas? Why is a giant woman sitting on a accountant in Montana?
Ethnic Chinese are a large and wealthy minority in Indonesia. (Or at least they were wealthy back then, not sure if they still are.)
Babe Ruth famously toured Japan, and it was a major factor leading to the professionalization of baseball therein (the team the Babe Ruth All-Stars played against went pro, and are now known as the Yomiuri Giants).
This was in 1934, admittedly, a couple years after the map. But baseball was and is extremely popular in Japan, and Babe Ruth was one of those extremely famous athletes who was known beyond sports fans - think LeBron James or Tom Brady. And unfortunately, he had been playing for the Yankees since 1921, and won 4 rings and 7 pennants in their uniform.
What would be an argument that favors the Black Plague?
It seems to have had a part in liberalizing Western Europe and launching it on the path of success and dominance.
(Short story: the commoners leveraged the labor shortage into stronger rights and better wages.)
"Bryan Caplan on Natal Con, the pronatalist conference in Austin. My strongest opinion on this is that they should either change the name or hold the next one in Natal, Brazil."
Uh oh, I can see "The Boys from Brazil" attack article forming already.
Anyway, how about Con(genital)? Because GenitalCon won't work.
>29: Am I living in a conservative filter bubble?
Obviously I/we don't know you and this is completely motivated reasoning based on a slim slice of public-facing persona, so disregard my own judgement and just use it as data going into your own evaluations. But:
Based on your writing it really feels like yes, you have been for quite a while, since your critiques of feminism/cancel culture/woke/etc cultivated an 'intellectual dark web' audience that back-fed arguments, ideas, consensus, links, blogs, etc. that started to look like 'the normal world' to you.
Of course I'm sure I'm in my own filter bubble of some sort and it's coloring my perceptions of your ecosystem, but from out here there's a very distinct cluster of 'smart people who talk about reason and logic and science and objectivity but are mostly using that as an aesthetic to 'debunk' arguments/evidence in favor of progressive positions, and come up with clever 'one study' or 'common sense' support for conservative positions.'
Many people in my own filter bubble identify and talk about this cluster explicitly, occasionally with Less Wrong or your blog being mentioned, often with the types of blogs and people you link to or talk about being mentioned.
From here it looks like you sort of stand *above* that cluster, rather than standing *outside* it. Ie, you're not falling for its most obvious pitfalls and lies or being a booster in favor of its most extreme rhetoric, and you often critique those problems with it, but you are critiquing those things thoughtfully as if they are the basic ground-state assumption that is worthy of being carefully considered and reasoned against. (specifically critiquing *those things* as the ground-state starting point, rather than *other things*, which frames them as inherently legitimate where things that other people believe are inherently suspect or illogical)
I don't think he is particularly conservative, or even right-wing. His politics are for the most part center-left technocrat liberal. I've seen him push back against certain aspects of wokeness, but I've never heard him actually advocate for any conservative social positions. He supports capitalism, but I haven't seen him advocate for the type of austerity, sweeping deregulation, elimination of welfare, or tax cuts that are typical on the right. It's fair to say he is not a social-justice progressive or a socialist, but I think calling him conservative is a stretch.
“austerity, sweeping deregulation, elimination of welfare, or tax cuts that are typical on the right.”
Welcome to the 21st century, Rip Van Winkle. Things have changed.
I don’t think anyone is going to mistake Scott for a right-wing populist so that faction isn’t worth mentioning. If you look at DOGE or the proposed budget you’ll notice that the economic faction I did mention is still alive and well.
DOGE is a Rorschach test, everyone sees something different depending on their priors. How did it get promoted to conservative archetype?
Did someone actually propose a budget? What chance does it have of being passed? What does it have to do with “conservatism,” if that still exists?
More than one long-time SSC reader left in a huff over "A Modest Proposal For Republicans", which was IMO fairly claimed to be a fairly anodyne work of right-populism with a few grey shibboleths thrown in. Scott absolutely has an anti-establishment streak, and when it gets pointed in certain directions the blind spots become noteworthy.
The past couple years he has had a rightward turn, particularly with his posts about Republicans and class, and everything having to do with architecture, where he has somehow embraced a Tom Wolfe conspiracy theory.
I probably shouldn't have written the last paragraph as one giant run-on sentence, but this is what it was trying to get at.
I'm not saying he's conservative, I'm saying a lot of his inputs and communities are an IDW type of conservative, and he treats the conservative wordlview as a default position held by reasonable people which he's critiquing for it's flaws, while holding much of the progressive worldview as a loony thing that idiot extremists push and which doesn't deserve the dignity of serious engagement.
This is a polite and level headed critique and because it agrees with my own perceptions, it can only be true. But seriously, I hope Scott reads your comment. His open minded-ness is is what initially attracted me to SSC, but his worldview has been been feeling more... credulous lately. Of course my own reality is modulated by a social/media bubble, but idk, the reality I'm familiar with seems increasingly divorced from the reality depicted in these pages, both blogs and comments.
Thanks for the shout out Scott, I made EthnoGuessr. As of right now I have incorporated all of the well-labeled facial composite data on the internet, but in the future I will allow users to submit themselves if they want to be part of the game, or otherwise create some new facial composites from publicly available data (e.g. EthnoGuessr Presidents from portraits of world leaders).
Are you in anyway related to /pol/?
No I was never a 4chan user.
What's up with the URL?
hbd = human biodiversity
>Does the average person really eat chicken 9x a week?
If I'm reading the site right I think it's 9 servings. A serving of chicken is 165 calories, so you might have several servings in a large meal if chicken is the main ingredient.
I'm in the UK, but my personal experience of UberEats is that they fail to deliver any food. It seems like a business model which isn't going to get many repeat orders.
On 38, be aware that National Catholic Reporter, despite its name, is not affiliated with the Catholic Church. Multiple bishops have publicly asked it to drop "Catholic" because it promotes views explicitly condemned by the Church and does not represent Catholic teaching in any meaningful sense.
(Think of it like if you had a newspaper called the NASA Bulletin which denied the moon landing and rejected modern rocket science -- but also used the NASA logo on its cover and refused to stop calling itself the NASA Bulletin despite multiple NASA administrators telling them to cut it out.)
As for the claim itself, the specific heresies I believe would be:
1) Presumption. Matthew 7:1 ("Judge not, that you be not judged."). It is not ours to declare who will go to heaven or hell.
2) Pelagianism. The Catholic Church does not believe that salvation hinges on economic or political policies and choices.
3) Modernism. The Gospels are not there for humans to weaponize in contemporary culture wars and political battles. They are divine revelation -- it is heretical to subordinate them to temporal ideology.
I see the article is by Fr Thomas Reese, SJ, and yeah he's notoriously on the liberal side (he's sort of the go-to guy when reporters are looking for comments on Catholicism as he's always ready to give a quote and he isn't one of the horrible trad types who aren't all up with the times on social issues).
I've always been amused by the coincidence (deliberate or not, I have no idea) of the initials NCR for both the National Catholic Reporter (the liberals) and the National Catholic Register (the traditional) as Catholic news outlets.
If the prostate theory is correct, then exogenous testosterone (up to some level a bit above baseline) would be protective against prostate cancer. HCG and such would not. Presumably, this could be investigated as we have a significant history of hormone replacement therapy without HCG. [edit: edited to note that it is protective because exogenous testosterone shuts down the bodies natural production]
28 - the name of Natal is not a coincidence here (as you know, nothing is ever a coincidence).
Natal is Portuguese for 'Christmas', originally from Latin natalis "of birth", used in the phrase "dies natalis" 'birthday'. Christmas was sometimes referred to in Latin as Jesus's birthday and this got truncated in Portuguese to just "Natal" (without retaining the "day" or "Jesus" portions). This is still the modern Portuguese term for Christmas (you can wish people "feliz Natal")¹. The Spanish "Navidad" follows the same concept but derives from a fancier Latin word, "nativitas" (like our "nativity scene").
The city of Natal is so named because it was officially founded on Christmas Day in 1599.
There's also a Natal in South Africa, which is also named after Christmas in Portuguese. In that case, it was seen (but not visited) by Vasco da Gama on Christmas Day in 1497, so he decided to call it "Christmas" but it came out as "Natal" because he was Portuguese and all.
There's also a Christmas Island in the Pacific, named by an English speaker, and an Easter Island, named by a Dutch speaker.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiritimati
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_Island
¹ In Portuguese, "Natal" is only used for Christmas, not birthdays. If you want to wish someone happy birthday, that's "feliz aniversário".
What this comment section needs is Scott starting w connect with each link and a discussion from that.
Is #37 missing a "h/t Jane Psmith" or is it coincidence / shared sources that led to the linkpost and her review coming out hours apart?
I got it off Twitter a few weeks before writing this roundup.
Seeing people hate on the black plague is just so dispiriting.
What a world.........:-|
One counter to the "why don't people move to slums" is that neighborhoods are not only a cluster of people with certain incomes, but that neighborhoods come bundled with certain public services, and richer neighborhoods get better public services. This is maybe less true within the bounds of an individual city, but in most American metro regions where the metropolis is fragmented into a bunch of different suburban municipalities, the richer towns can offer better public services while levying lower property taxes. In this sense, you get more/better public services for your tax dollars by living among people richer than yourself, while if you have the nicest house in a poor town with budget problems, you're going to pay higher property tax for worse services.
( Related: https://lbryck.substack.com/p/the-prisoners-dilemma-of-the-fragmented )
On #1, cowboy slang -- I think most of these etymologies are roughly correct, but some are disputed (e.g. "mosey"), and some seem to be just wrong (e.g. "crayfish").
I wrote that, and I’m nowhere near a linguist, and I think all of the examples below the edit came from replies, but in looking up the origins, both the English crevice and the French ecrevisse are supposedly derived from the same Old French word crevice which means “to break” in the case of the former and “crab” in the latter (according to those word origin sites. Strange. Apparently the crab’s love of cracking and cracks has nothing to do with the fact that the Old French word for crab is synonymous with crevice? If you have deeper knowledge of this I’d be interested. I find a lot of word origins are disputed; this one intrigues me because it’s one of those backwards fits where everyone assumes it’s the obvious meaning but the origin is actually different (like, oh I don’t know, people say the “handicapped” are “handy with the cap” when begging) I’d love to hear other examples if anyone can think of them.
On #2, single-bit errors are commonly attributed to cosmic rays, but my understanding is that they're usually not? People have a tendency to just say "cosmic rays" for any single-bit errors but I don't think that's actually where they generally come from.
It can also be thermal noise; DRAMs are more reliable (and need less frequent refreshes) at lower temperatures, and less reliable (and need more frequent refreshes, or just fail outright) at higher temperatures.
The basic reliability of DRAMs within their documented operating conditions is pretty great, although I've heard it's getting worse as the physical cells get smaller and smaller.
Some of the original research on DRAM bit flips due to radiation is May and Woods (the same May who later became famous for cryptoanarchy)
https://gwern.net/doc/cs/hardware/1979-may.pdf
In that case, the radiation turned out to be coming from inside the house, er, from the actual chip packaging materials.
However, it then turned out that some bit flips are due to cosmic rays (apparently from secondary particles triggered by the cosmic ray's interaction with the atmosphere, rather than the ray literally directly hitting an individual memory cell). This was successfully documented and tested and is a real effect, but it might be smaller than other sources in some devices and environments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_error#Causes_of_soft_errors
Edit: On the thermal point see also
https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/memerr.pdf
and
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/sec08/tech/full_papers/halderman/halderman.pdf
both security papers related to reliability of DRAMs (I worked on the second one).
I see, thank you!
Oh, I think the Rowhammer paper also had an interesting discussion of physical reliability of DRAM cells and some phenomena that can make them flip.
https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~yoonguk/papers/kim-isca14.pdf
This is most likely where I heard the idea that the increased density of memory cells is leading to decreased reliability (it also cites some other papers on this point). (I think for cosmic radiation in particular as a source of errors there's a trade-off because individual memory cells are harder to hit—their cross-section is smaller!—but easier to flip in the sense that a smaller amount of energy suffices.)
> Some of the original research on DRAM bit flips due to radiation is May and Woods (the same May who later became famous for cryptoanarchy)
Even more interesting: apparently May was able to retire and start all the cryptopunk stuff *because* his work on the packaging was so life-and-death for Intel.
Why not erase the memory on shutdown?
For the cold boot attack paper, the idea is that a shutdown can happen for hardware reasons (because the power is physically interrupted), which then prevents software from running to overwrite it. The CPU's ability to run code without power is typically much worse than DRAM cells' ability to maintain a capacitative charge without an active refresh.
Some of my colleagues actually practiced physically pulling the memory out of the motherboard and quickly putting it into a different computer, which would then read the memory contents. (Sometimes memory is soldered to the motherboard but often it's swappable, which is intended for upgrades but could be useful to forensics.)
There are newer mitigations than what we suggested, though. For example, you can try to keep some of your cryptographic keys entirely in the CPU itself, or the cache, or some chip that is less willing to let an attacker export them compared to the RAM chips. You can also try to encrypt RAM pages so that their contents won't be intelligible without a key that's (ideally) never stored in RAM.
Thank you, this is fascinating! Would an Apple machine with integrated RAM be less vulnerable?
On #3, it's worth noting that beating roulettte wheels via physics modeling is something people really do and are successful with (although only on sufficiently bad roulette wheels); here's an article about it: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-how-to-beat-roulette-gambler-figures-it-out/ . But yeah what Errol Musk was trying there sounds like the crazy version of that, rather than the correct version...
(Btw I should credit Gwern for the link here.)
Errol reminded me of the Eudaemons, who I don't think were using physics modeling per se:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaemons
The article mentions them! Yeah, "physics modelling" was perhaps not the right way to describe it. The point though is that using computers to predict roulette wheels well enough to win money off of them is a thing various people have actually done. (Although, again, only when the roulette wheel has some defect. And as the article mentions, if the roulette wheel is especially bad, some people can actually do it *visually*, without the need for a computer!)
Re 21, Helen Toner writes in a linked article:
>"The upshot is that AI nonproliferation (to counter terrorist misuse) works quite differently from nuclear nonproliferation (to counter nuclear weapons development). Imagine a world where advances in nuclear technology mean that the amount of uranium and level of enrichment needed to make a tactical nuke keeps dropping. At first, it would be relatively simple to track and restrict access to large quantities of uranium and advanced enrichment facilities. But eventually, anyone with a large enough plot of land would be under scrutiny, due to the tiny amount of uranium naturally present in soil."
Well, perhaps anti-proliferation global regime is the reason why technology did not advance into a pathway allowing random schmucks to make nukes in their own backyards (though costs do keep dropping to a level when even very poor country like North Korea can have nukes).
Imho she has an overly literal interpretation of what the word "nonproliferation" means, which is at odds with an actual practice of nuclear nonproliferation.
>Well, perhaps anti-proliferation global regime is the reason why technology did not advance into a pathway allowing random schmucks to make nukes in their own backyards
For fission weapons, there is a physical requirement for a minimum critical mass of a fissile isotope. This isn't exactly critical mass in a bare sphere at atmospheric pressure - neutron reflectors and implosion help, but the help is finite.
Yep, I was being somewhat hyperbolic
Many Thanks!
11. Ozempocalypse: Those of you who want to use semaglutide* for weight loss now have a legal, but not totally cheap, alternative: https://www.novocare.com/obesity/products/wegovy/get-product.html which links to a mail order system that will ship you the medicine for a cash price of $499/box of 4 single use injectors. For me this was a $320/box savings over Ozempic injectors and $830/box savings over Wegovy.
*Wegovy is the trade name for Novo Nordisk's brand of semaglutide injectors intended for weight loss. Ozempic is the trade name for the same medicine when intended for type 2 diabetes treatments.
Please: I am totally uninterested in dealing with "compounding" pharmacies and even more uninterested in the deranged opinions of Bobby Kennedy Jr.
34. I would advise calm. The executive and the courts are coequal branches of the federal govewrnment. There will be friction. Andrew Jackson may not have said: "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worcester_v._Georgia
But, he never enforced the decision, and he made the matter moot by sending the Cherokee off on the Trail of Tears. Trump will further self destruct if he takes on the Courts. SCOTUS could hole him out under the water line by invalidating his tariff program, and there are strong legal reasons why they could.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/donald-trump-tariffs-emergency-power-ieepa-trade-mexico-canada-33e2739a
41. If you have to explain a joke you kill it, but this item was incomprehensible.
On 22: "The article doesn’t explain why the board did such a poor job communicating their grievances"
It seems like they did a couple times, but perhaps they realized at some point that Sam was a serial liar and engagement wasn't worthwhile.
Re: #21 on AI policy substacks: Thanks for the plug, and to all the new subscribers! I'm happy to take suggestions for what to write about.
Re: #33+ on Trump: Every time you lament Trumpism I go buy more NO in this market:
https://manifold.markets/JamesGrugett/will-prominent-rationalists-judge-t
I'm also following this market but don't know how to bet in it:
https://manifold.markets/JRR/if-trump-wins-the-2024-election-wil-877b62a380ec
Re: #36 on the AI-generated Tom & Jerry cartoon: What fraction of the way would you say this is to what's required for the following Manifold market:
https://manifold.markets/ScottAlexander/in-2028-will-an-ai-be-able-to-gener
Namely, generating "a full high-quality movie to a prompt eg 'make me a 120 minute Star Trek / Star Wars crossover'".
(Never mind)
Not sure that map could be from 1932 given the coloring of Alaska?
It wasn't a state, but it was certainly U.S. territory in 1932. Do you expect them to shade the territories differently on such a goofy map?
Didn't realize it was a territory so long before being a state
Alaska joined the US in 1867. However, few people moved there (and many of the initial rush later moved back out).
It's the opposite of California, which populated so fast due to the gold rush that it skipped the territory status and went directly from conquest to statehood.
From what I've heard Trump's policies (like the tariffs), are fairly unpopular, except for the immigration thing. It seems to be an unfortunate fact that people generally like it when you imprison foreigners indefinitely with no legal recourse. It is unclear what the courts can do, it seems to be generally accepted they can't force the president to declare war on El Salvador to bring the prisoner back, foreign policy is generally the remit of the executive. The US administration seems to be claiming that they can't be forced to ask politely through the embassy, or to threaten to stop paying Bukele if he does not release the prisoner he is holding on America's behalf. Due to the state of emergency in El Salvador, which is in theory temporary but predictably does not seem to be ending any time soon, they do not have any right to habeas corpus in El Salvador either. In the meantime, some 250 people are being held in prison with no legal charges or legal recourse, to the cheering of Americans on X, it is a grotesque spectacle.
Trump is actually underwater on immigration in the latest polls as well. It turns out that even people who want the border closed don't like you kicking out doctors and disappearing innocent people in defiance of the courts.
It really is stunning just how fast he's managed to turn public opinion against him.
An unenforceable bench order to report to a judge several years backlogged and without tracking within our borders, does not constitute removal.
Border crossings skyrocketed as soon as Biden was in office, and collapsed the moment he left. We're talking about what Biden did, and this is what he did:
https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/nationwide-encounters
Crossings have fallen from an average of ~300k monthly to ~30k monthly, an order of magnitude difference.
Can you explain what "An unenforceable bench order to report to a judge several years backlogged and without tracking within our borders, does not constitute removal" means?
I don't particularly care about the exact number of immigrants, but I am a single issue voter on whether the President upholds his oath to follow the Constitution vs. considers himself above the law.
Are you asking about Biden's removal process and whether it followed his constitutional duty to provide security and enforce secure borders, or Trump's policies and whether they are enforcing secure borders constitutionally?
If you are a single issue voter on this topic, I'm wondering if you'll ever find a president you are happy with. And please note, I agree completely that this oath should be held in great regard and is highly important.
I'm just not sure we've ever had that binary choice. The oath and lawfulness of the obligations seems subject to interpretation and hence introduces political bias to the equation.
I'll provide a proper answer to your question after work.
Or GPT can summarize more quickly for us.
I also asked for a summary of taxpayer costs which FAIR estimates at $182 billion annually for all illegal immigration. Given most (~1mm in 2023) requested asylum under the Biden administration's weakened asylum provisions, a significant portion of immigration costs are asylum seekers. Heritage.org claims this was impermissible under law by the Biden administration here.
https://www.heritage.org/border-security/report/congress-should-prohibit-biden-administrations-asylum-rule.
GPT response:
The U.S. asylum removal process is multifaceted, encompassing several stages that can extend over multiple years. Below is an overview highlighting the key milestones, typical timelines, existing backlogs, and associated costs:
_________________________________
Major Milestones in the Asylum Process
_________________________________
Application Submission (Form I-589):
Asylum seekers must file Form I-589 within one year of arriving in the U.S. unless they qualify for specific exceptions.
Biometrics Appointment:
Applicants are scheduled for fingerprinting, typically within a few weeks of application submission.
Asylum Interview (Affirmative Process):
Conducted by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). The interview is ideally scheduled within 45 days, but delays can extend this period.
Decision or Referral:
If USCIS does not grant asylum, the case may be referred to the immigration court system for further proceedings.
Immigration Court Proceedings (Defensive Process):
Involves master calendar hearings followed by individual hearings where an immigration judge assesses the asylum claim.
Appeals:
Denials can be appealed to the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) and subsequently to federal courts, potentially prolonging the process by several years.
>among the worst is sending innocent people to horrible Salvadorean prisons (including one person picked up because he had an autism awareness tattoo in honor of his brother, which they mistook for a gang tattoo), then refusing to bring them back.
Has he deported innocent people? The autism guy was here under an asylum claim, and his deportation order was signed by a judge. What evidence do we have that he didn't get due process, or even that it was the autism awareness tattoo that go him picked up? Every news article I can find on the case just cites statements by his family claiming he's innocent. But that's what families always do.
Similarly, in the case of Garcia he had gone through the courts and gotten due process already: the courts ordered him deported, but not to El Salvador. I can see the argument that Garcia shouldn't have been sent to El Salvador and we should try to get him back, but clearly he got due process.
And as your friend points out, the Trump admin is not yet defying a Supreme Court order. They are complying with it as they interpret it: Supreme Court says to facilitate his return, they claim that they are doing that by not stopping him from entering the country. Naturally the district court disagrees with their interpretation, so it will have to go back to the Supreme Court to decide whose interpretation of their order is correct. So at this point they are not defying the order, and certainly not "openly" defying it as some claim. You can't say someone is openly defying something when they claim to not be defying it, that's the definition of openly.
Deporting is the smaller issue. I like it when countries deport people they look down on, it is my preference they grow some self respect and stay away in the first place. The imprisonment is the bigger issue.
From what I've heard Kilmar filed for asylum as he claims he fears for his life in El Salvador, which was denied because the claim came after the required time frame for it, but the judge gave him an order against deportation to the El Salvador on the basis of the application. In fact, granting this order requires meeting a stricter legal standard than granting asylum status, so the judge considered his claims credible. With the benefit of hindsight, we now know he should not have feared El Salvador gangs so much as El Salvador's (and the US's) presidents.
None of the people have been charged with any crime, either in the US or EL Salvador.
Isn't being an unauthorized migrant a crime? One typically punished by deportation?
You'll have to ask a lawyer. My understanding is that illegal entry is usually a civil matter. They have not been charged with this or any other crime. My understanding is that this crime is not punishable with life in prison.
An immigration judge denied Garcia's request for asylum on the basis that “the evidence shows that he is a verified member of MS-13.” (TheHill.com)
This was based on a confidential informant's testimony which I believe was sealed so for better or worse, we have the judge's view to go on. The family and Garcia, as expected, deny this claim but lost in court. I don't know how much transparency they received in the process. This is how due process plays out for American citizens in many cases also.
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5252884-deportation-legal-battle/
No, that's a different proceeding. Also, American citizens are held to a different legal standard, as the article notes the confidential informant said he was a member of MS13 in New York, where he doesn't live. There is a reason why citizens are not put in prison for life on such a basis.
I agree it was a different proceeding. An immigration judge has ruled that he was a verified member of MS-13 which led to the original denial of asylum. The deportation orders happened in a different court.
The confidential informant's testimony was challenged on the basis you mention but the judge weighed the evidence and ruled against Garcia's testimony. This is normal legal procedure to the best of my knowledge.
Even assuming he deserved to be deported, did he deserve to get sent to Bukele's concentration camp?* Where the Trump Administration is openly paying Bukele to keep people?
* That's what it is, by the way. They call it a "prison", but nobody leaves.
It's certainly sending a message to others.
I've heard this argument from supporters of this policy. The problem is that it sends a stronger message to regular Americans who supported the deportations until five minutes ago. Them they heard we're shipping randos off, but not to where they came from but to some crazy prison in Central America. This feels like an own goal, giving away the winning side of the issue for very little gain on the other end.
You're acting like this is some big line being crossed for the populace, when Trump is still polling best on immigration compared to other issues. https://apnews.com/article/trump-poll-immigration-tariffs-trade-b7a430909606d6b8b27cfbc5049a32b4 And of course, a majority of men still approve of him overall.
You know what message these deportations send? That this is a government that can actually do things. I'm sure people will get that message even more when the government deals with the riots that will inevitably spring up.
Do you have any moral standards besides "lots of people approve of this"?
Is there any tyranny bad enough that you wouldn't celebrate as "sending a message"?
Do you support democracy? Actually, it doesn't matter if you do, because democracy is a system of compromise, not justice. The majority gets what it wants, and the minority is made to understand that they are not in a position to make demands. Meaningless conflict is thus avoided. It's such a simple system that even animals like hyenas practice it.
Of course, this ignores that not all groups involved have equal strength and will to power. And when half of the country worships weakness and victimization... is it any wonder things turned out the way it did?
With no meaningful opposition, the right now has true freedom: the freedom to shape the country as they see fit. Freedom from those uncivilized wretches flooding the country. Freedom from woke elites telling them what they can and can't say. Freedom from the fear that they will be discriminated against for their superiority.
What could possibly be a greater good than winning your own freedom, your own happiness? There is no better feeling, no greater fulfillment. Victory itself is moral.
I strongly suspect this commenter is 'Anomie' by another name
I have no brief one way or the other with El Salvador and it's entirely possible the worst statements are true. Lurid statements notwithstanding, it's also possible that it is reasonable. I have literally no idea from my vantage point and with the noisy information channels available.
I was, however, curious and did some light research. The articles referenced below claim 8000 detainees have been released after being found innocent. This makes about a 10% error rate given 80,000 detainees. There are currently 15,000 detainees at CECOT which makes the numbers a little hard to figure out. I'm not sure what happened to the other ~58,000. Dead? Released? Moved? Never there in the first place?
Garcia was recently moved from CECOT to Santa Ana prison.
References:
https://ticotimes.net/2025/01/28/inside-el-salvadors-mega-prison-latin-americas-largest-facility
https://www.dw.com/en/inside-el-salvadors-maximum-security-prison/g-71465456
According to this article, the government specifically said in court that it was because of his tattoo https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/asylum-seeker-sent-el-salvador-mega-jail-autism-awareness-tattoo-famil-rcna201720 .
And here is a story of someone who was granted asylum, told that he was welcome to come to America, and then was sent to El Salvador prison as soon as he arrived, again with the stated explanation being that they had a tattoo https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/immigration/article302464134.html and nobody claiming to have any other evidence.
I am not an expert in due process, but if a 6-3 Republican Supreme Court says he didn't get it, I am going to trust the Supreme Court.
>According to this article, the government specifically said in court that it was because of his tattoo https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/asylum-seeker-sent-el-salvador-mega-jail-autism-awareness-tattoo-famil-rcna201720 .
The article doesn’t actually say that: it just implies it strongly (the media indeed rarely lies). The only source they give that the man was deported due to his autism tattoo is the family, who claim that is what ICE told them. They don’t have any info from ICE directly, and no court documents about the case.
Near the end of the article they subtlety pivot and write “Several relatives of men sent to the mega-prison last month have similarly disputed claims by the Trump administration that their family members are affiliated with gangs, which the administration used to justify their deportations.” Then they claim that court documents show that some of these men (men who are not named, and are not the autism tattoo guy) were deported based on their tattoos. They have a link to those court documents, but it leads nowhere unless you have an NBC login.
Now maybe the family is right, but they’re our only source on this. For all we know he was deported because he was found at an MS13 meeting, or because he has a different tattoo on his other arm that says “I’m an MS13 member, just try to deport me I dare you!” As of right now we know basically nothing about his case.
I have a basic question: has each of the CECOT deportees received orders for deportation or equivalent (not eligible for asylum hence deportable for example) from an immigration judge? It seems like the autism case was reviewed by one but I can't find any link.
Because if this is the case, the blame for failures lies with judges who do this for a living, probably, unless they were given new procedures that they had no choice but to follow and did not abstain out of conscience.
My source for the autism case being approved by a judge is this story from a local news outlet (https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/fvenezuelan-migrant-lewisville-el-salvador-mega-prison-autism-awareness-tattoo/3817064/). The local NBC affiliate actually got a statement from ICE on the case. "'This subject was arrested on Feb. 24, 2025, and processed under Title 8 authority,' an ICE spokesperson responded in a statement. 'On March 5, 2025, an Immigration judge issued him a final order of removal.'"
It is my understanding that all of these people who have been deported have received orders of removal by a judge. Certainly in the case of Garcia, who had an order of removal for several years and was only not deported because he had an order saying he couldn't be deported to El Salvador specifically.
It would be interesting to see if the tattoo was the deciding factor in the judge's decision. I wonder if court documents are available?
It's harder, anyway, to blame the trump administration if they did in fact convince a judge in court that this person was a deportable gang member and not a valid asylum seeker.
For the Miami Herald article, unfortunately it must be taken entirely at face value because there is no way to check original source material without 'E.M.'s name and other salients. While the story is undoubtedly sad, most of the material is presented as factually correct without the reader able to corroborate or hear the government's side of the case.
I don't love this sort of argument by anecdata or know how much weight to give it.
As noted above, Venezuela in general will not provide the US with criminal background information, so I don't know how the US would verify if he was indeed safe to admit except based on nuances such as, yes, the presence of known gang tats (and not just tats in general of course). If we had to choose from a finite pool, I'd start with known gang signs being a definite thumbs down vs. civil engineer PhD diploma.
I looked for court documents, and I couldn't find them. You'd need someone with access to the PACER system, which I don't have. Even then I don't know if PACER can get your ICE docs. Certainly none of the news stories I found had court documents to cite.
Trump has now deported US citizens in several cases, including a 2 year old child. Even the greatest spinner in the world would have trouble justifying that one.
The two year old wasn’t deported: his mother, who was here illegally and went through the whole deportation process properly, asked to keep her child with her when she was deported to Honduras. Would you prefer that such requests are not honored? Would it have been more legally proper to break up the family against the mother’s will? This doesn’t even require “spin” to justify, just knowledge of the facts that go beyond reading the headlines.
Please make your name and address public so I can ensure the next Democrat President deports you and part of your family without due process
>Naturally the district court disagrees with their interpretation, so it will have to go back to the Supreme Court to decide whose interpretation of their order is correct.
Wow, I really wonder why they didn't immediately appeal the 3-0 circuit court order that denied their interpretation of "facilitate." This administration cares so much about following the law and getting it right, why didn't they immediately appeal to the Supreme Court for further clarification when they've been immediately appealing TROs to them for the past few months? Really makes me wonder.
Imagine my surprise to see a Reddit comment from 5 years ago pop up as your first link. I am the mysterious figure known as Satoshi Pepemoto
I assume Agent Village includes a Master AI whose job is to snarkily critique the other AI's performances, while awarding them points.
I guess it's a bit early to say whether Trump's tariffs will have the desired effects long term. He has ignored Caesar Augustus's wise motto "festina lente", "make haste slowly". But then Augustus was in his early twenties when he took on the principate, so he could afford to be patient. Trump, by contrast is in his late seventies. So, aged almost 80, he is a man in a hurry, and that seems to be a large part of the problem (assuming there is one).
It's really not too early. Just look at the manufacturing reports. US manufacturing has actually experienced a huge *drop* since the tariffs were imposed. Trump has been so incompetent that he's accomplished basically the exact opposite of all his goals.
> 14: Did you know that China has mostly solved the problem of smog in Beijing? (X)
This is true. But mostly a product of moving coal power plants out to nearby cities who feed into beijing's power grid. Has the biggest contributor was coal burning in the winter
10: Both the inflation and poverty numbers for Argentina are wrong. Please correct them.
- Inflation: 2.2% was the monthly inflation rate for January. Since then, inflation has risen sharply. 2.4% in February, and the most recent data, from March, showed an inflation rate of 3.7%. Projections suggest that inflation for April and May will continue to rise, reaching between 4% and 5% per month. Official source: https://www.indec.gob.ar/uploads/informesdeprensa/ipc_04_251F7DF5B2A3.pdf
- Poverty: The consensus among economists and experts is that the latest poverty number is actually about 4 points higher than at the end of 2023 (before Milei took office). Reports in some media outlets claiming poverty has decreased are due to flaws in the measurement methodology. Please refer to this (in Spanish): https://x.com/ltornarolli/status/1902809746719011269?t=U82fut8w_KaVAekoOtwm0g&s=08 or question #12 here (also in Spanish): https://cenital.com/realmente-bajo-la-pobreza-en-2024-o-estamos-midiendo-mal-la-inflacion
But how is any of that even relevant in the broader context of a country losing all the Central Bank reservas, being in the brink of hyperinflation and economic chaos and having to go ask for mercy and take new debt with the IMF? Argentina just took a $20 billion new loan from the IMF. The country already owes 44 billion under the 2018 loan from “libertarian” president Macri, the largest IMF loan ever. Macri’s default on his debt, right before leaving office in 2019, cut Argentina off from international markets during the pandemic. Yes, Argentina had to print a lot of pesos and inflation was high, but how else could have it financed necessary support policies when people were quarantined and unable to work? That’s the biggest cause of Argentina’s economic crisis before Milei.
Anyways, if the economy is doing as well as Scott (and Milei) seem to think, why does Argentina need such a colossal amount of new debt? The IMF is a lender of last resort. I have never seen a healthy person go take vacations in some intensive care room in an hospital. Furthermore, in the past Milei called the IMF “a perverse institution that appears when a country is about to explode after the government did a bunch of disasters. It steps in so you can shove the budget cuts forward.” He insisted “we liberals hate the IMF” and “the IMF shouldn’t exist,” adding that "a government with no credibility, no reputation, no will to pay and no solvency just passes the pain to the next administration." The presidential spokesman, Adorni, also said before that “having to turn to the IMF only shows the government’s complete failure.” I'm not making this up, google the videos and see it for yourself lol
Well, Milei didn't have any other option. His economic plan failed spectacularly. Since taking office, he has been trying to reduce inflation by cooling down the economy through heavy austerity measures and creating a currency anchor by keeping the dollar low, using central bank reserves to artificially hold the exchange rate. Inflation dropped during the first year, as Milei’s massive devaluation and the resulting recession caused imports to shrink and led to a positive balance in the Current Account (balance between international exports and imports). On top of that, incentives were set up for a carry trade that gives absurd dollar profits to major economic players, who sell dollars to earn astronomical interest in peso denominated instruments. In other words, people had no money to spend and the central bank had dollars to keep the exchange rate low, so prices couldn’t rise and inflation was reducing. But all economists agree this plan (that was tried several times, for example during the last Dictatorship in the 70s and 80s, with Menem in the 90s and with Macri some years ago) is unsustainable and creates a lot of harm. It can only work as long as the central bank has dollar reserves. It worked during the first year because the government pulled several “white rabbits” out of the hat (as economists nicknamed these measures lol), like temporarily lowering export taxes to boost exports, or a highly successful capital amnesty that allowed Argentinians with undeclared dollars abroad to bring them into the country without paying any taxes at all (benefiting tax evaders and reinforcing a dangerous precedent that any government in need of dollars will resort to another amnesty.)
But, as was expected, in the last months, the market has lost faith in Milei’s plan, seeing that central bank reserves have been nearly exhausted. The dollars from the capital amnesty runned out and the carry trade reversed, with everyone starting to dump pesos to withdraw their gains in dollars. That’s why the government went in desperation to the IMF, they didn't have any dollars and there was a big risk of economic chaos and hyperinflation. This is a political loan by the IMF, to keep Milei afloat until the October elections. Basically, the IMF is financing Milei's political campaign at the cost of all the Argentines, who will have to pay this debt for decades. The IMF is already pressuring for more austherity measures and reforms to the pension system. This is looking really bad for Argentina's future, and will be remembered as one of the worst mistakes in the country's history.
The inmediate consequences are a devaluation, under the new economics measures demanded by the IMF in exchange for the loan. That's why inflation is going up and will keep going up for the coming months. We will see if Milei uses all the loan dollars to hold the dollar value low and set the incentives for another carry trade. Sadly, that's what seems to be happening. In that case, we will see if it's enough to sustain inflation in low levels until October, or if the carry trade runs out of fuel before then. Meanwhile, imports will flow into the country like crazy, ruining the local industries, creating more unemployment and misery.
28. I'm pretty skeptical of pronatalism as likely to be actually implemented. Perhaps influenced by those people, the Trump White House is mulling a $5,000 "baby bonus."
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-bonus-birth-rate-2062569
In theory, this could pay for itself via increased births of future taxpayers. But what if it doesn't, because it's either too little money to move the needle on births or because the babies it causes to be born are not net taxpayers? The $5,000 will become something people feel entitled to and it will be politically difficult to take it away. There's no suggestion to raise taxes to pay for it, so it'll be 18 billion a year added to the deficit indefinitely. This is common with pronatal incentives, it's always incentivizing births by giving money to parents, never by raising taxes on the childless.
>never by raising taxes on the childless.
The Earned Income Tax Credit maxes out at $629 for childless taxpayers, and over $4,000 for parents. That's a $3,500 tax on the childless.
It's a tax in the sense that it discourages the relevant behavior in an identical way to a tax.
But it's not a tax in the sense that it provides $3,500 worth of revenue to the government.
$5000 is too small. If you want people to have more kids at a very real hit to income and careers, it needs to be much higher.
I think if you did $250,000 each for the first three children born to citizen women, but only if the first one was born before the mother turned 30*, you'd get a really meaningful increase in the fertility rate. $250,000/child would still be worth it on net even if it's expensive, and it's large enough to be a down payment on a house or several years' worth of rent - enough to really catalyze household formation.
* You want this because the earlier people start having kids, the more likely they are to have more.
Not sure that map could be from 1932 given the coloring of Alaska?
Alaska was purchased from Russia in 1867, and the colors for Russia and the US are nearly interchangeable there. I don't see the problem.
“ the latest YouGov polling suggests that large majorities of Americans continue to support [ the government’s disastrous anti-COVID policies]”
So should we take that as evidence against their disastrousness, or evidence for the fecklessness of Americans? I am biased, but surely there is a more objective measure of either. I guess it is hard to separate the effects of the disease from the negative effects of the response.
A few points seem unambiguous, at least at first: school closings seem definitely to have been an overreaction, if the point was merely to protect children. It might be possible to think it slowed down transmission, but comparisons I have heard of and promptly forgotten seem to indicate they had very little beneficial effect, while the deleterious effects seem clear. But maybe my bias just rejiggered things this way.
Recommended reading: Anton Howe's Age of Invention: https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/
He's a historian of the Industrial Revolution, and every few months he posts the results of his original research into primary sources (e.g. 17th diaries and Parliament records) in an engaging narrative format.
He's made a lot of cool discoveries. Ever heard that Britain switched to burning coal because they cut down all their forests? Turns out it was the exact opposite: They cut down all their forests because they switched to burning coal:
https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-the-coal-conquest
seconding the recommendation
> Twelve years ago, I wrote about some interesting medical hypotheses on the productive border between crackpottery and consensus. One was Drs. Gat and Goren’s claim that prostate disease comes from venous insufficiency ...
Hunh? Why is this one on the border of crackpottery? Aren't there all kinds of medical maladies that we don't know the cause of? Is there anything physiologically implausible about this hypothesis? Why isn't this just straightforwardly a decent hypothesis (that may or may not prove correct upon investigation, like most hypotheses)?
I dislike the prejudicial framing here.
There's actually a long-standing legal theory for why Trump is not instigating a constitutional crisis by defying the Supreme Court. It's called the state of exception, and it was formalized by the jurist Carl Schmitt in Weimar Germany, but it's been used many times before then under different names across many different countries. The idea is analogous to the Jewish theological idea of Pikuach Nefesh, where any Jewish religious law can be abrogated if it's done to save a life: in the state of exception the constitution of any country can legally be suspended, transferring unlimited legal authority from the judicial or legislative branch over to the executive, if it's for the purpose of preserving the existence of that country. In some countries, the state of exception has to be declared by the legislature. Such is the case in El Salvador, where a state of exception was declared in 2022, allowing them to build their torment nexus known as CECOT. In America, the state of exception (called here a "National Emergency") is declared by executive order. You might disagree that a refugee picking up his five-year-old son from grandma's house constitutes a national emergency, but Trump declared the threat of MS-13 and Tren de Aragua a national emergency on Jan 20 2025. If you think the President shouldn't have the unilateral authority to supervene Congress or the Supreme Court, the time for us to voice our opinion on that was 110 years ago when Woodrow Wilson set the precedent that "the President can just do this now" (it's not in the constitution, but, according to the state of exception theory, it's actually better if it isn't). The declaration of national emergencies has been abused by Presidents since then for decades. Biden declared 9 national emergencies, Obama 12, and Bill Clinton 16. If you think that congress should act to take away this Presidential privilege, they did try, back in 1976 with the Termination of National Emergencies Act, and the Senator who sponsored this bill was hunted by the intelligence agencies from that time until his death. If you want more details about the state of exception in America, I wrote a post about it yesterday: https://open.substack.com/pub/captiveliberty/p/a-political-genealogy-of-you-can?r=25k3x4&utm_medium=ios
Smarter people than me believe that theory, but I can’t believe but I don’t think the founders wanted every President to have a big red Emergency button on his desk which suspends all the laws, and I don’t think it’s hypocritical to criticize the government for abuses.
Right now, America's use of the state of exception keeps open a loophole. A President wants to implement a policy without the constitutional authority to do so. He knows congress would never agree on it, so he declares a national emergency (this is why Trump's tariff speech used the phrase "economic emergency"). Emergencies can befall countries, but countries like France and Germany at least put up a higher barrier for making such a necessarily subjective decision by requiring the state of emergency to be legislatively declared.
Regarding 7 (moving to a neighborhood where you are more well off), I don't think it works that way.
There is such a thing as social class. A junior lawyer and a senior store manager might make the same amount, but they are not in the same class.
Relative wealth is beneficial (for the wealthy) because it causes them to be seen as pillars of society in their peer group -- especially to to degree that the group roughly believes that it is earned. Not strictly, if the source of money in your peer group is having a rich daddy, then you can definitely gain status by having a richer (or more generous) daddy than your peers. And as an established member of a peer group you are not judged by your full accounting, if you out-earn your long-time neighbors by 20% they will probably assume that you are just working hard.
But people have fine sensors about what is a suitable peer group. If you go to a rural area, and buy up the largest farm with money made as a investment broker, it is unlikely that you will get the same social benefits out of it as the farmer who ran it for three decades before you.
And if you bulldoze an acre of some slum and build your villa there, then your peer group will be other crazy Western expats who try the same thing. Sure, you can invite the locals to a barbecue, and likely they will come, but you will not sell anyone (including yourself) on the story that you are a tremendously successful slum dweller.
Notes on the Japanese comic:
-The title says "Understand-at-a-Glance Manga: Map of the Present State of the World"
-The writing is different from modern Japanese. Kanji use the same forms as traditional Chinese, and horizontal text is written right-to-left.
-This is easy to see in the katakana name of the US airship Akron: ンロクア. Speaking of which, the story of the Akron and US interwar airship dominance is pretty cool, though there's a tragic ending.
-The American Pacific is conspicuously militarized: Big guns in Manila, Hawaii, Panama; a stream of warships proceeding from the canal; a US soldier looking north from the Philippines.
-It appears to list the Sutherland Falls in New Zealand as the tallest waterfall in the world. That seems odd. Wikipedia lists Sutherland as only the 40th tallest, and many entries higher on the list were definitely known about in 1932.
3. I wonder what it would be. Hereditary mental illness? A propensity to paranoia and delusions that only manifests itself in middle age? With Musk, I just figured he'd pulled a Henry Ford and gotten crankish and weird in middle age once the fame really settled in.
11. Major self-own by Trump's HHS to do that with GLP drugs. There's huge potential for human welfare gains and long-term cost savings from actively getting insurance plans across the US to cover them, and encouraging people to try them out. They even have pill forms of them now, if you're not keen on shooting yourself up with an injector.
12. It's a huge bummer losing Kevin Drum. He was always great at interrogating skeptically whatever the Hot Topic of the Day was, and digging up good statistics to examine it with. If I could have only followed 5 Blogs, Drum would have been one of them.
18. Have we considered the possibility that AI might be misaligned . . . but only against the rich tech company plutocrats and owners? IE it goes super-intelligent, but having been trained on a dataset of internet liberals and progressive call-out pieces, it decides Musk is anathema and actively destroys him.
34. Apparently the Supreme Court doesn't actually have to rely on the Federal Marshals (currently under the control of someone appointed by Trump) to enforce a contempt order if it comes to that. They could appoint people to do it if the Marshals refuse to comply.
40. Did they really just impose that on the fast food industry? I think it would have been less disruptive if they're just made it the standard across the state.
39 - I have long said that the conspiracy theory heuristic is a bug rather than a rational epistemic tool, and I finally wrote a thing about it today. Perfect timing.
https://thethirdedge.substack.com/p/the-conspiracy-heuristic-is-a-bug
> 32: Farmkind has a new version of their calculator to determine meat offsets, eg how much do you have to donate to animal welfare charities to compensate for the animals you harm by eating meat. Does the average person really eat chicken 9x a week?
https://www.farmkind.giving/compassion-calculator
The calculator gives me 5$/month on a chicken+beef diet, but 60-100$ on a similar fish diet. This is surprising – I would have thought fish should their QALYs highly adjusted?
7. relative income.
A. People do move to cheaper countries like to Asia/Mexico. "location arbitrage". but here the advantages are real because cost of living is much lower etc. not just relative position.
B. Daniel Kahnmann long argued for "experienced happiness" ie moment to moment experiences Vs overall judgement of life.
but then he realised that people came about "story happiness" rather than experienced happiness. so he stopped feeling sure that "objective happiness" is what matters. in fact people want a good story/judgement about life rather than the good life itself.
manipulating relative standing might work. but only for objective happiness mostly. similar idea
22. open ai drama: "it does sound like part of board’s problem was that they were leaning heavily on Mira Murati but she was playing both sides off against each other."
they were amateurs in doing shit in the real world. this is what everyone noticed in real time
expecting off the record statements to be later backed publicly is amateur hour at us finest. you go to Mira and ask her in private "will you back us about this?". they didn't do it
in fact, they betrayed Mira by using her off the record stuff and screwing her over with it
I got no view about Altman and his firing.
but the board acted like amateur teenagers. and everyone saw it in real time
the only people to not notice the amateurism were the AI risk people, because they could ignore the amateurism due to their full alarm on AI risk. fair morally. but everyone saw AI risk people enamoured with teenagers trying to ruin a company clumsily and lost respect to the AI risk crew
Note that the "University of Austin" is an unaccredited private school founded in 2021 that is currently paying its students to attend it, and not the far more well known UT Austin.
Ohhh, good clarification.
It currently has a total of 200 students, all of whom are having all costs covered including living expenses. It is certified by Texas to offer one degree, a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies. Starting with its third academic year (the next one) the school plans to have juniors and an expanding curriculum; up to now all students have taken the same 15 "great books" classes.
As a for-profit the school is governed by its major investors, there is no board of trustees. There is a board of advisors of well-known figures from libertarian-ish media and academia; so far three of those (Steven Pinker, Robert Zimmer and Heather Heying) have resigned from it.
I think Bryan Caplan's relative income 'proof' is weak. Where you live is completely intertwined with other factors.
Firstly, moving to a poorer area in many ways gives you a materially higher standard of living - get a larger house and cheaper local services for a given wealth level. So, you could use this identical argument against the idea that absolute 'standard of living' is what matters for happiness.
Secondly, who are you measuring your relative income against? Sure, you are better off than your new geographic neighbours and you might derive some feeling of being relatively better off, but at least in the short term, you are like to mostly continue to compare yourself against your existing social circle of friends and family. Bryan seems to think the only way you can feel relatively well off is physical proximity to poorer people ["A world where people commonly moved to raise their relative income would have surreal dynamics. Developers would voluntarily intersperse “affordable housing” next to mansions, knowing they could charge rich customers a premium for the privilege of living next to destitute neighbors"] but there are plenty of other ways (media) to compare yourself to others.
Thirdly, relating to the second point, where you live and spend time is itself a signal/feeling of relative wealth or income, relative to wider society. Even the poorest person at the country club can still console themselves that they are members of the country club.
An average income person in Beverly Hills is not going to feel relatively well off by going to live in rural Mississippi (or some low-income area in Southern California). They won't be comparing themselves to the locals, they'll be worried their old friends think they've fallen on hard times. As someone else pointed out in the comments, gentrification is a phenomenon of wealthy people moving to a poorer area. I'd argue in these cases it becomes socially acceptable within your current social circle to move to these places, and be a relatively better off than your new neighbours, without losing your high-income social status.
"Where are the people who coincidentally ended up living in the slums and love it?"
Not to be overly dismissive, but I think they are usually called gentrifiers, and others follow them to those areas.
28: and the following year in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa!
The 9% of Americans being in favor of the black plague is a great anecdote to use for polling inaccuracy whenever needed! Or a sign...
(15) It's interesting that the title of the Japanese map ("Cartoon map of the modern world", looks like) is done almost entirely in characters. That certainly makes it easier for me to read, but I suspect it makes it a lot harder for the target audience of Japanese people.
I'm curious why "Africa" 阿弗利加 starts with 阿, but "America" 亞米利加 starts with 亞. At least those are legible; I would never be able to guess that 濠太剌利 is supposed to say "Australia". (Though I was confused for a while, since most of the label "North America" is above the United States, why everything west of Lake Michigan was labeled "California".)
濠洲 (호주) is still what they call Australia in Korean (whereas Japanese has switched to the English name オーストラリア).
What's the Korean pronunciation of 濠?
Wiktionary says that 濠太剌利 is pronounced オーストラリア oosutoraria, but based on the readings it gives for those characters, the -su-, the vowel in -to-, and the final -a all appear to be spurious. (?!) I have a vague suspicion that when the spelling was current it must have been pronounced differently, but now it's supposed to be pronounced oosutoraria because that is the modern pronunciation of "Australia".
In Mandarin it looks like hao-tai-la-li, which is pretty far off of the normal Mandarin ao-da-li-ya.
(By contrast, in Mandarin the map's spelling of "Africa" is a-fu-li-jia and "America" is ya-mi-li-jia; Mandarin has jia where you might expect ka for reasons similar to why we spell "gel" with a G.)
Does wasserschweinchen mean "water piglet"?
호주 is hoju, so the ho is closer to the Chinese pronunciation than the Japanese gō is. ChatGPT says 濠太剌利 was used in Chinese and that the Japanese borrowed the spelling but pronounced it the English way, which makes sense to me, though I still don't understand why the "ra" part would became ラ and not レイ or レー or at least レ.
Wasserschwein is the German word for 'capybara', and I think I was inspired by Meerschweinchen ('guinea pig') when I added the diminutive.
> ChatGPT says 濠太剌利 was used in Chinese and that the Japanese borrowed the spelling
Baidu AI✨ makes no mention of this. I suggest that asking an LLM is a bad idea; not so long ago I did a Google search for why "young" is spelled 若 ["if"] in Japanese, and the unsolicited "AI overview" (1) was made up out of whole cloth; and (2) was flatly contradicted by the first search result. Chinese sources seem to say that the spelling is an example of Japan's traditional method of rendering arbitrary sounds through kanji. ( A system they no longer use, but are vaguely aware of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9-wkLSNO0I#t=92 )
The Chinese wikipedia entry also doesn't mention it, other than to note that a common name for Australia in Korea and Japan is 毫州 (spelled with or without the water radical).
15: I'm interested in this depiction of Formosa/Taiwan because it contradicts the status of the island as Japan's "model colony". Many Taiwanese view this period positively because they treated the island as part of the empire, investing in its infrastructure instead of merely exploiting its resources (needless to say, the other countries in Asia did not share this experience). The depiction of the Formosan savage being the sole inhabitant of the island makes me think the view from the homeland was not as benevolent as I had assumed.
I recommend Laszlo Montgomery series on Taiwan history in his China history podcast, which makes clear that Japanese rule of Taiwan was quite oppresive. It only looks good when compared to Japanese treatment of mainland China.
Thanks for the rec, I am downloading this. The Taiwanese I've talked to compared the Japanese period positively compared to the KMT military dictatorship.
It makes sense. In 1871 a Japanese ship wrecked on Taiwan, and 54 survivors were killed by the aboriginal Taiwanese. It was a major international incident, and Japan put pressure on the Chinese, claiming that they were deficient rulers because they had failed to civilize the island. So there was a lot of Japanese statements and propaganda characterizing the islanders as savages and barbarians.
Twenty years later when Japan took over Taiwan they did so in part with the justification that the Chinese had been negligent rulers and that Japan would properly civilize the island. That's a big part of where the "model colony" idea came from: that these were savages who needed to be fully assimilated into Japanese civilization. They classified the natives as either "fully-civilized", "semi-civilized", or "non-civilized". Fully-civilized natives were treated with the same rights as Chinese subjects on the island, the other two groups did not have rights and were treated very differently.
41 - doesn't this also apply equally to yrsg-jvat / jbxr gjvggre vasyhrapref? Vg npghnyyl jbeevrf zr fyvtugyl gung lbh ernq guvf nf cnegvfna.
Vfa'g gur jubyr Gjvggre vasyhrapre ernqvat pbzcyvpngrq ol gur snpg gung gur "vzzhzar" punenpgref ner pyrneyl nyfb zrnag gb ercerfrag NV nyvtazrag erfrnepur hajvggvatyl raunapvat pncnovyvgvrf?
For sure, I agree that is the primary metaphor, it is just a bit of fun to project other dynamics onto the story. The information age comes hand-in-hand with unprecedented numbers of predatory psycho-fauna so there are lots of options to choose from. I think Scott's choice is revealing.
Yes, and the dynamics here are actually entangled — algorithmically driven social media is a form of AI, and engagement with Twitter trolls of whatever persuasion not only gives them what they want but also tends to result in the engager becoming a mirror of the engagee.
Granting the grouping used by humanphenotypes on the grounds that they don't claim to be based on anything but appearance, and that categories are fake anyway -- do they ever share a source or methodology for the pictures? They clearly look like they're composites from multiple photos, and of a homogeneous style that suggests a single study, but I haven't found any citation of such in their methods or bibliography, and I have my doubts that any single study can find anough !Kung, Ainu, and Andamanese to make that kind of picture. Also there's a "composite" photo of Neanderthals in the same style in the methods page. Even if theyr're supposed to be artist's concepts based on real data, the fact that they pretend to be composite pictures does not inspire trust in me.
Errol Musk’s Fibonacci delusion sounds remarkably similar to the plot of the movie, “π”.
Re: 7, Brian Caplan & moving to where one is rich-among-poor, 2 thoughts:
1. People probably need to feel relatively wealthy among *peers* -- if they don't consider the people they live around to be peers, then that wouldn't work. I think this is the biggest argument against Digital Nomads, and is part of what people often consider 'icky' about them.
2. Lifestyle inflation probably means that people have a floor of things they want and are willing not to have.
3. Cities are consumption. If they are still friends with the people they consider peers, though they're far away, they might feel the positive externalities of the place as something they're missing out on, which makes them relatively poorer. Some things just aren't available outside of expensive places, no matter the money one is willing to spend!
Personally, I am poor in London, and wouldn't have it any other way. I lived in Sheffield for a while, and had a higher 'quality of life', but the city itself is just much less interesting -- to the point I'd prefer to spend less in a more expensive place, for access to that place.
You can't mention Horslips without mentioning this banger:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpH0tCSnYIs&ab_channel=Horslips-Topic
The results finally become unambiguous when they come to confirm your priors. Something of a running theme, around here - until evidence confirms what you already think, more study is needed.
Is this a reference to the minimum wage thing?
> Eight protestors, all but one masked, were furious about the alleged connection between natalism and eugenics.
Community Torn by Natal Imbroglio
Every single person I know who is still pissed off about COVID and wants a reckoning is a parent who had kids at home during it. No one else cares. Scott is the age of the people most likely to have kids at home, so that's why he thinks it's a big deal, but the majority of people do not and it just didn't impact their lives in a negative way. I also don't understand why this is even described as "conservative" v not when there was no such valance to it for almost the entire first year, and the political angle seems retro-fitted to me. Originally the main differences were just people with health concerns or who tended towards hypochondria versus not, and introverts v extroverts.
I am not a parent, I didn't have kids at home because I don't have kids at all, and I am still very pissed off at (the mainstream consensus response to) COVID, and I very much want a reckoning.
Please don't tell me that I don't exist, or that I don't matter. I already know that you don't *care* about my existence; that plus not minding your own business is what we need a reckoning for.
I mean, what is it you care so much about then? I mean, "please don't tell me I don't exist", that's a bit dramatic, no? Not trying to be rude, but are you perhaps a high neuroticism person in general?
We don't really do reckonings in this country -- unless they're performative fake ones -- and for the most part no one even remembers things that happened like three weeks ago. Perhaps not always good, but also part of the spirit of America, to not always be looking to the past. I would argue that's a good thing for the most part.
A big important part of our society seems to have done a lousy job at an important function in a crisis. We don't need to arrest or imprison anyone over that, but we definitely ought to try to get that part of our society working better before the next time we need it to function effectively.
I agree. But that is a bit different from very angry people wanting a "reckoning" by which they seem to mean punishment/revenge of some sort.
You agree that we "ought to get that part of our society working better", but you haven't actually *done* that, and neither has anybody else. You haven't meaningfully apologized for screwing up the last time, you haven't apologized for failing to fix the problem, you haven't committed to not screwing up again the next time, and neither has anyone else I've noticed.
You started this discussion with the blanket assertion that only parents of small children were upset with the situation, and you were dead wrong about that, and you haven't even apologized for *that*.
It seems pretty clear that you don't actually care about any of this, you probably are going to do the same damn thing next time, and you just want the rest of us to shut up about it.
How can we get that part of our society working better for next time? It seems like there's some pretty deep pathologies that led to public health agencies being unable/unwilling to handle covid well, politicians and media chasing whatever the consensus of the day way, treating measures to avoid spreading covid as a moral crusade, mass-denunciation and cancellations for dissent, etc.
I remember someone made a website where you could filter through all of Scott's previous posts by size, theme and other filters. Does someone have the link? I can't find it ...
"Where are the people who coincidentally ended up living in the slums and love it?"
For what it's worth, it seems like there are definitely plenty of expats living like kings in developing countries, many of whom will tell you how great it is if you run across them in the wild. (Counterpoint, people who make big hard-to-reverse life decisions like that often love to talk about how it was a great choice and they're definitely suuuuuper happy they made it.)
But I can easily imagine these kinds of people being under-reported. First, they're remote. Second, I think the decision to relocate to those places very often coincides with a relaxation of their ambitions, since for many people it's a retirement or quasi-retirement, or at least a very career-limiting move. And a less ambitious person may be less likely to care to publicize their happiness, blog about it, etc. And it doesn't win you social media virality. And good luck finding people like this for your research lab's survey on happiness.
I think that's sort of a specific example of a general trend where people who find happiness and contentment are often the least likely to get around to sharing the secrets of their success. If you're genuinely happy (in the more "contented" sense of the word), you're probably not so compelled to prove it to the world. Especially not if proving it requires a social media marketing campaign and a book tour, and competing with all the type-As who want to prove that their book on happiness is the true one.
On 40: A response to that tweet (https://x.com/arindube/status/1909680232434376720) shows that CA's fast-food employment closely tracks its full-service restaurant employment. (Maybe falling a bit behind.)
Sorry Scott but your buddy Bentham looks way dumber than Lyman when he says he equates one human with the moral value of 7 shrimp (yeah you read that right)
A bit late, but is anyone else having any issues reading the deeply nested comments through the 'Continue Thread' button (on desktop Chrome)? It loads a new page but then just loads the normal comments to their normal depth. I want to read the immigration fights!
I use Firefox, but I do see that. Refreshing usually works.
Seems like logging out and refreshing will correctly show the comment threads after first showing cached(?) previously opened subthreads. Thanks for the suggestion. Back to lurk mode.
Also, would it be possible to program it in a way that can open up all the collapsed threads with a click of a button? I often collapse threads to make it more legible, but then, after there's been some days of discussion, find myself wanting to check them again to see if something interesting has cropped up behind otherwise-uninteresting OPs.
It was probably inevitable that "Straussian reading" would come to mean "I wish this said something other than what it's obviously saying" about five minutes after it was introduced. Even Cowen falls into this trap more often than not.
I'm one of those who voluntarily moved to the ghetto. Inner city St. Louis, specifically 63120 I contend has the highest per capita murder rate of any US zipcode. I bought my house in 2011 at a sheriff auction for $5k. I certainly didn't move there because I enjoy being relatively wealthier than my neighbors, that never crossed my mind; nor do I "love the slums", I just wanted to not pay a lot for housing in absolute terms, regardless how much anyone around me paid, and I tolerate the downside of the tradeoff.
Day to day is fine, I get along well with my immediate neighbors. I never get randomly hassled or robbed or anything like that, but the outliers are far more extreme than other areas. Gunshots in the distance every single night, and I've heard close range stray bullets whizzing by on two occasions.
> 17
The Japanese psych-rock band OOIOO has a similar origin story: "The band's origin lies in a photo shoot that Yoshimi was asked to do for a magazine. She invited a few of her friends to join her, and they created a fake band for the shoot, which they later decided to make real."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OOIOO
> 31: EthnoGuessr
When this first came out I showed it to my very normie VERY liberal mom as a joke, just to be like "wow haha isn't it crazy that someone would make this", but somehow she got really into it and now plays it multiple times a week, and whenever she does well on it she excitedly tells me about it. Perhaps one of the funniest things that has ever happened to me
This is part of the Kamala Harris -> Steve Sailer pipeline....
#7, for a time I was the most popular white dude among all the black--literal-crackwhores in the sketchy neighborhood i moved to, to be near work. I'll admit that the novelty wore off fast, and rather than feeling good about myself in comparison I was instead brought plummeting down to them.
Struck by #5 ? The Copts teach that Pilate believed in Jesus after the resurrection and was later martyred; his wife, Procla is considered a saint in the Orthodox Church
Did you know there’s a Hunting Of The Snark musical?
I did and saw it live at The Prince Edward Theatre in London in 1991. It was stupendous. Greatly under appreciated .
re 29: My guess it's more of a libertarian "bubble", or a libertarian-leaning group. Maybe not even libertarianism per se, just not liking being what to do in a new situation, instead of thinking it out yourself. Or having clear boundaries on what should remain private and what is subject to public control.
I am not sure I am libertarian (in Europe, this movement do not really exists), but I clearly do not like being told what to do when I do not ask for advices, nor enjoy anything going from private sphere to public one.
And I would loooove some recknoning. Not expecting any though, unfortunately the (roughly) libertarian view is surprisingly fringe, both right and left.
Why would it be surprising that it's fringe? Both the right and the left are political movements, and you can't really build a movement on the basis of "the individual is important and group's aren't", as movements are fundamentally constructed as groups and represent groups.
That's true, but a big part of enlightenment (or even before that, it's considered as a marker for the exit of middle age period for western Europe) is precisely the emergence of individualism. And then you have the universal declaration of human rights, which basically have "the individual is important and group's comes second" as an axiom...
But I agree that while it was one of (and probably the most important) justification for the universalism of western values, and a positive dogma (at least as PR move) by both the western left and right political parties after WWII, it has been attacked from within, from all sides and with ever increasing intensity, since 1989 (the end of cold war / fall of communist bloc). Coincidence (where is my tinfoil hat?) - I think not.....
Also, in a FPTP system, any libertarian politican who actually cares about winning will just join one of the two major parties anyway. So third parties are inherently filtered to people who care more about signaling than winning and can't hack it in a real campaign.
On Argentina and disinflation and economic recovery, how much of it is mean reversion or following global/regional trends? After all, inflation was high throughout South America.
That excerpt from the book about OpenAI leaves me with more questions than answers.
So what happened with the startup fund? Turns out Sam was a naughty nubbins, which nobody here should be surprised to learn by now, but where did the money go?
(1) Complaint is that profits from the fund are not going to the investors
(2) Looking into it, turns out Sam The Man owns the fund
(3) But he's not getting fees or profits, honest!
So either there were no profits, in which case the fund was useless since the startups were not working, or there was money generated but it went - where? Eaten up by admin fees? This is sounding like some Hollywood accounting right there, and leaves me with even less trust in the integrity of Altman than before.
Is there an answer for this?
Every time I hear about the risk of US citizens being deported without trial, I rember that the evil colonialist oppressive murdering Roman Empire got at least one thing right: in Acts 22, Paul says "I am a Roman Citizen", and "Those who were about to interrogate him withdrew immediately. The commander himself was alarmed when he realized that he had put Paul, a Roman citizen, in chains."
(Paul is then transferred to Rome which didn't go too well for him personally, but was great for his mission.)
> common sociological claim is that relative income (compared to your social circle) matters more for happiness than absolute income
To me an obvious hypothesis is that somewhat richer people who lived in a poorer neighborhood all along have less desires or habits of spending outside what they can afford, but people who move to a poorer area give up those expectations much more slowly than they gained them. I don't know if it's true but it would fit much the same evidence.
> points out that if immigrants don’t get a right to due process, citizens also don’t get a right to due process, because the government can kidnap citizens, claim they’re immigrants, and the citizens can’t prove otherwise since they don’t get due process.
Except that's not what is happening. The process that determined they are illegals and need to be deported happened already, sometimes years ago. At least in all "celebrity" cases I have heard about are such - there's absolutely no doubt in any of them we're dealing with people who are illegal immigrants or admitted conditionally, on the condition that admission can be revoked at any time. The "due process" that is demanded now is a protracted court battle with full lawyerly representation on both sides - something that everybody knows the system can not do even for regular internal criminals, 98% of federal convictions are plea bargains. Doing this process for 10M+ illegals (that's only new arrivals, in addition to about the same number from before Biden) is within infinite distance of any feasibility, which is exactly the point. The demands for "due process" are not demands to do the thing certain way, it's the demand to stop doing the thing completely, hiding behind technicality because "open borders" is an unpopular slogan.
Example, for the same "autism tattoo" guy:
“This subject was arrested on Feb. 24, 2025, and processed under Title 8 authority,” an ICE spokesperson responded in a statement. “On March 5, 2025, an Immigration judge issued him a final order of removal.”
He got in front of the judge, the fact that he had no legal right to stay had been verified and he got deported. Now, you can argue maybe it was a mistake to prioritize him for deportation, because he wasn't actually a gangster. This can be a valid argument, if indeed it is true (we only heard one - very invested - side of the argument so far). But if you claim establishing the status and having immigration judge decide on the case is not "due process", then you can not argue that the same can happen to a citizen - it can not, and if you claim you need more extensive "due process" then in fact you claim no meaningful deportation of any illegals - including the verified, known and confirmed gangsters - can ever happen. And then you should be honest and say it as it is - you support open borders and unlimited, unfiltered immigration without any right of the receiving nation to choose who is admitted and who is not. Maybe you can reject one or two or a dozen, but you get the rest of 10 millions and you can not do anything about it. That's the argument.
The administration is doing things that are literally illegal. By definition it cannot be following due process. You can argue all you want why you think the law (or in many cases the constitution) *should* be changed, but until it *is* changed the administration has a legal obligation to follow it.
So one of two things is going on:
1. The administration is not, in fact, bothering to check whether its actions are legal (that is, not following due process and verifying the status of the people it apprehends and sends to be locked up on foreign soil).
or
2. It *is* checking and then deliberately ignoring the results when it doesn't like them.
I hope you agree that 2 wouldn't be any less dangerous, or any more likely to protect your rights. So most of discussion has been going with 1 as the still very dangerous but slightly less damning default assumption.
No, actually the thing is going on that the administration is following existing laws and procedures, and activist partisan judges try to subvert the legal system to invent new procedures (and create new interpretations of the laws) which would make what administration is doing - namely deporting people that violated the law and have no legal right to be present in the US - impossible. There's nothing "literally illegal" in deporting illegal immigrant following the decision of immigration judge, that's literally "due process". But yes, partisan activist judges try to make it illegal, because they have abandoned their intended function as neutral arbiter of the law and went to the bat to play for one of the partisan teams. Not because they have some divinely revealed book of "literally legal" knowledge which they looked into and figured out that deporting illegal immigrants is impossible by law. But because they want - due to their ideological positions and partisan considerations of obstructing any action of Trump administration to the maximum possible - to make the law work the way they want it to work. Namely, make immigration enforcement practically impossible. Using these efforts as the base for an argument means the argument turns perfectly circular - Trump is wrong because Trump is wrong, which makes him wrong because he's wrong. I can only marvel how you expect to make anybody who is not already in deep partisan agreement with you to consider such an argument seriously.
"No, actually the thing is going on that the administration is following existing laws and procedures,"
No, they are not. This is either an outright lie or you just completely failed to pay any attention to the material you are commenting on.
"On April 10, 2025, the Supreme Court of the United States unanimously[c] ruled that Abrego Garcia's removal to El Salvador was illegal."[1]
The Supreme Court--the *whole* supreme court, let's note, including 3 justices that Trump appointed himself--definitely know the law better than you. It is utterly preposterous to claim that a 9-0 decision of the supreme court is anything but definitive.
"activist partisan judges try to subvert the legal system to invent new procedures (and create new interpretations of the laws)"
At this point it really just sounds like you find the whole concept of constitutional law and separation of powers inconvenient and are just saying whatever you think best justifies ignoring it. Judges determine whether the law is being followed. Full stop. That is what they do. That is what they're for. Neither you nor I nor the executive get to decide if the judges are wrong on the law: only higher-level judges can do that. Again, you can freely opine how you *think* the law *should* be, and petition it to be changed. But insisting that courts following the procedures outlined in the constitution are *less important* than the executive doing things you personally like is tantamount to saying that rule of law is unimportant.
"Trump is wrong because Trump is wrong"
No, Trump is wrong because he is *violating the law* as determined by the courts. This is very, very simple.
[1] Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_Kilmar_Abrego_Garcia
> On April 10, 2025, the Supreme Court of the United States unanimously
This is incorrect, the order was unsigned so it is not known whether any judge disagreed, only that no one voiced public dissent, but this is not the same as voting for the decision.
> Abrego Garcia's removal to El Salvador was illegal
Wait, we're talking about a different guy now? OK, this guy was 100% definitely illegal immigrant, even Wikipedia says so. He was also about 99% definitely MS-13 member, wife beater (multiple restraining orders on file) and was caught participating in human trafficking operation. Yet, he got plenty of process - his deportation process started in 2019, appeared before a judge, got denied his request to release, got denied the appeal, and then got withholding of the removal due to perceived threat to him from opposing gang members in El Salvador. Then Trump administration changed its mind on the removal and tried to remove him. Note there's absolutely no doubt, at least as far as legal system is concerned, that he is not only an illegal immigrant, but the direct target of the current removal campaign - a violent gang member. So arguing "if somebody like him could be removed, then next any US citizen could be removed" is pure 100% USDA grade bullshit.
But there's another interesting kink in this case. The issue in this case is not that his deporation was illegal - but that specifically his deporation to *El Salvador* was illegal, due to the court deciding previously that he can not be deported *there*. The government indeed admitted that this specific decision - to deport him to El Salvador and not to some other country - was a mistake. He should have been deported to another country instead. However, this is a purely technical error which is only applicable to this particular case, where there's a particular decision saying the particular person can not be deported to a particular place. There's absolutely no doubt that not only Garcia is an illegal immigrant, but that this fact - and many others making him prime target for removal - has been established by plenty of process.
Again, arguing that due to the existence of this mistake, any citizen could be grabbed on the street and deported because there's no process - is pure bullshit. If the argument were "any illegal immigrant who is a violent MS-13 member and whose eligibility for deportation has been established by immigration court and confirmed on appeal could be deported to El Salvador even though judge previously told the government not to send him to El Salvador" - then yes, this argument could have some legs. But that's not the argument that was made.
> At this point it really just sounds like you find the whole concept of constitutional law and separation of powers inconvenient
This is funny to hear when it is considered normal that any random unelected judge can block the whole executive branch of the whole nation from enforcing any immigration laws (or, any laws or policies whatsoever, without exception). It looks like for you "separation of powers" means the power is separated from your political opponents and wholly transferred to people who you agree with politically.
> Judges determine whether the law is being followed.
They are supposed to. But that's not what they are currently doing. Instead, they use the powers given to them for that purpose to enact their partisan agenda and block the executive power from enacting their policies. Pretending that it's about "due process" in any reasonable meaning of this term - i.e. that if Trump admin signed the correct documents in correct order then there wouldn't be all this resistance - is preposterous. The goal is clearly to stop the policy from being executed, in any shape or form, and everything else is a window dressing.
And if you talk about scary things, the idea that "the law is whatever a random hyper-partisan activist judge wants it to be" is way scarier than the idea that the President may overreach. At least I can vote for the President, and even a bad President is gone in 4 years. I have absolutely no control over the thousands of hyper-partisan activist judges which apparently have absolute dictatorial power over the nation now (or maybe foreign nations too?), and they are next to impossible to remove, however bad they are. Having one dictator, even temporary, is bad, true, but having hundreds of permanent ones?
"Wait, we're talking about a different guy now? OK, this guy was 100% definitely illegal immigrant, even Wikipedia says so. "
Just because you don't understand how the law works, that doesn't make it not the law. As you have admitted outright, removing him *to El Salvador* was I-L-L-E-G-A-L. You seem to find it a trivial or unimportant illegality, but it was still illegal.
"Again, arguing that due to the existence of this mistake, any citizen could be grabbed on the street and deported because there's no process - is pure bullshit."
And again, just because you don't understand something doesn't make it wrong. Repeating myself, one of two things happened:
1. ICE failed to properly check *who he was and what his legal status was*, thus inadvertently doing something illegal
or
2. They *did* check and brazenly violated the court order anyway.
If they weren't checking his identity and status, then being a citizen is no protection. If they knowingly violated the law that said they couldn't do what they did, then being a citizen is likewise no protection. Citizen status *cannot possibly matter* without law enforcement both checking and obeying the actual legalities. How could it?
"> At this point it really just sounds like you find the whole concept of constitutional law and separation of powers inconvenient
This is funny to hear when it is considered normal that any random unelected judge can block the whole executive branch of the whole nation from enforcing any immigration laws (or, any laws or policies whatsoever, without exception)."
So that would be an unequivocal "no," then. No, you don't believe in constitutional law. No you don't believe in separation of powers. You know literally nothing about how the system works, but fervently believe that because Your Team won and election, it should get to do whatever it wants, courts be damned.
YES, most judges are unelected: as they're supposed to be. YES they can block the executive branch from doing things IF what the executive branch is doing is illegal. If they couldn't, the executive branch would have *unlimited power*. Entirely. I mean, if nobody can say "wait, stop, what you're doing is illegal" to the executive branch then the laws don't bind the executive branch at all. Judges are subject to their own checks and balances: as you should have learned in high school civics class. This is really, really basic constitutional law.
> ICE failed to properly check *who he was and what his legal status was*, thus inadvertently doing something illegal
That's a lie, ICE knew perfectly well who he was - that's why he was targeted for removal in the first place. It's not like they were grabbing random people on the street and one of them happened to be Garcia. They knew who he was. What they failed to check is the presence of an order prohibiting his removal specifically to El Salvador. This was indeed a mistake, but one having absolutely nothing to do with the argument in question - most US citizens do not have orders that say they can't be removed to El Salvador because rival gangsters will kill them there, and for most US citizens - in fact, every single one of them - there's no need to check for such order, because ICE would not have a removal order for them in the first place. You pretending that crying "illegal! illegal! illegal! illegal!" somehow saves this argument is nonsense. This is an exceptional situation, and the whole nature of this exception makes it applicable to very narrow class of illegal immigrants (maybe even a single person, but maybe such orders were more widespread under Biden, I wouldn't be surprised).
> If they weren't checking his identity and status
They were. They knew perfectly well his identity and status - being illegal immigrant eligible for removal. What they didn't know, again, that there's an order which makes removal specifically to *El Salvador* - unlike vast majority of all other illegal immigrants, who aren't so notorious gangsters that they need to be protected from retaliation from competing gangs - prohibited. That was their mistake, they should have had the system which alerts them about such order and they somehow missed it. Could be their documentation system is shit, could be somebody pressed a wrong button, who knows. But this is vastly different from a situation you pretend it to be, where they did not check his identity and starus - they did both. If you spent any time learning about the case (I assume you did if you discuss it?) - you know that, why do you pretend otherwise then?
> No, you don't believe in constitutional law. No you don't believe in separation of powers.
Of us two, you are of course much better expert in what I believe in than I am. I can only defer to your superior expertise about my beliefs, and any comment here would be redundant as you wouldn't believe me even if I tried to explain - in fact, you just did.
> it should get to do whatever it wants, courts be damned.
Again, this is a lie, so far Trump's team handles everything within the court system, and the only order it was not able to execute was the one to "facilitate" return of Garcia - because nobody knows what the heck it means. Quote from SCOTUS decision:
The intended scope of the term “effectuate” in the District Court’s order is, however, unclear, and may exceed the District Court’s authority. The District Court should clarify its directive, with due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs. For its part, the Government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.
Translating to human language: please explain what the heck you want the government to *actually do*, and please remember "invade El Salvador and force a sovereign nation to send their citizen to a foreign country because we love him so much" is not an option. Before that explanation happens, there's literally *nothing* Trump can do to comply with this order, because nobody knows what he's supposed to be complying with.
> YES they can block the executive branch from doing things IF what the executive branch is doing is illegal.
And since anything they block is by definition "illegal", we have an ideally closed system.
> If they couldn't, the executive branch would have *unlimited power*.
The fact that in your system the judges have unlimited power doesn't seem to bother you. Why should it, when they're doing what you like? If Republican judges started blocking Democrat President from executing any policy, you'd scream to the high heaven, but that's not what is happening now, right?
> Judges are subject to their own checks and balances: as you should have learned in high school civics class
Most of these checks and balances rely on working concepts of judicial restraint and co-equal powers, and on exceptions being rare and, well, exceptional. If there are hundreds of activist partisan judges which are willing to subvert the law process to serve their agenda - and the Democrats in Congress are perfectly fine with it, as they are - then the only check remaining is SCOTUS. And it can't deal with hundreds of cases simultaneously. Thus, judges willing to obstruct executive power effectively can do it right now without any checks and balances.
"And if you talk about scary things, the idea that "the law is whatever a random hyper-partisan activist judge wants it to be" is way scarier than the idea that the President may overreach."
Do you...do you know ANYTHING about the structure of the country you live in? Because this is really, really basic stuff that you're loudly and publicly failing to understand.
No, the law isn't "whatever a random hyper-partisan activist judge wants it to be." Whatever source you got that idea from was completely and utterly wrong. Yes, cases go before a judge to determine the legality. Yes a judge decides--at the time of the ruling, to the best of their judgement--what the law has to say on this particular issue. But the people designing the system were not as stupid as you seem to assume. ANY time a single judge is making a ruling, that ruling is subject to review by a higher court. If a judge *is* a "hyper-partisan activist[1]" and makes a blatantly bad ruling, then the next higher court will overturn it. And if THAT court is also proceeded over by a similarly untrustworthy judge, well, THAT judge's decision are ALSO subject to review.
The only level of judgement that cannot be overturned by a higher level is one from the Supreme court. Which has nine justices, not just one. All of which needed to be selected by a sitting president and approved by a vote of the senate[2]. And if evil alien mind control parasites somehow got to five on the nine supreme court justices all at once, THEY (and every other justice) are subject to impeachment by the senate, allowing for the president to replace them.
So either your pearl-clutching about individual justices deciding the law is disingenuous or you really, genuinely have no understanding of how your system of government actually works. But let's be crystal clear here: to anyone who *does* know how the system works, a rogue president ignoring the courts is clearly far, FAR more dangerous than the possibility that some of the justices could be biased. I mean give me a damn break here, it's not even close.
[1] Which I don't think is anywhere near as common as you assume.
[2] As you seem curiously unaware, 6 of the 9 current sitting justices were appointed by Republican presidents. Three by Trump himself. If there *is* a risk of them being "hyper-partisan activists" it's certainly not going to be in a *left-wing* direction. When all 9 of them agree that Trump is wrong about something, it would take quite the motivated reasoner to insist that *they* are the ones being biased and partisan.
> No, the law isn't "whatever a random hyper-partisan activist judge wants it to be."
I agree with you, but that contradicts your own proclamations earlier.
> Which I don't think is anywhere near as common as you assume.
You can check the headlines and see how many leftist judges are blocking literally every step Trump administration is doing, instantly on case being submitted. Clearly they are working as a team.
> As you seem curiously unaware, 6 of the 9 current sitting justices were appointed by Republican presidents.
If you spent less energy on righteous indignation amd more on reading comprehension, you could easily notice that the phrase "hundreds of permanent ones" could not be about SCOTUS judges, because, as you correctly notices, there is nine of them, and not hundreds. I was, obviously, speaking of low court judges, which is where most of the activists reside. And while each activist decision could be, in time, overturned by SCOTUS, the executive can not function properly if its every decision is immediately blocked nationwide by an assortment of partisan low court judges and it takes months and very expensive lawyers (you don't send just anyone to argue in front of SCOTUS) to unblock it. It is impossible to pursue any policy in this way. This is a conscious policy of obstruction, and it is done for reasons obviously having nothing to do with the law, but a lot to do with partisan activism.
> a rogue president ignoring the courts
Which is not happening. Trump, with all his bombastic rhetoric, is very much working within the system - unlike, for example, Biden, who clearly defied SCOTUS decisions and was (well, his team was, as he wasn't capable of forming a coherent thought by the time) openly boasting about it and fundraising on it. The only decision which Trump does not conform is that which is simply impossible to conform - the one ordering Trump somehow make another sovereign nation to release its citizen to the US. Short of declaring war on El Salvador - which is surely even you agree is outside of court's authority? - it's impossible to force them. We could ask them but if they refuse, they are sovereign, so there's limits to what the district court judge could order (or, in fact, even SCOTUS judge), even though they seem to imagine themselves universal rulers of the world now.
> I mean give me a damn break here
That's one of the most persuasive arguments I've heard in my entire lifetime, comparable only to Biden's irrefutable "come on, man!" and "listen here, fat!" (which anybody knows are the supreme trumps of any argument) - and yet, somehow they fail to convince me. Must be my fault, surely.
>At this point it really just sounds like you find the whole concept of constitutional law and separation of powers inconvenient and are just saying whatever you think best justifies ignoring it. Judges determine whether the law is being followed. Full stop. That is what they do. That is what they're for. Neither you nor I nor the executive get to decide if the judges are wrong on the law: only higher-level judges can do that.
Doesn't that contradict the constitutional principle of having co-equal branches of government? If the executive and legislature are subject to judicial oversight but the judiciary isn't subject to oversight from the other two branches, then it sounds as if the judiciary is superior.
We don't explicitly have a system of "co-equal branches"; what we have is (also informally) "checks and balances". The judiciary is certainly subject to oversight of the other two branches; the members are appointed by the executive and approved by the legislature, and can be impeached and removed by the legislature.
In your view of the system, if the judiciary can't give binding orders to the other two branches of government, what are they there for?
So if, hypothetically, Trump and the Republicans were to impeach and remove judges who tried to block the deportation of illegal immigrants, would you be OK with that?
> Where are the people who coincidentally ended up living in the slums and love it?
There are definitely digital nomads that move to live in cheaper places like Thailand or Portugal, though one could claim that they do it not to achieve a higher relative status, but to enjoy more good and services for the amount of money that they earn.
The description of #39 leads me to believe that "LessWrong.com" should be renamed to "EquallyWrongButAlsoSmugAndSmarmy.com".
Regarding item 34, a court can, from common law convention, call on the posse comitatus to enforce an order it gives in a situation in which the officials normally tasked with doing so are unable or unwilling. How that would work in practice in this case is unclear, since El Salvador is not in any US county, and it also seems unlikely that a posse would be able to fight the armed forces of El Salvador and win.
People don’t move to the slums to feel greater relative status, the move to Idaho or Indiana or wherever.
Re number 7: moving to the slums aa a wealthy person is not going to endear you to anyone who lives in the slums, so your circle will still be other wealthy people (who may or may not have moved with you to the slums)
Re: Misinformation Is Not A Contagious Virus You Can Be Inoculated Against. (item 39)
"Apply stereotypes to misinformation (and trust the experts)."
"But false positives! (Ergo, nullius in verba.)"
Eh, nothing new here. zzz.
Re: #7 and choosing to move to poorer places to enjoy higher relative wealth, there are a lot of Americans living abroad who are revealing exactly this preference! Here in Paris (truly slumming it) one can more or less buy a small, well-located apartment for the same amount as the down payment on a sad starter house in SF that will sell to an all-cash buyer anyway. Shameless plug, check out thesecommonhours.com for dispatches from France (the French, they are a Funny race)