Niall Ferguson recently said his standard for his kids was that it's okay to use profanity if you bash your head on a kitchen cabinet or miss winning the lottery by one digit, but that it should not be part of your everyday vocabulary. That seems sensible to me.
I loved Aaron Renn’s Reject Vice post, though I agree with Doctor Hammer that alcohol should be on the list. Even churches (including mine) are dropping the torch a bit when it comes to vice. The worst sin these days is to be judgmental.
That's bullshit. People who say and believe this have zero issues with judging people harshly about even minor expressions of sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, about insufficiently self-abasing acknowledgments of privilege, about carbon footprint and wearing masks during corona, and dozens of other things. What is forbidden in their moral framework is e.g. judging women for loose sexual behavior (judging men for loose sexual behavior is much more acceptable and often even laudable).
When people say that they mean the prevailing culture does not permit judgmentalism on the topics you listed but finds it perfectly acceptable to be 'intolerant of intolerance (we don't like)'.
Aaron Renn's list of vices seems a little... oddly selective to me. He leaves off alcohol for instance, which is especially odd considering he includes an aside about how in modern days supply of vices that were the province of the mob are not common place business models. He also mentions TV in passing, but not as a vice... that seemed to be the pass time of the pot head underachiever not too long ago, and still seems to be for those who don't like video games. He talks about sports gambling but doesn't pass judgement on sports watching.
Like a lot of such folks, he seems to be saying "Here's a list of things I don't particularly like that I see other people doing. I think those are bad." Which is fine, whatever, preferences are preferences, but it also isn't a compelling argument for "This is what is wrong with the world" which is what he is pointing at. Don't get crazy doing stupid stuff is a perfectly good point to make, but at the same time there are underlying reasons why people do, and without fixing those reasons people just find other vices.
Social media ought to be on the list too: there's more evidence of its having a large negative impact on human flourishing than anything else on that list. But determinations of what constitutes "vice", Renn's or otherwise, are rarely focused on evidence-- his focus on anecdata, vibes, and traditional prejudices is sadly typical.
That's a good point, and combine with Handle's below probably points to the real issue of focusing on "vice": To some people a little vice can be overwhelming, while to others it is no problem in moderation, so focusing on the vice tends to lead to the thinker just listing off the things they don't like while ignoring many others. The better approach is probably to focus on the individual and their goals, along with their strengths and shortcomings. Telling everyone to abstain from alcohol probably isn't useful to the majority, and makes the message less salient to those few who really do need to stay away from alcohol.
If you only read old novels as I do, you are familiar with the shorthands of "the scoundrel" or "the wastrel", where the writer - say, Trollope or the like - needn't dilate on (or pollute the reader's mind with) much or any detail about the character's vices and iniquities.
We now obviously go into a lot more detail about such things, certainly in fiction where the lurid is paramount, be it genre or literary - in fact most often nastiness is the book - it's the rest that's shorthand - it is even the genre - but also in workaday nonfiction reporting.
But nobody is called a scoundrel or a wastrel anymore. Indeed, the latter term could be applied to so many "protected" things that I assume it would not pass muster, and in any case even if one were allowed to use the term - if life has little value, how much negative value can there be in wasting it?
Perversion is another example. "Perversion" is largely gone from our thinking, and thinking of the ways it is likely to recede further is actually so troubling to people - even to rightthinking, liberal-minded non-judgers, that they in sternest terms tend to refuse to countenance speculation along those lines, about what future thing will be no longer verboten? as nonsense - though simultaneously if the nonsense thing does indeed come along in turn, it will somehow be absorbed unnoticed by them, or upon receipt one morning of an (emailblast? facebook post? slack message?) that makes that influential segment of America know what to believe in what seems to the rest of us an awfully sudden and seemingly coordinated way.
I am so sorry then. I am going to tell you of something terrible. It will make you turn your face away from the screen. If you google it you will feel I reached out and made you marinate in evil.
Dean Corll. America's unsung serial killer.
Am I allowed to mention him because I was a child in the town where he committed his crimes?
If there's a caste system, as one of our commenters asserted although this would unfortunately not fit a Manichean racial schema, this killer's victims didn't belong to a caste that attracted the police's attention and concern. You can have 30 boys disappear from a couple of zip codes over a few short years, and no one will be the least bit curious about it, not even enough to question a single person. This is something, too, that makes me feel, when I think of it once every ten years or so, that even if I didn't have my own little temperamental problems with authority, that I wilI never be able to worship "The Blue" as others do.
It was never talked about that I remember, but you know, I think it contributed to a feeling that ours was a nasty city, just wrong in all its details; and not simply because we almost jocularly accepted the "Murder Capital of the US" title once or twice, or thought we did.
But I think there is something about the perversion, if I may say so, involved - that makes this string of murders fit uneasily into modern conceptions of what is evil - and what is good. People indulge, or play at or especially on the internet, pretend to play at, extreme sexual behavior on the assumption that it is utterly isolated from the subject of virtue.
Scoundrel, wastrel, drunkard, bum, those were (and arguably are) good and useful words. I sometimes wonder over their fall from use over the years as well. I wonder in part if they came to be over used, such that a decent upstanding person who supported himself but was otherwise very poor for whatever reason became called a bum, then people over corrected and refused to call anyone by the name. Or if perhaps the wastrel or scoundrel author/musician became such a popular trope that the words lost meaning.
A common Social Failure Mode is the failure of mechanisms that suppress the class-differentiation fashion cycle in competitive sanctimony and conspicuous status signaling of possessIng more """enlightened""" beliefs and superior preferences than those held by conventional normies. When normal people believe true things about human nature or have typical aesthetic preferences, elites are strongly tempted to show they are more subtle, smart, refined, enlightened, and sophisticated by spouting totally different beliefs and pretending to appreciate truly ugly """art""" and for the purpose of differentiation, the crazier, more outlandish, and more in conflict with experience and common sense, the better, because it means that lower-class / uncool ordinary people will balk at those beliefs and preferences such they cannot easily bring themselves to quickly adopt or copy them, which preserves the fidelity of the signal and avoids having to maintain a high rate of cyclical turnover and "the devil wears prada" trickle-down as one used to see more with sartorial fashions. Not everyone can afford to signal status with wealth, but anyone can pretend they have important intellectual insight you just wouldn't understand that brutalism is actually a high art and isn't actually ugly aesthetic pollution like your lying eyes make you feel when you look at that crap.
If an ordinary square normie knows there are bums and thinks those bums should have to clean up and get a job, then the differentiator has to embrace the bum as an innocent victim and stigmatize the ordinary person for improper stigmatization. The logic of this game causes elites to need to leap frog over each outer in this regard, leading to a kind of social singularity which ends in the embrace of ideas that must be the very opposite of reality - as far out on the crazy spectrum as one can get - and which when taken seriously and implemented can only result in human misery and disaster.
Unfortunately when one tries to figure out how one might put a stop to this perverse and pernicious phenomenon to substitute for the extinct cultural institutions which used to perform this function, the effective equivalent of sumptuary laws for luxury beliefs - it's hard to think of anything that wouldn't constitute a totally radical departure from current patterns of social organization, influence, and governance.
In Christian European history - and my impression is especially prior to the Reformation - I think the Catholic and Orthodox churches played a critical role in jealously guarding and enforcing their monopoly authority over matters of interpretation of scripture (e.g, the magisterium), with a hierarchical bureacracy to hear, adjudicate, and set uniform answers to new questions, and in a context that made it quite risky for anyone to express contrary moral values as being superior. Having this kind of religious-judicial-educational range of sovereign authority as a kind of exclusive property right and based in a foundational text impossible to edit took a lot of possibilities off the table and lowered the incentive for elites to status signal in that way as opposed to other easier and more typical ways, usually related to impressive displays of wealth, capability, and aesthetic taste. I suspect one could find parallels in the history of other times and places, the Islamic Empires for sure, and I think some East Asian and Roman history. The role of custom and tradition when intensely compelling to the members of some society also tends to perform this function by setting up a framework of risks of ostracization, disapprobation, etc. Furthermore, to the extent social conditions changed slowly and traditions survived because having emerged out of an evolutionary circumstance of trial and error while facing intense competition pressures, those traditions were presumably well-adapted to those human circumstances and perpetuating those cultural institutions produced widely- enjoyed benefits across classes and thus aligned with the interests in a way that would have made people more respectful of them, appreciative of their embedded 'wisdom' and more leery about what would happen if it were challenged to the point it all came undone. I think also the fact that elites used to focus mostly on impressing each other without the democratic-ethos-inspired tendency to try to show off with purportedly more righteous and enlightened greater concern for peasants apart from what maintains an orderly and productive domain with enough internal solidarity for collective defense. There was also something to the limited- access order for nobility, as the impossibility of entering the aristocracy except by marriage and birth (or exceptional service or aachievements) reduced (perhaps 'repressed') the incentive to even try by means of such moves in these belief signaling games.
I'm sure there's a lot more to it, and the subject deserves it's own comprehensive, cross-cultural scholarly exploration as a high priority research project to provide actionable strategic insight for the regime ruling the society that will replace our dying one. This is probably intimately related to priority research project 2 of how to prevent beneficial and competent institutions from getting captured, corrupted, and then crappy at their missions.
A wrinkle to all this is that the replacement of religion with """Science""" with the status of what I call the 'Trans-magisterium' makes it hard or perhaps even impossible in a a Neitzschean sense to try to resuscitate the effective functioning any of those former institutions in their traditional forms, short of a permanent restoration of strongly-held and explicitly religious sentiments. There may be second-best substitutes, for example in the form of direct hard power of Chinese Authoritarian panopticon, social credit, and cultural engineering, or in indirect and impersonal soft power of requirements to put Hansonian skin-in-the-game in a large numbers of domain-specific markets to force people to be held personally accountable for their claims and consequences of the implementation of their professed beliefs before they are allowed to do or say anything. But it seems to me that while both of those approaches might 'work' to some degree in terms of successfully solving a lot of the problem, they are simultaneously admissions of failure to sustain the more seemingly-natural and organic ways that our ancestral high trust society was somehow able to accomplish some of these functions, and I fear it will be difficult to emerge from a kind of "middle trust trap" akin to the "middle income trap" if these post-trust-collapse mitigation measures provide a tolerably "good enough" cope so that regime leaders simply resign themselves to such conditions and lack the will to take on the duty of civilizing moral uplift more conducive to reaching the highest potential for human flourishing.
He calls abstaining from alcohol a trendy anti-vice movement, so perhaps he would put it in the category of vices related to excess and which are better handled by moderation instead of blanket prohibition, which seems pretty reasonable to me.
People are so different with regards to vices that there is no good answer if one has to have a rule equally applicable to everyone, and you are always going to under-regulate some people and over-regulate others. It's a judgement call based on observing human reactions in the context of those humans being enmeshed in a set of economic and technological conditions and a particular scene of social pressure and cultural institutions which may assist with moderation or promote self-destructive abuse. Different cultures had different experiences and settled in every place along the spectrum from encouragement to indifference to "Absolutely Haram!" Everything causes some people some trouble, and there are always some people who can effortlessly brush off a megadose of whatever with no apparent compulsion to do it again or negative impact on their lives. There are some pleasures most people have little trouble enjoying in moderation with minor bad consequences. There are others that most people have major trouble moderating after they get started and hooked on the sensation, and they consistently and repeatedly get themselves and those around them into a lot of miserable trouble, i.e., it takes over and ruins their lives.
Alcohol is kind of an odd man out with the rest of this list because of thousands of years of experience and history during which many cultural and biological adaptations were developed. In general, it's much, much easier to moderate ones participation in any vice when you are under the watch of other people who share common values and notions of excess and limitation learned from social exposure to messages developed over generations of experience with that vice - and who will look out for you and apply nudges and social pressure to keep you from going too far. People tend to use "peer pressure" in a negative way as if your peers are only going to push you to do bad things you otherwise wouldn't. Sometimes that's true. But just as important is the peer pressure that keeps you from getting out of control. Alcohol consumption obviously causes tons of problems, but there are also a number of good solutions that in the nature of things are neither needed by everybody nor work equally well for those who do need them. On the other hand, alcohol is not just some problem, but as expressed in Soggy's famous "if by whiskey" speech, in its own special way, a solution to other human problems.
The special problem with many of the other vices on that list is that it only recently became easy and legally-low risk for anybody to indulge compulsively in them while completely alone, and to selectively socialize with physical and online communities that tend to encourage people to go to brain-warping extremes to chase the feeling of that first-time thrill's ultimate intensity, sometimes inadvertently, but sometimes enthusiastically.
You say a lot of things that don't address my my question. If you actually do address it, I've missed that part completely.
In Renn's piece which Kling draws his quote from, Renn speaks of reducing harm. I would argue that alcohol causes more harm than all the things on Renn's list combined. So again, why doesn't moderation apply to these other things? It seems clear to me Renn's opinion on what is acceptable today is largely based on what was generally acceptable when he was a younger person.
I think you are hitting on, or at least towards, the problem with focusing on vice itself: there are not universal responses to vice, but rather individuals are particularly prone to falling prey to certain vices and not others. So saying "stay away from X because it is dangerous!" (literally or figuratively) is not terribly useful, as those who can indulge without problems make it look like you are overreacting, and the people who absolutely should not indulge due to their personal nature will ignore you as a result. Better to focus on the individual and their life outcomes, instead of talking about vice as though smoking your life away with pot is worse than pissing it away with alcohol. The problem is that a person is wrecking their life, not so much the means by which they are doing so.
Trump inspired one of the largest political demonstrations in American history after his first election - the "Pussy Hat" demonstration. This huge event attracted hundreds of thousands of women, but had little focus and no effect on politics or policy. If there are demonstrations after Trump wins a second term, I predict that they will - again - be mostly women and mostly ineffectual. the class of young men who in former times undertook violent rioting in response to political changes won't make the effort to haul their large rear ends out of their gaming chairs, or abandon their private paradises of porn, pot, games and science fiction for the pleasures of running around the streets and starting fires. But the women will, indeed, get out of the house and go demonstrate, if only to socialize and see what others are wearing.
I wish I could agree, but I suspect the riots after a Trump victory would resemble the George Floyd protests on steroids, and they will be passively encouraged by the lame duck administration from November to January 20th. The only real comforting thought is that the Democrats will be burning down their own homes and businesses as was the case in 2020.
"217 people were arrested and six police officers suffered minor injuries after some protesters set fires and smashed windows in the nation's capital."
"July 6, 2018, 7:48 PM EDT / Updated July 6, 2018, 7:48 PM EDT / Source: The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Federal prosecutors on Friday moved to drop charges against the last 39 people accused of participating in a violent protest on the day of President Donald Trump's inauguration.
The motion to dismiss charges by the U.S. attorney's office seemingly ends an 18-month saga that started with the Justice Department attempting to convict more than 190 people.
That effort saw the government facing off against an intensely coordinated grassroots political opposition network that made Washington the focus of a nationwide support campaign — offering free lodging for defendants, legal coordination and other support.
Members of that activist network were declaring victory on Friday.
"This is huge news," said Dylan Petrohilos, a Washington-based activist who was one of the original defendants, but had his charges dropped earlier this year. "The solidarity we showed as defendants won out."
More than 200 people were arrested after the protest, during which several store windows were broken and a parked limo set ablaze. Two group trials ended in defeats for the U.S. Attorney's Office, which was hindered by the fact that most protesters wore similar black clothing and covered their faces."
Aren't there legions of black and Hispanic men who actually like Trump this time around? Seems that would undermine the notion of violent protest all around the country. Unless it's just a bunch of crusty white antifa types?
Disdain for a Republican president doesn't seem to kick off that scary nationwide city burning in the same way a black male being killed does.
Regardless of whether your first sentence is sarcasm or meant seriously, the very real growth of numbers of blacks and hispanics supporting Trump still leaves the total percent rather small. Still, your point remains. While a Trump win is likely to result in protests in the streets, how violent are those protests likely to be?
".....the moral dyad that pervades the social justice mindset" (I like the phrase). Prior to the 60s, there was another kind of dyad....a latent sense that everyone (including oneself) has a 'good side' and a 'bad side'. A sense that we are all capable of good deeds but also that all of us are prone to sin and error. The Social Justice mindset could be seen as a kind of outsourcing of the 'sin and error' part of the dyad from oneself to some abstraction (some xyzism). You personally then get to maximise your 'self esteem'.
Statement: Even if the attacks on Israel on Oct 7 were excessive, the Palestinians are justified in their struggle — which sometimes includes violence — as they live under dire conditions with limited political rights. This situation is a result of Israel's actions.
Question: Does the Palestinian leadership share some blame? And if so, does some of that blame extend to the Palestinian populace who've elected, those leaders?
Statement: No, the Palestinian people have been cornered. They've faced oppression for years. While the Palestinian leadership may share some blame, they are largely a product of the conditions Israel has imposed.
Question: Which conditions has Israel imposed?
Statement: Such as the blockade on Gaza and restrictions on the freedom of movement for the Palestinian people.
Question: As the Palestinians act under these constraints, are the Israelis also responding to their own circumstances, like feeling threatened or unsafe? couldn't the Israelis have concerns that a militarized Palestine might pose an existential threat?
Statement: No, the Israelis are not the oppressed party. The Israelis arrived and claimed Palestinian land. They should be ready to face the consequences of that risk. They had choices to make. Being the dominant power, they should’ve granted Palestinians full political rights.
Question: So, by this logic, if you're oppressed, your actions are entirely reactive and without agency? when the Jews migrated in large numbers post World War 2, weren't they fleeing persecution and oppression?
One rather doubts the Pentagon would be any more responsive to Trump than it was while he was President. If news accounts can be believed, he apparently requested national guard protection at the Capitol for January 6, 2020 but was refused. https://americanmilitarynews.com/2022/08/gen-kellogg-trump-did-request-natl-guard-troops-on-jan-6th-asks-congress-to-release-his-testimony/ It seems as if the Pentagon generals conduct their own private foreign policies. The problem of an unchecked and unbalanced Pentagon seems underrated. One doesn't really have to strain one's imagination to envision a war with China in which the Chair of the Joints Chief of Staff independently cuts a truce deal in which the Pentagon takes over control. What "checks and balances" would prevent such an event? Devolving national defense responsibilities to the states seems like a prudent measure and perhaps we would have fewer of these national embarrassments in which third world militias defeat us. For crying out loud, the Houthis are winning the war in the Red Sea and have effectively shut down that shipping route.
Deep State NatSec staff routinely boasted about thwarting Trump's attempts to control troop deployments.
Their perfidy was likely the major reason behind the Afghan bug-out disaster as they were conspiring to retain a significant operational bases in Bagram and the US embassy in Kabul but didn't have sufficient forces in place to retrograde from Kabul via Bagram. Since inserting *more* forces to safeguard the pullout would have been bad optics for Biden that plan was rejected for an abandonment of Bagram with its equipment stores and the fraught extrication via AKIA in Kabul
I don't think it would make any difference. Rioting is a federal crime (chapter 102) and I believe there are other statutory provisions besides the insurrection act, and (said to be) consistent with prohibition of congressionally unauthorized posse comitatus, that permit the president - perhaps upon declaration of emergency, or upon a state governor's request - to use military forces to enforce federal law when necessary.
Point is, when it hits the fan badly, even without a statute, the president is probably within his constitutional authorities to do what is necessary to restore public order.
Public order is such a local function. It's really hard to conceive of of anything that would genuinely warrant Federal intervention in local protests. The protests after MLK's assassination x 10?
Sure it is. It is property in the city and city police are suppose to protect lives and property in the city. If the FEderal government wants to provide more protection that it is getting, sure they can sent in reinforcements. That has nothing to do with "Insurrection."
"What rejecting vice means to me is: no porn, no pot, no gambling, no video games, no tattoos, no profanity."
It is an interesting list. Why is pot on the list but not alcohol or cigarettes? Why tattoos but not piercings? Shouldn't dancing and premarital sex be on the list too? (lol)
As someone who can be fairly potty-mouthed, but also a zealous defender of dignity and table manners, I find profanity to be rhetorically useful in a way that's similar to how conjunctions are useful...inelegant, perhaps undignified, but effective as part of a colloquial style.
If you live in a "youthful" city, you will find that swear words - and really, just two of them, this is not a world reminiscent of whichever writer you prefer for colorful profanity - have crowded out *most other* words in the speech of people you will hear on the street, or in the store, or wherever.
And: people in my orbit at least, especially those whom age and infirmity have made TV something necessary, have noticed that those screenwriters who so piously went on strike for their underappreciated craft - seem more and more to not be giving us our money's worth, if a head-to-head comparison were made between movie or TV screenplays of most any era, and now. By money's worth, I mean: it's as though you get half a script, to enjoy, were you to consider all the profanity as filler where thoughts or at least a variety of original words used to be.
I don't watch much TV, but I watched "Slow Horses" and found it funny and entertaining, if ridiculous and mostly sanitized and boring in its tediously predictable plot machinery. You watch it for some of the actors, the setting, the pacing, and the occasional quip. You do not watch it for the writing, except in the sense that you watched it at all and 90% of everything else produced wouldn't even clear that bar. Or in the sense that there are one or two words that it gives you pleasure to hear incanted ad infinitum.
Sure, I guess I'm just not sure how that's specific to profanity. There's a proliferation of bad, boring and formulaic content. Cursing can certainly comprise part of that picture, but I don't think it is the picture. The success of noir created a surplus of "hard boiled" Hammett-lite prose too...and 80s action movies were formulaic and boring for different reasons.
80s action movies were often boring, and the comedies often weren't very funny. And the women's hair and those awful high-necked blouses and shoulder pads, well, I digress ...
But they didn't demand any 12 hours of your time, or announce their importance.
Same. And those can be rhetorically useful signals of informality, but also cues to orient the reader on what comes next, eg skepticism. Plus, sometimes invoking the meme is itself an information dense packet
Regarding the use of profanity and coarse language, now ubiquitous, my late father (d. 1947) used to say that it showed that a person was ignorant and lacked the ability to use the language. The repetitious use of obscenities - one overhears conversations in which every other word seems to be the "f" word - adds little or nothing to what is being said, and indeed, is a distraction from it for intelligent listeners. Statements made with the knowledgeable use of language can be much more powerful and effective than those disfigured with crude epithets.
Well, as someone who uses profanity (although not so much in my writing), I can assure you it has little to do with my gift of gab. I understand the perspective, but I suppose that I'm suggesting that using profanity actually reflects an even more proficient grasp of language (similar to how Shakespearean characters used profanity, as well, depending on context and station).
I think Aaron Renn's actual post is more moderate than the lead-in paragraph would indicate, but it makes too much of middle class sins while ignoring the churning carnival of bad behavior in the lower social strata. Tsk tsking the mostly-nice fat boys for their small vices is easy, especially if you are a soft, bald, sensitive denizen of a HOA. It's trivial to skewer the bad behavior of the average fat slob, but try doing the same thing to women, the poor, and other such sacred cows in Our Democracy.
On the Trump thing: Arnold, you've acknowledged before how bad Trump's character is, so I continue to be perplexed by how much charity you're according him. In what plausible universe would his suppression of post-election protests be motivated by "just trying to keep the country together"? When has he ever had such a disinterestedly pro-social impulse in his entire life? And how is it unreasonable to worry about fascism coming from a leader who (a) has *explicitly stated* that he intends to be a dictator and (b) has argued in court that Presidents should be absolutely immune from prosecution, i.e. above the law, to the point that they could order their political opponents killed with impunity as long as it's an "official act"?
I can understand claiming, for example, that leftist activists would foment riots even against an actually prosocial and rule-of-law-promoting conservative elected President. But implying that Trump might be such a leader is delusional, and you shouldn't need to be either sympathetic to the left or opposed to his policy positions to see that.
Yep, and I'm aware that there was some foolish leftist overreaction to GWB during that time (and that GWB himself indulged in his own version of fascism-scaremongering to justify the Iraq invasion). But the moral of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" is not that wolves don't exist; and when people tell us who they are, it isn't uncharitable to believe them.
When it comes to China, Smith has gone off the deep end, as evidenced by his recent piece advocating nuclear proliferation to Japan and S. Korea.
I get that he's obsessed with Japan, but the weeb population is not a large enough special interest group that other Americans are going to put the interests of the Asian democracies so far ahead of our own national interests.
Smith has derangement syndrome I grant you. It's ironic that he wants to create Chinese style censorship regimes just with his people in charge.
But Japan, Korea, and Taiwan getting nukes is a good idea. Poland too.
A conventional war in the South China Sea would be terrible. Everyone knowing that there is a 0% chance of it not going nuclear would prevent that.
I agree that if you want to make a move like that, you've got to have a very different foreign policy (one that obviously isn't trying to overthrow governments throughout Eurasia whenever you get the chance).
Proliferating to Taiwan would surely provoke an immediate conventional war in the SCS as the Chinese would try to pre-empt it. (They don't currently believe that a war there would go nuclear if the US controls the nukes, and they're probably correct about that.)
And in all these cases, one has to think about the long-run consequences of proliferation. Yes over the next couple decades the results of just those countries arming would likely be positive. But Russia and China would then get us back by proliferating to other countries in ways that would harm us.
Or one of those countries could have a coup or some other change away from benign leadership. The fewer nuclear powers there are, the better, at least from the standpoint of US interests.
"Proliferating to Taiwan would surely provoke an immediate conventional war in the SCS as the Chinese would try to pre-empt it"
That's the best argument against it.
But it's kind of like saying "don't defend yourself so you don't get bullied."
In general I think that countries in East Asia should simply develop these weapons on their own (Japan for instance could do it easily, and if China invaded Japan over it then I think war was bound to happen anyway).
Believe me, I have some sympathy fir your view here. I see the USA as by far the aggressor around the world compared to China, and such precedent makes it hard to engage in any kind of escalation like having Taiwan get nukes.
"They don't currently believe that a war there would go nuclear if the US controls the nukes, and they're probably correct about that."
Then we've already lost. That leaves open the possibility of a conventional war, which we automatically lose (even if we win).
I want China to believe that a war would go nuclear immediately, thus making invasion of Taiwan futile. The same way we made the Soviets believe that a tank rush into western Germany would go nuclear.
I don't think you can make them believe that, but it is reasonable to try to create enough uncertainty about it that they would be reluctant to attack. Of course there is a delicate balancing act between achieving that goal on the one hand, and making a nuclear war more likely on the other.
I think you're right that Japan could get away with it. Maybe it's true that this would serve their self-interest, but it would be bad enough for the US and the global nonproliferation regime that I'd say we should create negative consequences for them if they do it. If they try to build nukes they should be treated no different from Iran.
If it is, then why is the lesson currently being taught on the international arena that you can do whatever you want to non-nuclear states with virtual impunity (I don't count loud imprecations and exclusion of your flag from Olympics as constituting real harm) as long as you're a nuclear power?
I'm not sure anyone needed to be taught that lesson, since it's obviously true. This is just the reality, and that's part of why the nuclear states (us included) have strong reasons to prevent proliferation.
That said, Russia has paid a serious price for starting this war, enough that it seems to me that deterrence in the region stands pretty strong now.
"What rejecting vice means to me is: no porn, no pot, no gambling, no video games, no tattoos, no profanity."
But plenty of alcohol and sugar ???
Niall Ferguson recently said his standard for his kids was that it's okay to use profanity if you bash your head on a kitchen cabinet or miss winning the lottery by one digit, but that it should not be part of your everyday vocabulary. That seems sensible to me.
I loved Aaron Renn’s Reject Vice post, though I agree with Doctor Hammer that alcohol should be on the list. Even churches (including mine) are dropping the torch a bit when it comes to vice. The worst sin these days is to be judgmental.
> The worst sin these days is to be judgmental.
That's bullshit. People who say and believe this have zero issues with judging people harshly about even minor expressions of sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, about insufficiently self-abasing acknowledgments of privilege, about carbon footprint and wearing masks during corona, and dozens of other things. What is forbidden in their moral framework is e.g. judging women for loose sexual behavior (judging men for loose sexual behavior is much more acceptable and often even laudable).
Quit being obtuse.
When people say that they mean the prevailing culture does not permit judgmentalism on the topics you listed but finds it perfectly acceptable to be 'intolerant of intolerance (we don't like)'.
Generally agreed. Judgement isn't optional; the moral hurdle is developing good judgement, or at least better judgement over time.
"The worst sin these days is to be judgmental."
according to whom? judgmental people?
See my reply to Candide.
Aaron Renn's list of vices seems a little... oddly selective to me. He leaves off alcohol for instance, which is especially odd considering he includes an aside about how in modern days supply of vices that were the province of the mob are not common place business models. He also mentions TV in passing, but not as a vice... that seemed to be the pass time of the pot head underachiever not too long ago, and still seems to be for those who don't like video games. He talks about sports gambling but doesn't pass judgement on sports watching.
Like a lot of such folks, he seems to be saying "Here's a list of things I don't particularly like that I see other people doing. I think those are bad." Which is fine, whatever, preferences are preferences, but it also isn't a compelling argument for "This is what is wrong with the world" which is what he is pointing at. Don't get crazy doing stupid stuff is a perfectly good point to make, but at the same time there are underlying reasons why people do, and without fixing those reasons people just find other vices.
Social media ought to be on the list too: there's more evidence of its having a large negative impact on human flourishing than anything else on that list. But determinations of what constitutes "vice", Renn's or otherwise, are rarely focused on evidence-- his focus on anecdata, vibes, and traditional prejudices is sadly typical.
That's a good point, and combine with Handle's below probably points to the real issue of focusing on "vice": To some people a little vice can be overwhelming, while to others it is no problem in moderation, so focusing on the vice tends to lead to the thinker just listing off the things they don't like while ignoring many others. The better approach is probably to focus on the individual and their goals, along with their strengths and shortcomings. Telling everyone to abstain from alcohol probably isn't useful to the majority, and makes the message less salient to those few who really do need to stay away from alcohol.
If you only read old novels as I do, you are familiar with the shorthands of "the scoundrel" or "the wastrel", where the writer - say, Trollope or the like - needn't dilate on (or pollute the reader's mind with) much or any detail about the character's vices and iniquities.
We now obviously go into a lot more detail about such things, certainly in fiction where the lurid is paramount, be it genre or literary - in fact most often nastiness is the book - it's the rest that's shorthand - it is even the genre - but also in workaday nonfiction reporting.
But nobody is called a scoundrel or a wastrel anymore. Indeed, the latter term could be applied to so many "protected" things that I assume it would not pass muster, and in any case even if one were allowed to use the term - if life has little value, how much negative value can there be in wasting it?
Perversion is another example. "Perversion" is largely gone from our thinking, and thinking of the ways it is likely to recede further is actually so troubling to people - even to rightthinking, liberal-minded non-judgers, that they in sternest terms tend to refuse to countenance speculation along those lines, about what future thing will be no longer verboten? as nonsense - though simultaneously if the nonsense thing does indeed come along in turn, it will somehow be absorbed unnoticed by them, or upon receipt one morning of an (emailblast? facebook post? slack message?) that makes that influential segment of America know what to believe in what seems to the rest of us an awfully sudden and seemingly coordinated way.
I am so sorry then. I am going to tell you of something terrible. It will make you turn your face away from the screen. If you google it you will feel I reached out and made you marinate in evil.
Dean Corll. America's unsung serial killer.
Am I allowed to mention him because I was a child in the town where he committed his crimes?
If there's a caste system, as one of our commenters asserted although this would unfortunately not fit a Manichean racial schema, this killer's victims didn't belong to a caste that attracted the police's attention and concern. You can have 30 boys disappear from a couple of zip codes over a few short years, and no one will be the least bit curious about it, not even enough to question a single person. This is something, too, that makes me feel, when I think of it once every ten years or so, that even if I didn't have my own little temperamental problems with authority, that I wilI never be able to worship "The Blue" as others do.
It was never talked about that I remember, but you know, I think it contributed to a feeling that ours was a nasty city, just wrong in all its details; and not simply because we almost jocularly accepted the "Murder Capital of the US" title once or twice, or thought we did.
But I think there is something about the perversion, if I may say so, involved - that makes this string of murders fit uneasily into modern conceptions of what is evil - and what is good. People indulge, or play at or especially on the internet, pretend to play at, extreme sexual behavior on the assumption that it is utterly isolated from the subject of virtue.
Scoundrel, wastrel, drunkard, bum, those were (and arguably are) good and useful words. I sometimes wonder over their fall from use over the years as well. I wonder in part if they came to be over used, such that a decent upstanding person who supported himself but was otherwise very poor for whatever reason became called a bum, then people over corrected and refused to call anyone by the name. Or if perhaps the wastrel or scoundrel author/musician became such a popular trope that the words lost meaning.
A common Social Failure Mode is the failure of mechanisms that suppress the class-differentiation fashion cycle in competitive sanctimony and conspicuous status signaling of possessIng more """enlightened""" beliefs and superior preferences than those held by conventional normies. When normal people believe true things about human nature or have typical aesthetic preferences, elites are strongly tempted to show they are more subtle, smart, refined, enlightened, and sophisticated by spouting totally different beliefs and pretending to appreciate truly ugly """art""" and for the purpose of differentiation, the crazier, more outlandish, and more in conflict with experience and common sense, the better, because it means that lower-class / uncool ordinary people will balk at those beliefs and preferences such they cannot easily bring themselves to quickly adopt or copy them, which preserves the fidelity of the signal and avoids having to maintain a high rate of cyclical turnover and "the devil wears prada" trickle-down as one used to see more with sartorial fashions. Not everyone can afford to signal status with wealth, but anyone can pretend they have important intellectual insight you just wouldn't understand that brutalism is actually a high art and isn't actually ugly aesthetic pollution like your lying eyes make you feel when you look at that crap.
If an ordinary square normie knows there are bums and thinks those bums should have to clean up and get a job, then the differentiator has to embrace the bum as an innocent victim and stigmatize the ordinary person for improper stigmatization. The logic of this game causes elites to need to leap frog over each outer in this regard, leading to a kind of social singularity which ends in the embrace of ideas that must be the very opposite of reality - as far out on the crazy spectrum as one can get - and which when taken seriously and implemented can only result in human misery and disaster.
Unfortunately when one tries to figure out how one might put a stop to this perverse and pernicious phenomenon to substitute for the extinct cultural institutions which used to perform this function, the effective equivalent of sumptuary laws for luxury beliefs - it's hard to think of anything that wouldn't constitute a totally radical departure from current patterns of social organization, influence, and governance.
What mechanisms and institutions were these?
In Christian European history - and my impression is especially prior to the Reformation - I think the Catholic and Orthodox churches played a critical role in jealously guarding and enforcing their monopoly authority over matters of interpretation of scripture (e.g, the magisterium), with a hierarchical bureacracy to hear, adjudicate, and set uniform answers to new questions, and in a context that made it quite risky for anyone to express contrary moral values as being superior. Having this kind of religious-judicial-educational range of sovereign authority as a kind of exclusive property right and based in a foundational text impossible to edit took a lot of possibilities off the table and lowered the incentive for elites to status signal in that way as opposed to other easier and more typical ways, usually related to impressive displays of wealth, capability, and aesthetic taste. I suspect one could find parallels in the history of other times and places, the Islamic Empires for sure, and I think some East Asian and Roman history. The role of custom and tradition when intensely compelling to the members of some society also tends to perform this function by setting up a framework of risks of ostracization, disapprobation, etc. Furthermore, to the extent social conditions changed slowly and traditions survived because having emerged out of an evolutionary circumstance of trial and error while facing intense competition pressures, those traditions were presumably well-adapted to those human circumstances and perpetuating those cultural institutions produced widely- enjoyed benefits across classes and thus aligned with the interests in a way that would have made people more respectful of them, appreciative of their embedded 'wisdom' and more leery about what would happen if it were challenged to the point it all came undone. I think also the fact that elites used to focus mostly on impressing each other without the democratic-ethos-inspired tendency to try to show off with purportedly more righteous and enlightened greater concern for peasants apart from what maintains an orderly and productive domain with enough internal solidarity for collective defense. There was also something to the limited- access order for nobility, as the impossibility of entering the aristocracy except by marriage and birth (or exceptional service or aachievements) reduced (perhaps 'repressed') the incentive to even try by means of such moves in these belief signaling games.
I'm sure there's a lot more to it, and the subject deserves it's own comprehensive, cross-cultural scholarly exploration as a high priority research project to provide actionable strategic insight for the regime ruling the society that will replace our dying one. This is probably intimately related to priority research project 2 of how to prevent beneficial and competent institutions from getting captured, corrupted, and then crappy at their missions.
A wrinkle to all this is that the replacement of religion with """Science""" with the status of what I call the 'Trans-magisterium' makes it hard or perhaps even impossible in a a Neitzschean sense to try to resuscitate the effective functioning any of those former institutions in their traditional forms, short of a permanent restoration of strongly-held and explicitly religious sentiments. There may be second-best substitutes, for example in the form of direct hard power of Chinese Authoritarian panopticon, social credit, and cultural engineering, or in indirect and impersonal soft power of requirements to put Hansonian skin-in-the-game in a large numbers of domain-specific markets to force people to be held personally accountable for their claims and consequences of the implementation of their professed beliefs before they are allowed to do or say anything. But it seems to me that while both of those approaches might 'work' to some degree in terms of successfully solving a lot of the problem, they are simultaneously admissions of failure to sustain the more seemingly-natural and organic ways that our ancestral high trust society was somehow able to accomplish some of these functions, and I fear it will be difficult to emerge from a kind of "middle trust trap" akin to the "middle income trap" if these post-trust-collapse mitigation measures provide a tolerably "good enough" cope so that regime leaders simply resign themselves to such conditions and lack the will to take on the duty of civilizing moral uplift more conducive to reaching the highest potential for human flourishing.
He calls abstaining from alcohol a trendy anti-vice movement, so perhaps he would put it in the category of vices related to excess and which are better handled by moderation instead of blanket prohibition, which seems pretty reasonable to me.
why doesn't moderation apply to other things?
People are so different with regards to vices that there is no good answer if one has to have a rule equally applicable to everyone, and you are always going to under-regulate some people and over-regulate others. It's a judgement call based on observing human reactions in the context of those humans being enmeshed in a set of economic and technological conditions and a particular scene of social pressure and cultural institutions which may assist with moderation or promote self-destructive abuse. Different cultures had different experiences and settled in every place along the spectrum from encouragement to indifference to "Absolutely Haram!" Everything causes some people some trouble, and there are always some people who can effortlessly brush off a megadose of whatever with no apparent compulsion to do it again or negative impact on their lives. There are some pleasures most people have little trouble enjoying in moderation with minor bad consequences. There are others that most people have major trouble moderating after they get started and hooked on the sensation, and they consistently and repeatedly get themselves and those around them into a lot of miserable trouble, i.e., it takes over and ruins their lives.
Alcohol is kind of an odd man out with the rest of this list because of thousands of years of experience and history during which many cultural and biological adaptations were developed. In general, it's much, much easier to moderate ones participation in any vice when you are under the watch of other people who share common values and notions of excess and limitation learned from social exposure to messages developed over generations of experience with that vice - and who will look out for you and apply nudges and social pressure to keep you from going too far. People tend to use "peer pressure" in a negative way as if your peers are only going to push you to do bad things you otherwise wouldn't. Sometimes that's true. But just as important is the peer pressure that keeps you from getting out of control. Alcohol consumption obviously causes tons of problems, but there are also a number of good solutions that in the nature of things are neither needed by everybody nor work equally well for those who do need them. On the other hand, alcohol is not just some problem, but as expressed in Soggy's famous "if by whiskey" speech, in its own special way, a solution to other human problems.
The special problem with many of the other vices on that list is that it only recently became easy and legally-low risk for anybody to indulge compulsively in them while completely alone, and to selectively socialize with physical and online communities that tend to encourage people to go to brain-warping extremes to chase the feeling of that first-time thrill's ultimate intensity, sometimes inadvertently, but sometimes enthusiastically.
You say a lot of things that don't address my my question. If you actually do address it, I've missed that part completely.
In Renn's piece which Kling draws his quote from, Renn speaks of reducing harm. I would argue that alcohol causes more harm than all the things on Renn's list combined. So again, why doesn't moderation apply to these other things? It seems clear to me Renn's opinion on what is acceptable today is largely based on what was generally acceptable when he was a younger person.
I think you are hitting on, or at least towards, the problem with focusing on vice itself: there are not universal responses to vice, but rather individuals are particularly prone to falling prey to certain vices and not others. So saying "stay away from X because it is dangerous!" (literally or figuratively) is not terribly useful, as those who can indulge without problems make it look like you are overreacting, and the people who absolutely should not indulge due to their personal nature will ignore you as a result. Better to focus on the individual and their life outcomes, instead of talking about vice as though smoking your life away with pot is worse than pissing it away with alcohol. The problem is that a person is wrecking their life, not so much the means by which they are doing so.
Trump inspired one of the largest political demonstrations in American history after his first election - the "Pussy Hat" demonstration. This huge event attracted hundreds of thousands of women, but had little focus and no effect on politics or policy. If there are demonstrations after Trump wins a second term, I predict that they will - again - be mostly women and mostly ineffectual. the class of young men who in former times undertook violent rioting in response to political changes won't make the effort to haul their large rear ends out of their gaming chairs, or abandon their private paradises of porn, pot, games and science fiction for the pleasures of running around the streets and starting fires. But the women will, indeed, get out of the house and go demonstrate, if only to socialize and see what others are wearing.
I wish I could agree, but I suspect the riots after a Trump victory would resemble the George Floyd protests on steroids, and they will be passively encouraged by the lame duck administration from November to January 20th. The only real comforting thought is that the Democrats will be burning down their own homes and businesses as was the case in 2020.
https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/inauguration-2017/washington-faces-more-anti-trump-protests-after-day-rage-n709946
"217 people were arrested and six police officers suffered minor injuries after some protesters set fires and smashed windows in the nation's capital."
and of course, some protests are regime approved
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/government-drops-charges-against-all-inauguration-protesters-n889531
"July 6, 2018, 7:48 PM EDT / Updated July 6, 2018, 7:48 PM EDT / Source: The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Federal prosecutors on Friday moved to drop charges against the last 39 people accused of participating in a violent protest on the day of President Donald Trump's inauguration.
The motion to dismiss charges by the U.S. attorney's office seemingly ends an 18-month saga that started with the Justice Department attempting to convict more than 190 people.
That effort saw the government facing off against an intensely coordinated grassroots political opposition network that made Washington the focus of a nationwide support campaign — offering free lodging for defendants, legal coordination and other support.
Members of that activist network were declaring victory on Friday.
"This is huge news," said Dylan Petrohilos, a Washington-based activist who was one of the original defendants, but had his charges dropped earlier this year. "The solidarity we showed as defendants won out."
More than 200 people were arrested after the protest, during which several store windows were broken and a parked limo set ablaze. Two group trials ended in defeats for the U.S. Attorney's Office, which was hindered by the fact that most protesters wore similar black clothing and covered their faces."
Aren't there legions of black and Hispanic men who actually like Trump this time around? Seems that would undermine the notion of violent protest all around the country. Unless it's just a bunch of crusty white antifa types?
Disdain for a Republican president doesn't seem to kick off that scary nationwide city burning in the same way a black male being killed does.
Regardless of whether your first sentence is sarcasm or meant seriously, the very real growth of numbers of blacks and hispanics supporting Trump still leaves the total percent rather small. Still, your point remains. While a Trump win is likely to result in protests in the streets, how violent are those protests likely to be?
Judging by the response to his first inauguration (see below), quite violent.
The vast majority of 'George Floyd' protestors were white liberals. See the Kenosa riots and Kyle Rittenhouse trial.
".....the moral dyad that pervades the social justice mindset" (I like the phrase). Prior to the 60s, there was another kind of dyad....a latent sense that everyone (including oneself) has a 'good side' and a 'bad side'. A sense that we are all capable of good deeds but also that all of us are prone to sin and error. The Social Justice mindset could be seen as a kind of outsourcing of the 'sin and error' part of the dyad from oneself to some abstraction (some xyzism). You personally then get to maximise your 'self esteem'.
Statement: Even if the attacks on Israel on Oct 7 were excessive, the Palestinians are justified in their struggle — which sometimes includes violence — as they live under dire conditions with limited political rights. This situation is a result of Israel's actions.
Question: Does the Palestinian leadership share some blame? And if so, does some of that blame extend to the Palestinian populace who've elected, those leaders?
Statement: No, the Palestinian people have been cornered. They've faced oppression for years. While the Palestinian leadership may share some blame, they are largely a product of the conditions Israel has imposed.
Question: Which conditions has Israel imposed?
Statement: Such as the blockade on Gaza and restrictions on the freedom of movement for the Palestinian people.
Question: As the Palestinians act under these constraints, are the Israelis also responding to their own circumstances, like feeling threatened or unsafe? couldn't the Israelis have concerns that a militarized Palestine might pose an existential threat?
Statement: No, the Israelis are not the oppressed party. The Israelis arrived and claimed Palestinian land. They should be ready to face the consequences of that risk. They had choices to make. Being the dominant power, they should’ve granted Palestinians full political rights.
Question: So, by this logic, if you're oppressed, your actions are entirely reactive and without agency? when the Jews migrated in large numbers post World War 2, weren't they fleeing persecution and oppression?
There's an inclination to ascribe libertarian free will to the Israelis while characterizing the Palestinians as having no agency. https://vaishnav1.substack.com/p/an-almost-logical-exchange-about
One rather doubts the Pentagon would be any more responsive to Trump than it was while he was President. If news accounts can be believed, he apparently requested national guard protection at the Capitol for January 6, 2020 but was refused. https://americanmilitarynews.com/2022/08/gen-kellogg-trump-did-request-natl-guard-troops-on-jan-6th-asks-congress-to-release-his-testimony/ It seems as if the Pentagon generals conduct their own private foreign policies. The problem of an unchecked and unbalanced Pentagon seems underrated. One doesn't really have to strain one's imagination to envision a war with China in which the Chair of the Joints Chief of Staff independently cuts a truce deal in which the Pentagon takes over control. What "checks and balances" would prevent such an event? Devolving national defense responsibilities to the states seems like a prudent measure and perhaps we would have fewer of these national embarrassments in which third world militias defeat us. For crying out loud, the Houthis are winning the war in the Red Sea and have effectively shut down that shipping route.
Deep State NatSec staff routinely boasted about thwarting Trump's attempts to control troop deployments.
Their perfidy was likely the major reason behind the Afghan bug-out disaster as they were conspiring to retain a significant operational bases in Bagram and the US embassy in Kabul but didn't have sufficient forces in place to retrograde from Kabul via Bagram. Since inserting *more* forces to safeguard the pullout would have been bad optics for Biden that plan was rejected for an abandonment of Bagram with its equipment stores and the fraught extrication via AKIA in Kabul
And it only seems to have gotten worse since then. Stephen Green addresses the potential consequences of Pentagon efforts to impose political uniformity on the ranks: https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2024/03/05/theres-only-one-terrifying-reason-for-a-woke-indoctrinated-military-and-this-is-it-n4927014
Yes, maybe the Insurrection act should have been repealed at some point.
I don't think it would make any difference. Rioting is a federal crime (chapter 102) and I believe there are other statutory provisions besides the insurrection act, and (said to be) consistent with prohibition of congressionally unauthorized posse comitatus, that permit the president - perhaps upon declaration of emergency, or upon a state governor's request - to use military forces to enforce federal law when necessary.
Point is, when it hits the fan badly, even without a statute, the president is probably within his constitutional authorities to do what is necessary to restore public order.
Public order is such a local function. It's really hard to conceive of of anything that would genuinely warrant Federal intervention in local protests. The protests after MLK's assassination x 10?
Safeguarding Federal facilities is not a state function, whether it's Fort Sumter in 1861 or the Federal Courthouse in Portland in 2023.
Sure it is. It is property in the city and city police are suppose to protect lives and property in the city. If the FEderal government wants to provide more protection that it is getting, sure they can sent in reinforcements. That has nothing to do with "Insurrection."
"What rejecting vice means to me is: no porn, no pot, no gambling, no video games, no tattoos, no profanity."
It is an interesting list. Why is pot on the list but not alcohol or cigarettes? Why tattoos but not piercings? Shouldn't dancing and premarital sex be on the list too? (lol)
As someone who can be fairly potty-mouthed, but also a zealous defender of dignity and table manners, I find profanity to be rhetorically useful in a way that's similar to how conjunctions are useful...inelegant, perhaps undignified, but effective as part of a colloquial style.
Somehow it wasn't able to stay at that level.
If you live in a "youthful" city, you will find that swear words - and really, just two of them, this is not a world reminiscent of whichever writer you prefer for colorful profanity - have crowded out *most other* words in the speech of people you will hear on the street, or in the store, or wherever.
And: people in my orbit at least, especially those whom age and infirmity have made TV something necessary, have noticed that those screenwriters who so piously went on strike for their underappreciated craft - seem more and more to not be giving us our money's worth, if a head-to-head comparison were made between movie or TV screenplays of most any era, and now. By money's worth, I mean: it's as though you get half a script, to enjoy, were you to consider all the profanity as filler where thoughts or at least a variety of original words used to be.
I don't watch much TV, but I watched "Slow Horses" and found it funny and entertaining, if ridiculous and mostly sanitized and boring in its tediously predictable plot machinery. You watch it for some of the actors, the setting, the pacing, and the occasional quip. You do not watch it for the writing, except in the sense that you watched it at all and 90% of everything else produced wouldn't even clear that bar. Or in the sense that there are one or two words that it gives you pleasure to hear incanted ad infinitum.
Sure, I guess I'm just not sure how that's specific to profanity. There's a proliferation of bad, boring and formulaic content. Cursing can certainly comprise part of that picture, but I don't think it is the picture. The success of noir created a surplus of "hard boiled" Hammett-lite prose too...and 80s action movies were formulaic and boring for different reasons.
I have recently re-read Raymond Chandler, lots. Insulting people is a lost art, partly lost to banal, lazy profanity.
80s action movies were often boring, and the comedies often weren't very funny. And the women's hair and those awful high-necked blouses and shoulder pads, well, I digress ...
But they didn't demand any 12 hours of your time, or announce their importance.
I'm entirely uncertain who is right on profanity but I can't help seeing it a bit like "uh" to start sentences or "man" to end them.
Same. And those can be rhetorically useful signals of informality, but also cues to orient the reader on what comes next, eg skepticism. Plus, sometimes invoking the meme is itself an information dense packet
Regarding the use of profanity and coarse language, now ubiquitous, my late father (d. 1947) used to say that it showed that a person was ignorant and lacked the ability to use the language. The repetitious use of obscenities - one overhears conversations in which every other word seems to be the "f" word - adds little or nothing to what is being said, and indeed, is a distraction from it for intelligent listeners. Statements made with the knowledgeable use of language can be much more powerful and effective than those disfigured with crude epithets.
Well, as someone who uses profanity (although not so much in my writing), I can assure you it has little to do with my gift of gab. I understand the perspective, but I suppose that I'm suggesting that using profanity actually reflects an even more proficient grasp of language (similar to how Shakespearean characters used profanity, as well, depending on context and station).
I think Aaron Renn's actual post is more moderate than the lead-in paragraph would indicate, but it makes too much of middle class sins while ignoring the churning carnival of bad behavior in the lower social strata. Tsk tsking the mostly-nice fat boys for their small vices is easy, especially if you are a soft, bald, sensitive denizen of a HOA. It's trivial to skewer the bad behavior of the average fat slob, but try doing the same thing to women, the poor, and other such sacred cows in Our Democracy.
On the Trump thing: Arnold, you've acknowledged before how bad Trump's character is, so I continue to be perplexed by how much charity you're according him. In what plausible universe would his suppression of post-election protests be motivated by "just trying to keep the country together"? When has he ever had such a disinterestedly pro-social impulse in his entire life? And how is it unreasonable to worry about fascism coming from a leader who (a) has *explicitly stated* that he intends to be a dictator and (b) has argued in court that Presidents should be absolutely immune from prosecution, i.e. above the law, to the point that they could order their political opponents killed with impunity as long as it's an "official act"?
I can understand claiming, for example, that leftist activists would foment riots even against an actually prosocial and rule-of-law-promoting conservative elected President. But implying that Trump might be such a leader is delusional, and you shouldn't need to be either sympathetic to the left or opposed to his policy positions to see that.
Of course Trump is going to be a fascist dictator. We were under a fascist dictatorship from 2017 to 2020.
What? We weren't? But wasn't he president then?!?!
Were you alive between 2001 and 2007?
Yep, and I'm aware that there was some foolish leftist overreaction to GWB during that time (and that GWB himself indulged in his own version of fascism-scaremongering to justify the Iraq invasion). But the moral of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" is not that wolves don't exist; and when people tell us who they are, it isn't uncharitable to believe them.
Who is Renn's "we?"
When it comes to China, Smith has gone off the deep end, as evidenced by his recent piece advocating nuclear proliferation to Japan and S. Korea.
I get that he's obsessed with Japan, but the weeb population is not a large enough special interest group that other Americans are going to put the interests of the Asian democracies so far ahead of our own national interests.
Smith has derangement syndrome I grant you. It's ironic that he wants to create Chinese style censorship regimes just with his people in charge.
But Japan, Korea, and Taiwan getting nukes is a good idea. Poland too.
A conventional war in the South China Sea would be terrible. Everyone knowing that there is a 0% chance of it not going nuclear would prevent that.
I agree that if you want to make a move like that, you've got to have a very different foreign policy (one that obviously isn't trying to overthrow governments throughout Eurasia whenever you get the chance).
Proliferating to Taiwan would surely provoke an immediate conventional war in the SCS as the Chinese would try to pre-empt it. (They don't currently believe that a war there would go nuclear if the US controls the nukes, and they're probably correct about that.)
And in all these cases, one has to think about the long-run consequences of proliferation. Yes over the next couple decades the results of just those countries arming would likely be positive. But Russia and China would then get us back by proliferating to other countries in ways that would harm us.
Or one of those countries could have a coup or some other change away from benign leadership. The fewer nuclear powers there are, the better, at least from the standpoint of US interests.
"Proliferating to Taiwan would surely provoke an immediate conventional war in the SCS as the Chinese would try to pre-empt it"
That's the best argument against it.
But it's kind of like saying "don't defend yourself so you don't get bullied."
In general I think that countries in East Asia should simply develop these weapons on their own (Japan for instance could do it easily, and if China invaded Japan over it then I think war was bound to happen anyway).
Believe me, I have some sympathy fir your view here. I see the USA as by far the aggressor around the world compared to China, and such precedent makes it hard to engage in any kind of escalation like having Taiwan get nukes.
"They don't currently believe that a war there would go nuclear if the US controls the nukes, and they're probably correct about that."
Then we've already lost. That leaves open the possibility of a conventional war, which we automatically lose (even if we win).
I want China to believe that a war would go nuclear immediately, thus making invasion of Taiwan futile. The same way we made the Soviets believe that a tank rush into western Germany would go nuclear.
I don't think you can make them believe that, but it is reasonable to try to create enough uncertainty about it that they would be reluctant to attack. Of course there is a delicate balancing act between achieving that goal on the one hand, and making a nuclear war more likely on the other.
I think you're right that Japan could get away with it. Maybe it's true that this would serve their self-interest, but it would be bad enough for the US and the global nonproliferation regime that I'd say we should create negative consequences for them if they do it. If they try to build nukes they should be treated no different from Iran.
If it is, then why is the lesson currently being taught on the international arena that you can do whatever you want to non-nuclear states with virtual impunity (I don't count loud imprecations and exclusion of your flag from Olympics as constituting real harm) as long as you're a nuclear power?
I'm not sure anyone needed to be taught that lesson, since it's obviously true. This is just the reality, and that's part of why the nuclear states (us included) have strong reasons to prevent proliferation.
That said, Russia has paid a serious price for starting this war, enough that it seems to me that deterrence in the region stands pretty strong now.