that's awesome. I think CBT is really reductive. Quite pessimistic, as well - CBT seems to hold little hope of actually healing many issues, but only aims for symptom management. I think that's because it's not a very good therapy for many (most?) situations so it has to rationalize it by saying true healing is impossible.
in gestalt therapy this is called being at an impasse - you are in touch with yourself enough to know that you're not happy, but not yet sure how to change your life to be happy. long term I do believe it is better to be in touch with yourself even though there may be periods of discomfort or confusion. it's better to do that than to be humming along feeding your trauma until you reach the age of 50, have a mid-life crisis and realize you've wasted so much time not in touch with yourself.
Mid-life crisis is a real thing - didn't really expect it. But can be viewed in a positive way. Out of what can be a pretty terrifying psychological breakdown, can also be considered part of a process of evolution and discovery.
If you're perhaps grounded with the goal, I want to evolve into the person I really am, and should be. Remembering (or discovering) that most of what the world tells you and teaches you is just false. There are reasons why we want the particular things we want and upon deep examination those reasons may be found to be silly. This realization is heartbreaking cause then we feel we are past the mid-point - and have wasted our life!
But is a necessary step toward our real goal. It's a tough road, but I believe provides one more dignity than a lot of people's alternatives - numbing the pain with alcohol or drugs or chasing money or false idols so to speak. Not dealing directly with one's pain and difficult questions about oneself.
I'm 40 and have a mortgage and a family, changing course is not easy. I've sent out hundreds of emails I got two interviews, both going nowhere. I went to do a startup with a friend with the hope of making something and then growing into a different role. But we haven't made much money and I'm still stuck in development.
Another issue with this logic is that the probabilities are not independent.
Saying that you have probability x of nuclear war every year and so probability (1-x)^n of no nuclear war in n years assumes independence. In fact, if you don't have nuclear war on year 1, I would assume that the reasons for that lead to inferences and correlations that would affect the probability of nuclear war on year 2, possibly making it lower.
No, that’s not quite right. Measuring “did we have a nuclear war?” is not the input you’d ever want to use there, it’s only one binary digit of information.
Instead take info like “did we have events/incidents with a high potential of nuclear war?”
If three “Cuban missile crisis” level events happened in year X, then the probability of nuclear war in year x+1 is higher than it was in other years — even though nuclear war didn’t occur in either year. If national leaders make no statements threatening war in year A, then it’s probably safer than year B where there were 100 such threats.
I might not have said this clearly enough - I'm not saying that conditioning on "did we have a nuclear war" will change the probability to be less. I'm saying that the event "did we have a nuclear war in year n" is not independent from "did we have a nuclear war in year n+1" "n+2", ... because there are shared factors influencing them. Therefore the model of independent probabilities multiplying year over year and seeming to imply that nuclear war is inevitable because (1-p)^n goes to 0 as n grows doesn't make sense mathematically speaking.
Ok. I think the question that we want to ask from the model is more like:
“What is (one minus (What is the chance we have had 0 nuclear wars by year “now plus 70”?)”
So if there is a nuclear war in year n+3 (for example) it’s effect on year n+4 is irrelevant as the answer to the question is already “0% chance of no nuclear wars by year 70”.
So the angle you’re initially coming from is not quite relevant.
We can then turn that a bit though and continue your point — we can rephrase your claim to be like this, for example:
“if we have had 0 nuclear wars in the next 69 years, then surely that would lower the probability of a war in year 70.”
And to that I’m saying — actually no. Or rather: not necessarily. Or more accurately: not much!
The info of “we’ve had no nuclear wars in 69 years” is not what the model would care about. More likely it would care about, running the model a bunch of times, in the cases where there no wars in the first 69 years, how many times is there a war in the 70th year? And “brink of war” or “HPI” scenarios would be a much better indicator than the simple absense of nuclear war in those first 69 years. Maybe better to said “there is a lot more information in the question of ‘how many times have we been on the brink of war’ than there is in the answer ‘did we have a nuclear war yet? No’. It’s more about that “how much info is there here?”
I'll say it again: I'm not saying that we can use past lack of nuclear war to predict future lack of nuclear war. All I'm saying is that each year's probability is not independent, meaning the model of a probability of no nuclear war which geometrically goes to 0 is not accurate.
surely there's some middle ground between infinity and a paltry $3500. in our legal system there are concepts like damages, emotional damages, pain and suffering. it's not just about how much wages you missed out on. or does all that just go out the window because these are members of society who aren't paid a lot for their labor?
The problem is it's a class action against the government that the people elected. The victims are both the petitioner and the defendant. Regardless of the amount paid, the only beneficiaries are the lawyers.
I think you might be failing to take into account that the population of Flint (the ones getting paid) is slightly less than 1% of the population of Michigan (the ones paying).
It is essentially equivalent to a retroactive insurance system. It is as if everyone in Michigan had been required to buy "State appointed manager mishandles water system causing lead poisoning" insurance, and Flint is now having a claim paid under that insurance.
"Regardless of the amount paid, the only beneficiaries are the lawyers."
If government destroyed your house through negligence, say military plane dropped a bomb on it, would you want to be made whole, or would you still believe that "the only beneficiaries are the lawyers"?
seems like a good place to put this quote: "Justice is what love looks like in public." If this conservative economist wants to spread love, he can start by supporting economic policies that prevent the 1% from exploiting everyone else
Right because conservative = bad and deserving of contempt. This is exactly the type of kneejerk reaction that he is talking about. The 1% do just as well when Democrats are in office, but keep on playing the game ruled by tribe and emotion, see where that gets us.
To move wealth from the poor and the middle class to the rich is not what commonly is known as wealth redistribution. Even if it can mean that if you take the words literally.
I have not read Brooks, so I don't know if his stated position is that he is in favour of plundering the poor for the sake of the rich. I'd imagine that it isn't.
He does mention that there are systemic issues with the status quo, so I'm sure if you asked him if he was happy with how things are running I'm sure he'd have quite a list of things that he thinks could make the world better for everyone -- even if you might disagree with some of his solutions.
In the interview he says that democracy is the political version of capitalism/a market economy and I think that's key to interpreting him charitably. In his worldview many of the good things about democracy are the good things about capitalism, but they also share many of the same flaws. In systems that emphasises individual agency and are incentive based, his view is that contempt locks us into a vicious cycle that de-incentivizes leaders from actually providing a realistic way forward. I tend to agree, and I can hardly fault someone for trying to argue for the best version of their vision for society.
The Democratic Party is conservative by any popular measure outside of the insular American worldview. In many European countries, the Democratic Party’s politics would be considered far right.
It is fiscally conservative, Democrats doesn't try to reduce the dominance of the 1%. It is however not socially conservative, they are probably among the most left wing in the world with respect to race if you only count popular parties. And since "far right" today is mostly used to describe racists they wouldn't considered to be "far right".
Instead in Europe the democrats would just be a typical right wing party. Meaning they are pro immigration to stimulate economic growth, pro healthcare for all etc.
The Democratic Party’s “fiscal” policies are a scourge on the very disproportionately impoverished African American population. Any suggestion that the Democratic Party has any sort of commitment to overcoming racial divisions in the US is undermined by that fact.
There is no such thing as a decoupled “fiscal” conservatism. Politics in practice are inseparable from their historical context and Democratic politicians know that. Their virtue appeals in the media are not supported by their politics but rather serve to distract from their politics. Their politics, in fact, are a conservative politics.
> The Democratic Party is conservative by any popular measure outside of the insular American worldview
Its mostly a center-right / center-left coalition with the center-right currently slightly stronger (until very recently much stronger). While it leans right, it isn't coherently conservative, even by international standards.
I've often wondered about this- I mean the US has it's share of coffeehouse anarchists and redistributionists. The large size of the US and the political structure make it hard for e.g. a 'Pirate Party' representative to appear, even if there is the same amount of support per capita.
The implicit premise itself, that the Democratic political party is monolithic is false. It was an old Woodie Alan joke about not belonging to an organized political party and that is true to some extent - if your group is excluded from the GOP the DNC is the big tent. Before the 9/11 xenophobia US muslims were dominantly aligned with the Republican party, afterwards it was reversed. There are in fact many religious conservative demographics in the DNC for one.
Frankly self proclaimed leftists have a terrible habit of consent manufacturing - both from their own natural bubbles and echo chambers and ad nausuem rhetoric. There is tbe "implicit identity and support" which assumes that universal support of the working class is the natural status quo and any who disagree are puppets of the rich. This abstraction spares them from having to consider the actual opinions of the people who compose it. Their poor electoral performance in even their strongholds highlights that they are a noisy minority operating under the pretense of being a majority.
I think virtually every conservative party in Europe supports single-payer healthcare. That's a big one that would put the Democrats to the extreme right in Europe.
Maybe even more importanly, the way Democrat representatives seem to be able to enrich themselves from lobbying money etc, would be totally unacceptable most places in Europe. It would place them more in the class of Plutocrats than conservatives. Democrats tend to have far closer ties to Big Capital than even the most business-friendly conservatives where I live.
It seems to me that their focus on identity politics is a cover for doing very little to actually help the unprivileged, but instead doing the biddings of their donors.
So I guess bring up negative facts is now contempt? One party is very much in favor of a more level playing field, for the most part. One party is very much against it.
>One party is very much in favor of a more level playing field, for the most part. One party is very much against it.
I mean, I would hardly argue that the Democrats are "against" a level playing field, but it wouldn't be a stretch to say that they are opposed to such a premise. The fact is though, just because we both strongly dislike progressive ideology does not mean that we need to harp on their shortcomings at every opportunity.
In my mind, it is the constant put downs and negativity that breeds contempt. The thing of itself need not be the act, but merely foster such a stance.
Personally I find another factor of contempt is "failing a reverse Turing Test" where there is such high repetition and little thought that it seems as if they are organic spam bots. The inauthenticity and persistence grating seems to be a common thing given the contempt for Jehovah's witnesses, Hare Krishina's, multilevel marketers and others. Tech support forced into canned scripts are another such example - in computer science terms it seems that the low entropy becomed apparent and raises subconscious red flags.
The infamous "New World Order" conspiracy theorist archetype tends to be negative and full of put downs to their target de jure as the cause of all the world's evils. Even when it is horrifying it draws more of a watching a trainwreck style reaction.
Negativity and putdowns I would classify more as a breeder of disengagement. This is reflected by the impact of negative campaign ads being more reduced total votes than drawing more votes by looking good in comparison.
People should stop complaining that they don't have healthcare because they have iPhones and vaccines and don't literally live in the mud? Maybe that would hold water if there were literally no other option, and if the distribution of wealth and misery were an unchangeable force of nature. But the reality is, people don't have healthcare BECAUSE some people don't want to pay more taxes, and want poor people to stay in a desperate bargaining position so they can be exploited. Some people have less BECAUSE other people have more, and for no good reason besides the fact that our society supports the haves in exploiting the have-nots. It is a choice that our society works this way, and there is another way for things to work, and we must make that choice to change.
Life is not a zero-sum game. The reason why some people have little is not that some people have a lot. This is not something we will agree on.
I agree that the distribution of wealth could be a lot more equitable, but I fundamentally disagree with this idea that "If some people have little, that is only because evil/stupid people don't want them to have more". The world is a lot more complicated than that.
I live in a country with crushingly high taxes. Our public services suck. If it were just a matter of raising taxes, we'd have no issues.
Agreed, life is not always zero-sum, and higher taxes don't always translate to better services.
Let's look at an example of where life is zero-sum, which also happens to be an important battleground that leads to more macro effects: wage negotiations. Clearly it's zero-sum: the firm produces some wealth, and many dollars that aren't paid to wages end up paid to someone with more power in the firm, such as an owner, major shareholder, or executive.
Now, when it comes to negotiating wages, in an oversaturated labor market, workers without a union are in a terrible bargaining position, as they basically have the choice: work or die. This leads to what we see today: horrible exploitation of the people with the least power in society. Lawmakers have, over the years, stripped unions of relative power. This is one of the choices I mentioned, where one group is immiserated precisely in order to let another group hoard more and more money. Now, sure, unions have downsides, and they can be corrupt, but on the whole, US wages have stagnated while production has increased since the 70s, when the US began its forceful destruction of labor power.
The only argument you can make in response is that the system as a whole has to be this way, or else, for example, talented executives won't step up to difficult tasks and things won't get done. I'm sure that, in some cases, this is true, but it's a trade-off, like most other things in economics, and the absolutist way that many people hold this, so that a lot of exploitation is justified to retain this, is murderously excessive, and not based on empirical evidence.
I don't think it does, no. I think our intuition is that it does, because that intuition works pretty well for tribal, hunter-gatherer life, but it doesn't really work in modern society.
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
- John Ehrlichman, Richard Nixon's Chief Domestic Advisor
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Ehrlichman died in 1999, but his five children in questioned the veracity of the account.
“We never saw or heard anything from our dad, John Ehrlichman, that was derogatory about any person of color,” wrote Peter Ehrlichman, Tom Ehrlichman, Jan Ehrlichman, Michael Ehrlichman and Jody E. Pineda in a statement provided to CNN.
“The 1994 alleged ‘quote’ we saw repeated in social media for the first time today does not square with what we know of our father. And collectively, that spans over 185 years of time with him,” the Ehrlichman family wrote. “We do not subscribe to the alleged racist point of view that this writer now implies 22 years following the so-called interview of John and 16 years following our father’s death, when dad can no longer respond. None of us have raised our kids that way, and that’s because we were not raised that way.”
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Just pointing out that your quote is an alleged quote, and may or may not be accurate.
Of course it's a powerful (alleged) quote, but it's far from the only evidence that the War on Drugs is not based, even in principle, on social good, but rather to serve powerful interests such as private prisons and police.
As far as the pushback from the family, I would just say that it wouldn't be the first time that someone is different at work than with his family. The worst people in history still sometimes had families and pets who they treated much better than minorities and political enemies.
Furthermore, Ehrlichman may not have been racist enough to spout it unprompted, the way Nixon is recorded as being. But he would not be the first person on Capitol Hill to be craven enough to go along with racism when it helps them attain or maintain power.
Another fact is that if the statement were made in 1994, there were five years to publish it while Ehrlichman might still be around to dispute it. Oddly enough, another fact is that this didn't come out until Ehrlichman was dead for seventeen years. Stake your reputation on such things if you like, but I think there's better material to use to make the point. Ehrlichman had a lot to answer for, but I'm not willing to pile on in this case based on something someone remembers from twenty years prior.
This is true. Ultimately, you have to multiply by the likelihood that this Dan Baum fellow is honest and has recollected correctly, using either memory or notes.
Curious. I wondered what other children would say about their parents, so I googled someone I know to be reprehensible.
Edda Goering on her father, the famous Hermann Goering:
> "My only memories of him are such loving ones. I cannot see him any other way."
> "The things that happened to the Jews were horrible, but quite separate from my father."
We, of course, are well-informed and know that "the things that happened to the Jews" are not, in fact, "quite separate from her father". I suspect that children of people are not reputable character references.
I don't see this as a counterargument for two reasons.
First, how do the actions of other countries have bearing on what is true about the history of our country?
Second, I don't know the details, but seems to me that powerful people in other countries could, just like the U.S., be reaping political and financial benefits from criminalizing drugs.
No, it is the memory of an interview for a book (which, AFAICT, was never published) back in 1994, and that memory was posted to a Harper's article in 2016 (I mean, it's right there in the URL), long after Ehrlichman was dead. As the inexplicably-downvoted GP comment says, there is no traceable basis for this quote. As far as we know, the author just made it up. The more likely case is that, at best, it is from old interview notes from 1994.
