“The ironic thing about Literal Nazis is that they have weaponized taking things literally,” BuzzFeed writer Katie Notopoulos wrote recently.
glimmersight replied to your post: not-even-even replied to your post “Without…
~in any prior era, no one thought that skin color was a qualification for societal reward~ you really think so?i know right
It’s downright surreal that the same guy could write that and also write stuff like, say, this, which manages to be cautious and relatively even-handed on a topic as currently politicized as the history of Islam.
It seems clear that he’s selectively turning his brain on and off (so to speak), but rarely is the difference between ON and OFF states this stark to an outside observer. And I’m still at a loss about why he chooses OFF in some cases and ON in others.
I was reading this guy’s blog again (previously featured here) and came upon this review, which is just like straightforwardly woke
He is large, he contains multitudes
I use prescription toothpaste that is 1% flouride (vs .1% in commercial toothpastes) which contributes to mineral-rich saliva… I’m not sure its possible under average toothbrushing circumstances.
@nostalgebraist I don’t think these are analogous situations. It would be nice if no one had to work all, and all labor is in some sense unfree in that one can’t really choose not to work at all if that leads to starvation. Working for a wage that is less than one feels one deserves certainly feels coercive. However, literal at-the-barrel-of-a-gun coercion is required to make people work for no pay.
You’re not working for no pay. If the wage cap is 10 million dollars, you’re working for 10 million dollars. I’m not convinced a wage cap is good policy, but to compare it to slavery is ridiculous.
People don’t work for the average dollar. They work for the marginal dollar. Let us suppose that that there is a wage cap of $10 million, and evil Bob the small business owner has already made $10 million dollars, but it’s only October.
Bob is not going to do any work in November or December, because he will not receive any more money for doing so. The marginal value to him of that work is zero. The only way he is going to work is if you either put a gun to his head, or threaten to punish him through fines or imprisonment or some such. At the point where someone is saying “work for zero more dollars than you already have, or I’m going to put you in prison”, a comparison to slavery is not ridiculous.
I say this as someone who thinks that libertarians claiming “taxation is theft” are being ridiculous in the more general case. But I roll to disbelieve on anyone making a utilitarian case for 100% marginal taxation at any level, because the counterfactual economic counterparties of the person being taxed into inactivity are also losing out in the process.
As someone joining late; is this basically just Laffer Curves revisited?
Nobody had actually brought up the Laffer curve, but yes, there is a long-running problem where conservatives don’t understand that the United States has never been on the right side of the Laffer curve, whereas many (non-economist) liberals/leftists don’t understand that the Laffer curve is a mathematical identity and can’t possibly be false.
Yeah, this is actually one of my pet peeves, is people who knee-jerk go “The Laffer Curve is false” when like, empirically, if you get tax rates into the 70%+ range you can start to see it.
If the US ever applies a 70% marginal tax rate on anything please wake me up because I am having the New Deal-iest dream possible.
This situation is related to the Laffer curve in that both involve people avoiding an action when the after-tax reward for that action approaches zero.
But with the Laffer curve, the key point is that tax revenue goes to zero in that cases. That’s a strong argument against a close-to-100% tax if the main point of the tax was to raise revenue. But if we frame this as an “income cap” rather than a tax bracket, suddenly we can see that the policy might have some justification even if it were revenue-neutral.
For instance we don’t expect a minimum wage policy to raise “tax revenue,” but you could reframe the minimum wage as “100% income tax on people making under this wage” and it’d be symmetric with the case at hand. (Floors/ceilings are not exactly the same as 100% tax brackets, and there may be differences in practice that I’m not appreciating. But the difference between making something illegal and merely making it pointless seems economically unimportant.)
I also don’t understand the Bob example. Bob owns his own business; if he wants to not go to work for two months, he can do that without government interference. What he can’t do without government interference is give himself more than $10 million of what the company makes in a year, no matter what work he does or doesn’t do in that time.
Maybe under this setup the Bobs of the world would take more time off, or maybe fewer small businesses would be sustainable, but this would all flow naturally from decisions made under the new incentives. No one is ever facing the barrel of a govt. gun in this process. (The govt. guns would come in if Bob tried to evade paying his excess income in taxes, not if Bob stayed home from work.)
(via kitswulf)
I recently moved house, and after seeing my new place, my father cautioned that I should be careful walking around in the dark because my room is on the second floor and the stairs are pretty steep.
I think there’s a very small chance I’ll ever significantly hurt myself by falling down those stairs, but I just realized that if I do, I won’t be able to get the “warned you about stairs, bro” meme out of my head afterwards
I have read in a good medical work that a nun, in a very large convent in France, began to meow like a cat; shortly afterwards other nuns also meowed. At last all the nuns meowed together every day at a certain time for several hours together.
Anonymous asked: In context, the reason for the "strange conceptual boundary" is that he's talking about "elite" discourse, not just trying to compare eras' overall "racial progressiveness" scores. (Aren't you the guy who rightly criticizes focusing on the mean instead of the details of the distribution all the time?)
I don’t think he’s talking about “elite” discourse. The paragraph we’re talking about in the review is about “the vast majority of political discourse today,” and about what opinions a “person” would “dare to offer in the public square.” This doesn’t sound like the way one would write if meaning to single out some “elite” stratum of the public conversation.
Anyway, even if this were true, I don’t understand why my criticism would not still apply. If, say, a Supreme Court majority opinion doesn’t constitute “elite discourse,” what does? What “elite discourse” in antebellum America do you have in mind here, and how does it fit his description?
Anonymous asked: I think you're confused about the "in any prior era, no one thought that skin color was a qualification for societal reward" line. In the past, skin color could be *dis*qualifying from baseline normal citizenship but would not itself qualify you for anything special. He's saying that now it'll get you, say, into Harvard or Congress when you don't really deserve it.
I agree that this is one construal of that line, and indeed it’s my best guess as to what he meant.
But I still don’t think it makes much sense. To make this kind of distinction, we need a baseline to compare to, but “baseline normal citizenship” has itself changed with time, and basically did not exist (in the modern, unitary way) prior to the 14th Amendment. Before that, individual states could make their own citizenship laws, and the status of “U.S. citizenship” was ill-defined and much less frequently invoked than it is today (e.g. the Bill of Rights was rarely used in court decisions, obviating the need to figure out to whom it applied).
A striking example of this: part of the court’s reasoning in Dred Scott was that many states in the early U.S. (i.e. still in the framers’ time) had legal restrictions on black people which violated freedoms protected by the Constitution for citizens – and that, since the framers apparently considered this consistent with the Constitution, they must not have meant to include black people when they wrote “citizens.” Rather than reasoning forward to the implications of some strong concept of citizenship, the court actually found itself reasoning backward from actually existing laws to figure out what citizenship actually meant. Admittedly the court’s reasoning in Dred Scott is widely considered to be very poor, but it still says something that an argument of this kind could be made at all. Clearly, the way laws were made and judged at the time involved very little consideration of federal citizenship as setting a standard for how you have to treat people.
Indeed, I think the very idea of a legal baseline in America (whether citizenship or something else) is a relatively modern one. There were a lot more gradations with none singled out as the reference level: white men without property were citizens but (depending on the state and time) couldn’t vote; women were citizens but couldn’t vote (except in some states early on) or own property; free black men either could or couldn’t vote (depending on the state and time), and could sometimes (I think generally?) own property, even after Dred Scott made them not citizens (e.g. William Ellison still owned property). In short, there were a bunch of different tiers and no single baseline.
And lacking a baseline, pre-1868 Americans would not have made this distinction between elevating people above the baseline and lowering them below it, so it can’t be the case that they were specifically okay with the latter but not the former.
Admittedly, the original line seemed to be about more than just the law, and I suppose you could argue that whiteness itself (if not citizenship) was considered a baseline, relative to which some were lowered but no one was raised. At this point, though, we drawing a very strange conceptual boundary, where the deciding factor is not that actual patterns of reward vs. punishment and acclaim vs. disapproval, but whether the reward/approval is given to the socially defined “default race” or not. I don’t see why this should be a salient distinction intellectually or morally, and I can’t see a reason to draw it unless we are trying to gerrymander the concept so it treats affirmative action in a particular way. (Which is what I think that guy is really doing.)
No matter how charitably you read him, it’s still asinine to act like affirmative action is a worse racial policy than chattel slavery.
Definitely. Although I don’t think this guy honestly believes that (if he did, it would doubtlessly come up a lot on his blog). As far as I can tell, he was trying to invoke the usual colorblindness argument against affirmative action, but since he was claiming that on this (among other issues) everyone took the “correct” position until recently, he ended up claiming that earlier Americans were far more progressive than they really were (and that this was a good thing!). It’s an entertainingly weird feat of ineptness.
Anonymous asked: I think you're confused about the "in any prior era, no one thought that skin color was a qualification for societal reward" line. In the past, skin color could be *dis*qualifying from baseline normal citizenship but would not itself qualify you for anything special. He's saying that now it'll get you, say, into Harvard or Congress when you don't really deserve it.
I agree that this is one construal of that line, and indeed it’s my best guess as to what he meant.
But I still don’t think it makes much sense. To make this kind of distinction, we need a baseline to compare to, but “baseline normal citizenship” has itself changed with time, and basically did not exist (in the modern, unitary way) prior to the 14th Amendment. Before that, individual states could make their own citizenship laws, and the status of “U.S. citizenship” was ill-defined and much less frequently invoked than it is today (e.g. the Bill of Rights was rarely used in court decisions, obviating the need to figure out to whom it applied).
A striking example of this: part of the court’s reasoning in Dred Scott was that many states in the early U.S. (i.e. still in the framers’ time) had legal restrictions on black people which violated freedoms protected by the Constitution for citizens – and that, since the framers apparently considered this consistent with the Constitution, they must not have meant to include black people when they wrote “citizens.” Rather than reasoning forward to the implications of some strong concept of citizenship, the court actually found itself reasoning backward from actually existing laws to figure out what citizenship actually meant. Admittedly the court’s reasoning in Dred Scott is widely considered to be very poor, but it still says something that an argument of this kind could be made at all. Clearly, the way laws were made and judged at the time involved very little consideration of federal citizenship as setting a standard for how you have to treat people.
Indeed, I think the very idea of a legal baseline in America (whether citizenship or something else) is a relatively modern one. There were a lot more gradations with none singled out as the reference level: white men without property were citizens but (depending on the state and time) couldn’t vote; women were citizens but couldn’t vote (except in some states early on) or own property; free black men either could or couldn’t vote (depending on the state and time), and could sometimes (I think generally?) own property, even after Dred Scott made them not citizens (e.g. William Ellison still owned property). In short, there were a bunch of different tiers and no single baseline.
And lacking a baseline, pre-1868 Americans would not have made this distinction between elevating people above the baseline and lowering them below it, so it can’t be the case that they were specifically okay with the latter but not the former.
Admittedly, the original line seemed to be about more than just the law, and I suppose you could argue that whiteness itself (if not citizenship) was considered a baseline, relative to which some were lowered but no one was raised. At this point, though, we drawing a very strange conceptual boundary, where the deciding factor is not that actual patterns of reward vs. punishment and acclaim vs. disapproval, but whether the reward/approval is given to the socially defined “default race” or not. I don’t see why this should be a salient distinction intellectually or morally, and I can’t see a reason to draw it unless we are trying to gerrymander the concept so it treats affirmative action in a particular way. (Which is what I think that guy is really doing.)