Tag: politics

The futility of fine distinctions

It is now commonplace to point out that economic exchange can and should be positive-sum: When it works well, both buyers and sellers get more value than they would by not participating. This is followed up by saying that Trump thinks of exchange as zero-sum: Any time one side gets value, then they must be taking it from the other. It now seems to me that this is wrong about Trump— not unfair, but wrong.

The current tariff strategy is, even in his vision for it, a negative-sum gambit. He is willing to crash the whole plane, because he thinks that he and the USA will be on the top of the hierarchy among the people scrambling for survival among the wreckage.

Ignoratio elenchi, of sorts

Via ABC news:

In a sworn declaration, ICE Acting Field Office Director of Enforcement and Removal Operations Robert Cerna argued that “the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose” and “demonstrates that they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile.”

The fact that ICE knows nothing about them proves that they are dangerous criminals?!? Although the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, neither is it evidence of dire terrorism.

Death by a thousand cuts

It is clear that the federal layoffs and budget cuts are indiscriminate, made without regard to the content of the jobs and programs being eliminated. Some of it is made at targets of opportunity, firing people hired in the last year because they are nominally in a probationary period. Some of it is illegal, done on the assumption that the courts can’t stop all the malfeasance— if courts can stop any of it.

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When the dog whistle is a middle C

President Trump has cut aid to South Africa because (he says) the government is persecuting the white minority. It’s easy enough to see Trump as a puppet here, with the hand up his backside belonging to Elon Musk— a white South African who grew up under apartheid and is salty about social justice.

Moreover, Trump has offered asylum to white Afrikaners who want to follow Musk to the US. Given Trump’s hostile rhetoric about immigration, the contrast is clear: He’s not really against immigrants as such, he’s against immigrants who are people of color.

Why foreground the fact that he’s a white-supremacist president doing the bidding of another, unelectable white-supremacist? Maybe the flagrant racism is a distraction from more subtle evils they’re doing, and there are plenty of those. But maybe they are just throwing all the shit at the fan to see what sticks.

Not understanding how consent works

Via the Guardian: Jonathan Mitchell, the architect of Texas’ abortion ban, claims that it doesn’t limit women’s ability to control their own bodies. Instead, “women can ‘control their reproductive lives’ without access to abortion” because they can practice abstinence. This is a bad take in lots of ways, but it requires at minimum that all sex be consensual. If he took as hard a line against rape culture as he takes against women’s choice, one might believe that he isn’t just plumping for patriarchy.

Over on Twitter: Kathleen Stock writes, “Some knowledge is essentially experiential- you can’t get knowledge of x, just by hearing description of x. Colours, tastes are like this.. and sexual pleasure. If you’ve never had sexual function, you can’t give informed consent to losing it imo: you can’t know what’s lost.” It’s an argument against puberty blockers, but it also has the immediate consequence that first sexual experiences can’t be consensual.2

The buzz, the bees, and belief

I’ve found that evil usually triumphs unless good is very, very careful.

Leonard McCoy

I posted yesterday about what I called the Positive Buzz fallacy:

  1. Activity z is the best way to accomplish goal y.
  2. Therefore, activity z is the best way to accomplish goals.

I realized today that it is closely related to a fallacy that people often commit in misunderstanding natural selection: An organism is fittest in a given environment, and the fallacifier infers that it’s simply best.

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Presuming that money is like bread

A relative of mine recently shared a gif on Facebook of ‘Five Best Sentences’. I try not to post whenever somebody is wrong on the internet, but responding to the list made me realize something about so-called economic conservatives:

Many conservative truisms only make sense if you assume money is like bread and that anything of value is like money.

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