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October 10th, 2016: NYCC was great and I met a lot of terrific Dinosaur Comics fans and thank you all for coming out! I gave you STICKERS. :0 – Ryan

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October 12th, 2016: I'm on a book tour this week! COME SAY HI TO ME AND MY PALS – Ryan

[See also Hardball Questions For The Next Debate. The Gary Johnson question is not original to me.]

Jill Stein:

You’re a former doctor and researcher who first got involved in politics because of your interest in public health. One of your first forays into activism was the 2000 publication of In Harm’s Way: Toxic Threats to Child Development, a magisterial report on the effect of pollution on children’s physical and mental health. You described your focus as being on “developmental disabilities, including attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, autism, and related neurodevelopmental diseases”. You describe “accumulating evidence of neurotoxic damage to children by environmental agents, such as lead and PCBs”.

In Chapter 7, you discuss the high burden of pesticides eaten by developing children, saying that:

Twenty million American children five and under eat an average of eight pesticides every day through food consumption. Thirty-seven pesticides registered for use on foods are neurotoxic organophosphate insecticides, chemically related to more toxic nerve warfare agents developed earlier this century…a national health exposure study detected chlorpyrifos residues (as the metabolite TCP) in the urine of 82% of a representative sample of American adults. A more recent study in Minnesota revealed that an even higher 92% of children had detectable levels of this metabolite in their urine.

You connect this increasing pesticide exposure to what you believe to be increasing levels of developmental disorders in American children:

The Cailfornia Department of Developmental Services released [a study] in March 1999 [that] looked at pervasive developmental disorders from 1987 through 1998 and showed a 210 percent increase in cases entered into the autism registry during those years. If the incidence of autism is increasing, and/or clusters of autism are being discovered, an environmental influence is likely.

Maybe as a result, you’ve become a big advocate of eating organic food. Your party platform says you want to “support organic and regenerative agriculture” and “put a moratorium on GMOs and pesticides until they are proven safe”. You presented a pro-organics case on Bill Moyers’ show back in 2012, and you’re even known for preparing your own organic meals on the campaign trail.

But there’s a lot of pushback from mainstream scientists and the mainstream media. For example, news webzine Vox has an interesting article Is Organic Food Any Healthier? Most Scientists Are Still Skeptical publicizing a meta-analysis of 237 studies which showed that “organic foods didn’t appear to be any healthier or safer to eat than their conventionally grown counterparts” and that “typical exposure to pesticide residues is at levels 10,000 to 10,000,000 times lower than doses that cause no observable effect in laboratory animals that are fed pesticides daily throughout their entire lifetimes”. Vox has also written Local And Organic Food Has Extra Safety Risks. Just Ask Chipotle. Vox’s spinoff webzine Eater even makes fun of customers looking for “natural” foods without having any idea what that means.

If they’re right, then you’re promoting an unscientific fad that has millions of people needlessly stressed out about everything they eat. On the other hand, if you’re right, then these media outlets’ pooh-poohing of a vital public health message makes them complicit in and maybe even responsible for what you call the “epidemic” of childhood neurodevelopmental disorders.

So my question for you is: do you believe Vox ‘zines cause autism?

Hillary Clinton:

During your first debate with Donald Trump, the moderator asked you about racial bias in police shootings; you responded that “implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police”. You argued that you would “put money into that budget to help us deal with implicit bias by police officers” and that we’ve “got to do everything possible to improve policing, to go right at implicit bias”. Your running mate Tim Kaine continued on the theme, saying that people shouldn’t be afraid to bring up police officers’ implicit biases.

This talk of implicit bias references a whole psychological field centered around the Implicit Association Test. It works like this: a subject sitting in front of a keyboard is shown rapid-fire pictures representing various categories – classically black people, white people, positive adjectives, and negative adjectives. They’re given various instructions about which keys to press in response to which categories, and their responses are timed. Many people will find that it’s easier to press the same key for white people and positive adjectives (and an opposite key for black people and negative adjectives) than to press the same key for whites+negatives and blacks+positives. This has been widely considered to show implicit racism – that is, even people who say they are not racist unconsciously associate black people with bad qualities. This research has become wildly popular, profiled in every major media outlet, and catapulted its inventors to scientific stardom. It’s even been featured on the Oprah Winfrey show, maybe a first for a social psych paper.

A few early small studies suggested the IAT predicted prejudiced behavior. But later attempts to replicate this result failed. Blanton, Jaccard, Klick, Mellers, Mitchell, Tetlock (2009) reanalyzed some of the original studies, found no effect, and complained that the IAT was being popularized despite an almost-complete lack of evidence for its validity. Oswald et al (2013) did a meta-analysis of 275 implicit association test results from 46 different studies and found that “IATs were poor predictors of every criterion category other than brain activity, and the IATs performed no better than simple explicit measures”. Carlsson and Agerstrom did another meta-analysis earlier this year, and found “the overall effect was close to zero and highly inconsistent across studies” and “there is…little evidence that the IAT can meaningfully predict discrimination, and we thus strongly caution against any practical applications of the IAT that rest on this assumption”.

You particularly mention the IAT as relevant to policing, but Dolan Group, a consulting firm which advises police forces how to avoid racial discrimination, did an internal analysis of results surrounding the IAT and reports to its clients that:

Persons who do not hold overt racist attitudes do not have to worry about some deeply-hidden, unknown, unconscious attitudes influencing their work decisions. These findings reveal the need to aggressively weed out officers who hold conscious racial stereotypes and biases in order to avoid biased-based policing. These findings also raise questions about whether the money and time spent on law enforcement training and testing regarding implicit bias could be put to better use on something else.

When you and your running mate suggest a focus on implicit bias as relevant to policing, this can really only be justified by taking the preliminary findings of a few small early studies and ignoring both more rigorous reanalysis of their results and the consensus finding of all studies and meta-analyses conducted since that time.

On the other hand, there still is something to be explained here: if the IAT isn’t analyzing implicit racial prejudice, why do people so consistently have an easier time associating black people with negative adjectives? I actually have a theory of my own about that. Consider claims like the following:

1. Black people were brutally enslaved for hundreds of years.
2. Black people are almost three times more likely than whites to live below the poverty line.
3. Black people are systematically being murdered by the criminal justice system.
4. Black people are frequent victims of racism and hate crimes.
5. Our society is set up to structurally discriminate against black people.

None of these claims are racist per se; in fact, many of them are anti-racist in intent. But all of them connect black people to negative affect! If your local newspaper says that white people usually have friendly and positive interactions with the police but black people are victimized and killed by police, that is some heavy association of whites with positive feelings and blacks with negative feelings. If you usually see photos of white people in the news under the headline “LOCAL BUSINESS BOUGHT BY GOOGLE”, and photos of blacks in the news under the headline “LEARN HOW OUR RACIST SOCIETY KEPT THIS POOR WOMAN FROM SUCCEEDING” then once again, you’re learning to associate whites with positive feelings and blacks with negative feelings.

This would explain very nicely why people taking the IAT generally associate whites with positive feelings and blacks with negative feelings in a way apparently unrelated to whether they are explicitly prejudiced/racist. It would also explain very nicely why about 50% of blacks associate whites with positive feelings and blacks with negative feelings, which is definitely a thing that happens and which previous explanations of have always sounded unconvincing and ad hoc.

But from your debate statements, it sounds like you are absolutely opposed to this reinterpretation. That you are committed to defending the position that implicit bias is a real predictor of racism, and that Implicit Association Tests don’t just report contingent associations drilled in by the media, but genuinely reveal profound unconscious beliefs about how the world works.

So my question for you is: would you be willing to take an Implicit Association Test measuring how easily you associate your own name vs. your opponents’ names with the adjective “crooked”?

Gary Johnson:

If you were elected, what would you do about the ongoing crisis in Updog?

Donald Trump:

You’re well-known for your boast that you “hire the best people”. And one of those best people is Steve Bannon, the CEO of your campaign. When Bannon took over on August 17th, 538 had you at only a 12% chance of winning; after he was running your campaign for a month, you were up to 40%. Although you’ve since crashed back down, a lot of political observers attribute what successes you’ve had to Bannon and what problems you’ve had to your own big mouth. You seem to recognize his utility, calling him one of “the best talents in politics, with the experience and expertise needed to defeat Hillary Clinton in November”.

Before he joined your campaign, Bannon was best known for his role leading far-right news website Breitbart. But he was actually involved in some pretty interesting stuff when he was younger. In particular, in 1993 Bannon was the acting director of the famous environmental science experiment Biosphere 2.

Biosphere 2 was an attempt to create a self-sustaining closed ecosystem capable of supporting human life, possibly with applications for future space travel. It was actually the first such attempt – it was called “Biosphere 2” because the first such self-sustaining biosphere was the Earth itself. Eight “crew members” entered the facility along with various plants and animals, the airlocks were sealed, and for a year everyone tried to do what they could to keep the various species and environmental parameters in balance.

It didn’t work; CO2 levels started fluctuating wildly, soil microbes surged out of control, ants and cockroaches overran the facility, oxygen dropped to worrying levels, and the experiment was stopped early out of concern for crew health. They decided to try a second mission, and that was when they had a change in management and brought on Mr. Bannon as director.

Unfortunately, a lot of the crew members really didn’t like Bannon and his team. Possibly some of it had to do with an incident where a crew member submitted a list of safety complaints and Bannon threatened to “shove it down her f**king throat”. It got so bad that some of the crew deliberately vandalized the Biosphere, causing gas exchange between the inside and the outside and ruining the scientific value of the experiment. Although they probably could have tried again, by that time lawsuits and financial mismanagement had sapped their funding, and they finally sold the whole thing off to Columbia University as a research campus.

So my question for you is: in all of history, there have only been two self-sufficient ecosystems capable of maintaining human life. Your team has already destroyed one of them. The other is Earth. How scared should we be?

[Epistemic status: Not sure if I’m arguing against a straw man here and my conclusion is what the researchers meant all along.]

I.

Benitez-Burraco and Lattanzi theorize that autism and schizophrenia are anomalies in the human self-domestication process. I’ll try to explain, but for a much better explanation than I can give read Dr. Chris Badcock here.

Still here? Fine. BBL’s theory goes like this. When Russian scientist Dmitry Belyaev tried to domesticate foxes by breeding them for tame behavior, he found that changes in a lot of other traits went along for the ride. In short, the foxes started looking kind of dog-like: smaller heads, shorter snouts, spotted fur, floppy ears, more youthful characteristics. Some further experiments confirmed that similar changes happen in any species bred for tameness. Probably this has to do with changes in the neural crest, an embryonic structure which goes on to form a bunch of things including the adrenal medulla. Since the adrenal medulla produces some of the hormones involved in fear and stress, animals with hypoactive medullae will probably be tamer. But since the neural crest also goes on to form lots of other stuff, or produce hormones that influence the formation of lots of other stuff, these tamer animals will be different in other ways too.

BBL continues: we went from being wild apes to tame humans, a process that could be analogized to “self-domestication”. Some of the same changes the Russians saw in the transition from wild to domesticated foxes can be seen in the transition from early hominid skulls to modern human skulls.

Autistic people, say BBL, are “undomesticated humans” – people in whom for some reason the neural crest changes that result in domesticated features have reversed. They find that some of the changes of domestication syndrome are the reverse of some of the symptoms of autism:

Smaller heads = autistic people have larger heads
More trusting and social = autistic people are less trusting and social
Spotted fur = the depigmenting disease “hypomelanosis of Ito” is sometimes associated with autistic symptoms
Floppy ears = studies find autistic people are more likely to have abnormally shaped ears (really!)
Change in adrenal response = autistic people have abnormal function in the HPA axis, the system including the adrenal gland

Or in the form of their cutesy picture:

Schizophrenics, say BBL, are “hyperdomesticated humans”. Once again, they match up the symptoms:

I originally thought this theory was dumb. After looking into it more, I think it has some serious issues, but that there might be a core of truth.

II.

I’ll get to that core, but first, the argument against: all of this is coincidences, pareidolia, and finessing things to fit into a system where they don’t really belong.

Going down the list:

Smaller heads = autistic people have larger heads

Some studies find this is true. Others find that it isn’t. In any case, note a discrepancy between this claim and the schizophrenia version. BBL note smaller brains in schizophrenics (true) and shorter skull (true), but not smaller heads, which we would expect if autism were the “reverse” of schizophrenia. In fact, schizophrenics may have larger heads than healthy people. This sort of moving the goal-posts, where autistics are judged on their larger heads but schizophrenics on their smaller brains, is a red flag for fake pattern-matching.

More trusting and social = autistic people are less trusting and social

True! But schizophrenics are way less trusting and social! Paranoia – pathological inability to trust – is a classic symptom of schizophrenia; indeed, if you made people choose between schizophrenia and autism and asked which one was associated with lack of trust, I think most people would choose schizophrenia. This brings an important point into relief: the whole point of domestication is that the domesticated animal is supposed to be friendlier and less aggressive. But nobody would describe schizophrenics as friendlier and less aggressive.

Spotted fur = the depigmenting disease “hypomelanosis of Ito” is sometimes associated with autistic symptoms

True! But hypomelanosis of Ito is a really rare disease (1/10,000 births) that has nothing to do with most autism. Also, it causes eye problems, kidney cysts, weirdly-shaped chests, short stature, seizures, mental retardation, etc. To me this looks more like “a super-rare disease that can cause pretty much anything can sometimes also cause autistic symptoms”, which is not very interesting. Also, domestication causing “pigmentation changes” (usually spotted fur) versus autism being (very rarely) associated with a depigmenting disease and schizophrenia being (very rarely) associated with albinism is more goalpost-shifting.

Floppy ears = studies find autistic people are more likely to have abnormally shaped ears (really!)

I looked at this study – Manouilenko et al – and what it actually finds is that autistic people are more likely to have asymmetrical ears. In fact, nonsignificantly more likely to have asymmetrical ears; their significant finding is that autistic people have more “minor physical abnormalities”, and the asymmetrical ears were one of many pieces of evidence combined to get the significant finding. But asymmetrical features are common in lots of genetic/embryological diseases and seem like a general sign of high mutational load. It seems sketchy to combine autists’ asymmetrical ears and wild foxes’ pointy ears and say “Look, they both have ear abnormalities, this is the same thing!” Some other studies suggest that autistic people have low-set ears, which sounds more promising, but schizophrenic people also have low-set ears, so whatever. The other schizophrenia ear findings are exactly as unconvincing as the autistic ones.

Change in adrenal response = autistic people have abnormal function in the HPA axis, the system including the adrenal gland

Wikipedia’s page on the HPA axis has a section on its possible role in disease, which states that dysfunction of the axis is involved in various conditions “including anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder, insomnia, posttraumatic stress disorder, borderline personality disorder, ADHD, major depressive disorder, burnout, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, and alcoholism”. In other words, in a list of the HPA axis’ twelve greatest hits, neither autism nor schizophrenia qualify for inclusion.

I’m not saying that there isn’t an HPA axis component to these diseases. I’m just saying HPA axis is a nonspecific finding. I’m agnostic whether the HPA axis causes everything or our HPA axis study methods are so bad that they invariably turn up false positives. The point is that we shouldn’t get too excited when we see the HPA axis involved in both domestication and autism. This is like saying “Cancer causes you to feel bad, and AIDS causes you to feel bad, therefore cancer causes AIDS.” No, it’s just that everything makes you feel bad.

When we look beyond the general claim of “abnormal function”, things get less clear. BBL say that domesticated animals have “reduced levels of stress hormones including adrenocorticoids, adrenocorticotropic hormone, cortisol, and corticosterone”. So their theory should predict that autistic people have increased stress hormones, and schizophrenics decreased, relative to typical people. Actually, it’s a mess; autistic people seem to have higher ACTH but lower cortisol; schizophrenia studies are conflicting but tend towards higher levels of both. Once again, they can support a general claim of “these conditions affect the same system”, but they can’t predict the direction of the effect. Also, every condition affects this system.

(if you’re wondering why we’re talking about cortisol levels in a theory about the adrenal medulla, well, so am I. Whatever.)

Finally, if by “undomesticated human” we mean something like an ape or Neanderthal, well, neither apes nor Neanderthals (as far as we know) display the symptoms of autism. They seem to be pretty social. They seem to be able to eat all kinds of stuff without trouble. They don’t seem bothered by sensory processing problems. For that matter, dogs and cattle and nth generation silver foxes, the most domesticated animals we’ve got, don’t seem very schizophrenic. I guess cows could just be hallucinating all the time and how would we know, but there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that they are.

So this is why I originally was not too big on this theory.

III.

But what about Williams Syndrome?

Benitez-Burraco and Lattanzi don’t mention Williams Syndrome (also called Williams-Beuren Syndrome) at all, which is crazy, because it sounds a thousand times more like a syndrome of hyperdomestication than either of the two conditions they examine (h/t Nicholas Wade and a random Reddit comment). Williams Syndrome is a rare condition (1/10,000 births) caused by the deletion of some genes on chromosome 7. There are three very interesting things about people with Williams Syndrome. Number one, they are really nice. Like if you meet someone with Williams Syndrome, you will think “This person clearly has a rare genetic disease that causes pathological levels of niceness as a symptom.” Number two, they are really trusting. An Atlantic article profiling the condition, What Happens When You Trust Too Much? describes special therapy for Williams Syndrome children where the therapist has to teach them, painfully and laboriously, how to distrust people. NPR calls it “essentially biologically impossible for kids [with Williams Syndrome] to distrust [people].” Number three, they talk all the time; the informal name for the condition is “cocktail personality syndrome”.

People with Williams Syndromes actually legitimately have short noses (compare to the short snout on domesticated foxes), smaller teeth (compare to smaller teeth in dogs vs. wolves), smaller brains, and “unusually shaped ears” (I can’t find anything more specific; I guess it’s too much to hope for that researchers actually describe the ears as “floppy”).

Also, somebody checked which gene was most different in dogs versus wolves, and they found it was WBSCR17. The WBS in the name stands for “Williams-Beuren Syndrome” because it’s been linked to the disorder. So there’s that.

So as far as I can tell there’s an amazingly good case for Williams Syndrome being linked to domestication. Williams Syndrome tends to cause severe mental retardation and death at an early age, but that’s probably because there are twenty-five totally different genes missing. Maybe a version that only deleted WBSCR17 would keep the behavioral and physiologic changes but not much else.

A lot of people suggest Williams’ Syndrome is “the opposite of autism”. I can only find three pieces of evidence for this. Number one, the obvious contrast with the love of social situations and high verbal skills. Number two, Williams Syndrome kids seem to be really good at face recognition, whereas autistic people are often worse at this. Number three, Williams’ Syndrome kids seem to be unusually bad at the puzzles and interlocking-mechanical-part type problems on which autistic people excel.

On the other hand, there are some reasons to think these conditions are not exact opposites. For one thing, autism is caused by a hideously complex interplay of thousands of genes and various environmental factors, but Williams Syndrome is a drop-dead simple “oops, we forgot part of this chromosome over here”. Williams Syndrome kids seem to have some of the same sensory sensitivities as autistic kids. And both groups usually suffer from mental retardation.

I think that Williams Syndrome establishes the possibility of a physiological social/trust system linked to domestication, the neural crest, and various other parts of embroygenesis. Once you admit the existence of such a system, it seems like autism probably involves some kind of damage to it – probably along with damage to a lot of other systems too. Schizophrenia is more of a stretch, but the overwhelming presence of distrust as a symptom makes the existence of a physiological social/trust system at least kind of interesting and relevant.

So maybe instead of saying that “autistic people are undomesticated humans” and “schizophrenics are hyperdomesticated humans”, we should say something like “there is a very subtle and hard-to-notice biological system that determines level of trust and sociability and which seems weirdly linked to ear and nose shape; autism, schizophrenia, and Williams Syndrome all affect that system in different ways.” Note that this doesn’t mean they’re “the same disease” or “opposite diseases”; the connection might be no deeper than the “connection” where heart attacks, atrial fibrillation, and getting stabbed in the chest all affect the heart. But they all hit the same system.

My take-home message from looking into all of this is that I was very silly for trying to learn about autism and schizophrenia without thinking about embryology. These are highly genetically-loaded diseases that present early in life and seem linked to teratogens and prenatal infections; of course they’re embryological! I had to take some embryology classes in medical school, and like everyone else I tuned them out because they seemed totally irrelevant to real clinical practice and mostly involved memorizing pointless trivia like “on day thirty-six and a half, the developing shmendroblast has transformed into a blexomere”. But if you want to know what causes secret connections between ear shape and level of social trust, embryology seems like the way to go. Autism and schizophrenia are hard to study because they seem to affect everything, yet nothing specifically enough to localize the condition. Maybe going back and thinking more embryologically could help pinpoint the particular systems involved.

Early voting in North Carolina

The excellent US blog,InsightUS, is providing regular reports and analysis on early voting for the election which takes place four weeks today.

In the swing state of North Carolina data is being released by the election board showing how many have early voters have participated so far and this is being compared with what was happening at exactly the same stage in 2012.

The post notes:-

“..North Carolina’s registered Republicans simply aren’t voting (so far, anyway) in anything like the numbers they typically post. This is surely the most bizarre result we’ve ever seen in decades of poll-watching…but then, by any reasonable criterion this is also the most bizarre election year in modern history.

ABM voting is typically the almost exclusive domain of Republicans (as the red bars in the figure above – for 2012 – illustrate). Democrats typically prefer in-person Early Voting (which begins on October 20th this year). But this election, while both Dems and independents have posted modest upticks relative to 2012 (107% and 106%, respectively), Republicans are voting at just 55% of their 2012 numbers. And this ‘Trump slump’ fully accounts for the overall decline in ABM voting so far.

It’s hard to imagine a reasonable scenario in which the mere mechanics of vote tabulation by the Board of Elections could yield numbers like these, short of bizarre conspiracy theories..”

Clearly this is just one state and the overall numbers are very small but this doesn’t look good for Mr. Trump or other Republicans standing for office.

Mike Smithson

Follow @MSmithsonPB

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Today is the beginning of early voting here in Ohio, which means that it is a good day for me to formally make the following announcement regarding my vote for President of the United States:

I am voting for Hillary Clinton for President of the United States, and I think you should too.

And now, let me explain why, in points that go (roughly) from external to internal, both in a political and personal sense. This entry is long, but this year, I think, longer is probably better.

1. Because she is not Donald Trump. I wrote yesterday on why I believe Donald Trump is an unmitigated and unprecedented disaster as a presidential candidate, so I don’t need to do it again. But I think it’s important to acknowledge that while I am affirmatively voting for Hillary Clinton as president — I want her in the White House — I am also actively and affirmatively voting against Donald Trump. Indeed, even if I wasn’t enthusiastically voting for Clinton, this year of all years I would pull the lever for her because as the candidate of one of the two major parties, she is the only realistic bulwark against Trump being in office. It’s that important that he be denied the presidency.

However, let me go into in detail here about one thing. I want to be clear that in voting against Trump, I’m not only voting against him as an individual, although given who he is as an individual — a racist, a misogynist, a liar and a cheat — that would be more than enough. I am also voting against the people who I see as the shock troops of the Trump campaign: the racists, the anti-semites, the religiously intolerant, the sexists and bullies, the toxic stew of hate, stupidity and sociopathy that has tried to pass into respectability with the jazzy new title of “alt-right,” but which is just the Klan and the neo-Nazis all over again.

In voting against Trump, I’m voting against the alt-right and larger pool of hate in which they fester, against the people who slur women, blacks, latinos, Jews, Muslims, LGBT folks and others on social media and elsewhere, against the ones who promise them a march to the ovens or a noose over a tree branch or a rape in an alley, against the ones who glory in the fact that Trump’s candidacy lends their bigotry mainstream cover, and the ones who, should Trump win, have plans for anyone and everyone who isn’t them. I’m voting against the people who believe, when Trump says “Make America great again,” it means “Make everyone else afraid again.”

To Hell with them, and to Hell with Trump for lifting them up and giving them cover and succor. I don’t believe and would not abide the idea that every person who might vote for Trump is the sort of person I describe above. But everyone who votes for Trump has to know that these are the people with whom they ride. I will not ride with them. I will vote against them and Trump, and gladly so. The best way to do that is to vote for Hillary Clinton.

2. Because she is not the GOP candidate. First, the practical: If Trump were to win the presidency, that would likely mean that the House and Senate would remain in GOP hands. Which means that I strongly suspect the first 100 days of a Trump presidency would be a fantastic orgy of the GOP rolling back every single Obama law and policy that it could. Not because doing so would make the lives of Americans better — it manifestly would not — but because they just fucking hate Barack Obama so much that giving him the middle finger for a hundred days would fill them with glee. I’m not down with that.

Likewise, not down with the GOP plan to pack the Supreme Court with Scalia clones; there are already two, in the form of Thomas and Alito. That’s more than enough for one court, I think.

Both the legislative and the judicial issues outlined above, I would note, would be a disincentive for me to vote for any presidential candidate the GOP might have picked in 2016, especially considering the generally atrocious primary field of candidates, of whom the only one I might have been willing to consider even briefly for my vote would have been John Kasich. But Kasich was too moderate and sensible for the GOP primary voters, which given how conservative Kasich is, is a vaguely terrifying thing.

Second, the philosophical: Look, I’m not a straight-ticket voter. In almost every election I vote for more than a single party, because — here’s a wacky idea — I consider each position up for election and who among the listed candidates will be the best for the role. I expect this year I will do the same.

But not on the national level. On the national level I don’t think the GOP has earned my vote, nor has it for years. Even before the moment where the GOP primary voters appallingly selected Donald Trump as their standard bearer, the national party’s philosophical and political tenets had been long abandoned for the simpler and uglier strategy of “deny Barack Obama everything.”

To what purpose? To what end? Well, not for the purpose of actually making the United States a better place for its citizens, or to practice active governance of the nation. From the outside at least — and I rather strongly suspect from the inside as well — it just looked like “sooner or later they have to let one of us be president, so let’s just throw a fit until then.” Fortunately, if you want to call it that, the GOP has spent decades training its electoral base to reward intransigence over actual action to make their lives better, and wasn’t above poking at the base’s latent (and not-so-latent) bigotry to delegitimize the president.

Trump has given the latter part of the game away — Trump doesn’t dog whistle his bigotry, he uses a megaphone — but the other part, the part about the intransigence, I don’t see the GOP, as it’s currently constituted on the national level, ever letting go of. Let’s not pretend that Hillary Clinton will have an easier time with the GOP than Obama did. The GOP already hates her just for being who she is, and it’ll be happy to slide the bigoted setting they use to on its base from “racism” to “sexism,” even if Trump’s blown its cover on that. So I expect that the new policy for the GOP will be the same as the old policy, with a new name slotted in: “Deny Hillary Clinton everything.”

And that’s just not acceptable. I’m not foolish enough to assume the GOP would give a President Hillary Clinton everything she wanted even in the best of times. But there’s a difference between an opposition party and an antagonistic party. The former is a participant and perhaps even a partner in governance. The latter, which is what we have, reduces politics down to a football game and in doing so makes life worse for every American. We can argue about how this has come about — training the base, gerrymandering safe districts which incline toward polarization, just plain rampant stupidity — but we can’t argue it’s not there.

This year of all years the national GOP needs to lose, and it needs to lose so comprehensively that the message is clear: Stop obstructing and start governing again. Now, as it happens, it might lose comprehensively because Trump and the GOP are fighting, and if Trump is going to go down, he might as well take the GOP down with him. Which would be a delightful irony! But just to be sure, and to use my vote to make a larger point, I won’t be voting for the GOP this year for president or US senator or US representative. I don’t imagine it will matter for US representative (my district hasn’t gone Democratic since the Great Depression) but for the senate and the presidency, it might help.

3. Because I largely agree with Hillary Clinton’s platform and positions. I’ve mentioned before that had I been born roughly 40 years earlier than I was, I probably would have become what’s known as a “Rockefeller Republican,” which is to say someone largely to the right on fiscal issues, and largely to the left on social issues. Rockefeller Republicans don’t exist anymore, or more accurately, they’re best known today as “mainstream Democrats.” And, hey, guess which of the two candidates for President of the United States could be described as a “mainstream Democrat”? Why, yes, that’s right, it’s Hillary Clinton.

So it’s not particularly surprising that I find many of her policy positions congenial, both in themselves and in contrast to Trump’s positions — that is, when Trump actually has a position that’s more than “trust me, it’ll be great.” As an example, let’s take, oh, say, Clinton’s tax policy, which essentially tweaks the existing code to make those of us on the top pay a slightly higher amount for our top marginal rate on income and investments, close some corporate loopholes, and essentially leave everyone else alone (or offer them slightly larger tax breaks). It’s not sexy, but it’s pretty sensible, particularly in contrast to Trump’s, which basically gives rich people really big tax cuts and as a result adds trillions to our debt (author John Green, who laudably does public service-related videos, has a ten minute video comparing and contrasting the plans, which I would recommend).

“Not sexy, but sensible” in fact describes most of her policies on everything from climate change to farm issues to voting rights to national security, and while I don’t necessarily agree with every single thing she proposes right down the line, when I don’t, what I still generally see is that the policy is based on a cogent reason or rationale in the real world, and not just some angry bellow from a fear-gravid id, which is how a large number of Trump policies come across.

And this is good, people. I want a policy nerd in the White House, and someone who has had real-world experience with how the political sausage gets made, and who both gets the value of having policies that have some relationship to the world outside their head and has the wherewithal, interest and capability to understand and express them. I’m not under the impression that Clinton will get everything she wants in terms of policy — despite the unbridled optimism on the left due to the events of recent days, I expect the House will stay in GOP hands (but, you know, prove me wrong!) — but I like most of what she has, and will likely be happy with whatever she manages to get through Congress.

4. Because I like what I know of Hillary Clinton. But! But! BenghaziWhitewaterEmailVincentFosterBillIsSkeevy Ggggwwwaaaaaaarrrrggghhhnnffffnf —

I’m going to skip over the vast majority of this right now by noting that there are very few people in the world whose personal and public conduct has been so aggressively and punitively investigated, and for so long, as Hillary Clinton, and yet she continues to walk among us, a free woman whose errors, when they have been made, are usually of the venial rather than the mortal sort. Which probably means one of two things: Either this decades-long persecution of Hillary Clinton on the part of her enemies is largely motivated for their own political and financial benefit, or that Hillary Clinton is a criminal mastermind so good at evading the forces of justice that holy shit we should be glad that she’s finally decided to use her evil-honed skills for the forces of good. Better give her eight years, just to make sure.

I believe that the vast majority of the bullshit said about Hillary Clinton is just that: bullshit. Hillary Clinton gets shit because apparently she’s always been an ambitious woman who is not here for your nonsense. And maybe, like any human who is not here for your nonsense, but especially a woman who is not here for your nonsense (and who has gotten more of it because she is a woman), she just gets tired of the unremitting flood of nonsense she has to deal with every single goddamn day of her life. Maybe she she gets tired of being told to smile and when she’s smiles being told she shouldn’t smile. Maybe she gets tired of being called a bitch and c*nt and a demon. Maybe she gets tired of having to be up on a stage with bullies who try to intimidate her with their physical presence in her physical space, and if you think that second presidential debate was the first time that happened, look up her senatorial debate just for fun. Maybe she gets tired of it but knows she has to take it and smile, because that’s the deal.

People, I flat out fucking admire Hillary Clinton for having dealt with all that bullshit for 30 years and yet not burning the whole world down.

So that’s the first thing, and it’s unfair that it’s the first thing, but since that’s what gets shoved on you the moment you open your mouth about Hillary Clinton, that’s what the first thing has to be.

But let me also tell you that I like her intelligence, her attention to detail, her ability to speak at length about the subjects that matter to her and that she thinks would matter to you, too. I like she doesn’t have a problem being the smartest person in the room, even if you do. I like the work that she did on her own, without reference to her husband and his own ambitions. I liked when she said that she wasn’t here to bake cookies, and I liked that you could see how much she hated having to bake the cookies when shit blew up around that statement (I like that I believe that in her personal life she probably likes baking cookies just fine, just on her terms, not yours). I like that she tried things and failed at them and picked herself up and kept going and got better at them because of it. I like that she cares about people who aren’t just like her. I like that she’s ambitious. I like that she’s fearless. I like that all the right people hate and loathe her. I like that she plows through them anyway.

There are things I don’t like about her too, but not nearly as many, and none of them enough, to reduce my admiration for her for these other things.

I don’t expect Hillary Clinton to be perfect, or not to fail, or to be a president whose actions I agree with straight down the line. I’ve never had that in any president and I think it would be foolish to expect it in her. What I do expect, based on what I’ve known of her since 1992, when she first entered my consciousness, is that she will never not try. Try to be a good president, and try to be a president whose administration does the most good for the largest number of Americans. Now, maybe she’ll succeed and maybe she won’t — it’s not all up to her and even if it was, you never know what happens to you in this life. But everything I know about her from the last quarter century convinces me that she has earned this opportunity, perhaps more than anyone else who has ever run for president.

5. Because I like what she represents for our country. I have written at length about the idea that being a straight white male is living life on the lowest difficulty setting, and if you should ever doubt that it’s the case, look at the 2016 election, in which a racist, sexist, ignorant boor of a straight white male, with no experience in public service and no policies he could personally articulate beyond “it’ll be great, believe me” went up against a woman who spent the better part of four decades in and around public service, including occupying some of the highest positions in government, and who had exhaustive, detailed policy positions on nearly every point of public interest — and was ahead of her in some polls on the day they had their first debate.

If that tape in which Trump bragged about sexual assault hadn’t hit the air, the polls might yet still be close. It literally took “grab ’em by the pussy” to get some air between arguably the most qualified candidate ever to run for president, who is a woman, and inarguably the worst major party presidential candidate in living memory, who is a straight, white man. I cannot know that fact and not be confronted by the immense and absolutely real privilege straight white men have — and just how much better a woman has to be to compete.

I am not voting for Hillary Clinton simply because she is a woman — but at the same time I cannot deny, and actively celebrate the fact, that much of what makes Hillary Clinton the person I want to vote for is because she is a woman. Everything that our culture has put on her, all the expectations it has had for her, all the expectations she’s had for herself, all the things that she’s taken on, or fought against, because she’s a woman, all of that has shaped the person she is and the character she has, and has become: A person who has talents and flaws, a person I admire, and a person who I want to see in the Oval Office.

When she becomes president, as I believe she will, it won’t only be because she is a woman. But her experience being a woman will have prepared her for the job and will be integral to how she will be president. Her simply being our first woman president will make her a symbol and an icon and almost certainly in time an inspiration (all of these more than she already is, to be clear), and I am glad for those. But it’s how her life and her experiences will bear on the day-to-day aspects of presidency that to me is key, and which I think in time should be what inspires people, as much as if not more than what she represents symbolically. It’s something we haven’t had yet. It matters to our country, and it matters to me.

And so: with a full heart and with no small amount of joy, I endorse Hillary Clinton for President of the United States.

At this point there is no doubt that Donald Trump is the single worst major party presidential candidate in living memory, almost certainly the worst since the Civil War, and arguably the worst in the history of this nation. He is boastful and ignorant and petty, disdainful of the Constitution, a racist and a sexist, the enabler of the worst elements of society, either the willing tool of, or the useful idiot for, Vladimir Putin, an admirer of despots, an insecure braggart, a sexual assaulter, a man who refuses to honor contracts, and a bore.

He is, in sum, just about the biggest asshole in all of the United States of America. He’s lucky that Syrian dictator Bashar Hafez al-Assad is out there keeping him from taking the global title, not that he wouldn’t try for that, too, should he become president. It’s appalling that he is the standard bearer for one of the two major political parties in the United States. It’s appalling that he is a candidate for the presidency at all.

But note well: Donald Trump is not a black swan, an unforeseen event erupting upon an unsuspecting Republican Party. He is the end result of conscious and deliberate choices by the GOP, going back decades, to demonize its opponents, to polarize and obstruct, to pursue policies that enfeeble the political weal and to yoke the bigot and the ignorant to their wagon and to drive them by dangling carrots that they only ever intended to feed to the rich. Trump’s road to the candidacy was laid down and paved by the Southern Strategy, by Lee Atwater and Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove, by Fox News and the Tea Party, and by the smirking cynicism of three generations of GOP operatives, who have been fracking the white middle and working classes for years, crushing their fortunes with their social and economic policies, never imagining it would cause an earthquake.

Well, surprise! Here’s Donald Trump. He is the actual and physical embodiment of every single thing the GOP has trained its base to want and to be over the last forty years — ignorant, bigoted and money-grubbing, disdainful of facts and frightened of everything because of it, an angry drunk buzzed off of wood-grain patriotism, threatening brown people and leering at women. He was planned. He was intended. He was expected. He was wanted.

But not, I think, in the exact form of Donald Trump. The GOP were busily genetically engineering the perfect host for their message, someone smooth and telegenic and possibly just ethnic enough to make people hesitant to point out the latent but real racism inherent in its social policies, while making the GOP’s white base feel like they were making a progressive choice, and with that person installed, further pursuing its agenda of slouching toward oligarchy, with just enough anti-abortion and pro-gun glitter tossed into the sky to distract the religious and the paranoid. Someone the GOP made. Someone they could control.

But they don’t control Trump, which they are currently learning to their great misery. And the reason the GOP doesn’t control Trump is that they no longer control their base. The GOP trained their base election cycle after election cycle to be disdainful of government and to mistrust authority, which ultimately is an odd thing for a political party whose very rationale for existence is rooted in the concept of governmental authority to do. The GOP created a monster, but the monster isn’t Trump. The monster is the GOP’s base. Trump is the guy who stole their monster from them, for his own purposes.

And this is why the GOP deserves the chaos that’s happening to it now, with its appalling and parasitic standard bearer, who will never be president, driving his GOP host body toward the cliff. If it accepts the parasite, it will be driven off the cliff. If it resists, the parasite Trump will rip himself from it, leaving bloody marks as it does so, and then shove the dazed and wounded GOP from the precipice. That there is a fall in the GOP’s future is inevitable; all that is left is which plunge to take.

I feel sorry for many of my individual friends who are Republicans and/or conservatives, who have to deal with the damage Trump is doing to their party and to their movement, even if I belong to neither. But I don’t feel sorry for the GOP at all. It deserves Trump. It fostered an environment of ignorance and fear and bigotry, assumed it could control the mob those elements created, and was utterly stunned when a huckster from outside claimed the mob as his own and forced the party along for the ride. It was hubris, plain and simple, and Trump is the GOP’s vulgar, orange nemesis.

Trump will do the GOP long and lasting damage, and moreover, Trump doesn’t care that he will do the GOP long and lasting damage. Trump was never about being a Republican; he was just looking to expand his brand. As it turns out, like apparently so many things Trump does, he’s done an awful job of it — the name Trump, formerly merely associated with garish ostentation and bankruptcy, is now synonymous with white nationalism, sexual battery and failure — but the point is on November 9th Trump is going to move on and leave the wreckage of the GOP in his wake, off to his next thing (everyone assumes “Trump TV,” in which Trump combines with Breitbart to make white pride propaganda for the kind of millennial racist who thinks a Pepe the Frog Twitter icon is the height of wit — and I hope he does, because the Trump touch will drive that enterprise into the ground, and little would warm my heart more than a bankrupt Breitbart).

Trump is the party guest who sets fire to your house, gropes your spouse and drives over your neighbor’s cat when he leaves; the GOP is left to deal with the police and the angry neighbors. It’s almost piteous, except when you scrub back to five hours earlier to hear the GOP say “What, Trump wants to come to the party? Well, he’s an asshole who drove Fred Jones’ car into the pool the other weekend, but he’s always good for a laugh, isn’t he? Surely it will be fine,” and then tells him to bring his bad boy self right on over.

There is no good way for the GOP or its members to extricate itself from this mess. Trump has doomed them for this election cycle. But there is a moral way, and they should take it. When a grifter and a con man has suckered you into a shitshow, you have two options: bail out early and admit you got shit all over yourself, or stick with the con and affirmatively choose to drown in the shit. No GOP politician should ever have endorsed him; the moral hazard he presented was obvious and clear and became clearer the further he went along. But if they were foolish enough to have endorsed him, it’s not too late to bail out. He’s going to lose either way and drag the GOP down with him; these politicians might as well come out of it with their souls, besmirched but still their own.

And obviously to me, no one with sense should cast a vote for Trump. He’s not just a candidate, he is an active repudiation of what we should expect from the United States and those who lead it. A candidate who can’t open his mouth without a lie falling out — a lie that everyone including him knows is a lie — doesn’t deserve to be president. A candidate who threatens millions because of their religion does not deserve to be president. A candidate who promises to extralegally throw his political opponent into jail does not deserve to be president. A candidate who fosters white nationalism, racism and anti-semitism does not deserve to be president. A candidate who brags about sexual assault and then tries to dismiss it as mere talk does not deserve to be president.

These are not merely Democratic or Republican issues. These are American issues, human issues and moral issues. You can’t vote for Donald Trump and say you don’t know what you’re voting for. You’re voting for hate, and chaos, and the deluge. Anything else that you think you get from voting for him will be washed away in the flood.

Trump is the single worst major party presidential candidate in living memory, but he’s there because the GOP spent decades making him possible, and its base, trained for decades to look for someone like him, made him its standard bearer. He needs to lose and the GOP needs to be punished for him. Conservatism and classical Republican ideas won’t go away, nor should they. But if the GOP can’t break itself from its addiction to the bigoted and the ignorant, then it certainly deserves to die. It’s brought the country to the edge. Shame is only the beginning of what it should feel for it.

Update, 3:00pm 10/12/16: I’ve made my official presidential endorsement. It’s, uh, not for Donald Trump.

Tagged: phone

[Read in black and white]

[Content advisory: raw discussion of the attitudes that validate the subjugation of women, sexually and otherwise, and legitimize rape and sexual assault.]

The Right has been plunged into turmoil by the discovery and release of a video that captures Trump, 10 years ago, bragging about his sexual behavior. This video has prompted a number of prominent Republicans to repudiate their support of Trump.

On the Left (e.g. Metafilter and Twitter), many expressed surprise that this, appalling as it may be, is the bridge too far for the Right, and are spinning hypotheses as to why this, and not any of the other reprehensible things he's been recorded saying, is what provoked the Right's rejection.

First and foremost, plenty of Republicans are not repudiating Trump. A lot of the people on this list of "defectors" were never Trump supporters to begin with. It is unclear to me that this "revelation" actually is having as much effect on the Right as the media are making it out to have.

Which is not to say it has none.

But I think some people on the Right are hearing that video very, very differently than people on the Left do. And I think it important for the Left that they understand the various ways the Right is taking this. It is a crash course in feminist history, and an orientation to something important that is going on right now.

How one hears what is in that audio recording depends on at least two things. One of them is what one believes constitutes unacceptable sexual behavior.

1.

Most people on the Left believe that sexually touching a woman without her permission is sexual assault. Most people on the Left also believe that pressuring a woman psychologically to have sex, say badgering her after she has already refused an overture, is unacceptable behavior, though not usually a prosecutable crime.

Frankly, one of the things that has characterized the Right is simply not believing that unwanted sexual attention, including physical contact, is all that bad. (Full props to the many prominent Republican women who have made it clear in the last day that they found Trump's remarks reprehensible on those grounds, but they have not been characteristic of the Right.) Many, if not most, on the Right simply do not grant women's claims that it is harmful to them (and they remain unconfronted by any men's claims of the same), and do not consider the imposition of unwanted sexual attention or contact a wrong done the person it is done to. To them, criminalizing the imposition of unwanted sexual attention or contact for being unwanted is perversion of the law, because it criminalizes something that isn't wrong.

This is a face of patriarchy: women's suffering having little-to-no particular moral or legal significance. Individual men of such a mindset might feel sentimental towards specific women they know, and concerned for their specific well-being, but that is merely directly analogous to a pet owner who loves their pets but doesn't feel their pet should have any legal rights and bridles at the suggestion that the law "interferes" with how they treat their animals.

This was the legal and social status of women in the West for thousands of years, and remains the situation of women in many places to this day. It's somewhat charming to me, as well as alarming, that so many Western liberal women (and men!) today are demonstrating that they clearly don't recognize or understand what they're hearing, because the last 100 years of fighting for women's rights has been so successful in our society that this entirely common and historically prevalent mindset is literally alien to them.

For most of human history men were people and women were either the property of people or unclaimed property, like a lost $100 lying on the ground. Here in the US, we inherited English common law, under which the doctrine of coverture a wife was legally a "chattel" of her husband. "Chattel" is a confusing word for moderns. It's a technical legal term meaning "property that's not real estate", and has passed into discussions of history as a euphemism. Since most people don't know the technical definition of "chattel" the term serves well to allow people to discuss the historical legal status of women without actually confronting the ugly truth that word indicates: women were property.

In societies in which women legally are (or socially are regarded as) property, their value is reckoned in terms of their value as livestock: the labor they can perform, the obedience they demonstrate, and, above all, the offspring they can produce. Since the value of those offspring to their owners in such patriarchal societies is mediated by the certainty of those offsprings' paternity, men in such societies or otherwise of that mindset understand themselves, both individually and as a demographic, to have enormous interest – financial interest – in controlling women's sexual contacts. This results, obviously, in various attempts to control women's sexual behavior, and curtailing women's liberty in general. But – and I think this is much less obvious to modern liberal Westerner – it also shaped legal and moral policy around men's conduct: Thou, presumed male audience, shalt not covet thy (also presumed male) neighbor's wife, neither shalt thou covet his house, his male slave, nor his female slave, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor's.

Rape has approximately always been illegal. But it has only recently in the West become regarded as a crime of violence against the person, usually female, it is done to. Historically, it was primarily a property crime, against the person who owned the person it was done to. To put it crudely, rape was the crime of unlawful breeding of someone else's livestock. Rape was a crime because it spoiled the incontestability of paternity of any subsequent offspring – it ruined, for the owner, the carefully cultivated sexual containment of their breeding stock.

This is why the very idea of marital rape was long scoffed at, and only recently got legal standing: when rape is a crime of violating a woman's owner's consent, well, how can a woman's owner commit rape against himself? Likewise, the notion of "loose women". You, gentle readers, probably think "loose" in this sense is a vulgar description of the presumed effect on a woman's genitals of having much sex, or a slang description of having low standards for sexual partners. It can definitely mean those things. It also means "loose" in the same sense as "loose change" and "on the loose": detached, not in anyone's possession, having escaped confinement. A "loose" woman is a woman to whom the doctrine of "finders keepers" applies. In societies where a woman does not own herself, if no man owns her, any man may.

(The feminist slogan "Feminism is the radical notion that women are people" isn't a quip. It's simply literally true.)

Which brings us back to Republican repugnance (and lack thereof) at the Trump Tape.

A lot of women (and a lot of men) seem surprised to see Republicans object to women being treated as Trump describes treating them in that recording. That seems to be way more consideration for women than they ever expected to see on the Right. Don't worry: in many cases, it is not consideration for women at all.

Many – not all, but Mitt Romney, I'm looking right at you – men on the Right who are recoiling in righteous indignation aren't doing it because Trump did something to a woman, or even (as some observed) a white woman.

Oh, you sweet summer children. He did it to a married woman.

The line too far is that he macked on some other bro's bitch.

I wrote that the mindset that women were property was in the past, but, clearly, not everybody in our society is down with how we do things here in the future. If you know the history of male supremicism, some otherwise mysterious reactions from the Right suddenly become transparent.

None of those men care about how Trump treats "loose" women – women who presume to own themselves, unmarried and carrying on their own adult lives unregulated by a father or other male relative. None of them cared how he treated Alicia Machado.

No, the intolerable part for some – many? – on the Right was his disrespecting the rights of the husband.

This is why this revelation will not shake the support of many of those on the religious Right who already committed to support him. From their perspective, the wrong he does in this recording isn't new and it isn't news: they knew from the get-go when they pinched their noses and endorsed him that he was a gluttonous greedy bastard who doesn't respect others' rights, including their property rights, and is proud of it. They knew he was a thief and a cattle rustler and a conman. He doesn't respect other men's claims to their own women? Quel surprise.

2.

I think a lot of people – those who are not conversant with the sort of toxic masculinity performance Trump is engaging in, at least – have trouble understanding what his point in telling about "moving on" the married woman is. After all, he's telling a story of how he didn't nail the chick. But he seems to be bragging. Why would someone brag about not getting laid?

He's not. He's bragging on his own daring for disrespecting that she was married. He's bragging on what a rascal he is for moving in on another man's woman, and thereby disrespecting him. He was saying, "Look at me, not giving a shit that she was some other dude's girl." He was saying, "What a bad-ass am I! I am unconstrained by petty considerations like respect for my fellow men!" When he talks about "failing", he's saying, "Look, the only reason I didn't score with her is that she turned me down. It's not like I held back out of respect for her man."

Trump's chief virtue as Trump sees it is his transgressiveness. There's nothing he is prouder of in himself than his refusal to be cowed into respecting other people's boundaries, rights, and dignity. Trump sees his eager willingness to do things other people won't scruple do as a sign of his superiority to them.

It's his most endearing trait to his followers. It's the trait in which they find the promise of the Final Solutions they crave. He's willing to do what others aren't, and call it right.

3.

In the recording, after the story about "moving on" a married woman, there's a change in topic. There's a bunch of other people saying things to Trump and exclaiming. They are apparently reacting to some woman's looks, a woman who is described as "your" by someone speaking, apparently to Trump: one says "Sheesh, your girl's hot as shit. [pause] In the purple." "Yes!" exclaims one, "The Donald has scored!" It would seem – I am surmising here – they are looking at some picture or video of a woman (it seems safe to say she's not present, because she is not addressed and I do not think those men would speak such of her in her presence, aeb the shift in speech when they leave the bus and are in the presence of a woman). This woman is regarded as "Trump's", possibly displayed by him, because he, himself, isn't commenting, and the other men express admiration of him and congratulations to him for his fortune to have sexual access/possession of that woman.

Now, this is a pretty gross way to discuss women. This would be that them there "objectification" feminists object to. But it is also a salaciousness found unbecoming to those on the culturally conservative Right, for a couple of other reasons.

If Trump is showing the other men a sexy picture of his own wife or other woman who is "sexually his", while he is reinforcing the subjugation of women, he is doing so in a way that violates the sanctity of the principle of male ownership. He's inviting other men to ogle – to covet – his own woman; he's encouraging other men in their sinfulness. You know that thing about how rape jokes perpetuate rape culture because it suggests to the rapily inclined that it's socially acceptable? The culturally conservative Right – some of it – has an analogous thing about some of their own sins. Here, by inviting other men (if that's what he's doing) to leer at his woman, he's cultivating the notion that coveting other men's women is okay.

Which, note, is exactly of a piece with what he was just saying: this follows hard on the heels of him bragging about disrespecting another man's marriage.

From the culturally conservative viewpoint, what's so awful here is not (just) "disrespecting women". It's that not only does he put the moves on another man's woman, he brags about it, he brags to men about not respecting other men's turf, and encourages other men to do likewise. He is attacking men's supposed rights to own their women without interference.

For men who are very fucking serious about their ownership rights in women, this is infuriating, an outrage, a violation of decency. His lack of propriety in parading his woman before those men for their lascivious delectation undermines the fundamental societal pact that allows men to live in harmony and not wind up all getting sucked into some stupid war over some dumb broad.

Also, bragging on owning a nicer woman that other men own is no different than bragging on having a nicer car, or a nicer house, or any other superior possession. In the eyes of some that see women as possessions, bragging on having a nice one lacks, shall we say, humility and decorum. But that just makes him an arrogant oaf.

4.

I said there are two things on which one's understanding of the video hinges, and one is what one believes constitutes unacceptable sexual behavior.

The other thing one's understanding of that recording hinges on is grammatical.

Trump has defended himself by calling his speech in that recording "locker-room banter". This has been taken by many on the Left as him claiming that what he said isn't bad because other men do it too. I don't think that's what he meant, at all. I think he meant "locker-room banter" to mean "empty bragging".

The Left hears what he said and widely has been characterizing it as him describing having committed sexual assault. Many women on the Right hear it likewise.

But many on the Right do not. Not because they (as explained above) do not consider those actions to constitute sexual assault (which they often don't). But because they don't consider him to have said he did them.

Before proceeding, let's, for reference, break the tape down into four sections. First there's the part where he describes himself pursuing a sexual relationship with a married woman. Second is the part where mostly people not him are speaking, and they seem to be regarding the image of a woman and are congratulating him about it. Third there's the part where he talks about himself "not waiting" to "kiss" women and says that thing about "grab[ing]" women "by the pussy". Fourth there's the part where he emerges from the bus.

Here, I want to talk about the first and third parts.

In the first part, we may read between the lines to surmise that he pressured that married woman to have sex she did not want. We may suppose that he got "handsy". We may suspect that he tried to physically intimidate her. But he didn't say he did any of that. What he said was that he "moved on" her. That's an idiom. It means he made a pass at her. He propositioned her. He tried to convince her to have sex with him.

And here's the thing. With help from the captioning from the WaPo:

UNKNOWN: She used to be great. She's still very beautiful.

TRUMP: I moved on her actually. You know she was down on Palm Beach. I moved on her and I failed. I'll admit it.

UNKNOWN: [appreciative] Whoa!

TRUMP: I did try and fuck her. She was married.

UNKNOWN: That's huge news there [laughter]

TRUMP: No, no... Nancy- No this was- And I moved on her very heavily. In fact I took her out furniture shopping. She wanted to get some furniture. I said I'll show you where they have some nice furniture.

UNKNOWN: [laughter]

TRUMP: I took her out furniture– I moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn't get there.

UNKNOWN: [gasp, laughter]

TRUMP: And she was married!

Note how Trump is relating that he failed to get this woman to have sex with him. He is describing, at some point, accepting her "no". He is describing how he didn't force himself on her but accepted her refusal of his bid for her sexual favor.

As per above, I think that some of the Right is looking at the Left's umbrage at this in incredulity: like, "He hit on her, she said no, he backed off; what the hell is you people's problem? That's what you liberals say you want. He met your standard of conduct. It's our standard he violated, by shamelessly hitting on some other man's woman."

While people on the Left might read between the lines to construe him having pursued this married woman in an aggressive, unwanted, physically intimidating way – and let me be clear here: I, personally, think it about 87% likely, because that does seem to be exactly the sort of ass he is – but that's not what he admits to here.

Likewise, in the third part. More transcript:

BUSH: It better not be the publicist. No, it's her. It's her.

TRUMP: Yeah, that's her. With the gold. I better use some Tic Tacs, just in case I start kissing her. [rattle, presumably of Tic Tacs] You know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful– I just start kissing them.

UNKNOWN: [laughter]

TRUMP: It's like a magnet.

UNKNOWN: [laughter]

TRUMP: Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.

BUSH: Whatever you want!

TRUMP: Grab them by the pussy.

UNKNOWN: [laughter]

TRUMP: You can do anything.

This is being described (e.g.) as Trump "saying he grabbed a woman's pussy".

No. He said "you can".

Strictly read, all he said that he had actually done was kiss women without their permission. And even there, he did not admit to forcing his attentions on any particular women, or that he had done so in the past. He just claimed that it is something he does. He's bragging about his transgressiveness again, as a trait he possesses, but he's not offering up any substantiating evidence or specifics. He's frontin'.

When he discusses grabbing women by the genitals – asserting how a star can get away with anything – he isn't saying that he did this. He's asserting it's something he could have done.

Now, I want to be clear here. I'm not saying Trump has not done these things. I am given to understand there are women coming forward to say he has done exactly these things, and the measure of my non-surprise knows no bounds. I am well aware – as apparently many reacting to this recording are not? – that Trump is an actual rapist [TW: explicit description of a rape]. The only thing that would surprise me about emerging evidence that he actually was going around mauling women's privates is that it doesn't seem his MO.

No, I'm not saying Trump has not done these things, I'm saying that Trump has not here said he has done these things. And his supporters are incredulous and outraged that he's being construed as having said he has. That would be why they're saying things like "Bill Clinton actually raped women, but Trump only said some things...!?!"

Which brings us back to "locker-room banter": what makes it "locker-room banter" is not that it was crude vulgarity, but that it was all in the hypothetical and subjunctive, empty boasts and claims about what one could do.

As far as Trump's supporters are concerned, Trump just ran his mouth in a way which was vulgar, but not actually an admission of any wrongdoing. They don't agree with cultural conservatives that hitting on a married woman is all that bad (if they even think it bad at all) and they don't agree with liberals that kissing women without consent is all that bad (if they even think it bad at all), either; and they don't think he's confessed to anything else.

5.

One interesting thing that's happened that might not be about owning women is the withdrawal (apparently) of (unnamed) top donors' support of Trump. It may be that these funders are people of principle – including people of the principle that women should be owned by men – who are withdrawing out of personal conscience.

But it could also be pure realpolitik: I'm sure it must have crossed a few male Republican minds that you can't – you really just can't – antagonize fifty-one percent of the electorate and still get elected.

The fascinating thing about this recording is that it's a political hat trick of an own goal: Trump managed to do something that offends women pretty much across the entire political spectrum. Whether one is a culturally conservative woman who endorsed male ownership of women – and believes marriage should be a shield against the sexual attention of other men – or whether one is simply a traditionalist woman who disapproves of men discussing women like cuts of meat, or whether one is a liberal woman who thinks that, no, honey, you really can't grab women by the genitals, there is something here for you object to.

And regardless of where a woman falls on the political spectrum, she's likely to notice just how rapey Trump is. Rapey is not a good look. At least, it doesn't play well to the majority sex.

6.

One of the hopeful little signs – I think of them as rhetorical flowers growing from cracks in the sidewalks – are the Republican men who issued denunciations of Trump that, despite sometimes initially, awkwardly taking the form of traditionalist denunciations (i.e. disrespecting another man's claim to a woman) wound up steering bow into the wave, following a feminist star.

Take Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who starts out, "These comments are repugnant, and unacceptable in any circumstance. As the father of three daughters, I–" and that doesn't lead one to feel confident, but he pulls hard to port, and manages "– strongly believe that Trump needs to apologize directly to women and girls everywhere, and take full responsibility for the utter lack of respect for women shown in his comments on that tape." Okay, he doesn't quite get why "respect for women" doesn't cover it, but, hey, he thinks the people owed the apology are "women and girls everywhere", which is totally heading in the right direction.

Likewise, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), alludes to his own fatherhood, but then instead of saying the traditionalist thing about how he wouldn't want his chattels degraded, flips the power relation and casts his 15 year old daughter as the moral authority to whom he must answer: "You think I can look her in the eye and tell her that I endorse Donald Trump for president when he acts like this?"

7.

I regret that I shall have to be grateful to Donald Trump, but I suspect that in addition to sabotaging his own election – and quite regardless of whether or not he does – he has accidentally made The Handmaid's Tale impossible in the US.

I have this sense, watching the media, that for the first time in US political history, women just woke up to their power as a voting demographic.

It took about 100 years, but by gum, I think we're finally seeing the ultimate natural consequence of suffrage.

I would make the jest that in uniting womankind and rousing them as a political force in the US, Trump personally did single-handedly what more than a century of feminist activists could not do, but that would be unfair. It took more than a century of activism to teach Americans that rape is a wrong done the person raped – even when that person is a woman. It took more than a century to teach Americans that rape, and more broadly sexual assault, harms the victim – even when that victim is a woman. It took more than a century to teach Americans that marital rape is rape and date rape is rape and rape by means of deception or intoxication is still rape. It took more than a century to teach Americans that nobody is entitled to make free with another's body without their consent – even if that body is a woman's. It took more than a century to teach Americans to listen to women as people, to consider women to be people.

It took more than a century of feminist activism to teach Americans what they needed to understand to be ready for the moment they heard Donald Trump talking about how the best part of being a media celebrity is that you can molest women and get away with it.

And we're not done, of course. Not everyone has mastered these lessons, not by a long shot. But so much has been accomplished, which we are now witnessing the fruit of. If that century of work hadn't been done, we would not be seeing the public outrage at this that we're seeing now. Indeed, I think this video would never have been aired – historically, when men dominated newsrooms and women's opinions on rape were widely minimized, politicians' sexual indiscretions typically were covered up as not politically relevant. Today, a man brought that recording to the public attention, knowing full well it was politically relevant, and knowing why.

I'm pretty sure that wouldn't have happened forty years ago. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have happened twenty years ago. (Reference point: Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings were 25 years ago.) I'm not sure it would have happened ten years ago.

I think we are entering a very interesting era in American politics. Very interesting indeed.

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[Read in black and white]

Okay, the debate is over, back to work.

Having had a chance to sleep on it, I have had a further realization from my own staring at the Trump Sexual Inkblot, and it is this. Please forgive my use of binary gender below in an attempt at expeditiousness, and the lack of nuance in the favor of concision.

Very many women – myself included – hear Trump's boasts about being able to grope women as not an admission that he has groped women, but evidence of him being a groper. Not conclusive evidence; circumstantial evidence to be sure. But still evidence.

Imagine you knew a guy that was always bragging that he "could" break into any place he wanted – pick any lock, card any door, jimmy any window, elude any security guard – to steal anything he desired. You might chalk him up for a braggart who exaggerated his claims. But you would probably assume it likely he did, in fact, practice breaking and entering on occasion. Or at least attempt to do so. If you later heard that he'd been busted for burglary, you probably wouldn't be saying something like, "Oh, gee, he talked about that stuff, but I didn't think he meant it." No, you'd be like, "Yeah, he was always going on about breaking into places."

Imagine you knew a guy that was always bragging that he "could" kill anybody he got in a fight with – "you know, if you can't take 'em face on, you can always wait around the corner from the bar with a broken bottle". You might figure he was mostly boasting, but you wouldn't doubt his sincere enthusiasm for violence. If you heard some day that he'd been sent up for murder, your reaction probably wouldn't be, "But he was such a nice guy! I can't believe he actually wound up in a physical altercation!" No, you'd be like, "Yeah, I guess the trouble he was always looking for found him."

Imagine you knew a guy that was always bragging that you "could" make a killing in the stock market by various illegal schemes, "but nobody'd ever catch you". You might figure he was mostly running his mouth to try to impress people. But given that he parades his fancy cars and watches, you wouldn't assume he was above doing what he described. If you then heard that he caught time for securities fraud, your reaction probably wouldn't be, "Gosh, I didn't think he'd actually do any of those things." No, you'd be like, "Yeah, that was only a matter of time."

Women are asked to treat men talking about rape and other sexual assault differently, epistemologically speaking, than men are asked to treat men talking about other violent crimes or crimes of property. When women encounter men bragging on how they "could" rape or sexually assault women, our society demands that women regard it as "empty talk" – which is to say, we are not to credit it as indicative of criminality the same way we could boasts of other criminal opportunity.

The "locker-room banter" excuse is an outrage because it contends that women (and men) should not consider men's bragging about the ability to commit sexual violence to be evidentiary in precisely the same way it is ordinary for all people to consider bragging about the ability to commit other crimes to be evidentiary.

Don't believe me? Go into a bar in a working class neighborhood around 9pm. Say in a loud voice to one person, "That guy? The one–" Describe clearly a man standing across the room from you, but within earshot. "– Yeah, a guy like that, you can total kick his ass. You can do anything you want to him. He won't put up a fight." See what happens.

The "locker-room banter" excuse says to women (and others), "you don't get to make the same natural surmises that men get to make about the very same speech acts applied to other crimes". It's a double standard: when the crime being boasted about is sexual in nature, women (and others) are supposed to give it a pass. "He's just saying that. It doesn't mean he does it."

When it comes to sexual crimes and torts, women (and others) are told they are supposed to suspend operation of their common sense. What men say when bragging about sexual misconduct is to be held in a little epistemological bubble, where none of it means, signifies, or counts in any way outside the bubble. Within the bubble – the rhetorical "locker-room" – those speech acts are to be understood and evaluated only by a special set of rules, which insist such utterances are not of relevance to the (presumed female) parties spoken of, only to the (presumed male) parties spoken to. Those utterances are not to be taken outside of the bubble; they are not to be exposed to reasoned contemplation in the light of anything outside the bubble whatsoever. We are to pretend under all circumstances not to have heard that which we have heard that men arrogate to the bubble; we are to pretend not to know anything the knowing of which men arrogate to the bubble. It is, Orwellianly, knowledge that, if we know it, we are forbidden to know.

It is a male privilege, historically jealously protected, to be able to brag on one's opportunities to commit sexual crimes against women while demanding that no one, especially not women, regard doing so as significant of anything. It is the entitlement to brag about sexual misconduct to posture and jockey for status in male social groups, without having to experience the usual negative consequences which typically attend one's bragging of all the opportunities one finds or enjoys to commit crimes.

What is going on, right now, is that women are standing up, across the political spectrum, to say, "Nah.... we really do get to come to the conclusions of our reason about this."

You hear that sound? That was the sound of the women of this country just revoking men's passes to joke about committing sexual assault and not be considered a presumed rapist. That was the sound of even Republican women going, "You know what? We know he didn't say that he committed sexual assault. We're saying he's committed sexual assault, and the fact he reveled in the opportunities afforded him by his celebrity to commit sexual assault is our evidence he commits sexual assault. We may not know whom he's assaulted. We may not know on what occasions. But we know it's somebody – probably lots of somebodies. It ain't enough to send him to jail for, but damned if it's not enough to judge him for."

From here on out, if you joke, brag, hypothesize about opportunities for committing sexual assault, you will be taken to be endorsing sexual assault. You will have come out, if you will, as being in favor of sexual assault. Not just in the hypothetical, but as a personal practice.

If you do that, everybody is just gonna figure your money must be where your mouth is. If you talk that talk, you'll be assumed to walk that walk.

Welcome to equality.

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As we've mentioned here, a special BAFTA Lifetime Achievement Award was presented last night to Monty Python's Terry Jones for him work in film and television. It was a bittersweet event as Mr. Jones is suffering from dementia…but as you'll see in the video he obviously understood what the event was all about and was very touched. The presentation was made to him by his longtime friend and collaborator, Michael Palin.

I have embedded below the video of the entire ceremony but I have configured a bookmark which in most browsers will cause the video to commence at the presentation to Jones, which was the final event of a long evening. If it starts at the beginning, you'll need to move the slider to 2:05:35 to get to it. You can also probably figure out how to watch the whole video if you are so inclined. But do watch the presentation as it is very touching…

The post Today's Video Link appeared first on News From ME.

A Man Called Electro

Villain:
Matt Dillon (Electro)

The infamous letter which Liam Byrne left for his successor as chief secretary to the Treasury is in the news. (You can read it in the photograph above.)

David Laws, who made it public after coming to office in 2010, is receiving demands that he hand it over from both the Treasury and the National Archives.

I am all for preserving our national heritage, but I can't help feeling it would have been better if Laws had burnt it when he first saw it.

First, there is an established tradition of ministers leaving joking notes for their successors. For instance, in 1964 Reginald Maudling left a note for Jim Callaghan (his replacement as chancellor) saying "Good luck, old cock.... Sorry to leave it in such a mess."

In the light of this, the decision to publish Liam Byrne's note is not an easy one to support.

Second, the publicity given to the note encouraged Liberal Democrat parliamentarians to hammer away with the message that Labour had maxed out the nation's credit card, Once Danny Alexander had replaced Laws, we seemed to have little more to say on economic policy.

This helped produce a political climate that was favourable to the Conservative message and made it harder to suggest an alternative approach.

Third, it came back to haunt us - and David Laws in particular.

Hover over the photograph and you will see that Byrne's letter is being waved by David Cameron and he is doing so in an election meeting at Norton Sub Hamdon - a village in Laws' Yeovil constituency.

There were plenty of seats we lost in 2015 where the splintering of the Lib Dem vote was more a factor than any swing to the Conservatives, but in Yeovil the Tories gained more than 5000 votes between 2010 and 2015.

So there are three good reasons why David Laws should have burnt that blasted letter.

CodeValley is the latest from the world of Blockchain™.

The "idea" is that you have a problem, so you put up a contract to fully-automated Vendors to supply the libs for a program to solve your problem. At no point does a coder have to write actual code apparently, it's all done by the machines ... somehow. All of this is paid for in penny shavings.

"This isn’t open source, and it isn’t closed source. It’s no source." (well, that's bracingly honest of them.)

Even Hacker News doesn't buy this shit. "the whitepaper reads something like what I'd imagine somebody trying to troll the software industry would write"

Here's the "whitepaper". It reads like a example of the CodeValley concept applied to marketing, or perhaps Hacker News fed to a Markov chain. (And be sure to "View Source" on that page.)

To be fair, it's reviving an old hype: "this will end programming! All you need to do is fill in a form and define the problem." This was first said about COBOL. I think the last time anyone said it quite that bluntly was The Last One in 1981.

Putting it on Blockchain™ is of course the obvious next step, and suggests a network of autonomous software vendor programs seeking out old sucker scams to put on Blockchain™.

So, what is CodeValley? It is literally code from thin air. Here is the lead CodeValleyer explaining it. Now it sounds saneish up to a point — you work out what lib-like things you need, those are contracted out to a Vendor. That's the bit where you'd expect a human would be doing the job. But no:

I just wanted to stress one last time that that trickling down goes all the way to the hardware. There is no more writing of code, as we have outsourced (and outsourced and outsourced) the design of the program until it is so detailed that only bytes need to be placed (or binary CPU instructions). Pretty cool huh?

So cool it's literally fucking magic.

Looking at how it's supposed to work, the lead proponent says:

A developer's IP — the decisions they automate their Vendor to make and the supplier that Vendor is automated to contracted — stays protected inside their Vendor program. We are not privy to how you designed your Vendor any more than any other user in the network is.

You fill in a form, and define the problem. (This is assumed to constitute a creative work you have a defensible copyright in.) Then you send this to a multilayered compiler chain that puts it together at byte level. You might think that THIS IS LITERALLY WHAT PROGRAMMERS DO, and that "do what I mean" is the entire hard bit of programming no matter how many layers it's on top of, but obviously you need enlightening as to the magic of Blockchain™.

There's a whole advertising subreddit: /r/codevalley

I'm wondering who the target market is. Sucker VCs? Developers themselves?

This sort of sci-fi (not SF, but bug-eyed monsters and special effects) approach was the sort of thing people were talking about before open source became popular, a fractal micropayments nightmare world where everything contracted to everything else for penny shavings. "Imagine if we had micropayments in open source for every lib that every lib you use uses, how much better it would all work." Except now they've automated it on Blockchain™. Left-pad on Blockchain™.

comments

[Read in black and white]

To recap Part 1 and Part 2: therapists have quite limited numbers of high-desirability schedule slots, and have to either charge huge amounts for those few slots or build a schedule around getting patients to accept less convenient times; therapists necessarily book fewer sessions than they can offer; therapists necessarily can only see fewer patients than they can book. Therapists can only bill for patients they see. The industry standard assumption of a "full time" therapist is one that books 40 hours a week, possibly of a 50 or 60 hour-per-week schedule, and sees 26 sessions, and loses one and a half of them to shrinkage.

Therapists who take insurance work in three roles – employee, independent contractor, and private practice – but it doesn't make all that much difference. Employees seem to make about 40% of revenues, contractors 45% (but knock 7.45% of that 45% off for SSM Tax), and private practitioners 50%. Therapists get no PTO, including no holidays and no vacations, so assume a 50 week year. Upshot: with insurance reimbursals at $60-to-$80 per session and working full-time (50hrs/wk), employee therapists can expect to make $30k to $40/yr, contractors can expect to make $32k to $41k/yr, and private practitioners can expect to make $37k to $50k/yr.

This raises the question: is that so bad, then? There are plenty of people who would love to see the far side of $32,000/yr, right?

Right?

11.

I have a rule of thumb I like to use. I got it from my mother who got it from Fannie Mae, who subsequently abandoned it, helping to precipitate the Mortgage Crisis.

It used to be that Fannie Mae – the Federal National Mortgage Association – had a rule for whom to give mortgages to. Based, I understand, on the work of actuaries studying how likely it was for a mortgage borrower to default on their mortgage, they figured out that an acceptable risk level to Fannie Mae was when a borrower earned a bit above four times their monthly mortgage payment (gross pay), or more. Any less than that, and the borrower was too likely to be wiped out by some sudden financial catastrophe – a hospitalization, a layoff. I'm not sure what the actual numbers were, but from Fannie Mae's perspective, someone making at least 4+ times the mortgage payment for their requested mortgage was someone who was a good risk. They were likely to be able to continue paying their mortgage, even when the inevitable vicissitudes of life rocked their financial boat. Any less than that, and they weren't a safe enough risk to entrust with a mortgage. A mortgage payment more than a quarter of their gross income pushed them too close to the financial edge. They might get swamped by the same waves of fate; it was too likely, and Fannie Mae would decline to lend such borrowers such a mortgage.

(Until, I gather, they changed the rules to loosen them, and started extending mortgages to people that they knew were at elevated risk of defaulting, and subsequently defaulted in great numbers.)

I figure that Fannie Mae's actuaries knew what they were about: they maybe knew better what people could actually afford, in the face of the uncertainty of life, than any of us winging it without actual data.

And what they knew, back in the day, was that if your housing cost you more than a quarter of your gross income, you were living your life on a financial flood plain.

One week's pay is one month's rent: that's the rule of thumb as I learned it from my mother, to answer the question, "what can I afford to spend on housing."

(As an aside, a lot of people don't like this guideline, because it makes them feel bad, because they're paying more than a quarter of their gross income on rent. Hey, I'm right there in that same boat with you; my rent is something like 75% of my income. If you're paying more than a quarter of your income to your housing costs, and you don't need to, then, yeah, maybe feeling guilty that you're being irresponsible is a sensible response, and maybe you should rethink your choices. But if you're paying more than a quarter of your income to your housing costs because you don't have a meaningful choice – your pay is what your pay is, and rents are what rents there are – maybe anger is a more sensible response than shame, and the proper target is not the rule of thumb that reveals your economic precariousness to you, but the deplorable economic conditions that put you in this precarious situation to begin with.)

If the maximally fiscally safe amount of one's monthly income to dedicate to housing is a week's pay, then with the above weekly gross income numbers, we can now go shopping for apartments for our hypothetical 50hrs/week therapists.

What do you think a rent budget of $600 to $800 per month will get our employee therapist in the Boston area? How about San Francisco, where Dembosky got those numbers in the first place? What sort of housing will our contractor therapist get with $625 to $825 a month, or will our private practice therapist get with the comparatively luxurious $750 to $1,000 per month?


Boston Rental Heatmap, 2013, by Jeff Kaufman, mashed up with a T map for reference. Responding to the criticism that combining different size apartments was deceptive, he created This one of just two-bedroom apartments, in 2013. For more maps see his site.

When a therapist Dembosky interviews tells her, "the reimbursement rates don’t provide a living wage; you can’t own a home and drive a car and survive on what in-network providers pay you," he's not joking. You can make rent work, maybe, if you are willing to accept the risk – what choice do you have? – and go up to sinking half your monthly income or more into your rent, but aint nobody going to lend you a mortgage.

I think that working full time as a therapist should pay enough to qualify one for a mortgage. I mean that in at least two senses of "should".

Certainly, in the moral sense: I think a highly-skilled medical professional with an advanced degree who is responsible for making life-or-death decisions, bears considerable legal liabilities, accepts enormous ethical constraints, and provides a valuable service not just to their patients but the greater community deserves to be compensated well enough to enjoy a modest gentry-class lifestyle, which includes ownership of a home adequate to house them, a spouse, and at least one child or parent. Also I understand car ownership is nice, and so is being able to pay your college loans and for your child to go to college in their turn, and maybe retire* some day.

But beyond prescriptive moral positions: if a profession like that doesn't provide what used to be considered a basic middle-class lifestyle... who's going to do it?

But I get ahead of myself.

12.

I've assumed, in the previous calculations, that private therapy practices have the same default overhead rate that businesses usually have, of 50%. That may actually be high for the scenario we're discussing, of a 50hr/week therapist managing to book 40 patients a week to see 26. That is to say, the one little glimmer of hopeful news in all this for therapists who take insurance is that if you're in private practice, you might beat that overhead rate at least a little, and pocket the difference. Maybe.

The big expense for therapists is rent. I'm not going to spell out the numbers here – I may post them separately – but I figured that rent can probably be had for about 12% to 20% of revenues (that is to say, 24% to 40% of a 50% overhead budget) at $60-to-$80/session. In my experience, rent dwarfs all the other expenses put together, so I figure if your rent is less than 25% of revenues, you have a reasonable chance to come in under 50% overhead.

But maybe don't take my word on it, because I'm not doing it, I'm just hypothesizing about it. Remember, my private practice is part time, so I'm renting office space by the hour or by the multi-hour block, and that's more expensive on an hourly basis than renting a whole office for yourself. Private practice therapists accepting insurance who work part time – say because they're starting out – are looking at rent being about $20/session, which is 25% to 33.4% of revenues – which is half to two-thirds of a 50% overhead budget.

13.

This brings us to to the next issue: is a therapist going to get to work full time? Just because a therapist is willing to attempt to book a 50hr/wk schedule full doesn't mean they get the 40 patients we're assuming that represents.

This is the answer to the question you might have been asking when you saw the 40%, 45%, and 50% numbers: why would any therapist accept working for 40% or 45% at a clinic when they could have 50% instead (or better, if they're good at beating overhead) by going into private practice?

There's a bunch of answers to that, including, "not everybody is temperamentally up to being a small business owner" and "not all therapists can because they aren't all licensed for independent practice".

But one of the big important answers is, "Well, where do the patients come from?"

The hardest part of private practice is getting patient referrals. Indeed, it is one of the prime motivations to take insurance: then that insurance company will route patients to you, by listing you as an approved provider.

When a therapist works for a clinic, the clinic provides the patients. If it's a well-established clinic that's been around for a while, they'll have more patients than they know what to do with. They will have a literal waiting list of patients that you can take patients from. Other therapists – the ones quitting because they're starting their own private practice, or going back to web development, or becoming monks, or whatever – will literally wander into your office and offer you patients. Which you will mostly have to regretfully decline, because your schedule is full up with the patients you already got.

For a lot of real-world private practice therapists, booking a 50hr/week schedule with 40 patients is an aspiration, not a present reality. They're not there yet. They're still building their practices, cultivating their referral sources.

When your practice is young and small, your overhead is larger because you have fixed expenses – your license costs the same regardless of how many patients you see – and also you have expenses that vary with the number of patients you see/bill, where there are effectively bulk discounts you can't yet take advantage of. Rent is an example of that. Hereabouts, in four-hour-minimum blocks, you're probably paying $10/hr; at 8+hr blocks (whole days), you might get down to $8 or $6/hr.

14.

I want to remind you of something I mentioned at the very start of Part 1, which may have been lost in all my hypnotic repetitions of "$60-to-$80 per session". Whether a therapist gets $60 for a session or $80 for a session session or something in-between is not dependent on the therapist. That's not like a salary range, where more junior employees get the lower pay and the more senior, more expert employees get the higher pay. It's not like better therapists are getting paid more money. How much a therapist gets paid by an insurance company is entirely based on the insurance company.

I am not contracted, myself, with any insurance companies – the clinics I have worked with have been – so I don't know for certain how this works. But I'm given to understand that insurance companies set the terms, and they don't tell you what terms they're offering until you apply and unless and until they decide to accept you. It's like a box of red-tape flavored chocolates; it's like a bureaucratic game show where you earn the right to open a random door and are stuck with whatever's behind it. You apply to an insurance company, and if they accept you – a decision that can take them months or years to come to – they tell you how much they're willing to pay. And you can accept it or walk away.

I gather that large clinical organizations can negotiate rates – Partners Health, a massive chain of hospitals here, has earned insurers' undying spleen for having the temerity to throw its weight around and demand higher reimbursement rates. But I don't know that individual therapists in private practice can do that. I don't even know that 100+ therapist multi-site social service agencies can do that.

Like I said, Neighborhood Health Plan pays my clinic about $55 per session for my time and MBHP pays about $86, and other insurance companies pay their rates in between, and as far as I know, that's what they're paying almost everyone.

Whether you are a private practice therapist making closer to $50k/year or a private practice therapist making closer to $37.5k/year is not dependent on how good a therapist you are or how mature your practice is. It's dependent on which insurance companies you do business with.

There's no way to work your way up from $60 to $80. Your only choice is to preferentially take patients with $80-paying-insurance over patients with $60-paying-insurance. That is to say, the only way for a therapist who takes insurance to move their compensation rate up is to discriminate against patients with insurance that pays less well.

(Do you, gentle reader, even know how well your insurance pays therapists? Comparatively? How would you?)

Well, there is one other thing a therapist can do to increase their compensation rate.

They can stop taking insurance.

15.

For a therapist to work as a therapist in our society one of these things must be true:

• The therapist can earn a living by providing therapy for money; or

• The therapist must have some other means on which to live: the income of a spouse; a pension; independent wealth; some other better paying line of work which subsidizes providing therapy – that is to say, a day job, same as actors and musicians.

I have written all this in response to April Dembosky's "Sorry, The Therapist Can't See You — Not Now, Not Anytime Soon", of which one segment is titled, "How Therapy Became A Hobby of the Wealthy – Rather Than A Necessity for the Mentally Ill". Of course, she's talking about therapy being a "hobby" of wealthy patients, and misses entirely the accidental truth she uttered. Therapy is becoming a hobby of wealthy – or retired, or part-timer, or just plain hobbyist – therapists, and the reason why is that insurance payment is so poor, it's increasingly only the wealthy or otherwise financially-able who can offer therapy to patients who need insurance to pay for it.

Years ago, another therapist at a clinic I worked pointed out to me what all the additional sources of income were for every therapist at the clinic. He was independently wealthy. I was working part time as a programmer. Two of the other therapists were retired – one a twenty-year military veteran. One taught night school. One was a real estate agent. One got married – to a claim reviewer at a health insurance company, no less. Etc. And this, at what is, to my knowledge, at the best-paying clinic in the Boston area (I, at least, was getting more than 40% as an employee).

Let's just take a moment to reflect on the intersectional consequences of this situation. This is the unpaid internship problem gone metastatic. Only people wealthy – financially privileged – enough to afford the ridiculous economics of unpaid internships get to access the subsequent privileges of having had an unpaid internship, thereby putting those opportunities and advantages beyond the reach of students from impoverished, or just not so wealthy, backgrounds. This is the same thing, only it's not just for the span of an internship. You don't get through it and it's over. It's for the entire career of a therapist.

And, of course, the people on whom this filter disproportionately works are those who are disproportionately not wealthy, because of generations of impecuniation by white supremacy. When the profession of psychotherapy is not economically self-sufficient, the consequences fall the hardest on therapists of color, especially Black, Latinx, and Native American therapists, who statistically are least likely to have the additional financial wherewithal to subsidize a therapy career.

Further, those are the populations of therapists who, it may be surmised, are most motivated to deliver services to patients of color – to give back to their own communities. But those patients are, for the very same reason, even more dependent on insurance to pay for psychotherapy: they are statistically much less likely to be able to afford paying for therapy out of pocket – and those therapists who want to help uplift their oppressed communities may very much want to focus on those least able to pay out of pocket. Therapists of color, insofar as they want to provide services to the most underserved of their own peoples, are even less in a position to walk away from insurance companies' immiserating take-it-or-leave-it offers.** Not and provide therapy.

Which, of course, brings us to the other alternative.

Throughout this whole post, both parts, I've been addressing the issue Dembosky brought up: therapists choosing not to take insurance, electing to have private-pay-only practices. That's one of two paths therapists can take in response to inadequate insurance compensation.

The other is to give up being a therapist altogether.

And that's the other thing that's happening on a broad scale.

Just from the experiences of my friends and colleagues, I know the attrition rate among therapists is terrible. Talented, committed, insightful therapists leave the profession at horrible rates, to go get real jobs: ones in other industries that pay enough to service their student loans, and maybe even let them qualify for a mortgage some day.

In addition to leaving healthcare all together, there are jobs that pay real-ish (at least comparatively) money for licensed clinicians - but they don't involve treating patients. For instance, large agencies (have to) hire independently licensed therapists as administrators and supervisors. The owner of one of the clinics I've worked for was a therapist there before she bought it; I gather only duly licensed therapists can own clinics. For a third, insurance companies hire therapists to be claims reviewers. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, I guess.

It's not just individual therapists who are quitting the field, either. Whole clinics are, as the techbros put it, "pivoting" to other services. The clinic I quit working at last month had been the original line of business that the corporation was founded to offer, but had, during the time I was there, become entirely vestigial to other, more lucrative, human service lines of business, that had nothing to do with psychotherapy. It was down to (including me) six part time therapists; when I started asking other therapists there to refer my last few patients when I gave notice, two of them confided they couldn't take new patients because they, too, were planning on leaving. There were no ads being run to hire replacements.

Other clinics are simply going out of business. From a recent Boston Globe article:

“My son is dead,” the man said, distraught over the heroin overdose that took his 30-year-old child. He’d feared this might happen, and yet he couldn’t stop it. Now he needed help for himself.

It was an autumn afternoon last year. The father, a 65-year-old retired construction worker, sat in the Lowell office of Ken Powers, a counselor he’d been seeing for more than a year. The man pulled out a tribute he’d written to his son and began to sob. Powers started crying, too.

Then came a knock on the door — highly unusual in the middle of a private counseling session. It was the program director at Powers’s agency, Comprehensive Outpatient Services Inc. The for-profit behavioral health company had just filed for bankruptcy, they were told. The building was being seized. Powers had less than an hour to get out.

His counseling session cut short, the father instead helped Powers pack up his office, filling his own car with Powers’s musical instruments and books. It was an abrupt, unsettling end to a much-needed moment of connection.

“It was like a slap across the face,” said the man, who asked not to be identified.

It was one of four clinics COS had, per the Lowell Sun:

The abrupt closure of four counseling centers in Massachusetts due to bankruptcy has left 2,000 patients without services, leading to a "mental-health emergency," according to documents filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court.

The state Department of Mental Health has been asked to "intervene to facilitate an expeditious transfer of the care" of patients of Comprehensive Outpatient Services, Inc., to other qualified mental-health professionals after the Newton-based company was granted authorization to close its four counseling centers in Lowell, Chelmsford, Fitchburg and Newton on Sept. 30 [2015].

It's not the only one. As the Globe story goes on to say:

Nearly a third of community mental health providers in Massachusetts reported closing clinics from 2013 to 2015, according to one study, a trend that has continued this year.

What happens when insurance companies pay too little for providing psychotherapy? Well, when it's really too little, people, and clinics, that depend on insurance payments stop providing psychotherapy. Which is one of the things that's happening.

For kicks and giggles, I just put "mental health clinic abruptly closed" into Bing. Results include:

Minnesota, 2014: Mental health centers abruptly shut in east central Minn.; officials scramble to aid clients:

State and county officials are rushing to find care for more than 1,000 people with mental illness in east central Minnesota after a major mental health care provider abruptly shut its doors Monday.

Riverwood Centers closed its clinics and mobile crisis services. The nonprofit was the designated mental health provider for Chisago, Isanti and Pine counties and also provided crisis services to Kanabec and Mille Lacs counties.

The operation simply ran out of money, said Kevin Wojahn, Riverwood's now former executive director.

Maine, 2016: Brunswick mental health care provider abruptly closes Friday:

Merrymeeting Behavioral Health Associates, which had initially notified town officials on March 28 that it would shutter its Pleasant Street facilities on April 22, has apparently closed its doors early, according to a report from Portland’s WCSH 6.

Merrymeeting employees were told the agency would be closing April 8 due to changes in MaineCare [Maine's Medicaid - S] that would result in a loss of coverage for 80 percent of the community-based services the organization provides. Instead, employees told WCSH that they were notified by phone late Friday that not only was the agency closing early, but they would not be paid for their anticipated final week of work. The decision by Merrymeeting will put approximately 170 people out of work.

Illinois, 2015: Report: Mental health care in crisis in Illinois:

Since 2009, the state has closed two inpatient facilities (including the Tinley Park Mental Health Center), six Chicago mental health clinics and several community mental health agencies throughout the state. [Note these were not even for-profit nor NGO non-profit, but state-run.]

Florida, 2015: Clewiston, Labelle mental health clinics close down unexpectedly:

Hundreds of Southwest Florida mental health patients are without treatment after two clinics closed their doors.

The Hendry-Glades Behavioral Health Center ended its contract with the state Wednesday. The center operated two clinics, one in Clewiston and another in Labelle.

After the clinics abruptly shut down, people were left desperate for their medical records.

Connecticut, 2016: Rally planned in West Haven to protest mental health service cuts:

After decades of serving the city, the West Haven Mental Health Clinic abruptly shut down its adult services last month due to state budget cuts, leaving 210 people who had been receiving mental health services to find them elsewhere.

[...]

The clinic’s adult program was closed because “there was a reduction in the funding for our department,” effective July 1, she said. As a result, “There was a nurse and some support staff that were redeployed to CMHC and there were four clinical positions that were eliminated.”

Minnesota, 2015: Another Clinic, Another Unmet Payroll, Another Set of Patients Abruptly Informed of a Closing:

The story has now become all too familiar: A healthcare agency finds itself unable to meet payroll after a long slide into financial insolvency. It closes abruptly and patients are precipitously required to seek other services. In this case, a nonprofit in Austin, Minnesota that had been providing mental health services to 120 low-income people closed on Friday.

Connecticut, 2015: Stress clinic closure leaves fewer mental health options:

Nearly two months after the Yale Stress Center closed its doors to patients, members of the Yale community who are ineligible for many of Yale’s on-campus mental health resources are still struggling to find a replacement.

The clinical side of the Stress Center, an interdisciplinary research center that had been run by the Yale Medical Group and department of psychiatry, was shut down because it was running at a significant financial loss each year, said University spokeswoman Karen Peart. The research side of the center is still operative.

Presumably there is a greater list of clinic closures which were less precipitous – not described by "abruptly" – though probably for their patients no less calamitous, for all that they had more warning.

This is what "$60-to-$80 per session" actually means. It doesn't just mean "therapists don't make as much money as they would like". It means "not enough money to keep doing it." Whether that means therapists recoursing to private pay private practices so that they can keep being therapists, or therapists – and clinics – packing it in and going to do something more lucrative, what "$60-to-$80 per session" means to you, gentle readers, is patients – maybe you, maybe your loved ones – go without treatment.

16.

This is the point where people start making "suggestions", of the form: "Why can't..." I'll tackle some of them now.

• "Why can't you make ends meet by [plan for {reducing expenses | reducing non-attendance}]?"

We do that already. I promise: whatever it is you're thinking of, we've tried it and if it worked, we adopted it. That is how we got so deep into this mess.

There's another harrowing way to describe the problem: therapists are being paid in 1980s dollars. Therapists are literally being paid the same nominal amounts for therapy sessions, today, as they were paid in the mid-1980s.

Geoff Gray at Carepaths.com reminisced in 2013:

In 1985 I worked for a small health plan setting up a mental health provider network in western Massachusetts. We contracted with psychologists for $58 for 90806 [now 90834], the most commonly reimbursed procedure code. This was a deeply discounted rate that led to some grumbling from providers who were used to a higher rates from Blue Cross Blue Shield and other payers. No surprise that some providers refused to join for that reason.

I mention this because I read today that Humana and its wholly owned subsidiary LifeSynch have lowered reimbursement rates for 90806 to $58 for its Illinois providers. Between 1985 and 2012 the cost of living has increased 78.2%! So if the 1985 rate had kept pace with inflation, providers today would receive about $103 for 90806.

Actually, USInflationCalculator.com returns that $58 in 1985 dollars would be $125.57 in 2013 dollars – and $129.83 in 2016 dollars. According to USInflationCalculator, the difference between 1985 dollars and 2010 dollars is just over 100%.

Which means that just to keep pace with inflation, insurance rates for therapy would have to be twice what they were in 1985 – which is to say twice what they are now.

Because, in any event, I can attest that here in 2016 I'm getting less than $59 from an insurer for the equivalent code.

We don't have to accept mere anecdote, at least back to the mid-90s. Psychotherapy Finances, a newsletter concerned with what it said in the masthead, conducted studies. Ten years ago, in January 2006, it published an article that reported that their data showed that the median HMO payment for a therapy session by social workers, counselors, and MFTs was $60 in 1997, 2000, and 2006 (except it was $63 in 2006 for counselors), and for psychologists it was $75 in 1997, $70 in 2000, and $75 in 2006.

Think of it: psychotherapists haven't seen a cost-of-living increase in insurance reimbursals in thirty years and counting.

The way the industry continued to function for thirty years of pay stagnation? Cutting every corner, pinching every penny. If there was a way to do without it, it was dispensed with. If there was something that improved revenues, it was done. Yes, we already thought of that. If it was doable, we did it.

The next time you find yourself thinking, "Why is this clinic so shabby looking?" or "Why does this office smell funny?", now you know.

• "Why don't you continue to take insurance, but just charge the patients more, above what the insurance pays?"

That's called "balance billing" and, depending just who you try it on, it falls somewhere on the "loophole"-to-"tortious"-to-"felonious" spectrum.

• "Why don't you therapist go on strike for better payment from insurance companies?"

Ah, because that would be massively illegal.

Therapists, from time to time, do go on strike. In Washington state in 2014, therapists employed by Behavioral Health Resource went on strike. In California in 2013, mental health care workers at Telecare La Casa Mental Health Rehabilitation Center went on strike. And in California in 2014, therapists employed by Kaiser Permanente's Oakland Medical Center went on strike.

You know what the therapists had in common in each of cases? They were employees striking against their employers.

Remember what I said about the difference in legal protections between employers and independent contractors? One of those legal protections for employees, hard won, was the right of organizing and collective bargaining. Strikes are mostly legal, for employees.

But an independent contractor isn't an employee. They're a business, which is selling a service to another business. And when businesses band together to force a customer – in this case insurers – to pay more for something? That's called price fixing and is a flagrant, unambiguous violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890.

It is illegal for therapists working as contractors or in private practice to organize any sort of strike or boycott against the insurance companies that pay so little. [PDF]

Which is a pity, because if private practice and contractor therapists had been able to strike for higher insurance reimbursals, we might not be in this fix. Insurance payment stagnated – and according to Geoff Gray's article above, even reduced – because, bluntly, it could. The vendors – therapists – had absolutely no leverage with which to negotiate rates, because each sole proprietor had to go up against a vast, well-funded corporation, alone. Even large multi-city agencies were no match for multi-state, and even nation-wide insurers.

Ironic, isn't it, that the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which is meant to protect the public from the price-gouging and restricted choice in the marketplace that can result when businesses collude, has had the effect of making psychotherapy simultaneously increasingly unaffordable and scarce to patients, and increasingly unviable as a profession for therapists.

In the triangular relationship between patient, insurer, and therapist, there are two customers: the patient is the customer of the insurer, and the insurer is the customer of the therapist. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act protects the interests of customers, but refracted through the prism of this three-sided relationship, it is the insurer as customer of the therapist who enjoys the benefits of the law's protections. The law works as intended and forces down the "prices" – the fees that therapists get paid by insurance companies for their services – to the insurance companies' delight. That the consequence is that insurance companies have depressed "prices" so low vendors are abandoning the market, to the detriment of the insurance companies' customers, the patients... well, not their problem.

Unsurprisingly, the law better protects the interests of large corporations that are customers than the interests of private individuals who are customers. So we have a society in which patients have precious little actual choice of therapists, but insurance companies have had their pick of which therapists they will contract with. We have a society in which insurers can set the terms to both their vendors and their own customers. We have a society in which insurers can effectively forbid their customers from retaining any but their selected therapists, literally contractually agreeing to eschew doing business with all but the designated providers, and this isn't an illegal restraint of trade, but two sole-proprietorship therapists discussing what is a reasonable reimbursement rate over lunch is an illegal restraint of trade – to say nothing of a dozen therapists (or a hundred, or a thousand) approaching an insurer asking to engage in collective negotiation.

If therapists had been able to engage in collective negotiation in the last 30 years, then reimbursement rates might be more tenable now. Instead, what we have is insurance companies who, unfettered by any constraint, have written a deal with therapists so "great" for themselves that... increasingly therapists won't even take it.

It's illegal for self-employed therapists to collude in boycotting insurers, because the Sherman Anti-Trust Act requires businesses to compete with one another and not cooperate in raising prices. But it's perfectly legal for a self-employed therapist, sitting alone in their office, looking at their books and their insurance panel contractual agreements, to come to the considered conclusion, bugger this for a lark.

There comes a point where it becomes inevitable.

So that's what's happening. We're not allowed to talk to one another about it, we're not allowed to coordinate it. But thousands upon thousands of therapists, having been left with literally no other recourse than to decline to take insurance companies' unilateral ruinous deals, have so declined. Told "take it or leave it", they've left. Having found themselves with no voice at the negotiating table, they have walked away. Some have walked away from insurance companies. Some have walked away from seeing patients. Some have walked away from being therapists entirely.

Strike? That's precisely what we've been talking about: not being able to find therapists who take insurance. This is what Dembosky was unwittingly writing about. It's not an organized strike. It's not a strike like anybody ordinarily means the term. It was not lead, called, organized, voted on or agreed to in any way. It is not collective action. It's tens or hundreds of thousands of individuals all individually looking at the same math and individually coming to the same conclusions. It's an emergent "strike". It's the inexorable result of inarguable arithmetic, multiplied across a nation of increasingly desperate individuals, each of whom had to confront the ill news of their balance sheets for themselves in the solitude of their practices.

This isn't a flock of starlings all wheeling in the sky together by watching one another's wings. It's the creatures of the woods all fleeing in the same direction before the front of a forest fire.

It's the marketplace voting with their feet.

And that is why you can't find a therapist, no, really.

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Loose change thoughts:

• I would humbly submit there is something wrong with the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. I'm not certain I know what, yet, though. I see it's value, and don't think it should be done away with. I would tentatively propose that the problem is that businesses have radically different scales, and treating a national corporation as equal in power with a sole-proprietorship is one of those "Law in it's majestic equality" situations.

It seems to me at first blush that a reasonable remedy would be to punch a hole in it, where if a business hires a hundred (100) or more sole-proprietorships to do the same or substantially the same job function, in the same rolling 5 year period, that those vendors may legally collectively bargain with that customer. So if you contract with 100 therapists, or 100 web designers or 100 livery car drivers, those therapists/designers/drivers can form a union of sorts to negotiate collectively with you.

By opening this loophole, we close another: the end-run around the rights of employees to organize that is achieved by hiring independent contractors instead. I parameterized the loophole – 100 people doing the same job – to describe a situation that's directly analogous to employment, and labors, if you will, under the same problematic power differential. If you contract with 100 seamstresses, yeah, you're employing seamstresses, even if you can convince the IRS they all belong on 1099s.

I am willing to negotiate on the 100 thing.

• I expect that the fact that this "strike", such as it is, is emergent, is a really bad thing. I mean... I don't see any way it could be called off. It will probably be radically less successful that an organized strike would be. There's no way for cooler heads to argue hotter heads into capitulating to reasonable compromises. My intuition says that this sort of structurelessness and lack of coordination leads to Bad Things.

It's a mighty cool social phenomenon though.

• Since our society has decided that therapists should provide their services regardless of the cost to the therapist, I figure it's just a matter of time before some jurisdiction decides the solution to not enough therapists taking insurance – especially not enough therapists taking Medicaid – will be to make it illegal for therapists not to.

I can't tell if this [PDF] is the first step along that road or not. I welcome edification. I have no idea what an "enrolled non-billing provider" could actually be, and I don't know what the ACA actually says about this.

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* j/k ha ha therapists don't retire. Haven't you seen "The Sixth Sense"?

** Notice how this filter on who gets to become a therapist also strongly reinforces the phenomenon of white, economically privileged, college-educated, gentry-class, able-identified, usually female professional treating non-white, impoverished, non-college attending, blue-collar or no-collar working-class, disability-identified, patients of color.

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Navigational note: I made all section heads in-page self-links, so that people can link to specific sections, if they want. To get the link for a section, click on the section number and the new URL will be in the URL bar of your browser; or just context click on a number and select "copy link location" or equivalent to copy it for pasting.

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The two big parties are left scrapping over the also rans

One of the more remarkable features of the polling in the last parliament was the almost complete inability of both Labour and Conservatives to win voters from each other. Vote shares may have gone up and down but it was gains from and losses to the Lib Dems, UKIP, the Greens and SNP (and non-voters) that was responsible; the direct swing between the big two was negligible.

As then, so now. All three polls released this last week tell the same story. ICM record 3% of the Labour vote from 2015 going to the Conservatives, with 3% of the Tories’ general election vote going back the other way; BMG’s figures are almost identical; YouGov have the Tories doing a little better, gaining 6% of Labour’s former vote while losing only 2% of their own but even there, that amounts to a swing of only a half per cent. We’re talking tiny numbers.

The current very comfortable Conservative leads are instead based on two different aspects. Firstly, the Tories are doing better at holding on to their own vote. ICM and YouGov record the Blues as keeping between 72-75% of their 2015 voters, against Labour’s 60-67% (this includes those who say they don’t know or would not vote). And secondly, the Conservatives have done better in the net swings from the lesser parties and in particular, from UKIP.

In fact, the notion that many Corbyn supporters have that the increase in the Conservative lead over the summer can be put down to the leadership challenge is at best only partly true. Labour’s introspection no doubt caused it to miss opportunities but the Labour share has drifted down only very slightly.

Of far more significance since June has been what looks like a direct UKIP-Con swing, presumably off the back of both the end of the EURef campaign and the change in Conservative leader.

What looks to be the case is that Britain is a very divided country with the concept of the traditional swing Lab/Con voter close to extinct and instead, three distinct broad groups (with subdivisions but let’s keep this simple): those who would vote Conservative, those who would vote Labour and those who would vote neither (who, outside of Scotland, we can more-or-less ignore).

So while there’s barely any defecting between the Tory tribe and the Labour lot, they do potentially meet when they go walkabout elsewhere, to UKIP, the Lib Dems or (most frequently) to none of the above.

What that suggests is that the big boys, but especially Labour, need the also-rans to be performing fairly strongly. Without those parties being attractive enough to their rival’s supporters, the negative campaigning of old will be far less effective as voters might be disillusioned but find no real alternative home.

Interestingly, the Lib Dems have been performing fairly strongly against the Conservatives in local by-elections recently but this hasn’t made its way across into the national polls. All the same, that the party seems capable of big swings across the country suggests at least a willingness by Conservative voters to consider them again; a willingness that might translate into Westminster voting given the opportunity.

The Lib Dems will no doubt hope that the opportunity will come in Witney. That might be a little too early but with Con and Lab unable to take support from each other, with a far-left Labour and a Tory government engaged in debates about Europe, if they can’t take advantage in the next two years, they never will.

David Herdson

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I.

Some of the best pushback I got on my election post yesterday was from people who thought Trump was a safer choice than Clinton because of the former’s isolationism and the latter’s interventionism. Since I glossed over that point yesterday, I want to explain why I don’t agree.

Trump has earned a reputation as an isolationist by criticizing the Iraq War. I don’t think that reputation is deserved. He’s said a lot of things which suggest he would go to war at the drop of a hat.

— He says he will “bomb the s#!t out of ISIS” and calls for sending 30,000 troops to destroy them. His campaign website says he will “pursue aggressive joint and coalition military operations to crush and destroy ISIS”.

— He is ambiguous about whether Obama should have intervened in Syria to depose dictator Bashar Assad. He complained “there is something missing from our president. Had he crossed the line and really gone in with force, done something to Assad – if he had gone in with tremendous force, you wouldn’t have millions of people displaced all over the world. ”

— Back during the rebellion in Libya, Trump seems to have been in favor of even more dramatic intervention than Obama eventually allowed. He said on his video blog “I can’t believe what our country is doing. Qaddafi in Libya is killing thousands of people, nobody knows how bad it is, and we’re sitting around we have soldiers all have the Middle East, and we’re not bringing them in to stop this horrible carnage and that’s what it is: It’s a carnage. You talk about things that have happened in history; this could be one of the worst. Now we should go in, we should stop this guy, which would be very easy and very quick. We could do it surgically, stop him from doing it, and save these lives. This is absolutely nuts. We don’t want to get involved and you’re gonna end up with something like you’ve never seen before. But we have go in to save these lives; these people are being slaughtered like animals. It’s horrible what’s going on; it has to be stopped. We should do on a humanitarian basis, immediately go into Libya, knock this guy out very quickly, very surgically, very effectively, and save the lives.”

— He thinks we should have “kept” Iraq’s oil. When pressed on how exactly one keeps billions of barrels of petroleum buried underneath a foreign country, he said he would get US troops to circle and defend the areas with the oil. The “areas with the oil” are about half of the country. This sounds a lot like he wants US troops to remain in Iraq indefinitely.

— He also wants to to keep Libya’s oil. As per National Review: “I would go in and take the oil — I would just go in and take the oil. We don’t know who the rebels are, we hear they come from Iran, we hear they’re influenced by Iran or al-Qaeda, and, frankly I would go in, I would take the oil — and stop this baby stuff.”

— He suggests declaring war on Iran as a response to them harassing US ships. During the debate, he said he would “shoot their ships out of the water.”

— In 2007, he he suggested “knocking the hell out of [Iran] and keeping their oil”, though in his (sort of) defense he might have been confusing them with ISIS at the time.

— In his 2000 book The America We Deserve he suggested a preemptive strike on North Korea: “[If I were President], North Korea would suddenly discover that its worthless promises of civilized behavior would cut no ice. I would let Pyongyang know in no uncertain terms that it can either get out of the nuclear arms race or expect a rebuke similar to the one Ronald Reagan delivered to Ghadhafi in 1986. [Reagan bombed Libya]. I don’t think anybody is going to accuse me of tiptoeing through the issues or tap-dancing around them either. Who else in public life has called for a pre-emptive strike on North Korea?”

— During a town hall meeting, when host Chris Matthews asked Trump when he would use nuclear weapons, he answered “Somebody hits us within ISIS — you wouldn`t fight back with a nuke?” When Matthews reminded him that most people try to avoid ever using nuclear weapons, he answered “Then why are we making them? Why do we make them?”

II.

Some writers have called the period since World War II the “Pax Americana”. Although there have been some deadly local wars, there’s been relative peace between great powers. A big part of this is America’s promise to defend its allies. This both prevents other countries from attacking America’s allies and prevents America’s allies from building big militaries and launching attacks of their own. The whole system is cemented by America-centric trade organizations which make war unprofitable and incentivize countries to stay in America’s orbit.

Trump wants to destroy this system because it costs money, even though it doesn’t really cost that much money compared to anything else we do and Trump intends to increase the defense budget anyway. It’s possible a post-Trump world might find some other way to maintain peace. It’s also possible that it wouldn’t, or that the process of finding that alternative way would be really bloody.

— In March, Trump said “I think NATO may be obsolete. NATO was set up a long time ago — many, many years ago when things were different. Things are different now. We were a rich nation then. We had nothing but money. We had nothing but power. And you know, far more than we have today, in a true sense. And I think NATO — you have to really examine NATO. And it doesn’t really help us, it’s helping other countries. And I don’t think those other countries appreciate what we’re doing.” Although this isn’t the worst opinion, most foreign policy scholars think that our policy of defending our allies is necessary to prevent global arms races and random regional wars.

— In July, he publicly admitted he wasn’t sure he would protect the Baltic states if Russia attacked, something we’re currently obligated to do. The Atlantic calls this “a marked departure from the security policy of every presidential nominee from either of the two major parties since NATO’s founding in 1949”. It’s especially worrying because even if you’re not going to protect the Baltic states from Russia, you shouldn’t openly say so where Russians can hear you!

— And throughout the race, Trump has campaigned on a platform that would effectively end American participation in the World Trade Organization. Trump understands that this would probably start a global trade war, but asks “who the hell cares if there’s a trade war?” I care for two reasons. First, because free trade has produced decades of sustained economic growth and the most successful poverty alleviation in human history. Second, this would probably crash the world economy, creating exactly the sort of depression that tends to produce instability (most famously Hitler’s rise during Germany’s interwar stagnation) or which drives countries toward regional hegemons willing to trade with them or just plain bribe them.

III.

Hillary’s foreign policy isn’t great either, but it doesn’t seem as bad as some people are making it out to be.

— Hillary will probably continue US intervention in Syria; here she is more interventionist than Obama. But her intervention would probably be smaller-scale than Trump’s. She wants to arm “friendly” rebel groups and enforce a no-fly zone, but she has ruled out sending ground troops into Iraq or Syria, something Trump has promised to do. Likely she would focus on keeping enough of Syria safe to protect some civilians and prevent more refugees, then use indirect methods to make life miserable for Assad. This seems like as good a plan as any other.

— The main concern I’ve heard is that the no-fly zone might lead to conflict (war?) with Russia. Declaring a no-fly zone would mean a commitment to shoot down any plane that flies through the zone. Russia is currently flying planes through Syria, and if they tried to call Hillary’s bluff she would have to shoot down Russian planes or lose credibility; shooting down a foreign plane could obviously lead to war. Many different news sources make this point (1, 2, 3, etc). But the clearest description she’s given of what she wants suggests a no-fly zone with Russian cooperation and support. Last October, she said of her no-fly zone proposal that “I think it’s complicated and the Russians would have to be part of it, or it wouldn’t work.” There’s some good discussion of this on Reddit (see especially this comment) where most people end up agreeing that this is the heart of her plan – something like the US agreeing it won’t bomb Russian allies if Russia doesn’t bomb our allies.

— Hillary has said she will “treat cyberattacks just like any other attack”, which could mean that if Russia launches a cyberattack on the US (for example hacking the DNC’s emails) Hillary would treat it as an act of war. I think this requires a stretch. She did mention the possibility of a military response, but only in the context of possible “serious political, economic, and military responses”. My guess is we should interpret this in a non-crazy way – if Russia hacks our emails, we condemn them and maybe hack some of their stuff. If Iran hacks a dam and causes it to fail, then maybe we start thinking airstrikes. Shooting down an airliner is an act of war, but countries have shot down other countries’ airliners a bunch of times and usually people posture a bit and then let it slide. I don’t think it makes sense to think Hillary will treat cyber-attacks more seriously than that.

IV.

A lot of this has a lot of room for interpretation. I’m totally ready to believe that when Trump said he would shoot any Iranian ship that annoyed US vessels, he just meant generic macho posturing and expected everyone to hear it that way. He might even be cunningly pursuing a North Korean – style “mad dog” strategy where he tries to sound so dangerous and unpredictable that nobody dares call his bluff, and so his enemies never mess with him in any way.

Or he might mean everything he says. After all, a lot of it has been pretty consistent since long before he was running for president. There’s no point in saying things to send a game theoretic signal to Iran if you’re a random New York real estate developer and Iran isn’t listening. If he understood the theory behind sounding trigger-happy to intimidate our enemies, he probably wouldn’t have openly admitted he wouldn’t respond to a Russian invasion of the Baltics. And he does seem kind of 100% like a loose cannon in every way, to the point where trying to explain away loose-cannon-like statements as part of a deeper plan seems overly complex.

(Actually, I have a theory which I think explains a lot about Trump’s foreign policy positions: he doesn’t like losers. He supported the Iraq War and the Libya intervention when it looked like we would probably win. Then we lost, and he said they were stupid and bungled. He supports counterfactual invasions of Iraq and Libya where we “kept the oil” because that would have counted as winning. He supports invading ISIS because he expects to be in charge of the invasion and he expects to win. Under this theory, Trump’s retrospective non-support for failed wars doesn’t predict that he won’t start new ones.)

In the end it all comes back to the argument from variance. Maybe Trump is secretly a principled isolationist, and he’s only saying he’ll shoot at Iran and invade Libya and first-strike North Korea and steal oil from Iraq and send troops against ISIS and remove Assad in order to scare people into cooperating with him. Or maybe he’ll actually shoot at Iran and invade Libya and first-strike North Korea and steal oil from Iraq and send troops against ISIS and try to remove Assad. Who knows? He’s said a thousand times now that he’s totally different from the usual politicians, and I believe him. He could do pretty much anything.

(I’d like to think his advisors would rein him in before that point, but when asked which advisors he would consult before a major foreign policy decision, Trump could only think of one person, and he does not exactly inspire confidence.)

I am not qualified to judge Hillary’s work as Secretary of State, but I expect her to play by the book. I’m not sure if Hillary will be more aggressive or more peaceful than the last few presidents, but I don’t expect her to be a wild outlier totally beyond comparison to any previous president. I expect her to consult the foreign policy community on anything important she does, and take some advice relatively within their Overton Window. If she comes to the brink of nuclear war with Russia, I expect her to de-escalate for the same reason I expect Putin to de-escalate; they’re both rationally self-interested people who want to continue being alive and ruling their respective countries, and they value that more than any particular principle or any opportunity to prove their machismo.

I think she remains the low-variance choice for president.

Stephen Bush has noticed that last night local by-elections victories were the latest in a growing line for the Liberal Democrats:

Polling has always been somewhat unkind to the Liberal Democrats outside of election campaigns, as the party has a low profile, particularly now it has just eight MPs. 

What appears to be happening at local by-elections and my expectation may be repeated at a general election is that when voters are presented with the option of a Liberal Democrat at the ballot box they find the idea surprisingly appealing. 

Added to that, the Liberal Democrats’ happiest hunting grounds are clearly affluent, Conservative-leaning areas that voted for Remain in the referendum. 

All of which makes their hopes of a good second place in Witney – and a good night in the 2017 county councils – look rather less farfetched than you might expect.

Seats changing hands in September 2016

Liberal Democrats GAIN Four Lanes on Cornwall from United Kingdom Independence Party

Conservatives GAIN Grangefield on Stockton on Tees from Labour

Liberal Democrats GAIN Mosborough on Sheffield from Labour

Liberal Democrats GAIN Tupton on North East Derbyshire from Labour

Liberal Democrats GAIN Plasnewydd on Cardiff from Labour

Labour GAIN Christchurch on Allerdale from Conservative

Plaid Cymru GAIN Cilycwm on Carmarthenshire from Independent

Labour GAIN Coatbridge North and Glenboig on North Lanarkshire from Scottish National Party

Labour GAIN Arley and Whitacre on North Warwickshire from Conservative

Liberal Democrats GAIN Hadleigh on Suffolk from Conservative

Liberal Democrats GAIN Teignmouth Central on Teignbridge from Conservative

Liberal Democrats GAIN Stow on Cotswold from Conservative

Liberal Democrats GAIN Adeyfield West on Dacorum from Conservative

Data compiled by Harry Hayfield

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September 30th, 2016: Unlike the Batman comic a few days ago, yes I did absolutely have to google every single one of these kale facts!! Sorry ladies, I'm spoken for – Ryan

I.

If you are American, SSC endorses voting in this presidential election.

Andrew Gelman, Nate Silver, and Aaron Edlin calculate the chance that a single vote will determine the election (ie break a tie in a state that breaks an Electoral College tie). It ranges from about one in ten million (if you live in a swing state) to one in a billion (if you live in a very safe state). The average American has a one in sixty million chance of determining the election results. The paper was from the 2008 election, which was a pro-Obama landslide; since this election is closer the chance of determining it may be even higher.

The size of the US budget is about $4 trillion, but Presidents can only affect a tiny bit of that – most of the money funds the same programs no matter who’s in charge. But Presidents do shift budgetary priorities a lot. GW Bush started a war in Iraq which probably cost $2 trillion; the CBO estimates Obamacare may cost about $1.2 trillion. Neither of these are pure costs – Obamacare buys us more health care, and military presence in Iraq buys us [mumble] – but if you think these are less (or more) efficient ways to spend money than other possible uses, then they represent ways that having one President might be better than another. If we suppose a good president would use these trillions of dollars at least 33% more efficiently than a bad president, then this is still $300 billion in value.

So order of magnitude, having a good President rather than a bad one can be worth $300 billion. A 1/60 million chance to create $300 billion in value is worth $5,000; even the 1/1 billion chance afforded someone in a safe state is worth $300.

We don’t know for sure that we’re right about politics. In order to add signal rather than noise to the election results, we have to be better than the average voter. The Inside View is useless here; probably every voter thinks they’re better than average. I recommend the Outside View – looking for measurable indicators correlated with ability to make good choices. Education’s probably a good one. IQ might be another. But overall, my suggestion is that if you’re seriously uncertain about whether or not you think more clearly than the average voter, by that fact alone you almost certainly do.

Suppose you live in a swing state. If you think (in a well-calibrated way) that it’s 10% more likely that your candidate will use $1 trillion well than that the other candidate will, your vote is worth $500. If you live in a safe state, it’s more like $30. If you value the amount of time it takes to vote at less than that, voting is conceivably a good use of your time.

II.

SSC endorses voting for Hillary Clinton if you live in a swing state. If you live in a safe state, I endorse voting for Clinton, Johnson, or (if you insist) Stein. If you want, you can use a vote-swapping site to make this easier or more impactful.

You might notice who’s missing from this endorsement. I think Donald Trump would be a bad president.

Partly this is because of his policies, insofar as he has them. I’m not going to talk much about these because I don’t think I can change anyone’s mind here – either you agree with me (and disagree with Trump) on things like abortion, global warming, free trade, et cetera, or you don’t. A two sentence argument in a blog post won’t change your mind either way.

In fact, I’m not sure any of this ever changes anyone’s mind, and I didn’t really want to write this post. But the latest news says:

This is going to be close. And since the lesson of Brexit is that polls underestimate support for politically incorrect choices, this is going to be really close.

And I don’t know if I’d go so far as Scott Aaronson, who worries that he will one day live in a nuclear hellscape where his children ask him “Daddy, why didn’t you blog about Trump?”. But if some of my blogging on conservative issues has given me any political capital with potential Trump voters, then I this is where I want to spend it.

So here are some reasons why I would be afraid to have Trump as president even if I agreed with him about the issues.

Many conservatives make the argument against utopianism. The millenarian longing for a world where all systems are destroyed, all problems are solved, and everything is permissible – that’s dangerous whether it comes from Puritans or Communists. These same conservatives have traced this longing through leftist history from Lenin through social justice.

Which of the candidates in this election are millennarian? If Sanders were still in, I’d say fine, he qualifies. If Stein were in, same, no contest. But Hillary? The left and right both critique Hillary the same way. She’s too in bed with the system. Corporations love her. Politicians love her. All she wants to do is make little tweaks – a better tax policy here, a new foreign policy doctrine there. The critiques are right. Hillary represents complete safety from millennialism.

Trump’s policy ideas are mostly silly, but no one cares, because he’s not really running on policy. He’s running on making America great again, fighting the special interests, and defying the mainstream media. Nobody cares what policies he’ll implement after he does this, because his campaign is more an expression of rage at these things than anything else.

In my review of Singer on Marx, I wrote that:

I’d always heard that Marx was long on condemnations of capitalism and short on blueprints for communism, and the couple of Marx’s works I read in college confirmed he really didn’t talk about that very much. It seemed like a pretty big gap. I figured…he’d probably made a few vague plans, like “Oh, decisions will be made by a committee of workers,” and “Property will be held in common and consensus democracy will choose who gets what,” and felt like the rest was just details. That’s the sort of error I could at least sympathize with, despite its horrendous consequences.

But in fact Marx was philosophically opposed, as a matter of principle, to any planning about the structure of communist governments or economies. He would come out and say “It is irresponsible to talk about how communist governments and economies will work.” He believed it was a scientific law, analogous to the laws of physics, that once capitalism was removed, a perfect communist government would form of its own accord. There might be some very light planning, a couple of discussions, but these would just be epiphenomena of the governing historical laws working themselves out. Just as, a dam having been removed, a river will eventually reach the sea somehow, so capitalism having been removed society will eventually reach a perfect state of freedom and cooperation.

Singer blames Hegel. Hegel viewed all human history as the World-Spirit trying to recognize and incarnate itself. As it overcomes its various confusions and false dichotomies, it advances into forms that more completely incarnate the World-Spirit and then moves onto the next problem. Finally, it ends with the World-Spirit completely incarnated – possibly in the form of early 19th century Prussia – and everything is great forever.

Marx famously exports Hegel’s mysticism into a materialistic version where the World-Spirit operates upon class relations rather than the interconnectedness of all things, and where you don’t come out and call it the World-Spirit – but he basically keeps the system intact. So once the World-Spirit resolves the dichotomy between Capitalist and Proletariat, then it can more completely incarnate itself and move on to the next problem. Except that this is the final problem (the proof of this is trivial and is left as exercise for the reader) so the World-Spirit becomes fully incarnate and everything is great forever. And you want to plan for how that should happen? Are you saying you know better than the World-Spirit, Comrade?

I am starting to think I was previously a little too charitable toward Marx. My objections were of the sort “You didn’t really consider the idea of welfare capitalism with a social safety net” or “communist society is very difficult to implement in principle,” whereas they should have looked more like “You are basically just telling us to destroy all of the institutions that sustain human civilization and trust that what is baaaasically a giant planet-sized ghost will make sure everything works out.”

And since then, one of the central principles behind my philosophy has been “Don’t destroy all existing systems and hope a planet-sized ghost makes everything work out”. Systems are hard. Institutions are hard. If your goal is to replace the current systems with better ones, then destroying the current system is 1% of the work, and building the better ones is 99% of it. Throughout history, dozens of movements have doomed entire civilizations by focusing on the “destroying the current system” step and expecting the “build a better one” step to happen on its own. That never works. The best parts of conservativism are the ones that guard this insight and shout it at a world too prone to taking shortcuts.

Donald Trump does not represent those best parts of conservativism. To transform his movement into Marxism, just replace “the bourgeoisie” with “the coastal elites” and “false consciousness” with “PC speech”. Just replace the assumption that everything will work itself out once power is in the hands of the workers, with the assumption that everything will work itself out once power is in the hands of “real Americans”. Just replace the hand-waving lack of plans with what to do after the Revolution with a hand-waving lack of plans what to do after the election. In both cases, the sheer virtue of the movement, and the apocalyptic purification of the rich people keeping everyone else down, is supposed to mean everything will just turn out okay on its own. That never works.

A commenter on here the other day quoted an Atlantic article complaining that “The press takes [Trump] literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally”. Well, count me in that second group. I don’t think he’s literal. I think when he talks about building a wall and keeping out Muslims, he’s metaphorically saying “I’m going to fight for you, the real Americans”. When he talks about tariffs and trade deals, he’s metaphorically saying “I’m going to fight for you, the real Americans”. Fine. But neither of those two things are a plan. The problem with getting every American a job isn’t that nobody has been fighting for them, the problem with getting every American a job is that getting 100% employment in a modern economy is a really hard problem.

Donald Trump not only has no solution to that problem, he doesn’t even understand the question. He lives in a world where there is no such thing as intelligence, only loyalty. If we haven’t solved all of our problems yet, it’s because the Department of Problem-Solving was insufficiently loyal, and didn’t try hard enough. His only promise is to fill that department with loyal people who really want the problem solved.

I’ve never been fully comfortable with the Left because I feel like they often make the same error – the only reason there’s still poverty is because the corporate-run government is full of traitors who refuse to make the completely great, no-downsides policy of raising the minimum wage. One of the right’s great redeeming feature has been an awareness of these kinds of tradeoffs. But this election, it’s Hillary who sounds restrained and realistic, and Trump who wants the moon on a silver platter (“It will be the best moon you’ve ever seen. And the silver platter is going to be yuuuuuge!”)

III.

But I guess you’ve got to balance someone’s ability to pursue goals effectively with whether you like the goals they’ll be pursuing. I can imagine someone admitting that Clinton will probably be better at governing than Trump, but preferring Trump’s position on the issues so much that it still gives him an edge. In that case, I beg you to consider not only the mean but the variance.

I think even people who expect Trump to be a better President on average will admit he’s a high-variance choice. Hillary is an overwhelmingly known quantity at this point. A Hillary presidency will probably be a lot like Obama’s presidency. There might be a Libya-style military action; probably not an Iraq-style one. If something terrible happens like China tries to invade Taiwan, she will probably make some sort of vaguely reasonable decision after consulting her advisors. She might do a bad job, but it’s hard to imagine a course where a Hillary presidency leads directly to the apocalypse, the fall of American democracy, et cetera.

Trump isn’t a known quantity. Maybe he’ll kind of dodder around and be kind of funny while not changing much. Or maybe there will be some crisis and Trump will take what could have been a quickly-defused diplomatic incident and turn it into World War III. Remember also that it’s more likely the House and Senate both stay Republican than that they both switch to being Democrat. So if Hillary is elected, she’ll probably spend four years smashing her head against Congress; if Trump is elected, he will probably get a lot of what he wants.

Some people like high variance. I don’t. The world has seen history’s greatest alleviation of poverty over the past few decades, and this shows every sign of continuing as long as we don’t do something incredibly stupid that blows up the current world order. I’m less sanguine about the state of America in particular but I think that its generally First World problems probably can’t be solved by politics. They will probably require either genetic engineering or artificial intelligence; the job of our generation is keep the world functional enough to do the research that will create those technologies, and to alleviate as much suffering as we can in the meantime. I don’t see a Clinton presidency as making the world non-functional, whatever that means. I don’t know what I see a Trump presidency doing because, Trump is inherently unpredictable, but some major blow to world functionality is definitely on the list of possibilities.

The one place where Clinton is higher-variance than Trump is immigration. Clinton does not explicitly support open borders, but given her election on a pro-immigration platform and the massive anti-Trump immigration backlash that seems to be materializing, it’s easy to see her moving in that direction. If you believe that immigrants can import the less-effective institutions of their home countries, lower the intelligence of the national hive mind, or cause ethnic fractionalization that replaces sustainable democratic politics with ethnic coalition-building (unlike the totally-not-ethnic-coalition-based politics of today, apparently?), that could potentially make the world less functional and prevent useful technologies from being deployed.

I consider this one of the strongest pro-Trump arguments, but I think it exaggerates the scale of the problem. Hillary will have a Republican Congress to contend with; she probably won’t be able to increase immigration very much. Immigration rates are currently too low to cause massive demographic change before the point at which useful technologies can be deployed, and most immigrants are Asian and come from countries with pretty good institutions themselves. More important, Trump’s anti-immigration policies would prevent foreign researchers from attending top American universities, and probably slow the deployment of future technologies directly, far more than any indirect effect from Hillary would.

There’s another argument here – how exactly are we visualizing a world where immigrants damage American institutions? I envision it as America becoming more like Third World countries – constant ethnic tension, government by strongmen, rampant corruption, lack of respect for checks and balances, and overregulation of industry. But Trump is promising us all of that already, without even admitting any immigrants! If we’re going to become a Third World country, let’s at least help some people while we’re doing it!

IV.

US conservatism is in crisis, and I think that crisis might end better if Trump loses than if he wins.

Since a country with thriving conservative and liberal parties is lower-variance than one with lots of liberals but no effective conservatism, I would like conservatism to get out of crisis as soon as possible and reach the point where it could form an effective opposition. It would also be neat if whatever form conservatism ended out taking had some slight contact with reality and what would help the country (this is not meant as a dig at conservatives – I’m not sure the Democrats have much contact with reality or helps the country either; I’m wishing for the moon and stars here).

Nobody expects Republicans to win blacks and Hispanics. The interesting thing about this election is that college-educated whites are also moving into the Democratic column. If the latest polls are to be believed, the demographic – which favored Romney by 14 points last election – favors Clinton by 8 points now. The nightmare scenario is that Trump wins, his style of anti-intellectual populism is cemented as Official New Republican Ideology, and every educated person switches to the Democrats.

I’m not 100% this would be bad – maybe educated people who are temperamentally conservative would pull the Democratic Party a little to the right, turning them into a broad moderate coalition which has no problem winning elections and combines the smartest elements of liberal and conservative thought. But more likely, there’s a vicious cycle where the lack of intelligent conservatives guts the system of think tanks that produce the sort of studies and analyses which convince smart people to become conservative, which in turn makes there even fewer intelligent conservatives, and so on. In the end, intellectuals won’t just vote Democrat; they’ll shift their personal views further to the left to fit in. We already have a problem with a glut of leftist researchers and journalists producing evidence why leftists are right about everything, and a shortage of conservative researchers and journalists to fact-check them and present the opposite case. As intelligent people desert the Republican Party, this situation gets worse and we lose access to any knowledge that Vox doesn’t want to write an explainer on. In the worst case scenario, everybody develops a hard-coded association between “conservative” and “stupid people”, even more than they have already, the academies purge the hell out of everyone even slightly to the right of the loudest activist, and the only alternative is The Donald Trump Institute Of Research That Is Going To Be Absolutely Yuuuuuuge, which busies itself putting out white papers to a coalition of illiterates.

If Trump fails, then the situation is – much the same, really, but conservatives can at least get started right now picking up the pieces instead of having to wait four years. There’s a fundamental problem, which is that about 30% of the US population is religious poor southern whites who are generally not very educated, mostly not involved in US intellectual life, but form the biggest and most solid voting bloc in the country. If you try to form two parties with 50% of the vote each, then whichever party gets the religious poor southern whites is going to be dominated by them and end up vulnerable to populism. Since the religious poor southern whites are conservative, that’s always going to be the conservative party’s cross to bear and conservatism is always going to be less intellectual than liberalism in this country. I don’t know how to solve this. But there have been previous incarnations of American conservatism that have been better at dealing with the problem than this one, and maybe if Trumpism gets decisively defeated it will encourage people to work on the problem.

V.

I said I wouldn’t try to convince people about the big hot-button issues, but I’ve been told now thatthe guardrails of democracy have been broken lying is okay. So let’s talk about global warming.

Most hot-button issues are less President-influenced than most people think. No Supreme Court is likely to overturn Roe v. Wade at this point, so the president’s impact on abortion is limited to whatever edge cases come before the justices they appoint. I have no idea whether there was more or less capital punishment during Obama’s administration than Bush’s, but I doubt that the president’s opinion of the issue had much impact one way or the other. But it looks like the Obama administration made really impressive progress on global warming; needless to say Donald Trump feels differently.

I don’t want to argue climate science here. I want to say that, as usual, I support the low-variance position that’s not going to make the world vastly less functional before we can invent genetic engineering or AI. Even if you doubt modern climate science, are you so sure it’s wrong that it’s worth the risk? What chance of global warming being a real problem would it take before you agreed that we should probably reduce CO2 emissions just in case? How could that chance possibly be lower than the chance of something that 90-something percent of the relevant scientists believe to be true is true? Yes, we know here that science is not always as authoritative as it would like to be, but it’s not completely anticorrelated with truth either!

(also, if the research about high CO2 levels decreasing cognitive ability is true – and my guess is no, but I’m far from sure – that could be even more disastrous than the traditional global warming effects – remember that even tiny IQ decreases have horrible consequences on a society-wide scale.)

VI.

Okay, but what about the real reason Trump is so popular?

When I talk to Trump supporters, it’s not usually about doubting climate change, or thinking Trump will take the conservative movement in the right direction, or even immigration. It’s about the feeling that a group of arrogant, intolerant, sanctimonious elites have seized control of a lot of national culture and are using it mostly to spread falsehood and belittle anybody different than them. And Trump is both uniquely separate from these elites and uniquely repugnant to them – which makes him look pretty good to everyone else.

This is definitely true. Please vote Hillary anyway.

Aside from the fact that getting back at annoying people isn’t worth eroding the foundations of civil society – do you really think a Trump election is going to hurt these people at all? Make them question anything? “Oh, 51% of the American people disagree with me, I guess that means I’ve got a lot of self-reflecting to do.” Of course not. A Trump election would just confirm for them exactly what they already believe – that the average American is a stupid racist who needs to be kept as far away from public life as possible. If Trump gets elected, sure, the editorial pages will be full of howls of despair the next day, but underneath the howls will be quiet satisfaction that the world is exactly the way they believed it to be.

The right sometimes argues that modern leftism is analogous to early millenarian Christianity. They argue this, and then they say “You know what would stop these people in their tracks? A strong imperial figure who persecutes them. That’s definitely going to make them fade away quietly. There is no way this can possibly go wrong.”

Leftism has never been about controlling the government, and really the government is one of the areas it controls least effectively – even now both houses of Congress, most state legislatures, most governors, etc, are Republican. When people say that the Left is in control, they’re talking about academia, the media, the arts, and national culture writ large. But all of these things have a tendency to define themselves in opposition to the government. When the left controls the government, this is awkward and tends to involve a lot of infighting. When the right controls the government, it gets easy. If Trump controls the government, it gets ridiculously easy.

This has real-world effects. Millennials are more conservative than previous generations. Andrew Gelman, who is usually right about everything, says:

If you look at the cohort of young voters who came of age during George W. Bush’s presidency, they’re mostly Democrats, which makes sense as Bush was a highly unpopular Republican. The young voters who came of age during Obama’s presidency are more split, which makes sense because Obama is neither popular nor unpopular; he has an approval of about 50%

I would prefer the next generation end up leaning more to the right, because that will cancel out younger people’s natural tendency to lean left and make them pretty moderate and so low-variance. I definitely don’t want an unpopular far-right presidency, because then they’re going to lean left, which will combined with the natural leftiness of the young and make them super left. And this is the sort of thing that affects the culture!

VII.

One more warning for conservatives who still aren’t convinced. If the next generation is radicalized by Trump being a bad president, they’re not just going to lean left. They’re going to lean regressive, totalitarian, super-social-justice left.

Everyone has already constructed the narrative: Trump is the anti-PC, anti-social-justice candidate. If he wins, he’s going to be the anti-PC, anti-social-justice President. And he will fail. First of all, because he doesn’t really show much sign of knowing what he’s doing. Second of all, because all presidents fail in a sense – 80% of Americans consistently believe the country is headed the wrong direction and the president is the natural fall guy for this trend. And third of all, because even if by some miracle Trump avoids the first two failure modes, the media will say he failed and people will believe them. And when the anti-PC, anti-social-justice President fails, the reaction will be a giant “we told you so” from the social justice movement, and a giant shift of all the disillusioned young people right into their fold.

Trump is all set to be the biggest gift to the social justice movement in history. They thrive on claims of persecution, claims that they’re the ones fighting a stupid hateful regressive culture that controls everything. And people think that bringing their straw man to life and putting him in the Oval Office is going to help?

If you’re a Jew fighting anti-Semitism, the absolute minimum you can do is not actually kill Christian children and use their blood to make matzah. Likewise, if you are a principled classical liberal fighting the social justice movement’s attempt to smear anyone who disagrees with them as an overprivileged clueless hateful Neanderthal, the absolute minimum you can do is not actually be an overprivileged clueless hateful Neanderthal. Opinions on Trump range all the way from “he is definitely an overprivileged clueless hateful Neanderthal” to “he is remarkably and uniquely bad at not appearing to be an overprivileged clueless hateful Neanderthal”. In any case, having him as the public face of anti-social-justice for the next four years would be a godsend for them and a disaster for everyone else.

VIII.

There’s one more thought I wanted to mention which is vaguely in this space.

The enemy isn’t leftism or social justice. The enemy is epistemic vice.

When the Left errs, it’s through using shouting and shaming to cut through the long and painful process of having to justify its beliefs. It’s through confusing disagreement with evil, a dissenter who needs convincing with a thought-criminal who needs neutralizing.

Sometimes it might be strategically necessary to whack particular ideologies to make examples of them. But in the longer-term, replacing left with right just puts a new group of people in position to shame their opponents and silence dissent. The long range plan has to combine a short-term need to neutralize immediate would-be tyrants with a long-term need to slowly encourage epistemic virtue so that we don’t have to keep putting out fires.

Now, watch this video:

Trump’s not in that crowd. But does anyone think he disagrees with it? Can anyone honestly say that Trump or his movement promote epistemic virtue? That in the long-term, we’ll be glad that we encouraged this sort of thing, that we gave it power and attention and all the nutrients it needed to grow? That the road to whatever vision of a just and rational society we imagine, something quiet and austere with a lot of old-growth trees and Greek-looking columns, runs through LOCK HER UP?

I don’t like having to vote for the lesser of two evils. But at least I feel like I know who it is.

RELATED: Eliezer, The Unit Of Caring, Scott Aaronson

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September 26th, 2016: This is real science facts!! We HAVE revised our species estimate downwards lately, because we've seen less biodiversity there than we expected. ALMOST AS IF SOMETHING IS KEEPING THE LIFE THERE IN CHECK, PERHAPS THROUGH DARK MEANS??? SCIENCE LITERALLY CANNOT SAY – Ryan

On Friday BBC News reported that court files recording details of Alan Turing's convictions for homosexual acts have been put on display at Chester Town Hall.

As Helen Pickin-Jones, chair of Chester Pride, says in the BBC report:

"Just a few simple lines of text reveal the appalling treatment of one of our national heroes."

One of the documents displayed in Chester shows the mathematician admitted "acts of gross indecency" at a trial there in 1952.

Turing was working at the University of Manchester when he was arrested for having a relationship with 19-year-old Arnold Murray at a time when homosexuality was illegal in the UK.

The version of it on the BBC site has been cropped, but if you look at the full version on the Alan Turing: The Enigma website an interesting fact emerges.

Arnold Murray's defence counsel was E. Hooson. That was Emlyn Hooson, who went on to be Liberal MP for Montgomery between 1962 and 1979.

He appears to have defended his man by trying to place the blame on Turing. Dark days.

We are all, of course, saddened by what we've heard about the health of Monty Python member Terry Jones. His colleague and writing partner Michael Palin posted a touching message about it to Facebook, complete with a recent photo taken by our pal Howard Johnson, whose own thoughts about the situation I linked to here. In case that link goes away, I'm going to quote part of what he wrote here…

Terry J has been my close friend and workmate for over fifty years. The progress of his dementia has been painful to watch and the news announced yesterday that he has a type of aphasia which is gradually depriving him of the ability to speak is about the cruellest thing that could befall someone to whom words, ideas, arguments, jokes and stories were once the stuff of life.

I've known people who went through approximately this…and for some whose value to the world and society lies in their ability to communicate, it can be even more painful than death. And I mean not just for them but for all those who care about them.

In the meantime, my pal Bob Claster has a lovely thought. Jones has written a several fine books for younger readers including the first two parts of a medieval adventure trilogy. They're not expensive and you might want to go order a copy of The Knight and the Squire or The Lady and the Squire…or better still, both. They're both out of print so those links take you to an Amazon page where you can find a good used copy of each for about four bucks.

But that's two out of three parts. What about the last one?

Turns out its publication is now being crowd-funded. As Bob wrote me, "They've still got a ways to go. It's a good opportunity to get a nice book, and perhaps give Terry the chance to see the publication of his trilogy completed." That would be a nice gift to a man who gave us all a lot of happy moments on the TV and movie screen. You can find out about it in the video below or go straight to the funding page here.

By the way: Bob Claster used to have a great radio show on which he interviewed just about everyone who ever mattered in comedy and was able to talk at the time. His website, which I've mentioned here before, is full of recordings from that show, including a fine one with Terry Jones.

WARNING: If you go over there, you're going to find a lot that you want to listen to and he's recently come across more recordings from his show and has been putting them up there…with more to come. You could spend an awful lot of time there, as I have.

The post Evening, Squire! appeared first on News From ME.

Moral obligation -- love, solidarity -- is boundless and universal. It is also, always, particular and differentiated. Those two things are not in conflict. Those two things have never been in conflict. Pretending that they are in conflict always leaves a trail of bodies.

The discredited PACE trial: bad science misled millions with ME / chronic fatigue syndrome.