689 Comments

I have two queries for Substack posts I am working on and thought I would put them to people here:

1: What are good examples of bogus history, historical factoids that many people believe but are not true. My standard example is the idea that Columbus defended the idea of a spherical Earth against critics who thought it was flat and he would fall off the edge.

2. What are good examples of robot nagging? My smart watch beeps from time to time to tell me I need to take more steps this hour.

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“Whole 9 yards”: amount of ammo for B17 waist gunner, or similar. I’ve heard theft’s not true,

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“That’s”

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I heard about a top-prize-winning author in Japan who used ChatGPT for about 5% of the prose.

https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2024/01/19/2003812335

I know this is debatable, but my take on it is this is a great use-case for AI. In fact, I'm surprised only 5% of the novel was written by ChatGPT. A human is still needed for editing it, the initial prompts, and determining whether the finished product is any good.

If you can't use AI to *help* you with a creative process, what good is AI at all?

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Having tried a bit of AI-assisted writing myself (using a locally-run open model), I have to say it sounds just about right.

My observation is that AI can be a wonderful entropy generator - because it might suggest novel (to the writer) ideas and approaches. However, if you are particular about your prose (as a prize-winning author will be), you'll find yourself going "yes, but" or "yes, and" quite a bit - and thus editing or outright re-writing a lot of what the AI put out.

It's the same with art generators, I find - the ideal usage is to generate something that wouldn't have come naturally to you, but then using that as a basis for a lot of additional work. Thus, I believe that all sorts of creative types stand to actually gain from incorporating AI into their tool belt.

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I've been beginning to wonder if the problem is that "depression" is describing more than one condition. About a year ago, I randomly decided to taper off of my antidepressants. It actually went well, and I felt better than normal... for about a month. Then I got the worst depressive symptoms of my entire life: I had zero energy to do anything (except read for some reason) and I pretty much just stopped eating because I had no appetite.

Thankfully, I was able to get a new antidepressant prescribed before I starved to death. And it worked: it quickly got rid of all the extreme symptoms, and I actually felt way better compared to the previous medication for a couple months. Then I became miserable again, but it was nice while it lasted.

...Anyways, my theory is that my regular depression and whatever the hell happened after I stopped taking my meds are two entirety separate conditions, and traditional antidepressants are only effective at treating the latter. One of them is a chemical dysfunction, and the other is purely psychological. And while brain chemistry and psychology are obviously connected, SSRI/SNRIs can only solve the chemical imbalances and nothing more.

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Yeah. I've had some experience with mild depression and with severe depression, and IMO they might as well be completely different conditions. Maybe I just never had a "medium" version, though.

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I'd like to step outside my comfort zone for a minute and try to steelman the case for reparations. Humor me for a second, especially if you read that sentence and immediately thought, "I know this guy is wrong and I'm going to prove it!"

Say Bri used to rob her friend Ira every day, then spend the money she stole on temporary stuff, like getting her nails done, or cosmetic surgery, or eating steak for dinner instead of a burger. Ira is angry about this, of course, because she goes from eating burgers to beans and rice, and she can't afford lipstick. This is a terrible situation, but it doesn't actually make Bri 'rich'. You can't plunder your way to wealth. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/nations-dont-get-rich-by-plundering

Eventually, Bri feels bad about stealing from Ira. Instead of focusing on Ira as her source of wealth, Bri goes to college, climbs the corporate ladder, and pretty soon she's making six figures. After a solid decade, Bri is attending a play downtown when she's accosted by a street thug with a knife. Luckily for Bri, she can afford a nice compact handgun. She pulls it from her bag to deter her assailant.

She stares the robber down - Bri has the upper hand now. As she looks closer, Bri recognizes the would-be robber. It's her old friend Ira. Ira isn't doing much better than last time they met, despite Bri's newfound commitment not to rob her.

"What happened to you?" Bri asks.

"You happened to me," Ira replies. "You took all my money and got rich off of it. I was trying to make things right for a change."

Bri scoffs, "That's not what happened at all! I took your money and spent it on frivolous stuff. You think you'll get rich from robbing me, but it'll never happen. You'll never get rich by trying to imitate my behavior BEFORE I figured out the secret to success. I got rich when I started focusing on myself. That's your problem, you should have gone to college and gotten a good job. Then you'd be rich like me. I didn't get rich by stealing from you. I got rich on my own."

Ira looks at Bri in disbelief. "Go to college? How was I supposed to afford it when you stole from me every day? Maybe you did get rich on your own, but you also kept me poor by robbing me. Don't come telling me you've changed unless you're willing to make that up to me now. A Benjamin or two would certainly help ..."

"Ira, you're not listening. Reparations don't work. A one-time transfer of wealth isn't going to make the difference in your life. You'll just come back to me a few years down the road, still poor, once again complaining that it's my fault! Look, we can get past this-" Bri waves her free hand at Ira's knife, "-unpleasantness. Just apologize for attacking me and we can be friends again."

"I'm the one who needs to apologize? Excuse me, but of the two of us, you're the only one with a successful career as a thief."

"Yes, and I'm telling you that's not 'success'. I don't owe my wealth to you, and besides, I'm a totally different person now."

"Okay," Ira replies. "But that doesn't absolve you of your sins, keeping me down all these years. The question isn't what you can do to pay me back for what you did to me all those years ago. The question is what you can do to make it right now. Maybe you could send me to college, or help me get a job at your company. Something to help me get ahead. Because one thing we don't disagree on is that you did me wrong."

Now imagine we're not talking about Bri and Ira, but about Britain and Iran. For years the British appropriated Iranian oil revenues. By "appropriated", I mean the British paid less for oil than the Iranians. I mean that the British NHS program was funded by Iranian oil revenues for as long as Britain controlled those oil revenues. When the Iranians tried to take their oil back, the Brits cried 'foul' and tried to stop them. That didn't work.

Then the Iranians found out their own newspapers and politicians had been bought and paid for by illegal British bribes, lying to the people in order to steal Iranian oil and keep them poor while a few politicians (and the British) got rich. Desperate to get their oil money back, the British used the magic word to activate the US CIA - "communist", though that was mostly blowing smoke - and the Americans blundered in to murder Iran's moderate prime minister, Mosaddegh, in a coup.

Now, I'm not going to claim the source of British wealth today is 1950's Iranian oil. Nor am I going to say that Iran would be wealthy today if not for Britain stealing a bunch of oil more than half a century ago. But when I look at the past from an Iranian perspective, I can see their entrance to what looks to a Western perspective like a life of crime as happening in reaction to a whole lot of British plunder. Maybe it's been years since the US or Britain plundered oil wealth from Iran, but maybe they haven't done much to deter Iran from a life of crime other than saying, "You must repent of your sins and accept global punishment and condemnation before we'll be willing to welcome you back into the international order. And make sure we know you really mean it."

And I can see Ira in my mind's eye, reacting to what seems to her a bizarre demand. "What? I'm the one who should apologize for MY past? Of the two of us robbers, you're the one who succeeded. If an apology is owed, maybe we should start chronologically. And make sure I know you really mean it."

I've heard a lot of cases for reparations that I find entirely unconvincing. Additionally, I don't think I've ever heard of an actual reparation that sounds like it would do anything to 'repair' past wrongs. In general, I think that's a fool's errand. I'm not my great-grandparents. I can't fix what they did to someone else's great-grandparents. And once you factor in immigration, emigration, and intertwined family trees, the whole idea falls to pieces. Having individuals today pay reparations to other individuals today seems to me less like 'correcting past mistakes', and more like 'compounding past mistakes by making new ones'.

However, countries outlive individuals. Therefore, perhaps there's an argument that the same country that made a past mistake should also be responsible for paying for that mistake. I'm amenable to arguments for a statue of limitations, but probably on more of a national time scale. What do you think?

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Another problem with reparations is that like most things, they'll be slanted towards benefiting the powerful. Take the case of Haiti, which gained independence from France in a bloody slave revolt, but then France forced Haiti to pay reparations to France for the loss in property. It took 122 years to pay off, and wrecked the economy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiti_Independence_Debt

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Also: under this scheme, why is it only Iran which is owed reparations? The British ruled a quarter of the world within living memory (notably not including Iran!), and many of those places would have complaints about bad behavior. But it would surely be beyond the ability of the British state to pay meaningful `reparations' to the entirety of its former empire. Not to mention current British generations might reasonably object to being presented a bill for the sins of their forefathers (a payment from the state being ultimately a payment from the taxpayers).

If what you really care about is `repairing relationships and moving forward' is there a reason why you are advocating for `reparations' rather than `truth and reconciliation?' `Truth and reconciliation' proceedings at least have some kind of track record of actually working.

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I used Iran as a single point of focus because 1.) like you said there are too many examples even just focusing on GB, and 2.) I liked the Ira/Bri abbreviations.

Yeah, I'm more concerned with outcomes than with the concept of a 'reparation' itself. If truth and reconciliation do the same work better I'm all for it. It seems like truth and reconciliation are also difficult, though. It's easier to see when ideological opponents mess up than it is to see the flaws in our allies. When I proposed that Britain had wronged Iran, many in this thread strongly defended Britain as having done no wrong, objecting that somehow their actions in scrambling for Iranian oil had been beneficial to Iran. All this despite a long (and often unacknowledged) history of serious abuses of Iranian sovereignty and oppression.

But perhaps this is another argument against reparations qua reparations, as they carry too much baggage to be popularly accepted. If you can instead invoke 'truth and reconciliation' and actually admit past wrongs that have been previously unknown/ignored/forgotten, that might have a stronger effect than making actual payments.

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>Truth and reconciliation' proceedings at least have some kind of track record of actually working.

Do they? Agree with you overall, but people say this and I am really not sure.

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South Africa seems kind of a train wreck, but race relations in south africa seem a lot less bad than they could have been, given apartheid and all.

Meanwhile, reparations seem to repeatedly lead to fresh wars.

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Thank you, this is really interesting and important! I wonder what other situations this applies to. Life is not a zero-sum game; you can hurt others without helping yourself, you can even hurt others while hurting yourself, therefore "how much you benefited from the action" is a bad proxy for "how much you have hurt others".

In case of individuals, punishment should probably be proportional to the greater of these two values? If the situation is like "you hurt others without really benefiting yourself", the important thing is that you have hurt others. (If you burn down my house, the important aspect is the damage you caused me, not whether you derived some benefit from that or not.) But if the situation is like "you hurt others, but you derive a much greater benefit for yourself", the punishment should be at least equal to your benefit, otherwise you will be tempted to do that again.

In case of governments, this is further complicated by the fact that people are not their governments; especially in non-democratic countries. If a dictator of one country hurts another country... his people probably didn't have much of a choice about it, and they are themselves just another victim of the same guy. But what about democracies? Are the Americans who didn't vote for Biden also responsible for whatever Biden does? (And if the elections are secret, how will you find out who should pay the reparations, if something bad happens.)

Asking for reparations from dictatorships may even create bad incentives. As long as the dictator is in power, he will just say "f--- you", and you are probably already sanctioning him anyway so what else can you do. So if the reparations will ever be paid by anyone, it will be by those who will replace the dictator. We should support those people rather than penalize them.

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I like a lot of this. Most of the reparations I'm thinking of are voluntary, otherwise it's a judicial judgement against the offender. For a dictatorship, I lean toward calling the ousting of the dictator a repudiation of the wrongs committed. But maybe you don't exactly need that to mend the relationship?

The Colonial US fought a war for sovereignty, then got no respect from the British or the French. Maybe you could argue that the animosity with the French was resolved through regime change in France, but the British came back in 1812 for round 2. Their form of government doesn't appear to have significantly changed since then, but the relationship seems to have largely mended without reparations per se. Just a lost war for the British and an increasingly powerful US economy/military. Tellingly, less than half a century later both countries sought to avert a war that might have started over a pig, so friendship seems to have come quickly without reparations.

In lieu of losing a war, maybe reparations could be contemplated. Sometimes an honest admission of the previous administration's wrongs might be the biggest step. For example, admitting to the Armenians that, yes, there was a genocide and it was wrong. Or the Russians admitting to the Holodomor ... and what they did in the Baltic states ... and Poland ... and Romania ... and the gulags ... and that punk move in Norway. Do the Russians go so far as to give Norway the land back? Maybe just letting the people take a vote and accepting their decision is enough? (Obviously none of that his happening any time soon.)

For example, if the US gave Hawaii a vote on staying in the Union (which they probably would vote to stay), what would be the argument for not respecting that vote one way or another? Probably strategic interest, more so than moral principles. But if we're going to let the Hawaiians vote on staying in the union, maybe first we would take their complaints seriously and make a real popularity play. For example by rescinding the Jones Act.

There are lots of animosities between peoples, and some of those animosities are deserved. I'm mostly trying to think through whether and when we can mend those animosities. Some, I don't think are directly mendable. For example, the Confederates in the US South aren't going to get an apology or reparations for the Civil War. They shouldn't. Maybe you could make the case for Sherman's march, but then you're adjudicating all the atrocities committed on both sides. Usually we try to forget those and move on. That's what we did in the Utah war, where the Mormons forgave Buchanan's Blunder and everyone looked the other way about the Mountain Meadows Massacre. All this was long before you could consider any statute of limitations to have run out, because official pardons were handed around, and within 50 years Utah had joined the Union amicably.

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For individual to individual `reparations' you say (and I agree) that this can't be heritable, and that essentially death of the individuals involved wipes the slate clean. What is the analog for states? So for instance, with the Britain-Iran example you invoke, the Iranian state died in the Iranian revolution, so what claim does the successor state have? Meanwhile, who owes the reparations? The Anglo-Persian oil company died when it was nationalized in 1951. Why does the British government inherit its debts? And for that matter, why is the British government liable for a CIA coup?

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I think these are all good questions, and I'm not claiming to have them figured out. Let me take a stab at a few and maybe you can provide counterbalance:

> What is the analog for states?

I don't have a hard rule for this one. Obviously there has to be a statute of limitations. For example, the Greeks don't have a case against Iran for the Persian War >2k years ago. How far back do we run that statute of limitations? I think that depends on what we're trying to accomplish with the project. I'm less interested in "righting the wrongs of history", because that's both impossible, and assumes a perfect understanding of history - which is a fantasy. I'm more interested in repairing broken relationships, which is a project that I can at least imagine is achievable, though it's only hypothetical at this stage. I'll note that I've never heard of this as a reason for reparations by anyone else. I'm really new to seriously considering reparations, and I'm still on the fence about whether it is an achievable project, or has solid achievable goals.

> So for instance, with the Britain-Iran example you invoke, the Iranian state died in the Iranian revolution, so what claim does the successor state have?

I don't know. It seems to me that the current regime is in power partly because attempts to kicking out the British by moderates were violently rejected, so the case could be made that CIA intervention led to the current regime being in power. So far as I can tell, current thinking on Iran is that if OECD countries sanction them hard enough we can convince the regime to stop being radical, or maybe we can convince the Iranian people to rise up against their rulers. This seems like a faboulously failed theory of statecraft that should be abandoned. We need something to replace it. What if, instead, the US and UK acknowledged some complicity for the status quo today, and instead of targeting the Iranians they should ...

This is where I'm very uncertain about this approach. Because sad experience teaches that inviting either of these two governments to interfere in affairs of state in your country is not going to end well.

I do think there has to be a limiting principle to who is the successor state, though. I have a friend whose family fled Iran when the Shaw was deposed. It has been a few years, but there's still a strong cultural memory of the wrongs that were suffered. I think there has to be a much stronger case for going back > 100 years.

For example, Andrew Jackson was famously terrible when it came to driving American Indians off their land. And in that case he literally just wanted to steal the land for him and his cronies. But it's been a long time since that happened. I recently heard a case for reparations to grant American Indians some of the vast holdings of US federal land. The argument was that federal land wasn't coming from any one person, but from the same government who did the dispossession, and as such a partial restitution could be made - not just in the form of 'reservations', but of full nationhood.

But then who gets the land? The land in Ohio can't be given back to the Miami Indians. Do you give them land in North Dakota that once belonged to other tribes? How will anyone think that's fair? Or do you combine them all into one 'tribe' and give everything in a lump sum package? Doesn't that effectively erase their unique tribal heritages all in one fell swoop? Isn't that exactly the complaint many of them have leveraged?

So going back too far seems to become too complicated to tease out legitimately. I'm open to reasonable arguments, though.

> Meanwhile, who owes the reparations?

I'm going to exempt companies for two reasons. The first is arbitrary, that I don't know how you could get a meaningful reparation from a company. The second is that companies (usually) lack meaningful state power. I realize this isn't true in many countries, where companies hire their own militias and can rule their own fiefdoms. I'm open to arguments of how to achieve accountability in these instances.

> The Anglo-Persian oil company died when it was nationalized in 1951. Why does the British government inherit its debts? And for that matter, why is the British government liable for a CIA coup?

BP would be the successor company in this case, but I maintain my earlier stance that I don't think it would be meaningful to hold a company accountable. Besides, the worst crimes appear to have been perpetrated by the British government, acting to 'protect its interests abroad'. And that's something the Brits definitely did, including a lot of flagrantly illegal/immoral actions before the coup.

Why do they still hold some responsibility for the coup? Because they recruited the US CIA to help them enact that coup. Obviously, the bulk of the responsibility lies with the CIA for actually committing murder, but the Brits were clearly accomplices. You don't hang the hitman and ignore the one who put out the hit.

One more potential positive effect this kind of policy might have would be to reestablish respect for national sovereignty that has come under threat since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. When politicians talk about openly thwarting other countries' sovereignty in order to 'protect our interests over there', they're often talking about making these same kinds of mistakes, and allow other actors to use these same justifications.

The CIA hasn't stopped ordering coups, they've just gotten better at it. Nobody asks the US citizenry whether we want these things done in our name, but they assume we're okay with it because nobody complains loud enough. If we at least start to acknowledge there should be some cost to meddling in other people's business and getting it horribly wrong, maybe they'll pause for half a second before getting us involved in yet another international blunder that creates hatreds our children will have to live with.

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Before reparations are considered, the receiving party must be willing to state that the reparations fully compensate for all past infringements and that they waive the right to bring them up again. Otherwise all it does is turn angry people into rich and angry people.

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I've never been convinced by the idea that reparations are or can be a one-time compensation for damages incurred. I think if you're trying to make people happy through a reparations payment, that will fail miserably. It will only set the stage for future rounds of reparations payments that will never end. Indeed, they may create a dependency on the reparations payments and leave the aggrieved party worse off than when they started. If the argument is for that kind of reparation, I would argue it's probably better to do nothing at all.

I am more interested in the argument for mending the relationship. I read somewhere that the US policy in Iraq was to pay families wrongful death sums that were in no way commensurate with their losses - sometimes as low as $500. Surprisingly, this policy helped turn public opinion, not because of the amounts paid but because they came with an official recognition from the government that a wrong had been committed. "We owe you money for killing your child" is an admission of guilt, and sometimes a simple "I'm sorry" is enough to build bridges.

I honestly don't think it's a reasonable goal to right the wrongs of history, nor that it's a productive activity. But if there are current-day animosities that stem from past atrocities, it seems like an easy win for politicians of today - who were in diapers when the atrocities were committed - to admit to wrongdoing and offer an apology. If that thaws tensions between nations, it seems like it's worth the cost of the experiment.

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(Amusingly, the report on those states "These payments are expressions of sympathy or remorse based on local culture and customs, but not an admission of legal liability or fault.") https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-07-699

Apologies are cheap and democracies are usually happy to apologize about one political party's actions once the other party gets in. Reparations are a level above that, on the grounds that apologies alone aren't strong enough. Which leads to the immediate counter of "then obviously apologies plus some money won't be enough either".

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You're probably right. I think the part that I'm least certain about for reparations is their ability to actually help the aggrieved party be in a better situation long-term as opposed to benign neglect. If you're funneling money somewhere, some politician is going to see that as an 'opportunity'. We may be better off sticking to apologies, and then leaving people alone.

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This is a historically ignorant example made no better by the unnecessary allegory and personification of the involved countries. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company lost a lot of money over its first decade or so and only lucked out at the last second before they were about to close operations. While the Brits were dishonest in order to pay the Iranians less, it's incorrect to say that they "kept them poor". It'd be accurate to say that the Brits made the Iranians money but not as much as Iranians were entitled to under the terms of their agreement. But then, there goes your argument for reparations.

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What would it take to admit to at least some wrongdoing in Iran by the British? What if the British coopted the Iranian government, interfered in their elections, and bought their newspapers? What if they went further and killed anyone who got powerful enough to thwart their efforts? Does total loss of sovereignty and suffering by the people under a brutal dictatorship installed by foreign powers not count as being "kept poor"? Because that's what happened.

Sure, the Shaw and his friends spent oil money lavishly, but that's not the same as your characterization, where the British were mostly benign, except they negotiated a lopsided-but-justifiable deal with the Iranians.

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I did admit wrongdoing by the British. I noted that they were dishonest to reduce what they had to pay the Iranians. To be more specific, iirc the Brits cooked the books. At the same time, the oil money would not have existed at all without the Brits, and in that reality the Iranians would have gotten nothing rather than the less they were entitled to under their agreement with the British.

>Sure, the Shaw and his friends spent oil money lavishly

I said nothing about that.

>but that's not the same as your characterization, where the British were mostly benign, except they negotiated a lopsided-but-justifiable deal with the Iranians.

This is not what I said.

Basically, my point was that your argument that the British-Iranian oil deal "kept the Iranians poor" and that therefore the Brits owe Iranians reparations is nonsensical because the British-Iranian oil deal did not in fact keep the Iranians poor.

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I see. Perhaps we're talking past one another then. I wasn't speaking of the "oil deal' per se, but more about the multiple things the British did that were illegal/immoral to support said deal. The contractual arrangement isn't what I object to, so much as the murders, bribes, coup, etc. that the British government undertook to ensure that when Iranians objected to the deal they had no power to alter or end the arrangement.

I guess you can argue that having their leader killed and a corrupt brutal dictator installed over the people "did not in fact keep the Iranians poor." That's a counterfactual that would be difficult to prove, and since I'm the one making the assertion I don't begrudge you not believing that assertion. Can we at least agree that reinstating the Shaw made the Iranian people worse off (if not in a specifically economic/monetary way)?

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>Can we at least agree that reinstating the Shaw made the Iranian people worse off (if not in a specifically economic/monetary way)?

That's probably true. But then nothing has been clarified and the reparations "debate" is back to where it is for most other examples. That is, questions of applying contemporary "universal" rules and entitlements to historical actions, questions of which aggrieved groups should be compensated and which not, quantifying the harm done, the culpability of individuals vs groups, etc etc.

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I agree. I think one of the biggest problems with the pro-reparations side is that it oversimplifies the matter. "You stole X amount of money, so you should pay Y amount of money to whomever I designate as the modern-day successor." That's not workable.

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Counter arguement: why should we care? There is no incentive for reparations other than misplaced pity. Why would the countries deserve reparations just because they were weak enough to be plundered in the past?

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Have you ever been hurt and felt the desire for revenge?

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I can't speak for anomie, but I frequently feel the desire for things I acknowledge I have no right to and do not expect anyone to give me. And vengeance for crimes done against my ancestors, that's never even been a thing I desired.

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That's a very good response. But I fear that there are people who are not as enlightened as you, who believe that injuries to their honor must be satisfied, and whose honor encompasses not just their personal honor, but that of their family, their tribe, their nation, their religion, and their country. And they don't care whether or not other people believe they have the right to vengeance.

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Yeah and a lot of people still think might makes right and fuck them they can come and get it if they want. What of it?

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In the words of the mafia, "that's a nice life you've got there".

I'm saying that (regardless of whether they're justified), it is generally bad for you if there are people out there who feel justified in breaking social norms in order to hurt you.

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Public opinion matters a lot here, though. In order to get "reparations" you either need to be strong enough to impose your will on your enemies, or you need to convince them that they should give you what they normally would not want to.

Everyone has a host of potential wrongs committed against them or some ancestor. This is significantly increased if these wrongs don't have to be specific but can be general (of the sort like "my family was poor and therefore had to live in bad neighborhoods with crime and bad schools, which made my life worse").

Pretty much everyone can find a couple dozen reasons that they are owed something by other people. It's unworkable at that level and everyone knows it. So, in order to actually get something, you need to be sympathetic. Calls for vengeance rarely are sympathetic. Nobody cares about your personal or family honor if you're a jerk who asks for clearly unreasonable things.

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I can't recall any particular cases of it. I've definitely been hurt before, but there really isn't anything you can do about it except make decisions to improve your current circumstances. Revenge isn't going to change the past.

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I used to think like that, too. I later learned that there were entire realms of feeling that I simply had no experience of, and so was not equipped to understand.

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I dunno, it might just be a genetic thing. My parents never experienced a genuine desire for revenge throughout their lives either. Obviously we've all resented people enough that we've hoped they die, but actually taking action against them? What's the point? That's just... a lot of effort for nothing.

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> What's the point? That's just... a lot of effort for nothing.

Nominative determinism? :-)

I don't know if it's genetic, at least on a short term level.

In the longer term, I'm pretty sure that this is millions of years of evolution screaming "it shall not stand", cutting through a bunch of game-theoretic logic to make it clear that if ape A crosses certain bounds, ape B will flip out and "go ape" on them, regardless of whether that's personally beneficial to ape B. Meaning that after a few high-profile examples, the boundaries don't get crossed, and all apes benefit.

In terms of what it feels like, I can't say for certain at the moment and I'll plead the 5th after this, but, based on what I've felt, I think it would feel better than sex, much better. And for some reason people keep having sex.

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An interesting legal theory of justice posits that one of the most important purposes of prosecution is to prevent vigilantism. After reading Jared Diamond's "The World Until Yesterday", I'm inclined to agree. It may even be more important than the hypothesized 'rehabilitation' objective, and at least as important as the 'deterrence' objective. The point is to prevent cycles of violence by assuring victims that they'll get their day in court.

In a world where governments police themselves (which I prefer), a similar mechanism to prevent vigilantism might be for potential target nations to seek to repair relationships with countries that have been wronged in the past. This is wildly hypothetical, of course, so it would need to actually be tested before we should give it much credence. But maybe there's an argument that something like reparations might be pursued as a way to seek peace with aggrieved nations.

Could this lead to perverse incentives, where the best way to seek reparations would be to send terrorists to the US? I'm not sure.

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I think one of my favorite examples of this argument comes from a comic book, of all places. Kurt Busiek's "Astro City" had a 2-parter, early on, about a lawyer who got a mobster acquitted of a murder. He characterized the legal system as akin to a primitive religion, dancing around the fire to keep the dark at bay. If we perform the dance correctly, if everyone believes, then we stay safe. But when the dance breaks down, when people forget or ignore their parts, then people stop believing, and then the darkness can enter. But there are other ways of dealing with the darkness, older ways, which are never really forgotten, which can be just as bad as the darkness itself. And so while half the purpose of the dance is to hold back the darkness, the other half is to hold back those older ways.

I like the way "The Sopranos" euphemized it: "They bring certain modes of conflict resolution from all the way back in the old country, from the poverty of the Mezzogiorno, where all higher authority was corrupt."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCDLz2Wabgg

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Do you feel the same about countries that are being plundered now? Do you see anything wrong with that?

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Not really, no. The "plundered" countries do have the benefit of having their existence guaranteed by their oppressors, which is at least worth something. The alternative can be seen in much of Africa, where populations are left to rot in disease and famine because they're not even worth exploiting compared to the competition.

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I think the analogy to Britain and Iranian oil doesn't really help your case. Iran didn't extract any oil before British companies spent vast amounts of money, and took huge risks, in creating the Iranian oil industry. With Iran's consent. And there's no plausible history in which any Iranian government could have done the same at the start of the twentieth century.

It's not that there was no wrongdoing, but there must be a better example you could use.

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Hold on a minute. The Iranian government went from one where the people had some say in their representatives to one where a religious dictatorship rules. If Iran hadn't had any oil, and hadn't become a battle ground for 'great power' intervention between Russia and the UK, they might have continued to develop democratic institutions. Would they have? Who knows. But they were certainly denied that ability because they had something of strategic value that more powerful countries wanted to control.

Would Ira have gone to college if Bri hadn't robbed her and kicked her to the streets? That's not the point. Bri can't sit there holding Ira down and then claim that it's Ira's fault she never got her act together. Still, one can wonder ... the CIA murdered a moderate Iranian prime minister who had the popular support of the people in order to return a brutal dictator to power in their country. When that unpopular brutal dictator became too much, the people had learned a lesson about the powerlessness of moderates in the face of external pressures.

So what choice do Iranians have for peaceful development? If they try, bigger countries will swoop in and assert control by overthrowing their government. If they do manage to assert control, they suffer from decades of crippling economic sanctions. At what point do the UK, Russia, and the US admit to having done something to contribute to the situation, and commit to help fix it?

Let's set aside for a minute the merits of arguing that it's okay for the UK to steal the oil, "because they weren't using it anyway". There's a difference between saying, "we should be allowed to do business in this foreign country, abiding by foreign rules", and saying, "we should be allowed to bully, bribe, and buy this country's sovereignty because we have an economic interest in this region." Because that's what they did. They bought politicians, newspapers, the Shaw, and anyone who objected. And when someone stood up who couldn't be bought, they had that person killed. If the Russians try to interfere in US elections, people lose their minds, but when they're one of those low/middle-income countries it's acceptable to "defend our interests".

But for Iranian oil and the incentive it gave for external plunder, they might have at least developed democratic institutions. Would they actually have? We'll never know, because these were explicitly denied to them by the plunderers.

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I am unconvinced by your theory that a country which had no representative institutions or governance before the growth of British influence, and which saw representative institutions and governance fade as British influence faded after the second world war, had its chances of developing into a healthy democracy significantly impeded because the British were too powerful.

It's not that you're necessarily wrong, but the timeline, and the history of other countries both regionally and globally which have developed into democracies, would suggest that it's more plausible that there was too little British influence rather than too much.

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What of the assassination of Mosaddegh and the coup that installed the Shaw? The people hated the Shaw as a brutal dictator and that's why they overthrew him. When he was reinstated by the Americans, he was even more oppressive than before. Can we at least, in this narrow instance, accept that foreign influence led to human suffering and interfered with development of sovereignty in Iran?

I also don't think the infiltration of the British into Iranian politics, rigging elections, buying news coverage, bribing officials, etc. can be plausibly counted as "too little influence" in driving toward a democratic outcome.

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It's a poor choice of words on my part. "British influence" could suggest a beneficent, almost angelic force for good, given that we seem to agree that a better Iran would be an Iran that was, in its governance, a bit Britishier. Which is a definition that is total bollocks.

British influence in the sense that Iran was moving in the right direction when the British were the dominant external power, and that it has been a bad thing that powerful Iranians stopped copying British models, even though, as individuals, the British in Iran were just as unpleasant and venal as men in their twenties who've emigrated to make money generally are - I think that's more defensible.

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There must be some example which doesn't involve the evil mugger paying you to borrow something from you that is objectively almost worthless, and expending enormous effort and capital in turning it into something valuable. Surely.

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Okay, how about when Guatemalans wanted to create laws against the exploitation of workers, and United Fruit got the CIA to overthrow the government?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat

How about the time the Cubans were frustrated that casino mobsters had taken over their country, and wanted to introduce law and order, but then the CIA tried to kick the government out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_of_Pigs_Invasion

How about when the British forced opium on the Chinese to correct trade imbalances?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars

The list of times Western governments intervened in countries to force them to go along with whatever economic scheme suited the foreign businessmen is not short, and it's not peaceful. Even if you restrict the list to the last 100 years, it's still long. Is forcing your neighbor into a monopsony relationship the same as mugging you? For my part, that's not a hair I care to split.

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Men, particularly men in their late teens and twenties, when placed in situations where they have power over others, with few external constraints on their behaviour, often do horrific things. There are good examples of this which involve anglophone countries - I don't know much about the extermination of Tasmanian aborigines, but from what I've read I think that it was fairly indefensible.

But anything where the good guys in the story were Communists - no, obviously not. These people weren't stupid, or poorly educated. They'd read Lenin, they knew what they wanted, and they had deliberately chosen an ideology that valorised the slaughter of innumerable innocents.

As for the opium wars, opium was legal in the UK at the time, and Chinese peasants were treated as subhumans by their rulers.

I don't think you have to try too hard to find examples of inhuman bestiality perpetrated within the last two hundred years by people who spoke English, but it's interesting that it's much harder to do so once you insist that they have to have been capitalists.

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Notice that your argument went from a nice clean logical "the perfidious Anglos stole oil so they owe reparations" to "Iran could have somehow become a prosperous democracy in an alternate reality so they owe reparations" the moment your historical example turned out to not be so clear cut. I suspect that you're a rather more partial supporter of reparations than the reluctant steelmanner you first made yourself out to be.

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Honestly, I've never considered myself to be a supporter of reparations and have never before heard a good argument for them. Prior to literally this post, I've always argued against them. I'm actually surprised at how strong of a knee-jerk reaction I got from people whose side I thought I was on, because I framed an argument in a way my 'side' isn't naturally inclined to agree with.

Go back and read what I originally wrote. I didn't make the argument that Ira would have been rich had she not been robbed from by Bri, even though that dubious argument is almost always something people who call for reparations claim, or that Bri's riches somehow came from robbing Ira. It isn't credible, and it's partly why I've never given serious thought to arguments in favor of reparations. Long-run wealth is created through economic functions that are novel in world history. Short-run plunder has been the norm for most of human history and has never resulted in long-run economic development or the creation of wealth. Plunder isn't how countries get rich, and the data from slavery suggests it may well be a net drag on general economic growth. The story of the last 100 years is one of a dramatically growing economic pie. That story doesn't square with a "you get rich by stealing from others" argument.

My argument was that - regardless of the source of Bri's actual wealth - the fact remained that Bri had wronged Ira in the past. Indeed, I was careful to separate the past wrongs from the current source of Bri's wealth. Let's call that the motte. I also made the more tenuous argument that the Bri's robberies of Ira kept her from developing her skills in the way Bri did. Let's call that the bailey, because it's much more difficult to prove.

Now take that to the case of Iran vs. Britain. Did the British plunder Iran? You and others claim "no" because they weren't using the oil anyway. (Really? As in, at any point between now and back then, or are we just saying it was okay in the 50's to take it because they didn't have an oil industry yet?) I'd like to steelman this argument, though, and say that the oil actually wasn't worth anything until the British brought their expertise to the fore, and so in a sense what they offered the Iranians should be considered 'fair', in the sense that they turned something worthless into something valuable, and thereby allowed the Iranian people to derive value from natural resources that had not previously had value. But for the British, the argument goes, the Iranians would have been poorer/worse off. It's not true that there was a bunch of oil wealth lying around. There was a bunch of dirt, and the only reason there was wealth to be had was because enterprising businesses went underneath that dirt and found oil. The wealth was created by the oil company's ability to extract and refine the oil. They paid for the right to extract the oil, but it's not like the Iranians were going to extract the oil and gain all the profits on their own. How much were the extraction rights worth? That's debatable, so maybe we can agree that the British were better negotiators who got a really good deal. But we don't cry 'plunder' every time a business uses their superior understanding of the market to negotiate a sweet deal.

That would be a nice story, if it's what had happened in Iran. But it assumes the kind of free trade and institutions that had no part in the development of Iranian oil. The Iranian people didn't negotiate a deal. Their corrupt leaders were told how much they'd get, so long as they kept the people in line. When people complained, they were 'silenced'. When people protested, they were oppressed. And when the people seized control of their government, there was a coup - people died. And all of that was funded by the British government against the Iranian people.

But also, the Iranians weren't dumb. There was a public outcry when the people learned how lopsided the deals were. When that happened, the British 'negotiations' weren't legitimate tactics, like threatening to withdraw their oil business. They were entirely illegitimate practices, like infiltrating the government, spying on the people, planting fake stories in the press and squashing others, bribery, corruption, etc.

Does all this constitute plunder? Let's say this happened in the US, with the Canadians overthrowing our institutions and oppressing the people under a brutal dictatorship in order for another country to extract a bunch of money from a previously-unknown diamond mine in Montana. The Canadian Diamond Extraction (CDE) company pays our new unelected overlords a bunch of cash they made from the sale of diamonds to oppress us, keeping us down. When we try to protest, our leaders are replaced by CDE plants. Despite widespread popular protests, 'elections' always somehow support the CDE-approved candidates who continue to sign lopsided contracts while they ride around in expensive cars and live in lavish mansions. The only way in which "Americans" can be said to have been enriched is that a handful of traitors took money as payment for doing bad things.

I will concede that while this looks a lot like plunder, under the theory that the US never would have found the diamond mine without CDE intervention, technically we wouldn't have a massive stash of diamonds but for the CDE. Arguably what we 'lost' wasn't some physical asset, but rather everything that makes our republic sovereign. Does this reverse the case for reparations? Does that constitute a 'moving of the goal posts'?

Fine. Can we still justify what was done as something that has no lasting moral culpability? Especially when we can trace a line straight from authoritarian oppression of the past to the present day.

I think if you're assuming me to be someone who previously thought reparations were a good idea and is just trying to justify my position, you could see me as thinking that the plunder element was essential to the argument in the first place. But I didn't make that case, nor have I ever believed it. My story did say Bri robbed Ira over and over during her time as a criminal. If that's the sticking point for you, I'll admit my analogy wasn't perfect, but then no analogy ever is.

For the sake of argument, let's amend the story to make it more accurate: Bri broke into Ira's house, tied Ira up in the back room, and delt drugs from the living room for five years. Of course, Bri spent all her drug earnings, but then one day after Ira's second attempted escape Bri fled the house. Later she went to college, started a career, etc.

Can we at least agree that Bri wronged Ira, and by that logic Bri had a moral obligation to right the historic wrongs she did to Ira? If your counter-argument is that Bri didn't wrong Ira because technically no direct 'plunder' can be accounted for on the ledger, I'm not convinced.

I'm willing to entertain arguments that the moral obligation doesn't exist, that it's too far down the road to be meaningful, that 'it's not the same people', or that the obligation isn't a clear-cut requirement to make direct payments. Indeed, I kind of already argued direct payments don't make any sense. But I'm perplexed that so many commenters have chosen to die on the hill that "no wrongs were committed" in the case of Iran. This seems absurd to me, given the history.

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If we could name individual perpetrators like Bri who stole specific money from people like Ira, this would be an easy question. The legal system has clear mechanisms for handling such things, even potentially many years after the fact.

My family is white, but moved from (very poor and oppressed regions of) Eastern Europe well after slavery ended. We lived in literal dirt poor (as in, my dad lived in a house built by his dad with no running water, electricity, or flooring) conditions until my generation. I'm not Bri. I'm not even slightly plausibly Bri. My ancestors, even in the last century, let alone all of history, may have been treated similarly to Ira - likely not due to skin color, but certainly ethnicity and class. Also, according to genetic testing I'm apparently part black, so maybe at least some of my ancestors were literally Ira.

In talking about reparations there's always the question of who pays and who receives. Reparations as talked about in the US are inextricably tangled by hundreds of years of history. If it's just skin color then you'll have people like my family giving money to Barack Obama. If it's lineage from slaves then should I receive money from my lineage, despite looking white? What about the people who can't trace their lineage back that far? What about the people who came to the US long after slavery was ended, who are asked to pay now? A quick Google says that over 80% of current US residents' ancestors came to the country only after the Civil War. This says nothing of the various people of mixed lineage who have significant amounts of both white and black ancestry. Have fun trying to come up with a replacement to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule.

I'm actually in favor of the government making things right when there's a specific wrong committed by a specific actor against a specific victim. There are still some people who were directly harmed as late as the 1960s, maybe 1970s, who are still alive today. (Edit: harmed in a systemic way, there have obviously been other direct and specific harms since then, but not as codified by law or widespread like previous generations). Anything beyond that very limited set of wrongs is too horribly tangled to do anything about it. This is ignoring a lot of other counterarguments about why not to do this, even if you could. Because we don't even have to tangle with this - we can't do it. Not in any kind of way that doesn't just ignore real harms or real difficulties and ignore any complications to just give people who *look* sufficiently black some generic sum of money that has no relation to any particular harms their ancestors may or may not have received in the past.

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I agree that attempts at reparation from individuals and/or to individuals is impossibly complex, especially when you go farther back into history. This is why I focused on country-on-country violations, many of which are fairly recent, historically speaking, with little to no effort having been made to acknowledge and right past wrongs.

I don't think you're going to get to the point where everything is 'set right', but I do think that before you get to the point where governments stop engaging in future plunder, you have to actually condemn past plunders - especially those that are most recent - and incur some cost to doing business that way as a country.

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We tried that after WWI, making Germany pay for the war. Let's just say that the efforts were not only ineffective, but actively backfired and created a situation where a person was able to take advantage of the legitimate grievances of his fellow citizens to take power and do far worse.

That's one of the major other arguments against reparations that I didn't touch on. Forcibly moving wealth/power/whatever from one group to another creates grievances. Even if it feels justified or is based on some known past wrong, it still creates many grievances.

Imagine being 30 years old and a UK citizen, being told that you have to live a much poorer life than you would otherwise because of things that happened decades before you were born. Does that feel justified to you, who had nothing to do with it? Not at all. You're going to be angry about it, and it's obviously unjust to you. That's true even if your grandparents were somehow involved. It's much worse when you may be a first or second generation immigrant or otherwise even your ancestors were not at fault for what happened. Countries are too complex for this to work based on individual grievances. Lots of people from the former British Empire live in the UK now, for instance. Should they pay their former country for things done 60+ years ago by their current country? If you try to exempt them you end up doing the same one drop rule lawyering about who is or isn't culpable.

It's all a huge pointless mess.

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I think this is the strongest argument against reparations.

I'm not sure the treaty of Versailles is a good example of 'reparations done right', since as you mentioned it was largely punitive, surprised the Germans in its severity after they'd signed the armistice, and set the stage for future conflict. Indeed, might reparations for that treaty have helped avert WWII? Probably not, since subsequent capitulations to Germany didn't prevent the war.

That said, there's a vast gulf between an ideal world, where every reparation is voluntary and accepted by all involved, and the real world where the treaty of Versailles was a real thing that clearly contributed to future conflict. I'm not going to No True Scotsman reparations. If they only ever work in theory, they're not a good idea. I'm not true there aren't any that ever work in practice, but I agree there's cause for skepticism.

And I agree that it's too shorthand to say that "a nation" did this or that thing, because nations are made up of individuals. Unfortunately to the dispossessed, it never feels like individuals so much as powerful nations that are the ones wronging them.

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Before Versailles there were the reparations that Prussia imposed on France after the war of 1870. Which seem to have left France determined to get revanche. Which they did at Versailles. This seems to be the usual pattern, with hundreds of historical data points. Can you think of a single historical example where reparations improved relations betwen nations, instead of flushing them down the toilet? I can't.

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This is the problem when reparations are forced payments from one party to another. Usually, it's the stronger party who is doing the forcing, which makes it more likely that a system of enforced reparations would follow the path you outlined, i.e. more plunder.

This isn't an example of reparations, per se, but I do know that US ownership of the Panama Canal was kind of a sore point for Panamanians, given the large number of people who died building it. After it was transferred back to Panama it helped solidify a very strong relationship between Panama and the US. That gift was an unforced act of charity on the part of the US, which is kind of what I'm imagining. But it's also rare enough that I can't think of other examples at the moment. Any system of just reparations needs the impetus for payment to come from the party who is doing the paying. If it's imposed externally, I agree with you that it'll be used as a tool for plunder, rather than as one for justice.

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If there were major reparations in the US the next election a "white nationalist" party of some sort would win. That alone is probably argument enough against them.

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Is Glassdoor, as we say over here, taking the piss?

I recently had to sign up with a bullshit account because I needed to look someone up, and from then on they've been sending me job recommendations. This is the latest one:

"[Deiseach}, you have a potential match!

Matches are based on your activity with geophysicist roles.

Site Geologist/Geophysicist

United States

[Company name] is seeking Site Geophysicists to work under the direction of a Project Geophysicist, QC Geophysicist, and Project Manager [rest of job description]"

Now, even with my bullshit account, the nearest I've been to geophysics is that I have a nephew doing a PhD in physics/earth sciences (don't ask me the details, I'm fuzzy here).

How did they get from "job history clerical work in Ireland" to "you'd be a shoe-in for geophysicist in the USA"?

If this is AI, I think they should scrap it. If it's a human, I'm sorry for your troubles toiling in the salt mines like this, desperately sending out solicitations for vacancies to all accounts on the site, in order to make your piecework rate to qualify for the gruel and cold water you are permitted fifteen minutes in every work day.

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Perhaps recruiters are targeting your nephew.

If so, sending his close contacts job postings that they might forward to him makes sense. I'd bet an employment opportunity forwarded by his trusted relative is more likely to be seen than a recruitment email in his spam folder.

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I don't think that can be it. First, I don't think he's on Glassdoor and second, I used a different name and email address to set up that account (not my real name). So they would need to be putting a lot of effort into matching "alternate identity -> real life identity -> post-grad degree by family member -> job opening" 😀

I do think it's all automated "send job openings to everyone who signed up in the vague hopes that some of them will click by random chance and we'll earn commission off them" instead of paying real live humans wages to sort out "all the people with clerical experience for these jobs, all the geophysicists for those jobs". That would cost *money*!

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Against my better judgement, I was reading through recent Marginal Revolution posts, when I stumbled onto this really interesting article analyzing the narrative differences between western and Japanese horror stories: http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/the-ghost-did-what-translation-exposing-providentialist-thinking/ I was already under the impression that Japanese culture was more pragmatic and realist compared to the idealism and moralism of the West, but it's interesting to see it reflected in fiction as well. I found this part particularly interesting:

> Also fruitful for describing the contrast between Hollywood’s personal, Providentialist, and purity narratives and these Japanese ecosystemic transitive-guilt narratives is to use Elizabeth Minnich’s terms, intensive vs. extensive evil, which she discusses in The Evil of Banality (2017). In both fiction and nonfiction, we are very used to stories about evil that is concentrated in a single actor who makes an evil choice from which bad consequences occur: the wicked witch, the greedy uncle, the violent assailant. Even in narratives about huge systemic problems like climate change or income inequality, our dramatizations tend to center the evil on a bad guy: the greedy capitalist or secret cabal. We are less good at both thinking about and narrativizing extensive evil, wherein real evil is caused by the innumerable small complicities of many people, which are the collective causes of real evils like gentrification, plastics pollution, etc.

All of this does imply that scapegoating is a uniquely Western phenomenon. I mean, it does happen in Japan as well, but only after someone *voluntarily* bears the burden of guilt (and kills themselves).

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I'm not sure I'd describe it as "scapegoating". It seems more like a "just world" fallacy where bad things only happen to bad people. So if you're good enough and pure enough, then bad things won't happen to you. And contrapositively, if bad things happen to you, then you must not be good or pure.

I'm tempted to lay this at the feet of some broad sweeping Orientalist generalization about Asian cultures having absorbed Buddhist ideas of karma and reincarnation, but it's not like Abrahamic religions (at least, post-Jesus) don't have notions of heaven and hell and afterlives and Judgement Day. Maybe it's got something to do with the number of autocracies that survived into the 20th century, so even the upper classes internalized what it feels like to be at the mercy of an autocrat - you can hope the king is just, and pray that the king is just, and know that it's unsafe to ever imply anything except that the king is just, but deep down you also know that if the wrong rumor gets started, you'll be killed horribly, and there's nothing you can do about it.

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Well, yes and no. I think she's correct about Hollywood Horror, and perhaps the older forms of ghost stories, but there are plenty of Western ghost/horror stories where the haunting or the entity happens to innocent victims who are ignorant of the origin of the grudge (as she puts it) or were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

A lot of M.R. James' stories fit this model - "The Mezzotint", a haunted picture where the unwitting purchaser observes the playing out of an old feud of revenge but can't intervene, and certainly wasn't related to anyone involved and did nothing more than buy the picture. "Count Magnus" and "The Rose-Garden" are others where the victims have no connection to the original source of the trouble and don't act out of malice or ill-intent.

Westerners didn't have to wait until anime and movies to get a taste of the Japanese folklore/ghost tale tradition; Lafcadio Hearn produced translations, or perhaps better to call them versions, of Japanese tales in the late 19th and early 20th century:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lafcadio_Hearn

Perhaps every generation does its own re-discovering of The Foreign, and this is Ms. Palmer's turn?

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There is a distinction to be made that the West sees a subversion of morality and justice to be novel, while in Japan, it was western morality was novel to them... or at least it used to be. Nowadays it's pretty standard in Japan as well, but the general culture of pragmatism still remains. They know better than to believe that moral righteousness will be rewarded.

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Hey, uh, I don't know if you noticed, but some of us got your ban reversed. I hope we'll see more of you, but I understand if you don't want to come back. Either way, I wish you well wherever you go.

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Banned for this comment.

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I really enjoyed this commenter. There were roughly two people posting in the pro-Palestine camp on this forum. One was NS, who just posted gorey twitter videos with hateful captions. And one was LearnsHebrewHatesIsrael (who could have chosen a better name), who started out under-researched but became a thoughtful commenter over time. I had thoughtful engagements with this commenter in the past. I’ll be sad to see this perspective disappear from the forum.

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Fine, by popular request they are unbanned, but should consider themselves on heavy probation (assuming my attempt to unban them worked).

I had just finished going through three months of backlogged ban requests and was kind of on a hair-trigger, sorry. I also don't like anything that looks like insulting banned posters who can't respond, although looking it over more I think they were more sincere than I originally thought.

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Hey, Scott, I hate to be That Guy, but I was wondering if you could tell us something about beowulf888's ban? If not where the comment was, then for how long he'll be gone, or at least whether or not it's permanent? I literally spent several hours hunting through all posts going back to Oct 1, but I didn't find where he got banned, not even when I expanded all the deep comment threads.

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Ah, OK. Thanks. I'll be hoping he'll come back in a month.

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He made similar appeals to NS in previous threads as well, it was almost certainly well-intentioned.

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What was wrong with that comment?

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I think the idea is comments directed to banned commenters will encourage them to evade the ban to come respond to it.

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The second (or maybe third?) most problematic commenter telling the most problematic commenter: "you had it [the ban] coming".

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LearnsHebrewHatesIP started out kinda bad, sure. But they got better! They did research, discovered things they didn't know, acknowledged that they were wrong about some things, even changed their handle because of it. They spent a fair bit of time trying to get NS to be more reasonable. They even subtly encouraged **me** to be less prejudiced against my outgroup. That's exactly the kind of person I want around.

I don't think the comment here was saying anything that most of us weren't thinking. And it had to be more frustrating for LHHI, because they were "on the same side". And maybe it's just me, but I read that comment as coming from a place of goodwill. It could be just me; I felt the same way about the comment Gunflint wrote, a few months ago. But when I read that second paragraph, well, I've been there, in a situation a bit like NS, and I wish someone had sat me down and told me "I sympathize with your position, but you're letting your emotions drive your behavior, and it's making things worse". I don't know if it would have helped, but it's more than anyone did.

(Now if only I could find what got beowulf888 banned...)

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> Now if only I could find what got beowulf888 banned...)

That guy is incorrigible. Yeah a joke.

Edit: wait a minute Beowulf888 didn’t really get banned did he?

Another edit: I see he actually was banned. I thought you were joking. If there were a least likely to be banned competIon I would have thought B888 would be up near the front.

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And yeah, I'm quite surprised. Like me, beowulf888 does get a little unreasonable around various aspects of American politics, but I thought less so than I do. And aside from that, they're generally great (like you).

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I had been curious about what got people banned, so I tried searching for "was banned for" in all posts back to Oct 1, but I didn't see him. Substack is laggy enough that I might have accidentally missed it, though. I also tried searching for "beow" in the last few posts, but still nothing.

(Weirdly, if I go back far enough, it stops showing "(Banned)" by the name.)

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I have just learnt an interesting fact about genetics that may be of interest given the many mentions of heritability here. It is possible for heritability to be less than 1 even for traits that are completely genetically determined, if the genetics of the trait are not entirely linear. One common case where this happens is with dominant and recessive alleles. Say for example that fur length is controlled by a single locus with two alleles, F and f, where individuals with genotype FF or Ff have 2cm long fur, and ff individuals have 1cm long fur, so long fur is dominant, and both alleles have equal frequency in the population. An individual whose father provided an F allele therefore has 2cm fur, and one whose father provided an f allele has on average 1.5cm fur, therefore the average child of a FF individual has 2cm fur, while the average child of a Ff individual has 1.75cm fur, despite the FF and Ff parents having the same fur. As a more obvious and extreme but less realistic example, if FF and ff both give short fur and Ff gives long fur, there will be no correlation at all between parents' and children's fur length. The same effect can occur with polygenic traits too, if either the individual loci have dominance effects or the loci interact non-linearly. The actual phenotype any individual has then depends not just on the sum of the effects of all of their genes, which is heritable, but the specific way they happen to be combined, which isn't.

I assume this is taken into account in twin studies, since identical twins will share not only the linear part of their genetic tendencies but the dominance part too, it just means that heritability isn't quite the same statistic as genetically-determinedness.

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Latest installment of my mint-versus-Covid pitch is now live. I'm indebted to ACX for the fascinating ivermectin post that inspired the update.

https://open.substack.com/pub/cbuck/p/viruses-are-supervillains-herbs-are

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Some time ago, Zvi's newsletter had a throwaway remark about plug-in hybrid cars being vastly better for the environment than pure electric. (I think the context was lamenting the policy focus on electric, but I can't find the reference now.) This was presented as something everybody knows. Can someone recommend a more detailed discussion? Off-hand, this seems like a surprising claim: even if you're reducing away most of the gasoline usage, aren't you still manufacturing two engines (gas and electric) and using all the battery technology? But, I know very little about automobile manufacturing, so it's entirely possible I'm missing something huge.

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No idea what Zvi's thinking on it was but I have heard a similar argument elsewhere. Namely, in this video (from 3 years ago) about Toyota's reasoning for not having a full EV in the line up (this is no longer true, though the bZ4x is developed with Subaru): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJI3DBanu1g

The summary is:

- There are limited batteries to go around

- Based on how people drive, they only really use up ~20%-25% of a battery each day (most of the time)

- Most EV buyers have access to home charging so aren't sensitive to charging speed

- Dividing the batteries for one full EV across 4-5 PHEV/Hybrids will result in 4 cars spending 80% of their miles using electric instead of one.

Basically, most EVs don't use up all their battery before charging to full so why not just give more cars the minimum battery they need to do most driving in EV mode with a gas back up. Toyota also thought it was easier to change peoples behavior by going Gas -> Hybrid/PHEV -> Full EV as they got comfortable with EV and the infrastructure was built out more.

Based on this data: https://www.bts.gov/content/gasoline-hybrid-and-electric-vehicle-sales I am not sure if they are right or not, it's hard to tell. I think it would be interesting to remove tesla sales from this only to see what difference it makes. My impression is that there are many tesla owners who would not have been EV owners for other brands. I'd also like to see a comparison of sales for models that come in gas and some type of EV. Do people prefer the EV option over the straight gas? (Hyunai and Kia have a lot of these options and the Rav4, which is the best selling non-pick up in the US has this option too with the Prime).

My exact numbers are probably wrong (the video has better ones) and of course many people don't follow the driving style assumptions the argument requires.

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You're still using battery technology, but you're using a much smaller battery than you'd have in a full EV. A typical PHEV might act like a full EV six days out of seven, but contain 400 kg less battery.

For certain values of the parameters "How bad is one gram of battery over its full life cycle" and "How bad is one gram of CO2 emitted", I can easily see how this _might_ be true. But I don't have any strong intuition of what those parameters should be (and I suspect that estimates would vary wildly).

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Yea that's an argument that I've not heard before....would like to see some explication of its logic.

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I have not done a deep dive into it, but I have read somewhere that a hybrid, being much more complicated mechanically than either one or the other can be problematic.

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That probably depends on the drivetrain style. As I understand it, there are four major types of hybrid drivetrains:

- Parallel hybrids, where the gas engine and the electric motor both drive the wheels directly. This has all the bits of either a pure-electric or a pure-ICE car, but the bits can be smaller because the two power sources can be run simultaneously when needed to produce peak power.

- Series hybrids, where you're mostly an electric car but there's also a small gasoline engine which runs at an efficient constant speed to drive a generator that more-or-less keeps the battery charged.

- Power-split, where the engine can either drive the wheels directly as in a parallel hybrid, or it can drive a generator like a series hybrid, or both at the same time. The car switches modes depending on power demand and how charged the battery is.

- Electric traction, which are about half-way in between series hybrids and a gasoline version of the diesel-electric transmissions often used on ships and trains. Here, the gas engine is running to drive a generator that mostly provides power directly to the motors, with the generator/motor system replacing the transmission system of a pure-ICE car. The batteries serve to smooth out demand: they recharge when the engine would otherwise be stopped or idling and they provide extra power when more is needed than the engine can efficiently provide.

All of these seem like they'd be more mechanically complicated than either a pure-ICE or pure-EV, with parallel or power-split having all the complexity of either with some additional bits besides, while series or electric traction at least saves the complexity of the mechanical drivetrain. But cutting the other way, the individual components can be smaller and simpler in a parallel or power-split hybrid because neither half of the drive train needs to be big enough to provide the entire peak power output of the car.

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At some point during the pandemic I let my general productivity and ability to focus collapse. I basically just became extremely lazy and distracted. I managed to coast through my current job for a couple years through bouts of productivity (often at the expense of a healthy sleep schedule), but am starting a new job soon and I want to make myself, well, functional again. Broadly speaking, I'm trying to drop bad habits like wasting hours watching YouTube videos and reading blogs and be both more productive at work and devote more of my free time to things like reading or working on coding projects or learning new things, but I'm struggling. I keep trying to set realistic goals like 'go one day without going to YouTube' and sometimes succeed, but only for a day or two. Does anyone have any advice on how to do this? Just trying to 'resolve harder' that today is the day I'm going to reform my life certainly hasn't worked.

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New job is a great time to change. My recommendation is probably unreasonable, but: move. When I was in your shoes, I changed jobs while going to a new country, hit a hard reset, and it became one of the most productive periods of my life.

They say drug addicts have an easier time quitting if they move because they don't have the same context cues. It's an opportunity to set all new habits. I find it very powerful.

If that is too crazy, try taking mushrooms, since it is also supposed to have benefits for pressing reset on habits.

Anyways, use the job as a sling shot. Make sure you act the way you want especially for those first few days, because those are the most powerful for setting down new habits.

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Your pre-pandemic productivity levels and ideal productivity levels probably don't have "never go to youtube" in them. That goal seems simple and easy and productive, but is probably having more of a rebound effect when you fail it than the positives you get when you follow it.

I've been trying the Theme System Journal from CGP Gray lately. Check out his short videos on it, copy the format into some dead trees, and call this your "Year of Productivity"! A few features:

* Give yourself "Half credit" for your daily goals, with a ridiculously low threshold to accomplish them. "Send any reply to anyone", "Write anything at all", and so on

* Your theme is a slight nudge at moments of decisions, a little helper that follows you around and points out alternative actions.

* The actual habits, goals, and structures should be flexible, and even your whole theme can be replaced if you need to.

Hopefully the above snippets are different enough from "resolve harder to quit youtube forever" to grab your interest!

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I'm real bad at productivity, but want to say that there are 86,400 seconds in a day and trying to break a habit in 86,400-chunk increments is perhaps not the most effective route. People talk about setting aside half an hour for their tasks, and being productive with that.

Remember that blogs and Youtube cover a huge swath of topics; might be worth just searching for videos about the thing you want to be doing more of, and try to phase the videos out by shifting their content rather than try to cut them off cold turkey.

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I usually won’t start a video unless it’s pretty short. Reading is so much faster.

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In addition to increasing the difficulty of the things you don't want to do (as Laurence recommends), decrease the difficulty of the things you want to do.

For example, make plans for the next day (reduces the difficulty of deciding) and write them on paper. If your plan is to go to gym, make a decision at what time exactly will you go, maybe set up an alarm, and prepare everything you need in advance so you can just grab a bag and go.

When I want to make myself cook something, I write the recipe on a small piece of paper and put it on the kitchen table, so that the next day when I enter the kitchen, the paper reminds me of my decision. (I can also grab the paper and go to a shop to buy the missing ingredients.)

Sometimes it helps to do things together with a friend. Even if it is you doing things, and the friend just standing nearby, talking to you. Helps with activities such as cleaning your room.

I think it is important that the first thing you do in the morning is a useful one. When you start doing the bad things, it is too easy to go on. Maybe if you catch yourself doing the wrong thing, you should do some symbolic "reset", for example take a short walk outside, or take a nap. While walking/napping, think about what you want to do.

If you want to read, put the books on your table (or your e-books on your desktop). Decide in advance in which order you want to read them.

Whatever you do, be nice to yourself. Yelling at yourself is not helpful.

Consider the priorities of the non-productive tasks. for example, suppose that there are three things you could do: (a) read a book, (b) take a nap, (c) watch cat videos. At first sight, it seems like reading the book is productive, and both taking nap and watching videos are unproductive, so if you really don't feel like reading the book, it does not matter which of the remaining two you choose. But that is wrong! Napping is much better than watching videos (from the perspective of future productivity), because the videos are addictive and make you feel tired, while napping has a natural limit and also allows you to think about your future work.

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Someone recommended to me that I set a timer when I begin my browsing so an alarm goes off after a certain amount of time. It’s not guaranteed, but maybe it’s enough of a bump to get you to take a break.

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Create small obstacles to break impulsive habits. For youtube, that could be logging out and disabling cookies in your browser so that it takes more time for you to get to your subscriptions and recommended videos, during which you have the opportunity to catch yourself and think "I should be doing something else". If you have an adblocker for youtube, disable it. If your browser autocompletes the youtube URL, clear your browser history. I've noticed myself occasionally opening a new tab and press y and enter while not even thinking about what I was doing, and when I see the search results for the letter y that's enough to break me out of it.

The best thing that happened to my productivity was changing the entire context that I worked in. I moved for my new job right in the middle of the pandemic and I worked from home most of the time, but because I had a fresh opportunity to build new habits, working from home in a different home was much easier. If you have a lot of context clues that you associate with wasting time, try changing those. Maybe sit in a different room on a different chair. Maybe go to a cafe or a library. Put on music you don't typically listen to. All of this is symptom-level stuff but it can add up so that it really helps.

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It turns out I was wrong about Donald Trump. Having been a keen (albeit foreign) Trump supporter in 2016, I thought I had my finger on the pulse of the Republican Party, and I thought this pulse was telling me that the 2024 candidate would be someone with sufficiently Trump-like positions but without Trump's personal flaws and baggage, someone like DeSantis. But I was wrong, I was mistaking my own personal preferences for everyone else's.

At this point the popularity of Trump seems to be mostly about spite -- people are supporting Trump just to spite the powers that be.

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Kinda. I also thought the party would pivot to DeSantis. Three reasons why not:

#1 Charisma. Trump is just a lot more charismatic and that matters. Trump is better on stage, on screen, just any forum you pick.

#2 Trust and loyalty. Man, people just do not trust DeSantis not to sell them out once he's in DC. Credit where credit is due, Trump is exactly the same person whether he's on the campaign trail or in the White House.

#3 Spite. Kinda spite but...hey, can the Republican party nominate whoever they want? According to two state supreme courts, no. Can various intelligence agencies declare the president a Manchurian candidate without consequence? Maybe, but the Mueller report didn't prove Russiagate to at least half the country's satisfaction and it wasn't realistically gonna.

This weird meta-debate, whether Trump can ever be a legitimate president, has genuinely overshadowed most of the actual policy debate.

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What's even left to debate in terms of policy? Trump really is just giving the people what they want, and apparently the people want fascism. Liberals think that the constitution will protect them, but ultimately they're just words. Words only have power if people give a shit about them.

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"apparently the people want fascism"

Boy, it sure is lucky that "fascism" doesn't have a specific meaning and just indicates "people/thing/philosophy/brand of cat litter I don't like", isn't it?

So when Trump gets re-elected, Hugo Boss will design the new Space Force uniforms and neo-classical architecture projects will spring up in the major cities for all government and public buildings, hmmm?

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They thought DeSantis was Trump without the baggage. What they got was Cruz without the charm.

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Can’t remember who I’m stealing this gag from.

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To use an analogy that is, I swear, more nuanced in my head than it may seem in this pithy phrasing: Ron DeSantis kind of feels like Hillary Clinton in a Republican meatsuit.

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The only way I made sense of Vivek Ramaswamy was to think of him as some sort of performance artist. A kind of South Asian Andy Kaufman.

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My guess is that he was auditioning to be Trump's VP pick, or at least to be able to pick up Trump's mantle when Trump finally keels over. If he can get even a few percent of the electorate to stick with him, he could be the next, slightly smarter, Lyndon LaRouche.

I admit, it would be entertaining to see him debate Kamala Harris.

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It's a shame that Mueller sucked all the oxygen from the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation and report. That one was a bipartisan (led by GOP senators) examination and its conclusions were clear and striking; but it's hard today to find a single US voter who's even heard of it let alone read it.

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> people are supporting Trump just to spite the powers that be.

I agree, but too bad that they don't vote for some small party instead.

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Well they think Trump can actually win in November. Also his style pushes MAGA emotional buttons ("but he fights!") in a particular way....his closing rally in Iowa on Sunday evening was classic, he literally described voting for him as a chance to get revenge.

There is a limit on how much 100,000 caucusgoers can project up to national voting results which is why the Iowa caucuses have a poor predictive record. And half of that 100,000 in this instance voted for someone other than Trump.

But the fundamentals remain in place which is that Trump understands his core audience way too well for any of these GOP lightweights to stop him. So Biden v Trump II is what we're looking at in November unless either or both (one about to turn 82 the other being 78 1/2) has a serious health crisis in the meantime.

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