The world is slowly getting better and better, we’re told, and The Needs of the Many Outweigh the Needs of the Few; we should take joy in the progress of the aggregate, and set aside the suffering of a few as negligible.
I guess this five year old boy found in the rubble of the siege of Aleppo is one of those negligible casualties.
…
Not finding any words.
My heart breaks.
Poor children. Poor people of Syria.
Pinker said absolutely nothing of the kind in that interview.
This reminds me why I could never be a photographer.
Btw, the boy’s name is Omran Daqneesh. He’s five years old and both he and his family, luckily, have survived an airstrike on a rebel-controlled part of Aleppo without major injuries, having been rescued shortly before their apartment building collapsed:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/18/boy-in-the-ambulance-image-emerges-syrian-child-aleppo-rubble
Others in the same and the surrounding buildings were not so lucky.
@Derek, #2: I agree partly; I don’t think insinuating that he would call these victims of war “negligible” is useful in criticising Pinker. However, “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”, is an apt description of his utilitarianism, and it’s ultimately a philosophy that would defend calling a small number of victims “negligible”.
Looks to me like you’re interpreting Pinker uncharitably, and with a goodly dose of inferred, imposed assumptions about his intent.
Oh, fuck you, Derek Vandivere. This is not about Pinker and it shouldn’t be about Pinker. It is about Omran Daqneesh and countless others whose names we’ll never know.
And you too, Rob Grigjanis.
Strawman.
Also fucking infuriating. Is it really too difficult to not to use human tragedies as fodders in strawman arguments to attack others?
Yes, he’d count as negligible – assuming that his family fared at least as well as he did. Far too many fared far worse and won’t be able to sit for a photo ever again, as they’re dead.
If you’re missing my fatigued point (I worked midnight, so I’m quite tired), I’m glad that he survived and hope that his family survived alongside him. Far too many didn’t survive.
I am reminded of a commercial from the 1960’s, late 1960’s as I recall, where two distinguished elder gentlemen portrayed national leaders and rather than send their young in to make war, fought an old fashioned fist fight as their war.
Wars would be astonishingly brief were that the practice. A few slugs and both cowards would find the negotiating table.
Derek Vandivere @ 2
Rob Gigjanis @ 3
lotharloo @ 6
You’ll note that PZ does not mention Pinker in the OP, but he links to this:
k5083 in that comment thread:
Is there a quoted portion where Pinker himself calls a death negligible? No. But there I’ve got two people sharing Pinker’s views saying exactly that and PZ did not credit Pinker with the “negligible” comments. This isn’t a strawman. This is what people supporting Pinker’s argument have actually said.
@lotharloo
k5083 and numerous others in the last thread were the ones using human success as a football in strawman arguments to attack activists who have the audacity to point out that the people slipping through the cracks are, you know, people.
I question why you’re more infuriated by PZ’s attempts to humanize those who slip through the cracks than you are by those who want to rationalize the cracks by keeping the victims dehumanized.
Oh. That is beyond heartbreaking. Looking at this thread, with tears running down my face, I don’t have to wonder why this happens and no one cares. With the exception of Rietpluim, TMM and Shiv, the rest of you have proved why this happens and no one cares. Much more important to pick a nit and defend assholes, yeah?
We already had a falling out with the Harrisites that used to be so prevalent here, maybe we’ll see the same with the Pinkertons.
Did anyone ask him if he wanted regime change?
That the world is better than it ever has been is both true and not in contradiction with the equally true statement that the world is a hopeless mess and we have a very very long way to go before we, as a species, stop actively making it worse through our own malice and stupidity.
Of course, I’m also rolling my eyes at a post in which a person who condones the war in Syria on the grounds that it’s a “lesser evil” worth supporting in the name of the greater good is now posting about how Syrian lives matter and even the death of one person in that war is a tremendous atrocity not to be ignored in the name of the greater good. Or dare I hope that your new-found enthusiasm for the lives of Syrian children as a non-negligible issue not to be set aside means that you now won’t be voting for any warmongers in November?
Once a year we get a picture of a little Syrian boy reminding us that oh yeah, there’s actual humans involved.
This same scene has surely happened thousands of times already, but wasn’t captured on video.
I was just listening to one of the Intelligence^2 podcasts (debating about Tony Blair) and one of the speakers did the thing that makes my head go all explodey: he talked about the tragic loss of british lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. The civilians that were killed over there didn’t even get a mention.
The power-mad shitheads that run the world are comfortable with the idea of bombing cities like Raqqa, which had populations in the 100,000+ range, in order to kill a few dozen of “the enemy” Admittedly, the enemy are nasty people – they have gone out of their way to show it – they torture and rape and kill and nasty ugly things to people who don’t deserve it. So the path to getting rid of nasty killing ugly people is through more nasty killing ugliness. “We had to bomb the village in order to save it” is alive and well.
“We came, we saw, your parents died.”
Only if not voting for one of the warmongers this November will lead to a non-warmonger taking office in January.
Since it won’t, and since you know full well it won’t, your concern about with this boy and the elections is very clearly point-scoring dishonesty.
“The world is better than ever before” is logically consistent with “the world is ever so slightly less fucked up than ever before” but I think the latter reflects reality somewhat better.
@17 Saad:
Well. I must admit that this is the very first time I’ve ever been accused of “virtue signalling.” Do I get the SJW Achievement Unlocked or does it only count if they use those exact words?
Shorter Jake Harban (#19):
Jake Harban, #19
Well, technically, there is another possibility: you could be genuinely mistaken about the whole thing. I thought I was giving you the benefit of the doubt.
It’s really quite simple: You expressed concern about the boy’s agony and connected it to the November elections. I pointed out to you (for probably the tenth time) that not voting for Hillary and Trump will still lead to Hillary or Trump as president. Therefore, you can either express sympathy for the little children or you can say “don’t vote for Hillary”. But you cannot connect the two as if voting third party in three months will better serve the people suffering in Syria.
I went for dishonesty because I thought you’d prefer to be called dishonest rather than ignorant or clueless about how this election will work.
But basically stop using people’s suffering for your own ego. Go vote Stein and pat yourself on the back for sticking it to the man. January will roll around soon enough to see what happens.
I said nothing at all about Pinker. It’s interesting that Pinker fans see a mention of callous indifference and assume I’m talking about him.
If you say you care about someone’s suffering, then the action you suggest must have results. It must do something to relieve that suffering. Anything else is about your own ego. Otherwise, you might as well just pray for them.
Those few seconds of Omran on that video are beyond heartwrenching.
At Human Rights Watch there is an excellent article, Syria/Russia: Incendiary Weapons Burn in Aleppo, Idlib Increasing Attacks on Civilian Areas Since Joint Operation Began.
Human Rights Watch informs people on human rights issues, takes action as an organization, and alerts others to opportunities for activism.
Yeah, this post is about a tragedy not Pinker, except of course for the title, the first paragraph and the first link in the post.
PZ’s both posts were strawmen. The first one did not bother me that much, I don’t necessarily have to agree with him on everything but this one does, because it uses a recent heartbreaking tragedy to overload the emotional content of a strawman argument.
I see nothing that would suggested any particular person as the source of the idea of negligible suffering really. If anything it puts a face on “collateral damage” that is part and parcel with how war is now fought. Gone are those idealized days of fixed battles of glorious armies going at each other on the field of battle. Oh there are protests of we are trying to minimize the deaths of none combatants to a negligible few this is who that few really look like this has been how war is fought since the 1930’s face it. It looks like this!
uncle frogy
Well, you know, we’re humans. Fully. To look at that boy and say “well, statistically the world has become better” is not a fully human response. It’s one of people who are lacking the crucial M.
As long as there are children like that, it is kind of meaningless if there used to be more children like that* because one is too many.
*Which is an interesting question. Statistically there are record numbers of refugees now, the highest since WWII. But also the world population has grown, so it’s a smaller proportion of the world’s population. Is it therefore less horrible?
This is a rare case where I disagree with PZ. Pinker used data to support his argument that the world is getting better. Where is PZ’s data that the world is not getting better? To me, Pinker has the more compelling argument.
Pinker’s very selective data and interpretation of it are more than shoddy.
There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, a population of 10 million is tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is a population of 1 million on the side track. You have two options: (1) Do nothing, and the trolley kills 10% of the people on the main track. (2) Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill 50% of the people. Which is the correct choice?
@27 Giliell: My moral intuition points to “no”.
is too universal a statement is PZ’s point. Even a single point of data refutes it, being PZ’s point (see the “Statistical averages” thread).
Also, the OP is addressing comments in a previous thread, where “neglible losses” were deemed irrelevant. This OP is used to ask. “Is this loss negligible?” (to speak for PZ).
Funny that people are accusing PZ of making strawmen and then posting shit like this. PZ isn’t saying the world’s not getting better. He’s saying it’s not getting better for everyone. The world is, and has been for a long time, trending for the better on average, but there are still plenty of periods where violence and suffering have spiked, and plenty of pockets in the world where thinks are decidedly not getting better. It is unsurprising that the ones whole feel the need to point out that the world is getting better on average are the ones that happen to be on the positive side of that average. PZ’s point is that we cannot forget the ones who are on the negative side of that average. It’s easy to pat humanity on the back and say “good job at getting better” when you’re sitting comfortably in a part of the world that isn’t wracked with oppression, terror, violence, and death.
@30
I choose option (3), I pull the lever only halfway, causing the train to derail and thereby come to a stop before reaching either location.
Although, If there’s a trolley with the momentum capable of killing 1 million people, we’re all fucked anyway.
<sigh> Previous post:
Before that:
Maybe you’re all baffled, because unlike Pinker or your other heroes, I flat out said what my position is.
Pinker used data to support his argument that the world is getting better. Where is PZ’s data that the world is not getting better?
Just because PZ’s not putting up his own counter-cherry-picked data doesn’t make Pinker right. PZ’s simply saying he’s unconvinced by Pinker’s cherry-picked data. So am I, for what that’s worth.
Here’s another way of thinking of it: suppose I come up with a metric, and announce a result based on that metric. Someone who is unconvinced is not required to offer a counter-rendering using the same methodology; they might argue the metric is unconvincing. In this case, Pinker’s methodology appears to be to assign data points that make his case, then announce that – according to the data – his case is made. That ought to be unconvincing. If you find it convincing you’re probably pretty easy to convince; you may want to adjust your skeptic setting.
Where is the evidence that is the case?
Pinker is saying the world is getting better and not saying that it is getting better for everyone. Seems to me they essentially agree.
Oh, I know, I know, I know!
You ride in on your space unicorn and challenge the trolley gnome to a game of Backgammon.
At least he’ll be distracted for a while because trolley problems do hardly ever happen in real life. The only thing they serve is to make people feel smug for posting them.
Here’s an example of what I mean. Suppose we say “things are getting worse” if there are more refugees. Then we observe that, since WWII, things have gotten dramatically worse!
The data (about refugees) is true. It’s the methodology/metric that’s wrong.
Now, I ask you to refute me with your own refugee statistics, and you’re left trying to define “refugee” differently or something like that. Brilliant: I just placed all the pieces on the chessboard, and invited you to play the color of my choosing.
If someone who understands metrics is pulling a trick like that, they’re being intellectually dishonest. So: intellectually dishonest, or bad metrics – which is it?
A curious thing about trolley problems / ticking time bomb scenarios: The people who bring them up are never the ones who would be sacrificed for the “greater good”.
PS – the correct answer is “it’s more complicated than that”
How does the trolley problem remotely map to real life, much less this situation? The options aren’t just “go over there and kill some innocent brown people” or “stay here and do nothing”.
Here’s some summaries
Here be another
I’d totally forgotten how Pinker attributes the cruelties and deaths of Vietnam to the Vietnamese…
yeah,
The top 1% population’s wealth increased 500%, the bottom 10% wealth decreased to 10% of previous.
On average wealth increased.
PZ is trying to emphasize the average isn’t helping the bottom 10%, so there is still work to do.
This is to refute the common misconception that the average applies to everyone.
re 30:
NEITHER (emphatically) it is neither correct to allow 1 million to die nor to prevent it by killing even 1. Both are incorrect. Choices are rarely provided with the binary, correct | incorrect, options.
The trolley problem is to illustrate that issue not to “solve the problem”. Why even ask it here.
-trolley yourself
OK I rescind my earlier comment. I hadn’t read below the fold on PZ’s earlier post about Pinker. After having read that I now understand his position.
@20 Richard Smith:
Summary of Richard Smith:
@21 Saad:
Very well. You convinced me.
No matter what I do, Clinton or Trump will be president, so I will vote for Clinton.
And no matter what I do, white cops will murder black people and get away with it, so I will defend murdering cops.
Because obviously, when faced with any major injustice, you have a strict binary choice: Either single-handedly create and implement a perfect solution, or agree that the injustice is, if not a good thing then at least tolerable in the name of the greater good. Since the first choice is never really a viable option, we must pick the second and choose the “lesser evil” of perpetrating atrocities that are statistically less damaging than the atrocities other people plan to commit.
By the way, has the irony really been lost on you that in voting for Clinton, you commit the exact offense excoriated in the original post?
That makes no sense. You might as well say: “You can either express sympathy for Freddie Gray and Eric Garner or you can march in the streets with banners saying ‘Black Lives Matter’ but you cannot connect the two as if ‘riots’ will better serve the people suffering from racism.”
Either my voting for Stein helps get Stein elected and ends the war, or my vote is overruled by millions of people voting in favor of the war. There are no circumstances in which you can say: “Your fight for justice failed, so you would have been better off fighting against justice.”
And again, you basically accuse me of “virtue signaling.” I think I’m definitely entitled to my SJW Achievement Unlocked now.
@41 Vivec, 44 Slithey Tove:
OK, here’s a slightly modified version:
Suppose the trolley is about to run over 10 people. You have a choice— you can do nothing and let them die, or you can pull the lever to divert the trolley onto a track where it will only kill 1 person, or you can try to jump on the trolley and try to pull the emergency brake.
If you jump on the trolley and pull the emergency brake successfully, then the trolley stops short and no one gets hurt. However, the trolley is moving pretty fast, so there’s a good chance you might fail to jump on board. And if you do fail, then the trolley will run over the 10 people.
So what do you do? Pull the lever and kill 1 person to save 10? Or give it your all to save everybody even in the face of overwhelming odds and the knowledge that failure will mean the deaths of 10 people (even if the deaths were not your fault and you did everything in your power to prevent them).
PZ:
I see a link in the first sentence, and I’m smart/dumb enough to think you’re probably implying some shit with it. If you’re honestly going to say you meant nothing by it and that there was “nothing at all about Pinker,” then your communication skills are definitely not at their peak today.
Pinker does seem to assume that things are better when the average is better (a simplistic way to put it, but charitable enough). As far as I’m aware, he’s never claimed that we shouldn’t care about the worst cases (or statistically insignificant ones, etc.) or that we shouldn’t do anything about them. Instead, the approach to doing something about it (because you do care and are proposing an approach) is to somehow get a higher average, reduce overall risk, lower the rates of bad things for the entire population, etc. That’s the goal because it’s (at least implicitly) taken to be the best outcome morally/politically. That might sound really stupid to you, but you don’t need to make a stupid claim worse by distorting it — just show what the problem is. Anyway, that’s supposed to be the work of these better angels he talks about, which he claims have in fact done something along those lines historically; and there are questions about what we could do to make more progress of that type (since, again, he thinks this is how we should make progress).
But contrast that with a position which says that you ought to improve conditions for the people who are in the worst shape. You may be satisfied with a worse average situation (concerning the rate of violent crimes or whatever it may be) when that’s due to less-than-perfect conditions for people near the “top” of the pile. Maybe you don’t find the standards at the “bottom” acceptable, and you’re not going to “walk past” them as the slogan goes. Maybe you think the privileges of the people at the top aren’t something we can/should sustain and implement for everyone, or that they don’t have priority over making things fair for everyone. Making things better could consist of both raising the bar and improving the average, in some cases, if you’re lucky enough to have options like that. But merely increasing the average doesn’t suffice as the goal our society should have, since it’s neglecting this other type of approach that we ought to take just as seriously. I can understand that kind of objection (in fact, I agree with it) but at least it’s clear what the objection is supposed to be about.
You don’t get to sling as many accusations around when the claims/arguments are presented this way, if that’s what you’re interested in doing; but maybe the conversation could be more productive. Nothing wrong with expressing outrage, of course, but we ought to try to do more than that.
And global warming will end, and the endangered species will rebound. And Big Pharma will be brought down!
Also, isn’t it false equivalence to say that voting for Stein is “fighting for justice,” while voting for Hillary is “fighting against justice”? One of the things it assumes is that Dr Stein is an effective and well-guided campaigner for justice. I have yet to be convinced of this.
re 47:
you’re making this into the Kobayashi Maru scenario.
That’s all I will say.
JH, The last time an abject anti-war candidate (which was his entire campaign) ran for president. This was during the ‘Nam War.
Result, won only one state (Massachusetts) and DC, and lost the rest of the country. 49 States to Nixon. Guess who won the election…
Link
Reality doesn’t back your agenda….
Trolley analogies don’t apply to war that well, since the trolley is already among the victims, is a sentient being, and is usually backed by Putin these days.
Obviously we can’t carpet-bomb the Trolley or go in heavy at the trolley, and potentially killing Ton-Trolleys. A peaceful solution to stop the Trolley’s track-barreling-down would be desired, but that may not be possible if the trolley has made sure to pit the Christians on Platform B against the Sunni Muslims on Platform A to cover his own caboose. Meanwhile the people are getting gassed and no one knows if it’s being done by the Trolley or one of the many Anti-Trolley factions.
However, in this situation, the people are not tied to the tracks, we in the west just won’t let them get out of the way of the Trolley, because we don’t want their brown-ness and Muslim-ness in our pristine not-at-all-sexist Christian/Secular railways. And then some of the Anti-Trolley cars, desperate and frustrated, have joined the goddamned Freight-Train that is fueled by the people left on the tracks.
I think the best moral analogy for war would be… war.
@49 gmacs:
Well, the only four people on the ballot are Trump, Clinton, Stein, and Johnson.
Three of them actively support the war on Syria; one of them opposes the war in Syria but may be ineffective at ending it.
It’s up to you to decide whether it’s worth betting on that fourth one or vote write-in (or stay home). However, you don’t get to claim that until Stein’s efficacy is proven, then Clinton is the superior choice by default.
Your argument is roughly equivalent to: “There’s no evidence that tweeting #BlackLivesMatter will end police-committed murders, and until you provide such evidence I will be defending Darren Wilson as good cop who acted in self-defense.”
#48: The magic word is “negligible”. Look at the linked post and comments. Who is using that magic word? Or more relevantly, who isn’t?
@53
I’m pretty sure they all want to end the war. Three simply believe that means getting involved militarily and the other one doesn’t. The only thing we can do that is guaranteed to help is to take in refugees. One of the two viable candidates is in favor of this. The other is the embodiment of everything wrong with
humanityliving organisms.You can’t compare my logic to BLM and police shootings, because the mechanisms of the problems are different. Jill Stein is not comparable to BLM, because BLM has very straight-forward, reasonable goals and doesn’t pander to left-wing conspiracy theorists. Also, if you think that comparing Hillary to twitchy-gunned cops is at all fair, then there is no way this debate can continue.
Not true. The number depends on which states you live in. wikipedia.
Like it says, those candidates will be on the ballot, but they can’t get enough electoral votes to win from the states where they appear on the ballot. Yet, logically speaking, you could vote for them and be “overruled by millions of people voting in favor of the war” as you put it. Nothing rules that out. Trouble is, those millions aren’t all in favor of the war or in favor of any particular thing for that matter. Some of them just think they should take into account the fact that the Green Party and co. don’t have any reasonable chance of winning (and consequently, no chance of doing whatever they may have promised). That is definitely a fact, by the way, one you don’t seem to understand. Some people want to get the best outcome they can, given the options available to them (ones that don’t require hoping for a bunch of perversely improbable events).
One of the options is of course “don’t vote and whine like a petulant baby for the next four years.” Will that produce the best outcome? I don’t think so. How exactly would that be different from voting for the Greens, if you’re in a state where Clinton needs all the support she can get to beat Trump, who is demonstrably worse in countless ways? I know some people like gambling — they think it’s worth it to play the game even when they’re losing — but have you thought about what you’re gambling with here? What exactly were you trying to win, against all odds? What’s the point of playing this game — just for fun, to pass the time, to make yourself feel better, or what? It doesn’t look like the point is to actually get better people into an actual office, to enact better actual policies which have major effects every day on actual human beings.
Belluz, whoever that is. Pinker replies with “yes,” and his plain English interpretation of Belluz’s claim follows: one rate exceeds another rate. I have no idea what you think all of the connotations of the magic word are supposed to be, but some people using it may simply mean that one thing is tiny compared to a big thing.
Presumably, it’s true that one exceeds the other — I’m not sure what conclusions we should draw from that, but it’s not clear at all that the specific conclusions you made for Pinker are the ones that he would make.
Well, I haven’t been using the magic word. Belluz did, you did, and probably lots of other people.
I don’t understand what using a word has to do with it, and I don’t get how this is supposed to be a response to #48.
You’re not expected to come up with a perfect solution. You’re expected to come up with a workable one. And guess what? “Vote third party” is not it. It does not work. It cannot work. The only a way a third party candidate wins is if one or more of the existing parties implodes (which has happened in the past). You know what happens then? The parties realign, new alliances and coalitions are formed, new compromises and bargains are struck, and you’re back where you started: with two powerful parties in an escalating financial arms race that breeds corruption.
Congratulations, your solution has solved nothing. Would you like me to tell you why? Because the two party system is an emergent property. It is an inevitability of our voting system. Until you change the fundamentals, the two party system will always reemerge. The only was to fix it is from the ground up. You have to get the people on your side. You have to win the local seats that form the pool the state seats draw from. Then you have to win the state seats that form the pool the national ones draw from. Only then will you have the power to change the fundamentals. And from that the presidential candidates you long for will naturally emerge.
But that takes time. Ridiculous amounts of time. Probably more than a lifetime. In fact, it may never happen. But it’s the only course you’ve got. In the meantime, you have to play the national scene to the best of your advantage. And as much as you may hate it, “lesser of two evils” is your best shot. Because while the president doesn’t have the power to affect the change you want, they sure as hell have to power to get in your way. Court appointments (both Supreme and federal), the DoJ, executive orders… all of these things can, in the wrong hands, do serious damage to your cause. Be fucking honest with yourself. Which of the two candidates is going to be more likely to fuck with your ability to affect the change you want so badly? It a question that shouldn’t even have to be asked.
Don’t like that? Well then propose a better solution. One that is feasible. One that has both a shot of actually happening and a shot of actually making a real permanent change. Do you even have one, or are you like most third party blowhards who can’t see beyond “but, I vote my conscience!”?
inspired by #58:
alternative voting systems:
first to come to mind, is a ranking vote rather than the populrality of check mark system currently in effect. To clarify: the current system allows each vote to be a single check mark for for a single candidate. The count of votes declares the candidate with the most check marks the winner. (with electoral college intermediate but essentially a rubber stamp). The proposed alternative is ech voter gives each candidate a numerical rank as to preference. 1 being first choice, 2 as 2nd, etc. Add all the votes for each candidate and give the one with the lowest total the ribbon of being the preferred choice overall.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Here’s a photo from the Spanish Civil War:
http://cache4.asset-cache.net/xr/463998789.jpg?v=1&c=IWSAsset&k=3&d=77BFBA49EF8789215ABF3343C02EA548B0760CA7368D3349FF21A4574E50704F3F871DFD5CD7D184A55A1E4F32AD3138
Instead of a Shiite led government battling Sunni rebels, it was Republicans (communists) vs Nationalists (fascists). So yes, history repeats itself. Just as it is pointless for me to show a heart-wrenching photo, I see no point in showing this photo in the opening thread. Tear jerking aside and the “Golly, we gotta do something about this!”, the stark reality is that no matter how many refugees we take in, more children will will likely suffer a worse fate in that region.
Yes, the American Boeing B17s could have bombed the railways to Auschwitz but that would not have stopped the Holocaust. And remember it was Joe Stalin and the Red Army that liberated that death camp.
Syria and related places are in an unsolvable predicament. An all out war engaged by the west with unsavory alliances to defeat the “bad guys” is not the answer. Indeed, there is the aftermath with even worse consequences. After we saved all those Kurdish children from Saddam Hussein’s future genocides, are they better off? After the fall out of the Iraq War, Kurdish kids now face genocide from ISIS.
I say take in as many refugees as possible. Beyond that? The Arab-Islamic world needs to sort out its shit and eliminate sectarian conflict. But bear in mind, many more children will die and there is fuck all we can do.
Additional. As stated, the purpose of the opening thread was not to score points against Pinker or Kurzweil. I’m sure no one is conflating Pinker’s thesis with this video given that he had no where shown any lack of empathy to any current violent deaths. Taking him to task over use of the word “negligible” is indeed a straw man. Painful and heart wrenching as this video is, the suffering shown is negligible (yes I said it) in comparison to the thousands of future Syrian children who will die from lack of clean drinking water due to climate change. My use of “negligible” does not make me a callous heartless bastard.
consciousness razor @58
“…some people using it may simply mean that one thing is tiny compared to a big thing.”
If the argument is statistical, then why not call it rare, relatively uncommon, or any description that doesn’t include unimportant and not worthy of consideration in its definition?
In any case, Pinker’s answer was not merely in the bland context of is the average human’s lot improving, statistically speaking? It was given in a context about news reporting provoking undue fear and concern. I fail to see how that is an argument for anything other than considering individual examples of human misery literally negligible.
He might not have answered the question he was asked fully, but it is the answer we have: “Yes” [they are negligible].
Personally, I think evidence-based policy can require that less consideration is given to situations which are outliers. That can easily be justified in a world of limited resources. However, suggesting that – for instance – reporting of mass shootings is given undue prominence in a nation with a peculiar problem with such shootings, seems odd.
Talking about overemphasis of war in an era where mass civilian casualties and the decimation of infrastructure are uniquely technologically enabled, seems to miss a point. Where developed nations are playing a primary role in dealing death and destruction, whilst insulated from the worst effects of conflict, it may be callous to argue that such misery is negligible.
If Pinker’s argument was something else, then he certainly articulated it in cold language which obscured his point.
@55 gmacs:
Wow. “Clinton wants to end the war, she just believes the best way to end the war is to destroy the Enemy.”
That’s basically Critical Dumb right there. That’s the sort of argument I’ve thus far only heard from the most fringe Republicans there are.
That you’d seriously try to make that argument means you are clearly incapable of rational thought so I don’t need to waste my time seriously addressing your “arguments.”
You think racial equality is a straight-forward and reasonable goal? Racism is embedded into the Constitution and every institution of society. Ending racism is the textbook example of a “non-viable” goal (by your contrived definition of “non-viable” at any rate), so by your argument I must choose between the two “viable” options of joining the KKK and declaring that I Don’t See Race™ and pick the obviously less evil option.
So I guess I don’t see race and #AllLivesMatter and all that claptrap.
@56 consciousness razor:
Your post is far too long and irrational for me to bother going through it line by line, so I’ll just point out that everything you said rests on two fundamental assumptions:
1. Stein can’t win no matter what.
2. Clinton is clearly better than Trump as President.
Both of these are basically articles of faith among the Clinton-or-bust crowd but no one has ever made more than a token effort at supporting either of them with evidence. Since both of these premises are almost certainly false, your entire argument collapses.
@58 themadtapper:
Your post is also lengthy and irrational, but all of your arguments are based on the fundamental assumption that elections have no consequences except the direct one of who holds office. You point out that our current election system makes it impossible to create a scenario in which Republicans, Democrats, and Greens are all more or less equal contenders for every office in the long term.
This is, of course, a straw man.
I’m not saying you should vote Stein because this will somehow establish the Greens as a third Major Party with their own equal contender in every election. I’m saying you should vote Stein because all else being equal we’re better off with Stein in the White House than with Trump, Clinton, or Johnson.
At minimum, a President Stein would spend four years as a gatekeeper vetoing the worst bills to come out of a right-wing Congress. However, there’s also a chance that Stein’s election would signal that the Democrats can’t keep ignoring the liberal base.
If the Democrats accept the message, then we’ll get progressive Democrats to vote for and the Greens can resume being an also-ran party with a footnote that they once served as a catalyst for change.
If the Democrats reject the message, then in future elections it will be impossible to dismiss the Greens out of hand whenever a liberal Green faces off against a Republican and a DINO. There’s probably very little genuine support for a Diet Republican Party, so if the Democrats keep up with their triangulating bullshit in the face of a newly-energized Green Party, then the Democrats implode and we end up with a Republican – Green two-party system.
Once you understand the primary benefit of voting for Stein, you will notice that she doesn’t actually need to win to achieve that goal. While merely winning a large enough share to spoil the election for Trump would deprive us of the ancillary benefit of a liberal gatekeeper in the White House, it would achieve the primary benefit of making it clear that the Democratic Party can no longer run Republican candidates on the assumption the left will simply vote for them anyway. Which means that in regard to your question:
Of course it doesn’t need to be asked. The answer is Clinton. I know you Clinton-or-bust-ers like to use the phrase “throwing your vote away” but the simple fact is that if you vote for Clinton you aren’t just throwing away your current vote, you are throwing away future votes as well. A vote for Clinton tells the Democratic Party that you will support them no matter what they do, and further guarantees that next time around the “lesser evil” will be even worse.
In 1996 and 2000, we were asked to vote for the “lesser evil” who supported bank deregulation.
In 2012 and 2016, we are being asked to vote for the “lesser evil” who supports torture of political prisoners.
If we say IOKIYAD and support it, then what will we be asked to support in 2028 or 2032?
If you want to say my plan is a long shot, then feel free. Just remember, I don’t see you or anyone else offering a viable alternative.
ragdish @ 60. Your statement that the Republicans were communists and the Nationalists fascists is far too sweeping and not true. Some of the Popular Front parties were taken over by the communists and were supported by Russian arms and supplies. Some historians believe that the inability of the different parties to come together for a common goal was a major contributing factor in their defeat. The outcome of the war might have been different had the USA and the UK helped
The natioalists were Monarchist (Alfonsine), Carlist and Falange. The last two being amalgamated by Franco in 1937 with himself becoming chief. With the help of Franco’s buddy in Germany they were far better supplied including bombers with Luftwaffe pilots. I conceed though that by the end of the war they were all out fascists.
Nope, they are FACTS. Stein and the Greens are unelectable in 2016, and like the socialists in the past, will never get out of single digits during my lifetime.
When you choose to pretend they are electable, in any sense other than being on the ballot, which the socialists were for years, you show your biases and delusions.
JH
Well, if you’re going to ignore major parts of an argument and intentionally misconstrue the others, why even engage in discussion with other people.
Go back and read. I never used the terms “viable” or “non-viable” when talking about goals. I used the term “viable” when speaking about candidates, in the same fucking way millions of other people do. Therefore it’s not my contrived goddamn definition.
Okay. Let’s talk about Dr. Jill Stein a bit. How much confidence can we really put with her? Does she really care for the democratic process?
Well, she keeps pandering to the anti-vax crowd. But that’s okay, anytime she gets called out, she just has t say “Big Pharma”. Granted, pharmaceutical companies get away with too much shit and their sales practices need to be more tightly regulated. However, that’s not to say that vaccines aren’t a vital part of keeping people safe, including the most vulnerable. And then there’s her batshit comment about wifi. Yeah, she’s failed to win my confidence.
In regards to the democratic process, Dr. Stein is a hypocrite. She went on and on about how the DNC had rigged the campaign and excluded votes… and then offered her own candidacy to Sanders! Handing over your nomination to another person is the opposite of democratic. The Green Party supporters nominated Stein, not Sanders. So she fails in comprehension of democracy as well.
tl;dr- You are acting like a willfully ignorant arse, and so is your candidate.
At no point do I assume that.
Even if one concedes that Stein is the better candidate, it’s still irrelevant because she can’t win. You have yet to propose a mechanism by which she can other than wishful thinking. “Oh if people would just vote for the better candidate instead of voting strategically…” 1) Not nearly enough Democrats and liberals would agree that Stein is the better candidate (you can think they’re wrong for that, but it doesn’t change the fact) and 2) People aren’t going to stop voting strategically because strategic voting wins.
The liberal base couldn’t even push Bernie to victory. Snowballs have a better chance in hell than Stein would at getting elected. You may need to accept the reality that there simply aren’t as many real liberals in the country as you’d like. Even among the “left” in this country, there are far too many that lean toward the center or even the right. If you want to shift the Democrats to the left, you’re going to have to do it incrementally. Ideological shifts take time. Bernie put up enough of a fight to show that the liberal base is bigger than the DNC thought, but also not big enough to take control. But it also shows the potential for incremental shift. What you want is possible, but it takes time and small steps. You want it all and you want it now, but that’s not going to work and you have not proposed any mechanism by which it could.
More wishful thinking. All that would do is reinforce that spoiler candidates only lead to a loss. Meanwhile we’d get at least one, likely two, and potentially three conservative Supreme Court justices put on the bench. All to “send a message” to the DNC. A message that will be overshadowed by the disaster of a conservative executive and judicial victory.
A vote for Clinton is throwing away future votes, eh? As opposed to voting in a way that increases the chances of a conservative president who will appoint conservative judges that are more likely to support voter suppression laws and gerrymandering. Which one of is is throwing away future votes here?
I did offer you a viable alternative. The only viable alternative. You have to work from the ground up. You have to get liberal left victories in the local elections you actually have a shot at winning. You have to get liberal policies in local areas and show they work. Then you move up to state victories. You get liberal policies there and show they work. Then you move up to national. In the meantime, you make do with what you have at the higher levels. By all means you can try to get more liberal candidates in at higher levels too where you have the opportunity, but when they don’t make the cut you take the shitty hand you’re left with and make the best of it.
You’re plan isn’t a long shot. It’s a no shot. But hey, while He Trump is filling the courts with regressive judges and using DoJ lawsuits to intimidate critics and political opponents, you can pat yourself on the back and smugly point out that “hey, at least I didn’t vote for a war hawk”.
cr @ 56,
That’s not what it says in reference to the Libertarians and the Greens. The Libertarians have access to 456 electoral votes, the Greens to 425. So either candidate could win.
They won’t, but they could.
The war in Syria started without US involvement, and it will continue with or without US involvement. Under the circumstances, it’s at least conceivable that some level of US military intervention will shorten the war and result in fewer casualties.
Bernard Bumner:
Yes, why not? I agree that “negligible” is a bad word choice. I don’t think it was being used to mean “unimportant and not worthy of consideration.” If you think that’s in the definition, okay, but the context doesn’t really suggest that.
I would distinguish between “this is not important (not at all, it has no import) because it’s relatively uncommon” and “we should proportion our fears/concerns to how common it is.” The latter may be wrong too, but they are certainly different claims.
Like I argued before, I don’t think it should always work that way, depending on what you’re talking about with this stuff about “outliers.” I mean, it sounds like you’re making a version of Pinker’s argument.
It has nothing to do with having limited resources. You should consider which parts of population you’ll focus your efforts on and how you intend to address their problems. You could spread your focus around uniformly, put more of it here, more of it over there, or have any distribution whatever. It’s definitely not easily justified that you should give “less consideration” to the poorest people, for instance. We could certainly improve their situation dramatically — whatever problems there may be with that, it isn’t that we’ll run out of resources because they’re finite. If doing so makes the situation slightly worse for the average or above-average person (because they pay higher taxes, let’s say), why should that be enough to say it’s the wrong goal to have?
I agree that would be weird. However, read what he actually said: first of all, that “normal” homicides outnumber deaths in terrorism and war, so they’re certainly being presented as a large problem. And when you look at the “normal” homicides, we have a peculiar problem with all types of shootings, however “massive” the shooting may be. But the press doesn’t offer a clear, undistorted reflection of what all of our peculiar problems are. Much more attention is given to a mass shooter, compared to a few separate shooters who might have had a higher combined death toll. Doesn’t it seem that we don’t see how most of the shooting deaths occur, but usually just the ones that allow CNN to create a huge spectacle and increase its market share?
Jake Harban:
I didn’t say it’s impossible. It’s also not impossible for a coin to land on its edge. Physics does allow that, if the conditions are fine-tuned just so. But I’m still going to pick either heads or tails, not both and not something else, because practically speaking that’s the reasonable thing to do. The coin may not be a fair one, of course, but I’m not reacting to that by picking the stupidest option I can think of. The rest of your pointless blather isn’t even worth my time.
@67 gmacs:
Special pleading. “Achieve racial equality” is a goal. “Elect Jill Stein” is a goal. You have not offered any reason to think one is qualitatively different from the other.
It doesn’t matter who contrived the definition. It’s still illogical.
Hm, let me see. The person with many good ideas, a few bad ones, and no record? Or the person with some bad ideas, some good ideas, and a long history of implementing only the bad ones?
And here comes the standard Clinton-or-bust trope #12, the ideological purity/double standard combo.
Stein is not absolutely 100% perfect and not a Democrat, therefore she is inherently untrustworthy and undesirable compared to Clinton who is a Democrat and therefore perfect by definition no matter what she actually does.
Tell you what. There’s a video in the original post. Why don’t you watch that and then tell me how you consider it tolerable and necessary in the name of the Greater Good of making sure Trump doesn’t win?
@68 Tapper:
Your argument is meaningless except in light of that assumption.
I have repeatedly, but since you believe on faith that she can’t you simply ignored it.
To reiterate: There are a wide range of campaign tools that are used by candidates including (but not limited to) calls, door-to-door campaigns, small donations, and other standard methods of activism. That such tools can bolster an otherwise-unknown candidate into a winner is well established (see: Bernie Sanders).
Thus far, no meaningful campaign has ever been conducted on Stein’s behalf. If you wish to continue your absurd belief that Stein simply “can’t win,” then you’ll need to demonstrate why typical campaign tactics that work for every other politician somehow uniquely won’t work for Stein.
That’s a contradiction. Stein is the only liberal candidate on the ballot. People who genuinely prefer Clinton over Stein (not out of “strategy” or misinformation) are, by definition, not liberals.
This is not even wrong.
Strategic voting “wins” in the sense that it puts people in power, but it doesn’t win in the sense of achieving political goals. If the liberal base “strategically” voted for Trump, we would definitely “win” the election so why risk a potential loss by picking Clinton?
Except we did.
I already have.
I would like for liberal beliefs to be universally accepted as common wisdom. However, I must accept the reality that liberals are merely a slim majority that must stick together in order to get anything done.
This is simultaneously irrelevant (in that it has no bearing on the fact that in this election, it’s better to vote for Stein than Clinton) and it’s wrong (since you’re not going to shift a party’s ideology by pledging unwavering support to them from the outset).
I already did, but you simply ignored it because it contradicts your faith.
Here, let me post it again just in case:
At minimum, a President Stein would spend four years as a gatekeeper vetoing the worst bills to come out of a right-wing Congress. However, there’s also a chance that Stein’s election would signal that the Democrats can’t keep ignoring the liberal base.
If the Democrats accept the message, then we’ll get progressive Democrats to vote for and the Greens can resume being an also-ran party with a footnote that they once served as a catalyst for change.
If the Democrats reject the message, then in future elections it will be impossible to dismiss the Greens out of hand whenever a liberal Green faces off against a Republican and a DINO. There’s probably very little genuine support for a Diet Republican Party, so if the Democrats keep up with their triangulating bullshit in the face of a newly-energized Green Party, then the Democrats implode and we end up with a Republican – Green two-party system.
Citation needed.
Yes, that’s one of the drawbacks to letting Clinton win. How, exactly, do you see it as an argument in her favor?
OK, you’re going to have to explain the math here.
How, exactly, does voting for a liberal President make it more likely that a conservative will win than if I vote for a conservative President? It seems to me that all else being equal, voting for a liberal adds to the liberal vote while voting for a conservative adds to the conservative vote. Yet you claim that voting for a conservative makes the liberal more likely to win?
I think you need to look up the word “alternative.” It does not mean what you think it means.
From your description, it would appear that my plan is this:
Campaign on behalf of liberals at every level of government. Work to make sure there are liberal candidates on every ballot. Lobby the Democratic Party to move to the left by backing liberals in primaries. And all the while, make it clear that we won’t accept anything less— we will not vote for a conservative under any circumstances, even if we have to vote write-in.
While your plan is this:
Campaign on behalf of Democrats at every level of government, whether they are liberal or conservative. Divide our efforts between getting liberal candidates on the ballot and getting conservative candidates elected. Politely ask the Democratic Party to move to the left by making a token effort to back liberal candidates in primaries while reassuring them that we will spend the bulk of our effort working to get any Democrat elected, no matter how conservative.
That you think the latter plan is more effective indicates you have lost sight of your goals— rather than care about policy, you merely focus on keeping the Democratic Party in charge; what they actually do is immaterial.
And while She Clinton is filling the courts with regressive judges and using DoJ lawsuits to intimidate critics and political opponents, what will you be doing?
@70 Maroon:
If you can look at the history of US military interventions and think attacking Syria will ever do anything except make the situation worse, you should probably take a history lesson prior to Election Day.
@71 Razor:
Yes. For example, if you grab the coin as it flips and physically hold it such that it lands on its edge, then basic physics dictate that it will probably land on its edge.
Once you’ve processed the idea of treating the coin toss as an ongoing event you can work to influence rather than a completely passive event whose deterministic outcome can merely be bet on, you’ll maybe start to see a reasonable course of action with regard to the election.
If you can’t figure it out, then the rest of your pointless blather isn’t even worth my time.
People who genuinely prefer Clinton over Stein (not out of “strategy” or misinformation) are, by definition, not liberals.
Fuck you. You accuse everyone else here of adhering to some ideological purity, and then come out with this statement. You accused me of being a hard-line Democrat, when in fact I reluctantly registered as such in February to caucus for Sanders.
Jake Harban idiologue
Jake, you have been asked to supply citations to the following claims. Those claims are dismissed without said citations, and you should shut up about those subjects, which essentially means shut the fuck up.
1) Voting for the Greens will pull the Democrats to the left. Historical data is required to show this isn’t delusional thinking.
2) The Greens, presently polling at 2-4%, are capable of surging to the point that Stein is electable in the present four-way race. Keep in mind the Libertarians keep outpolling the Greens at least 2-1, and that is unlikely to change. Historical data is required to show your claim isn’t delusional thinking.
3) That Trump isn’t worse that Clinton. Your hatred for Clinton has clouded your thinking. By all stretches of anybody’s imagination a Trump presidency would require generations to recover from. So, where is your historical evidence that a Trump presidency will force the Democrats to the left? Again, show us you have historical data to back up this claim.
No more “citations needed” until you provide the above links that back up your claims.
Damn. Blockquote fail. The first paragraph of my last post is a quote from Jake Harban.