Anonymous asked: More Trump discourse ahoy! (You are one of the only people with whom Trump discourse isn't invariably hugely upsetting!) I see a lot of people hold up his "you'd be in jail" comments as a sign that democracy is failing because he wants to jail his political rivals. Is this line of argument being made in ignorance of the widespread belief that she committed actual crimes (whether you believe it or not, his audience does), or is there another reason to not take it what seems to me the obvious way?
I think this one is legitimately hypocritical! Yes, it is unprecedented for a presidential candidate to suggest they’ll specifically direct their attorney general to investigate their opponent, but it’s not at all unprecedented to suggest that candidates for high office should be arrested; I remember a lot of liberals wanted Bush arrested before Obama did the same stuff and they decided it wasn’t so bad after all.
The norm ‘we don’t arrest the loser in a democratic election’ has value, but so does the norm ‘no one is above the law’, and I think it’s legitimate to debate which ought to hold sway in cases like when a major presidential candidate is accused of serious crimes. I think most of the people objecting to the ‘you’d be in jail’ comment wouldn’t object if Trump faced prison time for that underage rape case (it’s a civil suit, but I can’t imagine people minding if criminal charges were filed.)
Anonymous asked: I knew you'd answer with "if you feel that bad about it, feel free to use the money to get food for a different group of people who can be helped more by the same number of dollars," but for some reason I wasn't actually expecting "you aren't morally obligated to give anyone money." Thanks. I do in fact prefer there to be less starving people in the world; do you know a particularly good charity for helping with that, and would you be willing to give me positive feedback if I donated to it?
for some reason I wasn’t actually expecting “you aren’t morally obligated to give anyone money.”
I am a big believer that most people should donate more to charity, but this is because I think most people prefer that there be fewer starving people in the world and thus that donating to charity is a good way for them to achieve their goals.
I think really wanting the world to get better produces better outcomes than really wanting to have discharged one’s moral obligation to make the world better. (I think there’s a place for conversations about moral obligation but it’s a - hmm, more tailored? - place than the place they currently hold. I’m not a fan of the drowning child argument, for example.)
Anyway, GiveDirectly straight-up gives poor people money and they spend a lot of it on food; they’ve done lots of research that suggests that direct cash transfers increase food security a lot. I am totally in favor of giving people positive feedback for giving thoughtfully to make the world a better place and I would be really happy to hear you’d done that!
Anonymous asked: If a friend of a friend needs money to eat, and I'm reasonably confident that person would want me dead if they knew about my mental illness, should I give it to them anyway?
…if you want to? You don’t have a moral obligation to give friends, let alone friends of friends, money, and if you would want to give them money because you prefer in full generality that there not be starving people you can give it to starving people living somewhere where it’ll go farther. If you want to give this particular person money, you aren’t betraying people with your mental illness or anything. But if, because of their beliefs, you don’t want to give them money, that is valid (also, if you just don’t want to give them money, that is valid. There are a lot of problems in the world and you are not bad for ignoring any particular one of them, let alone one that you have no particular advantage at helping with and reason to find helping more stressful than usual.)
Anonymous asked: Election anecdata for you: I was going to support Trump, then your arguments made me think he's no better than Clinton and I considered voting for Johnson. A thousand repetitions of "a third-party vote is a vote for Trump! If you don't vote for Clinton and stop complaining, you're (whatever today's insult is)" and a conversation where a Trump supporter reassured me that it's my choice and I'll have their respect either way leave me tempted to choose Trump out of sheer pettiness. Your thoughts?
A lot of people have mentioned that it’s counterproductive to yell at people ‘if you don’t vote for Clinton you’re terrible!’ I have at least one friend who said they’d only be able to muster the stomach for a Clinton vote in November if they got several months without having to hear anyone sanctimoniously tell them to vote for Clinton (and I think they promptly removed themselves from social media, which is the only way they would have stood a chance).
I hope it’s pretty obvious that people have my respect by default and irrevocably. And I hope you vote for someone you’d be proud to have in office, even if that means writing someone in, and I hope you blacklist all the social media yelling and are uninfluenced in that choice by anyone yelling that you are a literal $INSULT.
Both candidates for District Attorney are running attack ads accusing their opponent of being insufficiently tough on crime, with the effect that I end up wanting to vote for whoever I’ve been told is soft on crime most recently.
(See also stuff like: “Ten years ago, Susan wasn’t for gay marriage. Susan thought ‘civil unions should be fine!’ Then, three years ago, Susan changed her mind and was for full marriage rights. Susan ‘evolved as a person.’ We love Susan!”
Vs.
“Ten years ago, Politician X wasn’t for gay marriage! They dared suggest that civil unions should be enough! Three years ago, they finally got on the bandwagon. They never changed their mind, of course! They still hate us deep inside. They just changed their stance with the wind. Politicians don’t change their minds, they change their spin.”
I don’t doubt many if not most politicians are at least a little corrupt, but jesus fuck do we like treating them like they’re not people.)
I mean, if you have enough political clout that politicians who oppose you deep down side with you publicly, that seems like a good thing?
Even if you’re convinced theyre secretly still against you, working with them and using their public endorsement of your position to push the Overton window a little further towards your beliefs seems more pragmatic.
That said I agree: people changing their mind over a multitude of years is normal and expected. Have some faith that your beliefs are genuinely convincing. Why would you believe them otherwise?
Related to this: there’s a Congressman in my area whose district used to be drawn so it was super Republican. After the redistricting, it ended up about fifty-fifty. The Congressman said “I represent my constituents and they’re more moderate now” and moderated his positions on a ton of things. He now had a bunch of Hispanic constituents, so he learned Spanish so he could address their concerns.
Cynical political maneuvering? Maybe. But I want to reward politicians for cynically maneuvering into moderate centrists who think Congressmen should learn Spanish instead of thinking immigrants are lazy for not speaking English. And, you know, maybe having constituents with different concerns did actually change his priorities. Either way, attacking him for changing his mind seems spectacularly counterproductive.
FiveThirtyEight observes that this election features an unprecedented gender gap; women overwhelmingly favor Clinton while a majority of men support Trump even as his overall numbers slide. Perhaps even more interestingly,
42 percent of all Republican women serving in Congress or as governor have now stated that they do not support Trump, versus just 17 percent of the men.This rift has emerged since the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape. On Friday morning, the share of these high-ranking Republican men and women who had plainly stated an opposition to Trump was far more comparable (about 6 percent of each group).
So, it’s not too much of a crazy generalization to say on average women think the tape is a big deal, and men don’t. Why?
One explanation that comes to mind is that the men who support Trump or were undecided already pretty much believed that this was Trump’s character, while the women who supported Trump mostly didn’t realize he was like this. Maybe men who support Trump do mostly brag about sexual assault, or entertain such bragging, and therefore weren’t surprised, whereas women mostly didn’t realize they did that?
But that seems weird to me. We already had a lot of evidence about Trump’s character.
An explanation that resonates more with me, but for which I have only anecdotal evidence, is that women were likelier to listen to that video and react with “I have known men like that and they were bad news.” That was my reaction; it’s the reaction I’ve seen from some other women; there’s the anecdotes that Republicans who ran their public statements by female staffers and advisors got told ‘go harsher’. It might be that while those comments pinged as juvenile for many men, they pinged as dangerous to many women.
They say that the winner for President is usually the person Americans say they’d most like to have a beer with. I think women are very likely to have decided off that video that they wouldn’t want a beer with Donal Trump - wouldn’t, in fact, feel safe having one alone with him - and that might be driving the gap in voter reactions to the tape.
Because men are pigs, and as a men I know what I’m talking about.
I feel like it’s potentially counterproductive to hold that men, in general, are like this.
Most women are straight; they are going to deal with men in their lives even if men are mostly awful and abusive and not consent-respecting. If you insist that all men are like that, then they are likely to put up with awful abusive non-consent-respecting men because it’s not like they can find a man who isn’t like that. Donald Trump’s secretary won’t quit because it’s not like being anyone else’s secretary will involve any less sexual harassment. Etcetera, etcetera.
Men aren’t pigs. There are men who are rapists and men who brag about sexually assaulting women (and there are women who are rapists and women who brag about sexually assaulting men) and there’s a culture that enables and mythologizes and encourages such men, and it’s a problem, and we need to fight it. But men are people and perfectly capable of being good people, and lots of them are, and there are lots of relationships and lots of communities where you will not have to deal with being nonconsensually groped and where someone joking about that would get called out on it.
Donald Trump thinks all men are like him. But Donald Trump’s wrong.
errantaxiom asked: 500,000 military deaths from a Clinton administration seems high to me. That's like another Iraq war. My number would've been about 100,000, but I admit that's pretty close to a raw guess(~10K/year from continued airstrikes + 10% chance of Iraq-scale conflict). Could you walk me through your thinking?
I don’t think Clinton’ll start another Iraq war but mismanaging ongoing wars in e.g. Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan into much bigger and deadlier conflicts than necessary wouldn’t surprise me. I also give around a 10% chance of a bigger-than-Iraq-scale conflict; my predictions about global events are super gut-level and I have no special expertise, so take that with appropriate grains of salt.
Anonymous asked: Kelsey, you are so great. I'm so happy that you might start blogging on tumblr full time. Believe it or not, for complicated reasons I am more enthusiastic about paying you to do this than I am about giving to most EA charities. My only feedback is to think through your Patreon reward tiers more carefully. I wasn't clear on whether the $50 tier meant getting to talk to you once, or once each month. If the former, is it cheating if I downtier after talking to you?
/2 Also if I give you $120/mo and get 6 hours of your time per month, then I’m effectively buying your time for $20/hr. So logically it seems like if I give you $50/mo then I should at least get 1 hour with you each month. I suppose bulk discounts could make sense if there’s a fixed cost to setting up hangouts with a particular person?
3/ You might think this is all silly, but you are such a fabulously nice, thoughtful and intelligent person that getting to pay you (e.g.) $20/hr to talk to you about my problems while supporting your blog seems like a pretty good deal.
4/ So if I were you I’d sit down, think about how much I value my time per hour, how much pain I associate with playing therapist, playing editor, making advertisement blog posts for people, etc. etc., redo the tiers and grandfather in all your existing supporters (while clarifying what they’re getting)
5/ (These are only suggestions, you’re great the way you are and you have no obligation to do anything.)
/6 Another idea: collect ideas from your readers about reward things you could do. Things they might be willing to (say) pay you $20/hr for. You could put a link to your ask box on your patreon page.
($50 is every month; I edited the tier to clarify.) A bunch of people have asked about buying time independent of the Patreon thing. I will probably eventually do that (and hopefully eventually do a grandfathered-in retiering with what makes sense in terms of time/energy), but in the past I’ve struggled to follow through on commitments so my goal for the short term is to jus make sure I can fulfill the commitments I have effectively. After a couple months of that I will get to the reevaluation and also have a better idea of how much time I have.
Thanks for the suggestions and for the patience with figuring-out-how-to-make-a-living-this-way.
Anonymous asked: I feel like you are a lot more optimistic than most on "People being less afraid of being fired for things about their private life" as a cause liberals would champion.
I think liberals feel really strongly that a man shouldn’t be fired for bringing his husband to the office holiday party (or, like, acknowledging at any point in his career that his husband exists) or that a woman shouldn’t be fired for coming out as trans. And that, given this still happens in many, many places, leading to a really high unemployment rate for marginalized people, most liberals would be super happy to establish a sweeping norm against this which also insulated people from being fired for having Trump/Pence bumper stickers or donating to Prop. 8 or whatever.
Anyone out there who disagrees: if you would not press a magic button that eliminated discrimination in the workplace for being LGBT or gender non-conforming or wearing a headscarf or not wearing a headscarf or being overweight or being disabled or etc. etc., but also meant people wouldn’t be fired for privately holding political positions you disagree with, can you explain to me why this seems like a bad tradeoff? Is it that you think you can get all of the things you want without having to give any ground? Because you can’t, and in the meantime people are unemployed and homeless and forced to compromise between living a lie and not earning a living at all. If we could achieve this compromise it would be an amazing achievement we should throw a party over.
(Or is it that you don’t think getting bigots fired has any effect on the propensity of bigots to get your people fired, and we’re not deciding on a grand compromise, we’re taking discrete actions that should be evaluated on their own terms? Because, nah, I know conservatives who would be persuadable to disarm in this culture war or who would in fact switch sides if they saw you loudly and sincerely pressing for the compromise.)
(Or is it that you think people who privately donate to anti-gay-rights legislation continuing to be employed are more of a threat to the LGBT community than housing and job discrimination? Because that’s throwing away a bird in the hand for, like, a quarter of a bird in the bush. The bigotry is a problem because it concretely harms peoples’ lives; the solution is to fix the concrete harms to those peoples’ lives, not to allow those harms to keep going so you can punish the bigotry.)
My position is somewhat complicated in practice by the fact that most people are employed by corporations or LLCs, which are artificial creations of the government, and therefore subject in many respects to the governments whims. However, as regards employment by partnerships and sole proprietorships, no, I would not press that button. Nor would I press it for “all employers,” lumping together those I think it would be reasonable to press it for without those I am emphatically against tyrannizing in that way.
The fundamental answer to your question is that it’s not any of the reasons you list; it’s simply and purely because liberty is a terminal good, and tyranny is a terminal evil. And compelling an individual or group of individuals to purchase the services of someone they do not wish to purchase the services of, not because they have bound themselves by promise contract to do so, but simply because you disapprove of their reasons for wanting not to, is rank tyranny.
Oh, I actually mostly don’t favor laws against firing people for these reasons, I’m discussing norms. Laws against firing people for X don’t tend to help people who are X because companies don’t want to hire people who they might not be able to fire. I’d be very reluctant to put those in place, But I want firing people for their personal lives to be a totally unacceptable thing to do that will result in terrible PR and talented people not wanting to work at your company. That’s the ground the firing wars is mostly being fought on anyway; the law didn’t force Eich out.
Though, like you said, this is complicated by how much the government has already entangled itself in the employment system.