Not sure what to say about this beyond, uh... have you heard, I guess? And also, this probably isn't going to be good for the country... not good at all... got any thoughts of your own to share?
My thought is, yeah that makes sense. Anarchy runs in every election, and people only trust the system when they think it's listening to them. Trump has been demonized and demonized himself for ten years, and now his only rival has visible dementia. The candidates are falling below the Anarchy line.
Assuming this is what it looks like at face value, seems like it probably cinches it for trump? That's just too good of a look, especially contrasting bidens already low energy (I will still be voting dem ticket, just being real)
It's heartbreaking that someone died, but in the big picture I expect that, unless this event inspires copycats, it will have no more effect than that person killed in a car accident would have.
I wouldn't know about left-wingers, but conservatives will be fine. I have a link to a whole page of Trump assassination memes for you. Check out these reactions:
Gosh, that silly old Trump! Just falling over at his own rallies! Needing the Secret Service to clear things up after him!
But you have to hand it to him for his political instincts - immediately, as the Secret Service are trying to get him out of danger and he's bleeding from the ear, he stops them to do the fist-pumping for the crowd and give the amazing photo shot of 'strength and defiance' with the American flag in the background. Truly, he is cursed with luck!
I was following this in near-real-time, via CNN. I'm pretty sure they went from "falls" to "was shot at" within minutes, and "was shot" in an hour or two. Which tracks with what was actually understood clearly enough to report on; it took a while to rule out other causes for the bloody ear (fragments from a bullet-shattered teleprompter, hitting the floor hard when the MiBs took him down).
But the internet never forgets, and if a memester wants the very first headline, it's always going to be out there for them.
That was how I remember it playing out on CBS too. Popping. Maybe gunfire, maybe fireworks. There appears to be blood right away. Verify it wasn’t a piece of glass or another accident for a while longer. Then confirmation it was a bullet wound within an hour or so. Being extra cautious mainly.
But if you stick to the facts the libs just won’t own themselves and you can’t turn up the heat before all or even most of the things involved have even been looked at.
We have crazies on the left saying it was a false flag. Crazies on the right saying Biden ordered a hit.
Throw in cranks just having a bit of malicious fun and we have… mid July 2024. To be continued.
I’m pleasantly surprised at the restraint Trump has shown so far. Knock on wood.
I think we should all take a deep breath, gather up this thing and put it on a shelf, and then go on with our evening and go to sleep. Tomorrow we'll know more, like maybe who the (attempted) assassin was, and who the bystanders who were killed and wounded were. And let's hope and pray that no one does anything stupid because of this.
In my imaginary ideal world, I hope Biden and Trump agree to have a golf match in a few days, and agree to announce in advance that they'll both lie about the outcome and claim that they each won by some ridiculous amount, so that only they and the Secret Service will know what actually happened. I wish that sort of shared joke would be enough to nudge the country toward a more healthy sort of politics.
It seems like it's now trendy to write gender-inclusive plurals like "Zuschauer:innen" in German, but how do they actually pronounce the ":" when speaking?
In my experience people pronounce it by a slight pausing at the ":" and then continuing with "Innen", pronouncing it as if it was it's own word. People use the same for the "*" version "Zuschauer*innen".
It is used for writing only, same as other variants such as
the internal I: ZuschauerInnen (as a software dev I'm personally rather partial to this one),
asterisk: Zuschauer*innen,
slash: Zuschauer/innen,
parentheses: Zuschauer(innen).
In speech, really the only solution is simply saying both variants ("Zuschauerinnen und Zuschauer"), as there is no pronounciation for special characters and pausing in the middle of saying a word would sound rather awkward. It also remains the default and most common usage in writing.
TIL the Japanese plans to defend against the expected American invasion of the home islands in 1945 were organized around the motto, "The Glorious Death of the 100 Million."
Goodness. I would have preferred a more motivating slogan.
Obviously thinking big, insofar as Japan's population in 1945 was only 70 million. Perhaps they were anticipating 100 million dead Americans littering Japan's beaches?
Am I getting it right: in NY, trash (before being taken away to landfills, presumably) has really just been stored on the sidewalks until *now*? Not in containers? Is this a common practice in American cities? What the hell?
In Philadelphia, people still put their trash out in plastic trash bags. Recycling (collected on the same day) is put in bins, though the recycling guys will pick up piles of cardboard from the ground.
I have no idea why we don't have crows, which would be the regional default. Ravens are a mythical bird from British fantasy.
My casual observation of local birds includes pigeons, sparrows, some sort of thrush. That's most of it. I saw a quail once, but I assume it escaped from a nearby market.
Oh, that's right, mallards and Canada geese on water in parks, but not near me. Sea gulls, mysteriously not listed, and possibly I'm remembering seeing them in Delaware.
I haven't been to New York, but the standard practice in the U.S. is to use containers. If New York does have trash just sitting on the sidewalk, I suspect that it's people being slobs, rather than what they're supposed to do.
Nope. It's not all of NY, it's just NYC. But it's the actual official system. They literally just pile trash on the sidewalk for the garbage men to pick up. Like industrial amounts, there will be a pile of 20 black contractor trash bags outside a restaurant. And it's like every building on a street will do that at once. It smells horrible, and it's as crazy as it sounds the first time you see it.
I think it's only certain times of day, as in they know the garbage men come around at 6 and so you can't put your bags out before 4. But it's still a wildly bad system. They didn't build good infrastructure for it long ago, and the calculus until now has been that having enough dumpsters for the density of that city couldn't fit on the sidewalks.
Estoy buscando un hablante de español que esté interesado en los temas cubiertos por Astral Codex Ten para chatear por video una o dos veces al mes.
Hablo español, pero me resulta difícil encontrar oportunidades para practicar el habla. Me encantaría conocer a un “amigo por correspondencia” que también pueda ser de EE. UU. o de un país de habla hispana en otro lugar del mundo. Estoy entusiasmada por aprender sobre lugares nuevos para mí y podría ayudarte a practicar inglés si lo deseas (aunque también me complace hablar solo español) y podría brindarte una idea de la cultura de los Estados Unidos.
Trabajo en salud pública y estoy interesada en la salud global, la visualización de datos, el cambio tecnológico, la escritura y lectura de poesía, la literatura, la racionalidad y el altruismo efectivo. Déjame saber si eres alguien que podría estar interesado en un intercambio multicultural como este.
Hola. Me parece interesante la idea de conversar sobre racionalidad en español. Si no te molesta la pregunta, me parece un poco extraño que en Estados Unidos no encuentes muchas oportunidades de practicar el español. ¿Vives en una zona con una población hispana muy baja? ¿O es solo que preferirías tener conversaciones especificamente sobre racionalidad?
@Claire buscas un hispanohablante nativo específicamente? Vivo en EEUU y aprendé hablar español hace unos años, pero siempre busco oportunidades para practicar y conocer más gente racionalista.
¡Agradezco el comentario! Me interesan diferentes culturas, pero sí, hay muchos hispanohablantes en los EE. UU. y me encantaría conectarme con ellos también. Adder, te enviaré un mensaje directo para conectarnos.
I have some sympathy for Joe Biden as things go on; his every gaffe and slip is now being scrutinised with the same attention that Trump's appearances received, instead of being papered over, ignored, or written off as "Only Fox News reported that and we all know it's a far-right Trump-worshipping propaganda outlet!"
I can understand why he mixed up Kamala and Trump here, while he might be slipping, he's not stupid and he would have to be not alone blind but dead not to be aware that Kamala is being touted as his replacement for the nomination. So she's his internal rival and Trump is his external rival, little wonder he conflated them:
"Since his poor performance against Mr Trump in a presidential debate two weeks ago, Mr Biden has faced growing doubts from donors, supporters and fellow Democrats about his ability to win the 5 November election and keep up with the demands of the job.
He probably did not help his case when he mixed up his vice president and his Republican rival at the outset of the news conference, which lasted nearly an hour.
"Look, I wouldn't have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president if she was not qualified to be president. So start there," Mr Biden said as he responded to a question from Reuters about his confidence in Ms Harris."
While it probably would be for the best if Biden stepped down or stepped back, the real scorn we should be showing is towards all the news outlets and others who covered for him these past few years. Something like this doesn't just happen all at once, but the constant "only the right wing outlets are reporting on this, so we know it's all cheap fakes disinformation propaganda lies" explaining away was only necessary *because* only the right-wing outlets reported on it, and they were the only ones who did because all the liberal, left, and self-proclaimed neutral just the facts outlets were in the hole for the Democrats.
I'm at the stage now where if a journalist says grass is green, I need to go look out the window to verify that for myself. And that's a disgrace for a profession which claims the moral high ground on being the ones to speak truth to power and tell the truth no matter where it leads, and where they do perform an important function for the public.
How strong is the case that the mainstream press covered up Biden's infirmities during the past few years? I thought it was mostly something done by the White House staff, doing a certain amount of stage management show the president at his best.
I think I would have noticed something in the Wall Street Journal, at least, if the more liberal side of the news industry had been telling fibs.
Biden went from having, unfairly, every benefit of the doubt from the media. To now when he has, unfairly, no benefit of the doubt at all.
Jill Biden was also managing Joe to a level to protect him from everything. If you haven't heard of Operation Bubblewrap you can check it out. This may have led him to deteriorating faster (or so I assert with little evidence).
Flubbing names, especially realizing you just said the wrong one and correcting it, is normal but people are on the hunt like they constantly were with Dan Quayle who didn't even know how to spell potato.
I saw it with my own father who went downhill very fast in the year leading up to his death in his early eighties. But even before then, he had gradually been getting frailer and less flexible and more forgetful. That's what I mean about Biden not suddenly switching in a matter of months from "just as good as when I was sixty" to "Trump is my vice president". There would have been small but noticeable instances of deterioration along the way.
Yeah, from what I've heard, there's been a clear decline even since the spring (apparently the SOTU was actually decent). Still doesn't excuse Biden deciding to run again, but it's not like he's been this bad for years either.
"The real scorn we should be showing is towards all the news outlets and others who covered for him these past few years"
Yep. We should also be updating heavily away from any position these news outlets have collectively supported; if they lied about one thing, they certainly lied about others.
It seems mathematically unavoidable given that there is a distributed spectrum of unwillingness-to-lie among any human population. Any lie reduces the prior of the liar being on the highly-unwilling-to-lie segment of that distribution.
Some lies more than others, obviously, and in a broadly predictable way.
Do you believe friend A lying to friend B about whether they look fat means that friend A can never be trusted in the future? Do you believe the allies should never be trusted after WW2 because of the various cover stories concocted to fool the enemy and their own people? Can the Jesuits never be trusted because they practised equivocation during the recusancy?
> Do you believe friend A lying to friend B about whether they look fat means that friend A can never be trusted in the future?
I certainly believe that they'd lack an a priori reluctance to lie to Nazis about Jews hiding in their basement. So that's good?
"Never" is a big word. Everyone has a threshold, whether it's rationally consistent or not. Knowing they'll perform a social "white lie" about whether a friend looks fat, provides little information about whether they'd lie maliciously to harm someone. I think most humans draw the line somewhere in between.
I have no idea how the Jesuits have evolved in this respect since the days of the Gunpowder Plot, but I bet it would take less than 15 minutes of searching the Internet to find out.
This was the original commentWe should also be updating heavily away from any position these news outlets have collectively supported; if they lied about one thing, they certainly lied about others.
Just a random thought: I've heard sometimes of the term "cultural cringe" applied to Canadians or Australians who believe that their culture is considered inferior to US or UK culture, but taking a global perspective, this seems faintly ridiculous - when it comes to things like music, series, celebs, famous landmarks and so on your average person in the world will probably know vastly more about Canada and Australia than about any other nation of similar size (ie 25-40 million people), unless in their immediate vicinity.
Cameroon and Burkina Faso are similar in size to Australia but we don't really see them as our peers.
I'm not sure if cultural cringe still exists in the same form that it did in the 1950s when the term was coined, anyway. There's no "high culture" for anyone to aspire to these days anyway -- the top of the cultural totem pole is no longer a fellow in a top hat speaking flawless RP, it's a black indigenous Muslim trans lesbian drawing stick figures while everybody coos in amazement. And we have plenty of those.
We have the Irish version of this vis-a-vis Britain. It's not just "thinking your culture is inferior" because to be blunt, USA culture is the behemoth everyone knows globally.
It's the adoption of the cringing attitude before the perceived 'betters', by those who wish they were or could be those same betters; that there is nothing good or valuable in the native culture, the other culture is simply superior in every way, and the values, attitudes, beliefs and themes of that culture should be adopted wholesale.
Resulting in the third-rate imitations of the Brits imitating the Americans, and the adoption of American culture war elements lock, stock and barrel even where they have no correspondence with the local context. It's not recognising "Hollywood will always be bigger than whatever we can produce", it's "Hollywood is the only way to go".
And it also involves being obsessed with what others think of us (even if they never think of us) and castigating the locals for thing X or belief Y which will make a show of us in front of the neighbours.
It's particularly funny for Ireland. There are almost certainly no nations of 5 million people (counting only RoI) with the same cultural output, cachet and favorability outside itself.
We've become more confident, but we've swung between trying to develop a very purely Irish Ireland culture that is self-referential (and often rightly skewered, see this satirical show from 1977, at the 34:50 mark https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlpgC7NLei8 ) and a cringing deference to our betters in England.
I think the main problem with us Canadians is that we tend to compare ourselves to the US, which is ten times our size, more than ten times wealthier than we are, and dominant in a score of industries, including popular culture. Of course we come out looking second-rate.
Don’t sweat it. You have a great country. Okay I have trouble computing my mileage at first, kilometers per litre? But I figure it out. Plus you have those great loonies and twonies!
Join us for our 69th OC ACXLW meetup where we'll delve into the intriguing world of sexual fetishes, exploring the interplay between tabooness and popularity. This week’s reading provides a deep dive into the complexities of how societal norms and personal experiences shape our understanding of fetishes.
**Discussion Topics:**
1. **Fetish Tabooness and Popularity by Aella**
**Overview:** This article explores the complexities of sexual fetishes, their perceived tabooness, and their popularity within different communities. Aella delves into how societal norms and personal experiences shape the way fetishes are viewed and practiced, examining the interplay between secrecy and acceptance.
**TLDR:** Aella's article investigates the societal and personal factors that influence the perception, secrecy, and popularity of fetishes, highlighting the role of media and subcultures in normalizing previously taboo practices.
**Summary:** Aella presents a comprehensive analysis of various fetishes, ranking them by their perceived tabooness and popularity. She discusses the methodology used to collect and analyze data from her Big Kink Survey, providing insights into the societal and cultural factors that influence how different fetishes are viewed and experienced. The accompanying chart visually represents the relationship between how taboo a fetish is perceived to be and its reported interest among participants.
- **Graph Analysis:** Which fetishes on the graph do you find most surprising in terms of their desirability, tabooness, or the combination of both? What do these positions reveal about societal attitudes towards these fetishes?
- **Societal Influence:** How do societal norms and cultural narratives shape the perception and acceptance of various fetishes? To what extent do these norms vary across different societies and historical periods?
- **Secrecy and Stigma:** In what ways does secrecy around fetishes both protect and hinder individuals? How does the stigma associated with certain fetishes impact personal identity and community dynamics?
- **Preference Falsification:** How does preference falsification affect the way individuals report or engage in fetishes? What are the implications for understanding true sexual preferences within a society?
- **Evolutionary Forces:** What evolutionary forces might drive the development and expression of certain fetishes? How do these forces interact with contemporary social structures and norms around mate selection?
- **Politicization of Sex:** How has the politicization of sex and sexual behavior influenced public and private attitudes towards fetishes? What are the potential benefits and drawbacks of this politicization for individual freedom and societal norms?
- **Psychological Factors:** What are the underlying psychological motivations that drive individuals to explore fetishes? How do these motivations intersect with broader social and cultural factors?
We look forward to an engaging and thought-provoking discussion where your insights will contribute to a deeper understanding of these significant topics.
Is there a write up anywhere of how the IRS expansion is doing? I keep seeing headlines of "1 billion dollars", which seems like a massive failure, given that it's taking 60 billion. How much are they getting, compared to what they expected?
I saw a chart claiming they expected 180 billion over ten years, but I don't know if that was before or after it got scaled down.
Also, this all seems like it's only minimally useful. Wouldn't an index fund go up by a similar amount over the same period?
$60B over ten years in funding, IIRC. It is really quite annoying that most of the the media coverage doesn't do more than repeat the overall figure and gives zero additional detail or context.
The pitch here is, "we were able to pull in $1B of additional funds just taking in some low-hanging fruit that we knew was there and didn't have the bandwidth to pick up", not "we spent $60B and got $1B back." The capacity for more audits of high-income taxpayers in forthcoming years will result in more funds, and more data analysis might drive more enforcement action + push tax preparers to take less aggressive positions, cutting the delta between the actual collections (e.g., what you send the IRS based on what your accountants/tax preparers argue you owe) and owed collections (e.g., what the IRS would tell you you owe after auditing your financials).
I would note a second big use for the fund allocation, as pitched by the agency and various pols, has been improving customer service, processing taxpayer returns on a more timely basis by updating back-end infrastructure, etc. All unsexy stuff that also might not result in directly increasing inflows, but would help build accountability and public trust (tbh, I would suggest this is as important if not more so)
The Republicans killed the IRS expansion. It was their number one demand in exchange for not forcing a debt default (which is a bit ironic, since it *increases* the deficit, but apparently Defund The Tax Police is really popular on the right for the same reasons that Defund The Local Police briefly captivated the left).
There are reasons, of course. I did something that somehow triggered YouTube into recommending me a couple of skits from the show, and they were generally all hilarious. I see it getting a lot of praise and homages on the internet (Spanish Inquisition, ...), allegedly the Python programming language was named after it because the (Dutch) designer was a fan. One skit is allegedly the reason why "Spam" (originally some sort of canned meat) is now the universal cross-language term for "Unwanted and repetitive offers".
It's... not that good? or at least Whither Canada, the only episode I have seen thus far, is. Perhaps the YouTube recommendations were cherry-picking the best parts and setting up an unrealistic standard. Why is the running joke with the pigs vs. humans funny? I mean, I know running jokes are funny by virtue of sheer repetition, but why pigs? Why is Picasso drawing while bicycling funny? Is there something about the comedy that is too British or too 1960s-1970s (or too Public-Broadcast-Television-era, or too European, etc...) that I as a 90s-born non-British person can't get? or is the comedy just entirely due to the surrealism and dream-like incoherency along with the laugh tracks in the background and the deadpan delivery?
Some skits were indeed funny, genuinely so. A musician upset that people are too preoccupied with a nickname his friends gave him they forget to ask about his actual music. A film producer being increasingly weirded out in an interview by the informal nicknames the interviewer keeps giving him. And Joke Warfare.
Joke Warfare is a brilliant anticipation of the concept of "Memetic Warfare", before Dawkins even coined the word "Meme" in the late 1970s. The skit was very Unsong-like. It's a play on the trope, probably first explored in the modern day by H.P. Lovecraft, that some things kill you just by knowing them:
A WW2-era British comedian discovers a joke too funny to stop laughing at, and he promptly dies from laughter after reading it in full. His mother finds him and dies too. A police officer trying to "remove The Joke" also dies. Eventually, the military gets wind of this, and translates it to German, the translators working one word at a time to avoid dying by The Joke. Allied soldiers read the German Joke out loud to German troops and they all fall like flies. The Germans develop a Counter-Joke, eventually translating it to English and attacking Britain with it using radio, but it's strongly implied the German sense of humor is inferior and ineffectual. Eventually, "Peace breaks out, and Joke Warfare is banned by a special clause in the Geneva Convention".
I really like this kind of cerebral and philosophical humor. If every episode of the show contained one skit like that I would be satisfied, but other skits seem... very ordinary? not outright unfunny or mediocre, just funny in a very normal and non-groundbreaking non-cult-status way, at least to my non-native-English ears. The next episodes could be hiding something.
If you're looking for pre-90s British humour, my personal recommendations would be a short book and a different TV show. The book is "1066 and All That", a parody history of England that's a spoof of popular histories and school exams. The TV show is "Yes, Minister" (and its continuation "Yes, Prime Minister"), which is a brilliant explanation and send-up of modern politics.
What people remember and quote are the best sketches, but the show ran for four series and there were forty-five episodes, so not all the sketches are of equal quality (like any TV show).
Youtube is definitely cherry-picking the best ones, they were a weird bunch and did a lot of weird things. The sketch where a man dances up to another man and slaps him with a small fish? Eh, probably can skip that one.
For one reason or another though I'm being routinely reminded of the Summarize Proust sketch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwAOc4g3K-g It's still the most I know about Proust, and that's after trying to read it.
As a big fan of Monty Python, a lot of the skits aren't that funny. Back when it was still broadcast on TV, I would say maybe 30-50% of an episode were good and the rest were meh. Same with the movies; there are bits of Holy Grail and Life of Brian that are great and other parts that are slow or not really my style of humor. Overall it's rather hit and miss. I'll never forget the lego Camelot scene from the extended cut Holy Grail DVD though.
The problem you're likely having, watching Monty Python, is that a lot of the comedy is at the expense of the contemporary BBC, and a lot of what remains is at the expense of the contemporary culture. In a modern context, particularly a modern US context, most of the jokes simply won't land, or if they do land, will land as purely absurdist comedy rather than as the deliberate lampooning of cultural artifacts that are missing from the viewer's context.
Right. My personal best examples is the Cat Detector Van, which drives around neighborhoods looking for unregistered cats. This isn't pure absurdity; it's a direct reference to TV Detector Vans, which roamed the roads using radio technology looking for people who were watching TV but had not paid the required license fee.
Fair. Most sketch shows are hit-and-miss in my opinion (Mitchell & Webb even have a sketch about this), and Python is no exception as well as being 50 years old. I like the first series but it does peak in series 2 or 3. Do you like the Fast Show?
I didn't know the Fast Show before I googled it just now, but if I finish Monty and find myself wanting more British humor, I might consider watching it.
I'd like to think it's less dated than python but it is nearly 30 years old. Unlike Python there's a lot of iterations of the same character/situation. Highlights: Rowley Birkin, Jazz Club, Channel 9 News, The "Suits you" Tailors (Johnny Depp appeared with them once)
The Fast Show is good, but towards the end it got a bit too high on its own importance and did a lot of fan-service that really didn't go anywhere, e.g. Ralph and Ted are funny characters but didn't need an entire backstory and a spin-off series; the hinted-at quiet tragedy of Ralph's relationship, or lack of one, with his father who was much more comfortable talking to the groundsman Ted is all we need to make the humour both poignant and hilarious.
And as an Irish person, well, I have to approve of the conclusion of this sketch 😁:
I've seen more than half the movies on the list, and they are generally films I like or at least respect. (Number 1 is "2001: A Space Odyssey," for example.)
But they put a really odd duck in the number 2 slot, "Stalker," by Andrei Tarkovsky. I just watched it, and it is more than two hours of wandering through countryside and some sort of industrial ruin, plus chatter about philosophy, art, and the role of the intellectual in society. It's slow, it's drab, and it's tiresome. How anyone could consider it the second-best anything is beyond me.
Stalker is somewhat based on the novel Roadside Picnic, and also spawned a trilogy of video games by the same name from a Ukrainian studio. These are hugely popular in the Russosphere, although I've never seen the movie myself.
The novel is decent. It's by far not the authors' best, but, unlike their best and their cult stuff, it seems to connect with non-Russian audience.
I never understood the movie. It has only a tenuous connection with the book. I'd guess the cinematography and all the philosophical stuff are the kinds of things that make movie critics happy.
II get the distinct impression, going through the list, that the creators wanted to include more "arthouse" style films, and sprinkled them in the list so as to seem sophisticated. Also some older films that, while solid in their era, don't really survive the test of time. You can see the distinct influence of
I don't particularly recommend Under the Skin, for example, unless you want to see where Stranger Things ripped off some of its visuals from. Liquid Sky is mostly just boring, with, again, some pretty visuals (there isn't much of a plot to discuss). Fantastic Planet is EXTRAORDINARILY boring. It's just an allegory in which the mice are humans, and not particularly subtle about it; the animation style is interesting but doesn't salvage the movie. I hosted a movie night pairing this movie with Mad God, and - skip Fantastic Planet, watch Mad God, which is a beautiful gnostic nightmare.
Given the absence of films like Eraserhead and Naked Lunch, and given the inclusion of the movies which were included, I think this list is less "Here are some great science fiction films to watch" and more "You're a smart consumer who enjoys good movies, as evidenced by the fact that your favorite modern science fiction movie is in the same list as these arthouse films, so you must be sophisticated". You include Naked Lunch in the former kind of list - you definitely do NOT include it in the latter, because that would be off-putting to people who couldn't enjoy it.
I would have thought "Naked Lunch" was exactly the kind of movie to put on "you're a sophisticated viewer" list and not "you're one of those grubby SF fans" list. Maybe views have changed since it came out?
Maybe. But it still strikes me as a very sound list. Just looking at the top 20, there are 16 films I have seen, and I could recommend 15 of those 16 to others. That's an excellent ratio of good to bad.
I know a lot has already been written about our current predicament in the presidential election, but I think I have something valuable to add, spurred on by Alex Berenson's breaking news on the Parkinson's specialist at the WH 8 times in the last few months. Parkinson's is a really weird disease - it doesn't kill you, but it turns your life upside down: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/my-personal-experience-with-parkinsons
I don't know if it's much better for Biden if the messaging is "Relax, it's not Alzheimer's, it's Parkinson's!"
I think the man has a reasonable few years of life left to enjoy, whatever the diagnosis really is. But to be president? No, too much of a burden for him and for the country.
According to the model, the title of the bill starting with "To designate the facility of the United States Postal" is good for the bill's odds, and the title starting with "A bill to amend the Internal Revenue Code of" is really bad.
She's 1/4 Cape Verdean and claims she worked as a stripper and drug dealer as a teenager. She dated a series of famous rappers with names like Machine Gun Kelly and 21 Savage. She married rapper Wiz Khalifa and divorced him a year later. She had a kid out of wedlock. She identifies as bisexual, though like most bisexual women it appears most of her partners have been men. In 2015, she led the Los Angeles Slut Walk. In 2016, she spoke out against Trump. And now she's suddenly a Trump supporter. Some have questioned the sincerity of her conversion; I think one could just as easily question the sincerity of her feminist beliefs circa 2015. Did she just want to help her career in the liberal-dominated entertainment industry?
I'm unsure if having her speak at the convention is a good idea. On the one hand, she's bound to alienate a lot of the suit-and-tie traditional Republicans who used to be the Republican party stereotype:
On the other hand, she's a good representation of the "new" Republican Party that's more secular, downscale, and diverse than the old one. Dare I say she represents the Trumpian populist movement better than these college-educated paleolibertarian male converts to Eastern Orthodoxy who proclaim themselves as its leaders. Your "multiracial working class" includes a lot of women with arms covered in tattoos, scantily-clad Instagram photos and kids born out of wedlock. If they were all run out of the party, it would be electorally dead in the water. Trump, though no genius, is smart enough to understand this. Many Republicans are complaining about her inclusion in the RNC, but if they don't like it, they should start thinking seriously about how to win back the high-income, high-education whites Trump drove out of the party.
After the assassination attempt, having a rapper speak at the RNC is going to be ideal because there are already lots of memes going around setting the video footage to 50 Cent's "Many Men" 😁
Which candidate - Trump, Biden, other Democrat - is likely to be best for AI safety?
My first impression is that a Democrat is likely to appoint sober professionals to formulate policy on the issue, while Trump is likely to appoint whichever culture warrior appears most macho or most willing to bribe. The first could produce good policies, the latter is likely to ignore the issue or do what's best in the short term for some particular insider.
Consider that the recently released draft 2024 Republican platform said they'll repeal the recent White House Executive Order on AI.
> Artificial Intelligence (AI) We will repeal Joe Biden’s dangerous Executive Order that hinders AI Innovation, and imposes Radical Leftwing ideas on the development of this technology. In its place, Republicans support AI Development rooted in Free Speech and Human Flourishing.
I'd say that a Democrat is more likely to listen to the "AI ethics" crowd rather than the "AI safety" crowd, since the "ethics" people are much more left-wing than the "safety" people, and they use all the right buzzwords. This will be bad for actual safety, but just might slow AI progress down to a crawl, which could be a silver lining.
I'd say that Trump would do partially what catches his interest, and partially what he thinks will score points against his opposition. If the Democrats push "ethics" over "safety", Trump might well embrace "safety" and play it up on a populist level. This could be bad for safety, since it could render the entire field toxic to anyone who wants to be accepted in left-wing society. On the other hand, he could do something else, which is likely to be bad too, or nothing at all, which is probably the most positive outcome on the table.
The AI people are mostly left-wing, which means Trump is motivated to make things difficult for them out of spite. I think that's the closest we're getting to AI safety.
When leftists talk about sober professionals, they mean people who went to the Ivy League and have the right connections. Which could just as easily result in a credentialed moron as a competent technocrat. And most willing to bribe, really? Your take mostly boils down to tribal bias. Of course, Trump was notoriously bad at staffing the administration in his first term so he probably wouldn't appoint someone competent either.
Politics is mostly downstream from society and culture. Most people don't know or understand anything about AI. Even the people who do are pretty bitterly divided between AI is the Best Thing Ever and AI is Going to Kill Us All. Typically the government response to new technologies is reactive rather than proactive. Maybe if there is an incident where a rogue AI kills a few thousand people we will see some effective legislation. Otherwise, it will be business as usual.
No one knows what is likely to be best for AI safety, let alone someone in government. Government people will use fears of AI (some of which are legitimate) to boost their own image to their constituents, enact some regulations which transfer resources from some people to others, and accomplish nothing noteworthy.
I think it takes a professional, not a culture warrior, to formulate a rule such as "report all AI runs over 10^26 FLOPs". The average culture warrior has never heard of a FLOP.
Is there any serious movement in the UK to fix the First Past the Post election system? It seems to cause all kinds of weird chaos.
Unusually, the weird chaos doesn't seem to benefit the two major parties that would presumably need to agree in order to get it to change. A move to instant runoff would keep the two major parties in power just as often, but prevent the wild swings in the composition of the house which kick MPs out of their jobs so often. Though I guess it might also result in more frequent hung parliaments with the LibDems as the constant swing votes.
First Past the Post is the worst system except for all the others that have been tried from time to time.
In particular, I think the strongest argument in favor of FPtP is that it is very simple and easy to understand. Even the dumbest voters can understand "the person who gets the most votes wins", which is not true of most alternatives. And that's a very important consideration at a time when a lot of distrust is being cast on the electoral process even as it is (at least in the US).
(This is why approval voting is my preferred improvement: it's almost as simple, and better overall. And if you don't want to bother with it, then you only vote for one candidate, and it's back to simple FPtP.)
The last time we had a referendum on voting reform (which lost) the Lib Dems had just destroyed their reputation by going into a coalition with the Conservatives.
Possible ....
a) "No" voters had just been exposed to a vivid example of the donside of coalition government, and had talken against votoing reforms that would probably make future coalitions more likely
b) The Lib Dems had just self destructed, so "No" voters might have been thinking that the main reason whyb you might need PR had just committed political suicide, so the reasons for voting yes had just gone away.
WE might get a more fortuitous combination of circumstances next time. Now, we need to deal with Reform, the Greens, and sundry independents that Starmer had kicked out of Labour and successfully won against the official Labour candidate. Lots more potential for three way contests.
More bluntly: the Conservatives now have a motive to support PR to reduce the extent to which Reform is splitting their voter, and Labour a (smaller) motive to reduce the extent to which the Greens and Jeremy Corbyn are splitting their vote.
George Galloway won in a by-election, but lost in the general election a short while later, We might take that as a fluke event that is unlikely to be repeated (Labout kicking out their own candidate too late in the process to select a new one). We might take this as a sign that Corbyn actually has support, but Galloway doesnt.
Not really. There was a referendum on changing the system a few years ago but it didn't pass. Since then everyone has quoted that result as justification not to try again.
"Weird chaos" seems overstated, the FPTP system normally results in strong majorities and means a government can be formed quickly, without the kind of chaos seen in countries with other systems (e.g. France, Belgium, Italy...)
The Lib Dems have always supported changing the system, but landslides make the current system too attractive to Labour and the Tories. 400+ seats with 35% of the vote is a good deal. Sometimes the boot is on the other foot, but winning an election is like falling in love again - you forget about the heartbreak from last time. But if enough people vote Green, Reform or Lib Dem so that hung parliaments become the new normal, you will get Proportional Representation eventually, even so it might take some time - there was an Alternative Vote referendum during the Cameron/Clegg era and the Yes side were slaughtered. AV not pure PR but voters seemed very nervous about changing the voting system.
Have been following the reaction to the Alice Munroe revelations on Twitter. Generally like the reactions to it by Joyce Carol Oates because she has no interest in playing judge or executioner, but what she says here has me thinking:
"None of this is exactly new to women writers & academics since 70% (low estimate) of literature is saturated with sexism & its more pathological expression, misogyny. But we learn to read/appreciate what is there to be appreciated. Otherwise—what’s left for us?"
70% of literature is saturated with misogyny? As a writer herself, I assume she isn't saying literature is saturated with descriptions of misogyny but that the literature itself is saturated with misogyny! Unless I'm mistaken, Joyce Carol Oates is not known as some outspoken feminist.
I get that there are of course misogynistic writers. But I wonder where the line gets drawn. For instance, I often hear that Hemingway is misogynistic but I don't see it. Where is it? What are the central examples of misogyny in 20th century literature? Where does Hemingway cross the line?
I went and researched the Alice Munro allegations, and I am a little mystified at the focus on misogyny. [1]
The story appears to be that Alice had a marriage which resulted in several children, one of which is Andrea. At some point, Alice ended that relationship, and later married Gerald Fremlin. Andrea accused Gerald of engaging in sexual abuse of herself, and possibly other children. Alice apparently reacted as if Andrea was trying to seduce Gerald.
Siblings of Andrea agreed with her that abuse was happening. Other parents involved (including Andrea's father and his new spouse, Andrea's step-mother) tried to bring attention to the abuse. Eventually, Gerald was faced with the possibility of a criminal trial and pled guilty.
This plays out against a background of Alice's fame in the literary world of her home country, Canada.
This looks like one woman ignoring the possibility that her new husband was being abusive towards her children from an earlier marriage. It also looks like the kind of ugly family dynamics that are generated by such allegations.
Were the personality traits that made Alice a capable, successful author in some way related to her disastrous choices in her personal relationships?
The misogyny of the wider world seems to have little to do with these things.[2] However, people who talk about Alice Munro seem to be talking about misogyny in literature already. So they seem to be approaching this scenario as another point of discussion about misogyny.
Where is the misogyny in this story? Was it in Gerald's behavior towards Alice, or Gerald's behavior towards Andrea? Was it in Alice's disbelief of Andrea's testimony? Or was it somewhere else?
[1] Unless 'Alice Munroe' is a different person than the Canadian short-story author Alice Munro, as detailed in this post
[2] Food for thought: in some cultures which are much more restrictive towards women, Alice would have been severely criticized, and possibly separated from her children, for leaving her first husband and taking up with her second husband. Would have have kept daughter Andrea out of the reach of Alice's second partner, with his tendencies towards abuse? Would Andrea think of that as misogynistic, or not? Would Alice think of that as misogynistic?
My post had nothing to do with Alice Munro, rather it was a reaction to a comment from novelist Joyce Carol Oates about the subject, during one of those "Can we separate the art from the artist?" debates. Oates opined there wasn't much literature left to read if she couldn't, considering 70% of what has been written is drenched in misogyny.
What with one thing and another, I don't think there's literally anything written that I could whole-heartedly endorse (present company excepted), and so I have to live in Oates' compromise.
Misogyny is open to interpretation, and if one is looking for it, one can always find it.
Lord of the Rings (the novels, chiefly) is (not intentionally) misogynistic: https://xkcd.com/2609/
The further back in time one goes, the fewer female authors there were. They say to write what you know. It is only natural, if one is a man, to write the protagonist (and antagonist, and mooks, and background characters) as a man. It doesn't mean the author meant to be sexist.
Gosh, that XKCD is so perceptive! A war story where there are armies is not 50:50 equal representation of women in the Fellowship! Imagine, a guy writing in the 1940s didn't realise that seventy years later "modern audiences" would expect Strong Women, minorities in both ethnicity and sexual orientation, and differently abled persons on the team! Why is there no wheelchair user?
My reaction to this is "why do you think women are only important if they are emulating men, that is, riding around on horseback waving swords and fighting trolls?" I think turning Boromir into the princess, not prince, of Gondor would be a fascinating change to the tale, but she wouldn't be in the Fellowship. Neither is Eowyn, but neither is Eomer, either.
From the Selected Letters:
"The sequel, The Lord of the Rings, much the largest, and I hope also in proportion the best, of the entire cycle, concludes the whole business – an attempt is made to include in it, and wind up, all the elements and motives of what has preceded: elves, dwarves, the Kings of Men, heroic 'Homeric' horsemen, orcs and demons, the terrors of the Ring-servants and Necromancy, and the vast horror of the Dark Throne, even in style it is to include the colloquialism and vulgarity of Hobbits, poetry and the highest style of prose. We are to see the overthrow of the last incarnation of Evil, the unmaking of the Ring, the final departure of the Elves, and the return in majesty of the true King, to take over the Dominion of Men, inheriting all that can be transmitted of Elfdom in his high marriage with Arwen daughter of Elrond, as well as the lineal royalty of Númenor. But as the earliest Tales are seen through Elvish eyes, as it were, this last great Tale, coming down from myth and legend to the earth, is seen mainly though the eyes of Hobbits: it thus becomes in fact anthropocentric. But through Hobbits, not Men so-called, because the last Tale is to exemplify most clearly a recurrent theme: the place in 'world polities' of the unforeseen and unforeseeable acts of will, and deeds of virtue of the apparently small, ungreat, forgotten in the places of the Wise and Great (good as well as evil). A moral of the whole (after the primary symbolism of the Ring, as the will to mere power, seeking to make itself objective by physical force and mechanism, and so also inevitably by lies) is the obvious one that without the high and noble the simple and vulgar is utterly mean; and without the simple and ordinary the noble and heroic is meaningless."
But of course, none of that any good without Strong Girlboss as leaderette of the Fellowship!
When I was younger, I too went "where are the women in these stories?" but when I got a little older, it occurred to me "why do I think women are only important when they are doing the same things as the men in the same way as the men? why don't I think that the traditional roles and concerns of women are themselves important?"
I did not mean that I think The Lord of the Rings is misogynistic; quite the contrary, I think it had nothing whatsoever to say on the subject. I thought the XKCD was funny, though. It IS seen through a modern lens, and as I said, misogyny is open to interpretation. In the paraphrased words of Tom Lehrer, misogyny is in the eyes of the beholder. When correctly viewed, everything is crude.
Arguably the most "powerful" character in The Lord of the Rings, barring Ainur and above, is Galadriel, who demonstrated her great goodness, power, and strength of will by refusing the Ring, even as a freely offered gift. That's like having access to a tool or technology which could be used to rule the world, and refusing to rule the world with it.
She wasn't being treated badly. She just wasn't being treated like the warrior woman she wanted to be. She was placed in charge of her whole country while the ruler went to war.
There's also Wormtongue, both watching her father being damaged and being at risk of being married to him, though I grant that a great deal of her complaint was being kept out of battle.
Never mind main character, in the Hobbit there are no women at all. Now okay it's about war and stuff but IRL women were spying, codebreaking. Erasure is a legitimate feminist concern. Again: I love Tolkien.
Nobody, including the men, in the Shire are spying and codebreaking. Bilbo is dragged out of his comfortable life by Gandalf for mysterious reasons. Nobody else in the Shire, or hardly anyone else, would both want to go off on An Adventure or be suitable for one.
We hear about Hobbit women in the text, such as Bilbo's mother, and we get a lot more family background in the selected letters:
"As I was saying, the mother of this hobbit—of Bilbo Baggins, that is—was the famous Belladonna Took, one of the three remarkable daughters of the Old Took, head of the hobbits who lived across The Water, the small river that ran at the foot of The Hill. It was often said (in other families) that long ago one of the Took ancestors must have taken a fairy wife. That was, of course, absurd, but certainly there was still something not entirely hobbitlike about them, and once in a while members of the Took-clan would go and have adventures. They discreetly disappeared, and the family hushed it up; but the fact remained that the Tooks were not as respectable as the Bagginses, though they were undoubtedly richer."
Gandalf refers to Bilbo by his mother's, not his father's, heritage:
"To think that I should have lived to be good-morninged by Belladonna Took’s son, as if I was selling buttons at the door!”
"...Indeed for your old grandfather Took’s sake, and for the sake of poor Belladonna, I will give you what you asked for.”
And Gandalf was blamed for Hobbit lasses, as well as Hobbit lads, going off on adventures:
“Dear me!” he went on. “Not the Gandalf who was responsible for so many quiet lads and lasses going off into the Blue for mad adventures? Anything from climbing trees to visiting elves—or sailing in ships, sailing to other shores! Bless me, life used to be quite inter—I mean, you used to upset things badly in these parts once upon a time. I beg your pardon, but I had no idea you were still in business.”
From the letters:
"It could, therefore, happen in various circumstances that a long-lived woman of forceful character remained 'head of the family', until she had full-grown grandchildren. Laura Baggins (née Grubb) remained 'head' of the family of 'Baggins of Hobbiton', until she was 102. As she was 7 years younger than her husband (who died at the age of 93 in SY 1300), she held this position for 16 years, until SY 1316; and her son Bungo did not become 'head', until he was 70, ten years before he died at the early age of 80. Bilbo did not succeed, until the death of his Took mother Belladonna, in 1334, when he was 44.
Customs differed in cases where the 'head' died leaving no son. In the Took-family, since the headship was also connected with the title and (originally military) office of Thain, descent was strictly through the male line. ...In other great families the headship might pass through a daughter of the deceased to his eldest grandson (irrespective of the daughter's age). This latter custom was usual in families of more recent origin, without ancient records or ancestral mansions. In such cases the heir (if he accepted the courtesy title) took the name of his mother's family – though he often retained that of his father's family also (placed second). This was the case with Otho Sackville-Baggins. For the nominal headship of the Sackvilles had come to him through his mother Camellia. It was his rather absurd ambition to achieve the rare distinction of being 'head' of two families (he would probably then have called himself Baggins-Sackville-Baggins) : a situation which will explain his exasperation with the adventures and disappearances of Bilbo, quite apart from any loss of property involved in the adoption of Frodo."
But mainly I think we can't expect the attitudes and expectations of today to hold for works written eighty years and more ago.
I recently re-read the first bit of "The Hobbit", and was struck by Gandalf's references to Belladonna Took. Not to mention, her name itself.
I only wish Amazon had had a similar inspiration. Why exactly was Gandalf so familiar with her? Why was she "famous" and "remarkable"? What would lead him to expect more from her descendants? There's a story there!
To celebrate one other strong-minded Hobbit matriarch, from a draft of an unsent letter 1958/59:
"But the government of a 'family', as of the real unit: the 'household', was not a monarchy (except by accident). It was a 'dyarchy', in which master and mistress had equal status, if different functions. Either was held to be the proper representative of the other in the case of absence (including death). There were no 'dowagers'. If the master died first, his place was taken by his wife, and this included (if he had held that position) the titular headship of a large family or clan. This title thus did not descend to the son, or other heir, while she lived, unless she voluntarily resigned. [We are here dealing only with titular 'headship' not with ownership of property, and its management. These were distinct matters; though in the case of the surviving 'great households', such as Great Smials or Brandy Hall, they might overlap. In other cases, headship, being a mere title, and a matter of courtesy, was naturally seldom relinquished by the living.]
…A well-known case, also, was that of Lalia the Great (or less courteously the Fat). Fortinbras II, one time head of the Tooks and Thain, married Lalia of the Clayhangers in 1314, when he was 36 and she was 31. He died in 1380 at the age of 102, but she long outlived him, coming to an unfortunate end in 1402 at the age of 119. So she ruled the Tooks and the Great Smials for 22 years, a great and memorable, if not universally beloved, 'matriarch'. She was not at the famous Party (SY 1401), but was prevented from attending rather by her great size and immobility than by her age. Her son, Ferumbras, had no wife, being unable (it was alleged) to find anyone willing to occupy apartments in the Great Smials, under the rule of Lalia. Lalia, in her last and fattest years, had the custom of being wheeled to the Great Door, to take the air on a fine morning. In the spring of SY 1402 her clumsy attendant let the heavy chair run over the threshold and tipped Lalia down the flight of steps into the garden. So ended a reign and life that might well have rivalled that of the Great Took.
It was widely rumoured that the attendant was Pearl (Pippin's sister), though the Tooks tried to keep the matter within the family. At the celebration of Ferumbras' accession […But Ferumbras, though he became Thain Ferumbras III in 1380, still occupied no more than a small bachelor-son's apartment in the Great Smials, until 1402] the displeasure and regret of the family was formally expressed by the exclusion of Pearl from the ceremony and feast; but it did not escape notice that later (after a decent interval) she appeared in a splendid necklace of her name-jewels that had long lain in the hoard of the Thains."
There's a lot in the background we never get to know about! The Tooks are, as mentioned, considered a lot more adventurous than the Hobbit norm and thus much less respectable (even though richer - and that's a subtle point Tolkien is making that wealth alone doesn't buy status) than the Bagginses.
There's a hint that Belladonna and her sisters are the reasons why Bilbo, and later on Frodo, Merry and Pippin, all have that streak of daring in their makeup since they get it from the maternal side of the family. Strong-minded and capable Hobbit women are there - see Lobelia, for instance. Just because we don't see them running around doing men's adventures alongside the men in the men's style does not mean Tolkien perceives the role of women as to sit meekly at home by the fire being obedient to their husbands (often in Hobbit society it's the husbands and sons who are obedient to them).
That's what annoys me about "your faves are problematic" here; yes, there's a legitimate criticism to be made about the lack of female visibility, but if the criticism is that "the women in this story are not pseudo-men", then that devalues and looks down upon traditional roles and duties and activities of women. It's every bit as misogynistic to ignore running a household as not being something worth talking about, as it is to say "women in the kitchen and kitchen only, please".
The women in Tolkien's stories are on the Home Front, like his own wife after they married.
From a letter to his son Michael, 1941:
"I fell in love with your mother at the approximate age of 18. Quite genuinely, as has been shown – though of course defects of character and temperament have caused me often to fall below the ideal with which I started. Your mother was older than I, and not a Catholic. Altogether unfortunate, as viewed by a guardian. And it was in a sense very unfortunate; and in a way very bad for me. These things are absorbing and nervously exhausting. I was a clever boy in the throes of work for (a very necessary) Oxford scholarship. The combined tensions nearly produced a bad breakdown. I muffed my exams and though (as years afterwards my H[ead] M[aster] told me) I ought to have got a good scholarship, I only landed by the skin of my teeth an exhibition of £60 at Exeter: just enough with a school leaving scholarship of the same amount to come up on (assisted by my dear old guardian). Of course there was a credit side, not so easily seen by the guardian. I was clever, but not industrious or single-minded; a large part of my failure was due simply to not working (at least not at classics) not because I was in love, but because I was studying something else: Gothic and what not. Having the romantic upbringing I made a boy-and-girl affair serious, and made it the source of effort. Naturally rather a physical coward, I passed from a despised rabbit on a house second-team to school colours in two seasons. All that sort of thing. However, trouble arose: and I had to choose between disobeying and grieving (or deceiving) a guardian who had been a father to me, more than most real fathers, but without any obligation, and 'dropping' the love-affair until I was 21. I don't regret my decision, though it was very hard on my lover. But that was not my fault. She was perfectly free and under no vow to me, and I should have had no just complaint (except according to the unreal romantic code) if she had got married to someone else. For very nearly three years I did not see or write to my lover. It was extremely hard, painful and bitter, especially at first. The effects were not wholly good: I fell back into folly and slackness and misspent a good deal of my first year at College. But I don't think anything else would have justified marriage on the basis of a boy's affair; and probably nothing else would have hardened the will enough to give such an affair (however genuine a case of true love) permanence. On the night of my 21st birthday I wrote again to your mother – Jan. 3, 1913. On Jan. 8th I went back to her, and became engaged, and informed an astonished family. I picked up my socks and did a spot of work (too late to save Hon. Mods. from disaster) – and then war broke out the next year, while I still had a year to go at college. In those days chaps joined up, or were scorned publicly. It was a nasty cleft to be in, especially for a young man with too much imagination and little physical courage. No degree: no money: fiancée. I endured the obloquy, and hints becoming outspoken from relatives, stayed up, and produced a First in Finals in 1915. Bolted into the army: July 1915. I found the situation intolerable and married on March 22, 1916. May found me crossing the Channel (I still have the verse I wrote on the occasion!) for the carnage of the Somme.
Think of your mother! Yet I do not now for a moment feel that she was doing more than she should have been asked to do – not that that detracts from the credit of it. I was a young fellow, with a moderate degree, and apt to write verse, a few dwindling pounds p. a. (£20 – 40), and no prospects, a Second Lieut. on 7/6 a day in the infantry where the chances of survival were against you heavily (as a subaltern). She married me in 1916 and John was born in 1917 (conceived and carried during the starvation-year of 1917 and the great U-Boat campaign) round about the battle of Cambrai, when the end of the war seemed as far-off as it does now. I sold out, and spent to pay the nursing-home, the last of my few South African shares, 'my patrimony'."
Fairly or not it's an example that I have seen used - “there are no women in the Hobbit”. I do think there's a difference between writing a living character who can speak for themselves and characters who are spoken of in the backstory, like Mainwaring's wife. I simply disagree that those are the values of 80 years ago, period. Perhaps Tolkien and the Inklings represent the best of western civilization more than, say, Virginia Woolfe, but that doesn't put them in the majority in their own time. There's more potential for espionage/codebreaking in LOTR (any sufficiently advanced technology…)
The only codebreaking I can think of is Elrond reading the moon-runes.
Where is your putative female Hobbit spy going to be doing all this spying and codebreaking? For whom? Gandalf is not running a network of Hobbit spies. There is no king in Arnor any more. Gondor is miles and miles to the South. Halflings are pretty much considered a legend or fairy story outside of the Shire, where only the Dwarves really have any contact with them, due to the roads to the Blue Mountains passing through the Shire.
In Bree? Bree may have a mixed population of Big Folk and Little Folk, but it's just as insular in its own way.
Maybe you could swap out Merry and/or Pippin for their girl cousins to go off with Frodo, but in the general run of things, no Hobbits - male *or* female - want to go off adventuring and mixing with strange folk in foreign lands.
Tolkien was writing what he knew as much as Virginia Wolfe was writing what she knew. With "The Hobbit", it was a children's bed time story for his children, and it seems mostly to be Christopher that interacted with it. He didn't put in "and here are all the Strong Girlbosses" because that wasn't in his mind, shaped as it was by Norse epics.
I'm not saying he's the best of the best, I'm saying "putting modern attitudes into the past doesn't work". Virginia Wolfe is not writing about Anglo-Saxon societies, and the closest she comes to fantasy is the novel "Orlando" which is decidedly not the same kind of thing as "The Hobbit" or "The Lord of the Rings".
If I look at another famous (adult) novel from 1937 (the year "The Hobbit" was published), it's "The Citadel" by A.J. Cronin, which could also be criticised for "where's the women?" The main female character is the wife of the hero and ends up killed by being hit by a bus.
I think that's totally fair, and I think that there are some writers who are genuine misogynists or misandrists and that this will come out in their writing.
I once read a terrible novel in which the main character was a man who went around being a jerk to everybody for two hundred pages and then in the end he rapes his teenage daughter because he catches her masturbating and is so personally offended that she is enjoying her own body despite its obesity that he decides to rape her because, like, reasons. You could tell _that_ novel was written by someone who just plain hates men. I'm sure there's equally misogynist examples too, but none immediately spring to mind.
I don't think there's many *good* novels written by misogynists or misandrists though. If you hate a whole sex then you're probably working from a very flawed mental model of how they actually think and behave, so you're not going to be able to write these characters convincingly.
> I don't think there's many good novels written by misogynists or misandrists though.
One way to get away with it is to only write about the sex you like. That's been easier for misogynists than misandrists, given the male-dominated nature of literate civilization. And personally, I hate it when authors go off on lengthy rants about groups they despise, so I'm just as happy if misogynists write books with only men in them, because I think those books stand a much better chance of being actually *good*, that way.
I don't know whether I would say Hemingway is "misogynistic" necessarily, and I haven't read that much Hemingway, but the reason people say that is because Hemingway is primarily concerned with men attaining what he sees as masculine virtue by doing masculine things like hunting or bull fighting or soldiering. In that world, women are kind of second rate beings who are either sex objects or harpies or distractions, or in the worst case seek to destroy men, like Francis Macomber's wife.
You're a writer yourself? What sort of thing do you write? I am now in the horrifying middle of writing a novel about future people in a world with a superintelligent AI.
If you count sexism by omission, that is no female main characters, no female characters with agency and so on, there's a lot. Also if you include old books there's a lot.
Yep, if you define words however you want, then you can say anything you like, and have it be true.
I don't begrudge anyone the right to define words however they want, the appropriate thing to do is to recognise they're speaking a language that is similar to but not equivalent to English, and block it out as noise.
In the 19th century, classic characters like Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina have plenty of agency.
Molly Bloom has plenty of agency as do Proust's Albertine and his other female characters. Kafka's, Hemingway's, and Fitzgerald's distaff characters all have agency. Yes, there are few female main characters by male authors, but I don't see how that amounts to misogyny. Few writers, whatever their gender, write main characters of the opposite gender.
Perhaps 20th century publishers and the writing culture in NYC was sexist. I can believe that.
and saying "yes yes I will yes." I think you have to read the closing monologue of hers to decide whether Joyce is mind reading a woman accurately, or just projecting.
I think there's no doubt that women think and feel and say that more often than men. Did you know that marriage protects men well from depression?Married men are much less likely to be depressed than single ones. But the same does not hold true for women. Tis better to be the receiver of the Yes than the giver.
Absolutely true, and yes, I did know that. So I would say that Joyce was sensitive to this in his depiction of Molly.
I think one of the most important parts of saying yes, is the spirit in which it is said. There is a lot of her own pain in that monologue of Molly's and it makes her saying "yes yes I will yes" kind of profound I think. At least that's how I remember it.
Read an old post about navigating crappy phone trees, negotiating with insurances and such in the medical system, I think I have a vague idea that might improve things - but it needs to ultimate be enforced by the government to have bite.
First, legislation - make it explicit that if a business fails to provide a service it is contracted to provide because their service is delivered in such a way to defeat most good-faith attempts to navigate it, this is legally a breach of contract and if this is something a customer is paying for, this basically cancels the bill. Release a set of standards for what good faith provisioning of services looks like (without being too prescriptive, so they can't just follow the letter and not the spirit).
Perhaps set up a hotline to send evidence and report such instances. Really egregious offenders face severe penalties.
If this law is written right, a whole bunch of lawyers will immediately go out of their way to find people who are struggling with getting medical treatment or medications covered. They will sit in the room and observe the customer interactions and note down all the obvious infractions, time the hold time, etc. They might charge a percentage of the insurance bill that they're saving the customer.
If they're ambitious, they'll figure out how to scale this and create a class action case.
On the flipside, now that offering shitty phone CS has a high chance of voiding contracts, owing refunds, and losing money, a lot of companies may find themselves under pressure to actively improve the situation.
I think it's important to keep the infraction in line with the intent of the legislation (force companies you have a contract with to actually honour the damn contract - so the infraction is "it's impossible to get my contract fulfilled").
It's a bit harder for a shop that you just go and buy things from, because you don't have contracts with them, but there's far more competition in retail so it's not as big a problem (i.e unlike with insurers which aren't easily switched you can just try a different pharmacy).
Surely someone is already doing something like this to try to improve things?
This is not a navigation problem - it's a Getting Your Problem Solved problem. It's about not being sent on wild goose chases where phone operators endlessly transfer you between departments.
If it takes an unreasonable amount of time, or is unreasonably difficult to access a service I've paid for (eg: make my health insurance pay a bill the contract obliges them to pay), I should be able to simply cancel the contract and get all my premiums back because they've failed at providing me the service.
Things that this could cause: someone might be finally motivated to produce a simple webpage or pdf or something that tells you how much they're going to pay for a service, so you can plan for it, and make it easy to access.
This is why I'm adamant that the wording of the law is performance based.
(To be fair, the refund mechanism in the US gets more complicated because a lot of people don't directly pay for their own insurance)
They're not hard to navigate, but I've found that generally the options don't match my issue at hand. So it's usually 0,0,0,0,0,0,0 or "customer service, customer service, _customer service!" for me.
Last week I posted how I think I agree with Spinoza that The Universe Is God, and some of the questions I got about it has me wondering how much of my thinking is merely semantic. For instance, if I say I believe that the same being who experiences being Taylor Swift is the same being who experiences being Joe Biden is the same being who experiences being a lizard on the fence, does that mean anything or is it just words?
To put it another way, let's say one believes in reincarnation and souls are distinct entities, but nobody is able to remember their past lives. Does that mean anything?
Assuming no further theology is in place, do the words "being" and "soul" mean anything if we stipulate that a being or soul may be multiple people but none of those people will ever know that they are the same being or soul as others?
Is this the kind of stuff of which Wittgenstein said we must remain silent?
Imagine that there are two universes. In one of them, the universe is God. In the other, the universe is merely a universe. You are randomly teleported into one of those universes. How would you find out which one you are in? (Let's assume that you have unlimited resources at your disposal, so you can build a spaceship or a collider or whatever is necessary to perform the experiment.)
Similarly, imagine that there are two universes. In one of them, the same being who experiences being Taylor Swift is the same being who experiences being Joe Biden, etc. On the other universe, Taylor Swift and Joe Biden are different beings. You are randomly teleported into one of those universes, and you can perform any kind of experiments with Taylor Swift and Joe Biden. How would you find out which universe you are in?
Some of us remember our past lives. I don't know if they're real memories or false memories, but they're there in my brain. Likewise, I don't remember or I misrember a significant portion of my current life. I'd say I only retain memories of the highlights — say 1%? — and of those, I misremember significant details. Yet we talk as if our lives are a continuous uninterrupted thread of experience (being) that's completely accessible from our present state of consciousness.
I don't know about souls. I could posit other reasons for my other-life memories — if they're "real" — but then again none of my regular memories are "real" either — rather they're highly edited abstractions of the states of my qualia and thoughts at a given moment in the past.
I don't know what Spinoza said about being, but it seems to me that the whole project of empiricism is that the universe exists (has being) without us necessarily being there to enjoy it.
But with the proper definitions and examples, I think we can discuss the ideas of being and souls without having to remain silent on those subjects.
Yes. Quite simply if you think that Biden and Taylor Swift are the same person or substance, and there’s no way either of them can know this not only is the idea unfalsifiable, it’s merit less.
I agree that it's unfalsifiable, but I don't think it's meritless. It seems to me that if there were a group of people that believed that the universe is god, and had some rituals and some music saturated with that idea, and gatherings where they celebrated it, those people would feel more thrilled and happy about life than others, and more interested in things beyond themselves, and more connected with other people.
No, I'd say it's the kind of stuff that AJ Ayer said was meaningless, according to his Princiciple of Verification: The meaning of a statement is its method of verification. There's no conceivable way of verifying statements like the ones you made, hence (acc/to Ayer) they are meaningless. I think Wittgenstein was talking about only being able to say so much about the way language has meaning -- yet there's a way that it's all arbitrary and made up. He could say *some*stuff about words and statements and how they come to mean something, but after all he's using words to do it, and there comes a point where it's impossible to use words to describe the arbitrariness of language, the way it's fake -- because the statements he's making are made of the same arbitrary fake stuff.
I don't think your statements are meaningless, though. They pass the shiver test for me. Here's my own non-rational formulation: The universe understands itself. We know it does because it made a model of itself. What model? The universe.
And what is _being_ if "things" are temporary configurations of sub-atomic particles that rearrange themselves over time? The names we give things are arbitrary assignments which have little meaning below a certain level of reality. And subatomic particles may n
And what is the soul in such a universe? If we think about it, souls (if they exist), must be containers for (or consist of) information. What is information? Patterns in randomness? But if we encrypt information, we have no way to distinguish it from randomness. Yet randomness can contain the information...
Nothing is random. Computer programmers know they can only generate pseudo-random numbers. Rolling dice generates numbers that can, in principle, be calculated from initial conditions and following physical laws with enough precision; even quantum mechanics is deterministic until the wave function is collapsed.
As for quantum mechanics being deterministic, John Stewart Bell's theorem stated that there were no hidden variables in quantum mechanics. Subsequent experiments have proved his theorem, at least as far as local variables go.
So you're claiming that we could predict the entire evolutionary history of the universe if we knew all the details of the initial conditions from when the universe was the size of a casaba melon? Are you claiming we could predict the evolution of actual casaba melons on a small planet around a G-type star around a small spiral galaxy among trillions of galaxies 13.6 billion years after Inflation and the Big Bang? I find that hard to swallow. But if you want to believe that, go right ahead.
C. S. Lewis wrote a little about this in "Mere Christianity", in the chapter where he defined Pantheism and Theism (he would know, having once been a pantheist similar to the Spinoza bent himself):
"The first big division of humanity is into the majority, who believe in some kind of God or gods, and the minority who do not. On this point, Christianity lines up with the majority—lines up with ancient Greeks and Romans, modern savages, Stoics, Platonists, Hindus, Mohammedans, etc., against the modern Western European materialist.
"Now I go on to the next big division. People who all believe in God can be divided according to the sort of God they believe in. There are two very different ideas on this subject One of them is the idea that He is beyond good and evil. We humans call one thing good and another thing bad. But according to some people that is merely our human point of view. These people would say that the wiser you become the less you would want to call anything good or bad, and the more dearly you would see that everything is good in one way and bad in another, and that nothing could have been different. Consequently, these people think that long before you got anywhere near the divine point of view the distinction would have disappeared altogether.
"We call a cancer bad, they would say, because it kills a man; but you might just as well call a successful surgeon bad because he kills a cancer. It all depends on the point of view. The other and opposite idea is that God is quite definitely “good” or “righteous.” a God who takes sides, who loves love and hates hatred, who wants us to behave in one way and not in another. The first of these views—the one that thinks God beyond good and evil—is called Pantheism. It was held by the great Prussian philosopher Hegel and, as far as I can understand them, by the Hindus. The other view is held by Jews, Mohammedans and Christians.
"And with this big difference between Pantheism and the Christian idea of God, there usually goes another. Pantheists usually believe that God, so to speak, animates the universe as you animate your body: that the universe almost is God, so that if it did not exist He would not exist either, and anything you find in the universe is a part of God. The Christian idea is quite different. They think God invented and made the universe—like a man making a picture or composing a tune. A painter is not a picture, and he does not die if his picture is destroyed. You may say, “He’s put a lot of himself into it,” but you only mean that all its beauty and interest has come out of his head. His skill is not in the picture in the same way that it is in his head, or even in his hands. expect you see how this difference between Pantheists and Christians hangs together with the other one. If you do not take the distinction between good and bad very seriously, then it is easy to say that anything you find in this world is a part of God. But, of course, if you think some things really bad, and God really good, then you cannot talk like that.
"You must believe that God is separate from the world and that some of the things we see in it are contrary to His will. Confronted with a cancer or a slum the Pantheist can say, “If you could only see it from the divine point of view, you would realise that this also is God.” The Christian replies, “Don’t talk damned nonsense.” For Christianity is a fighting religion. It thinks God made the world—that space and time, heat and cold, and all the colours and tastes, and all the animals and vegetables, are things that God “made up out of His head” as a man makes up a story. But it also thinks that a great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and that God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again"
I would sum up this distinction as being between (1) true wisdom of the nature of things as they are and (2) something that is designed in order to achieve social coherence, which is also necessary and another part of the universe that is god, embodied.
I used to admire Lewis but as I get older not so much. At the end, his entire argument boils down to "Dammit, we are Englishman!"
It also seems to be very odd that any God that has clout in these discussions (the monotheistic religions)didn't show up until we human beings had been on the planet for at least 500,000 years. This only makes sense to me if my conception of god is "God is the ultimate video game designer." I don't find that satisfactory. I also understand that rules of conduct are necessary, and enforcing them is much easier if you can appeal to a higher power. It's a conundrum.
"At the end, his entire argument boils down to "Dammit, we are Englishman!""
Boy, have you got the wrong vampire!
From "Surprised by Joy":
"My father belonged to the first generation of his family that reached professional station. His grandfather had been a Welsh farmer; his father, a self-made man, had begun life as a workman, emigrated to Ireland, and ended as a partner in the firm of Macilwaine and Lewis, "Boiler-makers, Engineers, and Iron Ship Builders". My mother was a Hamilton with many generations of clergymen, lawyers, sailors, and the like behind her; on her mother's side, through the Warrens, the blood went back to a Norman knight whose bones lie at Battle Abbey. The two families from which I spring were as different in temperament as in origin. My father's people were true Welshmen, sentimental, passionate, and rhetorical, easily moved both to anger and to tenderness; men who laughed and cried a great deal and who had not much of the talent for happiness. The Hamiltons were a cooler race. Their minds were critical and ironic and they had the talent for happiness in a high degree--went straight for it as experienced travellers go for the best seat in a train. From my earliest years I was aware of the vivid contrast between my mother's cheerful and tranquil affection and the ups and downs of my father's emotional life, and this bred in me long before I was old enough to give it a name a certain distrust or dislike of emotion as something uncomfortable and embarrassing and even dangerous.'"
"It was decided that I should go as a boarder, but I could get an exeat to come home every Sunday. I was enchanted. I did not believe that anything Irish, even a school, could be bad; certainly not so bad as all I yet knew of England. To "Campbell" I accordingly went."
"No Englishman will be able to understand my first impressions of England. When we disembarked, I suppose at about six next morning (but it seemed to be midnight), I found myself in a world to which I reacted with immediate hatred. The flats of Lancashire in the early morning are in reality a dismal sight; to me they were like the banks of Styx. The strange English accents with which I was surrounded seemed like the voices of demons. But what was worst was the English landscape from Fleetwood to Euston. Even to my adult eye that main line still appears to run through the dullest and most unfriendly strip in the island. But to a child who had always lived near the sea and in sight of high ridges it appeared as I suppose Russia might appear to an English boy. The flatness! The interminableness! The miles and miles of featureless land, shutting one in from the sea, imprisoning, suffocating! Everything was wrong; wooden fences instead of stone walls and hedges, red brick farmhouses instead of white cottages, the fields too big, haystacks the wrong shape. Well does the Kalevala say that in the stranger's house the floor is full of knots. I have made up the quarrel since; but at that moment I conceived a hatred for England which took many years to heal.
Our destination was the little town of--let us call it Belsen--in Hertfordshire. "Green Hertfordshire", Lamb calls it; but it was not green to a boy bred in County Down. It was flat Hertfordshire, flinty Hertfordshire, Hertfordshire of the yellow soil. There is the same difference between the climate of Ireland and of England as between that of England and the Continent. There was far more weather at Belsen than I had ever met before; there I first knew bitter frost and stinging fog, sweltering heat and thunderstorms on the great scale."
" I had been told that Surrey was "suburban", and the landscape that actually flitted past the windows astonished me. I saw steep little hills, watered valleys, and wooded commons which ranked by my Wyvernian and Irish standards as forests"
"Hitherto my feelings for nature had been too narrowly romantic. I attended almost entirely to what I thought awe-inspiring, or wild, or eerie, and above all to distance. Hence mountains and clouds were my especial delight; the sky was, and still is, to me one of the principal elements in any landscape, and long before I had seen them all named and sorted out in Modern Painters I was very attentive to the different qualities, and different heights, of the cirrus, the cumulus, and the rain-cloud. As for the Earth, the country I grew up in had everything to encourage a romantic bent, had indeed done so ever since I first looked at the unattainable Green Hills through the nursery window. For the reader who knows those parts it will be enough to say that my main haunt was the Holywood Hills-the irregular polygon you would have described if you drew a line from Stormont to Comber, from Comber to Newtownards, from Newtownards to Scrabo, from Scrabo to Craigantlet, from Craigantlet to Holywood, and thence through Knocknagonney back to Stormont. How to suggest it all to a foreigner I hardly know.
First of all, it is by Southern English standards bleak. The woods, for we have a few, are of small trees, rowan and birch and small fir. The fields are small, divided by ditches with ragged sea-nipped hedges on top of them. There is a good deal of gorse and many outcroppings of rock. Small abandoned quarries, filled with cold-looking water, are surprisingly numerous. There is nearly always a wind whistling through the grass. Where you see a man ploughing there will be gulls following him and pecking at the furrow. There are no field-paths or rights of way, but that does not matter for everyone knows you--or if they do not know you, they know your kind and understand that you will shut gates and not walk over crops. Mushrooms are still felt to be common property, like the air. The soil has none of the rich chocolate or ochre you find in parts of England: it is pale--what Dyson calls "the ancient, bitter earth". But the grass is soft, rich, and sweet, and the cottages, always whitewashed and single storeyed and roofed with blue slate, light up the whole landscape.
Although these hills are not very high, the expanse seen from them is huge and various. Stand at the north-eastern extremity where the slopes go steeply down to Holywood. Beneath you is the whole expanse of the Lough. The Antrim coast twists sharply to the north and out of sight; green, and humble in comparison, Down curves away southward. Between the two the Lough merges into the sea, and if you look carefully on a good day you can even see Scotland, phantom-like on the horizon. Now come further to the south and west. Take your stand at the isolated cottage which is visible from my father's house and overlooks our whole suburb, and which everyone calls The Shepherd's Hut, though we are not really a shepherd country. You are still looking down on the Lough, but its mouth and the sea are now hidden by the shoulder you have just come from, and it might (for all you see) be a landlocked lake. And here we come to one of those great contrasts which have bitten deeply into my mind--Niflheim and Asgard, Britain and Logres, Handramit and Harandra, air and ether, the low world and the high. Your horizon from here is the Antrim Mountains, probably a uniform mass of greyish blue, though if it is a sunny day you may just trace on the Cave Hill the distinction between the green slopes that climb two-thirds of the way to the summit and the cliff wall that perpendicularly accomplishes the rest. That is one beauty; and here where you stand is another, quite different and even more dearly loved--sunlight and grass and dew, crowing cocks and gaggling ducks. In between them, on the flat floor of the Valley at your feet, a forest of factory chimneys, gantries, and giant cranes rising out of a welter of mist, lies Belfast. Noises come up from it continually, whining and screeching of trams, clatter of horse traffic on uneven sets, and, dominating all else, the continual throb and stammer of the great shipyards. And because we have heard this all our lives it does not, for us, violate the peace of the hill-top; rather, it emphasises it, enriches the contrast, sharpens the dualism. Down in that "smoke and stir" is the hated office to which Arthur, less fortunate than I, must return to-morrow: for it is only one of his rare holidays that allows us to stand here together on a weekday morning. And down there too are the barefoot old women, the drunken men stumbling in and out of the "spirit grocers" (Ireland's horrible substitute for the kindly English "pub"), the straining, overdriven horses, the hard-faced rich women--all the world which Alberich created when he cursed love and twisted the gold into a ring.
Now step a little way--only two fields and across a lane and up to the top of the bank on the far side--and you will see, looking south with a little east in it, a different world. And having seen it, blame me if you can for being a romantic. For here is the thing itself, utterly irresistible, the way to the world's end, the land of longing, the breaking and blessing of hearts. You are looking across what may be called, in a certain sense, the plain of Down, and seeing beyond it the Mourne Mountains.
It was K.--that is, Cousin Quartus' second daughter, the Valkyrie--who first expounded to me what this plain of Down is really like. Here is the recipe for imagining it. Take a number of medium-sized potatoes and lay them down (one layer of them only) in a flat-bottomed tin basin. Now shake loose earth over them till the potatoes themselves, but not the shape of them, is hidden; and of course the crevices between them will now be depressions of earth. Now magnify the whole thing till those crevices are large enough to conceal each its stream and its huddle of trees. And then, for colouring, change your brown earth into the chequered pattern of fields, always small fields (a couple of acres each), with all their normal variety of crop, grass, and plough. You have now got a picture of the "plain" of Down, which is a plain only in this sense that if you were a very large giant you would regard it as level but very ill to walk on--like cobbles. And now remember that every cottage is white. The whole expanse laughs with these little white dots; it is like nothing so much as the assembly of white foam-caps when a fresh breeze is on a summer sea. And the roads are white too; there is no tarmac yet. And because the whole country is a turbulent democracy of little hills, these roads shoot in every direction, disappearing and reappearing. But you must not spread over this landscape your hard English sunlight; make it paler, make it softer, blur the edges of the white cumuli, cover it with watery gleams, deepening it, making all unsubstantial. And beyond all this, so remote that they seem fantastically abrupt, at the very limit of your vision, imagine the mountains. They are no stragglers. They are steep and compact and pointed and toothed and jagged. They seem to have nothing to do with the little hills and cottages that divide you from them. And sometimes they are blue, sometimes violet; but quite often they look transparent--as if huge sheets of gauze had been cut out into mountainous shapes and hung up there, so that you could see through them the light of the invisible sea at their backs."
"Meanwhile, on the continent, the unskilled butchery of the first German War went on. As it did so and as I began to foresee that it would probably last till I reached military age, I was compelled to make a decision which the law had taken out of the hands of English boys of my own age; for in Ireland we had no conscription. I did not much plume myself even then for deciding to serve, but I did feel that the decision absolved me from taking any further notice of the war. ...Accordingly I put the war on one side to a degree which some people will think shameful and some incredible. Others will call it a flight from reality. I maintain that it was rather a treaty with reality, the fixing of a frontier. I said to my country, in effect, "You shall have me on a certain date, not before. I will die in your wars if need be, but till then I shall live my own life. You may have my body, but not my mind. I will take part in battles but not read about them." If this attitude needs excusing I must say that a boy who is unhappy at school inevitably learns the habit of keeping the future in its place; if once he began to allow infiltrations from the coming term into the present holidays he would despair. Also, the Hamilton in me was always on guard against the Lewis; I had seen enough of the self-torturing temperament."
"I noticed a strange tall gaunt man half in khaki half in mufti with a large wide-awake hat, bright eyes and a hooked nose sitting in the comer. The others had their backs to him, but I could see in his eye that he was taking an interest in the conversation quite unlike the ordinary pained astonishment of the British (and American) public at me presence of the Lewises (and myself) in a pub. It was rather like Trotter at the Prancing Pony, in fact v. like. All of a sudden he butted in, in a strange unplaceable accent, taking up some point about Wordsworth. In a few seconds he was revealed as Roy Campbell (of Flowering Rifle and Flaming Terrapin'). Tableau! Especially as C.S.L. had not long ago violently lampooned him in the Oxford Magazine, and his press-cutters miss nothing. There is a good deal of Ulster still left in C.S.L. if hidden from himself. "
"C.S.L. of course had some oddities and could sometimes be irritating. He was after all and remained an Irishman of Ulster. But he did nothing for effect; he was not a professional clown, but a natural one, when a clown at all. He was generous-minded, on guard against all prejudices, though a few were too deep-rooted in his native background to be observed by him. That his literary opinions were ever dictated by envy (as in the case of T. S. Eliot) is a grotesque calumny. After all it is possible to dislike Eliot with some intensity even if one has no aspirations to poetic laurels oneself.
Well of course I could say more, but I must draw the line. Still I wish it could be forbidden that after a great man is dead, little men should scribble over him, who have not and must know they have not sufficient knowledge of his life and character to give them any key to the truth. Lewis was not 'cut to the quick' by his defeat in the election to the professorship of poetry: he knew quite well the cause. I remember that we had assembled soon after in our accustomed tavern and found C.S.L. sitting there, looking (and since he was no actor at all probably feeling) much at ease. 'Fill up!' he said, 'and stop looking so glum. The only distressing thing about this affair is that my friends seem to be upset.' And he did not 'readily accept' the chair in Cambridge. It was advertised, and he did not apply. Cambridge of course wanted him, but it took a lot of diplomacy before they got him. His friends thought it would be good for him: he was mortally tired, after nearly 30 years, of the Baileys of this world and even of the Duttons.1It proved a good move, and until his health began too soon to fail it gave him a great deal of happiness."
> It also seems to be very odd that any God that has clout in these discussions (the monotheistic religions)didn't show up until we human beings had been on the planet for at least 500,000 years.
Are you asking the question of why — if there were a monotheistic god — why it didn't make itself known to humanity sooner? If so, that assumes that any monotheistic god would take an interest in humans. Or maybe god was waiting until we had reached a certain level of literacy and civilization before it revealed itself. OTOH, we can't know if there were monotheistic religions in pre-history. I suspect there weren't, and that monotheism was a unique god mutation that happened to Jewish theology during their Babylonian exile. Before that Yahweh was a henotheistic deity ("My thunder god is bigger than your thunder god!").
It's not God showing up, it's us finally getting to a level where communication of some sort is possible.
It's like waiting until ants have achieved some way of being able to understand a human interacting with them; a sceptical ant historian might of course say "isn't it very coincidental that the Big Person only showed up after so many aeons of glorious ant empire?" with the implication that the ants had invented the very notion of the Big Person.
Well, if we are ants to the big person, then I seriously question this conception of God. This God is far too bound up in the ways of human beings, it seems to me to be considered the alpha and omega; a schoolboy running an ant farm and looking forward to hear them, squealing in terror when he steps on them. Mind you if I could see God tramping around every day and having no way to communicate with him at least I wouldn’t doubt his presence.
All forms of God are a leap of faith, but this particular form does not encourage me to make the leap.
> If so, that assumes that any monotheistic god would take an interest in humans.
Monotheistic gods seem to take an enormous interest in humans from what I can gather.
> Or maybe god was waiting until we had reached a certain level of literacy and civilization before it revealed itself.
Or maybe we had to reach a certain level of literacy and civilization in order to need him… We needed him in order to have laws. I am not mocking this, it is not trivial, but in the larger understanding of “god” I think Spinoza is closer to the truth.
Lewis isn’t making any argument in this passage; he’s simply giving a 101 breakdown in the difference between Pantheists and Theists.
Also, who in the world said that God only showed up when humans did? I can’t think of a mainstream monotheistic religion that doesn’t claim that God predates the beginning of the natural universe.
> But it also thinks that a great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and that God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again"
If that’s not an argument I don’t know what is.
I think you have misunderstood my comment about god and human history.
It's a description. Lewis is saying that Christians believe X. Nowhere is there are argument for why you should believe what Christians believe in that passage.
>I think you have misunderstood my comment about god and human history.
OK. Fair enough. But in the context of CS Lewis’ writings, I think it’s not an unfair inference that there is an argument there. I will let it go.
I was not trying to make a point about how long God has been around, but how long it took the human race to stumble upon him in three related but different forms.
I understand the dichotomy -- and stand with the Beyond Good and Evil crowd -- but it doesn't address my question which is about semantics.
Let's say Johan describes the universe as "cold and indifferent, where life is a cosmic coincidence" and Tess describes it as "miraculous, beautiful beyond description".
These two people are describing the same universe. Although their tone differs radically, they don't contradict each other logically because their descriptions are subjective. My question is whether saying one shares a soul or doesn't share a soul is meaningful logically or merely another distinction without a difference.
My take here is that the real stuff doesn't happen at the level of propositional affirmations or negations. "Sharing a soul" is just a bunch of words meant to point those of us "here" towards a state of consciousness that we aren't currently experiencing, but that many people have experienced and are experiencing, and of which we may have more glimpses than we usually care to remember or appreciate. It's like trying to describe the taste of chocolate to someone who doesn't know it.
I would disagree that Johan and Tess don't contradict it other, assuming they were being sincere in their statements. Though it may be possible for a cold, indifferent, and purposeless universe to be beautiful and a miracle, it would be a very odd kind of beauty and a very strange kind of miracle. Things can be subjective, but also have logical implications or be true or false.
As to your "shared soul" problem, I would say that is is certainly meaningful as well. If we are all sharing one soul, then that describes an aspect of reality. A very important one, for now I would be aware that if I harm my neighbor, or my cat, I harm myself for we all share one soul. On the other hand, if we do not share one soul and each have our own soul than that also has strong implications. For one thing, it means that I am not the only person in existence. This is strange, as I did not create myself. Was my soul then created for a purpose? Could I either succeed or fail at accomplishing this purpose?
So I don't think it's semantics, unless you don't actually mean the things you are saying. It is either true that we all share one soul, or false. To say that it is true is to say something, not nothing.
I think you are approaching the cosmology of the Upanishads here. For a very good treatment of this topic I recommend the Epilogue of “What is Life” by Erwin Schrödinger.
“Within a cultural milieu (Kulturkreis) where certain conceptions (which once had or still have a wider meaning amongst other peoples) have been limited and specialized, it is daring to give to this conclusion the simple wording that it requires. In Christian terminology to say: ‘Hence I am God Almighty’ sounds both blasphemous and lunatic. But please disregard these connotations for the moment and consider whether the above inference is not the closest a biologist can get to proving God and immortality at one stroke.
In itself, the insight is not new. The earliest records to my knowledge date back some 2,500 years or more. From the early great Upanishads the recognition ATHMAN = BRAHMAN (the personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self) was in Indian thought considered, far from being blasphemous, to represent the quintessence of deepest insight into the happenings of the world. The striving of all the scholars of Vedanta was, after having learnt to pronounce with their lips, really to assimilate in their minds this grandest of all thoughts.
Again, the mystics of many centuries, independently, yet in perfect harmony with each other (somewhat like the particles in an ideal gas) have described, each of them, the unique experience of his or her life in terms that can be condensed in the phrase: DEUS FACTUS SUM (I have become God).
To Western ideology the thought has remained a stranger, in spite of Schopenhauer and others who stood for it and in spite of those true lovers who, as they look into each other’s eyes, become aware that their thought and their joy are numerically one – not merely similar or identical; but they, as a rule, are emotionally too busy to indulge in clear thinking, in which respect they very much resemble the mystic.”
Schrödinger goes on to further describe the Vedantic concept of each of us being an aspect of a universal “One”.
I believe the book is now in the public domain and available as a PDF
What I found most useful in grappling these questions is to read the lives and direct writings of those who didn't just wonder about it, but who (by their own admission) experienced reality in the way Hank above has described. There have been examples in all sorts of cultures and traditions, but Nisargadatta's _I Am That_ is the best example I know of someone stating it powerfully in 1st person.
I never studied Nisargadatta's teachings, but his consciousness hierarchy seems similar to (some) Sufi teachings. It jibes with the commonly experienced (at least among mystics) of the dissolution of selfhood. There may be distinctions between his and other mystical praxes that I'd see if I dug deeper, tough.
My only problem with Nisargadatta's analysis — as well as Spinoza's — is the continual reference to being.
Nagarjuna seems to have been the first philosopher to have gotten beyond the idea (obsession?) with beingness. But once he posits there is no being and no non-being the the whole mystical enterprise of obtaining oneness with the universe seems to be illusionary. Of course, I may be misunderstanding his logical tetralemas. Even though I find his analysis to be convincing with my limited understanding, perversely, I'm still in the mystical camp.
What I like about Nisargadatta is that he mostly talks (his writings are transcripts of his dialogues with people) experientially, with no attempt to do formal philosophy. He had his awakening, he remember what mind was like before, he feels what it's like after, and seeks to convey the difference in as many thoughtful words. Because there is little philosophical baggage, it's easy to read and get some sense of the depth he wants to convey, and of how it's not really a question of beliefs. So whenever there are words like "self" or "being", they're meant as pointers, not as philosophical assertions.
Nagarjuna of course is the granddaddy of it all, from just over 2000 years ago. And as you say, he goes even deeper, not even the concepts of "being" or "self" are left standing. He's also a proper philosopher, writing in the form of formal arguments aimed at specific philosophical opponents; and since his main form of argumentation is to take the theories of existing schools and push them to the utter absurd limits of their consequences, if you really want to grapple intellectually with Nagarjuna, you probably need to get acquainted with worldview of the long-extinct Sarvastivadin Buddhist school among others. Not to mention that he's such a totem pole, that hardly anyone reads Nagarjuna as Nagarjuna, but rather through the lens of the founders of sub(sub)schools like Bhavya, Chandrakirti, Shantarakshita, and (on the other side of the Himalayas) Tsongkhapa and Gorampa, all the way to Gendun Choepel. So it's quite a journey if you want to go into all that — personally I quite enjoyed it!
Then again, however careful Nagarjuna's followers want to be with language, at the end of the day they're also Buddhists, and so remain committed to an account of awakening as something that can be experienced by a living, human being. It's just that instead of using common words like "Self" or "beingness", they tend to use highly technical words like "suchness" or "dharmadhatu", to emphasize the discontinuity with common concepts. The mystical component is very much there, by design.
Alan Watts did a “here’s how I would explain it to a 8 year old” thing in one of his books:
Paraphrasing:
“God plays a trick on himself when he is born in each of us and makes himself forget he’s God so he can experience his creation anew.”
Thomas Mann riffs on the all the ‘small souls’ being a part of a larger soul in ‘The Magic Mountain’
In the chapter titled ‘Snow’, Hans Castorp is lost alone skiing and his brush with death is described as the small soul reuniting with the whole. Hans does live through that experience though.
If you’ve yet to pick up ‘The Magic Mountain’, it’s set in an early 20th century tuberculosis sanitarium in Davos. It’s really a pretty good read.
Your "God plays a trick on himself" quote reminded me of a passage from Chesterton on this subject:
"Love desires personality; therefore love desires division. It is the instinct of Christianity to be glad that God has broken the universe into little pieces, because they are living pieces. It is her instinct to say 'little children love one another' rather than to tell one large person to love himself. This is the intellectual abyss between Buddhism and Christianity; that for the Buddhist or Theosophist personality is the fall of man, for the Christian it is the purpose of God, the whole point of his cosmic idea. The world-soul of the Theosophists asks man to love it only in order that man may throw himself into it. But the divine centre of Christianity actually threw man out of it in order that he might love it. The oriental deity is like a giant who should have lost his leg or hand and be always seeking to find it; but the Christian power is like some giant who in a strange generosity should cut off his right hand, so that it might of its own accord shake hands with him. "
I can only speak from the Buddhist perspective, but Buddhist practice and philosophy is all about the alleviation of suffering. Love and hate are emotions that may give us temporary pleasure, but they all lead back to suffering. You may think you're in a wonderful relationship, but your lover leaves you, and you suffer the loss and separation. Your separation from others may make you misunderstand their motives. The person who won your lover's love may be the object of your hatred. But if you put yourself in their shoes, they were seeking some release from their suffering. If you understand that we're all suffering together, that allows you have compassion (karuna) for others.
We're all grasping at things to make us feel better, but those only temporarily alleviate the itch. No outside force or godlike being is responsible for our inner states. Recognizing that suffering is an innate part of existence, we offer karuna to others to help relieve their suffering and we seek to develop equanimity within ourselves to get past our own suffering. Implied in this equation is you get back what you put out — karma. Although the Buddha didn't touch on questions of god or what happens us after we die, Buddhism developed in culture where a belief in reincarnation was common (although not universal). So Buddhists came to believe that karma follows us between our lives. But strictly speaking, a good Buddhist does not have to believe in the existence of a higher being or higher beings, nor does a Buddhist have to believe in an afterlife. This makes Buddhism (especially Zen) attractive to American atheists and materialists.
Anyway, a Buddhist wouldn't say "love your fellow human" nor "love yourself", because love is a grasping emotion. Instead of love, a Buddhist would say "have compassion for others" (because they're suffering, too), and while you're at it, analyze the nature of your own suffering (prajna, aka wisdom), so you can develop equanimity and understand the root of other people's suffering to offer them the proper type of karuna.
Yes; and this difference in understanding of love, and what the purpose of existence is, is part of that "intellectual abyss between Buddhism and Christianity". To a Buddhist, existence is an evil to escape through the extinguishing of the self. For a Christian our existence is purposeful, and that purpose is not to escape suffering but to live in relationship with the Good. To love something, you must have a self and the thing you love must be separate from you: of course pursuing love would be folly to a Buddhist. To a Christian love is a virtue to be perfected within ourselves; and the proper object of love is God, who is eternal and whose very essence is Good. As Paul wrote:
"If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails."
Note the language is steeped in this idea of purpose: that we exist for a reason, and a Good reason, and that love is central to the purpose of our existence, so much so that if we do not have it then everything else we have amounts to nothing.
So I agree, a Buddhist would not say "love your fellow human". That is a Christian idea.
I thought this was a fantastic article exploring the difference between LGB and TQIA+. What I found really interesting was the division between what's a preference and what requires (or makes use of) medical interventions. https://juliebindel.substack.com/p/the-problem-with-lgbtqia
To any extent that it's worthwhile to decompose the full set into two subsets, I'd think LGBA & TQI+ would be more useful; the former are about other people & the latter are about oneself.
I think it's mostly about the comparatively mild social implications. Asexuals might occasionally get awkward questions from their parents and friends, but nobody tries to throw them off buildings.
Also, being asexual isn't a behaviour, it's an internal state that leads to a behaviour. The behaviour is celibacy, and celibacy can have all sorts of reasons (asexuality, religious belief, just haven't found the right person, etc). You can classify people as hetero/homo/bisexual by their behaviour, but you can't classify them as asexual just by seeing them _not_ have sex.
I read it, but I don't see what distinguishes this particular opinion piece from the other hundreds of "trans activists are coming to mutilate your kids" pieces we've already got. I mean, the photo caption is "David Tennant, who peddles the notion of ‘trans children’", which thoroughly undercuts the idea that the purpose of the article is objective truth-seeking.
You mention that author makes a distinction between LGB and the rest of the letters, but that particular "divide and conquer" approach against LGBTQ+ activism is very far from being new, so I'm wondering if there's something else you saw in it.
>Depending on where one lives, children coming out as lesbian or gay might face violence and abuse. Lesbian and gay kids often get bullied, no matter where they live. But the challenges of being lesbian or gay are social. Lesbians and gay men may seek psychotherapy, not (except in rare cases) to change their sexuality but to deal with the pain of being stigmatized and/or the emotional problems that many people experience.
Transgender people also face violence and abuse, also get bullied, also face similar social challenges, and also frequently seek therapy to deal with the pain of being stigmatized and various emotional problems. And same as cis-LGB people, we generally do not seek conversion therapy; in both cases, conversion therapy is ineffective as well as being generally not desired.
This commonality of experience is one big reason why LGBT is meaningful to group together. Another big reason is that there's a very large overlap between the categories. Many if not most trans people are bi, and many of us are gay (I'm a trans lesbian), and a fairly large number of cis gay and bi people are varying degrees of gender-nonconfirming in ways that have some similarities to being trans.
The article is correct as far as it goes that there is no analogue to medical transition for cis-gay people. That is a difference between cis-gays and trans people who pursue medical transition. But pursuing medical transition is not strictly necessary to be trans: some of us choose to live with dysphoria rather than facing the challenges of transition, and some (most commonly but not exclusively people with nonbinary gender identities) only feel the need to transition socially. That said, a lot of us (myself included) do feel the need to medically transition and feel we've vastly benefited from the ability to do so.
> Transgender people also face violence and abuse, also get bullied, also face similar social challenges, and also frequently seek therapy to deal with the pain of being stigmatized and various emotional problems
So do fat people, or very ugly people. Should we add F and U to the coalition?
Seriously though, I think it's *sometimes* fine to roll up L, G, B and T (and much more dubiously I and A) into one category for some purposes, just as it's okay to roll up "seafood" into a single category. But we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that they're not the same thing, and people are allowed to be one of them without being "on the same side" as the others.
Well said. In addition, there are medical interventions that are more relevant to gay men than to straight men, e.g., PrEP for HIV, vaccinations for some STIs, testing for many STIs.
And I'm cynical enough to believe that this would be pointed out by the author in a new opinion piece to try to separate the "GB" from the "L" if they're eventually successful in separating the "T" from the rest.
The reporting restrictions clearly haven't endeared the prosecution to the media or the medical profession. I'm all for protecting the families of the deceased, but this has been at the cost of a Lucy Letby subculture developing, helped by her pitiable demeanour (which is consistent with her being a manipulative sociopath, but if so it's working on the Guardian, the New Yorker and several neonatologists). When Shipman was convicted, it was immediately announced that he may have killed hundreds. I was expecting something similar, but it hasn't happened yet. There is an enquiry coming up but that it's not clear yet what the focus will be - it could just be about why she was allowed to carry on working, presupposing the murders rather than putting forward additional evidence for the murders. So, a bit of a mess. Arguments casting doubt about the air embolism or the insulin deserve some sort of answer, arguments that Letby is a poor fit for a serial killer or "you can't ascribe a single cause to a baby death, there are a myriad of factors and it's unfair to blame one person" deserve nothing but contempt and mockery. Who would ever get convicted for murder if the bar is set so high?
I think the reporting restrictions are because there are still ongoing court cases regarding the topic, not because they are trying to protect the families. Normally these restrictions are imposed to avoid prejudicing potential juries before a trial begins.
That's right, and some prominent statisticians have had their say too. The prosecution did also present some medical causes of death i.e she injected them with air and/or insulin, but this is also being disputed.
For interest - if you write a reply to a thread comment and then realise you need to sign in, your comment will still be drafted after signing in but *is no longer tied to the thread and instead gets posted as a top level comment if you submit it*.
I suspect that's the cause of the occasional accidental top level comments we occasionally see here.
In art, literature, and Abrahamic religions the lamb traditionally represents innocence and the lion - sometimes tigers - represents savagery.
Why is this? The lion is no more driven by malice than the lamb chooses good. They each act according to their own nature as dictated by immutable biology.
I get it. The lamb’s wool is white and the lion’s claws are red with blood. It’s a facile symbolism. Surely we can do better. What would you use to represent innocence and savagery? Animal, vegetable, shape, scent, etc?
Does the lion really represent "savagery"? I would say lions traditionally represent *power*, whether used for good or ill. In the Bible, the lion is used to represent both God *and* Satan.
Maybe because the religion was by and for herders (and farmers), and to a shepherd, lambs are good and useful (although sometimes not to the lamb's personal benefit), whereas the lion is a dangerous (if individually magnificent) predator that should be killed on sight?
Those symbols were invented by ancient people who probably didn't know or think much about those animals beyond the ways they were relevant to humans.
So: the lamb is cute, harmless, helpless, can be eaten, and if you treat it well it will grow up into a useful sheep. The lion is mysterious, and if you see one you're in trouble.
Furthermore, if you subscribe to the idea that every creature is equally innocent because they're all part of nature and acting according to deterministic principles -- then the concepts of innocence and malice are kind of meaningless in the first place and don't really need to be represented by anything.
Why is this? The lion is no more driven by malice<
Malice and savagery are not the same thing. Savagery is the willingness to inflict great violence, with or without malice. Lions are savage, unquestionably.
Don't know if this is an answer, but male lions will kill cubs that aren't their own if they take over a pride. Don't think sheep do that.
Another reading is that lambs/sheep are herd animals (and rather dumb). Elites may be motivated to push the idea that "good" people should be like herd animals, by falling in line and being like the rest of the herd. Male lions fight against their rulers for control of the pride which is probably not something you want to encourage if you are already controlling the pride.
It's symbolism - you're more likely to get mauled and eaten by a lion than a lamb. Lions also represent majesty, kingship, leadership and other good qualities; another Biblical title is The Lion of the Tribe of Judah which became representative of the House of David (and thus attached to Jesus Christ, who as the son of David is the Lion as well as being the Lamb of God).
The explanation I heard was that cats want to make sure their prey is as passive as possible before going for the killing bite on the neck. Wolves will do a similar thing where they'll harass the prey and try to distract or weaken it before going in for the kill. Cats are generally solitary hunters, so they have to do more battering before killing.
So it inflicts more suffering, but from the point of view of the cat, doing that maximizes chances they'll live to hunt another day. Longer survival means more chance of passing on your genes, while minimal suffering puts that at risk. Only one of these gets selected for.
If they have no theory of mind that allows them to appreciate the fact that they are inflicting pain - and I am unaware of any evidence that they possess such, but if you know of any I’d be happy to consider it - then you are right that this isn’t malice. For lack of a better term it’s play. Whatever it is, to the best of our knowledge it’s as instinctive and reflexive as scratching an itch.
I don't know what the latest study in Nature says about theory of mind in cats, but if you think that culture should not portray big cats as vicious until it's proven that cats understand they are being vicious, you have a pretty impoverished understanding of culture and language.
Long ago I took a university Extension class that gave me a chance to stand a couple feet in front of the bars that restrained an adult tiger. As she passed in front of me I could have reached through the bars and touched her flank.
I resisted the impulse to try that and still have two arms to show for my restraint.
It's truly remarkable how the pop media have turned on old Joe.
Just weeks ago he was their darling, and now they're all singing from the same hymnal and slowly shuffling him over to the kitchen door. It's beginning to look like regressive progressives, including his unqualified 'affirmative action' appointments, are using the debate performance as a casus belli to declare hostilities against him.
I'm not exactly a fan, but I feel sorry for the guy. He made so many concessions to the genderfied woke and the racialist mob, lent them his political expertise. Peter Baker recently published who his seven or eight closest advisors are. Maybe former President Trump can debate them. They'll be the ones running things -- with or without Joe.
We've known since Reagan the suit in the seat isn't running the show.
The only real question is , Who is?
Biden fading out at this time is very bad news for the three-year-old ecosystem of Democrat players behind the curtain. No doubt, scores of 'advisors', 'aides', 'speech writers', etc. affected are scrambling to maintain or gain position in the shakeup: So it's Harris? Really? Or is it ____?.
When Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bush 1's crew were up there, the NYT still had reporters, and when they weren't finding Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, they actually covered the people behind the scenes.
Today, not so much.
So maybe we'll find some real reporters again. One can hope. It may be the Chinese curse -- to live in interesting times.
This is politics. No one that mattered cared about Biden. He was only important as a way for Democrats to retain power, and the debate made it much less likely he could defeat Trump in an election. After all, those entrenched in one party or the other don't decide election winners, but those that may choose between one or the other do, and if someone wasn't sure between the two then Biden's performance sure made a definitive point.
I feel sorry for the old man struggling as best he can, and he should be pitied. Those calling strongly for him to step aside care only about the election win.
Strongly disagree - calling for him to step aside can also be about caring for the future of the American experiment. Having a (potential) senile leader is (potentially) catastrophic to the lives of hundreds of millions of people.
You have a point: not everyone just wants the win. But those that knew about his cognitive limitations without doing anything about it that NOW are calling for the change are the worst ones.
Unsheltered homelessness in San Fransisco is at a 10 year low, even as sheltered homelessness continues to rise. I guess all that spending on homeless shelters did have an effect after all.
Yes, so why didn't you cite it when you posted the claim?
As @Renderdog notes below, there's reason to be skeptical of a city grading itself, in the winter, two and a half months after a massive sweep and cleanup effort to impress Xi Jinping. You'll note that three weeks after the sweep, many people living on the streets returned, but many did not: (https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/san-francisco/san-francisco-streets-after-apec/3395312/).
This (federally mandated) count has been conducted every two years going back to 2014. If you think they're rigging it, the question would be why would they rig it *more* over time? Also, if they were going to rig it, why does it still show overall homeless going *up*?
I mean sure, it's always worth questioning any statistic, but it doesn't seem like there's a particular reason to disbelieve this one. And more importantly, this appears to be the only good source of data about homelessness in SF in the first place. If you don't believe it, you don't have any statistics at all.
If people are getting off the streets and into shelters, that's an improvement. Now San Francisco has to make sure that the shelters aren't dangerous and violent places, due to drugs, mental illness, etc. That's the hard part: some homeless people don't want to go into shelters because they are dangerous, violent places due to other homeless people drinking, taking drugs, and being mentally ill, and some homeless people don't want to go into shelters because they won't be allowed to drink and take drugs while they're also mentally ill.
Homelessness is not a simple problem, and I hate the facile "well just give them houses first and then we'll sort the rest out, duh" approach I see too much on social media.
> does anybody else remember when the bad guys were the ones wearing masks?
"A face mask? Against a virus coming from China? Only a *racist* would do that!" was the woke position for a brief time interval in the early 2020... and then it was quickly memory-holed.
I think it was just some of the wingnuts (left-wing, in this case) who memed themselves into absurdity. I have a fair number in my vicinity, so I saw more of it, but I'd expect that I'm above average in that respect.
I don't recall official guidance that people wearing masks were bad guys. But there were definitely people who took "most people shouldn't" and turned it into "no one should and anyone who does is bad". It's the same sort of "telephone" game that can turn "51%" into "most" into "almost all" into "all", coupled with a desire to establish social dominance that prefers to mask itself with righteousness.
It was certainly not the worst form of mass insanity that happened during the pandemic, so I'd basically stopped caring about it after a few months. Plus, it reversed into the opposite direction fairly quickly, so my "arguing for centrist sanity" pose had me pushing back in the direction of "masks being useful but not magic", for much of the time.
You're not wrong, the question is who is responsible? Some people are neurotic about the Rules and use them as a pretext to yell. But we really did need some input from public health, and the evidence was patchy and fluid. Masks have a marginal effect which is difficult to express in a public health campaign. Masks Probably Help.
The first link doesn't work, could you re-post? I did say masks have a marginal effect - which may be tantamount to "of little use". The question is what the state of knowledge re: masks was c. March 2020 - I say it was probably foggy and hard to express in a single snappy public health campaign. Cue terrible messaging and Covid Karens and so on. But there will always be Karens one way or another.
This Cochrane review is actually an update from pre-pandemic one and the conclusions haven't changed much. What the WHO and others said initially (that masks gives false security) was according to our level of knowledge. But then at some point panic took over except in Sweden. Madness followed and the rest is history. It was very sad that people reacted with panic and switched off their rational brains.
I too am old, and I don't remember that happening in rainy Ireland. There *were* scolding articles in the press about people panicking and grabbing up masks and thereby depriving the health services of needed and vital supplies, but that was when the party line was being set by America and Doctor Fauci (remember him?) that masks were unnecessary and for health workers only.
Of course, then the party line switched and we were all supposed to mask up, but it didn't get as bad over here as in America, at least not as I remember.
I think the messaging makes a difference. Fauci should have been honest and said that masks were helpful from the beginning, and then should have tried the "scolding" route of telling people not to buy them up so that doctors could have them. Instead the party line was "masks are not needed" and then suddenly they 180'd and said "masks are super incredibly important and you need to wear them!"
I really think avoiding the scolding route in favor of the "lie to the rubes, you know they have not self control" route is responsible for a significant amount of the degrading of trust in American institutions, and the government in particular.
Not joking. There were definitely campaigns against wearing masks on the first few weeks. As I said the forgetting here is the more interesting thing, like one of those time travel shows where things have subtlety changed and the population has forgotten something they should know. Like forgetting the Beatles in the movie Yesterday.
I remember the recommendation to save the masks - particularly surgical type masks - for medical professionals. This was for a short while until production of masks for the general public was ramped up.
I live in the US. In my little corner of it, I heard no yelling.
Was it a campaign against mask *wearing*? Or against mask *hoarding*?
I recall the latter - there was concern that a few people were buying up large amounts of masks, either to personally use or price gouge (see, e.g. https://nypost.com/2020/03/30/brooklyn-man-arrested-for-hoarding-masks-coughing-on-fbi-agents/), which was impacting the supply available for healthcare and other critical workers. I can personally attest that the issue was real - a member of my family was a nurse at the time in a department that didn't deal with COVID cases, and there was a period where supply was so low that she was being instructed not to wear masks for procedures that she would normally mask for, because the hospital had a low supply of masks and needed to make sure they were available for the teams that were treating COVID and other respiratory cases.
On the other hand, I don't recall the former, but I could see how there could be blurring of the lines between the two. If I say "save masks so we make sure there are enough for nurses & immunosuppressed patients who need them," then on the one hand my goal isn't "anti-mask" in the sense that it disputes the effectiveness of masks or thinks that they are bad in general - if anything it's the opposite, recognizes masks as good and is trying to prioritize a limited supply of masks for those who need them most. It also can be construed fairly as "discouraging mask use," but not in a way that I'd view as problematic to the CDC's credibility as some kind of waffle on the value of masks.
Here in the US, there was briefly a campaign by the CDC to discourage mask-wearing, but nobody outside the CDC took it seriously. The only actual yelling at mask wearers came later in the pandemic and was largely done by insane people who thought they were part of a globalist plot to normalize mass compliance or something--and those instances were few and far between. I never saw one in person, only a handful of videos posted and reposted on social media. The vast, vast majority of people reacted to mask-wearing with something between approval and eyerolling disdain, with nothing said either way.
I wore a mask in public every working day during the pandemic (I didn't WFH), and whenever shopping or otherwise going out. Either a surgical (type) mask, or a 3M respirator in poorly ventilated or crowded indoor spaces. Never got so much as a dirty look in the hundreds of times and thousands of hours doing it.
I didn't forget anything; my experience of the pandemic era simply differed from yours. I get the feeling that a lot of people's did.
I asked if people remembered when there was a campaign against mask wearing. I wasn’t asking if people were shouted at, and I didn’t ask about “later in the pandemic”. Your sneery response - which was an ad hominem which I might report - was that it was only me who remembered this. Even though you wouldn’t presume to say that it was, you did.
> I wouldn't presume to say, but that's sure what my guess would be.
(I hate that kind of language by the way, don’t say that you aren’t going to engage in an insult and engage in the insult anyway).
But clearly, as with the more honest arguments here attest, and the Google evidence supports, it wasn’t just me. You seemed to have sort of remembered that the CDC did in fact argue against the use of masks but are still resorting to the anti mask campaign being my own version of reality.
I've never seen anyone shouted at for wearing a mask (that was probably a red state thing), but there was a brief period early in the pandemic when the dominant narrative was that masks were likely to be ineffective for ordinary people and needed to be saved for the medical workers who needed them and knew how to use them.
It was a fashionable left winger who chided me. I’m talking the very first months. Across the world at the time the reasons given for not using masks was not that they were needed by medical workers, but that they didn’t work. Sometimes both which made no sense.
You can use googles date restricted search to see it.
surgical masks don't work after:2020-03-01 before:2020-06-01
There is *some debate* in there but it’s clear the WHO and many national health organisations have decided they were useless.
My favourite is the Time magazine story. It has been updated since - which you will see if you click in - but the Google saved title and first paragraph is cached and it’s:
> Why people aren’t listening to experts about Face Masks?
> The government and most health experts keep telling the public not to wear face masks for coronavirus. So why are they doing it anyway?
But I’m really interested in the forgetting. The same woman, a village acquaintance, who shouted at me (well it was more an exasperated exclamation) now denies she was ever anti mask, and most people forget that it was ever a thing.
Something similar happened with antigen tests which went from snake oil to necessities in a matter of weeks, and to a lesser extent the idea of herd immunity from the vaccines.
My favorite were the snarky social media posts from nurses who thought they were special for having a little training on how to fit an n95 mask, and how the aging white women who are buying up all the masks will just wear them wrong and it'll do no good anyway.
I remember too, and in fact talked about that in the comment to which you are replying. I don't know why you're trying to treat this as some sort of own when you're just repeating what I already said with more anger.
I remember standing in line outside a fish and chip shop, wearing my compulsory mask, staring at a several-months-old poster urging me not to wear a mask. I don't remember anyone shouting at anyone about wearing a mask though.
Mostly I'm amazed how much I've forgotten about covid, how much we just don't think about that whole period missing from our lives. I wonder if this is what it was like living in 1948, you thought the war would change everything but instead now it's just something you think about every now and then "Hey, remember the war? That was weird, wasn't it?"
This is so true, Melvin. It’s disappeared from art and literature too, with the exception of Stephen King’s last novel which was horribly dated as a result. Even during Covid there were few attempts to represent reality on screen in contemporary situations, understandably as it thwarts the action.
I was one of the first people in my neighborhood to wear a mask. I little kid asked his parents if I was a doctor. No one ever gave me a hard time about it though.
This is definitely true, and I unfortunately remember being a part of that group during the very early days of 2020, even arguing about it in a university forum. Not my proudest/smartest moment in retrospect.
Apart from other things that government mandated me with the threat of police force (with which I disagreed and resented but followed to avoid any penalties), that was basically the only thing I did to minimise risks.
I don't know how people are not freaking out more about the supreme court case about immunity. Sotomayor, in dissent, said that it means that the president can order the military to assassinate people and get immunity.
The majority responded - not by saying that it isn't true - but by saying that they don't think it's as likely as a president being "unable to boldly and fearlessly carry out his duties".
I think the best response was something like "those orders would be illegal, and illegal orders are definitionally not the President acting in his official capacity, and therefore there would be no immunity", with a side order of "the reason those orders are illegal is that Congress passed laws making them illegal, so maybe you should think about what Congress lets the Executive Branch get away with, before your party loses control".
"those orders would be illegal, and illegal orders are definitionally not the President acting in his official capacity, and therefore there would be no immunity"
This isn't what the supreme court was saying. If this was the view then no immunity would be necessary; because if the orders were not illegal, then there's no criminal liability to be immune from.
Immunity only comes into play when the president does something that Congress says *is* illegal. Saying that the president has immunity for official acts, without it being a null set, means that there *are* official acts that are against a law from Congress. And therefore that the president can break laws passed by Congress with impunity.
As I've said to various people on this thread - people keep assuming that the supreme court must have said something reasonable, but they really did say some crazy shit!
He can ... but it won't necessarily be enough, even if you trust the Senate to be responsible about impeachment. E.g. the situation with trump, where he lost the election and is on the way out unless he does a coup to hold on to power. "We'll kick you out of office if you try a coup" isn't a meaningful threat if the president is going to be out of office without the coup anyway.
And this is really the most important thing to be worried about - I'm not worried about the president shaking down Chipotle for free burritos, I'm worried about a president trying to become a dictator.
Seems to me if the military is willing to assassinate domestic political opponents on the president's orders, and the president is willing to give those orders, then whether the president can be criminally prosecuted for those orders after leaving office is irrelevant, because that guy isn't a president any more, he's a military dictator, and military dictators don't leave just because their term is up.
No system can ever be a 100% guarantee of not lapsing into dictatorship. You can only have systems that are more or less likely to do so. You aren't going to have a system where there is 0 risk of the military being willing to assassinate political rivals and the president being willing to order it, there will always be some uncertainty.
And with that uncertainty, a factor that decides how likely it is to happen, is whether there will be consequences for it and what the courts and other authorities say about it.
Indeed, but `criminal consequences for the president personally after he leaves office' are not the most important consequences here. Impeachment&removal is almost surely more relevant to the President's decision making regarding whether to give such orders, and the risk of criminal consequences to the members of military who carry out the assassination are almost surely more relevant to whether those orders are obeyed. Neither is affected by the ruling. And it was already the case that the President personally could not be criminally charged while actually in office.
I don't know factually what would be the most important consequence. Hard to know how these thing would play out in practice. In many cases impeachment and criminal charges would go hand in hand.
But it is important in any sort of self coup/overturning election scenario, probably one of the most consequential ones, where the president will soon leave office anyway, and so impeachment won't do a whole lot.
I also think there's an expressive element to this ruling - e.g., it doesn't say that the soldiers that do the murdering are immune. But I bet it would embolden soldiers in that situation who want to do the bad thing. And same people who like this ruling will inevitably see any law regulating the army as less legitimate, given all the language about "conclusive, preclusive" powers in which the president has total control.
I agree, it's worth freaking out over. It seems like using Seal Team 6 to kill people is contentious, but I don't think the president needs the military for this ruling to be dangerous: POTUS has broad powers to address the nation (per Trump v United States) and absolute power of pardon. What's to stop a president from calling his opponents very bad people, a danger to the country, etc., and then pardoning the killer? Sure, the president could already do that before this decision: what's changed is that now neither of his actions are submissible as evidence in court and he cannot be held criminally liable for them.
The decision creates a huge space where a creative president can criminally misbehave.
Presidents can only pardon federal crimes, so he'd only be able to protect killers whose crimes were exclusively federal. Killing a federal judge in California, for example, is both a state and a federal crime, so California prosecutors could still bring murder charges despite a pardon.
There's still a pretty big window of vulnerability, since no state has jurisdiction over DC or various national parks. I think the federal courts might also have exclusive jurisdiction over crimes occurring on military bases or in federal buildings, but I'm not 100% sure and search results for "exclusive federal jurisdiction" are dominated by subject matter jurisdiction questions.
I'm not american, but imo the evidence inadmissibility clause is a very bad decision. It can lead to situations where everyone agrees something was obviously illegal, but all the evidence is inadmissible.
Everything else, especially that part from Sotomayor's dissent, is a pretty bad take. The majority correctly notes it as baseless fearmongering unhinged from reality. At the point when a court it rules a political assassination as a "core duty", it's already so captured that it will rule anything it wants anyway. It's like complaining that some particular welfare system will stop working when civilization collapes - yes of course it does, but so will any other welfare system, by its nature.
"The majority correctly notes it as baseless fearmongering unhinged from reality"
We should be clear about what exactly the majority says. They say that the dissent with its hypotheticals ignores the more likely problem. They don't say she's wrong about the implications of their holding. And she is, in fact, right about the implications of their holding, whether the majority disputes it or not.
"At the point when a court it rules a political assassination as a "core duty", it's already so captured that it will rule anything it wants anyway."
I'm sorry to tell you but that's the world you're living in! Like I said in my original comment - I don't know why people aren't freaking out more!
> I'm sorry to tell you but that's the world you're living in!
For years or decades, this just formalises what was known already, what was true already. The president can order assassinations including against American citizens - see Anwar al-Awlaki. It’s unlikely that an American president will assassinate an American political rival but the court was just confirming what was legal already. To do otherwise and apply retrospectively would mean Obama could be arrested. There can hardly be a distinction between assassinations being legal against American citizens abroad or at home, that would merely mean - in the hypothetical and fanciful case suggested by the dissent - that a president would wait for his political rival to go on holiday to Spain and kill him there.
It doesn't just formalize what was already known. This sounds like the savvy, appropriately cynical thing to say, but it ain't so.
It doesn't explain why there's a whole prosecution of the president (possibly 3 prosecutions) that will get at least partially shut down now, where almost nobody was arguing that they couldn't go forward due to immunity before. Also doesn't explain why people spent so much time wondering about whether trump would/could pardon himself, or why Ford pardoned Nixon, etc.
As for al-Awlaki, I was against that, as I was against trump killing his eight year old daughter. If I were in charge, the president would have fewer wartime powers, not more, including in that case; whereas my experience is that most people making a big stink about al-Awlaki are fine with expanded presidential powers, police powers, qualified immunity, holding people in GITMO, drone strikes under trump, the whole shebang, and thinks anyone against them on any of that is a liberal wuss; but they suddenly become a civil libertarian in the narrow case of when it's convenient to argue against Obama.
But legally the distinction with al-Awlaki would be that Congress (allegedly) did authorize the killing. You can argue against that, but it's a different argument from saying that the president is immune no matter what.
“If a president says, ‘we’re going to have an auction and I’m gonna veto or sign a bill based on who pays me more’ — that’s not prosecutable,” Super said. “‘Want to be a Supreme Court justice for the low, low sum of x?’ Not prosecutable, since appointing the highest offices is the preclusive power of the President.”
That seems completely wrong, because all that is required for a bribery conviction is an agreement to trade the exercise of political authority for compensation. There is no need for the government official to perform any act at all. https://www.ce9.uscourts.gov/jury-instructions/node/944. The appointment is a core official act, but since criminal liability is not based on the core official act, that doesn't matter.
For the same reason, the limits on evidence of intent behind the official act* is not much of an impediment, since all that is necessary is to show intent behind the agreement. And all of that can be shown by the testimony of the person offering the bribe, as well as any correspondence.
*A limitation which seems bad for Trump. He wants to argue that his motive was to safeguard the election, but that doesn't work if motive is irrelevant.
"The appointment is a core official act, but since criminal liability is not based on the core official act, that doesn't matter." I really think you're misunderstanding just how radical the Supreme Court decision is. Because it's part of an official act, nobody is allowed to review whethere or not there is any criminal liability!
But Footnote 3 on page 32 of the majority opinion discusses at some length how a prosecutor would prove a bribery allegation against a president based on an official act. That certainly implies that the decision is not as broad as you interpret it to be. (And, after all, the decision is nothing if not vague in most particulars)
Stepping back from "assassinating political enemies" for a second: what about this possibility?
It is within the core presidential duties to replace the Attorney General. The decision in Trump v United States appears to mean that the president can now replace the Attorney General by having him poisoned ... and he cannot be prosecuted for that.
Though why stick at Trump? Biden too can now do a Cersei Lannister on all those calling for him to step down, get rid of all the disloyal and backstabbers coming out of the woodwork, right?
As best I can figure out, the distinction between core and non-core duties has been left somewhat vague so as to allow for common-sense interpretations in the future, and common sense says that if the President murders the Attorney-General then this will be found to be a non-core duty.
Same with any other silly example that one could invent. There's probably genuine grey areas, but it's somewhere else.
But that's simply not what the court said. "As best I can figure out" -- with respect, Melvin, that's what's going on in *your* head. It's not going to constrain the court in deciding what they want to decide.
So, the future of US democracy depends on the Supreme Court only using common-sense interpretations? The same Supreme Court that just ruled that it's not bribery to pay government officials for doing you favors, as long as the payment comes after the favor and not before. Would you call that a common-sense interpretation?
That is not what the Court ruled. From the dissent:
>There is no dispute that §666 criminalizes bribes. See ante, at 1. This Court has also been clear about what a bribe requires: “a quid pro quo.” United States v. Sun-Diamond Growers of Cal., 526 U. S. 398, 404 (1999). A quid pro quo means “a specific intent to give or receive something of value in exchange for an official act.” Id., at 404–405. So, for a payment to constitute a bribe, there must be an upfront agreement to exchange the payment for taking an official action. See ibid.
>Legislatures have also considered it similarly wrongful for government officials to accept gratuities under certain circumstances, but unlike bribes, gratuities do not have a quid pro quo requirement. Generally speaking, rather than an actual agreement to take payment as the impetus for engaging in an official act (a quid pro quo exchange), gratuities “may constitute merely a reward for some future act that the public official will take (and may already have determined to take), or for a past act that he has already taken.” Id., at 405.
>We took this case to resolve “[w]hether section 666 criminalizes gratuities, i.e., payments in recognition of actions the official has already taken or committed to take, without any quid pro quo agreement to take those actions.” Pet. for Cert. I. The majority today answers no, when the answer to that question should be an unequivocal yes.
Hence, the case is purely one of statutory interpretation, and the Court only held that the statute, as currently written, applies to bribes but not gratuities.
"The same Supreme Court that just ruled that it's not bribery to pay government officials for doing you favors, as long as the payment comes after the favor and not before."
You may be interested in the discussion of this point over on The Motte, as I've linked above:
"Fears:
Sotomayor: The President will be immune for ordering assassinations, coups, bribes for pardons, etc. (pages 29-30)
Roberts: Your chilling doom is disproportionate to what was decided (page 37). You are just fearmongering with extreme hypotheticals and a future where the President feels free to violate criminal law. (page 40) You need to be more concerned about an executive branch that cannibalizes itself with prosecution.
My thoughts: Disrespect is a legitimate concern. I'd imagine, though, that assassinating rivals, or attempting a coup would be something that the court would rule as beyond the President's authority. This would probably defuse a lot of the online complaints about this opinion. The bribes for pardons thing is weird, because it deals with something agreed to be within the exclusive powers, even by the government.
And that's the end of Sotomayor's opinion."
If you go into the comments, you'll see people talking about 'does this mean bribery is okay?'
If I were an alien or a computer or something reading this case, and had to decide whether it immunizes the president from poisoning the AG to remove them, then I'd probably say that it does, unless there's something in there that says something about the *means* of carrying out a particular "core" power possibly being invalid, but I don't remember that and I don't think Jackson would have put that in the footnote if there was.
The reason I'm less worried about it is that historically "use the military to claim dictatorial power" is a bigger issue than "randomly poison an underling you could have just fired". And I do trust that the supreme court would find a reason to say that their opinion doesn't cover the poisoning scenario, whereas I don't think so about the military assassinating people (keeping in mind that it would probably come with a really thin veneer of an excuse of military necessity).
Everyone seems to be forgetting that it isn't a "core duty" to, say, replace the AG, but to enforce the laws. It may be that the President decides the current AG should be replaced in order to do that, and the President must have unrestricted power to do so. HOW it is done, however, matters, and poisoning couldn't be considered a valid way of doing it, since it certainly is the opposite of enforcing the laws.
If I understand correctly, the Supreme Court did not decide anything concerning Trump, just that Presidents, in general, no matter who they are, are immune to prosecution for official acts. It is up to another court, so far, to decide whether January 6 stuff was official acts, but, supposing those prosecuting are correct that Trump was behind it all and ordered all of the rebellious acts, such acts would clearly NOT be official acts. But no one wants the President prosecuted for, say, supporting Israel or Ukraine, even if someone strongly opposes the policy and wants to delay it by any means possible.
"Everyone seems to be forgetting that it isn't a "core duty" to, say, replace the AG, but to enforce the laws"
The opinion does say that removing the AG and other similar officers is a "conclusive and preclusive" power of the president (which they use interchangeably with "core" power, at least if they mean there to be a distinction I don't know what it is)
"For that reason, Trump’s threatened removal of the Acting Attorney General likewise implicates “conclusive and preclusive” Presidential authority."
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, people keep projecting their much more reasonable gloss onto the opinion which downplays how bad it is. But the opinion really is way more extreme!
If I'm reading Jackson's dissent correctly, she thinks that's probably what it implies
> That point bears emphasizing. Immunity can issue for Presidents under the majority’s model even for unquestionably and intentionally egregious criminal behavior. Regardless of the nature or the impact of the President’s criminal conduct, so long as he is committing crimes “pursuant to the powers invested exclusively in him by the Constitu-tion,” ante, at 7, or as needed “to carry out his constitutional duties without undue caution,” ante, at 14, he is likely to be deemed immune from prosecution.
> To fully appreciate the oddity of making the criminal immunity determination turn on the character of the President’s responsibilities, consider what the majority says is one of the President’s “conclusive and preclusive” prerogatives: “ ‘[t]he President’s power to remove . . . those who wield executive power on his behalf.’ ” Ante, at 8 (quoting Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 591 U. S. 197, 204 (2020)). While the President may have the authority to decide to remove the Attorney General, for example, the question here is whether the President has the option to remove the Attorney General by, say, poisoning him to death. Put another way, the issue here is not whether the President has exclusive removal power, but whether a generally applicable criminal law prohibiting murder can restrict how the President exercises that authority.
Barring some secret cabal, it appears they're trying to avoid a dynamic like the one in Brazil, in which the incoming president sues the outgoing president, and candidates end up suing each other and campaigning between court dates and/or dodging incarceration between terms of service in government. It seems pretty out of control.
Here, some are still contesting the 2020 election or suing Fauci for doing his job. Obama certainly approved the killing of terrorists with drone strikes, and often there was 'collateral damage'. I wouldn't want to see him criminally charged for taking out the garbage.
I agree that's what they say they're doing, but that doesn't change the fact that they are also saying that the president can order the military to murder people.
And it doesn't even stop the issue of a cycle of retributive prosecutions either! A president can just order the DOJ to spend all its resources looking into a president's "unofficial" acts, or even "presumptively official" acts (where the president might get off the hook but they'd still have to hire a bunch of lawyers to argue all the way to the supreme court to beat the charges).
"That IS the purpose of the military. One must trust the President to use the military properly to carry out policy."
We should not have to trust that the president doesn't act corruptly in commanding the military, and under the constitution as actually written (as opposed to what the supreme court said in this case), we don't!
Maybe! Nothing is certain. If a president is willing to assassinate political enemies and if he can get away with it, then you're right, it won't matter.
But if a president isn't certain on whether he can get away with it or not, it does matter if the punishment for failing to get away with it is they get to enjoy retirement, vs going to prison. And because it makes it more attractive an option, it makes it more likely presidents will try and makes it seem more likely to succeed, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
More generally, it's a little nuts that people on here are actually arguing that it doesn't matter whether the president is allowed to murder people. Nobody would ever argue it was OK if divorced from specific facts, everyone would say it's an absolutely basic, essential component of a free, democratic government!
"that doesn't change the fact that they are also saying that the president can order the military to murder people"
Are they saying that? Sotomayor claims it does say that, the others deny it does say that.
So when is the prosecution of Obama for killing American citizens via drone strikes? Because that too is "ordering the military to murder people" and it's something that actually happened, not hypothetical "Trump can order Seal Team 6 to assassinate the Attorney General".
"Are they saying that? Sotomayor claims it does say that, the others deny it does say that."
I responded to you elsewhere on this point, but the others do not, in fact, "deny it does say that".
As for Obama I'd be OK with this incident being investigated and possibly prosecuted, provided it isn't some one-sided thing where we only prosecute Obama and not others who did similar things, like trump. Like, Obama droned Al-Awlaki (US citizen), and trump droned his eight year old daughter (also a citizen).
Obama's defense should be that it wasn't illegal because it was authorized by Congress ... not that he's immune even if Congress prohibited it.
Yeah, the majority are explicitly trying to avoid a Brazil scenario. In the majority opinion Roberts wrote:
"The dissents’ positions in the end boil down to ignoring the Constitution’s separation of powers and the Court’s precedent and instead fear mongering on the basis of extreme hypotheticals about a future where the President “feels empowered to violate federal criminal law.” The dissents overlook the more likely prospect of an Executive Branch that cannibalizes itself, with each successive President free to prosecute his predecessors, yet unable to boldly and fearlessly carry out his duties for fear that he may be next. For instance, Section 371—which has been charged in this case—is a broadly worded criminal statute that can cover “‘any conspiracy for the purpose of impairing, obstructing or defeating the lawful function of any department of Government.’” Virtually every President is criticized for insufficiently enforcing some aspect of federal law (such as drug, gun, immigration, or environmental laws). An enterprising prosecutor in a new administration may assert that a previous President violated that broad statute. Without immunity, such types of prosecutions of ex-Presidents could quickly become routine. The enfeebling of the Presidency and our Government that would result from such a cycle of factional strife is exactly what the Framers intended to avoid. Ignoring those risks, the dissents are instead content to leave the preservation of our system of separated powers up to the good faith of prosecutors."
This is just histrionics from Sotomayor's laughably bad take in the dissent. Assassinating people is not an official duty of the presidency, except as an extension of Congress' authority to declare war. Further, US citizens can't be killed by the government without a trial (except that one time Obama did and I guess no one thought it was a problem).
Personally, I think the immunity is overly broad. But I also think that about the immunity given to police and prosecutors, and it would be really strange if the head of the executive branch had less legal protection than them. In an ideal world, the legal protections of the presidency would never have been litigated and the legal system would not be used as a cudgel against the opposition party. But we don't live in that world any more.
The issue does seem as clear cut as this. Per the decision, Presidents have absolute immunity for core powers, and being the Commander in Chief is certainly a core power. On addition, the Court said, "Nor may courts deem an action unofficial merely because it allegedly violates a generally applicable law." So, merely telling the military to commit a crime, even murder, is not enough.
> Further, US citizens can't be killed by the government without a trial
That is not necessarily relevant. The question is not whether an act is permissible under the Constitution. It is whether the President can be held criminally liable for committing an unconstitutional act. One can argue that an unconstitutional act is per se outside the core powers, but there is no direct evidence of that in the opinion.
That link does point out something important, which is that the president doesn't actually have sole power over the conduct of the armed forces. Congress has the power "To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;"
It should be clear, then, that one such law/regulation can be "the president can't order navy seals to murder political rivals"
But if that's the case then listing "commanding the Armed Forces" as a "conclusive and preclusive" power of the president is clearly wrong!
>It should be clear, then, that one such law/regulation can be "the president can't order navy seals to murder political rivals"
Presumably it can be, but OP was making a very different argument, which is that murdering rivals is inherently outside the power of the President, even if Congress does not act.
PS: Note that the Posse Comitatus Act puts limits on the use of the military domestically, but would not affect killings done overseas.
That is not the point. Read the linked article. It argues, based on language in the Court's opinion, that shared Congressional authority over the use of the military implies that it is not a core official act for which the President has absolute immunity, but rather is in the second category of official acts, re which he only has presumptive immunity. Hence the relevance of the Posse Comitatus Act.
Moreover, it makes no sense to argue that the ruling overrides the Posse Comitatus Act, because the Act is not a criminal statute. It forbids the use of the military for most domestic purposes. The decision does not change that. Every act that was illegal or unconstitutional before continues to be illegal or unconstitutional. The Court simply eliminated one remedy for some of those acts.
The president doesn't have a "constitutional prerogative" to override any law. A law can be unconstitutional if it is not within Congress's powers, and a way in which a law might go beyond Congress's powers is if it usurps or limits a president's powers. E.g. if a law said that it's illegal for a president to veto laws.
But in this case, a specific clause of the constitution says that it *is* within Congress's powers to regulate the armed forces. They aren't usurping the president's powers; if the president ignores the Posse Comitatus Act then it's the president doing the usurping. No different than if the president decides he's going to rewrite the bankruptcy code.
According to the opinion, if it's an unconstitutional action then the President is not immune. They specifically granted absolute immunity only for official actions that are an "exercise of his core constitutional powers".
But it is an open question what level of generality "core powers" refers to. The court said that Trump was immune to charges that he "attempted to leverage the Justice Department’s power and authority to convince certain States to replace their legitimate electors with Trump’s fraudulent slates of elector" because prosecuting crimes and overseeing the Justice Department is a core power. That implies that if he had instead "attempted to leverage the Defense Department’s power and authority to convince certain States to replace their legitimate electors with Trump’s fraudulent slates of electors," he would have similarly been immune, regardless of the specific means. I am not necessarily saying that you are definitely wrong, but rather that the case is far from open and shut.
The opinion does that say that Trump can "convince certain States to replace their legitimate electors with Trump's fraudulent slates". It says that the prosecution alleges that Trump was trying to do that, and their proof of it is that Trump discussed doing so with his Attorney General and then threatened to fire him when he said that he wouldn't go along with that. The Court's opinion on that was " "The President may discuss potential investigations and prosecutions with his Attorney General and other Justice Department officials to carry out his constitutional duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Art. II, §3. And the Attorney General, as head of the Justice Department, acts as the President’s “chief law enforcement officer” who “provides vital assistance to [him] in the performance of [his] constitutional duty to ‘preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.’” Mitchell v. Forsyth, 472 U. S. 511, 520 (1985) (quoting Art. II, §1, cl. 8). Investigative and prosecutorial decisionmaking is “the special province of the Executive Branch,” Heckler v. Chaney, 470 U. S. 821, 832 (1985), and the Constitution vests the entirety of the executive power in the President,
Art. II, §1. For that reason, Trump’s threatened removal of the Acting Attorney General likewise implicates “conclusive and preclusive” Presidential authority. As we have explained, the President’s power to remove “executive officers of the United States whom he has appointed” may not be regulated by Congress or reviewed by the courts. Myers, 272 U. S., at 106, 176; see supra, at 8....The indictment’s allegations that the requested investigations were “sham[s]” or proposed for an improper purpose do not divest the President of exclusive authority over the investigative and prosecutorial functions of the Justice Department and its officials. App. 186–187, Indictment ¶10(c). And the President cannot be prosecuted for conduct within his exclusive constitutional authority. Trump is therefore absolutely immune from prosecution for the alleged conduct involving his discussions with Justice Department officials."
In other words, the Constitution grants the President the power to prosecute crimes, so "discussions with Justice Department officials" are Constitutionally authorized official actions. At no point do they say that actually convincing states to replace their electors is protected under the prosecutorial power. They just said that Trump is allowed to discuss the possibility with his AG as on official action, and allowed to fire the AG as on official action.
Like I said, the issue is far from open and shut. And three Supreme Court justices seem to think the opposite of you (because Kagan and Jackson joined Sotomayor's dissent). I would think that might give you pause.
"Assassinating people is not an official duty of the presidency, except as an extension of Congress' authority to declare war."
People keep just saying this like it's obvious ... and I would have agreed it was obvious ... but you should tell John Roberts! The way his opinion is written, ordering an assassination is an "official act" and, again, he didn't even dispute that that's what he's holding.
People seem convinced that this isn't what they said - but they never actually make the argument based on the text of the opinion itself. They just assume that there's no way the supreme court would have said that. But they did! It's really bad!
"The way his opinion is written, ordering an assassination is an "official act" and, again, he didn't even dispute that that's what he's holding"
Can you quote this part to me? There's a lot of "A said, B said" flying around but nobody is giving any wording where A said this and B said that. Except for Sotomayor and her Seal Team 6 which seems to be quoted all over the place.
Looking at the text of the judgment, here is what Roberts says. He doesn't explicitly say, that I can see, "yeah sure the Prez can order a hit" but maybe it's all in the interpretation; if he didn't say explicitly "nah fam, El Prez can't order a hit" then it's the same as saying "sure he can!"
"Unable to muster any meaningful textual or historical support, the principal dissent suggests that there is an “established understanding” that “former Presidents are answerable to the criminal law for their official acts.” Post, at 9. Conspicuously absent is mention of the fact that since the founding, no President has ever faced criminal charges—let alone for his conduct in office. And accordingly no court has ever been faced with the question of a President’s immunity from prosecution. All that our Nation’s practice establishes on the subject is silence.
Coming up short on reasoning, the dissents repeatedly level variations of the accusation that the Court has rendered the President “above the law.” See, e.g., post, at 1, 3, 11, 12, 21, 30 (opinion of SOTOMAYOR, J.); post, at 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 19 (opinion of JACKSON, J.). As before, that “rhetorically chilling” contention is “wholly unjustified.” Fitzgerald, 457 U. S., at 758, n. 41. Like everyone else, the President is subject to prosecution in his unofficial capacity. But unlike anyone else, the President is a branch of government, and the Constitution vests in him sweeping powers and duties. Accounting for that reality—and ensuring that the President may exercise those powers forcefully, as the Framers anticipated he would—does not place him above the law; it preserves the basic structure of the Constitution from which that law derives.
The dissents’ positions in the end boil down to ignoring the Constitution’s separation of powers and the Court’s precedent and instead fear mongering on the basis of extreme hypotheticals about a future where the President “feels empowered to violate federal criminal law.” Post, at 18 (opinion of SOTOMAYOR, J.); see post, at 26, 29–30; post, at 8–9, 10, 12, 16, 20–21 (opinion of JACKSON, J.). The dissents overlook the more likely prospect of an Executive Branch that cannibalizes itself, with each successive President free to prosecute his predecessors, yet unable to boldly and fearlessly carry out his duties for fear that he may be next. For instance, Section 371—which has been charged in this case—is a broadly worded criminal statute that can cover “‘any conspiracy for the purpose of impairing, obstructing or defeating the lawful function of any department of Government.’” United States v. Johnson, 383 U. S. 169, 172 (1966) (quoting Haas v. Henkel, 216 U. S. 462, 479 (1910)). Virtually every President is criticized for insufficiently enforcing some aspect of federal law (such as drug, gun, immigration, or environmental laws). An enterprising prosecutor in a new administration may assert that a previous President violated that broad statute. Without immunity, such types of prosecutions of ex-Presidents could quickly become routine. The enfeebling of the Presidency and our Government that would result from such a cycle of factional strife is exactly what the Framers intended to avoid. Ignoring those risks, the dissents are instead content to leave the preservation of our system of separated powers up to the good faith of prosecutors."
It's in the part you quoted. Here is the key piece:
"The dissents’ positions in the end boil down to ignoring the Constitution’s separation of powers and the Court’s precedent and instead fear mongering on the basis of extreme hypotheticals about a future where the President “feels empowered to violate federal criminal law.” Post, at 18 (opinion of SOTOMAYOR, J.); see post, at 26, 29–30; post, at 8–9, 10, 12, 16, 20–21 (opinion of JACKSON, J.). The dissents overlook the more likely prospect of an Executive Branch that cannibalizes itself, with each successive President free to prosecute his predecessors, yet unable to boldly and fearlessly carry out his duties for fear that he may be next"
Note that the reference to page 29-30 of Sotomayor's dissent includes the "seal team 6" thing and a couple other examples.
"Looking at the text of the judgment, here is what Roberts says. He doesn't explicitly say, that I can see, "yeah sure the Prez can order a hit" but maybe it's all in the interpretation; if he didn't say explicitly "nah fam, El Prez can't order a hit" then it's the same as saying "sure he can!""
It's not that "if he didn't explicitly say the president can't do it, that means he thinks that the president can". I don't think that the majority is obligated to respond to any scary hypothetical the majority puts out there. If the dissent says in effect "the majority's ruling means the president has a free hand to assassinate people" ... Roberts can ignore it.
But ... he didn't ignore it. He responded to it!
And he didn't respond to it to say "that's not true, I didn't say that", he responded to say "you're not considering the more likely issue of the president not being insufficiently bold and fearless". In any other situation people would understand that as implicitly agreeing that he is, in fact, "saying that". People only resist the conclusion here because it's so self-evidently insane and they don't want to believe the supreme court did such a bad thing.
Now of course if Roberts did ignore it, that wouldn't make Sotomayor wrong. It would just mean you'd have to analyze the opinion to see if she's right. Which she is.
"Now of course if Roberts did ignore it, that wouldn't make Sotomayor wrong. It would just mean you'd have to analyze the opinion to see if she's right. Which she is."
Well gosh, Jack, then all I can recommend is that you flee to Canada right this second before Trump can send the death squads - or rather, Seal Team 6 - after you.
Because just today I saw someone claiming that the Supreme Court decision means that Trump can kill his rivals, which means the Democratic Party, which means people who vote for the Democrats. Justice Sotomayor said so! It's true!
Your argument reminds me of people who like to say "Well Jesus said nothing about abortion, so that means it's okay". Technically yes, that is so: there is nothing in the Gospels regarding abortion. But I think that we can take it that no. Abortion not the thing. Don't do.
Roberts also did not specifically deny that Trump could ride a dragon down the street and invade your house and loot and pillage all your belongings and drive you before him as a slave while the women of the household lament and weep. Better make sure your insurance is fully paid up for house burning via dragon fire!
Seems like you're just ignoring what I wrote. I'm not saying "Roberts didn't deny he's holding it therefore he's holding it", and you're just proceeding as if I am saying that.
I actually cited the opinion and shit, cited it more in other comments, and can continue to do so, you're just saying weird stuff about dragons that ignores the argument.
The majority never directly responds to Sotomayor's accusations because they are ridiculous. Nowhere in the Constitution is the president delegated the power to assassinate other Americans. The Constitution does not vest this power in the President, thus it is not an official power and there is no immunity, the end.
Sotomayor also never points to any legal evidence that using the Navy Seals to kill political rivals is an official act. She just asserts that the president is now above the law and throws out a bunch of clearly illegal and despotic actions and pretends they are immune, without ever doing the work of establishing how they are powers constitutionally granted to the presidency.
"Nowhere in the Constitution is the president delegated the power to assassinate other Americans"
Concerning specificity there! Are you saying that the US president IS legally immune if they assassinate me as a non-American? I don't really see any guidance on that in the text of your constitution.
Ah well, we non-Americans all know that it's okay for the US government to ignore international law and courts when it likes and if that includes killing non-Americans, too bad for us not having the foresight to make sure we were born in the USA and remain there (even being an American citizen is no protection if you go outside the USA).
It's OK for ALL governments to ignore international law and courts when they like. Countries make their own rules, and must deal with the consequences of their actions with other countries.
They can even decide to violate treaties. It's rather dumb to do, since no one will then make another treaty with them, but that's the consequences.
Who will enforce anything countries want done? Them, and their army.
Well the problem is that the standard for presumptive immunity is literally just that it can be shown that prosecuting the president would impede on the executive's ability to perform its function (i.e. interfering on the "energetic and vigorous" job of Presidency).
Sotomayor might be exaggerating that the President can just kill someone, but like, imagine a scenario where people are protesting, and political rivals are calling for a President's impeachment. Would this not be interfering with the executive's ability to function? What is stopping a President from brutally repressing the protests and arresting his rivals? Then, the President can't even later be convicted of a crime, because evidence of him wanting to silence political rivals would be a conversation with someone in his cabinet that forms parts of his core powers and you can't look into his motivations for performing a core act when you want to convict someone.
Sotomayor was 100% correct though that the decision considers the necessity of the executive to act "vigorously", but not the public's interest in having the president not be allowed to infinitely commit crimes.
I think Barrett made a valid point in her partial concurrence about using immune acts as evidence.
For instance, Trump can't be convicted for discussing the possibility of changing state electors with the AG or threatening to fire the AG if he refuses because the appointment of the AG is a core duty of the president. Presumably if Trump had actually coerced the state electors that would have been illegal, because the president has no authority over state legislatures. But claiming immunity for the official discussion should not be a shield against using the discussion as evidence for the unofficial act.
Similarly, Barrett had an example about bribery. Signing laws is a core duty of the presidency, immune. Bribery is not, criminal act that can be prosecuted. But if the president can claim immunity for any evidence about signing a law, the prosecution would be unable to prove the quid in the quid pro quo.
Note also that the Court does not say that presumptive immunity applies to those acts. Rather, it says, "we conclude that the separation of powers principles explicated in our precedent necessitate at least a presumptive immunity from criminal prosecution for a President’s acts within the outer perimeter of his official responsibility. ... But as we explain below, the current stage of the proceedings in this case does not require us to decide whether this immunity is presumptive or absolute. See Part III–B, infra. Because we need not decide that question today, we do not decide it."
That implies that at least some Justices think that the immunity should be absolute.
I do not believe one should conclude the Justices decided anything about the absolute immunity, since they explicitly say they aren't deciding on this specific case.
"The majority never directly responds to Sotomayor's accusations because they are ridiculous."
But the thing is, they do respond! As I said in my original comment. They don't respond to say that it's ridiculous that the president has that power, they respond to say it's less likely to happen than the president not being "bold and fearless"
"Nowhere in the Constitution is the president delegated the power to assassinate other Americans"
Again, I agree, but people are confusing their own sense of what would be reasonable for the supreme court to say, with what it actually said.
"Sotomayor also never points to any legal evidence that using the Navy Seals to kill political rivals is an official act."
As relevant to the navy seals thing, the majority lists "commanding the Armed Forces" and "tak[ing] care that the laws be faithfully executed" as "conclusive and preclusive" powers of the presidency. And then goes on to say, regarding the facts in this case, that any discussions with DOJ officials about prosecutions are immune because it's a conclusive or preclusive power, and because of that immunity, the fact that ordering those prosecutions would be illegal doesn't matter. Presumably the same would apply for the armed forces - conclusive and preclusive power, therefore immune even though it violates, e.g., a law against murder. Majority says "nor may courts deem an action unofficial merely because it allegedly violates a generally applicable law."
The decision isn't really complete right now, because the SC punted the question of core vs peripheral official acts, and what is needed to overcome the presumption of immunity for non-core acts to the lower courts. However, most of the decision is open to interpretation by judges who are going to apply it in an actual court.
A future president can launch a military coup and fail, then claim immunity. However, the court deciding that case would have to agree that a military coup is part of the official duties inherent to commanding the Armed Forces. Clearly it is not, just like assassinating other Americans is not part of being the Commander in Chief, nor is accepting bribes part of the president's role in signing laws. To think Sotomayor's hypotheticals would come true, a court would have to agree that murdering an AG with poison is protected because removing the AG is a core duty. These are absurd scenarios, as the majority rightly point out.
>As I said in my original comment. They don't respond to say that it's ridiculous that the president has that power, they respond to say it's less likely to happen than the president not being "bold and fearless"
And as I have replied to you, repeatedly, they don't say that at all. It is nowhere in the opinion. Please cite it or stop claiming that it is. The only place where the words "bold and fearless" are written in the opinion are in Sotomayors dissent. At no point does Roberts say that the president is unlikely to assassinate people., so it's okay.
"And as I have replied to you, repeatedly, they don't say that at all. It is nowhere in the opinion. Please cite it or stop claiming that it is. The only place where the words "bold and fearless" are written in the opinion are in Sotomayors dissent. At no point does Roberts say that the president is unlikely to assassinate people., so it's okay. "
I see you already responded to another of my comments where I cite the language (for anyone following at home, 48th page, language about 'extreme hypotheticals').
Regarding "bold and fearless" - again page 48, president won't be able to "boldly and fearlessly" do whatever.
Also note "more likely" - true that he doesn't say it's 'unlikely' the president will order assassinations, just that it's 'more likely' that the 'not bold and fearless' issue will happen, again page 48.
"Please cite it or stop claiming that it is"
Please stop ignoring that I've repeatedly cited it! You keep claiming I'm making stuff up, I keep citing it, you keep just ignoring the fact that I cited it!
I didn’t think it was anything new. Nixon had to be pardoned after office, from a criminal offence that was not investigated by the courts (but by Congress as an impeachment).
Presidents have authorised foreign assassinations in any case. In particular Trump has. And the US protects not just the president but most officials from international law.
Yes it is. You now can't enter into evidence the fact that Trump was willing to fire his Attorney General for not going with his elector fraud scheme, because they specifically delineate that conversation between the President and the AG are part of his core duties, and you are not allowed to look into his motivations when performing core duties. This makes him above the law in this sense.
"Presidents have authorised foreign assassinations"
Presidents have authorized foreign assassinations with the powers vested into them from Congress. They are not doing anything illegal when authorizing those assassinations. What law did they break? Now, it doesn't matter whether or not they are doing something illegal, if it's a core act, and it also doesn't matter if it's an official act that prosecuting can be said to harm the function and role of the executive.
The president does, in fact, regularly order the military to assassinate people (eg Bin Laden). What Sotomoyor is suggesting - that the president might try to assassinate a political rival -would certainly be ruled as outside official presidential duties and thus not subject to immunity.
Anyway plenty of people are indeed freaking out about the ruling (which FWIW grants FAR more power to the presidency than I would prefer) but nonetheless I think the hysterics are overstated.
It is NOT illegal for the president to assassinate foreign targets. It IS illegal for the president to assassinate political rivals.
"would certainly be ruled as outside official presidential duties"
Why give the president immunity at all then? Plus the test is not whether or not something is super duper illegal, but for presumptive immunity, whether prosecuting that would interfere with the President's ability to rule "energetically and vigorously." There are a ton of things that are illegal and might interfere, and that gray zone is very worrying.
Plus, why the fuck did Roberts not address a single thing that would fall outside of official actions? When Sotomayor specifically brought up the example of assassination? Even if you think this is too far, isn't the president now able to arrest rivals calling for his impeachment because it can be argued it interferes with the functioning of the executive? Why even open this can of worms?
"What Sotomoyor is suggesting - that the president might try to assassinate a political rival -would certainly be ruled as outside official presidential duties and thus not subject to immunity."
Seems like this ignores the very thing I just said in my comment. When Sotomayor brought up the possibility, the majority, while responding to that specific claim, didn't even dispute what she said! They just said it isn't likely that a president would do that.
But even beyond that, based on how the opinion is written, it pretty clearly is within the president's "official duties" to order the military to assassinate anyone. People assuming otherwise are really basing it on the idea that the supreme court would never say something like that. But they did, in fact, say something like that.
"When Sotomayor brought up the possibility, the majority, while responding to that specific claim, didn't even dispute what she said! They just said it isn't likely that a president would do that."
Not true. That simply is not anywhere in the majority opinion.
Where's the beef? Where is Roberts claiming that the president can do the things Sotomayor alleges? Where is he saying that it is okay because he's unlikely to do so? Where does anyone respond to that specific claim at all, as opposed to responding generally as cited here?
"Where's the beef? Where is Roberts claiming that the president can do the things Sotomayor alleges? Where is he saying that it is okay because he's unlikely to do so? Where does anyone respond to that specific claim at all, as opposed to responding generally as cited here?"
He says "extreme hypotheticals" then cites the pages (bottom of 29 to top of 30) on which Sotomayor says the Seal Team 6 thing, along with a few other similar hypotheticals. Is there something else on those pages other than that you think he's responding to?
I think people aren't freaking out because, imagine that the Supreme Court had ruled the other way. Would it then be the case that we can rest easy, knowing the President can't order his enemies assassinated, because it would be *against the law*? Is the legality of ordering the military to assassinate people currently what prevents presidents from doing it? Does the fear of getting arrested stop presidents from ordering assassinations? Doubtful: the President already has the power of the pardon and could simply pardon himself for their murders.
So what actually keeps the president from ordering assassinations? The chief issue is that the military is not likely to follow such orders. It is already the case that the military is not supposed to follow illegal orders, a duty that applies to each soldier from the General the President would send the order to to the Seal Team member who would carry it out. We already have whole teams of lawyers that go over every drone strike against a terrorist before it happens, arguing over whether the use of force fits Congress's authorization of force, or whether it would fall outside that scope: if the lawyers rule that it does, the strike is called off. Ordering the military to kill anyone without authorization from Congress is not, with some exceptions, within the scope of the President's duties. Even if it was, Congress could impeach him for doing so. If the President orders the military to take out Congress, well, that's about as clearly an illegal order as you can get. If the military follows it, then rule of law has already been abandoned, Supreme Court ruling or no.
Note also that the military members would expose themselves to criminal liability under state law. A pardon would not prevent state criminal charges from being brought, and federal officer immunity only applies where (1) the federal agent was performing an act which he was authorized to do by the law of the United States and (2) in performing that authorized act, the federal agent did no more than what was necessary and proper for him to do. In re Neagle, 135 U.S. 1 (1890).
Though I guess this would not be a problem if the assassination took place in DC.
"Is the legality of ordering the military to assassinate people currently what prevents presidents from doing it? Does the fear of getting arrested stop presidents from ordering assassinations? Doubtful: the President already has the power of the pardon and could simply pardon himself for their murders.
So what actually keeps the president from ordering assassinations? The chief issue is that the military is not likely to follow such orders."
There are various things in the American system that could in theory be abused in order for someone to gain absolute power. Pardons are an example (though there's a good argument that the president can't pardon themselves). And in any system, there's always the possibility that enough people will ignore the system that it collapses. E.g. the best possible version of the American system of branches, checks and balances, etc, wouldn't protect against genocide if everyone in every branch, backed by popular majorities, wanted to do a genocide.
All we can do is make it more likely or less likely that the system will stay stable. Under that test, the supreme court's ruling is clearly bad. Saying that it doesn't matter because in theory these bad results could happen anyway, is like saying it doesn't matter if you get a trial or not because in theory the jury and judge and all appeals courts could be in cahoots anyway.
As for the military ignoring orders, I hope they would, but - leaving aside that that's the "deep state" that trump fans rail against - the threat of criminal prosecution (and not having retributive actions against the military personnel involved) makes it more likely that we wouldn't get into that situation.
"Ordering the military to kill anyone without authorization from Congress is not, with some exceptions, within the scope of the President's duties."
Under this case it is an "official act" and therefore he is immune from prosecution, whether it's illegal or not.
"Under this case it is an "official act" and therefore he is immune from prosecution, whether it's illegal or not."
It is not. The opinion states that "We conclude that under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power requires that a former President have some immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts during his tenure in office. At least with respect to the President’s exercise of his core constitutional powers, this immunity must be absolute. As for his remaining official actions, he is also entitled to immunity. At the current stage of proceedings in this case, however, we need not and do not decide whether that immunity must be absolute, or instead whether a presumptive immunity is sufficient."
In other words, he only has absolute immunity for official acts that exercise his core constitutional powers, and only presumptive immunity for all other official acts. The Constitution does not authorize the President to order the assassination of anyone he pleases, so at most he would only have presumptive immunity; and it's arguable that such an action would not be an official action at all, since the President is neither authorized by the Constitution or by Congress to take such actions.
"In other words, he only has absolute immunity for official acts that exercise his core constitutional powers, and only presumptive immunity for all other official acts. The Constitution does not authorize the President to order the assassination of anyone he pleases, so at most he would only have presumptive immunity; and it's arguable that such an action would not be an official action at all, since the President is neither authorized by the Constitution or by Congress to take such actions. "
They put "commanding the armed forces" as a "conclusive, preclusive" official act. And ordering the navy seals to kill people is "commanding the armed forces". The fact that it's also illegal doesn't make it an unofficial act.
>If the President claims authority to act but in fact exercises mere “individual will” and “authority without law,”
the courts may say so.<
So no, it's not an automatic pass to tell the military to kill people. It would be a direct violation of the constitution and the courts would point that out.
"So no, it's not an automatic pass to tell the military to kill people. It would be a direct violation of the constitution and the courts would point that out."
All the language you cited is saying is that the president *claiming* authority doesn't mean that he *has* the authority. But then separately in this case, they also say that he *does* have the authority to "command the armed forces".
Also - it's not a "direct violation of the constitution" to tell the military to kill people, the president has been telling the military to kill people since forever, and nothing in the constitution says they can't.
Right in that part I just quoted! Page 6, Part II-A, "commanding the Armed Forces" listed as a power of the presidency, citing the constitution, and then on the next page saying where it's listed in the constitution it's "conclusive and preclusive".
What more are you looking for?
(actual last comment for now, realize I never hit send on this one)
Damn, would have been good for Roberts to explicitly mention a single thing that fell squarely outside of official acts then! Maybe even acknowledging what Sotomayor had said in her decision!
I would have supposed it was meant as a rebuke to the notion that political parties in and out of power should take turns jailing one another. I guess I wouldn't have imagined it needed to be said, but change happens fast these days.
That is what they say they are worried about that. But if that's the case (as opposed to just supporting "their side"), then that doesn't change the fact that they OK'd ordering political assassinations.
So they try to solve thing A while making thing B more likely. But also - they didn't actually make A less likely either! It gives presidents immunity for ... among other things ... ordering retributive political prosecutions! And they can still try to gin up charges for "unofficial" acts.
"But if that's the case (as opposed to just supporting "their side"), then that doesn't change the fact that they OK'd ordering political assassinations."
Nowhere in the opinion did they "OK" political assassinations.
We're not going to change his mind, FLWAB. He's hung up on "Sotomayor said the president could murder us all in our beds and Roberts never said no that is not legal, so we're all gonna be murderated!!!!"
Even if Roberts had said the exact denial Jack wants, he'd still find a way to go "but anyway Sotomayor said it could happen and that means it will happen!" because he has his version of The Truth firmly fixed in his mind.
As a non US citizen I can't say I'm less comfortable with the idea that the President of the United States has carte blanche to assassinate US citizens than that he has carte blanche to assassinate non US citizens.
Maybe if Congress had to publically pass some kind of declaration of war against a specific individual in order to assassinate them, that might be an appropriate level of oversight.
The POTUS doesn't have carte blanche to kill people; the Office of Legal Counsel decided that killings ordered by the President must be 'lawful', otherwise it is murder. He can't just have random people in another country killed. Although if he did, I don't think it would be very hard to get the CIA or someone to set up a pretense. "Melvin? Yep, the CIA definitely thinks he is a terrorist. Send in the drone."
Thank you! I voted for the f..ker so I feel extra-responsible.
To the substance: yes, no argument if we’re talking about an actual battle or emergency. If the Seals shoot Bin Laden’s guards and one of them turns out a US citizen - he was asking for it.
But that was different. Al-Awlaki wasn’t shooting at our troops. This was a long-planned kill. At least a court approval? Anything? I think we should be alarmed that he just decided to kill a US citizen without any checks.
Moreover, this kind of opens a giant can of disgusting worms. We haven’t officially declared war on any country, and the whole GWOT thing is an abomination. So now should the President be able to just drone Snowden? Imagine the most despised President, idk, Clinton, offing Bob Novak while the latter was on holiday in Mexico. What’s the difference between that and killing Al-Awlaki?
Scroll down to "Thoughts on Trump v. United States"
"There were five opinions. The Conservatives joined Roberts' opinion, except for Barrett regarding one section. He set out the following:
Presidents have absolute immunity for core constitutional powers.
For official acts more generally, he at least has presumptive immunity, but maybe absolute immunity.
They have no immunity for unofficial acts.
This judgment was based on large part on structural considerations of the constitution. For one, if the Constitution says that the President shall have some power, like the veto or the pardon, Congress cannot, by regulation, limit that or take it away. That would counter the separation of powers and intent of the Constitution. On the other hand, some things have authority from both, so maybe Congress could regulate those.
Additionally, this was based in large part on extensions of precedent from several prior cases, especially Nixon v. Fitzgerald. There, they ruled that presidents could not have civil suits leveled against them for official acts in Congress. While there is a greater interest, there is also a greater danger to the president, as jail is more serious than a financial burden.
The concern is that not having any immunity would allow frivolous criminal cases to proceed, which would seriously limit the bold action that the founders would have wanted a president to take. In such things, the dangers of intrusion on the executive branch must be considered: subpoenas were ruled to be fine in Burr. Executive privilege has long been held to exist. In all such cases, the risk of intrusion is weighed against the interest of the people, and so in this case, because criminal proceedings are a serious matter, they are allowing them, but they are permissible, but cannot pose any danger of intrusion upon the authority of the Executive branch."
There's a lot more about each justice's opinion and taking the dissent step-by-step, well worth reading to get past the Seal Team 6 memes online and to find out why Sotomayor says that and the others disagree.
As you describe it, it sounds like the most potentially dangerous Presidential powers, control of the military and federal law enforcement, would fall in the shared authority bucket. The President is CinC of the military, but Congress is empowered to declare war, maintain armies and navies, provide for organizing militias and calling them into federal service, etc. Similarly for federal criminal law, which is "faithfully executed" by the President but the laws and procedures are set by Congress as well as the authorizations of funding and authority for the FBI, DEA, etc.
"As you describe it, it sounds like the most potentially dangerous Presidential powers, control of the military and federal law enforcement, would fall in the shared authority bucket."
That may be a reasonable way to do it, but the opinion puts those powers in the bucket of "conclusive, preclusive" powers of the presidency for which he has absolute immunity and can act against the will of Congress.
I feel like I keep saying different versions of this but a lot of the arguments against my position seem to amount to "they can't possibly have said that because that's crazy" ... but, they really did say it!
I realized that software engineers don't quite fit into that capitalist model of "private citizens own the means of production, employees operate them" since software engineers can _build more means of production_. But, it seems like companies never compensate engineers for their long-term value creation, only for their time. I made a video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_Vkpunpiqg. Then I kind of digressed into what it would take to make a hypothetical business that pays employees based on value creation.
First, plenty of individuals get paid significantly more than others despite nominally holding the same job. The usual justification is that they are more reliable, do more work in the same time, make more important decisions, etc. In other words, a reward for disproportionate value creation.
Second, most people greatly prefer the reliability of being paid the same amount of money every month, and working the same amount of hours. So whatever system you come up with originally, once it develops towards people's preferences it will be functionally indistinguishable from paid-by-the-hour work. Remember, the industrial revolution started with contract work - paying people by the hour was considered a revolution for the benefit of the worker.
Third, independent from the variance inherent to contract work, actual value creation is tricky to define. Plenty of programmers can and do sell code/apps per usage, which is proportional to value creation. But quite a few find out that their codes marginal value is actually zero - people will just move to free options even for arbitrarily cheap pricing schemes.
Software engineers also can (and some do) sell their software instead of their time, but we no longer call them "employees" when they do this.
And there are lots of professions that build more means of production. All the hammers and factories and so forth are coming from somewhere.
I feel like there are probably better angles of attack if you want to analyze why the standard work relationships are the way they are and whether they could be different.
Like: Why are employees paid based on time worked instead of amount of value produced? I think mostly because "amount of value produced" is hard to measure. Ideally, employees who perform well over time will have their salaries increased to match, though there are various reasons this doesn't always happen in practice.
Why do software engineers usually sell their skills instead of their products? I think mostly because lots of software is impractical to produce alone, so people like to work in teams.
Why does product success mostly benefit the company, and not the employees? I think primarily because the company is taking on more risk and partly because the company is usually in a better negotiating position.
Why are things that produce ongoing value (e.g. screwdrivers, software) often sold, instead of rented? I think mostly because of transaction costs and enforcement costs. Renting becomes more common for high-cost items, where the initial capital outlay for a purchase becomes more inconvenient and the other costs become a smaller fraction of the total value. Also note that the recipient of a one-time payment can convert that into ongoing income so long as they can put it in an interest-bearing account or some other investment instrument, so it's not like selling-instead-of-renting means that you CAN'T have ongoing income.
Bro.....it's over. There's no "impartial independent judiciary anymore" (not that there really ever was) - it's a democratic battlefield now. We just...don't give a fuck. Clarence Thomas could shoot someone on 5th Avenue for all I care.
(Note that this is what you're doing too - and you probably know it, with your twisting of the gifts (yeah just put "bribes" in parentheses...no one will care you didn't justify it) and that tape with Alito. Not bad imo - all in the game.)
Sotomayor must resign for the good of the country though, ofc.
I think she should resign for tactical reasons, not due to ethical lapses (i.e. so she can be replaced with someone younger).
I also think it would be helpful to put more focus on the recent supreme court decision that, as Sotomayor pointed out, would give the president immunity for ordering the military to assassinate people.
It would not: ordering the military to kill individuals that the President has not been authorized by Congress to kill is already illegal. The President doesn't have carte blanche to order the military to do *anything*, he has specific powers.
"ordering the military to kill individuals that the President has not been authorized by Congress to kill is already illegal"
Doesn't matter if it's illegal! Whole point of immunity is you can do things that would otherwise be illegal.
"The President doesn't have carte blanche to order the military to do *anything*, he has specific powers. "
People keep saying this because it manifestly makes sense as the way it should work ... unfortunately it isn't what the court actually said. The court actually said the bad, unreasonable thing. I can make the argument in more detail, but the easiest way to see it is what I put in my original comment - the majority didn't actually dispute Sotomayor's characterization that it means the president can order military assassinations, they just said it's unlikely the president would do it.
That's simply not true. The majority held that: "Article II of the Constitution vests “executive Power” in “a President of the United States of America.” The President has duties of “unrivaled gravity and breadth.” This authority to act necessarily “stem[s] either from an act of Congress or from the Constitution itself.” In the latter case, the President’s authority is sometimes “conclusive and preclusive.” When the President exercises such authority, Congress cannot act on, and courts cannot examine, the President’s actions. It follows that an Act of Congress—either a specific one targeted at the President or a generally applicable one—may not criminalize the President’s actions within his exclusive constitutional power. Neither may the courts adjudicate a criminal prosecution that examines such Presidential actions. The Court thus concludes that the President is absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for conduct within his exclusive sphere of constitutional authority."
In other words, the President is immune for carrying out the powers granted to him by the Constitution. Presumably Sotomayor would argue that his Constitutionally granted position of "Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States" means he can order them to do whatever he wants, but that's simply not the case. He cannot order them to perform illegal actions, and a President ordering the military to kill American Citizens without authorization from Congress is not one of his Constitutional Powers. So no immunity.
I've read over the ruling, and I cannot anywhere find the majority not disputing Sotomayor's characterization, or saying they think a President would be immune from prosecution for assassinating political enemies but that "it's unlikely the president would do it." Can you quote the section in question? As far as I can tell, it doesn't exist.
Where the opinion actually does address the dissents Roberts writes that "As for the dissents, they strike a tone of chilling doom that is wholly disproportionate to what the Court actually does today—conclude that immunity extends to official discussions between the President and his Attorney General, and then remand to the lower courts to determine “in the first instance” whether and to what extent Trump’s remaining alleged conduct is entitled to immunity" and "Coming up short on reasoning, the dissents repeatedly level variations of the accusation that the Court has rendered the President “above the law.” See, e.g., post, at 1, 3, 11, 12, 21, 30 (opinion of SOTOMAYOR, J.); post, at 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 19 (opinion of JACKSON, J.). As before, that “rhetorically chilling” contention is “wholly unjustified.” Like everyone else, the President is subject to prosecution in his unofficial capacity. But unlike anyone else, the President is a branch of government, and the Constitution vests in him sweeping powers and duties. Accounting for that reality—and ensuring that the President may exercise those powers forcefully, as the Framers anticipated he would—does not place him above the law; it preserves the basic structure of the Constitution from which that law derives. The dissents’ positions in the end boil down to ignoring the Constitution’s separation of powers and the Court’s precedent and instead fear mongering on the basis of extreme hypotheticals about a future where the President “feels empowered to violate federal criminal law.”
People can read for themselves, but it simply isn't true that the Court has made it so that the President can order the execution of his enemies without facing prosecution, or that they agree with Sotomayor's characterization of that.
Yes, it was authorized when Congress passed the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, which authorized the President to "use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons."
Bin Laden took a while to get, but definitely fell under the scope of Congress's authorization.
Yeah, the "he determines [...] aided" is a very flexible phrase. The "necessary and appropriate force" part is what would, in theory, limit the actions of the president here.
Kavanaugh's rich family apparently paid off his loans. Mother Jones magazine, which had led the media charge on that topic, printed that updated conclusion. People online continue to link to the original Jones expose of the dollars while ignoring the magazine's subsequent clarification.
With Thomas and Alito, the known facts are as you summarize them. E.g. in a better world Thomas would by now have been impeached and removed.
None of that in any way negates or even relates to the argument for Sotomayor's resignation, which is being advanced by persons who couldn't be farther from fans of Kavanaugh, Thomas or Alito.
I guess there're still some questions about Kavanaugh's debts, but it seems less likely they were paid off as bribes. When questioned by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, Kavanaugh said that he had "not received financial gifts other than from our family which are excluded from disclosure in judicial financial disclosure reports." But some people want more details from him.
the idea behind her resigning isn’t because of some accused crime, it’s about liberals preserving a seat in the court, as opposed to a potential rbg situation again.
I have to write up a performance review at work that's going to lead to one of my direct reports getting let go. I've never had to do this before. He's been a poor performer for a while now, but on a personal level, he seems like he's not a bad guy. Right now, I am alternating between wanting to channel Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross and Obi Wan's "why'd you make me do this?" histrionics after the light saber battle in Revenge of the Sith.
I go for clean, concise, complete, and as nearly emotionless as possible when I have to do this. The nearly emotionless part is basically impossible, so do your emoting privately to someone disconnected from the issue and not in the performance review
Sucks but might be for the best for your underling ultimately. I got managed out last year and it was a pretty grim 6 months, but early this year I landed a much more interesting and rewarding job (both intellectually & $$$). I strongly doubt I'd have had the motivation, or the time, to look without being shown the door.
That said...probably best not to try and spin it like that when you're actually delivering the review. Like taking off a Band-Aid, quicker is better
Yeah, that's a good thing to keep in mind. Good for you on actually levelling up with your new job. I got laid off myself during the financial crisis, and I felt as though I took a significant step back, career-wise, after that. I've since recovered, but it took a while. That's part of why I feel bad for this guy: I remember what happened to me, way back when, and it stunk. Hopefully things work out for him more like they did for you.
In this picture, you see a long multiplication example, in which all digits are replaced by asterisks. After it's carried out, all digits in every column are summed separately (without carrying between columns) and the sum written below. The sum is over all digits in the column, including the original numbers, the intermediate sums and the final product! The challenge, of course, is to reconstruct all the digits.
I'll give guidance on how to solve this, in rot13. Each paragraph explores more and more of the solution until almost finishing it.
- svther bhg gung gur frpbaq vagrezrqvngr naq svany yvarf ner bar-frira-kk naq bar-rvtug-kkk erfcrpgviryl. guvf fubhyq or rnfl
- ybbx ng gur evtugzbfg pbyhza. vg unf n sbez n*o, gura ynfg qvtvg bs n*o ercrngrq gjvpr, nyy guvf gbtrgure 12. r.t. vs gur qvtvg vf 1, gura n*o zhfg fhz gb 10 naq cebqhpg zhfg raq va 1, gurer'f bayl bar cnve. Cebprrqvat gueh nyy cbffvoyr qvtvgf sebz 1 gb 5, cebqhpr gur guerr cbffvoyr cnvef bs n/o. abgr gung n,o ner arire 1.
- fvapr n/o ner arire 1, naq gur svefg zhygvcyvpnaq unf 3 qvtvgf naq erznvaf guerr qvtvgf nsgre *o, vgf uhaqerqf qvtvg vf yrff guna 5. abj svther bhg vgf cnevgl onfrq ba gur gbgny fhz bs 25 va gung pbyhza, naq gur irel cebonoyr nffhzcgvba gung gurer'f n pneel bs 1 sebz gur cerprqvat pbyhza. lbh fubhyq raq hc oryvrivat gur qvtvg vf rira, fb pna or rvgure gjb be sbhe.
- nffhzr vg'f sbhe, guna gur o nobir (ynfg qvtvg bs 2aq zhygvcyvpnaq) pna or bayl 2. abj hfr gur snpg gung 4kk gvzrf kk zhfg svg va 17kk, naq abg bayl gung, gur fhz bs 25 sbeprf gung pbyhza gb or 4,8,7,6 (7,6 gur bayl pbzovangvba j/ fhz bs 13 gung'f pbzcngvoyr jvgu gur nqqvgvba 8+7+pneel). gur frpbaq cnegvny cebqhpg vf abj 177k, juvyr gur frpbaq zhygvcyvpnaq gb or 42 (gur 4 vf sbeprq ol 4kk orpbzvat 17kk), ohg 42 fxvcf bire 177k, fb gung'f n pbagenqvpgvba.
- jr abj xabj vg'f 2kk * ko, jurer o=2 be 3, ehyr bhg 2 onfrq ba gur fhz bs 25, pbapyhqr vg'f 2k7 k k3, ntnva onfrq ba gur fhz bs 25 fubj 17kk zhfg or ng yrnfg 177k be zber, svaq juvpu 2k7 unf n zhygvcyr gung svgf vagb gung vagreiny (1770-1799), gurer ner gjb cbffvovyvgvrf, bayl bar bs gurz jvyy tvir gur fhz bs 34 va gur cerivbhf pbyhza.
> - ybbx ng gur evtugzbfg pbyhza. vg unf n sbez n*o, gura ynfg qvtvg bs n*o ercrngrq gjvpr, nyy guvf gbtrgure 12. r.t. vs gur qvtvg vf 1, gura n*o zhfg fhz gb 10 naq cebqhpg zhfg raq va 1, gurer'f bayl bar cnve. Cebprrqvat gueh nyy cbffvoyr qvtvgf sebz 1 gb 5, cebqhpr gur guerr cbffvoyr cnvef bs n/o. abgr gung n,o ner arire 1.
I was sure I found the one pair that worked here. I worked from that assumption for a while. Then something made me wonder if the above was actually true.
There are three different permutations that can go in the right most column, just looking at it in isolation.
At that point I decided this is bullshit and quit.
The most wtf part of it is, I wrote code to brute force and play with conditions a bit, and it turns out that removing the sum of the rightmost column, just leaving it unknown, still leads to only one possible solution (with other columns it's not so). But if you do that, the problem becomes just about impossible to reason about compared to brute force, I think.
So, I spent a few hours thinking about this, but ended up barking up the wrong tree. My path forward would be to brute-force the problem in 10k loop iterations (the tests should not be very difficult). Rather than just printing the the results, writing them as the bottom line first and then put a "proof" why they must be the only solution above it, a slightly less intellectually dishonest approach would be to just test which of my statements is the first one which is wrong. I most likely won't have time to do so any time soon. Rest in rot13.
k
l
---
z
a
---
f
Yrg gur svefg ahzore pbafvfgvat bs guerr qvtvgf or pnyyrq k=100*k2+10*k1+k0.
Yrg gur ahzore va gur frpbaq yvar or pnyyrq l=10*l1+l0.
Yrg z=100*z2+10*z1+z0 or gur cebqhpg bs k naq l0. Yrg a = 10000*a4+1000*a3+100*a 2+10*a1 or gur cebqhpg bs k naq 10*l1. Yrg a0=0.
Yrg f=fhz(cbj(10, v)*f_v, v sebz mreb gb sbhe) or gur gbgny cebqhpg.
Jura qbvat n fhz bs gjb be srjre qvtvgf, gur pneel vf rvgure mreb be bar. Guhf a 4==f4==1.
a3+f3==15, guvf vf bayl cbffvoyr vs gur pneel vf bar, juvpu lvryqf f3==8, a3==7 naq z2+a2>10.
Hfvat gur qvtvgf jr unir qvfpbirerq sebz a, jr pbapyhqr gung
1700 <= k*l1 <= 1799.
Bofreir gung z guerr qvtvgf. Guvf pna bayl or gur pnfr jura k*l0 < 1000 naq gur nhgube bzvggrq gur yrnqvat pneevrq mreb.
Ol gur genafvgvir cebcregl bs yrff-guna, 1.7*l0 < l1.
As a woman with a fraternal twin brother, I’m interested in this study (https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1812786116) showing that women with twin brothers make less money, marry less, have worse educational outcomes, etc. I figured this was largely socialization effects but the pattern also applied to women whose twin brother passed away in infancy. The study suggests that this is due to prenatal testosterone transfer although I find that surprising because the best I could find online, testosterone levels either don’t impact men’s success or have a slight positive association. So it’s interesting that they would have such a strong negative influence on women’s success, not just in the marriage market but also on education and finances.
Does anyone have any insight into this? I also find this interesting since I’m a female ACX reader in a pool of mostly men. Any other female readers with a twin brother out there?
Interesting result! I know at least two pairs of male/female fraternal twins, and this roughly matches my perceptions, there. Take that anecdata as you will.
At a quick skim this paper confuses me. The effect sizes and the error bars both seem huge. I can see why the error bars would be huge on the "co-twin died young" sample because that's a small sample, but I can't understand why it's equally large on the "co-twin didn't die young".
I'm also puzzled why they didn't bother to report results for the male twin, or for same-sex twins, while they were at it.
They did some info about both groups, but certainly not the kind of detailed info they gave about the females with male twins. As I recall they said that those males were not different from other males in the dependent variables they were looking at.
Uh... Not what you were asking, but maybe relevant/interesting?
In the cattle industry male/female twins are not looked upon very favourably.
The male calf is generally relatively normal, although unlikely to become a top performer.
The female is usually - 95% probability - sterile and is generally automatically discarded from any breeding program, and if they are being lot-fed for beef the females don't tend to thrive. In it's severest form these female calves look and act somewhat male, and are called freemartins.
It's widely attributed to in-utero exposure to testosterone.
I just read study. Here's a theory: Acc/to study,. women with a male fraternal twin are more likely to exhibit male behavioral tendencies such as rule-breaking & antisocial and aggressive behavior. These behaviors in boys are better tolerated by adults than the same behaviors in girls. And in adulthood these behaviors in men are better tolerated by peers than the same behaviors in women. So females exposed to androgens make, on average, a slightly worse impression on others than females not exposed, and so are less successful.
By the way, I'm a female ACX reader too, and while I didn't have a male fraternal twin, I have always felt like I am more masculine than most women -- less sentimental, more willing to argue energetically, and way way less sweet. And I my ring fingers are much longer than my index fingers (pattern's said to be associated with being a lesbian -- which I'm not, by the way -- though that may be an unban myth anyhow).
I would have assumed a having slightly higher t would be beneficial? lots of complaints about treatment of women seem more tractable with some t-linked traits like higher aggression/higher risk tolerance. Getting ignored in meetings, for example.
By more tractable do you mean that women's treatment in, for ex., meetings would be better if they had more t-linked traits (aggression, rule-breaking, sensation -seeking)?
Which of Robert A. Heinlein's late-period novels are actually good? The old master was increasingly ill towards the end of his life, and apparently it showed quite a bit in his work. But were there some works that had that old magic?
I'd break down Heinlein's style into four distinct periods: early (up to 1956); transitional (1956-1960); mature (1960-1973), and post-mature/cognitive decline (1980-1987). Regardless, here are my favorites...
1. _Beyond This Horizon_ (early)
2. _Double Star_ (early)
3. _Citizen of the Galaxy_ (transitional)
4. _The Door Into Summer_ (transitional)
5. _Starship Troopers_ (transitional)
6. _The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress_ (mature)
7. _Job_ (post-mature/cd). _Job_ was published after _The Number of Beast_ which I think is a novel that shows he was in cognitive decline after a series of TIAs and a blocked carotid artery. And I suspect that _Job_ is from an earlier draft that he may have reworked.
I read SF voraciously as a child, and explored late-period Heinlein around puberty. (Great timing!) I mention this detail because while I was both very unsophisticated, and fascinated with sex, I somehow managed to recognize the whole body of work as authorial wish-fulfillment fantasy, and gave up on most of the books when it became clear that RAH was more titillated than I was. Not just in terms of sex; Lazarus Long was a completely uninteresting Mary Sue authorial stand-in, and poisoned books which only referenced him from a distance.
The sole exception was Friday, which I reread several times (most recently a few years ago). The narrative is fast-paced and self-contained, indulging RAH's various libertarian hobby-horses in entertaining ways. The central character's sympathetic replicant's-eye perspective was a formative influence on my own progressive politics. Friday had been a feminist book for me, and rereading decades later I was disappointed by the apparent meekness and flowery dialogue of the female characters.
Contra another commenter, I don't remember anything that stuck out as racist. Maybe RAH mentions something bad happening to Africa or Africans as an incidental future world event. I don't recall any pattern of racial prejudice in his work, and would need to see evidence to decide.
Honorable mention: To Sail Beyond The Sunset's amazing Vallejo cover art, which is tailor-made for 12-year-old boys.
Friday was a genetically modified human, though I'm not sure how the extremely high strength worked.
There's a fair amount of anti-racist material in how the group marriage broke up. The bigoted woman who was de facto in charge of the marriage had a very racist/privileged attitude about who one of the young women wanted to marry. I think it was a Tongan man.
Friday looses her temper, and reveals that she's an Artificial Person-- genetically modified, and there's a lot of prejudice against them. (This is all from memory.) Not only is there the unfair treatment of the young woman, but it turns out that the marriage is a financial scam for Friday and possibly some of the other younger members.
I'm a huge Heinlein fan. I liked Friday a lot. Job was good. The other three were all fun reads for me, but they were also somewhat based on (or called up characters from) his other books so not so good as a stand alone read. Perhaps (at least this week) my favorite Heinlein, outside his juveniles, is "Double Star". A nice tight story.
(Oh, dear and now I can't get the Biden rewrite of Double Star out of my head. Well Joe Biden is no John Joseph Bonforte, but I love the similarity.)
The Number of the Beast provoked some amazing negative reviews.
My personal favorite is Dave Langford's. Dave is not a hater by nature - he ran one of the longest-running and most decorated fanzines out there. But for years afterwards the 'SPUNG' sound effect made for a good repeat gag.
Number of the Beast: has some fun bits, but overall is pretty bad. The main plot starts strong but quickly turns out to just be an excuse for a bunch of disjointed interludes that aren't anywhere near strong enough to carry the book. It also suffers from trying to be a character-centered story when the characters aren't very interesting nor do they seem to be developing in a meaningful way.
Friday: I read it once in high school. I remember kinda liking it, but feeling like it rambled quite a bit and desperately needed a more assertive editor. Never felt the urge to reread it.
Job: I've read and reread it several times over the years. It also rambles a bit and would be better with an editor, but the characters are actually interesting and the ideas being explored are strong enough to carry the story.
Cat Who Walks Through Walls: This was the second Heinlein book I ever read, after Starship Troopers. I read it in high school and haven't re-read it, so I've forgotten most of the specifics. I remember really liking the first half, but getting lost in the second half. I also remember thinking that Lazarus Long (who of course is a long-standing recurring character in Heinlein's stories, probably the closest thing his overall corpus has to the a primary protagonist, but whom I'd never met before before) was a huge jerk and didn't understand why he was getting so much page time and sympathetic treatment by the narrative.
To Sail Beyond the Sunset: Never tried to read it.
Overall, I think the biggest problem was that Heinlein took the Protection From Editors feat before he resumed writing for publication. All writers need editors, and Heinlein was worse than most at acknowledging this. I remember reading an author's note in an Isaac Asimov compilation where Asimov talked about his writing process, how he had a structured series of drafts and editing passes. He mentions once trying to compare notes with Heinlein on process, and Heinlein reacted to Asimov's description of his own process with "That seems like too much work. Why don't you just write it correctly the first time?" That's a fairly consistent attitude from Heinlein, who repeatedly said that he never edits his own stuff, considering it a waste of time, and will only make revisions under duress from publishers because he feels that substantive changes proposed by editors violate his works' artistic integrity.
A while back, I tried reading "Stranger in a Strange Land" (1961) in the posthumously-published edition that restored the bits that he'd been forced to cut under pressure from his original publisher. I DNFed it, despite thinking the concept was really strong and the story had some good moments especially in the first half. Unedited SiaSL has a very similar feel to Late Heinlein novels, which leads me to believe that the problem with Late Heinlein novels was that he got too good at resisting pressure to trim and tidy his stories, and/or his publishers at the time no longer had the guts (or the leverage) to twist his arm and force editing on him.
I think _The Cat Who Walks Through Walls_ is Heinlein's worst novel, though many disagree. It's got a bunch of Heinlein's preoccupations. I have a special hatred for "young people are so awful" in fiction. The protagonists try to adopt a "freelance socialist" (petty thief) while they're on the run, and they just don't have the resources. (This is from memory.)
The space station (Rule Golden) is privately owned, and not a good place to live. This may signal that Heinlein was moving away from libertarianism.
He tries to take tragic bits out of stories, in particular reviving Mike from _The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress_, which I think just undercuts the earlier story.
I am a big fan of Heinlein, but the late-period novels are not very good. There are still specs of "the old master" in some of them, but increasingly rare as time went on. The Number of the Beast is probably the only one was spending time on.
Friday and Job had icky incest stuff? Really. Where?
Friday had a rape stuff, but how was it racist?
Please give me some quotes to work with here.
_Time Enough for Love_ was Heinlein's big incest novel. In an imagined universe where humans had the ability to weed out dangerous genes, Heinlein asks why would incest be bad if there was no genetic downside? Likewise, _To Sail Beyond the Sunset_ continued TEfL's themes. Also, there were a lot of references to underage sex in both those novels. But it's worth remembering that the age of consent was twelve or thirteen when Heinlein was growing up — and it stayed that way in many states until the late 1970s and early 1980s. In fact, when I was coming of age in the 1970s, I remember lots of themes of underage sex in the media (_Pretty Baby_, _Blue Lagoon_, _Summer of 42_). And one of the teachers in my High School married his student (a year ahead of me) the summer after she graduated. He was dating her with her parent's consent while she was a senior. Then they got married. And nobody blinked! It's amazing (at least to me) how much society has changed in 40 years (mostly for the better, but we're definitely sexually more conservative now). Anyway, Heinlein wrote TEfL within the societal perspectives of that time.
The Texans from the futuristic timeline who hosts Alex and Margrethe for a day or two, Jerry Farnsworth and his family, has a throwaway line where Jerry's wife mentions that her husband has sexual feelings for their teenage daughter and they'd both be better off if they acted on the feelings and got it out of their systems. It's a tiny throwaway part of the narrative, but intensely squicky.
Jr yngre svaq bhg gung Wreel vf yvgrenyyl Fngna, jvgu n zvk bs qrzbaf naq qnzarq fbhyf cynlvat gur snzvyl zrzoref, naq gurl jrer unzzvat vg hc va beqre gb arrqyr Nyrk'f cehqvfuarff.
I had forgotten that remark. Upon first reading it, I took it to be Freudian cant until I discovered that Jerry was Satan and his daughter is an imp of Satan. So Heinlein may have been funning us on multiple levels.
Not disputing the icky rape stuff, and also some old-fashioned ideas about male/female roles and relationships, but in what way was Friday racist? I seem to remember it having some fairly heavy-handed anti-racist messages, especially by the standards of its time. The protagonist has light-brown skin and indeterminate ethnicity as a result of being a mixture of many genetic donors. The only people spouting explicit racist ideas are the group marriage in New Zealand which she briefly joins, and they are definitely not the good guys.
Personally I thought that if you can stomach the icky parts, it was OK as a forgettable but entertaining high-speed sci-fi potboiler. It reminded me a bit of Michael Chrichton, in that despite having some potentially interesting premises, the story and characters are so flat that it would work better as a movie script than as a book.
And yeah, Heinlein sure loved him some incest stories. In particular, Time Enough For Love is a collection of short stories, *every one of which* has a theme of incest, or almost-incest, or uncomfortably-close-to-incest, or technically-not-incest-if-you-squint, and then by the end of the book he just abandons all pretense and lets the protagonist have sex with his mother. Here also I don’t remember Friday being a particularly bad offender, though.
Friday is more sophisticated than that if you look at it as a story of Friday trying to find a home and having one after another yanked away from her until she develops some independence and moves to a planet which isn't a high-defection society.
Heinlein liked to subvert racial stereotypes. IIRC in _Tunnel In the Sky_ the lead character is black (but he Heinlein let that fact drop part way into the novel). Also, the lead character in _Starship Troopers_ is Filipino/Hispanic. The main character in _The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress_ is multiracial. Seems like he was ahead of his time when it comes to getting past racism.
Yes, that was a trick he liked to play a lot -- introduce his protagonist without any physical description, the better to let the reader imagine themselves in their place -- and then, two-thirds into the novel, casually drop a hint indicating that the protagonist is either multiracial or a specific ethnic minority. (Thereby also implying that this was a non-issue to all the people they've met in the story so far, since even their *enemies* don't bother to bring it up in a negative way.)
In Friday, the hint gets dropped earlier (and it's more than a hint) because her lack of a specific ethnic identity is part of the plot, and the discrimination she suffers as an Artificial Person is a not-too-subtle metaphor for racial discrimination.
It's been 20+ years since I read this so my memory might be wrong. Friday is thinking about using some technology to help starving Africans. Then decides against, since Africans are starving because they are lazy and therefore deserves to die. Don't think it was phrased that bluntly but that was the meaning.
It's been quite a few years for me too; I don't remember that part but I'm not saying it wasn't there.
There was a subplot where Friday concludes from extrapolating a bunch of subtle trends that there's a deadly plague upcoming in an overpopulated part of the world, and her boss states matter-of-factly that there's no way to prevent it from happening, and so the only priority is to prevent the virus from escaping to the off-world colonies. That is certainly a very Heinleinian kind of pragmatism. But I don't remember either a suggestion that the plague or the overpopulation was linked to some racial flaw of the people involved, or that there was an easy solution which they decided not to use because the victims deserved their fate. It was more like, these are just the natural boom-and-bust cycles of the world, and the only thing you can do about them is to make sure you and your friends are somewhere else when the shit hits the fan.
Heinlein seemed to have a rather Nietzschean view of the world, where there's a small set of superior people who matter, and billions of unimportant NPCs in the background. I don't get the impression that he thought of that in racial terms, though -- he was a bit of a misanthrope who didn't have a high opinion of 99% of people in general, including those of his own skin color.
Plus not so subtle subtexts of sadomasochism plus erotic stimulation after killing people. There was the whole time travel to have sex with his mother too. So yeah, this strikes me as icky too.
I enjoyed Job immensely. And I reread it every few years. Friday was an older uncompleted novel that he reworked. I thought it was pretty good, too. It had that 1950s Heinlein feel to it.
Question for people who are good at Magic: Let’s say you were playing Magic against an AI, and trying to figure out based on its play how intelligent it is in various ways. The AI has not been pre-trained on Magic. (As of now, I gather that Magic is not the sort of game where the present methods of teaching an AI a game work.)
You teach the game to the AI, just as you would to a person, except that after teaching it the basics you do not coach it on strategy. After you teach it how to play, you just play against it. What things would interest you and what actions by the AI would you take as evidence it is capable of a certain thing, or incapable of it, or extraordinarily good at it? The reason I am asking is that I am writing a piece of fiction about a future version of our world featuring a highly intelligent AI. However, it is not, like, infinitely intelligent. It is better at some things than others, just as our present AI is. I’d like to include in it the story the observations of a Magic player.
I myself have never played Magic. What I know about it is gleaned from places like Wikipedia. If you give me some suggestions I can use I’d be happy to credit you in the story’s acknowledgments. Here are some examples of the kinds of observations I’m imagining an expert player in this situation might make:
-How fast it learns
- What it masters pretty much instantly, and what it has to learn from actually playing, showing a learning curve just as person would.
- How good it is a learning and adopting strategies it sees you use.
- Are there things it just doesn’t seem to get?
- What’s it playing style?
- How inventive is it?. Is it coming up with novel and clever uses of certain cards or card combinations? Is it doing that as often as really good players? More often?
- How good is it at learning your style — what strategies you use a lot, how much risk-taking you do?
- What's your takeaway regarding what kind of mind it has. What's it smart at, what does it just fail to grasp?
One concept from MtG and other card games is called "card advantage". It represents the idea that if you have more cards available to you than your opponent has, you are generally going to be able to take more actions and have more options, which usually helps put you ahead in the game. Spending 1 card from your hand to remove 2 cards from your opponent's board is plus 1 card advantage for you. Using 1 card from your hand to draw 4 cards is +3 card advantage.
Another concept is that you have a number of resources available each turn to spend on making game actions, and it is beneficial when you can make full use of the resources available to you. In Magic, your main resource is how much "mana" you have available, so how well you are able to utilize your mana each turn is called your "mana efficiency." On turn 4, if you have 4 mana available but are only able make a play using 1 mana, that is less mana efficient than if you were able to make 2 plays each costing 2 mana.
If you wanted your AI to make the mistake of "valuing card advantage too much", your human could say of the AI something like: "You've got all those cards in your hand, but when are you going to have time to use them?"
If you wanted your AI to be good at card advantage, your human could say something like: "This thing manages to get 3 cards up on me every game."
If you wanted to show your AI knew how to deny mana efficiency to their opponent, your human could say something like: "I was holding up mana for a response and it purposefully didn't give me a target. It basically made me waste my turn."
Something a little more complicated you could do would be to give it a deck that it chooses to play even though it doesn't have the best win rate. We call it having "pet deck" when someone keeps playing their favorite deck no matter how good or bad it is against the field of opposing decks. For some match, the AI could choose to switch from playing their favorite deck to playing the best deck in the format because this time it wanted to give itself the best chance of winning. This would demonstrate that the AI understands the metagame of all available decks, and possibly reveal that it could be an expert at all of them if you wanted to take it that way.
More than the technically-correct face-up play that I assume it will manage with some basic tree-search, the signs of intelligence are in how it deals with the hidden information. Does it account for:
- what draws are possible from its deck, and how to move the game state so that those draws lead to victory
- what cards are in the opponent's deck - how to move the game state to minimise the chance of losing to them
- what the opponent is thinking about the AI's deck - what can it represent that will make the opponent play suboptimally
- what the opponent is thinking about their own deck - what could they have in the deck that would make their line of play make sense
- what the opponent is thinking about what the AI is thinking about what's in the opponent's deck, etc. etc.
The more meta it gets, the fewer opportunities there are to calibrate one's own beliefs / manipulate the opponent's beliefs profitably, but the more impressive when it happens.
At a competitive level, the cards and decks and playing styles that are relevant change every couple months as new cards are released and old cards are banned. So if you want your story to really be realistic, you should have them specify that they are playing cards from a specific historical period of time, e.g. pre-MH3 Modern, and then you can look at the relevant decks for that meta and namecheck actual play patterns, etc.
Things are not going to be that detailed. The expert who is played the AI is going to say a few sentences about his read of the AI, based on the AI's play. And I need those sentences to be in language that non-players can understand, so it won't work to be talking about an actual game and specific cards. So the expert might say, for instance, "it has done several things that are close parallels to clever card uses that won me a game, but it seems not to have developed an ability to invent its own unique and clever uses of cards. It tends to miss lots of opportunities I'd see to use a certain card in an unexpected and devastating way." See what I mean? I have read up a bit on Magic, and one of the things I ran across is that there's a famous play someone made that was just a devastatingly clever use of a certain innocuous-seeming card. The specifics have left my mind, since they involved actual cards or types of cards and I'm not familiar the Magic cards. But I think the general idea was that the card in question didn't look very powerful -- like maybe it said something like "this gives you the power to double anything, but only once" (I'm just making this up) -- and all the obvious things you could double gave you an advantage when doubled, but didn't give you a killer advantage, but there was one weird way to use it that made a huge difference, pretty much wiped out your opponent. So that is the sort of thing I'd have in mind if I had my expert say that the AI is not good a thinking of clever and unique ways to use cards. Does that make sense, and is it valid?
Anyway, if you're looking for some more specific examples of semi-unintuitive card uses, here are two examples of unusual card uses that are reasonably plausible to come up in current competitive Modern.
1. Target yourself with Stomp to bypass opponent's The One Ring
2. Kill or sac your own creature in response to March of Wretched Sorrows to prevent your opponent from gaining life.
3. Target yourself with Relic of Progenitus to blank an opponent's Surgical Extraction or Drown in the Loch.
If you really want to ensure your play is unimpeachable, you could probably find an actual historical high-level tournament game and just copy the whole match exactly. (I heard that's what they did for the chess games in the TV show Queen's Gambit, to ensure their actors weren't making any stupid moves.)
Of course, that won't make sense if your goal is to show how the AI plays *differently* from a human, and I imagine it's pretty weird to be using a specific historical card set in the first place.
There isn't going to be a magic game in the story -- just the expert who has played with the AI telling what he has deduced about the AI's intelligence based on how fast the AI learned, and what its play is like at this point.
I've never played much Magic, but some general comments:
There are two reasons you might have a "playing style":
One reason is if you know you are better at certain parts of a game; for instance, if you're good at fighting but bad at economics then you might play in a way that lets you fight more often, to take advantage of that skill.
The second reason is personal preferences: Even if you're not better at fighting, you might just LIKE fighting, so if you're not sure what move is best, you pick fighting.
The second reason matters less and less the better you get at a game, because "you're not sure what move is best" happens less often. If you know which move is better, then you just do that. (Assuming that winning is your primary goal.)
Caveat: If the AI is significantly better than human players, it might discover that what humans consider to be one style among many is actually just flat-out better than the other styles, in which case it will look to humans like it is following that particular style. But if humans could predict which style that was going to be, then the humans would already all be playing that way.
The first reason (being better at certain parts of the game) is often a difference between human and AI players, though the details depend on the game and how the AI was made. An AI that relies mostly on tree search has different characteristics than one that relies mostly on heuristic evaluations, for instance. Depending on what breakthoughs lead to advanced AI in your fictional setting, it *could* end up having the same biases as humans and then this wouldn't necessarily show up.
But one common difference in a lot of today's games is that the human will quickly narrow their options down to a few candidate moves before giving deep consideration only to those few candidates, while an AI will thoroughly examine a large number of options. (Possibly this difference is more a special feature of humans than a special feature of AIs.)
This is most noticeable when the AI makes a counter-intuitive move that is obviously good once you think carefully, but which human players eliminated in their quick first-pass because it fit some pattern that is USUALLY bad (e.g. moving backwards, promoting your pawn to a bishop instead of a queen, losing some sub-competition on purpose). Example: I once trained an AI that snatched victory from the jaws of defeat by spending a valuable one-time ability to intentionally get its own piece captured and sent back to the start, where the captured piece was able to attack an otherwise-unreachable enemy formation and disrupt their win. (Obviously, humans *sometimes* spot moves like this, but computers can spot them more reliably.)
It can also show up in the AI making a lot of slightly-better moves because it doesn't miss stuff. Maybe there's 50 similar places you could go, and the human went in a place that gives 10 points, but the computer went in a place that gives 10.1 points that the human just overlooked in a long list of similar options. Because the human didn't carefully calculate the exact value of all 50 options, and the computer did. Example: Another AI that I trained performs noticeably better when it has a special power that gives a large number of usually-poor options; along the lines of "when you would normally pay silver, you can pay gold instead," where silver is something that you pay frequently, and gold is usually more valuable than silver so you would usually rather just pay silver like normal, but the computer will find all the rare edge cases where it's worth paying gold for some unusual reason, whereas a human will get fatigued and miss a few.
Another tend I've noticed in a lot of modern game AIs is that they struggle with hidden information, by which I mean things that are known to one player but not another (like the cards in your hand, or the values of your pieces in Stratego). This is hard enough that lots of commercial games' AIs just flat-out cheat and peek at the hidden info so that the programmers don't need to figure out a way to deal with it.
In particular, hidden information is a huge pain for any sort of tree-search-based algorithm, like minimax or Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), because some distant tree nodes are correlated based on variables that the search doesn't know, so it breaks the locality of the algorithm. There are researchers today actively trying to adapt MCTS to handle hidden info, and my impression of the current state of the art is "they can make it kinda work in certain limited situations, but this remains a major hurdle." For example, I don't think modern tech is up to deriving the strategy of Clue from first principles (though you can definitely make a Clue AI if the programmer hand-codes some of the strategy).
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Most modern AIs do NOT learn while you play against them. They might learn a lot of stuff in advance, but it's rare that they try to adapt on-the-fly to their current opponent, and virtually unheard-of that they try to improve their general skills before the game is over. You *could* make an AI do this but it'd be weird.
When an AI learns a game by playing it, it normally plays against itself (or other AIs) and plays way, way more games than a human would play. A human could take "samples" from various stages of training to see how things are changing, but a human wouldn't be "naturally" involved in the process in a position where they could see this unfold unless they specifically went looking for it.
It's certainly possible to imagine an AI that can listen to a human explain the rules of a game and just start playing with that human and learn as it goes--humans can do it, so presumably it's possible--but I'm not aware of anyone today that is seriously trying to make an AI do that.
The AI in the story is much smarter than the present ones. However, it is not, like *infinitely* smart, the way some people talk about ASI being after it learns how to improve itself and then does ever-cleverer improvements ever faster , and then improves the improvements blah blah. It can, though, converse on any subject at great length, and in such a way that the person its talking with, no matter how clever and how familiar with AI, could not possibly deduce it's an AI. It can learn to do anything a person can learn, but does not perform all such tasks as well as a brilliant or talented person could.
If it can fake humanness in conversation under expert scrutiny on an arbitrary topic, that basically requires that it can fake humanness in playing games, too. (Otherwise it should flub in conversations about game strategy.)
And if you can convincingly fake being a human at a game, that means you can play at least as well as the human that you are faking.
Other than that, if the AI is not trying to fake humanness when playing games, then I don't think that description tells me much about how it would play.
I was just trying to give you a sense of its level of smartness. Being able to talk like a person on any subject is one of the ways it's smarter than our present AI. However, that does not mean it's deeply knowledgable about every subject, and can come across as a brilliant human being about everything. All I said was that it can always come across as human. If it hasn't played Magic before, for instance, it would sound sort of like I do here: "I only know about it from sources like Wiki, but don't have any familiarity with the actual cards, and have never seen a game." Learning to play Magic from the person it's playing against it would also be transparent and honest, and, depending on how good it was it might be saying "I failed to notice a situation where X would have worked, I need to pay more attention to that from now on" or, "I think I've got it, and can probably beat you on the next game."
OK, but I wasn't saying that smartness does say anything about your style of play, or that style of play gives info about smartness. The point of the Magic expert playing Magic with the AI and observing its style of play is not to figure out how smart the AI is, but try to get a sense of what the AI is capable of -- what its style is. Is it inventive? Is it quick to learn from observing people? Is it good at bluffing and other head games? How willing is it to take risks? This AI of the future is sort of a black box. It can talk as well as a person, and sound like a person, but it can't explain itself.
If your AI is going to be realistically human, and you just want a brief description of its play, then I suggest you forget asking about AI behavior and just go to some Magic discussion forum with a prompt like: "Imagine you just played a game of Magic against a player who turned out to be intermediate-level. Your friend who doesn't play Magic asks for a two-sentence description of what they did during the game that let you peg them as intermediate-level. What do you tell them?"
Maybe I should have asked that here. I'm not crazy about asking things on other forums. Here people are generally civil and smart. On other forums, people are often very rude to strangers, plus I don't feel able to gauge how much to trust somebody's answer if they're strangers and so are the norms of the forum.
I used to play Magic at a professional level some 15 years ago
Random thoughts in no particular order
Drafting
- to what extent does it preserve optionality? Is it willing to select a weaker card that does not commit it to a particular colour or strategy, and for how long in the draft does it continue to do this? When does it consider itself “committed?”
- to what extent does it read signals? When other players are passing it cards that indicate that they have left a particular colour combination/strategy open, does it pick up on that?
- to what extent does it consider the signals it is sending to others?
- how does it value synergy? Is it willing to take a weaker card that fills a critical role in the deck?
Constructed
- how does it approach the meta game? When selecting/tweaking/tuning a deck, does it show evidence of thinking about what it will play against?
- how does it approach sideboarding? Does it show evidence of thinking about how its opponent’s deck will change after sideboard, and alter its play to reflect that? Does it recognise which cards are weaker, which are stronger, and which are (nearly) useless?
- does it show any preference for certain archetypes? Excellent human players are indifferent to whether they play more aggressive or more controlling decks, they understand both and will choose whatever is objectively better in the meta game
Playing
- mulligan decisions - very consequential, very interesting to see how an AI would approach this. Does it factor in what it is playing against, not just the strength of its opening hand in a vacuum?
- overcommitting vs holding back - for example playing the third creature when the opponent might have a Day of Judgment next turn - does it show evidence of understanding when it is ahead, and can afford to play around dangerous cards, vs when it is behind and has to take large risks to stand a chance of winning?
- protecting its key strengths - is it aware what cards will make a dramatic impact on the game, and does it go to lengths to stop its opponent countering/destroying them?
- bluffing - does it ever make a strange attack that would indicate to its opponent that it has card X when it in fact does not? This would impress me probably more than anything else on this list if an AI came up with this independently
I'll note that being able to preserve option value and pivot when you draw a good card for a different strategy than what you were planning is the sort of thing that I would expect a good AI to handle better than humans. (Though in a typical commercial game this could go either way depending on whether the programmer handled it correctly, because it's an easy thing to program wrong.)
Possibly also better at card evaluation - understanding what the key elements are it needs to defend/preserve? Extrapolating here from chess where it seems that AIs can independently derive the value of, say, a Queen, without needing humans to tell it that it’s worth 9 points, you shouldn’t trade it for one rook, but maybe trading for two rooks is OK
I wouldn't extrapolate my expectations from Chess in that particular way, for 2 reasons:
1. Chess AIs derive those scores "empirically" by measuring how often one side wins or loses given certain pieces and/or certain beliefs about piece value. But Magic has a lot more cards than Chess has pieces, so acquiring and analyzing enough empirical data on every card might be problematic.
You could still try to assign values based on principled reasoning rather than pure experimentation, but that's not how Chess AIs work, so Chess provides no evidence that AIs are good at this.
2. The value of a card or piece doesn't have to be a constant. In fact, the more sophisticated value systems for Chess usually have some hacks to account for the fact that it's NOT completely constant, such as the "pair bonus" for having 2 bishops on opposite colors, or the fact that a rook grows more powerful as the board empties.
The fact that the values are *approximately* constant in Chess is a particular property of Chess, not a universal property of all games. There doesn't have to BE any single number you could assign to a Magic card that serves as a useful approximation of its value across all game positions. So there might not be any "correct" answer to find.
(In fact, talking about a piece having any "value" at all--even a variable one--only makes sense within a certain decision framework, where you are choosing which move to make based on heuristic scoring of the resulting game position. If you were playing chess with certain other algorithms, like pure MCTS, then a queen "having a value" might not mean anything within your decision process. So it's not trivially obvious that assigning values to Magic cards is a thing that an advanced Magic AI would do in the first place--though I wouldn't be surprised if they did.)
I find this very interesting because I would not necessarily have predicted 10 yrs ago that computers today would beat humans in Go and Chess but not Magic - although this may be a reflection of my ignorance of programming more than anything else
Perhaps the difference is that Magic requires more of a theory of mind?
That is, for most of my examples above, I’m asking if the AI can understand that it is competing with another intelligent being and understand why they are taking the decisions that they are - after all the opponent has information that it doesn’t
Vs Chess where it just needs to analyse an enormous tree of possible lines and pick the best one
I haven't studied Magic AI in particular, but a couple reasons immediately occur to me for why AI might find it harder than Chess or Go:
1. Magic has hidden information, which as I mentioned in another comment remains a major hurdle for tree-search-based algorithms.
2. Magic game trees are probably much deeper than Chess (though I'm not sure about Go) when you take into account that one "turn" of Magic can actually involve dozens of plies, because of all the places where your opponent can potentially interrupt your turn.
3. Magic probably has a larger state space when you take into account all the different cards someone could have.
That makes sense. Particularly with regards to #3, it’s not just the cards they have right now, it’s the cards they will have in future (the random aspect of the game which neither player can perfectly predict)
Hidden info is definitely a thing in Magic, but not as much as it is in poker, where it’s literally the only thing that matters. Last I heard computers could beat humans at Limit Texas Hold’em but not No Limit which has a vastly larger state space.
Wikipedia seems to say that the limited version (of some hold 'em variant) has been "essentially solved" since 2015 but that as of 2019 bots can beat the top human players even at no-limit.
Hidden info is important in Poker, but I would guess that tree search is NOT very important in Poker, so the fact that hidden info messes with tree search might not be a big deal.
(Also note that these factors compound; hidden info could be an important factor even if computers are good at *some* games with hidden info.)
But in poker there's a lot you can deduce about hidden info. YOu know what's in the universe of hidden info -- 52 cards less the ones whose location you know. You know for sure which cards have been played already, and which are visible. And you can deduce some more about what cards have been drawn by who has folded after a draw. And you can deduce some by how those still are in the game are betting, although that's less sure because they may be bluffing, or doing the opposite.
I think you’d be better off taking a slightly different approach and studying what DeepMind did with AlphaGo and what the impact was on the future of human play of Go. This is similar to what I’d expect in MTG, although with better documentation (like a full on documentary).
Similar to Go, a sufficiently advanced, but not superhuman, AI would probably have the same impact as a newer player making a big splash/success with novel deck.
A somewhat recent example would be Ali Aintrazi developing and winning with Chromatic Black, a deck that worked very well in the specific meta at the time and required the whole meta to compensate (I can’t find a good historical account of this but I’d guess someone has written one).
With Go 2 AI's played each other, right?, and the outcome of games was info to each about how to play. I've read that that approach does not work for a game like Magic because there are too many cards overall, so too many possible hands, so just overall too many unknowns. General idea seems to be that each game of Magic is different in a way each game of Go is not.
Not only is there hidden info and a huge state space, but there's also a huge amount of randomness from game to game, which means that it takes a huge number of games to extract weak signals from the noise.
It's easy for someone in say Kaladesh limited to pull a masterpiece Sol Ring (one of the most broken cards ever) and then still lose their matches because they just never drew it or never drew it at the right times. And that's despite the fact that it is very clear that adding a sol ring to any draft deck would improve its odds of winning.
I happen to have studied this problem a bit for TCG AIs, never getting to great answers, but a whole directory full of models.
There are different strategies for different colors and even different decks. You could train an AI with its specific deck against your specific deck, but the things it learns might be completely wrong if either of you run a slightly different deck.
Things it should learn quickly:
- who lives and who dies in basic battles
Over time:
- when to swing for victory, and how sure it is when doing so. (If there's no chance I can counter, it better do it.)
- avoiding giving me the win condition for my deck
- ability to memorize things a super-observant human could memorize
- can it avoid falling for the traps I set for it?
- can i set traps for me?
- can i tell that if I'm deliberately training it to learn the wrong things?
More explanation: to deny your opponent information about what you're playing/preserve option value, it's almost always correct to play a card as late as you can. If you can play a card on your turn either before or after attacking, you should attack first and then play it (so that your opponent, deciding how to defend against your attack, does not know what you have in your hand and what you can play.) If you can play a card at any time (an 'instant'), you should play this at the end of your opponents turn (immediately before your mana refreshes, so that you don't waste it), so that your opponent cannot play their turn knowing what you will do.
An AI that does this unprompted is not necessarily 'intelligent', but at least has figured out an important aspect of adversarial play under incomplete information.
An AI that regularly fails to do this has clearly missed something substantial.
For example, if you have an instant, then *generally* you would want to wait to play it, but sometimes you want to play it early because if you wait for your opponent to untap and draw, they're more likely to be able to respond to it.
A more niche example is that you might not be sure whether your opponent can counter your play, and will do things on your turn (e.g. combat) differently depending on how it goes, then you might even play your instant *pre-combat* on your turn to see if it gets countered or not.
This is the kind of observation I'm looking for, but there's something I don't understand about what you wrote: You must not mean that this applies to *any* given card. I mean, you can't play all of them as late as possible, right? So what is special about the cards you should play as late as possible? Also, even if the card creates such unique contingencies that it's a big deal that you have it, what's bad about your opponent knowing early that you have it? When you play it they are surprised and dismayed, so you get whatever advantages surprise gives you. And once you play the you don't have it any more right? Or are there cards you can play again and again?
Different cards can be played at different times, and that depends on the cards themselves and also the state of other cards in play. Also some cards might be more useful when played early whereas other cards are not. But that's just the basic game rules.
What's more relevant is that every principle has exceptions. For example, if you have an instant, then *generally* you would want to wait to play it, but sometimes you want to play it early because if you wait for your opponent to untap and draw, they're more likely to be able to respond to it.
Agreed, yes. Or if you intend to play an Equipment that enhances your creature, you might want to play and equip it before attacks so that your attacking creature is stronger. The general rule is 'if there isn't an actual reason to play this now, and you can wait until playing it later without cost, wait'.
I suspect aphyer *does* mean to apply this to *any* card, and is contrasting it with other game actions you can take, such as activating a card that is already in play (see the part about "attacking").
With the important difference being that one of these actions reveals hidden information to your opponent and the other does not (because they already know about the card that is in-play).
Oh, I get it. I was picturing Magic being like the kind of card game where you play a card once and then it's gone from your hand and has no further effect on play. But I guess with some it least they more like chess pieces -- the stay on the board and influence ongoing play with other pieces/cards.
Even if you don't want to learn the rules and play, you probably should at least watch one actual game of Magic so you have some idea of the sorts of things that commonly happen.
- In repeat play with sideboards (alternative cards you can substitute into your deck, a common way to play somebody repeatedly), does it correctly bring in the counters to its opponent's strategy?
- More of a curiosity on my part, but, does it favor decks with more or fewer colors?
- Does it favor certain styles of decks over others? For example, does it try to build a cohesive set of combos or just focus on individual powerful cards? Does it include a lot of cards that are not central to the deck butt help counter other strategies? (E.g., cards to destroy or exile creatures/artifacts/enchantments, counterspells)
- How aggressively does it trade off between its creatures and its life total? (Life is a resource that in some cases should be spent rather than blocking with a creature, but that depends on your overall strategy, and current life total, and what creature you're considering blocking with).
Honestly, if you're going to try to write something like this; I'd probably take the time to learn the basics of Magic - the basics about how combat and creatures work aren't that hard (almost to the point where I could put them in this comment, but not quite) - you don't have to learn every modifier a creature can have, but it informs a lot of the strategy of actually playing a deck.
... though "playing the deck" is only a portion of Magic's strategy - actually figuring out how to build a deck and what to put in it is often a huge part of the game; so you'd probably want to decide whether the AI is just being handed decks and playing them or whether it is building them. A huge layer is the multi-dimensional rock-paper-scissors that largely manifests in the deck construction - though serious contexts will be multiple games between the same players and will allow players to bring a limited number of extra cards which they can substitute in between games to try to adapt to deal with particular match ups. (Also, matches involve multiple games to address some of the luck aspect)
So deck construction can be a big factor, and even if you're working with a specific deck, knowing the cards that are actually likely to be played can be super important so you'd want to both clarify whether this AI is building their own decks (or playing some specific format like Draft where the deck building is part of the format) and whether they know what cards are legal.
As for the actual game itself, a lot of it comes down to deciding when to be aggressive. Generally the defender has an advantage, so *very* broadly, a common aspect of the game is 'spending' resources to attack and hoping the opponent dies before you run out of momentum. ... or playing the reverse strategy and trying to weather the storm long enough to get some high-value things into play and start getting value from them.
There can also be a bluffing aspect to the game - cards in hand can be played at any time and can have big effects: if I send my creature on a seemingly suicidal attack, you have to decide whether to 'take the bait' and block it (and risk that I have a card in my hand that makes it not suicide) or let the attack through (and miss what might be an opportunity to kill my creature for free). A classic bluff in MtG is to do something that appears to be suicidal (because it actually is) while pretending that you have a card in your hand that makes it a good play. Can the AI do that? Can it tell if I'm doing it?
Earthquake is a card that deals damage to all creatures in play without flying and all players. You could write that at first the AI would play creatures and then play Earthquake, killing its own creatures as well as the opponent's creatures. But later it gets smarter and waits to play its creatures until after it has played Earthquake. This is very basic strategy, so this could be something it learns early.
Later the AI could make a blue deck with no creatures that focusing on destroying the opponent's lands. Those decks are very difficult and frustrating to play against.
> some Democrat friends have asked me to signal-boost this post they wrote ...
The linked post concludes:
> Regardless of whether Biden can sometimes perform, it’s inevitable he’ll have more ‘senior moments.’ More clips will be shared of him looking frail and confused, and we will lack a candidate who can stand up for themselves and actually confront Trump...
I find it kind of astonishing, though perhaps in retrospect not at all surprising, that (apparently) no one is thinking of the scenario wherein Biden does get elected, and proceeds to have "senior moments" all over the place while performing his duties. What happens if one of a thousand crises in world politics that occur every week just happens to occur after 8pm ? The answer seems to be "it doesn't matter", but why ? Is this because:
a). The US President's job in general is not to make important decisions (the staff does all that) but just to look good in public ? But in this case, electing Trump would be somewhat problematic, but far from the disaster it is portrayed to be. Or is the reason that:
b). The US President's job is very important, but having a mentally incompetent President is still better than electing Trump, it's just that no one wants to say this out loud ? But is this actually true ? Trump can make a lot of bad decisions, but at least he's somewhat less likely to randomly stumble into doing something like starting WWIII, right ?
I would say it's b). The president's job is important - he has capability to do things much better or much worse - but an out-of-it, inactive president means that important decisions will mostly be made by his advisors, which is a bad-but-not-terrible baseline.
Trump is 1) likely to pressure for actively bad decisions, unlike Biden whose senior moments are more likely to simply lead to inaction, and 2) his advisors are probably not going to be as good as Biden's.
> Trump can make a lot of bad decisions, but at least he's somewhat less likely to randomly stumble into doing something like starting WWIII, right ?
I think Trump would be a lot more likely to accidentally start WWIII, but in any case, Trump would be very definitely worse on all the day-to-day stuff. But whether you agree or disagree likely depends on personal political views.
Megan McArdle wrote an article describing how bad things can get with trying to run the government through a Twenty-Fifth Amendment crisis, both with and without a co-operative Congress. She was still more pro-Biden but she's admitting he could be plain unacceptable, too.
I think it's a combination of the two: I don't think it's true that the US President never makes important decisions in general, but I think it probably WOULD be true if Biden got elected. So I think the choice is between Trump doing the job, vs. Biden's staff doing the job by committee. I think a lot of people would prefer the latter.
More or less a, the cabinet will just run the country for Biden, which has possibly already been the case for years. Which makes the Democrat position "we have to save democracy, by giving power to an unelected cabal."
Because only a person who had actually lost his mind would start WWIII. Trump may be an evil demon or whatever, but at least he still has his mind -- or rather, he retains more of it than Biden does.
If nothing else, the fact that the people who told you Trump would make bad decisions have spent the last five years covering for Biden, and thus you should be updating your beliefs based on this new information.
That isn't particularly pertinent information to update with. One's beliefs about Trump's future decisions should be based on what he says he will do and what he has done in the past, and what his character is like.
"Trump didn't start any wars" is a talking point that kind of ignores that Trump did do highly provocative things. He killed Iran's top general and threatened Kim Jong Un with nuclear war.
Whatever the hell happened with John Bolton and planes in the air, makes it seem like Trump managed to avert a war that his staff almost started. Not super encouraging from a competency standpoint. But I do think he had internalized from the Bush Jr. era that war makes for bad optics and an unflattering legacy.
And where, exactly, has this information come from? What information was passed along, and what information was suppressed? What context was included, what context was omitted?
Nobody arrives at their opinions by interacting with the pure truth embedded in the universe; there is chain of custody of almost all forms of evidence, and when your evidence has all come from people who have shown themselves willing to subvert that information to particular ends, you should be seriously re-evaluating all your beliefs that have been informed by this information.
What are you talking about? Trump has been a public figure for upwards of 40 years, he was the president, etc. There are a variety of sources of information about him, of which only a tiny percentage comes from the people who could have been covering for Biden.
Is this weird? A good 5-10% of people will get appendicitis at some point in their life, and if left untreated it can easily kill. Modern surgery plus antibiotics means the risk is very low these days (just 0.02% of deaths in the US), but surely there must have been a time when it was understood as a diagnosis but still very dangerous? Why is history not full of stories which end "and then one day he randomly got appendicitis and died"?
Houdini is a possible case not listed in that wikipedia article.
I only recognized Minkowski from name alone. As for the list: deaths clearly skew towards late 19th, early 20th century. Late enough for appendicits being recognizable as cause of death, but early enough for surgery and antibiotics being less developed/available. That means many of the people on the list lived too long ago to remain in the general memory.
However, since they are all people important enough to earn a WP article, it is still somewhat surprising to see few highly notable people. One reason might be that the most notable people also received better health care and so were less at risk of dying to appendicitis.
Another guess would be purely related to the Wikipedia category tagging process: The more notable people on WP have more categories applicable to them than less notable people (also more eyes on those articles), and people simply avoided tagging the highly notable people with the "appendicitis-related death" category in order not to overload the page.
Lord Dursany, a late 19th/early 20th century fantasy and horror writer who's been cited as a major influence by a whole bunch of writers from the following generation or two, including Tolkien and Lovecraft.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a long-time Senator from New York. Hillary Clinton succeeded him in the Senate.
I thought I recognized a third, but it turns out it was W. G. Grace (a 19th century English cricketer), not W. R. Grace, founder of the chemical company of the same name.
Hm, just speculating here, but perhaps antibiotics became common before it became common to determine the reason for deaths with high granularity?
So, when did people start to write down the death causes of people? And if someone had abdominal pain and was vomiting, when became this note more than "something with stomach or digestion"?
One factor may be that it skews young - most cases between 5-35; while the list of "famous people" that you would recognize probably skews older. Probably lots of people who died in their teens/twenties who might have gone on to be famous if they hadn't died of apendicitis.
Houdini's appendix quite likely ruptured from him being punched in the stomach, which does give you the same end result (sepsis) as having it burst from appendicitis as such ... but I wouldn't count it
My understanding is that it has been hypothesized that blunt trauma can cause appendicitis (and there are several theories as to the mechanism by which maybe it can do this): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28673696/
I think re: Sotomayor there might be some concern about getting a replacement through the Senate, also. They can only afford one defection and Manchin and Sinema are not super reliable.
From this video it seems like Biden is speaking in coherent sentences (unlike Trump). He displays no aphasia (unlike Trump). It seems like like the same old Joe with a slight speech impediment who I've watched since the Obama administration. And it seems like the same old Democratic circular firing squad in action again.
As for the NY Times asking for Biden to step away from the race but not Trump, it confirms their MO as a rightwing mouthpiece. What's ironic to me is that if Trump wins, the editors of the NY Times will be right in his sites because they don't kowtow to him enough.
I think the president of the United States being unable to speak in coherent sentences from time to time and looking completely lost is not a good thing.
I can't believe you're serious! They want the D candidate to win, so they're offering recommendations to Ds that they think will make their preferred outcome more likely. That's usually called "trying to help".
They may be bad at it - they may be trying to help in a way that actually hurts the D chance to win - but that's where your comment about the circular firing squad comes in.
"As for the NY Times asking for Biden to step away from the race but not Trump, it confirms their MO as a rightwing mouthpiece. What's ironic to me is that if Trump wins, the editors of the NY Times will be right in his sites because they don't kowtow to him enough."
Back in 2023:
"Donald Trump Should Never Again Be Trusted With the Nation’s Secrets"
"As for the NY Times asking for Biden to step away from the race but not Trump, it confirms their MO as a rightwing mouthpiece."
I...uh...I know right-wingers. Like, normal ones and radical ones. They would all burn the NYT offices to the ground and salt the ashes if given the chance. Very few organizations have done as much to earn their undying hatred.
I think you might be using a non-central example of "rightwing".
Anyone talking about Trumps mental decline while downplaying Bidens is acting like we haven't seen them next to each other in a debate. They are worlds apart.
Trump didn't cite a single statistic or fact, and basically only relies on appeals to emotions and lies (some states wanted post-birth abortions, really?). I don't deny Biden is definitely worse age-wise than Trump, but less than the debate would make appear.
https://shadowoneboxing.wordpress.com/2024/07/02/objective-tests-for-aphantasia/
It turns out that if you can visualize, visualizing affects your eyes, so visualizing a bright light means your pupils contract.
What does this do to the NLP claim that everyone is visualizing all the time, but not everyone is conscious of it?
I wonder about my negative visualization? I can't visualize a Tolkien hobbit, but I'm convinced all illustrations are wrong.
I'll bring this back for the new open thread.
If you haven't heard yet, there's been a (failed) attempted assassination attempt on Trump: https://apnews.com/article/trump-vp-vance-rubio-7c7ba6b99b5f38d2d840ed95b2fdc3e5 ("Trump rally shooting is being investigated as an assassination attempt, officials say"). They even have a photo of the bullet whizzing past his head: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/07/13/world/13trump-shooting-combo/13trump-shooting-combo-superJumbo.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp (it's the thin brown line to the right of his head in the 1st photo).
Not sure what to say about this beyond, uh... have you heard, I guess? And also, this probably isn't going to be good for the country... not good at all... got any thoughts of your own to share?
My thought is, yeah that makes sense. Anarchy runs in every election, and people only trust the system when they think it's listening to them. Trump has been demonized and demonized himself for ten years, and now his only rival has visible dementia. The candidates are falling below the Anarchy line.
Assuming this is what it looks like at face value, seems like it probably cinches it for trump? That's just too good of a look, especially contrasting bidens already low energy (I will still be voting dem ticket, just being real)
It's heartbreaking that someone died, but in the big picture I expect that, unless this event inspires copycats, it will have no more effect than that person killed in a car accident would have.
I wouldn't know about left-wingers, but conservatives will be fine. I have a link to a whole page of Trump assassination memes for you. Check out these reactions:
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2024/07/13/you-missed-maga-memesters-immortalize-donald-trump-surviving-assassination-attempt/
Gotta hand it to the Babylon Bee for this one:
https://babylonbee.com/news/cnn-clumsy-trump-hits-head-on-bullet
After CNN apparently had this headline up for early coverage:
https://x.com/marcorubio/status/1812259108973912261
Gosh, that silly old Trump! Just falling over at his own rallies! Needing the Secret Service to clear things up after him!
But you have to hand it to him for his political instincts - immediately, as the Secret Service are trying to get him out of danger and he's bleeding from the ear, he stops them to do the fist-pumping for the crowd and give the amazing photo shot of 'strength and defiance' with the American flag in the background. Truly, he is cursed with luck!
The situation here in the US is dangerously volatile. Maybe it would be good to hold off on the giddy, reflexive ‘own the libs’ stuff for a while.
Gunflint, my friend, I don't have to own any libs when they're doing it themselves.
Here was me thinking this election would just be a boring rehash of 2020 when the Fates decided to mix it up for a change.
Yeah, right.
Gunny, this is for you 😉
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f90BL4uVIag
In the first 30 seconds, we really didn't know what was going on.
Better coverage in the next 30 seconds mentioned popping noises without saying they were gunshots.
Sure, but apparently CNN kept up the "Trump fell over" headline for several hours.
Anyway, plenty of time for the memes to be churned out.
I was following this in near-real-time, via CNN. I'm pretty sure they went from "falls" to "was shot at" within minutes, and "was shot" in an hour or two. Which tracks with what was actually understood clearly enough to report on; it took a while to rule out other causes for the bloody ear (fragments from a bullet-shattered teleprompter, hitting the floor hard when the MiBs took him down).
But the internet never forgets, and if a memester wants the very first headline, it's always going to be out there for them.
That was how I remember it playing out on CBS too. Popping. Maybe gunfire, maybe fireworks. There appears to be blood right away. Verify it wasn’t a piece of glass or another accident for a while longer. Then confirmation it was a bullet wound within an hour or so. Being extra cautious mainly.
But if you stick to the facts the libs just won’t own themselves and you can’t turn up the heat before all or even most of the things involved have even been looked at.
We have crazies on the left saying it was a false flag. Crazies on the right saying Biden ordered a hit.
Throw in cranks just having a bit of malicious fun and we have… mid July 2024. To be continued.
I’m pleasantly surprised at the restraint Trump has shown so far. Knock on wood.
I think we should all take a deep breath, gather up this thing and put it on a shelf, and then go on with our evening and go to sleep. Tomorrow we'll know more, like maybe who the (attempted) assassin was, and who the bystanders who were killed and wounded were. And let's hope and pray that no one does anything stupid because of this.
In my imaginary ideal world, I hope Biden and Trump agree to have a golf match in a few days, and agree to announce in advance that they'll both lie about the outcome and claim that they each won by some ridiculous amount, so that only they and the Secret Service will know what actually happened. I wish that sort of shared joke would be enough to nudge the country toward a more healthy sort of politics.
It seems like it's now trendy to write gender-inclusive plurals like "Zuschauer:innen" in German, but how do they actually pronounce the ":" when speaking?
The : is reflected in speech by a glottal stop, like YesNoMaybe said.
Barring misunderstand by me, EngineOfCreation’s response is false: It is most definitely used in speech as well as in writing.
While using it in speech is not particularly common,
I do have a few friends who do it. Mostly younger progressive types. I have also heard it used on podcasts etc.
In my experience people pronounce it by a slight pausing at the ":" and then continuing with "Innen", pronouncing it as if it was it's own word. People use the same for the "*" version "Zuschauer*innen".
It is used for writing only, same as other variants such as
the internal I: ZuschauerInnen (as a software dev I'm personally rather partial to this one),
asterisk: Zuschauer*innen,
slash: Zuschauer/innen,
parentheses: Zuschauer(innen).
In speech, really the only solution is simply saying both variants ("Zuschauerinnen und Zuschauer"), as there is no pronounciation for special characters and pausing in the middle of saying a word would sound rather awkward. It also remains the default and most common usage in writing.
TIL the Japanese plans to defend against the expected American invasion of the home islands in 1945 were organized around the motto, "The Glorious Death of the 100 Million."
Goodness. I would have preferred a more motivating slogan.
https://www.history.navy.mil/about-us/leadership/director/directors-corner/h-grams/h-gram-057/h-057-1.html
Obviously thinking big, insofar as Japan's population in 1945 was only 70 million. Perhaps they were anticipating 100 million dead Americans littering Japan's beaches?
Maybe the Blood God doesn't care whose bodies cover the battlefield, only that they do.
https://x.com/trungtphan/status/1810821636016500902?s=46&t=aMnHr6c2FmZVSEcDiYHhNA
Am I getting it right: in NY, trash (before being taken away to landfills, presumably) has really just been stored on the sidewalks until *now*? Not in containers? Is this a common practice in American cities? What the hell?
The Upshot did an interesting story about the trash problem in NYC: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/02/upshot/nyc-trash-rules.html
In Philadelphia, people still put their trash out in plastic trash bags. Recycling (collected on the same day) is put in bins, though the recycling guys will pick up piles of cardboard from the ground.
Doesn't Philadelphia have crows or other corvids that would peck a plastic bag open to find food scraps inside?
Apparently not.
I have no idea why we don't have crows, which would be the regional default. Ravens are a mythical bird from British fantasy.
My casual observation of local birds includes pigeons, sparrows, some sort of thrush. That's most of it. I saw a quail once, but I assume it escaped from a nearby market.
https://birdwatchinghq.com/common-birds-of-philadelphia/
Oh, that's right, mallards and Canada geese on water in parks, but not near me. Sea gulls, mysteriously not listed, and possibly I'm remembering seeing them in Delaware.
This is a unique quirk of New York City. Normal cities have trash cans and dumpsters.
It's not a matter of people being slobs though, as Bullseye speculated. It's due to NYC just not having dumpsters for weird historical reasons.
I haven't been to New York, but the standard practice in the U.S. is to use containers. If New York does have trash just sitting on the sidewalk, I suspect that it's people being slobs, rather than what they're supposed to do.
Nope. It's not all of NY, it's just NYC. But it's the actual official system. They literally just pile trash on the sidewalk for the garbage men to pick up. Like industrial amounts, there will be a pile of 20 black contractor trash bags outside a restaurant. And it's like every building on a street will do that at once. It smells horrible, and it's as crazy as it sounds the first time you see it.
I think it's only certain times of day, as in they know the garbage men come around at 6 and so you can't put your bags out before 4. But it's still a wildly bad system. They didn't build good infrastructure for it long ago, and the calculus until now has been that having enough dumpsters for the density of that city couldn't fit on the sidewalks.
How on Earth could Pizza Rat (and his descendants keep fed if the trash wasn't in easy to access bags? *s*
I blame the Rodent Lobby.
Estoy buscando un hablante de español que esté interesado en los temas cubiertos por Astral Codex Ten para chatear por video una o dos veces al mes.
Hablo español, pero me resulta difícil encontrar oportunidades para practicar el habla. Me encantaría conocer a un “amigo por correspondencia” que también pueda ser de EE. UU. o de un país de habla hispana en otro lugar del mundo. Estoy entusiasmada por aprender sobre lugares nuevos para mí y podría ayudarte a practicar inglés si lo deseas (aunque también me complace hablar solo español) y podría brindarte una idea de la cultura de los Estados Unidos.
Trabajo en salud pública y estoy interesada en la salud global, la visualización de datos, el cambio tecnológico, la escritura y lectura de poesía, la literatura, la racionalidad y el altruismo efectivo. Déjame saber si eres alguien que podría estar interesado en un intercambio multicultural como este.
Hola. Me parece interesante la idea de conversar sobre racionalidad en español. Si no te molesta la pregunta, me parece un poco extraño que en Estados Unidos no encuentes muchas oportunidades de practicar el español. ¿Vives en una zona con una población hispana muy baja? ¿O es solo que preferirías tener conversaciones especificamente sobre racionalidad?
Jaja pues nuestra cultura es dividido en partes casi completamente distintas (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/). Los hispanohablantes viven en comunidades estrechos, y solo dentro ciertos comunidades hay mucha oportunidad por intercambio do idiomas.
@Claire buscas un hispanohablante nativo específicamente? Vivo en EEUU y aprendé hablar español hace unos años, pero siempre busco oportunidades para practicar y conocer más gente racionalista.
¡Agradezco el comentario! Me interesan diferentes culturas, pero sí, hay muchos hispanohablantes en los EE. UU. y me encantaría conectarme con ellos también. Adder, te enviaré un mensaje directo para conectarnos.
I have some sympathy for Joe Biden as things go on; his every gaffe and slip is now being scrutinised with the same attention that Trump's appearances received, instead of being papered over, ignored, or written off as "Only Fox News reported that and we all know it's a far-right Trump-worshipping propaganda outlet!"
I can understand why he mixed up Kamala and Trump here, while he might be slipping, he's not stupid and he would have to be not alone blind but dead not to be aware that Kamala is being touted as his replacement for the nomination. So she's his internal rival and Trump is his external rival, little wonder he conflated them:
https://www.rte.ie/news/world/2024/0712/1459457-joe-biden/
"Since his poor performance against Mr Trump in a presidential debate two weeks ago, Mr Biden has faced growing doubts from donors, supporters and fellow Democrats about his ability to win the 5 November election and keep up with the demands of the job.
He probably did not help his case when he mixed up his vice president and his Republican rival at the outset of the news conference, which lasted nearly an hour.
"Look, I wouldn't have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president if she was not qualified to be president. So start there," Mr Biden said as he responded to a question from Reuters about his confidence in Ms Harris."
While it probably would be for the best if Biden stepped down or stepped back, the real scorn we should be showing is towards all the news outlets and others who covered for him these past few years. Something like this doesn't just happen all at once, but the constant "only the right wing outlets are reporting on this, so we know it's all cheap fakes disinformation propaganda lies" explaining away was only necessary *because* only the right-wing outlets reported on it, and they were the only ones who did because all the liberal, left, and self-proclaimed neutral just the facts outlets were in the hole for the Democrats.
I'm at the stage now where if a journalist says grass is green, I need to go look out the window to verify that for myself. And that's a disgrace for a profession which claims the moral high ground on being the ones to speak truth to power and tell the truth no matter where it leads, and where they do perform an important function for the public.
How strong is the case that the mainstream press covered up Biden's infirmities during the past few years? I thought it was mostly something done by the White House staff, doing a certain amount of stage management show the president at his best.
I think I would have noticed something in the Wall Street Journal, at least, if the more liberal side of the news industry had been telling fibs.
Biden went from having, unfairly, every benefit of the doubt from the media. To now when he has, unfairly, no benefit of the doubt at all.
Jill Biden was also managing Joe to a level to protect him from everything. If you haven't heard of Operation Bubblewrap you can check it out. This may have led him to deteriorating faster (or so I assert with little evidence).
Flubbing names, especially realizing you just said the wrong one and correcting it, is normal but people are on the hunt like they constantly were with Dan Quayle who didn't even know how to spell potato.
"Something like this doesn't just happen all at once"
I think you might be surprised just how rapidly old people can mentally decline once the decline starts. Per WebMD: https://www.webmd.com/healthy-aging/what-to-know-about-cognitive-decline-in-older-adults
"Cognitive decline, also known as cognitive impairment, can come on **suddenly** or gradually"
I saw it with my own father who went downhill very fast in the year leading up to his death in his early eighties. But even before then, he had gradually been getting frailer and less flexible and more forgetful. That's what I mean about Biden not suddenly switching in a matter of months from "just as good as when I was sixty" to "Trump is my vice president". There would have been small but noticeable instances of deterioration along the way.
Yeah, from what I've heard, there's been a clear decline even since the spring (apparently the SOTU was actually decent). Still doesn't excuse Biden deciding to run again, but it's not like he's been this bad for years either.
"This bad", probably not, but here he is in 2020 speaking about Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwBEcyI_qm0
He wasn't in good shape then either.
"The real scorn we should be showing is towards all the news outlets and others who covered for him these past few years"
Yep. We should also be updating heavily away from any position these news outlets have collectively supported; if they lied about one thing, they certainly lied about others.
Genuine question: is there evidence that lying about one thing increases the likelihood of lying about other things?
It seems mathematically unavoidable given that there is a distributed spectrum of unwillingness-to-lie among any human population. Any lie reduces the prior of the liar being on the highly-unwilling-to-lie segment of that distribution.
Some lies more than others, obviously, and in a broadly predictable way.
Do you believe friend A lying to friend B about whether they look fat means that friend A can never be trusted in the future? Do you believe the allies should never be trusted after WW2 because of the various cover stories concocted to fool the enemy and their own people? Can the Jesuits never be trusted because they practised equivocation during the recusancy?
> Do you believe friend A lying to friend B about whether they look fat means that friend A can never be trusted in the future?
I certainly believe that they'd lack an a priori reluctance to lie to Nazis about Jews hiding in their basement. So that's good?
"Never" is a big word. Everyone has a threshold, whether it's rationally consistent or not. Knowing they'll perform a social "white lie" about whether a friend looks fat, provides little information about whether they'd lie maliciously to harm someone. I think most humans draw the line somewhere in between.
I have no idea how the Jesuits have evolved in this respect since the days of the Gunpowder Plot, but I bet it would take less than 15 minutes of searching the Internet to find out.
You really think I'm asking you like you're Google?
Shifting the goalposts, are we? The standard was "increases the likelihood of lying about other things", not "can never be trusted in the future".
This was the original commentWe should also be updating heavily away from any position these news outlets have collectively supported; if they lied about one thing, they certainly lied about others.
Just a random thought: I've heard sometimes of the term "cultural cringe" applied to Canadians or Australians who believe that their culture is considered inferior to US or UK culture, but taking a global perspective, this seems faintly ridiculous - when it comes to things like music, series, celebs, famous landmarks and so on your average person in the world will probably know vastly more about Canada and Australia than about any other nation of similar size (ie 25-40 million people), unless in their immediate vicinity.
Cameroon and Burkina Faso are similar in size to Australia but we don't really see them as our peers.
I'm not sure if cultural cringe still exists in the same form that it did in the 1950s when the term was coined, anyway. There's no "high culture" for anyone to aspire to these days anyway -- the top of the cultural totem pole is no longer a fellow in a top hat speaking flawless RP, it's a black indigenous Muslim trans lesbian drawing stick figures while everybody coos in amazement. And we have plenty of those.
We have the Irish version of this vis-a-vis Britain. It's not just "thinking your culture is inferior" because to be blunt, USA culture is the behemoth everyone knows globally.
It's the adoption of the cringing attitude before the perceived 'betters', by those who wish they were or could be those same betters; that there is nothing good or valuable in the native culture, the other culture is simply superior in every way, and the values, attitudes, beliefs and themes of that culture should be adopted wholesale.
Resulting in the third-rate imitations of the Brits imitating the Americans, and the adoption of American culture war elements lock, stock and barrel even where they have no correspondence with the local context. It's not recognising "Hollywood will always be bigger than whatever we can produce", it's "Hollywood is the only way to go".
And it also involves being obsessed with what others think of us (even if they never think of us) and castigating the locals for thing X or belief Y which will make a show of us in front of the neighbours.
It's particularly funny for Ireland. There are almost certainly no nations of 5 million people (counting only RoI) with the same cultural output, cachet and favorability outside itself.
Wow, I had no idea Ireland was so small. Looks like it is comparable in population to New Zealand, and about 1/10th of South Korea.
We've become more confident, but we've swung between trying to develop a very purely Irish Ireland culture that is self-referential (and often rightly skewered, see this satirical show from 1977, at the 34:50 mark https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlpgC7NLei8 ) and a cringing deference to our betters in England.
It's funny to read about Ireland's "cringing deference" while "Come on out ye Black and Tans" plays in the background.
People don't adjust for population size when it comes to their feelings and impressions.
I think the main problem with us Canadians is that we tend to compare ourselves to the US, which is ten times our size, more than ten times wealthier than we are, and dominant in a score of industries, including popular culture. Of course we come out looking second-rate.
On the other hand, Scott Pilgrim in all its incarnations is worth a full decade of American cultural output. ;-)
Don’t sweat it. You have a great country. Okay I have trouble computing my mileage at first, kilometers per litre? But I figure it out. Plus you have those great loonies and twonies!
On the bright side, you at least managed to get a lot of American TV to be produced in Canada.
OC ACXLW Meetup - Exploring Sexuality: Fetishes, Tabooness, and Popularity
**OC ACXLW Meetup - Exploring Sexuality: Fetishes, Tabooness, and Popularity**
**Date:** Saturday, July 13, 2024
**Time:** 2 PM
**Location:** 1970 Port Laurent Place
**Host:** Michael Michalchik
**Email:** michaelmichalchik@gmail.com
Hello Enthusiasts,
Join us for our 69th OC ACXLW meetup where we'll delve into the intriguing world of sexual fetishes, exploring the interplay between tabooness and popularity. This week’s reading provides a deep dive into the complexities of how societal norms and personal experiences shape our understanding of fetishes.
**Discussion Topics:**
1. **Fetish Tabooness and Popularity by Aella**
**Overview:** This article explores the complexities of sexual fetishes, their perceived tabooness, and their popularity within different communities. Aella delves into how societal norms and personal experiences shape the way fetishes are viewed and practiced, examining the interplay between secrecy and acceptance.
**TLDR:** Aella's article investigates the societal and personal factors that influence the perception, secrecy, and popularity of fetishes, highlighting the role of media and subcultures in normalizing previously taboo practices.
**Summary:** Aella presents a comprehensive analysis of various fetishes, ranking them by their perceived tabooness and popularity. She discusses the methodology used to collect and analyze data from her Big Kink Survey, providing insights into the societal and cultural factors that influence how different fetishes are viewed and experienced. The accompanying chart visually represents the relationship between how taboo a fetish is perceived to be and its reported interest among participants.
**Text Article:** [Fetish Tabooness and Popularity](https://open.substack.com/pub/aella/p/fetish-tabooness-and-popularity-v3?r=fbgbc&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web) - https://open.substack.com/pub/aella/p/fetish-tabooness-and-popularity-v3?r=fbgbc&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
**Graph:** [Fetish Tabooness and Popularity Graph](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F85a5b629-0865-4748-bbb8-2ca4a7d8f094_12336x10431.png) - https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F85a5b629-0865-4748-bbb8-2ca4a7d8f094_12336x10431.png
**Questions for Discussion:**
- **Graph Analysis:** Which fetishes on the graph do you find most surprising in terms of their desirability, tabooness, or the combination of both? What do these positions reveal about societal attitudes towards these fetishes?
- **Societal Influence:** How do societal norms and cultural narratives shape the perception and acceptance of various fetishes? To what extent do these norms vary across different societies and historical periods?
- **Secrecy and Stigma:** In what ways does secrecy around fetishes both protect and hinder individuals? How does the stigma associated with certain fetishes impact personal identity and community dynamics?
- **Preference Falsification:** How does preference falsification affect the way individuals report or engage in fetishes? What are the implications for understanding true sexual preferences within a society?
- **Evolutionary Forces:** What evolutionary forces might drive the development and expression of certain fetishes? How do these forces interact with contemporary social structures and norms around mate selection?
- **Politicization of Sex:** How has the politicization of sex and sexual behavior influenced public and private attitudes towards fetishes? What are the potential benefits and drawbacks of this politicization for individual freedom and societal norms?
- **Psychological Factors:** What are the underlying psychological motivations that drive individuals to explore fetishes? How do these motivations intersect with broader social and cultural factors?
We look forward to an engaging and thought-provoking discussion where your insights will contribute to a deeper understanding of these significant topics.
Is there a write up anywhere of how the IRS expansion is doing? I keep seeing headlines of "1 billion dollars", which seems like a massive failure, given that it's taking 60 billion. How much are they getting, compared to what they expected?
I saw a chart claiming they expected 180 billion over ten years, but I don't know if that was before or after it got scaled down.
Also, this all seems like it's only minimally useful. Wouldn't an index fund go up by a similar amount over the same period?
$60B over ten years in funding, IIRC. It is really quite annoying that most of the the media coverage doesn't do more than repeat the overall figure and gives zero additional detail or context.
The pitch here is, "we were able to pull in $1B of additional funds just taking in some low-hanging fruit that we knew was there and didn't have the bandwidth to pick up", not "we spent $60B and got $1B back." The capacity for more audits of high-income taxpayers in forthcoming years will result in more funds, and more data analysis might drive more enforcement action + push tax preparers to take less aggressive positions, cutting the delta between the actual collections (e.g., what you send the IRS based on what your accountants/tax preparers argue you owe) and owed collections (e.g., what the IRS would tell you you owe after auditing your financials).
I would note a second big use for the fund allocation, as pitched by the agency and various pols, has been improving customer service, processing taxpayer returns on a more timely basis by updating back-end infrastructure, etc. All unsexy stuff that also might not result in directly increasing inflows, but would help build accountability and public trust (tbh, I would suggest this is as important if not more so)
The Republicans killed the IRS expansion. It was their number one demand in exchange for not forcing a debt default (which is a bit ironic, since it *increases* the deficit, but apparently Defund The Tax Police is really popular on the right for the same reasons that Defund The Local Police briefly captivated the left).
I could be under informed, but Reason seems to believe that they still received 60 billion, which is less than the 80 billion originally planned.
https://reason.com/2024/07/11/irs-crackdown-nets-enough-revenue-to-fund-the-government-for-90-minutes/
Was the 60 billion hampered in some way, so it could not be spent effectively? Or is Reason mistaken or misleading about the additional budget?
I decided to watch Monty Python, Flying Circus.
There are reasons, of course. I did something that somehow triggered YouTube into recommending me a couple of skits from the show, and they were generally all hilarious. I see it getting a lot of praise and homages on the internet (Spanish Inquisition, ...), allegedly the Python programming language was named after it because the (Dutch) designer was a fan. One skit is allegedly the reason why "Spam" (originally some sort of canned meat) is now the universal cross-language term for "Unwanted and repetitive offers".
It's... not that good? or at least Whither Canada, the only episode I have seen thus far, is. Perhaps the YouTube recommendations were cherry-picking the best parts and setting up an unrealistic standard. Why is the running joke with the pigs vs. humans funny? I mean, I know running jokes are funny by virtue of sheer repetition, but why pigs? Why is Picasso drawing while bicycling funny? Is there something about the comedy that is too British or too 1960s-1970s (or too Public-Broadcast-Television-era, or too European, etc...) that I as a 90s-born non-British person can't get? or is the comedy just entirely due to the surrealism and dream-like incoherency along with the laugh tracks in the background and the deadpan delivery?
Some skits were indeed funny, genuinely so. A musician upset that people are too preoccupied with a nickname his friends gave him they forget to ask about his actual music. A film producer being increasingly weirded out in an interview by the informal nicknames the interviewer keeps giving him. And Joke Warfare.
Joke Warfare is a brilliant anticipation of the concept of "Memetic Warfare", before Dawkins even coined the word "Meme" in the late 1970s. The skit was very Unsong-like. It's a play on the trope, probably first explored in the modern day by H.P. Lovecraft, that some things kill you just by knowing them:
A WW2-era British comedian discovers a joke too funny to stop laughing at, and he promptly dies from laughter after reading it in full. His mother finds him and dies too. A police officer trying to "remove The Joke" also dies. Eventually, the military gets wind of this, and translates it to German, the translators working one word at a time to avoid dying by The Joke. Allied soldiers read the German Joke out loud to German troops and they all fall like flies. The Germans develop a Counter-Joke, eventually translating it to English and attacking Britain with it using radio, but it's strongly implied the German sense of humor is inferior and ineffectual. Eventually, "Peace breaks out, and Joke Warfare is banned by a special clause in the Geneva Convention".
I really like this kind of cerebral and philosophical humor. If every episode of the show contained one skit like that I would be satisfied, but other skits seem... very ordinary? not outright unfunny or mediocre, just funny in a very normal and non-groundbreaking non-cult-status way, at least to my non-native-English ears. The next episodes could be hiding something.
Like everyone's saying, it's uneven.
> There was a little girl, who had a little curl
> Right in the middle of her forehead,
> And when she was good, she was very, very good,
> But when she was bad she was horrid.
If you're looking for pre-90s British humour, my personal recommendations would be a short book and a different TV show. The book is "1066 and All That", a parody history of England that's a spoof of popular histories and school exams. The TV show is "Yes, Minister" (and its continuation "Yes, Prime Minister"), which is a brilliant explanation and send-up of modern politics.
I agree that Monty Python is uneven.
"Philosophy Football" is funny, but I agree: it's a particular sort of humour that either hits or misses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfduUFF_i1A
What people remember and quote are the best sketches, but the show ran for four series and there were forty-five episodes, so not all the sketches are of equal quality (like any TV show).
As a Brit I agree. It’s not that good. Nostalgia.
SNL’s greatest ever sketch “more cowbell” isn’t that great either.
Youtube is definitely cherry-picking the best ones, they were a weird bunch and did a lot of weird things. The sketch where a man dances up to another man and slaps him with a small fish? Eh, probably can skip that one.
For one reason or another though I'm being routinely reminded of the Summarize Proust sketch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwAOc4g3K-g It's still the most I know about Proust, and that's after trying to read it.
As a big fan of Monty Python, a lot of the skits aren't that funny. Back when it was still broadcast on TV, I would say maybe 30-50% of an episode were good and the rest were meh. Same with the movies; there are bits of Holy Grail and Life of Brian that are great and other parts that are slow or not really my style of humor. Overall it's rather hit and miss. I'll never forget the lego Camelot scene from the extended cut Holy Grail DVD though.
It probably looks very dated now. It was funny when first broadcast.
The Parrot sketch has become legendary (Pet shop owner tries to break it customer that his parrot has died).
The Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook is also legendary.
The problem you're likely having, watching Monty Python, is that a lot of the comedy is at the expense of the contemporary BBC, and a lot of what remains is at the expense of the contemporary culture. In a modern context, particularly a modern US context, most of the jokes simply won't land, or if they do land, will land as purely absurdist comedy rather than as the deliberate lampooning of cultural artifacts that are missing from the viewer's context.
Right. My personal best examples is the Cat Detector Van, which drives around neighborhoods looking for unregistered cats. This isn't pure absurdity; it's a direct reference to TV Detector Vans, which roamed the roads using radio technology looking for people who were watching TV but had not paid the required license fee.
Fair. Most sketch shows are hit-and-miss in my opinion (Mitchell & Webb even have a sketch about this), and Python is no exception as well as being 50 years old. I like the first series but it does peak in series 2 or 3. Do you like the Fast Show?
I didn't know the Fast Show before I googled it just now, but if I finish Monty and find myself wanting more British humor, I might consider watching it.
I'd like to think it's less dated than python but it is nearly 30 years old. Unlike Python there's a lot of iterations of the same character/situation. Highlights: Rowley Birkin, Jazz Club, Channel 9 News, The "Suits you" Tailors (Johnny Depp appeared with them once)
The Fast Show is good, but towards the end it got a bit too high on its own importance and did a lot of fan-service that really didn't go anywhere, e.g. Ralph and Ted are funny characters but didn't need an entire backstory and a spin-off series; the hinted-at quiet tragedy of Ralph's relationship, or lack of one, with his father who was much more comfortable talking to the groundsman Ted is all we need to make the humour both poignant and hilarious.
And as an Irish person, well, I have to approve of the conclusion of this sketch 😁:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wivJ6FeXqdk
Yeh that's a good one, this is my favourite: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=su8QmJyHeCM
Back in January of this year, Rolling Stone published an article listing their choices for the 150 best science-fiction movies of all time.
https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-lists/best-sci-fi-movies-1234893930/stalker-1979-2-1234931315/
I've seen more than half the movies on the list, and they are generally films I like or at least respect. (Number 1 is "2001: A Space Odyssey," for example.)
But they put a really odd duck in the number 2 slot, "Stalker," by Andrei Tarkovsky. I just watched it, and it is more than two hours of wandering through countryside and some sort of industrial ruin, plus chatter about philosophy, art, and the role of the intellectual in society. It's slow, it's drab, and it's tiresome. How anyone could consider it the second-best anything is beyond me.
Stalker is somewhat based on the novel Roadside Picnic, and also spawned a trilogy of video games by the same name from a Ukrainian studio. These are hugely popular in the Russosphere, although I've never seen the movie myself.
I've heard good things about the novel. Maybe it's better than the film.
The novel is decent. It's by far not the authors' best, but, unlike their best and their cult stuff, it seems to connect with non-Russian audience.
I never understood the movie. It has only a tenuous connection with the book. I'd guess the cinematography and all the philosophical stuff are the kinds of things that make movie critics happy.
II get the distinct impression, going through the list, that the creators wanted to include more "arthouse" style films, and sprinkled them in the list so as to seem sophisticated. Also some older films that, while solid in their era, don't really survive the test of time. You can see the distinct influence of
I don't particularly recommend Under the Skin, for example, unless you want to see where Stranger Things ripped off some of its visuals from. Liquid Sky is mostly just boring, with, again, some pretty visuals (there isn't much of a plot to discuss). Fantastic Planet is EXTRAORDINARILY boring. It's just an allegory in which the mice are humans, and not particularly subtle about it; the animation style is interesting but doesn't salvage the movie. I hosted a movie night pairing this movie with Mad God, and - skip Fantastic Planet, watch Mad God, which is a beautiful gnostic nightmare.
Given the absence of films like Eraserhead and Naked Lunch, and given the inclusion of the movies which were included, I think this list is less "Here are some great science fiction films to watch" and more "You're a smart consumer who enjoys good movies, as evidenced by the fact that your favorite modern science fiction movie is in the same list as these arthouse films, so you must be sophisticated". You include Naked Lunch in the former kind of list - you definitely do NOT include it in the latter, because that would be off-putting to people who couldn't enjoy it.
I would have thought "Naked Lunch" was exactly the kind of movie to put on "you're a sophisticated viewer" list and not "you're one of those grubby SF fans" list. Maybe views have changed since it came out?
Ah, but if it's on the list and you didn't like it at all, that would make you feel less sophisticated.
Maybe. But it still strikes me as a very sound list. Just looking at the top 20, there are 16 films I have seen, and I could recommend 15 of those 16 to others. That's an excellent ratio of good to bad.
I know a lot has already been written about our current predicament in the presidential election, but I think I have something valuable to add, spurred on by Alex Berenson's breaking news on the Parkinson's specialist at the WH 8 times in the last few months. Parkinson's is a really weird disease - it doesn't kill you, but it turns your life upside down: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/my-personal-experience-with-parkinsons
I don't know if it's much better for Biden if the messaging is "Relax, it's not Alzheimer's, it's Parkinson's!"
I think the man has a reasonable few years of life left to enjoy, whatever the diagnosis really is. But to be president? No, too much of a burden for him and for the country.
My wife always asks "why don't these people move on and spend some time with their family?" It's a good question.
Did you all know that there's a model online calculating the odds of a bill in US Congress getting enacted? If not, check it out:
https://www.govtrack.us/about/analysis#prognosis
According to the model, the title of the bill starting with "To designate the facility of the United States Postal" is good for the bill's odds, and the title starting with "A bill to amend the Internal Revenue Code of" is really bad.
I've been reading the wiki bio of one of the soon-to-be speakers at the Republican national convention, rapper Amber Rose:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Amber_Rose&oldid=1231239062
She's 1/4 Cape Verdean and claims she worked as a stripper and drug dealer as a teenager. She dated a series of famous rappers with names like Machine Gun Kelly and 21 Savage. She married rapper Wiz Khalifa and divorced him a year later. She had a kid out of wedlock. She identifies as bisexual, though like most bisexual women it appears most of her partners have been men. In 2015, she led the Los Angeles Slut Walk. In 2016, she spoke out against Trump. And now she's suddenly a Trump supporter. Some have questioned the sincerity of her conversion; I think one could just as easily question the sincerity of her feminist beliefs circa 2015. Did she just want to help her career in the liberal-dominated entertainment industry?
I'm unsure if having her speak at the convention is a good idea. On the one hand, she's bound to alienate a lot of the suit-and-tie traditional Republicans who used to be the Republican party stereotype:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6pv0_eK960
On the other hand, she's a good representation of the "new" Republican Party that's more secular, downscale, and diverse than the old one. Dare I say she represents the Trumpian populist movement better than these college-educated paleolibertarian male converts to Eastern Orthodoxy who proclaim themselves as its leaders. Your "multiracial working class" includes a lot of women with arms covered in tattoos, scantily-clad Instagram photos and kids born out of wedlock. If they were all run out of the party, it would be electorally dead in the water. Trump, though no genius, is smart enough to understand this. Many Republicans are complaining about her inclusion in the RNC, but if they don't like it, they should start thinking seriously about how to win back the high-income, high-education whites Trump drove out of the party.
After the assassination attempt, having a rapper speak at the RNC is going to be ideal because there are already lots of memes going around setting the video footage to 50 Cent's "Many Men" 😁
https://x.com/PGATUOR/status/1812260286839316676
I just called my representative's office and left a comment asking him to publicly call on Biden to drop out. Hopefully every little bit helps.
Which candidate - Trump, Biden, other Democrat - is likely to be best for AI safety?
My first impression is that a Democrat is likely to appoint sober professionals to formulate policy on the issue, while Trump is likely to appoint whichever culture warrior appears most macho or most willing to bribe. The first could produce good policies, the latter is likely to ignore the issue or do what's best in the short term for some particular insider.
Does anyone have a different take?
Consider that the recently released draft 2024 Republican platform said they'll repeal the recent White House Executive Order on AI.
> Artificial Intelligence (AI) We will repeal Joe Biden’s dangerous Executive Order that hinders AI Innovation, and imposes Radical Leftwing ideas on the development of this technology. In its place, Republicans support AI Development rooted in Free Speech and Human Flourishing.
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/2024-republican-party-platform
That is a very useful piece of information.
I'd say that a Democrat is more likely to listen to the "AI ethics" crowd rather than the "AI safety" crowd, since the "ethics" people are much more left-wing than the "safety" people, and they use all the right buzzwords. This will be bad for actual safety, but just might slow AI progress down to a crawl, which could be a silver lining.
I'd say that Trump would do partially what catches his interest, and partially what he thinks will score points against his opposition. If the Democrats push "ethics" over "safety", Trump might well embrace "safety" and play it up on a populist level. This could be bad for safety, since it could render the entire field toxic to anyone who wants to be accepted in left-wing society. On the other hand, he could do something else, which is likely to be bad too, or nothing at all, which is probably the most positive outcome on the table.
We know what policy Democrats would put in place, because they've already put it in place. It's about "safety", not "ethics".
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/biden-ai-executive-order-says-companies-will-have-to-report-large-compute-deployments-to-us-gov/
And that's great, but I don't trust that to continue. It could be wiped out with a word.
Is it better to vote for the party who promise to ignore "safety" altogether?
The AI people are mostly left-wing, which means Trump is motivated to make things difficult for them out of spite. I think that's the closest we're getting to AI safety.
We're fucked.
When leftists talk about sober professionals, they mean people who went to the Ivy League and have the right connections. Which could just as easily result in a credentialed moron as a competent technocrat. And most willing to bribe, really? Your take mostly boils down to tribal bias. Of course, Trump was notoriously bad at staffing the administration in his first term so he probably wouldn't appoint someone competent either.
Politics is mostly downstream from society and culture. Most people don't know or understand anything about AI. Even the people who do are pretty bitterly divided between AI is the Best Thing Ever and AI is Going to Kill Us All. Typically the government response to new technologies is reactive rather than proactive. Maybe if there is an incident where a rogue AI kills a few thousand people we will see some effective legislation. Otherwise, it will be business as usual.
No, by "sober professionals" in this case, I mean something like "people who have heard of a FLOP, or who will listen to those who have".
No one knows what is likely to be best for AI safety, let alone someone in government. Government people will use fears of AI (some of which are legitimate) to boost their own image to their constituents, enact some regulations which transfer resources from some people to others, and accomplish nothing noteworthy.
"sober professionals to formulate policy on the issue"
Does this just mean "culture warriors on my side?" Seems to me like Democrats wage culture war just as often as Republicans.
I think it takes a professional, not a culture warrior, to formulate a rule such as "report all AI runs over 10^26 FLOPs". The average culture warrior has never heard of a FLOP.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/biden-ai-executive-order-says-companies-will-have-to-report-large-compute-deployments-to-us-gov/
Is there any serious movement in the UK to fix the First Past the Post election system? It seems to cause all kinds of weird chaos.
Unusually, the weird chaos doesn't seem to benefit the two major parties that would presumably need to agree in order to get it to change. A move to instant runoff would keep the two major parties in power just as often, but prevent the wild swings in the composition of the house which kick MPs out of their jobs so often. Though I guess it might also result in more frequent hung parliaments with the LibDems as the constant swing votes.
First Past the Post is the worst system except for all the others that have been tried from time to time.
In particular, I think the strongest argument in favor of FPtP is that it is very simple and easy to understand. Even the dumbest voters can understand "the person who gets the most votes wins", which is not true of most alternatives. And that's a very important consideration at a time when a lot of distrust is being cast on the electoral process even as it is (at least in the US).
Agreed.
(This is why approval voting is my preferred improvement: it's almost as simple, and better overall. And if you don't want to bother with it, then you only vote for one candidate, and it's back to simple FPtP.)
The last time we had a referendum on voting reform (which lost) the Lib Dems had just destroyed their reputation by going into a coalition with the Conservatives.
Possible ....
a) "No" voters had just been exposed to a vivid example of the donside of coalition government, and had talken against votoing reforms that would probably make future coalitions more likely
b) The Lib Dems had just self destructed, so "No" voters might have been thinking that the main reason whyb you might need PR had just committed political suicide, so the reasons for voting yes had just gone away.
WE might get a more fortuitous combination of circumstances next time. Now, we need to deal with Reform, the Greens, and sundry independents that Starmer had kicked out of Labour and successfully won against the official Labour candidate. Lots more potential for three way contests.
The thing about AV was it wouldn't have led to a genuinely proportional result. I voted for it anyway, mind.
More bluntly: the Conservatives now have a motive to support PR to reduce the extent to which Reform is splitting their voter, and Labour a (smaller) motive to reduce the extent to which the Greens and Jeremy Corbyn are splitting their vote.
George Galloway won in a by-election, but lost in the general election a short while later, We might take that as a fluke event that is unlikely to be repeated (Labout kicking out their own candidate too late in the process to select a new one). We might take this as a sign that Corbyn actually has support, but Galloway doesnt.
With PR, Reform would be here for good.
I'm not desperate for PR but the Irish & German systems seem to work okay.
Not really. There was a referendum on changing the system a few years ago but it didn't pass. Since then everyone has quoted that result as justification not to try again.
"Weird chaos" seems overstated, the FPTP system normally results in strong majorities and means a government can be formed quickly, without the kind of chaos seen in countries with other systems (e.g. France, Belgium, Italy...)
The Lib Dems have always supported changing the system, but landslides make the current system too attractive to Labour and the Tories. 400+ seats with 35% of the vote is a good deal. Sometimes the boot is on the other foot, but winning an election is like falling in love again - you forget about the heartbreak from last time. But if enough people vote Green, Reform or Lib Dem so that hung parliaments become the new normal, you will get Proportional Representation eventually, even so it might take some time - there was an Alternative Vote referendum during the Cameron/Clegg era and the Yes side were slaughtered. AV not pure PR but voters seemed very nervous about changing the voting system.
Have been following the reaction to the Alice Munroe revelations on Twitter. Generally like the reactions to it by Joyce Carol Oates because she has no interest in playing judge or executioner, but what she says here has me thinking:
"None of this is exactly new to women writers & academics since 70% (low estimate) of literature is saturated with sexism & its more pathological expression, misogyny. But we learn to read/appreciate what is there to be appreciated. Otherwise—what’s left for us?"
70% of literature is saturated with misogyny? As a writer herself, I assume she isn't saying literature is saturated with descriptions of misogyny but that the literature itself is saturated with misogyny! Unless I'm mistaken, Joyce Carol Oates is not known as some outspoken feminist.
I get that there are of course misogynistic writers. But I wonder where the line gets drawn. For instance, I often hear that Hemingway is misogynistic but I don't see it. Where is it? What are the central examples of misogyny in 20th century literature? Where does Hemingway cross the line?
I went and researched the Alice Munro allegations, and I am a little mystified at the focus on misogyny. [1]
The story appears to be that Alice had a marriage which resulted in several children, one of which is Andrea. At some point, Alice ended that relationship, and later married Gerald Fremlin. Andrea accused Gerald of engaging in sexual abuse of herself, and possibly other children. Alice apparently reacted as if Andrea was trying to seduce Gerald.
Siblings of Andrea agreed with her that abuse was happening. Other parents involved (including Andrea's father and his new spouse, Andrea's step-mother) tried to bring attention to the abuse. Eventually, Gerald was faced with the possibility of a criminal trial and pled guilty.
This plays out against a background of Alice's fame in the literary world of her home country, Canada.
This looks like one woman ignoring the possibility that her new husband was being abusive towards her children from an earlier marriage. It also looks like the kind of ugly family dynamics that are generated by such allegations.
Were the personality traits that made Alice a capable, successful author in some way related to her disastrous choices in her personal relationships?
The misogyny of the wider world seems to have little to do with these things.[2] However, people who talk about Alice Munro seem to be talking about misogyny in literature already. So they seem to be approaching this scenario as another point of discussion about misogyny.
Where is the misogyny in this story? Was it in Gerald's behavior towards Alice, or Gerald's behavior towards Andrea? Was it in Alice's disbelief of Andrea's testimony? Or was it somewhere else?
[1] Unless 'Alice Munroe' is a different person than the Canadian short-story author Alice Munro, as detailed in this post
https://meghandaum.substack.com/p/alice-munro-andrea-skinner-stepfather-sexual-abu
[2] Food for thought: in some cultures which are much more restrictive towards women, Alice would have been severely criticized, and possibly separated from her children, for leaving her first husband and taking up with her second husband. Would have have kept daughter Andrea out of the reach of Alice's second partner, with his tendencies towards abuse? Would Andrea think of that as misogynistic, or not? Would Alice think of that as misogynistic?
My post had nothing to do with Alice Munro, rather it was a reaction to a comment from novelist Joyce Carol Oates about the subject, during one of those "Can we separate the art from the artist?" debates. Oates opined there wasn't much literature left to read if she couldn't, considering 70% of what has been written is drenched in misogyny.
What with one thing and another, I don't think there's literally anything written that I could whole-heartedly endorse (present company excepted), and so I have to live in Oates' compromise.
Wodehouse - I love Aunt Agatha, truly great character. But...also a sexist trope. Bossy women stopping us having fun.
Waugh - magdelenes get a pretty raw deal in the poetic justice department.
Lewis - even Peter Hitchens thinks Susan gets a raw deal in the Narnia books.
These are all writers I love, I'm just saying.
Has Oates written elsewhere about what she means by sexism and misogyny?
Misogyny is open to interpretation, and if one is looking for it, one can always find it.
Lord of the Rings (the novels, chiefly) is (not intentionally) misogynistic: https://xkcd.com/2609/
The further back in time one goes, the fewer female authors there were. They say to write what you know. It is only natural, if one is a man, to write the protagonist (and antagonist, and mooks, and background characters) as a man. It doesn't mean the author meant to be sexist.
Gosh, that XKCD is so perceptive! A war story where there are armies is not 50:50 equal representation of women in the Fellowship! Imagine, a guy writing in the 1940s didn't realise that seventy years later "modern audiences" would expect Strong Women, minorities in both ethnicity and sexual orientation, and differently abled persons on the team! Why is there no wheelchair user?
https://diaryofadisabledperson.blog/2022/03/06/wheelchairs-dragons/
My reaction to this is "why do you think women are only important if they are emulating men, that is, riding around on horseback waving swords and fighting trolls?" I think turning Boromir into the princess, not prince, of Gondor would be a fascinating change to the tale, but she wouldn't be in the Fellowship. Neither is Eowyn, but neither is Eomer, either.
From the Selected Letters:
"The sequel, The Lord of the Rings, much the largest, and I hope also in proportion the best, of the entire cycle, concludes the whole business – an attempt is made to include in it, and wind up, all the elements and motives of what has preceded: elves, dwarves, the Kings of Men, heroic 'Homeric' horsemen, orcs and demons, the terrors of the Ring-servants and Necromancy, and the vast horror of the Dark Throne, even in style it is to include the colloquialism and vulgarity of Hobbits, poetry and the highest style of prose. We are to see the overthrow of the last incarnation of Evil, the unmaking of the Ring, the final departure of the Elves, and the return in majesty of the true King, to take over the Dominion of Men, inheriting all that can be transmitted of Elfdom in his high marriage with Arwen daughter of Elrond, as well as the lineal royalty of Númenor. But as the earliest Tales are seen through Elvish eyes, as it were, this last great Tale, coming down from myth and legend to the earth, is seen mainly though the eyes of Hobbits: it thus becomes in fact anthropocentric. But through Hobbits, not Men so-called, because the last Tale is to exemplify most clearly a recurrent theme: the place in 'world polities' of the unforeseen and unforeseeable acts of will, and deeds of virtue of the apparently small, ungreat, forgotten in the places of the Wise and Great (good as well as evil). A moral of the whole (after the primary symbolism of the Ring, as the will to mere power, seeking to make itself objective by physical force and mechanism, and so also inevitably by lies) is the obvious one that without the high and noble the simple and vulgar is utterly mean; and without the simple and ordinary the noble and heroic is meaningless."
But of course, none of that any good without Strong Girlboss as leaderette of the Fellowship!
When I was younger, I too went "where are the women in these stories?" but when I got a little older, it occurred to me "why do I think women are only important when they are doing the same things as the men in the same way as the men? why don't I think that the traditional roles and concerns of women are themselves important?"
I did not mean that I think The Lord of the Rings is misogynistic; quite the contrary, I think it had nothing whatsoever to say on the subject. I thought the XKCD was funny, though. It IS seen through a modern lens, and as I said, misogyny is open to interpretation. In the paraphrased words of Tom Lehrer, misogyny is in the eyes of the beholder. When correctly viewed, everything is crude.
Arguably the most "powerful" character in The Lord of the Rings, barring Ainur and above, is Galadriel, who demonstrated her great goodness, power, and strength of will by refusing the Ring, even as a freely offered gift. That's like having access to a tool or technology which could be used to rule the world, and refusing to rule the world with it.
LOTR has something to say about women, or at least about Eowyn's point of view about the bad treatment she was getting.
She wasn't being treated badly. She just wasn't being treated like the warrior woman she wanted to be. She was placed in charge of her whole country while the ruler went to war.
There's also Wormtongue, both watching her father being damaged and being at risk of being married to him, though I grant that a great deal of her complaint was being kept out of battle.
Not having a woman as a main character isn't the same as misogyny.
Never mind main character, in the Hobbit there are no women at all. Now okay it's about war and stuff but IRL women were spying, codebreaking. Erasure is a legitimate feminist concern. Again: I love Tolkien.
Nobody, including the men, in the Shire are spying and codebreaking. Bilbo is dragged out of his comfortable life by Gandalf for mysterious reasons. Nobody else in the Shire, or hardly anyone else, would both want to go off on An Adventure or be suitable for one.
We hear about Hobbit women in the text, such as Bilbo's mother, and we get a lot more family background in the selected letters:
"As I was saying, the mother of this hobbit—of Bilbo Baggins, that is—was the famous Belladonna Took, one of the three remarkable daughters of the Old Took, head of the hobbits who lived across The Water, the small river that ran at the foot of The Hill. It was often said (in other families) that long ago one of the Took ancestors must have taken a fairy wife. That was, of course, absurd, but certainly there was still something not entirely hobbitlike about them, and once in a while members of the Took-clan would go and have adventures. They discreetly disappeared, and the family hushed it up; but the fact remained that the Tooks were not as respectable as the Bagginses, though they were undoubtedly richer."
Gandalf refers to Bilbo by his mother's, not his father's, heritage:
"To think that I should have lived to be good-morninged by Belladonna Took’s son, as if I was selling buttons at the door!”
"...Indeed for your old grandfather Took’s sake, and for the sake of poor Belladonna, I will give you what you asked for.”
And Gandalf was blamed for Hobbit lasses, as well as Hobbit lads, going off on adventures:
“Dear me!” he went on. “Not the Gandalf who was responsible for so many quiet lads and lasses going off into the Blue for mad adventures? Anything from climbing trees to visiting elves—or sailing in ships, sailing to other shores! Bless me, life used to be quite inter—I mean, you used to upset things badly in these parts once upon a time. I beg your pardon, but I had no idea you were still in business.”
From the letters:
"It could, therefore, happen in various circumstances that a long-lived woman of forceful character remained 'head of the family', until she had full-grown grandchildren. Laura Baggins (née Grubb) remained 'head' of the family of 'Baggins of Hobbiton', until she was 102. As she was 7 years younger than her husband (who died at the age of 93 in SY 1300), she held this position for 16 years, until SY 1316; and her son Bungo did not become 'head', until he was 70, ten years before he died at the early age of 80. Bilbo did not succeed, until the death of his Took mother Belladonna, in 1334, when he was 44.
Customs differed in cases where the 'head' died leaving no son. In the Took-family, since the headship was also connected with the title and (originally military) office of Thain, descent was strictly through the male line. ...In other great families the headship might pass through a daughter of the deceased to his eldest grandson (irrespective of the daughter's age). This latter custom was usual in families of more recent origin, without ancient records or ancestral mansions. In such cases the heir (if he accepted the courtesy title) took the name of his mother's family – though he often retained that of his father's family also (placed second). This was the case with Otho Sackville-Baggins. For the nominal headship of the Sackvilles had come to him through his mother Camellia. It was his rather absurd ambition to achieve the rare distinction of being 'head' of two families (he would probably then have called himself Baggins-Sackville-Baggins) : a situation which will explain his exasperation with the adventures and disappearances of Bilbo, quite apart from any loss of property involved in the adoption of Frodo."
But mainly I think we can't expect the attitudes and expectations of today to hold for works written eighty years and more ago.
I recently re-read the first bit of "The Hobbit", and was struck by Gandalf's references to Belladonna Took. Not to mention, her name itself.
I only wish Amazon had had a similar inspiration. Why exactly was Gandalf so familiar with her? Why was she "famous" and "remarkable"? What would lead him to expect more from her descendants? There's a story there!
To celebrate one other strong-minded Hobbit matriarch, from a draft of an unsent letter 1958/59:
"But the government of a 'family', as of the real unit: the 'household', was not a monarchy (except by accident). It was a 'dyarchy', in which master and mistress had equal status, if different functions. Either was held to be the proper representative of the other in the case of absence (including death). There were no 'dowagers'. If the master died first, his place was taken by his wife, and this included (if he had held that position) the titular headship of a large family or clan. This title thus did not descend to the son, or other heir, while she lived, unless she voluntarily resigned. [We are here dealing only with titular 'headship' not with ownership of property, and its management. These were distinct matters; though in the case of the surviving 'great households', such as Great Smials or Brandy Hall, they might overlap. In other cases, headship, being a mere title, and a matter of courtesy, was naturally seldom relinquished by the living.]
…A well-known case, also, was that of Lalia the Great (or less courteously the Fat). Fortinbras II, one time head of the Tooks and Thain, married Lalia of the Clayhangers in 1314, when he was 36 and she was 31. He died in 1380 at the age of 102, but she long outlived him, coming to an unfortunate end in 1402 at the age of 119. So she ruled the Tooks and the Great Smials for 22 years, a great and memorable, if not universally beloved, 'matriarch'. She was not at the famous Party (SY 1401), but was prevented from attending rather by her great size and immobility than by her age. Her son, Ferumbras, had no wife, being unable (it was alleged) to find anyone willing to occupy apartments in the Great Smials, under the rule of Lalia. Lalia, in her last and fattest years, had the custom of being wheeled to the Great Door, to take the air on a fine morning. In the spring of SY 1402 her clumsy attendant let the heavy chair run over the threshold and tipped Lalia down the flight of steps into the garden. So ended a reign and life that might well have rivalled that of the Great Took.
It was widely rumoured that the attendant was Pearl (Pippin's sister), though the Tooks tried to keep the matter within the family. At the celebration of Ferumbras' accession […But Ferumbras, though he became Thain Ferumbras III in 1380, still occupied no more than a small bachelor-son's apartment in the Great Smials, until 1402] the displeasure and regret of the family was formally expressed by the exclusion of Pearl from the ceremony and feast; but it did not escape notice that later (after a decent interval) she appeared in a splendid necklace of her name-jewels that had long lain in the hoard of the Thains."
There's a lot in the background we never get to know about! The Tooks are, as mentioned, considered a lot more adventurous than the Hobbit norm and thus much less respectable (even though richer - and that's a subtle point Tolkien is making that wealth alone doesn't buy status) than the Bagginses.
There's a hint that Belladonna and her sisters are the reasons why Bilbo, and later on Frodo, Merry and Pippin, all have that streak of daring in their makeup since they get it from the maternal side of the family. Strong-minded and capable Hobbit women are there - see Lobelia, for instance. Just because we don't see them running around doing men's adventures alongside the men in the men's style does not mean Tolkien perceives the role of women as to sit meekly at home by the fire being obedient to their husbands (often in Hobbit society it's the husbands and sons who are obedient to them).
That's what annoys me about "your faves are problematic" here; yes, there's a legitimate criticism to be made about the lack of female visibility, but if the criticism is that "the women in this story are not pseudo-men", then that devalues and looks down upon traditional roles and duties and activities of women. It's every bit as misogynistic to ignore running a household as not being something worth talking about, as it is to say "women in the kitchen and kitchen only, please".
The women in Tolkien's stories are on the Home Front, like his own wife after they married.
From a letter to his son Michael, 1941:
"I fell in love with your mother at the approximate age of 18. Quite genuinely, as has been shown – though of course defects of character and temperament have caused me often to fall below the ideal with which I started. Your mother was older than I, and not a Catholic. Altogether unfortunate, as viewed by a guardian. And it was in a sense very unfortunate; and in a way very bad for me. These things are absorbing and nervously exhausting. I was a clever boy in the throes of work for (a very necessary) Oxford scholarship. The combined tensions nearly produced a bad breakdown. I muffed my exams and though (as years afterwards my H[ead] M[aster] told me) I ought to have got a good scholarship, I only landed by the skin of my teeth an exhibition of £60 at Exeter: just enough with a school leaving scholarship of the same amount to come up on (assisted by my dear old guardian). Of course there was a credit side, not so easily seen by the guardian. I was clever, but not industrious or single-minded; a large part of my failure was due simply to not working (at least not at classics) not because I was in love, but because I was studying something else: Gothic and what not. Having the romantic upbringing I made a boy-and-girl affair serious, and made it the source of effort. Naturally rather a physical coward, I passed from a despised rabbit on a house second-team to school colours in two seasons. All that sort of thing. However, trouble arose: and I had to choose between disobeying and grieving (or deceiving) a guardian who had been a father to me, more than most real fathers, but without any obligation, and 'dropping' the love-affair until I was 21. I don't regret my decision, though it was very hard on my lover. But that was not my fault. She was perfectly free and under no vow to me, and I should have had no just complaint (except according to the unreal romantic code) if she had got married to someone else. For very nearly three years I did not see or write to my lover. It was extremely hard, painful and bitter, especially at first. The effects were not wholly good: I fell back into folly and slackness and misspent a good deal of my first year at College. But I don't think anything else would have justified marriage on the basis of a boy's affair; and probably nothing else would have hardened the will enough to give such an affair (however genuine a case of true love) permanence. On the night of my 21st birthday I wrote again to your mother – Jan. 3, 1913. On Jan. 8th I went back to her, and became engaged, and informed an astonished family. I picked up my socks and did a spot of work (too late to save Hon. Mods. from disaster) – and then war broke out the next year, while I still had a year to go at college. In those days chaps joined up, or were scorned publicly. It was a nasty cleft to be in, especially for a young man with too much imagination and little physical courage. No degree: no money: fiancée. I endured the obloquy, and hints becoming outspoken from relatives, stayed up, and produced a First in Finals in 1915. Bolted into the army: July 1915. I found the situation intolerable and married on March 22, 1916. May found me crossing the Channel (I still have the verse I wrote on the occasion!) for the carnage of the Somme.
Think of your mother! Yet I do not now for a moment feel that she was doing more than she should have been asked to do – not that that detracts from the credit of it. I was a young fellow, with a moderate degree, and apt to write verse, a few dwindling pounds p. a. (£20 – 40), and no prospects, a Second Lieut. on 7/6 a day in the infantry where the chances of survival were against you heavily (as a subaltern). She married me in 1916 and John was born in 1917 (conceived and carried during the starvation-year of 1917 and the great U-Boat campaign) round about the battle of Cambrai, when the end of the war seemed as far-off as it does now. I sold out, and spent to pay the nursing-home, the last of my few South African shares, 'my patrimony'."
Fairly or not it's an example that I have seen used - “there are no women in the Hobbit”. I do think there's a difference between writing a living character who can speak for themselves and characters who are spoken of in the backstory, like Mainwaring's wife. I simply disagree that those are the values of 80 years ago, period. Perhaps Tolkien and the Inklings represent the best of western civilization more than, say, Virginia Woolfe, but that doesn't put them in the majority in their own time. There's more potential for espionage/codebreaking in LOTR (any sufficiently advanced technology…)
The only codebreaking I can think of is Elrond reading the moon-runes.
Where is your putative female Hobbit spy going to be doing all this spying and codebreaking? For whom? Gandalf is not running a network of Hobbit spies. There is no king in Arnor any more. Gondor is miles and miles to the South. Halflings are pretty much considered a legend or fairy story outside of the Shire, where only the Dwarves really have any contact with them, due to the roads to the Blue Mountains passing through the Shire.
In Bree? Bree may have a mixed population of Big Folk and Little Folk, but it's just as insular in its own way.
Maybe you could swap out Merry and/or Pippin for their girl cousins to go off with Frodo, but in the general run of things, no Hobbits - male *or* female - want to go off adventuring and mixing with strange folk in foreign lands.
Tolkien was writing what he knew as much as Virginia Wolfe was writing what she knew. With "The Hobbit", it was a children's bed time story for his children, and it seems mostly to be Christopher that interacted with it. He didn't put in "and here are all the Strong Girlbosses" because that wasn't in his mind, shaped as it was by Norse epics.
I'm not saying he's the best of the best, I'm saying "putting modern attitudes into the past doesn't work". Virginia Wolfe is not writing about Anglo-Saxon societies, and the closest she comes to fantasy is the novel "Orlando" which is decidedly not the same kind of thing as "The Hobbit" or "The Lord of the Rings".
If I look at another famous (adult) novel from 1937 (the year "The Hobbit" was published), it's "The Citadel" by A.J. Cronin, which could also be criticised for "where's the women?" The main female character is the wife of the hero and ends up killed by being hit by a bus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Citadel_(novel)
Is XKCD drawing cute cartoons about "where all the lady doctors?"
I agree, but I think the issue is more closely related to what kinds of female characters a male writer invents.
I think that's totally fair, and I think that there are some writers who are genuine misogynists or misandrists and that this will come out in their writing.
I once read a terrible novel in which the main character was a man who went around being a jerk to everybody for two hundred pages and then in the end he rapes his teenage daughter because he catches her masturbating and is so personally offended that she is enjoying her own body despite its obesity that he decides to rape her because, like, reasons. You could tell _that_ novel was written by someone who just plain hates men. I'm sure there's equally misogynist examples too, but none immediately spring to mind.
I don't think there's many *good* novels written by misogynists or misandrists though. If you hate a whole sex then you're probably working from a very flawed mental model of how they actually think and behave, so you're not going to be able to write these characters convincingly.
> I don't think there's many good novels written by misogynists or misandrists though.
One way to get away with it is to only write about the sex you like. That's been easier for misogynists than misandrists, given the male-dominated nature of literate civilization. And personally, I hate it when authors go off on lengthy rants about groups they despise, so I'm just as happy if misogynists write books with only men in them, because I think those books stand a much better chance of being actually *good*, that way.
I don't know whether I would say Hemingway is "misogynistic" necessarily, and I haven't read that much Hemingway, but the reason people say that is because Hemingway is primarily concerned with men attaining what he sees as masculine virtue by doing masculine things like hunting or bull fighting or soldiering. In that world, women are kind of second rate beings who are either sex objects or harpies or distractions, or in the worst case seek to destroy men, like Francis Macomber's wife.
You're a writer yourself? What sort of thing do you write? I am now in the horrifying middle of writing a novel about future people in a world with a superintelligent AI.
If you count sexism by omission, that is no female main characters, no female characters with agency and so on, there's a lot. Also if you include old books there's a lot.
Yep, if you define words however you want, then you can say anything you like, and have it be true.
I don't begrudge anyone the right to define words however they want, the appropriate thing to do is to recognise they're speaking a language that is similar to but not equivalent to English, and block it out as noise.
>I don't begrudge anyone the right to define words however they want..
That's good, because everyone does.
In the 19th century, classic characters like Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina have plenty of agency.
Molly Bloom has plenty of agency as do Proust's Albertine and his other female characters. Kafka's, Hemingway's, and Fitzgerald's distaff characters all have agency. Yes, there are few female main characters by male authors, but I don't see how that amounts to misogyny. Few writers, whatever their gender, write main characters of the opposite gender.
Perhaps 20th century publishers and the writing culture in NYC was sexist. I can believe that.
All I remember Molly doing is spending twice with Blazes Boylon and menstruating.
and saying "yes yes I will yes." I think you have to read the closing monologue of hers to decide whether Joyce is mind reading a woman accurately, or just projecting.
I think there's no doubt that women think and feel and say that more often than men. Did you know that marriage protects men well from depression?Married men are much less likely to be depressed than single ones. But the same does not hold true for women. Tis better to be the receiver of the Yes than the giver.
Absolutely true, and yes, I did know that. So I would say that Joyce was sensitive to this in his depiction of Molly.
I think one of the most important parts of saying yes, is the spirit in which it is said. There is a lot of her own pain in that monologue of Molly's and it makes her saying "yes yes I will yes" kind of profound I think. At least that's how I remember it.
Read an old post about navigating crappy phone trees, negotiating with insurances and such in the medical system, I think I have a vague idea that might improve things - but it needs to ultimate be enforced by the government to have bite.
First, legislation - make it explicit that if a business fails to provide a service it is contracted to provide because their service is delivered in such a way to defeat most good-faith attempts to navigate it, this is legally a breach of contract and if this is something a customer is paying for, this basically cancels the bill. Release a set of standards for what good faith provisioning of services looks like (without being too prescriptive, so they can't just follow the letter and not the spirit).
Perhaps set up a hotline to send evidence and report such instances. Really egregious offenders face severe penalties.
If this law is written right, a whole bunch of lawyers will immediately go out of their way to find people who are struggling with getting medical treatment or medications covered. They will sit in the room and observe the customer interactions and note down all the obvious infractions, time the hold time, etc. They might charge a percentage of the insurance bill that they're saving the customer.
If they're ambitious, they'll figure out how to scale this and create a class action case.
On the flipside, now that offering shitty phone CS has a high chance of voiding contracts, owing refunds, and losing money, a lot of companies may find themselves under pressure to actively improve the situation.
I think it's important to keep the infraction in line with the intent of the legislation (force companies you have a contract with to actually honour the damn contract - so the infraction is "it's impossible to get my contract fulfilled").
It's a bit harder for a shop that you just go and buy things from, because you don't have contracts with them, but there's far more competition in retail so it's not as big a problem (i.e unlike with insurers which aren't easily switched you can just try a different pharmacy).
Surely someone is already doing something like this to try to improve things?
There are two phone Oses in general use and while neither is perfect, they aren’t hard to navigate.
This is not a navigation problem - it's a Getting Your Problem Solved problem. It's about not being sent on wild goose chases where phone operators endlessly transfer you between departments.
If it takes an unreasonable amount of time, or is unreasonably difficult to access a service I've paid for (eg: make my health insurance pay a bill the contract obliges them to pay), I should be able to simply cancel the contract and get all my premiums back because they've failed at providing me the service.
Things that this could cause: someone might be finally motivated to produce a simple webpage or pdf or something that tells you how much they're going to pay for a service, so you can plan for it, and make it easy to access.
This is why I'm adamant that the wording of the law is performance based.
(To be fair, the refund mechanism in the US gets more complicated because a lot of people don't directly pay for their own insurance)
They're not hard to navigate, but I've found that generally the options don't match my issue at hand. So it's usually 0,0,0,0,0,0,0 or "customer service, customer service, _customer service!" for me.
Last week I posted how I think I agree with Spinoza that The Universe Is God, and some of the questions I got about it has me wondering how much of my thinking is merely semantic. For instance, if I say I believe that the same being who experiences being Taylor Swift is the same being who experiences being Joe Biden is the same being who experiences being a lizard on the fence, does that mean anything or is it just words?
To put it another way, let's say one believes in reincarnation and souls are distinct entities, but nobody is able to remember their past lives. Does that mean anything?
Assuming no further theology is in place, do the words "being" and "soul" mean anything if we stipulate that a being or soul may be multiple people but none of those people will ever know that they are the same being or soul as others?
Is this the kind of stuff of which Wittgenstein said we must remain silent?
Here is a test whether your words mean anything:
Imagine that there are two universes. In one of them, the universe is God. In the other, the universe is merely a universe. You are randomly teleported into one of those universes. How would you find out which one you are in? (Let's assume that you have unlimited resources at your disposal, so you can build a spaceship or a collider or whatever is necessary to perform the experiment.)
Similarly, imagine that there are two universes. In one of them, the same being who experiences being Taylor Swift is the same being who experiences being Joe Biden, etc. On the other universe, Taylor Swift and Joe Biden are different beings. You are randomly teleported into one of those universes, and you can perform any kind of experiments with Taylor Swift and Joe Biden. How would you find out which universe you are in?
Some of us remember our past lives. I don't know if they're real memories or false memories, but they're there in my brain. Likewise, I don't remember or I misrember a significant portion of my current life. I'd say I only retain memories of the highlights — say 1%? — and of those, I misremember significant details. Yet we talk as if our lives are a continuous uninterrupted thread of experience (being) that's completely accessible from our present state of consciousness.
I don't know about souls. I could posit other reasons for my other-life memories — if they're "real" — but then again none of my regular memories are "real" either — rather they're highly edited abstractions of the states of my qualia and thoughts at a given moment in the past.
I don't know what Spinoza said about being, but it seems to me that the whole project of empiricism is that the universe exists (has being) without us necessarily being there to enjoy it.
But with the proper definitions and examples, I think we can discuss the ideas of being and souls without having to remain silent on those subjects.
Yes. Quite simply if you think that Biden and Taylor Swift are the same person or substance, and there’s no way either of them can know this not only is the idea unfalsifiable, it’s merit less.
I agree that it's unfalsifiable, but I don't think it's meritless. It seems to me that if there were a group of people that believed that the universe is god, and had some rituals and some music saturated with that idea, and gatherings where they celebrated it, those people would feel more thrilled and happy about life than others, and more interested in things beyond themselves, and more connected with other people.
Not necessarily meritless, since merit is a matter of opinion. It is, however, a matter of philosophy, and not a scientific question.
No, I'd say it's the kind of stuff that AJ Ayer said was meaningless, according to his Princiciple of Verification: The meaning of a statement is its method of verification. There's no conceivable way of verifying statements like the ones you made, hence (acc/to Ayer) they are meaningless. I think Wittgenstein was talking about only being able to say so much about the way language has meaning -- yet there's a way that it's all arbitrary and made up. He could say *some*stuff about words and statements and how they come to mean something, but after all he's using words to do it, and there comes a point where it's impossible to use words to describe the arbitrariness of language, the way it's fake -- because the statements he's making are made of the same arbitrary fake stuff.
I don't think your statements are meaningless, though. They pass the shiver test for me. Here's my own non-rational formulation: The universe understands itself. We know it does because it made a model of itself. What model? The universe.
Interesting. This subject makes me shiver too, but I'm not sure that is evidence of meaning.
Also I like this Buddhist bit: form is emptiness, emptiness is form
And what is _being_ if "things" are temporary configurations of sub-atomic particles that rearrange themselves over time? The names we give things are arbitrary assignments which have little meaning below a certain level of reality. And subatomic particles may n
And what is the soul in such a universe? If we think about it, souls (if they exist), must be containers for (or consist of) information. What is information? Patterns in randomness? But if we encrypt information, we have no way to distinguish it from randomness. Yet randomness can contain the information...
My brain hurts!
Nothing is random. Computer programmers know they can only generate pseudo-random numbers. Rolling dice generates numbers that can, in principle, be calculated from initial conditions and following physical laws with enough precision; even quantum mechanics is deterministic until the wave function is collapsed.
We only have unpredictability, not randomness.
As for quantum mechanics being deterministic, John Stewart Bell's theorem stated that there were no hidden variables in quantum mechanics. Subsequent experiments have proved his theorem, at least as far as local variables go.
So you're claiming that we could predict the entire evolutionary history of the universe if we knew all the details of the initial conditions from when the universe was the size of a casaba melon? Are you claiming we could predict the evolution of actual casaba melons on a small planet around a G-type star around a small spiral galaxy among trillions of galaxies 13.6 billion years after Inflation and the Big Bang? I find that hard to swallow. But if you want to believe that, go right ahead.
Wouldn't it be awful to have to write a book called The False Randomness of the Encrypted? Or we could let you off with just a poem.
I was the shadow of the waxwing crypted
By the false random of the thought encrypted
I was the smudge of s9env&,smNE#ch2 stuff-- and I
Lived on, flew on, in the cryptic sky.
(That's from Pale Fire, corrupted by me of course)
C. S. Lewis wrote a little about this in "Mere Christianity", in the chapter where he defined Pantheism and Theism (he would know, having once been a pantheist similar to the Spinoza bent himself):
"The first big division of humanity is into the majority, who believe in some kind of God or gods, and the minority who do not. On this point, Christianity lines up with the majority—lines up with ancient Greeks and Romans, modern savages, Stoics, Platonists, Hindus, Mohammedans, etc., against the modern Western European materialist.
"Now I go on to the next big division. People who all believe in God can be divided according to the sort of God they believe in. There are two very different ideas on this subject One of them is the idea that He is beyond good and evil. We humans call one thing good and another thing bad. But according to some people that is merely our human point of view. These people would say that the wiser you become the less you would want to call anything good or bad, and the more dearly you would see that everything is good in one way and bad in another, and that nothing could have been different. Consequently, these people think that long before you got anywhere near the divine point of view the distinction would have disappeared altogether.
"We call a cancer bad, they would say, because it kills a man; but you might just as well call a successful surgeon bad because he kills a cancer. It all depends on the point of view. The other and opposite idea is that God is quite definitely “good” or “righteous.” a God who takes sides, who loves love and hates hatred, who wants us to behave in one way and not in another. The first of these views—the one that thinks God beyond good and evil—is called Pantheism. It was held by the great Prussian philosopher Hegel and, as far as I can understand them, by the Hindus. The other view is held by Jews, Mohammedans and Christians.
"And with this big difference between Pantheism and the Christian idea of God, there usually goes another. Pantheists usually believe that God, so to speak, animates the universe as you animate your body: that the universe almost is God, so that if it did not exist He would not exist either, and anything you find in the universe is a part of God. The Christian idea is quite different. They think God invented and made the universe—like a man making a picture or composing a tune. A painter is not a picture, and he does not die if his picture is destroyed. You may say, “He’s put a lot of himself into it,” but you only mean that all its beauty and interest has come out of his head. His skill is not in the picture in the same way that it is in his head, or even in his hands. expect you see how this difference between Pantheists and Christians hangs together with the other one. If you do not take the distinction between good and bad very seriously, then it is easy to say that anything you find in this world is a part of God. But, of course, if you think some things really bad, and God really good, then you cannot talk like that.
"You must believe that God is separate from the world and that some of the things we see in it are contrary to His will. Confronted with a cancer or a slum the Pantheist can say, “If you could only see it from the divine point of view, you would realise that this also is God.” The Christian replies, “Don’t talk damned nonsense.” For Christianity is a fighting religion. It thinks God made the world—that space and time, heat and cold, and all the colours and tastes, and all the animals and vegetables, are things that God “made up out of His head” as a man makes up a story. But it also thinks that a great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and that God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again"
I would sum up this distinction as being between (1) true wisdom of the nature of things as they are and (2) something that is designed in order to achieve social coherence, which is also necessary and another part of the universe that is god, embodied.
I used to admire Lewis but as I get older not so much. At the end, his entire argument boils down to "Dammit, we are Englishman!"
It also seems to be very odd that any God that has clout in these discussions (the monotheistic religions)didn't show up until we human beings had been on the planet for at least 500,000 years. This only makes sense to me if my conception of god is "God is the ultimate video game designer." I don't find that satisfactory. I also understand that rules of conduct are necessary, and enforcing them is much easier if you can appeal to a higher power. It's a conundrum.
"At the end, his entire argument boils down to "Dammit, we are Englishman!""
Boy, have you got the wrong vampire!
From "Surprised by Joy":
"My father belonged to the first generation of his family that reached professional station. His grandfather had been a Welsh farmer; his father, a self-made man, had begun life as a workman, emigrated to Ireland, and ended as a partner in the firm of Macilwaine and Lewis, "Boiler-makers, Engineers, and Iron Ship Builders". My mother was a Hamilton with many generations of clergymen, lawyers, sailors, and the like behind her; on her mother's side, through the Warrens, the blood went back to a Norman knight whose bones lie at Battle Abbey. The two families from which I spring were as different in temperament as in origin. My father's people were true Welshmen, sentimental, passionate, and rhetorical, easily moved both to anger and to tenderness; men who laughed and cried a great deal and who had not much of the talent for happiness. The Hamiltons were a cooler race. Their minds were critical and ironic and they had the talent for happiness in a high degree--went straight for it as experienced travellers go for the best seat in a train. From my earliest years I was aware of the vivid contrast between my mother's cheerful and tranquil affection and the ups and downs of my father's emotional life, and this bred in me long before I was old enough to give it a name a certain distrust or dislike of emotion as something uncomfortable and embarrassing and even dangerous.'"
"It was decided that I should go as a boarder, but I could get an exeat to come home every Sunday. I was enchanted. I did not believe that anything Irish, even a school, could be bad; certainly not so bad as all I yet knew of England. To "Campbell" I accordingly went."
"No Englishman will be able to understand my first impressions of England. When we disembarked, I suppose at about six next morning (but it seemed to be midnight), I found myself in a world to which I reacted with immediate hatred. The flats of Lancashire in the early morning are in reality a dismal sight; to me they were like the banks of Styx. The strange English accents with which I was surrounded seemed like the voices of demons. But what was worst was the English landscape from Fleetwood to Euston. Even to my adult eye that main line still appears to run through the dullest and most unfriendly strip in the island. But to a child who had always lived near the sea and in sight of high ridges it appeared as I suppose Russia might appear to an English boy. The flatness! The interminableness! The miles and miles of featureless land, shutting one in from the sea, imprisoning, suffocating! Everything was wrong; wooden fences instead of stone walls and hedges, red brick farmhouses instead of white cottages, the fields too big, haystacks the wrong shape. Well does the Kalevala say that in the stranger's house the floor is full of knots. I have made up the quarrel since; but at that moment I conceived a hatred for England which took many years to heal.
Our destination was the little town of--let us call it Belsen--in Hertfordshire. "Green Hertfordshire", Lamb calls it; but it was not green to a boy bred in County Down. It was flat Hertfordshire, flinty Hertfordshire, Hertfordshire of the yellow soil. There is the same difference between the climate of Ireland and of England as between that of England and the Continent. There was far more weather at Belsen than I had ever met before; there I first knew bitter frost and stinging fog, sweltering heat and thunderstorms on the great scale."
" I had been told that Surrey was "suburban", and the landscape that actually flitted past the windows astonished me. I saw steep little hills, watered valleys, and wooded commons which ranked by my Wyvernian and Irish standards as forests"
That’s very amusing. Thank you for that. Later on in the same memoir he says this though.
“ ... I have made up the quarrel since; but at that moment I conceived a hatred for England which took many years to heal."
I think they finally got to him in some way.
"Hitherto my feelings for nature had been too narrowly romantic. I attended almost entirely to what I thought awe-inspiring, or wild, or eerie, and above all to distance. Hence mountains and clouds were my especial delight; the sky was, and still is, to me one of the principal elements in any landscape, and long before I had seen them all named and sorted out in Modern Painters I was very attentive to the different qualities, and different heights, of the cirrus, the cumulus, and the rain-cloud. As for the Earth, the country I grew up in had everything to encourage a romantic bent, had indeed done so ever since I first looked at the unattainable Green Hills through the nursery window. For the reader who knows those parts it will be enough to say that my main haunt was the Holywood Hills-the irregular polygon you would have described if you drew a line from Stormont to Comber, from Comber to Newtownards, from Newtownards to Scrabo, from Scrabo to Craigantlet, from Craigantlet to Holywood, and thence through Knocknagonney back to Stormont. How to suggest it all to a foreigner I hardly know.
First of all, it is by Southern English standards bleak. The woods, for we have a few, are of small trees, rowan and birch and small fir. The fields are small, divided by ditches with ragged sea-nipped hedges on top of them. There is a good deal of gorse and many outcroppings of rock. Small abandoned quarries, filled with cold-looking water, are surprisingly numerous. There is nearly always a wind whistling through the grass. Where you see a man ploughing there will be gulls following him and pecking at the furrow. There are no field-paths or rights of way, but that does not matter for everyone knows you--or if they do not know you, they know your kind and understand that you will shut gates and not walk over crops. Mushrooms are still felt to be common property, like the air. The soil has none of the rich chocolate or ochre you find in parts of England: it is pale--what Dyson calls "the ancient, bitter earth". But the grass is soft, rich, and sweet, and the cottages, always whitewashed and single storeyed and roofed with blue slate, light up the whole landscape.
Although these hills are not very high, the expanse seen from them is huge and various. Stand at the north-eastern extremity where the slopes go steeply down to Holywood. Beneath you is the whole expanse of the Lough. The Antrim coast twists sharply to the north and out of sight; green, and humble in comparison, Down curves away southward. Between the two the Lough merges into the sea, and if you look carefully on a good day you can even see Scotland, phantom-like on the horizon. Now come further to the south and west. Take your stand at the isolated cottage which is visible from my father's house and overlooks our whole suburb, and which everyone calls The Shepherd's Hut, though we are not really a shepherd country. You are still looking down on the Lough, but its mouth and the sea are now hidden by the shoulder you have just come from, and it might (for all you see) be a landlocked lake. And here we come to one of those great contrasts which have bitten deeply into my mind--Niflheim and Asgard, Britain and Logres, Handramit and Harandra, air and ether, the low world and the high. Your horizon from here is the Antrim Mountains, probably a uniform mass of greyish blue, though if it is a sunny day you may just trace on the Cave Hill the distinction between the green slopes that climb two-thirds of the way to the summit and the cliff wall that perpendicularly accomplishes the rest. That is one beauty; and here where you stand is another, quite different and even more dearly loved--sunlight and grass and dew, crowing cocks and gaggling ducks. In between them, on the flat floor of the Valley at your feet, a forest of factory chimneys, gantries, and giant cranes rising out of a welter of mist, lies Belfast. Noises come up from it continually, whining and screeching of trams, clatter of horse traffic on uneven sets, and, dominating all else, the continual throb and stammer of the great shipyards. And because we have heard this all our lives it does not, for us, violate the peace of the hill-top; rather, it emphasises it, enriches the contrast, sharpens the dualism. Down in that "smoke and stir" is the hated office to which Arthur, less fortunate than I, must return to-morrow: for it is only one of his rare holidays that allows us to stand here together on a weekday morning. And down there too are the barefoot old women, the drunken men stumbling in and out of the "spirit grocers" (Ireland's horrible substitute for the kindly English "pub"), the straining, overdriven horses, the hard-faced rich women--all the world which Alberich created when he cursed love and twisted the gold into a ring.
Now step a little way--only two fields and across a lane and up to the top of the bank on the far side--and you will see, looking south with a little east in it, a different world. And having seen it, blame me if you can for being a romantic. For here is the thing itself, utterly irresistible, the way to the world's end, the land of longing, the breaking and blessing of hearts. You are looking across what may be called, in a certain sense, the plain of Down, and seeing beyond it the Mourne Mountains.
It was K.--that is, Cousin Quartus' second daughter, the Valkyrie--who first expounded to me what this plain of Down is really like. Here is the recipe for imagining it. Take a number of medium-sized potatoes and lay them down (one layer of them only) in a flat-bottomed tin basin. Now shake loose earth over them till the potatoes themselves, but not the shape of them, is hidden; and of course the crevices between them will now be depressions of earth. Now magnify the whole thing till those crevices are large enough to conceal each its stream and its huddle of trees. And then, for colouring, change your brown earth into the chequered pattern of fields, always small fields (a couple of acres each), with all their normal variety of crop, grass, and plough. You have now got a picture of the "plain" of Down, which is a plain only in this sense that if you were a very large giant you would regard it as level but very ill to walk on--like cobbles. And now remember that every cottage is white. The whole expanse laughs with these little white dots; it is like nothing so much as the assembly of white foam-caps when a fresh breeze is on a summer sea. And the roads are white too; there is no tarmac yet. And because the whole country is a turbulent democracy of little hills, these roads shoot in every direction, disappearing and reappearing. But you must not spread over this landscape your hard English sunlight; make it paler, make it softer, blur the edges of the white cumuli, cover it with watery gleams, deepening it, making all unsubstantial. And beyond all this, so remote that they seem fantastically abrupt, at the very limit of your vision, imagine the mountains. They are no stragglers. They are steep and compact and pointed and toothed and jagged. They seem to have nothing to do with the little hills and cottages that divide you from them. And sometimes they are blue, sometimes violet; but quite often they look transparent--as if huge sheets of gauze had been cut out into mountainous shapes and hung up there, so that you could see through them the light of the invisible sea at their backs."
"Meanwhile, on the continent, the unskilled butchery of the first German War went on. As it did so and as I began to foresee that it would probably last till I reached military age, I was compelled to make a decision which the law had taken out of the hands of English boys of my own age; for in Ireland we had no conscription. I did not much plume myself even then for deciding to serve, but I did feel that the decision absolved me from taking any further notice of the war. ...Accordingly I put the war on one side to a degree which some people will think shameful and some incredible. Others will call it a flight from reality. I maintain that it was rather a treaty with reality, the fixing of a frontier. I said to my country, in effect, "You shall have me on a certain date, not before. I will die in your wars if need be, but till then I shall live my own life. You may have my body, but not my mind. I will take part in battles but not read about them." If this attitude needs excusing I must say that a boy who is unhappy at school inevitably learns the habit of keeping the future in its place; if once he began to allow infiltrations from the coming term into the present holidays he would despair. Also, the Hamilton in me was always on guard against the Lewis; I had seen enough of the self-torturing temperament."
From Tolkien's letters:
"I noticed a strange tall gaunt man half in khaki half in mufti with a large wide-awake hat, bright eyes and a hooked nose sitting in the comer. The others had their backs to him, but I could see in his eye that he was taking an interest in the conversation quite unlike the ordinary pained astonishment of the British (and American) public at me presence of the Lewises (and myself) in a pub. It was rather like Trotter at the Prancing Pony, in fact v. like. All of a sudden he butted in, in a strange unplaceable accent, taking up some point about Wordsworth. In a few seconds he was revealed as Roy Campbell (of Flowering Rifle and Flaming Terrapin'). Tableau! Especially as C.S.L. had not long ago violently lampooned him in the Oxford Magazine, and his press-cutters miss nothing. There is a good deal of Ulster still left in C.S.L. if hidden from himself. "
"C.S.L. of course had some oddities and could sometimes be irritating. He was after all and remained an Irishman of Ulster. But he did nothing for effect; he was not a professional clown, but a natural one, when a clown at all. He was generous-minded, on guard against all prejudices, though a few were too deep-rooted in his native background to be observed by him. That his literary opinions were ever dictated by envy (as in the case of T. S. Eliot) is a grotesque calumny. After all it is possible to dislike Eliot with some intensity even if one has no aspirations to poetic laurels oneself.
Well of course I could say more, but I must draw the line. Still I wish it could be forbidden that after a great man is dead, little men should scribble over him, who have not and must know they have not sufficient knowledge of his life and character to give them any key to the truth. Lewis was not 'cut to the quick' by his defeat in the election to the professorship of poetry: he knew quite well the cause. I remember that we had assembled soon after in our accustomed tavern and found C.S.L. sitting there, looking (and since he was no actor at all probably feeling) much at ease. 'Fill up!' he said, 'and stop looking so glum. The only distressing thing about this affair is that my friends seem to be upset.' And he did not 'readily accept' the chair in Cambridge. It was advertised, and he did not apply. Cambridge of course wanted him, but it took a lot of diplomacy before they got him. His friends thought it would be good for him: he was mortally tired, after nearly 30 years, of the Baileys of this world and even of the Duttons.1It proved a good move, and until his health began too soon to fail it gave him a great deal of happiness."
> It also seems to be very odd that any God that has clout in these discussions (the monotheistic religions)didn't show up until we human beings had been on the planet for at least 500,000 years.
Are you asking the question of why — if there were a monotheistic god — why it didn't make itself known to humanity sooner? If so, that assumes that any monotheistic god would take an interest in humans. Or maybe god was waiting until we had reached a certain level of literacy and civilization before it revealed itself. OTOH, we can't know if there were monotheistic religions in pre-history. I suspect there weren't, and that monotheism was a unique god mutation that happened to Jewish theology during their Babylonian exile. Before that Yahweh was a henotheistic deity ("My thunder god is bigger than your thunder god!").
It's not God showing up, it's us finally getting to a level where communication of some sort is possible.
It's like waiting until ants have achieved some way of being able to understand a human interacting with them; a sceptical ant historian might of course say "isn't it very coincidental that the Big Person only showed up after so many aeons of glorious ant empire?" with the implication that the ants had invented the very notion of the Big Person.
Well, if we are ants to the big person, then I seriously question this conception of God. This God is far too bound up in the ways of human beings, it seems to me to be considered the alpha and omega; a schoolboy running an ant farm and looking forward to hear them, squealing in terror when he steps on them. Mind you if I could see God tramping around every day and having no way to communicate with him at least I wouldn’t doubt his presence.
All forms of God are a leap of faith, but this particular form does not encourage me to make the leap.
> If so, that assumes that any monotheistic god would take an interest in humans.
Monotheistic gods seem to take an enormous interest in humans from what I can gather.
> Or maybe god was waiting until we had reached a certain level of literacy and civilization before it revealed itself.
Or maybe we had to reach a certain level of literacy and civilization in order to need him… We needed him in order to have laws. I am not mocking this, it is not trivial, but in the larger understanding of “god” I think Spinoza is closer to the truth.
How did you conclude that we need a monotheistic god to have laws? And...
> Monotheistic gods seem to take an enormous interest in humans from what I can gather.
Well, I'd rephrase that statement as monotheistic worshippers believe (hope) that monotheistic gods take an interest in them...
...right down to hearing their prayers for their team to win the football game.
> How did you conclude that we need a monotheistic god to have laws?
Essentially a supreme arbitrator, beholden to principles and not to men.
Kind of like Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still.
> monotheistic worshippers believe (hope) that monotheistic gods take an interest in them...
To believe is necessary. It comes down to a question of what you are willing to believe.
> I used to admire Lewis but as I get older not so much. At the end, his entire argument boils down to "Dammit, we are Englishman!"
Ouch.
Lewis isn’t making any argument in this passage; he’s simply giving a 101 breakdown in the difference between Pantheists and Theists.
Also, who in the world said that God only showed up when humans did? I can’t think of a mainstream monotheistic religion that doesn’t claim that God predates the beginning of the natural universe.
> But it also thinks that a great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and that God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again"
If that’s not an argument I don’t know what is.
I think you have misunderstood my comment about god and human history.
>If that’s not an argument I don’t know what is.
It's a description. Lewis is saying that Christians believe X. Nowhere is there are argument for why you should believe what Christians believe in that passage.
>I think you have misunderstood my comment about god and human history.
Can you elucidate?
OK. Fair enough. But in the context of CS Lewis’ writings, I think it’s not an unfair inference that there is an argument there. I will let it go.
I was not trying to make a point about how long God has been around, but how long it took the human race to stumble upon him in three related but different forms.
I understand the dichotomy -- and stand with the Beyond Good and Evil crowd -- but it doesn't address my question which is about semantics.
Let's say Johan describes the universe as "cold and indifferent, where life is a cosmic coincidence" and Tess describes it as "miraculous, beautiful beyond description".
These two people are describing the same universe. Although their tone differs radically, they don't contradict each other logically because their descriptions are subjective. My question is whether saying one shares a soul or doesn't share a soul is meaningful logically or merely another distinction without a difference.
Well, I guess the distinction is the one between cold and indifferent and beautiful beyond description.
My take here is that the real stuff doesn't happen at the level of propositional affirmations or negations. "Sharing a soul" is just a bunch of words meant to point those of us "here" towards a state of consciousness that we aren't currently experiencing, but that many people have experienced and are experiencing, and of which we may have more glimpses than we usually care to remember or appreciate. It's like trying to describe the taste of chocolate to someone who doesn't know it.
The more you love yourself the more you’ll be willing to share a soul with someone else. It stands to reason.
I would disagree that Johan and Tess don't contradict it other, assuming they were being sincere in their statements. Though it may be possible for a cold, indifferent, and purposeless universe to be beautiful and a miracle, it would be a very odd kind of beauty and a very strange kind of miracle. Things can be subjective, but also have logical implications or be true or false.
As to your "shared soul" problem, I would say that is is certainly meaningful as well. If we are all sharing one soul, then that describes an aspect of reality. A very important one, for now I would be aware that if I harm my neighbor, or my cat, I harm myself for we all share one soul. On the other hand, if we do not share one soul and each have our own soul than that also has strong implications. For one thing, it means that I am not the only person in existence. This is strange, as I did not create myself. Was my soul then created for a purpose? Could I either succeed or fail at accomplishing this purpose?
So I don't think it's semantics, unless you don't actually mean the things you are saying. It is either true that we all share one soul, or false. To say that it is true is to say something, not nothing.
I think you are approaching the cosmology of the Upanishads here. For a very good treatment of this topic I recommend the Epilogue of “What is Life” by Erwin Schrödinger.
“Within a cultural milieu (Kulturkreis) where certain conceptions (which once had or still have a wider meaning amongst other peoples) have been limited and specialized, it is daring to give to this conclusion the simple wording that it requires. In Christian terminology to say: ‘Hence I am God Almighty’ sounds both blasphemous and lunatic. But please disregard these connotations for the moment and consider whether the above inference is not the closest a biologist can get to proving God and immortality at one stroke.
In itself, the insight is not new. The earliest records to my knowledge date back some 2,500 years or more. From the early great Upanishads the recognition ATHMAN = BRAHMAN (the personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self) was in Indian thought considered, far from being blasphemous, to represent the quintessence of deepest insight into the happenings of the world. The striving of all the scholars of Vedanta was, after having learnt to pronounce with their lips, really to assimilate in their minds this grandest of all thoughts.
Again, the mystics of many centuries, independently, yet in perfect harmony with each other (somewhat like the particles in an ideal gas) have described, each of them, the unique experience of his or her life in terms that can be condensed in the phrase: DEUS FACTUS SUM (I have become God).
To Western ideology the thought has remained a stranger, in spite of Schopenhauer and others who stood for it and in spite of those true lovers who, as they look into each other’s eyes, become aware that their thought and their joy are numerically one – not merely similar or identical; but they, as a rule, are emotionally too busy to indulge in clear thinking, in which respect they very much resemble the mystic.”
Schrödinger goes on to further describe the Vedantic concept of each of us being an aspect of a universal “One”.
I believe the book is now in the public domain and available as a PDF
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Life%3F
What I found most useful in grappling these questions is to read the lives and direct writings of those who didn't just wonder about it, but who (by their own admission) experienced reality in the way Hank above has described. There have been examples in all sorts of cultures and traditions, but Nisargadatta's _I Am That_ is the best example I know of someone stating it powerfully in 1st person.
I came across this Theory of Everything video of Curt Jaimungal's interview with idealist Bernardo Kastrup. I think it's pertinent to our discussion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAB21FAXCDE
I never studied Nisargadatta's teachings, but his consciousness hierarchy seems similar to (some) Sufi teachings. It jibes with the commonly experienced (at least among mystics) of the dissolution of selfhood. There may be distinctions between his and other mystical praxes that I'd see if I dug deeper, tough.
My only problem with Nisargadatta's analysis — as well as Spinoza's — is the continual reference to being.
Nagarjuna seems to have been the first philosopher to have gotten beyond the idea (obsession?) with beingness. But once he posits there is no being and no non-being the the whole mystical enterprise of obtaining oneness with the universe seems to be illusionary. Of course, I may be misunderstanding his logical tetralemas. Even though I find his analysis to be convincing with my limited understanding, perversely, I'm still in the mystical camp.
What I like about Nisargadatta is that he mostly talks (his writings are transcripts of his dialogues with people) experientially, with no attempt to do formal philosophy. He had his awakening, he remember what mind was like before, he feels what it's like after, and seeks to convey the difference in as many thoughtful words. Because there is little philosophical baggage, it's easy to read and get some sense of the depth he wants to convey, and of how it's not really a question of beliefs. So whenever there are words like "self" or "being", they're meant as pointers, not as philosophical assertions.
Nagarjuna of course is the granddaddy of it all, from just over 2000 years ago. And as you say, he goes even deeper, not even the concepts of "being" or "self" are left standing. He's also a proper philosopher, writing in the form of formal arguments aimed at specific philosophical opponents; and since his main form of argumentation is to take the theories of existing schools and push them to the utter absurd limits of their consequences, if you really want to grapple intellectually with Nagarjuna, you probably need to get acquainted with worldview of the long-extinct Sarvastivadin Buddhist school among others. Not to mention that he's such a totem pole, that hardly anyone reads Nagarjuna as Nagarjuna, but rather through the lens of the founders of sub(sub)schools like Bhavya, Chandrakirti, Shantarakshita, and (on the other side of the Himalayas) Tsongkhapa and Gorampa, all the way to Gendun Choepel. So it's quite a journey if you want to go into all that — personally I quite enjoyed it!
Then again, however careful Nagarjuna's followers want to be with language, at the end of the day they're also Buddhists, and so remain committed to an account of awakening as something that can be experienced by a living, human being. It's just that instead of using common words like "Self" or "beingness", they tend to use highly technical words like "suchness" or "dharmadhatu", to emphasize the discontinuity with common concepts. The mystical component is very much there, by design.
Thanks. Great quote. I'm not unaware that my thoughts on the matter are Eastern influenced, although my intuition on it started as a child.
I'm still not sure if "I am God almighty" means anything. What is God almighty? If He is me, then I am unimpressed...
Alan Watts did a “here’s how I would explain it to a 8 year old” thing in one of his books:
Paraphrasing:
“God plays a trick on himself when he is born in each of us and makes himself forget he’s God so he can experience his creation anew.”
Thomas Mann riffs on the all the ‘small souls’ being a part of a larger soul in ‘The Magic Mountain’
In the chapter titled ‘Snow’, Hans Castorp is lost alone skiing and his brush with death is described as the small soul reuniting with the whole. Hans does live through that experience though.
If you’ve yet to pick up ‘The Magic Mountain’, it’s set in an early 20th century tuberculosis sanitarium in Davos. It’s really a pretty good read.
Your "God plays a trick on himself" quote reminded me of a passage from Chesterton on this subject:
"Love desires personality; therefore love desires division. It is the instinct of Christianity to be glad that God has broken the universe into little pieces, because they are living pieces. It is her instinct to say 'little children love one another' rather than to tell one large person to love himself. This is the intellectual abyss between Buddhism and Christianity; that for the Buddhist or Theosophist personality is the fall of man, for the Christian it is the purpose of God, the whole point of his cosmic idea. The world-soul of the Theosophists asks man to love it only in order that man may throw himself into it. But the divine centre of Christianity actually threw man out of it in order that he might love it. The oriental deity is like a giant who should have lost his leg or hand and be always seeking to find it; but the Christian power is like some giant who in a strange generosity should cut off his right hand, so that it might of its own accord shake hands with him. "
I can only speak from the Buddhist perspective, but Buddhist practice and philosophy is all about the alleviation of suffering. Love and hate are emotions that may give us temporary pleasure, but they all lead back to suffering. You may think you're in a wonderful relationship, but your lover leaves you, and you suffer the loss and separation. Your separation from others may make you misunderstand their motives. The person who won your lover's love may be the object of your hatred. But if you put yourself in their shoes, they were seeking some release from their suffering. If you understand that we're all suffering together, that allows you have compassion (karuna) for others.
We're all grasping at things to make us feel better, but those only temporarily alleviate the itch. No outside force or godlike being is responsible for our inner states. Recognizing that suffering is an innate part of existence, we offer karuna to others to help relieve their suffering and we seek to develop equanimity within ourselves to get past our own suffering. Implied in this equation is you get back what you put out — karma. Although the Buddha didn't touch on questions of god or what happens us after we die, Buddhism developed in culture where a belief in reincarnation was common (although not universal). So Buddhists came to believe that karma follows us between our lives. But strictly speaking, a good Buddhist does not have to believe in the existence of a higher being or higher beings, nor does a Buddhist have to believe in an afterlife. This makes Buddhism (especially Zen) attractive to American atheists and materialists.
Anyway, a Buddhist wouldn't say "love your fellow human" nor "love yourself", because love is a grasping emotion. Instead of love, a Buddhist would say "have compassion for others" (because they're suffering, too), and while you're at it, analyze the nature of your own suffering (prajna, aka wisdom), so you can develop equanimity and understand the root of other people's suffering to offer them the proper type of karuna.
Yes; and this difference in understanding of love, and what the purpose of existence is, is part of that "intellectual abyss between Buddhism and Christianity". To a Buddhist, existence is an evil to escape through the extinguishing of the self. For a Christian our existence is purposeful, and that purpose is not to escape suffering but to live in relationship with the Good. To love something, you must have a self and the thing you love must be separate from you: of course pursuing love would be folly to a Buddhist. To a Christian love is a virtue to be perfected within ourselves; and the proper object of love is God, who is eternal and whose very essence is Good. As Paul wrote:
"If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails."
Note the language is steeped in this idea of purpose: that we exist for a reason, and a Good reason, and that love is central to the purpose of our existence, so much so that if we do not have it then everything else we have amounts to nothing.
So I agree, a Buddhist would not say "love your fellow human". That is a Christian idea.
I thought this was a fantastic article exploring the difference between LGB and TQIA+. What I found really interesting was the division between what's a preference and what requires (or makes use of) medical interventions. https://juliebindel.substack.com/p/the-problem-with-lgbtqia
To any extent that it's worthwhile to decompose the full set into two subsets, I'd think LGBA & TQI+ would be more useful; the former are about other people & the latter are about oneself.
I think LGB belong together, "T" is a different thing, and "A" is a very different thing.
Then "Q" and "+" aren't meaningful categories at all.
How is "neither" a very different thing from "same" & "either"? Is it just the comparatively mild social implications thereof?
I think it's mostly about the comparatively mild social implications. Asexuals might occasionally get awkward questions from their parents and friends, but nobody tries to throw them off buildings.
Also, being asexual isn't a behaviour, it's an internal state that leads to a behaviour. The behaviour is celibacy, and celibacy can have all sorts of reasons (asexuality, religious belief, just haven't found the right person, etc). You can classify people as hetero/homo/bisexual by their behaviour, but you can't classify them as asexual just by seeing them _not_ have sex.
>"Also, being asexual isn't a behaviour, it's an internal state that leads to a behaviour."
OK, but that would seem to fit LGB just as well (albeit with different behaviors), but not so much the rest.
I read it, but I don't see what distinguishes this particular opinion piece from the other hundreds of "trans activists are coming to mutilate your kids" pieces we've already got. I mean, the photo caption is "David Tennant, who peddles the notion of ‘trans children’", which thoroughly undercuts the idea that the purpose of the article is objective truth-seeking.
You mention that author makes a distinction between LGB and the rest of the letters, but that particular "divide and conquer" approach against LGBTQ+ activism is very far from being new, so I'm wondering if there's something else you saw in it.
>Depending on where one lives, children coming out as lesbian or gay might face violence and abuse. Lesbian and gay kids often get bullied, no matter where they live. But the challenges of being lesbian or gay are social. Lesbians and gay men may seek psychotherapy, not (except in rare cases) to change their sexuality but to deal with the pain of being stigmatized and/or the emotional problems that many people experience.
Transgender people also face violence and abuse, also get bullied, also face similar social challenges, and also frequently seek therapy to deal with the pain of being stigmatized and various emotional problems. And same as cis-LGB people, we generally do not seek conversion therapy; in both cases, conversion therapy is ineffective as well as being generally not desired.
This commonality of experience is one big reason why LGBT is meaningful to group together. Another big reason is that there's a very large overlap between the categories. Many if not most trans people are bi, and many of us are gay (I'm a trans lesbian), and a fairly large number of cis gay and bi people are varying degrees of gender-nonconfirming in ways that have some similarities to being trans.
The article is correct as far as it goes that there is no analogue to medical transition for cis-gay people. That is a difference between cis-gays and trans people who pursue medical transition. But pursuing medical transition is not strictly necessary to be trans: some of us choose to live with dysphoria rather than facing the challenges of transition, and some (most commonly but not exclusively people with nonbinary gender identities) only feel the need to transition socially. That said, a lot of us (myself included) do feel the need to medically transition and feel we've vastly benefited from the ability to do so.
> Transgender people also face violence and abuse, also get bullied, also face similar social challenges, and also frequently seek therapy to deal with the pain of being stigmatized and various emotional problems
So do fat people, or very ugly people. Should we add F and U to the coalition?
Seriously though, I think it's *sometimes* fine to roll up L, G, B and T (and much more dubiously I and A) into one category for some purposes, just as it's okay to roll up "seafood" into a single category. But we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that they're not the same thing, and people are allowed to be one of them without being "on the same side" as the others.
Well said. In addition, there are medical interventions that are more relevant to gay men than to straight men, e.g., PrEP for HIV, vaccinations for some STIs, testing for many STIs.
And I'm cynical enough to believe that this would be pointed out by the author in a new opinion piece to try to separate the "GB" from the "L" if they're eventually successful in separating the "T" from the rest.
Given that many L talk about themselves being G (and that G is actually in the dictionary definition of L), not going to happen.
Another Lucy Letby article, this time in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/jul/09/lucy-letby-evidence-experts-question
The reporting restrictions clearly haven't endeared the prosecution to the media or the medical profession. I'm all for protecting the families of the deceased, but this has been at the cost of a Lucy Letby subculture developing, helped by her pitiable demeanour (which is consistent with her being a manipulative sociopath, but if so it's working on the Guardian, the New Yorker and several neonatologists). When Shipman was convicted, it was immediately announced that he may have killed hundreds. I was expecting something similar, but it hasn't happened yet. There is an enquiry coming up but that it's not clear yet what the focus will be - it could just be about why she was allowed to carry on working, presupposing the murders rather than putting forward additional evidence for the murders. So, a bit of a mess. Arguments casting doubt about the air embolism or the insulin deserve some sort of answer, arguments that Letby is a poor fit for a serial killer or "you can't ascribe a single cause to a baby death, there are a myriad of factors and it's unfair to blame one person" deserve nothing but contempt and mockery. Who would ever get convicted for murder if the bar is set so high?
I think the reporting restrictions are because there are still ongoing court cases regarding the topic, not because they are trying to protect the families. Normally these restrictions are imposed to avoid prejudicing potential juries before a trial begins.
https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/practice-points/reporting-restrictions-in-the-lucy-letby-trial/5117175.article On the restrictions: "Many months before trial, media judge Steyn J made an order under sections 45 and 46 of the act barring identification of the victims of Letby’s crimes and their families."
The court cases are now concluded.
It’s all correlations as far as I can tell. Where she was, there were more deaths. This could possibly be a statistical anomaly.
That's right, and some prominent statisticians have had their say too. The prosecution did also present some medical causes of death i.e she injected them with air and/or insulin, but this is also being disputed.
Say no to post-modern post-mortems
The same Dem friends are highlighting today's a crucial deadline: before Biden meets with Dem Senators this afternoon, would be great to give them a call -- I just called Schumer & Gillibrand. https://maketrumploseagain.substack.com/p/how-to-stop-trump-call-your-representatives
Did they pick up?
<deleted - mispost>
For interest - if you write a reply to a thread comment and then realise you need to sign in, your comment will still be drafted after signing in but *is no longer tied to the thread and instead gets posted as a top level comment if you submit it*.
I suspect that's the cause of the occasional accidental top level comments we occasionally see here.
In art, literature, and Abrahamic religions the lamb traditionally represents innocence and the lion - sometimes tigers - represents savagery.
Why is this? The lion is no more driven by malice than the lamb chooses good. They each act according to their own nature as dictated by immutable biology.
I get it. The lamb’s wool is white and the lion’s claws are red with blood. It’s a facile symbolism. Surely we can do better. What would you use to represent innocence and savagery? Animal, vegetable, shape, scent, etc?
Does the lion really represent "savagery"? I would say lions traditionally represent *power*, whether used for good or ill. In the Bible, the lion is used to represent both God *and* Satan.
Maybe because the religion was by and for herders (and farmers), and to a shepherd, lambs are good and useful (although sometimes not to the lamb's personal benefit), whereas the lion is a dangerous (if individually magnificent) predator that should be killed on sight?
Those symbols were invented by ancient people who probably didn't know or think much about those animals beyond the ways they were relevant to humans.
So: the lamb is cute, harmless, helpless, can be eaten, and if you treat it well it will grow up into a useful sheep. The lion is mysterious, and if you see one you're in trouble.
Furthermore, if you subscribe to the idea that every creature is equally innocent because they're all part of nature and acting according to deterministic principles -- then the concepts of innocence and malice are kind of meaningless in the first place and don't really need to be represented by anything.
>represents savagery.
Why is this? The lion is no more driven by malice<
Malice and savagery are not the same thing. Savagery is the willingness to inflict great violence, with or without malice. Lions are savage, unquestionably.
Don't know if this is an answer, but male lions will kill cubs that aren't their own if they take over a pride. Don't think sheep do that.
Another reading is that lambs/sheep are herd animals (and rather dumb). Elites may be motivated to push the idea that "good" people should be like herd animals, by falling in line and being like the rest of the herd. Male lions fight against their rulers for control of the pride which is probably not something you want to encourage if you are already controlling the pride.
FYI, lions are super dangerous, dude.
It's symbolism - you're more likely to get mauled and eaten by a lion than a lamb. Lions also represent majesty, kingship, leadership and other good qualities; another Biblical title is The Lion of the Tribe of Judah which became representative of the House of David (and thus attached to Jesus Christ, who as the son of David is the Lion as well as being the Lamb of God).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_of_Judah
Roses are beautiful, but roses also have thorns. A lot of natural elements have this double-edged symbolism.
Cats do play with birds. I don't know if that is "malice", but it's not inflicting the minimum suffering needed to sustain oneself either.
The explanation I heard was that cats want to make sure their prey is as passive as possible before going for the killing bite on the neck. Wolves will do a similar thing where they'll harass the prey and try to distract or weaken it before going in for the kill. Cats are generally solitary hunters, so they have to do more battering before killing.
So it inflicts more suffering, but from the point of view of the cat, doing that maximizes chances they'll live to hunt another day. Longer survival means more chance of passing on your genes, while minimal suffering puts that at risk. Only one of these gets selected for.
If they have no theory of mind that allows them to appreciate the fact that they are inflicting pain - and I am unaware of any evidence that they possess such, but if you know of any I’d be happy to consider it - then you are right that this isn’t malice. For lack of a better term it’s play. Whatever it is, to the best of our knowledge it’s as instinctive and reflexive as scratching an itch.
I don't know what the latest study in Nature says about theory of mind in cats, but if you think that culture should not portray big cats as vicious until it's proven that cats understand they are being vicious, you have a pretty impoverished understanding of culture and language.
Resist the Hierarchy of Cuteness at your peril.
Long ago I took a university Extension class that gave me a chance to stand a couple feet in front of the bars that restrained an adult tiger. As she passed in front of me I could have reached through the bars and touched her flank.
I resisted the impulse to try that and still have two arms to show for my restraint.
It's truly remarkable how the pop media have turned on old Joe.
Just weeks ago he was their darling, and now they're all singing from the same hymnal and slowly shuffling him over to the kitchen door. It's beginning to look like regressive progressives, including his unqualified 'affirmative action' appointments, are using the debate performance as a casus belli to declare hostilities against him.
I'm not exactly a fan, but I feel sorry for the guy. He made so many concessions to the genderfied woke and the racialist mob, lent them his political expertise. Peter Baker recently published who his seven or eight closest advisors are. Maybe former President Trump can debate them. They'll be the ones running things -- with or without Joe.
It's almost like people can update their opinions based on new evidence. Shocking, I know.
We've known since Reagan the suit in the seat isn't running the show.
The only real question is , Who is?
Biden fading out at this time is very bad news for the three-year-old ecosystem of Democrat players behind the curtain. No doubt, scores of 'advisors', 'aides', 'speech writers', etc. affected are scrambling to maintain or gain position in the shakeup: So it's Harris? Really? Or is it ____?.
When Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bush 1's crew were up there, the NYT still had reporters, and when they weren't finding Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, they actually covered the people behind the scenes.
Today, not so much.
So maybe we'll find some real reporters again. One can hope. It may be the Chinese curse -- to live in interesting times.
This is politics. No one that mattered cared about Biden. He was only important as a way for Democrats to retain power, and the debate made it much less likely he could defeat Trump in an election. After all, those entrenched in one party or the other don't decide election winners, but those that may choose between one or the other do, and if someone wasn't sure between the two then Biden's performance sure made a definitive point.
I feel sorry for the old man struggling as best he can, and he should be pitied. Those calling strongly for him to step aside care only about the election win.
Strongly disagree - calling for him to step aside can also be about caring for the future of the American experiment. Having a (potential) senile leader is (potentially) catastrophic to the lives of hundreds of millions of people.
You have a point: not everyone just wants the win. But those that knew about his cognitive limitations without doing anything about it that NOW are calling for the change are the worst ones.
Yeah right now I'm reading a dozen articles totally coincidentally using the adjective "forceful" to describe Biden's NATO speech.
https://www.google.com/search?q=biden+nato+speech+forceful
Biden's senility absolutely will be back to being far-right disinformation by this time next month.
Unsheltered homelessness in San Fransisco is at a 10 year low, even as sheltered homelessness continues to rise. I guess all that spending on homeless shelters did have an effect after all.
[citation needed]
it only takes a few seconds to Google...
https://www.sf.gov/news/new-data-san-francisco-street-homelessness-hits-10-year-low
Yes, so why didn't you cite it when you posted the claim?
As @Renderdog notes below, there's reason to be skeptical of a city grading itself, in the winter, two and a half months after a massive sweep and cleanup effort to impress Xi Jinping. You'll note that three weeks after the sweep, many people living on the streets returned, but many did not: (https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/san-francisco/san-francisco-streets-after-apec/3395312/).
This is the city grading itself. While it may be true, I'd look for a truly independent audit on any statistics.
This (federally mandated) count has been conducted every two years going back to 2014. If you think they're rigging it, the question would be why would they rig it *more* over time? Also, if they were going to rig it, why does it still show overall homeless going *up*?
I mean sure, it's always worth questioning any statistic, but it doesn't seem like there's a particular reason to disbelieve this one. And more importantly, this appears to be the only good source of data about homelessness in SF in the first place. If you don't believe it, you don't have any statistics at all.
If people are getting off the streets and into shelters, that's an improvement. Now San Francisco has to make sure that the shelters aren't dangerous and violent places, due to drugs, mental illness, etc. That's the hard part: some homeless people don't want to go into shelters because they are dangerous, violent places due to other homeless people drinking, taking drugs, and being mentally ill, and some homeless people don't want to go into shelters because they won't be allowed to drink and take drugs while they're also mentally ill.
Homelessness is not a simple problem, and I hate the facile "well just give them houses first and then we'll sort the rest out, duh" approach I see too much on social media.
Two posts this week, unusually both me, both on climate change issues.
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/did-climate-change-cause-hurricane
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/market-forces-are-not-enough-to-halt
I’m old enough to remember Covid. Anybody else of that vintage?
If so, does anybody else remember when the bad guys were the ones wearing masks? Or is that a figment of my imagination.
Over here in sunny England I’m pretty sure I was being shouted at for wearing a mask around April 2020. Am I wrong?
> does anybody else remember when the bad guys were the ones wearing masks?
"A face mask? Against a virus coming from China? Only a *racist* would do that!" was the woke position for a brief time interval in the early 2020... and then it was quickly memory-holed.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YSP9prWnjKxzwuAKp/rationalwiki-on-face-masks
I think it was just some of the wingnuts (left-wing, in this case) who memed themselves into absurdity. I have a fair number in my vicinity, so I saw more of it, but I'd expect that I'm above average in that respect.
I don't recall official guidance that people wearing masks were bad guys. But there were definitely people who took "most people shouldn't" and turned it into "no one should and anyone who does is bad". It's the same sort of "telephone" game that can turn "51%" into "most" into "almost all" into "all", coupled with a desire to establish social dominance that prefers to mask itself with righteousness.
It was certainly not the worst form of mass insanity that happened during the pandemic, so I'd basically stopped caring about it after a few months. Plus, it reversed into the opposite direction fairly quickly, so my "arguing for centrist sanity" pose had me pushing back in the direction of "masks being useful but not magic", for much of the time.
I'm old enough to have been reading Scott since before the pandemic
- https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/23/face-masks-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
You're not wrong, the question is who is responsible? Some people are neurotic about the Rules and use them as a pretext to yell. But we really did need some input from public health, and the evidence was patchy and fluid. Masks have a marginal effect which is difficult to express in a public health campaign. Masks Probably Help.
Masks probably are of little use.
https://www.cochrane.org/CD006207/ARI_do-physical-measures-such-hand-washing-or-wearing-masks-stop-or-slow-down-spread-respiratory-viruses
At least their use should have been by choice and not mandatory.
Also, even Jha admits that covid mandates were wrong:
https://x.com/TheChiefNerd/status/1810664901452386613
The first link doesn't work, could you re-post? I did say masks have a marginal effect - which may be tantamount to "of little use". The question is what the state of knowledge re: masks was c. March 2020 - I say it was probably foggy and hard to express in a single snappy public health campaign. Cue terrible messaging and Covid Karens and so on. But there will always be Karens one way or another.
This Cochrane review is actually an update from pre-pandemic one and the conclusions haven't changed much. What the WHO and others said initially (that masks gives false security) was according to our level of knowledge. But then at some point panic took over except in Sweden. Madness followed and the rest is history. It was very sad that people reacted with panic and switched off their rational brains.
The link works for me. You can open https://www.cochrane.org/CD006207/
Yes that works, thanks I'll take a look.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a-red-flag
I too am old, and I don't remember that happening in rainy Ireland. There *were* scolding articles in the press about people panicking and grabbing up masks and thereby depriving the health services of needed and vital supplies, but that was when the party line was being set by America and Doctor Fauci (remember him?) that masks were unnecessary and for health workers only.
Of course, then the party line switched and we were all supposed to mask up, but it didn't get as bad over here as in America, at least not as I remember.
I think the messaging makes a difference. Fauci should have been honest and said that masks were helpful from the beginning, and then should have tried the "scolding" route of telling people not to buy them up so that doctors could have them. Instead the party line was "masks are not needed" and then suddenly they 180'd and said "masks are super incredibly important and you need to wear them!"
I really think avoiding the scolding route in favor of the "lie to the rubes, you know they have not self control" route is responsible for a significant amount of the degrading of trust in American institutions, and the government in particular.
>I’m old enough to remember Covid. Anybody else of that vintage?
Yes.
>If so, does anybody else remember when the bad guys were the ones wearing masks?
No.
>Or is that a figment of my imagination.
I wouldn't presume to say, but that's sure what my guess would be.
Thanks for confirming my thesis about the mass forgetting
Cannot tell if joking
Not joking. There were definitely campaigns against wearing masks on the first few weeks. As I said the forgetting here is the more interesting thing, like one of those time travel shows where things have subtlety changed and the population has forgotten something they should know. Like forgetting the Beatles in the movie Yesterday.
I remember the recommendation to save the masks - particularly surgical type masks - for medical professionals. This was for a short while until production of masks for the general public was ramped up.
I live in the US. In my little corner of it, I heard no yelling.
Was it a campaign against mask *wearing*? Or against mask *hoarding*?
I recall the latter - there was concern that a few people were buying up large amounts of masks, either to personally use or price gouge (see, e.g. https://nypost.com/2020/03/30/brooklyn-man-arrested-for-hoarding-masks-coughing-on-fbi-agents/), which was impacting the supply available for healthcare and other critical workers. I can personally attest that the issue was real - a member of my family was a nurse at the time in a department that didn't deal with COVID cases, and there was a period where supply was so low that she was being instructed not to wear masks for procedures that she would normally mask for, because the hospital had a low supply of masks and needed to make sure they were available for the teams that were treating COVID and other respiratory cases.
On the other hand, I don't recall the former, but I could see how there could be blurring of the lines between the two. If I say "save masks so we make sure there are enough for nurses & immunosuppressed patients who need them," then on the one hand my goal isn't "anti-mask" in the sense that it disputes the effectiveness of masks or thinks that they are bad in general - if anything it's the opposite, recognizes masks as good and is trying to prioritize a limited supply of masks for those who need them most. It also can be construed fairly as "discouraging mask use," but not in a way that I'd view as problematic to the CDC's credibility as some kind of waffle on the value of masks.
Here in the US, there was briefly a campaign by the CDC to discourage mask-wearing, but nobody outside the CDC took it seriously. The only actual yelling at mask wearers came later in the pandemic and was largely done by insane people who thought they were part of a globalist plot to normalize mass compliance or something--and those instances were few and far between. I never saw one in person, only a handful of videos posted and reposted on social media. The vast, vast majority of people reacted to mask-wearing with something between approval and eyerolling disdain, with nothing said either way.
I wore a mask in public every working day during the pandemic (I didn't WFH), and whenever shopping or otherwise going out. Either a surgical (type) mask, or a 3M respirator in poorly ventilated or crowded indoor spaces. Never got so much as a dirty look in the hundreds of times and thousands of hours doing it.
I didn't forget anything; my experience of the pandemic era simply differed from yours. I get the feeling that a lot of people's did.
I asked if people remembered when there was a campaign against mask wearing. I wasn’t asking if people were shouted at, and I didn’t ask about “later in the pandemic”. Your sneery response - which was an ad hominem which I might report - was that it was only me who remembered this. Even though you wouldn’t presume to say that it was, you did.
> I wouldn't presume to say, but that's sure what my guess would be.
(I hate that kind of language by the way, don’t say that you aren’t going to engage in an insult and engage in the insult anyway).
But clearly, as with the more honest arguments here attest, and the Google evidence supports, it wasn’t just me. You seemed to have sort of remembered that the CDC did in fact argue against the use of masks but are still resorting to the anti mask campaign being my own version of reality.
I've never seen anyone shouted at for wearing a mask (that was probably a red state thing), but there was a brief period early in the pandemic when the dominant narrative was that masks were likely to be ineffective for ordinary people and needed to be saved for the medical workers who needed them and knew how to use them.
It was a fashionable left winger who chided me. I’m talking the very first months. Across the world at the time the reasons given for not using masks was not that they were needed by medical workers, but that they didn’t work. Sometimes both which made no sense.
You can use googles date restricted search to see it.
surgical masks don't work after:2020-03-01 before:2020-06-01
There is *some debate* in there but it’s clear the WHO and many national health organisations have decided they were useless.
My favourite is the Time magazine story. It has been updated since - which you will see if you click in - but the Google saved title and first paragraph is cached and it’s:
> Why people aren’t listening to experts about Face Masks?
> The government and most health experts keep telling the public not to wear face masks for coronavirus. So why are they doing it anyway?
But I’m really interested in the forgetting. The same woman, a village acquaintance, who shouted at me (well it was more an exasperated exclamation) now denies she was ever anti mask, and most people forget that it was ever a thing.
Something similar happened with antigen tests which went from snake oil to necessities in a matter of weeks, and to a lesser extent the idea of herd immunity from the vaccines.
My favorite were the snarky social media posts from nurses who thought they were special for having a little training on how to fit an n95 mask, and how the aging white women who are buying up all the masks will just wear them wrong and it'll do no good anyway.
Two weeks later they were mandatory.
I remember too, and in fact talked about that in the comment to which you are replying. I don't know why you're trying to treat this as some sort of own when you're just repeating what I already said with more anger.
I remember standing in line outside a fish and chip shop, wearing my compulsory mask, staring at a several-months-old poster urging me not to wear a mask. I don't remember anyone shouting at anyone about wearing a mask though.
Mostly I'm amazed how much I've forgotten about covid, how much we just don't think about that whole period missing from our lives. I wonder if this is what it was like living in 1948, you thought the war would change everything but instead now it's just something you think about every now and then "Hey, remember the war? That was weird, wasn't it?"
This is so true, Melvin. It’s disappeared from art and literature too, with the exception of Stephen King’s last novel which was horribly dated as a result. Even during Covid there were few attempts to represent reality on screen in contemporary situations, understandably as it thwarts the action.
The coverage of it made it seem like The Stand, but it seems to have turned out more like Desperation.
> There was literally nothing good about the Covid years (other than accelerating the development of mRNA technology)
Hm... Air quality and traffic improved in my city, temporarily, due to fewer people driving to work. :-)
I was one of the first people in my neighborhood to wear a mask. I little kid asked his parents if I was a doctor. No one ever gave me a hard time about it though.
This is definitely true, and I unfortunately remember being a part of that group during the very early days of 2020, even arguing about it in a university forum. Not my proudest/smartest moment in retrospect.
I remember seeing a meme in early 2020:
"How to react to COVID 19:
-Wash your hands
-Don't be racist
-That's it"
Apart from other things that government mandated me with the threat of police force (with which I disagreed and resented but followed to avoid any penalties), that was basically the only thing I did to minimise risks.
I don't know how people are not freaking out more about the supreme court case about immunity. Sotomayor, in dissent, said that it means that the president can order the military to assassinate people and get immunity.
The majority responded - not by saying that it isn't true - but by saying that they don't think it's as likely as a president being "unable to boldly and fearlessly carry out his duties".
I think the best response was something like "those orders would be illegal, and illegal orders are definitionally not the President acting in his official capacity, and therefore there would be no immunity", with a side order of "the reason those orders are illegal is that Congress passed laws making them illegal, so maybe you should think about what Congress lets the Executive Branch get away with, before your party loses control".
"those orders would be illegal, and illegal orders are definitionally not the President acting in his official capacity, and therefore there would be no immunity"
This isn't what the supreme court was saying. If this was the view then no immunity would be necessary; because if the orders were not illegal, then there's no criminal liability to be immune from.
Immunity only comes into play when the president does something that Congress says *is* illegal. Saying that the president has immunity for official acts, without it being a null set, means that there *are* official acts that are against a law from Congress. And therefore that the president can break laws passed by Congress with impunity.
As I've said to various people on this thread - people keep assuming that the supreme court must have said something reasonable, but they really did say some crazy shit!
Can't he be impeached?
He can ... but it won't necessarily be enough, even if you trust the Senate to be responsible about impeachment. E.g. the situation with trump, where he lost the election and is on the way out unless he does a coup to hold on to power. "We'll kick you out of office if you try a coup" isn't a meaningful threat if the president is going to be out of office without the coup anyway.
And this is really the most important thing to be worried about - I'm not worried about the president shaking down Chipotle for free burritos, I'm worried about a president trying to become a dictator.
Seems to me if the military is willing to assassinate domestic political opponents on the president's orders, and the president is willing to give those orders, then whether the president can be criminally prosecuted for those orders after leaving office is irrelevant, because that guy isn't a president any more, he's a military dictator, and military dictators don't leave just because their term is up.
No system can ever be a 100% guarantee of not lapsing into dictatorship. You can only have systems that are more or less likely to do so. You aren't going to have a system where there is 0 risk of the military being willing to assassinate political rivals and the president being willing to order it, there will always be some uncertainty.
And with that uncertainty, a factor that decides how likely it is to happen, is whether there will be consequences for it and what the courts and other authorities say about it.
Indeed, but `criminal consequences for the president personally after he leaves office' are not the most important consequences here. Impeachment&removal is almost surely more relevant to the President's decision making regarding whether to give such orders, and the risk of criminal consequences to the members of military who carry out the assassination are almost surely more relevant to whether those orders are obeyed. Neither is affected by the ruling. And it was already the case that the President personally could not be criminally charged while actually in office.
I don't know factually what would be the most important consequence. Hard to know how these thing would play out in practice. In many cases impeachment and criminal charges would go hand in hand.
But it is important in any sort of self coup/overturning election scenario, probably one of the most consequential ones, where the president will soon leave office anyway, and so impeachment won't do a whole lot.
I also think there's an expressive element to this ruling - e.g., it doesn't say that the soldiers that do the murdering are immune. But I bet it would embolden soldiers in that situation who want to do the bad thing. And same people who like this ruling will inevitably see any law regulating the army as less legitimate, given all the language about "conclusive, preclusive" powers in which the president has total control.
I agree, it's worth freaking out over. It seems like using Seal Team 6 to kill people is contentious, but I don't think the president needs the military for this ruling to be dangerous: POTUS has broad powers to address the nation (per Trump v United States) and absolute power of pardon. What's to stop a president from calling his opponents very bad people, a danger to the country, etc., and then pardoning the killer? Sure, the president could already do that before this decision: what's changed is that now neither of his actions are submissible as evidence in court and he cannot be held criminally liable for them.
The decision creates a huge space where a creative president can criminally misbehave.
The worst part is that something very close to that *already happened* in Texas.
Presidents can only pardon federal crimes, so he'd only be able to protect killers whose crimes were exclusively federal. Killing a federal judge in California, for example, is both a state and a federal crime, so California prosecutors could still bring murder charges despite a pardon.
There's still a pretty big window of vulnerability, since no state has jurisdiction over DC or various national parks. I think the federal courts might also have exclusive jurisdiction over crimes occurring on military bases or in federal buildings, but I'm not 100% sure and search results for "exclusive federal jurisdiction" are dominated by subject matter jurisdiction questions.
I'm not american, but imo the evidence inadmissibility clause is a very bad decision. It can lead to situations where everyone agrees something was obviously illegal, but all the evidence is inadmissible.
Everything else, especially that part from Sotomayor's dissent, is a pretty bad take. The majority correctly notes it as baseless fearmongering unhinged from reality. At the point when a court it rules a political assassination as a "core duty", it's already so captured that it will rule anything it wants anyway. It's like complaining that some particular welfare system will stop working when civilization collapes - yes of course it does, but so will any other welfare system, by its nature.
"The majority correctly notes it as baseless fearmongering unhinged from reality"
We should be clear about what exactly the majority says. They say that the dissent with its hypotheticals ignores the more likely problem. They don't say she's wrong about the implications of their holding. And she is, in fact, right about the implications of their holding, whether the majority disputes it or not.
"At the point when a court it rules a political assassination as a "core duty", it's already so captured that it will rule anything it wants anyway."
I'm sorry to tell you but that's the world you're living in! Like I said in my original comment - I don't know why people aren't freaking out more!
> I'm sorry to tell you but that's the world you're living in!
For years or decades, this just formalises what was known already, what was true already. The president can order assassinations including against American citizens - see Anwar al-Awlaki. It’s unlikely that an American president will assassinate an American political rival but the court was just confirming what was legal already. To do otherwise and apply retrospectively would mean Obama could be arrested. There can hardly be a distinction between assassinations being legal against American citizens abroad or at home, that would merely mean - in the hypothetical and fanciful case suggested by the dissent - that a president would wait for his political rival to go on holiday to Spain and kill him there.
It doesn't just formalize what was already known. This sounds like the savvy, appropriately cynical thing to say, but it ain't so.
It doesn't explain why there's a whole prosecution of the president (possibly 3 prosecutions) that will get at least partially shut down now, where almost nobody was arguing that they couldn't go forward due to immunity before. Also doesn't explain why people spent so much time wondering about whether trump would/could pardon himself, or why Ford pardoned Nixon, etc.
As for al-Awlaki, I was against that, as I was against trump killing his eight year old daughter. If I were in charge, the president would have fewer wartime powers, not more, including in that case; whereas my experience is that most people making a big stink about al-Awlaki are fine with expanded presidential powers, police powers, qualified immunity, holding people in GITMO, drone strikes under trump, the whole shebang, and thinks anyone against them on any of that is a liberal wuss; but they suddenly become a civil libertarian in the narrow case of when it's convenient to argue against Obama.
But legally the distinction with al-Awlaki would be that Congress (allegedly) did authorize the killing. You can argue against that, but it's a different argument from saying that the president is immune no matter what.
A couple more possibilities.
“If a president says, ‘we’re going to have an auction and I’m gonna veto or sign a bill based on who pays me more’ — that’s not prosecutable,” Super said. “‘Want to be a Supreme Court justice for the low, low sum of x?’ Not prosecutable, since appointing the highest offices is the preclusive power of the President.”
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/supreme-court-immunity-trump
That seems completely wrong, because all that is required for a bribery conviction is an agreement to trade the exercise of political authority for compensation. There is no need for the government official to perform any act at all. https://www.ce9.uscourts.gov/jury-instructions/node/944. The appointment is a core official act, but since criminal liability is not based on the core official act, that doesn't matter.
For the same reason, the limits on evidence of intent behind the official act* is not much of an impediment, since all that is necessary is to show intent behind the agreement. And all of that can be shown by the testimony of the person offering the bribe, as well as any correspondence.
*A limitation which seems bad for Trump. He wants to argue that his motive was to safeguard the election, but that doesn't work if motive is irrelevant.
"The appointment is a core official act, but since criminal liability is not based on the core official act, that doesn't matter." I really think you're misunderstanding just how radical the Supreme Court decision is. Because it's part of an official act, nobody is allowed to review whethere or not there is any criminal liability!
But Footnote 3 on page 32 of the majority opinion discusses at some length how a prosecutor would prove a bribery allegation against a president based on an official act. That certainly implies that the decision is not as broad as you interpret it to be. (And, after all, the decision is nothing if not vague in most particulars)
I have to admit I haven't read footnotes! Thanks.
Yw. Footnotes can sometimes be pretty important lol. https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/carolene-products-footnote-four/
Stepping back from "assassinating political enemies" for a second: what about this possibility?
It is within the core presidential duties to replace the Attorney General. The decision in Trump v United States appears to mean that the president can now replace the Attorney General by having him poisoned ... and he cannot be prosecuted for that.
Yes? No?
Yes, he can be replaced. No, not by poisoning.
Though why stick at Trump? Biden too can now do a Cersei Lannister on all those calling for him to step down, get rid of all the disloyal and backstabbers coming out of the woodwork, right?
I'm just gonna go with "No".
As best I can figure out, the distinction between core and non-core duties has been left somewhat vague so as to allow for common-sense interpretations in the future, and common sense says that if the President murders the Attorney-General then this will be found to be a non-core duty.
Same with any other silly example that one could invent. There's probably genuine grey areas, but it's somewhere else.
But that's simply not what the court said. "As best I can figure out" -- with respect, Melvin, that's what's going on in *your* head. It's not going to constrain the court in deciding what they want to decide.
So, the future of US democracy depends on the Supreme Court only using common-sense interpretations? The same Supreme Court that just ruled that it's not bribery to pay government officials for doing you favors, as long as the payment comes after the favor and not before. Would you call that a common-sense interpretation?
That is not what the Court ruled. From the dissent:
>There is no dispute that §666 criminalizes bribes. See ante, at 1. This Court has also been clear about what a bribe requires: “a quid pro quo.” United States v. Sun-Diamond Growers of Cal., 526 U. S. 398, 404 (1999). A quid pro quo means “a specific intent to give or receive something of value in exchange for an official act.” Id., at 404–405. So, for a payment to constitute a bribe, there must be an upfront agreement to exchange the payment for taking an official action. See ibid.
>Legislatures have also considered it similarly wrongful for government officials to accept gratuities under certain circumstances, but unlike bribes, gratuities do not have a quid pro quo requirement. Generally speaking, rather than an actual agreement to take payment as the impetus for engaging in an official act (a quid pro quo exchange), gratuities “may constitute merely a reward for some future act that the public official will take (and may already have determined to take), or for a past act that he has already taken.” Id., at 405.
>We took this case to resolve “[w]hether section 666 criminalizes gratuities, i.e., payments in recognition of actions the official has already taken or committed to take, without any quid pro quo agreement to take those actions.” Pet. for Cert. I. The majority today answers no, when the answer to that question should be an unequivocal yes.
Hence, the case is purely one of statutory interpretation, and the Court only held that the statute, as currently written, applies to bribes but not gratuities.
"The same Supreme Court that just ruled that it's not bribery to pay government officials for doing you favors, as long as the payment comes after the favor and not before."
You may be interested in the discussion of this point over on The Motte, as I've linked above:
"Fears:
Sotomayor: The President will be immune for ordering assassinations, coups, bribes for pardons, etc. (pages 29-30)
Roberts: Your chilling doom is disproportionate to what was decided (page 37). You are just fearmongering with extreme hypotheticals and a future where the President feels free to violate criminal law. (page 40) You need to be more concerned about an executive branch that cannibalizes itself with prosecution.
My thoughts: Disrespect is a legitimate concern. I'd imagine, though, that assassinating rivals, or attempting a coup would be something that the court would rule as beyond the President's authority. This would probably defuse a lot of the online complaints about this opinion. The bribes for pardons thing is weird, because it deals with something agreed to be within the exclusive powers, even by the government.
And that's the end of Sotomayor's opinion."
If you go into the comments, you'll see people talking about 'does this mean bribery is okay?'
> or attempting a coup would be something that the court would rule as beyond the President's authority.
We already ran that experiment.
If I were an alien or a computer or something reading this case, and had to decide whether it immunizes the president from poisoning the AG to remove them, then I'd probably say that it does, unless there's something in there that says something about the *means* of carrying out a particular "core" power possibly being invalid, but I don't remember that and I don't think Jackson would have put that in the footnote if there was.
The reason I'm less worried about it is that historically "use the military to claim dictatorial power" is a bigger issue than "randomly poison an underling you could have just fired". And I do trust that the supreme court would find a reason to say that their opinion doesn't cover the poisoning scenario, whereas I don't think so about the military assassinating people (keeping in mind that it would probably come with a really thin veneer of an excuse of military necessity).
But it does show the shoddiness of the opinion.
Everyone seems to be forgetting that it isn't a "core duty" to, say, replace the AG, but to enforce the laws. It may be that the President decides the current AG should be replaced in order to do that, and the President must have unrestricted power to do so. HOW it is done, however, matters, and poisoning couldn't be considered a valid way of doing it, since it certainly is the opposite of enforcing the laws.
If I understand correctly, the Supreme Court did not decide anything concerning Trump, just that Presidents, in general, no matter who they are, are immune to prosecution for official acts. It is up to another court, so far, to decide whether January 6 stuff was official acts, but, supposing those prosecuting are correct that Trump was behind it all and ordered all of the rebellious acts, such acts would clearly NOT be official acts. But no one wants the President prosecuted for, say, supporting Israel or Ukraine, even if someone strongly opposes the policy and wants to delay it by any means possible.
"Everyone seems to be forgetting that it isn't a "core duty" to, say, replace the AG, but to enforce the laws"
The opinion does say that removing the AG and other similar officers is a "conclusive and preclusive" power of the president (which they use interchangeably with "core" power, at least if they mean there to be a distinction I don't know what it is)
"For that reason, Trump’s threatened removal of the Acting Attorney General likewise implicates “conclusive and preclusive” Presidential authority."
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, people keep projecting their much more reasonable gloss onto the opinion which downplays how bad it is. But the opinion really is way more extreme!
If I'm reading Jackson's dissent correctly, she thinks that's probably what it implies
> That point bears emphasizing. Immunity can issue for Presidents under the majority’s model even for unquestionably and intentionally egregious criminal behavior. Regardless of the nature or the impact of the President’s criminal conduct, so long as he is committing crimes “pursuant to the powers invested exclusively in him by the Constitu-tion,” ante, at 7, or as needed “to carry out his constitutional duties without undue caution,” ante, at 14, he is likely to be deemed immune from prosecution.
> To fully appreciate the oddity of making the criminal immunity determination turn on the character of the President’s responsibilities, consider what the majority says is one of the President’s “conclusive and preclusive” prerogatives: “ ‘[t]he President’s power to remove . . . those who wield executive power on his behalf.’ ” Ante, at 8 (quoting Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 591 U. S. 197, 204 (2020)). While the President may have the authority to decide to remove the Attorney General, for example, the question here is whether the President has the option to remove the Attorney General by, say, poisoning him to death. Put another way, the issue here is not whether the President has exclusive removal power, but whether a generally applicable criminal law prohibiting murder can restrict how the President exercises that authority.
Barring some secret cabal, it appears they're trying to avoid a dynamic like the one in Brazil, in which the incoming president sues the outgoing president, and candidates end up suing each other and campaigning between court dates and/or dodging incarceration between terms of service in government. It seems pretty out of control.
Here, some are still contesting the 2020 election or suing Fauci for doing his job. Obama certainly approved the killing of terrorists with drone strikes, and often there was 'collateral damage'. I wouldn't want to see him criminally charged for taking out the garbage.
If the collateral damage had been your family, would you change your mind?
Congratulations! You’ve successfully avoided answering the question.
I agree that's what they say they're doing, but that doesn't change the fact that they are also saying that the president can order the military to murder people.
And it doesn't even stop the issue of a cycle of retributive prosecutions either! A president can just order the DOJ to spend all its resources looking into a president's "unofficial" acts, or even "presumptively official" acts (where the president might get off the hook but they'd still have to hire a bunch of lawyers to argue all the way to the supreme court to beat the charges).
"the president can order the military to murder people"
That IS the purpose of the military. One must trust the President to use the military properly to carry out policy.
"That IS the purpose of the military. One must trust the President to use the military properly to carry out policy."
We should not have to trust that the president doesn't act corruptly in commanding the military, and under the constitution as actually written (as opposed to what the supreme court said in this case), we don't!
Maybe! Nothing is certain. If a president is willing to assassinate political enemies and if he can get away with it, then you're right, it won't matter.
But if a president isn't certain on whether he can get away with it or not, it does matter if the punishment for failing to get away with it is they get to enjoy retirement, vs going to prison. And because it makes it more attractive an option, it makes it more likely presidents will try and makes it seem more likely to succeed, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
More generally, it's a little nuts that people on here are actually arguing that it doesn't matter whether the president is allowed to murder people. Nobody would ever argue it was OK if divorced from specific facts, everyone would say it's an absolutely basic, essential component of a free, democratic government!
"that doesn't change the fact that they are also saying that the president can order the military to murder people"
Are they saying that? Sotomayor claims it does say that, the others deny it does say that.
So when is the prosecution of Obama for killing American citizens via drone strikes? Because that too is "ordering the military to murder people" and it's something that actually happened, not hypothetical "Trump can order Seal Team 6 to assassinate the Attorney General".
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/holder-weve-droned-4-americans-3-by-accident-oops/
"Are they saying that? Sotomayor claims it does say that, the others deny it does say that."
I responded to you elsewhere on this point, but the others do not, in fact, "deny it does say that".
As for Obama I'd be OK with this incident being investigated and possibly prosecuted, provided it isn't some one-sided thing where we only prosecute Obama and not others who did similar things, like trump. Like, Obama droned Al-Awlaki (US citizen), and trump droned his eight year old daughter (also a citizen).
Obama's defense should be that it wasn't illegal because it was authorized by Congress ... not that he's immune even if Congress prohibited it.
Does Congress have the power to authorise the killing of American citizens, is then the next question.
I see your point, and can appreciate the dangers. It's a difficult needle to thread and could provide opportunities for abuse.
Yeah, the majority are explicitly trying to avoid a Brazil scenario. In the majority opinion Roberts wrote:
"The dissents’ positions in the end boil down to ignoring the Constitution’s separation of powers and the Court’s precedent and instead fear mongering on the basis of extreme hypotheticals about a future where the President “feels empowered to violate federal criminal law.” The dissents overlook the more likely prospect of an Executive Branch that cannibalizes itself, with each successive President free to prosecute his predecessors, yet unable to boldly and fearlessly carry out his duties for fear that he may be next. For instance, Section 371—which has been charged in this case—is a broadly worded criminal statute that can cover “‘any conspiracy for the purpose of impairing, obstructing or defeating the lawful function of any department of Government.’” Virtually every President is criticized for insufficiently enforcing some aspect of federal law (such as drug, gun, immigration, or environmental laws). An enterprising prosecutor in a new administration may assert that a previous President violated that broad statute. Without immunity, such types of prosecutions of ex-Presidents could quickly become routine. The enfeebling of the Presidency and our Government that would result from such a cycle of factional strife is exactly what the Framers intended to avoid. Ignoring those risks, the dissents are instead content to leave the preservation of our system of separated powers up to the good faith of prosecutors."
This is just histrionics from Sotomayor's laughably bad take in the dissent. Assassinating people is not an official duty of the presidency, except as an extension of Congress' authority to declare war. Further, US citizens can't be killed by the government without a trial (except that one time Obama did and I guess no one thought it was a problem).
Personally, I think the immunity is overly broad. But I also think that about the immunity given to police and prosecutors, and it would be really strange if the head of the executive branch had less legal protection than them. In an ideal world, the legal protections of the presidency would never have been litigated and the legal system would not be used as a cudgel against the opposition party. But we don't live in that world any more.
The issue does seem as clear cut as this. Per the decision, Presidents have absolute immunity for core powers, and being the Commander in Chief is certainly a core power. On addition, the Court said, "Nor may courts deem an action unofficial merely because it allegedly violates a generally applicable law." So, merely telling the military to commit a crime, even murder, is not enough.
This article argues that the answer is "maybe." https://reason.com/volokh/2024/07/03/thoughts-on-the-trump-immunity-decision/
> Further, US citizens can't be killed by the government without a trial
That is not necessarily relevant. The question is not whether an act is permissible under the Constitution. It is whether the President can be held criminally liable for committing an unconstitutional act. One can argue that an unconstitutional act is per se outside the core powers, but there is no direct evidence of that in the opinion.
That link does point out something important, which is that the president doesn't actually have sole power over the conduct of the armed forces. Congress has the power "To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;"
It should be clear, then, that one such law/regulation can be "the president can't order navy seals to murder political rivals"
But if that's the case then listing "commanding the Armed Forces" as a "conclusive and preclusive" power of the president is clearly wrong!
>It should be clear, then, that one such law/regulation can be "the president can't order navy seals to murder political rivals"
Presumably it can be, but OP was making a very different argument, which is that murdering rivals is inherently outside the power of the President, even if Congress does not act.
PS: Note that the Posse Comitatus Act puts limits on the use of the military domestically, but would not affect killings done overseas.
"Presumably it can be, but OP was making a very different argument"
Yes to be clear I'm not making the same argument as them.
The Posse Comitatus Act is a law. This ruling is about constitutional prerogatives, so it overrides the Posse Comitatus Act or any other law.
That is not the point. Read the linked article. It argues, based on language in the Court's opinion, that shared Congressional authority over the use of the military implies that it is not a core official act for which the President has absolute immunity, but rather is in the second category of official acts, re which he only has presumptive immunity. Hence the relevance of the Posse Comitatus Act.
Moreover, it makes no sense to argue that the ruling overrides the Posse Comitatus Act, because the Act is not a criminal statute. It forbids the use of the military for most domestic purposes. The decision does not change that. Every act that was illegal or unconstitutional before continues to be illegal or unconstitutional. The Court simply eliminated one remedy for some of those acts.
The president doesn't have a "constitutional prerogative" to override any law. A law can be unconstitutional if it is not within Congress's powers, and a way in which a law might go beyond Congress's powers is if it usurps or limits a president's powers. E.g. if a law said that it's illegal for a president to veto laws.
But in this case, a specific clause of the constitution says that it *is* within Congress's powers to regulate the armed forces. They aren't usurping the president's powers; if the president ignores the Posse Comitatus Act then it's the president doing the usurping. No different than if the president decides he's going to rewrite the bankruptcy code.
But hey tell Roberts that, I guess.
According to the opinion, if it's an unconstitutional action then the President is not immune. They specifically granted absolute immunity only for official actions that are an "exercise of his core constitutional powers".
But it is an open question what level of generality "core powers" refers to. The court said that Trump was immune to charges that he "attempted to leverage the Justice Department’s power and authority to convince certain States to replace their legitimate electors with Trump’s fraudulent slates of elector" because prosecuting crimes and overseeing the Justice Department is a core power. That implies that if he had instead "attempted to leverage the Defense Department’s power and authority to convince certain States to replace their legitimate electors with Trump’s fraudulent slates of electors," he would have similarly been immune, regardless of the specific means. I am not necessarily saying that you are definitely wrong, but rather that the case is far from open and shut.
The opinion does that say that Trump can "convince certain States to replace their legitimate electors with Trump's fraudulent slates". It says that the prosecution alleges that Trump was trying to do that, and their proof of it is that Trump discussed doing so with his Attorney General and then threatened to fire him when he said that he wouldn't go along with that. The Court's opinion on that was " "The President may discuss potential investigations and prosecutions with his Attorney General and other Justice Department officials to carry out his constitutional duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Art. II, §3. And the Attorney General, as head of the Justice Department, acts as the President’s “chief law enforcement officer” who “provides vital assistance to [him] in the performance of [his] constitutional duty to ‘preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.’” Mitchell v. Forsyth, 472 U. S. 511, 520 (1985) (quoting Art. II, §1, cl. 8). Investigative and prosecutorial decisionmaking is “the special province of the Executive Branch,” Heckler v. Chaney, 470 U. S. 821, 832 (1985), and the Constitution vests the entirety of the executive power in the President,
Art. II, §1. For that reason, Trump’s threatened removal of the Acting Attorney General likewise implicates “conclusive and preclusive” Presidential authority. As we have explained, the President’s power to remove “executive officers of the United States whom he has appointed” may not be regulated by Congress or reviewed by the courts. Myers, 272 U. S., at 106, 176; see supra, at 8....The indictment’s allegations that the requested investigations were “sham[s]” or proposed for an improper purpose do not divest the President of exclusive authority over the investigative and prosecutorial functions of the Justice Department and its officials. App. 186–187, Indictment ¶10(c). And the President cannot be prosecuted for conduct within his exclusive constitutional authority. Trump is therefore absolutely immune from prosecution for the alleged conduct involving his discussions with Justice Department officials."
In other words, the Constitution grants the President the power to prosecute crimes, so "discussions with Justice Department officials" are Constitutionally authorized official actions. At no point do they say that actually convincing states to replace their electors is protected under the prosecutorial power. They just said that Trump is allowed to discuss the possibility with his AG as on official action, and allowed to fire the AG as on official action.
Like I said, the issue is far from open and shut. And three Supreme Court justices seem to think the opposite of you (because Kagan and Jackson joined Sotomayor's dissent). I would think that might give you pause.
"Assassinating people is not an official duty of the presidency, except as an extension of Congress' authority to declare war."
People keep just saying this like it's obvious ... and I would have agreed it was obvious ... but you should tell John Roberts! The way his opinion is written, ordering an assassination is an "official act" and, again, he didn't even dispute that that's what he's holding.
People seem convinced that this isn't what they said - but they never actually make the argument based on the text of the opinion itself. They just assume that there's no way the supreme court would have said that. But they did! It's really bad!
"The way his opinion is written, ordering an assassination is an "official act" and, again, he didn't even dispute that that's what he's holding"
Can you quote this part to me? There's a lot of "A said, B said" flying around but nobody is giving any wording where A said this and B said that. Except for Sotomayor and her Seal Team 6 which seems to be quoted all over the place.
Looking at the text of the judgment, here is what Roberts says. He doesn't explicitly say, that I can see, "yeah sure the Prez can order a hit" but maybe it's all in the interpretation; if he didn't say explicitly "nah fam, El Prez can't order a hit" then it's the same as saying "sure he can!"
"Unable to muster any meaningful textual or historical support, the principal dissent suggests that there is an “established understanding” that “former Presidents are answerable to the criminal law for their official acts.” Post, at 9. Conspicuously absent is mention of the fact that since the founding, no President has ever faced criminal charges—let alone for his conduct in office. And accordingly no court has ever been faced with the question of a President’s immunity from prosecution. All that our Nation’s practice establishes on the subject is silence.
Coming up short on reasoning, the dissents repeatedly level variations of the accusation that the Court has rendered the President “above the law.” See, e.g., post, at 1, 3, 11, 12, 21, 30 (opinion of SOTOMAYOR, J.); post, at 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 19 (opinion of JACKSON, J.). As before, that “rhetorically chilling” contention is “wholly unjustified.” Fitzgerald, 457 U. S., at 758, n. 41. Like everyone else, the President is subject to prosecution in his unofficial capacity. But unlike anyone else, the President is a branch of government, and the Constitution vests in him sweeping powers and duties. Accounting for that reality—and ensuring that the President may exercise those powers forcefully, as the Framers anticipated he would—does not place him above the law; it preserves the basic structure of the Constitution from which that law derives.
The dissents’ positions in the end boil down to ignoring the Constitution’s separation of powers and the Court’s precedent and instead fear mongering on the basis of extreme hypotheticals about a future where the President “feels empowered to violate federal criminal law.” Post, at 18 (opinion of SOTOMAYOR, J.); see post, at 26, 29–30; post, at 8–9, 10, 12, 16, 20–21 (opinion of JACKSON, J.). The dissents overlook the more likely prospect of an Executive Branch that cannibalizes itself, with each successive President free to prosecute his predecessors, yet unable to boldly and fearlessly carry out his duties for fear that he may be next. For instance, Section 371—which has been charged in this case—is a broadly worded criminal statute that can cover “‘any conspiracy for the purpose of impairing, obstructing or defeating the lawful function of any department of Government.’” United States v. Johnson, 383 U. S. 169, 172 (1966) (quoting Haas v. Henkel, 216 U. S. 462, 479 (1910)). Virtually every President is criticized for insufficiently enforcing some aspect of federal law (such as drug, gun, immigration, or environmental laws). An enterprising prosecutor in a new administration may assert that a previous President violated that broad statute. Without immunity, such types of prosecutions of ex-Presidents could quickly become routine. The enfeebling of the Presidency and our Government that would result from such a cycle of factional strife is exactly what the Framers intended to avoid. Ignoring those risks, the dissents are instead content to leave the preservation of our system of separated powers up to the good faith of prosecutors."
It's in the part you quoted. Here is the key piece:
"The dissents’ positions in the end boil down to ignoring the Constitution’s separation of powers and the Court’s precedent and instead fear mongering on the basis of extreme hypotheticals about a future where the President “feels empowered to violate federal criminal law.” Post, at 18 (opinion of SOTOMAYOR, J.); see post, at 26, 29–30; post, at 8–9, 10, 12, 16, 20–21 (opinion of JACKSON, J.). The dissents overlook the more likely prospect of an Executive Branch that cannibalizes itself, with each successive President free to prosecute his predecessors, yet unable to boldly and fearlessly carry out his duties for fear that he may be next"
Note that the reference to page 29-30 of Sotomayor's dissent includes the "seal team 6" thing and a couple other examples.
"Looking at the text of the judgment, here is what Roberts says. He doesn't explicitly say, that I can see, "yeah sure the Prez can order a hit" but maybe it's all in the interpretation; if he didn't say explicitly "nah fam, El Prez can't order a hit" then it's the same as saying "sure he can!""
It's not that "if he didn't explicitly say the president can't do it, that means he thinks that the president can". I don't think that the majority is obligated to respond to any scary hypothetical the majority puts out there. If the dissent says in effect "the majority's ruling means the president has a free hand to assassinate people" ... Roberts can ignore it.
But ... he didn't ignore it. He responded to it!
And he didn't respond to it to say "that's not true, I didn't say that", he responded to say "you're not considering the more likely issue of the president not being insufficiently bold and fearless". In any other situation people would understand that as implicitly agreeing that he is, in fact, "saying that". People only resist the conclusion here because it's so self-evidently insane and they don't want to believe the supreme court did such a bad thing.
Now of course if Roberts did ignore it, that wouldn't make Sotomayor wrong. It would just mean you'd have to analyze the opinion to see if she's right. Which she is.
"Now of course if Roberts did ignore it, that wouldn't make Sotomayor wrong. It would just mean you'd have to analyze the opinion to see if she's right. Which she is."
Well gosh, Jack, then all I can recommend is that you flee to Canada right this second before Trump can send the death squads - or rather, Seal Team 6 - after you.
Because just today I saw someone claiming that the Supreme Court decision means that Trump can kill his rivals, which means the Democratic Party, which means people who vote for the Democrats. Justice Sotomayor said so! It's true!
Your argument reminds me of people who like to say "Well Jesus said nothing about abortion, so that means it's okay". Technically yes, that is so: there is nothing in the Gospels regarding abortion. But I think that we can take it that no. Abortion not the thing. Don't do.
Roberts also did not specifically deny that Trump could ride a dragon down the street and invade your house and loot and pillage all your belongings and drive you before him as a slave while the women of the household lament and weep. Better make sure your insurance is fully paid up for house burning via dragon fire!
Seems like you're just ignoring what I wrote. I'm not saying "Roberts didn't deny he's holding it therefore he's holding it", and you're just proceeding as if I am saying that.
I actually cited the opinion and shit, cited it more in other comments, and can continue to do so, you're just saying weird stuff about dragons that ignores the argument.
The majority never directly responds to Sotomayor's accusations because they are ridiculous. Nowhere in the Constitution is the president delegated the power to assassinate other Americans. The Constitution does not vest this power in the President, thus it is not an official power and there is no immunity, the end.
Sotomayor also never points to any legal evidence that using the Navy Seals to kill political rivals is an official act. She just asserts that the president is now above the law and throws out a bunch of clearly illegal and despotic actions and pretends they are immune, without ever doing the work of establishing how they are powers constitutionally granted to the presidency.
"Nowhere in the Constitution is the president delegated the power to assassinate other Americans"
Concerning specificity there! Are you saying that the US president IS legally immune if they assassinate me as a non-American? I don't really see any guidance on that in the text of your constitution.
Ah well, we non-Americans all know that it's okay for the US government to ignore international law and courts when it likes and if that includes killing non-Americans, too bad for us not having the foresight to make sure we were born in the USA and remain there (even being an American citizen is no protection if you go outside the USA).
It's OK for ALL governments to ignore international law and courts when they like. Countries make their own rules, and must deal with the consequences of their actions with other countries.
They can even decide to violate treaties. It's rather dumb to do, since no one will then make another treaty with them, but that's the consequences.
Who will enforce anything countries want done? Them, and their army.
Well the problem is that the standard for presumptive immunity is literally just that it can be shown that prosecuting the president would impede on the executive's ability to perform its function (i.e. interfering on the "energetic and vigorous" job of Presidency).
Sotomayor might be exaggerating that the President can just kill someone, but like, imagine a scenario where people are protesting, and political rivals are calling for a President's impeachment. Would this not be interfering with the executive's ability to function? What is stopping a President from brutally repressing the protests and arresting his rivals? Then, the President can't even later be convicted of a crime, because evidence of him wanting to silence political rivals would be a conversation with someone in his cabinet that forms parts of his core powers and you can't look into his motivations for performing a core act when you want to convict someone.
Sotomayor was 100% correct though that the decision considers the necessity of the executive to act "vigorously", but not the public's interest in having the president not be allowed to infinitely commit crimes.
Impeachment is provided for within the existing law though, is it not? Or what were all those "this time for sure" acts Mueller was carrying out?
I think Barrett made a valid point in her partial concurrence about using immune acts as evidence.
For instance, Trump can't be convicted for discussing the possibility of changing state electors with the AG or threatening to fire the AG if he refuses because the appointment of the AG is a core duty of the president. Presumably if Trump had actually coerced the state electors that would have been illegal, because the president has no authority over state legislatures. But claiming immunity for the official discussion should not be a shield against using the discussion as evidence for the unofficial act.
Similarly, Barrett had an example about bribery. Signing laws is a core duty of the presidency, immune. Bribery is not, criminal act that can be prosecuted. But if the president can claim immunity for any evidence about signing a law, the prosecution would be unable to prove the quid in the quid pro quo.
Note also that the Court does not say that presumptive immunity applies to those acts. Rather, it says, "we conclude that the separation of powers principles explicated in our precedent necessitate at least a presumptive immunity from criminal prosecution for a President’s acts within the outer perimeter of his official responsibility. ... But as we explain below, the current stage of the proceedings in this case does not require us to decide whether this immunity is presumptive or absolute. See Part III–B, infra. Because we need not decide that question today, we do not decide it."
That implies that at least some Justices think that the immunity should be absolute.
I do not believe one should conclude the Justices decided anything about the absolute immunity, since they explicitly say they aren't deciding on this specific case.
"The majority never directly responds to Sotomayor's accusations because they are ridiculous."
But the thing is, they do respond! As I said in my original comment. They don't respond to say that it's ridiculous that the president has that power, they respond to say it's less likely to happen than the president not being "bold and fearless"
"Nowhere in the Constitution is the president delegated the power to assassinate other Americans"
Again, I agree, but people are confusing their own sense of what would be reasonable for the supreme court to say, with what it actually said.
"Sotomayor also never points to any legal evidence that using the Navy Seals to kill political rivals is an official act."
As relevant to the navy seals thing, the majority lists "commanding the Armed Forces" and "tak[ing] care that the laws be faithfully executed" as "conclusive and preclusive" powers of the presidency. And then goes on to say, regarding the facts in this case, that any discussions with DOJ officials about prosecutions are immune because it's a conclusive or preclusive power, and because of that immunity, the fact that ordering those prosecutions would be illegal doesn't matter. Presumably the same would apply for the armed forces - conclusive and preclusive power, therefore immune even though it violates, e.g., a law against murder. Majority says "nor may courts deem an action unofficial merely because it allegedly violates a generally applicable law."
The decision isn't really complete right now, because the SC punted the question of core vs peripheral official acts, and what is needed to overcome the presumption of immunity for non-core acts to the lower courts. However, most of the decision is open to interpretation by judges who are going to apply it in an actual court.
A future president can launch a military coup and fail, then claim immunity. However, the court deciding that case would have to agree that a military coup is part of the official duties inherent to commanding the Armed Forces. Clearly it is not, just like assassinating other Americans is not part of being the Commander in Chief, nor is accepting bribes part of the president's role in signing laws. To think Sotomayor's hypotheticals would come true, a court would have to agree that murdering an AG with poison is protected because removing the AG is a core duty. These are absurd scenarios, as the majority rightly point out.
>As I said in my original comment. They don't respond to say that it's ridiculous that the president has that power, they respond to say it's less likely to happen than the president not being "bold and fearless"
And as I have replied to you, repeatedly, they don't say that at all. It is nowhere in the opinion. Please cite it or stop claiming that it is. The only place where the words "bold and fearless" are written in the opinion are in Sotomayors dissent. At no point does Roberts say that the president is unlikely to assassinate people., so it's okay.
"And as I have replied to you, repeatedly, they don't say that at all. It is nowhere in the opinion. Please cite it or stop claiming that it is. The only place where the words "bold and fearless" are written in the opinion are in Sotomayors dissent. At no point does Roberts say that the president is unlikely to assassinate people., so it's okay. "
I see you already responded to another of my comments where I cite the language (for anyone following at home, 48th page, language about 'extreme hypotheticals').
Regarding "bold and fearless" - again page 48, president won't be able to "boldly and fearlessly" do whatever.
Also note "more likely" - true that he doesn't say it's 'unlikely' the president will order assassinations, just that it's 'more likely' that the 'not bold and fearless' issue will happen, again page 48.
"Please cite it or stop claiming that it is"
Please stop ignoring that I've repeatedly cited it! You keep claiming I'm making stuff up, I keep citing it, you keep just ignoring the fact that I cited it!
I didn’t think it was anything new. Nixon had to be pardoned after office, from a criminal offence that was not investigated by the courts (but by Congress as an impeachment).
Presidents have authorised foreign assassinations in any case. In particular Trump has. And the US protects not just the president but most officials from international law.
Everybody’s a king in the US.
"I didn’t think it was anything new."
Yes it is. You now can't enter into evidence the fact that Trump was willing to fire his Attorney General for not going with his elector fraud scheme, because they specifically delineate that conversation between the President and the AG are part of his core duties, and you are not allowed to look into his motivations when performing core duties. This makes him above the law in this sense.
"Presidents have authorised foreign assassinations"
Presidents have authorized foreign assassinations with the powers vested into them from Congress. They are not doing anything illegal when authorizing those assassinations. What law did they break? Now, it doesn't matter whether or not they are doing something illegal, if it's a core act, and it also doesn't matter if it's an official act that prosecuting can be said to harm the function and role of the executive.
The president does, in fact, regularly order the military to assassinate people (eg Bin Laden). What Sotomoyor is suggesting - that the president might try to assassinate a political rival -would certainly be ruled as outside official presidential duties and thus not subject to immunity.
Anyway plenty of people are indeed freaking out about the ruling (which FWIW grants FAR more power to the presidency than I would prefer) but nonetheless I think the hysterics are overstated.
It is NOT illegal for the president to assassinate foreign targets. It IS illegal for the president to assassinate political rivals.
"would certainly be ruled as outside official presidential duties"
Why give the president immunity at all then? Plus the test is not whether or not something is super duper illegal, but for presumptive immunity, whether prosecuting that would interfere with the President's ability to rule "energetically and vigorously." There are a ton of things that are illegal and might interfere, and that gray zone is very worrying.
Plus, why the fuck did Roberts not address a single thing that would fall outside of official actions? When Sotomayor specifically brought up the example of assassination? Even if you think this is too far, isn't the president now able to arrest rivals calling for his impeachment because it can be argued it interferes with the functioning of the executive? Why even open this can of worms?
"What Sotomoyor is suggesting - that the president might try to assassinate a political rival -would certainly be ruled as outside official presidential duties and thus not subject to immunity."
Seems like this ignores the very thing I just said in my comment. When Sotomayor brought up the possibility, the majority, while responding to that specific claim, didn't even dispute what she said! They just said it isn't likely that a president would do that.
But even beyond that, based on how the opinion is written, it pretty clearly is within the president's "official duties" to order the military to assassinate anyone. People assuming otherwise are really basing it on the idea that the supreme court would never say something like that. But they did, in fact, say something like that.
"When Sotomayor brought up the possibility, the majority, while responding to that specific claim, didn't even dispute what she said! They just said it isn't likely that a president would do that."
Not true. That simply is not anywhere in the majority opinion.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf
Right here, 48th page of the PDF:
"The dissents’ positions in the end boil down to ignoring
the Constitution’s separation of powers and the Court’s
precedent and instead fear mongering on the basis of ex-
treme hypotheticals about a future where the President
“feels empowered to violate federal criminal law.” Post, at
18 (opinion of SOTOMAYOR, J.); see post, at 26, 29–30; post,
at 8–9, 10, 12, 16, 20–21 (opinion of J ACKSON, J.). The dis-
sents overlook the more likely prospect of an Executive
Branch that cannibalizes itself, with each successive Presi-
dent free to prosecute his predecessors, yet unable to boldly
and fearlessly carry out his duties for fear that he may be
next. "
Where's the beef? Where is Roberts claiming that the president can do the things Sotomayor alleges? Where is he saying that it is okay because he's unlikely to do so? Where does anyone respond to that specific claim at all, as opposed to responding generally as cited here?
"Where's the beef? Where is Roberts claiming that the president can do the things Sotomayor alleges? Where is he saying that it is okay because he's unlikely to do so? Where does anyone respond to that specific claim at all, as opposed to responding generally as cited here?"
He says "extreme hypotheticals" then cites the pages (bottom of 29 to top of 30) on which Sotomayor says the Seal Team 6 thing, along with a few other similar hypotheticals. Is there something else on those pages other than that you think he's responding to?
Roberts’ opinion appeared to address the matter only obliquely.
He accused Sotomayor and the other two dissenters of “fear mongering on the basis of extreme hypotheticals.”
So yes, Roberts did say in so many words, “a president just wouldn’t do that.”
I think people aren't freaking out because, imagine that the Supreme Court had ruled the other way. Would it then be the case that we can rest easy, knowing the President can't order his enemies assassinated, because it would be *against the law*? Is the legality of ordering the military to assassinate people currently what prevents presidents from doing it? Does the fear of getting arrested stop presidents from ordering assassinations? Doubtful: the President already has the power of the pardon and could simply pardon himself for their murders.
So what actually keeps the president from ordering assassinations? The chief issue is that the military is not likely to follow such orders. It is already the case that the military is not supposed to follow illegal orders, a duty that applies to each soldier from the General the President would send the order to to the Seal Team member who would carry it out. We already have whole teams of lawyers that go over every drone strike against a terrorist before it happens, arguing over whether the use of force fits Congress's authorization of force, or whether it would fall outside that scope: if the lawyers rule that it does, the strike is called off. Ordering the military to kill anyone without authorization from Congress is not, with some exceptions, within the scope of the President's duties. Even if it was, Congress could impeach him for doing so. If the President orders the military to take out Congress, well, that's about as clearly an illegal order as you can get. If the military follows it, then rule of law has already been abandoned, Supreme Court ruling or no.
Note also that the military members would expose themselves to criminal liability under state law. A pardon would not prevent state criminal charges from being brought, and federal officer immunity only applies where (1) the federal agent was performing an act which he was authorized to do by the law of the United States and (2) in performing that authorized act, the federal agent did no more than what was necessary and proper for him to do. In re Neagle, 135 U.S. 1 (1890).
Though I guess this would not be a problem if the assassination took place in DC.
"Is the legality of ordering the military to assassinate people currently what prevents presidents from doing it? Does the fear of getting arrested stop presidents from ordering assassinations? Doubtful: the President already has the power of the pardon and could simply pardon himself for their murders.
So what actually keeps the president from ordering assassinations? The chief issue is that the military is not likely to follow such orders."
There are various things in the American system that could in theory be abused in order for someone to gain absolute power. Pardons are an example (though there's a good argument that the president can't pardon themselves). And in any system, there's always the possibility that enough people will ignore the system that it collapses. E.g. the best possible version of the American system of branches, checks and balances, etc, wouldn't protect against genocide if everyone in every branch, backed by popular majorities, wanted to do a genocide.
All we can do is make it more likely or less likely that the system will stay stable. Under that test, the supreme court's ruling is clearly bad. Saying that it doesn't matter because in theory these bad results could happen anyway, is like saying it doesn't matter if you get a trial or not because in theory the jury and judge and all appeals courts could be in cahoots anyway.
As for the military ignoring orders, I hope they would, but - leaving aside that that's the "deep state" that trump fans rail against - the threat of criminal prosecution (and not having retributive actions against the military personnel involved) makes it more likely that we wouldn't get into that situation.
"Ordering the military to kill anyone without authorization from Congress is not, with some exceptions, within the scope of the President's duties."
Under this case it is an "official act" and therefore he is immune from prosecution, whether it's illegal or not.
"Under this case it is an "official act" and therefore he is immune from prosecution, whether it's illegal or not."
It is not. The opinion states that "We conclude that under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power requires that a former President have some immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts during his tenure in office. At least with respect to the President’s exercise of his core constitutional powers, this immunity must be absolute. As for his remaining official actions, he is also entitled to immunity. At the current stage of proceedings in this case, however, we need not and do not decide whether that immunity must be absolute, or instead whether a presumptive immunity is sufficient."
In other words, he only has absolute immunity for official acts that exercise his core constitutional powers, and only presumptive immunity for all other official acts. The Constitution does not authorize the President to order the assassination of anyone he pleases, so at most he would only have presumptive immunity; and it's arguable that such an action would not be an official action at all, since the President is neither authorized by the Constitution or by Congress to take such actions.
"In other words, he only has absolute immunity for official acts that exercise his core constitutional powers, and only presumptive immunity for all other official acts. The Constitution does not authorize the President to order the assassination of anyone he pleases, so at most he would only have presumptive immunity; and it's arguable that such an action would not be an official action at all, since the President is neither authorized by the Constitution or by Congress to take such actions. "
They put "commanding the armed forces" as a "conclusive, preclusive" official act. And ordering the navy seals to kill people is "commanding the armed forces". The fact that it's also illegal doesn't make it an unofficial act.
>If the President claims authority to act but in fact exercises mere “individual will” and “authority without law,”
the courts may say so.<
So no, it's not an automatic pass to tell the military to kill people. It would be a direct violation of the constitution and the courts would point that out.
"So no, it's not an automatic pass to tell the military to kill people. It would be a direct violation of the constitution and the courts would point that out."
All the language you cited is saying is that the president *claiming* authority doesn't mean that he *has* the authority. But then separately in this case, they also say that he *does* have the authority to "command the armed forces".
Also - it's not a "direct violation of the constitution" to tell the military to kill people, the president has been telling the military to kill people since forever, and nothing in the constitution says they can't.
>And ordering the navy seals to kill people is "commanding the armed forces"
Where does the opinion say that the constitutionally granted commanding power includes the power to order the military to do whatever he wants?
Right in that part I just quoted! Page 6, Part II-A, "commanding the Armed Forces" listed as a power of the presidency, citing the constitution, and then on the next page saying where it's listed in the constitution it's "conclusive and preclusive".
What more are you looking for?
(actual last comment for now, realize I never hit send on this one)
Damn, would have been good for Roberts to explicitly mention a single thing that fell squarely outside of official acts then! Maybe even acknowledging what Sotomayor had said in her decision!
I would have supposed it was meant as a rebuke to the notion that political parties in and out of power should take turns jailing one another. I guess I wouldn't have imagined it needed to be said, but change happens fast these days.
That is what they say they are worried about that. But if that's the case (as opposed to just supporting "their side"), then that doesn't change the fact that they OK'd ordering political assassinations.
So they try to solve thing A while making thing B more likely. But also - they didn't actually make A less likely either! It gives presidents immunity for ... among other things ... ordering retributive political prosecutions! And they can still try to gin up charges for "unofficial" acts.
"But if that's the case (as opposed to just supporting "their side"), then that doesn't change the fact that they OK'd ordering political assassinations."
Nowhere in the opinion did they "OK" political assassinations.
We're not going to change his mind, FLWAB. He's hung up on "Sotomayor said the president could murder us all in our beds and Roberts never said no that is not legal, so we're all gonna be murderated!!!!"
Even if Roberts had said the exact denial Jack wants, he'd still find a way to go "but anyway Sotomayor said it could happen and that means it will happen!" because he has his version of The Truth firmly fixed in his mind.
There is simply too much to freak out about right now. It makes it hard to focus.
Such is the state of things I can't but help feel it's at least partially often by design.
I wouldn't really be against it, so long as it isn't one sided and others who did similar (like trump) were investigated.
We can argue about the legality, but "Obama's totally immune no matter what" isn't a good answer.
You know, I think "yes"? At least, investigated?
As a non US citizen I can't say I'm less comfortable with the idea that the President of the United States has carte blanche to assassinate US citizens than that he has carte blanche to assassinate non US citizens.
Maybe if Congress had to publically pass some kind of declaration of war against a specific individual in order to assassinate them, that might be an appropriate level of oversight.
The POTUS doesn't have carte blanche to kill people; the Office of Legal Counsel decided that killings ordered by the President must be 'lawful', otherwise it is murder. He can't just have random people in another country killed. Although if he did, I don't think it would be very hard to get the CIA or someone to set up a pretense. "Melvin? Yep, the CIA definitely thinks he is a terrorist. Send in the drone."
Thank you! I voted for the f..ker so I feel extra-responsible.
To the substance: yes, no argument if we’re talking about an actual battle or emergency. If the Seals shoot Bin Laden’s guards and one of them turns out a US citizen - he was asking for it.
But that was different. Al-Awlaki wasn’t shooting at our troops. This was a long-planned kill. At least a court approval? Anything? I think we should be alarmed that he just decided to kill a US citizen without any checks.
Moreover, this kind of opens a giant can of disgusting worms. We haven’t officially declared war on any country, and the whole GWOT thing is an abomination. So now should the President be able to just drone Snowden? Imagine the most despised President, idk, Clinton, offing Bob Novak while the latter was on holiday in Mexico. What’s the difference between that and killing Al-Awlaki?
I don’t think Yamamoto was a US citizen though…
Over on The Motte, there's someone doing a series of posts on recent Supreme Court decisions and they go through the immunity decision in some detail:
https://www.themotte.org/post/1063/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week
Scroll down to "Thoughts on Trump v. United States"
"There were five opinions. The Conservatives joined Roberts' opinion, except for Barrett regarding one section. He set out the following:
Presidents have absolute immunity for core constitutional powers.
For official acts more generally, he at least has presumptive immunity, but maybe absolute immunity.
They have no immunity for unofficial acts.
This judgment was based on large part on structural considerations of the constitution. For one, if the Constitution says that the President shall have some power, like the veto or the pardon, Congress cannot, by regulation, limit that or take it away. That would counter the separation of powers and intent of the Constitution. On the other hand, some things have authority from both, so maybe Congress could regulate those.
Additionally, this was based in large part on extensions of precedent from several prior cases, especially Nixon v. Fitzgerald. There, they ruled that presidents could not have civil suits leveled against them for official acts in Congress. While there is a greater interest, there is also a greater danger to the president, as jail is more serious than a financial burden.
The concern is that not having any immunity would allow frivolous criminal cases to proceed, which would seriously limit the bold action that the founders would have wanted a president to take. In such things, the dangers of intrusion on the executive branch must be considered: subpoenas were ruled to be fine in Burr. Executive privilege has long been held to exist. In all such cases, the risk of intrusion is weighed against the interest of the people, and so in this case, because criminal proceedings are a serious matter, they are allowing them, but they are permissible, but cannot pose any danger of intrusion upon the authority of the Executive branch."
There's a lot more about each justice's opinion and taking the dissent step-by-step, well worth reading to get past the Seal Team 6 memes online and to find out why Sotomayor says that and the others disagree.
As you describe it, it sounds like the most potentially dangerous Presidential powers, control of the military and federal law enforcement, would fall in the shared authority bucket. The President is CinC of the military, but Congress is empowered to declare war, maintain armies and navies, provide for organizing militias and calling them into federal service, etc. Similarly for federal criminal law, which is "faithfully executed" by the President but the laws and procedures are set by Congress as well as the authorizations of funding and authority for the FBI, DEA, etc.
"As you describe it, it sounds like the most potentially dangerous Presidential powers, control of the military and federal law enforcement, would fall in the shared authority bucket."
That may be a reasonable way to do it, but the opinion puts those powers in the bucket of "conclusive, preclusive" powers of the presidency for which he has absolute immunity and can act against the will of Congress.
I feel like I keep saying different versions of this but a lot of the arguments against my position seem to amount to "they can't possibly have said that because that's crazy" ... but, they really did say it!
This seems very Unsong/ACX presidential debate. In the UK election there is a question over whether some of the candidates from the Reform party were human. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jul/08/reform-uk-under-pressure-to-prove-all-its-candidates-were-real-people
> A Reform source said: “All our candidates are categorically real.
> Matlock insisted that he did exist,
I demand a birth certificate, so that I can know that they were born.
Even if that guy's real, there's no way that picture is real.
I realized that software engineers don't quite fit into that capitalist model of "private citizens own the means of production, employees operate them" since software engineers can _build more means of production_. But, it seems like companies never compensate engineers for their long-term value creation, only for their time. I made a video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_Vkpunpiqg. Then I kind of digressed into what it would take to make a hypothetical business that pays employees based on value creation.
Some notes here:
First, plenty of individuals get paid significantly more than others despite nominally holding the same job. The usual justification is that they are more reliable, do more work in the same time, make more important decisions, etc. In other words, a reward for disproportionate value creation.
Second, most people greatly prefer the reliability of being paid the same amount of money every month, and working the same amount of hours. So whatever system you come up with originally, once it develops towards people's preferences it will be functionally indistinguishable from paid-by-the-hour work. Remember, the industrial revolution started with contract work - paying people by the hour was considered a revolution for the benefit of the worker.
Third, independent from the variance inherent to contract work, actual value creation is tricky to define. Plenty of programmers can and do sell code/apps per usage, which is proportional to value creation. But quite a few find out that their codes marginal value is actually zero - people will just move to free options even for arbitrarily cheap pricing schemes.
Software engineers also can (and some do) sell their software instead of their time, but we no longer call them "employees" when they do this.
And there are lots of professions that build more means of production. All the hammers and factories and so forth are coming from somewhere.
I feel like there are probably better angles of attack if you want to analyze why the standard work relationships are the way they are and whether they could be different.
Like: Why are employees paid based on time worked instead of amount of value produced? I think mostly because "amount of value produced" is hard to measure. Ideally, employees who perform well over time will have their salaries increased to match, though there are various reasons this doesn't always happen in practice.
Why do software engineers usually sell their skills instead of their products? I think mostly because lots of software is impractical to produce alone, so people like to work in teams.
Why does product success mostly benefit the company, and not the employees? I think primarily because the company is taking on more risk and partly because the company is usually in a better negotiating position.
Why are things that produce ongoing value (e.g. screwdrivers, software) often sold, instead of rented? I think mostly because of transaction costs and enforcement costs. Renting becomes more common for high-cost items, where the initial capital outlay for a purchase becomes more inconvenient and the other costs become a smaller fraction of the total value. Also note that the recipient of a one-time payment can convert that into ongoing income so long as they can put it in an interest-bearing account or some other investment instrument, so it's not like selling-instead-of-renting means that you CAN'T have ongoing income.
And wait a minute. Have I fallen into an alternate universe?
We've got Clarence Thomas taking expensive gifts (bribes) from a billionaire friend.
We've got Samuel Alito admitting on tape that he is making biased decisions.
And we've still never found out who paid off Brent Kavanaugh's 200K loan.
...but Sotomayor MUST RESIGN!
Bro.....it's over. There's no "impartial independent judiciary anymore" (not that there really ever was) - it's a democratic battlefield now. We just...don't give a fuck. Clarence Thomas could shoot someone on 5th Avenue for all I care.
(Note that this is what you're doing too - and you probably know it, with your twisting of the gifts (yeah just put "bribes" in parentheses...no one will care you didn't justify it) and that tape with Alito. Not bad imo - all in the game.)
Sotomayor must resign for the good of the country though, ofc.
>We've got Samuel Alito admitting on tape that he is making biased decisions
Thus seems to me to be a rather tendentious interpretation of that tape, unless you are referring to some other tape.
I think she should resign for tactical reasons, not due to ethical lapses (i.e. so she can be replaced with someone younger).
I also think it would be helpful to put more focus on the recent supreme court decision that, as Sotomayor pointed out, would give the president immunity for ordering the military to assassinate people.
It would not: ordering the military to kill individuals that the President has not been authorized by Congress to kill is already illegal. The President doesn't have carte blanche to order the military to do *anything*, he has specific powers.
"ordering the military to kill individuals that the President has not been authorized by Congress to kill is already illegal"
Doesn't matter if it's illegal! Whole point of immunity is you can do things that would otherwise be illegal.
"The President doesn't have carte blanche to order the military to do *anything*, he has specific powers. "
People keep saying this because it manifestly makes sense as the way it should work ... unfortunately it isn't what the court actually said. The court actually said the bad, unreasonable thing. I can make the argument in more detail, but the easiest way to see it is what I put in my original comment - the majority didn't actually dispute Sotomayor's characterization that it means the president can order military assassinations, they just said it's unlikely the president would do it.
That's simply not true. The majority held that: "Article II of the Constitution vests “executive Power” in “a President of the United States of America.” The President has duties of “unrivaled gravity and breadth.” This authority to act necessarily “stem[s] either from an act of Congress or from the Constitution itself.” In the latter case, the President’s authority is sometimes “conclusive and preclusive.” When the President exercises such authority, Congress cannot act on, and courts cannot examine, the President’s actions. It follows that an Act of Congress—either a specific one targeted at the President or a generally applicable one—may not criminalize the President’s actions within his exclusive constitutional power. Neither may the courts adjudicate a criminal prosecution that examines such Presidential actions. The Court thus concludes that the President is absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for conduct within his exclusive sphere of constitutional authority."
In other words, the President is immune for carrying out the powers granted to him by the Constitution. Presumably Sotomayor would argue that his Constitutionally granted position of "Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States" means he can order them to do whatever he wants, but that's simply not the case. He cannot order them to perform illegal actions, and a President ordering the military to kill American Citizens without authorization from Congress is not one of his Constitutional Powers. So no immunity.
I've read over the ruling, and I cannot anywhere find the majority not disputing Sotomayor's characterization, or saying they think a President would be immune from prosecution for assassinating political enemies but that "it's unlikely the president would do it." Can you quote the section in question? As far as I can tell, it doesn't exist.
Where the opinion actually does address the dissents Roberts writes that "As for the dissents, they strike a tone of chilling doom that is wholly disproportionate to what the Court actually does today—conclude that immunity extends to official discussions between the President and his Attorney General, and then remand to the lower courts to determine “in the first instance” whether and to what extent Trump’s remaining alleged conduct is entitled to immunity" and "Coming up short on reasoning, the dissents repeatedly level variations of the accusation that the Court has rendered the President “above the law.” See, e.g., post, at 1, 3, 11, 12, 21, 30 (opinion of SOTOMAYOR, J.); post, at 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 19 (opinion of JACKSON, J.). As before, that “rhetorically chilling” contention is “wholly unjustified.” Like everyone else, the President is subject to prosecution in his unofficial capacity. But unlike anyone else, the President is a branch of government, and the Constitution vests in him sweeping powers and duties. Accounting for that reality—and ensuring that the President may exercise those powers forcefully, as the Framers anticipated he would—does not place him above the law; it preserves the basic structure of the Constitution from which that law derives. The dissents’ positions in the end boil down to ignoring the Constitution’s separation of powers and the Court’s precedent and instead fear mongering on the basis of extreme hypotheticals about a future where the President “feels empowered to violate federal criminal law.”
People can read for themselves, but it simply isn't true that the Court has made it so that the President can order the execution of his enemies without facing prosecution, or that they agree with Sotomayor's characterization of that.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf
Interesting. Did taking Osama Bin Laden out require such authorization or did it fly under the radar because he *might* have been taken alive?
Osama Bin Laden had a $25 million bounty on him since at least the USS Cole attack in 2000. https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/osama-bin-laden-reward-paid/story?id=13633236
His death had been authorized to hell and back.
Sure, but I didn't realize it had been a matter of debate in the US Capitol.
Yes, it was authorized when Congress passed the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, which authorized the President to "use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons."
Bin Laden took a while to get, but definitely fell under the scope of Congress's authorization.
EDIT: Here's a link with a decent overview of the 2001 AUMF, and how it is still used today, and a bit on how these Authorizations work: https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/publications/after-authorization-use-military-force
Damn, so the only thing a president needs to do to kill political opposition is claim that 9/11 was an inside job? Neat.
Yeah, the "he determines [...] aided" is a very flexible phrase. The "necessary and appropriate force" part is what would, in theory, limit the actions of the president here.
Thank you for the quick reply!
Kavanaugh's rich family apparently paid off his loans. Mother Jones magazine, which had led the media charge on that topic, printed that updated conclusion. People online continue to link to the original Jones expose of the dollars while ignoring the magazine's subsequent clarification.
With Thomas and Alito, the known facts are as you summarize them. E.g. in a better world Thomas would by now have been impeached and removed.
None of that in any way negates or even relates to the argument for Sotomayor's resignation, which is being advanced by persons who couldn't be farther from fans of Kavanaugh, Thomas or Alito.
I guess there're still some questions about Kavanaugh's debts, but it seems less likely they were paid off as bribes. When questioned by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, Kavanaugh said that he had "not received financial gifts other than from our family which are excluded from disclosure in judicial financial disclosure reports." But some people want more details from him.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/09/heres-the-truth-about-brett-kavanaughs-finances/
the idea behind her resigning isn’t because of some accused crime, it’s about liberals preserving a seat in the court, as opposed to a potential rbg situation again.
Well, yeah. Integrity is clearly a thing that only liberals still pretend to have.
And conservatives don't even bother to try anymore.
I have to write up a performance review at work that's going to lead to one of my direct reports getting let go. I've never had to do this before. He's been a poor performer for a while now, but on a personal level, he seems like he's not a bad guy. Right now, I am alternating between wanting to channel Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross and Obi Wan's "why'd you make me do this?" histrionics after the light saber battle in Revenge of the Sith.
I go for clean, concise, complete, and as nearly emotionless as possible when I have to do this. The nearly emotionless part is basically impossible, so do your emoting privately to someone disconnected from the issue and not in the performance review
Thanks for the tip. I will definitely try to keep this in mind.
Sucks but might be for the best for your underling ultimately. I got managed out last year and it was a pretty grim 6 months, but early this year I landed a much more interesting and rewarding job (both intellectually & $$$). I strongly doubt I'd have had the motivation, or the time, to look without being shown the door.
That said...probably best not to try and spin it like that when you're actually delivering the review. Like taking off a Band-Aid, quicker is better
Yeah, that's a good thing to keep in mind. Good for you on actually levelling up with your new job. I got laid off myself during the financial crisis, and I felt as though I took a significant step back, career-wise, after that. I've since recovered, but it took a while. That's part of why I feel bad for this guy: I remember what happened to me, way back when, and it stunk. Hopefully things work out for him more like they did for you.
An unusual, and unexpectedly tough, puzzle in the verbal arithmetic genre.
https://i.imgur.com/VOO9jmu.png
In this picture, you see a long multiplication example, in which all digits are replaced by asterisks. After it's carried out, all digits in every column are summed separately (without carrying between columns) and the sum written below. The sum is over all digits in the column, including the original numbers, the intermediate sums and the final product! The challenge, of course, is to reconstruct all the digits.
I'll give guidance on how to solve this, in rot13. Each paragraph explores more and more of the solution until almost finishing it.
- svther bhg gung gur frpbaq vagrezrqvngr naq svany yvarf ner bar-frira-kk naq bar-rvtug-kkk erfcrpgviryl. guvf fubhyq or rnfl
- ybbx ng gur evtugzbfg pbyhza. vg unf n sbez n*o, gura ynfg qvtvg bs n*o ercrngrq gjvpr, nyy guvf gbtrgure 12. r.t. vs gur qvtvg vf 1, gura n*o zhfg fhz gb 10 naq cebqhpg zhfg raq va 1, gurer'f bayl bar cnve. Cebprrqvat gueh nyy cbffvoyr qvtvgf sebz 1 gb 5, cebqhpr gur guerr cbffvoyr cnvef bs n/o. abgr gung n,o ner arire 1.
- fvapr n/o ner arire 1, naq gur svefg zhygvcyvpnaq unf 3 qvtvgf naq erznvaf guerr qvtvgf nsgre *o, vgf uhaqerqf qvtvg vf yrff guna 5. abj svther bhg vgf cnevgl onfrq ba gur gbgny fhz bs 25 va gung pbyhza, naq gur irel cebonoyr nffhzcgvba gung gurer'f n pneel bs 1 sebz gur cerprqvat pbyhza. lbh fubhyq raq hc oryvrivat gur qvtvg vf rira, fb pna or rvgure gjb be sbhe.
- nffhzr vg'f sbhe, guna gur o nobir (ynfg qvtvg bs 2aq zhygvcyvpnaq) pna or bayl 2. abj hfr gur snpg gung 4kk gvzrf kk zhfg svg va 17kk, naq abg bayl gung, gur fhz bs 25 sbeprf gung pbyhza gb or 4,8,7,6 (7,6 gur bayl pbzovangvba j/ fhz bs 13 gung'f pbzcngvoyr jvgu gur nqqvgvba 8+7+pneel). gur frpbaq cnegvny cebqhpg vf abj 177k, juvyr gur frpbaq zhygvcyvpnaq gb or 42 (gur 4 vf sbeprq ol 4kk orpbzvat 17kk), ohg 42 fxvcf bire 177k, fb gung'f n pbagenqvpgvba.
- jr abj xabj vg'f 2kk * ko, jurer o=2 be 3, ehyr bhg 2 onfrq ba gur fhz bs 25, pbapyhqr vg'f 2k7 k k3, ntnva onfrq ba gur fhz bs 25 fubj 17kk zhfg or ng yrnfg 177k be zber, svaq juvpu 2k7 unf n zhygvcyr gung svgf vagb gung vagreiny (1770-1799), gurer ner gjb cbffvovyvgvrf, bayl bar bs gurz jvyy tvir gur fhz bs 34 va gur cerivbhf pbyhza.
> - ybbx ng gur evtugzbfg pbyhza. vg unf n sbez n*o, gura ynfg qvtvg bs n*o ercrngrq gjvpr, nyy guvf gbtrgure 12. r.t. vs gur qvtvg vf 1, gura n*o zhfg fhz gb 10 naq cebqhpg zhfg raq va 1, gurer'f bayl bar cnve. Cebprrqvat gueh nyy cbffvoyr qvtvgf sebz 1 gb 5, cebqhpr gur guerr cbffvoyr cnvef bs n/o. abgr gung n,o ner arire 1.
I was sure I found the one pair that worked here. I worked from that assumption for a while. Then something made me wonder if the above was actually true.
There are three different permutations that can go in the right most column, just looking at it in isolation.
At that point I decided this is bullshit and quit.
Yeah, it's a bit of bullshit.
The most wtf part of it is, I wrote code to brute force and play with conditions a bit, and it turns out that removing the sum of the rightmost column, just leaving it unknown, still leads to only one possible solution (with other columns it's not so). But if you do that, the problem becomes just about impossible to reason about compared to brute force, I think.
So, I spent a few hours thinking about this, but ended up barking up the wrong tree. My path forward would be to brute-force the problem in 10k loop iterations (the tests should not be very difficult). Rather than just printing the the results, writing them as the bottom line first and then put a "proof" why they must be the only solution above it, a slightly less intellectually dishonest approach would be to just test which of my statements is the first one which is wrong. I most likely won't have time to do so any time soon. Rest in rot13.
k
l
---
z
a
---
f
Yrg gur svefg ahzore pbafvfgvat bs guerr qvtvgf or pnyyrq k=100*k2+10*k1+k0.
Yrg gur ahzore va gur frpbaq yvar or pnyyrq l=10*l1+l0.
Yrg z=100*z2+10*z1+z0 or gur cebqhpg bs k naq l0. Yrg a = 10000*a4+1000*a3+100*a 2+10*a1 or gur cebqhpg bs k naq 10*l1. Yrg a0=0.
Yrg f=fhz(cbj(10, v)*f_v, v sebz mreb gb sbhe) or gur gbgny cebqhpg.
Jura qbvat n fhz bs gjb be srjre qvtvgf, gur pneel vf rvgure mreb be bar. Guhf a 4==f4==1.
a3+f3==15, guvf vf bayl cbffvoyr vs gur pneel vf bar, juvpu lvryqf f3==8, a3==7 naq z2+a2>10.
Hfvat gur qvtvgf jr unir qvfpbirerq sebz a, jr pbapyhqr gung
1700 <= k*l1 <= 1799.
Bofreir gung z guerr qvtvgf. Guvf pna bayl or gur pnfr jura k*l0 < 1000 naq gur nhgube bzvggrq gur yrnqvat pneevrq mreb.
Ol gur genafvgvir cebcregl bs yrff-guna, 1.7*l0 < l1.
k2*100 <= k*l0 < 1000, urapr k2*l0 < 10.
Sbe pbyhza mreb, k0 +l0 + z0 + f0 == 12. Boivbhfyl z0==f0==(k0*l0)%10. (% orvat gur zbqhyhf bcrengbe, yvxr va tbbq byq P).
Guhf
k0+l0 + 2*((k0*l0)%10) == 12
Rvgure k0 naq l0 ner obgu bqq, be obgu rira, orpnhfr gur guveq fhzznaq vf pyrneyl rira.
Nf gurer ner bayl n srj cbffvoyr inyhrf sbe l0 (vg unf gb or yrff guna fvk qhr gb gur 1.7 guvat), jr pna gel gb oehgr sbepr guvatf.
Svefg, jr jvyy gel gb fbyir gur rdhngvba zbqhyb gra, naq gura grfg nal fbyhgvbaf jvgu gur aba-zbqhyne rdhngvba.
Vs l0==0, gura z0==f0==0, fb bayl k0 pbagevohgrf gb gur fhz, naq n fvatyr qvtvg va onfr gra vf fheryl fznyyre guna gjryir.
Vs l0==1, gura n erdhverzrag jbhyq or: 1+3*k0 == 2 (zbq 10).
Guvf unf bar fbyhgvba, k0==7. Ubjrire, gur erfhyg bs gur pbyhza jbhyq or gjragl-gjb, engure guna gjryir.
Sbe l0==2, jr trg 2+5*k0 == 2 (zbq 10), juvpu vf gehr sbe rirel rira qvtvg k0.
Pebff-purpxvat jvgu gur aba-zbqhyne rdhngvba (V purngrq naq hfrq clguba) yrnirf bayl k0==2 be k0==6.
Sbe l0==3, jr trg 3+7*k0==2 (zbq 10), be 7*k0==9. Gur fbyhgvba k0==7 jbhyq yrnq gb n pbyhza fhz bs 32, fb gurer vf abguvat urer.
Sbe l0==4, pbafvqre 4+9*k0==2 (zbq 10), be 9*k0==8. k0==2 pbzrf gb zvaq. Gung fhz vf 22, juvpu vf abg vqragvpny gb gryir.
Ynfg bar gb pbafvqre vf l0==5. 5+11*k0==2, juvpu trgf fvzcyvsvrq gb k0==7. Fnqyl, guvf nyfb lvryqf gjragl-gjb.
Guhf, jr xabj gung l0==2 (juvpu unf gur qbjafvqr gung vg qbrf abg pbafgenva l1 zhpu, ohg jung pna bar qb?), jvgu k0 orvat rvgure gjb be fvk.
Gurer ner gjb cbffvoyvgvrf sbe z1:
Vs k0==2, gura gurer vf ab pneel naq z1==2*k1.
Terng, qvq jr whfg tb sebz bar haxabja gjb gjb haxabjaf?
Yrg hf svefg pbafvqre guvf zrff zbqhyhf gra:
5*k1+5*l1==4. Guvf frrzf hayvxryl.
Vs k0==6, gura gur pneel vf bar naq z1==2*k1+1, creuncf guvf vf zber fhpprffshy.
Pbyhza fhz vf k1+l1+(2*k1+1)%10+(l1*6)%10+(2*k1+1+l1*6)%10
Zbqhyb gra, jr trg
5*k1+13*l1+2==4 fvzcyvsvrq gb
5*k1+3*l1==2.
Nffhzr k1 vf rira, gura 3*l1==2, juvpu jbhyq jbex sbe l1==4.
Gur shyy rdhngvba jbhyq
k1+4+(2*k1+1)%10+4+(2*k1+7)%10==34.
k1+(2*k1+1)%10+(2*k1+7)%10==26.
Gur bayl jnl gb ernpu gung fhz jvgu guerr qvtvgf jbhyq or 8, 9, 9.
Hasbeghangryl, frggvat k1==8 (nf vg zhfg or rira) jvyy abg znxr gur bgure gjb fhzznaqf orvat avar. Fb V gbbx n jebat rkvg fbzrjurer, naq unir ab vqrn vs vg jnf gra zvahgrf ntb be gjb ubhef ntb. Arire fraq n uhzna gb qb n znpuvarf wbo naq nyy gung. Hayrff gung ybat cebqhpg vf npghnyyl va urknqrpvzny, juvpu frrzf hayvxryl.
As a woman with a fraternal twin brother, I’m interested in this study (https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1812786116) showing that women with twin brothers make less money, marry less, have worse educational outcomes, etc. I figured this was largely socialization effects but the pattern also applied to women whose twin brother passed away in infancy. The study suggests that this is due to prenatal testosterone transfer although I find that surprising because the best I could find online, testosterone levels either don’t impact men’s success or have a slight positive association. So it’s interesting that they would have such a strong negative influence on women’s success, not just in the marriage market but also on education and finances.
Does anyone have any insight into this? I also find this interesting since I’m a female ACX reader in a pool of mostly men. Any other female readers with a twin brother out there?
Interesting result! I know at least two pairs of male/female fraternal twins, and this roughly matches my perceptions, there. Take that anecdata as you will.
At a quick skim this paper confuses me. The effect sizes and the error bars both seem huge. I can see why the error bars would be huge on the "co-twin died young" sample because that's a small sample, but I can't understand why it's equally large on the "co-twin didn't die young".
I'm also puzzled why they didn't bother to report results for the male twin, or for same-sex twins, while they were at it.
They did some info about both groups, but certainly not the kind of detailed info they gave about the females with male twins. As I recall they said that those males were not different from other males in the dependent variables they were looking at.
Uh... Not what you were asking, but maybe relevant/interesting?
In the cattle industry male/female twins are not looked upon very favourably.
The male calf is generally relatively normal, although unlikely to become a top performer.
The female is usually - 95% probability - sterile and is generally automatically discarded from any breeding program, and if they are being lot-fed for beef the females don't tend to thrive. In it's severest form these female calves look and act somewhat male, and are called freemartins.
It's widely attributed to in-utero exposure to testosterone.
With this kind of "Hey, get this" study, I think it's generally best to wait to see if it replicates before trying to draw any conclusions.
Right. Didn't we all learn: Never trust one study! That's been one of my big takeaways of the past ten years.
I just read study. Here's a theory: Acc/to study,. women with a male fraternal twin are more likely to exhibit male behavioral tendencies such as rule-breaking & antisocial and aggressive behavior. These behaviors in boys are better tolerated by adults than the same behaviors in girls. And in adulthood these behaviors in men are better tolerated by peers than the same behaviors in women. So females exposed to androgens make, on average, a slightly worse impression on others than females not exposed, and so are less successful.
By the way, I'm a female ACX reader too, and while I didn't have a male fraternal twin, I have always felt like I am more masculine than most women -- less sentimental, more willing to argue energetically, and way way less sweet. And I my ring fingers are much longer than my index fingers (pattern's said to be associated with being a lesbian -- which I'm not, by the way -- though that may be an unban myth anyhow).
I would have assumed a having slightly higher t would be beneficial? lots of complaints about treatment of women seem more tractable with some t-linked traits like higher aggression/higher risk tolerance. Getting ignored in meetings, for example.
By more tractable do you mean that women's treatment in, for ex., meetings would be better if they had more t-linked traits (aggression, rule-breaking, sensation -seeking)?
Which of Robert A. Heinlein's late-period novels are actually good? The old master was increasingly ill towards the end of his life, and apparently it showed quite a bit in his work. But were there some works that had that old magic?
Wikipedia lists these as "Late Heinlein novels":
The Number of the Beast, 1980
Friday, 1982
Job: A Comedy of Justice, 1984
The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, 1985
To Sail Beyond the Sunset, 1987
I'd break down Heinlein's style into four distinct periods: early (up to 1956); transitional (1956-1960); mature (1960-1973), and post-mature/cognitive decline (1980-1987). Regardless, here are my favorites...
1. _Beyond This Horizon_ (early)
2. _Double Star_ (early)
3. _Citizen of the Galaxy_ (transitional)
4. _The Door Into Summer_ (transitional)
5. _Starship Troopers_ (transitional)
6. _The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress_ (mature)
7. _Job_ (post-mature/cd). _Job_ was published after _The Number of Beast_ which I think is a novel that shows he was in cognitive decline after a series of TIAs and a blocked carotid artery. And I suspect that _Job_ is from an earlier draft that he may have reworked.
Not "Have Spacesuit Will Travel"? That's hands-down my favorite...
Yes, that was a good one. He was such a talented writer.
I read SF voraciously as a child, and explored late-period Heinlein around puberty. (Great timing!) I mention this detail because while I was both very unsophisticated, and fascinated with sex, I somehow managed to recognize the whole body of work as authorial wish-fulfillment fantasy, and gave up on most of the books when it became clear that RAH was more titillated than I was. Not just in terms of sex; Lazarus Long was a completely uninteresting Mary Sue authorial stand-in, and poisoned books which only referenced him from a distance.
The sole exception was Friday, which I reread several times (most recently a few years ago). The narrative is fast-paced and self-contained, indulging RAH's various libertarian hobby-horses in entertaining ways. The central character's sympathetic replicant's-eye perspective was a formative influence on my own progressive politics. Friday had been a feminist book for me, and rereading decades later I was disappointed by the apparent meekness and flowery dialogue of the female characters.
Contra another commenter, I don't remember anything that stuck out as racist. Maybe RAH mentions something bad happening to Africa or Africans as an incidental future world event. I don't recall any pattern of racial prejudice in his work, and would need to see evidence to decide.
Honorable mention: To Sail Beyond The Sunset's amazing Vallejo cover art, which is tailor-made for 12-year-old boys.
Friday was a genetically modified human, though I'm not sure how the extremely high strength worked.
There's a fair amount of anti-racist material in how the group marriage broke up. The bigoted woman who was de facto in charge of the marriage had a very racist/privileged attitude about who one of the young women wanted to marry. I think it was a Tongan man.
Friday looses her temper, and reveals that she's an Artificial Person-- genetically modified, and there's a lot of prejudice against them. (This is all from memory.) Not only is there the unfair treatment of the young woman, but it turns out that the marriage is a financial scam for Friday and possibly some of the other younger members.
I'm a huge Heinlein fan. I liked Friday a lot. Job was good. The other three were all fun reads for me, but they were also somewhat based on (or called up characters from) his other books so not so good as a stand alone read. Perhaps (at least this week) my favorite Heinlein, outside his juveniles, is "Double Star". A nice tight story.
(Oh, dear and now I can't get the Biden rewrite of Double Star out of my head. Well Joe Biden is no John Joseph Bonforte, but I love the similarity.)
The Number of the Beast provoked some amazing negative reviews.
My personal favorite is Dave Langford's. Dave is not a hater by nature - he ran one of the longest-running and most decorated fanzines out there. But for years afterwards the 'SPUNG' sound effect made for a good repeat gag.
https://ansible.uk/writing/numbeast.html
Number of the Beast: has some fun bits, but overall is pretty bad. The main plot starts strong but quickly turns out to just be an excuse for a bunch of disjointed interludes that aren't anywhere near strong enough to carry the book. It also suffers from trying to be a character-centered story when the characters aren't very interesting nor do they seem to be developing in a meaningful way.
Friday: I read it once in high school. I remember kinda liking it, but feeling like it rambled quite a bit and desperately needed a more assertive editor. Never felt the urge to reread it.
Job: I've read and reread it several times over the years. It also rambles a bit and would be better with an editor, but the characters are actually interesting and the ideas being explored are strong enough to carry the story.
Cat Who Walks Through Walls: This was the second Heinlein book I ever read, after Starship Troopers. I read it in high school and haven't re-read it, so I've forgotten most of the specifics. I remember really liking the first half, but getting lost in the second half. I also remember thinking that Lazarus Long (who of course is a long-standing recurring character in Heinlein's stories, probably the closest thing his overall corpus has to the a primary protagonist, but whom I'd never met before before) was a huge jerk and didn't understand why he was getting so much page time and sympathetic treatment by the narrative.
To Sail Beyond the Sunset: Never tried to read it.
Overall, I think the biggest problem was that Heinlein took the Protection From Editors feat before he resumed writing for publication. All writers need editors, and Heinlein was worse than most at acknowledging this. I remember reading an author's note in an Isaac Asimov compilation where Asimov talked about his writing process, how he had a structured series of drafts and editing passes. He mentions once trying to compare notes with Heinlein on process, and Heinlein reacted to Asimov's description of his own process with "That seems like too much work. Why don't you just write it correctly the first time?" That's a fairly consistent attitude from Heinlein, who repeatedly said that he never edits his own stuff, considering it a waste of time, and will only make revisions under duress from publishers because he feels that substantive changes proposed by editors violate his works' artistic integrity.
A while back, I tried reading "Stranger in a Strange Land" (1961) in the posthumously-published edition that restored the bits that he'd been forced to cut under pressure from his original publisher. I DNFed it, despite thinking the concept was really strong and the story had some good moments especially in the first half. Unedited SiaSL has a very similar feel to Late Heinlein novels, which leads me to believe that the problem with Late Heinlein novels was that he got too good at resisting pressure to trim and tidy his stories, and/or his publishers at the time no longer had the guts (or the leverage) to twist his arm and force editing on him.
I think _The Cat Who Walks Through Walls_ is Heinlein's worst novel, though many disagree. It's got a bunch of Heinlein's preoccupations. I have a special hatred for "young people are so awful" in fiction. The protagonists try to adopt a "freelance socialist" (petty thief) while they're on the run, and they just don't have the resources. (This is from memory.)
The space station (Rule Golden) is privately owned, and not a good place to live. This may signal that Heinlein was moving away from libertarianism.
He tries to take tragic bits out of stories, in particular reviving Mike from _The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress_, which I think just undercuts the earlier story.
I am a big fan of Heinlein, but the late-period novels are not very good. There are still specs of "the old master" in some of them, but increasingly rare as time went on. The Number of the Beast is probably the only one was spending time on.
Started Friday, gave up.
Read Job, was OK.
Both books had icky incest stuff. Heinlein seems to be supportive of incest. Friday had icky rape stuff and was racist.
Friday and Job had icky incest stuff? Really. Where?
Friday had a rape stuff, but how was it racist?
Please give me some quotes to work with here.
_Time Enough for Love_ was Heinlein's big incest novel. In an imagined universe where humans had the ability to weed out dangerous genes, Heinlein asks why would incest be bad if there was no genetic downside? Likewise, _To Sail Beyond the Sunset_ continued TEfL's themes. Also, there were a lot of references to underage sex in both those novels. But it's worth remembering that the age of consent was twelve or thirteen when Heinlein was growing up — and it stayed that way in many states until the late 1970s and early 1980s. In fact, when I was coming of age in the 1970s, I remember lots of themes of underage sex in the media (_Pretty Baby_, _Blue Lagoon_, _Summer of 42_). And one of the teachers in my High School married his student (a year ahead of me) the summer after she graduated. He was dating her with her parent's consent while she was a senior. Then they got married. And nobody blinked! It's amazing (at least to me) how much society has changed in 40 years (mostly for the better, but we're definitely sexually more conservative now). Anyway, Heinlein wrote TEfL within the societal perspectives of that time.
The Texans from the futuristic timeline who hosts Alex and Margrethe for a day or two, Jerry Farnsworth and his family, has a throwaway line where Jerry's wife mentions that her husband has sexual feelings for their teenage daughter and they'd both be better off if they acted on the feelings and got it out of their systems. It's a tiny throwaway part of the narrative, but intensely squicky.
Jr yngre svaq bhg gung Wreel vf yvgrenyyl Fngna, jvgu n zvk bs qrzbaf naq qnzarq fbhyf cynlvat gur snzvyl zrzoref, naq gurl jrer unzzvat vg hc va beqre gb arrqyr Nyrk'f cehqvfuarff.
I had forgotten that remark. Upon first reading it, I took it to be Freudian cant until I discovered that Jerry was Satan and his daughter is an imp of Satan. So Heinlein may have been funning us on multiple levels.
Not disputing the icky rape stuff, and also some old-fashioned ideas about male/female roles and relationships, but in what way was Friday racist? I seem to remember it having some fairly heavy-handed anti-racist messages, especially by the standards of its time. The protagonist has light-brown skin and indeterminate ethnicity as a result of being a mixture of many genetic donors. The only people spouting explicit racist ideas are the group marriage in New Zealand which she briefly joins, and they are definitely not the good guys.
Personally I thought that if you can stomach the icky parts, it was OK as a forgettable but entertaining high-speed sci-fi potboiler. It reminded me a bit of Michael Chrichton, in that despite having some potentially interesting premises, the story and characters are so flat that it would work better as a movie script than as a book.
And yeah, Heinlein sure loved him some incest stories. In particular, Time Enough For Love is a collection of short stories, *every one of which* has a theme of incest, or almost-incest, or uncomfortably-close-to-incest, or technically-not-incest-if-you-squint, and then by the end of the book he just abandons all pretense and lets the protagonist have sex with his mother. Here also I don’t remember Friday being a particularly bad offender, though.
Friday is more sophisticated than that if you look at it as a story of Friday trying to find a home and having one after another yanked away from her until she develops some independence and moves to a planet which isn't a high-defection society.
Heinlein liked to subvert racial stereotypes. IIRC in _Tunnel In the Sky_ the lead character is black (but he Heinlein let that fact drop part way into the novel). Also, the lead character in _Starship Troopers_ is Filipino/Hispanic. The main character in _The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress_ is multiracial. Seems like he was ahead of his time when it comes to getting past racism.
Yes, that was a trick he liked to play a lot -- introduce his protagonist without any physical description, the better to let the reader imagine themselves in their place -- and then, two-thirds into the novel, casually drop a hint indicating that the protagonist is either multiracial or a specific ethnic minority. (Thereby also implying that this was a non-issue to all the people they've met in the story so far, since even their *enemies* don't bother to bring it up in a negative way.)
In Friday, the hint gets dropped earlier (and it's more than a hint) because her lack of a specific ethnic identity is part of the plot, and the discrimination she suffers as an Artificial Person is a not-too-subtle metaphor for racial discrimination.
It's been 20+ years since I read this so my memory might be wrong. Friday is thinking about using some technology to help starving Africans. Then decides against, since Africans are starving because they are lazy and therefore deserves to die. Don't think it was phrased that bluntly but that was the meaning.
It's been quite a few years for me too; I don't remember that part but I'm not saying it wasn't there.
There was a subplot where Friday concludes from extrapolating a bunch of subtle trends that there's a deadly plague upcoming in an overpopulated part of the world, and her boss states matter-of-factly that there's no way to prevent it from happening, and so the only priority is to prevent the virus from escaping to the off-world colonies. That is certainly a very Heinleinian kind of pragmatism. But I don't remember either a suggestion that the plague or the overpopulation was linked to some racial flaw of the people involved, or that there was an easy solution which they decided not to use because the victims deserved their fate. It was more like, these are just the natural boom-and-bust cycles of the world, and the only thing you can do about them is to make sure you and your friends are somewhere else when the shit hits the fan.
Heinlein seemed to have a rather Nietzschean view of the world, where there's a small set of superior people who matter, and billions of unimportant NPCs in the background. I don't get the impression that he thought of that in racial terms, though -- he was a bit of a misanthrope who didn't have a high opinion of 99% of people in general, including those of his own skin color.
Plus not so subtle subtexts of sadomasochism plus erotic stimulation after killing people. There was the whole time travel to have sex with his mother too. So yeah, this strikes me as icky too.
I thought Number of the Beast was pretty bad. I haven’t read any of the others.
I enjoyed Job immensely. And I reread it every few years. Friday was an older uncompleted novel that he reworked. I thought it was pretty good, too. It had that 1950s Heinlein feel to it.
Kettlebelly Baldwin and his organization was a character in an early career novella, _Gulf_. The pacing feels like _Gulf_.
Question for people who are good at Magic: Let’s say you were playing Magic against an AI, and trying to figure out based on its play how intelligent it is in various ways. The AI has not been pre-trained on Magic. (As of now, I gather that Magic is not the sort of game where the present methods of teaching an AI a game work.)
You teach the game to the AI, just as you would to a person, except that after teaching it the basics you do not coach it on strategy. After you teach it how to play, you just play against it. What things would interest you and what actions by the AI would you take as evidence it is capable of a certain thing, or incapable of it, or extraordinarily good at it? The reason I am asking is that I am writing a piece of fiction about a future version of our world featuring a highly intelligent AI. However, it is not, like, infinitely intelligent. It is better at some things than others, just as our present AI is. I’d like to include in it the story the observations of a Magic player.
I myself have never played Magic. What I know about it is gleaned from places like Wikipedia. If you give me some suggestions I can use I’d be happy to credit you in the story’s acknowledgments. Here are some examples of the kinds of observations I’m imagining an expert player in this situation might make:
-How fast it learns
- What it masters pretty much instantly, and what it has to learn from actually playing, showing a learning curve just as person would.
- How good it is a learning and adopting strategies it sees you use.
- Are there things it just doesn’t seem to get?
- What’s it playing style?
- How inventive is it?. Is it coming up with novel and clever uses of certain cards or card combinations? Is it doing that as often as really good players? More often?
- How good is it at learning your style — what strategies you use a lot, how much risk-taking you do?
- What's your takeaway regarding what kind of mind it has. What's it smart at, what does it just fail to grasp?
One concept from MtG and other card games is called "card advantage". It represents the idea that if you have more cards available to you than your opponent has, you are generally going to be able to take more actions and have more options, which usually helps put you ahead in the game. Spending 1 card from your hand to remove 2 cards from your opponent's board is plus 1 card advantage for you. Using 1 card from your hand to draw 4 cards is +3 card advantage.
Another concept is that you have a number of resources available each turn to spend on making game actions, and it is beneficial when you can make full use of the resources available to you. In Magic, your main resource is how much "mana" you have available, so how well you are able to utilize your mana each turn is called your "mana efficiency." On turn 4, if you have 4 mana available but are only able make a play using 1 mana, that is less mana efficient than if you were able to make 2 plays each costing 2 mana.
If you wanted your AI to make the mistake of "valuing card advantage too much", your human could say of the AI something like: "You've got all those cards in your hand, but when are you going to have time to use them?"
If you wanted your AI to be good at card advantage, your human could say something like: "This thing manages to get 3 cards up on me every game."
If you wanted to show your AI knew how to deny mana efficiency to their opponent, your human could say something like: "I was holding up mana for a response and it purposefully didn't give me a target. It basically made me waste my turn."
Something a little more complicated you could do would be to give it a deck that it chooses to play even though it doesn't have the best win rate. We call it having "pet deck" when someone keeps playing their favorite deck no matter how good or bad it is against the field of opposing decks. For some match, the AI could choose to switch from playing their favorite deck to playing the best deck in the format because this time it wanted to give itself the best chance of winning. This would demonstrate that the AI understands the metagame of all available decks, and possibly reveal that it could be an expert at all of them if you wanted to take it that way.
More than the technically-correct face-up play that I assume it will manage with some basic tree-search, the signs of intelligence are in how it deals with the hidden information. Does it account for:
- what draws are possible from its deck, and how to move the game state so that those draws lead to victory
- what cards are in the opponent's deck - how to move the game state to minimise the chance of losing to them
- what the opponent is thinking about the AI's deck - what can it represent that will make the opponent play suboptimally
- what the opponent is thinking about their own deck - what could they have in the deck that would make their line of play make sense
- what the opponent is thinking about what the AI is thinking about what's in the opponent's deck, etc. etc.
The more meta it gets, the fewer opportunities there are to calibrate one's own beliefs / manipulate the opponent's beliefs profitably, but the more impressive when it happens.
At a competitive level, the cards and decks and playing styles that are relevant change every couple months as new cards are released and old cards are banned. So if you want your story to really be realistic, you should have them specify that they are playing cards from a specific historical period of time, e.g. pre-MH3 Modern, and then you can look at the relevant decks for that meta and namecheck actual play patterns, etc.
Things are not going to be that detailed. The expert who is played the AI is going to say a few sentences about his read of the AI, based on the AI's play. And I need those sentences to be in language that non-players can understand, so it won't work to be talking about an actual game and specific cards. So the expert might say, for instance, "it has done several things that are close parallels to clever card uses that won me a game, but it seems not to have developed an ability to invent its own unique and clever uses of cards. It tends to miss lots of opportunities I'd see to use a certain card in an unexpected and devastating way." See what I mean? I have read up a bit on Magic, and one of the things I ran across is that there's a famous play someone made that was just a devastatingly clever use of a certain innocuous-seeming card. The specifics have left my mind, since they involved actual cards or types of cards and I'm not familiar the Magic cards. But I think the general idea was that the card in question didn't look very powerful -- like maybe it said something like "this gives you the power to double anything, but only once" (I'm just making this up) -- and all the obvious things you could double gave you an advantage when doubled, but didn't give you a killer advantage, but there was one weird way to use it that made a huge difference, pretty much wiped out your opponent. So that is the sort of thing I'd have in mind if I had my expert say that the AI is not good a thinking of clever and unique ways to use cards. Does that make sense, and is it valid?
Anyway, if you're looking for some more specific examples of semi-unintuitive card uses, here are two examples of unusual card uses that are reasonably plausible to come up in current competitive Modern.
1. Target yourself with Stomp to bypass opponent's The One Ring
2. Kill or sac your own creature in response to March of Wretched Sorrows to prevent your opponent from gaining life.
3. Target yourself with Relic of Progenitus to blank an opponent's Surgical Extraction or Drown in the Loch.
At that level of generality, there's no particular need to even talk about Magic specifically. It might as well be a fictional game.
There is a reason having to do with a plot twist that the game has to be Magic.
Well, name-dropping Magic does give many readers a general idea of how complex the game is and what skills it involves.
If you really want to ensure your play is unimpeachable, you could probably find an actual historical high-level tournament game and just copy the whole match exactly. (I heard that's what they did for the chess games in the TV show Queen's Gambit, to ensure their actors weren't making any stupid moves.)
Of course, that won't make sense if your goal is to show how the AI plays *differently* from a human, and I imagine it's pretty weird to be using a specific historical card set in the first place.
There isn't going to be a magic game in the story -- just the expert who has played with the AI telling what he has deduced about the AI's intelligence based on how fast the AI learned, and what its play is like at this point.
I've never played much Magic, but some general comments:
There are two reasons you might have a "playing style":
One reason is if you know you are better at certain parts of a game; for instance, if you're good at fighting but bad at economics then you might play in a way that lets you fight more often, to take advantage of that skill.
The second reason is personal preferences: Even if you're not better at fighting, you might just LIKE fighting, so if you're not sure what move is best, you pick fighting.
The second reason matters less and less the better you get at a game, because "you're not sure what move is best" happens less often. If you know which move is better, then you just do that. (Assuming that winning is your primary goal.)
Caveat: If the AI is significantly better than human players, it might discover that what humans consider to be one style among many is actually just flat-out better than the other styles, in which case it will look to humans like it is following that particular style. But if humans could predict which style that was going to be, then the humans would already all be playing that way.
The first reason (being better at certain parts of the game) is often a difference between human and AI players, though the details depend on the game and how the AI was made. An AI that relies mostly on tree search has different characteristics than one that relies mostly on heuristic evaluations, for instance. Depending on what breakthoughs lead to advanced AI in your fictional setting, it *could* end up having the same biases as humans and then this wouldn't necessarily show up.
But one common difference in a lot of today's games is that the human will quickly narrow their options down to a few candidate moves before giving deep consideration only to those few candidates, while an AI will thoroughly examine a large number of options. (Possibly this difference is more a special feature of humans than a special feature of AIs.)
This is most noticeable when the AI makes a counter-intuitive move that is obviously good once you think carefully, but which human players eliminated in their quick first-pass because it fit some pattern that is USUALLY bad (e.g. moving backwards, promoting your pawn to a bishop instead of a queen, losing some sub-competition on purpose). Example: I once trained an AI that snatched victory from the jaws of defeat by spending a valuable one-time ability to intentionally get its own piece captured and sent back to the start, where the captured piece was able to attack an otherwise-unreachable enemy formation and disrupt their win. (Obviously, humans *sometimes* spot moves like this, but computers can spot them more reliably.)
It can also show up in the AI making a lot of slightly-better moves because it doesn't miss stuff. Maybe there's 50 similar places you could go, and the human went in a place that gives 10 points, but the computer went in a place that gives 10.1 points that the human just overlooked in a long list of similar options. Because the human didn't carefully calculate the exact value of all 50 options, and the computer did. Example: Another AI that I trained performs noticeably better when it has a special power that gives a large number of usually-poor options; along the lines of "when you would normally pay silver, you can pay gold instead," where silver is something that you pay frequently, and gold is usually more valuable than silver so you would usually rather just pay silver like normal, but the computer will find all the rare edge cases where it's worth paying gold for some unusual reason, whereas a human will get fatigued and miss a few.
Another tend I've noticed in a lot of modern game AIs is that they struggle with hidden information, by which I mean things that are known to one player but not another (like the cards in your hand, or the values of your pieces in Stratego). This is hard enough that lots of commercial games' AIs just flat-out cheat and peek at the hidden info so that the programmers don't need to figure out a way to deal with it.
In particular, hidden information is a huge pain for any sort of tree-search-based algorithm, like minimax or Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), because some distant tree nodes are correlated based on variables that the search doesn't know, so it breaks the locality of the algorithm. There are researchers today actively trying to adapt MCTS to handle hidden info, and my impression of the current state of the art is "they can make it kinda work in certain limited situations, but this remains a major hurdle." For example, I don't think modern tech is up to deriving the strategy of Clue from first principles (though you can definitely make a Clue AI if the programmer hand-codes some of the strategy).
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Most modern AIs do NOT learn while you play against them. They might learn a lot of stuff in advance, but it's rare that they try to adapt on-the-fly to their current opponent, and virtually unheard-of that they try to improve their general skills before the game is over. You *could* make an AI do this but it'd be weird.
When an AI learns a game by playing it, it normally plays against itself (or other AIs) and plays way, way more games than a human would play. A human could take "samples" from various stages of training to see how things are changing, but a human wouldn't be "naturally" involved in the process in a position where they could see this unfold unless they specifically went looking for it.
It's certainly possible to imagine an AI that can listen to a human explain the rules of a game and just start playing with that human and learn as it goes--humans can do it, so presumably it's possible--but I'm not aware of anyone today that is seriously trying to make an AI do that.
The AI in the story is much smarter than the present ones. However, it is not, like *infinitely* smart, the way some people talk about ASI being after it learns how to improve itself and then does ever-cleverer improvements ever faster , and then improves the improvements blah blah. It can, though, converse on any subject at great length, and in such a way that the person its talking with, no matter how clever and how familiar with AI, could not possibly deduce it's an AI. It can learn to do anything a person can learn, but does not perform all such tasks as well as a brilliant or talented person could.
If it can fake humanness in conversation under expert scrutiny on an arbitrary topic, that basically requires that it can fake humanness in playing games, too. (Otherwise it should flub in conversations about game strategy.)
And if you can convincingly fake being a human at a game, that means you can play at least as well as the human that you are faking.
Other than that, if the AI is not trying to fake humanness when playing games, then I don't think that description tells me much about how it would play.
I was just trying to give you a sense of its level of smartness. Being able to talk like a person on any subject is one of the ways it's smarter than our present AI. However, that does not mean it's deeply knowledgable about every subject, and can come across as a brilliant human being about everything. All I said was that it can always come across as human. If it hasn't played Magic before, for instance, it would sound sort of like I do here: "I only know about it from sources like Wiki, but don't have any familiarity with the actual cards, and have never seen a game." Learning to play Magic from the person it's playing against it would also be transparent and honest, and, depending on how good it was it might be saying "I failed to notice a situation where X would have worked, I need to pay more attention to that from now on" or, "I think I've got it, and can probably beat you on the next game."
I think general level of smartness says a lot about how quickly you'll learn and how much you'll win, but very little about your style of play.
OK, but I wasn't saying that smartness does say anything about your style of play, or that style of play gives info about smartness. The point of the Magic expert playing Magic with the AI and observing its style of play is not to figure out how smart the AI is, but try to get a sense of what the AI is capable of -- what its style is. Is it inventive? Is it quick to learn from observing people? Is it good at bluffing and other head games? How willing is it to take risks? This AI of the future is sort of a black box. It can talk as well as a person, and sound like a person, but it can't explain itself.
If your AI is going to be realistically human, and you just want a brief description of its play, then I suggest you forget asking about AI behavior and just go to some Magic discussion forum with a prompt like: "Imagine you just played a game of Magic against a player who turned out to be intermediate-level. Your friend who doesn't play Magic asks for a two-sentence description of what they did during the game that let you peg them as intermediate-level. What do you tell them?"
Maybe I should have asked that here. I'm not crazy about asking things on other forums. Here people are generally civil and smart. On other forums, people are often very rude to strangers, plus I don't feel able to gauge how much to trust somebody's answer if they're strangers and so are the norms of the forum.
I used to play Magic at a professional level some 15 years ago
Random thoughts in no particular order
Drafting
- to what extent does it preserve optionality? Is it willing to select a weaker card that does not commit it to a particular colour or strategy, and for how long in the draft does it continue to do this? When does it consider itself “committed?”
- to what extent does it read signals? When other players are passing it cards that indicate that they have left a particular colour combination/strategy open, does it pick up on that?
- to what extent does it consider the signals it is sending to others?
- how does it value synergy? Is it willing to take a weaker card that fills a critical role in the deck?
Constructed
- how does it approach the meta game? When selecting/tweaking/tuning a deck, does it show evidence of thinking about what it will play against?
- how does it approach sideboarding? Does it show evidence of thinking about how its opponent’s deck will change after sideboard, and alter its play to reflect that? Does it recognise which cards are weaker, which are stronger, and which are (nearly) useless?
- does it show any preference for certain archetypes? Excellent human players are indifferent to whether they play more aggressive or more controlling decks, they understand both and will choose whatever is objectively better in the meta game
Playing
- mulligan decisions - very consequential, very interesting to see how an AI would approach this. Does it factor in what it is playing against, not just the strength of its opening hand in a vacuum?
- overcommitting vs holding back - for example playing the third creature when the opponent might have a Day of Judgment next turn - does it show evidence of understanding when it is ahead, and can afford to play around dangerous cards, vs when it is behind and has to take large risks to stand a chance of winning?
- protecting its key strengths - is it aware what cards will make a dramatic impact on the game, and does it go to lengths to stop its opponent countering/destroying them?
- bluffing - does it ever make a strange attack that would indicate to its opponent that it has card X when it in fact does not? This would impress me probably more than anything else on this list if an AI came up with this independently
I'll note that being able to preserve option value and pivot when you draw a good card for a different strategy than what you were planning is the sort of thing that I would expect a good AI to handle better than humans. (Though in a typical commercial game this could go either way depending on whether the programmer handled it correctly, because it's an easy thing to program wrong.)
Possibly also better at card evaluation - understanding what the key elements are it needs to defend/preserve? Extrapolating here from chess where it seems that AIs can independently derive the value of, say, a Queen, without needing humans to tell it that it’s worth 9 points, you shouldn’t trade it for one rook, but maybe trading for two rooks is OK
I wouldn't extrapolate my expectations from Chess in that particular way, for 2 reasons:
1. Chess AIs derive those scores "empirically" by measuring how often one side wins or loses given certain pieces and/or certain beliefs about piece value. But Magic has a lot more cards than Chess has pieces, so acquiring and analyzing enough empirical data on every card might be problematic.
You could still try to assign values based on principled reasoning rather than pure experimentation, but that's not how Chess AIs work, so Chess provides no evidence that AIs are good at this.
2. The value of a card or piece doesn't have to be a constant. In fact, the more sophisticated value systems for Chess usually have some hacks to account for the fact that it's NOT completely constant, such as the "pair bonus" for having 2 bishops on opposite colors, or the fact that a rook grows more powerful as the board empties.
The fact that the values are *approximately* constant in Chess is a particular property of Chess, not a universal property of all games. There doesn't have to BE any single number you could assign to a Magic card that serves as a useful approximation of its value across all game positions. So there might not be any "correct" answer to find.
(In fact, talking about a piece having any "value" at all--even a variable one--only makes sense within a certain decision framework, where you are choosing which move to make based on heuristic scoring of the resulting game position. If you were playing chess with certain other algorithms, like pure MCTS, then a queen "having a value" might not mean anything within your decision process. So it's not trivially obvious that assigning values to Magic cards is a thing that an advanced Magic AI would do in the first place--though I wouldn't be surprised if they did.)
I find this very interesting because I would not necessarily have predicted 10 yrs ago that computers today would beat humans in Go and Chess but not Magic - although this may be a reflection of my ignorance of programming more than anything else
Perhaps the difference is that Magic requires more of a theory of mind?
That is, for most of my examples above, I’m asking if the AI can understand that it is competing with another intelligent being and understand why they are taking the decisions that they are - after all the opponent has information that it doesn’t
Vs Chess where it just needs to analyse an enormous tree of possible lines and pick the best one
I haven't studied Magic AI in particular, but a couple reasons immediately occur to me for why AI might find it harder than Chess or Go:
1. Magic has hidden information, which as I mentioned in another comment remains a major hurdle for tree-search-based algorithms.
2. Magic game trees are probably much deeper than Chess (though I'm not sure about Go) when you take into account that one "turn" of Magic can actually involve dozens of plies, because of all the places where your opponent can potentially interrupt your turn.
3. Magic probably has a larger state space when you take into account all the different cards someone could have.
That makes sense. Particularly with regards to #3, it’s not just the cards they have right now, it’s the cards they will have in future (the random aspect of the game which neither player can perfectly predict)
Hidden info is definitely a thing in Magic, but not as much as it is in poker, where it’s literally the only thing that matters. Last I heard computers could beat humans at Limit Texas Hold’em but not No Limit which has a vastly larger state space.
Wikipedia seems to say that the limited version (of some hold 'em variant) has been "essentially solved" since 2015 but that as of 2019 bots can beat the top human players even at no-limit.
Hidden info is important in Poker, but I would guess that tree search is NOT very important in Poker, so the fact that hidden info messes with tree search might not be a big deal.
(Also note that these factors compound; hidden info could be an important factor even if computers are good at *some* games with hidden info.)
But in poker there's a lot you can deduce about hidden info. YOu know what's in the universe of hidden info -- 52 cards less the ones whose location you know. You know for sure which cards have been played already, and which are visible. And you can deduce some more about what cards have been drawn by who has folded after a draw. And you can deduce some by how those still are in the game are betting, although that's less sure because they may be bluffing, or doing the opposite.
I think you’d be better off taking a slightly different approach and studying what DeepMind did with AlphaGo and what the impact was on the future of human play of Go. This is similar to what I’d expect in MTG, although with better documentation (like a full on documentary).
Similar to Go, a sufficiently advanced, but not superhuman, AI would probably have the same impact as a newer player making a big splash/success with novel deck.
A somewhat recent example would be Ali Aintrazi developing and winning with Chromatic Black, a deck that worked very well in the specific meta at the time and required the whole meta to compensate (I can’t find a good historical account of this but I’d guess someone has written one).
With Go 2 AI's played each other, right?, and the outcome of games was info to each about how to play. I've read that that approach does not work for a game like Magic because there are too many cards overall, so too many possible hands, so just overall too many unknowns. General idea seems to be that each game of Magic is different in a way each game of Go is not.
Not only is there hidden info and a huge state space, but there's also a huge amount of randomness from game to game, which means that it takes a huge number of games to extract weak signals from the noise.
It's easy for someone in say Kaladesh limited to pull a masterpiece Sol Ring (one of the most broken cards ever) and then still lose their matches because they just never drew it or never drew it at the right times. And that's despite the fact that it is very clear that adding a sol ring to any draft deck would improve its odds of winning.
I happen to have studied this problem a bit for TCG AIs, never getting to great answers, but a whole directory full of models.
There are different strategies for different colors and even different decks. You could train an AI with its specific deck against your specific deck, but the things it learns might be completely wrong if either of you run a slightly different deck.
Things it should learn quickly:
- who lives and who dies in basic battles
Over time:
- when to swing for victory, and how sure it is when doing so. (If there's no chance I can counter, it better do it.)
- avoiding giving me the win condition for my deck
- ability to memorize things a super-observant human could memorize
- can it avoid falling for the traps I set for it?
- can i set traps for me?
- can i tell that if I'm deliberately training it to learn the wrong things?
Does it play any given card as late as possible?
More explanation: to deny your opponent information about what you're playing/preserve option value, it's almost always correct to play a card as late as you can. If you can play a card on your turn either before or after attacking, you should attack first and then play it (so that your opponent, deciding how to defend against your attack, does not know what you have in your hand and what you can play.) If you can play a card at any time (an 'instant'), you should play this at the end of your opponents turn (immediately before your mana refreshes, so that you don't waste it), so that your opponent cannot play their turn knowing what you will do.
An AI that does this unprompted is not necessarily 'intelligent', but at least has figured out an important aspect of adversarial play under incomplete information.
An AI that regularly fails to do this has clearly missed something substantial.
Every "rule" in Magic has an exception though.
For example, if you have an instant, then *generally* you would want to wait to play it, but sometimes you want to play it early because if you wait for your opponent to untap and draw, they're more likely to be able to respond to it.
A more niche example is that you might not be sure whether your opponent can counter your play, and will do things on your turn (e.g. combat) differently depending on how it goes, then you might even play your instant *pre-combat* on your turn to see if it gets countered or not.
This is the kind of observation I'm looking for, but there's something I don't understand about what you wrote: You must not mean that this applies to *any* given card. I mean, you can't play all of them as late as possible, right? So what is special about the cards you should play as late as possible? Also, even if the card creates such unique contingencies that it's a big deal that you have it, what's bad about your opponent knowing early that you have it? When you play it they are surprised and dismayed, so you get whatever advantages surprise gives you. And once you play the you don't have it any more right? Or are there cards you can play again and again?
Different cards can be played at different times, and that depends on the cards themselves and also the state of other cards in play. Also some cards might be more useful when played early whereas other cards are not. But that's just the basic game rules.
What's more relevant is that every principle has exceptions. For example, if you have an instant, then *generally* you would want to wait to play it, but sometimes you want to play it early because if you wait for your opponent to untap and draw, they're more likely to be able to respond to it.
Agreed, yes. Or if you intend to play an Equipment that enhances your creature, you might want to play and equip it before attacks so that your attacking creature is stronger. The general rule is 'if there isn't an actual reason to play this now, and you can wait until playing it later without cost, wait'.
I suspect aphyer *does* mean to apply this to *any* card, and is contrasting it with other game actions you can take, such as activating a card that is already in play (see the part about "attacking").
With the important difference being that one of these actions reveals hidden information to your opponent and the other does not (because they already know about the card that is in-play).
Oh, I get it. I was picturing Magic being like the kind of card game where you play a card once and then it's gone from your hand and has no further effect on play. But I guess with some it least they more like chess pieces -- the stay on the board and influence ongoing play with other pieces/cards.
Even if you don't want to learn the rules and play, you probably should at least watch one actual game of Magic so you have some idea of the sorts of things that commonly happen.
Yeah, I will.
Specific to M:TG, I would say things like:
- In repeat play with sideboards (alternative cards you can substitute into your deck, a common way to play somebody repeatedly), does it correctly bring in the counters to its opponent's strategy?
- More of a curiosity on my part, but, does it favor decks with more or fewer colors?
- Does it favor certain styles of decks over others? For example, does it try to build a cohesive set of combos or just focus on individual powerful cards? Does it include a lot of cards that are not central to the deck butt help counter other strategies? (E.g., cards to destroy or exile creatures/artifacts/enchantments, counterspells)
- How aggressively does it trade off between its creatures and its life total? (Life is a resource that in some cases should be spent rather than blocking with a creature, but that depends on your overall strategy, and current life total, and what creature you're considering blocking with).
Honestly, if you're going to try to write something like this; I'd probably take the time to learn the basics of Magic - the basics about how combat and creatures work aren't that hard (almost to the point where I could put them in this comment, but not quite) - you don't have to learn every modifier a creature can have, but it informs a lot of the strategy of actually playing a deck.
... though "playing the deck" is only a portion of Magic's strategy - actually figuring out how to build a deck and what to put in it is often a huge part of the game; so you'd probably want to decide whether the AI is just being handed decks and playing them or whether it is building them. A huge layer is the multi-dimensional rock-paper-scissors that largely manifests in the deck construction - though serious contexts will be multiple games between the same players and will allow players to bring a limited number of extra cards which they can substitute in between games to try to adapt to deal with particular match ups. (Also, matches involve multiple games to address some of the luck aspect)
So deck construction can be a big factor, and even if you're working with a specific deck, knowing the cards that are actually likely to be played can be super important so you'd want to both clarify whether this AI is building their own decks (or playing some specific format like Draft where the deck building is part of the format) and whether they know what cards are legal.
As for the actual game itself, a lot of it comes down to deciding when to be aggressive. Generally the defender has an advantage, so *very* broadly, a common aspect of the game is 'spending' resources to attack and hoping the opponent dies before you run out of momentum. ... or playing the reverse strategy and trying to weather the storm long enough to get some high-value things into play and start getting value from them.
There can also be a bluffing aspect to the game - cards in hand can be played at any time and can have big effects: if I send my creature on a seemingly suicidal attack, you have to decide whether to 'take the bait' and block it (and risk that I have a card in my hand that makes it not suicide) or let the attack through (and miss what might be an opportunity to kill my creature for free). A classic bluff in MtG is to do something that appears to be suicidal (because it actually is) while pretending that you have a card in your hand that makes it a good play. Can the AI do that? Can it tell if I'm doing it?
Earthquake is a card that deals damage to all creatures in play without flying and all players. You could write that at first the AI would play creatures and then play Earthquake, killing its own creatures as well as the opponent's creatures. But later it gets smarter and waits to play its creatures until after it has played Earthquake. This is very basic strategy, so this could be something it learns early.
Later the AI could make a blue deck with no creatures that focusing on destroying the opponent's lands. Those decks are very difficult and frustrating to play against.
> some Democrat friends have asked me to signal-boost this post they wrote ...
The linked post concludes:
> Regardless of whether Biden can sometimes perform, it’s inevitable he’ll have more ‘senior moments.’ More clips will be shared of him looking frail and confused, and we will lack a candidate who can stand up for themselves and actually confront Trump...
I find it kind of astonishing, though perhaps in retrospect not at all surprising, that (apparently) no one is thinking of the scenario wherein Biden does get elected, and proceeds to have "senior moments" all over the place while performing his duties. What happens if one of a thousand crises in world politics that occur every week just happens to occur after 8pm ? The answer seems to be "it doesn't matter", but why ? Is this because:
a). The US President's job in general is not to make important decisions (the staff does all that) but just to look good in public ? But in this case, electing Trump would be somewhat problematic, but far from the disaster it is portrayed to be. Or is the reason that:
b). The US President's job is very important, but having a mentally incompetent President is still better than electing Trump, it's just that no one wants to say this out loud ? But is this actually true ? Trump can make a lot of bad decisions, but at least he's somewhat less likely to randomly stumble into doing something like starting WWIII, right ?
I would say it's b). The president's job is important - he has capability to do things much better or much worse - but an out-of-it, inactive president means that important decisions will mostly be made by his advisors, which is a bad-but-not-terrible baseline.
Trump is 1) likely to pressure for actively bad decisions, unlike Biden whose senior moments are more likely to simply lead to inaction, and 2) his advisors are probably not going to be as good as Biden's.
> Trump can make a lot of bad decisions, but at least he's somewhat less likely to randomly stumble into doing something like starting WWIII, right ?
I think Trump would be a lot more likely to accidentally start WWIII, but in any case, Trump would be very definitely worse on all the day-to-day stuff. But whether you agree or disagree likely depends on personal political views.
Megan McArdle wrote an article describing how bad things can get with trying to run the government through a Twenty-Fifth Amendment crisis, both with and without a co-operative Congress. She was still more pro-Biden but she's admitting he could be plain unacceptable, too.
I think it's a combination of the two: I don't think it's true that the US President never makes important decisions in general, but I think it probably WOULD be true if Biden got elected. So I think the choice is between Trump doing the job, vs. Biden's staff doing the job by committee. I think a lot of people would prefer the latter.
More or less a, the cabinet will just run the country for Biden, which has possibly already been the case for years. Which makes the Democrat position "we have to save democracy, by giving power to an unelected cabal."
Or c) The president does have power, but Joe Biden is preferred precisely because he does exactly what people tell him to do without questioning it.
This seems accurate. If you trust the people around him, you’ll vote for Biden. If not, you’ll vote for Trump.
It is not really true that no one is discussing this. Ezra Klein discussed that question with Ross Douthat on some NY Times podcast last week.
Michael Moore called on Biden to step down right now.
The Republicans have been hinting at some variant of "Kamala is the real president" off and on for a long time.
What makes you think that Trump's bad decisions are less likely to start WWIII than Biden's bad decisions?
Because only a person who had actually lost his mind would start WWIII. Trump may be an evil demon or whatever, but at least he still has his mind -- or rather, he retains more of it than Biden does.
Neither Trump nor Biden is going to *start* WWIII, but they might react poorly to another country's provocation in a way that leads to it.
Yes, the sinking boat battery and shark speech is clearly a sign that Trump is as he claims a very stable genius.
If nothing else, the fact that the people who told you Trump would make bad decisions have spent the last five years covering for Biden, and thus you should be updating your beliefs based on this new information.
That isn't particularly pertinent information to update with. One's beliefs about Trump's future decisions should be based on what he says he will do and what he has done in the past, and what his character is like.
Well he didn’t start any wars last time, if I recall. Obama he wasn’t.
"Trump didn't start any wars" is a talking point that kind of ignores that Trump did do highly provocative things. He killed Iran's top general and threatened Kim Jong Un with nuclear war.
Whatever the hell happened with John Bolton and planes in the air, makes it seem like Trump managed to avert a war that his staff almost started. Not super encouraging from a competency standpoint. But I do think he had internalized from the Bush Jr. era that war makes for bad optics and an unflattering legacy.
Yes. This is, exactly, how he avoided wars
And where, exactly, has this information come from? What information was passed along, and what information was suppressed? What context was included, what context was omitted?
Nobody arrives at their opinions by interacting with the pure truth embedded in the universe; there is chain of custody of almost all forms of evidence, and when your evidence has all come from people who have shown themselves willing to subvert that information to particular ends, you should be seriously re-evaluating all your beliefs that have been informed by this information.
What are you talking about? Trump has been a public figure for upwards of 40 years, he was the president, etc. There are a variety of sources of information about him, of which only a tiny percentage comes from the people who could have been covering for Biden.
Ah, so you're talking about all the wars he started as a real estate mogul.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Deaths_from_appendicitis, nobody I've ever heard of has ever died of appendicitis.
Is this weird? A good 5-10% of people will get appendicitis at some point in their life, and if left untreated it can easily kill. Modern surgery plus antibiotics means the risk is very low these days (just 0.02% of deaths in the US), but surely there must have been a time when it was understood as a diagnosis but still very dangerous? Why is history not full of stories which end "and then one day he randomly got appendicitis and died"?
Houdini is a possible case not listed in that wikipedia article.
I only recognized Minkowski from name alone. As for the list: deaths clearly skew towards late 19th, early 20th century. Late enough for appendicits being recognizable as cause of death, but early enough for surgery and antibiotics being less developed/available. That means many of the people on the list lived too long ago to remain in the general memory.
However, since they are all people important enough to earn a WP article, it is still somewhat surprising to see few highly notable people. One reason might be that the most notable people also received better health care and so were less at risk of dying to appendicitis.
Another guess would be purely related to the Wikipedia category tagging process: The more notable people on WP have more categories applicable to them than less notable people (also more eyes on those articles), and people simply avoided tagging the highly notable people with the "appendicitis-related death" category in order not to overload the page.
Whoops, I missed Minkowski on my first read-through, I definitely know him. I take back the "nobody" and substitute "hardly anybody".
I see two people on the list that I've heard of:
Lord Dursany, a late 19th/early 20th century fantasy and horror writer who's been cited as a major influence by a whole bunch of writers from the following generation or two, including Tolkien and Lovecraft.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a long-time Senator from New York. Hillary Clinton succeeded him in the Senate.
I thought I recognized a third, but it turns out it was W. G. Grace (a 19th century English cricketer), not W. R. Grace, founder of the chemical company of the same name.
Dang so that's what happened to Dunsany. RIP he was a real one.
Hm, just speculating here, but perhaps antibiotics became common before it became common to determine the reason for deaths with high granularity?
So, when did people start to write down the death causes of people? And if someone had abdominal pain and was vomiting, when became this note more than "something with stomach or digestion"?
Antibiotics, namely penicilline, were 1940s. Appendectomy as a surgical life-saving intervention surely is decades older.
One factor may be that it skews young - most cases between 5-35; while the list of "famous people" that you would recognize probably skews older. Probably lots of people who died in their teens/twenties who might have gone on to be famous if they hadn't died of apendicitis.
Houdini's appendix quite likely ruptured from him being punched in the stomach, which does give you the same end result (sepsis) as having it burst from appendicitis as such ... but I wouldn't count it
More likely the punch masked the symptoms of appendicitis until it was too late.
I doubt any human can punch any human stomach in a way to burst a healthy appendix veriformis.
My understanding is that it has been hypothesized that blunt trauma can cause appendicitis (and there are several theories as to the mechanism by which maybe it can do this): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28673696/
Not sure how this applies or not to Houdini
I see. Always better to have a good shit before the action starts.
I think re: Sotomayor there might be some concern about getting a replacement through the Senate, also. They can only afford one defection and Manchin and Sinema are not super reliable.
She could wait to retire until the replacement is confirmed, removing that risk.
Manchin is retiring, so there no reason for him to vote no.
Is there a reason for him to vote yes?
From this video it seems like Biden is speaking in coherent sentences (unlike Trump). He displays no aphasia (unlike Trump). It seems like like the same old Joe with a slight speech impediment who I've watched since the Obama administration. And it seems like the same old Democratic circular firing squad in action again.
https://x.com/i/status/1809317737556222075
Unlike Trump who's babbling about sharks and batteries...
https://x.com/i/status/1799895088354804183
As for the NY Times asking for Biden to step away from the race but not Trump, it confirms their MO as a rightwing mouthpiece. What's ironic to me is that if Trump wins, the editors of the NY Times will be right in his sites because they don't kowtow to him enough.
1:10-1;20 is the time to check on the Biden video, he's got that debate stutter going on.
Trump has always been insane, his behavior isn't new. Check out this 1990 interview. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RN5zgxsC6i4 ("I think your demeanor was inaccurate").
Biden overcame a stutter as a kid.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWn1CkIU_rc
...okay, I guess 1:10's just a verbal tic, he does sound the same in both.
I think the president of the United States being unable to speak in coherent sentences from time to time and looking completely lost is not a good thing.
> it confirms their MO as a rightwing mouthpiece
I can't believe you're serious! They want the D candidate to win, so they're offering recommendations to Ds that they think will make their preferred outcome more likely. That's usually called "trying to help".
They may be bad at it - they may be trying to help in a way that actually hurts the D chance to win - but that's where your comment about the circular firing squad comes in.
"As for the NY Times asking for Biden to step away from the race but not Trump, it confirms their MO as a rightwing mouthpiece. What's ironic to me is that if Trump wins, the editors of the NY Times will be right in his sites because they don't kowtow to him enough."
Back in 2023:
"Donald Trump Should Never Again Be Trusted With the Nation’s Secrets"
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/09/opinion/trump-indictment-documents.html
"As for the NY Times asking for Biden to step away from the race but not Trump, it confirms their MO as a rightwing mouthpiece."
I...uh...I know right-wingers. Like, normal ones and radical ones. They would all burn the NYT offices to the ground and salt the ashes if given the chance. Very few organizations have done as much to earn their undying hatred.
I think you might be using a non-central example of "rightwing".
As a conservative, I second this. I'm quite cheered to see internecine squabbling hurt the Grey Lady, as she is no friend of mine.
Yet the carried water for the "Hillary's email" story. And mostly they've ignored Trump's very obvious cognitive decline.
Anyone talking about Trumps mental decline while downplaying Bidens is acting like we haven't seen them next to each other in a debate. They are worlds apart.
Trump didn't cite a single statistic or fact, and basically only relies on appeals to emotions and lies (some states wanted post-birth abortions, really?). I don't deny Biden is definitely worse age-wise than Trump, but less than the debate would make appear.