Catching Up.

You know, i wasn't really gone all that long, but I sure seemed to have missed a lot of. . . stuff. Let's say "stuff."


Like, for instance, this:

Exclusive: Presidential hopeful Biden looking for ‘middle ground’ climate policy

 

Oh fer. . . "middle ground?"

What exactly is the "middle ground" on the climate catastrophe down the barrel of which we are now staring?

Okay, how about this? How about only ONE of the ice caps melts, hmm? We'll keep the one with the penguins. You like penguins, don't you?

Oh what if only SOME coastal cities are underwater? We don't really need Miami AND New Orleans, do we? We'll still have Seattle. Probably. And some of Manhattan.

I really do not understand this compulsion among certain Democrats (they know who they are) to always, always, always try to work out some kind of compromise with the recalcitrant sociopathic lunatics of the Republican Party. It will never happen, and if it ever did, the result would still be horrendous. We have something like 10-12 years to take serious, drastic, severe measures to combat this threat to humanity and guys like Biden are seriously going to come out with his trademark "whoa, there, let's not get too far out there on this. Let's to be reasonable, find a way to make everybody happy" bullshit? God! Does he not remember the 8 years he spent as Barack Obama's vp? Does he still seriously have no idea who these people are? Remember, Joe, how you and President Obama offered cuts to Social Security and Medicare as part of a "grand bargain?" What happened, Joe? Did they accept your offer and work out some bi-partisan compromise? No. No they did not. And it's honestly a good thing that they didn't because where in the Hell do you get off offering cuts to Social Security and Medicare? We should be expanding those programs. It's just lucky that those bug-eyed, poo-throwing lunatics in the "Tea Party" refused to take any deal wherein they got less than 100% of what they want or we'd all be living with the consequences of your "grand bargain" today.



Oh, and speaking of  nutty caucuses:

House Freedom Caucus Unanimously Condemns Amash, Its Own Member

How. . . why. . . what could he possibly have done to warrant condemnation by members of his own cabal? Must have been truly egregious!

The House Freedom Caucus on Monday night formally condemned one of its founding members for declaring that President Trump committed impeachable offenses

Is this the Onion? Is this one of those satire articles like "GOP Congressman censured for telling truth?" Is this for real?

Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the top Republican on the House Oversight Committee and a former chairman of the Freedom Caucus, said that every single member in attendance during a weekly caucus meeting was unified in their opposition toward Amash’s comments.

Jim Jordan. Jim fucking Jordan. Jim the enabler of sexual abuse Jordan is taking umbrage.


I mean, Jeezus, even if it wasn't Jim Jordan, how does any member of Congress have the balls to say "this guy made a statement of fact that I don't care for. I therefore, must in the strongest possible terms, CONDEMN HIM!"

Also, how does a Tea Party/Freedom Caucus shitbird like Amash realize that this president needs to be impeached, but Nancy Pelosi somehow doesn't?


What else did I miss? Oh, Texas has really upped the ante for voter suppression.

Texas Sen. Bryan Hughes' new bill, S. Bill 9, will disallow driving of elderly, disabled, or poor people to the polls. It would ban efforts with vans full of elderly from nursing homes, disabled people, poor people who don’t have cars, would be illegal in Texas pic.twitter.com/ikGcEIAs8L

— Grild Cheez (@grild_cheez) May 6, 2019

Now, is that an exageration? Probably. But the bill does contain the following language

A person who assists at least three voters voting under this section at the same time by providing the voters with transportation to the polling place must complete and sign a form that:(1) requires the person to affirm that the voters arephysically unable to enter the polling place without personalassistance or likelihood of injuring their health; and(2) contains the following information:(A) the person's name and address; and(B) whether the person is providing assistance tothe voters solely under this section or under both this section andSubchapter B.

Also, according to the Texas Civil Right Project:

• It threatens voters with jail time and enormous fines: Voters could be punished for innocent mistakes, such as filling out their voter registration form wrong.
• It scares voters by weakening the right to a provisional ballot: Voters have a right to a provisional ballot when they sincerely believe they are eligible to vote, but this bill exposes them to possible jail time for doing so.

And there's this:

In a letter sent today to the bill’s sponsor, Republican Sen. Bryan Hughes of Mineola, said Senate Bill 9 would make “voting substantially harder for thousands of Texans … by spreading fear that people may be thrown in jail for honest mistakes while trying to vote.”

Yeah, a Republican from Texas thinks this bill is offensive.
And I don't pretend to know anything about Mineola, but I guarantee Mineola ain't Austin.


And let's see. Oh, we have the first entry in the race to be this year's Todd Akin. It's Missouri representative Barry Hovis.

No. BARRY Hovis.

Eeeewwww.


Anyway, this is what Hovis had to say:

Let’s just say someone goes out and they’re raped or they’re sexually assaulted one night after a college party — because most of my rapes were not the gentleman jumping out of the bushes that nobody had ever met,”explained Hovis. “That was one or two times out of a hundred. Most of them were date rapes or consensual rapes, which were all terrible.”

Yes. He said "consensual rapes." Which is about as big an oxymoron as one could conjure up, but mostly is just sickeningly offensive.
So, being a fine Southern gentleman, of course he apologized.

He tried explaining that he had misspoke and meant to say, “Date rapes or consensual or rape,” rather than “consensual rapes.”“It’s my apology if I didn’t enunciate the word ‘or,'” said Hovis on Friday.

  

That's not any better!

Oh, and there's this.

There are  children in cages. Roe v Wade is being dismantled. We're rattling sabres with Iran. And our President openly flouts the law with impunity. So a bunch of people in Los Angeles decided to hold a protest.

Lakers fan protest: 'Fire Rambis!' 'Sell the team!' 'No Jason Kidd!'

Yes. They actually held a demonstration outside the Staples Center to protest the way in which a basketball team is being run. Because you know, it isn't like there are any bigger issues to worry about.

But at least some people understand the urgency of the current political situation and have organized a petition drive.

More Than 1 Million Disappointed Fans Sign Petition Demanding ‘Game of Thrones’ Season 8 Remake

Om Vacation

Back next week.

Does Nancy Pelosi even want to win?

In what alternate universe does Nancy Pelosi live?

Pelosi Warns Democrats: Stay in the Center or Trump May Contest Election Results

Does Ms Pelosi honestly think that there is a scenario in which Donald Trump loses the election and doesn't contest the results? For God's sake, he spent a year contesting the results of the election he WON!

There is no way - NO WAY - that Trump will ever admit defeat. He will never shake the hand of whichever Democrat defeats him in 2020 and say "congratulations and good luck." He will probably have to be forcibly removed from the Oval Office by the capitol police.

Or he may go peacefully. And spend his remaining years telling anyone who will listen about how the deep state and the Democrats stole the presidency from him. But if he loses, there is no way in Hell he just accepts defeat.

I mean, for God's sake, he won't even admit to having been a shitty businessman who lost a billion dollars of his father's money. He's out there saying that he lost that money intentionally for tax purposes because he's so smart.

I meant to do that!

“If we win by four seats, by a thousand votes each, he’s not going to respect the election,” said Pelosi in an interview with the New York Times.

Who. Cares?

He doesn't have to respect the election (And he won't). He just needs to make a funny landing when he's tossed out on his ear.

And take Pence and Bolton and Mnuchin with you!

“He would poison the public mind. He would challenge each of the races; he would say you can’t seat these people,” she added, and referenced the 40 House seats gained by Democrats in 2018 midterm elections.

You know what, though? He didn't do that. He didn't challenge the legitimacy of the various Democratic election winners. Because they aren't him. So he doesn't give a shit about them. Donald Trump only cares about people whose name rhymes with Schmonald Schump.
And also, so what if he did? The only people who would take that seriously are the 35% of Americans who already think that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring out of a pizzeria when she wasn't having Seth Rich murdered and that some mysterious stranger with a "Q" level security clearance is sending them coded messages on Reddit. Those people still think that Barack Obama wasn't really president because Hawaii is part of Kenya.

“We had to win. Imagine if we hadn’t won — oh, don’t even imagine. So, as we go forward, we have to have the same approach.”

Okay. Good. Let's have the same approach. Let's have dynamic, charismatic candidates withe true progressive ideas like AOC, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Presley, Lucy McBath, Ilhan Omar. . .

Sitting in her office, Ms. Pelosi . . . offered Democrats her “coldblooded” plan for decisively ridding themselves of Mr. Trump:
. .  .do not risk alienating the moderate voters who flocked to the party in 2018 by drifting too far to the left.
“Own the center left, own the mainstream,” Ms. Pelosi, 79, said.

“Our passions were for health care, bigger paychecks, cleaner government — a simple message,” Ms. Pelosi said of the 40-seat Democratic pickup last year that resulted in her second ascent to the speakership. “We did not engage in some of the other exuberances that exist in our party” — a reference to some of the most ambitious plans advocated by the left wing of her party and some 2020 candidates, including “Medicare for all” and the Green New Deal, which she has declined to support.

Oh, right. Of course. Of course you managed to learn exactly the wrong lesson from 2018. You sure wouldn't want to alienate the elusive "moderate" voters with a radical plan like the Green New Deal which is only supported by. . . **quick Google search**. . .

More than 80% of Americans support almost all of the key ideas in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal

Oh my God! 80 percent?!?! Well, what left-wing rag published this?



Oh my God. . .

So Nancy Pelosi thinks that it is vital for Democrats to not only defeat Trump, but to do so by a wide margin, and part of her strategy to achieve this wide margin of victory is to run away from a policy that is supported by OVER EIGHTY PERCENT OF AMERICANS?!?!?!?
And this is who's in charge of the party?


Okay, so maybe she's wrong about the Green New Deal. What about opposing Medicare for All? Surely that must be a smart political stance, right?

 70 percent of Americans support 'Medicare for all' proposal

So, instead of running candidates who support policies favored by 70 - 80% of voters, you want to do what, again?

REALLY?

Joseph R. Biden Jr. “took off because people know him,” she said. “They trust him.”


No. See, they either know him or they trust him. Not both. People who know Joe Biden know about shit like this:

I like how @JoeBiden told Obama that he didnt want his endorsement.
I really like how he used Obama's voice in his first Campaign video, instead.

Shows us the real Joe Biden #SlimyJoe #BidenIsARepublican
Give us a real democrat #BERN #FeelTheBern2020 pic.twitter.com/30wr4u0TLP

— Rocks~1968 All Over Again (@julynewmoon) April 30, 2019

And this:

A reminder of just how terrible a presidential candidate #Biden has always been#NeverBiden #BidenIsARepublican #HellNoJoehttps://t.co/S5xIKaQS29 pic.twitter.com/2uWdEmpliO

— Ԍεοϝϝ🌹 (@SpittingBack) May 8, 2019

And this:

https://t.co/YuNxsHpZG0

— Professor Chaos (@akaProfessorCha) May 8, 2019

So, you're dealing with an electorate that is 70 percent in favor of Medicare for All, and you want to trot out a guy who's been looking to CUT Medicare for basically his whole career? And you're supposed to be the reasonable one?


Oh, and does it occur to you that we are now doing politics in the #MeToo era?

When asked whether Mr. Biden would pay a political price for his grilling of Anita F. Hill during the 1991 confirmation hearings for Justice Clarence Thomas, Ms. Pelosi shook her head in the negative and waved a hand dismissively.

Honest to God, Madam Speaker, just open up Twitter and search "Anita Hill." You are so out of touch with the electorate.

More than anything, Ms. Pelosi is focused on pursuing center-left policies she thinks will help her party out in 2020 — a focus on pragmatic improvements to health care, 

Oh my God. People do not want "pragmatic improvements" to healthcare. We want what the rest of the modern world has. We want single payer. How do you not get this? And we are sick and tired of being told that it isn't "practical" or "pragmatic" or "feasible" when we know good and damn well that it is. We know they do it in Canada, the UK, Australia, the Netherlands, etc etc etc and we know the only reason we don't do it here is because our politicians are too afraid of upsetting the billionaires who run the insurance companies.

You want to beat Trump? Good. So do I. So does every decent person. You don't do it by trying to play down the middle. You know who tried your approach of "owning the center-left" and not alienating the "moderates?" Hillary Clinton. How did that work out again? She lost. And before anyone comes back with "actually she won, because she got 3 million more votes. . ." yes, I know that. But as long as we have this verkackte electoral college, you can get 3 million more votes and still lose if you don't get enough of those votes from the "swing states." And the way you get those voters from the swing states to show up and pull the lever for you is to offer them something to vote FOR, not just a villain to vote against. You have to offer something that they want. And what they want is Medicare for All and a Green New Deal. If you can't figure that out, maybe you're in the wrong line of work.

Oh, and P.S. Joe Biden has run for President at least twice and caused barely a ripple. The only memorable thing about either of his campaigns was his being caught plagiarizing. Joe Biden is not a horse you want to back. Not if you want to win.

How to make your child into an alt-right hatebeast.

This lady's kid became an alt-right pig boy but it wan't his fault! And it certainly wasn't his fault. It's that darn internet!

What Happened After My 13-Year-Old Son Joined the Alt-Right

A Washington family's nightmare year.

WRITTEN BY ANONYMOUS 

 | PUBLISHED ON MAY 5, 2019

The problems had started when Sam was 13, barely a month into eighth grade. In the taxonomy of our local public school, his close group of friends was tagged edgy and liberal

Yes. I'm sure they were ever so "edgy." Nothing "edgier" than a "liberal" teenager.

One morning during first period, a male friend of Sam’s mentioned a meme whose suggestive name was an inside joke between the two of them. Sam laughed. A girl at the table overheard their private conversation, misconstrued it as a sexual reference, and reported it as sexual harassment. Sam’s guidance counselor pulled him out of his next class and accused him of “breaking the law.” 

No. No, that didn't happen. No guidance counselor would be that stupid, that ignorant of the law. The guidance counselor may have accused your son of violating school rules or behavioral guidelines, but the law? No way. And, honestly I doubt that the incident happened the way your son told you it did. There is no way a girl just overheard a risque' reference in a private conversation and ran off to report that she had been sexually harassed.  Girls who have actually been sexually harassed rarely report it  for a variety of reasons not the least of which is that the school is unlikely to take their accusations seriously.

If this girl made an accusation of sexual harassment, AND the school took it seriously, your son did something a lot worse than laugh at an off-color joke. I would think maybe something like Jameis Winston did at Florida State. That was based on an internet meme, too.
https://www.sbnation.com/lookit/2014/9/16/6252613/jameis-winston-stood-on-a-table-at-fsu-and-yelled-f-k-her-right-in
And if this had actually happened the way your liar son claims it did, wouldn't she have reported the boy who MADE the vulgar joke? Not the one who merely laughed?

You can not seriously take a 13-year-old boy at his word. If I had gotten into trouble at school (which I never did, I was a fucking saint) I would have lied to my mom about it too.

Before long, he was in the office of a male administrator who informed him that the exchange was “illegal,” hinted that the police were coming, and delivered him into the custody of the school’s resource officer. At the administrator’s instruction, that man ushered Sam into an empty room, handed him a blank sheet of paper, and instructed him to write a “statement of guilt.”

And you seriously bought this story? Fuck, I wish you had been my mom. I could've gotten away with murder! (Not that I would have. Saint, you know.)

No one called me as this unfolded

And that didn't tip you off? I'm guessing, just by your indulgent parenting some of the other things you write here that you live in a fairly affluent school district. The kind where parents hire lawyers if their precious little angels don't get a passing grade. there is no way they wouldn't have informed you or the boy's father while this was going on. This alone should tell you that this never happened.

No one called me as this unfolded, even though Sam cried for about six hours straight as staff members parked him in vacant offices to keep him away from other students. When he stepped off the bus that afternoon and I asked why his eyes were so swollen, he informed me that he would probably be suspended, but possibly also expelled and arrested.
If Kafka were a middle-schooler today, this is the nightmare novel he would have written.

Yes. Kafka, a fiction writer, might well have written such an implausible scenario.,

At a meeting two days later with my husband, Sam, and me, the administrator piled more accusations on top of the harassment charge—even implying, with undisguised hostility, that Sam and his friend were gay. He waved in front of us a statement from the girl at the table and insisted that Sam would need to defend himself against her claims if he wanted to prove his innocence. But the administrator refused to reveal the particulars of the complaint (he had also blacked out identifying details, FBI-style) and then hid the paperwork under a book. He declared that it was his primary duty, as a school official and as a father of daughters, to believe and to protect the girls under his care.

So the administrator was Joseph McCarthy? You're still expecting us to believe this? And all this, you expect us to believe, was the result of your son merely laughing at someone else's bawdy joke. I mean, you can see why no one believes this, right?

Sam agreed, reluctantly, to write a letter of apology to the girl who’d reported him so that the debacle would come to an end. But no hoped-for resolution materialized. Instead, Sam’s sweet earnestness, his teenage overconfidence, even his tremulous determination in the face of unjust authority drained away, replaced by . . . nothing. He lost all affect. He stopped eating and sleeping, complained of headaches, and regressed in disturbing ways. He couldn’t concentrate, turned in no homework, and didn’t even pick up a pen when it was time to take a test.

 Okay, your son is disturbed. If this is true, and I have my doubts, this kid sounds severely depressed. This isn't funny anymore. You need to get him help.

But the transfer, midyear, to a new school—after he’d been wrongly accused, unfairly treated, then unceremoniously dropped by his friends—shattered Sam. 

Oh my God, he would not have been dumped by his friends for having been mistreated by school officials. That wouldn't happen. Why would they drop their friend if all he had done was laugh at a risque' joke? If anything, they would have rallied around him. You know who would have been ostracized? The girl who made the complaint. No matter how legitimate the complaint was, girls who report boys' bad behavior and get the boys in trouble are usually the ones who face negative social consequences. At least in the real world where real things happen. Not in the made-up world where your son is an innocent angel victimized by cruel authorities over a simple misunderstanding.

 He felt totally alone. I counseled patience, naively unprepared for what came next: when he found people to talk to on Reddit and 4chan.
Those online pals were happy to explain that all girls lie—especially about rape. And they had lots more knowledge to impart. They told Sam that Islam is an inherently violent religion and that Jews run global financial networks. (We’re Jewish and don’t know anyone who runs anything, but I guess the evidence was convincing.) They insisted that the wage gap is a fallacy, that feminazis are destroying families, that people need guns to protect themselves from government incursions onto private property. They declared that women who abort their babies should be jailed.

And your son wasn't intelligent enough to smell this bullshit from a mile away?

Sam prides himself on questioning conventional wisdom and subjecting claims to intellectual scrutiny. 

Really? At thirteen. At thirteen years of age, he prides himself on "subjecting claims to intellectual scrutiny." That's what you're going with. That's what you think seems like a reasonable description of your thirteen-year-old son.
Seem this is half the problem. You have this kid believing this shit. You've been telling him forever how special and intelligent he is, what a deep thinker he is, how he's just so much better than the other kids. So now when something doesn't go his way (which I would bet an awful lot of money was entirely his fault) he can't handle it. He goes into a nearly catatonic depression. Then he gets intrigued by the alt-right, because they also tell him that nothing is his fault. It's the feminists, it's the Muslims, it's the Jews. All these powerful forces are aligned against him simply because he was unfortunate enough to have been born white, male and affluent.

Sam prides himself on questioning conventional wisdom and subjecting claims to intellectual scrutiny. For kids today, that means Googling stuff. One might think these searches would turn up a variety of perspectives, including at least a few compelling counterarguments. One would be wrong. 

No, one would actually be correct. If your son had actually been searching out answers, he would not have found only the alt-right "intellectual dark web."

Here's an example. I just now typed "Do women lie about rape?" into the Google. Here are the top three results:

MAAN » Myths about false accusation - Stanford University

www.stanford.edu/group/maan/cgi-bin/?page_id=297

Only about 2% of all rape and related sex charges are determined to be false, the same percentage as for other felonies (FBI).

The truth about false assault accusations by women - BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45565684

Over the past 20 years, only 2-10% of rape accusations (Prof Ford's lawyer says she believes this was attempted rape) are proven to be fake, argue the authors of a 2010 US study.
we should be sceptical of the notion that it is common for women to say they've been sexually abused when they haven't.

False Rape Accusations Are Incredibly Rare - The Cut

https://www.thecut.com/article/false-rape-accusations.html

Almost No One Is Falsely Accused of Rape

By Katie Heaney

You get the idea. If your son had been honestly searching for the truth, using his famed "intellectual scrutiny," he would have found much more accurate answers. If he went to 4chan and typed in something like "why do these b*tches always lie about rape?" then he would have gotten spmething more like the results that he did actually get.

The Google searches flooded his developing brain with endless bias-confirming “proof” to back up whichever specious alt-right standard was being hoisted that week. Each set of results acted like fertilizer sprinkled on weeds: A forest of distortion flourished.

see, you're almost getting it. You're soooo close to getting it. Confirmation Bias! That's what was going on here. Your son, if he saw an article that said "well, no, women virtually never make up false charges of rape or assault," he disregarded it as it didn't fit in with his preconceived notion that he can never be at fault so the girl must be nefariously trying to harm him because girls are evil. But when he sees an article saying something like, as Rush Limbaugh has infamously said repeatedly, "the concept of date-rape was made up by feminists to destroy the fine art of seduction," well that fits in with his framework of him being the victim And in a way, he probably is a victim. He's probably the victim of your parenting. I mean, I guess I'm going out on a limb here, but I assume you're like one of those mothers you see on Judge Judy who insists that their son would never never do the thing he is accused of doing and he never lies and always tells the truth and then Judge Judy gets him on the stand for about 30 seconds and the kid goes "okay, yeah, I did it." And then at the end of the show the mother still somehow thinks her kid didn't so it.

 Kids who are raised like that are going to have an awfully tough time dealing with the real world when it turns out that they actually can't get away with whatever they want. (Unless they are good at football)

 

Exhibit A. 

(And this was just him dealing with the possibility that he might not get what he wanted)

I did try to clear my own mind enough to understand some situations as he did, such as his belief that the men’s-rights movement restored justice to the world. Sam pledged fealty to the idea of men’s rights because, as he said, his former administrator had privileged girls’ words and experiences over boys’, and that’s how all of his troubles had started in the first place. I’d never in my life backed the “masculinist” cause or imagined that men needed protecting—yet I couldn’t help but agree with Sam’s analysis.

Seriously?
First of all, let's pretend for a moment that the incident actually happened the way you claim it did. Your son had one negative experience where the word of one girl was taken over the word of one boy, and he extrapolates from that one experience that the entire world is somehow biased against boys and you -- a goddamm adult woman -- think "hey, the kid has a point?"
Seriously?

No wonder this kid has issues.

Awful person is awful

I had never heard of this Robin Hanson person until someone re-tweeted this survey on to my timeline:

Imagine that you now live with one sibling, are far away from where you grew up and where the rest of your family lives. Would you agree to become a slave in order to be able to live near your family? Do you think most people in history would agree to that?

— Robin Hanson (@robinhanson) April 29, 2019

So, I made the mistake of  clicking on a link to this article on something called "Overcoming Bias," which seems to want its readers to overcome their bias against slavery.

Taboo Gradations

By Robin Hanson · April 29, 2019 4:00 pm 

Saturday I visited Monticello, and was struck by hearing this story:

Thomas Jefferson (TJ) brought slaves Sally & James Hemings with him to Paris. After 5 yrs, at ages 16 & 24, they could have stayed free in Paris, but they instead agreed to return to US as slaves. TJ agreed to free Sally’s future kids, and that James would be free in US after training replacements. The rest of their family had remained in US, she was pregnant w/ TJ child, James knew French & had a trade, and the French revolution had started.

Okay. That actually makes sense. If given the choice between being dropped off in a foreign country, pregnant, unmarried, with no money and a slim chance of being able to find a job in a country currently undergoing a violent revolution and returning to the only home you've ever known where at least you know you'll be fed, it hardly seems surprising that they would choose the Devil they knew over the Devil they didn't. That makes perfect sense in a tragic, sickening way.

Overall my opinion of Jefferson declined, and I tweeted:

Visiting Monticello, I’m not inclined to see Jefferson as more sincere then the typical politician. Articulate, charismatic, well connected, but not especially sincere.

Wait. Did this come as a surprise to you? Were you unaware that the man who penned the line "all men are created equal" was a slaveholder? How long have you lived in this country and you don't know that? How is it possible to have not known that?

As the Hemmings were famous slaves, they seem an interesting example of people who apparently voluntary chose to become slaves.

Voluntarily. Chose.    Are you fucking serious?
They were BORN into slavery! They had no choice. They were never given a choice of whether or not to become slaves. They were given a choice of either remaining slaves or being thrown into an extremely precarious position that might have been even worse than slavery. It's not like they turned down 40 acres and a mule because they just really enjoyed being enslaved. What the hell is wrong with you?

. . . people who apparently voluntary chose to become slaves. I’ve long thought this was an interesting category, which includes the historically more common category of debt bondage. Even if one disapproves of enticing someone into voluntarily agreeing to slavery, that still seems less blameworthy than enslaving people via direct physical force. 

Yes, it's a very interesting category that includes zero people. And "debt bondage" is not a voluntary condition. Debt bondage occurs in situations like in this story from the Bible.:

23 “Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. 24 As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand bags of gold[h] was brought to him. 25 Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt.

Or it's like the old company store scam, where in order to get work, a poor person must buy tools on credit from the company who then take the money from his pay, rendering him unable to purchase food and other necessities except on credit which ends up with the worker trapped in a never-ending cycle of debt wherein he is essentially working for no pay.

(side note: I should NOT have done an image search for "Debt Bondage." Yikes!)

 So I tweeted:

There should be a word for slaves who agreed to be salves,[sic] w/o extortion or other illegitimate pressures. E.g. Sally Hemings & brother made deals w/ Jefferson. Different word could highlight its lower moral culpability.

There should be a word for people who do this thing that no person ever has done nor ever will do so that I can feel better about Thomas Jefferson enslaving his fellow human beings. That's a hell of a take!
Also, I don't know what you would consider "illegitimate pressure," but in the world of us normal people, saying "stay a slave or I'll drop you off in a foreign country with no way to support yourself or the baby you're about to have" is about as illegitimate a form of pressure as I can think of.

I soon added a link to a summary of this history, and the clarification:

Note: I’m not claiming that it is obvious that these two people were not subject to illegitimate pressures, only that it seems plausible that they were not. Allowing them to serve as an example of the concept I ask about.

Well, no. It doesn't. It seriously does NOT seem at all plausible that they were somehow not subject to illegitimate pressure. This is like a bank robber claiming that his gun was irrelevant and that the teller was just being generous. They can not serve as examples of this "concept" you ask about. Also, there are zero examples of this concept because this isn't a thing that happens in the world.

I have so far been subject to a storm of disapproving, and often quite rude, responses (1K comments so far). 

Yeah. That's what happens when you post something this morally repugnant.

In response to a comment (explained below), I said:

Slave owners did many bad things, but each owner didn’t do every single one.

This received a similar storm of disapproval, as did this question:

Do you think all Nazis were equally bad?

Again, hard to see my statement or question as incorrect,

Holy fuck, dude. You don't even know whether the words you posted constitute a statement or a question? That's really not that hard. If it has one of those little squiggly things on the end (?) it's a question.

Again, hard to see my statement or question as incorrect, but many see pointing to moral variations among slave owners or Nazis as praising them.

Noooo. . . Normal people see "pointing to moral variations among slave owners or Nazis" as an attempt to morally exonerate at least some of the perpetrators of this great crime against humanity. I'm really shocked that you misinterpreted that!

To see how many agreed with my claim on moral culpability differences, I did two Twitter polls. By a 2 to 1 margin out of 660 votes, they said that there exist plausible history, options, & preferences to make a scenario where someone got someone else to agree to be a slave less morally culpable than if they had enslaved them via direct physical force. By a 5 to 2 margin out of 486 votes, they said that Jefferson specifically would have been more culpable if he had instead physically forced the Hemmings to return to the US. So they clearly agree with me that we can distinguish different degrees of culpability here.

Oh my God, you got a majority of Twitter assholes to agree with you? Well, why didn't you say so? Clearly I'm in the wrong, then. I mean, it's not like Twitter is overrun with neo-Nazis, Confederate apologists, anti-Semites and ignorant bigots of every stripe!
Oh, wait. . .


So who is this guy? I was actually a bit surprised to learn that he is not the son of Victor Davis Hanson.
What he is, though, is a professor of economics at the nightmare factory known as George Mason University, home of the Antonin Scalia School of Law and current employer somehow of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. (how is that legal? I do not know.)

Oddly, for a professor of economics, Hanson's bachelor's and master's degrees are both in physics. Hmm, it's almost like George Mason has no fucking standards or something.

Just based on the fact that he argues in favor of something called "voluntary slavery," I think it's safe to assume that he's a freaking libertarian. They always think they're smarter than everyone else and they love "thought experiments."


A couple more interesting facts - he is, according to his Wikipedia page, an expert in "idea futures " which is about as made up a thing as once could possibly have expertise in, but will probably crash our economy at some point. 

(Wikipedia explains the "idea futures" market this way: are exchange-traded markets created for the purpose of trading the outcome of events.^[1] The market prices can indicate what the crowd thinks the probability of the event is. A prediction market contract trades between 0 and 100%. It is a binary option that will expire at the price of 0 or 100%. Prediction markets can be thought of as belonging to the more general concept of crowdsourcing which is specially designed to aggregate information on particular topics of interest. The main purposes of prediction markets are eliciting aggregating beliefs over an unknown future outcome. Traders with different beliefs trade on contracts whose payoffs are related to the unknown future outcome and the market prices of the contracts are considered as the aggregated belief.)

So it's a bunch of imaginary bullshit that Wall Street is probably sinking billions of imaginary dollars into and we will eventually end up bailing them out when this house of imaginary cards inevitably collapses.


Another interesting Wikipedia page fact about Hanson: Hanson has elected to have his brain cryonically preserved in the event of medical death.^[8]

And thank God, because it would be a crime to deprive future generations of this brilliant mind! I mean, a man with a PhD who thinks Twitter polls have some sort of validity doesn't come around every day!


And, if you're on the fence about Hanson, if you're thinking "I don't know, on the one hand he seems like a scumbag, but on the other he also seems like a complete moron" and ou're not sure whether to love or hate him, consider this, the last line from his Wikipedia page:

Hanson has argued that men might experience more harm from cuckoldry than from rape in a series of posts on his blog Overcoming Bias. He takes the premise that "Biologically, cuckoldry is a bigger reproductive harm than rape, so we should expect a similar intensity of inherited emotions about it."

Yeah, he's completely awful