A taxonomy of the political spectrum

Big caveat — just a few years after I originally posted this essay, dramatic shifts in the structure of the political right in the US left many of its references to some particulars outdated. As things have progressed, it has only made the structure of the right even harder to describe on these terms. I modified the diagram in 2025 to start to account for that, but at that point the structure of the right remains in motion and confusing.

• The intention of this post
• Left vs right
• Points on the spectrum
• Neighboring points and their relationships
• More terms on the right
• More terms on the left
• Liberals vs leftists
• Libertarians
• Mad magazine!

The intention of this post

As someone with a weakness for political discussion, I am often frustrated by people who have a very confused vocabulary for talking about the range of political views from left to right. Conservatives who referred to Barack Obama as a “radical leftist” inspired me to write up this essay, but such sloppy rhetoric is nearly as common coming from liberals, and perhaps even more common among eccentrics who like to style themselves as off the conventional spectrum altogether.

Language for describing the political spectrum is necessarily a bit mushy. The spectrum itself is a blunt tool for organizing categories of political thought: one dimension is of course insufficient to describe the universe of possible political stances. But the left-right axis has its uses — I consider it the best simple model available, in practice better than other attempts like the political compass — and of course it turns up in discussions all of the time, so if we are to use it we need as much clarity in it as we can muster.

When I want to talk about one whole side of the spectrum I will usually say “the broad left” or “broad right”. But that is not enough.

So I have tried to cultivate as much rigor and consistency as I can in the language I use in talking about where in the range one might place the philosophy which an individual or a movement expresses. What marks the difference between moderates and radicals? Between the hard right and the extreme right? Between liberals and leftists? These distinctions have an inherent slipperiness, of course. But reading people from a range of viewpoints whom I regard as sophisticated, I find good enough consensus that I can identify a taxonomy which is clear enough to use.

Though this essay references specific examples from American politics, I think this language can serve in other contexts as well.

Left vs right?

Fully addressing the defining distinction of the spectrum is itself a subtle and contentious subject which many people have examined at length. It admits no simple resolution into a clear right answer. I find the diagram’s one-word (over) simplifications that the broad left is egalitarian while the broad right is heirarchical clarifying, but reasonable people may differ.

I keep a collection of links to my favorite pieces on this hard question, and have one of my own. I will not attempt to recapitulate all of that here … though if you believe the canard that the key distinction is How Much Government one favors, I recommend following those links and doing some homework.

For the purposes of this essay, I intend to frame the vocabulary of positions along the axis such that they will still be useful if one rejects my Egalitarian vs Heirarchical thesis entirely. It suffices that we know the left and right when we see them.

Points on the spectrum

The mainstream

These positions care about working for the policy they want within existing social & political institutions; in the US at a grand scale, that means capitalism and liberal democracy delivered through the Constitutional order.

Moderate

“we need to work together with the other side”

Moderates are committed to one side or the other, but not perfectly consistently, such that they support some policies from the other side. In principle, politicians tend to be moderates (though back when I wrote this, the Republican Party had driven a lot of their moderates out of Congress, and in 2025 moderates are almost completely absent from the Republican establishment). A Dem who opposes gun control or a Republican who opposes the war on drugs may be described as a “moderate”. People further to the right like to describe moderate conservatives as RINOs (“Republicans in name only”), while Democrats call their moderates “Blue Dog Democrats”. I sometimes use “centrist” with the scare quotes in place to reference how folks further from the center tend to refer to these folks. Occasionally one used to hear “liberal Republican” and “conservative Democrat”, to refer to people’s place on the mini-spectrum within the party, but that usage has become vanishingly rare.

Wing

“we need big policy victories”

The Wing, as in “the left wing of the Democratic Party”, are fully committed to the philosophy of their axis and believe in focusing their political energies entirely within existing institutions. They want to win a decisive advantage in mainstream politics so that government can implement their policies without needing to compromise significantly with the other side.

On the right from the 1980s through the mid-2010s, these folks were generally movement conservatives; these days, I tend to refer to them as “non-MAGA conservatives”.

On the left, these folks are generally just called “liberals”. To distinguish “liberal” in this sense from liberal-as-in-liberal-democracy, I sometimes refer to the position on the axis as “libs” and the deeper ideology as “libdem”. (Much more on that below.)

Hard

“we need both policy change and institutional change”

The Hard left and right believe in trying to win policy victories through participation in conventional political institutions (like elections, government, and the two major parties) but also believe in the importance of working to change those institutions themselves if their philosophy is to be fully enacted.

The hard left are generally called “progressives”; they may want a Constitutional Amendment to counter the Citizens United decision on free speech and corporate campaign donations, or to dismantle most of the military-industrial complex.

Someone on the hard right may want a dramatic re-interpretation of the First Amendment, or even a new Constitutional Amendment, to recognize that the United States is a Christian nation. There is not a ready term of art for talking about the hard right generally. When I first wrote this post, the hard right included most of the “Tea Party” (remember them?), the “religious right”, some “libertarians” (more on them below), and many movement conservatives. These days, the MAGA movement includes people ranging from Hard to Extreme; I like to distinguish “soft” from “hard” MAGAs to account for that range (more on that below) so often I refer to people & positions on the hard right as “soft MAGA”.

“Far”

When people talk about the “far” left & right, they are talking about movements & ideologies which disdain participation in existing major “mainstream” social & political institutions — including electoral politics — because they see the range of political possibilities within them as meaningless in comparison to the need to change those institutions. Critics of the “far” left & right fault them for embracing of political violence and authoritarianism — and yes, that becomes more common at the “far” ends — but they are neither definitional nor universal. The defining thing is the focus on stuctural change.

Radical

“only institutional change matters”

“Radical” literally means “striking at the root”.

The radical left are generally called “leftists” or “The Left”. They want to dismantle capitalism. (More on the distinction from “libs” below.)

The radical right are commonly referred to as “reactionaries” or “the Right” (from which we get the “Alt Right”, remember them?) though to be fussy “reactionary” refers to a particular type of far right movement. The radical right are fundamentally skeptical of democracy, though in the US they may not say so overtly. Radical right projects include structural changes like dissolving seperation of Church & State, or dismantling the Federal government’s power over the States to dramatically strengthen the independence of county government. Radical right movements include Christian Dominionists, “Patriots”, and MAGA.

Extreme

“only revolutionary change matters”

Extremists have eccentric philosophies, directed not just to altering political institutions but to revolutionary change throughout society. There is a wide range of different extremisms, as there are a wide range of visions of the post-revolutionary world. Though “horseshoe theory” claiming that the extreme left and right ultimately converge is more misleading than helpful, departure from ordinary political discourse can make it hard to place these folks on the left-right axis at first glance.

Left extremism includes Maoism, anarchism, pacificism, lesbian seperatism, and much more.

Right extremism of course includes fascism, but “fascism” is not just synonymous with right extremism — there are many very different movements including monarchism (really), neoreaction, green primitivism, and much more.

Neighbors

One reason why I like my taxonomy and its breakpoints is how it reveals a pattern in people’s views of other positions. Across the spectrum, people read their neighbors in strikingly similar ways:

People take the folks directly next to them as allies whom they can work with because they they have their hearts (mostly) in the right place, while considering those allies compromised by confused priorities and misunderstandings of how the world works.

People have an especially passionate disgust at the positions two notches away from them, seeing those people as rivals whose agenda presents special dangers greater than those presented by people at positions further away.

hard | wing | moderate | moderate | wing

Moderates think their own Wing has good ideas, but consider that Wing naïve about how one gets governance done because of the Wing’s refusal to reach across the aisle to the Moderates on the other side.

Moderates look at their Moderate counterparts on the other side as wrongheaded about their policy preferences but respect them as reasonable people one can work with …

… unlike the Wing one step further to the other side, whom they hate for making things harder for those reasonable Moderate counterparts.

Moderates consider their own Hards narrowminded ideologues who must be kept away from any power, lest they break every effective institution.

radical | hard | wing | moderate | moderate

The Wing admire their Hards’ ideas and idealism, but see themselves as smarter than those Hards, who waste too much energy on impossible dreams.

The Wing returns the friendly frustration of their neighboring Moderates, whom they see as allies vulnerable to manipulation by the supposed Moderates on the opposite side.

Thus the Wing regards the Moderates of the other side as both tactially and morally dangerous for their ability to seduce Moderates of their own side with feigned “reasonableness”. People further out on the opposing side “are at least honest” in contrast to the disingenuous of the opposing Moderates.

To the Wing, heaven forbid the Radicals on their side get their hands on power; the Radicals claim to stand for the same things but their dangerous plans would destroy the necessary foundations of society.

extreme | radical | hard | wing | moderate

Hards share most of their Radicals’ long-term goals, but they do not want to abandon the fights within existing institutions to people who do not share those ideals, so they see their role as a bridge between the Radicals’ aims and their allies in the Wing.

Hards hope to ignite the ideals of their side’s Wing as a way to drive the Wing to wring as much as they can out of existing institutions.

Hards hate their side’s Extremists as scary lunatics almost indistinguishable from the Extremists of the other side, discrediting their entire side and threatening to seduce the Radicals they admire.

Hards suspect that their side’s Moderates do not really believe in anything because of how often they prioritize appeasing the Moderates on the other side over supporting their Wing.

extreme | extreme | radical | hard | wing

Radicals have a loving pity for both of their neighbors, whom they see as sharing their dreams. They expect the Hards to eventually end up heartbroken after wasting their energies on hopeless institutions, while they read most Extremists on their side as tragic products of heartbreak, their legitimate moral urgency boiling over into an understandable but counterproductive zealotry.

Radicals feel contempt for the Wing on their side; to Radicals, their Wing paradoxically supports the very institutions which create the problems which they claim to want to fix.

I am wary of supporting the Horseshoe Theory that the extreme left & right wrap around to be “the same” — they do not — but something like it is useful in this narrow context. When Radicals look at the Extremists on the other side they are terrified to see the passion of their side’s Extremists — often aroused by similar wrongs — dedicated to morally perverse ideals.

radical | extreme | extreme | radical | hard

Extremists return the feelings of their neighboring Radicals on their side: they see folks who want the right things, so come the Revolution they expect their Radicals to step up belatedly, after having wasted their time for so long with refusal to Do What’s Necessary.

Extremists also return their Hards’ hatred: to them their Hards sap the energy of people who see The Problem, softening the way people talk about it, making people complacent with the world which must be overthrown.

Extremists have ambivalence about the Extremists of the other side, whom they see as sharing their understanding of the profundity of change the world needs, but half-right and half-wrong in their reading of The Problem. To an Extremist, opposing Extremists have terrible ideas about the world they want to build after The Revolution — but they will fight for The Revolution and thus can serve as allies, either to be flipped to join their side … or at least employed as useful idiots on key issues until the current order has been overthrown, at which point they must be prevented from holding any power.

Extremists see the Radicals on the other side as the worst monsters of all, determined to build the world of their nightmares. This looks to Extremists like a revealation of the horrifying impulses which animate the entire other side, suggesting that the Radicals on the other side must be the secret masters of the world they seek to fix through revolutionary change.

More terms on the right

Revisting this post in early 2025, the taxonomy of positions on the right is very hard to pin down, as we are in a moment of radical reälignment of our political dynamics, with churn on the right driving that change.

I sometimes still reference “movement conservatism”, a term of art for the dominant ideology of the Republican Party from 1980-2015: a marriage of quasi-libertarian economic policy (low regulation & taxation), military “strength”, and “social conservatism” courting white Evangelicals. Movement conservatism ranged between right-wing and hard right, with its most ambitious manifestations pursuing big institutional change in dismantling the policy order emergent from the New Deal and Civil Rights Era. Donald Trump’s successful challenge to that agenda has almost entirely broken the power of this strain of conservatism. The rise of MAGA demonstrates how few movement conservatives were true believers. But a large handful of them have become Never Trump Conservatives.

Fascism is not simply synonymous with authoritarianism or the far right; it is a distinctive extreme right ideology.

I think scholar David Griffin provides the most useful single thesis, summarizing fascism as “palingenetic ultranationalism”: a dream of violent, transformative national rebirth. He and other scholars find a host of characteristics common among fascist movements, but his description of that dream as the “core” of fascism helps see through confusion created by the ways in which fascist movements vary dramatically.

I have my own distillation of Griffin’s and others’ theories, describing fascism as a myth combined with a method ⋯

Neoreaction is a different extreme right authoritarian idology significant in this moment: “rationalist” in contrast to fascism’s irrationalism, enthusiastic about the fragmentation of the Westphalian order in contrast to fascism’s reification of the Westphalian order with “nationalism”.

In the course of a post about Trump voters, I name a taxonomy useful here:

Though with precious few exceptions MAGAs refuse to recognize themselves as fascists, that is what both types are. Fascists are driven by bigotry, drawn to the absurdities of fascist rhetoric which free them not just from moral responsibility but from having to think rationally at all.

Hard MAGAs have bloodlust. They do in fact dream of gunning down millions of people they hate et cetera. They know Haitian immigrants are not eating pet cats, but since Those People are inhuman monsters, they love the lie for getting at the “essential truth” that the suffering & death of Those People is a positive good in itself.

Soft MAGAs have doublethink. Horseshit to rationalize horrors — as good, as necessary, or as not actually horrible — works better the more preposterous it is because it distracts from facing the centrality of their bigotry. They “believe” that Haitian immigrants eating pet cats must be “true”: it “makes sense”, it justifies the fantasy they have of Getting Rid Of Those People. They don’t think about what that will require, and when the bloodshed does appear before them, these kinds of “beliefs” will justify their schadenfreude at the suffering & death.

Non-MAGA Trump voters do not think like fascists. They are bigots but it is not their central motivation in the same way. They prefer to look away from their own bigotry; the shame they feel about it compels them to deny they have it rather than to correct it as they should. They dislike the absurdities of MAGA, but see aligning with MAGA as “necessary” in the face of the Greater Evil of the nightmarish “radical left” Democratic Party. They have selected an information bubble which protects them from hearing the story about Haitian immigrants eating cats; Trump’s nonsense is irrelevant, they just have a thirdhand impression that he cares about the Important Problems facing Real Americans. If MAGA fascism guns down millions of people, they will deny that they knew and it will be half-true because they go out of their way to not know.

More terms on the left

I added this long-overdue section in early 2025, though I used these terms for many years before that point.

I often use “lefties” and “the broad left” to mean the entire left side of the range.

Usage of “progressives” out there gets slippery, but I think one can get close enough to what most people mean if one understands it as a term for the hard left in the US — folks interested in both institutional change and policy change within existing instutions. This makes progressives the leftmost edge of the Democratic Party coalition. One can count Senator Elizabeth Warren among elected “progressives”, together with the clear examples of Sanders & AOC. Chris Hayes & Jamelle Bouie stand among the few progressive voices in mainstream political media; there is also a robust ecosystem of explicitly progressive political commentary, including old “netroots” internet commentators like Digby who influenced this blog.

Though progressives have more high positions in elected office and political media in 2025 than when I first created this post in 2014, they still hold very little institutional power. IMHO, this fails to represent the progressive bloc among US voters as strongly as they deserve … but progressive voters fall far short of the major voting bloc which they tend to imagine they have.

“Leftists” and “the Left” mean people focused on institutional change, particularly in ending the capitalist order. This is not perfectly distinct from progressives; some leftists dismiss electoral politics but others do engage with it. Leftists are noisy on the internet but their numbers are small in the US, and they hold practically zero institutional power in the US. I have a lot more on the distinction between “liberals” and “leftists” below.

I use “the Dem establishment” to mean the constellation of players shaping the Democratic Party: that includes not just folks in the Party organzation but also allied organizations, some voices in political commentary, major financial backers, and others. Many folks exaggerate the coherence of the Dem establishment — progressives & leftists often imagine that the DNC hold far more leverage than they do — but the constellation is coherent enough and powerful enough to be worth referencing. The Dem establishment almost entirely excludes progressives.

It is sometimes useful to use “neolib Dems” to describe the more centrist wing of the Dem coalition. One must tread carefully with that, since progressives & leftists too often villify neoliberalism on oversimplified terms. But neoliberalism is a real thing and it has dominated both the Republican Party from 1981-2016 and the Democratic Party from 1992-2020.

Liberals vs leftists

Even people on the broad left often get confused about the distinction between liberals and The Left.

Partly this reflects how both “left” and “liberal” are a multivalent terms. Even people seriously engaged in politics tend to get confused, tangling up the different layers of meanings, with commentators in both camps and on the broad right tending to muddy these waters.

As I say above, there is a deep layer of political philosophy which aspires to an egalitarian society, where we can meaningfully include everyone from moderate Democrats to Maoists in a “broad left”.

At a comparably deep level, we can understand “liberalism” as a differently broad constellation of social & political ideas — the stuff which distinguishes most real-world democratic societies from simple tyranny-of-the-majority direct democracy: universal rights, rule of law, structural limitations on government power, and so forth — a governance ideology, a vision of norms & institutions: how government (and to a degree society) should operate, how we set policies. We reference liberalism in that sense in calling movement conservatism, exemplified by Reagan, “neoliberal”. Some libertarians invoke liberalism in this sense by calling themselves “‘classical’ liberals”. We invoke liberalism in this sense which we call some leftist movements like Maoism “illiberal”. I sometimes refer to this deep liberalism-as-in-Isaiah-Berlin-and-liberal-democracy as “libdem” for brevity and clarity; I argue that many strains of socialism can and even should understand themselves as liberal in that sense.

When we contrast “liberals” with “the Left”, we are talking about “liberal” and “left” in narrower senses, as not governance ideologies but policy positions, programs of particular things they want government to do: projects to undertake, rules to enforce, an approach to the economy, and so forth. We can locate these well enough on the left-right spectrum. “Liberals” — as in neither-conservatives-nor-leftists — sit closer to center, mainly at the the location I refer to as the wing while “leftists” stand further out, mainly at the location I refer to as radical. For convenience I sometimes use the leftist convention of refering to liberals in this sense as “libs”.

That said, to truly understand the split between libs and leftists, we do need to think about another question more profound than just policy. Political positions ranging from hard left to hard right — including liberals in this sense we are talking about but also many others — do not directly challenge fundamental institutions, which includes both libdem as a governance ideology and capitalism as an economic ideology.

• Capitalism is when capital (the factories, land, patents, and so forth which make it possible to create the goods & services which people want & need) is privately held. These means of production are owned by particular people, either directly or through indirect institutions like a stock market.
• Socialism is when capital is publicly controlled. There are a wide range of possible arrangements for public control: it can mean government control, but could also mean any number of alternatives, like corporations where each worker owns an equal share and the workers choose their own corporate leadership in elections.

Looking at examples in the world, one cannot draw a bright line separating capitalist from socialist societies. A “socialist” country may have small privately-owned cottage industries like corner stores. A “capitalist” country may have utilities like electric power plants owned by the state. Though socialism rejects markets in capital — people cannot buy or sell factories — it may or may not embrace markets for goods & services in general, or for specific things in particular. A socialist might advocate corner store shopkeepers choosing their own stock and setting their own prices in a market … while opposing a market for housing, calling for the state to act as landlord for everyone without charging rents.

All this gives us the equipment to understand contrasting leftists with libs without getting tangled up in other meanings of “liberal”.

Libs embrace both libdem & capitalism as a given, and advocate policy which they believe will deliver greater equity under both. They frame these policy objectives in libdem terms: protecting rights, electing representatives who will pass legislation enforced by the state, building democratically-accountable institutions which tax & regulate privately-held corporations, and so forth. They support policies of universal social insurance like retirement pensions or healthcare provision funded through taxation. Some of these social insurance policies may even give government socialistic ownership of particular elements of the economy (like schools and hospitals) but they do not pursue a general disruption of capitalism.

Leftists reject capitalism. They hold that it is unjust for individuals to own capital, because that produces a dramatic inequity in wealth and power over people who do not own capital, that the structure of capitalism inevitably creates inequities which no liberal policy under capitalism could adquately correct. They advocate replacing capitalism with socialist economic institutions which they believe will enable greater equity than capitalism will allow. Different leftists can vary enormously in the particular institutional forms they advocate as an alternatives.

Leftists have a range of relationships with libdem. They may support libdem norms & institutions as worth retaining while criticizing the limitations in the equity libdem delivers — “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread” — arguing that society must also enact other social & political governance institutions beyond only libdem. For example, leftists commonly say that libdem universalism which forbids overt discrimination based on race or sex or other characteristics is insufficient to correct inequities which linger from past discrimination, so society must make a positive effort toward cultural, institutional, and material supports for the populations who inherit those legacies, extending beyond the universalism of libdem mechanisms to incorporate unequal treatment of different groups which can correct the inequities between those groups. Other leftists reject libdem entirely, again on a range of different terms. Marxist-informed leftists may say that because libdem and capitalism spring from the same historical and political processes, we cannot disentangle them; a different form of state governance must displace libdem in order to overcome capitalism. Leftist anarchists reject the state itself as exercising power which inevitably produces inequities, and see libdem principle as inseperable from the logics of the state.

For more on this, including a bunch more vocabulary, I like a pair of posts by Sophia Lewis and Nathan Allebach. (Allenbech’s index of The Most Influential Political Identities From Left To Right explores some distinctions which get lost when one only thinks in terms of the one-dimensional left-right spectrum.) For more about the meanings of “liberalism” in the US, Jamelle Bouie has a brisk video. For more on current intra-leftist tensions, I like Ben Gidley’s & Daniel Mang’s Left Renewal in an Age of Waiting. For more on approaches to social justice, I have an attempt at clarifying common social justice praxis.

Libertarians

We need a quick word on libertarians, as they often claim that libertarianism is a third, distinct peer to liberalism and conservatism, or hold that a Liberty vs Authority axis is a peer to Left vs Right, or protest the common presumption that libertarianism is a species of conservatism by pointing to the left-libertarian tradition.

These folks have a bit of a point. The smartest and most principled libertarians end up with policy preferences which resist facile placement on the spectrum. But I submit that one can place even the most eccentrically thoughtful libertarians on the spectrum if one has a real understanding of what the broad left and right represent.

And frankly, in the US, the term “libertarian” emerges from rationalizations of conservatism, and one can see it in how most folks who call themselves “libertarians” prove to be firmly on the right if one examines their positions and their implications closely.

Mad magazine!

They covered this question back in 1970 with a set of satires of liberals, leftists, conservatives, reactionaries, right-wing militants, and new left extremists. I would say “just for fun” but it remains surprisingly familiar, and maps to many of the same waypoints I point to here, so I consider it a ratification of my taxonomy.

Ongoing revisions

I have made several clarifying changes and expansions from the original version of this essay over the years. Aside from many tweaks to phrasing and formatting, key changes include:

• Adding the groupings “broad left/right”, “mainstream”, and “far left/right” to the diagram. That last reflects a subtle change in nomenclature. I had long used “far” and “extreme” interchangably, but this revision makes “far” into a term which includes both “extreme” and “radical”.
• Softening the description of the Extreme position from saying “only violent revolution matters” to saying “only revolutionary change matters”. Advocacy for, or acceptance of, political violence is common at the far edges, but it is not universal.
• The original exemplars of different positions on the right became frustratingly dated, but hard to pin down in new forms. DJT’s impact has scrambled the structure of the broad right in the US. One can find the Trumpist slogan Make America Great Again used from the right wing to the far right; I’ve tried to use “hard” and “soft” MAGA with increasing precision. Clear examples in each position will have to wait for things to settle.
• The original post only had a small hint about what the section about neighbors now describes in detail.
• I added the explication of the relationship between liberals and The Left, and exploring more common terms for different points on the left side, long after the original post.

A more generic diagram

In case one needs it, this variant diagram strips out the specific examples of where to locate particular ideologies:

Nutrition information label

So today designers have been looking at FDA nutrition information labels. The FDA have proposed an improvement of the existing label:

Not too shabby. But like a lot of people, I like to think about the proportions between carbs, protein, and fat I'm getting in what I eat. Figuring that out requires math, since a gram of protein or carbohydrate has four calories, but a gram of fat has nine. So it would be nice to also show that:

I also snipped off the “Nutrition Facts” caption at the top because, duh.

But having started tinkering, I was annoyed by a common bad information design pattern: the captions for the different nutrients are displayed stronger than the amounts. That's the opposite of what you want: the emphasis should be on the data. Once I succumbed to the temptation to reverse that, I got a little carried away.

I tried to make the “Calories” header do double duty for the total and the column I've added on the right, but that could use some more finesse. Maybe this needs more than fifteen minutes' experimentation.

---

Update: I've found a cornucopia of nutrition information displays.

A crackpot theory about crackpot theories

One of my whiskey rants when talking about Weird Stuff is how I suspect that the aliens which supposedly crashed near Roswell, New Mexico were probably an invention of US Air Force disinformation as a kind of “false bottom” concealing the real secret of the crash of one of Project Mogul's experimental spy balloons. If folks found evidence of the cover-up of Project Mogul, the trail would lead them first to “evidence” of space aliens, thereby leading would-be investigators to either dismiss the story or follow the wrong story and discredit themselves.

Since this is at least plausible, one might go on to suspect that UFO conspiracy culture as a whole could be an example of what the CIA used to call a “Mighty Wurlitzer”: a self-sustaining ecosystem of propaganda organs which, once built up, generates its own material but can also be used to inject propaganda ideas into a society. The spooks don't need to control everything in the media, as the truly paranoid would imagine; they just need to water the garden a little and plant a few invasive species.

I've stumbled across a blog post with a similar thesis, grounded in that amazing article from Glenn Greenwald in The Intercept How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations which has been making the rounds. Greenwald publishes slides from a presentation used by the Government Communications Headquarters, UK's equivalent to the NSA, talking about the dirty tricks they use to manipulate online communities.

And now we get to the really freaky stuff. I honestly was not expecting to see this ...

Why do UFO images appear in a GCHQ document about deception, magic tricks and social control? Obviously, the people who put this document together do not believe in aliens. This ain't about that. This presentation is about the manipulation of large numbers of people. It's about deception.

....

I'd give a lot to know the context. Just what did the presenter say about the preceding flying saucer photographs? How do they tie into the theme of control?

My suggestion: Ufology, unimportant in and of itself, is a testing ground for deception tactics. If those tactics prove effective in that arena, they may be imported into the “real” world and put to serious use.

Hmm.

Lady Gaga and the Posthuman Groteque

I am reminded again of this unforgettable reflection on what Lady Gaga means. Note that it is from 2009.

While the rest of the world spirals into economic degradation, environmental pestilence and complete systems failure of ALL of the old world models, Lady Gaga reigns above the flames. Pay attention to the lesson: Lady Gaga is the ONLY person prospering in this cultural climate. Therefore she has done something RIGHT. She is the necessary evolutionary adaptation to our times and THIS is why people are disturbed by her: This is what we must all become.

The difference between taking offense and being insulted

This keeps coming up. So a quick word about offensiveness and insults.

Someone may find something you say offensive. You may think they were wrong to take offense.

You may have good reasons to think that they are wrong. They may have misinterpreted the plain meaning of what you meant. It happens. They may be informed by an assumption that is factually wrong. It happens. They may have assumed that you were informed by something you didn't know. It happens. There's other reasons why someone may be wrong to be offended.

Many people try to just dismiss anyone taking offense at what they've said by trying to “clarify”. That's shenanigans, but it does not mean that opening a dialogue about whether a comment was rightly offensive is necessarily wrong. If there truly was a misunderstanding, correcting it makes the world a better place.

But.

If you knew that people would take offense — even wrongly — then you have deliberately chosen to offend them. The term for this is an “insult”.

One might rightly debate whether the comment was offensive in such a situation. But there is no question that the comment was an insult.

What does the word “Zionism” mean?

Posts on this subject are obviously fraught, so first:

• I keep an index of resources
• the moral question is simple:
  Palestinian liberation is right & necessary
• the history is complicated:
  I have a survey which addresses many common misunderstandings
• the praxis is complicated:
  antisemitic entryism into the movement for liberation is subtle, pervasive, and unacceptable

Apartheid and Zionism : Precise Definitions, Visceral Ontologies

The original link on this post. Lef Lafayette’s long essay addresses a lot of things I had been meaning to write about, only says it better than I ever would have. The whole thing is worth reading, and I consider this excerpt essential:

In 1975 the United Nations General Assembly “determine[d] that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination” by a vote of 72 to 35 with 32 abstentions. In 1991, the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 46/86 adopted on December 16, 1991, revoked Resolution 3379, by a vote of 111 to 25, with 13 abstentions. The change in vote had much to do with the realignment of the global balance of power following the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite states. For a political philosophy however, the question is not the successes of the resolutions, but rather which of the resolutions are true.

It is from the insightful classic paper of Abdeen Jabara that some basic definitional assessments can be made. Racism, as Jabara illustrates from the The International Convention on Racial Discrimination, notes that there must be exclusion preferences based on race, colour, descent, national or ethnic origin that have the purpose or effect of impairing the equal exercise of basic freedoms. The segregational aspect of such policies expressed in a inhuman manner constitutes the crime of apartheid. Jabara makes a case that Zionism engages in racism, as it argues that Jews are members of a single nation that requires a single nation-state. Rather sensibly, criticism is made of the implausible claim of Jewish as a nationality, the enormous influence of the exclusive land laws, and the numerous examples of discriminatory laws. A conclusion is reached that Zionism was a colonial force that dispossesed an existing population of their lands in the formation of a new state.

But is this really what Zionism means, and what is required of it? On August 29, 1897, the First Zionist Congress in Basel adopted the definition that “Zionism aims at establishing for the Jewish people a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine”. Theodor Herzl wrote in his diary a few days later: “At Basel I founded the Jewish State”. But there is enormous difference between “homeland” and “state”. Herzl’s opinions on the matter are well-known; he certainly wanted a statehood for the Jewish people as a matter of priority. But others disagreed such as the cultural Zionists, led by Ahad Ha’am, who sought primarily a revival of Jewish religious identity and the Hebrew language (the “eastern” Chibbath Zion) over political statehood (the “western” Zioniyuth). Following his first trip to Palestine in 1891, Ha’am had the following to say — one can only wonder what he would think of the situation today:

We must surely learn, from both our past and present history, how careful we must be not to provoke the anger of the native people by doing them wrong, how we should be cautious in our dealings with a foreign people among whom we returned to live, to handle these people with love and respect and, needless to say, with justice and good judgment. And what do our brothers do? Exactly the opposite!

From the two fundamentally different orientations, a myriad of variations developed. The majority viewpoint combined both the religious revivialism with nationalism utilising a Statist approach, often with revanchist attitudes of a Jewish State, although rarely to the extremist position of extending over the entirety of Eretz Yisrael Hashlemah (“from the brook of Egypt to the Euphrates”, Genesis 15:18-21). From the cultural-religious perspective, emphasis was placed on reviving cultural identification. In some cases that meant a religious rejection of a Jewish state, such as with the small Haredi sect, Neturei Karta. In others, it became a Hebrew (rather than Judiac) nationalism, such as with the Canaanites. Among the more liberal perspectives something akin to the unification of Chibbath Zion and Zioniyuth was sought — a state that would be simultaneously Jewish and democratic.

A smaller tangent developed among those who rejected Jewish statism, but supported the concept of a Jewish homeland in Palestine — a democratic, liberal, secular, and socialistic Palestine. Chief among these advocates are luminary figures such as Albert Einstein, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, and Noam Chomsky. Einstein supported a Jewish homeland in Palestine, but opposed the establishment of a Jewish state and the proposals to partition Palestine into independent Arab and Jewish countries, and even moreso, the existence of separate armed forces. Martin Buber, the famous existentalist, agreed. Deeply committed to the Zionist project as a spiritual and anarcho-socialist endeavour, as a member of Brit Shalom, he too argued for a bi-national rather than for a Jewish state in Palestine. The ever-astute Arendt, was of a similar perspective. Her writings in the 1940s predicted the Nakba, an unending conflict, of Israel's dependence on the American Jewish community and a rising conflict with the same as the country trends towards a nationalistic conservatism, and the rise of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism in response — all of which can be summarised with her pithy and tragic brilliance: “… a Jewish state can only be erected at the price of the Jewish homeland”.

Finally, it is well known that Chomsky’s Zionism is more influenced by labour and socialist perspectives that sought Arab-Jewish working-class cooperation for socialist binational Palestine and that he was associated with groups like Hashomer Ha’tzair. He points out that mainstream Zionism at the time included opposition to the “the deeply antidemocratic concept of a Jewish state”. In the 1990’s Chomsky argued in favour of a two-state solution for two peoples with aspirations for self-determination. More recently, he has become a stronger advocate for the more principed position of a binational secular state “from the sea to the river”. Of course, as has been pointed out in the past, the issue isn't one, two, or many states, but rather the content of those states — where secularism, civil liberties, and democratic rights equate with the “a zero State solution”.

[⋯]

In reference to the the two UN General Assembly resolutions it should be evident that Zionism as such does not equate to racism, let alone a form colonialism. It can represent the legitimate desire of a dispersed and ethnically varied religious community to a spiritual and even linguistic reawakening and to identify with a geographical area as their historically meaningful homeland after centuries of extreme persecution. But it has also been most certainly in the name of Zionism that racially-inspired policies of violent invasions, dispossessions, and continuing oppression continues to this day against the Palestinian Arabs (not to mention the apocalyptic visions by Christian Zionists). But by the same token, in introducing the revoking resolution to the General Assembly, George W. Bush commented to equate Zionism to racism is to reject Israel's right to exist. How extraordinary it is to think that “nations”, those “imagined communities” to use Benedict Anderson’s phrase, or even “States”, have rights when the rights of real flesh-and-blood human beings are quite forgotten.

Zionism was never a single concept. We should be grateful to JFNA’s survey for the reminder.

An instructive meditation on what it means that a 2026 study found that about 9 out of 10 American Jews say “Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish, democratic state” but only 1 in 3 identify as “Zionists”, includes this telling aside:

A brief detour into the thought of Martin Buber helps illuminate how mutable these terms are. Buber, one of the 20^th century’s most influential Jewish philosophers, was a committed Zionist. He emigrated to Palestine, supported Jewish national renewal, and believed passionately in Hebrew nationalist culture. Yet he also advocated for a binational state, shared by Jews and Arabs on egalitarian political terms, grounded in political equality and mutual recognition. In his own time, Buber was squarely within the Zionist tent, so much so that Theodor Herzl invited him to serve as editor of the Zionist newspaper Die Welt. Today, if you espouse Martin Buber’s views of a binational state without emphasis on maintaining a Jewish voting majority, you are labeled an anti-Zionist.

State use of force

I've talked about this before, but I'm not perfectly happy with how I've articulated it, so here's two pictures to save me two thousand words.

Citizens using force to protect public order:

Liberal democratic government using force to protect public order:

The choice is clear to me.

Rockstar developers

A friend who prefers to remain nameless puts a finger on something that has bothered me about “rockstars”, “ninjas”, et cetera.

Dear recruiters of the world:

Please stop emailing me saying you're looking for a “rockstar programmer” or a “badass programmer” or even a “fearless programmer.” There are none of the above. There are, however, programmers who front at being rockstars and fearless badasses. When you recruit with those terms, you tell me you're actively seeking programmers who front at things, which makes me presume my team will be awful. I am an adult and a professional with a track record. I work with other calm, mature adults. Programmers putting on a front aren't those people.

Usability research

Via Coding Horror, I am reminded of the Wichita State Software Usability Research Lab which publishes some good, instructive research.

Graham's Heirarchy of Disagreement

Saved for future reference, some good talking about talking.

If we're all going to be disagreeing more, we should be careful to do it well.

Wikipedia offers a helpful diagram:

The Oakland hills fire

One Sunday morning in 1991 some friends and I were visiting a friend who was a UC Berkeley student living on the east side of campus. I noticed that the rising sun shining through the window made a bright red square of light on the floor of her little apartment. But a moment later I realized that this couldn't be right. It was maybe nine in the morning; that couldn't be the sunrise. I went to look out the window.

Smoke was curling beautifully around the sun, glowing red in churning billows.

I called my friends over to look. A minute later we were outside, watching a huge pillar of black smoke rise into the sky. Ten minutes later, we had climbed into a car to chase the smoke and see if we could find where the fire was.

Fifteen minutes after that, we realized that we had misread the distance to the fire; the pillar of smoke was much bigger than we thought. And it had already visibly grown. We turned back, and turned on the radio to hear reports of the fire. Firefighters were responding; some places in the hills were being evacuated, but we were safe.

Our group split up to forage for brunch and enjoy a downtown Berkeley ramble. Shortly after noon, from Shattuck avenue, I saw a long line of fire in the hills, black smoke streaming. I telephoned my host — from a pay phone, this was before we all had phones in our pockets — and my friends were worried. They still weren't being evacuated (and it later turned out they wouldn't be) but radio reports kept describing the fire as growing. “Get back here so we can go home.”

By the time I met back up at my friend's apartment, the whole sky was hazy with gray smoke. Making our way to the freeway, we passed through an even smokier neighborhood. The streets were quiet, and there was an apocalyptic air. Streetlights were on, ash was drifting down over everything, the sky was gray and the sun shone a deep red through it. I misquoted Revelation 6:12: “The sky became as sackcloth and the sun became as blood.”

Finally we found our way to the freeway, and sped out of the smoky area, heading back to Santa Cruz.

As one makes the connection from Berkeley's Highway 24 to 880 heading south toward San Jose, there's an overpass at the edge of downtown Oakland that arcs up high before descending to the freeway, where one can see 880 extending to the south. We were facing thick southbound traffic, but northbound there were no cars.

Just fire trucks. Dozens of them, as far as the eye could see, racing north to the fire.

Corey Robin

A little snippet from Corey Robin's excellent book The Reactionary Mind:

The conservative position stems from a genuine conviction that a world thus emancipated [by the left] will be ugly, brutish, base, and dull. It will lack the excellence of a world where the better man commands the worse.

Note that this corresponds with my own thumbnail description of the core of liberalism and conservatism.

Race Forward

Drawn by a good plug from the marvelous Jay Smooth, I took a look at the recent report from the folks at Race Forward. Both the content and the format are good stuff: it's well-produced, and I really love their focus on thinking systemically and sharpening our vocabulary for talking about that.

Both to give you a taste of the report, and to have it handy for other discussions, I'm going to quote their taxonomy of racism.

Race Forward’s Levels of Racism

During the course of our three decades of in-person trainings and consulting for clients of various backgrounds and fields of work, Race Forward has developed definitions for “Four Levels of Racism” — two within the individual level of racism and two within the systemic level — that we re-introduce here. The key distinction is between the two levels of racism, individual and systemic. While we acknowledge the impact of individual acts of racial discrimination, we believe that it is critical to do so within a deeper analysis of systemic racial injustice.

Individual-Level Racism

INTERNALIZED RACISM lies within individuals. These are our private beliefs and biases about race and racism, in-fluenced by our culture. Internalized racism can take many different forms including racial prejudice toward other people of a different race; internalized oppression, the negative beliefs about oneself by people of color; or inter- nalized privilege, beliefs about superiority or entitlement by white people. An example is a belief that you or others are more or less intelligent, or beautiful, because of your race.

INTERPERSONAL RACISM occurs between individuals. These are biases that occur when individuals interact with others and their private racial beliefs affect their public interactions. Examples include racial slurs, bigotry, hate crimes, and racial violence.

Systemic-Level Racism

INSTITUTIONAL RACISM occurs within institutions and systems of power. It is the unfair policies and discriminatory practices of particular institutions (schools, workplaces, etc.) that routinely produce racially inequitable outcomes for people of color and advantages for white people. Individuals within institutions take on the power of the institution when they reinforce racial inequities. An example is a school system that concentrates people of color in the most overcrowded schools, the least-challenging classes, and the least-qualified teachers, resulting in higher dropout rates and disciplinary rates compared with that of white students.

STRUCTURAL RACISM is racial bias among institutions and across society. It involves the cumulative and compounding effects of an array of societal factors including the history, culture, ideology, and interactions of institutions and policies that systematically privilege white people and disadvantage people of color. An example is the overwhelming number of depictions of people of color as criminals in mainstream media, which can influence how various institutions and individuals treat people of color with suspicion when they are shopping, traveling, or seeking housing and employment – all of which can result in discriminatory treatment and unequal outcomes.

Systems Analysis

What it is and why it’s needed — Because the popular notion of racism is narrowly focused on personal prejudice and racial animus, a more complete analysis and presentation of race-related developments is needed. When racial dynamics are not sufficiently contextualized, it is easy to fall into the trap of victim blaming. A systems analysis adds context, reveals root causes and contributing factors, and surfaces possible corresponding solutions. A systems analysis involves an examination of questions: What institutional policies and practices are involved? What are the historical underpinnings and cumulative inequities? What cultural norms and popular ideas are reinforcing the problem? What is causing the racial inequities and tensions and what are possible solutions? If racial justice advocates adopt a routine and robust use of a systems analysis to inform our work — and the way we publicly communicate our issues — we can be a model for other advocates and journalists to do the same.

A big piece of their analysis is that mainstream media do not generally talk about racism on the systemic level at all, and break down “seven harmful racial discourse practices” that need to change:

1. Individualizing Racism
2. Falsely Equating Incomparable Acts
3. Diverting From Race
4. Portraying Government As Overreaching
5. Prioritizing (Policy) Intent Over Impact
6. Condemning Through Coded Language
7. Silencing History

Sophisticated and accessible. Joe Bob says check it out.

Turn the other cheek

Fascinating specifics about Jesus' crafty use of nonviolence.

In Jesus’s time, striking someone of a lower class (a servant) with the back of the hand was used to assert authority and dominance. If the persecuted person “turned the other cheek,” the discipliner was faced with a dilemma. The left hand was used for unclean purposes, so a back-hand strike on the opposite cheek would not be performed. Another alternative would be a slap with the open hand as a challenge or to punch the person, but this was seen as a statement of equality. Thus, by turning the other cheek the persecuted was in effect putting an end to the behavior or if the slapping continued the person would lawfully be deemed equal and have to be released as a servant/slave.

More examples under the link, though it doesn't include my favorite example of Jesus' clever rhetorical jujitsu: “render unto Ceasar”, in which he plays dumb in order wittily observe unspoken assumptions. “Gee, I don't know about money. Can I see one of these coins you're talking about? There's a guy's picture on there! I guess it's his! So if he really wants it back …”

Pro-Life

Huerca Zafada says something I've said about “pro-life” folks which I've said, only better than I've ever said it. Read the whole thing.

In each and every dark pit of desperation, I have never seen a pro-lifer. I ain’t never seen them babysitting, scrubbing floors, bringing over goods, handing mom ^$50 bucks a month or driving her to the pediatrician.

You want to put a stop to abortion? Make a world that doesn't need it.

Politics and the lust for power

I was just reading a little monograph about political philosophy on the internets, the way you do, and there came the all-too-familiar moment in which it asserted “and here you see that the professed ideology of my opponents is at best self-deception on their part, for it is revealed that their true motive is pure lust for power”. And I let out a little sigh at this failure of the Ideological Turing Test. It invalidated the piece's whole argument, for me.

It hardly matters what side this piece was arguing. It galls me when I am told that my political ideas are just a mask for my simple desire to exercise power. It galls me no less when people say the same of my political opponents; if we are to understand what is going on, we must credit our opponents with at least a sincere desire for a better society as they conceive it.

Claiming a pure lust for power as the motives of one's opponents is a mark of the unsophisticated. A childish, cartoon view of politics.

So presuming the sincerity of one's political opponents — if not necessarily their honesty or goodwill — is a habit of the politically sophisticated.

But.

What of fascism? Though it rarely takes root, fascism is always with us. Rarely does it profess to be fascism. And one of its defining features is its radical disinterest in policy, its profound insincerity about its ideology, its pure will-to-power.

This makes the sophisticated vulnerable to fascism's deceptions if they do not learn to recognize its scent.

Bruce Sterling on startups and disruption

Chilling and vitally important.

In the startup world, you work hard and you move fast in order to make other people rich.

Other people. Not you.

You're a small elite of very smart young people who are working very hard for an even smaller elite of mostly Baby Boomer financiers … so they can buy national governments, shut the governments down, destroy the middle class and the nation-state.

That's been going on a long time. It's not something you invented; that's a historical development. There's a lot of reasons that the nation-state's got to go. There's a lot of reasons why a middle class is in the way.

But that's what you do. That will be the judgment of history for your startup culture. They're going to say that the twenty-teens were all about that:

“It was a tacit allegiance between the hackerspace favelas of the startups and off-shored capital & tax avoidance money laundries. And what were they doing? They were building a globalized network society.”

And that's what's coming next: an actual globalized network society. You're routing around it from the bottom while they climb over it from the top, but you're both aimed in the same direction. That's why you're in tacit allegiance, whether you know it or not.

And right now everybody lives the way that people used to live under empires in colonial states. We're all auto-colonialized by the austerity. That's your big dragon. That's your actual dragon. Not, like, the little tactical dragon. That's the BIG DRAGON. And you know it's the big dragon because you're part of it. You're actually its brain and its nervous system.

You.

And as long as you are making rich guys richer, you are not disrupting the austerity. You are one of its top facilitators.

More:

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The (sort of) rosy version, from Mark Andreessen:

Speaking of disruption: Tech people like me can sometimes come across as presumptuous/arrogant re disruption of other peoples' industries.

It is possible this is an understatement. I am sure that some of my Twitter friends will expand on this for me
:-).

From this side of the aisle, though, it's less smugness, more the result of hard experience and learning from our own lives and careers.

In tech, our *own* businesses are disrupted by technology change and new competitive entrants at whiplash-inducing rates.

It's shocking how quickly you can go from the hot disruptive upstart to the stodgy disrupted incumbent in tech -- frequently within 5 years.

I've probably been on the receiving end of disruption 30 times in the last 20 years -- almost as many times as I've been on the giving end.

Now, on the one hand, you might say, “How can people live like that?” ... what's wrong with a little stability?

But, what we see is: Frequent disruption is the handmaiden of rapid progress -- and it's a blast to create and work amid rapid progress.

It's not just rapid progress of tech. It's also rapid grown of companies, and even better, rapid development of *people* & their talents.

It's hard to stay in tech for any period of time and not get good at rapid adaptation, skill acquisition... and new product creation.

As software eats the world: Same disruption dynamics always present in tech now applying to many more industries, fields, professions.

Rather than superiority/contempt, what a lot of us feel is deep sympathy/understanding -- even if that's not always how it comes across!

And now we all have the opportunity to learn together -- to make many parts of industry/life more innovative/dynamic, better for everyone.

Poverty

For future reference: Will Someone Please Address (Poverty)

I live wealth. But I am not wealthy. I will never be wealthy, no matter how much money I make or what title I hold, because I have spent over thirty years of my life, the overwhelming majority, orbiting poverty’s gravity well. I have not just “been poor.” I have drunk poverty straight from the jug. I’ve been over, under, and through it. I have at various times hated it, hidden it, rebelled against it and worshiped it, and after 35 very long years, I seem to have clawed my way out of it. But no matter how long or far I walk in the other direction, it’s there. It’s always there.

It’s hard to capture the depth of my sincerity when I said I didn’t want to write about this. If I’m any indication, the last thing your average Recovering Poverty Citizen (RPC) wants to do, is talk about being poor. You don’t climb out of the poverty tar pits by accident. If you get out, it’s because you really want out. Talking takes you back in.

This is relevant to a range of social justice discussions:

As a human race, we just haven’t got a bead on the resource distribution problem. It’s over our heads, it’s intimidating, so people shut down.

The conversation is stuck because individual people are stuck. And people are stuck for multiple reasons, not the least of which is that everyone is freaking out. When somebody opens their mouths to talk about it, somebody else rips their freaking head off and spits down their neck hole.

This conversation isn’t working for anyone. Let’s don’t have it anymore. Let’s start with what we should be talking about.

Highly recommended by a friend whose wisdom on the subject I trust.

Progress

Ariel Sharon
1928-2014

Relentless warrior

I’ll admit it. My first thought was … good.

But my second thought is more complicated.

I've spent a fair bit of time studying and thinking about the fate of the modern Levant, the question to which Sharon devoted his life, and it’s really fucking complicated. When talk turns to Israel, I typically wind up arguing with whoever's in the room. In loopy lefty circles, that typically means defending Israel by patiently explaining the history of the region — trying to stick to those precious few things that are clearly agreed upon as fact — to people who really don’t know anything about it. In staunchly Zionist circles, it typically means criticizing Israel by painstakingly distinguishing Arab Palestians from Syria or Egypt or Jordan, pre-’67 from post-’67. In more daring circles, it may mean talking about how Zionism fits into the history of nationalism and European imperialism, asking why Israel was even a good idea in the first place, or reflecting on whether Brooklyn isn't the New Jerusalem.

So my second thought about Sharon is complicated.

On the first day after a person’s death, I try to honor the tradition of not speaking ill of the dead. I gritted my teeth and did it for Reagan. But I cannot do it for Sharon. I have no tears to cry for him.

Yes, Sharon has been at war with a real injustice, fighting for a people wronged by history. But he has made his war against the wrong enemy, the Arab Palestinian people, by despicable means, awash in the blood of innocents. He has failed as a leader of his own people, robbing them of their honor, their opportunities for peace, and the truth. He is one of the principal midwives of our era of terrorism, leaving a curse for all humanity. We are all well rid of him — even, and perhaps especially, the Jews of Israel.

Israeli Jews sometimes reference Exodus in calling themselves (mixing self-deprecation and pride) עַם-קְשֵׁה-עֹרֶף: “a stiff-necked people”. This is, of course, both true and false — and vividly so of Sharon. I hold distant hope than now, without him, that will change.

So no tears. But today I can hope for the better parts — only the better parts — of his dreams to come true. In that spirit, I strongly suggest that you read the decade-old post from which I just copied this one.

• Times of Israel
• The New Yorker
• Al Jazeera
• New York Times
• Informed Comment
• Jerusalem Post
• Quotes at Salon and Al Jazeera
• Human Rights Watch
• Counterpunch

Posts on this subject are obviously fraught, so:

• I keep an index of resources
• the moral question is simple:
  Palestinian liberation is right & necessary
• the history is complicated:
  I have a survey which addresses many common misunderstandings
• the praxis is complicated:
  antisemitic entryism into the movement for liberation is subtle, pervasive, and unacceptable

Fukushima

Dr. M at Deep Sea News is keeping an index of All The Best, Scientifically Verified, Information on Fukushima Impacts.

With all the misinformation around the internet here are links to articles that we trust. The following provide credible information about what is actually occurring and/or dispel myths about Fukushima radiation that are prevalent on the internet. I will not link to pseudoscience, misinformation, or outright lies in this post or allow them in the comments below. These posts and ideas have received far more attention and links than they deserve already. I provide the author, their credentials, a statement of the misinformation if applicable, the take home message, and my favorite quotes.

Deferring to expertise

A friend observes:

Listening to the nuclear power plant safety portion of John Hockenberry’s NPR show a few minutes ago, I suddenly had a moment of clarity about my own emotional biases. If I’m reading or listening to someone where most or all of what they think or claim has no admitted contradictions, no difficult choices, no acknowledged problems, no legitimate entry for debate or disagreement, nor confession of doubt or uncertainty, I fundamentally mistrust them at a very primal, emotional level, whether or not I know anything else about the issue at hand. The older I get and the more I know and have seen, I distrust even (perhaps especially) my own judgment in inverse proportion to how certain I feel about an issue.

And goes on to say:

Oh, there is a short road from this feeling to crippling self-doubt. It’s also a reason that academics in general are shitty communicators who over-qualify everything. This is really more a feeling than an argument — it’s a gut thing for me. In a way it makes me easy to manipulate in the other direction — all I need is someone who entertains some doubts and ambiguity and I’m foolishly reassured about what they want or think.

As someone who shares this same impulse — and thus of course sees it as a mark of sophistication — I take it as an adaptation to what Julian Sanchez calls “one way hash arguments.”

Sometimes the arguments are such that the specialists can develop and summarize them to the point that an intelligent layman can evaluate them. But often — and I feel pretty sure here — that’s just not the case. Give me a topic I know fairly intimately, and I can often make a convincing case for absolute horseshit. Convincing, at any rate, to an ordinary educated person with only passing acquaintance with the topic. A specialist would surely see through it, but in an argument between us, the lay observer wouldn’t necessarily be able to tell which of us really had the better case on the basis of the arguments alone — at least not without putting in the time to become something of a specialist himself. Actually, I em a possible advantage here as a peddler of horseshit: I need only worry about what sounds plausible. If my opponent is trying to explain what’s true, he may be constrained to introduce concepts that take a while to explain and are hard to follow, trying the patience (and perhaps wounding the ego) of the audience.

Come to think of it, there’s a certain class of rhetoric I’m going to call the “one way hash” argument. Most modern cryptographic systems in wide use are based on a certain mathematical asymmetry: You can multiply a couple of large prime numbers much (much, much, much, much) more quickly than you can factor the product back into primes. A one-way hash is a kind of “fingerprint” for messages based on the same mathematical idea: It’s really easy to run the algorithm in one direction, but much harder and more time consuming to undo. Certain bad arguments work the same way — skim online debates between biologists and earnest ID afficionados armed with talking points if you want a few examples: The talking point on one side is just complex enough that it’s both intelligible — even somewhat intuitive — to the layman and sounds as though it might qualify as some kind of insight. (If it seems too obvious, perhaps paradoxically, we’ll tend to assume everyone on the other side thought of it themselves and had some good reason to reject it.) The rebuttal, by contrast, may require explaining a whole series of preliminary concepts before it’s really possible to explain why the talking point is wrong. So the setup is “snappy, intuitively appealing argument without obvious problems” vs. “rebuttal I probably don’t have time to read, let alone analyze closely.”

If we don’t sometimes defer to the expert consensus, we’ll systematically tend to go wrong in the face of one-way-hash arguments, at least outside our own necessarily limited domains of knowledge. Indeed, in such cases, trying to evaluate the arguments on their merits will tend to lead to an erroneous conclusion more often than simply trying to gauge the credibility of the various disputants …

Update

Scott (whom I think is the same Scott Alexander of the excellent deeply problematic Slate Star Codex) calls his response to this epistemic learned helplessness.

I am obviously just gullible in the field of ancient history. Given a total lack of independent intellectual steering power and no desire to spend thirty years building an independent knowledge base of Near Eastern history, I choose to just accept the ideas of the prestigious people with professorships in Archaeology rather than the universally reviled crackpots who write books about Venus being a comet.

I guess you could consider this a form of epistemic learned helplessness, where I know any attempt to evaluate the arguments are just going to be a bad idea so I don't even try. If you have a good argument that the Early Bronze Age worked completely differently from the way mainstream historians believe, I just don’t want to hear about it. If you insist on telling me anyway, I will nod, say that your argument makes complete sense, and then totally refuse to change my mind or admit even the slightest possibility that you might be right.

Speaking with conviction

On occasion people have told me that I speak too directly. That I state my opinions without saying “but that's just my opinion” and such.

I reject the mushmouthed voice which that implicitly advocates.

Here is a poetic evocation of the principle.

A note about Israel

Posts on this subject are obviously fraught, so first:

• I keep an index of resources
• the moral question is simple:
  Palestinian liberation is right & necessary
• the history is complicated:
  I have a survey which addresses many common misunderstandings
• the praxis is complicated:
  antisemitic entryism into the movement for liberation is subtle, pervasive, and unacceptable

This keeps coming up. So a quick note about Israel.

If you cannot clearly identify and distinguish the differences between all of these things …

• Zionism as a historical movement
• Zionism as a contemporary political position
• the state of Israel as a geopolitical entity
• the process by which the state of Israel was founded
• the state of Israel’s right to exist
• the history of Israel’s policies
• Israel's current policies
• Jewish ethnic identity
• Jewish religious identity
• Jewish racialized identity
• the religion of Judaism
• 1967
• 1948
• The Balfour Declaration

… then your opinion about Israel is not informed enough to be relevant.

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Update

I’ve had some people suggest to me that this post implies a position on Israel’s policies. Since the policy positions people have inferred from this post have never matched my actual position, I think I can rightly claim that any implications you read in this post reflect not me, but Something Else.

My point is neither more nor less than that the atmosphere is full of bullshit about Israel pointed in many different directions. It is hard to develop an informed opinion in this environment, and unless you do the work to become informed, you will fall into somebody’s trap.

Brooks

As a long time David Brooks hayta, I really enjoyed Gary Greenberg's little reflection on knowing Brooks in his youth.

(Evidently fictional but it's deliciously hard to tell.)

TTRPG psychological shock systems

Unknown Armies 2E

The tabletop roleplaying game Unknown Armies has a great system for dealing with the psychological shocks of the characters’ adventures, a more complex iteration of the sanity system from the classic Call of Cthulhu game, in which characters eventually go mad from exposure to Lovecraftian Nameless Horrors.

There are five different kinds of psychological stress in Unknown Armies, each tracked independently. Shocking experiences can make a character either hardened to the stress it presents, or fragile about it, or both. A character might become hardened against encounters with the unnatural but fragile in the face of violence. If a character becomes hardened or fragile enough, other people start to notice that there is something off about them, and ultimately a character pushed too far becomes an insane NPC.

In the game as written, when something happens with a higher shock rating than the character’s relevant Hardened score, the player rolls percentile dice against the character’s Mind score to see if they can keep their composure. On a successful roll, they keep it togther and their Hardened rating for that shock goes up +1. On a failed roll, the character’s Fragile rating goes up +1 and the player chooses whether the character freezes, flees, freaks out (screaming et cetera), or goes into a fighting frenzy against the cause of the shock.

In my games, I tweaked this with a house rule where characters rolled against different attributes for the different types of stress:

• Violence vs Body
  a frail character is more likely to panic in the face of violence
• Unnatural vs 100-Mind
  an intelligent character is more vulnerable to dread from seeing something supernatural
• Helplessness vs Soul
  a person with a grounded spirit can better face this threat
• Isolation vs Mind
  an intelligent character has more to think about while alone
• Self vs 100-Soul
  violating their personal norms is more upsetting to a person with a strong spirit

After I originally wrote this post, 3E engaged a similar idea and took it much further! In UA 3E, characters have ten base stats in opposed pairs linked to each stress. As one is changed by encounters with Violence, say, one’s Struggle stat used for fighting improves while one’s Connect stat decreases. This can feed a breakdown spiral: one uses Connect to protect against Isolation shock, so even hardening to a shock creates vulnerabilities.

Over on Twitter, Dragon Cobolt has an incisive comment about how this produces an ethical dimension which contrasts with other games.

So, my friend Jay was recently in a D&D game she had to quickly leave when the party went pretty quickly to torturing a captured NPC for information and it hit me how … the adventure and the mechanics both incentivize and encourage the players to unpeople stuff. And like, torture in D&D is kinda toothless? It’s just a re-themed skill check and if you’re not particularly engaged with the setting or the roleplaying, it can go by in a literal blink. “I rough him up for the password” “okay, that’s a DC12 intimidation check.”

Contrast with Unknown Armies. Unknown Armies actually has a … relatively robust coercion system for when you want to get an NPC to do something they’d rather not — and it’s infinitely more … visceral and bone cracking. Mechanically and narratively, you’re made deeply aware? It’s not just rolling percentiles, you need to know how you’re hurting someone. Hammering their helplessness gauge with threatening to ruin their lives, hammering their isolation by duct taping them up in a cargo container, that kind of thing.

And those things then have effects on your character — using a blowtorch on someone’s thigh? That’s a violence stress check. That’s going to change yourself. The game asks: Are you willing to become the kind of girl who will blowtorch someone’s thigh until they do what you want?

That’s why I’ve never seen the kind of cavalier disregard for NPCs in any of the UA games I’ve run. People … shy away from the pain when it’s real. Which, like … that’s good? I think that’s good.

Vigorously agreed; this connects to the challenge of responsibly thinking about violence in TTRPG design more broadly.

Making stronger shocks more threatening

This similar mechanic comes out of a conversation with Zed Lopez about a game based on 2d6 rolls, rather than percentile rolls.

As in Unknown Armies, for each type of shock characters have both a Hardened and a Fragile rating, with different experiences having a different Rank in the level of shock they produce. Seeing the ghost of someone one knows to be dead might be a Rank 6 unnatural stress, while a Tentacle Monster From Another Dimension which speaks in that person’s voice might be a 10. As in Unknown Armies, if a character’s Hardened score for a stress exceeds its rank, they need not roll. (“Bah! I’ve seen weirder!”)

When facing a shock, one rolls and adds the character’s Fragile rating for the shock, then compares the roll to the shock Rank and the character’s Hardened rating:

• under Hardened
  the character keeps their cool and gets another point of Hardened
• between Hardened and the shock’s Rank (inclusive)
  the character adds +1 Fragile for that shock and the GM chooses their response:
  • fight
  • flee
  • freeze
  • freak out
• above the shock Rank
  the player chooses one:
  • fight
  • flee
  • freeze
  • freak out
  and may also either:
  • add +1 Hardened point
  • add +1 Fragile point

The more severe a stress, the more likely it will make the character snap and become more fragile, and the less likely the player will have control over their reaction. Hardened characters tend to get more hardened still; less hardened characters tend to become more fragile. A high roll — more likely when very fragile! — creates a hard choice, fun for roleplaying.

Fate

This is a comparable house rule for Fate, my favorite TTRPG rules engine. I have tinkered with it at the table but do not yet consider it fully playtested.

Three skills protect against psychological shock:

• Violence protects against violence shocks, and is used for all fighting (and more). The difference in skills for weapons et cetera are all handled using Fate’s stunt system.
• Gnosis protects against weirdness shocks, and can be used to intuit truths about Scary Things one encounters, use spooky magic, et cetera.
• Willpower protects against other psychological shocks, and otherwise operates as written in standard Fate rules.

These skills must be justified by permanent character aspects, one for each level of skill — though an aspect may double up to support more than one skill. For example, a character with the aspects Former Army Commando and Deadly In A Fight could have +1 Willpower and +2 Violence.

When a character encounters a psychological shock, it functions as an Attack. Rather than roll for the Attack, the GM just gives it a value reflecting its severity; the player employs their character’s relevant skill to Defend. A character ignores shocks with an Attack value below their skill (like with Hardened ratings in the other systems). Our Former Army Commando with +2 Violence has no problem witnessing a bar fight (violence shock +1) but must roll their +1 Willpower to run into a burning building (will shock +2). Characters may use stunts, invoke aspects, or get help from other characters when making these rolls, but these do not help ignore the need for a roll.

If the character successfully Defends, their player may elect to harden the character, spending a Fate point to raise the relevant skill, transforming a character aspect into a different one which supports this. After running into that burning building, our commando might turn Proud Father Of Two Daughters into Relentlessly Devoted To Stopping The Cult Of Flames. He now has +2 Willpower but his relationship with the kids will suffer.

If the character fails in Defending against a shock, as normally in Fate the shifts use up the character’s Stress track … and if they cannot soak the Stress, they get a Condition. For these psychological shocks, we borrow from UA and give players their choice from a short menu of Conditions: Frozen or Fighting Frenzy or Freaking Out. (The GM may also offer context specific alternatives.) Fleeing is not a possible Condition because the Fate rules already have a mechanic for characters leaving a scene by conceding a conflict.

A player too impatient to go through the normal process for their character to recover from one of these Conditions may elect to have their character crack. This immediately clears the Condition and gives the character a Fate point, but they must alter a permanent character aspect to make it more troublesome; this may not improve skills as hardening does. For example, after seeing an eldrich horror a character might go from Elegant Debutante to Frightened Of Tentacles, or another character with +1 Gnosis supported by the aspect Aware Of The True Geometry Of The Cosmos might become instead Obsessed With The True Geometry Of The Cosmos.

This supports interesting player choices in the spirit of Fate and reflects how traumatizing experiences permanently change a person.

Internet bullshitpocalypse

Luke O'Neill at Esquire calls this The Year We Broke The Internet.

This is not a glitch in the system. It is the system. Readers are gullible, the media is feckless, garbage is circulated around, and everyone goes to bed happy and fed. BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti admitted as much when explaining, that, when he’s hiring, he looks for “people who really understand how information is shared on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and other emerging platforms, because that is in some cases as important as, you know, having traditional reporting talent.” Upworthy editorial director Sara Critchfield seconded the notion. “We reject the idea that the media elite or people who have been trained in a certain way somehow have the monopoly on editorial judgment.”

I would protest, however, that this is not new. Recall that deceiving us has become an industrial process.