Politics – Page 17 – Difficult Run

Speaking on campus and the ctrl-left

April 6, 2018November 14, 2017 by reece

Update: the full text of the speech is now online on its own post.

My university is home to a controversial Confederate War memorial.

It is a bronze sculpture of a college student carrying a rifle, commemorating the students at my university who left their studies and went to fight in the American Civil War for the Confederacy. On the base are three inscriptions, the middle of which shows the student in class, hearing the call of a woman representing duty urging him to fight. The side inscription speaks of honor and duty.

The statue has always been controversial, but recent events have brought the controversy back.

The university is holding an open panel, inviting the general public to share their thoughts. You just had to register, and the first 25 get to go.

Well, I have some thoughts on the monument, and I wanted to share them. So I signed up, and I wrote a speech (exactly 3 minutes in length), and I’ve been practicing it. On Wednesday, I anticipate getting to deliver the speech.

I would be pretty foolish to not be worried. Actually, on an issue this incendiary, I am pretty foolish to want to speak out at all.

For starters, there’s a chance my talk could anger white supremacist groups.

I am a white man with pale skin and reddish/blondish hair. I am married to a beautiful woman from Costa Rica, with caramel skin and these gorgeous black eyes you can just get lost in. We don’t have children yet, but we are both excited to meet them. I know they will be beautiful, like their mother. I hope my daughters look like her, with her dark skin and dark eyes and her raven black hair.

If you listen to what white supremacist groups actually say these days, then you’d know this is their raison d’être. They refer to it by the moronic title “white genocide” — the “diluting” of the “white race” through marriage of white people with people of other races.

Me and my family are the main thing that white supremacists march against.

In the speech I have planned, I think I make it clear that I consider the cause of the Confederacy in the American Civil War to be an unworthy cause — it was certainly not worth the lives of the men who died for it.

That might anger white supremacists, who would already have reason to despise my family.

But, I’m not afraid of angering white supremacists; they’re evil, but they don’t frighten me. Because I know they are a powerless group of isolated and outcast individuals with little to no social standing in their own communities, who are resorted to anonymous online forums for human contact. They are pathetic, and I’m not enough of a coward to shrink away from shadows in a basement.

White supremacy is, of course, evil. It cost me nothing to say that, and means nothing when I do say it, as everyone either agrees with it already, or is a white supremacist and doesn’t care what society thinks about them.

White supremacy is also stupid. It is lazy thinking. It is the kind of mental shortcut that the feeble-minded rely on. It is the sort of excuse that the weak-willed cower to, lacking the testicular fortitude to face their own inadequacies. It’s the kind of pseudo-intellectualism the internet is famous for, citing poorly analyzed statistics, when all it would take is meeting one normal, middle-class African American to see the fatuity of it all — that blacks and whites are the same race, because there is only the one race of Adam.

My comments might make them mad, but what are they going to do? Make memes about me?

There is also a chance my speech could anger Progressives on the ctrl-left. Actually, probably a much bigger chance. And that does scare me.

It scares me so much that I’m actually considering if I even want to speak at all. I have a speech written, and I’ve been practicing it, and I’ve shopped it with a number of friends, and I’ve made edits and timed it perfectly. But I’m thinking of not doing it at all.

I’m afraid of what the ctrl-left could do to me.

What is the ctrl-left? The label is a take on the alt-right designation, though the ctrl-left have been around for a lot longer. Maybe since the Bush administration. They are a political activist class — that is, they are a class of people with nothing else to do but be politically active. They are employed in universities, shutting down conservative voices. They are employed in news stations, selectively editing narratives and choosing which stories to give press time. They are employed at online opinion magazines, and spend all day opining on politics and culture. They are employed in Starbucks, and then spend 14 hours a day on twitter and tumblr investigating the lives of people they disagree with, trying to have them removed from their jobs, or shut down their youtube, facebook, or twitter to prevent them from sharing in electronic public forums. They are employed in tech companies enforcing “community standards” with bans and post removals, which on platform after platform seems to conveniently mean removing opinions on the right of American politics.

The ctrl-left, in essence, want to control what you are allowed to say, and punish you when you say what you are not.

The most recent explosion of this movement has been in antifa, the group of emotional children using acts of literal street violence to suppress and silence dissident voices in the public sphere — which is to say, they are a group of fascists. These jackbooted thugs have been taking to the streets, punching people in the face, smashing up their campuses in temper tantrums, setting fires, and generally acting exactly like the goosestepping authoritarians they are in order to stop people from saying anything that they don’t think people should be able to say anymore.

This latest expression of the ctrl-left doesn’t particularly worry me. I can take physical violence. I can take being punched in the face, or maced, or beaten with a club. I would consider it an honor, actually. Make my day.

What does worry me are the online Social Justice Warriors in the ctrl-left who have nothing better to do with their lives, apparently, than to seek new ways to punish people for wrongthink.

I work in academia. Tenured professors cannot get fired for refusing to attend their own classes for two years, but tenured professors have been fired for daring to injure the precious emotions of the ctrl-left. I’m a mere, lowly teaching assistant. I could lose my job, or be dismissed from school. I could be made unhirable in colleges and tech companies.

If my speech offends the wrong person, they could look to dig up all kinds of stuff on me.

It wouldn’t even be very hard to dig up stuff on me. For most of my life, I was a pretty terrible jerk. Just ask anyone who knew me in high school. Since high school, I have been slightly tolerable. If you had nothing to do but look for reasons to say crap about me, you could find crap to say about me. And the ctrl-left has absolutely nothing else to do.

But even if they can’t find dirt on me, the very act of disagreeing with their orthodoxy is a firable offense. They have power in universities and companies to crush whoever displeases them; and not only do they have it, but they use it.

I know this, so I generally go about my day and just grit my teeth and keep my mouth shut. My fellow students don’t have to keep their mouths shut, because they affirm the accepted dogmata of our thought guardians.

I let them talk and express opinions I disagree with and laugh at people who think the exact things I think and endorse ideologies I completely reject and say nothing, because I just want to get out of here alive, get my PhD, and maybe once I have a job I can rely on, maybe then I’ll be able to breathe again.

And the crux of the story is that I’m just sick of it. I am sick and tired of shutting up. I am done with being expected to receive with full docility the ramblings of this tumblr magisterium. I’m tired of feeling like I can’t speak my mind without retaliation and blowback, while others can express their politics unafraid.

I’m done. I’m done being shut up.

Realistically, I can probably expect nothing. I’m probably over-worrying myself. It’s unlikely anyone will really take notice. It’s an indoor event with a few dozen speakers, and who really wants to attend a meeting like that unless you’re speaking? Local news might pick it up, and they might run two seconds of my three minute speech (probably selectively edited to make it sound like I’m saying something completely opposite of what I’m saying), and then that’s probably it. Maybe some person I know might notice and say something, maybe a student would say they heard I spoke or something, but that’s about it.

In a rational universe, maybe that’s all there needs to be about it. I can just say what I think, people can hear it and agree or disagree with it, we can have back-and-forth, and then we go on our merry ways.

But this is not a rational universe, so who knows what I can expect.

(Authors’s Note and General Disclaimer: These are not the only two groups of people with opinions in this country. There are people opposed to the monument who are not part of the ctrl-left and who want civil dialogue and peaceful protest to lead the change. There are people in favor of the monument who are neither white supremacists nor part of the alt-right, and who want all people to be treated with the dignity due all human individuals. There are people on the left who also champion free speech, such as the ACLU, because free speech is not a partisan concern but the birthright of humanity. I know these people exist, because I know them; they are my family and friends and neighbors. With all of these people, I hope to see the American spirit of passionate but nonviolent engagement in the marketplace of ideas continue to drive political discourse. To the ctrl-left and alt-right, I pray that God has mercy on you and grants you repentance from your hatred, violence, and folly.)

Does Fact Checking Undo the Effects of Fake News?

November 14, 2017 by Walker

From a recent study:

Fake news or ‘alternative facts’ have become a key ingredient of Western political discourse. They are skillfully used by populist candidates to leverage fears and frustrations of the voters. The fake news efforts are often successful. For example, as Ipsos’ 2016 Perils of Perception survey shows, in all Western countries voters greatly overestimate the Muslim population in their countries. In France (where the gap between perception and reality is largest), the perceived share of Muslim population is 31% while the actual share is only 7.5%.

Can this sway elections? Recent work by Allcott and Gentzkow (2017) suggests that, even though false rumors about Hilary Clinton were more likely to be shared on social media, it is not clear whether they were pivotal in the 2016 US presidential election. In a recent paper (Barrera et. al. 2017), we show that misleading statements used by a populist politician can have substantial effects on voting intentions. Moreover, while fact checking of the populist’s misleading ‘alternative facts’ improves voters’ factual knowledge, it does nothing to undo the effect of these statements on policy views and voting intentions of voters.

During the 2017 French election, the researchers surveyed 2,480 participants “on political preferences and factual knowledge.” These participants were divided into 4 groups:

Group 1 (“Alt Facts”) read some of Marine Le Pen’s statements, including the one mentioned above. All the quotes had a similar structure: misleading statements were used as part of a logical link to reach a desired conclusion.
Group 2 (“Fact Check”) read the same Le Pen quotes along with the facts from the official sources on the very same issues; these facts were strikingly different from Le Pen’s misleading numbers.
Group 3 (“Facts”) read only the facts from the official sources without any ‘alternative facts’.
Group 4 (“Control”) didn’t read any text.

They found that inaccurate statements about migrants made by far-right politician Marine Le Pen were “highly persuasive, regardless of whether they were subsequently corrected. Both participants in the Alt Facts and Fact Check groups were 7% more likely to report intentions to vote for MLP.”

Our result that fact checking of a populist’s statements does not change the voters support of the populist candidate is consistent with findings of concurrent research conducted in the context of the 2016 US presidential election (Swire et al. 2017, Nyhan et al. 2017).

Does this mean that voters do not believe the corrections or do not trust the source? The answer is no. The majority of respondents in the Fact and the Fact Check groups answered the questions about facts at the end of the survey correctly…The Alt Facts treatment moved respondents away from the truth, but only slightly. Overall, we find strong evidence that respondents learn the facts and trust official sources more than Le Pen.

So what gives?

Overall, our results imply that once voters have learned the conclusions, correcting the fake facts can no longer shift their policy views.

Furthermore, it turns out that providing the facts may increase the salience of the immigration issue and by making voters more worried, can actually drive them toward Le Pen. We find that even participants in the Facts group are 4% more likely to vote for Le Pen than the control group – a significant difference – even they are not even reminded about the candidate during the experiment. (Immigration was a prominent issue in Le Pen’s campaign – much more so than for other politicians.)

Our results suggest that confronting alternative facts with correct numbers is not enough. To be effective, fact checking needs to be more than a journalists’ or pundits’ enterprise. The correct facts need to be embedded in a narrative with persuasive argumentation and conclusions – and delivered by a charismatic politician. The result of the 2017 French presidential election is consistent with this conjecture.

Politics Ruins Thanksgiving

November 15, 2017November 13, 2017 by Walker

I’ve noted before that politics makes us mean and dumb according to the social science.[ref]For more on what Jason Brennan calls political “hobbits and hooligans,” see the latest from Vox.[/ref] And now new evidence suggests that it erodes family relationships (and holidays) as well:

Animosity toward political rivals is not limited to the ballot box; implicit partisan biases manifest in discriminatory decisions at a rate higher than racial or gender biases. In surveys, parents have become less tolerant of their children dating and marrying across partisan lines, and observed dating and marital behavior segregates on politics more strongly than on physical attributes or personality characteristics. Political polarization impacts economic decisions in the public sphere, including where to work and shop, at higher larger than those caused by race, ethnicity, or religion.

We study whether politics strains close family ties by measuring family gathering durations. After the historically divisive and stressful 2016 presidential election, 39% of American families avoided political conversations during the holidays (10). Aversion to family political discussions largely spans both party and socioeconomic lines. In this context we study Thanksgiving, which in US election years, brings together family members with differing political views at a time of partisan salience. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many altered or canceled Thanksgiving plans in the wake of the 2016 election. Other families cut short their dinners if political arguments arose. Most political-personal studies rely on survey data, and lack the ability to broadly measure inflamed partisan antipathy and its effect on real-world behaviors such as spending time with friends and family.

This study analyzes how political differences affected 2016 Thanksgiving dinners through the merging of two novel datasets. A unique collection of smartphone location-tracking data from more than ten million Americans allows observation of actual (not self-reported) movement behavior, at extremely precise spatial and temporal levels. We combined this with a database of the national precinct returns for the 2016 presidential election to impute individual political leanings at the finest spatial resolution legally possible. By comparing the partisan bend of an individual’s home location and where they attended Thanksgiving dinner, we can test the relationship between political disagreement and time expenditure.

To further isolate the particular effect of election-year political partisanship, we compare time spent at Thanksgiving in 2016 with the Thanksgiving of the year before. That comparison suggests that our measured effect really is the result of heightened political rhetoric, and not an artifact of politically-correlated demographic or spatial sorting. Finally, since political advertising polarizes opinions and media coverage of polarization heightens dislike for opposing parties, we compare partisan rifts between families who live within a few miles of each other but on opposite sides of media-market boundaries, and find political advertising more than doubles our measured Thanksgiving effects (pgs. 1-2).

Their results?

Following the 2016 election, anecdotal media reports and online social media behavior demonstrated an avoidance of political confrontations among Democratic voters, findings our study corroborate. Republicans, however, were more sensitive to partisan differences at Thanksgiving dinners. Aggregating across the 77% of American adults who own smartphones, our results suggest partisan differences cost American families 62 million person-hours of Thanksgiving time, 56.8% from individuals living in Democratic precincts and 43.2% from Republican precincts. Political advertising eliminated an additional 3.3 million person-hours, 52.8% from Democratic precinct residents and 47.2% from Republican residents. We estimate 27 million person-hours of cross-partisan discourse were eliminated, which may provide a feedback channel by which partisan antipathy reduces opportunities for close cross-party conversations (pg. 5).

Happy Thanksgiving!

Taylor Swift — Still Not Feminist Enough

April 12, 2018November 12, 2017 by Ro

I’m pretty tired of the constant political onslaught (I mean, still #nevertrump, but remember when we used to talk about other things? no? Homestar Runner? cat memes?), especially from random famous people. But apparently this is blasphemous for anyone who thinks they are feminist, and Taylor Swift is the shining example.

The Washington Post has an article laying out the many “feminists” attacking T. Swift, along with some good commentary:

[Y]ou might think, given our current focus on women’s rights and dignity, that “Reputation” would land with a girl-power splash. But you’d be wrong. Very wrong. In fact, Swift is already under fire from feminist critics. And their attacks reveal something very ugly about modern feminism: While today’s feminists claim to champion the rights of all women, they speak only for women who agree with them – vocally, frequently and on demand…

The test of a feminist’s commitment should be how she treats women who are different from her. It shouldn’t matter if Swift agrees or disagrees, if she speaks or remains silent. We should applaud her ability as a person, independent, with her own heart and mind, to be who she wishes.

Taylor has been criticized (often throughout multiple articles) by Bustle, Salon, and The Daily Beast, among others. [ref]Some criticisms include using feminism only when it benefits her, not attending the women’s march, not speaking out against Trump, not vocally supporting Planned Parenthood, etc.[/ref] Buzzfeed seems to be the one of sole holdouts – having articles going back up to four years about her feminism.

I’m not sure what or who these kinds of criticisms are going to help. Nitpicking about being feminist “enough” can only make the movement look unnecessary. So ladies, let’s spend some more time attacking the patriarchy (I don’t usually say that literally, but the time is ripe) and leave our fellow sisters alone, including Ms. T-Swizz.

Does Population Diversity Lead to Economic Growth?: Evidence from the Age of Mass Migration

April 6, 2018November 11, 2017 by Walker

A brand new study seeks to answer the following questions:

“Does having a very diverse population at one point in time lead to persistently higher levels of economic growth?”
“Is the economic impact of diversity only evident in the short term, vanishing once the different population groups become part of the society’s ‘melting pot’?”

The researchers “assess these questions by examining the extent to which the high degree of cultural diversity in US counties generated during the Age of Mass Migration of the late 19th and early 20th centuries has left an enduring impact on the economic development of those US areas that witnessed the greatest heterogeneity in population. Their analysis

identif[ies] the presence of a strong and very long lasting impact of diversity on county-level economic development. Counties that attracted migrants from very diverse national and international origins over a century ago are significantly richer today than those that were marked by a more homogeneous population. Highly diverse counties after the Age of Mass Migration strongly benefited from the enlarged skillset and the different perspectives and experiences the arriving migrants brought with them and from the interaction among those different groups. The result was a surge of new ideas and a newfound dynamism that was quickly translated into lofty, short-term economic gains. These gains proved durable and, albeit in a reduced way, can still be felt today.

Yet the benefits of diversity came with a strong caveat: the gains of having a large number of groups from different origins within a territory (fractionalisation) only materialised if the diverse groups were able to communicate with one another (low polarisation). Hence, past population diversity in the US has become a double-edged sword: it has worked only where the different groups were able to interact, that is, in those places where the ‘melting pot’ really happened. Where such ‘bridging’ did not occur, groups and communities remained in their own physical or mental ghettoes, undermining any economic benefits from a diverse environment.

Moreover, the benefits from diversity have remained over time. Where high levels of diversity have been coupled with ‘bridging’ across groups – high population fractionalisation with low polarisation – the associated economic gains were felt in the short, medium, and long term. With the exception of the highly turbulent 1920s to 1940s, a strongly positive and robust impact of fractionalisation on regional income levels, as well as a negative one of polarisation is evident…The only change in this enduring relationship is that both connections, while remaining strongly statistically significant, became weaker after the 1920s.

They conclude,

At a time when many developed countries are rapidly closing down their borders to immigration, trying to shield what – particularly in the case of Europe and Japan – are still rather homogeneous populations from external influences and the perceived security, economic, and welfare threats often unjustly associated with migrants, restricting migration will limit diversity and is bound to have important and long-lasting economic consequences. By foregoing new migration, wealthy societies may be jeopardising not only the short-term positive impact associated with greater diversity, but also the enduring positive influence of diversity on economic development.

The large, positive, and persistent impact of societal diversity on economic development seen in the US would therefore be difficult to replicate – something that ageing and lethargic societies across many parts of the developed world can ill afford. However, if migration is to be encouraged, it is of utmost importance that mechanisms facilitating the dialogue across groups and, hence, the integration of migrants are in place to guarantee that diversity is transformed into higher and durable economic activity over the short, medium, and long term.

Do the American Alt-Right’s Ideas Have European Roots?

April 9, 2018November 10, 2017 by Walker

That’s what a recent essay in Foreign Affairs suggests. Political scientist George Hawley writes,

The [alt-right] is disorganized and mostly anonymous, making it difficult to study systematically, and until recently its definition was up for grabs. Throughout 2016, the term “alt-right” was often applied to a much broader group than it is today; at times, it seemed to refer to the entirety of Trump’s right-wing populist base. Since the U.S. presidential election, however, the alt-right’s nature has become clearer: it is a white nationalist movement that focuses on white identity politics and downplays most other issues. As the alt-right’s views became better known, many people who had flirted with the movement broke ranks, leaving it smaller but more ideologically cohesive.

Some have argued that the alt-right is simply the latest iteration of an old, racist strain of U.S. politics. And indeed, as a white nationalist movement, the alt-right’s ultimate vision—a racially homogeneous white ethnostate—is similar to that of earlier groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations, and the National Alliance. Yet the alt-right considers itself new and distinct, in terms of both style and intellectual substance. Stylistically, it has attempted to distance itself from the ineffectual violence and pageantry of what it derisively calls “white nationalism 1.0,” instead preferring a modern aesthetic that targets cynical millennials on social media and online message boards. And ideologically, the movement represents a break from American racist movements of the past, looking not to U.S. history but to the European far right for ideas and strategies.

White nationalists like Richard Spencer draw on ideas from the European New Right:

The ENR first emerged in France in the late 1960s, at a time when the radical left was at its apogee and the country looked to be on the brink of revolution. In 1968, a group led by the young right-wing journalist Alain de Benoist founded the Research and Study Group for European Civilization (known by its French acronym, GRECE). This new think tank sought to provide a philosophical foundation for a new political order, one that rejected liberalism, communism, and the excesses of fascism.

The ENR was an unusual amalgamation of ideas from the beginning. Although it repudiated fascism and Nazism, the ENR drew inspiration from many of the same intellectual sources. Particularly important to the ENR were the so-called conservative revolutionary writers of Weimar-era Germany, including the legal theorist Carl Schmitt and the historian Arthur Moeller van den Bruck. Like these figures, the ENR envisioned a new path for Europe that rejected both Soviet communism and Anglo-American liberalism.

The ENR flirted with, but eventually rejected, a politics based on overt racism. Instead, the movement grounded its arguments in culture. ENR thinkers rejected the idea that all human beings are generally interchangeable and posited instead that every individual views the world from a particular cultural lens; inherited culture, that is, is a vital part of every person’s identity. They further argued that all cultures have a “right to difference,” or a right to maintain their sovereignty and cultural identity, free from the homogenizing influence of global capitalism and multiculturalism. The right of cultures to preserve their identity in turn implied their right to exclude or expel groups and ideas that threatened their cohesion and continuity.

…Yet the ENR also used left-wing theories and rhetoric. It adopted the New Left’s opposition to global financial capitalism and borrowed arguments about cultural particularity from anticolonial movements, concluding, for instance, that European colonial projects had been a mistake and that the United States was trying to Americanize every corner of the globe, destroying distinct cultures along the way. The ENR even supported anti-American populist uprisings in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa…The ENR was also strongly influenced by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, whose views on metapolitics and cultural hegemony contended that a political philosophy will attain lasting power only after it has won the battle of ideas, at least among elites. The ENR was pro–environmental conservation, as well.

Mainstream American conservatism paid no attention to the ENR, while even the “radical right in the United States…showed little awareness of the ENR until quite recently. This was also understandable, given the language barrier—the writings of de Benoist and others were mostly untranslated—and the ENR’s lack of interest in U.S. domestic politics. De Benoist’s careful avoidance of transparent racism also put him at odds with white nationalists in the United States, who wore their racism on their sleeves…Institutions affiliated with the alt-right are now working to translate books from ENR thinkers into English. The publishing company Arktos Media has put out a large catalog of these translations and is now part of the recently formed AltRight Corporation, which has become a significant hub of alt-right propaganda. Arktos has published works by de Benoist and Faye, the French-German ENR ideologue Pierre Krebs, and earlier right-wing radicals such as the Italian philosopher Julius Evola.”

Hawley notes that “it would be an exaggeration at this point to speak of a unified, global far-right movement. Yet members of the radical right on both sides of the Atlantic are increasingly adept at borrowing each other’s ideas and learning from each other’s successes and failures. Those who study these phenomena must maintain an international perspective. If a right-wing idea, tactic, or meme proves successful in one context, it will probably appear in others.”

The Story Behind Sexual Assaults: Power Corrupts

April 11, 2018October 30, 2017 by Nathaniel

The list of prominent men who stand credibly accused of sexually assaulting women and children just keeps growing. Just today, Kevin Spacey and Neil DeGrasse Tyson got added to it.

In my cynical moments, I agree with Malcolm Reynolds

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HG6UvDSuoF4

Do you think I’m exaggerating? Well, then you clearly missed the Wall Street Journal’s review of the Gandhi biography Great Soul which described (among many unsavory aspects of his life, from hypocrisy to outright racism) how “when he was in his 70s and close to leading India to independence, he [Gandhi] encouraged his 17-year-old great-niece, Manu, to be naked during her “nightly cuddles” with him.” If this is Gandhi, what did we expect from Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby? Perhaps our world is structured so that the people who get the statues built after them are the people willing to step on others to get there. After all, the blood on the hands of villains and the blood on the hands of saints is still the same color.

But there are two silver linings to the floodgates of accusations we’re now witnessing. The first is the most obvious: these men aren’t getting away with it anymore. For every famous icon who is shamed and punished, I hope there are dozens or hundreds of predators out there who begin to act with decency out of a sense of fear and self-preservation. I hope women are safer today than they were yesterday because of the courage of these women to come forward and name their attackers, and because a complicit and corrupt media has finally been shamed into covering the story.[ref]I should say: partially covering the story. I was disgusted to hear NPR discuss the Kevin Spacey allegations in terms of attacks against men instead of attacks against children. The ideological instinct to manufacture equivalence between genders is truly stunning, and it allows Hollywood pedophilia to remain as much as taboo subject today as Harvey Weinstein’s attacks were a month ago.[/ref]

The second is not as frequently commented on. That is the fact that the perpetrators defy partisan explanation. We’ve got a Republican president, a Holocaust survivor, a famous gay actor (that’d be Kevin Spacey), a scientist known for his views on global warming and atheism (DeGrasse Tyson), one of the mega-pundits of conservatism,[ref]And let’s not get: the entire network that covered for him.[/ref] and of course Harvey Weinstein was a major Democratic fundraiser. Democrat or Republican, straight or gay, black or white, the list of predators confounds just about every conceivable partisan breakdown. And if you think your particular partisan niche is safe, just wait. Because here are a couple of inviolable rules of human nature. The first is that men–yes, men in particular–are driven by sexual desire. The second is that power tends to corrupt. This means that when men have the power to coerce victims and get away with it, quite a lot of them will do so.

This has long been my problem with so-called “rape culture” criticism. The term “rape culture” implies that there is some kind of special, unusual set of assumptions required to create an environment in which sexual assault flourishes. It is a tragically naive view that the default, natural state of human beings is to be kind and nice to each other, and if only we could get rid of these ideological perversions–the patriarchy, toxic masculinity, whatever–and return society to its default, natural state then rape would go away.

But analyzing rape and sexual assault through a political lens has always been a lost cause, because the origins of sexual assault are not political or ideological. It does not require some kind of special philosophy, culture, or ideology to allow sexual assault to flourish. Rape culture is not some kind of aberration. It is the default. Civilization is the exception.

Some people have expressed surprise or even skepticism at the #MeToo campaign. I have not. For whatever reason, when I was growing up I was the kind of person people liked to confide in. So many of my female friends told me of the times they had been sexually assaulted (up to and including rape) that I have long supposed that a woman who hasn’t been sexually assaulted is very, very rare.

The reality is that men as predators are not exceptions or aberrations. It doesn’t take a specific culture for rapists to flourish. That’s the default. It takes a specific culture to counteract the natural tendency towards exploitation and abuse. It takes unnatural institutions like criminal justice systems alongside unnatural concepts such as honor and duty and sacrifice to create an environment where rape is suppressed.

If there’s one thing that I hope we can learn from these horrific revelations: this is it. That the ideas that men and women are interchangeable or that moral violations are political are bad ideas. They are political dogmas that fly in the face of common sense, science, and–most importantly–that consistently sabotage our efforts to build an anti-rape culture. Because we should be less concerned with tearing down rape culture and more concerned with building up anti-rape culture. We should be less concerned with teaching about consent–which is a horrifically low bar–and more concerned with teaching ideals of respect, honor, virtue, and love. We should be less concerned with sexual liberation and more concerned with discipline and self-control. Yes, I realize that the idea of teaching adolescents concepts like chastity and self-control sounds laughable today.

That’s why we’re here.

There will never come a day when rape does not exist in our society for the same reason that there will never come a day when theft and murder do not exist. But that doesn’t mean we are doomed to tolerate this degree of profligate harassment and exploitation, either. It doesn’t mean we have to do nothing or accept the status quo. We do not.

What does this look like in practice? I don’t think Weinstein was confused about consent. Teaching him the concept would have accomplished nothing. But teaching him about chastity would not have done an iota more good than teaching about consent. However, a society that still had some appreciation for ideals of chastity, fidelity, self-control, and what used to be called “decency” would be a much more hostile environment for predators. We live in a country where the President of the United States could coerce a young intern into a sexual relationship[ref]Don’t try and tell me that there is such a thing as consent across that power differential.[/ref] and instead of being viewed as a universal affront to civilization it became a partisan issue. The day we decided Bill Clinton’s abuse and exploitation of women was somehow his personal business and decided to rehabilitate a serial sexual abusesr and accused rapist into some kind of grandfatherly political icon was the day that we told every Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Bill Cosby, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson in the world: go ahead. It’s open season. As long as you’re powerful enough, we’ll look the other way.

If we returned to old-fashioned concepts of honor, propriety, and decency maybe some boys would grow up to be better men and never assault women. I believe that would happen. But–worst case scenario–at least we could take away the horrific sense of entitlement that men of power are currently operating under. Because, as great as it is for the current crop of serial abusers to get taken out, as long as the underlying assumptions of our society remain unchallenged, the only thing that will change is that the next generation of predators will be smarter than the last.

Irrational Voters

October 30, 2017 by Walker

More voter irrationality from The Economist:

[M]ost [social psychologists] argue that it is a widespread tendency to attribute other people’s misfortune to personality traits rather than to the circumstances they find themselves in; we do the reverse when it comes to our own failures. This “fundamental attribution error” is discussed by Edward Glaeser, an economist at Harvard, and his colleagues in a recent paper that could help explain many political outcomes.

There is no simple objective measure of a politician’s competence. But voters’ perception of competency appears to often be determined by ideology. For example 70% of Democratic voters thought Barack Obama would go down in history as an outstanding or above average president at the end of his term compared to 15% of Republicans.

Even while objective outcomes do play a role in determining voters’ attitudes, voters often judge politicians on results that are beyond their control. Justin Wolfers, an economist, found that voters in oil-producing states were more likely to re-elect incumbent governors during oil price rises, and vote them out of office when the oil price drops—despite the fact that governors have effectively no power over the global price of a barrel of crude. Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels of Princeton and Vanderbelt similarly suggest a strong pattern of voters penalising politicians in the aftermath of floods, droughts and even shark attacks. They argue that in the presidential election of 2000 as many as 2.8m voted against Al Gore (the “incumbent” candidate in that he was a vice-president campaigning to replace his fellow Democrat Bill Clinton) because their states had been too wet or too dry that year.

It continues:

Voters are less interested in mechanisms to provide better guidance on who is a good politician or protect against bad politicians who are elected regardless: institutions like a free press or oversight mechanisms to fight corruption.

Of course, no voting result can be reduced to a single set of factors, let alone one potential psychological quirk amongst the electorate. But Mr Glaeser and colleagues argue that the attribution error may lead to voters electing the lucky over the competent and selecting politicians on the grounds that they are strong in areas where elected officials actually have little control. Not least, the paper suggests, voters favour presidential candidates who claim that they can manage the economy “despite the fact that presidential control over war and diplomacy is arguably far greater than presidential control over GDP growth”.

The social science is clear: voters are irrational.

Vaping: The Safer Alternative

August 27, 2018October 24, 2017 by Walker

Another example of perfect being the enemy of the good and good intentions paving away:

Flavor bans for e-cigarettes and menthol in combustibles are pressing policy issues that have received relatively little empirical study. Now that the FDA has the power to regulate flavors in both combustible and e-cigarettes, it has again been considering flavor bans for all types of cigarettes (FDA, 2017). Thus, there is an urgent need for an analysis of the impact of flavor bans on public health. Despite the need for this information, there are no studies predicting the impacts of alternative bans on the use of combustibles, e-cigarettes, and neither. We provide such information for adult smokers and recent quitters using a DCE and a large, nationally representative survey.

We find that flavors themselves serve as an attribute that drives choices across combustibles and e-cigarettes and choosing none. We conclude that flavor bans can be effective levers that affect smokers’ choices. Alternative flavor bans can either enhance protection of the health of the public or worsen it. Specifically, our results indicate that banning flavors in e-cigarettes, while allowing them to remain in combustibles, would result in the greatest increase in smoking of combustible cigarettes; and the use of e-cigarettes would decline (10.3 percent).

By comparison, we find that a ban on menthol combustible cigarettes would produce the greatest reduction (4.8 percent) in the use of combustible cigarettes across the flavor bans that we study. Much of this movement from combustible cigarettes would be to e-cigarettes (3.5 percent) and the remainder would be toward “none” (1.3 percent). Given that combustible cigarettes impose the most significant harms on those who smoke them, reducing the smoking rate would likely increase the health of the public. Our results suggest that policymakers need to consider simultaneously the impact of flavor policies on combustibles, e-cigarettes, and abstinence (pgs. 20-21).

One study found for “those aged 15 years and above in 2016, almost 6.6 million fewer premature deaths and 86.7 million fewer LYL due to cigarette use occur in the Optimistic Scenario. The average 15-year-old would increase their life expectancy by 0.5 years, reflecting the increased life span of those who have, or would otherwise have smoked cigarettes, switching to e-cigarettes.” Even in the Pessimistic Scenario, “a net gain of 1.6 million (1.4 million male; 0.3 million female) representing 6% fewer premature deaths and 20.8 million (17.8 million male; 3.0 million female) representing 8% fewer LYL are projected. Average life expectancy increases 0.08 years (0.14 male; 0.02 female).”[ref]E-cigarettes have also reduced smoking in Europe.[/ref]

While I’d prefer that people not smoke at all, I’m all for safer alternatives that reduce premature deaths.

Image result for gandalf vaping gif