My problem with both TNC's argument and Sanders' response is that "reparations", unlike single-payer healthcare or even a vague trillion-dollar jobs program, isn't a policy proposal at all. Certainly TNC himself didn't present it as one himself in "The Case for Reparations", which mostly focused on a bill to study the question, and then laid out a few different ideas of what reparations has meant in the past, from large cash payments to descendants of slaves to a race-neutral program that sounds like it's not so different from what Sanders wants to offer:
Scholars have long discussed methods by which America might make reparations to those on whose labor and exclusion the country was built. In the 1970s, the Yale Law professor Boris Bittker argued in The Case for Black Reparations that a rough price tag for reparations could be determined by multiplying the number of African Americans in the population by the difference in white and black per capita income. That number—$34 billion in 1973, when Bittker wrote his book—could be added to a reparations program each year for a decade or two. Today Charles Ogletree, the Harvard Law School professor, argues for something broader: a program of job training and public works that takes racial justice as its mission but includes the poor of all races.
I'm not sure what TNC was asking Sanders to support--just Conyers' perpetually stalled bill?--and what Sanders was rejecting.
OK, so the political dating apps are evidently horrible because... they reflect the (apparent) emerging reality that the really important tribal marker these days is whether you're on Team Red or Team Blue.[1] Yeah, sure, I suppose I should deplore the fact politics has gotten so polarized and/or ideologically sorted, and this is just another sign of the widening gulf and so on, but the folks who actually want to find someone to date probably want to find someone to date, not solve the broader social ills of our debased age.
[1] Hey, Slate Star Codex enthusiastically agrees with Vox about this. That's gotta be worth something, right?[2]
[2] Am I being sarcastic? I can never tell anymore.
Yeah, I work in Corporate America, and we have annual mandatory diversity training (basically a glorified PowerPoint presentation). It really blends into all the other mandatory compliance training. I can't say I'm really surprised that it doesn't accomplish anything, because glorified PowerPoint presentation, but it also doesn't even make my list of Top 10 Ways In Which My Job Wastes My Time.[1]
Also, seriously, speaking as a white dude, the only unsettling thing about it is how frigging anodyne it is. People actually feel threatened by this stuff?![2]
Compared to white men interviewing at the company that did not mention diversity, white men interviewing for the pro-diversity company expected more unfair treatment and discrimination against whites. They also performed more poorly in the job interview, as judged by independent raters. And their cardiovascular responses during the interview revealed that they were more stressed.
Of course, looking at the study itself, I gotta say I'm not overwhelmed with confidence in it. Small N, Mechanical Turk, et c. add up to "interesting if replicated" in my book.
I know a couple people who, if not Trump supporters, seemed at least Trump-curious. They were were blue collar white guys, and not generally "into politics", which meshes with a lot of the polling I've seen. Of course, the last time I discussed it with them was six months ago, so things could've changed since then.
But we are secure in the knowledge that we know more than those who came before from different status quos/consensuses.
Yes, because--at the bare minimum--we know about their status quo while they don't know about ours. Why know about our conditions and make choices to respond to them.
I find that this criticism applies just as much to us and our status quo and our consensus as it does our ancestors, though.
Yeah, but the NRX types aren't our ancestors. That's the crucial difference here. Our ancestors have an excuse of having to deal with a different world, based on a different, smaller knowledge base. NRX doesn't. These are people out there now with blogs and Twitter... and, um, that's about it.
Is this somewhat universal? Is it true for others, for example?
Seems like a reasonable rule of thumb.
To what extent are there people who would seriously benefit from seeking you out?
As a source of unique and challenging ideas? Probably not very many.
As a reasonably well-informed exponent of quite a few popular and influential political ideas? I dunno, maybe half, but I can't really say they wouldn't be better off talking to other people with any degree of confidence.
My judgement is based on information that I do have about the quality of available ideas. The assumption that my current ideas will one day justifiably be viewed as retrograde and backwards is a solid assumption, but an assumption it remains, and it's rooted in the understanding that things I don't know would likely cause me to reevaluate my ideas if I did know them.
NRX, on the other hand, preferentially embraces bad old failed ideas, ones where we have plenty of compelling information to indicate that they're failed. If I'm going to find ideas to challenge myself and my understanding, I'm best off seeking ideas presented by people who plausibly know as much or more than I do. not ideas presented by people who very obviously know less.
Well, if the main thing you’re interested in is being on the right side of the numbers, absolutely not. You’re absolutely right.
I have an interest in engaging with ideas where the engagement provides a clear benefit. I also think that, since the NRX types prove repeatedly that they can't tell good ideas from bad, it calls the basic premise that ideas from the past are discarded without regard to their quality into question. How the hell would they know?
For example, it seems to me that insofar as democracy can be defended (legitimately!) as being the worst form of government except for all the others, then it’s important to make that argument to the Moldbug’s of the world contemporaneously with their advocacy of an opposing view.
If there were worlds enough and time, you know? I think the biggest challenges to things I care about, from a political standpoint, come from a very different place than the NRXish skepticism of democracy. It's arguable that his point is abstractly interesting, but so are an arbitrarily large number of other points.
The healthcare cutting thing that makes for the article's lede seems like a particularly weird interpretation of the data, and one which really ignores much of the substance of the policy rationale for Obamacare. While that probably isn't going to have much impact on Republicans or Independents (on the reasonable grounds that they're likely to find the policy rationale unconvincing), Democrats are likely to expect it, and a major driver of reform was concern that healthcare spending was too high. In addition to the big ticket items like exchanges and Medicaid expansion, there were a ton of measures designed at "bending the cost curve".
Democrats are also more likely to be sympathetic to adopting single-payer or NHS-style socialized medicine, and one of the most common arguments for those systems is that they're cheaper than what we have in the US.
I think that without understanding the failures of the past, we’re likely to switch out a handful of kludgy solutions to problems of the past for new kludges that fail to take into account the other times these particular kludges were applied.
Yes, but NRX is about pretty much exactly the opposite of understanding the failures of the past. They're taking the failures of the past and holding them up as successes.
And the virtues that you champion in the Current Year will be mockable as backwards and retrograde the moment the status quo becomes a new status quo because the fundamental ruler is divorced from “good” or “bad”.
Yeah, this is answered by the same objection. It would be a lot more convincing if the historical ideas that they kept returning to weren't the most thoroughly discredited ones. That suggests to me there's a fundamental weakness with their whole program which makes it not really worth engaging with seriously unless it progresses beyond an Internet fringe weirdo thing.
To replace them with… what? The ones that will replace them?
Seems pretty likely, unless you believe that the ideas that will replace our current ideas have nothing to do with the reasons our current ideas need to be replaced.
If you want to win the bet, it seems like the safest play would be as Current Year as you can possibly be and the very second things seem to be changing, change along with them. You will totally display mastery of the odds.
Not necessarily. However, you're going to be better off paying attention to those ideas. They're more likely to usefully address problems with the status quo if they're good, and it's much more important to refute them if they're bad.
And our Current Year ideas will be discarded for a reason.
For reasons we are unlikely to know now. If we knew the reasons that future generations would have for discarding our current ideas, we'd likely have discarded them already.
It is somewhat important to figure out how and why this sort of thing happens. The failures are archaeological digs. Cthulhu, in his swimmings, will occasionally swim a trench he swam before. It feels important to know how this sort of thing failed last time.
Well, yeah, if you want to understand them in a historical perspective, that's fine. But it's also not what I understood @Damon to be advocating in his post[1], which suggests that the discarded ideas are likely to be valuable in their own right, and that's why they're likely to be worth studying. Like I said, this seems to be playing the odds backwards.
[1] This is also the problem, IMO, with the Slate Star Codex approach to extreme ideas, too)
OK, but the NRX folks are generally not talking about tinkering around the edges or trying new things. They spend a lot of time talking about things that were tried in the past and totally sucked. Given the relative success of democratic institutions at creating/allowing/maintaining good policy, it seems to make a hell of a lot more sense to debate the relative merits of parliamentary vs. US-style democracy, or elected representatives vs. referenda, instead of democracy vs. absolute monarchy or feudalism.
Given the length of human history, and the riotous breadth of weird political ideas people become entranced with, you're never going to be able to study and understand them all. Going back to pay careful attention to weird old ideas that were popular once and no longer are seems to be playing the odds in the worst possible way, since those ideas were discarded by lots of people, many of whom were smarter than any of us, and they were discarded for a reason.
Sure, there's a tiny chance that you might find something really good, but it's like playing the lottery. You're still buying 70 cents for a dollar.
It has been interesting to see a white Republican governor involved in urban areas the way the governor has. It has not been perfect and yes, the state did drop the ball. But in a time when most GOP leaders are not focused on urban issues, Snyder’s attempt, however imperfect it maybe (and it was very imperfect) is noteworthy.
Well, his noteworthy attempt ended in disaster. Conservatives are left with either engaging critically with the way a Snyder tried to address Flint's fiscal problems with disastrous results, figuring out some way the whole thing was actually the fault of some Democrats somewhere, or just ignoring the whole thing. Every incentive in partisan politics is going to push someone towards either shifting the blame or just not talking about it, especially if the problem falls affects a constituency the GOP has basically given up on anyway.
As for why they gave up on it, well, Republicans can continue to do extremely well at the state level and hold onto the House indefinitely without voters from urban centers supporting them, and, well, it seems like the EM law is the best they had to offer in the first place. No matter what you think of the EM law, it seems like it would be a tough sell for the voters who are actually having their votes overridden.
I think that concern is a big part of it, but another is that the Democratic establishment has become committed to the premise that raising taxes on the "middle class"[1] is so toxic that the Dems must never, ever do it. Sanders rejects this, and that drives a lot of the policy differences between the Clinton and Sanders camp.
[1] Which somehow wound up being households making less than $250K/year. Maybe that is a donor base issue....
Yes, there's a persistent sense that if you just cut benefits (to appeal to Republicans) and raise taxes (to appeal to Democrats) you'll just be able to cruise into the Oval Office.
@Will H., is your objection that an individual can't sue to compel the government to prosecute someone for a crime[1] or for failing to protect them from a crime?
Because my general belief is that judiciary is only one branch of three, and all of them are (or at least should be) focused on protecting our rights, first and foremost. It's just that they function in different ways, and one can petition and influence them in different ways. The resposibilities of the legislative and executive branches for protecting our rights are much less formal, and are "enforced", as it were, through political processes.
The argument I'm making is much more philosophical than legal, which is (I believe) appropriate for political debates about what the scope of our rights are, and how they should be protected.
[1] Is this actually true? I was under the impression that in extraordinary circumstances it could happen....
On “The Atlantic: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Bernie Sanders and Reparations”
My problem with both TNC's argument and Sanders' response is that "reparations", unlike single-payer healthcare or even a vague trillion-dollar jobs program, isn't a policy proposal at all. Certainly TNC himself didn't present it as one himself in "The Case for Reparations", which mostly focused on a bill to study the question, and then laid out a few different ideas of what reparations has meant in the past, from large cash payments to descendants of slaves to a race-neutral program that sounds like it's not so different from what Sanders wants to offer:
I'm not sure what TNC was asking Sanders to support--just Conyers' perpetually stalled bill?--and what Sanders was rejecting.
On “Morning Ed: Society {2016.01.20.W}”
OK, so the political dating apps are evidently horrible because... they reflect the (apparent) emerging reality that the really important tribal marker these days is whether you're on Team Red or Team Blue.[1] Yeah, sure, I suppose I should deplore the fact politics has gotten so polarized and/or ideologically sorted, and this is just another sign of the widening gulf and so on, but the folks who actually want to find someone to date probably want to find someone to date, not solve the broader social ills of our debased age.
[1] Hey, Slate Star Codex enthusiastically agrees with Vox about this. That's gotta be worth something, right?[2]
[2] Am I being sarcastic? I can never tell anymore.
"
Yeah, I work in Corporate America, and we have annual mandatory diversity training (basically a glorified PowerPoint presentation). It really blends into all the other mandatory compliance training. I can't say I'm really surprised that it doesn't accomplish anything, because glorified PowerPoint presentation, but it also doesn't even make my list of Top 10 Ways In Which My Job Wastes My Time.[1]
Also, seriously, speaking as a white dude, the only unsettling thing about it is how frigging anodyne it is. People actually feel threatened by this stuff?![2]
Of course, looking at the study itself, I gotta say I'm not overwhelmed with confidence in it. Small N, Mechanical Turk, et c. add up to "interesting if replicated" in my book.
[1] Coming soon to a clickbait site near you!
[2] From the linked article.
On “Donald Trump Is Really Unpopular With General Election Voters”
Option 1 is way worse. I'd much rather have another LBJ in the Oval Office than Biff Tannen.
"
I know a couple people who, if not Trump supporters, seemed at least Trump-curious. They were were blue collar white guys, and not generally "into politics", which meshes with a lot of the polling I've seen. Of course, the last time I discussed it with them was six months ago, so things could've changed since then.
On “Why Discuss Anti-Modernist and Anti-Democratic Literature?”
Yes, because--at the bare minimum--we know about their status quo while they don't know about ours. Why know about our conditions and make choices to respond to them.
Yeah, but the NRX types aren't our ancestors. That's the crucial difference here. Our ancestors have an excuse of having to deal with a different world, based on a different, smaller knowledge base. NRX doesn't. These are people out there now with blogs and Twitter... and, um, that's about it.
Seems like a reasonable rule of thumb.
As a source of unique and challenging ideas? Probably not very many.
As a reasonably well-informed exponent of quite a few popular and influential political ideas? I dunno, maybe half, but I can't really say they wouldn't be better off talking to other people with any degree of confidence.
"
My judgement is based on information that I do have about the quality of available ideas. The assumption that my current ideas will one day justifiably be viewed as retrograde and backwards is a solid assumption, but an assumption it remains, and it's rooted in the understanding that things I don't know would likely cause me to reevaluate my ideas if I did know them.
NRX, on the other hand, preferentially embraces bad old failed ideas, ones where we have plenty of compelling information to indicate that they're failed. If I'm going to find ideas to challenge myself and my understanding, I'm best off seeking ideas presented by people who plausibly know as much or more than I do. not ideas presented by people who very obviously know less.
"
@pillsy:
I have an interest in engaging with ideas where the engagement provides a clear benefit. I also think that, since the NRX types prove repeatedly that they can't tell good ideas from bad, it calls the basic premise that ideas from the past are discarded without regard to their quality into question. How the hell would they know?
"
@Stillwater:
If there were worlds enough and time, you know? I think the biggest challenges to things I care about, from a political standpoint, come from a very different place than the NRXish skepticism of democracy. It's arguable that his point is abstractly interesting, but so are an arbitrarily large number of other points.
On “Linky Friday #149: Pirates, Poindexters, & Confederados”
One of my favorite TV jokes of all time involves "The Bloody Unicorn Puppet Theater Production of Marat/Sade".
"
The healthcare cutting thing that makes for the article's lede seems like a particularly weird interpretation of the data, and one which really ignores much of the substance of the policy rationale for Obamacare. While that probably isn't going to have much impact on Republicans or Independents (on the reasonable grounds that they're likely to find the policy rationale unconvincing), Democrats are likely to expect it, and a major driver of reform was concern that healthcare spending was too high. In addition to the big ticket items like exchanges and Medicaid expansion, there were a ton of measures designed at "bending the cost curve".
Democrats are also more likely to be sympathetic to adopting single-payer or NHS-style socialized medicine, and one of the most common arguments for those systems is that they're cheaper than what we have in the US.
On “Why Discuss Anti-Modernist and Anti-Democratic Literature?”
Yeah, what could go wrong?
"
@Jaybird:
Yes, but NRX is about pretty much exactly the opposite of understanding the failures of the past. They're taking the failures of the past and holding them up as successes.
Yeah, this is answered by the same objection. It would be a lot more convincing if the historical ideas that they kept returning to weren't the most thoroughly discredited ones. That suggests to me there's a fundamental weakness with their whole program which makes it not really worth engaging with seriously unless it progresses beyond an Internet fringe weirdo thing.
"
@Jaybird:
To replace them with… what? The ones that will replace them?
Seems pretty likely, unless you believe that the ideas that will replace our current ideas have nothing to do with the reasons our current ideas need to be replaced.
If you want to win the bet, it seems like the safest play would be as Current Year as you can possibly be and the very second things seem to be changing, change along with them. You will totally display mastery of the odds.
Not necessarily. However, you're going to be better off paying attention to those ideas. They're more likely to usefully address problems with the status quo if they're good, and it's much more important to refute them if they're bad.
"
@Jaybird:
And our Current Year ideas will be discarded for a reason.
For reasons we are unlikely to know now. If we knew the reasons that future generations would have for discarding our current ideas, we'd likely have discarded them already.
It is somewhat important to figure out how and why this sort of thing happens. The failures are archaeological digs. Cthulhu, in his swimmings, will occasionally swim a trench he swam before. It feels important to know how this sort of thing failed last time.
Well, yeah, if you want to understand them in a historical perspective, that's fine. But it's also not what I understood @Damon to be advocating in his post[1], which suggests that the discarded ideas are likely to be valuable in their own right, and that's why they're likely to be worth studying. Like I said, this seems to be playing the odds backwards.
[1] This is also the problem, IMO, with the Slate Star Codex approach to extreme ideas, too)
"
@Chris:
It’s a shame that nothing like that happened in Yarvin’s case.
Well played.
"
OK, but the NRX folks are generally not talking about tinkering around the edges or trying new things. They spend a lot of time talking about things that were tried in the past and totally sucked. Given the relative success of democratic institutions at creating/allowing/maintaining good policy, it seems to make a hell of a lot more sense to debate the relative merits of parliamentary vs. US-style democracy, or elected representatives vs. referenda, instead of democracy vs. absolute monarchy or feudalism.
"
Given the length of human history, and the riotous breadth of weird political ideas people become entranced with, you're never going to be able to study and understand them all. Going back to pay careful attention to weird old ideas that were popular once and no longer are seems to be playing the odds in the worst possible way, since those ideas were discarded by lots of people, many of whom were smarter than any of us, and they were discarded for a reason.
Sure, there's a tiny chance that you might find something really good, but it's like playing the lottery. You're still buying 70 cents for a dollar.
On “Most roads lead to Rubio, but…”
I mean, sure, if Rubio can win in Iowa (coming all the way from third) he's probably the guy. Likewise NH.
But other scenarios always seem to call for the intervention of the Underpants Gnomes.
On “The Sounds of Conservative Silence”
Well, his noteworthy attempt ended in disaster. Conservatives are left with either engaging critically with the way a Snyder tried to address Flint's fiscal problems with disastrous results, figuring out some way the whole thing was actually the fault of some Democrats somewhere, or just ignoring the whole thing. Every incentive in partisan politics is going to push someone towards either shifting the blame or just not talking about it, especially if the problem falls affects a constituency the GOP has basically given up on anyway.
As for why they gave up on it, well, Republicans can continue to do extremely well at the state level and hold onto the House indefinitely without voters from urban centers supporting them, and, well, it seems like the EM law is the best they had to offer in the first place. No matter what you think of the EM law, it seems like it would be a tough sell for the voters who are actually having their votes overridden.
On “A Shot Over the Bow of Centrism”
I think that concern is a big part of it, but another is that the Democratic establishment has become committed to the premise that raising taxes on the "middle class"[1] is so toxic that the Dems must never, ever do it. Sanders rejects this, and that drives a lot of the policy differences between the Clinton and Sanders camp.
[1] Which somehow wound up being households making less than $250K/year. Maybe that is a donor base issue....
"
Yes, there's a persistent sense that if you just cut benefits (to appeal to Republicans) and raise taxes (to appeal to Democrats) you'll just be able to cruise into the Oval Office.
On “Saturday!”
Wait, there's going to be a sequel to Psychonauts!? But... but... that's awesome!
On “Another Post I Wish I’d Written”
@Will H., is your objection that an individual can't sue to compel the government to prosecute someone for a crime[1] or for failing to protect them from a crime?
Because my general belief is that judiciary is only one branch of three, and all of them are (or at least should be) focused on protecting our rights, first and foremost. It's just that they function in different ways, and one can petition and influence them in different ways. The resposibilities of the legislative and executive branches for protecting our rights are much less formal, and are "enforced", as it were, through political processes.
The argument I'm making is much more philosophical than legal, which is (I believe) appropriate for political debates about what the scope of our rights are, and how they should be protected.
[1] Is this actually true? I was under the impression that in extraordinary circumstances it could happen....
On “Paging Dr. Saunders… Paging Dr. Saunders…”
They're a very mercurial bunch, aren't they?
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.