Last we saw, Catalonia had what I suspected would happen – a muddled, slightly pro-independence election result.
How do you say “Big Freakin’ mess” in Catalan?
So, what has been happening?
Well, near and dear to me – Switzerland has been dragged into the mess. One of the separatists from the Left, Anna Gabriel, logically skipped showing up to the Spanish Supreme Court to answer charges of being naughty and not wanting to be part of Spain. After wisely choosing to flee to Switzerland (look what happens when you stick around) she has indicated she will stay there. One of the more theatrical elements of this action by the Spanish Government…no extradition request was attached to their arrest warrant (Switzerland has mentioned they would probably not extradite anyways). And to remind you all how awesome Switzerland is….they have previously offered to mediate between Madrid and the separatists. OK,OK, that is enough Swiss strokin’.
What about me?!
Carles Puigdemont, once (and future?) President of Catalonia’s regional government, is squawking from his exile in Belgium, that he should be running the show – but any kind of law to allow him to do so hasn’t been moved forward. So we are left with a dozen political leaders in exile or jail and Madrid issuing symbolic arrest warrants. Oh, and Madrid not being content with things being muddled, but peaceful, has decided to stick a big middle finger up to the Catalans, regarding one of the sorest points out there.
In my opinion, Madrid is caught on the horns of a dilemma – do they try to keep a sort of soft squashing of independence going (the arrest warrants – but no extradition requests, hovering around and waving Article 155 – direct rule by Madrid – of the constitution, and diplomatically pressuring other nations to not recognize Catalan independence) or do they clench a fist and swing – disbanding the regional government again, pushing Spanish language and national feeling, and actively trying to round up leaders of the independence movement.
At least it is still jaw-jaw (mostly, pay no mind to the jailed and exiled) and not war-war. But sooner or later, one side is going to fish or cut bait. Right now, I’d say it is likely Madrid will be the first to push hard. We will see, one way or the other.
It’s no secret that in counting from 1 to 10, the ACLU seems to always skip 2. It’s also no secret that they have a continuing habit of conflating, “You have a right to do X” with, “You have a right to demand taxpayer money to do X,” and their remarkably immoral support of Mandated Racism Affirmative Action is stunningly hypocritical. More and more, they seem to have lost sight of their purported mission, despite flashes here and there of doing something good. But this morning when I clicked over to their site to read an article about our loss of Fourth Amendment rights in the notorious 100 mile zone, I got this popup:
Remember when they used to beg, “Donate monthly to fight Obama’s attacks on people’s rights” after the arrests of journalists, the abuse of the IRS to attack his political enemies, the drone killing of Americans, record-setting deportations, expanded domestic spying, and stepped-up incarceration rates for victimless crimes? Yeah, me neither.
So at this point, it’s not a matter of the mask slipping, it’s been totally removed. The ACLU is nothing but an arm of the Democratic Party, no different than MoveOn.org or Democratic Underground, and now doesn’t even pretend otherwise.
That sound you hear is Nat Hentoff and other principled civil libertarians of yore spinning in their graves.
An amusing news story yesterday caused some discussion. These seem to pop up every year or so and are generally used as a way for academics to bash their latest not-a-leftist target. Eight straight years of “see, Bush is horrible!” followed by eight straight years of “Obama is dreeeeamy!” sort of triggered my cynicism meter. Of course, the inclusion of presidents still in office is de rigeur for sending the desired signals, and putting Trump on the list after barely a year in office is reminiscent of Obama’s affirmative action Nobel Peace Prize, just before he started six new wars and began drone-killing Americans.
Likewise, historians love presidents who were incredibly active, preferably ones who killed a few hundred thousand people. The bias that “doing something” is better than “leaving us alone” is a powerful means of slanting the ratings. So given OUR biases as libertarians, how would you rank our presidents?
My own personal feeling is that there’s probably 5 or six great ones, five or six horrendous ones, and most of the rest form a blob in the middle and ranking them is useless.
My Top Five:
Calvin Coolidge- did a wonderful job of leaving us alone, and look what happened. Economic boom time, which only ended when a more activist president and congress decided to start meddling.
George Washington- for doing what every president ought to do: serve his time, then go home and shut up. I put him here in the top 5 because he wasn’t John Adams.
Grover Cleveland- someone whose first instinct is to avoid federal action unless specifically demanded by the constitution ought to get more libertarian love. And he had a wonderful way of phrasing.
Bill Clinton- wait, what? His arrival here wasn’t due to anything he deliberately did, but what he managed to do accidentally was totally tie the government into knots so that they were too busy with perjury and blowjobs to fuck things up. Economic boom, balanced budgets, only minor wars, who can complain?
William Henry Harrison- for the obvious reason.
My Bottom Five:
45. Richard Nixon- the guy who came close to killing a million, brought us the War On Drugs, the EPA, wage-and-price controls, “Affirmative Action,” decoupling of currency from hard assets… he was a fucking disaster, top to bottom.
44. Lyndon Johnson- easily the most corrupt and murderous human to ever occupy the Oval Office. Besides killing millions, he halted the progress of black Americans and destroyed their next several generations.
43. Woodrow Wilson- it was hard to not rank him the worst, and I think a good argument could be made for that. Besides getting us into a world war and setting the conditions for an even bigger one, he was famous for his intense racism, his love of eugenics, his complete disregard for the constitution, and… well, I can think of absolutely nothing in the favor of that disgusting piece of shit.
42. James Buchanan- sometimes the historians are right.
41. John Adams- the Alien and Sedition Act and the Quasi War sent the US in the wrong direction from which we still haven’t fully recovered.
I have not towed the libertarian lion of putting Lincoln in that bottom five, mostly because (unlike the guys there) he was a mixed bag and besides the obvious evil, accomplished some great things as well (like Amendment XIII). And FDR came oh so close to the final cut, and I would not argue about his inclusion…
Things are not good in the Land of Lincoln and believe it or not, they’re only getting worse. Illinois already has the lowest credit rating of any state in the union (BBB- according to S&P and BBB3 according to Moody’s), along with having the dubious distinction of being the only state in the union to ever have a credit rating so low. Coupled with this, the State continues to run deficits (with its deficits representing roughly 10% of its total revenues), along with having a backlog of bills in the hundreds of billions (for comparison, the State’s total operating fund revenues total roughly $60 billion), and having several woefully underfunded pension plans (the liabilities are conservatively estimated to total $100 billion). Despite all this, though, recent news suggests that today may be remembered as better times in the State’s history.
Most likely future state of the State
The State is now floating an idea to issue $100 billion in new bonds in order to shore-up its pension plans. Essentially, the State is hoping that it can issue taxable debt (pension bonds are not tax exempt) and invest it in stocks and corporate bonds (which are the bulk of the underlying assets in a pension plan) and achieve a return greater than the interest payments on that debt. This is utter insanity.
At the State’s current rating category, the taxable bond interest rate on such debt would be roughly 4%, which is a lazy estimate and assumes that the issuance of such debt would not automatically trigger rating agencies to downgrade the State to ‘junk bond status’ (the State’s BBB- and BBB3 ratings are currently just one step above ‘junk’). More likely than not, the State will have to pay an interest rate well above 4%, particularly since such a large debt issuance would only attract a very small segment of the market (more supply than demand equals higher interest rates for the issuer). But, even assuming a 4% interest rate, the State will have to come up with roughly $4 billion in interest payments each year (again, this is a lazy estimate and does not account for several factors and the interest payment will likely be larger). Remember, the money from this debt issuance is suppose to be invested in its pension plans, therefore even if the returns on this investment exceeds 4% on a yearly basis (which is likely in the near term) that money is just reinvested into the plans- the State cannot access those funds. Additionally, the State is hoping that its interest payments will be less than the annual pension contributions that the State is required to make. At a 4% interest rate (which, again is a very conservative estimate) the interest payments would be slightly less than the required annual pension contributions, however the State will have no flexibility with regards to making these interest payments. With annual pension payments the State has the ability to reduce or not make such payments (which has occurred too often in the past and has resulted in the underfunding of the pension plans), but interest payments cannot be missed. So in order for the State to ensure adequate revenues to make regularly scheduled interest payments it must raise taxes.
Last time, we swear!
The State of Illinois just raised its income tax rate in 2017. The City of Chicago, the State’s largest municipality, has also been on a tax raising spree and will be raising taxes even more going forward. And on a completely unrelated note, I’m sure, while these tax increases have been occurring Cook County (the second most populous county in the country and home to Chicago) has been losing more residents than any county in America; the City of Chicago has been losing residents (more than any other major city in the country), and the State of Illinois has been losing residents (more than any other state in the country). People vote with their feet and they’re leaving the Land of Lincoln.
Many seem to take this road, lately…
Not to worry, though, while the State’s financial position spirals out of control Republican governor Bruce Rauner and the Democratic majority in the General Assembly have been focused on the important issues (cosmotarian moment!, because reduce government spending, but not woke spending) What’s the point of bankrupting a State if you can’t approve more spending on culture war issues? Somehow, I don’t think this spending will improve the State’s population decline.
Whether these pension bonds are issued or not, the fact that the State is floating such an idea suggests that cost cutting reform is not being considered. This means that Illinois is irrevocably broken. No change in political leadership, whether in the legislature, or in the executive, can salvage the situation – this problem has long festered under both Republicans and Democrats. This is a tragedy of the State’s own making, more than anything. And though I fully expect Congress to discuss an ‘Illinois bailout’ within the next ten years, this misery should only be borne by the Illinois electorate and the poor decisions that it continued to make in the voting booth. Let this be a lesson to the rest of the country.
It’s no secret that I’m somewhat less than enamored of Donald Trump as a person, and not terribly impressed with him as a president (‘better than Hillary” is not exactly a glowing encomium). But there’s ONE thing he could do which would cause me to admire him. Yes, not give a SOTU speech, complete with props (human and inanimate) and stagecraft, but revert back to the previous custom of literally mailing it in. But keeping Trump away from the spotlight is akin to getting between Gloria Allred and a TV camera, so that’s not going to happen.
So, given the inevitable, here’s a chance for you, the wise and always entertaining Glibertariat, to give your thoughts beforehand and as it happens.
After barely surviving the immediate fallout of the government shutdown, Baby Trshmnstr and I braved the post-apocalyptic wasteland to see if the Starbucks gift cards still worked. On the way, we passed by ground zero, one of the hardest hit places in the world by this tragedy… a National Park. Specifically, Manassas Battlefield National Park.
Blood stained these grounds a century and a half ago, and we honor the loss, but this park will now have new historic meaning as the Bull Run ran red with the life essence of the millions who have died because of the government shutdown.
I originally thought that I had captured an image of a valiant National Park Officer shielding the gawkers and rubberneckers from the unimaginable horror that lies beyond the main entrance. Upon further inspection, it was an evil libertarian trying to pillage the piled up bodies for gold and for survivors to put to work in their salt mines. Thank God for the gate blocking their way! Some heroic government employee must have put it in place prior to dying from lack of funding.
The evil libertarians are at the gate!!! They’ve failed to get in, but they’ve succeeded at blocking my picture of the gate!!
We trudged on: me, the less than loyal dog, and the only-partially-aware baby. Oh, to view this horror from the eyes of a babe! What a punishment! A sentence worse than death: to grow up and live a shell of a life surrounded by death and rot! And all because the damn Republicans shut down the government!
We continued to what was once the field hospital, where the wounded were once brought to be hacked up or to be released into the sweetness of death. However, through the wanton cruelty of the Trump, the casualties of today’s Civil War weren’t even given a chance. Only a few straggling survivors were able to make it to the field hospital to revive the building to its most glorified use. The well that once was polluted with the severed appendages and disfigured tissue of battlefield casualties is quietly empty today, the few survivors too disoriented and delirious from the mass gore and violence of the GOP assault.
Oh, the poor survivors! Nowhere to go, no civilization to return to! They’re left, like the beasts of the plains, to die nameless and without dignity in this new dystopian reality!!
We finally passed by what was once a gathering place for schoolchildren and other lovers of learning to gaily frolic from historical monument to historical monument. Horses would gallop by and athletes would perfect their fitness in a small utopia built up on government land. Now, all that is left at this alternate entrance to the park is a bevy of burnt out automobiles, husks left from a happier time.
As we drove past this monument to unspeakable violence, choking back tears and vomit, it struck me how this park would look in a far away future, once this turmoil has passed. Much like the neatly lined cannons and artillery pieces that adorn Henry Hill not more than half a mile from this place, a future monument to this oh so frivolous act of hatred will show these destroyed cars lined in neat rows, scorched by the hatred of this nation’s Hitler.
Why is there sometimes a perverse beauty in violent death? What draws the eye to such destruction?
I part with a single thought. As I gaze into the cruel face of government shutdown, I see that the struggle is finished. I love Big Brother.
To start with the disclaimer, I have read quite little of the considerable corpus of either the Frankfurt school – a many of whom were, in fact, neo-Marxists – or postmodern philosophy – quite a number of whom were, in fact, Marxists or neo-Marxists. What little I have read was, for me, rather uninteresting and kinda obscurantist, which I dislike, and overall not a good use of my time. Why am I writing about it? It is the internet, brethren. This is what it is for. Reading is for cucks; writing opinions on any and everything is for the modern Alpha male. So I am about to drop the definitive view on Cultural Marxism et al.
Now, cultural Marxism is en vogue these days among certain segments of the population, of the right wing persuasion. It is sort of like fascism for the left. The difference is that, beyond being buzzy and exaggerated, it is slightly more accurate, at least in my opinion. Most things that are literally Nazi are not Nazi much, if at all. But many things that are cultural Marxist can be somewhat described as such. As long as you define the term properly (and in these brave new worlds of ours, you get to define everything for yourself and thus never lose a debate)
Not part of a series on Marxism
When I use a phrase like “Cultural Marxism, Critical theory and postmodern nonsense”, I use it knowing well enough that those are different concepts and that they don’t quite gel together. It is a way to describe some modern leftists’ views that take a bit from each place, usually the worst bit, and mix it up together.
These elements of the Modern Left are not really critical theory; it is not really postmodern philosophy. Current postmodern philosophy may not be postmodern philosophy, but, being obscurantist, no one can tell, really. There is great debate what Derrida or Foucault or whomever really meant. This is not relevant that much, it is more how what they said is interpreted in the rpesent. On my Romanian lit papers in high school, no one cared what the poet really wanted to say with this or that metaphor, but what respectable literary critics thought they meant.
So what is cultural Marxism? It is used, yes, excessively, as a generic catch all term for “Everything I don’t like is cultural Marxist” by some on the right. But does the term have its uses? In serious debates, probably rather limited. But in less-than-serious ones, it can send across some information – people know, in a general way, what you mean when you say it. But is there a rigorous, clear definition?
Wikipedia does not seem to have a page on it, except as a subsection of Frankfurt School saying:
“‘Cultural Marxism” in modern political parlance refers to a conspiracy theory which sees the Frankfurt School as part of an ongoing movement to take over and destroy Western society.
Now, I admitted as much that it is a catch all buzzy word. But conspiracy theory seems a bit strong to me. I have seen many left wingers recently on the interwebz countering the term with “conspiracy theory”. Not to engage in conspiracy theory, it does seem a bit coordinated.
Wiki: “The term ‘cultural Marxism’ has an academic usage within cultural studies, where it refers to a form of anti-capitalist cultural critique which specifically targets those aspects of culture that are seen as profit driven and mass-produced under capitalism”
Well, yes. And in many views of the successors of the Frankfurt school those aspects of culture that are seen as profit driven and mass-produced under capitalism are almost all aspects of culture.
Continued: “it was misappropriated by paleoconservatives as part of an ongoing culture war in which it is argued that the very same theorists who were analyzing and objecting to the “massification” and mass control via commercialization of culture were in fact working in a conspiracy to control and stage their own attack on Western society,”
Ah, here we get to the key points. Was it misappropriated? In a way yes, but many words were, sadly, changed in meaning over time. But it was only partially misappropriated; it had a nugget of truth.
I think it is quite obvious many elements of the left wanted to obtain social change. It is clear to me that a way of achieving this is through taking over educational and cultural institution. Just like elements of the right want the same thing. Where is the conspiracy theory? Most of the vast right wing and left wing conspiracies alike are quite in the open. We are having a sort of kind of war aren’t we, on the cultural front. It is clear the sides want different things and are willing to use this war to get them. So where is the conspiracy? Hell, even some classical Marxist use the term cultural Marxist in a derogatory fashion, because they believe it draws attention from class war to more meaningless struggles.
Wait Pie, Culture War is also an ill-defined buzzword. Never mind you that, that is not the point, focus here!
All activists want to change society in a way they see fit. That is why they are activists. Progressives quite more so then others, it is one of their defining characteristics. All people in the culture war want something different. It is ridiculous to suggest otherwise.
And anyone with half a brain can see the left are trying to shove their social justice views in popular culture, being books, movies, games, comics, etc. It is not conspiracy that in certain areas of education it is more likely to have a Marxist professor than a moderate conservative one. And to the right, this equates with a destruction of Western Civilization as they see it. No need to see conspiracies everywhere. If I believe socialism destroys society (and I do), then I believe people who push socialism aim to destroy society. Maybe they don’t believe they do, but that does not change things. And they do quite clearly state that western society must be radically changed, in way to make it almost unrecognizable. So… destroy and rebuild in a different fashion, but destroy nonetheless.
The future of politics
I will come on record: I despise most of what the social justice left wants to achieve and would very much like to see it stopped. I outed myself as a supporter of conspiracy theories.
So basically Cultural Marxism, Critical theory and postmodern nonsense for me means the modern far left side of the culture war and the weapons used by them, attacking culture and education that does not conform, intersectionality and the oppression Olympics, attacking reason and reality when it does not go their way, calling math and science racist, sexist, ableist. Making everything white patriarchy. Can there be better definitions for this? Sure. I usually try to avoid these terms myself. But cultural Marxism can be good enough on Twitter – not that I am on Twitter, mind you. Helps some folks never forget these people support actual Marxism. The good ones do, others are Stalinists and Maoists.
So can you tell us more of postmodern philosophy? Carpenter in the sky, you people with all the questions. Ask HM or something, he’s the one blessed with the gift of book learning (I got the looks and sexual endowment part instead).
And on this note, how about you my fellow glibs? Do you like your Marxism of the cultural variety? Is your theory critical? Would you say you moved on beyond modernism? Thoughts below.
“3 out of 4 Americans believe that killing animals for meat is immoral, according to a MSNBC-MediaMatters-PETA poll. Based on this information, Congress is debating new rules put forth by the FDA to tax meat production at a higher rate than vegetables.”
The infant mortality rate is nearly double in Mississippi and Alabama than it is in New York and California!!!! Oh wait, It is 0.4% in NY and CA and 0.8% in MS and AL. And wait, there’s more! There’s a longstanding and well-known correlation between poverty and higher infant mortality. CA and NY are 2 of the richest states and MS and AL are 2 of the poorest states. What, exactly, is the point of this article except to poor shame the south?
Every media outlet has published a metric ton of articles that start just like this. It’s lazy writing, but it’s also the platinum standard for crafting a narrative. See, people are social animals that are primed to go with the crowd. When that subconscious impulse is manipulated through polling, people’s behavior becomes malleable. When you have some basic understanding about the strata of voters and their belief systems, you can get them to do your bidding without them even knowing.
Three basic concepts make public opinion polling an irresistible tool used to bias an audience: herd behavior, identity politics, and aura of authority. The formula is simple, using a favorable polling result, generalize the findings so that it is implied that a majority of an identity group believe a certain way, relying on herd behavior to solidify support of the belief within the identity group.
The ironic part is that none of what makes public opinion polling such a strong tool is based in reality. The herd behavior is based on an illusion. By and large, support for a politically controversial position sits somewhere between 40% and 60%, meaning that nearly half of people oppose said controversial position. Further, polling doesn’t allow for enough nuance to differentiate between being opposed to legalizing machine guns and being for the repeal of the 2nd Amendment. Identity politics, as well, is subtle. Take, for example, the approval/disapproval ratings of prominent politicians. If identity politics were the primary driver of public opinion, the surges and drops in approval ratings would be quite attenuated.
However, the illusion of universal agreement is very powerful.
Social Science is Modern Day Astrology
The holy grail of science is replicability. If you can produce an effect in one study, you should be able to replicate the conditions and achieve the same effect in a successive study. In physics or chemistry, this is usually fairly straight forward. Barring some unknown environmental variable affecting the experiment, the bowling ball and the feather land on the ground at the same time in a vacuum. The sodium and the water create a highly exothermic reaction when combined.
Social science is much squishier, both in methodology and in result. When you’re working with people, they don’t behave like molecules in a vacuum. They lie, they are affected by minor biases in your methodology, they are subject to many weird psychological effects like the placebo effect, and they don’t take kindly to being locked in a laboratory for 15 years for a longitudinal study.
Resultantly, more social science is done by “poll” than by “experiment.” Not that the experimental method is any better. I experienced the infamous psychological experiment where they flash pictures of different races of people and then time how fast you click on the good word or the bad word.
This has led many skeptics to put scare quotes around social “science”, which more and more resembles phrenology than physics. Adding more fuel to the fire is the “replicability crisis.” The replicability crisis affects both experimental and poll based studies. Essentially, social science can’t find the same effect two times in a row. Not only that, but they can make a study say that any effect exists (such as, listening to songs about old people makes you younger).
However, in a world that fucking loves science and decides social policy by sound byte, the internal crisis in social science becomes a very public issue. As discussed in Part 1, science journalism is a farce. When an ethically compromised journalism industry interacts with an ethically compromised social science industry, you get science journalism that is slave to the agenda of the media. We live in a world where science is subservient to the state. If you publish something that aligns with the state’s goals, you get media coverage and additional grant funding. If you try to publish something that goes against the state’s goals, you get undermined at every step.
Manipulating the Results: Bias in the Experiment
People are quite malleable as I’ve already said, and this is evident in the results of studies. Wording is very important. Want an anti-abortion poll result, mention “mother” and “convenience.” Want a pro-abortion poll result, mention “choice” and “woman”. I’ll let the next example speak for itself.
An example of a wording difference that had a significant impact on responses comes from a January 2003 Pew Research Center survey. When people were asked whether they would “favor or oppose taking military action in Iraq to end Saddam Hussein’s rule,” 68% said they favored military action while 25% said they opposed military action. However, when asked whether they would “favor or oppose taking military action in Iraq to end Saddam Hussein’s rule even if it meant that U.S. forces might suffer thousands of casualties,” responses were dramatically different; only 43% said they favored military action, while 48% said they opposed it. The introduction of U.S. casualties altered the context of the question and influenced whether people favored or opposed military action in Iraq.
There are quite a few known phenomena that influence studies, as well.
Acquiescence Bias – Making a statement and asking the poll taker to agree or disagree. Usually folks with lower education will agree disproportionately with the statement in comparison to when the same issue is asked in a question format.
Social Desirability Bias – We saw a bunch of this last election cycle. People tend not to like to tell others about their illegal or unpopular opinions, so they’ll simply lie to make the poll giver like them.
Question Order Bias (“Priming the Pump”) – Ask a question that will likely get a positive or negative reaction, then follow it with a question you want to influence in that positive or negative way. For example, if I were to ask y’all whether you like the current spending levels of the federal government and then followed it up with a question of whether you like deep dish pizza, the pizza question will be skewed negative.
Interviewer Effect – Related to the Social Desirability Bias. The poll taker changes their responses based on characteristics of the poll giver. For example, if a woman is giving a poll on equal pay, the poll taker may respond more favorably than if a man gives the poll.
Observer Effect – The poll taker is subtly affected by the poll giver’s unconscious cues, resulting in their responses being biased toward the poll giver’s expectations. For example, if the poll giver expects that black people will answer a question a certain way, they may change their inflection when asking the question in a way that influences a black poll taker to answer in that way.
This still ignores the cognitive biases that we have talked about in Parts 1 and 2.
How do you sort through all this crap and get to a real, measurable effect? You design a good experiment. How do you design a good experiment when taking a survey? You don’t.
Manipulating the Results: Playing with the Data
Okay, so we have highly questionable data from a shit survey, but at least we’re now in the realm of math. Nothing can go wrong here!
A core requirement of legitimate polling is “randomization.” Taking a random sample of the group you’re trying to study is what allows you to generalize the results to the group as a whole. If you do something to disrupt the random sample, you weaken the ability to generalize the results to the group as a whole.
How do people screw with the random sample?
Weighting – Let’s say you’ve done a 1,000 person survey, but you’re concerned that your relatively small (but random) sample isn’t actually representative of the world. See, you’re a savvy poll taker and you know that a recent poll showed that there are 41% Democrats, 37% Republicans, and 22% Independents in the locality of your poll, and your poll has 39% Democrats, 40% Republicans, and 21% Independents. We’ll just inflate the results of the Democrats in the poll to reflect 41%, deflate the result of Republicans to reflect 37% and mildly inflate the results of the Independents to 22%, and we’ll do our further analysis based on this massaged data. Of course, this assumes that the pollster’s understanding of reality is correct, and it screws with the randomization of the data, resulting in a strong danger that the data no longer reflects reality.
Margin of Error – You survey 1,000 people, and 44% love Trump and 46% hate him. Therefore, Trump is unpopular on the net. Well, except for the margin of error. For a 1,000 person survey in a country of ~300 million, the results are roughly correct. Roughly correct means that your poll (and others designed in the same way) is within 3% of the reality 95% of the time. This, of course, assumes a representative (read random) sample.
Data dredging – Let’s do a huge survey asking a zillion questions. Then let’s go fishing for correlation between variables. We’ll just ignore that correlation does not imply causation, because who actually believes in that. It actually makes for some amusing reading.
Fudging the data – How about we do 15 runs of the survey, pick the 3 that most support my hypothesis, and publish a paper with the results of those 3 data runs?
A more technical issue is highlighted in Anscombe’s quartet. Four completely different sets of data that are statistically identical. Why? Let me tell a story from Poli Sci 300-something, Statistics for Political Science. One of the main statistical analyses performed by Poli Sci statisticians is linear regression. Linear regression (which you may remember from 5th grade math) is trying to fit data to a straight line (technically you can fit it to another curve). However, the problem is that you have to predetermine the type of curve you’re fitting it to. It doesn’t self-tailor. If you have an exponential relationship between being libertarianism and small government views, it won’t fit well to the straight line regression. It struck me, sitting in that class, how much statistical analysis was an art, not a science. If you don’t understand the math and conceptual understanding behind the numbers (as most social science students don’t), you’re going to come to somewhat worthless results when doing statistical analysis.
The Results are Garbage In the First Place: The Telephone Problem
Garbage in, garbage out. It’s pretty much my motto. It’s especially true with public opinion polling. Let’s quickly mention two issues so you get a sense for the type of garbage being used in modern public opinion polls. No need to linger on this issue.
1) Self-selection bias – This has always been there. Who is likely to answer a telephone poll? Is there some inbuilt bias caused by some declining to participate? Is there a destruction of the randomness of the sample if it takes 3,000 phone calls to get 1,000 poll takers?
2) The shift away from landlines – This is new. Currently, less than 50% of people still have landlines. Cell phones really screw up some of the assumptions behind the methodology of telephone polling. For example, if a pollster wanted to survey people in central Indiana about some local issue, it’s possible that I would get a phone call. I don’t live in central Indiana, and haven’t for over 5 years. What does it mean for the poll that I’m not in the expected cohort? Nothing good. However, it’s easy enough to ask where I live at the beginning. What about the other way around. A pollster is trying to survey northern Virginians about some local issue. I’m essentially disenfranchised by that poll because my area codes is central Indiana. Further, cell phones make it really easy to block unknown numbers, resulting in even fewer “hits” for each phone call.
Knowing the Public: What Motivates Voting Behavior?
Now that I’ve thoroughly shattered your trust in the public opinion poll, let me shatter your trust in the people being polled. Let’s talk about a truly experimental social science study looking at beliefs and voting patterns.
The interesting result of this experimental study of people’s beliefs and voting habits is this:
There are 5 different types of voters:
Ideological – Able to abstract their issue positions into larger conceptualizations (principles) and set those conceptualizations relative to other ideologies.
Near Ideological – Have awareness of an ideological spectrum, but their positions don’t particularly rely on an ideology.
Group Interest – Good ol’ identity politics. I’m black therefore I vote Democrat.
Nature of the Times – Something bad happened in the world when Republicans were in power so I’m voting Democrat.
No Issue Content – I vote because…well… argle bargle, incoherent rambling, no making sense. Seriously, this is the category where the pollster couldn’t make any sense of their motivations for their beliefs.
There must be a bunch of people in groups 1 and 2, a ton in 3, and a smaller amount in groups 4 and 5, right? That would be the sort of society I want to live in.
Sorry to disappoint.
Group 1 (Ideologues) – 2.5%
Group 2 (Near Ideologues) – 9%
Group 3 (Identititarians) – 42%
Group 4 (Idiots who can rationalize their opinons) – 24%
Group 5 (Idiots who can’t even coherently explain the reason for their opinions to a pollster) – 22.5%
This was taken in the early 1960s. Wanna bet it’s even worse today? Identity politics wins because that’s how a plurality of people think. Principals over principles is a thing because 42% of people care about principals and 11.5% (generously) care about principles.
The sickening part is that group 4 and 5 vote. (Table 1 of the study shows the percentages for the study as a whole and for likely voters, with only marginal changes to the percentages).
I could type more about the horrifying prospects of society based on this study, but I think it’s more impactful to let the data sink in. 89% of people base their worldview/politics/beliefs on something other than a set of principles/ethics/morals. Almost 50% have blatantly idiotic reasons for holding their opinions.
As a final note, 35% of respondents randomly varied across opposing positions for issues in successive interviews. There wasn’t a trend in these changes, which made the pollster come to the conclusion that these people weren’t able to come to the same opinion two interviews in a row.
Quick Takeaways from the series of articles
The media is untrustworthy, and not just in the obviously biased ways
Gell-Mann amnesia is real
Science journalism is neither about science nor is it good journalism
Any conclusion drawn from social science should be viewed with great skepticism
Anything being pushed based on majoritarian or poll-tested bases is probably shit
By thinking in terms of principles, you’ve elevated yourself into rarified air. Most people struggle to even rationalize their opinions.
This will be quite a bit less thorough than my last writing, primarily because of the subject matter. The earlier piece was easier to come up with examples for, as it is so transparently obvious that the metric system is more overrated than any other system, with the possible exception of Urban Meyer’s spread. [Note to editors, please remove that bit if Oklahoma gets crushed in the first round of the playoffs. Likewise, if the Sooners take the whole thing before this gets published, feel free to add “Booya!” or “Oh no he di-in’t!” or similar. Also, definitely include this clip. Editor’s note: I have no idea what happens in sportsball-world, so I left this in for the lulz]. At the end of this article I expect to receive an offer for a tenured position in Whiteness Studies.1
I hereby proclaim my theory of whiteness based on two indisputable facts: first, that whiteness (as specified below) increases over time (at least until very recently) and second, that “mighty white of you” was a compliment. Now when I am talking about whiteness, I mean that term as it applies to the United States (sorry Rufus). I doubt I need to recap but maybe for Pie, there was a time when in America, the White Race was the English Race. Even the Germans were considered non-white by Ben Franklin. Ponder that for a moment.2 Even as late as the 20th century, “true whites” were also referred to as WASPs (anyone else find it odd how that term seems to have completely vanished?) or White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (remember how the KKK hated Catholics). Now here is the thing: “white ethnics” never went away. Which leads me to my first point:
Whiteness is not an ethnicity; it is a meta-ethnicity.
I didn’t see this much growing up in Indian Territory, but when I moved to upstate New York, I entered a place were white ethnic enclaves are still a thing. The local paper’s sports section has a story titled “Danes Defeat Dutchmen” and as God is my witness, I can tell people from those towns apart by sight. Ditto those descended from Poles. And the Irish, and the Eye-ties and… There is enough endogamy going on up here that the various white ethnicities maintain their physical and cultural (expressed through styles of dress) differences that I never expected to see from my few decades living in the south-central part of the country. There is no conflict between someone being “white” and being “Italian,” because they are separate categories of taxonomy.
A helpful guide to tracking your white heritage
But what about me? I am a white man[citation needed]. I don’t really have access to an actual ethnicity. I’m all mutted up. I have a German (maternal) grandmother (Northern German, she would stress, not one of those silly southern Germans), but all I really have of a heritage from her is a smattering of verbal imperatives and the ability to play this on the accordion. (Side note: none of the women in my family descending from that grandmother, including my sister and her daughters have pierced ears. Proper German girls don’t piece their ears. That’s for those Polish trollops.) My father’s mother’s mother’s mother was of the (((tribe))). That left me the ability to correctly pronounce “kibitz” and “chutzpah,” but the inability to remember more than half of the Sh’ma Yisrael at any given time. One of my grandfathers managed to do a genealogy going back to the Norman invasion, but the other only made it back a few generations since most of them were actively trying to change their identities as they *ahem* sought greener (or at least less jail-filled) pastures. Yeah, they pretty much fucked anything that would let them. Oh, and in my only defense of Elizabeth Warren ever, I can confirm that every child born in Oklahoma is told that they are descended from a Cherokee princess. Apparently they looooved the D.3
Anyway, if Albion’s Seed is correct, the Borderers (Scots-Irish, Border Reavers, “Scum of Two Nations,” whatever) brought their tendency to eschew any cultural identity with then when they settled in the US. I’d guess this would be why there is a large portion of the country that has no real interest in an ethnicity and therefore are “white by default” as Ozy Franz would never say.
Now about this mutting process, is it the case where I do have a “real” ethnic identity, but I just don’t identify with it? I… don’t think so. My mother almost never made strudel. I think she made spätzle once. She did make pork meatballs in sauerkraut on a fairly regular basis and liked to cook pork ribs with onions and apples, but you couldn’t really call her cuisine “German” outside of some ironclad rules on meal preparation (each supper needed a starch, a meat, a yellow vegetable, a green vegetable, and a salad). She cooked pots and pots of chili. Mountains of meatballs with enough spaghetti to consume the entire harvest of Ticino. Corned beef and cabbage. Pinto beans and cornbread (did I mention she was born in Milwaukee?). And those unfortunate culinary relics of the pre-Carter era which need not be spoken of. The point is, my culinary “heritage” is a hodge-podge of things that tasted good to my mom that she learned to cook, just as my genetic heritage is a hodge-podge of those people my ancestors liked to bang.
So how is it that nowhere people like myself and also pureblood ethnics all fall under the rubric “white?” Because…
Whiteness does not refer to your ethnicity; it refers to your relationship with other ethnicities
If your ethnic culture is in a state of mutual intelligibility (and I would say respect) with the dominant ethnic culture, you are white. That’s it. If the WASPs understood and tolerated the way another group lived, and that group reciprocated, they became less “other,” especially in comparison to TGOT. This is not to say that this understanding is deep or even accurate. It’s just enough that the other cultures are grokked as being comprehensible, even if not currently comprehended. This is why whiteness expands. Groups experiencing a cultural exchange (appropriation!) and especially those living close enough to intermarry will inevitably gain mutual understanding. Unless, of course, you make an effort not to.
Any group that does not actively resist becoming white, will become white
“I can has culture?”
There is a good example of a (((group))) that made an effort to keep itself separate and isolated from the larger society that it lived in, and it worked in maintaining otherness for a couple of millennia. In the US, that’s rapidly changed. I can’t speak for other parts of the country, but in Austin, people of Mexican descent are white. So are Vietnamese, though the average gringo in Austin knows a lot fewer words of Vietnamese than they do Spanish. I think this trend may be happening nationwide, as I’ve heard Jews and Asians referred to in the derpverse of reddit/twitter/tumblr as “Schrödinger’s POCs.” About that term–POC, I absolutely loathe it. It is as wrong as a term could possibly be. It creates false connections where none exist and disregards those similarities that do. Any mindset that can claim that my US-born and raised coworker of West Indian descent has less in common with me than he does with a subsistence yak farmer in Tibet is simply diseased. It’s as insulting as telling a political lesbian that her sexuality is defined by her lack of desire for penis4. I do understand why the term exists, though; it’s a deliberate attempt at destruction. Everyone got their aluminum foil ready? *takes a drink of water, inhales* Whiteness expands, since it’s just the ever-increasing understanding of one’s neighbors. Capitalism expands because it works. A certain worldview which has a penchant for red flags and brass ornaments equates both of these as hegemonic movements. *Voice changes to O’Brien’s.* Action needed to be taken to stop the cisheteropatriarchical albumkyriarchcapitalistic5 forces. Whiteness is a state of mutual understanding. That needed to be broken. So, break the culture. Eliminate the canon. Make sure that the only books that an entire generation has read is Harry Potter. Make the educational system focus on literature that is recent, so there won’t be any intergenerational touchstones. Ensure that the only common references available are from mass media, and ensure that you can determine what makes it into the mass media. Emphasize differences. Emphasize slights. Emphasize hurts. Let nothing pass unremarked, no aggression is too micro to not demand an apology for. Make sure that apologies demand humiliation so that you may inspire resentment. That’s the genius of POC. Whiteness is a state of commonality. POC is the definition of difference. It’s an identity based on opposition to that idea of mutual understanding. Prevent cultural exchange, make it a new sin, call it “appropriation.” Abolish the word “normal.” Everyone’s identity must be broken down to as many different axes of oppression as possible, for each axis is another attempt to demonstrate just how alien we are to each other, another potential fault line. Eventually, the only thing that people should have in common is their subservience to the state.
I can has grant monies nao?
1 I do not actually expect this to happen.
2 “You know who else didn’t consider Germans white?” may be the first time where the game cannot actually be answered.
3 An alternate interpretation is that there is just a whoooole lot of inbreeding going on.
4 Do not actually attempt to do this. It will not go well.
5 Fun fact: randomly mashing on a keyboard generates leftist academic concepts.
Social science is much squishier, both in methodology and in result. When you’re working with people, they don’t behave like molecules in a vacuum. They lie, they are affected by minor biases in your methodology, they are subject to many weird psychological effects like the placebo effect, and they don’t take kindly to being locked in a laboratory for 15 years for a longitudinal study.
Acquiescence Bias – Making a statement and asking the poll taker to agree or disagree. Usually folks with lower education will agree disproportionately with the statement in comparison to when the same issue is asked in a question format.
1) Self-selection bias – This has always been there. Who is likely to answer a telephone poll? Is there some inbuilt bias caused by some declining to participate? Is there a destruction of the randomness of the sample if it takes
