My “Never-Trump From Here to Eternity” FAQ
Q1: Who will you be voting for in November?
A: Kamala Harris (and mainstream Democrats all down the ballot), of course.
Q2: Of course?
A: If the alternative is Trump, I would’ve voted for Biden’s rotting corpse. Or for Hunter Biden. Or for…
Q3: Why can’t you see this is just your Trump Derangement Syndrome talking?
A: Look, my basic moral commitments remain pretty much as they’ve been since childhood. Namely, that I’m on the side of reason, Enlightenment, scientific and technological progress, secular government, pragmatism, democracy, individual liberty, justice, intellectual honesty, an American-led peaceful world order, preservation of the natural world, mitigation of existential risks, and human flourishing. (Crazy and radical, I know.)
Only when choosing between candidates who all espouse such values, do I even get the luxury of judging them on any lower-order bits. Sadly, I don’t have that luxury today. Trump’s values, such as they are, would seem to be “America First,” protectionism, vengeance, humiliation of enemies, winning at all costs, authoritarianism, the veneration of foreign autocrats, and the veneration of himself. No amount of squinting can ever reconcile those with the values I listed before.
Q4: Is that all that’s wrong with him?
A: No, there are also the lies, and worst of all the “Big Lie.” Trump is the first president in US history to incite a mob to try to overturn the results of an election. He was serious! He very nearly succeeded, and probably would have, had Mike Pence been someone else. It’s now inarguable that Trump rejects the basic rules of our system, or “accepts” them only when he wins. We’re numb from having heard it so many times, but it’s a big deal, as big a deal as the Civil War was.
Q5: Oh, so this is about your precious “democracy.” Why do you care? Haven’t you of all people learned that the masses are mostly idiots and bullies, who don’t deserve power? As Curtis Yarvin keeps trying to explain to you, instead of “democracy,” you should want a benevolent king or dictator-CEO, who could offer a privileged position to the competent scientists like yourself.
A: Yeah, so how many examples does history furnish where that worked out well? I suppose you might make a partial case for Napoleon, or Ataturk? More to the point: even if benevolent, science-and-reason-loving authoritarian strongmen are possible in theory, do you really expect me to believe that Trump could be one of them? I still love how Scott Alexander put it in 2016:
Can anyone honestly say that Trump or his movement promote epistemic virtue? That in the long-term, we’ll be glad that we encouraged this sort of thing, that we gave it power and attention and all the nutrients it needed to grow? That the road to whatever vision of a just and rational society we imagine, something quiet and austere with a lot of old-growth trees and Greek-looking columns, runs through LOCK HER UP?
I don’t like having to vote for the lesser of two evils. But at least I feel like I know who it is.
Q6: But what about J. D. Vance? He got his start in Silicon Valley, was championed by Peter Thiel, and is obviously highly intelligent. Doesn’t he seem like someone who might listen to and empower tech nerds like yourself?
A: Who can say what J. D. Vance believes? Here are a few choice quotes of his from eight years ago:
I’m obviously outraged at Trump’s rhetoric, and I worry most of all about how welcome Muslim citizens feel in their own country. But I also think that people have always believed crazy shit (I remember a poll from a few years back suggesting that a near majority of democratic voters blame ‘the Jews’ for the financial crisis). And there have always been demagogues willing to exploit the people who believe crazy shit.
The more white people feel like voting for trump, the more black people will suffer. I really believe that.
[Trump is] just a bad man. A morally reprehensible human being.
To get from that to being Trump’s running mate is a Simone-Biles-like feat of moral acrobatics. Vance reminds me of the famous saying by L. Ron Hubbard from his pre-Dianetics days: “If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion.” (And I feel like Harris’s whole campaign strategy should just be to replay Vance’s earlier musings in wall-to-wall ads while emphasizing her agreement with them.) No, Vance is not someone I trust to share my values, if he has values at all.
Q7: What about the other side’s values, or lack thereof? I mean, don’t you care that the whole Democratic establishment—including Harris—colluded to cover up that Biden was senile and cognitively unfit to be president now, let alone for another term?
A: Look, we’ve all seen what happens as a relative gets old. It’s gradual. It’s hard for anyone to say at which specific moment they can no longer drive a car, or be President of the United States, or whatever. This means that I don’t necessarily read evil intent into the attempts to cover up Biden’s decline—merely an epic, catastrophic failure of foresight. That failure of foresight itself would’ve been a huge deal in normal circumstances, but these are not normal circumstances—not if you believe, as I do, that the alternative is the beginning of the end of a 250-year-old democratic experiment.
Q8: Oh stop being so melodramatic. What terrible thing happened to you because of Trump’s first term? Did you lose your job? Did fascist goons rough you up in the street?
A: Well, my Iranian PhD student came close to having his visa revoked, and it became all but impossible to recruit PhD students from China. That sucked, since I care about my students’ welfare like I care about my own. Also, the downfall of Roe v. Wade, which enabled Texas’ draconian new abortion laws, made it much harder for us to recruit faculty at UT Austin. But I doubt any of that will impress you. “Go recruit American students,” you’ll say. “Go recruit conservative faculty who are fine with abortion being banned.”
The real issue is that Trump was severely restrained in his first term, by being surrounded by people who (even if, in many cases, they started out loyal to him) were also somewhat sane and valued the survival of the Republic. Alas, he learned from that, and he won’t repeat that mistake the next time.
Q9: Why do you care so much about Trump’s lies? Don’t you realize that all politicians lie?
A: Yes, but there are importantly different kinds of lies. There are white lies. There are scheming, 20-dimensional Machiavellian lies, like a secret agent’s cover story (or is that only in fiction?). There are the farcical, desperate, ever-shifting lies of the murderer to the police detective or the cheating undergrad to the professor. And then there are the lies of bullies and mob bosses and populist autocrats, which are special and worse.
These last, call them power-lies, are distinguished by the fact that they aren’t even helped by plausibility. Often, as with conspiracy theories (which strongly overlap with power-lies), the more absurd the better. Obama was born in Kenya. Trump’s crowd was the biggest in history. The 2020 election was stolen by a shadowy conspiracy involving George Soros and Dominion and Venezuela.
The central goal of a power-lie is just to demonstrate your power to coerce others into repeating it, much like with the Party making Winston Smith affirm 2+2=5, or Petruchio making Katharina call the sun the moon in The Taming of the Shrew. A closely-related goal is as a loyalty test for your own retinue.
It’s Trump’s embrace of the power-lie that puts him beyond the pale for me.
Q10: But Scott, we haven’t even played our “Trump” card yet. Starting on October 7, 2023, did you not witness thousands of your supposed allies, the educated secular progressives on “the right side of history,” cheer the sadistic mass-murder of Jews—or at least, make endless excuses for those who did? Did this not destabilize your entire worldview? Will you actually vote for a party half of which seems at peace with the prospect of your family members’ physical annihilation? Or will you finally see who your real friends now are: Arkansas MAGA hillbillies who pray for your people’s survival?
A: Ah, this is your first slash that’s actually drawn blood. I won’t pretend that the takeover of part of the US progressive coalition by literal Hamasniks hasn’t been one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. Yes, if I had to be ruled by either (a) a corrupt authoritarian demagogue or (b) an idiot college student chanting for “Intifada Revolution,” I’d be paralyzed. So it’s lucky that I don’t face that choice! I get to vote, once more, for a rather boring mainstream Democrat—alongside at least 70% of American Jews. The idea of Harris as an antisemite would be ludicrous even if she didn’t have a Jewish husband or wasn’t strongly considering a pro-Israel Jew as her running mate.
Q11: Sure, Kamala Harris might mouth all the right platitudes about Israel having a right to defend itself, but she’ll constantly pressure Israel to make concessions to Hamas and Hezbollah. She’ll turn a blind eye to Iran’s imminent nuclearization. Why don’t you stay up at night worrying that, if you vote for a useful idiot like her, you’ll have Israel’s annihilation and a second Holocaust on your conscience forever?
A: Look, oftentimes—whenever, for example, I’m spending hours reading anti-Zionists on Twitter—I feel like there’s no limit to how intensely Zionist I am. On reflection, though, there is a limit. Namely, I’m not going to be more Zionist than the vast majority of my Israeli friends and colleagues—the ones who served in the IDF, who in some cases did reserve duty in Gaza, who prop up the Israeli economy with their taxes, and who will face the consequences of whatever happens more directly than I will. With few exceptions, these friends despise the Trump/Bibi alliance with white-hot rage, and they desperately want more moderate leadership in both countries.
Q12: Suppose I concede that Kamala is OK on Israel. We both know that she’s not the future of the Democratic Party, any more than Biden is. The future is what we all saw on campuses this spring. “Houthis Houthis make us proud, turn another ship around.” How can you vote for a party whose rising generation seems to want you and your family dead?
A: Let me ask you something. When Trump won in 2016, did that check the power of the campus radicals? Or as Scott Alexander prophesied at the time, did it energize and embolden them like nothing else, by dramatically confirming their theology of a planet held hostage by the bullying, misogynistic rich white males? I fundamentally reject your premise that, if I’m terrified of crazy left-wing extremists, then a good response is to vote for the craziest right-wing extremists I can find, in hopes that the two will somehow cancel each other out. Instead I should support a coherent Enlightenment alternative to radicalism, or the closest thing to that available.
Q13: Even leaving aside Israel, how can you not be terrified by what the Left has become? Which side denounced you on social media a decade ago, as a misogynist monster who wanted all women to be his sex slaves? Which side tried to ruin your life and career? Did we, the online rightists, do that? No. We did not. We did nothing worse to you than bemusedly tell you to man up, grow a pair, and stop pleading for sympathy from feminists who will hate you no matter what.
A: I’ll answer with a little digression. Back in 2017, when Kamala Harris was in the Senate, her office invited me to DC to meet with them to provide advice about the National Quantum Initiative Act, which Kamala was then spearheading. Kamala herself sent regrets that she couldn’t meet me, because she had to be at the Kavanaugh hearings. I have (nerdy, male) friends who did meet her about tech policy and came away with positive impressions.
And, I dunno, does that sound like someone who wants me dead for the crime of having been born a nerdy heterosexual male? Or having awkwardly and ineptly asked women on dates, including the one who became my wife? OK, maybe Amanda Marcotte wants me dead for those crimes. Maybe Arthur Chu does (is he still around?). Good that they’re not running for president then.
Q14: Let me try one more time to show you how much your own party hates you. Which side has been at constant war against the SAT and other standardized tests, and merit-based college admissions, and gifted programs, and academic tracking and acceleration, and STEM magnet schools, and every single other measure by which future young Scott Aaronsons (and Saket Agrawals) might achieve their dreams in life? Has that been our side, or theirs?
A: To be honest, I haven’t seen the Trump or Harris campaigns take any position on any of these issues. Even if they did, there’s very little that the federal government can do: these battles happen in individual states and cities and counties and universities. So I’ll vote for Harris while continuing to advocate for what I think is right in education policy.
Q15: Can you not see that Kamala Harris is a vapid, power-seeking bureaucratic machine—that she has no fixed principles at all? For godsakes, she all but condemned Biden as a racist in the 2020 primary, then agreed to serve as his running mate!
A: I mean, she surely has more principles than Vance does. As far as I can tell, for example, she’s genuinely for abortion rights (as I am). Even if she believed in nothing, though, better a cardboard cutout on which values I recognize are written, than a flesh-and-blood person shouting values that horrify me.
Q16: What, if anything, could Republicans do to get you to vote for them?
A: Reject all nutty conspiracy theories. Fully, 100% commit to the peaceful transfer of power. Acknowledge the empirical reality of human-caused climate change, and the need for both technological and legislative measures to slow it and mitigate its impacts. Support abortion rights, or at least a European-style compromise on abortion. Republicans can keep the anti-wokeness stuff, which actually seems to have become their defining issue. If they do all that, and also the Democrats are taken over by frothing radicals who want to annihilate the state of Israel and abolish the police … that’s, uh, probably the point when I start voting Republican.
Q17: Aha, so you now admit that there exist conceivable circumstances that would cause you to vote Republican! In that case, why did you style yourself “Never-Trump From Here to Eternity”?
A: Tell you what, the day the Republicans (and Trump himself?) repudiate authoritarianism and start respecting election outcomes, is the day I’ll admit my title was hyperbolic.
Q18: In the meantime, will you at least treat us Trump supporters with civility and respect?
A: Not only does civil disagreement not compromise any of my values, it is a value to which I think we should all aspire. And to whatever extent I’ve fallen short of that ideal—even when baited into it—I’m sorry and I’ll try to do better. Certainly, age and experience have taught me that there’s hardly anyone so far gone that I can’t find something on which I agree with them, while disagreeing with most of the rest of the world.
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Comment #1 July 31st, 2024 at 12:11 am
I have to nitpick here and point out that one could argue that Rutherford B. Hayes was an earlier example.
(Not a very substantive comment, I know, but I saw that “first” and had to correct it before even reading the rest of the post. 😛 )
Comment #2 July 31st, 2024 at 12:55 am
Trump would retire in 4 years and follows common sense.
“Democrats” would effectively end democracy by imposing their new ideology: tell millions of illegal immigrants that their problems are your fault so that they will vote by race (and gender), permanently turning your country into the countries they escaped from. To stay in politicised academia, one must endorse the ideological belief that civilisation is just a software. Once this proves wrong, it’s too late.
Comment #3 July 31st, 2024 at 1:27 am
In past elections you’ve been a big supporter of vote trading. Is there a reason you’re not looking into it for this election? I’m surprised you’re not trying to find somebody in Pennsylvania and tell them you’ll vote Libertarian in exchange for them voting for Harris. Do you think there’s a chance that Texas goes to Harris, or is it more of a question of optics?
Comment #4 July 31st, 2024 at 2:13 am
Q9: Not related to the main message but probably if the good guys stopped telling white/small/etc lies, it would be easier for everyone to tell apart the knights and the knaves.
Comment #5 July 31st, 2024 at 2:43 am
Thank you Scott for helping us retain hope in Americans.
Of those (many) whom I actually met, I’ve found them all to be decent and generous people. I don’t really understand what is going on over there.
Comment #6 July 31st, 2024 at 5:40 am
>>>an American-led peaceful world order
Why not just a peaceful world order?
Comment #7 July 31st, 2024 at 5:47 am
As one of the aforementioned Israelis who despises the Trump/Bibi axis, I’d like to explain why I’m on the fence on this election. I think Biden’s policy of inaction in the middle east has led to relentless escalation, and if things continue on their current trend there’s a real risk of nuclear war. It’s increasingly feeling like a modern day James Buchanan, vaguely calling for “both sides to deescalate” as Iran goes from aggression to aggression (not just bombing Israel directly but effectively shutting down shipping in the red sea and bombing American troops in Iraq) while refusing to use force in any way. I think there’s a real and increasing risk of a full on Iranian (or possibly Turkish, if we take Erdogan at his word) invasion of Israel, which would force Israel into a nuclear response.
Meanwhile Harris seems to be both left of Biden on foreign policy and less into foreign policy. I can’t imagine her being more aggressive on Iran, and I suspect she’d hire staff from the left anti-israel wing if the party.
I don’t like Trump, who’s certainly not a wise or cautious man, but he does seem more likely to credibly threaten Iran with force if they keep escalating. This was bad when we had a better chance of peaceful de-escalation with jcpoa, but I think it’s necessary now. And “less likely to lead to nuclear war” is something I might legitimately be a single issue voter on.
(Another example that shook my faith in the “moderate ” left recently: Kier Starmer ran on a claim of having purged the antisemites in his party. Immediately on taking office he restored funding for UNRWA, reversed the government’s objections to the ICC’s seeking warrants against Israeli officials, and rumors are that he’s likely to ban weapons exports to Israel. Meanwhile he’s talked about how anti-muslim rioters will “feel the full force of the law” – a statement I agree with, but which makes the lack of any similar statement about anti-jewish rioters deafening)
Comment #8 July 31st, 2024 at 6:02 am
egan #6: That’s a fair question, and my answer is, because right now the only realistic alternative is a China/Russia/Iran-led world order. That alternative probably wouldn’t be peaceful, but even if it was I’d still find it horrifying. I’d probably be fine with a Denmark- or New Zealand- led world order if that were in the cards.
Comment #9 July 31st, 2024 at 6:09 am
Question #7: I respect your position. My reply is that, even or especially in the terrible eventuality that nuclear war does break out (or come to the verge of breaking out) in the Middle East, in the US I prefer to have the slightly naive and inexperienced Kamala Harris atop a pyramid of sane diplomatic and military and intelligence professionals, than Trump madly tweeting atop a hollowed-out tower of political hacks and mediocrities.
Comment #10 July 31st, 2024 at 6:11 am
Dömötör Pálvölgyi #4: Indeed!
Comment #11 July 31st, 2024 at 6:32 am
Alessandro Strumia #2:
“Democrats” would effectively end democracy by imposing their new ideology: tell millions of illegal immigrants that their problems are your fault so that they will vote by race (and gender), permanently turning your country into the countries they escaped from. To stay in politicised academia, one must endorse the ideological belief that civilisation is just a software. Once this proves wrong, it’s too late.
Your comment seems divorced from reality in three respects.
First, illegal immigrants don’t vote unless and until they’re made citizens. The compromises that could’ve offered them a pathway to citizenship seem dead now, but even if they were revived, any prospective citizens would in any case have to follow a long pathway (just like immigrants who took the usual routes).
Second, the idea that Latin American immigrants will just mechanically vote Democrat has been exploded by events—haven’t you been following the news? Trump gained a shocking amount of ground in immigrant communities, upending the assumptions of both parties; that’s a huge part of why this election is close.
Third, as Bryan Caplan has pointed out, the US had something much closer to open borders from the late 1800s until the mid-1920s, a period that conservatives look back on (with some justification) as a golden age. The 60 million new citizens didn’t vote like robots for whichever candidate they were told, but participated in democracy like anyone else. Many of us are now descended from them.
Comment #12 July 31st, 2024 at 8:10 am
Regarding Q17: Even in that hypothetical situation, your title wouldn’t be hyperbolic and bad. In that situation, the Republican party would no longer be Trump’s party.
Comment #13 July 31st, 2024 at 8:33 am
Isn’t the democratic party responsible for making the support to hamas, a terrorist organization, seem like a reasonable and acceptable thing. I am so confused with whats going on, so i think i should go with a simple rule.. whoever the New York Times supports must be evil.
Comment #14 July 31st, 2024 at 9:25 am
Vrushali #13: The rationalists have a saying that “reversed stupidity is not intelligence,” and that seems especially important to bear in mind here.
Comment #15 July 31st, 2024 at 10:55 am
The party that believes that men can be women and that women can be men, and demands affirmation of this as a condition of entry, is not the party of “reason, Enlightenment, scientific and technological progress, secular government, pragmatism, democracy, individual liberty, justice, intellectual honesty”. It is the opposite of very nearly all of these. Woke gender ideology is a shibboleth – people who believe in that will believe every wicked lie promulgated by the left.
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” –George Orwell, 1984
The reason I am not yet a Trump voter is abortion, which is the shibboleth of the right. The party that demands forced birth as a condition of entry is one that believes in the enslavement of (real) women, censorship, and forced religion.
The saving grace for the Democrats is that the woke filth always overreach and always form circular firing squads, so that before too long, people reel away from them in disgust. There were the “mostly peaceful” riots, looting, and arson. There’s the “Stop Oil” people defacing at. There are the male boxers performing as women in the Olympics. There’s the mocking of the Last Supper by drag queens at the same Olympics. There’s the Democratic Socialists of America casting out AOC. And there was the very hopeful defeat of Jamaal Bowman in NYC, and maybe even Cori Bush.
Comment #16 July 31st, 2024 at 11:06 am
Scott #11
Caplan doesn’t consider how badly the US has been out procreated since 1920. Mexico’s population has increased from around 10 million to about 150 million in that time and South America’s from about 60 million to 440 million and Central America 20 million to 180 million. This of course compares to the US’s downright paltry increase of 100 million to 340 million.
Tangentially related to one of your statements-
The Hunga Tonga subsea eruption in January 2022 was the largest recorded event since atmospheric sound monitoring started pursuant to surveillance of nuclear weapons testing. It didn’t receive much press since subsea so no video of people fleeing. Since subsea not much ash but an estimated 150 million tons of Pacific water vaporized into the atmosphere and of that enough made it to the stratosphere that NASA monitoring indicated water vapor in the stratosphere increased by 10% in a matter of days. It is estimated that the atmosphere will return to baseline in 7-10 years but actually this is the first event of this type to be monitored with space based instruments.
Excuse me but whenever I read your posts of this type they are so impassioned that the conclusion must be that it is self evident that a single party system would be superior to what we have now.
Comment #17 July 31st, 2024 at 11:36 am
Two questions.
1. You said a year ago on your blog: “The former president dining with a Holocaust denier and open antisemite is utterly disgusting, though not actually surprising to those of us who pegged that president for a fascist thug from the start, and who still mourn the fact that he ever was the president. In the best case, this will be beginning of the end of that thug’s political relevance. In the worst case—which, to be clear, I don’t expect—it will be the beginning of the end of the United States, or at least of the US as a safe place for Jews … I never called Trump an antisemite, which is not an accident, because I don’t think he is one. I’m obviously well-aware of Jared and Ivanka. What Trump is, and what I called him, is a fascist thug who enables the country’s antisemites.”
So: can’t you say precisely the same thing about Kamala, perhaps minus the “fascist thug” part? She has a Jewish husband and might pick a pro-Israel running mate—so what? Trump has a Jewish son-in-law and was HIMSELF enormously pro-Israel when it came to foreign policy. At least in your mind, that didn’t stop him from emboldening and enabling and empowering the nation’s antisemites (of the alt-right variety). So couldn’t you say precisely the same about Kamala—that despite being nominally pro-Israel (although she’d likely embolden Iran and force Israel to make concessions to Iran and Hezbollah, as you freely admit), she’d empower the nation’s antisemites of the “progressive” variety, the antisemites she has never explicitly denounced, who she’ll probably happily have dinner with as Trump did with Fuentes?
2. That she sent you a single email, and that one of your friends met her once and came away with a positive impression, is obviously no proof that she’s a genuine friend of nerds—and says nothing about her views on lonely and rejected males. At risk of breaking Godwin’s law, I’m sure Hitler was friendly at some point with some Jew, if you want to push this argument to its logical conclusion. Psychopaths are often skilled at presenting themselves as friendly to people. But even if we assume that personally she’s friendly to nerds or lonely rejected males, we can still apply my reasoning in question 1. Namely, you could say PRECISELY the same thing about Trump being friendly with Jews and black people. In your view, that doesn’t absolve Trump of emboldening and empowering the alt-right and the confederates, who do hate blacks and Jews. Well, Kamala is emboldening and empowering progressives who hate nerds and men and mock lonely men and want to make their lives miserable. Surely her own staff, especially the younger ones, are full of these people. Kamala herself might not mock you, but all her younger campaign staff surely would. On Twitter her “Kama Headquarters” called Vance “weird and creepy”—and let’s remember that Vance is coming from the nerdy tech circle of Peter Thiel. They mocked a disabled veteran who’s face was mangled by an explosion, calling him “weird.” “Weird” is now their go-to term for attacking men, and remember that it has strong connotations of anti-nerd hatred.
Comment #18 July 31st, 2024 at 11:37 am
I don’t like when people hide their true identity. i think thats the most dangerous person. Basically i don’t know what she really stands for( oh nvm she doesn’t stand for anything what a joke, i meant the democratic party) . Which is why i am genuinely interested in why you would trust the democrats because i trust your opinion. But anyway..
Comment #19 July 31st, 2024 at 11:39 am
Coincidentally-I happened to watch the movie “From Here to Eternity” last night and was struck by the poor acting and cheap sets.
Comment #20 July 31st, 2024 at 11:51 am
“Well, my Iranian PhD student came close to having his visa revoked, and it has become almost impossible to recruit PhD students from China.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure any administration is making serious changes to improve this situation. The Biden administration does appear to be somewhat better than the Trump administration, but sources still highlight major issues for exceptionally talented prospective PhD researchers:
1. https://www.iranintl.com/en/202401253919
2. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/20/chinese-students-in-us-tell-of-chilling-interrogations-and-deportations
It is very sad that academics, who are born with a certain nationality through no fault of their own, are prevented from participating in activities that aim to break down barriers and advance the collective knowledge of humanity.
Comment #21 July 31st, 2024 at 12:07 pm
You could also mention Taiwan, which Trump seems ambivalent about defending. (Am I crazy for thinking that preparing for a possible war with China is way more important than any other issue in this election, given China’s military buildup?)
Q5: also Lee Kuan Yew.
Comment #22 July 31st, 2024 at 12:39 pm
Scott#8
The china/russia/iran alternative has become viable in the recent years for Africa/Latin America etc, thanks to the slow moving action from US. See how long it is taking to take actions on Tiktok, and carefully obfuscating the fact that data of Americans was leaking out, which was revealed only in recent court filing, details of which were not revealed to American public earlier. And the loopholes provided for chipmakers to find workaround around export controls is nothing to crow about. If anything, this regime has been repeatedly shooting itself in the foot, when it was clearly theirs to lose.
Comment #23 July 31st, 2024 at 1:06 pm
@Greg Rosenthal #21 China and the threat it poses are indeed extremely important. Is that a pro-Democrats argument?
China used 7/10 to keep the West morally confused and deeply divided, and keeps doing so, with no pushback from the Left to say the least.
A recent investigation by a bipartisan committee found that the elements in US culture antagonistic to the military, to security investments and R&D are a big part of why the US is not ready for a global war. Which side does this characterize more?
The Left balked for a long while at COVID being associated with China, and more broadly seems to lack the basic self-love needed for a real conflict (“We will not fight you on the beaches because we are evil white colonialists”).
Exactly one side contains many people cheering China’s military allies.
I can continue. I can also bring up some pro-Democrat arguments. Point is, you don’t get to say “China” as an obvious argument without doing more work.
Comment #24 July 31st, 2024 at 2:03 pm
Sniffnoy #1: Thanks, that’s fair. How about I change it to “incite a mob.”
Comment #25 July 31st, 2024 at 2:08 pm
4gravitons #3: Well, are you aware of any vote-trading efforts underway? Involving RFK, or Jill Stein, or whoever? If so, I’m happy to promote them here.
Alas, given just how massive and obvious the stakes have become since 2000, I’ve soured a bit on the prospect that anyone who would vote for these third-party candidates could be induced to think strategically at all. But I’d love to be wrong about this!
Comment #26 July 31st, 2024 at 2:11 pm
David Speyer #12: Thanks! Edited to clarify that point.
Comment #27 July 31st, 2024 at 2:23 pm
Hyman Rosen #15:
The party that believes that men can be women and that women can be men, and demands affirmation of this as a condition of entry, is not the party of “reason, Enlightenment, scientific and technological progress, secular government, pragmatism, democracy, individual liberty, justice, intellectual honesty”. It is the opposite of very nearly all of these. Woke gender ideology is a shibboleth – people who believe in that will believe every wicked lie promulgated by the left.
I had a question about trans stuff in an earlier draft of this FAQ, but I took it out … maybe I shouldn’t have!
Here’s the thing: as far as I know, no trans person has ever killed my cat, or stolen my bike, or done anything else bad to me. I have had a few trans students and friends and colleagues and they’ve been great. I deeply, fundamentally don’t get why I’m supposed to fear them. Why shouldn’t I call them by whatever pronouns they want? Why shouldn’t I acknowledge them to have a socially defined gender that differs from their biological sex? What false empirical belief do I hold as a result of having done so?
I agree that exactly who should get to use women’s bathrooms or play in women’s sports, or under what circumstances (if any) puberty blockers and other serious drugs should be given to minors, are fraught and difficult questions. But I don’t see either side as holding a monopoly of reason and truth on those questions. I also, to be honest, find it really hard to get myself worked up about the future of women’s swimming contests, let alone about Drag Queen Story Hour.
Comment #28 July 31st, 2024 at 2:35 pm
Sconte #17: I understand your argument; I guess I just fail to see the symmetry. Can you quote anything Kamala has said indicating that she despises me as a nerdy heterosexual male, as I could quote you a thousand things Trump has said indicating that he despises me as an elitist academic egghead? (Likewise, any praise Kamala has given Maduro that compares to Trump’s praise for Putin? Any lies that compare to Trump’s lie of the stolen election?)
Comment #29 July 31st, 2024 at 2:39 pm
Greg Rosenthal #21: Yes, Trump’s unwillingness to stand up to the world’s autocrats (including Xi, Putin, and Kim Jong, though with an exception for Khamenei) is one the fundamental reasons I despise him. It’s strange that his image among both supporters and detractors is as a belligerent tough guy, when his actual foreign policy is so much more like Chamberlain’s than Churchill’s.
Comment #30 July 31st, 2024 at 3:32 pm
B_Epstein #23:
– “Is that a pro-Democrats argument?”: Yep, see https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-trump-or-harris-might-fail-to and the relevant parts of https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-positive-case-for-joe-biden. In summary, even though Trump has made more noise about China, this has been in the context of outsourcing jobs rather than the military situation, and Biden’s been quietly pursuing much more disciplined military / diplomatic / industrial / trade policies as president.
– “Which side does [antagonistic to the military, to security investments and R&D] characterize more?” Agreed that Trump is proposing more friendly regulation toward military R&D (see the relevant parts of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_sNclEgQZQ, which is the strongest case for Trump that I’ve seen.) As for military funding in general, this is up to Congress not the president, and anyway I trust the Democrats more here given their support for Ukraine funding.
– “The Left balked for a long while at COVID being associated with China” – Not Harris specifically, as far as I know, and even if she did I think this carries little predictive power conditioned on the Biden administration’s record (and taking into account Harris’s lack of fixed principles compared to any other Democrat I can think of). Besides, this seems to have just been reflexive disagreement with Trump, who (again) likes to make noise about China with little action to back it up.
– “[The Left] seems to lack the basic self-love needed for a real conflict” – True, but I think the MAGA Republicans are even worse in this regard, cf. Ukraine aid.
– “Exactly one side contains many people cheering China’s military allies.” I assume you’re referring to leftists cheering on Hamas, but don’t forget about Tucker Carlson fans cheering on Russia.
Comment #31 July 31st, 2024 at 3:37 pm
Brilliant interview Scott — thank you! Yet (pondering Q2) it is thoroughly unclear to me whether “Biden’s rotting corpse or … Hunter Biden” would pose a lesser threat to the Republic upon becoming a democratically elected President.
Comment #32 July 31st, 2024 at 3:45 pm
Hi Scott,
I’m afraid that I feel like you’re missing the point of my comment.
To answer your question, though, Kamala called Vance “weird and creepy.” That’s surely playing on the fact that Vance came from Silicon Valley and Peter Thiel’s circle, and the stereotype that nerdy men in Silicon Valley are “weird and creepy.” Haven’t you seen how this weird “weird” has been all over Democrats’ messaging the past few days? Isn’t “weird” like an anti-male-nerd slur? It would be as if she called Vance “gay” or whatever—calling him “weird” as an insult is just as “nerdphobic” as calling him “gay” would be homophobic.
When I was in school people bullied me for being “weird.” Hence, why I think this line of verbal attack is disgusting.
Anyway, my point is not that Kamala herself hates nerds or Israel, but that she EMPOWERS fanatical idealogues who hate nerds and/or Israel. It’s like Trump with the alt-right. Has Trump himself personally said anything anti-semitic? Has he said anything anti-black? Yet, you’re still worried that he’s supposedly empowering confederates and alt-righters or whatever, right? So why doesn’t precisely the same reasoning apply to Kamala?
Comment #33 July 31st, 2024 at 3:56 pm
I’m concerned that this could literally be the most important election in all of history. If one of OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. manages to achieve superintelligent AI in the next 4 yrs, the president may directly decide whether this results in human extinction, utopia, or dystopia.
I very much doubt that Trump would intervene to stop the AI industry if it seemed that we were on track to producing a superintelligent paperclip maximizer. Even if the AI is aligned, I fear that Trump could seize control of the technology and use it to make himself permanent world dictator (if AI manages to figure out life extension, permanent may not be a figure of speech).
I’m not confident that Harris is up to the job but there are dozens of experts who would be willing to advise her and that she would listen to. And I believe her administration would at least attempt to distribute the economic benefits widely.
Comment #34 July 31st, 2024 at 3:57 pm
Scott #29: Putin’s resemblance to Hitler is not less compelling than Harris’ resmblance to Churchill. But not more either.
Comment #35 July 31st, 2024 at 4:12 pm
Sconte #32: I suppose I’d agree with you if Harris had called Vance “weird and creepy” on account of his being a Silicon Valley techbro. But she didn’t (and incidentally, in what sense is he even a techbro? has he ever written a line of code?). Instead, she called him “weird and creepy” specifically because of his obsession with controlling women’s reproductive choices through law, including not only abortion but IVF. And, like, there are people who want to do that out of genuine religious conviction, who arguably (whatever else one thinks of them) avoid the “weird and creepy” designation on that basis. But Vance’s obsession does seem kind of weird and creepy to whatever extent it’s genuine at all.
Comment #36 July 31st, 2024 at 4:18 pm
SR #33: Yes. The fact that Biden and Harris have taken AI risk seriously, whereas Trump and Vance have given every indication that they won’t, might seem like the nerdiest and most esoteric reason to vote for Harris, but it’s a sign of how much the world has changed that it’s become entirely real in this election cycle.
Comment #37 July 31st, 2024 at 4:26 pm
I’m sure he’s written code at some point, but no, he didn’t work as a software engineer. He was a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, and he worked at Thiel’s fund, Mithril Capital. They’re obviously leaning into his history in Silicon Valley and with Peter Thiel by calling him “weird and creepy.”
BUT: REGARDLESS of whether she’s calling him “weird and creepy” for coming from Silicon Valley or not, she’s STILL using “weird” as an insult! Like I asked before, how is using “weird” as an insult any better than using “gay” as an insult? If you call someone “gay” as an insult, REGARDLESS of whether you’re attacking their sexuality or their ideas, you’re implying that to be “gay” is somehow wrong or invalidating. Likewise, using “weird” as an insult—calling someone “weird” as an insult—implies that there’s something wrong with being “weird.”
Same with creepy: Can you really divorce her use of the word “creepy” from the context that many young progressives (surely including some working for her campaign) shame men for being creepy? By using this language they’re obviously telling young women that Vance is just like the creepy nerd hitting on you at a bar or whatever.
Anyway, SHE SUPPORTS #METOO! https://x.com/KamalaHarris/status/920004169125076992
She’s literally against “sexual harassment.” Doesn’t that show that she hates men who are trying to get sex?
Comment #38 July 31st, 2024 at 4:44 pm
Perhaps it is only fair I should make my own position clear. I will not be voting for Trump. Full stop.
Yet I find the claim that electing him would spell the end of the Republic dubious (and focusing on this claim as the main electoral issue counterproductive as a matter of politics).
Comment #39 July 31st, 2024 at 4:49 pm
Lots of things in your post that I agree with.
Thanks especially for the link to the 2016 SSC post. I’ve read it before, forgotten about about it, and on rereading I’m struck by how much it captures what I’ve felt (or wish I had, if I was more clever).
It’s interesting that your interrogator is so decidedly pro-Trump.
Like many, I often don’t relate to your choice to publicly argue about politics, especially on issues like this which I would think are so beyond a reasonable uncertainty level that you wouldn’t find it personally helpful to continue arguing.
But, maybe a factor is the hope that you’ll change some minds, in which case you should be imagining the undecided or apathetic reader, not the pro-Trump reader.
My dad says that instead of voting for Trump, he’ll probably just not vote. My uncle despises Trump, but “can’t ever vote for a democrat”. Just guessing you have some readers like these.
I’m still super unclear what the roi is on trying to change people’s minds with your blog (instead of talking science/math/philosophy/etc).
But, that seems more productive, and might garner some more discussions instead of arguments in the comments.
Comment #40 July 31st, 2024 at 4:57 pm
Scott #27
Woke gender ideology is exactly analogous to religion. There is no problem if some people believe that it is sinful for them to eat bacon cheeseburgers, or that they have to wear special hats at all times. The problem arises when those people require you to affirm their beliefs. They should not be able to stop the cafeteria from serving bacon cheeseburgers. They may think it’s blasphemous to have images of Allah, but they should not be able to get a professor fired for presenting those images in class, or slaughter everyone in the office of a magazine that printed those images.
Every society has social, cultural, and religious taboos against mixing sexes in certain contexts. Your very nice trans-deluded friends can believe anything they like about themselves, but that gives them no right to intrude into single-sex spaces for which their bodies disqualify them, because the people in those spaces don’t want them there and don’t care what they think about themselves, only about their bodies.
But the most fundamental issue is that woke gender ideology is false. People are only the sex of their bodies. No one can “know” they are a different sex because the only mind anyone has access to is their own. To the extent that “all women” or “all men” share something, it’s because they all have a common biology that the opposite sex can never personally know. And this falsehood is permeating every aspect of society that the woke have colonized – government, academia, education, professional societies.
Imagine that we taught Velikovsky or Lysenko as truth to young schoolchildren. That shouldn’t matter, right? The fraction of kids who need correct information about astronomy or genetics is minuscule, and those smart kids would figure it out anyway. So, no problem, right? Wrong. Teaching lies as truth undermines every fundamental value of a rational society. If you are going to allow the lie that men can be women to be taught to schoolchildren, you have no leg to stand on when you reject the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump – you have already abandoned facts and reason, and cannot demand them back only when they’re convenient for you.
Comment #41 July 31st, 2024 at 5:01 pm
And about AI, I think you got it wrong. Biden/Harris have shown zero interest in AI alignment. They are interested in “AI ethics,” which basically means they’re worried ChatGPT might generate a right-wing meme or whatever.
Comment #42 July 31st, 2024 at 8:09 pm
(Sconte continues to submit comments but is out, alas, on suspicion of being a troll)
Comment #43 July 31st, 2024 at 8:55 pm
Thank you for writing this, and your moral clarity. Rarely do I read something on the web/social media that brings my blood pressure down.
Comment #44 July 31st, 2024 at 8:57 pm
Scott I noted with interest that you call yourself a Zionist in this post. Forgive me if I’m being obtuse, but based on your previous writings, I hadn’t taken for granted that you were a Zionist. Could I ask you to expand on why you identify that way?
Maybe you simply want to draw special attention to the risks that Jews face, in a way that embracing a less ethnically-oriented ideology would not accomplish. If so, I think that this is understandable, and it makes complete sense to me. I think many people call themselves feminists for essentially this reason — to be a feminist is not to support special rights for women, just equal rights. The slogan “Black Lives Matter” serves the same purpose. No one denies that all lives matter, but to change the slogan to “All Lives Matter” would completely miss the point.
But historically, as you are no doubt aware, the core tenet of Zionism has been support for a Jewish state in Palestine, a state where Jews will always be the dominant political faction. I wonder how you reconcile this version of Zionism (if you support it) with some of the other ideological commitments that you articulated in this post, such as to democracy, secularism, liberty and justice.
To make the question more concrete, consider that about 27% of Israelis are non-Jews. I presume that many of them do not want to live in a Jewish state. Are there any peaceful actions they could take to try to end the exclusively Jewish character of their country that would be consistent with your understanding of Zionism? For example, could they organize to overturn the Law of Return, which is designed to enshrine a permanent Jewish majority in Israel and prevent non-Jews from ever exercising meaningful political power? In other countries, immigration laws that discriminate on the basis of religion — such as Trump’s proposed Muslim ban or India’s new citizenship law — are widely understood to be bigoted. Do you think the Law of Return belongs in this category?
Or, to take another well-known example, land ownership regulations in Israel are explicitly biased against non-Jews, in a way that would be completely illegal in the US. How do you feel about this?
(Lest you think that I am singling out Israel for criticism, I am very willing to condemn Muslim majority countries that engage in religious discrimination and human rights violations, and there are obviously many such examples.)
Comment #45 July 31st, 2024 at 9:21 pm
Scott #27:
A: “I identify as trans” usually means “I identify as trans because I have [list of traits not typical for my biological sex]”, which implicitly assumes “People of my biological sex can’t have [list of traits].” This is wrong, and in particular rejects much of the progress made by the feminist and gay rights movements over the last century.
Q: But have you actually met a trans person who explicitly disagrees with feminism, gay rights, etc.? No? So what’s wrong with someone identifying as trans without undergoing irrevocable medical procedures or entering opposite-sex spaces?
A: I agree that it’s much less of a problem than some conservatives make it out to be. The danger though is that normalizing this ideology makes children (or others who don’t know any better) more sexist, more likely to undergo harmful medical procedures, and less likely to realize that they’re gay if that’s what they are.
Sources: https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/internalized-homophobia-and-gay-shame and https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/how-to-make-a-trans-kid .
Comment #46 July 31st, 2024 at 9:37 pm
US #44: A Zionist is just anyone who believes that a Jewish state of Israel should continue to exist. So yes, I’m obviously that.
Israel is Jewish in the same sense that Japan is Japanese or France is French. In all these cases, there’s also immigration and minority communities. Equal rights for its non-Jewish inhabitants was one of Israel’s founding principles in 1948. Like other liberal democratic countries, Israel has not been perfect in living up to its ideals, and alas, it’s gone downhill recently, e.g. with the risible “nation-state law” (which I and almost all Israelis I know bitterly opposed). Crucially, though, Israel is still doing incomparably, ludicrously better at respecting minority rights than its Middle Eastern neighbors! There are Arabs in the Knesset and on Israel’s Supreme Court; how many Jews do you imagine there are in the Syrian or Iranian governments?
(Hezbollah’s recent slaughter of Druze children playing soccer in the Golan Heights provides a dramatic if macabre example: Israelis overwhelmingly expressed the same grief, rage, and determination to make Hezbollah pay as if the children had been Jewish.)
Finally, so you understand: the Law of Return doesn’t prevent non-Jews from applying to immigrate to Israel! I’ve met non-Jews who have, for marriage or work or other reasons (and whose Hebrew is 10000x better than mine). Similarly to other countries, they can go through a naturalization process and become full citizens. As one example, Noa Argamani, the hostage who the IDF rescued, has a mother who immigrated to Israel from China.
What the Law of Return does is to provide automatic admission to anyone who’s “Jewish enough for the Nazis to have murdered” (they don’t need to be halakhically Jewish). Its purpose is to prevent a repeat of what happened in the 1930s, when no country on earth was willing to take more than a token number of Jewish refugees, and as a direct consequence, most of our families ended up as ashes in crematoria or shot in pits in the woods. If you don’t see the value of such a policy, then I’m afraid you and I have no basis for further discussion.
Comment #47 July 31st, 2024 at 11:57 pm
There is a possibility not mentioned here: that Trump, as soon as he sees fit, betrays the state of Israel and teams up with Iran. I have three reasons to believe this is the most likely outcome:
1) I truly believe he is getting (some) orders from Moscow and he obliges either by blackmail, corruption, or conviction. The axis Moscow-Tehran is real and neither care about Israel, to put it mildly.
2) No dictator of a large country has ever teamed up with a smaller liberal democracy. It doesn’t work that way and never will. Trump will ally up with Iran, a more natural ally, where strongmen torture and hang their citizens on a daily basis. Even Saudi Arabia won’t be able to stop this if Moscow pressures him to do so. He couldn’t care less what happens to Israel.
3) The Christian fundamentalists who help him gain power are antisemites, too.
Comment #48 August 1st, 2024 at 1:02 am
@Greg Rosenthal #30
Good points, indeed some of them are the possible pro-Democrat ones I alluded to. But before going into specifics, let’s zoom out. We agree that a global conflict, possibly a WWIII, is looming. If your arguments would lead you to facing it with a typical Democrat voter rather than a gun-toting hillbilly from the Deep South, I submit that this is by itself a reductio ad absurdum. What I think you (and to some extent Scott, when he’s laser-focused on the individual qualities of the candidates and who’s nicer to him) are perhaps not weighing sufficiently is that you’re not voting for a president. You’re voting for a party, a government apparatus, and beyond that – a culture to strengthen or to weaken. There may be other great reasons to vote for the Democrats, but the military threat from China can’t be on that list.
Now to the counter-arguments you raise.
– Yes, Biden did some good things against China. Not at all sure Kamala will/ can do more of that. And loud rhetoric has its place. In a world where China uses soft power to gradually take over international institutions, boorishly but correctly shouting about it from the rooftops is, in fact, useful. Again, just zoom out. Compare, say, the UN in 2007 (when Ban-Ki-Moon was elected) to its current basically-China-puppet state. 13 out of those 17 years of US diplomatic defeat were under Obama-Biden-Harris administrations. How is more of the same going to be great vs China?
– Ukraine does not necessarily generalize. Just as you wrote, a lot of the US politics around it are contaminated by corruption/ perceived corruption on both sides and reflexive polarization.
– Left, China and Covid – no, Kamala didn’t say much. Does she ever? A vapid cardboard, I heard someone say? Among the things she didn’t say at the time was any demands to push for more CCP accountability for their (in)action. How can this narrow issue be anything but a win for Trump, in the context of opposition to China?
– Left and self-love – I fail to see how you actually counter my point. This particular line of debate was about the lack of self-hatred. To fight, or to credibly threaten to fight, you can’t have the self-hatred characterizing the Left. You agree. I don’t see how Ukraine is relevant specifically here.
– Tucker Carlson, Russia – etc. – first, you’re presenting a cartoonish view of Carlson’s stance. He’s on record saying nobody decent would defend Putin. And while, yes, he could and should be more anti-Russia, he did take a lot of flak from Republicans, not to mention losing his job. But more importantly, this is totally a fake symmetry. There a difference between insufficiently criticizing Russia and actively cheering for Iran, Hamas and the Houthis. Moreover, moving from Carlson to Republicans more generally, a lot of the objection to investment in Ukraine isn’t driven by apathy or by pro-Russia sentiment. Many aren’t opposed to aiding Ukraine – they’re opposed to aiding Ukraine without a clear plan, without cost assessment, without an end in sight. After all, a Western world endlessly preoccupied with the Ukraine problem is exactly what China wanted – for them, it’s better than a quick one-sided Russian victory (explaining why they greenlit the invasion but didn’t do all that much to support Russia directly following that). Whether this specific approach to Ukraine by some Republicans is ultimately correct or not, I don’t think this is highly informative on the anti-China question.
As an aside re: Israel – the (non-Jewish) Americans that came to the kibbutzim to help save the agriculture in the south of the country right after 7/10, at considerable personal risk, were not avocado-toast New-Yorkers. Just look at their hats!
In summary – no, China’s still very far from being a topic the Democrats obviously win on. To say the least.
Comment #49 August 1st, 2024 at 1:14 am
@Scott #33 indeed Biden and Harris have given thought to the tech sector. Their planned tax on unrealized capital gains will, if ever… realized spell doom for the Silicon Valley startup scene as we know it and deliver a devastating blow to US innovation. I wish it were hyperbole. It is not. Zvi Mowshowitz writes well on this. Yes, there are good reasons why this particular proposal is probably not going to make it into policy – but that’s cold comfort with something so harmful.
EU-fication of tech can happen – it did in the EU, after all.
Unless your p(doom) is high enough to render all other questions on tech future irrelevant, surely this is an argument against voting for Kamala Harris? Or at least one that should been on the question list?
Comment #50 August 1st, 2024 at 1:37 am
Hyman Rosen Says:
Comment #40 July 31st, 2024 at 4:57 pm
“Teaching lies as truth undermines every fundamental value of a rational society. ”
Any rational person knows that:
The biggest and most immediate threat to every human being on Earth right now is the possibility of the failure of US democracy if Trump gets in. Nothing else matters at the moment – not even men in the women’s bogs. Maybe Trump gets in and does nothing but eat Big Macs again, or maybe Putin is encouraged to invade the Baltic states and China is encouraged to invade Taiwan. Do you want to toss that coin?
Comment #51 August 1st, 2024 at 7:14 am
B_Epstein #49: I feel like, as arguably the central economic engine of the country, Silicon Valley is probably powerful enough by now to look out for its own financial interests in a Democratic administration? Certainly the hundred VCs who recently came out in support of Harris think so. But I’m open to the possibility that I’m wrong about that, and that a Harris administration would actually be serious about this new tax and wouldn’t water it down.
Comment #52 August 1st, 2024 at 7:46 am
Hi Scott,
Q: Who is more likely, Kamala or Trump, to enable Iran to develop nuclear warheads (they are 2 weeks from having enough enriched Uranium for a bomb) that could be dropped on Israel?
A: Kamala .
The Biden/Kamala policy on Iran is appeasement. In other words, Biden/Kamala prefer a few thousand votes in Michigan and pennsylvania, rather than preventing a potential second holocaust against Israel.
Trump is much likelier to defend Israel by militarily ending Iran’s nuclear program, and replacing that regime .
Comment #53 August 1st, 2024 at 8:58 am
A vote for Trump is a vote for democracy. The Biden-Harris administration prosecuted its political enemies. Trump did not. The 2020 election really did have novel procedures for casting and counting votes, and Trump wants to return to the more reliable methods used in Europe and elsewhere. You do not agree with Trump’s interpretation of the Electoral Count Act, but that law has since been amended to eliminate that interpretation. You say you want a “European-style compromise on abortion”, but that is exactly what reversing Roe v Wade has accomplished. Harris has been picked as the Presidential nominee, without any voters choosing that, or any contest with rival candidates.
Covering up Biden’s decline was not a failure of foresight. Conventional wisdom in 2020 was that Biden would not last 8 years in the White House. Biden does not appear to be in charge anyway, as an unelected cabal forced him to drop out of the race.
If Trump were really an authoritarian, he would have used the covid pandemic of 2020 to seize emergency powers. He did not. He governed as elected, and largely in line with the opinions you express here, if you can get past his personality quirks.
Comment #54 August 1st, 2024 at 9:12 am
Rod #52: I mean, Trump could’ve launched a war against Iran in his first term, but didn’t. He could’ve made it part of his campaign that he wants to do so in his second term, but hasn’t. And of course, if Iran does demonstrate a nuclear bomb, the chance that a president from either party goes to war against them drops precipitously from an already-low baseline.
Furthermore, while I’m sure Bibi would be thrilled for the US to lead a preemptive war against Iran, most of my Israeli friends wouldn’t be. They know that such a war, even if Israel didn’t start it, would precipitate the worst assault on Israel in its (post-1947) history, and that Israel might or might not survive.
Look, I want the murderous Ayatollah regime gone as fervently as anyone does, with the possible exception of my Iranian friends. But it’s totally unclear to me that launching a “regime change” war against Iran in the near future would be wise. The US’s recent record with such wars is famously less than sterling. Our uneasy semi-truce with Iran has lasted since 1979. In the case of the Cold War, we basically just waited it out for 45 years until the Soviet Union (which had thousands of nuclear weapons) collapsed from its own internal decrepitude and the bravery of its internal dissidents. Iran, too, has staggering amounts of both internal decrepitude and brave dissidents. Probably 2/3 of its people despise the Ayatollahs. So maybe the right strategy is again to wait it out, while making clear that, if the secular majority tries again to revolt like it did in 2009, the West will be ready this time with money and weapons and aid?
Comment #55 August 1st, 2024 at 9:26 am
“I mean, Trump could’ve launched a war against Iran in his first term, but didn’t. He could’ve made it part of his campaign that he wants to do so in his second term, but hasn’t. And of course, if Iran does demonstrate a nuclear bomb, the chance that a president from either”
Looking at the past events is completely unproductive at this point.
Additionally, it has always been true that the most correct time to attack iran is just before they reach a bomb. That time is NOW. and the president is Biden (assuming his brain is functional still).
“Furthermore, while I’m sure Bibi would be thrilled for the US to lead a preemptive war against Iran, most of my Israeli friends wouldn’t be. They know that such a war, even if Israel didn’t start it, would precipitate the worst assault on Israel in its (post-1947) history, and that Israel might or might not survive.”
Most israelis will definitely prefer a preemptive strike on iran, than a nuclear Iran who can aniihilate israel with a button. I dont know who your friends are…
“Look, I want the murderous Ayatollah regime gone as fervently as anyone does, with the possible exception of my Iranian friends. But it’s totally unclear to me that launching a “regime change” war against Iran in the near future would be wise. ”
You are giving Iran way way too much credit. Israel and the USA can eliminate the Ayatolah regime in 3 days. The alternative that you are for is the possible annihilation of the whole jewish state into ashes. At best, most people will leave israel because of the threat of nuclear war
Comment #56 August 1st, 2024 at 9:36 am
Anonymous #45,
From a straight father of a trans person, here’s a few bits of information you might found useful:
A: “I identify as trans” **always** means « I have a dysphoria ». They suffer. Sometime they have a [list of traits not typical for my biological sex]. Sometime they don’t. Sometime they *need* irrevocable medical procedures to stop the suffering. Sometime they don’t need that at all.
Q: I’ve never ever meet any trans who assumes “People of my biological sex can’t have [list of traits].” nor rejects much of the progress made by the feminist and gay rights movements over the last century. I suspect you haven’t either.
Q2: There’s nothing wrong with someone identifying as trans without undergoing irrevocable medical procedures or entering opposite-sex spaces, except when their condition is such that they would suffer more and more unless they change their body, or if access to these spaces is a possible way to alleviate the need for irrevocable medical procedure.
> I agree that it’s much less of a problem than some conservatives make it out to be. The danger though is that normalizing this ideology makes children (or others who don’t know any better) more sexist, more likely to undergo harmful medical procedures, and less likely to realize that they’re gay.
As several trans, my f2m son first though she was a lesbian, or asexual maybe. Up to now he still dates women, but that didn’t make the suffering inside go away. At one point, I thought I might lose her. But when he started wearing binders and I started calling him « my son », the suffering *did* attenuate. It’s now under control. I’m so happy I won’t lose him.
Comment #57 August 1st, 2024 at 10:43 am
Steven Evans #50
Apocalyptic panic that someone who was already president once might be president again is not convincing to me, any more than apocalyptic panic over what AI might do, or apocalyptic panic over climate change.
Instead, step back a moment and reflect how the Democrats have made themselves so despised that someone like Trump is seen by so many people as a better alternative.
Wokeness elevates concern for the very worst of society over the needs of the ordinary citizen. It is an elitist policy, because those who advocate for it are never the ones affected by its failures. The advocates for men forcing their way into women’s sports don’t play sports. (Look at what Scott #27 said: “hard to get myself worked up about the future of women’s swimming.”) The advocates for Palestinian terrorists don’t live in Israel. The advocates for carceral reform don’t live in high-crime neighborhoods. Like CEOs, they fail, leave wreckage behind them, and go on to ruin the next thing.
Comment #58 August 1st, 2024 at 12:03 pm
Anon father #56: Okay, I’ve significantly updated my priors in the direction of “I am completely confused.” The root issue seems to be that I don’t understand what “gender identity” could possibly mean besides either biological sex, desired anatomy, or sex-typical behavior. The first two possibilities don’t apply to people who use different pronouns without sex-change surgery, leading me to conclude by process of elimination that such people must at least subconsciously have some sexist opinions about who’s allowed to do what. But your anecdote is strong evidence for a fourth possibility that I’m having trouble conceptualizing. On the other hand, every definition of gender identity that I’ve seen (including after a lot of Googling just now) is either equivalent to sex-typical behavior, or is so circular/tautological as to be completely meaningless.
Comment #59 August 1st, 2024 at 12:29 pm
Hyman Rosen #57: The thing is, apocalypses happen. If you consider the dinosaurs, or the American megafauna before the arrival of humans, or the later days of the Sumerian, Egyptian, Babylonian, or Roman empires, or the Israelites in Jesus’ time, or the American civilizations before the arrival of the Spanish, or the Jews of Europe in the 1930s — any doomsayers among them were or would’ve been completely vindicated, and anyone who ridiculed the doomsayers would’ve been wrong. And this seems to me to add up to a significant fraction of all the value that’s ever existed in the world.
Right now there are at least three plausible paths to an apocalypse: (1) AI, (2) catastrophic climate change and drought, or (3) nuclear war triggered by the Russia/China/Iran axis. And these paths need not be independent but could interact strongly with each other. I’ll be thrilled if our civilization makes it for one more century.
Comment #60 August 1st, 2024 at 2:58 pm
B_Epstein #48:
Very thought-provoking response! Before responding to your points, let me present my psychoanalysis of some relevant people in more detail:
– Harris: A career Democratic establishment politician. To the extent that she has any core beliefs, I don’t know if they’re better represented by her over-the-top tough on crime record in California, or her maximally woke record in the Senate and in her 2020 campaign, or her moderate statements in her 2024 campaign, or some combination; all of these postures are at least plausibly what she thought would best advance her career at the time. Regardless, she doesn’t seem like a fully committed, uncompromising, Hamas-cheering leftist. And I think she would need to be that far left to abandon Taiwan, given how much of a break this would be with decades of America foreign policy (“strategic ambiguity” seems like an obvious white lie), and in particular with recent Democratic establishment policy (I interpret Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan as evidence that it’s not just Biden’s policy).
– American leftists: Once Trump becomes less relevant and people start to forget about his China-bashing, I think there’s a chance American leftists will become much more critical of China, given its alliance with Russia and the Uygher genocide. So even if you think Harris is further left than I do, it might not matter.
– Trump: Has explicitly stated he isn’t very interested in defending Taiwan. I believe him since he rarely chooses the hard route, and since he picked a non-establishment running mate.
I think our differing assessments of Harris explain a lot of our disagreements.
To your specific points:
– “you’re not voting for a president. You’re voting for a party, a government apparatus, and beyond that – a culture to strengthen or to weaken.”
Regarding the government apparatus, see Scott #9. Regarding culture, this isn’t self-evident to me; could you elaborate?
– “And loud rhetoric has its place.”
Except Trump demonstrated in his first term that he often doesn’t back up his loud rhetoric with action. Which makes it much less meaningful.
– “13 out of those 17 years of US diplomatic defeat were under Obama-Biden-Harris administrations.”
Control of Congress was more balanced in that time range, and anyway I blame Obama and Trump more than Biden. And to be fair, Obama also had to deal with an economic crisis and wars in the Middle East.
– “Ukraine does not necessarily generalize. Just as you wrote, a lot of the US politics around it are contaminated by corruption/ perceived corruption on both sides and reflexive polarization.”
Okay, maybe true. In a saner world, preparing for WW3 would transcend party politics.
– “How can [Covid] be anything but a win for Trump, in the context of opposition to China?”
Because talk is cheap. I think this is basically neutral. Harris was just repeating the party line as she always does.
– “To fight, or to credibly threaten to fight, you can’t have the self-hatred characterizing the Left.”
This comes back to my assessment of Harris above – I don’t think she’s _so_ far left that this will be a problem.
– “I don’t see how Ukraine is relevant specifically here.”
Because I expected it to generalize to Taiwan, though I’ll concede your point that maybe Russia is so policitized that this isn’t the case.
– “first, you’re presenting a cartoonish view of Carlson’s stance”
Plausible; I’m not especially familiar with Carlson.
– “There a difference between insufficiently criticizing Russia and actively cheering for Iran, Hamas and the Houthis.”
Yes, but Harris shouldn’t be judged by her worst supporters.
– “Many aren’t opposed to aiding Ukraine – they’re opposed to aiding Ukraine without a clear plan, without cost assessment, without an end in sight.”
For any realistic cost assessment, I’d rather keep the war in Ukraine than for Russia to win and then regroup and then attack NATO while China attacks Taiwan.
– “After all, a Western world endlessly preoccupied with the Ukraine problem is exactly what China wanted”
I see Russia/China as basically one block. Of course, within that block, China would prefer Russia to take the larger share of casualties. But regardless I like the idea of crippling Russia before China’s ready to invade Taiwan, so that the West doesn’t have to fight a two-front war.
– “explaining why they greenlit the invasion but didn’t do all that much to support Russia directly following that”
Alternative explanation: China isn’t itself ready to go to war yet.
Comment #61 August 1st, 2024 at 3:06 pm
Scott, you seem to think that we do not have sufficiently many beliefs in common to sustain a discussion, but I think we must surely agree on at least these:
1) Jews have been victims of persecution for thousands of years, up to the present day, and were nearly exterminated in the Holocaust. Jews do not deserve to be killed or displaced because of their ethnic identity or religious beliefs. Protecting Jewish life and well-being is an important goal.
2) Establishing a nation where Jews are guaranteed to be the dominant political faction is a surefire way to protect Jewish life and well-being.
3) Enlightenment principles like democracy, secularism and pluralism should be promoted in every society in the world.
I think Zionism is the proposition that (2) is the best solution to (1). However, I am struggling to reconcile (2) with (3), and I was basically asking how you’ve done it. I have always found you to be an articulate defender of the Enlightenment, and since I’m hardly the first person to take note of the tension between Zionism and liberal democracy, I presumed that you’d given the matter some consideration.
Regarding your previous response: I don’t see how it’s relevant that Israelis fall short of their ideals no more than other groups (I’m questioning the ideals themselves), or that Iran is even worse (then they should be criticized too, and you often do so), or that Israeli immigration laws permit some non-Jewish immigration (the laws are clearly designed to prevent non-Jews from ever exercising meaningful political power, which is what I find objectionable).
Maybe another example would make the discussion more concrete. When the “risible” nation-state law was being debated in the Knesset, a group of Arab MKs proposed Basic Law: A State for All Its Citizens, an alternative designed to “alter the character of the State of Israel from the nation-state of the Jewish people to a state in which there is equal status from the point of view of nationality for Jews and Arabs”.
Here is what I see here: The representatives of an ethnic minority that constitutes one-quarter of the inhabitants of a country, asking for equal status in that country’s political system, the same as they would enjoy if they lived in the United States, or Britain, or South Africa, or India.
The bill was tabled and no vote on it was permitted, as it was deemed contrary the Israel’s founding principles.
Is that okay? It’s a genuine question, not a troll.
Comment #62 August 1st, 2024 at 3:46 pm
I resemble this post’s remarks.
Trump people, as evidenced by the comments, seem to be people with fixed, negative opinions which are hardened against facts or logic. All my adult life I’ve known that Trump was a terrible specimen of humanity, from his serial adultery, to his telling numerous contractors that if they wanted their final, contracted payment (at a job’s satisfactory completion), they would have so sue him for it, to his citation by the Civil Rights Commision for racism against qualified, black, rental applicants, to his numerous bankruptcies to avoid owed payments. I blame NBC for presenting him as a creditable business man in “The Apprentice”. Someone who worked on that show whose non-disclosure agreement has expired recently wrote an article about how hard that misleading presentation was to produce.
His two Secretaries of State, and National Security Advisor John Bolton, all called Trump an idiot, especially on foreign policy (see Bolton’s memoir “The Room Where It Happened”). His Attorney General, Barr, told him their was no evidence of significant illegal voting or vote tampering in the 2020 election, and has repeated that in recent interviews.
I expect Harris has her shortcomings, as do we all, but I have never seen her photo on a scandal-sheet at the checkout of a grocery, as I often did of Trump. Nor has she said anything as asinine as Trump speculating that injecting bleach could be effective against Covid.
I may be or have been considered a bit weird myself, but my advice is a) to live with such imperfections and b) to try to counter-balance them with some positive traits, such as generosity. Vance (no relation I hope to one of my favorite authors Jack Vance) has no such tendencies that I have heard of. Trump certainly has not. P.S., he (Trump) is a known cheater at golf, not only by inflating his scores, but by interfering with other players golf balls (tossing them into bunkers after racing ahead in his golf cart).
Comment #63 August 1st, 2024 at 3:46 pm
Scott #59
The Spanish conquest of American civilizations is implausible even in hindsight. Pizzaro’s victory over Atahualpa is to my view one of the most implausible events in human history. If before the fact there are plausible civilization ending catastrophes and implausible (unexamined or poorly considered catastrophes), the probability over all the implausible catastrophes is large in comparison to the plausible since so many more cases. Doomseers have a horrifically poor track record presumably because they are typically invested in some way in the process of forecasting doom rather than developing a reasonable basis for expectation of doom.
You indicate that you form expectations based on the worst case so not much room for discussion about what constitutes a reasonable basis, it is irrelevant.
Comment #64 August 1st, 2024 at 4:05 pm
I do agree that tribal (national) weakness increases the probability of civilization ending conflict throughout history and even still today.
Comment #65 August 1st, 2024 at 5:25 pm
Scott #46: I replied to you in comment #61, but there I forgot to tag what I was replying to, so doing that here.
Comment #66 August 1st, 2024 at 5:52 pm
Anonymous #58,
Thanks, that makes my day. 🙂
As a rationalist-adjacent person, I’d say the epistemic mistake was to assume a dichotomy in how we perceive our genders. I’ve heard we can sometime see the same debate for the gay versus bisexual. It’s ok to confused, nobody knows the last word on the physiological basis for gender dysphoria. For myself I’ve been converging on a cartoon story where the gender you feel for yourself mostly depends on asymetries of your two ventral striatum (which are also involved in stress/anxiety/hormonal cascades). Most of the time that’s a match with what your cortices want you to perceive, then you feel hard to imagine how it could feel different. Sometime there’s some fuck up (or maybe some sneaky genes trying to increase variance in phenotypes) which means the parts of the brain which are involved in anxiety say you must feel sick. That would be the basic why for dysphoria. Then most thing therapeutical would amount to « What would make my cortices more likely to get in sync with my amygdalae? » (that’s the cartoonish part).
Comment #67 August 1st, 2024 at 9:18 pm
https://polymarket.com/elections
The 2024 US Presidential Election prediction markets look much closer now compared to a few days ago. It will be a close election.
Comment #68 August 2nd, 2024 at 12:08 am
One more thing to add to my first comment #47.
Understandably, the focus on this comment section is on Israel, but when it comes to Trump et al, one must be able to see it from *their* point of view, to wit:
Trump and his enablers in the US seek, with help from Russia and other authoritarian states, a complete realignment of the world order. Free reign at home to rule and loot the country to death with no interference from human rights, voting, environmental concerns, etc.; and free reign abroad to conquer, loot, and rule adjacent and less-adjacent smaller countries.
All this is to say that in this new world order, the fate of Israel is absolutely, utterly irrelevant. From Trump’s vantage point, what’s in it for him, or his regime’s stability, to continue to support this tiny democracy? Think about it! What’s in it for him, or the 350 million sized country he now owns? If Trumpists decide that now is the time to ally up with Iran, they will do it. And they will let the Hamas thugs hunt the Jews with their kitchen knives. Have you noticed the Hamas thugs never attack Trump? Don’t you think if they help him win Michigan, they’ll demand and he’ll show them a perverse form of gratitude?
And what are you going to do then? “We didn’t see that coming”?
You didn’t see that coming? Almost a century after the Holocaust, and the guy who talks about “poisoning our blood” and allegedly had Mein Kampf on his night stand turning on the Jews is supposed to be an unforeseeable event? Because famously in world history, the Jews have always been spared by a Christian nationalist xenophobe? In my perception of the world, Scott is right about everything, and most of the commenters here are wrong. Fatally so.
Lots of brainpower on this thread, but lack of street smarts. Dictators are street smart and they have always known how to play you. Looks like Trump won’t be an exception.
Comment #69 August 2nd, 2024 at 2:51 am
Well-written and persuasive. I wish Kamala was less woke but she’s the lesser of 2 evils, indeed. On the plus side, her wokeness is only a front. She’ll take on any position that gets her elected. She does this bounded by some limits, which is a judgement I make about her, like you seem to.
Comment #70 August 2nd, 2024 at 6:25 am
Anonymous father #66:
“the epistemic mistake was to assume a dichotomy in how we perceive our genders”
“the gender you feel for yourself”
I don’t even understand what it means to perceive/feel a sense of one’s own gender, never mind whether it’s a dichotomy or not. (Unless gender identity just means sex-typical traits or desired anatomy, but you’ve strongly implied that that’s inaccurate or at least incomplete, so I’m trying to figure out what else it could mean.)
As a thought experiment, suppose I wanted to create a complete record of how I think/feel/act in response to stimuli so that future beings can reconstruct a copy of my mind. Would adding my gender identity convey any additional information relevant to this engineering project? If no, then what makes gender identity a meaningful concept? If yes, then in what way specifically, and why are all the definitions on the first page of my Google search for “gender identity” so vague and circular?
Comment #71 August 2nd, 2024 at 9:01 am
Anonymous #70
I don’t see what’s so difficult to grasp about “gender identity”.
E.g. sex and gender are social, they develop based on our relations to others.
In this case, how someone feels when in actual (*) contact/relation with many different people at various points in the gender spectrum.
Btw, none of that stuff is new, already in the 60s, there was this “circle of sex” book.
(a bit outdated by now given that it refers to male/female stereotypes of the era).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_Arthur#The_Circle_of_Sex
https://www.organism.earth/library/document/circle-of-sex
(*) not by living isolated in a basement, hooked on online porn (e.g. “hikikomori” in Japan).
Comment #72 August 2nd, 2024 at 10:06 am
The Hartmann Report today pointed out how Trump has entered the “Fat Elvis” stage of his career. The exponentially growth of the realization of his buffoonness might lead to a massive win for progressives (and save civilization).
BTW, Hartmann, the rare leftist/progressive who is not insane or an idiot, is well worth following. He presents an interesting progressive viewpoint on all sorts of things. Check it out.
Comment #73 August 2nd, 2024 at 11:25 am
FD #32
Hamas is a client of Iran and Iran is devoting effort to the defeat of Trump. I have no clue why you would expect an alliance between the three. On the other hand very large sums of money have been delivered to Iran by others in the Federal Government.
Comment #74 August 2nd, 2024 at 12:38 pm
US #61: I’m going to refer you to David Benatar’s beautiful recent Quillette essay on the relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, which explains my thinking on many of your questions better than I can on short notice. Some choice passages (although you should really read the whole thing):
“If, for example, somebody asserts that no ethnic group has a right to self-determination, it would not be antisemitic for that person to believe that Jews are no exception to this rule. That is a relatively rare case, though—and would certainly not include those who claim that Palestinians have a right to self-determination.”
“Those who doubt that a view can be antisemitic in effect though not in intention, should ask themselves what they would say about an argument that antebellum African American slaves should not have been aided in fleeing to the North because they should have been able to live as free people in the South. Of course they should not have had to flee, but the predictable effect of cutting off their escape routes would have been continued enslavement of the would-be runaways. Few people on the political left would deny that such naiveté would have been racist in effect (if not also in thinly veiled intent).”
“Countries do not lose the right to exist or to defend themselves on account of their origins. If you think that suicide bombings, stabbings, beheadings, and rapes constitute ‘legitimate resistance’ against the ‘colonial oppressor’ in Israel, then you would also have to endorse such acts in Washington DC, Ottawa, and Canberra on the part of Native Americans, First Nations Canadians, and Indigenous Australians, if they were to engage in such ‘resistance.’ If you insist that the Jewish state is the only one that should not be allowed to defend itself against such attacks, you are probably an antisemite. There are therefore good reasons for suspecting antisemitism in most cases of anti-Zionism.”
Bottom line, I’m 100% fine with someone calling for an end to all countries dominated by a particular ethnic or religious group, including Japan, China, India, Sweden, Saudi Arabia, and (as one more special case) Israel. Such a person would be advocating a radically different, possibly utopian world, with open borders everywhere, the boundaries between nations mattering no more than those between US states or counties.
In the world as it actually exists, though, Jews are at greater risk of annihilation than almost any other ethnic group. They were nearly wiped out within living memory, and a good fraction of the planet still fervently wants to finish the job (indeed, you can barely glance at anything Jewish-related on Twitter without encountering that fraction). Accordingly, of all the world’s many “ethnostates,” the one whose purpose is to safeguard the survival of the world’s remaining Jews would seem to have a greater justification for its existence than virtually any other one. Which means that, if someone obsesses about the destruction of the Jewish state and only that one, their emphasis is so perverse that the suspicion immediately arises that undeclared motivations are in play. I hope that clarifies.
Comment #75 August 2nd, 2024 at 1:28 pm
OhMyGoodness #73
Hamas is a client of Iran and Iran is a client of Moscow. Trump is a client of Moscow. If Moscow decides its two clients must work together to crush freedom and democracy everywhere it will happen. This would also be in Trump’s interests.
Why is it so hard for some people to get rid of the fantasy of a dictator supporting a democracy over another dictator, against all historical precedent, and especially if the latter would stabilize their own rule and provide ample learning opportunities for eliminating domestic enemies?
Comment #76 August 2nd, 2024 at 1:51 pm
Scott –
I won’t argue with most of your criticisms of Trump (for instance, I see no good way to defend his conduct on Jan 6) but I think you’re letting your (rightful) abhorrence of him blind you to some of his actual good points*. Which is not completely your fault, as his tendency to say idiotic things is the biggest reason his achievements often go completely unnoticed (e.g. Operation Warp Speed, which helped produce the very vaccines which so many of his biggest supporters now blame on the Global Liberal Conspiracy).
Specifically, I want to defend his foreign policy, which I think pretty dang good (not just not-as-bad). Whoever wins in November, I hope they take a Trump-first-term foreign policy, with maybe a little less blathering wherever possible. Trump’s first term had the best foreign policy since at least Clinton or HW Bush, and this has been down to more than just “he didn’t get us into another idiotic military misadventure”.
First, a non-point: Trump may sometimes say nice things about Putin, Xi, and Kim Jong-Un, and go out and meet them. But what, in concrete terms, did he actually do to subvert American interests in their favor, a la Chamberlain? I really don’t see much of anything. He criticized NATO, but a lot of it was complaining that European countries fail to meet their defense obligations and lean on the US, which seems the opposite of what Russia wants. Of course, he was spared the ultimate test, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and we can’t see what he would have done in that position. But it should be noted that Russia’s decision to attack Ukraine with Biden in charge means that their planners probably didn’t think it would make much difference one way or the other.
Then, there’s the most controversial Foreign Policy decision: pulling out of Afghanistan. But as godawful as the Taliban are, it really doesn’t look to me like we had any better options, other than “the same thing but maybe don’t make such a huge mess of it”. But of course the shambles that was the withdrawal can’t be blamed on Trump (nor do I really blame it on Biden btw). In hindsight, I still think Trump negotiating an end to the Afghanistan War was probably for the best.
Regarding meeting evil foreign autocrats, as I recall he met Putin in Finland and nothing much happened. The only really different thing was his attempt to reach out to Kim Jong-Un, and I consider it nothing short of great. The basic reasoning is sound: Kim has one priority above all else, to stay in power (or else he and his whole family probably die), and all of North Korea’s awful repression stem from that one need; Kim probably cares little about ‘Juche’ and can change ideological tacks without too much trouble (his propaganda machine can spin any decision he makes as good, and if it is actually a good decision so much the better). Why not take Kim to Singapore and show him a vision of a prosperous, economically free autocratic state? Why not give him the impression that the US will not take economic liberalization as an opening to try and topple him? Sure, North Korea would remain a dictatorship, which sucks, but at least the North Korean people would be a lot better off and there wouldn’t be a constant looming threat of war. Sure, it ultimately didn’t work, which caused the disaster of… everything going straight back to the way it was before. It was worth a try, all upside and no downside.
Finally, there’s the obvious Trump Big Foreign Policy Win – the Abraham Accords. Even though I really dislike Kushner I can’t deny that he delivered the goods here. We’ll see whether it survives the combined efforts of Hamas, Iran, and (in effect) Bibi to torpedo it but I find it weird that people don’t see it as a legitimately impressive achievement.
I’m not trying to convince you that Trump is good: obviously, there’s a lot more to politics than foreign policy, and it’s not even clear that a Trump 2nd term would have a foreign policy like his first. And while saying nice things about Xi doesn’t make me worried that he’ll sell out our interests to China, it does imply a worrying attitude towards domestic politics.
But I think your dislike of Trump does blind you to one of the few good things about Trump’s worldview, that the current world conflicts aren’t necessarily baked in and that, if you get creative, you can sidestep them. The same worldview that tells him that maybe NATO can be re-evaluated (probably bad) also tells him that maybe we can somehow work with North Korea to make things better (probably good). And I’m worried that you (and lots of Democrat-leaning people) will, in rejecting all things Trumpy, end up with foreign policy tunnel vision.
* Speaking of good points, I notice that most of the defenses of Trump here cast him as the lesser of two evils – and most of the defenses of the Democrats cast them as the lesser of two evils. Not a particularly good sign for American politics if so few people feel like their preferred candidate/party is actually good rather than just less-bad!
Comment #77 August 2nd, 2024 at 2:06 pm
Possibly relevant to this thread:
I keep reading today on right-wing Twitter that Western civilization is doomed because its corrupt overlords allowed two male boxers who brazenly, ludicrously claimed to be women to fight against women in the Olympics, thereby endangering those women’s lives.
Meanwhile, I keep reading in the mainstream press that the right-wing disinformation machine launched terrifying attacks against two innocent female Olympians, who it falsely, insanely claimed to be men with no evidence whatsoever.
And … I had to dig surprisingly deep before I found anyone willing to explain the actual situation, that these boxers were born with XY chromosomes and male hormonal profiles, but also a mutation causing them to develop female genitalia, which unsurprisingly meant that they were raised female their whole lives. Selecting sufficiently hard on punching ability would indeed surface such rare cases. So, are these “really” men or women, or neither? Who, if anyone, should they be punching? Seems hard to say!
The delta between the (knowable) reality and the dueling narratives constructed by the two ideological camps is so clear-cut here that it’s tempting to use it as calibration for other issues.
Comment #78 August 2nd, 2024 at 2:28 pm
Scott #54: One lesson of the Cold War is that obtaining nuclear capabilities is apt to dramatically alter deterrence calculus: only after the Soviet atomic bomb was successfully tested in 1949 did Stalin feel confident enough to authorize the North Korean invasion in 1950 (leading to circa 3 million fatalities).
Comment #79 August 2nd, 2024 at 3:09 pm
@Dr. Aaronnson #77
One of Jerry Coyle’s posts yesterday at whyevolutionistrue.com has some extensive comment on this disorder. It may save some time for you if you wish to pursue it there.
Beside it being a grey issue, I looked up the IOC guidance. As I expected, it contained a prohibition against intrusive medical examinations. No one ought to forget about the molestation of female US gymnasts a few years ago.
While not a gynecoligical exam, chromosome testing may be considered as intrusive from a wider context of civil liberty.
Should all parents be required be required to submit a genetic sample at their child’s birth so that possible participation in sports at a later time will be scientifically monitored for “fairness”?
My own investigation took a different tack because of controversy in school sports and interpretation of “Title IX.”
Wikipedia describes Title IX as an extension of the anti-discrimination intent of Title VII to education environments.
The actual language about “sex” in Title IX makes no mention of “gender identity.” However, case law for Title VII certainly does. This appears to be how “sex” subsumes “gender identiy” for purposes of law. The case law involves “sexual dscrimination” in cases of alternate lifestyles. Again, from Wikipedia, the earliest guidance for educational institutions on this conception of “sexual discrimination” I could find had been a 2010 letter from the Obama administration about bullying.
By that time, of course, bullying had become somewhat of a national crisis because of innovative technology run amuck. And, I found no conspiracy of elites trying to impose “wokeness.”
My motivation for looking this up had been a MAGA devotee running around (in my face) about how this unfortunate event ought to be expected from people who disrespect religion.
The IOC guidance had also been clear about trying to follow the relevant science that might apply. In practice, such policies are difficult without consulting experts at every turn. Furthermore, this is not even resolved for the use of scientific testimony in courts of law (motivated by trying to demarcate “science” from “psudoscience”).
I have become entirely exhausted by political extremists from both sides regurgitating bullshit in people’s faces to make Americans hate one another. But, I lack the resources to go anywhere else.
Comment #80 August 2nd, 2024 at 3:36 pm
mls #79
I couldn’t agree more with your last paragraph. It seems to me that the focus should be on why the US political system allows such ill-suited candidates to trickle up rather than the incessant fighting about who is least worst.
Comment #81 August 2nd, 2024 at 3:42 pm
Scott 54
“Furthermore, while I’m sure Bibi would be thrilled for the US to lead a preemptive war against Iran, most of my Israeli friends wouldn’t be. They know that such a war, even if Israel didn’t start it, would precipitate the worst assault on Israel in its (post-1947) history, and that Israel might or might not survive.”
Are you claiming that Iran can can do significant military harm to Israel, before having a nuclear weapon? They have no mechanism whatsoever to do this. Especially if America is in the game.
The only way that Iran can jeopardise Israel is with nuclear weapons. That is the point that I am making.
Worse case scenario, Iran+Houthis+hezbollah+Syria+Hamas can cause a few thousand casualties. But they can have no military wins, and certainly not threaten the existence of israel.
” But it’s totally unclear to me that launching a “regime change” war against Iran in the near future would be wise. The US’s recent record with such wars is famously less than sterling. ”
What do you mean by this? The USA can very easily eliminate the Iranian nuclear program. That is all that is needed.
“Our uneasy semi-truce with Iran has lasted since 1979. ”
What do you mean by “semi-truce”?
How many Israeli people have died from Iranian backed armed Hamas/Hezbollah/Syria in the last 40 years?
what about the half a miliion Yemenites ? half a million syrians?
Iraqis? thousands of american soldiers in these countries?
“In the case of the Cold War, we basically just waited it out for 45 years until the Soviet Union (which had thousands of nuclear weapons) collapsed from its own internal decrepitude and the bravery of its internal dissidents.”
“just waited out”?
Korean war (millions of civilian deaths)
Vietnam war (millions of civlian deaths)
The cuban missile crisis- by pure luck human-kind survived this.
The suffering of Europe and Asia and south america under communism?
50 million deaths under Mao in china?
Much of this could have been prevented, were it not that Soviet union and China had nuclear weapons that were used as deterrent.
” Iran, too, has staggering amounts of both internal decrepitude and brave dissidents. Probably 2/3 of its people despise the Ayatollahs. So maybe the right strategy is again to wait it out, while making clear that, if the secular majority tries again to revolt like it did in 2009, the West will be ready this time with money and weapons and aid?”
Wait it out until they have nuclear bombs?
This will make the Ayatollah regime untouchable.
Why not just do 2 weeks of F-35s over iran’s nuclear program and on the Ayatollah’s palace and on their military until they surrender?
Easy peasy.
Comment #82 August 2nd, 2024 at 4:49 pm
@OhMyGoodness #80
Please forgive an old man nostalgic for an uninformed childhood. I was born in 1960 when it still appeared as if Americans could disagree without needing to reinvent government.
I was uninformed about many things — the restriction of “American,” for example, to the biases of white normativity. But, at least I had witnessed a responsible opposition party that had been equally appalled by the criminality of their President.
You are correct, of course. And, people who study elections (objectively) work hard to consider less manipulable election schemes.
On that count, Alaska is currently engaged in an interesting experiment if you are unaware of it,
https://alaskapublic.org/2022/01/26/heres-how-alaskas-unique-new-election-system-will-work/
It is motivated by the desire to make party extremists less influential in the choosing of general election candidates.
Comment #83 August 2nd, 2024 at 7:25 pm
I think that your view of Trump is more negative than it should be, though maybe not by much. But leaving that aside, and assuming you’re right — I still think there’s an argument to be made that you defend the Democrats more than reason licenses. You should just say (I submit) “Trump is so bad that I’ll vote for these other very bad people, because they’re obvious much much better.”
When you start saying things that make it seem like you believe the Democrats did not deliberately try to gaslight Americans about Biden’s mental state (for example), you seem somewhat out of touch with reality. (In my respectful opinion.)
Comment #84 August 2nd, 2024 at 7:40 pm
>> The central goal of a power-lie is just to demonstrate your power to coerce others into repeating it
Allow me to respectfully disagree. Although I surely share your disrespect for Trump and agree that he is the greatest threat for the American democracy at least since Richard Nixon, I don’t believe he has enough power to literally scare people into repeating his lies… yet. I believe, the real reason why he uses these lies is that his supporters need plausible deniability (or at least some deniability) when it comes to the reasons why they support Trump. They need a way to explain this support, at least to themselves, a way which would make them look decent in their own eyes. This explanation does not have to be coherent or factual or truthful, it suffices that it works like, as Eliezer calls it, “curiosity stopper”. It is emotionally comfortable for them to believe in these half-baked lies, and so they do.
Comment #85 August 2nd, 2024 at 7:52 pm
P.S. Also, why use the Russian -nik suffix when describing the supporters of Hamas? Is this some reference I don’t get? Hamasnik sounds very unnatural in Russian. A correct way to, err, russify this would be “Hamasovets”
Comment #86 August 2nd, 2024 at 9:13 pm
A good friend, on reading this post, emailed me the following, which I thought was excellent, and gave me permission to share:
——————————
I was a bit surprised that in your Q&A, you didn’t include the long, long, long list of former members of the Trump administration who have publicly or privately come out strongly against him ever returning to office.
That list includes his first secretary of state (Rex Tillerson), two different secretaries of defense (Jim Mattis, Mark Esper), two different national security advisors (John Bolton, H.R. McMaster), two different chiefs of staff (Mick Mulvaney, John Kelly), his communications director (Anthony Scaramucci), and even his personal lawyer (Michael Cohen).
I mean, the list even includes his literal former vice president (Mike Pence), who ended up fearing for his life at the end of Trump’s presidency from Trump’s own mob of followers, and has publicly said Trump shouldn’t ever be president again.
This doesn’t even mention all the members of the Trump administration who resigned in protest, including his transportation secretary (Elaine Chao) and his education secretary (Betsy DeVos).
And one could also list all the recent presidential nominees and previous presidents from his own party, and even some of their running mates: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Paul Ryan. I think Sarah Palin is the only exception…
I feel like a person really only needs to know this one fact – that there is such an extensive list of people who worked with Trump and are now telling us not to put him back into office.
I mean, what’s the counterargument? I really can’t think of one. Even whataboutism isn’t available, because no other former president has a list like this.
My god. I forgot a whole bunch more. A White House Counsel (Ty Cobb), a White House aide (Cassidy Hutchison), another communications director (Alyssa Farah Griffin), a press secretary (Stephanie Grisham), and a deputy press secretary (Sarah Matthews).
As insane as January 6 might be, this list might even be crazier.
Comment #87 August 2nd, 2024 at 10:09 pm
Anonymous #77,
I don’t get this thought experiment. If we can reconstruct your thoughts then yes, by definition that can act as a memory of your gender (or your name). But why would that make your gender (or your name) irrelevant concepts? Maybe it would make more sense to ask: « Given a few thousands plausible reconstructions of my brain from my genes, and assuming some variance in the perceived gender of these numeric twins, should I expect those with my gender to act more like me? ». Does that fit what you had in mind?
Comment #88 August 3rd, 2024 at 3:58 am
Fulmenius #85:
It’s a popular idiom among Israelis to label the followers of something, sometimes implying contempt and sometimes neutrally.
Hamas followers are Hamasniks
Peace activists are Peaceniks
Etc…
Comment #89 August 3rd, 2024 at 7:24 am
mls #82
I was vaguely aware that Alaska had adopted a ranked voting system but didn’t know the motivation and so thank you for the link. After reading the article it appears this might have wider application and so I intend to watch the results.
I have recently thought a parliamentary system might have advantages over what we have now with improved representation for the average citizen vs the current force feeding of two candidates by two monopolistic parties intent on playing two party power games. That possibility will never come to fruition but forced ranking would have a much higher chance of implementation if resistant to gaming by the masters of power politics gaming.
Comment #90 August 3rd, 2024 at 11:36 am
Scott #74 – This is really interesting. A little while back, I pointed out where you had a “Pyramid of White Supremacy” form of argument, except with negatives affecting Jews. And now you’re endorsing almost word for word “structural racism”, except it’s structural antisemitism (“in effect though not in intention”). By the way, it’s not that I disagree with this last point. But in rationalist-type discussions, it’s almost axiomatic that personal bigotry is the only correct definition of an “-ism” (so if someone simply states they’re well-intentioned, they’re covered). Talking about a “disparate impact” meaning is usually vigorously denounced as a trick to connect bad feelings of the bigotry definition to good-faith arguments on principles – which should in their view never, ever be connected with such negative associations. Once more, to be clear, I’m not saying the case made is wrong. But it’s just surprising to me to be seeing an argument that “disparate impact” analysis is crucial here, the fact of historical oppression must empirically take precedence over abstract principle, because such abstraction does not adequately describe real world considerations – and anyone who thinks otherwise is probably a racist, err, antisemite. And half a dozen people don’t immediately jump to tell you how important it is to “decouple” (or maybe they did, and got moderated away for being sealions/JAQing-off/tone-policing, etc).
Come to think of it, while there’s a prominent strain of left-wing *Jewish* intellectual anti-Zionism (i.e. ethnostates are bad, period, end of story), I can’t think of a comparable right-wing rationalist-type *Jewish* intellectual anti-Zionism. Maybe it’s the sides of a coin, if the former thinks of Palestinians as an oppressed group, the latter tend to consider that whole concept as a way of escaping what they view as the moral correctness of the status quo.
Anyway, I started out to write an argument that the Republican Party has antisemitism (as in anti-Jew, not anti-Israel) “baked in” to it via the portion which truly believes in Christianity as a religion (literal meaning, not the derision sense of the word). But on second thought, I guess that’s too far from what anyone would be convinced about, which is all left/right culture-war.
Comment #91 August 3rd, 2024 at 11:54 am
Seth Finkelstein #90: I think you’re conflating two different things. “Structural” racism, according to the theorists of it, is racism that could still be baked into systems and societies even if none of the individual members were racist. (In Twitter usage, of course, it more likely means “this whole society or organization is racist, because it’s controlled by horrible people who are also individually racist.”)
By contrast, even an individual could do something that’s racist in effect but not in intent. Turning away escaped slaves because “in a just world they wouldn’t need to run away” is an excellent example. Consigning millions of Jews to extermination because “in a just world they wouldn’t need a Jewish state” is an almost precisely parallel example.
Comment #92 August 3rd, 2024 at 5:46 pm
Scott #91: I fear your interpretation of “systemic racism” might not be sufficiently “progressive”: no “rebaking” can extinguish it fully and irreversibly. It is an “original sin” without a possibility of “redemption” (achievement of “just world” by peaceful/constitutional means is a “liberal delusion”).
Comment #93 August 3rd, 2024 at 5:52 pm
Oh, thank you. I really, really needed this
I post as Gunflint on ACX and Slow Boring
Really, thank you again.
Comment #94 August 3rd, 2024 at 6:29 pm
PS. Upon reading Benatar’s essay, it occurred to me that a necessary prerequisite for viability of “two-state solution” might well be that a plurality of Palestinians become de-facto “Zionists” (which I interpret as (however tacitly) acknowledging legitimacy and inviolability of the ‘national home for the Jews’ within ‘1967 lines’ — à la Joe Biden).
Comment #95 August 3rd, 2024 at 7:45 pm
AG #94: Well, yes! How to raise a generation of Palestinians who are, if not thrilled about, then at least reconciled with the permanent existence of Israelis has always been the core problem. Once you had that, you could get to a Palestinian state, the dismantling of settlements, and everything else.
Comment #96 August 3rd, 2024 at 9:13 pm
Scott #95: It is indeed apt to take a generation. But let us begin!
NB: The Palestinians are free to remain as “antisemitic” as they wish, as long as their “legitimate leaders” choose to (however reluctanctly) embrace “Zionism” (as interpreted in #94 or circa thereof). Sine qua non, I am afraid, is ‘inviolability’ (cf. the opening of the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Gerrmany: ‘Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar’.)
Comment #97 August 4th, 2024 at 1:30 am
Scott #25: I don’t know of any organized efforts, and thinking about it you’re probably right as to the reason: most of the people who want to vote third-party but also want to think strategically are already voting for Harris.
Comment #98 August 4th, 2024 at 2:09 am
Anon father #87:
Ok, let me rephrase. I’m trying to get an answer to the question “what is the definition of gender identity”. Or the closely related question, “why would someone who is happy with their anatomy, has anatomy corresponding to their biological sex, isn’t sexist, isn’t trying to enter opposite-sex spaces, and isn’t deeply confused, choose to use pronouns not corresponding to their biological sex?”
It doesn’t have to be a fully explicit definition, e.g. “the reason some people suffer until they undergo sex change surgery” would be fine even if we don’t know which genes cause dysphoria. But this particular definition is incomplete, since it doesn’t explain perfectly happy people who use different pronouns without transitioning.
An example of what I would consider to be a bad definition is “A qwer is the category that encompasses asdf and zxcv, and asdf and zxcv are defined to be different types of qwer”. Without further context, this is obviously meaningless.
Suppose you also tell me that most men are asdf and most women are zxcv. This still isn’t a meaningful definition for two reasons: First, saying that most men are asdf is a theorem, not a definition, and definitions should come before theorems. Second, this doesn’t tell me which concepts in reality can be more precisely described using “asdf” than with preexisting words like “male”.
Suppose you define an asdf as someone who calls themself an asdf. This is a logically coherent definition, but it’s not clear to me why it’s a useful one (unless we’re arbitrarily dividing into teams for pickup basketball, but that’s obviously not what this is an allegory for). This is despite the fact that a perfectly intelligent being with perfect knowledge of my mind could predict which random string of characters I’d choose if asked, and so my last comment wasn’t the right way to explain my point of confusion.
—
Scott #77: I’d say the IOC is a private company and has the right to decide however it wants and suffer the free-market consequences. In other corner cases the answer might be different; for example, if this was about public high school team sports, I’d probably want people with the same anatomy on the same team since it’s convenient to have everyone in the same locker room. Convicted male rapists who suddenly identify as female shouldn’t be allowed in female prisons for obvious reasons (see e.g. https://www.nbcnewyork.com/investigations/man-posing-as-transgender-woman-raped-female-prisoner-at-rikers-lawsuit-says/5067904/). And so on. We can evaluate these situations on a case-by-case basis without an all-encompassing concept of “gender identity”.
Comment #99 August 4th, 2024 at 8:30 am
US #44
India has bigoted laws!! Yup ! Absolutely! Do you understand that India the most ancient country and hinduism the mostest tolerant religion lost almost half of our country because muslims wanted two seperate islamic countries because they could not tolerate staying with hindus?
Do you see Dr. Aaronson? My forever belief ‘you do even a little for some people and they will feel forever grateful to you whereas some will never know gratitude no matter what you do. So as said in Bhagvad Gita you just do the right thing and forget about peoples opinion. i was looking up who Haniyeh was on wikipedia and learnt that many from his immediate family travel to israel for medical treatment from jewish doctors!!
Comment #100 August 4th, 2024 at 8:33 am
Re #98: “the reason some people suffer until they undergo sex change surgery” would be fine even if we don’t know which genes cause dysphoria.
With the small caveat that gender dysphoria is most likely not purely genetic, that’s great line, easy for me to complete: « The reason some people suffer until they undergo some amount of gender change ».
This doesn’t say how much suffering and this doesn’t say how much change, and that’s ok because both varies in real life. Some become happy with social change only (clothes, pronoms). Some become happy when they start getting hormones (barbe, muscles, no periods). Some indeed need surgical procedures before they get better. And nothing works for some, who typically have shorter life expectancy. In addition there are tradeoffs all the time, like when my child considered taking hormones but decide he would delay that step as much as he can because his fear for his long term health was slightly stronger than how much he envy the barbe of his brother.
In a sense, I suspect that the more acceptance and moral support they get, the more likely they are to become happy without invasive procedures. But that’s a personal guess, I couldn’t find hard data to support or deny it.
Comment #101 August 4th, 2024 at 10:19 am
On another note, I’m happy to see that the comment thread remains extremely interesting (and totally nuts?) with your new policy. I hope it’s been helping with your ability to coexist in life with your blog, Scott! (At least at the margins.)
Comment #102 August 4th, 2024 at 10:52 am
Anon dad #100:
“The reason some people suffer until they undergo some amount of gender change.”
This is an example of what I mean by a circular definition – you can’t use the word “gender” in a definition of “gender” itself! 🙂
I wonder if the impasse in this discussion comes down to us having different definitions of sexism? E.g. you mentioned clothes in the subsequent paragraph – personally I think it’s bad for society (and factually wrong) to normalize the idea that men who like to wear dresses aren’t real men – but if we include this sort of thing in the definition of gender then it’s easy for me to construct a non-circular definition that fits the data.
Comment #103 August 4th, 2024 at 1:37 pm
I agree, let’s elect Kamala Harris, a decent qualified person for president, instead of Donald Trump, an unqualified cruddy person who probably wants to default on the national debt and certainly will severely damage the Constitution and who will neglect America’s interests and harm a lot of other countries…As for Questions 10 and 11 on Israel, it is up to the people of Israel to lead so that their leaders will follow: Parents in Israel should have their children learn Palestine Arabic and try to make it mandatory. Not doing this is one of the missteps made in the beginning that a famed Iraqi Jew warned against in the early 1900s…(by the way, it’s the same misstep the Pilgrims made when they colonized New England..they should have made their children lfearn the local American Indian language. It would be better late than never to encourage every American university to teach as much as is still known about American Indian languages in their language departments).
Comment #104 August 4th, 2024 at 1:41 pm
Anonymous #102,
Yep, I think we still talk pass one to each other. For example, I was defining gender dysphoria, not gender.
About gender definition, may I suggest you try switching « gender » for « name » each time you see this sort of problem? That’s a form of womansteeling. Exemple: how would you define « name » without circular reference? Maybe « the word (either a sound or a writing) that you perceive as referring to you as an individual agent (typically) from a specific lineage »? If that’s ok to your taste, then switch to gender: « the word (either a sound or a writing) that you perceive as referring to you as an individual agent (typically) from a specific social role. » You tell me if that resolves the impasse when you try this using your own words.
..but I doubt rational discussions is the way to fully feel how our own typical perceptive apparatus could produce these kind of atypical feelings. Maybe you would enjoy having a look at atypical perceptions in neurology (Oliver Sachs), or even a neuroscientific account of the rubber hand illusion. Short bits: you can’t *feel* the difference between a perception that you know is right and a perception that you know is false, including the perception of your own body or the perception that your hat keeps pretend to be your wife despite you know very well hats are not even supposed to talk.
About sexism I don’t get the reasoning (nor the absence of a negation in your last sentence, so maybe that cancels out). However we want to use words, we must be able to say « Men who don’t wear suits are not typical of financial circles » without offending men who don’t fit this pattern. And my son won’t stop feeling good when his chest is flattened, even if we could imagine (in some twisted way) calling that sexist!
Comment #105 August 4th, 2024 at 3:31 pm
It’s remarkable how closely your political views coincide with my own, except that you are able to express them much better than I can. Bravo Professor Aaronson!
John K Clark
Comment #106 August 5th, 2024 at 2:57 am
Anon dad #104:
Okay, I’m getting tired of this discussion. In each of my last four comments I said I didn’t understand the/your definition of gender. This is probably why we’re talking past each other, since your perspective seems to rely on gender being a meaningful, well-defined concept distinct from biological sex. Your last comment gave me a description (which I didn’t really follow) of a thought experiment that I could use to arrive at a definition – wouldn’t it be a lot easier to just give me the definition itself?
You used the word “name” as an analogy. Oxford English Dictionary (https://www.oed.com/) defines “name” as “a word or phrase constituting the individual designation by which a particular person or thing is known, referred to, or addressed.” See, _this_ is a clear definition. If I was unfamiliar with the word “name” but otherwise knew English, I could read this definition and learn the meaning of the word “name”. In contrast, Oxford English Dictionary defines “gender identity” as “an individual’s personal sense of being or belonging to a particular gender or genders, or of not having a gender”. Notice the difference in clarity? You see why I’m skeptical that there’s any underlying substance to this?
“we must be able to say « Men who don’t wear suits are not typical of financial circles » without offending men who don’t fit this pattern.”
Yeah, literally the phrase “men who don’t wear suits are not typical of financial circles” does that. The point is, they’re still men, and not all men conform to stereotypically male behavior, and that’s okay. I have a male family member who wears earrings, and I don’t think his wife would like being called a lesbian. If I said that the women in the math department at my university were actually men because women don’t do high-level math, I’m sure you can imagine what would happen to me. And so on.
Comment #107 August 5th, 2024 at 5:57 am
I don’t get the fear and hatred of South Americans in the USA. The way you guys talk of Mexicans sound like some of you think they come from a different planet. It’s especially bizarre to a European as,
1. Mexican is Spanish which is a European language
2. S. American languages are all either Spanish or Portuguese
3. These are ex-colonies, so heavily infused with European culture
4. The US stole half of Mexico in the 19th century, and as such large parts of USA speak Spanish and will continue to do so. Maybe give these land back if Hispanics frighten you?
5. The US is already a melting pot of various diverse cultures, and these are often way stranger than Spanish filtered through a colonial lens.
As someone who has travelled extensively through the Americas, I don’t see much difference between most S. American cities and many US ones. Why the fear and hate then?
Comment #108 August 5th, 2024 at 7:03 am
Kezia #107: Trump, alas, masterfully stoked paranoia about wave after wave of Latin American immigrants coming to take away blue-collar white Americans’ jobs, along with their cultural and demographic supremacy. While this stuff existed back in the 90s, I don’t remember it being nearly as big a deal. Of course it does have an obvious counterpart in the far-right parties of Europe.
Comment #109 August 5th, 2024 at 9:10 am
Scott #108:
Yeah, I get some of that. But I still find it bizarre that a lot of the hate doesn’t actually come from blue-collar workers. People in your comments section for example. I’d be surprised if you had a large following of angry agricultural workers. However, even then I am puzzled;
1. These people have no interest in actually helping blue-collar workers by – increasing their wages, regulating safety, providing better working conditions, or anything like that. They only care when it means attacking Mexicans
2. The far right in Europe are certainly pernicious racists, but even their ire is directed at people from very different cultures. Muslims from the East for example. Not mostly white, European speaking, Catholics.
3. As for culture/demography, the US became a Hispanic country thanks to its conquests. For much of the southern US that battle was lost a hundred years ago.
Thanks for the reply
Comment #110 August 5th, 2024 at 9:19 am
Kezia #109: Yeah, I wish it weren’t so. The whole thing about the statistically nonexistent wave of murders being committed by illegal immigrants in the US shows how much of this is based on vibes and fantasies rather than people’s actual experience. But has there ever been an authoritarian demagogue without an outsider to scapegoat?
One of the great ironies is that this is happening at the same time as actual Hispanics in the US are becoming more conservative, assimilating, intermarrying, etc.
Comment #111 August 5th, 2024 at 10:09 am
Scott #8: I don’t get it (== I do, but I vehemently disagree). Are the only stable arrangements you consider X-dominated for some X? Should the world order also be Male/Female-dominated? Or, perhaps, Christian(/muslim?/buddhist?/atheist?/…)-dominated?
This is precisely the kind of logic that drives wars, that creates and deepens humanity’s bipolar divide into two camps. If _you_ espouse it, there’s little hope for humanity.
Comment #112 August 5th, 2024 at 10:23 am
Anonymous 106
>This is probably why we’re talking past each other, since your perspective seems to rely on gender being a meaningful, well-defined concept distinct from biological sex.
My own guess is you are confusing your perspective with mine. What matters to me is how I could help my child. Why on earth would you believe I care about definitions? You say it’s offensive that I want you call my child a boy, according to your definition of sexism. I say your definition sounds stretched, and less relevant than realizing it’s a gift when relatively minor environmental changes (call it role play and langage tricks, if that helps) can help with their condition.
Comment #113 August 5th, 2024 at 11:27 am
Denis #111: I don’t want the US to “dominate” any other country (and I never used that word). I do want the US and other Anglophone countries to stand up as the ultimate defenders of liberty on earth, if no one else is going to do it, just like they did in WWII.
From the Russian revolutionaries of 1917 to the Iranian revolutionaries of 1979, there’s a very long history of utopians overthrowing a flawed regime without ever considering the question of whether a 1000x worse regime will immediately take its place. Let’s not repeat that mistake today.
Comment #114 August 5th, 2024 at 3:47 pm
Anon dad #112:
“You say it’s offensive that I want you call my child a boy”
I never said this!!! My previous statements have been prefaced with passages like “someone identifying as trans without undergoing irrevocable medical procedures” (#45), “besides … desired anatomy” (#58), “people who use different pronouns without sex-change surgery” (#58), “unless … desired anatomy” (#70), “someone who is happy with their anatomy [and] has anatomy corresponding to their biological sex” (#98), and “people who use different pronouns without transitioning” (#98). I didn’t bother to include this disclaimer in #102 or #106 because I thought I had already beat it to death by that point. Almost nothing I’ve written has been about people like your child.
The reason I care so much about definitions is that, in my assessment, unclear language surrounding gender is causing confusion about actual ideas (if you doubt that language affects how people think, consider Newspeak from 1984) and that this confusion about ideas is leading to harmful actions. As I started to talk about in my initial comment #45.
Bowing out of this discussion now because the ratio of insight to time/effort/frustration has been very low for me.
Comment #115 August 5th, 2024 at 5:56 pm
Scott #113: “long history of utopians overthrowing a flawed regime without ever considering the question of whether a 1000x worse regime will immediately take its place”
Coincidentally this seems to be what is happening in Bangladesh today. Sheikh Hasina has been overthrown and it seems likely that Islamist parties will fill the power vacuum.
Comment #116 August 5th, 2024 at 11:54 pm
@mls, #79
“While not a gynecoligical exam, chromosome testing may be considered as intrusive from a wider context of civil liberty.
Should all parents be required be required to submit a genetic sample at their child’s birth so that possible participation in sports at a later time will be scientifically monitored for “fairness”?”
A chromosomal exam, at minimum, would be required to determine if a high testosterone level in an athlete in the women’s categories is due to doping (which results in a ban) or a disorder such as PCOS or a DSD.
So while one could legitimiately argue about the intrusiveness of genetic sampling in lower-level sports, by the time someone is at a level that samples are being provided for anti-doping purposes, then those samples should legitimately be tested for genetic anomalies on an as needed basis (e.g. as a follow up to a failed testosterone test). And the results of course kept secret unless an athlete who did fail for disqualifying reasons continues to try to compete.
@Anon #98
Parents of trans-identified children are both in a hard spot, and should be focusing on the particularities of their relationship with their child (not on the general trans issue). While it *may* be appropriate for a third-party to ask them questions about their particulars, roping them into a more general debate seems like it can come to no good end for either them or you (or the debate). I’m glad you’ve both bowed out of this debate, and I hope you reconsider before ever engaging in such a debate with a parent of a trans-identified person again. There are plenty of places dedicated to this broader debate, and some dedicated to actual questions, as opposed to rhetorical questions, such as r/ask_detransition
“Scott #77: I’d say the IOC is a private company and has the right to decide however it wants and suffer the free-market consequences.”
Private companies, like private individuals, live under laws. The IOC and other competitive organizations subjected themselves to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
Comment #117 August 6th, 2024 at 3:19 am
@Kezia 107,
I think it’s more complicated even than you think. Even many *Mexican and south-American Hispanic* (by ethnicity) Americans are aghast at the immigration situation in the US, and are swinging toward the GOP either because of, or notwithstanding the issue. Trump has done better in this demographic than any Republican in recent memory.
Comment #118 August 6th, 2024 at 3:40 am
Scott #113
I agree with your sentiments. Fervor in the absence of wisdom is not uncommon and leads to terrible outcomes.
Comment #119 August 6th, 2024 at 4:15 am
Kezia Mason #109
I am not claiming any deep insights here and these is just my personal observations-
There are various countries around the world that have sizable work forces of undocumented workers. Of these the undocumented Latino workers in the US contribute the most. My opinion they have by far the best work ethic on average and present the least problems. On average they have a strong sense of family and ethical behavior. However with a current total Latin population of around 700 million there are some very very bad people in Latin countries. The Mexican cartels as an example are some of the worst people on Earth.
Immigration procedures do increase the probability of not admitting those oblivious to the pain of others while favoring those interested in contributing positive economic output to the benefit of society. I can’t imagine that reasonable efforts to control immigration could be argued as inappropriate except in the cases of anarchists or Marxists or others that have an ideological commitment to the eradication of national boundaries.
Comment #120 August 6th, 2024 at 10:46 am
As per the Mexican immigration issue (not the general Latin American immigration issue). NAFTA in conjunction with proportionately *huge* subsidies for US farms and agriculture really screwed over the Mexican farmer. Together in conjunction with US Farm Bill and subsidy policy that encouraged growth in the size of farms (by eliminating a lot of small US farms), this created a market in the US for Mexican farm laborers. And this would also have had a downstream effect of making those Mexican farmers who stayed in business more prone to the influence of Mexican cartels.
The US, in general, has a lot of gall complaining about Mexican illegal immigrants and the cartel situation when our trade, subsidy, and “war on drugs” policies have done a good deal of fueling it.
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/publication/Subsidizing_Inequality_Ch_8_Wise.pdf
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/08/07/541671747/nafta-s-broken-promises-these-farmers-say-they-got-the-raw-end-of-trade-deal
@OhMyGoodnes #119: Old school libertarians are also in favor of open borders.
As a pro-democracy person my major issue with immigration controls is that they favor a rich-person’s idea of “merit”. If we are going to have limits I want them to be based on crimes against persons and strictly numerical without regard to origin or ability (maybe favoring family members of citizens).
Comment #121 August 6th, 2024 at 11:12 am
Re Anonymous (106, 114):
Bowing out is a wise decision on your/their part (I don’t know if they’re actually reading this). Because writing “gender identity” into a dictionary and expecting to produce a definition of “gender” is too stupid to be an honest mistake.
Comment #122 August 6th, 2024 at 11:27 am
Although I’m kind of glad I decided to look up “gender” in the OED. Because now I know that the word was originally not about sex, but about grammar.
Comment #123 August 6th, 2024 at 12:12 pm
@kezia mason #107
History is often not easily parsed. I had been certain that the history of anti-Catholocism in the United States would participate in the demonization of Mexicans.
The most straightforward statement corresponding to my suspicion is in the abstract for the thesis at
https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/8568/
I have not looked at the entire document.
In related finds, I had been reminded that Spanish colonization had already established racial hierarchies in the region, with pure Spanish descendants at the apex and native Americans at the bottom. Mixed race people had an intermediate status. This, in turn, influenced the interpretation of how a resident of conquered territory could be a citizen of the United States. In the mid-19th century, of course, native Americans would not even be considered for such a status. Also, United States citizenship would have been very ambiguous in meaning. Many injustices had occurred because the citizenship provisions of the treaty said nothing about rights in states and territorial administrations.
More recent history traces to the demonization of Mexican immigrants in the Great Depression. That would have been a typical anti-immigration response to unemployment except that the (Catholic) French-Canadians had also been an “immigration problem.” They, however, were not “racialized” in this period as had been the Mexicans. Mexicans had been repatriated and deported at this time. Once WWII created a labor shortage, the United States and Mexico attempted a guest worker program. However, because employers did not want to submit compliance documents, the program actually promoted illegal immigration.
So, the sociology of racism against the Mexican community had been well-established before immigration laws had been generally liberalized in 1965.
Overt anti-Catholicism (setting aside the “other issue”) is presently diminished because the US military had forced men of different religions to fight together in several wars and the modern abortion issue splits the Catholic community across the two parties.
Ugly history does not go away just because some people don’t want to talk about it.
Comment #124 August 6th, 2024 at 1:16 pm
Scott #74: “Bottom line, I’m 100% fine with someone calling for an end to all countries dominated by a particular ethnic or religious group, including Japan, China, India, Sweden, Saudi Arabia, and (as one more special case) Israel.”
One can distinguish between “domination” in an informal cultural sense vs. legal privileges for a certain ethnic or religious group though, not true in many of the countries you list like Japan and Sweden. I also think the Benatar essay you quoted is equivocating when it refers to question of “self-determination” for Palestinians–some do believe in this in an ethnic sense but many just mean the population of long-term residents of the occupied territories should have right to a democratic role in the state governing the area, whether a two-state solution or a secular binational state. Joseph Levine had a good NY Times op-ed a while back about distinction between civic and ethnic/religious notions of self-determination at http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/09/on-questioning-the-jewish-state/ (if it’s paywalled, can also read at https://archive.is/8HLlp )
Even the more modest goal of all nation-states being legally defined in civic terms is somewhat utopian and long-term, but I don’t see evidence that most of the people protesting Israel’s tactics in Gaza, or protesting the occupation more generally, see end of notion of Israel as a “Jewish state” as something they are calling for in the immediate future. One can agree that Oct. 7th was horrible and that Hamas is a malignant political organization while thinking IDF tactics in Gaza, like indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas and making it difficult for sufficient food/medicine to get in, are also very wrong; it’s similar to how one could say the overall Allied cause in WWII was just but still think the nuking of Hiroshima/Nagasaki, and general use of indiscriminate area bombing of cities as a tactic (particularly firebombing like in Dresden and Tokyo), was a war crime.
Comment #125 August 7th, 2024 at 2:23 am
Scott #113,
Its high time the defenders of liberty countries expand beyond the Anglophone and European countries, including those countries that have built a reasonable track record. For example , Japan/India already part of Quad alliance that has a specific objective around Indo-Pacific, that needs to strengthen and flourish. Similar efforts should be initiated around countries like Brazil, South Africa etc so that liberal democracies are precipitated there. The autocratic regimes are not taking any time off, so any complacency will only lead to more of the current horrific situations around the world.
Comment #126 August 7th, 2024 at 2:57 am
Jesse M #124
Thankfully the tribe of Israel has maintained its integrity/identity since ancient times. The cultural and genetic diversity they have provided has contributed bountifully to Western Civilization.
The genetic and cultural diversity that ethnostates provide are a positive for humanity. Why anyone would prefer a uniform smoosh escapes me.
AnonSkimmer #120
Yes. Libertarians didn’t pop into my mind as I was typing and agree with overhaul of the immigration system. I am not sure what impact AI/Robotics will have on still required job skills over coming decades. Simply possessing a strong work ethic is an increasingly valuable quality.
Comment #127 August 7th, 2024 at 7:32 am
M #117
Do you have any evidence that Hispanic communities are somehow aghast at US immigration? Everything I read shows that they are split on the abortion issue more than anything else. Not sure that this counts as ‘complicated’.
OhMyGoodness #119
If you think that only Marxists or anarchists want open borders you should probably make a serous study of national borders, and how recent this hysteria about the free movement of people is. Also, as someone else has pointed it’s also a big thing in Libertarian circles.
mls #123
All countries have ugly histories. Europe has centuries of inter enthno-religious conflict. Still, we don’t’ treat modern Spanish the way the US treats modern Mexicans. Also, the people I see at the forefront of this hatred don’t strike me as particularly literate about their own history.
Anyway, I’m not arguing for open borders. Just that the current immigration debate deals more in hysteria and fear mongering than actual producing a sensible immigration policy.
Regarding not letting in the bad people – well… you might want to take a look at the number of human rights abusers the US has been happy to let settle within its borders.
Comment #128 August 7th, 2024 at 9:21 am
It’s quite strange to see Sweden put in the same bag as Japan, China, and Saudi Arabia… as a country “dominated by an ethnic group”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Sweden
I guess the stereotype of Scandinavia being the land of the Vikings is still strong.
Every fourth (24.9%) resident in the country has a foreign background and every third (32.3%) has at least one parent born abroad. The most common foreign ancestry is Finnish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Sweden#Demographics
The 30 most common foreign birth countries in Sweden:
1) Syria
2) Iraq
3) Finland
4) Poland
5) Iran
6) Somalia
…
The Vikings have moved on, clearly.
Comment #129 August 7th, 2024 at 10:39 am
@OhMyGoodness #126
Strong work ethics can be killed. I’d argue that the vast majority of people with weak work ethics had their strong work ethic killed, possibly at an early age. Most children basically come into the world wanting to emulate their parents in tasks in the home, but parents often prevent them (too much work having a child help before they know how to help) or criticize them.
You get this in school as well, and not just among the high performers. As kids are prevented from accelerating in what they are good at, or are forced to spend more time in things they are bad at to the additional detriment of what they are good at. And that’s not even mentioning the impact of enforced task-switching that comes with 3 to 7 subjects per day (though the block program of alternating subjects per day may have helped with that some).
And when they become adults you get these kinds of situations: https://www.businessinsider.com/double-edged-sword-high-performers-face-at-work-feedback-managers-2024-8
Work ethic can be killed, but it can also be built up again. People just need the right opportunities. And yes, this is a difficult task.
“The genetic and cultural diversity that ethnostates provide are a positive for humanity. Why anyone would prefer a uniform smoosh escapes me.”
You never have uniformity. The only thing you need for non-uniformity is sufficient separation of two populations. This can be a natural separation (geographic), or arbitrary (ethnic, religious, caste), or based on personal preference (e.g. variations in Amish communities).
We don’t know what things would have been like had the Jews, as a people, dissolved during the Babylonian exile. There would have been no Christianity though, and any monotheistic Islam-like religion would have been, at best, based on a Persian or Egyptian monotheism. Had that drive to monotheism not culturally united Europe and separately the Middle and Near East and North Africa, we might have had more diversity.
Comment #130 August 7th, 2024 at 11:05 am
Scott, just out of curiosity, have you ever read the 1981 (short) book “Simulacra and Simulation” from french philosopher Jean Baudrillard? If so, would you recommend it, still?
(some friends working at the CS department at MIT were quite fond of it).
Comment #131 August 7th, 2024 at 11:10 am
The genetics of the Jewish people has produced individuals that define the limits of human intelligence. The genetics of the Babylonians are someplace that certainly hasn’t produced individuals that test the limits of human intelligence. I find no reasonable support for your statements in fact.
Distance to support population drift was certainly a process in ancient times. I am aware of only a few very small populations that are sufficiently isolated to allow genetic drift in the modern world based on distance/difficult access.
I don’t agree that all behavior, including work ethic, is strictly a function of current environment. As an example I have two daughters in the same environment with decidedly different work ethics.
Comment #132 August 7th, 2024 at 11:53 am
As a quick proxy here are the stats for Nobel prizes ex Peace.
Total Arab population-about 500 million
Global Jewish population-about 17 million
Arab Nobel Prizes
Chem-3
Literature-3
Physics-1
Jewish Nobel Prizes
Chem-36
Econ-38
Lit-16
Physics-56
Medicine-59
Bountiful contribution to Western Civilization.
Comment #133 August 7th, 2024 at 1:23 pm
@OhMyGoodness #131
This isn’t how genetics work. Yes, endogamy can increase the abundance of certain variants in a population, and thus result in higher percentages of certain clusters of variants. But endogamy exists regardless of self or other enforced ethnicity.
Smart people will often self-select for similarly smart mates, and will train their kids in smart behaviors and thinking patterns. You don’t need them to be a particular ethnicity.
The modern world (especially western, and particularly US, but also elsewhere) is pretty unique with the extent to which it facilitates exogamy.
It may be possible that Jews, on average, are smarter than other populations. If this is the case, at least to some extent, it would be because historic Jews who either didn’t measure up, or didn’t want to measure up, could convert out of the community. This would be no different in effect than smart people marrying other smart people*. I have also read that the average Jew is about 50% non-Jewish. Specifically that Ashkenazim are, on average, about 50% of Italian ancestry genetically. The Mediterranean peoples got around. I think this is also similar with the Sephardim and Mizrahim, but don’t quote me on that. My favorite Youtube Genealogist, Geneavlogger, is 100% Jewish and has red hair. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsA2rweF9ZI
* – I want to mention an often disregarded couple of facts here: 1) Environment and opportunity will still come into play. There are plenty of would-have-been smart people who were screwed over, and plenty of other smart people who just didn’t have the right opportunities, or were beat down instead of built up. 2) Even genetically “dumb” populations can have both the right environments for them to thrive at their highest potential, and will have various intelligence alleles, just in less abundance than genetically “smart” populations. This means that those populations will occasionally pop up a person with the genetics for brilliance.
Genetic drift happens regardless. Isolated populations experience a greater degree of genetic drift, but genetic drift in general is the reason DNA tests are able to distinguish between Norwegians and Swedes to a slight extent.
I never said work ethic is solely about environment. I’m more talking about judging adults based on work ethic and assuming their current demonstrated work ethic is some inherent property that isn’t changeable. Your daughters are not experiencing exactly the same environment, and presuming that they are not identical twins who also have identical personalities, this work ethic will depend on the person-specific opportunities they get. You do not expect a person who loves music to necessarily be gung ho about manual labor, just like you do not expect a person who likes physical activity and fitness to necessarily be gung ho about learning the bugle. There are going to be rare people who will do their utmost at any task for any period of time (even years of the same monotonous task), but this is something beyond “work ethic”, at least in my book.
Comment #134 August 7th, 2024 at 1:26 pm
fred #130: No, I haven’t read it. Wasn’t Baudrillard one of the postmodernists parodied/exposed by Alan Sokal?
Comment #135 August 7th, 2024 at 1:31 pm
In addition while .2% of global population they have been recipients of 25% of the Fields Medals.
Comment #136 August 7th, 2024 at 1:50 pm
I wasn’t talking about the Babylonians per se, I was briefly mentioning the Babylonian exile of the Jews.
But since you bring them up as a people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebra#History
“Babylonian clay tablets from around the same time explain methods to solve linear and quadratic polynomial equations, such as the method of completing the square.[80]”
(Note that their mathematics did stagnate after that, according to Wikipedia.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonia#Culture
“Along with contemporary ancient Egyptian medicine, the Babylonians introduced the concepts of diagnosis, prognosis, physical examination, and prescriptions. In addition, the Diagnostic Handbook introduced the methods of therapy and aetiology and the use of empiricism, logic and rationality in diagnosis, prognosis and therapy.”
“The only Babylonian astronomer known to have supported a heliocentric model of planetary motion was Seleucus of Seleucia (b. 190 BC).[54][55][56] Seleucus is known from the writings of Plutarch. He supported the heliocentric theory where the Earth rotated around its own axis which in turn revolved around the Sun. According to Plutarch, Seleucus even proved the heliocentric system, but it is not known what arguments he used. ”
Maybe if the Babylonians weren’t conquered and their culture destroyed they would have continued these traditions.
And yes, I’m familiar with the Nobel prizes. If Jews hadn’t existed, but somehow ceteris paribus, other people of other ethnicities would have won those prizes. A Nobel prize is not a test of intelligence. It’s a test of intelligence, opportunity, support, luck, and whether one works in a discipline that gets such a prize.
There are indeed a lot of smart Jews. And some of the broader Jewish culture seems to greatly encourage learning and (more important) good teaching. It’s also a culture that encourages a relatively limited set of disciplines for its people (though some of this was enforced from the outside, and certainly I’m sure many Jewish people participate in many different disciplines, it’s just that like Brahmin or Tiger-mother cultures, certain jobs are highly encouraged in children).
I’m just saying that I think we would still have had a bunch of smart people even if the Jews, as a people, dissolved way back when. Maybe I’m wrong. One can never tell with an alternate history thought experiment.
Comment #137 August 7th, 2024 at 1:52 pm
Scott #133
Haha, what I did know was that the book was also the main inspiration for The Matrix, but he hated the movie.
“The Wachowski siblings made Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation required reading for all the cast of The Matrix. It was the central inspiration of the movies and is referenced multiple times (Neo stores his disks inside a hollowed-out copy of Simulacra and Simulation).
After the first movie, the Wachowskis reached out to Baudrillard asking if he’d be interested in working on the sequels with them. He demurred. In a 2004 interview with the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur it became obvious why.
He hated the movies for three reasons: he says they misunderstood his idea of simulation, the movies were hypocritical fetishizations of their supposed critical target and thirdly that they failed to incorporate his chosen form of rebellion – “a glimmer of irony that would allow viewers to turn this gigantic special effect on its head.” “
Comment #138 August 7th, 2024 at 2:16 pm
(At least partially) walking back my previous comment about Obama from #60, “I blame Obama and Trump more than Biden [for not containing China]”, since I forgot about the TPP.
Comment #139 August 7th, 2024 at 5:49 pm
#132: Alfred Nobel was a Swede, a descendant of the Vikings. The Vikings conquered Sicily, Ukraine, UK, and Pennsylvania. The Noble Prize was funded by the military-industiral complex (dynamite). The number of Nobel Peace Prizes the Jews got is lower than the other categories. This is all you need to know when someone opines that the Jews want Peace above all.
Comment #140 August 7th, 2024 at 7:44 pm
@Kezia Mason #127
I assume your last two paragraphs are addressed to someone else.
I was only being polite by casting a historical context for your question. Racial hatred is central to current American politics regardless of whether or not intellectuals have turned to denying it because it is exhausting and intractable.
Google books usually produces a significant excerpt from the beginning of books. You might Google excerpts from
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691225548/the-power-to-destroy
The subsection “Government spending on the poor” spanning pages 11 and 12 will explain how Latino immigration and assistance for (mostly black) impoverished families had been recognized as leverage for expanding the voter base of anti-tax Republicans.
I recommend the book in its entirety. The first chapter contains details about how Southern Christians eventually adopted the “abortion issue” as a proxy for their actual political objecive. Politico posted an entry on the matter:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/05/10/abortion-history-right-white-evangelical-1970s-00031480
I am strongly inclined to agree with the last remark by FD32 in #68.
Except for a short number of years working in information technology before the debacle in 2000, I have worked shoulder-to-shoulder with Blacks, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans. More recently, that has been augmented with Eastern Europeans. I have worked with both legal residents, naturalized citizens, and undocumented workers. Because I understand the influence of white normativity in my life, I have never pretended to be anything but a “racist” in my dealings with them. I only mean that, of course, in the sense that I cannot fully understand their personal experience. And, I correct them when they regugitate nonsense about white privilege — the sentiment that leads to resentment about welfare is the difficulty of having only labor to exchange for income.
I have been in many discussions about who hates whom and why. It is all very current.
With regard to white normativity, I cannot recall a year of my adult life in which I did not suddenly find myself in a discussion about “good niggers” and “bad niggers.”
Fifteen years ago, an apprentice of mine was a Mexican brought to the US as a child. He had been the only member of his family that never naturalized. He had acquired a felony as a young adult. When “immigration reform” began to compromise on keeping “good Mexicans” and deporting “bad Mexicans,” his life became extremely stressful. Unlike DACA refugees, his family came here legally.
As for DACA, I never had conversation with a Mexican in which it wasn’t cast as racism. The same is true of any conversations with white liberals.
When Richard M. Daley sought the Democratic convention years ago, the Stae of Illinois changed its prostitution laws so that a handful of offenses became a felony. Prostitutes in Chicago had been jailed to clean up the streets (of course, you could turn down any side street to buy crack cocaine and heroin).
Do you think I found a single Mexican co-worker or white liberal sympathetic to the ruination of African-American families because of parental lawbreaking? I have directly asked Mexicans about racism against African-Americans. I have never received an answer other than “I don’t even think about it.” To be a “model minority” in America, one must appease “whiteness” — even among liberals.
I am the bastard child of a Roman Catholic mother and a Southern Methodist father. My mother has always been the Catholic whore who enticed a good Christian to sin. I have had little interaction with my father’s family because he got drunk and drove into a railroad train beore my birth. When I was 8 or 9, however, I visited an aunt for a holiday. I remember the adults telling a joke that began, “How many niggers does it take to blacktop a driveway?” And, my cousins grew up to be avid fans of Rush Limbaugh.
Should I turn to the importation of European anti-Semitism that accompanied immigration from Eastern Europe? Twenty years ago I had to relate personal jobsite experiences to elderly Jewish friends who had been wistfully talking about how anti-Semitism seemed to be in decline. The week before, I had the misfortune of having been present during a show-and-tell of swastika tattoos…
…as if the run-of-the-mill anti-Semtism of the American working class because of interactions with Jewish bankers and Jewish lawyers wasn’t bad enough.
I was trying to indicate this aspect of modern American politics politely. It cannot be “intellectualized.”
Comment #141 August 8th, 2024 at 2:35 am
Scott #77: I don’t know which mainstream media you usually read; but the NYT has had about a half-dozen articles about that boxing controversy, and from the first one it mentioned the claims by some boxing officials that the two boxers have XY chromosome sets:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/01/world/olympics/boxer-quits-gender-angela-carini-imane-khelif.html
So I don’t think there was anything being hidden there.
Comment #142 August 8th, 2024 at 7:54 am
I don’t take particular issue with anything said here modulo some minor quibbles, but to address this point:
It seems pretty straightforward to me. If you think Trump is reprehensible, but you also think he stands a good chance of being elected, you should naturally conclude that some people should be in positions to keep him in check. The conclusion simply follows from believing you have the moral fortitude to stand up to Trump if needed.
Comment #143 August 8th, 2024 at 8:45 am
Sandro #142: So you’re asking me to believe that Vance is playing 5000-dimensional chess, running to be Trump’s VP so he can use his power for the secret goal of restraining Trump??
Under that theory, I do find it hard to understand why Vance would’ve risked blowing his cover by comparing Trump to Hitler, etc, before he affected to change his mind!
My hand itches to wield Occam’s Razor against such theories, slicing them to ribbons.
Comment #144 August 8th, 2024 at 12:42 pm
For what is worth (on the subject of evangelical hypocritism which was brought up above) I grew up in a small town in an evangelical family, well before Roe vs. Wade. It was not unusual to see a pregnant, unmarried teenager in the town. Abortion was illegal in most states, and it was considered a terrible sin by all the evangelicals I knew. A nephew who is a doctor of medicine brought it up, unasked, in his interview for med school (well after Roe vs. Wade), saying that as a doctor, he would never perform, or assist in, an abortion. (He understood what Trump was, but could not vote for Hillary Clinton due to her pro-choice stance, so he wrote in another name on his ballot in 2016. I think he voted for Biden in 2020 though.) Most evangelicals (wrongly in my opinion) considered Trump the lesser of two evils, however.
When I first heard online (about 15 years ago) the accusation that evangelicals were never seriously opposed to abortion until the last few generations, I asked the Internet what Billy Sunday’s position on abortion was. (Billy Sunday was the main founder of the evangelical movement in the USA, circa 1900-1915.) I found that he gave a special sermon at a venue where only women were invited to attend, to say that there was a “secret sin” taking place in the USA, the murder of babies by abortion.
So I consider most cited evidence to the contrary to be cherry-picked and not representative of the majority of evangelicals. I could of course be wrong, but that is definitely true of the evangelicals I know (mostly by relation). I myself think over-population is one of the main problems which humanity faces and on some days consider that it would have been better if I had been aborted, or at best a wash. (I am genetically predisposed to survival however.)
Comment #145 August 9th, 2024 at 8:55 am
I’m voting for Trump, partially because I’m unphased by the soap opera-like components of American politics, and partially because I believe that he’ll be better for the economy.
After a decade of intermittently reading the Marginal Revolution blog, I’m fully convinced that reason, Enlightenment, technological progress, pragmatism, individual liberty, and human flourishing gravitate towards the side that wouldn’t use the American Disabilities Act to take down free online courses for able-bodied people.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/09/egalitarianism-versus-online-education.html
Comment #146 August 9th, 2024 at 12:27 pm
OhMyGoodness #136
“Thankfully the tribe of Israel has maintained its integrity/identity since ancient times. The cultural and genetic diversity they have provided has contributed bountifully to Western Civilization.”
That’s a really nice idealized narrative, but, unfortunately, in practice, the same can’t be said about the government of Israel, where things seem to often go only one way, i.e. West -> Israel, while Israel is always trying to hedge its own interests, playing as many sides as possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93Russia_relations
“Unlike many Western countries, Israel has maintained relations with the Kremlin, refused to impose sanctions against Russia, and rejected calls to send defensive weaponry to Ukraine. Relations became strained during the 2023 Israel-Hamas war.”
(the extra irony, of course, is that Zelenski is Jewish).
But, as Bibi is now realizing, what goes around comes around:
https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2024/08/06/russia-reportedly-delivers-air-defense-radar-equipment-to-iran/
Comment #147 August 9th, 2024 at 12:47 pm
If Scott Aaronson were president, how would US policy towards Israel be different than the diplomacy-first de-escalatory approach of the Biden Admin? Would Scott Aaronson be willing to use US troops to directly overthrow the Iranian regime? What is the range of outcomes for Palestinian civilians that you are willing to accept to guarantee security for Israel on your preferred time frame?
Comment #148 August 9th, 2024 at 1:37 pm
The Jan 6 event was only ever going to be a ruckus, but the property damage is regrettable (I know, the property has symbolic significant for many – apologies if offense is taken for that). In regard to the significant levers that Trump tried to pull, we should remember Mayor Daley “delivering” Chicago for Kennedy, and George W commenting during the count that Jeb would “deliver” Florida.
Comment #149 August 9th, 2024 at 1:48 pm
JimV #144
We have similar backgrounds it appears. I am from a poor rural area and about the only written material in our household was the Bible. We of course attended church Wednesdays and Sundays and at ages 3+ say I used to dream of being able to read while looking at the placard in church that monitored attendance. I agree with you concerning overpopulation and abortion. It appears to me that there is a difference in our respect for beliefs different than our own.
There are beliefs that are demonstrably false but others, no matter how unlikely they seem, are not demonstrably false. Leviticus includes advice concerning diagnosis and treatment of leprosy. I can evaluate clinical data to see if this advice is reasonably supported or discounted by objective evidence. The only evidence I know of concerning near death experiences is they are not supported by objective evidence. An emergency room in NYC installed a display of random numbers on top of a cabinet so that anyone floating above their body seeing what was transpiring would see the numbers. No one reporting an NDE ever reported seeing the numbers let alone identified the numbers.
When the claim is that everyone will be judged after death and abortion will be considered murder and a sin I can’t conduct an experiment to reasonably support or discount. I personally don’t believe that’s the case but I have no way of conducting observations to support or not. In that case I respect the belief that I don’t personally hold.
In the US then abortion has been subject to the electoral process. Some Republicans have made this issue a hill to die on and they will die on it in many elections. If some area decides however through the electoral process to make abortion illegal then I respect the decision even though I personally suspect the basis of the decision is faulty.
My view is that one important failure of the US educational system is that fervor has been promoted to supersede tolerance. The marketplace of ideas has been replaced by a monopoly that dictates what beliefs are allowed even irrespective of empirical evidence to the contrary.
Comment #150 August 9th, 2024 at 4:24 pm
A friend once told me that he considered the best government to be “dictatorship under the ideal dictator.” The ideal dictator is one that shares your values. Then the country runs exactly as you would run it yourself were you in charge, with the least amount of effort on your part.
The emphasis on “democracy” being the distinguishing feature between enlightenment nations and autocracies is of relatively recent origin. Prior to WWII, there was much more branding of the US being a “republic” and of democracy being government by the will of the uneducated mob.
I could probably vote for a Donald Trump who shared my values. This one doesn’t.
Comment #151 August 9th, 2024 at 5:14 pm
DP #147: I don’t know. Furthermore, if I did say with confidence what I’d be doing despite my current ignorance, then you definitely shouldn’t want me as president! I’ve written at great length on this blog about my values and how I think about things, but I don’t presume to dictate diplomatic or military policy to the people who spend their lives on such things any more than I presume to dictate monetary policy.
Gun to my head, though: I’d certainly try to avoid a war between the US and Iran. But I’d have zero hesitation in saying that regime change in Iran and Russia and China and North Korea and every other despotic and murderous regime is the US’s eventual goal — the question is how to get there. In the case of Iran, the best way by far would be for the majority of Iranians who despise the Ayatollah regime to overthrow it, with the West supporting them as needed. I don’t know how you do that. But if you could cut off the head of the snake, I think that would also disable Hezbollah and Hamas and the Houthis and finally pave the way for peace between Israel and Palestine.
Comment #152 August 9th, 2024 at 6:59 pm
OMG: “When the claim is that everyone will be judged after death … I have no way of conducting observations to support or not. In that case I respect the belief that I don’t personally hold.”
That’s not a reasonable belief given current available scientific data and philosophical reasoning, compared to the alternative that it is the result of one of many confidence games that that have occurred historically and continue to occur today, such as Trump worship. Therefore, without any valid supporting evidence (which the judge or judges could easily supply if they existed) I don’t respect it.
I consider the realm of such ideas, like those of science, medicine, philosophy, etc, (but not including musical, artistic, or culinary tastes) to be one in which there are right and wrong answers and progress can be made by identifying the wrong ones.
I respect my evangelical relatives for many strengths they have, but not for their religious beliefs. Despite 19 years of Sunday School, Sunday Church, Sunday Night Youth Service, Daily Vacation Bible School, and Thursday afternoon Release Time (from school) Religious Education, those beliefs did not stand up to rational scrutiny.
Comment #153 August 9th, 2024 at 9:06 pm
JimV #152
Certainty is easier. I continue to believe not much difference between certainty against versus certainty for.
Interesting that von Neumann reportedly had a religious conversion on his death bed. Maybe it was Pascal’s wager.
Comment #154 August 10th, 2024 at 7:41 am
I am currently reading The Bible cover to cover for the first time and find it tough sledding. I was disappointed to find that Asimov’s guide is not available as an ebook (unless someone knows better). As a result of this post I intend reading Spinoza after the Bible primarily because of Einstein’s comments on Spinoza and pan-theism.
Comment #155 August 10th, 2024 at 9:56 am
OhMyGoodness #154: Asimov’s Guide to the Bible is excellent enough that I’d just order a hardcopy.
Comment #156 August 10th, 2024 at 10:31 am
Scott #155
Okay and thanks.
Comment #157 August 10th, 2024 at 12:11 pm
Off-topic, but excellent new interview of Scott on AI (The Institute of Art and Ideas)
Comment #158 August 10th, 2024 at 1:02 pm
Scott #113
Scott #151
Comment #159 August 10th, 2024 at 7:42 pm
Nick Drozd #158:
1) The current Iranian regime, besides murdering and oppressing its own people, might well start World War III by launching nuclear weapons at Israel, if its own rhetoric is to be believed. How exactly do you get 1000x worse than that??
2) In 1979, you had a motley collection of Communists, Islamists, and other ideologues opposed to the Shah. While I wouldn’t be born for a couple more years, I feel like I could’ve told you even at the time that a revolution would be playing with fire. By contrast, the Iranians risking their lives today to oppose the Ayatollahs seem in the main to be liberal democratic secularists who are admirable in every way.
Comment #160 August 11th, 2024 at 10:55 am
Scott #159
Perhaps everything you’re saying about Iran is true — it is absolutely the worst imaginable regime, there is a nice friendly regime ready to step in at a moment’s notice, everything will go according to plan, etc.
But your comment #151 pushes for regime change here there and everywhere.
How do you envision regime change in China going? Do you mean getting rid of Xi, or getting rid of the CCP entirely?
Regime change in Russia — who will replace Putin? Nice friendly pro democracy activists, or military hawks who will double down on the Ukraine war?
Regime change in North Korea — they have nukes and a gigantic standing army, what happens to all that? Is the plan just to collapse the state and let China and South Korea pick up the pieces? Will North Korean regime change happen before or after China regime change?
And also “every other despotic and murderous regime” — who all does this include? Saudi Arabia maybe?
Keep in mind that recent American attempts at “regime change” have ended in disaster. Remember Saddam Hussein? He was despotic and murderous and he got his regime changed. The result was that Iraq ceased to exist as an independent political entity, Islamist militias sprang up all over the place (ISIS, etc), and Iranian influence expanded dramatically. Mission accomplished? Turns out that Saddam was Chesterton’s dictator all along, and he was keeping a lid on some really nasty forces brewing in Iraq.
The disastrous effects of regime change in Iraq might have been foreseen by somebody wise and cautious, like Scott #113. But Scott #151 throws caution to the wind in pursuit of a utopian vision of an American led supposedly democratic world order. What would Scott #113 say about all this?
Comment #161 August 11th, 2024 at 1:12 pm
Nick Drozd #160: All I say is that there are regimes that, through their actions against their own people and the rest of the world, clearly deserve not to exist, and I feel no need to pretend otherwise.
In many cases, it’s relatively obvious what would be a better arrangement: Taiwan could be reunited with China under Taiwanese rule. North and South Korea could be reunited under the rule of the South. Iran could hold an actually open election, which by all evidence would be won by a candidate who wants to dismantle the Ayatollah regime.
In contrast to the radical utopians, I see a desired endpoint here (liberal democracy) that clearly is attainable, because a large fraction of the world has actually attained it—just not these particular countries.
On the other hand, knowing the desired endpoint doesn’t mean that I know the path. It doesn’t mean that an American attempt to reach the endpoint couldn’t end in costly quagmire, just like our attempts in Afghanistan and Iraq. This is a question not merely of strategy but also of state capability and competence. We clearly had the ability in WWII to destroy evil regimes and replace them with liberal democracies, and we clearly lost that ability sometime afterward. I freely admit that I don’t know what it would take to regain it.
Please stop trying to read contradictions into my position that aren’t there.
Comment #162 August 12th, 2024 at 3:04 am
Scott #161: Two things that both Germany and Japan had at the time of WWII were (a) a lot of state capacity, and (b) some recent experience of democracy. Together those meant there were a lot of people in each country who were prepared to do the work of running a more-or-less liberal democratic system; they just needed external events to tip the balance of power to them.
Specifically, Japan has been a constitutional monarchy since the 1880s; it wasn’t particularly democratic at first (though maybe no less so than, say, Britain before the mid-19th century), but developed a degree of real functioning democracy in the early 20th century that ran for a couple of decades before the military took power. The term for this period is “Taishō democracy”. Meanwhile of course the Weimar Republic is well known.
As for state capacity, both Germany and Japan in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were famous for their well-organized, efficient (even if bureaucratic) administrations. That’s part of how they got into the position of leading a world war in the first place.
Of your four examples today, Iran might be in a similar position but I think none of the others. (And Iraq and Afghanistan certainly weren’t in 2003 or 2001.) So it’s not about what the US or its allies have lost or gained in the past 80 years — turning a country like today’s China or Russia or North Korea into a democracy, by external influence, is just a different task where it’s hard to think of any successful precedents at all.
As for hypothetical Taiwanese rule over China: even if it could somehow be arranged, I think it would be a disaster and I think few Taiwanese people would be for it (let alone Chinese). The Germans did something similar in 1991… but East Germany was smaller than West Germany, rather than 50x or so bigger, and even so it’s been rough and not entirely successful. In a unification scenario, Taiwan would just be overwhelmed: culturally, economically, and in the end politically, no matter what sort of hypothetical arrangement initially provided for “Taiwanese rule”.
Comment #163 August 12th, 2024 at 9:28 am
Greg #162
You make reasonable points about Japan and Germany but I have a different view. Human societies throughout history have organized into tribes. Evolutionary pressures (sociobiology) have favored the development of, call it, warrior classes. The individuals in this class have high propensity to fight invaders or engage in operations of conquest. This class must be eliminated, or weakened sufficiently, to allow an invading force to force a phase change in societal organization. Otherwise they will continue to fight and subvert.
The numbers are still disputed but Germany had about 18 million men that served in WW2 and about 5 million were killed or listed as missing and presumed dead or died as POW’s (Overman-latest estimate including files that became available in East Germany). The male population of Germany prior to the war was about 40 million. So more than 25% of the military died and more than 10% of the total pre war male population. Many of the true believers were executed after the war and others fled to South America. In West Germany the remaining population under unconditional surrender was amenable to a phase change of societal organization and in East Germany external control remained. The above doesn’t include male civilian deaths.
Japan incurred about 2.3 million military deaths and 5.4 million served in the armed forces so approaching 50% casualties. The pre war male population of Japan was about 35 million so about 7% of the male pre war population excluding civilian casualties. The remaining population of Japan under terms of unconditional surrender were amenable to a phase change of societal organization.
In Iraq it is estimated that the armed forces were about 400 thousand prior to the war. There were about 20 thousand direct combatant deaths and the male population of Iraq about 13 million pre war so 5% of the armed forces and .2% of the pre war male population.
My conclusion is that the portion of the population naturally pre disposed to fight invasion were left largely intact in Iraq and in fact continued to subvert and fight invasion. In addition there was a philosophical bent in the US that valued above all that the US not even have the appearance of a colonial occupier interested in acquiring Iraq’s oil reserves. The result of all this is what we have now.
Whenever someone said to me that this was American colonialism my retort was-George Bush is too stupid to be a colonialist.
Comment #164 August 19th, 2024 at 10:56 pm
> Trump is the first president in US history to incite a mob to try to overturn the results of an election. He was serious!
You’ve never met my friend George W. Bush, I can tell ;-). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot
Comment #165 August 21st, 2024 at 11:06 am
America’s Left faction _contains_ a cadre of lunatic self-hating ideologues. America’s Right faction is _controlled_ by a cadre of lunatic self-hating ideologues. As a result, America’s Left is the faction more correctly called ‘conservative’, in the non-Orwellian sense of that word. They want to conserve the middle class, civil rights, women’s rights, the environment, rule of law, and democracy; the other faction does not.
That makes _me_ a conservative, in the non-Orwellian sense. I view this fact with amusement and alarm. My father was right about me all along! Fifty years ago, he snarked that I will become a conservative in my old age; stung to the quick, I retorted “on my own terms”. We were both right.
Comment #166 August 21st, 2024 at 12:50 pm
paradoctor #165:
America’s Left faction _contains_ a cadre of lunatic self-hating ideologues. America’s Right faction is _controlled_ by a cadre of lunatic self-hating ideologues.
That’s extremely well-put, except for one quibble: the right faction’s ideologues don’t seem self-hating at all; they’re merely other-hating! 😀
Comment #167 August 21st, 2024 at 3:34 pm
Scott #166:
Point taken, though I say that on some psychological level they do hate themselves, but they don’t consciously know it.
Comment #168 August 23rd, 2024 at 4:53 pm
Scott #161: The Chinese do not appear to view “desired endpoint” as essentially tantamount to “liberal democracy”. And they are more than entitled to the view of their own.
Comment #169 August 24th, 2024 at 12:24 pm
Scott #155
It’s out of print but purchased an old hardback in excellent condition that includes both volumes. I am looking forward to starting Asimov. King James routinely presents people of complicated genealogy committing acts in obscure locations (for me at least).
Thanks again.
Comment #170 September 6th, 2024 at 3:30 am
Scott #11, the topic in my «comment divorced from reality» is now discussed by the NYT. It reassures you that illegal immigrants don’t vote because it’s illegal.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/05/us/politics/immigrant-noncitizen-voting-republicans.html
Comment #171 November 3rd, 2024 at 10:43 pm
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