1. Interfering with the use of physical infrastructure.
2. Vandalism.
3. Teachers preaching their pet ideologies to a captive audience at taxpayer expense.
Things lefties do not think should be protected speech:
This article has a chart summarizing changes in police funding for major cities from 2019 to 2022. There's no indication that this is adjusted for inflation. About half of the cities increased funding less than 10% over those three years, while cumulative inflation was about 15%. For several cities, including Seattle, New York, and Washington DC, funding was down more than 2% in nominal terms.
Granted, this isn't the dramatic defunding that the crime-positive left wanted, but real, and even nominal, funding does appear to be down in many major cities.
"But they have also always been perfectly capable, and deserving, of remaining employed and contributing productively to society irrespective of the views they hold."
The problem with this is that many people's views include a belief that they have a moral imperative to act on their other views at the expense of doing their jobs. We saw this, e.g., with the NYT meltdown over the Tom Cotton op-ed.
I don't think the impact of deaths really scales like that. Yeah, it's the same percentage of the population, but 0.015% (actually, how are you getting 100k? Wouldn't it be 40k?) is a small enough share of the population that it doesn't significantly weaken Israel strategically or economically, nor is it a large enough percentage of the population that a significant share of voters will have lost a close family member or close friend.
The absolute number of deaths matters, and when the percentage of population killed is so small, I think the absolute number matters much more than the percentage. So I'd say this is a lot more like 1400 Americans being killed than like 100k or even 40k Americans being killed.
It was to refute the notion that moving to single payer would kill off the profit motive for R&D of the kind that gave us Ozempic.
If you're just going to assert conclusions that clearly don't follow from the evidence you present, why not go big? Say you linked the paper to demonstrate a cure for all cancer or prove that P = NP or something.
In the US (and in all countries, AFAIK), scientific discoveries cannot be patented. As a result, there is limited incentive for private investment in basic scientific research, i.e. the discovery of facts about the natural world. For various reasons private companies do engage in this to some degree, but not as much as we would like.
Now, we could change the law to allow patenting of scientific discoveries, so that if you discover that some protein in the human body is involved in a disease process, you get the exclusive right to develop therapies based on that discovery for the next 20 years. This is probably a bad idea, because it greatly reduces the incentive for other companies to research therapies based on that discovery.
So we end up with a system where the government funds basic scientific research, and then anybody who wants to can try to develop therapies based on the discoveries yielded by this research.
Note, from the paper you linked:
Funding from the NIH totaled $187 billion; $31 billion (17%) represented applied research on approved drugs, and $156 billion (83%) represented basic research on drug targets.
That's actually more spending on applied research than I would have thought, and I wonder what exactly gets counted as applied research. But NIH spending on applied research is definitely much less than industry spends on drug development.
The key thing to understand here is that the research funded by the NIH is not producing anything like a viable drug, but typically just documenting some aspect of human biology. A target is not a drug, and the process of developing a drug from a target is far from trivial. It's extremely expensive, has high failure rates, and generally takes several years in the best-case scenario.
So yes, unless the government takes over drug development, the ability to profit from selling drugs is crucial to ensuring that new drugs keep getting developed. The fact that the NIH (and other governments and charities) fund basic research does not make this any less true.
As for what effect single-payer health care would have on the incentive to invest in drug development and clinical trials, this depends entirely on how it's run. If it cheaps out and "negotiates" low prices for drugs, this will result in fewer new drugs. If maintaining the incentive to invest in drug development is an explicit goal that is actively promoted, it will not result in fewer drugs. It might result in more drugs. The flip side of this, of course, is that it will require spending more on drugs; IMO we underinvest in drugs and this would be a good thing on net.
However, experience suggests that it won't shake out that way. Countries with single-payer health care systems pay less for drugs than the US. And recently, old Bottom-Eighth Biden has been selling out future generations by "negotiating" lower prices for prescription drugs. I doubt that giving him and his ilk even more power over health care spending would result in more responsible behavior.
Sure, I get that it's hard to resist the temptation to eat unhealthful foods, and I think it's great that there's medicine that can help with that. I'm just saying that hunger level is not, in fact, an immutable personal trait, and can be manipulated with diet.
I think you're underestimating the role that dietary choices play in managing hunger. Yes, there are a handful of people who have some kind of genetic defect that causes the hormones regulating hunger and satiation not to work right, and as a result will never not be hungry, but that's not what's driving the obesity epidemic.
There's extensive evidence, which you can easily confirm anecdotally, that certain foods aggravate hunger and promote overeating. As a rule, it's easier to overeat foods which contain a mix of fat and carbohydrates while being low in protein and fiber. Nobody binges on boiled potatoes, but french fries and potato chips are classic binge foods. Ice cream yes, butter no. Whole-grain bread no, donuts yes.
When researchers want to induce obesity and diabetes in rodents, they feed them what's called a high-fat diet, but is actually a diet with a mix of fat and carbohydrates. Lab rats won't overeat low-fat lab chow, and they won't overeat a ketogenic diet, but they'll go nuts on HFD chow. Another diet that works to induce obesity and diabetes is the cafeteria diet, where mice get access to a variety of human junk food.
That patient who ate a Big Mac and bag of Halloween candy probably doesn't have some kind of genetic abnormality that makes it impossible to eat a 2,000-calorie diet without constantly suffering severe hunger pangs. It's more likely that he overeats because his diet consists primarily of foods that promote overeating. Lock him up with nothing to eat but boiled potatoes, fish, and steamed vegetables, and he'll fill up just fine on 2,000 calories per day, maybe less.
Depends on what you mean by those. If you mean taking positions on specific object-level policy questions, I'd rather they not. What I want from universities is dedication to political neutrality, open inquiry, and high standards of intellectual and scientific rigor. I suspect that the main cause of universities becoming cesspits of left-wing lunacy is relaxing standards of rigor. There are entire academic fields that can only exist in anything like their current forms because nobody in a position to do anything about it is checking their work.
Yes, I understand that enforcing this stuff is hard. But we should at least be trying.
Yes, I even think they should refrain from taking positions like "genocide is bad." We don't need university administrators to weigh in on the question of whether genocide is good. These are people whose favorite thing in the world is racial discrimination. They don't have any special insight, and they don't have any special moral authority.
I think there are a lot of fair rejoinders to this centered on the fact that the people organizing chants and rallies seem to have expended approximately zero effort thinking through how exactly this is supposed to work.
You can just plug this as is into any political essay.
Are the conservatives here in the room with us now?
I think the only regular commenter here who's actually a conservative is Pinky, and I don't think anyone here would be sad to see the handful of holdouts in Congress go. Personally, I only see Republicans, in their current state, as useful for preventing Democrats from enacting their sh*t-for-brains agenda.
Keep in mind, also, that it takes two. At any time, a handful of Democrats could end this by voting for the candidate supported by 90% of House Republicans. They know they're not going to get their guy in. This continues because 10% of House Republicans and at least 90% of House Democrats want it to continue.
The "What did you think decolonization meant?" guy wasn't wrong. The woke left have been telling us exactly who they were all along, and most American Jews haven't been listening. Antisemitism is baked into the core dogma of woke ideology: The people who think that the only way one ethnic group can have higher SES than another is through oppression and exploitation were never going to give a pass to the highest-SES ethnic group of all. You might have been their allies, but they were never yours.
The New York Times is so reliable that only a bad-faith troll would say otherwise. How do we know it's so reliable? Only bad-faith trolls are saying otherwise!
I heard about this a month or two ago. I kind of suspect that any foundation run by the kind of people who would do this had already been reduced to a skinsuit and was primarily giving money to stupid and/or evil causes already, so maybe it's not great loss.
I took a look at their web site and couldn't really get a concrete idea of what kind of causes they were funding before.
Anyway, the lesson here is never to donate to a general-purpose philanthropy organization. Huge swaths of the sector have been totally taken over by wokium junkies. Organizations with very specific missions are probably more resistant to this.
The IDF just…shot hundreds of people standing around almost entirely non-violently (Oh no, a few people threw rocks or whatever), exactly as the Palestinians had expected, well documented, condemned by the UN.
I don't know anything about this, and maybe Israelis have captured the editing process, but the Wikipedia article gives a very different impression than I get from your account.
First, it isn't true that 489 Palestinians were killed. The article actually gives several different fatality counts, the largest being 223. That aside, this was the result of several skirmishes occurring over the course of several months. The IDF didn't just fire indiscriminately into a crowd, massacring hundreds, which is what I assumed based on your description. Furthermore the actions of (a minority) of Palestinians are described with phrases like:
Palestinians attempted to breach the border fence, hurled Molotov cocktails and explosive devices, and attempted to fly firebomb kites into Israeli territory.
Granted that the casualties were heavily lopsided because the Israelis were much better equipped, but according to this, the violence on the Palestinian side went far beyond throwing rocks. In fact, several of the dead on the Palestinian side were killed when their own "rocks" exploded. Sounds like this was the original fiery but mostly peaceful protest.
I had suspected that "trying to help him get through life" had been a euphemism for some kind of sugar-daddy situation, but I did not have "started when the shooter was 15" on my bingo card.
The Philadelphia Inquirer is reporting that police are saying that Kruger had "disturbing" sexually explicit photos on his phone, but are not giving details.
Insofar as the family is not being entirely straightforward, I would guess that it's in the direction of minimizing the shooter's agency, to make it sound like he had no other way out, rather than just making the whole thing up out of whole cloth.
ThTh11: If you want to market a new drug, you have to put it through a series of rigorous, preregistered clinical trials that demonstrate that the drug is safe and at least as effective as the current standard of care. This is just to be allowed to sell it to people who are willing to pay their own money to buy it. Standards for rolling out educational or sociological interventions at the cost of billions of dollars to taxpayers, taken by force, should be at least as high.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Open Mic for the week of 11/13/2023”
Whoops. It was a link to the Wikipedia page for Citizen's United.
"
Things lefties think should be protected speech:
1. Interfering with the use of physical infrastructure.
2. Vandalism.
3. Teachers preaching their pet ideologies to a captive audience at taxpayer expense.
Things lefties do not think should be protected speech:
1. Actual political speech.
On “Support for Israel is Strong, But….”
No, guess not. What happened with Saul's comment, then?
"
The link got cut off. Does the commenting software now truncate raw links?
https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/47867-bidens-israel-hamas-war-impact-palestinian-democrats
On “Open Mic for the week of 11/13/2023”
This article has a chart summarizing changes in police funding for major cities from 2019 to 2022. There's no indication that this is adjusted for inflation. About half of the cities increased funding less than 10% over those three years, while cumulative inflation was about 15%. For several cities, including Seattle, New York, and Washington DC, funding was down more than 2% in nominal terms.
Granted, this isn't the dramatic defunding that the crime-positive left wanted, but real, and even nominal, funding does appear to be down in many major cities.
On “Open Mic for the week of 11/6/2023”
What do you mean both sides? Aren't these left-wing protesters?
"
The difference between lived experience and anecdotal evidence is that anecdotal evidence can often be reliably sourced.
"
"But they have also always been perfectly capable, and deserving, of remaining employed and contributing productively to society irrespective of the views they hold."
The problem with this is that many people's views include a belief that they have a moral imperative to act on their other views at the expense of doing their jobs. We saw this, e.g., with the NYT meltdown over the Tom Cotton op-ed.
On “From Under A Rock”
I don't think the impact of deaths really scales like that. Yeah, it's the same percentage of the population, but 0.015% (actually, how are you getting 100k? Wouldn't it be 40k?) is a small enough share of the population that it doesn't significantly weaken Israel strategically or economically, nor is it a large enough percentage of the population that a significant share of voters will have lost a close family member or close friend.
The absolute number of deaths matters, and when the percentage of population killed is so small, I think the absolute number matters much more than the percentage. So I'd say this is a lot more like 1400 Americans being killed than like 100k or even 40k Americans being killed.
On “The Weight of Society”
If you're just going to assert conclusions that clearly don't follow from the evidence you present, why not go big? Say you linked the paper to demonstrate a cure for all cancer or prove that P = NP or something.
In the US (and in all countries, AFAIK), scientific discoveries cannot be patented. As a result, there is limited incentive for private investment in basic scientific research, i.e. the discovery of facts about the natural world. For various reasons private companies do engage in this to some degree, but not as much as we would like.
Now, we could change the law to allow patenting of scientific discoveries, so that if you discover that some protein in the human body is involved in a disease process, you get the exclusive right to develop therapies based on that discovery for the next 20 years. This is probably a bad idea, because it greatly reduces the incentive for other companies to research therapies based on that discovery.
So we end up with a system where the government funds basic scientific research, and then anybody who wants to can try to develop therapies based on the discoveries yielded by this research.
Note, from the paper you linked:
That's actually more spending on applied research than I would have thought, and I wonder what exactly gets counted as applied research. But NIH spending on applied research is definitely much less than industry spends on drug development.
The key thing to understand here is that the research funded by the NIH is not producing anything like a viable drug, but typically just documenting some aspect of human biology. A target is not a drug, and the process of developing a drug from a target is far from trivial. It's extremely expensive, has high failure rates, and generally takes several years in the best-case scenario.
So yes, unless the government takes over drug development, the ability to profit from selling drugs is crucial to ensuring that new drugs keep getting developed. The fact that the NIH (and other governments and charities) fund basic research does not make this any less true.
As for what effect single-payer health care would have on the incentive to invest in drug development and clinical trials, this depends entirely on how it's run. If it cheaps out and "negotiates" low prices for drugs, this will result in fewer new drugs. If maintaining the incentive to invest in drug development is an explicit goal that is actively promoted, it will not result in fewer drugs. It might result in more drugs. The flip side of this, of course, is that it will require spending more on drugs; IMO we underinvest in drugs and this would be a good thing on net.
However, experience suggests that it won't shake out that way. Countries with single-payer health care systems pay less for drugs than the US. And recently, old Bottom-Eighth Biden has been selling out future generations by "negotiating" lower prices for prescription drugs. I doubt that giving him and his ilk even more power over health care spending would result in more responsible behavior.
"
Sure, I get that it's hard to resist the temptation to eat unhealthful foods, and I think it's great that there's medicine that can help with that. I'm just saying that hunger level is not, in fact, an immutable personal trait, and can be manipulated with diet.
"
I think you're underestimating the role that dietary choices play in managing hunger. Yes, there are a handful of people who have some kind of genetic defect that causes the hormones regulating hunger and satiation not to work right, and as a result will never not be hungry, but that's not what's driving the obesity epidemic.
There's extensive evidence, which you can easily confirm anecdotally, that certain foods aggravate hunger and promote overeating. As a rule, it's easier to overeat foods which contain a mix of fat and carbohydrates while being low in protein and fiber. Nobody binges on boiled potatoes, but french fries and potato chips are classic binge foods. Ice cream yes, butter no. Whole-grain bread no, donuts yes.
When researchers want to induce obesity and diabetes in rodents, they feed them what's called a high-fat diet, but is actually a diet with a mix of fat and carbohydrates. Lab rats won't overeat low-fat lab chow, and they won't overeat a ketogenic diet, but they'll go nuts on HFD chow. Another diet that works to induce obesity and diabetes is the cafeteria diet, where mice get access to a variety of human junk food.
That patient who ate a Big Mac and bag of Halloween candy probably doesn't have some kind of genetic abnormality that makes it impossible to eat a 2,000-calorie diet without constantly suffering severe hunger pangs. It's more likely that he overeats because his diet consists primarily of foods that promote overeating. Lock him up with nothing to eat but boiled potatoes, fish, and steamed vegetables, and he'll fill up just fine on 2,000 calories per day, maybe less.
On “From Matt Yglesias: Israel, Palestine, and the need for principled free speech”
Depends on what you mean by those. If you mean taking positions on specific object-level policy questions, I'd rather they not. What I want from universities is dedication to political neutrality, open inquiry, and high standards of intellectual and scientific rigor. I suspect that the main cause of universities becoming cesspits of left-wing lunacy is relaxing standards of rigor. There are entire academic fields that can only exist in anything like their current forms because nobody in a position to do anything about it is checking their work.
Yes, I understand that enforcing this stuff is hard. But we should at least be trying.
Yes, I even think they should refrain from taking positions like "genocide is bad." We don't need university administrators to weigh in on the question of whether genocide is good. These are people whose favorite thing in the world is racial discrimination. They don't have any special insight, and they don't have any special moral authority.
On “The Wolf”
I think we've seen it from Briggs at least once before. Possibly in a Danny Dreamer?
On “From Matt Yglesias: Israel, Palestine, and the need for principled free speech”
You can just plug this as is into any political essay.
On “Open Mic for the week of 10/16/2023”
Are the conservatives here in the room with us now?
I think the only regular commenter here who's actually a conservative is Pinky, and I don't think anyone here would be sad to see the handful of holdouts in Congress go. Personally, I only see Republicans, in their current state, as useful for preventing Democrats from enacting their sh*t-for-brains agenda.
Keep in mind, also, that it takes two. At any time, a handful of Democrats could end this by voting for the candidate supported by 90% of House Republicans. They know they're not going to get their guy in. This continues because 10% of House Republicans and at least 90% of House Democrats want it to continue.
"
The "What did you think decolonization meant?" guy wasn't wrong. The woke left have been telling us exactly who they were all along, and most American Jews haven't been listening. Antisemitism is baked into the core dogma of woke ideology: The people who think that the only way one ethnic group can have higher SES than another is through oppression and exploitation were never going to give a pass to the highest-SES ethnic group of all. You might have been their allies, but they were never yours.
"
If you pay attention to his skin, it checks out, but hair loss and fat can really skew the first impression.
Jason Alexander turned 30 during the first season of Seinfeld.
"
The New York Times is so reliable that only a bad-faith troll would say otherwise. How do we know it's so reliable? Only bad-faith trolls are saying otherwise!
On “Open Mic for the week of 10/9/2023”
I'm not following. Could you spell out the details of what you're suggesting might have happened here?
"
I heard about this a month or two ago. I kind of suspect that any foundation run by the kind of people who would do this had already been reduced to a skinsuit and was primarily giving money to stupid and/or evil causes already, so maybe it's not great loss.
I took a look at their web site and couldn't really get a concrete idea of what kind of causes they were funding before.
Anyway, the lesson here is never to donate to a general-purpose philanthropy organization. Huge swaths of the sector have been totally taken over by wokium junkies. Organizations with very specific missions are probably more resistant to this.
On “Auribus Teneo Lupum: Holding a Wolf by its Ears”
I don't know anything about this, and maybe Israelis have captured the editing process, but the Wikipedia article gives a very different impression than I get from your account.
First, it isn't true that 489 Palestinians were killed. The article actually gives several different fatality counts, the largest being 223. That aside, this was the result of several skirmishes occurring over the course of several months. The IDF didn't just fire indiscriminately into a crowd, massacring hundreds, which is what I assumed based on your description. Furthermore the actions of (a minority) of Palestinians are described with phrases like:
Granted that the casualties were heavily lopsided because the Israelis were much better equipped, but according to this, the violence on the Palestinian side went far beyond throwing rocks. In fact, several of the dead on the Palestinian side were killed when their own "rocks" exploded. Sounds like this was the original fiery but mostly peaceful protest.
On “Open Mic for the week of 10/9/2023”
What a Dickstein.
"
I had suspected that "trying to help him get through life" had been a euphemism for some kind of sugar-daddy situation, but I did not have "started when the shooter was 15" on my bingo card.
The Philadelphia Inquirer is reporting that police are saying that Kruger had "disturbing" sexually explicit photos on his phone, but are not giving details.
Insofar as the family is not being entirely straightforward, I would guess that it's in the direction of minimizing the shooter's agency, to make it sound like he had no other way out, rather than just making the whole thing up out of whole cloth.
But we'll see.
On “Throughput: Leaky International Space Station Edition”
ThTh11: If you want to market a new drug, you have to put it through a series of rigorous, preregistered clinical trials that demonstrate that the drug is safe and at least as effective as the current standard of care. This is just to be allowed to sell it to people who are willing to pay their own money to buy it. Standards for rolling out educational or sociological interventions at the cost of billions of dollars to taxpayers, taken by force, should be at least as high.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.