Book Post for April, Not About Parenting

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american politics is the best reality show, diane duane, god bothering, history side of tumblr, lingua latina, ozy blog post, rape tw, rationality, science side of tumblr, sex work, there is no justice and there is no judge

Eros and Thanatos: A pair of philosophical dialogues about love and sex, starring a family of Roman reconstructionist pagans. If this sounds like your sort of thing, it probably is. In the first, Catullus (a closeted gay man who believes that Love Conquers All) debates homosexuality with Germanicus (a Stoic who believes sex is only for procreation), Lydia (a Catholic), Sheila (a basically normal person), Ali (a postmodernist feminist) and Juvenal (the sort of edgelord who goes about saying that everything is violence and power). In the second, Juvenal, Germanicus, and Catullus debate whether murder is ever morally acceptable, along with Caligula (an atheist) and Brutus (a Buddhist).

Motel of the Mysteries: From the Body Ritual Among The Nacirema school of parody, the premise is that two thousand years from now an archaeologist finds a buried motel and concludes that this was a place of sacred mysteries. The book discusses The Great Altar (a television), the ceremonial burial cap (a shower cap), and the sacred collar (a toilet seat). Funny and pointed.

Sexual Authenticity: An Intimate Reflection on Homosexuality and Catholicism: This is a very frustrating book. I thought I would really enjoy it because I love her blog– even when I disagree she’s always insightful– but this book occasionally veered towards something I agree with and then felt like it came from Cloudcuckooland. People who have casual sex are all sex addicts! You can tell, because they deny that they’re sex addicts, and addicts always deny their addiction. Obviously. Nevertheless, Selmys’s conversion story is really interesting. She gets catechized early on by a Druid.

Sexual Authenticity: More Reflections: I find this book much less frustrating than the former book, and even agree with it in some places.

Selmys uses the Roman emperors as a framing to talk about the etiology of homosexuality. Of the first fifteen Roman emperors, only one was completely heterosexual. Even assuming that some were slandered by their detractors, at least half the emperors had some level of same-sex attraction. This seems strange from a perspective in which only three percent of the population is LGB, and startling even if you assume Roman emperors carried the gay gene, since many early Emperors were not related. She uses it as a framework to talk about different causes of homosexuality: for instance, Julius Caesar might have been an opportunistic bisexual, Tiberius a sex addict, Caligula a sexual assault victim, Nero a very feminine man forced into an ultra-masculine role in an ultra-masculine society by an overbearing mother, Hadrian a normal well-balanced person who happened to be in love with a man, Elegabalus a trans woman. Even given the many similarities between Roman emperors, there’s a lot of diversity in sexual behavior and motivation and what it means to call someone gay or bisexual.

Selmys’s observations on ex-gays seem to match up with my own observations of bihacking. Some people experience a sudden change in sexuality, but it’s not common and there’s no way to cause it; most people can, with a lot of hard work, transform themselves from Kinsey 0s and 6s to Kinsey 1s and 5s, but this does not actually offer a realistic hope of a relationship. Selmys claims that sudden orientation shifts are often caused by falling in love, which isn’t true in my experience, and I am curious what the difference is.

Selmys had a really interesting perspective on how having a lot of kids affects the experience of a parent of a disabled child. If you have one kid, all your hopes and dreams are on that kid. When your child is diagnosed with a disability, you have to grieve all the experiences you won’t have: if your child uses a wheelchair, it’s going to be a lot harder for them to play football; if your child is intellectually disabled, it’s harder to share the pleasures of science with them. But if you have more than one kid, then you can still have those experiences with your other kids, and it’s easier to recognize how good your disabled child is as themselves. I am not sure if I agree, but I think it’s interesting to think about.

Interim Errantry: Three Tales of the Young Wizards: An excellent three-novella collection. It’s nice to get a little breather and see what Kit and Nita are up to when they aren’t saving Earth. Interim Errantry is as weird as any other Young Wizards book: my attempts to explain the plots to Topher involved a lot of “Jack O’Lanterns are apparently sapient”, “and then the tree alien decides to become a Christmas tree”, and “and then through a series of misunderstandings an alien concludes that Nita and Kit are going to engage in the Impregnation Ritual on Valentine’s Day and the prelude to this involves eating one candy heart each day.”

Science fantasy is a genre close to my heart. I love urban fantasy that takes full advantage of the fact that it takes place in our reality and therefore has moons and aliens.

Also, I’m not sure if this is just me, but there were definitely more references to boners and porn than I’m used to in the Young Wizards series. The freedom of self-publishing? Changing standards in YA books?

Borderline (The Arcadia Project Book 1): The fey exist. All genius artwork comes from collaborations between humans and their fey soulmates, called “Echoes”. (The soulmate does not have to be a romantic soulmate.) The Arcadia Project, which employs solely crazy people, manages the fey/human interactions.

Our protagonist has borderline personality disorder and it’s amazing. Nothing I love more than a book about a borderline who totally has insight into the awful things she does and keeps doing them anyway. I liked how it realistically wrote her both as sympathetic and as kind of an awful person, but not as some kind of chaotic evil monster– just someone who has the same empathy and compassion as anyone else, but who sometimes does bad things on impulse. I really liked how the protagonist had recovered from suicidality but was still obviously mentally ill and had a life that sucked because, yeah, not being suicidal anymore doesn’t necessarily mean your life is great. And there was DBT in the book! The protagonist talks about her reason mind and her emotion mind, and one of the other characters is someone who literally severed her reason mind from her emotion mind with magic! I would have appreciated more use of skills, but then the protagonist is (canonically) not very cooperative with therapy. So I guess it makes sense.

 

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High: Wow, it’s like the book Nonviolent Communication, but without the weird and creepy implication that if you do everything right then people will do what you want.

The key piece of advice is that you should focus on what you actually want and doing things that will achieve the goal you actually want, instead of giving into the temptation to instead achieve the goals “no one ever criticizes me” or “the person I’m talking to is punished” or “my sense of self-righteousness is justified” or similar. Do not assume that it’s impossible to get a deal both sides will be okay with: this is often possible!

Before you can succeed at a crucial conversation, you have to separate out what’s actually going on from the story you’re telling yourself is going on about how you are an innocent victim, or the other person is a horrible monster, or you are completely incapable of improving the situation. Try looking at the objective facts of the situation and separating them from your interpretations of what’s going on. Ask yourself about your role in the problem, why a reasonable and rational person would do what the other person is doing, and what you should do to move towards what you want.

The first step in a crucial conversation is to notice when people feel unsafe. When people feel unsafe, they will usually turn to silence or violence: on one hand, selectively showing your true opinions, avoiding important issues, or even withdrawing from the conversation altogether; on the other hand, forcing your views on others, labeling and stereotyping people, or insulting and threatening people. When these happen, the conversation has gone off the rails. Even noticing unsafe conversations can be a huge step towards improving conversations, but you can also work on making it safer. You do that through: apologizing when appropriate; using a contrast statement which addresses others’ concerns that you don’t respect them or have a malicious intent and then clarifies your respectfulness and intent; and finding a mutual purpose, a goal both sides share. You do that through CRIB (this book is as fond of acronyms as DBT is): committing to find a mutual purpose; recognizing why the person you’re talking to wants the things they want; inventing a mutual purpose, perhaps by agreeing that everyone wants the relationship to be strong or the business to succeed; and brainstorming new strategies that serve everyone.

Once everyone is safe, you want to find out other people’s perspectives and share your own. To share your own perspectives, use STATE: share a factual description of the situation from your perspective; tell the story you’ve told yourself about those facts; and ask for the other person’s perspective. While doing this, talk tentatively, saying things softly and in a way that implies you want other people to correct you, and encourage other people to share their own views, no matter how controversial. To encourage other people to share their perspectives, use AMPP: ask to hear people’s concerns; mirror other people’s feelings; paraphrase what you’re hearing; and if they really won’t share their opinions with you at all, prime by saying tentatively what you think the other person’s perspective might be. If it turns out you and the other person disagree, start with an area of agreement; build on what the other person is saying by suggesting that they might have overlooked something; and compare positions, suggesting that you differ and not that one of you is wrong, when you really can’t reach consensus.

When it comes time to make the decision, you should follow an appropriate decision-making procedure: for instance, the boss has the final say in a corporation, but in most marriages decisions are made by consensus. When decisions are made, you should always be clear about who is responsible, what exactly they’re supposed to do, when they’re supposed to do it by, and what the followup will be.

The Myth of the Rational Voter: Voters are systematically biased: for instance, compared to the consensus of economists, they tend to underestimate the usefulness of markets and the economic benefits of trade with foreigners. Voters are wrong even about obvious empirical issues: for instance, voters tend to vastly overestimate the percentage of the budget devoted to foreign aid. Voters care about trivia about politicians (Dan Quayle’s feud with a television character) at the expense of practical issues (who is their senator); while voters swiftly punish transgressions they hear about, these transgressions are generally things like “said a racist slur” or “cheated on his dying wife” rather than things like “caused the incarceration of millions of people for relatively small crimes” or “destroyed the entire economy”. The worst part is that voters are altruistic, so instead of voting based on their pocketbooks (which, presumably, would incentivize politicians to have a good economy for most of their voters) they vote based on what they think is good for the country (which incentivizes politicians to give voters things the voters think are a good idea, whether it is or not).  All this means that voters vote for and receive terrible policy.

Honestly, it’s kind of remarkable to me how democratic governments wind up with their current level of low-variance mediocrity. This happens every time I read something about society. Like, it’s really remarkable how well our society works given that every individual element of it is a constantly-falling-apart shitshow. I have no explanation for this state of affairs.

Weirdly, Caplan models the situation as “there are benefits to having biased opinions (less effort researching right opinions, signalling group membership, not having to admit you’re wrong), there are costs to having biased opinions (you are wrong about things and that hurts you), since any voter has an astronomically small chance of flipping the election it is rational for them to buy way more bias than they would for things affecting their personal life.” While I think that’s correct for some situations, other biases, such as the availability heuristic, clearly don’t seem to fit this model. Like, I really don’t think parents are hysterical about children playing outside because they’re obtaining a certain amount of signalling that they’re good parents at the cost of a certain amount of parenting effort, I think they’re legitimately just mistaken about the chance their children will be kidnapped. And I suspect similar arguments apply to voters as well.

Intelligence: A Very Short Introduction: I am impressed by the consistent high quality of the “very short introduction” series and wish I could subscribe to a program where they mail me a random one each month and then I get to learn about mathematics or nothingness or logic or something each month.

The most interesting thing I learned from this book is that some people, including Flynn himself, believe the Flynn effect is due to increased familiarity with standardized tests in general and intelligence tests in specific. For instance, in the 1930s, an IQ test was probably the first standardized test a person had ever taken, while I took about two standardized tests a year for twelve years while attending a school system which was widely criticized for primarily teaching me how to be good at taking tests. It’s no wonder that I’d have a higher IQ score. In this case, the Flynn effect means that changing IQ scores provide us little to no information about whether and how people’s IQ scores are changing over time.

The Rent Is Too Damn High: What To Do About It, And Why It Matters More Than You Think: This is a pretty good introduction to the YIMBY position on housing. Various regulations– including rent control and zoning– make it more difficult and less profitable to build more homes, so we have fewer homes than we need. The idea that homes are an “investment” which always increases in price also increases the price of housing for people who don’t own their own homes. As a result, people live further from work (leading to unpleasant commutes and lots of pollution) or move to cities with cheaper housing but fewer jobs. This is bad, because dense locations provide a lot of benefits to people– ranging from higher productivity to a cleaner environment to better restaurants.

With Liberty and Justice for Some: How The Law Is Used To Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful: I originally thought I was a ooey-gooey soft-on-crime liberal, and then I read this book, and discovered I was an ooey-gooey soft-on-crime liberal except for crimes committed by presidents. When Glenn Greenwald remarked that under international law torture is punished with the death penalty, I thought “yep, actually, I totally support executing George W Bush.”

Unfortunately, my tough-on-crime stance is not shared by most people. In fact, under the name of “unifying the country” and “looking forward not backward”, presidents have managed to get away with absurd violations of national and international law: from Nixon’s multiple felonies to Bush’s surveillance and torture. Of course, this is not actually how the rule of law ought to work: the most basic principle of our government is that it is a government of laws not men, which is to say that if you commit a crime you should be punished, even if you are the president. (Especially if you are the president!) Claims that “public policy takes precedence over the rule of law”. Of course, there are many incentives for any given president to pull this shit: if they punish their predecessors for felonies and war crimes, maybe they’ll be punished for their own felonies and war crimes! All this is combined with a massive expansion of incarceration, meaning a poor black person gets more time in jail for smoking pot than a president does for violating international law.

Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to SlutWalk: The real lesson of this book is that Margo St. James, the founder of COYOTE and the St. James Infirmary, is a stone-cold badass. Margo St. James became a sex worker after she was accused of doing sex work because she was a beatnik and hosted lots of different men in her apartment, and obviously the only reason one would have men stay over is doing sex work. Her conviction meant that she couldn’t find a job other than doing sex work. She founded COYOTE, one of the first sex workers’ rights organizations, a year after J Edgar Hoover died “because we wanted to make sure he was really dead”. COYOTE’s shenanigans included awarding a giant keyhole to the Vice Cop of the Year and holding loiter-ins at the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. Their largest victory was when Judge Marie-Victoire dismissed almost forty sex workers’ cases on the grounds of sex discrimination, since the police had not arrested the clients. (The assistant district attorney for vice crimes said there was no reason to arrest men because “the customer is not involved with the commercial exploitation of sex, at least not on an ongoing basis.”) St. James also climbed Pike’s Peak to prove that sex workers aren’t diseased. Today, he St. James Infirmary commits to doing research that sex workers feel matters to them: for instance, it performed the first medical research on the foot problems caused by working all night in hooker heels.

I also appreciated the following slogans from a protest of Playboy Bunny clubs which only paid their workers in tips, without any salary: “don’t be a bunny, work for money” and “women should be obscene and not heard.”

In 34 states, doing full service sex work while being HIV positive is a felony, regardless of whether transmission occurred or what the actual risk profile of the sex act is. No HIV-positive client has ever been prosecuted.

The unsung heroes of this book are public health workers and activists, many of whom regularly break laws to help their sex worker clients: from giving out clean needles and crack kits, breaking trafficking laws to help underage sex workers find shelter and necessities, giving out birth control and post-exposure prophylaxis for HIV without prescriptions, or letting people know when the police are a few blocks away.

[content warning: rape]

Bang: The advice in this book is mostly reasonable. The author, however, is a goddamn misogynist.

As an example: Roosh says that you should do things because you want to do them, not in a desperate attempt to please a particular woman. This is great advice; I agree that if you’re buying someone a drink, it should be because you like them and want them to be happy, not because you’re desperately seeking their approval. His next sentence says that if he buys women drinks, it’s not a form of supplication, it’s to loosen them up so they’ll fuck him.

This is merely one example of a larger problem. Roosh seems to view sex not as something that people do together because it’s fun but as a competition between men and women in which men try to obtain sex and women try to deny it. He views a woman saying no to sex as an ordinary, normal part of the process of having sex with her; his writing clearly seems to imply that he expects a woman to say “no” to sex three or four times the first time he has sex with her. It is nice that he does not suggest physically forcing a woman into sex. He does, however, suggest ignoring her nos (for instance, responding to “we’re going too fast” with “yeah, I agree” but continuing to do whatever you’re doing) and responding to an outright “no” by stopping for a few minutes and then doing the thing again.

Of course, perhaps some women are saying “no” in the hopes that Roosh will override her “no”. (As I’ve always said, I think such ridiculous behavior should be punished by those women not getting to have sex until they learn better.) And of course some people say no to sex and then change their mind and say yes, although early on in a relationship you should probably check in and see if they’re sure. But a lot of the women he’d be using that strategy on are people who are scared, inexperienced, unsure, not good at setting boundaries. They might be frightened that if they don’t comply he will hurt them; he’s given them no reason to think otherwise. It is scary to be alone and naked, often in a house that isn’t your own, with a person who is larger and stronger than you. Is this the sort of thing you’re comfortable doing with a sexual partner?

Even from a purely selfish level, I can’t imagine that this is a great way to obtain sex. Like… surely you want to have sex with someone who wants to have sex with you? What benefit does having sex with a reluctant person have over masturbation? They make very good Fleshlights these days, you know. And it certainly makes the rest of Roosh’s pickup advice questionable. If he’s so good at seducing women, how come he has to pressure people who don’t want sex with him into sex? Surely they should be throwing their dripping panties at his head?

I think a lot of pickup stuff can be really useful for shy men. It can be hard to think of something to say to strangers, so knowing basically what you’re going to say can make it easier to break the ice and come off as charming and fun. A lot of pickup stuff isn’t the Magic Secret To Obtaining Sex, it’s just a basically reasonable thing to say while flirting, and that can serve as a magic feather to build confidence so you actually hit on people. And by relying on other people’s lines for a while you can develop a sense of what works and what doesn’t and eventually learn to flirt without the lines. But there has got to be a book written by a man with less awful and disgusting views about sexuality.

[content warning: rape, suicide]

The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented A Story of Martyrdom: A depressing amount of this book is based on word games about the meaning of the word “persecution”. You see, it only counts as persecution if the government intended to oppress Christians. The actual state of affairs was that Christians were widely thought of as very strange and rumored to be incestuous and cannibals, were occasionally oppressed by local governors, and sometimes were executed because the Emperor passed a law that said that everyone had to sacrifice to him or be executed, intended to figure out who his political enemies were, but that accidentally harmed Christians. I found this sort of argument-by-definition extremely pedantic. I also found the tie-ins to current culture war stuff really annoying: I can figure out for myself the connections between Christian ideals of martyrdom and Rick Santorum’s idea that Christians are persecuted today, thank you.

That said, it’s still an interesting read for the historical facts. Many so-called martyrdom stories are, in fact, fiction: there are historical inaccuracies and lurid plotlines that make the most sense if they were popular novels intended to amuse the reader. Many bear a striking similarity to Greek romance novels popular at the time. They have plots like “a Christian who has taken a vow of celibacy is forced to marry a vestal virgin, whom he converts to Christianity; they are arrested for trying to convert people, where the vestal virgin is sentenced to work at a brothel; an escaped lion does not harm her but instead kills the men attempting to rape her.” This is salacious enough that it is probably fiction and not a thing that actually happened.

Voluntary martyrdom was apparently quite common in the early church. We have several early Christian writers condemning it as heresy and the sin of suicide; this was probably political, because the Christians we would today consider non-heretical often escaped or recanted their Christianity, and there was a group of heretics, the Donatists, who had confessed to being Christian but were not executed for one reason or another. The non-Donatists have an obvious reason to condemn voluntary martyrdom. One of the stories we have about early Christians is that they went to a regional governor to try to be martyred, except the governor refused and instead told them that if they wanted to die there were cliffs to throw themselves off and ropes to hang themselves on.

The Christians were really confusing to the Romans. Roman polytheism was syncretic; it literally did not make sense to them that worshipping one god meant not being allowed to worship the emperor either. Many Christians were deliberately stubborn and difficult: for instance, one Christian responded to all questions, including his name, with “I am a Christian.” Many Christians said they respected God alone, which was both incomprehensible and probably seditious from a Roman perspective, since Roman society was based on hierarchies of respect.

 

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Melania Trump

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american politics is the best reality show, ozy blog post

My husband Topher Brennan has written an article about Melania Trump’s libel case and has asked me to signal-boost it, which I’m doing.

Excerpt:

Furthermore, there appear to be good reasons to think the part of the story about Melania violating US immigration laws is true. One of Melania’s former roommates confirmed that she was in the US in 1995 in an interview with Politico reporter Julia Ioffe, and the quotes where Melania appears to admit to illegally working on a tourist visa are on video tape. According to Politico, these kinds of immigration violations were common in the modeling industry in the 90s.

I have a copy of Pojar’s book, and it cites two sources by name to support its claim that the official story about how the Trumps met is not the real story. It also gives an account of Melania’s years as a model in New York that sounds a hell of a lot like a euphemistic account of an escorting career—”dating” rich men and making up to $1500 per day while simultaneously being frustrated with her inability to get kinds of modeling work she really wanted.

On top of all this, my own instinct is that whenever I hear about a celebrity abusing libel laws to suppress embarrassing rumors about themselves, I tend to assume the rumors are true. Most people realize that the smart way to deal with false rumors is to ignore them, especially when you’re famous.

If that was all there was to the story, though, I wouldn’t be bothering with it. I personally don’t care if Melania was an escort—in fact I don’t think there’s anything wrong with sex work and it should be decriminalized. And the hypocrisy angle falls a bit flat given that even without this story it would be perfectly obvious that her husband’s stance on immigration has nothing to do with immigration per se but is instead an expression of thinly-veiled racism.

Even the libel angle wouldn’t be terribly interesting, if Melania had merely sued the Daily Mail in a British court. British libel law is an internationally famous dumpster fire. If Melania had merely sued a British publication in a British court for repeating nasty rumors about her, she’d be joining the ignominious company of the Church of Scientology and anti-vax frauster Andrew Wakefield, but there wouldn’t be much of a story beyond that.

However, there are some twists to the story.

5Calls

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american politics is the best reality show, ozy blog post

Many of my readers are interested in opposing the Trump administration. I’d like to suggest they look into 5calls.org.

Calling your representatives is one strategy for influencing their votes. If a representative gets a lot of calls about an issue, they’re likely to believe that their constituents care a lot about it. They are afraid to go against what their constituents want, because that means that you might vote for their opponent (either in the primary or the general election). Phone calls are generally considered better than emails, because they are difficult.

5calls.org makes calling your representatives very easy. You enter your address, and then it provides phone numbers for your representatives. There are a variety of issues on the sidebar: for instance, you might be interested in calling about a proposed bill that puts more limits on the President’s ability to engage in a nuclear first strike, a Senate investigation of Michael Flynn’s ties to Russia, or calling your governor to encourage them to protect immigrant rights. For each issue, it provides you with a script. All you have to do is say the script. For me, this reduces my phone anxiety a great deal.

Personally, some of the issues seem to me to involve rather poor prioritization skills: for instance, I am not particularly opposed to the nomination of Scalia II: The Scaliaing to the Supreme Court, and a while back one of the issues you could call about was public lands potentially being given to the states. However, you do not have to call about those issues! I think they try to do scripts for a wide variety of issues that people who oppose Trump could potentially be concerned about, so that people with a lot of different political opinions can use the website. Just ignore the things you don’t care about. Fortunately, the Trump administration does enough ridiculous things that you aren’t going to run out of phone calls.

I suggest doing some research on the issue you’re calling about to make sure that you really care about it and agree with 5calls.org’s position. In my experience, 5calls.org has done a pretty good job of highlighting the most urgent Trump-related issues, so this is also a sustainable way of staying updated on the news without being burned out by the continual stream of “Trump is an authoritarian dictator destroying America!” accompanied by no concrete action one can do to help. It might also be a good idea to look up your representative’s opinion on the issue, so that you can thank them if they have a good opinion. (Representatives like positive feedback too!)

The name “5 Calls” comes from their proposed goal of five calls a day. However, you definitely don’t have to do five calls a day! Personally, I have set a goal of one voicemail or conversation with a staffer daily. (This is slightly different from a phone call because Senator Feinstein’s staffers never pick up the damn phone.) I find that, including research, this usually takes me five or ten minutes.

Epistemic Closure Challenge #4

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american politics is the best reality show, capitalism is NOT MADE BY BIRBS, god bothering, ozy blog post

People who are not participants are welcome to comment to give book recommendations, talk about what other people are reading, or talk about books that they’ve read recently that they disagree with. If you are confused about what the epistemic closure challenge is, read this.

General Notes: I would like to thank this article for giving me such excellent reading recommendations; two of the books I read came from that list, I have started the other two books it suggests, and I am already a big fan of the Righteous Mind. I encourage my conservative readers to check out its companion article.

The Virtue of Selfishness: My beliefs and Rand’s are very similar in some ways, and yet they are so strikingly different in others that I want to poke at our areas of disagreement.

There are a lot of parts of Rand that– don’t just move me, but do a good job of capturing what my personal eudaimonia is. I believe in rationality, productiveness, and pride as cardinal virtues. For me, productive work is central to my happiness. Rand’s description of love is eloquent and beautiful, leaving aside its slut-shaming: “In spiritual issues—(by “spiritual” I mean: “pertaining to man’s consciousness”)—the currency or medium of exchange is different, but the principle is the same. Love, friendship, respect, admiration are the emotional response of one man to the virtues of another, the spiritual payment given in exchange for the personal, selfish pleasure which one man derives from the virtues of another man’s character. Only a brute or an altruist would claim that the appreciation of another person’s virtues is an act of selflessness, that as far as one’s own selfish interest and pleasure are concerned, it makes no difference whether one deals with a genius or a fool, whether one meets a hero or a thug, whether one marries an ideal woman or a slut. In spiritual issues, a trader is a man who does not seek to be loved for his weaknesses or flaws, only for his virtues, and who does not grant his love to the weaknesses or the flaws of others, only to their virtues.” And yet so much of her ethics seems… not precisely wrong, but incomplete.

One difference, I think, is that Rand believes very strongly in objective values related to humans’ nature qua humans, grounded in what it means to survive qua human. She believes that one’s values ought to be objectively worked out from first principles. For me, my sense of my own eudaimonia is… perhaps not an emotion, but certainly a felt sense. It is not precisely what Rand means by ‘whim’: after all, it is quite common for my eudaimonia to be something I don’t particularly want to do in that moment, such as every time I have to wake up when my bed is nice and warm. But it is also not rational, and I am suspicious of the whole “making one’s feelings rational” project. Rand says that it is better to die a free man than live a slave, but she grounds her morality in what is necessary to maintain a human existence. To me, this just seems unprincipled: a slave’s existence is still more human than a corpse’s.

Rand is strongly opposed to what she calls the malevolent universe metaphysics: “The altruist ethics is based on a “malevolent universe” metaphysics, on the theory that man, by his very nature, is helpless and doomed—that success, happiness, achievement are impossible to him—that emergencies, disasters, catastrophes are the norm of his life and that his primary goal is to combat them.” I don’t precisely believe in a malevolent universe, but I certainly don’t believe in a benevolent universe; I believe in a pitilessly neutral universe. And thus I have no problem with the claim that right now we happen to be in a decades-long state of emergency– in which both global poverty exists and we can act to reduce it– and once that problem has been sorted out we can go back to selfishness. Rand, conversely, believes that decades-long emergencies are simply not a thing the universe allows to exist.

But I think the crux of our difference is that I seem to have– an emotion? a drive? something like that– that Rand simply does not. You might call it “lovingkindness” or “compassion” or “pity” or “empathy”. I don’t like it when beings suffer, and I want to make it stop. I have more of this emotion when I am generally otherwise virtuous– when I have more of the rationality and productivity and integrity and justice and honesty and independence and pride that Rand praises– and far less when I am cruel and petty and slothful and weak. It is distinct from what Rand calls “altruism”, which I have felt as well: “The basic principle of altruism is that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value. Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others. These are not primaries, but consequences, which, in fact, altruism makes impossible. The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice—which means; self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction—which means: the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as a standard of the good.” (This quote is from Philosophy: Who Needs It, not The Virtue of Selfishness.)

I think Rand believes that the only reason one would have for wanting to help people you don’t know is a sense of what she calls altruism, and I don’t think that’s true, at least for me. When I am least desirous of self-immolation and self-denial, I am the most concerned about animals and people in developing countries. Indeed, the concept of not having those concerns feels like what-Rand-calls-altruism to me: like cutting out a bit of my soul to offer it up on the altar of someone else’s approval and someone else’s sense of what I must value.

Rand and I agree in the usefulness in making firm moral judgments instead of reserving them; it is important to be able to call good things good and bad things bad. However, I think we have very different ideas of what the correct moral judgments to make are. In nearly all situations, when I am making my best and most objective moral judgment, it tends to be something along the lines of “this person is trying to pursue a good, but their tactics are hopelessly counterproductive and they won’t get the thing they want. It’s sad how people wind up trapping themselves in these awful situations.” Rand, however, seems to generally respond to such situations with “that person is a brute and an altruist and does not have virtues.” I think the former is generally a far more accurate description of situations.

The Virtue of Selfishness contains a very facile criticism of anarchocapitalist thought: “what happens if a person from Defense Company A murders a person from Defense Company B? They might go to war!” Obviously, most defense companies would have contracts covering this sort of eventuality, including perhaps a specific arbitration company they go to. War is expensive and a rational company would not engage in war unless it had to. One might very well expect companies to be less warmongering than governments.

The Communist Manifesto: The Communist Manifesto is funny! I had not expected it to be funny.

I think the first part about the bourgeoisie is mostly correct: cosmopolitanism, conquest through cheap things, subjection of nature to humanity. Unfortunately, Marx seems to have been incorrect about what would happen in the future; the proletariat in the US existed for a brief time but has passed away to be replaced by the service economy. There seems to me to have been a rise in the importance of human capital (e.g. medicine, programming). The gig/sharing/freelancing economy seems really interesting to me from a Marxist perspective: the exploited worker has access to some capital (their car, their laptop, their ability to write articles) and indeed would not be employed if they didn’t, but they’re still exploited. I’d be really interested in reading a good neo-Marxist analysis of all this if anyone has a recommendation.

I have a lot more respect for Marxism, I think, than I do for Leninism; I think one could make a very reasonable case that we’ve tried Leninism and it clearly doesn’t work. But the idea of the vanguard party seems (to my admittedly uninformed mind) to go against a lot of Marxist thought: one notices that there was no vanguard party in the transition from feudalism to capitalism; while the bourgeoisie has its philosophers, they didn’t really take their marching orders from their philosophers, and the philosophers had almost no class analysis. They talked about the Rights of Man– which happened, because of class relations, to be the Rights of Man As Defined By The Bourgeoisie’s Class Interests– but they didn’t actively talk about The Rights of the Bourgeoisie. The idea of a vanguard party seems almost anti-materialist to me. And of course it’s absurdly undemocratic and leads to the authoritarianism of actually existing communist countries.

My favorite part is this bit:

But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the bourgeoisie in chorus.

The bourgeois sees his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women.

He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.

Side Effects and Complications: The Economic Consequences of Health Care Reform: This book has So Much Math. I did not understand all the math that was contained inside this book. It made my head spin and I cannot assess the accuracy of its analysis of the situation.

That said, I did manage to grasp the broad outlines of the argument, and it seems correct. While the ACA does not officially raise very many taxes, its exchange subsidies and employer penalties create a lot of de facto taxes, many of which are poorly implemented and mean that people would earn more money by working less. They can be expected to respond to incentives by doing so, even if they’d rather have worked more and had more money. I don’t know how large the effect is but that sounds like the sort of thing that is probably true.

Philosophy for Dummies: Topher found out that I learned almost everything I know about analytic philosophy from Philosophical Foundations of a Christian Worldview and then in horror bought me this book. I very much question his choice of introduction to analytic philosophy book.

Philosophical Foundations of a Christian Worldview might be (as the title implies) Christian, but at least it treats you like a grownup. Its discussion of epistemology includes words like “foundationalism” and “coherentism” and “Gettier cases”. Philosophy for Dummies’s discussion of epistemology, however, talks about skepticism a little bit and defines “knowledge” as “justified true belief” without once bringing up the many difficulties with this definition. Admittedly, it is an introductory text, but the author had plenty of time to spend on his half-baked self-help theories. Personally, when I read a book entitled “Philosophy for Dummies”, I expect a discussion of what problems analytic philosophers are working on and what their areas of consensus and disagreement are. If I were looking for people’s half-baked self-help theories, I would be reading Tara Brach and Cal Newport, because I already know their advice helps me.

There might be two advantages of Philosophy for Dummies over Philosophical Foundations of a Christian Worldview. First, Philosophy for Dummies might more fairly represent the views it discusses. This is not true; Philosophy for Dummies had a cringeworthy two-page discussion of ethical subjectivism that is best summed up as “sometimes people argue about whether sex before marriage is wrong! CHECKMATE ATHEISTS.” (Well, (a) people argue about all sorts of dumb shit, (b) you can, in fact, argue about whether sex before marriage causes harm, is unfair, is disloyal to your future partner, etc., and that doesn’t mean that subjectivism is wrong about the issue of whether you care about fairness, harm, both, or neither.) Second, Philosophy for Dummies could better reflect philosophical consensus on issues on which there is a philosophical consensus (e.g. the existence of the external world, scientific realism, the nonexistence of God, the existence of a priori knowledge). Unfortunately, the author of Philosophy for Dummies is also a theist and definitely gives the impression that theism is what philosophers agree on. At least ‘Philosophical Foundations of a Christian Worldview’ doesn’t give you the illusion that it’s saying what real philosophers think about things.

[content warning: abuse; the statement that people sometimes do wrong things because they’re abuse victims]

Not The Way It’s Supposed To Be: A Breviary of Sin: Half of this book is an excellent and inspirational exploration of the nature of sin that really captures the Christian mythological viewpoint, although honestly there wasn’t much I hadn’t gotten from C S Lewis or Francis Spufford. The other half of this book is Old Man Yells At Cloud.

Like, come on, dude, saying “I could care less” is understatement and linguistic change, not the sin of sloth. There is no psychological consensus that listening to violent music or watching violent media leads to more violent behavior, it is a little weird to concentrate on rap music without ever once bringing up Brown Sugar, and anyway the rates of violent crime are going down.

The other thing that upset me is that he talked about abuse as an example of hurt people hurting people, which I think is a great thing to do. But he talked about it solely in a context of abuse victims becoming abusers themselves. But while being abused increases your risk of being an abuser yourself, most abuse victims never abuse anyone! I’m not saying that he shouldn’t have brought up cycles of abuse. But there are lots of other kinds of harm people can cause because they’re abused. What about the man who becomes frightened and suspicious and lashes out against innocent women who happen to look like his abuser? What about a person who becomes a heroin addict to cope with their abuse history and winds up stealing thousands of dollars from their closest friends? What about a man who is chronically depressed because he was abused as a child, wasting all his potential in endless days and nights of numbness? Just talking about abuse seems like a very shallow analysis to me.

A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law: help I think I’m a textualist

Scalia believes that the proper role of the court is to interpret the text of the law in the way a reasonable person would, in the context of the rest of the law. He dislikes thinking about the legislators’ intent. Many cases involve things that the legislators couldn’t possibly have an intent about, because they didn’t think of them; if they had thought of them, they would have put them in the law. Paying attention to legislative intent appears to go against the Constitution: the Constitution says that things that legislators vote for are law, even if they are confused about what the law is or never read it, not that their intent is law. He also dislikes activist judges. In his opinion, not only are activist judges an unwarranted usurption of the legislature’s constitutional role by the judiciary, they also go against the point of a government by laws and not men. People should have reasonable expectations about what is and is not against the law, instead of having to guess about the whims of whatever judge is assigned their case. (This is why, incidentally, Scalia also likes precedent, even precedent that he feels goes against the Constitution; precedent makes the courts more consistent.)

The Constitution is interestingly different from most law, because it’s much older. Scalia argues that it should be understood the way a reasonable person would have understood it at the time the Constitution or amendment was ratified. For instance, the First Amendment should be understood to protect the free-speech rights in the Colonies at the time of ratification. To do otherwise, he argues, leaves speech with no protection. At any time, a judge who doesn’t like free speech can decide that “freedom of speech” actually means freedom to say things that aren’t hateful (what is “hateful” is of course decided by the government). It’s true that courts have trended in the definition of more free speech for the past century or so, but there is no law that says that that has to continue. (Indeed, one could make a very good case that the Second Amendment was hollowed out in the same period, eliminating protections the Founders would have considered to be obvious.) If freedom of speech de facto means whatever judges think it means, there’s not much point to having a constitution at all, instead of just letting judges make up whatever they think is a good idea.

I think I do agree with Scalia that the death penalty is not cruel and unusual punishment, because the Constitution makes provision elsewhere that you shouldn’t kill people without due process, and it would be really weird for the Constitution to limit how you can do something that is unconstitutional in the first place.

Bad Outcomes of a Trump Presidency

Tags

american politics is the best reality show, I totally thought I would have to retire this after the election, ozy blog post

[Epistemic status: I know nothing about politics. This post written in the spirit of being wrong loudly.]

Here is my understanding of possible situations in which Trump could be significantly worse than Generic Republican President.

Depicted: generic Republican president.

I think Trump is extremely high variance: I think possible outcomes from his presidency range from “better president than Obama or Hillary Clinton” to “nuclear war”. Needless to say, this is a very safe thing to say as a predictor, because if he turns out to be a great president I can say “look! I said he was high-variance!” and all I have to do is give up I-told-you-so points that won’t matter all that much anyway if we’re scavenging in a nuclear wasteland.

Trump is high variance for a couple of different reasons. First, he has not held any political office; this means that we don’t have any sense of how he governs (whether he will listen to advisors, whether he will try to keep his campaign promises, whether his impulsive behavior will be sobered by the power he holds, etc.). Second, he doesn’t know anything about governing, which increases the likelihood that he will make totally random and ill-informed decisions out of ignorance. Third, over the course of his campaign, he has often been extremely vague about his preferred policies beyond “terrific” and “the best.” He has regularly gone back and forth about what his positions are. When he does express policy positions, they are often more symbolic than literal. That is, “I want to register all the Muslims” may mean “I take the threat of Islamic terrorism seriously”, not “I want to create a large database of every Muslim”. All this makes a bit hard to tell what he will actually do.

That said, I think it’s worth trying to figure out what the most likely worst-case scenarios are so we can plan ahead.

Since I’m comparing Trump to the generic Republican president, I am not including policies where I also expect the generic Republican president to be horrible, such as not allowing refugees into the country.

There are several things that people are worried about that I am explicitly not worried about. For instance, Trump is relatively pro-LGBT for a Republican (his Ballotpedia entry has a pretty good overview). While Pence is fairly anti-LGBT, I would view Pence being able to pass anti-gay policies as a positive sign, because it would suggest that Pence has actual power and Pence is way lower-variance than Trump. While anti-LGBT laws are awful, we’re only like four percent of the population, and I would much rather have federally funded conversion therapy than a trade war, which hurts everyone, queer and not queer. (In the long run, of course, Supreme Court justices have effects; we can only hope that Pence will follow in Eisenhower’s footsteps and accidentally nominate Earl Warren.)

I do not care about the president’s personal virtue. I do not think it is particularly important for my assessment of his presidency that Trump has committed repeated sexual assaults; Bill Clinton is a rapist, but I think he did a decent job as president. I also am uninterested in questions about Trump’s personal feelings of racism. I don’t think it would be a whole lot of comfort to a Latino deported from the only country he’s ever known that Trump harbors no personal feelings of animosity to him in his heart.

So here are the scenarios I can think of for Trump being a really bad president:

Trump is incompetent at his job. Several aspects of being president are very complicated and tend to break a lot of things if you do a bad job at them. I’m thinking in particular of international relations and macroeconomics. Macroeconomic policy is fairly complicated and has a large effect on people’s wealth and quality of life. In addition to mismanagement due to incompetence, Trump might mismanage the economy for his short-term political benefit at the expense of long-term fiscal health.

My understanding of diplomacy is that it is extremely important to be predictable and to send clear messages to avoid misunderstandings that could lead to wars; Trump neither has political experience in which he has developed these skills nor has he shown a great ability to be predictable and a clear communicator on the campaign trail. I also worry about Trump being rash and easily offended, which leads to him escalating tense situations. This is where Trump’s largest chance of being an existential risk comes from, I think.

Positive signs: Trump appoints to his cabinet competent people who are not sycophants, preferably including at least one #NeverTrumper; Trump appoints qualified people to the Fed; over his first year in office, Trump has a cool-headed and moderate foreign policy.

(This, incidentally, is why I do not think we should nominate Oprah, or Kanye, or Bruce Springsteen, or the Rock, or any other celebrity. An unqualified Democrat is as much of an existential risk as an unqualified Republican.)

Trump has bad policies. My primary concerns are about immigration, climate change, prisons, and trade.

I think it would be bad if he made a serious attempt to deport a large percentage of undocumented immigrants. Given that undocumented immigrants are three percent of the US population, I’m not sure that deporting more than a small minority of them could be done without serious human rights violations. I also think it would be bad to sharply reduce the number of immigrants the US takes in, because immigration benefits migrants a lot.

I am worried about Trump ending trade deals which benefit people in developing countries. I am particularly worried about Trump’s anti-trade stances and poor diplomacy skills precipitating a trade war, because trade wars hurt everyone but particularly the poorest, and this would lead to an increase in international tension that may lead to a real war.

The United States has about a fifth of the world’s prisoners, which makes our prison policy unusually important. Trump has nominated Senator Jeff Sessions as Attorney General. Senator Sessions was one of only a handful of senators who voted against an amendment banning torture of prisoners; while that amendment applied primarily to the Department of Defense, I think it speaks to his respect for the humanity of people who might have done something wrong. He is also well-known for being against marijuana use, going so far as to say last April that good people do not smoke marijuana. I am afraid that Senator Sessions will not pay an adequate amount of attention to the human rights of prisoners and drug users, that he will expand the drug war, and that he may seek to imprison consumers of legal marijuana.

I am also concerned about Trump radically cutting back or even eliminating US policy that is intended to prevent or reduce the harm of climate change, because climate change is predicted to kill lots of people, especially the global poor.

Sessions was a bit of a surprise to me, so I am also worried about Trump choosing other advisors that have remarkably awful positions on important issues.

Positive signs: Trump shows a willingness to break campaign promises; Trump implements some of his campaign promises in a less extreme form (e.g. expanding the border fence somewhat and then claiming that’s a “wall”); Trump appears to focus on relatively innocuous policy positions (e.g. building a lot of infrastructure and naming it after himself); Sessions is not appointed Attorney General; the rest of Trump’s cabinet is non-awful.

Trump is an autocrat. This is the “Trump as Juan Peron” theory, as written about eloquently in this article. In this scenario, Trump causes a good deal of harm to America’s institutions. We might expect jailing of political opponents, punishment of protestors, firing of advisors who disagree with him, disrespect of the free press, and general silencing of dissent. He might be unlikely to give up power once his two turns are up and continue to rule through proxies. An autocratic Trump administration would also likely have batshit economic policy, because autocrats usually do. The autocrat scenario leads to a good deal of harm to America’s institutions, possibly leading to the fall of America as a great power.

Even if Trump’s autocracy is successfully contained by the strength of America’s institutions– for instance, if he tries to interfere with the freedom of the press, but the Supreme Court slaps him down– he may inspire authoritarian and autocratic movements in other countries.

Positive signs: A year into his presidency, Trump continues to be no more prone to jailing political opponents or punishing protestors than the average American president (note that early positive signs may simply be Trump biding his time); early attempts to gain power are met with strong opposition from Republicans.

On the Presidential Election

Tags

american politics is the best reality show, ozy blog post

There are three questions which I don’t think that people are sufficiently distinguishing between, and I think distinguishing between them will make discourse about the election much clearer. They are:

• What are the characteristics of Trump’s base, his most fervent supporters?
• What are the characteristics of the average Trump voter?
• What are the characteristics of the people who pushed Trump over the edge, the ones that caused him to win?

I’m not sure anyone really knows the answer to #3 yet. I expect in a couple months Nate Silver will write a blog post about it and then I will have the answer. However, I think that it’s unlikely that #3 will provide any earth-shaking revelations for the average political junkie, as opposed to advice like “try to choose candidates people like” and “campaign in Wisconsin.”

Either way, the outcome of this election is embarrassing to both Republicans and Democrats. For Republicans, in an election in which they had every structural advantage, they barely eked out a win against a woman who’s been the right-wing Public Enemy #1 for twenty-five years. For Democrats, they lost to Donald Trump.

As for #2: the average Trump voter is the same as the average Republican voter in any other election. Given Trump’s record unfavorables, they probably weren’t super-enthusiastic about Trump (any more than people on the Democrat side were, as a whole, super-enthusiastic about Hillary). However, they probably didn’t want to waste their vote on a third party. Trump had some good policies, and probably the Republican elite will be able to help him in spite of his incompetence. And they despise Hillary; many Republicans would vote for a paper-bag puppet over Hillary Clinton. So they held their noses and voted for the lesser of two evils.

(A post I can’t find told Democrats to imagine choosing between Kanye West and Dick Cheney, which I think is accurate. [ETA: it’s here, thanks Amelia and Linch.])

With regards to how they could vote for Trump in spite of his repeated sexual assaults: think about your support for Bill Clinton. There you go. That isn’t even hard to understand.

With regards to #1: I believe that the evidence suggests that Trump’s base is motivated by ethnocentrism and white identity politics.

I think it is a problem that Republican voters who care about white identity politics seem willing to elect incompetent people. While identity politics also plays a role in the Democratic nominating process, at least identity-politics-motivated voters on the left seem to favor qualified centrists with a slight penchant for war crimes. I do not know how to get identity-politics-motivated voters on the right to share this preference; I think this is mostly a project for moderate Republicans, because I’m pretty sure Trump’s base is not going to listen to me.

I believe that reducing ethnocentrism is a good idea in general, but I’m not sure how tractable it is, particularly in the next four years. I suspect one possible strategy might be for centrist Republicans to play more explicitly to white identity politics while overall having fairly moderate views, in the same way that Obama played to black identity politics while overall having fairly moderate views. As long as we have white identity politics– which, again, I’m not sure how easy it is to eliminate in general, much less within one presidential term– it’s important to reduce the harm it might cause.

While Trump’s base is fairly upset about anti-racist and feminist activism, I do not think that changing anti-racist and feminist activism is necessarily a good way to get Trump voters not to vote for Trump. I think that Trump’s base’s primary objection to people like me is not to our tone but to our beliefs. No matter how politely we respectively speak, Trump voters object to the presence of large numbers of immigrants, and I object to people deporting my friends, sometimes to places where they’re in danger. These are incompatible goals, and they are likely to be quite angry at me about them (as well as I at them).

Don’t Mourn, Organize

Tags

american politics is the best reality show, effective altruism, not like other ideologies, ozy blog post

[See also: Don’t Panic, Think.]

I.

“Yes, that’s so,” said Sam. “And we shouldn’t be here at all, if we’d known more about it before we started. But I suppose it’s often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually – their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t. And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on – and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know, coming home, and finding things all right, though not quite the same – like old Mr Bilbo. But those aren’t always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in! I wonder what sort of a tale we’ve fallen into?”

“I wonder,’ said Frodo. “But I don’t know. And that’s the way of a real tale. Take any one that you’re fond of. You may know, or guess, what kind of a tale it is, happy-ending or sad-ending, but the people in it don’t know. And you don’t want them to.”

“No, sir, of course not. Beren now, he never thought he was going to get that Silmaril from the Iron Crown in Thangorodrim, and yet he did, and that was a worse place and a blacker danger than ours. But that’s a long tale, of course, and goes on past the happiness and into grief and beyond it – and the Silmaril went on and came to Eärendil. And why, sir, I never thought of that before! We’ve got – you’ve got some of the light of it in that star-glass that the Lady gave you! Why, to think of it, we’re in the same tale still! It’s going on. Don’t the great tales never end?”

“No, they never end as tales,” said Frodo. “But the people in them come, and go when their part’s ended. Our part will end later – or sooner.”

“And then we can have some rest and some sleep,” said Sam. He laughed grimly. “And I mean just that, Mr. Frodo. I mean plain ordinary rest, and sleep, and waking up to a morning’s work in the garden. I’m afraid that’s all I’m hoping for all the time. All the big important plans are not for my sort. Still, I wonder if we shall ever be put into songs or tales. We’re in one, or course; but I mean: put into words, you know, told by the fireside, or read out of a great big book with red and black letters, years and years afterwards. And people will say: ‘Let’s hear about Frodo and the Ring!’ And they’ll say: ‘Yes, that’s one of my favourite stories. Frodo was very brave. wasn’t he, dad?’ ‘Yes, my boy, the famousest of the hobbits, and that’s saying a lot.'”

“It’s saying a lot too much,” said Frodo, and he laughed, a long clear laugh from his heart. Such a sound had not been heard in those places since Sauron came to Middle-earth. To Sam suddenly it seemed as if all the stones were listening and the tall rocks leaning over them. But Frodo did not heed them; he laughed again. “Why, Sam,” he said, “to hear you somehow makes me as merry as if the story was already written. But you’ve left out one of the chief characters: Samwise the stouthearted. ‘I want to hear more about Sam, dad. Why didn’t they put in more of his talk, dad? That’s what I like, it makes me laugh. And Frodo wouldn’t have got far without Sam, would he, dad?'”

“Now, Mr. Frodo,” said Sam, “you shouldn’t make fun. I was serious.”

“So was I,’ said Frodo, ‘and so I am. We’re going on a bit too fast. You and I, Sam, are still stuck in the worst places of the story, and it is all too likely that some will say at this point: ‘Shut the book now, dad; we don’t want to read any more.'”

“Maybe,” said Sam, “but I wouldn’t be one to say that. Things done and over and made into part of the great tales are different. Why, even Gollum might be good in a tale, better than he is to have by you, anyway. And he used to like tales himself once, by his own account. I wonder if he thinks he’s the hero or the villain?”

II.

I hold to certain values, those shared perhaps by the majority of my readership. I am a utilitarian, in the John Stuart Mill mode. I care as much about a stranger who lives in Africa or who has darker skin than mine as I do about a pasty-white stranger who lives in my hometown. I believe in science, in rationality, in the pursuit of truth. I support the rights of people to speak and think freely, to decide what to do with their own bodies, and to live their lives as they please without busybodies sticking their noses in. I value positive-sum interactions, as exemplified through the positive-sum interaction of trade. I desire the happiness and flourishing of all sentient beings.

Yesterday, the US people elected a president who is the repudiation of many of my most closely held values. A man with an ethnocentric view of the world, who leaves refugees to die and will not protect our allies unless they make it worth our while. A man with a poor understanding of scientific issues and an astonishing history of lying to the public. A man whose policies violate the First, Fourth, Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments. A rent-seeker who earned his money through his skill at manipulating state force in zero-sum games, and who views a good deal as one where you’re crushing your trade partner to the ground and grinding every last dollar you can from their corpse, as opposed to one in which all parties benefit. Far than contributing to the happiness and flourishing of all beings, he runs an uncomfortably high risk of eliminating humanity– and thus nearly all good or value in the universe.

But if you share my values, remember: we are still winning.

Between 1990 and 2010, nearly a billion people were taken out of extreme poverty; the aim of halving global poverty by 2015 was reached five years early. The global average lifespan has more than doubled in the past century, rising from 32 in 1900 to over 70 today. We have not had a great-power war in seventy years. Catholics and Protestants live next to each other peacefully in much of the globe, when for hundreds of years they enthusiastically murdered each other whenever they got the chance. It appears we will continue our streak of twenty-nine peaceful changes of leadership, something that was unimaginable for most of history. The people who are calling Trump a Nazi need not fear execution or imprisonment for insulting their leader.

Famine is going through its death throes. We have shown it is possible to win against Pestilence, and not merely reduce harm. War is at bay, although the tide may turn any minute. Perhaps soon we shall turn and gird ourselves to face the greatest enemy… after all, in strange aeons, even Death may die.

We eked out victories even in this election. Four more states have legalized marijuana, and the majority of US states have legalized medical marijuana. The condescending and whorephobic Proposition 60 failed. Massachusetts has banned the sale of animal products from animals without enough room to move around, even from out of state. Small victories, to be sure; in some places, we just hold the line; but we must be grateful for the good as well.

I do not mean to say that we will win. An atheist does not have that sort of comfort; there is no rule, no law, that says that good things have to happen. The world is a place of absolute and exceptionless neutrality. If you fall off a cliff, you die, regardless of whether it is good or just or right or narratively satisfying. Good men die screaming and evil men live till eighty, surrounded by friends and family, their bellies full and their hearts at ease.

In particular, in spite of our many victories, there is still the one great failure: the strength we have acquired that allows us to heal the sick and feed the hungry has also given us the ability to destroy ourselves, through climate change, environmental damage, nuclear war, or risks from newly invented technology. The most grave aspect of President Trump’s election is that, compared to Hillary, he increases the risk that we will destroy ourselves before we ever visit the stars.

And yet… the victories do not go away when we have a setback. The billion people who have been fed and clothed are still fed and clothed; the decades of life– precious exquisite tragic beautiful life– that have been lived were lived; the few people on a few small parts of the globe who tasted freedom still tasted it, and it is sweet.

III.

Make America Great Again.

An odd slogan, from my perspective.

One does wonder what on Earth Trump thought was great about America in the first place. If you don’t like that we’re a nation of immigrants, and you don’t like our freedoms, what is it you think made America great? Fireworks? Bald eagles? Tiny American flags?

America was founded with the statement that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This statement was written by a man who owned, assaulted, and raped human beings. I think this pretty much sums up America.

American’s origins lie in the genocide of one people and the enslavement of another. We created some very nice-sounding amendments protecting people’s freedoms, and promptly ignored all of them (except, to be fair, the Third). We are a nation of high ideals unfulfilled.

And yet… in the slowest, most switchbacky way possible, we are fulfilling them. We fought the Civil War to end slavery. We faced down dogs and firehoses for civil rights. We fought court cases to let Nazis march through Skokie, to let students protest war in schools, to grant poor people the right to a public defender, to protect women’s rights to use contraception.

Make America great again? No. America was never great, and is always great; we are not great, because of how we have failed, and we are always great, because for nearly two hundred and fifty years we have been trying to fail better.

I fear that Donald Trump does not hold to our ideals (so long cherished, so often betrayed) and, as such, is a traitor to the America I hold dear.

IV.

The normal way for moral issues to go is that they are very confusing, and you never know what side you should be on, and you’re powerless to do much of anything about it one way or the other anyway.

But there are some situations where that no longer holds, where moral issues become clear. Where the questions are more about strength, courage, the ability to put aside. The Holocaust, the AIDS crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Some people sheltered Jews from the Nazis at the risk of their own lives; others operated death camps. Some people took care of the dying at a time when they could do nothing and when they might have risked contracting the disease themselves, because it was wrong to allow people to die alone; others yell homophobic slurs at sick children. Some people risked nuclear war for the sake of national pride; Vasili Arkhipov saved us all.

I fear that Trump’s presidency will create a similar situation.

(Trump is an extraordinarily high-variance president. My range of possible outcomes for President Trump include everything from “better than Hillary Clinton would have been” to “human extinction via nuclear war.” I very much hope that he will turn out to be closer to the former than to the latter, and that in retrospect this entire blog post will seem unbearably melodramatic.)

The thing is that you can’t tell who’s going to rise above in a crisis like that. Oskar Schindler was a Nazi spy. C Everett Koop, who fought the Reagan administration to be able to educate the public about HIV, was a deeply conservative evangelical Christian who believed that gays were sinners. Larry Kramer, the founder of ACT UP, is a complete asshole who doesn’t even manage to come off well in his own roman a clef about the AIDS crisis which he wrote.

And at the same time… Ronald Reagan was, by all accounts, a kind-hearted and genuine man and loving father. He also let thousands of people die for his political gain. Being a nice person does not stop you from doing evil.

This scares me. I try to generally be a kind, thoughtful person who would never spy for Nazis, and it is terrifying that this is in no way a protective factor whatsoever.

I hope that if any person who reads this is put to the test, they will make the right choice.

V.

Take care of yourself. You cannot help anyone if you are depressed or burned out. You matter as much as anyone else does, and probably quite a lot more to yourself.

I have been seeing a lot of strategizing about how our plans should change given a Trump presidency. Right now, the most important thing is thoughtful, rational, non-hysterical discussion about how to reduce the downside risk of Trump’s presidency, including both personal and political actions. I don’t want to put down any firm ideas yet about what we should do– I feel we are very much still in a brainstorming stage– but I appreciate the discussion that has happened so far and encourage people– particularly subject-area experts– to discuss it more.

We are not powerless. We do not have to watch as horrible things happen to our country. If there is one thing I have learned it is that as a person in the developed world, with all the wealth and power that implies, I have tremendous opportunities to do good. We don’t know what the right thing to do is yet, but we will find it. There are things you can do.

Several people I know have chosen to withdraw from political engagement and refocus on their own friendships, communities, and cause areas. I think this is a fine and honorable course. Trump doesn’t change everything; the courses of action that were good on November 7th continue to be good on the 9th. In particular, I think having strong communities that are a good source of support is going to be really important for getting the best outcomes in a whole host of different tail-risk situations. If, for you, politics is stressful and not the right choice, please do not feel obligated to be involved.

V.

Despair is the enemy.

If we fail, everyone in the world will die, either slowly or all at once. If we succeed, a slow and asymptotic approach to utopia.

(Or a fast and sudden approach to utopia, for you FAI fans out there.)

We are, perhaps, more likely than not to fail. Our chances are, perhaps, worse today than they were when we woke up yesterday morning with Clinton in a comfortable lead.

But we must not despair. If we despair, we lose the chance we had.

Take comfort in the grim, exceptionless neutrality of the universe. It does not say that we must win. But it also does not say that we must lose.

Language Policing: Gaslighting

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abuse tw, american politics is the best reality show, language

I recently saw someone characterize Mike Pence lying about what Trump said as an attempt at a “mass public gaslighting,” which I think is the final lump of dirt thrown into the grave of the good and useful word ‘gaslighting’, which used to describe a specific form of abuse and is now apparently a synonym for “lying” or “disagreeing”.

First of all, gaslighting is about observable, physical facts. Here is an example of things that could be gaslighting: “no, I never hit you”; “we didn’t go to that restaurant yesterday”; “you think that painting is blue? no, it is definitely purple”; “don’t be ridiculous, you never went to Yale, you went to Harvard”; “that table has always been there”; “two plus two is five”. Here is an example of things that are not gaslighting: “white privilege doesn’t exist”; “as a man, you can’t experience sexism”; “the minimum wage increases unemployment”; “I think that argument was your fault”; “you are lazy and entitled.” You can’t take a video of laziness and entitlement or of white privilege; these are abstractions used to explain a particular situation. You can, however, take a video of someone hitting someone else; those are observable facts.

To pick another example: if someone says “you’re a man, therefore your experience of being forced into sex while you said ‘no’ isn’t rape”, they’re not gaslighting, they’re just being an awful rape apologist fuckwit. If someone who was not present says “you didn’t say ‘no'”, they may be mistaken (perhaps they believe the rapist). If someone says “I was there while you were being raped and you didn’t say ‘no'”, they are gaslighting.

Second, gaslighting is a pattern. If you think that the painting is blue and I think it is purple, there are lots of possible explanations. Maybe it’s a weird color that’s kind of blue and kind of purple depending on the light. Maybe one of us is colorblind. If I think that we went to the restaurant on Tuesday and you think that we went to the restaurant on Wednesday, probably one of us has a shitty memory. Now, if every time I think that something is blue you think it is purple and every time we go to a restaurant we disagree about when it is, we might have an issue.

Not only is gaslighting repeated, but it also doesn’t involve an alternate explanation. If I’m colorblind, you and I may disagree a lot about what color the painting is, but this also isn’t gaslighting, because I know perfectly well why we disagree. It’s because I’m colorblind. If we both have terrible memories, we will probably go “eh, who knows when we went to the restaurant.” It is only when the conversation repeatedly descends to “you are insane and incapable of determining when you went to the place” that it is gaslighting.

I don’t want to go hardcore “all gaslighting is intentional,” because that sounds like I’m saying “all gaslighting is a deliberate attempt to make someone think they’re crazy.” While that does happen, sometimes gaslighting is “I don’t want to take responsibility for my actions so I will deny them in face of all evidence” or “I am in total denial of my shit memory and therefore assume that it must all be your fault.” But it is nonetheless true that gaslighting is not really a thing reasonable people do.

Third, gaslighting is taking advantage of a position of trust. For instance, you might trust your parents, your friends, and your partners. If some random stranger comes up to you and whacks you in the face and then says “I didn’t hit you, you imagined that”, your thought process is probably going to be something like “crazy fucker, I should call the cops.” If your parent comes up to you and whacks you in the face and then two days later when you confront them about it they say “I didn’t hit you, you imagined that”, your thought process is probably going to be something like “wait, did I imagine that? Was that a dream or something? I couldn’t have been making it up… I remember it! Maybe it was a hallucination? What’s going on?” Repeated over a long enough period of time, it can cause you to doubt your perceptions of reality.

(This, incidentally, is why gaslighting is much more dangerous for crazy people than for sane people. Many crazy people rely on their friends, family, partners, and caregivers for reality checking on everything from “does everyone secretly hate me?” to “is there an enormous monster in the corner of the room?” If someone is in a position of that much trust, they can abuse their power, and since the crazy person’s perceptions are much more unreliable, it’s that much harder to catch.)

This is why Mike Pence is not gaslighting anyone. He is a politician. Most people above the age of six do not rely on politicians to be accurate reporters of empirical facts. Indeed, many people expect them to lie as much as they can get away with. If a politician telling a lie causes you to distrust your perceptions of reality, that is probably more about you than about the politician.

Thing of Things Ballot Endorsements

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american politics is the best reality show, ozy blog post

[Note: I live in East Palo Alto, California, and therefore large sections of this post may be of limited interest to people who live elsewhere.]

President: Hillary Clinton

I removed myself from social media for a month, which meant that I was sheltered from the hordes of people informing me that if I consider voting third party then I am a whiny entitled misogynistic bernie bro who needs to grow up and stop wanting “candidates” who “reflect my viewpoints” and who is single-handedly responsible for the rise of fascism in the United States. This significantly improved my willingness to vote for Hillary Clinton. I think that Hillary will probably be Obama But More Hawkish and thus successfully manage to avoid destroying anything important. Given the Clinton Foundation I am cautiously optimistic about her stance on foreign aid; I am also cautiously optimistic about her on free trade and immigration.

I continue to like and respect Gary Johnson, and in the event he ever wins the Republican nomination I would be happy to cast my vote for him.

(Important Note For Hillary Supporters: if you are planning to leave a condescending and patronizing comment about my previous desire to vote third party, please consider that this will only make me less likely to vote for your preferred candidate.)

United States Senator: Loretta Sanchez

Kamala Harris and Loretta Sanchez are indistinguishable on the issues. However, Kamala Harris recently orchestrated the arrest of the CEO of Backpage.com on pimping charges. This ridiculous arrest will only make life harder for sex workers. Spite-voting for Loretta Sanchez is a great comfort to me given my previous vote for Hillary Clinton.

United States Representative: Jackie Speier

My husband looked into Speier’s record and characterized her as “mostly alright” and I’m relying on him here.

State Senator: Jerry Hill

Rick Ciardella is opposed to early release of prisoners and wants to build more prisons instead, so fuck him.

Member of the State Assembly: Marc Berman

Marc Berman has a moderate but solid position on the housing crisis. While I’d support a stronger pro-housing candidate, I think “mostly votes with the pro-growth people” is the best we’re going to get.

Judge of the Superior Court, Office No.7: Write-In

Judicial elections are often absurdly uncompetitive, particularly those– like this one– in which the candidate is running unopposed. So it doesn’t really matter whom you vote for, but I’m doing my part to make the election a little bit more competitive by not voting for the only guy running. I wrote in Ken White of Popehat.

City of East Palo Alto City Council Members: Everyone except Duane Goff

You get three votes for the City of East Palo Alto City Council, and there are four people running. Duane Goff feels that the tech industry has been “counterproductive to the [East Palo Alto] community” and that the solution for affordable housing is better eviction protection and rent control instead of, you know, building more housing. I suggest not voting for the guy who thinks you’re counterproductive.

San Mateo County Harbor District: The people that the Democrats endorsed.

You can get the endorsement list here. I have no strong opinions about harbors. I appreciate that the candidates for the harbor district in their voters’ guide essays included actual positions on actual issues instead of just applause lights about East Palo Alto, but I really have no strong opinions about harbors. Ed Larenas is a biologist? I am broadly in favor of biologists doing things about harbors.

[Note: I highly recommend ballot.fyi for researching California ballot propositions]

Prop 51: No.

Governor Brown’s alternative proposals seem to make sense to me: he wants to give more local control to school districts and keep the state’s role in school construction to helping out the neediest schools. I’m broadly in favor of local control of school districts and against giveaways to rich people.

Prop 52: Yes.

The lopsidedness in the support of Prop 52, a bill which uses some complicated accounting to get more money from the federal government for MediCal patients, is absurd. Both the Republican and Democratic parties endorse it, and its primary opponent recently decided it was now neutral on it. The primary problem that Prop 52 has with passing is that people don’t understand it. Far be it from me to go against bipartisan agreement.

Prop 53: No.

Requires statewide voter approval of revenue bonds. I understand that this measure would lead to the existence of fewer trains. Thing of Things is a pro-train blog and therefore is against this proposition.

Prop 54: No.

The legislature will only pass bills published on the Internet for 72 hours before the vote. On one hand, more accountability, yay! On the other hand, more time for lobbying, boo! I’m honestly torn on this one but voted ‘no’ because I generally vote ‘no’ on things if I’m confused about them.

Prop 55: No.

I don’t think it’s a good idea to reserve tax money for schools; all that does is give the legislature less wiggle room when it’s deciding what services to cut and what to keep. The California tax system is wildly fucked up and adding another layer of ridiculousness to it will not improve the situation. This made sense as an emergency measure when we feared school closings, but right now is not the time to extend it.

Prop 56: No.

Cigarette taxes are a great idea, but Prop 56 also taxes ecigs, which are significantly less dangerous than cigarettes. This offers no incentive for smokers to reduce harm by switching to less-dangerous ecigs and places an unfair burden on poor people who are addicted to nicotine. Given how complicated the proposition process is, it’s not very likely that we’d be able to improve the law any time soon. Hopefully a better proposition will come along soon.

Prop 57: No.

It seems really unclear to me what this proposition does, and given how hard propositions are to repeal I am generally against unclear propositions.

Prop 58: Yes.

Mostly repeals Prop 227, a previous bad proposition which mandates English-only classrooms, and instead allows communities to decide the best way to teach native Spanish speakers. IMO, you should vote ‘yes’ on this one even if you’re generally nervous about propositions, since what it does primarily is repeal a previous bad proposition.

Prop 59: No.

I agree with the ACLU that Citizens United was decided correctly and “should people be able to advertise their documentary about a presidential candidate before a presidential election?” is not actually a remotely difficult free-speech question.

Prop 60: No.

Prop 60, which requires condom use in porn, condescendingly assumes that porn stars can’t make their own cost/benefit analyses about their own sexual safety. Even if a married, monogamous couple films and distributes porn from their own home, they would be punished for not using condoms. HIV testing of porn stars is a very successful method of controlling HIV transmission: CAL/OSHA has not confirmed a single case of on-set HIV transmission in California in more than a decade. This ridiculous law– opposed by the vast majority of porn stars– is a clear no.

Prop 61: No.

Prop 61, requiring state agencies to pay no more than what the Veterans’ Administration pays for drugs, is a complicated law which might lower drug prices? Or raise them? No one knows? This is exactly the sort of complicated bill that shouldn’t be done through the hard-to-repeal proposition system. Also, the same guy who’s the big force behind Prop 60, Michael Weinstein, is a major supporter of Prop 61, and to be honest I don’t trust him.

Prop 62: Yes. 

Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.

Prop 63: No.

We don’t know a lot about gun policy in the United States (mostly because the NRA has pushed to prevent the CDC from researching gun deaths). For this reason, I am inclined to be against this proposition, both because I don’t want to vote for propositions I’m not certain of, and because in the absence of clear evidence I want to err on the side of protecting people’s constitutional right to gun ownership.

Prop 64: Yes.

Marijuana causes relatively little harm to oneself and others, while alcohol is the single most dangerous drug consumed. To the extent that marijuana legalization causes people to smoke pot instead of getting drunk, it will cause a tremendous improvement in the quality of life of both users and non-users. Plus, the drug war has failed and legalization/decriminalization are the best way to end it.

Prop 65: No.

Prop 65 is apparently a product of Shenanigans by an industry group representing plastic bag manufacturers, in the hopes they will confuse the public (which supports plastic bag bans) into accidentally not having a plastic bag ban. I don’t approve of people creating measures for the purpose of confusing voters, and so I am voting ‘no’ on this as a fuck you.

Prop 66: No. 

This law will speed up executions, which is exactly the opposite of what I want; I want to make them expensive enough and time-consuming enough that eventually the legislature gives up and ends the death penalty.

Prop 67: No.

Plastic bags are not necessarily worse than paper. I rarely support banning things to begin with, and never when the thing you’re trying to ban isn’t necessarily that bad.

Measure K: Yes.

“We’re going to prevent human trafficking!” is one of those sentences that makes me worry it actually means “we’re going to harass sex workers who are just trying to do their jobs!” Nevertheless, we need to lower housing prices, and Measure K will also go to fund groups like HIP Housing which reduce the harm of housing crises.

Measure J: No.

Economists everywhere say “no” to rent control.

Measure O: No.

If you tax something, you will generally get less of it. Therefore, if we tax landlords that have more than five tenants, we will get… that’s right… fewer landlords with more than five tenants. I don’t know why, given the housing crisis, anyone thought this was a good idea.

Measure P: Yes.

I approve of better drinking water and storm drains. I’m leery about increased police patrols, but not 100% against it– it all depends on how it’s implemented– so that doesn’t outweigh the benefit of better drinking water.

Thoughts About Strategic Voting

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american politics is the best reality show, ozy blog post

[epistemic status: do I look like I know anything about game theory?]

This blog post will be assuming you like Gary Johnson. If you prefer Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, the strategic voting implications are not particularly interesting. Conversely, if you prefer Jill Stein, my argument has nothing to do with strategic voting but is instead merely pointing out that the only elected office Jill Stein has ever held is Town of Lexington Town Meeting Representative.

As best as I can tell, the major argument people provide about why I, a dove who strongly opposes the drug war, should vote for Clinton is that Trump is even worse. While I might want to vote my conscience in general, in this case the consequences of Trump becoming president are so awful that I have to hold my nose and vote for Clinton. This argument would, admittedly, be a lot more plausible if Democrats were not The Boy Who Cried Hitler. While I agree with the claim that Trump is exceptionally bad, I am suspicious when this claim is also trotted out about McCain, Romney, and other establishment Republicans who have more qualifications for office than being the star of a bad reality TV show and who could be trusted to leave the country not substantially worse than how they found it.

But my fundamental objection is that this is also an exceptional year for third-party candidates! Gary Johnson is consistently polling about four times as well as he did in 2012. Trump and Clinton have record-breaking unfavorables, implying that a lot of people would be willing to jump ship to Johnson. If Johnson breaks 15%– which seems distinctly possible– he’ll be on stage at the debates, which third-party candidates essentially never get to do. And Johnson may very well pick up a state: perhaps his home state of New Mexico, or Utah, which absolutely despises Trump.

If Johnson is successful, there are two desirable outcomes for libertarians. First, it’s possible that no one will pick up 50% of the vote, in which case it will go to the House. The GOP establishment has reluctantly thrown itself behind Trump, but they still don’t like him. Facing a choice between Trump, a racist know-nothing with no governing history and a wavering commitment to conservative ideals, and Gary Johnson, a competent former governor with strong conservative principles, they might pick Johnson, and we have a libertarian president. Second, in the event that Trump causes the Republican Party to implode, Gary Johnson’s success would leave the Libertarian Party in a good place to pick up the pieces in 2020, nudging US politics in a more libertarian-ward direction. (This could happen either in the form of the Republican Party reformulating itself as more libertarian, or in the form of the Libertarian Party picking up Republican voters.)

In short, this is a unique election because voting third-party isn’t necessarily throwing away your vote.

So here are my general recommendations:

1. If you like Johnson, say you’re voting for him to pollsters, even if you’re considering voting for Clinton instead. Getting Johnson to the polls is a complete win for libertarians: having him at the debates raises awareness of libertarian ideas, and means that there are at least two grown-ups on the debate floor.
2. If you’re in a state where Johnson is polling extremely well such that there is a chance that Johnson might win, vote Johnson.
3. If you’re in a swing state where Trump and Clinton are neck-and-neck, vote Clinton.
4. I would recommend consulting Fivethirtyeight in the days before the election to figure out which of those groups you’re in; pay attention to polls, not pundits.
5. If your state is solidly Trump or solidly Clinton, vote your conscience. But BE SURE TO VOTE DOWN-TICKET. Look up your local and state elections and have an informed opinion! Your vote counts much more in state or local elections than it does in presidential elections. In particular, in the SF Bay Area, I would suggest being a single-issue voter on the issue of building more fucking housing.