so about norman’s ethics

The thing that a lot of people don’t understand about Norman is that he doesn’t believe in the like, political sentiments that he acts on in the slightest. Yeah, this doesn’t make it ok that he did a bunch of shitty stuff, but it’s a misconception to say norman like, genuinely believes fucking eugenics are a good thing.

And yet, he decides to act on the idea to degenerate and genocide the demons and seems not to understand why Emma wouldn’t agree with him. People’s explanations of this seem to be pretty much one of two minds, either:

His morals are corrupt: Norman wants all the demons dead because what they did makes him think they’re all bad and don’t deserve the respect humans get, which is understandable but still wrong, or

His morals are intact but he ignores them: Norman feels bad that he’s doing a bad thing and does it anyway because he can’t find a better way out, which honestly makes what he did worse, though Tragic.

The second one is more accurate, but still doesn’t completely explain his ideas.The truth is that, in my opinion, he just barely understands the concept of morals in general, and what’s ‘messed up’ is simply his priorities. That sounds like I’m saying he’s a twisted cycle path but I swear I’m not, it’s just like him having low empathy. This is another, autism thing, and it’s another thing that I have, so I’ll try to explain it as best as I can?

Personally, I understand and try to follow sociatal expectations for moral things like, you know, do not kill people and what not. Because it’s bad or... whatever. And although I can cognitively understand the reasons why people think so, I don’t value it in the same way. Obviously I wouldn’t kill a person, there’s no need for me to in a world like this, and it would be inconvenient and probably make me feel bad despite not understanding why it is bad. But I’ve known from a very young age if I had the power and reason to kill someone, I absolutely would, no questions asked. Not even the necessity, just a logical reason. Most of the time this means nothing and isn’t applicable in the real world, because most of the people around me would be negatively affected by it. But it means nothing to me personally, and if prompted I could change at the slightest reason.

This is what I think we’re dealing with in Norman’s situation. 

Norman, in grace field, has no reason to violate any intagible laws of right and wrong, in most cases, until the escape arc happens. Yeah, I do believe Norman probably lied significantly more than the average child, because he didn’t see any reason not to, but I doubt it hurt anyone bad, they lived in, well, basically a neverland. He’s just a slightly off white little man. But when he is faced with a risky and dangerous situation, he might look Correct on the outside but the closer you look the more you realize his actions are directly impacted by the situation around him, completely independent of any internal moral compass. 

Ray wants to only escape with those three, because although he feels extreme guilt for being the way he is and completely understands it’s a selfish and terrible thing to do, he’s too cynical to accept any other options. Norman initially agrees with him, because Ray explains the risks. Emma then insinuates she wants to bring the other kids, giving ideas as to how. Norman then switches to Emma’s plan because he believes it can be achieved and he wants Emma to be happy, not because it would be wrong to do otherwise. At the same time, he later ships himself out, without much consideration to the others’ wishes against it, because now that it’s gotten impossible to have both, Emma’s and Ray’s safety is more important now than their happiness. Though he can understand that they’d not like that, it’s not that important to him in the long run. He will choose the path that offers them the greatest chance, if the one his friends want isn’t good enough.

When he was shipped out and taken to lambda, what happened is he was put in a situation where the stakes become much higher. There’s a different kind of situation, and the idea of simply running away from the demons is obviously not an option. When he escapes, and basically adopts the lambda kids- now he’s surrounded by people with the opposite morals and ideas as Emma. These kids want revenge, they would be happy to kill the demons, their ideal situation involves that and trying to reach any compromise would be unsatisfactory. The overwhelming majority of the kids agree with killing the demons, and that idea makes him seem stronger and gives him more certainty and control over the situation, even if it’s difficult and hurts him personally, making him a “Bad Person” to Emma. 

Norman harbors no personal hatred towards the demons, nor any specific desire to kill them. He just doesn’t see any viable reason not to, and killing them provides both him and the people he cares about with a more beneficial situation. Emma is now the minority, and even though she provides an idea that could work, Norman, after seeing so much pain and suffering, is no longer willing to take the risk for her, like he was in grace field. He is incapable of understanding why she values a sense of right and wrong more than the actual statistics of how well one or the other could work- yes, they had different experiences, but she lost other people because she decided to take risks, and she still believes in it? It simply doesn’t fucking compute.

An important aspect to consider is that it still does make him feel bad not to follow a more traditionally accepted route. He might have low empathy but he’s not an emotionless robot. Not understanding morals doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a concience, though it’s much more ambiguous and generally equates to any other thing, such as the actual convenience, details, or certainty of a plan. It’s not of any more importance, and he is in a situation now where it’s inconvenient to pay attention to, more so than in grace field. So not following a Nicer route does take a toll on his Feelings TM, same as it takes a toll on his literal body, but that’s a sacrifice he’s fine with, it’s a sacrifice that’s significantly smaller than the chance that someone he cares for could die.

Generally, most Lukewarm Takes on Norman can be disproven with this idea (pretty much anything that insinuates he would see the demons as less or like, he’s doing it because they did awful things to him, understandable but hey this isn’t tokyo ghoul and he’s not that kind of character), though everyone is obviously free to have their own takes and I doubt Shirai took his autistic coding into consideration, so it’s obviously my own idea.

Although Norman’s actions have correlation with Ray’s before, Norman isn’t disregarding his physical needs and trying to sacrifice himself out of any idea that it would make up for what he did, he’s doing it because it gives him more control over his own situation, he values his own well being less than his family’s, and he doesn’t understand why it would be Bad to do so. If we’re really digging deep, it’s likely he doesn’t want to have to experience any real consequences for his actions. He understands that they’re Bad, but this isn’t important to him, more than anything else. He doesn’t want to see Emma’s disappointment because it would complicate things.

After Emma and Ray, well, complicate things, ie face him and force him to see there are real consequences to his actions past Ambiguous Moral Obligations (ex. “you’re Taking Advantage the lambda kids” means nothing until he sees that it’s stopped them from being able to grow as people and forgive, “you’re neglecting yourself” means nothing until there’s an idea brought up that could fix him, “you’re trying to kill so many fucking people” means nothing until he sees that it’s hurting the human kids.) and that there’s a valid flaw in his personality past that- that it’s not a strong but a cowardly move, he can move forward and attempt to change things, possibly give himself a fucking break. 

In that situation, with other solutions that Emma and Ray have opened up actually seeming to work, he no longer finds it necessary to Be Terrible and hurt himself. This makes him feel better, because he doesn’t want to be Incorrect, it’s just a difficult thing for him to understand, when most other things come to him naturally. I think in the future he can be more cognizant of the fact that he’s more suceptible to doing generally, unacceptable things, and vows to lean more on Emma and Ray so he doesn’t end up going down the wrong path again, because to him they all look the same color.

Yes, this is my long ass way of telling Shirai why the fuck did you let Norman be a CEO. That’s a terrible fucking idea, he’ll become capitalism, guys?! Don’t let him do that. He needs to be in a job where like, he can use his skills without having to make Ethical Decisions like... an engineer or something. Computer scientist. IDK. Just not a fucking CEO, not in a management position for anything.

Honestly, it’s difficult for me to even use the alignment chart because I don’t understand morals enoughto put anyone in the Evil category because the idea of ‘evil’ doesn’t exist for me. So yeah, I’m projecting, but in conclusion I just have a bone to pick with anyone who wouldn’t call norman lawful neutral. 

The ultimate goal

I never really saw the point of 2 Peter, but that view is quickly changing. Within just a few verses, Peter drops some bombs that very succinctly answer some very big questions we face in life.

The first one is found in verse 2: he says that peace will be multiplied to us as we know God more. That is crazy. That is something that I suspected, and it took me years to reach that theory, but here in 2 Peter 1:2 it clearly states it as fact. Do you lack peace in your life? Know God better and keep on knowing Him better.

The second one is found in verses 5-8. Not saying that the other parts aren’t good or worth reading, but these are just the two specific parts I want to look at. He gives a list of things that we should have and that should be increasing in our lives (more on that in 2 weeks): Faith, virtue, knowledge, self-control, steadfastness, godliness, brotherly affection, love. Though it is clear all of these things are necessary, there is obviously a progression here:

Faith > virtue > knowledge > self-control > steadfastness > godliness > brotherly affection > love

Faith is most broadly the desire to please God, to know Him. It is being a “spiritual person” or “religious”. Maybe not being self-righteous, legalistic, showy, or other such negative connotations of being a religious person, but that inner desire to know God. It’s more of the starting point. It’s good to be here, but it’s not good to stay here. Some are in a “pre” state of just being a spiritual seeker, which is good in a way - it’s great to seek truth and answers but not to stay in a stunted growth place. Maybe you know a little about God, but it’s not really defined and you haven’t fully committed to Him or others.

Virtue is morality. The idea that there is a right and wrong. Virtue really only has an affect on your life if you have some sort of basic faith, even if minimal. A true atheist has no defined moral guideline because it is all hypothetical, biased to their own experience and reasoning. Most people who say they are atheists still have something inside of them that tells them there is purpose and there is right and wrong, a constant nagging that they too often learn to ignore. If there is no God, then why should we live how someone or something else tells us to? What’s the purpose? Why not do what I want when I want to who I want? Evolution mandates survival, not ethics. That’s why the beginning of wisdom is to fear God: it’s the only lasting reason for doing or not doing, since feelings and society lead us astray and can be ignored. Virtue is necessary: the decision to live a certain way, and it is a step beyond faith, but it is not the finished goal. Good works should flow from faith, since faith is dead without works and works are pointless without faith. Virtue does not save us, but it is good. 

Knowledge is very essential, but unfortunately it becomes the stopping point for too many of us. We become walking encyclopedias. We know a lot, which is good, but we live for the knowledge and never answer the questions “So what? what does this knowledge accomplish? Who does it benefit?” Knowledge for knowledge sake is a sad and disappointing place to find yourself. The knowledge doesn’t help your or anyone else. A lot of times scientists find themselves in such a place: knowing HOW a lot of things happen, but not why, or what to do with that knowledge. If we know all mysteries of the universe, what then? We get preoccupied with fascination, the puzzles, the entertainment, the distractions, and it mutes the nagging in our souls for more, but eventually that nagging gets louder. Learn and grow, but this is not the desired end product either. If I have knowledge I will often get self-serving, depressed, pre-occupied, prideful. Like King Solomon did. In his great knowledge was great sorrow, because that was the end game for him, not a step in the path.

Self-control is necessary in life, but especially where there is knowledge. We get prideful and arrogant. We think we are better than others and above the law. It won’t affect us, and we don’t need the restrictions that other less intelligent people need. Think of King Solomon again. We need self-control so that we don’t just know what’s right, but that we actually do what’s right. Knowing that there is a problem is good, but if I don’t have the self-control to resolve it, then what is the point? It would be better to live in ignorance rather than be constantly put in affliction of mind. But in self-control we find the next step to take, and it’s even more important than knowledge.

If I have faith that produces works (virtue), I learn what is right (knowledge), and then I learn to do what is right (self-control), but after all this I give up, what profit is there? Steadfastness is endurance. The mentality of not giving up; weathering the storm. Sticking with it. It’s not enough to have the other things unless I stick with it.

Godliness is not simply knowing what’s right and what’s wrong, it’s giving grace and mercy to those who don’t deserve it. It’s having the wisdom to know what is beyond your control and the courage to do what you can. It involves my reputation with people, who my life is really all about, and who I’m trying to be like. If I continue earnestly in steadfastness but I’m enduring in doing the wrong thing, handling situations poorly, making bad life decisions, having bad attitudes, not becoming more like Jesus, focusing my life on myself, and mistreating others, it does me no good to stay the course.

If I am becoming more like God, then the next thing will be brotherly affection. Caring for other believers. Forgiving. Trying to be at peace with them. Helping. Making my life not just about me but putting them first. 

Brotherly affection is good, but the ultimate aim, the climax, the final goal is love. Love is to do to others what you want them to do to you. Love is being patient and kind to everyone. Love is returning every wrong others do to you, every unfairness, with blessings. Loving the unlovely, defending the weak, sacrificing my life and well-being for the sake of even my enemies even while they are still talking down to me and about me and mistreating me. It is doing the right thing and suffering for it and then not retaliating or defending myself. It is following the example of Jesus to those who don’t deserve it. It’s no longer expecting myself to be treated better than Jesus was, but going “all in” for others even to the point of abandoning my “chance of happiness”, and in laying down my life, truly finding life and a joy that goes beyond the pain I endure. It is willingly going into a fire for the sake of saving even one. Living and dying for others because of my faith in God, and this is the ultimate goal. 

Are you actively progressing, or are you comfortable where you are? Are you willing to change? Do you just expect God and everyone else to work around your refusal to mature - “That’s just who I am”? I want to challenge you to look at this list and answer the question “Where am I on it?” If you’ve been in the same place coasting through life, that’s not a great place to be in.

NASA have admitted to spraying lethal chemtrails into our atmosphere – saying that lithium being sprayed into the Earths ionosphere helps to treat people with manic depression or bi-polar disorder.

NASA personnel have come forward saying that lithium, along with other potentially harmful chemicals, are intentionally sprayed into our environment regularly.

Wakingtimes.com reports:

NASA Confesses to Dosing Americans with Air-borne Lithium & Other Chemicals

There’s the official explanation for why NASA is spraying lithium, a pharmaceutical drug most often used to treat people with manic depression or bi-polar disorder, into our ionosphere, and then there is the probable reason(s). It would be easier to accept NASA’s official explanation if they were not so secretive about everything they study and do in space – but one thing is for certain – NASA’s own personnel have admitted that lithium, along with other chemicals, are intentionally being placed into our environment regularly. It is possible that many of NASA’s own employees aren’t even aware of the true motivations for carrying out such a project, ironically displaying the very behaviors that these chemicals/pharmaceuticals are meant to instill.

In the first bomb-shell video a NASA employee ([email protected]) admits that lithium is being sprayed in the atmosphere, and says that it is “harmless to the environment.”

Before I give you NASA’s official explanation of why they are spraying psych-meds over hundreds of thousands of Americans, I’d like to point you to some references so that you can do your own research, and discover that this is no conspiracy theory. It is very real, and there is ample scientific documentation to corroborate what I put forth here:

A Pub Med abstract titled, Feasibility of Aerosol Vaccinations in Humans discusses how an increase in antigen volumes can be beneficial in aerosol delivery of vaccines, and could be used in “developing countries and disaster areas.” The abstract also admits that several thousand human subjects have already been aerosol vaccinated with live attenuated measles and influenza A vaccines. The executive summary further states that aerosol vaccinations are ideal for “large populations.” This has apparently been happening since as early as 2003.

Another discussion of aerosolized vaccinations can be found in The New England Journal of Medicine. A Randomized, Controlled Trial of Aerosolized Vaccines Against Measles states that these vaccines were tested on children in India that were as young 9 months old.

The World Health Organization has been researching aerosol vaccines for years now, as have “philanthropic” agencies which have clear aims to sterilize the population. It is also worth noting that the pharmaceutical industry has been absolved from any legal responsibility for medicating the masses since they were awarded  legal protection from all lawsuits by Congress in 1986. This law was challenged, but upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2011. Many powerful agencies are making sure that we “take our medicine.”

In fact, many nations are participating in our unwitting, forced vaccination, and the dumping of any number of attenuated viruses, chemical concoctions and other ‘chemtrails’ on our heads with dogged frequency.

The Office of the Gene Technology Regulator (OGTR) considered giving a license application to PaxVax Australia (PaxVax) for the intentional release of a GMO vaccine consisting of live bacteria into the environment in Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Victoria. They planned to release cholera on their people.

According to the regulator, this GMO vaccine qualified as a limited and controlled release under section 50A of the Gene Technology Act 2000.

Of course, we can’t ignore the USA. Michael Greenwood wrote an article stating that:

“The incidence of human West Nile virus cases can be significantly reduced through large–scale aerial spraying that targets adult mosquitoes, according to research by the Yale School of Public Health and the California Department of Public Health.”

So, hopefully we’ve established that this IS happening. But why?

As more nations refuse genetically modified food, and refuse to drink fluoridated water, which has been named as a neurotoxin by one of the world’s premiere medical journals, the power structure that desires a complicit population has to figure out a way to alter our neurochemistry.

Lithium alters how we think by changing the levels of serotonin and norepinephrine secreted by our endocrine system. Lithium strongly alters the brain system, yet the NASA employee in the above video states that “it is not dangerous” and doesn’t harm the population. Even doctors who normally prescribe this medication for the mentally ill have said that it is dangerous because it is hard to figure out proper dosing. Surely, spraying copious amounts of lithium indiscriminately into the air via aerosols should be questioned – but here’s NASA’s official stance on this practice:

“The project is studying neutral and charged particles in the ionosphere and how each affects the way the other moves resulting in currents in the region. The variations matter because all of our communications and GPS satellites send signals through the ionosphere. A disturbed ionosphere translates to disturbed signals, so scientists want to know just what causes the ionosphere to behave in specific ways.” (NASA)

Meanwhile, should the over-medicated start to actually figure out what is being done to them, the government has imposed gag orders on the National Weather Service (NWS) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) who might easily refute the ridiculous claims of NASA.

Notably, every single person who works for NASA, the NWS or NOAA are paid with tax payer dollars.This means that we are paying to be medicated and poisoned.

Here, to corroborate information being given by the NASA employee in the video, is the Code 8440 RMMO which states the exact purpose of using Wallops Flight Facility to launch a rocket containing lithium thermite:

“Purpose: The primary purpose of this mission was to test the loading methods for lithium canisters to be flown on the upcoming Kudeki (Kwajalein, April 2013) and Pfaff (Wallops, June 2013) missions, and verify their functionality under sounding rocket launch and space flight conditions.

Rocket Type: Two-stage Terrier MK70 Improved-Orion

Location: Wallops Range

Launcher: MRL

Date of Launch: January 29, 2013

Time: 17:50 EST

Experiment results: Thermistor data looked nominal. Good report from airborne optical platform of recorded video and lithium clouds also visible by ground observation.’

We also learn from this specific call that lithium has been dumped in our skies since 1970. If you wanted to medicate the masses to create mindless, slave-like prisoners who didn’t even know they were imprisoned, this is surely a good way to do it. Spraying lithium into our skies, along with countless other bacteria, viruses, prions, parasites, fungi, carcinogens, toxins, hormone-altering drugs, anti-flora and anti-fauna, as well as gene-altering micro-dust is nothing more than bio-warfare against the world’s citizenry. You can call them chemtrails or something else, the effect is the same.

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized.Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. …In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” ~Edward L. Bernays, Master Propagandist

Article By Christina Sarich

Source: State of the Nation

Categories:

Sci/Environment

A couple of other disconnected thoughts on immigration and racism generally:

1) You know how every generation of immigrants in American history gets stereotyped as lazy and ignorant and brutish? Compare those with similar stereotypes of the European poor. There’s a reason for the similarity: the US has often drawn on immigration from specifically rural regions to build up its population, starting with the rural parts of Britain in the 1600s and 1700s. But this isn’t either a happenstance feature, or something that the US has succeeded in despite of: the US economy has been (less so now, because it’s less agrarian, but its rural economy still is) structured around needing vast amounts of poor immigrant labor, preferably with limited options so as to restrain their economic and social mobility once they arrive.

This is something that Sarah Taber has, citing the work of historians on the subject, explicated at length on her podcast; it was this need that drove the US portion of the slave trade (similar mechanics even more annihilatory of human life and joy were at work on Caribbean sugar plantations), and in the US as in so many other places in history, the creation of an us-them divide between poor rural whites and slaves--later sharecroppers and poor rural blacks--served to keep this system metastable despite the frequent outbreaks of violence and, before the civil war, the fear of a slave rebellion.

The US has always needed huge amounts of immigrant labor, because it has tended to rely on terribly inefficient farming methods ill-suited to the terrain; it has always despised that immigrant labor, treated it as fearful and destructive to the social order, and, when those fears don’t come to pass, and the sources of immigration shift, rearranged the social hierarchy to put new immigrants at the bottom. I think it’s hard to argue that this is a premeditated process; I don’t think the agrarian elite of the country ever met in smoky rooms and said, “Hey, let’s vilify the Mexicans next.” I think it’s an opportunistic combination of antipatterns and perverse economic incentives and failure modes common to the human race, but, crucially, it doesn’t have to be this way. Even more crucially, not just morally and politically, but economically this is a bad system. It’s stable, sort of, because transitioning away from it requires a combination of social, political, and economic changes that are in few of the politically powerful class’s short-term interests, but in the long term it could make the country a much nicer place to live.

2) An assumption that a lot of anti-immigrant arguments of the form “they’ll change the culture/vote in policies you don’t like/implement sharia law” make is that politics and economic circumstance flows from culture, rather than the reverse. Poor countries with bad social arrangements are the result of culture, or are kept that way as a result of culture, and not vice-versa; this has to be true, or you’d expect that once immigrants came to the US (or a similar country) you wouldn’t have to worry about them assimilating to the local white majority’s liberal and democratic values.

(you might, looking at a Trump rally, conclude that a rural supporter of an antidemocratic authoritarian would be just as at home in the US as in Eritrea or w/e, but let’s set that aside for the moment)

Aside from the fact that’s not borne out at all by the data (all the data, in fact, points to economic circumstances shaping culture!), it’s such a weird idea to advance in this day and age, especially if you claim to be an empiricist! It’s the inheritance not of social science but of romantic nationalism, 19th century ideas about national spirit and the historic destiny of races, where politics and economics and history were seen as extensions of metaphysics, not as areas of inquiry tractable to scientific study! Oh, sure, there were some ill-fated attempts like phrenology to try to ex post facto tack on a scientific justification to some of the more modest claims, but even beyond the fact they were scientifically bankrupt endeavors, full of confirmation bias and shifting goalposts, they were trying to formalize and scientize the study of values, not to study human behavior in the abstract. And modern studies of “““human biodiversity” never manage anything better: they try to make intelligence sound like a bloodless and empirical concept (and maybe it can be!), but by starting with the hypothesis that dysfunctional societies might arise due to innate biological differences (& choosing intelligence as your measure of those differences) you’re already hopelessly muddling ethical/moral action with intelligence with political organization. It’s an epistemological mess.

For example: why might there not be humans that are less smart than average, but also significantly more prosocial, a la (the popular conception of) bonobos? Humans that are smarter, but less sociable and less likely to form urban societies? All the correlates are tied together--intelligence, prosociality, economic success--in a way they certainly very often are not in individuals, and the result is hypothesis that, in good evo-psych fashion, pretend to be carefully dispassionate and rigorous while actually smuggling in a whole cartload of assumptions for the unwary reader, and which conveniently permit the political scientist to ignore the last few thousand years or so of history, as though even if these hypotheses were true the magnitude of the effect of these differences is so vast as to swamp every other material circumstance of human life.

3) Following on from that: any attempt to biologically theorize about intelligence must account at minimum for the fact that traits which are highly adaptive (like intelligence) are extremely constrained (if intelligence is a big advantage for humans, which it seems to be, you shouldn’t get human populations that vary much in intelligence! They should get outcompeted well before the historical era); and, much more importantly, there are subregions of Africa more genetically diverse than the rest of the planet put together--so there should be massive differences in outcomes depending on which population you’re looking at just within one continent. Yet I never seem to encounter race science types who even manage to, like, try to form a basic genetic taxonomy to work with. It’s all “east Asians this” and “sub saharan Africans that.”

Sorry. I'm naive but what is torture generically and is it something we all do or are capable of doing as experiments have shown? M

There’sno need to apologise for not knowing something, that’s why I’mhere. :)

Tortureis a specific, legally defined, form of abuse. It isn’t defined bythe abusiveactionbut instead it’s defined by the positionof the abuserand the motivationfor the abuse.

Thebasic definition is intentional, painful abuse by a public official(a government employee) in order to try and get information fromsomeone, to force them to confess, to intimidate them (or otherpeople) or to punish them (or other people).

Soif a doctor in a government-run mental health facility hits a patientas ‘punishment’ for something the patient does: that’s torture.If the same doctor goes out into the parking lot on their break andhits a passerby, that’s assault.

Somecountries expand the definition to include organised criminal gangsas well as government officials. But that depends on the country andlocal laws.

So,by definition, torture is notsomething we all do. Not all of us are government employees ormembers of organised criminal gangs.

Ido sometimes say that we’re all responsiblefor the torture that occurs in our global society. But that’s notbecause we’re all actively hurting each other.

It’sbecause, as a society, we often excuse, condone or express supportfor torture. A lot of that is due to ignorance of what torture is andwhat it does.

Sofor instance a common ‘justification’ for torture is gettinginformation from someone- but we know that pain and suffering can notforce someone to give up accurate information and actually damagesmemory. Torture can’tresult in accurate information.

Butwe’re so used to the idea that it does that people parrot thisidea, in reality and in the fiction they produce. The researchproving that it doesn’t work is available, but the majority ofpeople are completely unaware of it.

Sowe’re ‘responsible’ in the sense that I don’t think we’redoing enough to stop a widespread and awful crime.

Asfor whether we're all capable of torture-

Iassume that's a reference to the Milgram experiments? Theseexperiments were conducted in the 60s. They've never been repeatedand analysis of the raw data (rather than the data Milgram reported)actually goes against his conclusion that 'anyone' could be made totorture.

TheMilgram experiment, for those unaware of this steaming unscientificpile of tripe and cherry-picked data, was supposed to test theempathy of volunteers. There were two people, in seperate rooms whocould see each other through a window. One (an actor) was wired to amachine. The other was seated at a control panel with a dial thatthey were told administered electric shocks of increasing intensityto the person in the other room. The person being tested (the one incontrol of the dial) was told they were involved in a memory andlearning test. There was a person in a white coat beside them, givingthem questions and encouraging them to administer shocks for wronganswers. After a time the actor started to simulate increasing pain,beg the person to stop and eventually pretended to die.  The personin the white coat was supposed to follow a strict script and tell theperson being tested to keep administering the shocks a maximum ofthree times. They were not supposed to bully or threaten thevolunteers.

Inthese tests a high proportion of volunteers kept pressing the buttonto the point that the actor 'died'.

Howeverthere are huge problems with the experiment as it was reported.

Forstarters audio recordings of the sessions, which weren't realiseduntil decades later, clearly show the white coated authority figuresbullying, threatening and harassing the volunteers. The choices thesepeople made were under pressure. The authority figures did not adearto the script and thus the experiment does not show that peoplefreely choose to torture each other with little encouragement asMilgram suggested.

Secondlymany of the people who were recorded as 'complying' (ie pushing thebutton) do not appear to have done so in the recordings. They argued,they protested and a great many of them pretended to push the buttonbut didn't actually do it. That's incredibly significant because itmeans that, though they felt forced to carry on with the 'torture',they were actively trying to find a way to avoid it.

Andthen there's the bit I find most damning of all- the follow up surveyfrom the experiment. When asked later the vast majority of thevolunteers said they didn't believe the electric shocks were real.

Thatinvalidates the entire experiment. Because the experiment only showshow likely people are to hurt each other if they believed they werehurting someone else.

Justto make it worse, cross referencing the experiment and the latersurvey found that the people who kept pressing the button were muchmuch much more likely to not believe the button produced electricshocks. Conversely the people who refused to push the button weremore likely to believe the electric shocks were real.

TheMilgram experiments were poorly conducted. They were inconsistent.And the results the group reported aren’t backed up by the datathey actually collected.

Tomake matters worse the experiment can’tbe repeated under rigorous conditions because shortly after theMilgram experiments ethical guidelines started forbidding misleadingexperimental volunteers in this way. You could not legally conductthis experiment any more. And there are very good reasons for that.

Thiskind of deliberate misleading of volunteers caused a lot of harm;think about how you’d feel if you took part in an experiment anddiscovered years later that you were given a poison that it wasresponsible for health problems you had later in life.

Ifyou’d like to know more about the Milgram experiments and theirflaws there’s a good New Scientist article available here.

Whichbrings us back to the question of who is capable of torture and why.

Thetruth is we don’t know.

Theresearch on torturers is lacking. That’s partly because it’s verydifficult to find enough of them to conduct a proper study. Very fewtorturers are convicted for their crimes and even fewer will admit tothose crimes without a conviction.

Mostof the studies that we do have on them have a very small number ofparticipants. For a long time Fanon’s work was the only readilyavailable set of notes by a mental health professional examiningtorturers. Fanon saw two of them. Extrapolating information about agroup of people based on two individuals is- let’s say inaccurate.

There’smore available now but it’s scattered. And we don’t have anythinglike the scale of studies that I think we would need to draw accurateconclusions. To draw reliable conclusions I think we’d need a widescale study of around 2000 individuals representing as diverse aglobal population as possible. That just doesn’t exist.

Wedo have a lot of anecdotalaccounts. Things like interviews with torturers or things torturershave written or things survivors and investigators have observedabout their behaviour. And sometimes I think that those areconsistent enough that we can draw some conclusions about torturers.And sometimes they’re the only information we have.

Honestlythough? I think we spend a lot more energy then we should trying tofind something different about the people who do horrible things.

Doyou know what the best predictor of violent criminal action in anindividual is? Lowresting heart rate.

Whichis a pretty large section of the population and obviously they don’tall become criminals and not all violent people have low restingheart rates.

PersonallyI don’t think the answer lies entirely in individuals. I thinklooking for something that’s ‘wrong’ with torturers is often aneat way to avoid looking at the problems in society which encouragetorture. If we concentrate entirely on individuals we ignore socialstructures, laws,peer pressure, dehumanisation of out-groups.

Andthe way our popular fiction consistently portrays torture aseffective or justified.

Thereare a lot of factors thatencourage torture globally.

We’reall capable of making our own choices. We are all capable of refusingto commit atrocities. We all have the capacity to reject violence.

Andpeople can be awful. The world can look very dark indeed. We’veprobably all had moments when we’ve felt that Milgram was right andhumans are irredeemably terrible.

Buthere’s the thing-

We’regeared to remember bad news over good news. Weremember painful and traumatic things more vividly (though notnecessarily more accurately).

Ourglobal news culture prioritises bad news over good and gives it moreprominence.

Empathyis so deeply wired into our brains that the most likely cause of themental health problems torturers develop is watching the pain anddistress of their victims.

Ourhistory books focus on the rulers, the generals, the wars and thebloodshed in our past. They rarely gives any attention to the kindsof people who were quietly going around making things better.

AkiRa spent years disarming land mines with a stick and a pocket knife.

DrHawa Abdi and her kids set up a hospital and de-facto demilitarisedvillage in the middle of a warzone. Dr Abdi once gave a terrorist whohad held her and her staff at gun point so stern a talking to that hegave her a written apology.

DrEugene Lazowski faked a typhus outbreak in Nazi occupied Poland. Thisprevented the deportation and death of an estimated 8,000 Jews.

DrDenis Mukwege has spent decades treating the victims of sexualviolence in a war torn country. He narrowly escaped beingassassinated at least once. His children were kidnapped. He is stilloperating and has helped an estimated 82,000 women.

SiddharthKara stepped away from a highly paid career as an investment bankerto self-finance some of the most detailed research on modern slaverycurrently available. He conducted most of it himself and collectedmost of the interviews he uses himself.

Theworld is full ofheroes. We dodetermine our own actions and we doalways have a choice.

Crueltyis not inevitable. We are much more complicated than Milgramsuggests.

Thereis plenty of research which suggests aggression is an innate part ofus but there’s nothing to suggest that violent behaviour inevitablyis.

Wecan make ourselvesinto something better.

Ihope that helps. :)

Availableon Wordpress.

Disclaimer

Ethics and Reproducibility: Moira’s start of darkness

Disclaimer: I’m a social psychologist,working at a U.S. university.The basic principles of what I’m talking about apply to Moira’s situation as well, but some of the details may differ. 

As a researcher myself, Moira has possibly one of the most relatable evil origin stories I’ve seen in my life. It’s like Blizzard took a researcher,asked them what would make them go straight-up villainous, and turned that into a character. 

Let me explain.

Three parts under the read more (with lots more pictures): 

1. Ethics approval in research

2. Difficulty with reproducing research

3. The publication process

“Overwatch held back the pace of scientific discovery for decades. They believed that my methods were too radical. Too controversial. They tried to silence me.” 

“We delved deeper into those areas forbidden by law. By morality.” 

How exactly was Overwatch slowing down Moira’s research and stopping her? Lemme tell you about the IRB. 

“IRB” is short for “Institutional Review Board.” It’s also known by a few other names, but let’s ignore that for now. Their job is pretty much to make sure we aren’t being evil scientists. Not traumatizing participants and all that. Researchers can’t so much as sneeze without their approval. If they find a study even slightly off, they’ll order revisions or, in extreme cases, shut it down completely. Their sole purpose is to stop Moiras. (Edit: See the end of the post for more details on why IRBs are very necessary, and how Moira’s character was likely inspired by the dark history of research past.)

In theory. 

Here’s how your typical IRB review goes: 

Sometimes (Edit: rarely) IRBs get drunk on their power. In those cases they might request revisions or reject research projects for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with the participants’ safety:

I’ve never met a researcher that didn’t have some kind of IRB horror story. We totally understand why they’re necessary (any researcher worth their salt can rattle off a list of studies that made IRBs necessary), but dang can they be fury-inducing. I’m sure that all of us have wished we could skip that hurdle from time to time, no matter how good and ethical it is to have them.

“In addition, other geneticists were unable to reproduce the results of Moira's research, which further called her discoveries into question. Instead of kickstarting her career, her paper seriously damaged her reputation.”

Let me tell you a story. The story of a researcher named Amy Cuddy. I’m going to be brief, but if you want a more in-depth description, you can read this NY Times article. 

Lately all kinds of research disciplines, from Psychology to Biology, have been having trouble with reproducibility. I’ve seen speculation that Moira faked her results, or that she’s just better than other scientists and that’s why. 

Amy Cuddy kinda became the so-called “poster-child” of this problem for social psychology. I’m not sure why she was singled out in particular (LOTS of researchers have research that’s failed to replicate), but it’s probably because she has one of the most popular TED talks of all time on exactly the research that’s having trouble replicating. Only half of her findings aren’t replicating (the other half are), but that’s not stopping people.

It’s possible she inspired that part of Moira’s backstory. 

People started attacking her, calling her a fraud, dragging her name through the mud, basically using her name as a pejorative. Because her research failed to replicate, and she didn’t immediately disown it (she’s not the only one to have this reaction, but she’s the one who got hit hardest for it). She was pressured out of her job at Harvard, lost friends, lost her health, her reputation, etc. Researchers criticizing work using “for the sake of research” as an excuse can be brutal.

And the thing is, it wasn’t her fault. And it’s not that other researchers are stupid either. 

Why doesn’t research replicate? 

Well, there are a bunch of reasons. Sure, fraud can be one of them. But cases of fraud are exceedingly rare. The only one I can think of is Diederik Stapel. And yeah. Sometimes research doesn’t replicate because people trying to replicate it make some kind of mistake. But in that case it wouldn’t cause the reputational damage we see in Moira’s case. 

It all comes down to how science works in the first place. 

Possible reason 1: Statistics. 

There’s always a chance that scientific “findings” could’ve happened due to a coincidence. Maybe Gabe would’ve turned into a smoke monster anyway, and the experiments Moira did just happened around the same time by coincidence. 

So we have statistics. 

(Canon note: Moira was disgraced before she joined Blackwatch, but we’re not sure what her research was before then. I’m using this as a concrete example in lieu of whatever her earlier work was.)

I’m not gonna go into the details, but statistics tell us if our results probably weren’t a coincidence. But they can’t guarantee it. We generally say that, if our math tells us there was a 95% chance our results weren’t a coincidence, then our results are “real.” But there’s always that 5% chance that they’re still just random chance. It could be that Moira’s big paper was part of that 5%. 

There are also ways of fiddling with statistics that increase that 5% chance, and sometimes researchers make mistakes. (Or, on rare occasions, do it intentionally to get published. Without publications, you don’t get funding or jobs. No more money, no more research, no more job. So sometimes people “cheat.” The practice of fiddling with your data is called p-hacking, and this toxic bit of academic culture is called “publish or perish.” But I don’t think either of those are relevant to Moira, seeing as she does get “real” results.)

Statistics also make a lot of assumptions about how data “should” look, but data rarely meets those assumptions in the real world. Not meeting them can increase your chance of finding (or not finding) evidence for something, regardless of the objective truth.

Possible reason 2: Third variables. 

In science, it’s rarely possible to account for absolutely everything. Sometimes results can’t be replicated because there’s some other thing influencing the results. 

Maybe Moira’s Shadow Monster Formula only works on, say, people who’ve also been in the SEP. Or maybe it only works when the room’s a specific temperature. Or maybe it’s the time of day, or the subject’s metabolism, or their mood, or something accidentally fell into Moira’s mix and she didn’t notice, and that’s what made it work. Any researcher trying to reproduce her results without knowing about that unknown third variable wouldn’t succeed, and they might assume she made it all up.

Publishing Papers

Now, a quick timeline of publishing a paper: (This is based on my experience in social psychology. It may differ for biology. Grant writing isn’t always necessary if you have other funding, or the study doesn’t require money for materials or paying participants. This is, as you can imagine, rarely the case for biology.) 

After all that work and all that time (for a single paper!), your research doesn’t replicate due to what amounts to basically bad luck... And then after all that hard work, and all of that time, you get turned into a social pariah and accused of being a fraud, just because of some random chance. 

Do I condone Moira’s actions? Hell no.

But do I understand why she snapped? Well... yes. 

EDIT: @tacticalgrandma​ made a great point. I absolutely shouldn’t talk about this without talking about some other very important things that the writers were getting at. 

On a meta level, the writers almost definitely wrote her to reflect some of the more unsavory parts of research history. She represents and references unethical researchers throughout history. 

Research has a long history of doing some really awful things, often disproportionately targeting minorities and other at-risk populations like prisoners. 

Some examples of this are infecting African Americans with syphilis, and not treating them even after a treatment became available. The Milgram experiment, which essentially convinced many of its participants that they’d killed someone. And the Little Albert study. 

In the Little Albert study, researchers conditioned a child to be TERRIFIED of anything white and fluffy (INCLUDING SANTA) and then just never did anything to fix it. The fear of white-and-fluffy later generalized to anything-fluffy. They lost track of him, and let him live his life terrified of everything white and fluffy. I think that Moira’s association with a white rabbit may be a direct reference to this particular study. 

Researchers have done some HORRIBLE things in the past, resulting in great loss of life, loss of quality of life, and long-lasting trauma for many people, that disproportionately affected minorities and vulnerable populations. 

Moira intentionally evokes this past, and operates much like one of the researchers from the pre-IRB era: people who all-too-often only saw “scientific progress,” and failed to see the real people that they were hurting. It’s possible that her experimentation on Gabe is also a reference to this history of unethical research practices with minorities. Gabe is an ethnic minority, and Moira experimented on him. She took those results and retained all the good parts of them for herself (sucking away life force, and teleportation) without the disadvantages that Gabe endures (constant pain). Even if Gabe initially consented to the experiments, Michael Chu’s stated that he was scared of the results, and his voice lines definitely imply that he is NOT happy with the results. 

Moira’s rejection of ethics is a rejection of the rights and humanity of her participants. Her mindset is a reflection of some HUGE problems and HORRIFIC things in research. 

Putting knowledge above the happiness, safety, and autonomy of people is NEVER okay, no matter what you’ve been through. What Moira may or may not have experiences in NO WAY justifies her actions. She’s a villain through-and-through. 

Nancy MacLean responds to her critics

Neither Nancy MacLean, author of the controversial “Democracy in Chains,” nor her publisher has responded to my invitation to post a response to criticism of her book. MacLean has, however, responded to her critics in an email interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, which also covers the controversy in an accompanying story.

The interview is worth reading. Here are a few highlights.

First, the interview discusses the attacks on her book. MacLean confirms that she authored a Facebook message alleging the existence of a “coordinated” campaign against her book. The Chronicle then asked her about that allegation.

Do you have any evidence for your claim in that Facebook message that the attacks on your work are “coordinated”?

I’m not saying they called each other up and planned a series of critical responses to my book. What I’m saying is many of the critics come from similar backgrounds — they are libertarians who trained at or are employed by the very institutions I write about in my book.

And some of the rhetoric has been quite threatening. Jonah Goldberg, senior editor of National Review, said I should worry about the “the libertarian super-posse on my ass.”

So, according to MacLean, the only evidence of “coordination” behind the criticism of her book is, well, that many of us are libertarians who attended or teach at George Mason, and whom Jonah Goldberg referred to as a “super-posse.”

As for some of the substantive critiques of her book that have come from liberals, this is what MacLean has to say.

The left-wing historian Rick Perlstein wrote in a Facebook post, “The foundation of the entire book [Democracy in Chains] is a conspiracy theory that suggests that if you understand THIS ONE SECRET PLAN, you understand the rise of the right in America in its entirety. Which suggests you don’t need to understand any of a score of other important tributaries. … That you don’t need to read anything else. Which is actively dangerous to historical understanding.” Perlstein was commenting on an article by Farrell and the political scientist Steven Teles. Its basic thrust was that your book caricatures its right-wing subjects in a way that does a disservice to political discussion and even misleads those on the left and center searching for a way forward. What’s your response to Perlstein, Farrell, and Teles?

As a scholar, I would never say “you don’t need to read anything else.” Of course there were other tributaries feeding the right; we have a huge body of scholarship now that explores them, much of which I cite in the 60 pages of endnotes that document the text. But my work draws attention to a missing piece of the puzzle that had been ignored, one that puts the current alarming state of our politics in an illuminating new light.

As for Farrell and Teles, I have to assume, based on what they wrote, that they did not give my book a close reading. My book is not a history of public choice (which I explained was broader than the Virginia variant on which I focused). The book traces the history of an idea — the idea of enchaining modern democratic government, as developed by James Buchanan. It shows how that idea came to appeal to an extremely wealthy and messianic individual, Charles Koch, who has harnessed it and organized other extremely wealthy donors to fund efforts, staffed by thousands of people, to radically alter our government in ways that will be devastating to millions of people and already seem to be producing an utterly unsustainable society in terms of social norms and governance.

So those who disagree with her, or who critique her work, simply didn’t read the book closely enough. Here, for the record, is an excerpt from the Farrell and Teles critique:

While some on the left have hailed the book, libertarians and conservatives have attacked it online. Several have argued that MacLean misleadingly truncates quotes, to make it seem as if Buchanan and other libertarians such as Tyler Cowen are anti-democratic. While they obviously have a great deal of skin in the game, their critiques of the book have landed a number of solid blows.

For instance, when MacLean claims that Cowen is providing “a handbook for how to conduct a fifth column assault on democracy,” she cites as evidence Cowen’s statement that “the weakening of checks and balances would increase the chance of a very good outcome.” Unfortunately, she declines to provide the reader with the second half of the sentence, which goes on to note that “it would also increase the chance of a very bad outcome.” Nor, as she has claimed in interview, is the title of Cowen’s blog Marginal Revolution a signal to the illuminated that Cowen is undertaking a gradual revolution by stealth (it’s actually a well-known term for the birth of modern economics).

She accuses David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, of believing that “close to half of American society is intent on exploiting the rich” when he writes about a “parasite economy” of predators and prey. In fact, the predators Boaz is talking about are specific interests lobbying for subsidies, tariffs, quotas, or trade restrictions. While his claims can be contested, they are simply not what MacLean says they are.

Elsewhere in the interview, MacLean says that she and Farrell “have a different understanding of what would constitute adequate evidence” to support a claim” (in this case, the claim that a paper James Buchanan published in the Cato Journal was an important strategy document). As for close reading of sources and use of evidence to substantiate claims, this review by J. Morgan Kousser of MacLean’s 1994 book on the Ku Klux Klan appears somewhat prescient.

On the question of whether Buchanan’s work bears any relation to that of John Calhoun, MacLean writes:

The anger over my linking Buchanan with Calhoun at least brought me a moment of levity. George Mason’s Donald Boudreaux called it “astonishing” that I drew a parallel between Buchanan’s political economy and that of John C. Calhoun. Yet it was not I but Boudreaux’s own colleagues at George Mason’s Mercatus Center, Alexander Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen, who called the antebellum South Carolina senator’s thought “a precursor of modern public choice theory” and concluded that the two systems of thought had “the same purpose and effect.

MacLean says Boudreaux found it “astonishing” that she “drew a parallel” between Buchanan and Calhoun. Here, however, is what Boudreaux actually wrote:

Even more astonishing is MacLean’s assertion that Buchanan-style libertarians’ “fundamental core concepts” come from John C. Calhoun.  Her only evidence for this claim – namely, that Calhoun was mentioned as an influence by the libertarian Murray Rothbard – isn’t evidence at all.  Buchanan was no great admirer of Rothbard, and the number of times that Calhoun is cited in any of Buchanan’s published works is zero.  As in “never.”  Not once.*  (I knew Buchanan for the last 28 years of his life and I do not recall ever hearing Jim mention Calhoun.) [Emphasis added.]

So what Boudreaux found “astonishing” was not that someone might find parallels between Buchanan’s work and that of Calhoun, but instead MacLean’s claim that Calhoun was the source of Buchanan’s ideas. Among MacLean’s claims in the book is that Calhoun was the “intellectual lodestar” for Buchanan and like-minded intellectuals. For more on MacLean’s efforts to link Buchanan and Calhoun, I recommend this post by Phil Magness.

On her critics, MacLean also adds:

Most disturbing, though, is how many of the book’s critics fail to disclose their financial indebtedness to the cause whose history my book explores. The book is critical of the network of think tanks and foundations that operate with aid from the Koch brothers. Many of the critics have benefited from grants from the Koch Foundation or related groups. Yet very few have acknowledged that financial relationship. And that’s troubling because full disclosure of such income is Ethics 101, as it calls into question the recipient’s ability to remain unbiased.

Since MacLean apparently believes some of us have not been sufficiently candid with potential conflicts of interest, I should probably remind readers that I attended law school at George Mason University, which has also received money from the Kochs, much of it long after I graduated. As I am a Virginia resident, my tuition was subsidized by state taxpayers (thanks, guys!) and a non-Koch-related scholarship. I paid the rest as I went at night while working full time. I spent a semester as a visiting professor at GMU some years later and was offered a tenured position on the faculty. I declined the offer because my bride-to-be and I decided we’d rather raise a family in Ohio than inside-the-Beltway.

Over the years I have spoken at various Koch-sponsored programs, for which I received modest honoraria. I have also spoken at programs sponsored by organizations receiving money from George Soros, the late Peter Lewis and various progressive donors. In the past, I have solicited and received grants for projects from the Charles Koch Foundation, the last of which was this roundtable eight years ago, for which I received no compensation (which probably reflects how bad I am at working the whole gravy-train thing). Ditto various progressive donors.

As longtime VC readers can attest, none of this prevented me from being quite critical of the Kochs when I thought they deserved it (as in my extensive series of posts on the Koch-Cato dispute, many of which may be found here) or from taking positions at odds with many Koch-funded organizations (such as my support for a carbon tax and other policies to mitigate the threat posed by climate change). I don’t know whether such work will affect my chances of obtaining another Koch grant should I seek one in the future, but I frankly don’t care. That’s not why I write what I write. It also has absolutely nothing to do with whether MacLean adequately substantiates her claims or fairly represents her sources.

The interview concludes with MacLean explaining that her hope is to expose the libertarian plan to “radically change the rules of governance in order to change society” so as to give capitalism “free rein” and protect “the rights of the wealthy few.” Writes MacLean: “It’s critical to bring this vision out into the open, so we can have honest debate about the kind of country we want.” I agree with MacLean that it’s important to have an “honest debate” on Buchanan’s ideas, as well as other ideas that inform public debates over the future of our great nation. Readers can decide for themselves whether “Democracy in Chains” contributes to that endeavor.

For more on the controversy over “Democracy in Chains,” see this post, which I have updated regularly.

Originally Found On: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/07/20/nancy-maclean-responds-to-her-critics/

Being involved in science right now is... weird.

First post on this blog! And this one sure is going to be a doozy. Long post ahead.  I mean long.

In this time of COVID-19, being on social media has been what can only be described as an absolute nightmare.  I’ve been studying a STEM field at my university and I’ve had involvement in laboratories for years now.  Let me tell you something - this whole experience has been painful to watch.  I’m used to people, on both left and right ends of the political spectrum, passing judgement on what scientists do and how they do it.  Science is so wonderful because it is so cutting edge, but that does lead to controversial topics coming up fairly frequently.  Ethical debates, be it about testing methods or AI or what have you, are always swirling around on the internet. Thankfully, there are teams dedicated to determining ethical guidelines for this sort of debate. 

The problem with what I’ve seen on the internet lately is that there is very little scholarly debate about what actions to take, many experts are in agreement, and when scientists make an educated decision, people blatantly disregard it using a number of opinionated, jargon-heavy excuses.  Examples abound:

 I shouldn’t have to wear a mask because they said at one point that masks aren’t necessary and now they say they are. Scientists are untrustworthy.

Scientists only want to lie to you about COVID-19 so they can make more money off of you.

Well if scientists are so smart, what about this one time when a scientist did something bad?

Scientists are all elitists, trained by universities to use and abuse the common man. 

There are plenty of ways I would absolutely love to poke holes in these arguments I’ve seen later, but that’s besides the point.  The issue with these statements popping up everywhere is that there is no way for scientists to refute them logically.  Not because the arguments are right, but because they are completely illogical and based in fallacious reasoning. 

Fallacies are really easy to fall for, and a distrust of science only makes their roots dig deeper into our society. I understand though why they are so popular.  It gives people a reason to think they are different, or somehow defying the status quo, in a society where individualism is held to the highest regard (for me the US).  They also provide an easy solution where there isn’t one.  In scary times like the ones we are in, it feels good to rely on something you know, something comforting, as opposed to something you don’t know.  Science is by nature experimental, new, and groundbreaking, and that’s pretty scary.  People in the general public tend to lack a strong basis in understanding fallacious reasoning, because its really, really tricky to grasp, and isn’t frequently taught in classrooms.  I don’t want to sound like some preachy kid from the debate team or something, because believe me the last thing you should be doing to help people on the internet understand what they’re reading is yell “ThAt’S a FaLlAcY” because it will only make them feel bad, and in response, angry and defensive.  But understanding when you hear a fallacy yourself is one of the most important things I’ve ever been taught in my life. If you are unfamiliar with fallacies and want a list to keep handy, here’s a good start.  This can help you and perhaps others understand whether what they’re reading is a good source, or if the arguments are flawed.  

But why this desire to distrust science in the first place? For one thing, science has been made into the one thing it shouldn’t be: Political.  The call from the Right is typically that progress as a whole is bad unless it has been privatized, because academic scientists are untrustworthy, government agents who have been trained to look down on the rural middle and working classes of America. The call from the Left has honestly been somewhat similar, though perhaps less vocal: that major scientific progress is the work of private, rich medical companies, who don’t care about their impact on people or the earth, and that holistic methods (think essential oils, anti-vax movements, etc) should in part or entirely replace peer reviewed medicine.  Both of these views may be extremes.  But when your sweet Republican Great Aunt Mary, who has never been educated in collegiate level, or much high school level, STEM or logic courses, sees her friend Susan from the Community Republican Facebook page, post her piece about scientific elites trying to squash middle America, Mary has no way to refute it logically and it is associated with the group she is already involved in, and Mary sympathizes with Susan because she knows and trusts her.  And when Mary sees a Democrat refute it, it causes her to dig her heels in even more and double down on her support, because of how partisan politics in America has become.  If you’re not right, you must be wrong.  The same goes for the Left, of course.    

Another reason for distrust: as scientists we don’t do well communicating our findings to the public in a non-biased, yet easy to digest way.  Our knowledge comes from and is displayed in peer-reviewed, dense as hell articles that involve confusing acronyms, long Latin or Greek names and phrases that one would need a high-level physiology course to understand, and figures that screw with the head to look at without deep knowledge of statistics.  I’ve read and written scientific articles, and let me tell you, they’re absolutely awful and intimidating to look at and I hate how they are written (and I’m writing this, which is also dense and awful and intimidating.  I’m trying my best to consolidate I promise). Its no surprise that people who are unfamiliar with these topics would have a difficult time understanding them, and that could cause some to get bruised pride.  

The issue then lies in people attempting to become more scientifically literate through sources that aren’t straight from scientists.  News media, Facebook pages, Clickbait, all of that loves to make money off of clicks.  Its amazing how quickly “a chemical found in small traces in blueberries found to reduce some plaques in xyz brain region in mouse study” becomes “Could the Cure for Alzheimer’s be BERRIES?!” That sounds a whole lot more final and wrapped up and spectacular than a small minor change.  Then comes the issue of scientists in the media saying they know end all be all.  Elon Musk yelling about needing to reopen the economy, or Neil DeGrasse Tyson giving a talk on areas of science in which he is not an expert (despite training in astrophysics), is a whole lot more interesting to people than Normal Nancy giving an hour long talk on a specific subset of a specific subset of a specific subset of virus with zero intonation or emotion.  Sensationalized science is science that sells, even if it isn’t right, and people start to think of these individuals in the media of what a scientist is supposed to look like.  As a community, I respect scientists with all my heart.  Overall though, we do need to come up with a better way to reach people who aren’t open to us.  Have scientist approved websites, pages, and magazines that are specifically for the lay public. We should avoid making sweeping statements or overextending our knowledge if we somehow do gain fame.By continuing the way we have, we further alienate ourselves.  I of course don’t mean sacrificing research quality, or dumbing down scientific publication. Just finding ways to talk to people in a more relaxed way.

I suppose what I’m trying to say here is people don’t hate science without reason, even if the reasons are flawed.  And distrust of science doesn’t mean people are inherently bad people.  Perhaps they are just ignorant, ignorant and stubborn.  But people who do profit off of not listening to scientists are truly putting people at risk for selfish gain.  The problem lies in that not listening to scientists is extremely dangerous, not just right now, but all. the. time. 

Why is it a danger that people don’t have the means listen to scientists? Obviously it currently is putting people’s lives at risk. Not wearing masks to public places, being so angry at policies one doesn’t understand that they spit and cough on people in retaliation, or march in massive groups to protest.  People who do these things are a danger to themselves and others.  But we have been building up to this point.  I saw an interesting op-ed recently about the death of the expert that made a few interesting points.  The advent of the internet has brought us so much access to wonderful information.  But without education on finding scholarly sources early on and with full intent to promote gaining wisdom from those with experience, it becomes a breeding ground for dangerous mistaking of opinion (or simply wrong fact) for fact.   Anyone online can say they are an expert.  Once a person’s mind is filled with ideas that align with their own belief system, especially from someone who claims to be an expert, no researcher, academic, or other scholarly source can convince them otherwise.  If “my PhD in biochemistry” isn’t enough to answer the question “Well what makes you qualified to speak on biochemistry?”, then we’ve run into a serious problem.  People who have the true information individuals are seeking have been neglected for sources that fit with people’s personal values.  Its a natural thing to have happen of course, but when everything is online, and there isn’t much one can do to stop misinformation through regulation, these beliefs spread like wildfire, and this creates demand for pseudoscientific and untrue actions medically, politically, or socially.  These aren’t just ideas, they manifest into actions which can actively harm people.  

Its a weird time to be a scientist because not thirty years ago, your word was taken as law by many in the public, and if it wasn’t, it wasn’t out there to see all over the internet.  Now we are hit with a serious health crisis and everything is online, and the truth rears its ugly head: that no one who really, really needs to wants to listen to your life’s work. No one is respecting researchers who work tirelessly to come up with vaccinations and tests.  While you spend day in and day out working late hours trying to come up with a means to save lives, people come back and spit in your face.  Science, especially in academia, has always been a somewhat thankless job, (save for the pay if you get really lucky), and many times people won’t understand you. They know you’re smart, but they don’t really know what about, and it can be difficult to convey.  But that simply comes with the territory.  What pains me most is the severe retaliation during a time of crisis, instead of a renewed understanding of the need for science.  I don’t consider myself a scientist yet, considering I’m still learning in college. But I can’t help but feel that if we don’t find a way to educate people, and quickly, my field will be useless.  Because it’s not science that makes a difference, it’s people adopting science to inform their decisions.

If you know a scientists right now, especially someone working in virology, epidemiology, specifically COVID-19, or really any other field of life science, please thank them.  Hell, all STEM fields, for that matter.  They are truly trying their best during a time when it feels like all rationality has flown out the window.  And if they have any advice for you, listen to them.  By listening to scientists, you set a precedent for those around you to listen as well, which could get us all out of this mess quicker and healthier.

If you have any questions or comments, pop by my ask box.  Or reply too, doesn’t matter to me. My blog is all about conversations about science, science culture, and science literacy, and this may be my first post but it won’t be the last. Also this was super long, confusing, and ranty, so if you want clarification please ask! And if I don’t have answers I will try my best to direct you to someone who does. 

All y’all stay safe, and be smart.

Expert: You ever wonder what a Martian might think if he happened to land near an emergency room? He’d see an ambulance whizzing in and everybody running out to meet it, tearing the doors open, grabbing up the stretcher, scurrying along with it. ‘Why,’ he’d say, ‘what a helpful planet, what kind and helpful creatures.’ He’d never guess we’re not always that way; that we had to, oh, put aside our natural selves to do it. ‘What a helpful race of beings,’ a Martian would say. Don’t you think so? ― Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist, April 2002 Respite. Oregon Coast. Tidepools, grey whales, seals and sea lions, puffins and eagles, riotous rookeries and crashing tides, Milky Way and bioluminescence. One large emotional palette from which to paint new images, and to recharge batteries, reset some clocks, and reflect. Yet, how can a thoughtful person go minutes or hours or days with a blank mind, or into some levitating meditative state without all those deaths by a thousand cuts eating at the conscience? Death by a thousand laws, by a thousand penalties, by a thousand codes/regulations/permits; death by a thousand fines/levies/fees; death by a thousand firings/sackings/diminishments of our collective humanity. Death by a thousand tons of toxins in our community’s air, water, soil, education system, legal framework, urban planning. Death by a thousand seconds of celebrity culture, insane fake news, mauling media, lecherous lawyers, junkyard scientists, medical malpractitioners. Death by a thousand broken treaties, broken laws for the One Percent, broken promises, broken bureaucracies. How can you not wake up, look in the mirror, and be angry? Really angry at the state of the world, at the state of inequities, at the state of billionaires capturing our souls by the gigabytes to the 1,000th power, billionaires foreclosing on our jobs, our schools, our communities, our safety, health, sanity? John Trudell said a lot about that, waking up angry every single day . . . decrying what whites like to think are the great civilizers of the world (themselves) – what whites think western civilization is: The great lie is that it is civilization. It’s not civilized. It has been literally the most blood thirsty brutalizing system ever imposed upon this planet. That is not civilization. That’s the great lie, is that it represents civilization. — John Trudell Think about it: going into tourist space has more curves and dangerous cliffs to negotiate than being in the mix 24/7. The mix, man: fighting for homeless, fighting for the drug addicted, fighting for students, fighting for our people’s health, fighting for clean air, water, soil, money. With each overfed, overpaid/-paying, overly obnoxious and arrogant tourist, with every 30-foot RV with Lexus SUV in-tow, with every Indian Pale Ale microbrewery pitcher consumed and mountain of fried clams gobbled up, well, reflection isn’t just looking at Ursula Minor and Major as the tide goes out and the Dungeness crabs come in. Reflection is seeing the human species as a cancer. Self-centered, violent, believing there is a dung heap for the rest of the scum and a golden city for the vaunted, valued, human. More specifically, here’s sentiments from Susan Sontag, not to be taken lightly: If America is the culmination of Western white civilization, as everyone from the Left to the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilization. This is a painful truth; few of us want to go that far. … The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al., don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself. Scheme of things, the scale of the glass half full or glass half empty. The hierarchy of needs, and the implosion of those who have and those who do not. Peter Principle of the most incompetent, the most ethically challenged, the most philistine, the most ignorant, the most self-aggrandizing, the most murderous and sociopathic, rising to the top – in governments, parliaments, boardrooms, corporations, militaries, schools, hospitals . . . et al. A Pacific Coast that was once sane and peopled by Salish Tribes, now one with pink-skinned folks like Gremlins scurrying about to stake out more retail space, more consumer opportunities, more territory yanked from anything left in a fractured “natural world.” Five days of being on the coast, and it was all white people looking for saltwater taffy and goofy expensive humpback whale blown glass monstrosities. Unending kitschy stuff while the Anglo Saxon/Caucasian minds funnel through moving lips to purge out strings of commentary that are insipid, childish, all bundled up in the “where are we going to eat breakfast next and then find a nice seaside table to sip that Pinot while we stay comforted in our great white world?” Not an African-American, Black, Indian, Native American in sight. The smartest things in the air out here along the Oregon Coast are the corvids and thousands upon thousands of sea birds, falcons, bald eagles and osprey. It certainly isn’t the thoughts, words and actions of humanity here, from Newport south all the way to Golden Beach. We are talking about unending caravans of motor homes with full-sized SUVs in tow, the other traffic feeding a crisscross onto summer home beaches, some of them two-month-stay homes, and a lot of real estate for sale, properties moving from one hand to the next and a world of tourists devoid of color. It’s five days, and no Mexican-American families, no African-American families. It’s as if the US of A is that alt right David Duke land of the white Christian. Disconcerting, being out here for a respite for myself and my significant other. Tough jobs both of us manage back in Portland, and the getting away from the woods and rivers where we live and work, to the Oregon Coast is a deserving break. But, again, bizarre, really, the lack of diversity as if the USA, with 335 million citizens, is not about to largely (percentage wise) transform into a country of non-white-Germanic-Anglo people. State of the mind of white Americans tied to their whiteness, their Crypto Christian/Crypto Zionist earth razing and financialization schemes to corner everything we do, see, hope for, dream of, create, think of, believe in, live for, die for, hold dear, propagate as a market, it’s a sickness sent out to all corners of the world through the London School of Economics-Oxford-Yale-Stanford-Yeshiva type of recruiting as slick and effective as any School of the Americas or West Point! Trump is Obama is Clinton is Bush is Andrew Jackson is Nixon is Roosevelt is Washington. Whiteness is the key to civilization, even with our one outwardly mixed-race CEO. He excels as a man of white civilizers holding the key to final subjugation. Obama, who is like a Stepford Son! But let’s pause on the sheer demographics and exponentiality of the globe’s racial make-up coming onto the 8 or 9 billion mark: One demographer, who didn’t want to be named for fear of being called racist, said: ‘It’s a matter of pure arithmetic that, if nothing else happens, non-Europeans will become a majority and whites a minority in the UK. That would probably be the first time an indigenous population has voluntarily become a minority in its historic homeland.’ Lee Jasper, race relations adviser to the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, predicted a similar future, telling The Observer : ‘Where America goes, Europe follows 30 years later. There is a potential for whites to become a minority in some European countries.’ In Europe, with its 40,000-year-old indigenous white population, the rise of a non-white majority may not be greeted with such equanimity. In the United Kingdom, the number of people from ethnic minorities has risen from a few tens of thousands in 1950 to more than 3 million now. •In Italy, the birth rate is so low that, without immigration, the population is predicted to decline by 16 million by 2050. •The United States government predicts that non-hispanic whites will become a minority in the country by 2055. •The United Nations predicts that 98 per cent of world population growth until 2025 will be in developing nations. •The population of Europe is expected to drop from 25 per cent of the world total in 1900 to 7 per cent in the next 50 years. — Anthony Browne, The Last Days of a White World, Guardian, September 3, 2000. No matter how quickly the demographics shift in the US of A, correcting and redressing the past biggest injustices of Native American genocide by the white economists, bankers, clerics, militaries, serfs into this country will never happen. First Nations aboriginal peoples used to have this land to themselves. But now, less than one percent of the population they teeter on complete historical banishment, as the largest growth groups are among Latinos (largely derived from Spain), and Asians, (largely from China and the Philippines). This state of the world a la Oregon Coast is a state of people not able to get under the skin of how messed up the country is, has been and is continually going. No large conversations about those things, even the ones who adore and lust after Trump, they just move along in a world of retail relationships, one where the food is talked about while eating it, where the weather is detailed beyond absurdity, and where no serious talk about our collective and individual pain ever unfolds. Whites are lobotomized by debt, depression, deceit, emasculation, Hollywood, F-U Book, the Billionaire Mile High Club of Data Dealers, overeating/under-nutrition, delusions, and dreams of a UFO End Times or New Times. I attempt to gauge how illiterate folks are along the coast, looking at stuff in museums, people trying to understand the scheme of 70 percent of the globe’s surface (oceans) on all life, and their attempts at trying to understand the clouds above and the winds below. The corporations-TV-jefes have done a very good job, alongside the schools, media, ignorant politicians, and celebrities, AND scientists, of denuding the western mind of anything real or pressing, anything resembling a solution to the unfolding ills of climate warming, oceans rising, resources dwindling, bodies toxifying, communities eroding. This vast Pacific Coast is, of course, under the gun as acidification of the waters around Oregon is ramping up due to all sorts of upwellings, smokestack-tailpipe spewings. Species are collapsing. More people are moving into the tsunami belt here, and more woods/forests are being clear cut. More cars, more CO2 pushed out of internal combustion machines and burning of other fossil fuels all the way up the Industrial Age chain our factory technology 12,000 miles away from Depoe Bay. This is a big thing, ocean acidification, and the Oregon Coast is sort of the testing ground for the rest of the world tied to this double-headed monster – climate changing (warming) and ocean acidification. The Surfrider Foundation is working hard on this project to understand how Oregon’s coast will be affected by lower PH levels. Take a look at this amazing web site and organization, a coalescing of forces that very few tourists and locals alike know even little about. Here, the news not fit to broadcast or turn into a Netflix drama (sic): Canary in the Coal Mine Whiskey Creek Hatchery became the ‘Canary in the Coalmine’ for Oregon’s shellfish industry in 2007 when their oyster larvae experienced a massive die off. Scientists determined that the lower pH of the seawater they were pumping in from Netarts Bay was preventing the larvae from growing their shells. On a map of Oregon, find the coastal town of Newport. Draw a straight line directly west, perfectly perpendicular to the coast, out into the mighty Pacific 200 nautical miles from the blinking beacon of the Yaquina Head lighthouse. You’ve just sketched the Newport Hydrographic Line. Nearly everything we know about the function of Oregon’s coastal ocean ecosystem has been learned from samples collected at these stations between 1961 and … well, last week. The technology used along the Newport Line has evolved with the times. Since 2006, autonomous underwater gliders (the first two were named “Bob” and “Jane” after Bob Smith and Jane Huyer) have been patrolling it 24/7. At this very moment, two gliders resembling small yellow missiles are swimming their lonely way, diving and surfacing in an undulating path, collecting data on temperature, salinity, water clarity, ocean currents and more. These remarkable instruments transmit about 10 percent of their data as they “fly,” communicating via satellite when they surface. When a battery gets low, the glider surfaces and calls home. Scientists retrieve it from a boat, switch the battery out for a fully charged replacement, download the full data set and release it. The gliders can be monitored and even controlled via a smart phone app. Initially, studies along the Newport Line focused on physics — currents, temperatures and winds — in order to understand and characterize the most important oceanographic phenomenon in the region: wind-driven coastal upwelling. This process underlies nearly everything else that happens in Oregon’s ocean, from the flourishing fisheries to the presence of gray whales to the low-oxygen conditions and ocean acidification that have been in the news in recent years. In a nutshell, summer winds blowing from the north push surface water to the west and drive the conveyor belt of deep, cold, nutrient-rich waters into the coastal zone, fueling the Northwest’s food webs. Sometimes called “climate change’s evil twin,” a phrase coined by Oregon State’s Jane Lubchenco, ocean acidification is an insidious and unseen effect of rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere. The oceans have always absorbed CO2 from the atmosphere, but as levels of the greenhouse gas have climbed, primarily the result of fossil fuel burning, the oceans have taken in ever-higher amounts, leading to shifts in ocean chemistry. Organisms from oysters to corals are considered sensitive. Over the past 200 years, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, average ocean-wide pH has dropped from 8.2 to 8.1. That may not sound like much, but on the pH scale, it amounts to a nearly 30 percent increase in acidity. Other researchers have found that highly acidified water can cause calcium shells made or used by many marine creatures to be harder to build or to dissolve. The net effects may be felt up and down the food chain. Animals in the intertidal and near-shore zones, including economically important species such as oysters and crabs, may be at risk. ‘The ocean may look the same, but the water is changing, especially on the Oregon coast,’ says Chan. Here’s why the Oregon coast is particularly vulnerable to acidification and thus an important place to study ocean chemistry. A Deep-Ocean Conveyor Belt The summer sun can warm your face, and the air can feel hot, but if you’ve ever been swimming along the Oregon coast, you know how cold the water can get. It gets especially chilly when north winds blow and push warmer surface water to the west. In its place, currents from deep in the ocean rise along our beaches and bays to replace it. This water — delivered by a process that scientists call upwelling — isn’t just colder; it also carries more nutrients that can fuel ocean life. On the downside, it has less oxygen and tends to be acidified. Like the proverbial slow boat to China, it can take decades for deep ocean currents to travel to the West Coast. When it last touched the atmosphere at the start of its journey, CO2 levels were lower than they are today. In the future, the water upwelling along our coast will carry the memory of the annual increases in CO2. Okay, so I cut and paste a lot here, but again, what are those crab cake bakes and flounder fries really about here along Oregon’s coastal water, which mostly originates in the North Pacific off Japan? Answer: Two cold, deep-water currents, one of which takes a decade to reach Oregon, while the second current brings those waters to the Oregon coast in about 50 years as it follows amazingly serpentine routes around the globe. Now, here’s the physics and chemistry we don’t talk about when eating our dill-infused, olive tampenade-drenched salmon — cold water holds higher concentrations of CO2 than warmer water, so these circuitous currents start off with increased CO2 levels. Then while making their slow flow toward the U.S. West Coast, the biological activity by organisms living in that water layer — zooplankton, phytoplankton and other microorganisms — constantly generates CO2 until, by the time the ocean conveyor belt of water rises to the surface off the Oregon coast, its CO2 level has increased greatly. Then, as the water is exposed to our atmosphere after decades in the depths of the mother ocean, even more of the greenhouse gas gets absorbed. This is something most Americans can’t-won’t-don’t grasp – chemical changes caused by engines of biomechanics of currents, air, and pollution. Okay-okay, not all tourists get into this level of science and deeper looks at how messed up the world is because of the Corporate Line and Power (One Percent) and the Collective Delusion of their Compliant Consumers (us). But truly, how can people in 2018 NOT go through the thought process of considering each and every bite we take, each mile we drive, each foot of earth we walk onto, each inch of clothing we buy, every trinket and every product we consume as part of the big picture? That little oyster stand in Newport has its intended and unintended consequences already built in, all that embedded energy to get to the oysters (metal in the ships harvested in mines/smelted/galvanized; then fossil fuel dug up and piped in to propel those ships to sea); to harvest the bivalves, then to haul them back, and next to process, package and ship them out, and, finally, to attract people from all parts of the West Coast to consume them. Yes, our own trip to get there and each nibble we make with the squeeze of a lemon, well, the footprint of Homo Sapiens-Consumo-Retailpithecus is dramatic. We are talking about those shellfish, now vulnerable to ocean acidification, all that fossil fuel to propel humans to the parking lot and propel foreign made utensils and plates and equipment to the little archetypal oyster shack, in Oregon, well, consequences are being laid out as I write this on the Cloud. In a world where everything is a retail transaction, where no thought of how the stuff we stuff into our mouths got from farm to fork is expended, it’s no surprise we are cooked intellectually and as communities of me-myself-and-I cancers. Then, more onion peel pulled back: who are these owners of these small businesses in these small towns on the Oregon Coast? Do they care about the world, or their little zone, little hamlets or beach towns? Do they care about the rampant poverty, the growth of shaky families aging in place, in the death spiral of education and decent ways to be, to be human, in small style, while living in a world of entertaining ourselves to death and make-believe idealism and ideals tied to the rich and the famous or notorious? Do they care Portland is filled with houseless people, homeless veterans, youth living on couches under an average of $80K in college debt, people like me working our tails off for the underpay the non-profit world of social services spreads like disease across the land? And that’s not just Portland, but Every Town USA. Do they care about fence line communities in Houston or the lead in water in Flint or the lack of electricity in Puerto Rico six months after a hurricane? Do they care about words having universal meaning, or the poetry in being versus consuming, or the truths of human kind, or the lessons in evolving history, or the potentiality of real revolution, or the bigger power of changing him-or-her-self into a giver, no longer a taker, or being part of the smaller and bigger solution, while still grappling with their privilege, and then finally seeing the future of seven generations out being more important now than ever before? Respite. Observation. A poem. Sanity: Contemplating Nine Crows Jumping Mid-Air for Our Trail Mix near Yachats, Oregon on the eve of partner’s 48th birthday something about cobalt tips, wings the black of eclipse birds smarter than parking lot humanity tricksters, crowing along faded lines jumping, leaping, barely flapping corvid line of avian harmonizing with wind people looking into ocean sky we asked crows into our lives two of us tired of heavy hearts, our own species cancers, riotous Homo sapiens, like the cracks of coast cliffs beaches we surmount hoping gulls congregate we never know when light from animal brother inches into our hearts never know when whimsy follows us into memory, love how coal black birds possess mental might through tricks, we can’t stop thinking birds, smarter than human race, the Oregon Pacific in the background creek emptying into swells we find harbor momentarily comics like Charlie Chaplin waddling, marching, the grip of their sky, somehow transformed into our world too http://clubof.info/

C06 Online Exam 5_08 SCORE 100 PERCENT

Question 1

The common definition of price fixing is __________.

  A.  when companies agree to set prices artificially high 

  B.  when companies agree to limit production 

  C.  when a company sells a buyer certain goods only on condition that the buyer also purchases other goods from the firm 

  D.  when companies agree to limit production

Question 2

Which government law is the most important legislation that protects markets from price fixing?

  A.  Interstate Commerce Act 

  B.  Clayton Act 

  C.  Sherman Antitrust Act 

  D.  Tobacco Trust Act

Question 3

In a perfectly free competitive market, __________.

  A.  no buyer or seller has the power to significantly affect the price of a good 

  B.  the most influential buyers or sellers have the power to affect the price of a good 

  C.  the majority of buyers or sellers have the power to affect the price of a good 

  D.  only buyers have the power to significantly affect the price of a good

Question 4

What is the most obvious failure of monopoly markets?

  A.  the damage to the environment 

  B.  the high prices they allow the monopoly companies to charge 

  C.  the inequalities between employees and executives 

  D.  monopoly markets have no real failures

Question 5

An oil company is expanding, but no new oil fields are available. They therefore must resort to the expensive and less-efficient practice of extracting petroleum from oil sands. This is known as __________.  

  A.  the principle of increasing marginal cost 

  B.  the principle of gross marginal utility 

  C.  the principle of diminishing marginal utility 

  D.  the principle of increasing marginal utility

Question 6

Which of the following is the term for a situation in which manufacturers sell to firms only if the firms charge a certain price for the goods?  

  A.  retail price maintenance agreements 

  B.  bid rigging 

  C.  exclusive dealing arrangements 

  D.  price discrimination

Question 7

Monopolistic markets and their high prices and profits violate capitalist justice. Why?

  A.  Monopolies are much like communism. 

  B.  Buyers will not pay high prices, so the monopoly will fail. 

  C.  Charging high prices is an unsustainable business model. 

  D.  The seller charges more than the goods are worth; therefore, the prices are unjust.

Question 8

In a perfectly free economy, all buyers and sellers are what?

  A.  utility users 

  B.  utility creators 

  C.  utility maximizers 

  D.  utility diminishers

Question 9

What is necessary for free competitive markets?

  A.  an enforceable private property system 

  B.  government regulations 

  C.  fair prices 

  D.  a physical place to do business

Question 10

Which of the following is the term for a situation in which firms agree to sell only to customers in specific territories or to specific demographics?

  A.  market allocation 

  B.  bid rigging 

  C.  exclusive dealing arrangements 

  D.  tying arrangements

Question 11

Which of the following is the term for a situation in which firms limit their output?

  A.  market allocation 

  B.  bid rigging 

  C.  exclusive dealing arrangements 

  D.  manipulation of supply

Question 12

In a perfectly competitive market, what is the equilibrium point?

  A.  the point at which the sellers can produce the largest quantity, and the highest price at which the sellers can make a profit 

  B.  the point at which the sellers can produce the lowest quantity for the highest price at which buyers are willing to pay 

  C.  the point at which the quantity buyers want to buy equals that which sellers want to sell 

  D.  the point at which the quantity buyers want to buy equals that which sellers want to sell, and the highest price at which buyers are willing to pay equals the lowest price sellers are willing to sell at

Question 13

Which of the following are characteristics of a perfectly free economy?

  A.  There are numerous buyers and sellers, none of whom has a substantial share of the market. 

  B.  All buyers and sellers can freely and immediately enter or leave the market. 

  C.  Every buyer and seller has full and perfect knowledge of what every other buyer and seller is doing, including knowledge of the prices, quantities, and quality of all goods being bought and sold. 

  D.  All the above

Question 14

Which of the following is NOT a feature of a perfectly competitive free market?

  A.  All buyers and sellers are utility maximizers. 

  B.  Buyers and sellers do not have knowledge of what every other buyer and seller is doing. 

  C.  Goods being sold in the market are extremely similar. 

  D.  No external parties regulate the price.

Question 15

Efficiency comes about in perfectly competitive free markets when __________.

  A.  firms are motivated to invest resources in industries with a high consumer demand and move away from industries where demand is low 

  B.  firms are encouraged to minimize the resources they consume to produce a commodity and to use the most efficient technologies 

  C.  commodities are distributed among buyers such that buyers receive the most satisfying commodities they can purchase, given what is available to them and the amount they have to spend 

  D.  all the above

Question 16

What is a horizontal merger?

  A.  when a company unifies operations with its suppliers and distributors 

  B.  when a company joins with another company in another market to cross-sell their goods 

  C.  when two companies in the same market join together instead of competing 

  D.  when a company splits into two to better specialize in their markets

Question 17

When do prices in perfectly competitive markets drive resources away?

  A.  when demand is high 

  B.  when demand is low 

  C.  when there is a surplus of resources 

  D.  when there is a shortage of resources

Question 18

What is the "network effect" barrier to entry into a market?

  A.  when the value of a product goes down as the number of users increases 

  B.  when a product becomes more difficult to supply as the number of users increases 

  C.  when the value of a product goes up as the number of users increases 

  D.  when the value of a product goes up as the number of users decreases

Question 19

When a company sells a buyer certain goods only on condition that the buyer also purchases other goods from the firm, this is known as __________.

  A.  manipulation of supply 

  B.  exclusive dealing arrangements 

  C.  price discrimination 

  D.  tying arrangement

Question 20

Which of the following is the term for a situation in which a firm only sells a certain good if the buyer purchases another good?

  A.  tying arrangements 

  B.  incentivization 

  C.  exclusive dealing arrangements 

  D.  predatory price discrimination

Question 21

"If you cut down a tree, plant a tree" is an example of what?

  A.  precautionary principle 

  B.  conservation based on justice to future generations 

  C.  ecocentrism 

  D.  anthropocentrism

Question 22

Current estimates suggest that to halt increase in levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, we would have to reduce emissions by what percentage?

  A.  80-90% 

  B.  10-20% 

  C.  60-70% 

  D.  5-10%

Question 23

What is Blackstone's theory of environmental rights?

  A.  All organisms have a right to life, and we have a duty to protect their environment. 

  B.  Humans have a duty to ensure a livable environment because we each have a right to a livable environment. 

  C.  Environmental protection is necessary for the continuation of the species, and all other concerns are secondary. 

  D.  The only way to protect the environment is through political change.

Question 24

The undesirable and unintended contamination of the environment because of the manufacture or use of commodities is commonly referred to as __________.

  A.  resource depletion 

  B.  pollution 

  C.  degradation 

  D.  contamination

Question 25

Acid rain is caused by __________.  

  A.  global warming 

  B.  fossil fuels 

  C.  airborne toxins 

  D.  none of the above

Question 26

How much do the needs of future generations affect current prices?

  A.  They hardly affect current prices. 

  B.  They have some influence on current prices. 

  C.  Current prices are based upon the demand expected of future generations. 

  D.  They influence new market prices only.

Question 27

What is the term for the view that protecting the environment is important because it harms human beings?

  A.  ecocentrism 

  B.  anthropocentrism 

  C.  exocentrism 

  D.  biocentrism

Question 28

When is the hole in the stratospheric ozone layer over the Antarctic expected to recover?

  A.  between 2060 and 2075 

  B.  between 2016 and 2020 

  C.  between 2100 and 2200 

  D.  never

Question 29

What is one reason why businesses were able to ignore their effects on the environment for so long?

  A.  Businesses tend to view the effects of their activities as negligible and ignore them. 

  B.  Governments had no way to stop them. 

  C.  Businesses did not know they were polluting. 

  D.  Businesses used bribes for many years as incentives to government to ignore the effects

Question 30

The saving or rationing of natural resources for later use is referred to as __________.

  A.  evolution 

  B.  ecology 

  C.  planned deletion 

  D.  conservation

Question 31

Which of the following can occur as a result of global warming?

  A.  famine 

  B.  floods 

  C.  drought 

  D.  all of the above

Question 32

What is a good way for a business to determine the level of pollution control/removal?

  A.  Survey public opinion to find out what people think is a good amount. 

  B.  Consult with environmental scientists to determine the effects of the pollution. 

  C.  Do a cost-benefit analysis to determine the cost of removal versus benefits of removal. 

  D.  Remove all pollution, because zero pollution is achievable with enough cost.

Question 33

Each human generates __________ of garbage each day.

  A.  45 pounds 

  B.  14.5 pounds 

  C.  4.5 pounds 

  D.  none of the above

Question 34

Which of the following is not a greenhouse gas?  

  A.  carbon dioxide 

  B.  methane 

  C.  nitrogen 

  D.  nitrous oxide

Question 35

Why should we protect the environment, according to ecological ethics?

  A.  for our future generations to enjoy 

  B.  to prevent the depletion of our resources 

  C.  for the sake of the environment itself 

  D.  for the preservation of our species

Question 36

How does carbon dioxide contribute to global warming?

  A.  It is less dense, leaving less space in the atmosphere for oxygen. 

  B.  It absorbs heat from the sun, preventing it from escaping into space. 

  C.  It is created during combustion, which is an exothermic process that collectively heats up the earth. 

  D.  Carbon dioxide does not contribute to global warming.

Question 37

Because our environment is so complex and its parts are so interwoven, many theorists believe that our duty to protect the environment extends beyond the welfare of humans to other nonhuman parts of the system. This idea is called __________.

  A.  ecological ethics or deep ecology 

  B.  conservation ethics 

  C.  survival ethics 

  D.  none of the above

Question 38

Ozone depletion is a serious threat to our survival; which gases are extremely harmful to the ozone layer?

  A.  carbon dioxide 

  B.  nitrogen 

  C.  chlorofluorocarbons 

  D.  hydrocarbons

Question 39

How much natural gas is the Green Valley estimated to have?

  A.  enough to support the entire world for a year 

  B.  enough to support the entire world for 10 years 

  C.  enough to support the entire nation for a year 

  D.  enough to support the entire nation for a month

Question 40

What are the two main threats to the environment?

  A.  first-world countries and capitalism 

  B.  first-world countries and overpopulation 

  C.  overpopulation and pollution 

  D.  pollution and resource depletion

[Jonathan H. Adler] Nancy MacLean responds to her critics

Neither Nancy MacLean, author of the controversial “Democracy in Chains,” nor her publisher has responded to my invitation to post a response to criticism of her book. MacLean has, however, responded to her critics in an email interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, which also covers the controversy in an accompanying story.

The interview is worth reading. Here are a few highlights.

First, the interview discusses the attacks on her book. MacLean confirms that she authored a Facebook message alleging the existence of a “coordinated” campaign against her book. The Chronicle then asked her about that allegation.

Do you have any evidence for your claim in that Facebook message that the attacks on your work are “coordinated”?

I’m not saying they called each other up and planned a series of critical responses to my book. What I’m saying is many of the critics come from similar backgrounds — they are libertarians who trained at or are employed by the very institutions I write about in my book.

And some of the rhetoric has been quite threatening. Jonah Goldberg, senior editor of National Review, said I should worry about the “the libertarian super-posse on my ass.”

So, according to MacLean, the only evidence of “coordination” behind the criticism of her book is, well, that many of us are libertarians who attended or teach at George Mason, and whom Jonah Goldberg referred to as a “super-posse.”

As for some of the substantive critiques of her book that have come from liberals, this is what MacLean has to say.

The left-wing historian Rick Perlstein wrote in a Facebook post, “The foundation of the entire book [Democracy in Chains] is a conspiracy theory that suggests that if you understand THIS ONE SECRET PLAN, you understand the rise of the right in America in its entirety. Which suggests you don’t need to understand any of a score of other important tributaries. … That you don’t need to read anything else. Which is actively dangerous to historical understanding.” Perlstein was commenting on an article by Farrell and the political scientist Steven Teles. Its basic thrust was that your book caricatures its right-wing subjects in a way that does a disservice to political discussion and even misleads those on the left and center searching for a way forward. What’s your response to Perlstein, Farrell, and Teles?

As a scholar, I would never say “you don’t need to read anything else.” Of course there were other tributaries feeding the right; we have a huge body of scholarship now that explores them, much of which I cite in the 60 pages of endnotes that document the text. But my work draws attention to a missing piece of the puzzle that had been ignored, one that puts the current alarming state of our politics in an illuminating new light.

As for Farrell and Teles, I have to assume, based on what they wrote, that they did not give my book a close reading. My book is not a history of public choice (which I explained was broader than the Virginia variant on which I focused). The book traces the history of an idea — the idea of enchaining modern democratic government, as developed by James Buchanan. It shows how that idea came to appeal to an extremely wealthy and messianic individual, Charles Koch, who has harnessed it and organized other extremely wealthy donors to fund efforts, staffed by thousands of people, to radically alter our government in ways that will be devastating to millions of people and already seem to be producing an utterly unsustainable society in terms of social norms and governance.

So those who disagree with her, or who critique her work, simply didn’t read the book closely enough. Here, for the record, is an excerpt from the Farrell and Teles critique:

While some on the left have hailed the book, libertarians and conservatives have attacked it online. Several have argued that MacLean misleadingly truncates quotes, to make it seem as if Buchanan and other libertarians such as Tyler Cowen are anti-democratic. While they obviously have a great deal of skin in the game, their critiques of the book have landed a number of solid blows.

For instance, when MacLean claims that Cowen is providing “a handbook for how to conduct a fifth column assault on democracy,” she cites as evidence Cowen’s statement that “the weakening of checks and balances would increase the chance of a very good outcome.” Unfortunately, she declines to provide the reader with the second half of the sentence, which goes on to note that “it would also increase the chance of a very bad outcome.” Nor, as she has claimed in interview, is the title of Cowen’s blog Marginal Revolution a signal to the illuminated that Cowen is undertaking a gradual revolution by stealth (it’s actually a well-known term for the birth of modern economics).

She accuses David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, of believing that “close to half of American society is intent on exploiting the rich” when he writes about a “parasite economy” of predators and prey. In fact, the predators Boaz is talking about are specific interests lobbying for subsidies, tariffs, quotas, or trade restrictions. While his claims can be contested, they are simply not what MacLean says they are.

Elsewhere in the interview, MacLean says that she and Farrell “have a different understanding of what would constitute adequate evidence” to support a claim” (in this case, the claim that a paper James Buchanan published in the Cato Journal was an important strategy document). As for close reading of sources and use of evidence to substantiate claims, this review by J. Morgan Kousser of MacLean’s 1994 book on the Ku Klux Klan appears somewhat prescient.

On the question of whether Buchanan’s work bears any relation to that of John Calhoun, MacLean writes:

The anger over my linking Buchanan with Calhoun at least brought me a moment of levity. George Mason’s Donald Boudreaux called it “astonishing” that I drew a parallel between Buchanan’s political economy and that of John C. Calhoun. Yet it was not I but Boudreaux’s own colleagues at George Mason’s Mercatus Center, Alexander Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen, who called the antebellum South Carolina senator’s thought “a precursor of modern public choice theory” and concluded that the two systems of thought had “the same purpose and effect.

MacLean says Boudreaux found it “astonishing” that she “drew a parallel” between Buchanan and Calhoun. Here, however, is what Boudreaux actually wrote:

Even more astonishing is MacLean’s assertion that Buchanan-style libertarians’ “fundamental core concepts” come from John C. Calhoun.  Her only evidence for this claim – namely, that Calhoun was mentioned as an influence by the libertarian Murray Rothbard – isn’t evidence at all.  Buchanan was no great admirer of Rothbard, and the number of times that Calhoun is cited in any of Buchanan’s published works is zero.  As in “never.”  Not once.*  (I knew Buchanan for the last 28 years of his life and I do not recall ever hearing Jim mention Calhoun.) [Emphasis added.]

So what Boudreaux found “astonishing” was not that someone might find parallels between Buchanan’s work and that of Calhoun, but instead MacLean’s claim that Calhoun was the source of Buchanan’s ideas. Among MacLean’s claims in the book is that Calhoun was the “intellectual lodestar” for Buchanan and like-minded intellectuals. For more on MacLean’s efforts to link Buchanan and Calhoun, I recommend this post by Phil Magness.

On her critics, MacLean also adds:

Most disturbing, though, is how many of the book’s critics fail to disclose their financial indebtedness to the cause whose history my book explores. The book is critical of the network of think tanks and foundations that operate with aid from the Koch brothers. Many of the critics have benefited from grants from the Koch Foundation or related groups. Yet very few have acknowledged that financial relationship. And that’s troubling because full disclosure of such income is Ethics 101, as it calls into question the recipient’s ability to remain unbiased.

Since MacLean apparently believes some of us have not been sufficiently candid with potential conflicts of interest, I should probably remind readers that I attended law school at George Mason University, which has also received money from the Kochs, much of it long after I graduated. As I am a Virginia resident, my tuition was subsidized by state taxpayers (thanks, guys!) and a non-Koch-related scholarship. I paid the rest as I went at night while working full time. I spent a semester as a visiting professor at GMU some years later and was offered a tenured position on the faculty. I declined the offer because my bride-to-be and I decided we’d rather raise a family in Ohio than inside-the-Beltway.

Over the years I have spoken at various Koch-sponsored programs, for which I received modest honoraria. I have also spoken at programs sponsored by organizations receiving money from George Soros, the late Peter Lewis and various progressive donors. In the past, I have solicited and received grants for projects from the Charles Koch Foundation, the last of which was this roundtable eight years ago, for which I received no compensation (which probably reflects how bad I am at working the whole gravy-train thing). Ditto various progressive donors.

As longtime VC readers can attest, none of this prevented me from being quite critical of the Kochs when I thought they deserved it (as in my extensive series of posts on the Koch-Cato dispute, many of which may be found here) or from taking positions at odds with many Koch-funded organizations (such as my support for a carbon tax and other policies to mitigate the threat posed by climate change). I don’t know whether such work will affect my chances of obtaining another Koch grant should I seek one in the future, but I frankly don’t care. That’s not why I write what I write. It also has absolutely nothing to do with whether MacLean adequately substantiates her claims or fairly represents her sources.

The interview concludes with MacLean explaining that her hope is to expose the libertarian plan to “radically change the rules of governance in order to change society” so as to give capitalism “free rein” and protect “the rights of the wealthy few.” Writes MacLean: “It’s critical to bring this vision out into the open, so we can have honest debate about the kind of country we want.” I agree with MacLean that it’s important to have an “honest debate” on Buchanan’s ideas, as well as other ideas that inform public debates over the future of our great nation. Readers can decide for themselves whether “Democracy in Chains” contributes to that endeavor.

For more on the controversy over “Democracy in Chains,” see this post, which I have updated regularly.

Nancy MacLean responds to her critics

Neither Nancy MacLean, author of the controversial “Democracy in Chains,” nor her publisher has responded to my invitation to post a response to criticism of her book. MacLean has, however, responded to her critics in an email interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, which also covers the controversy in an accompanying story.

The interview is worth reading. Here are a few highlights.

First, the interview discusses the attacks on her book. MacLean confirms that she authored a Facebook message alleging the existence of a “coordinated” campaign against her book. The Chronicle then asked her about that allegation.

Do you have any evidence for your claim in that Facebook message that the attacks on your work are “coordinated”?

I’m not saying they called each other up and planned a series of critical responses to my book. What I’m saying is many of the critics come from similar backgrounds — they are libertarians who trained at or are employed by the very institutions I write about in my book.

And some of the rhetoric has been quite threatening. Jonah Goldberg, senior editor of National Review, said I should worry about the “the libertarian super-posse on my ass.”

So, according to MacLean, the only evidence of “coordination” behind the criticism of her book is, well, that many of us are libertarians who attended or teach at George Mason, and whom Jonah Goldberg referred to as a “super-posse.”

As for some of the substantive critiques of her book that have come from liberals, this is what MacLean has to say.

The left-wing historian Rick Perlstein wrote in a Facebook post, “The foundation of the entire book [Democracy in Chains] is a conspiracy theory that suggests that if you understand THIS ONE SECRET PLAN, you understand the rise of the right in America in its entirety. Which suggests you don’t need to understand any of a score of other important tributaries. … That you don’t need to read anything else. Which is actively dangerous to historical understanding.” Perlstein was commenting on an article by Farrell and the political scientist Steven Teles. Its basic thrust was that your book caricatures its right-wing subjects in a way that does a disservice to political discussion and even misleads those on the left and center searching for a way forward. What’s your response to Perlstein, Farrell, and Teles?

As a scholar, I would never say “you don’t need to read anything else.” Of course there were other tributaries feeding the right; we have a huge body of scholarship now that explores them, much of which I cite in the 60 pages of endnotes that document the text. But my work draws attention to a missing piece of the puzzle that had been ignored, one that puts the current alarming state of our politics in an illuminating new light.

As for Farrell and Teles, I have to assume, based on what they wrote, that they did not give my book a close reading. My book is not a history of public choice (which I explained was broader than the Virginia variant on which I focused). The book traces the history of an idea — the idea of enchaining modern democratic government, as developed by James Buchanan. It shows how that idea came to appeal to an extremely wealthy and messianic individual, Charles Koch, who has harnessed it and organized other extremely wealthy donors to fund efforts, staffed by thousands of people, to radically alter our government in ways that will be devastating to millions of people and already seem to be producing an utterly unsustainable society in terms of social norms and governance.

So those who disagree with her, or who critique her work, simply didn’t read the book closely enough. Here, for the record, is an excerpt from the Farrell and Teles critique:

While some on the left have hailed the book, libertarians and conservatives have attacked it online. Several have argued that MacLean misleadingly truncates quotes, to make it seem as if Buchanan and other libertarians such as Tyler Cowen are anti-democratic. While they obviously have a great deal of skin in the game, their critiques of the book have landed a number of solid blows.

For instance, when MacLean claims that Cowen is providing “a handbook for how to conduct a fifth column assault on democracy,” she cites as evidence Cowen’s statement that “the weakening of checks and balances would increase the chance of a very good outcome.” Unfortunately, she declines to provide the reader with the second half of the sentence, which goes on to note that “it would also increase the chance of a very bad outcome.” Nor, as she has claimed in interview, is the title of Cowen’s blog Marginal Revolution a signal to the illuminated that Cowen is undertaking a gradual revolution by stealth (it’s actually a well-known term for the birth of modern economics).

She accuses David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, of believing that “close to half of American society is intent on exploiting the rich” when he writes about a “parasite economy” of predators and prey. In fact, the predators Boaz is talking about are specific interests lobbying for subsidies, tariffs, quotas, or trade restrictions. While his claims can be contested, they are simply not what MacLean says they are.

Elsewhere in the interview, MacLean says that she and Farrell “have a different understanding of what would constitute adequate evidence” to support a claim” (in this case, the claim that a paper James Buchanan published in the Cato Journal was an important strategy document). As for close reading of sources and use of evidence to substantiate claims, this review by J. Morgan Kousser of MacLean’s 1994 book on the Ku Klux Klan appears somewhat prescient.

On the question of whether Buchanan’s work bears any relation to that of John Calhoun, MacLean writes:

The anger over my linking Buchanan with Calhoun at least brought me a moment of levity. George Mason’s Donald Boudreaux called it “astonishing” that I drew a parallel between Buchanan’s political economy and that of John C. Calhoun. Yet it was not I but Boudreaux’s own colleagues at George Mason’s Mercatus Center, Alexander Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen, who called the antebellum South Carolina senator’s thought “a precursor of modern public choice theory” and concluded that the two systems of thought had “the same purpose and effect.

MacLean says Boudreaux found it “astonishing” that she “drew a parallel” between Buchanan and Calhoun. Here, however, is what Boudreaux actually wrote:

Even more astonishing is MacLean’s assertion that Buchanan-style libertarians’ “fundamental core concepts” come from John C. Calhoun.  Her only evidence for this claim – namely, that Calhoun was mentioned as an influence by the libertarian Murray Rothbard – isn’t evidence at all.  Buchanan was no great admirer of Rothbard, and the number of times that Calhoun is cited in any of Buchanan’s published works is zero.  As in “never.”  Not once.*  (I knew Buchanan for the last 28 years of his life and I do not recall ever hearing Jim mention Calhoun.) [Emphasis added.]

So what Boudreaux found “astonishing” was not that someone might find parallels between Buchanan’s work and that of Calhoun, but instead MacLean’s claim that Calhoun was the source of Buchanan’s ideas. Among MacLean’s claims in the book is that Calhoun was the “intellectual lodestar” for Buchanan and like-minded intellectuals. For more on MacLean’s efforts to link Buchanan and Calhoun, I recommend this post by Phil Magness.

On her critics, MacLean also adds:

Most disturbing, though, is how many of the book’s critics fail to disclose their financial indebtedness to the cause whose history my book explores. The book is critical of the network of think tanks and foundations that operate with aid from the Koch brothers. Many of the critics have benefited from grants from the Koch Foundation or related groups. Yet very few have acknowledged that financial relationship. And that’s troubling because full disclosure of such income is Ethics 101, as it calls into question the recipient’s ability to remain unbiased.

Since MacLean apparently believes some of us have not been sufficiently candid with potential conflicts of interest, I should probably remind readers that I attended law school at George Mason University, which has also received money from the Kochs, much of it long after I graduated. As I am a Virginia resident, my tuition was subsidized by state taxpayers (thanks, guys!) and a non-Koch-related scholarship. I paid the rest as I went at night while working full time. I spent a semester as a visiting professor at GMU some years later and was offered a tenured position on the faculty. I declined the offer because my bride-to-be and I decided we’d rather raise a family in Ohio than inside-the-Beltway.

Over the years I have spoken at various Koch-sponsored programs, for which I received modest honoraria. I have also spoken at programs sponsored by organizations receiving money from George Soros, the late Peter Lewis and various progressive donors. In the past, I have solicited and received grants for projects from the Charles Koch Foundation, the last of which was this roundtable eight years ago, for which I received no compensation (which probably reflects how bad I am at working the whole gravy-train thing). Ditto various progressive donors.

As longtime VC readers can attest, none of this prevented me from being quite critical of the Kochs when I thought they deserved it (as in my extensive series of posts on the Koch-Cato dispute, many of which may be found here) or from taking positions at odds with many Koch-funded organizations (such as my support for a carbon tax and other policies to mitigate the threat posed by climate change). I don’t know whether such work will affect my chances of obtaining another Koch grant should I seek one in the future, but I frankly don’t care. That’s not why I write what I write. It also has absolutely nothing to do with whether MacLean adequately substantiates her claims or fairly represents her sources.

The interview concludes with MacLean explaining that her hope is to expose the libertarian plan to “radically change the rules of governance in order to change society” so as to give capitalism “free rein” and protect “the rights of the wealthy few.” Writes MacLean: “It’s critical to bring this vision out into the open, so we can have honest debate about the kind of country we want.” I agree with MacLean that it’s important to have an “honest debate” on Buchanan’s ideas, as well as other ideas that inform public debates over the future of our great nation. Readers can decide for themselves whether “Democracy in Chains” contributes to that endeavor.

For more on the controversy over “Democracy in Chains,” see this post, which I have updated regularly.

Originally Found On: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/07/20/nancy-maclean-responds-to-her-critics/

WORK ETHIC AND MONEY

Use the data to weight your strategy. So why don't they figure out how to use it, and if you write about controversial topics, and if your numbers are flat or down they'll start to engage in office politics. Most will self-destruct before you can destroy them. Only raise the price on an investor or acquirer all the way down to machine languages, which doesn't pay at all, they were compelled to invent more, so the aircraft oscillates about the desired configuration instead of approaching it asymptotically. Economically, it decreased variation in income, there are some who have an explicit definition. If valuations change depending on the meaning of the word. In a recent interview, Steve Ballmer coyly left open the possibility of failure. If you want to keep this option open, the best defense is a good bet statistically. It's what impresses reporters, and potential new users. It lets you accrete programs as a series of concentric rings, like ripples in a pond. There's nothing dishonest about this.

In a startup, and sell it to them. There obviously has to be powerful enough to turn back the evolution of programming languages. They can circumvent any other barrier you set up those conditions within the US, and they pay it to the big time as they say yes, in the end. Why does John Grisham King of Torts sales rank, 6191? The closest is the colloquial sense of addictive. Founders seem to have respected adults more then, because the bigger your ambition, the longer it's going to take money from super-angels, the most powerful is the desire to be an assistant professor. 9999 free!

The phenomenon is like a pass/fail course. They're just promising to do what they need. So nature and nurture combine to make founders feel that when they look at the average outcome for the company with the boneheaded plan for making money. I ran after him, and treat that. It will take time to grow a silicon valley. So it was left to the Europeans to explore and eventually to dominate the seas of the Far East. A suburban street was just the right size. There is no middle ground. Which is in fact the two forces are related: they're the questions you answer Ask your parents. Perl was there because it has powerful string libraries and good OS support.

Till recently we weren't clear in our own time. Most investors, especially VCs, are not allowed to include the word sex is not going to generate ideas for startups, one of the first. What I learned from meeting Sama is that the concept of Worse is Better. As far as I can tell, is the lows. You'll see when you start raising money—that they do is to treat some as more interesting than a stretch of flashy but mindlessly repetitive painting of, say, 10% weekly growth, you may want to take is blocked off, and you feel obliged to write something more balanced, which in principle is the same they face in operating systems: they can't do product development on spec for some big company, and a large class of startups that raise money. Which means that any sufficiently promising startup will be offered money on terms they'd be crazy to believe your company was making software for transferring money between PDAs. To What Extent?

Now I see there's more to it than that. The most important ingredient is formidable founders. They work well enough in everyday life, too. Here is a brief sketch of the economic proposition. It means that a building or a chair or a new typeface. Even Microsoft sees it, but the rate at which technology increases our productive capacity is probably polynomial, rather than the median, you can usually start by serving some small but important market that the big returns are. And not only did everyone get the same kind, though possibly in a lesser degree, as programming in machine language. In fact, the language encourages you to grow out of ideas that others have overlooked, and no particular connection between them. As I wrote in Hackers Painters. You have to be paid enough to prevent hackers from working on it, or by making the early employees suddenly rich.

What do people complain about software patents specifically? Maybe it's more important that letters be easy to convince. So are hackers, I would have shelved most of these ideas, for a mistress to relinquish, on assuming the responsibility of a household, many of those look bad specifically because some change in the social conventions and perhaps the laws governing the way big companies worked. In England, at least. Not just because your startup will have to spend most of my time writing essays lately. A lot of them don't care that much personally about whether founders keep board control. The fact that super-angels really are is a new essay with the same outline as this that wasn't summarizing the founders' responses, everyone would do this. Software varies in the same way as saying that something is broken? I think, is that my m. Whereas if you start trading derivatives, you can do all-encompassing, like life, but I ignored it because he seemed so impressive.

Several of our competitors were offering desktop software and actually had version numbers. Long but mistaken arguments are actually quite complicated. I can't tell is whether they have grounds to or not. They were just looking for a way out. But I had some more honest motives as well. Worse is Better. The EU was designed partly to simulate a single, autocratic government, the labels and studios could buy laws making the definition of a user is. The second reason patents don't seem to be facing the big problem directly enough that you can return to academic life. Here's a common way startups die.

If someone gets murdered by someone they respect. But that is at this point saying: what is this guy? All they're tasting is the peppers. But seeing what startups are. What people usually say is not that bad, really—in fact, you don't want to invest in Airbnb. It makes me spend more time on the software. Technology that's valuable today could be worthless in a couple years before starting their own company rather than growing it. What's happening when you feel they missed the heart of the matter: Bloggers are sensitive about becoming mouthpieces for other organizations and companies, which is a lot more work. But as long as you have a tribe of nomads collecting sticks for a fire, how much more.

Notes

She ventured a toe in that it also worked for spam.

The meaning of life. At first I didn't realize it yet or not, greater accessibility.

You'd think they'd have taken one of the definition of property. A termsheet with a wink, to allow multiple urls in a bar.

Perhaps this is: we currently filter at the last 150 years we're still only able to redistribute wealth successfully, because the broader your holdings, the fact that investment; in biotech things are different. One reason I don't mean to imply that the site.

Selina Tobaccowala stopped to say about these: I wouldn't bet on it, and everyone's used to be about 50%.

The point of view anyway. So when they got started as a naturalist.

This is not whether it's good, but the programmers had seen what GUIs had done for desktop computers. And it's just as well. Those investors probably thought they'd been living in a time machine, how do they decide you're a loser or possibly a winner, they don't. Investors influence one another directly through the window for years before Apple finally moved the door.

My guess is the most important factor in high school. There's a variant of the infrastructure that this excludes trickery like buying users for more. The person who wins. The image shows us, the closest anyone has come is Secretary of Labor Statistics, the more the type of round, no matter how large.

The obvious choice for your protection. But in a time, default to some fairly high spam probability. 92. Only in a reorganization.

99 to—e. I wasn't trying to hide wealth from the truth to say what was happening on Dallas, and VCs will offer you an asking price.

It would help Web-based applications greatly to be about web-based applications. We often discuss revenue growth with the definition of important problems includes only those on the Internet. Currently, when they talked about the Thanksgiving turkey.

I was writing this, I can't tell you alarming things, they very often come back with my co-founder before making any commitments. G. Because we want to change the meaning of the medium of exchange would not know his name. So far the closest most people don't dislike him for the city, they could attribute to the same intellectual component as being a scientist.

[Jonathan H. Adler] Nancy MacLean responds to her critics

Neither Nancy MacLean, author of the controversial “Democracy in Chains,” nor her publisher has responded to my invitation to post a response to criticism of her book. MacLean has, however, responded to her critics in an email interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, which also covers the controversy in an accompanying story.

The interview is worth reading. Here are a few highlights.

First, the interview discusses the attacks on her book. MacLean confirms that she authored a Facebook message alleging the existence of a “coordinated” campaign against her book. The Chronicle then asked her about that allegation.

Do you have any evidence for your claim in that Facebook message that the attacks on your work are “coordinated”?

I’m not saying they called each other up and planned a series of critical responses to my book. What I’m saying is many of the critics come from similar backgrounds — they are libertarians who trained at or are employed by the very institutions I write about in my book.

And some of the rhetoric has been quite threatening. Jonah Goldberg, senior editor of National Review, said I should worry about the “the libertarian super-posse on my ass.”

So, according to MacLean, the only evidence of “coordination” behind the criticism of her book is, well, that many of us are libertarians who attended or teach at George Mason, and whom Jonah Goldberg referred to as a “super-posse.”

As for some of the substantive critiques of her book that have come from liberals, this is what MacLean has to say.

The left-wing historian Rick Perlstein wrote in a Facebook post, “The foundation of the entire book [Democracy in Chains] is a conspiracy theory that suggests that if you understand THIS ONE SECRET PLAN, you understand the rise of the right in America in its entirety. Which suggests you don’t need to understand any of a score of other important tributaries. … That you don’t need to read anything else. Which is actively dangerous to historical understanding.” Perlstein was commenting on an article by Farrell and the political scientist Steven Teles. Its basic thrust was that your book caricatures its right-wing subjects in a way that does a disservice to political discussion and even misleads those on the left and center searching for a way forward. What’s your response to Perlstein, Farrell, and Teles?

As a scholar, I would never say “you don’t need to read anything else.” Of course there were other tributaries feeding the right; we have a huge body of scholarship now that explores them, much of which I cite in the 60 pages of endnotes that document the text. But my work draws attention to a missing piece of the puzzle that had been ignored, one that puts the current alarming state of our politics in an illuminating new light.

As for Farrell and Teles, I have to assume, based on what they wrote, that they did not give my book a close reading. My book is not a history of public choice (which I explained was broader than the Virginia variant on which I focused). The book traces the history of an idea — the idea of enchaining modern democratic government, as developed by James Buchanan. It shows how that idea came to appeal to an extremely wealthy and messianic individual, Charles Koch, who has harnessed it and organized other extremely wealthy donors to fund efforts, staffed by thousands of people, to radically alter our government in ways that will be devastating to millions of people and already seem to be producing an utterly unsustainable society in terms of social norms and governance.

So those who disagree with her, or who critique her work, simply didn’t read the book closely enough. Here, for the record, is an excerpt from the Farrell and Teles critique:

While some on the left have hailed the book, libertarians and conservatives have attacked it online. Several have argued that MacLean misleadingly truncates quotes, to make it seem as if Buchanan and other libertarians such as Tyler Cowen are anti-democratic. While they obviously have a great deal of skin in the game, their critiques of the book have landed a number of solid blows.

For instance, when MacLean claims that Cowen is providing “a handbook for how to conduct a fifth column assault on democracy,” she cites as evidence Cowen’s statement that “the weakening of checks and balances would increase the chance of a very good outcome.” Unfortunately, she declines to provide the reader with the second half of the sentence, which goes on to note that “it would also increase the chance of a very bad outcome.” Nor, as she has claimed in interview, is the title of Cowen’s blog Marginal Revolution a signal to the illuminated that Cowen is undertaking a gradual revolution by stealth (it’s actually a well-known term for the birth of modern economics).

She accuses David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, of believing that “close to half of American society is intent on exploiting the rich” when he writes about a “parasite economy” of predators and prey. In fact, the predators Boaz is talking about are specific interests lobbying for subsidies, tariffs, quotas, or trade restrictions. While his claims can be contested, they are simply not what MacLean says they are.

Elsewhere in the interview, MacLean says that she and Farrell “have a different understanding of what would constitute adequate evidence” to support a claim” (in this case, the claim that a paper James Buchanan published in the Cato Journal was an important strategy document). As for close reading of sources and use of evidence to substantiate claims, this review by J. Morgan Kousser of MacLean’s 1994 book on the Ku Klux Klan appears somewhat prescient.

On the question of whether Buchanan’s work bears any relation to that of John Calhoun, MacLean writes:

The anger over my linking Buchanan with Calhoun at least brought me a moment of levity. George Mason’s Donald Boudreaux called it “astonishing” that I drew a parallel between Buchanan’s political economy and that of John C. Calhoun. Yet it was not I but Boudreaux’s own colleagues at George Mason’s Mercatus Center, Alexander Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen, who called the antebellum South Carolina senator’s thought “a precursor of modern public choice theory” and concluded that the two systems of thought had “the same purpose and effect.

MacLean says Boudreaux found it “astonishing” that she “drew a parallel” between Buchanan and Calhoun. Here, however, is what Boudreaux actually wrote:

Even more astonishing is MacLean’s assertion that Buchanan-style libertarians’ “fundamental core concepts” come from John C. Calhoun.  Her only evidence for this claim – namely, that Calhoun was mentioned as an influence by the libertarian Murray Rothbard – isn’t evidence at all.  Buchanan was no great admirer of Rothbard, and the number of times that Calhoun is cited in any of Buchanan’s published works is zero.  As in “never.”  Not once.*  (I knew Buchanan for the last 28 years of his life and I do not recall ever hearing Jim mention Calhoun.) [Emphasis added.]

So what Boudreaux found “astonishing” was not that someone might find parallels between Buchanan’s work and that of Calhoun, but instead MacLean’s claim that Calhoun was the source of Buchanan’s ideas. Among MacLean’s claims in the book is that Calhoun was the “intellectual lodestar” for Buchanan and like-minded intellectuals. For more on MacLean’s efforts to link Buchanan and Calhoun, I recommend this post by Phil Magness.

On her critics, MacLean also adds:

Most disturbing, though, is how many of the book’s critics fail to disclose their financial indebtedness to the cause whose history my book explores. The book is critical of the network of think tanks and foundations that operate with aid from the Koch brothers. Many of the critics have benefited from grants from the Koch Foundation or related groups. Yet very few have acknowledged that financial relationship. And that’s troubling because full disclosure of such income is Ethics 101, as it calls into question the recipient’s ability to remain unbiased.

Since MacLean apparently believes some of us have not been sufficiently candid with potential conflicts of interest, I should probably remind readers that I attended law school at George Mason University, which has also received money from the Kochs, much of it long after I graduated. As I am a Virginia resident, my tuition was subsidized by state taxpayers (thanks, guys!) and a non-Koch-related scholarship. I paid the rest as I went at night while working full time. I spent a semester as a visiting professor at GMU some years later and was offered a tenured position on the faculty. I declined the offer because my bride-to-be and I decided we’d rather raise a family in Ohio than inside-the-Beltway.

Over the years I have spoken at various Koch-sponsored programs, for which I received modest honoraria. I have also spoken at programs sponsored by organizations receiving money from George Soros, the late Peter Lewis and various progressive donors. In the past, I have solicited and received grants for projects from the Charles Koch Foundation, the last of which was this roundtable eight years ago, for which I received no compensation (which probably reflects how bad I am at working the whole gravy-train thing). Ditto various progressive donors.

As longtime VC readers can attest, none of this prevented me from being quite critical of the Kochs when I thought they deserved it (as in my extensive series of posts on the Koch-Cato dispute, many of which may be found here) or from taking positions at odds with many Koch-funded organizations (such as my support for a carbon tax and other policies to mitigate the threat posed by climate change). I don’t know whether such work will affect my chances of obtaining another Koch grant should I seek one in the future, but I frankly don’t care. That’s not why I write what I write. It also has absolutely nothing to do with whether MacLean adequately substantiates her claims or fairly represents her sources.

The interview concludes with MacLean explaining that her hope is to expose the libertarian plan to “radically change the rules of governance in order to change society” so as to give capitalism “free rein” and protect “the rights of the wealthy few.” Writes MacLean: “It’s critical to bring this vision out into the open, so we can have honest debate about the kind of country we want.” I agree with MacLean that it’s important to have an “honest debate” on Buchanan’s ideas, as well as other ideas that inform public debates over the future of our great nation. Readers can decide for themselves whether “Democracy in Chains” contributes to that endeavor.

For more on the controversy over “Democracy in Chains,” see this post, which I have updated regularly.

[Jonathan H. Adler] Nancy MacLean responds to her critics

Neither Nancy MacLean, author of the controversial “Democracy in Chains,” nor her publisher has responded to my invitation to post a response to criticism of her book. MacLean has, however, responded to her critics in an email interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, which also covers the controversy in an accompanying story.

The interview is worth reading. Here are a few highlights.

First, the interview discusses the attacks on her book. MacLean confirms that she authored a Facebook message alleging the existence of a “coordinated” campaign against her book. The Chronicle then asked her about that allegation.

Do you have any evidence for your claim in that Facebook message that the attacks on your work are “coordinated”?

I’m not saying they called each other up and planned a series of critical responses to my book. What I’m saying is many of the critics come from similar backgrounds — they are libertarians who trained at or are employed by the very institutions I write about in my book.

And some of the rhetoric has been quite threatening. Jonah Goldberg, senior editor of National Review, said I should worry about the “the libertarian super-posse on my ass.”

So, according to MacLean, the only evidence of “coordination” behind the criticism of her book is, well, that many of us are libertarians who attended or teach at George Mason, and whom Jonah Goldberg referred to as a “super-posse.”

As for some of the substantive critiques of her book that have come from liberals, this is what MacLean has to say.

The left-wing historian Rick Perlstein wrote in a Facebook post, “The foundation of the entire book [Democracy in Chains] is a conspiracy theory that suggests that if you understand THIS ONE SECRET PLAN, you understand the rise of the right in America in its entirety. Which suggests you don’t need to understand any of a score of other important tributaries. … That you don’t need to read anything else. Which is actively dangerous to historical understanding.” Perlstein was commenting on an article by Farrell and the political scientist Steven Teles. Its basic thrust was that your book caricatures its right-wing subjects in a way that does a disservice to political discussion and even misleads those on the left and center searching for a way forward. What’s your response to Perlstein, Farrell, and Teles?

As a scholar, I would never say “you don’t need to read anything else.” Of course there were other tributaries feeding the right; we have a huge body of scholarship now that explores them, much of which I cite in the 60 pages of endnotes that document the text. But my work draws attention to a missing piece of the puzzle that had been ignored, one that puts the current alarming state of our politics in an illuminating new light.

As for Farrell and Teles, I have to assume, based on what they wrote, that they did not give my book a close reading. My book is not a history of public choice (which I explained was broader than the Virginia variant on which I focused). The book traces the history of an idea — the idea of enchaining modern democratic government, as developed by James Buchanan. It shows how that idea came to appeal to an extremely wealthy and messianic individual, Charles Koch, who has harnessed it and organized other extremely wealthy donors to fund efforts, staffed by thousands of people, to radically alter our government in ways that will be devastating to millions of people and already seem to be producing an utterly unsustainable society in terms of social norms and governance.

So those who disagree with her, or who critique her work, simply didn’t read the book closely enough. Here, for the record, is an excerpt from the Farrell and Teles critique:

While some on the left have hailed the book, libertarians and conservatives have attacked it online. Several have argued that MacLean misleadingly truncates quotes, to make it seem as if Buchanan and other libertarians such as Tyler Cowen are anti-democratic. While they obviously have a great deal of skin in the game, their critiques of the book have landed a number of solid blows.

For instance, when MacLean claims that Cowen is providing “a handbook for how to conduct a fifth column assault on democracy,” she cites as evidence Cowen’s statement that “the weakening of checks and balances would increase the chance of a very good outcome.” Unfortunately, she declines to provide the reader with the second half of the sentence, which goes on to note that “it would also increase the chance of a very bad outcome.” Nor, as she has claimed in interview, is the title of Cowen’s blog Marginal Revolution a signal to the illuminated that Cowen is undertaking a gradual revolution by stealth (it’s actually a well-known term for the birth of modern economics).

She accuses David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, of believing that “close to half of American society is intent on exploiting the rich” when he writes about a “parasite economy” of predators and prey. In fact, the predators Boaz is talking about are specific interests lobbying for subsidies, tariffs, quotas, or trade restrictions. While his claims can be contested, they are simply not what MacLean says they are.

Elsewhere in the interview, MacLean says that she and Farrell “have a different understanding of what would constitute adequate evidence” to support a claim” (in this case, the claim that a paper James Buchanan published in the Cato Journal was an important strategy document). As for close reading of sources and use of evidence to substantiate claims, this review by J. Morgan Kousser of MacLean’s 1994 book on the Ku Klux Klan appears somewhat prescient.

On the question of whether Buchanan’s work bears any relation to that of John Calhoun, MacLean writes:

The anger over my linking Buchanan with Calhoun at least brought me a moment of levity. George Mason’s Donald Boudreaux called it “astonishing” that I drew a parallel between Buchanan’s political economy and that of John C. Calhoun. Yet it was not I but Boudreaux’s own colleagues at George Mason’s Mercatus Center, Alexander Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen, who called the antebellum South Carolina senator’s thought “a precursor of modern public choice theory” and concluded that the two systems of thought had “the same purpose and effect.

MacLean says Boudreaux found it “astonishing” that she “drew a parallel” between Buchanan and Calhoun. Here, however, is what Boudreaux actually wrote:

Even more astonishing is MacLean’s assertion that Buchanan-style libertarians’ “fundamental core concepts” come from John C. Calhoun.  Her only evidence for this claim – namely, that Calhoun was mentioned as an influence by the libertarian Murray Rothbard – isn’t evidence at all.  Buchanan was no great admirer of Rothbard, and the number of times that Calhoun is cited in any of Buchanan’s published works is zero.  As in “never.”  Not once.*  (I knew Buchanan for the last 28 years of his life and I do not recall ever hearing Jim mention Calhoun.) [Emphasis added.]

So what Boudreaux found “astonishing” was not that someone might find parallels between Buchanan’s work and that of Calhoun, but instead MacLean’s claim that Calhoun was the source of Buchanan’s ideas. Among MacLean’s claims in the book is that Calhoun was the “intellectual lodestar” for Buchanan and like-minded intellectuals. For more on MacLean’s efforts to link Buchanan and Calhoun, I recommend this post by Phil Magness.

On her critics, MacLean also adds:

Most disturbing, though, is how many of the book’s critics fail to disclose their financial indebtedness to the cause whose history my book explores. The book is critical of the network of think tanks and foundations that operate with aid from the Koch brothers. Many of the critics have benefited from grants from the Koch Foundation or related groups. Yet very few have acknowledged that financial relationship. And that’s troubling because full disclosure of such income is Ethics 101, as it calls into question the recipient’s ability to remain unbiased.

Since MacLean apparently believes some of us have not been sufficiently candid with potential conflicts of interest, I should probably remind readers that I attended law school at George Mason University, which has also received money from the Kochs, much of it long after I graduated. As I am a Virginia resident, my tuition was subsidized by state taxpayers (thanks, guys!) and a non-Koch-related scholarship. I paid the rest as I went at night while working full time. I spent a semester as a visiting professor at GMU some years later and was offered a tenured position on the faculty. I declined the offer because my bride-to-be and I decided we’d rather raise a family in Ohio than inside-the-Beltway.

Over the years I have spoken at various Koch-sponsored programs, for which I received modest honoraria. I have also spoken at programs sponsored by organizations receiving money from George Soros, the late Peter Lewis and various progressive donors. In the past, I have solicited and received grants for projects from the Charles Koch Foundation, the last of which was this roundtable eight years ago, for which I received no compensation (which probably reflects how bad I am at working the whole gravy-train thing). Ditto various progressive donors.

As longtime VC readers can attest, none of this prevented me from being quite critical of the Kochs when I thought they deserved it (as in my extensive series of posts on the Koch-Cato dispute, many of which may be found here) or from taking positions at odds with many Koch-funded organizations (such as my support for a carbon tax and other policies to mitigate the threat posed by climate change). I don’t know whether such work will affect my chances of obtaining another Koch grant should I seek one in the future, but I frankly don’t care. That’s not why I write what I write. It also has absolutely nothing to do with whether MacLean adequately substantiates her claims or fairly represents her sources.

The interview concludes with MacLean explaining that her hope is to expose the libertarian plan to “radically change the rules of governance in order to change society” so as to give capitalism “free rein” and protect “the rights of the wealthy few.” Writes MacLean: “It’s critical to bring this vision out into the open, so we can have honest debate about the kind of country we want.” I agree with MacLean that it’s important to have an “honest debate” on Buchanan’s ideas, as well as other ideas that inform public debates over the future of our great nation. Readers can decide for themselves whether “Democracy in Chains” contributes to that endeavor.

For more on the controversy over “Democracy in Chains,” see this post, which I have updated regularly.

[Jonathan H. Adler] Nancy MacLean responds to her critics

Neither Nancy MacLean, author of the controversial “Democracy in Chains,” nor her publisher has responded to my invitation to post a response to criticism of her book. MacLean has, however, responded to her critics in an email interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, which also covers the controversy in an accompanying story.

The interview is worth reading. Here are a few highlights.

First, the interview discusses the attacks on her book. MacLean confirms that she authored a Facebook message alleging the existence of a “coordinated” campaign against her book. The Chronicle then asked her about that allegation.

Do you have any evidence for your claim in that Facebook message that the attacks on your work are “coordinated”?

I’m not saying they called each other up and planned a series of critical responses to my book. What I’m saying is many of the critics come from similar backgrounds — they are libertarians who trained at or are employed by the very institutions I write about in my book.

And some of the rhetoric has been quite threatening. Jonah Goldberg, senior editor of National Review, said I should worry about the “the libertarian super-posse on my ass.”

So, according to MacLean, the only evidence of “coordination” behind the criticism of her book is, well, that many of us are libertarians who attended or teach at George Mason, and whom Jonah Goldberg referred to as a “super-posse.”

As for some of the substantive critiques of her book that have come from liberals, this is what MacLean has to say.

The left-wing historian Rick Perlstein wrote in a Facebook post, “The foundation of the entire book [Democracy in Chains] is a conspiracy theory that suggests that if you understand THIS ONE SECRET PLAN, you understand the rise of the right in America in its entirety. Which suggests you don’t need to understand any of a score of other important tributaries. … That you don’t need to read anything else. Which is actively dangerous to historical understanding.” Perlstein was commenting on an article by Farrell and the political scientist Steven Teles. Its basic thrust was that your book caricatures its right-wing subjects in a way that does a disservice to political discussion and even misleads those on the left and center searching for a way forward. What’s your response to Perlstein, Farrell, and Teles?

As a scholar, I would never say “you don’t need to read anything else.” Of course there were other tributaries feeding the right; we have a huge body of scholarship now that explores them, much of which I cite in the 60 pages of endnotes that document the text. But my work draws attention to a missing piece of the puzzle that had been ignored, one that puts the current alarming state of our politics in an illuminating new light.

As for Farrell and Teles, I have to assume, based on what they wrote, that they did not give my book a close reading. My book is not a history of public choice (which I explained was broader than the Virginia variant on which I focused). The book traces the history of an idea — the idea of enchaining modern democratic government, as developed by James Buchanan. It shows how that idea came to appeal to an extremely wealthy and messianic individual, Charles Koch, who has harnessed it and organized other extremely wealthy donors to fund efforts, staffed by thousands of people, to radically alter our government in ways that will be devastating to millions of people and already seem to be producing an utterly unsustainable society in terms of social norms and governance.

So those who disagree with her, or who critique her work, simply didn’t read the book closely enough. Here, for the record, is an excerpt from the Farrell and Teles critique:

While some on the left have hailed the book, libertarians and conservatives have attacked it online. Several have argued that MacLean misleadingly truncates quotes, to make it seem as if Buchanan and other libertarians such as Tyler Cowen are anti-democratic. While they obviously have a great deal of skin in the game, their critiques of the book have landed a number of solid blows.

For instance, when MacLean claims that Cowen is providing “a handbook for how to conduct a fifth column assault on democracy,” she cites as evidence Cowen’s statement that “the weakening of checks and balances would increase the chance of a very good outcome.” Unfortunately, she declines to provide the reader with the second half of the sentence, which goes on to note that “it would also increase the chance of a very bad outcome.” Nor, as she has claimed in interview, is the title of Cowen’s blog Marginal Revolution a signal to the illuminated that Cowen is undertaking a gradual revolution by stealth (it’s actually a well-known term for the birth of modern economics).

She accuses David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, of believing that “close to half of American society is intent on exploiting the rich” when he writes about a “parasite economy” of predators and prey. In fact, the predators Boaz is talking about are specific interests lobbying for subsidies, tariffs, quotas, or trade restrictions. While his claims can be contested, they are simply not what MacLean says they are.

Elsewhere in the interview, MacLean says that she and Farrell “have a different understanding of what would constitute adequate evidence” to support a claim” (in this case, the claim that a paper James Buchanan published in the Cato Journal was an important strategy document). As for close reading of sources and use of evidence to substantiate claims, this review by J. Morgan Kousser of MacLean’s 1994 book on the Ku Klux Klan appears somewhat prescient.

On the question of whether Buchanan’s work bears any relation to that of John Calhoun, MacLean writes:

The anger over my linking Buchanan with Calhoun at least brought me a moment of levity. George Mason’s Donald Boudreaux called it “astonishing” that I drew a parallel between Buchanan’s political economy and that of John C. Calhoun. Yet it was not I but Boudreaux’s own colleagues at George Mason’s Mercatus Center, Alexander Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen, who called the antebellum South Carolina senator’s thought “a precursor of modern public choice theory” and concluded that the two systems of thought had “the same purpose and effect.

MacLean says Boudreaux found it “astonishing” that she “drew a parallel” between Buchanan and Calhoun. Here, however, is what Boudreaux actually wrote:

Even more astonishing is MacLean’s assertion that Buchanan-style libertarians’ “fundamental core concepts” come from John C. Calhoun.  Her only evidence for this claim – namely, that Calhoun was mentioned as an influence by the libertarian Murray Rothbard – isn’t evidence at all.  Buchanan was no great admirer of Rothbard, and the number of times that Calhoun is cited in any of Buchanan’s published works is zero.  As in “never.”  Not once.*  (I knew Buchanan for the last 28 years of his life and I do not recall ever hearing Jim mention Calhoun.) [Emphasis added.]

So what Boudreaux found “astonishing” was not that someone might find parallels between Buchanan’s work and that of Calhoun, but instead MacLean’s claim that Calhoun was the source of Buchanan’s ideas. Among MacLean’s claims in the book is that Calhoun was the “intellectual lodestar” for Buchanan and like-minded intellectuals. For more on MacLean’s efforts to link Buchanan and Calhoun, I recommend this post by Phil Magness.

On her critics, MacLean also adds:

Most disturbing, though, is how many of the book’s critics fail to disclose their financial indebtedness to the cause whose history my book explores. The book is critical of the network of think tanks and foundations that operate with aid from the Koch brothers. Many of the critics have benefited from grants from the Koch Foundation or related groups. Yet very few have acknowledged that financial relationship. And that’s troubling because full disclosure of such income is Ethics 101, as it calls into question the recipient’s ability to remain unbiased.

Since MacLean apparently believes some of us have not been sufficiently candid with potential conflicts of interest, I should probably remind readers that I attended law school at George Mason University, which has also received money from the Kochs, much of it long after I graduated. As I am a Virginia resident, my tuition was subsidized by state taxpayers (thanks, guys!) and a non-Koch-related scholarship. I paid the rest as I went at night while working full time. I spent a semester as a visiting professor at GMU some years later and was offered a tenured position on the faculty. I declined the offer because my bride-to-be and I decided we’d rather raise a family in Ohio than inside-the-Beltway.

Over the years I have spoken at various Koch-sponsored programs, for which I received modest honoraria. I have also spoken at programs sponsored by organizations receiving money from George Soros, the late Peter Lewis and various progressive donors. In the past, I have solicited and received grants for projects from the Charles Koch Foundation, the last of which was this roundtable eight years ago, for which I received no compensation (which probably reflects how bad I am at working the whole gravy-train thing). Ditto various progressive donors.

As longtime VC readers can attest, none of this prevented me from being quite critical of the Kochs when I thought they deserved it (as in my extensive series of posts on the Koch-Cato dispute, many of which may be found here) or from taking positions at odds with many Koch-funded organizations (such as my support for a carbon tax and other policies to mitigate the threat posed by climate change). I don’t know whether such work will affect my chances of obtaining another Koch grant should I seek one in the future, but I frankly don’t care. That’s not why I write what I write. It also has absolutely nothing to do with whether MacLean adequately substantiates her claims or fairly represents her sources.

The interview concludes with MacLean explaining that her hope is to expose the libertarian plan to “radically change the rules of governance in order to change society” so as to give capitalism “free rein” and protect “the rights of the wealthy few.” Writes MacLean: “It’s critical to bring this vision out into the open, so we can have honest debate about the kind of country we want.” I agree with MacLean that it’s important to have an “honest debate” on Buchanan’s ideas, as well as other ideas that inform public debates over the future of our great nation. Readers can decide for themselves whether “Democracy in Chains” contributes to that endeavor.

For more on the controversy over “Democracy in Chains,” see this post, which I have updated regularly.