That academic writing about differences between “liberal” and “conservative” comedy...Have they ever been to a comedy club? John Oliver, Samantha Bee, or Gutfeld do not represent the institution of comedy. Spend time around the subculture and you’ll see that’s not how any of this works.
The truly great comics are the ones who get at the greater, universal truths and absurdities of the human condition. Appealing to a certain tribe is low hanging fruit. A great comic will have every person in the room dying of laughter regardless of their social class or politics, this is the beauty of it.
I was just at the famous comedy cellar in NYC this weekend, in the west village. There were 5 professional comics that performed, and even in an overwhelmingly wealthy liberal audience, there was a significant drop off in laughter with the one woman who did something that could be called “left wing comedy.” It was impossible to tell what the politics of the other 4 were, not because they avoided the topics, but because they touched on them in a way that gave a unique perspective. They weren’t “left” or “right”, they were just *funny*.
I don’t know how you talk about things like relationships without giving a hint to politics or social outlook today. I’ll bet that everyone in the comedy cellar shares a worldview and seeing the performances there as non political might be like a fish in water thing.
Well I’ll say that being a funny comedian usually requires being tethered to reality in order to make relatable observations ab the human experience. Acknowledging differences btw men/women, and differences btw races is basically a prerequisite for that. So in that broad sense a lot of comedy can be coded as right leaning but I think they would reject that.
The thing about comedy today is that, like everything else, the traditional gatekeepers (tv, late night) have lost much of their authority. SNL used to be the pinnacle of success for comedians, and now a lot of the cast members can’t sell out a 250 seat club in a major city. Meanwhile guys like Tom Segura are selling out across the world, having built massive followings mostly on the internet. So if your main source comedy is what you see on tv, you may be under the false impression that they are the most successful comedians, which isn’t quite true.
So point being, if there is a broadly shared world view among comedians, it by default involves a rejection of wokeness. There’s a small pool of careerist/striver comics who do something like “left wing” comedy bc their view of success involves approval from the traditional industry gatekeepers, but they always get the least laughs at the clubs (hence why they look to the institutions). Most comics, however,see the path to success as building a following, and you build a following by being funny to as many ppl as possible.
Side note- theres a discussion on YT/Spotify hosted by Glenn Loury with Coleman Hughes, Roland Fryer, and a few big standup comics (Shane Gillis, who famously got “cancelled” from SNL is one of them) where they talk about the intersection of comedy and politics. Def some good insights there.
What you say seems to back up what I’m saying. I don’t think those gatekeepers like SNL are lying about what they prefer, they genuinely believe the leftist comedy is funny, but they’ve lost touch. It sounds like the most popular comedians have moral values and opinions that are about the middle of where the population is, so they have the largest audience. Joe Rogan being anti-woke but liking Bernie Sanders is where a lot of people are. The median American probably finds Samantha Bee shrill but would be uncomfortable with open racism or sexism. So what comedy people enjoy reflects their worldview.
I went to a comedy show in literally San Francisco.
The only joke I remember is how the male comedian likes couples therapy because it turns an argument into a debate. The therapist is the moderator and prevents the gf from using emotional instead of rational arguments.
Could be you have a Silicon Valley audience that skews heavily male and thus somewhat less left-wing. There's a small right-wing dissident tech contingent.
You could say that all comedy is political in the broad sense that it’s peculiar to a culture and a worldview, but it still seems like an error to conflate that with comedy that is political in the narrow sense, that it is focused on skewering one’s political/culture-war enemies. And this paper seemed to be focused on that narrow sense.
If you want comedy that is broad-sense conservative but narrow-sense apolitical, I would think you look to “clean comics” that primarily speak to family life.
Well said. The old Colbert Report was a sort of comedy (and thus actually funny to the people it was skewering), whereas people giving sarcastic commentary designed to please only one side of the aisle aren't really doing comedy.
Agree. It's an error to treat highly-politicized comedy, of the "making fun of the other side's politicians or values" sort, as if it were the whole banana (even if it appears in some extremely visible places), when really that sort of comedy, on both sides, is a relatively small and inferior ghetto within the broader world of comedy.
And sometimes it's worth reminding ourselves that professional comedy itself is only a small part of the humor we experience daily as human beings, and the latter tends to be even less politicized than the former (e.g., laughing because of something your toddler does or says).
Chris Rock's current live tour is going to make the World's head explode once it hits Netflix. It does just that "The truly great comics are the ones who get at the greater, universal truths and absurdities of the human condition". Chris repeats, correctly and ad nauseum, "everyone is full of shit."
3) Good God. "I'm socially conservative so too stupid to not do meth so me need government to ban meth." Richard, I could probably smoke some weed and be fine. I know plenty of highly functional people who dabble in drugs. I also live and work around low IQ people. I don't want drugs legalized because the low IQ people who will inevitably use them will MAKE MY LIFE AND THE COMMUNITY AROUND ME WORSE. It's like NIMBY but real.
16) "Let's Go Brandon" is a joke that also takes a little bit of cognitive effort to fully understand (a sports reporter choosing to change what she clearly heard so as not to offend liberals, conservatives wanting a cleaner inside joke rather than saying "Fuck Joe Biden" all the time). It's arguably more clever than "Trump's ties so long they go to Russia". I guess I never watch Fox News so I don't really know what kind of humor they use. Maybe u are using Fox too much as a proxy for social conservatism in general.
26) The problem with Fusion reporting is that anti-nuclear liberals (the worst kind in terms of causing human suffering and climate degradation) will often use Fusion "breakthroughs" as a reason to avoid further investment in fission. I'd love for Fusion to become viable and replace most or all power generation, but let's not sit on our hands and burn coal/oil and cover the country in solar panels waiting on something that may never come.
As far as antivaxxers I tend to agree. They go way beyond pointing out obvious concerns about mandates and forcing poor candidates to take the vaccine. But plenty of conservatives are not antivaxx in general. Once again u are painting with a broad brush. Until u stop this tendency you'll continue to vacillate between hating the left and hating the right.
“Let’s go Brandon” is just literally code for “FU Biden” which is the crudest insult imaginable. To “get it” you just have to know the backstory, it’s very ad hominem in the sense that you can’t derive it from anything about the phrase. I don’t see that as a smart joke, quite the opposite.
As for drugs, a lot of the problems come from prohibition, which leads to increasing prices and criminal activity surrounding it.
I agree, the let's go Brandon meme is literally the quintessential example of the "liberal" comedy style he described. It says fuck Joe Biden while also alluding to the fact that the media is bad and won't criticize him. I actually don't think there is right wing or left wing comedy, with the exception of the fact that the left is not allowed to say any uncomfortable truths so they are at a disadvantage.
That is true, and a lot of the 'extra steps' might be more visible to someone more up with the conservative media. I remember a NYT review of the last Dark Tower book, and they were complaining that things happened for no sense, and I thought, "No, you idiot, you didn't read the last six books!"
Richard, you express fear and contempt toward people with low IQ. But many of the most threatening people and movements seem to have high IQ. How to reconcile?
My own approach is to suggest that people with high IQ tend to over-estimate their cognitive ability by enough to make them even worse on policy issues than people with low IQ
I haven’t seen that. In my experience smarter people have a harder time acknowledging that they are wrong. Given the increasing number of alcoholics with high IQs, I think people tend to use the drugs they are allowed to by work. Smarter people are more likely to have jobs requiring drug tests. One last point--my favorite book of the year that made me laugh out loud was The End of the World is Flat. When did the right get the best satire?
The missing piece here is that IQ must be combined with accurate and robust Information/knowledge in order to not act stupidly. Plenty of high IQ people read the NYT, and the wider liberal media, but because they inadvertently find themselves trapped in a liberal media bullshit bubble, they wind up acting stupidly like wildly overestimating Covid risk and demanding everyone wear masks and close the beaches. I call this, the Intellectual Idiot phenomenon.
“smart” does not equal “high IQ”. people signal intelligence in many ways (big job, good taste, yada yada) but let’s not confuse actual intelligence w the outward appearance of it.
I think this point can be stated more generally: the more specialised a question is, the less useful (or at least sufficient) general intelligence is at solving it. The average IQ-120 person is no more likely to know the right interpretation of quantum mechanics than the average IQ-100 person. Only a rarefied minority of people who've thought and studied that question extensively have any better chance of being right than 99+% of the species, who are all more or less equally in the dark. Many social scientific questions are similar, not so much because they're as hard as quantum mechanics but because they're so difficult to study empirically.
Richard seems to think public policy questions are more like intermediate math questions, and being generally intelligent goes a long way in helping you get the right answer.
>Calling it a “culture-war form of the precautionary principle” really captures what is going on.
I think, given what's happened in the past 20 years, that this is not that bad of an argument. It's basically AI alignment: "As long as I haven't made sure that AI (the levers of power in society, as vague as a concept that might be) are aligned to my values, I'd rather not give it more tools for progress, lest it use them to destroy me".
It has the same basic weakness: Even if you don't want to, others will, and will reap the benefits of early adoption.
EDIT: Also, Hiro is not the founder of 4chan, that's m00t. He's just its current owner.
The shells for the Soviet artillery the UA relies on (1000-2000 pieces) are in short supply (outside of Russia and its allies). Meanwhile, the US has provided only a few dozen of the best American howitzers, cannot spare anymore and also has precious few shells for them. NATO is not built for a large scale land war.
Of course the US is teaching the UA to conserve shells! Problem is that artillery is a morale booster for troops getting shelled by the opponents artillery.
Russia also running low on shells but can manufacture more than Ukraine can.
Refitting NATO country factories to produce Soviet-type shells would have been a smart move six months ago.
There are NATO countries that had or still have factories that can produce Soviet-type shells because they are former members of the Warsaw Pact and still have mainly soviet artillery in their armies. I never see them discussed though.
Yes! Czechia had a good arms industry. Probably Poland, too. Retooling is expensive, though the need for the shells was obvious months ago. Giving business to American and European defense companies may play into it, but they cannot produce the volume of artillery pieces that Ukraine needs at a reasonable cost
It seems odd to me how little attention is given to the Ukrainian case for Ukraine seeking a peace agreement. If the war goes on for a long time as Lemoine expects, then those millions of emigres - disproportionately young, educated, skilled - will permanently settle down in Poland and Germany and never come back. Those emigrants aren't going to yank their kids out of their school, friends, and nice neighborhood in Munich to move back to a dilapidated warzone. If it takes a few more years, even if Ukraine wins a total victory, it will likely be a Pyrhhic one for demographic reasons alone.
As KD alluded to, "Ukraine" doesn't really get to be a sovereign actor with its own agency in this scenario. Zelensky and his government are tied irreversibly to the support of the west, and the strings that may attach to that support; if the west demands that Ukraine be sacrificed as a bulwark against Putin, then so it shall be. Imagine Zelensky trying to tell them no? He couldn't possibly afford to do so at this point.
I read an article that Ukraine needs about $5 billion a month in hard currency from allies to keep its economy from spiraling into hyper-inflation. If the West cut off aid, the whole country would collapse in a month or two. Zelensky has zero leverage, and if he gets in the way, well see what we did to President Diem in Vietnam.
It will be a victory for Raytheon, General Dynamics, and US LNG distributors able to sell natural gas In Europe at x4 to x5 times the cost of Russian gas. In fact, they have already won in Ukraine. NATO in Sevastopol and regime change/break-up of Russian Federation would just be the cherry on the sundae.
>17. Speaking of my culture war piece, two anonymous (I think) authors wrote a response to it. The biggest mistake here is confusing the culture war theory for a theory of how policy is made or power is exercised.
Thanks for the shoutout.
I disagree with your critique of our critique though. Our argument is summarized with this paragraph:
>In other words, there exists a sovereign class, which I call the Patriciate, whose political desires determine the state of political culture. It consists of less than 10,000 people. Since this is the case, then a status game among >10% of the population cannot be the driver of political change. Rather, the driver is change in the composition of the Patriciate, whose behavior can be analyzed using the standard model from behavior genetics.
Your article's thesis statement is:
>This article presents a psychological theory of the culture war, and posits a dynamic social system in which the actions, rhetoric, and behaviors of each side influence the other. People are not seeking their own economic interests nor even working towards a moral vision, but responding to a built-in drive towards trying to achieve status, which involves tearing others down. It’s something of a LARP because those who are most unaware of their own motivations can act with the most certitude, and therefore have the largest effects on our political culture. In its most extreme form, my model suggests that if all the hot-button issues that supposedly cause so much division in this country like abortion and immigration were taken off the table, it wouldn’t have all that much effect on the level of class resentment we have, which is the fuel of the culture war. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but I’m sort of tempted to. See this theory as claiming that issues are overrated as causes of our divides, rather than them not mattering.
In our article, we're talking about political culture, not just policy, although policy is a part of political culture.
16: I disagree, I don't think the political premise is that important to whether it's funny. Dave Chappelle made left wing jokes - e.g. about police and racism - that I find pretty funny, and think would make even most conservatives laugh despite disagreeing with the premise; ditto for some of Bill Burr's 'right wing' jokes about feminism making even feminists laugh. Liberals don't laugh at Samantha Bee because she's funny, they laugh because she indulges their egos by reaffirming how obviously stupid and morally inferior their opponents are - same reason why right wingers laugh at Dennis Miller's unfunny rants. Telling someone how great they are and how stupid everyone against them is almost as effective a way to get them to smile as telling a good joke. I mean, the Trump's ties joke requires lots of cognition and knowledge? Come on, that's about as simple a joke as one could come up with. Basically makes my point that the writer thinks that's a sophisticated joke.
I don't purport to understand the science of comedy, but as I see it the best comedians tend to be those that can be essentially nihilists on stage. Moral indignation is the enemy of comedy. It's worth contrasting the standard dumb late night liberal comedy with actual good comedians doing bits that happen to be political. John Oliver or Samantha Bee bits on abortion are cringeworthy, whereas Louie C.K.'s bit on why he's a fan of abortion is great (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBbC2krBopw); I think most ardent pro-life people even would enjoy the latter. Because Louie - unlike all the late night hacks - isn't morally invested in political proselytization, he's willing take the joke into the facial absurdities of his own position (which I assume is sincere in this bit).
I'd love to to hear about all these high IQ, highly productive regular fentanyl users, who use the drug responsibly and derive joy without being harmed. Well, there is Carl Hart I suppose.
> I was familiar with this work already, which is what pushed me away from social conservatism, when I realized that I agreed with them about nothing except LGBT
You see affirmative action as an economic policy rather than a social policy?
#3. IF liberals are so damn smart how come San Francisco can't solve any of its homeless/drug addiction problems? I don't see any of that kind of behavior in red country where I live. Unless you're telling me that smart people actually like stepping in human feces on their way to the office, I'm not seeing where all these extra IQ points are helping the libs
No amount of intelligence, achievement or book-learnin' can inoculate you or your community from religious uprisings and their consequences.
As Cali is the Vatican City of the Social Justice religion, and those turds come from an officially protected Victim class (the Unhoused), we think of them as holy blessings that hold a whiff of the sacred.
It's safer to bow down to the gods and maybe get your shoes smeared in shit, then proclaim your heresy and be cast out of the community of saints, where the shit then gets smeared all over your reputation, career, family, and future.
My main problem with John Oliver is that he's smug, conformist and complacent. I'm not sure he's even left-wing in, say, a Marxist sense.
As a comedian, Oliver’s nemesis would be Bill Hicks. He had no time for smugness or complacency from any quarter, right or left.
There are, of course, plenty of comedians who are on the left. I enjoy some of them. Here in the UK, BBC Radio Four’s house Trotskyists, Mark Steel and the late Jeremy Hardy, never hide/hid their political priors. But Hardy was very willing to poke fun at the “People’s Front of Judea” absurdities of his own side. And Steel goes out of his way to proselytise his genteel take on revolutionary Trotskyism to elderly Tory audiences in the English shires.
I even like Stewart Lee, who is the closest thing we have to a UK Bill Hicks. Lee never attempts to strike even the pretend balance Hardy did. But if you watch his live shows, there’s a note of fear in his lefty audience’s laughter, which I find fascinating. They pay money to see Lee attack the left's current baddies. But Lee’s pummelling assaults always rise to such hysterical, venomous intensity, it’s impossible for his audience to extract the kind of easy, supercilious self-satisfaction that John Oliver sells. There’s a feeling in the air of, “shit, if he’s this frenzied and maniacal towards anyone he dislikes, I really don’t want to get on the wrong side of this guy”. For me, it feels that people nervously laugh at Lee’s jokes the way they nervously clapped at Stalin’s speeches. It’s this near-fear he creates which makes his routine “edgy”, in a way Oliver’s never is.
My favourite lefty comedian is Alexei Sayle. Sayle grew up in a Jewish Communist family in Liverpool. As he likes to say, “my name is Alexei Yuri Gagarin Siege of Stalingrad Glorious Five Year Plan Sputnik Tractor Moscow Dynamo Back Four Balowski. My dad was a bit of a Communist, know what I mean?”.
Sayle knows the territory: “I think despite all the chaos we create, the famines, the gulags, left-wing people are basically good people. Admittedly left-wing regimes might over time devolve into authoritarian kletpocracies whose autocratic rule is enforced by terror and torture. But we do mean well.” These days Sayle insists he’s still a Marxist, but no longer a Communist. I take that to mean he thinks Marx has a good analysis of society’s problems, but not any good practical solutions to them.
In the 80s and 90s Sayle would mercilessly attack the trendy millionaires of Hampstead, fully aware that they trended Labour, electing Glenda Jackson their MP in 1992. His attitude of suspicion towards left-wing luxury yacht owners is the antithesis of John Oliver. Best of all, Sayle said this: “If someone starts agreeing with me, I don't like it. Out of pique, I become something else.” Such reflex contrarianism represents everything the hyper-conformist Oliver isn’t.
The bit on comedy reminds one of that “midwit” meme which depicts a low-IQ person holding an opinion, a person of average to above average IQ holding a contradictory opinion, and a high-iq person agreeing with the low-IQ person. I’m probably not the first person to notice this but conservative bases tend to be dominated by the smartest and dullest people whereas liberal or progressive bases tend to be comprised of, well, midwits. Could this be why we see more conservatives favoring illiberalism, because they don’t trust their less-intelligent fellow conservatives(let alone liberals of average intelligence) to make rational decisions?
1. Valuation shmaluation. This is China, it's about whether the Chinese government thinks this is the next tech leap or not. Has been since 259 BC.
3. What, you mean ordinary people can't have a girlfriend and a submissive while smoking marijuana and holding down a software engineering job? Besides, pagan rituals are more fun than church, and a polycule means you always have enough people for a D&D game. (One of those was actually true in my case.)
4. Yglesias is actually quite right, politics has always been kind of an affiliation-thing more than an implementation-thing for most people. I mean, a gas station attendant in Wyoming isn't really going to spend lots of time worrying about tax policy, he's probably more concerned about his daughter being convinced to cut her breasts off at this point. (I'm actually OK with gender variance, it's the rush to surgery that bothers me. Kids are always experimenting--don't forget 60s long hair and pants on women was its own genderbending in that era.)
9. International trade and income? So you're pro-immigration too? That'll annoy your readers. ;) Seriously I think things like affirmative action make the situation more zero-sum than it would otherwise be--it's one thing to let Jaime from Guadalajara come over here, work as a landscaper before eventually starting his own landscaping business, and send his kids to college (nice American story right?), but if those kids now get *preference* in college admissions over yours...
10. OK, I know what he's trying to say, but I saw 'arty fire' and couldn't help but think he was making fun of some new conceptual art trend.
11a. I think part of the thing in the ex-Eastern Bloc was the Communist government was socially conservative, so if you were for 'progress' (as opposed to tradition) you were socially liberal (more gay rights, abortion, etc.) and economically conservative (more free-market).
Also I wonder if at some point we're going to have to separate out the authoritarian component of what 'socially liberal' is going to mean--a pure libertarian might support the right to gay marriage, transitioning, abortion, polyamory, and the like, but probably wouldn't try to get someone fired for disagreeing. Our modern progressives probably would. So the social-issues curve actually has a U-shape from the libertarian point of view where both the ends want to use the government to impose their views on everyone, though of course the views are different. Is the political compass now a saddle-shape in 3-space, or do we need to start tossing the wokies in the red as opposed to the green quadrant?
11b. I wonder how much information we lose in these sorts of factor-analysis problems because we are beings in a 3D universe and like to cut off principal component analyses at 2 because we can graph them. I mean, personality types apparently have five dimensions (that's the five-factor model). There's no reason politics couldn't have four or six.
12. I mean, there's no dysgenic fertility in Japan, but there's no fertility either. I don't know if it's the cost of living or they're marrying their body pillows, but something ain't working over there. (Though hey, my twenty-year-old Honda still works and their cartoons aren't woke, so I wish the Japanese people nothing but the best.)
16. I think there probably is something to the need-for-cognition argument that liberals like more complex stuff, though it's also true as others have said here that a lot of the 'missing steps' may not be seen by liberals--'Let's Go Brandon' is a joke about media bias as well as an anti-Biden bit.
It is also true that the left's gotten a lot more pious after winning the culture war, which leaves them open to jokes.
22. I'm agnostic on the HBD stuff but don't think it's enough to build a platform on.
24. Ugh. Probably the Ukraine war will continue. Alone among the things on the list, that's going to mean a lot of real human misery.
27. Ugh. Thanks for reminding me why I'm a peacenik. IRL his daughters will wait for him to come home until they hear he got blown up in a ditch somewhere.
32. You never get the ending you want; political careers end in failure, after all, unless you get assassinated. BTW, have you seen the first chapter of Ross's fantasy novel?
35. There was an article in National Review a few decades ago making fun of some vegan business, and someone wrote in saying, "Wait, I thought conservatives were supposed to be for the free market. Why shouldn't an entrepreneur make a product for people who want it and make a profit?"
T1. You know the thing...the modern left is so obsessed with weaponizing every possible double standard against men that I think a lot of righty men are happy to see a woman get caught in the new standards as well.
T7. Lot of truth to this; at least in the USA there's a lot of 'you go do your thing, over there'. I do wonder how they get around cultural pressures to look happy in studies like this.
The irony of Steve Sailer's twitter banning/unbanning is that his most recent thread about the NYT gun violence article is spicier than what got him sent to the gulag originally. For anyone who wants a more complete understanding of how the NYT can be factual but not necessarily truthful, it's worth reading that thread.
That academic writing about differences between “liberal” and “conservative” comedy...Have they ever been to a comedy club? John Oliver, Samantha Bee, or Gutfeld do not represent the institution of comedy. Spend time around the subculture and you’ll see that’s not how any of this works.
The truly great comics are the ones who get at the greater, universal truths and absurdities of the human condition. Appealing to a certain tribe is low hanging fruit. A great comic will have every person in the room dying of laughter regardless of their social class or politics, this is the beauty of it.
I was just at the famous comedy cellar in NYC this weekend, in the west village. There were 5 professional comics that performed, and even in an overwhelmingly wealthy liberal audience, there was a significant drop off in laughter with the one woman who did something that could be called “left wing comedy.” It was impossible to tell what the politics of the other 4 were, not because they avoided the topics, but because they touched on them in a way that gave a unique perspective. They weren’t “left” or “right”, they were just *funny*.
I don’t know how you talk about things like relationships without giving a hint to politics or social outlook today. I’ll bet that everyone in the comedy cellar shares a worldview and seeing the performances there as non political might be like a fish in water thing.
Well I’ll say that being a funny comedian usually requires being tethered to reality in order to make relatable observations ab the human experience. Acknowledging differences btw men/women, and differences btw races is basically a prerequisite for that. So in that broad sense a lot of comedy can be coded as right leaning but I think they would reject that.
The thing about comedy today is that, like everything else, the traditional gatekeepers (tv, late night) have lost much of their authority. SNL used to be the pinnacle of success for comedians, and now a lot of the cast members can’t sell out a 250 seat club in a major city. Meanwhile guys like Tom Segura are selling out across the world, having built massive followings mostly on the internet. So if your main source comedy is what you see on tv, you may be under the false impression that they are the most successful comedians, which isn’t quite true.
So point being, if there is a broadly shared world view among comedians, it by default involves a rejection of wokeness. There’s a small pool of careerist/striver comics who do something like “left wing” comedy bc their view of success involves approval from the traditional industry gatekeepers, but they always get the least laughs at the clubs (hence why they look to the institutions). Most comics, however,see the path to success as building a following, and you build a following by being funny to as many ppl as possible.
Side note- theres a discussion on YT/Spotify hosted by Glenn Loury with Coleman Hughes, Roland Fryer, and a few big standup comics (Shane Gillis, who famously got “cancelled” from SNL is one of them) where they talk about the intersection of comedy and politics. Def some good insights there.
What you say seems to back up what I’m saying. I don’t think those gatekeepers like SNL are lying about what they prefer, they genuinely believe the leftist comedy is funny, but they’ve lost touch. It sounds like the most popular comedians have moral values and opinions that are about the middle of where the population is, so they have the largest audience. Joe Rogan being anti-woke but liking Bernie Sanders is where a lot of people are. The median American probably finds Samantha Bee shrill but would be uncomfortable with open racism or sexism. So what comedy people enjoy reflects their worldview.
Ahh ok that makes sense, I misinterpreted what you meant by comedians having a “shared world view” on politics.
I went to a comedy show in literally San Francisco.
The only joke I remember is how the male comedian likes couples therapy because it turns an argument into a debate. The therapist is the moderator and prevents the gf from using emotional instead of rational arguments.
So not woke.
Could be you have a Silicon Valley audience that skews heavily male and thus somewhat less left-wing. There's a small right-wing dissident tech contingent.
That’s funny as hell lol
You could say that all comedy is political in the broad sense that it’s peculiar to a culture and a worldview, but it still seems like an error to conflate that with comedy that is political in the narrow sense, that it is focused on skewering one’s political/culture-war enemies. And this paper seemed to be focused on that narrow sense.
If you want comedy that is broad-sense conservative but narrow-sense apolitical, I would think you look to “clean comics” that primarily speak to family life.
Well said. The old Colbert Report was a sort of comedy (and thus actually funny to the people it was skewering), whereas people giving sarcastic commentary designed to please only one side of the aisle aren't really doing comedy.
Agree. It's an error to treat highly-politicized comedy, of the "making fun of the other side's politicians or values" sort, as if it were the whole banana (even if it appears in some extremely visible places), when really that sort of comedy, on both sides, is a relatively small and inferior ghetto within the broader world of comedy.
And sometimes it's worth reminding ourselves that professional comedy itself is only a small part of the humor we experience daily as human beings, and the latter tends to be even less politicized than the former (e.g., laughing because of something your toddler does or says).
Chris Rock's current live tour is going to make the World's head explode once it hits Netflix. It does just that "The truly great comics are the ones who get at the greater, universal truths and absurdities of the human condition". Chris repeats, correctly and ad nauseum, "everyone is full of shit."
3) Good God. "I'm socially conservative so too stupid to not do meth so me need government to ban meth." Richard, I could probably smoke some weed and be fine. I know plenty of highly functional people who dabble in drugs. I also live and work around low IQ people. I don't want drugs legalized because the low IQ people who will inevitably use them will MAKE MY LIFE AND THE COMMUNITY AROUND ME WORSE. It's like NIMBY but real.
16) "Let's Go Brandon" is a joke that also takes a little bit of cognitive effort to fully understand (a sports reporter choosing to change what she clearly heard so as not to offend liberals, conservatives wanting a cleaner inside joke rather than saying "Fuck Joe Biden" all the time). It's arguably more clever than "Trump's ties so long they go to Russia". I guess I never watch Fox News so I don't really know what kind of humor they use. Maybe u are using Fox too much as a proxy for social conservatism in general.
26) The problem with Fusion reporting is that anti-nuclear liberals (the worst kind in terms of causing human suffering and climate degradation) will often use Fusion "breakthroughs" as a reason to avoid further investment in fission. I'd love for Fusion to become viable and replace most or all power generation, but let's not sit on our hands and burn coal/oil and cover the country in solar panels waiting on something that may never come.
As far as antivaxxers I tend to agree. They go way beyond pointing out obvious concerns about mandates and forcing poor candidates to take the vaccine. But plenty of conservatives are not antivaxx in general. Once again u are painting with a broad brush. Until u stop this tendency you'll continue to vacillate between hating the left and hating the right.
“Let’s go Brandon” is just literally code for “FU Biden” which is the crudest insult imaginable. To “get it” you just have to know the backstory, it’s very ad hominem in the sense that you can’t derive it from anything about the phrase. I don’t see that as a smart joke, quite the opposite.
As for drugs, a lot of the problems come from prohibition, which leads to increasing prices and criminal activity surrounding it.
Moreover, making it a catch phrase adds to the stupidity. Smart people seek novelty, they don’t keep repeating the same joke over and over again.
I agree, the let's go Brandon meme is literally the quintessential example of the "liberal" comedy style he described. It says fuck Joe Biden while also alluding to the fact that the media is bad and won't criticize him. I actually don't think there is right wing or left wing comedy, with the exception of the fact that the left is not allowed to say any uncomfortable truths so they are at a disadvantage.
That is true, and a lot of the 'extra steps' might be more visible to someone more up with the conservative media. I remember a NYT review of the last Dark Tower book, and they were complaining that things happened for no sense, and I thought, "No, you idiot, you didn't read the last six books!"
Thank you for making this post available to everyone. And thank you for introducing us to Rob Henderson and Brian Chau. These guys are fantastic.
Check out Judge Lock in the podcast from #8 best case for NIMBY
Richard, you express fear and contempt toward people with low IQ. But many of the most threatening people and movements seem to have high IQ. How to reconcile?
My own approach is to suggest that people with high IQ tend to over-estimate their cognitive ability by enough to make them even worse on policy issues than people with low IQ
Well IQ seems to be on average associated with better policy positions, so I think being high IQ is better.
I haven’t seen that. In my experience smarter people have a harder time acknowledging that they are wrong. Given the increasing number of alcoholics with high IQs, I think people tend to use the drugs they are allowed to by work. Smarter people are more likely to have jobs requiring drug tests. One last point--my favorite book of the year that made me laugh out loud was The End of the World is Flat. When did the right get the best satire?
The missing piece here is that IQ must be combined with accurate and robust Information/knowledge in order to not act stupidly. Plenty of high IQ people read the NYT, and the wider liberal media, but because they inadvertently find themselves trapped in a liberal media bullshit bubble, they wind up acting stupidly like wildly overestimating Covid risk and demanding everyone wear masks and close the beaches. I call this, the Intellectual Idiot phenomenon.
“smart” does not equal “high IQ”. people signal intelligence in many ways (big job, good taste, yada yada) but let’s not confuse actual intelligence w the outward appearance of it.
I think this point can be stated more generally: the more specialised a question is, the less useful (or at least sufficient) general intelligence is at solving it. The average IQ-120 person is no more likely to know the right interpretation of quantum mechanics than the average IQ-100 person. Only a rarefied minority of people who've thought and studied that question extensively have any better chance of being right than 99+% of the species, who are all more or less equally in the dark. Many social scientific questions are similar, not so much because they're as hard as quantum mechanics but because they're so difficult to study empirically.
Richard seems to think public policy questions are more like intermediate math questions, and being generally intelligent goes a long way in helping you get the right answer.
>Calling it a “culture-war form of the precautionary principle” really captures what is going on.
I think, given what's happened in the past 20 years, that this is not that bad of an argument. It's basically AI alignment: "As long as I haven't made sure that AI (the levers of power in society, as vague as a concept that might be) are aligned to my values, I'd rather not give it more tools for progress, lest it use them to destroy me".
It has the same basic weakness: Even if you don't want to, others will, and will reap the benefits of early adoption.
EDIT: Also, Hiro is not the founder of 4chan, that's m00t. He's just its current owner.
I mean, you extend it to 'the government in general', it's one of the major arguments for libertarianism.
Re: arming Ukraine
The shells for the Soviet artillery the UA relies on (1000-2000 pieces) are in short supply (outside of Russia and its allies). Meanwhile, the US has provided only a few dozen of the best American howitzers, cannot spare anymore and also has precious few shells for them. NATO is not built for a large scale land war.
Of course the US is teaching the UA to conserve shells! Problem is that artillery is a morale booster for troops getting shelled by the opponents artillery.
Russia also running low on shells but can manufacture more than Ukraine can.
Refitting NATO country factories to produce Soviet-type shells would have been a smart move six months ago.
There are NATO countries that had or still have factories that can produce Soviet-type shells because they are former members of the Warsaw Pact and still have mainly soviet artillery in their armies. I never see them discussed though.
Yes! Czechia had a good arms industry. Probably Poland, too. Retooling is expensive, though the need for the shells was obvious months ago. Giving business to American and European defense companies may play into it, but they cannot produce the volume of artillery pieces that Ukraine needs at a reasonable cost
It seems odd to me how little attention is given to the Ukrainian case for Ukraine seeking a peace agreement. If the war goes on for a long time as Lemoine expects, then those millions of emigres - disproportionately young, educated, skilled - will permanently settle down in Poland and Germany and never come back. Those emigrants aren't going to yank their kids out of their school, friends, and nice neighborhood in Munich to move back to a dilapidated warzone. If it takes a few more years, even if Ukraine wins a total victory, it will likely be a Pyrhhic one for demographic reasons alone.
As KD alluded to, "Ukraine" doesn't really get to be a sovereign actor with its own agency in this scenario. Zelensky and his government are tied irreversibly to the support of the west, and the strings that may attach to that support; if the west demands that Ukraine be sacrificed as a bulwark against Putin, then so it shall be. Imagine Zelensky trying to tell them no? He couldn't possibly afford to do so at this point.
I read an article that Ukraine needs about $5 billion a month in hard currency from allies to keep its economy from spiraling into hyper-inflation. If the West cut off aid, the whole country would collapse in a month or two. Zelensky has zero leverage, and if he gets in the way, well see what we did to President Diem in Vietnam.
It will be a victory for Raytheon, General Dynamics, and US LNG distributors able to sell natural gas In Europe at x4 to x5 times the cost of Russian gas. In fact, they have already won in Ukraine. NATO in Sevastopol and regime change/break-up of Russian Federation would just be the cherry on the sundae.
>17. Speaking of my culture war piece, two anonymous (I think) authors wrote a response to it. The biggest mistake here is confusing the culture war theory for a theory of how policy is made or power is exercised.
Thanks for the shoutout.
I disagree with your critique of our critique though. Our argument is summarized with this paragraph:
>In other words, there exists a sovereign class, which I call the Patriciate, whose political desires determine the state of political culture. It consists of less than 10,000 people. Since this is the case, then a status game among >10% of the population cannot be the driver of political change. Rather, the driver is change in the composition of the Patriciate, whose behavior can be analyzed using the standard model from behavior genetics.
Your article's thesis statement is:
>This article presents a psychological theory of the culture war, and posits a dynamic social system in which the actions, rhetoric, and behaviors of each side influence the other. People are not seeking their own economic interests nor even working towards a moral vision, but responding to a built-in drive towards trying to achieve status, which involves tearing others down. It’s something of a LARP because those who are most unaware of their own motivations can act with the most certitude, and therefore have the largest effects on our political culture. In its most extreme form, my model suggests that if all the hot-button issues that supposedly cause so much division in this country like abortion and immigration were taken off the table, it wouldn’t have all that much effect on the level of class resentment we have, which is the fuel of the culture war. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but I’m sort of tempted to. See this theory as claiming that issues are overrated as causes of our divides, rather than them not mattering.
In our article, we're talking about political culture, not just policy, although policy is a part of political culture.
More than that, our critique is based on a developing science known as exousiology, the study of power. I think it's worth a full read for that reason alone: https://josephbronski.substack.com/p/against-status-feedback-loops-an
16: I disagree, I don't think the political premise is that important to whether it's funny. Dave Chappelle made left wing jokes - e.g. about police and racism - that I find pretty funny, and think would make even most conservatives laugh despite disagreeing with the premise; ditto for some of Bill Burr's 'right wing' jokes about feminism making even feminists laugh. Liberals don't laugh at Samantha Bee because she's funny, they laugh because she indulges their egos by reaffirming how obviously stupid and morally inferior their opponents are - same reason why right wingers laugh at Dennis Miller's unfunny rants. Telling someone how great they are and how stupid everyone against them is almost as effective a way to get them to smile as telling a good joke. I mean, the Trump's ties joke requires lots of cognition and knowledge? Come on, that's about as simple a joke as one could come up with. Basically makes my point that the writer thinks that's a sophisticated joke.
I don't purport to understand the science of comedy, but as I see it the best comedians tend to be those that can be essentially nihilists on stage. Moral indignation is the enemy of comedy. It's worth contrasting the standard dumb late night liberal comedy with actual good comedians doing bits that happen to be political. John Oliver or Samantha Bee bits on abortion are cringeworthy, whereas Louie C.K.'s bit on why he's a fan of abortion is great (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBbC2krBopw); I think most ardent pro-life people even would enjoy the latter. Because Louie - unlike all the late night hacks - isn't morally invested in political proselytization, he's willing take the joke into the facial absurdities of his own position (which I assume is sincere in this bit).
I'd love to to hear about all these high IQ, highly productive regular fentanyl users, who use the drug responsibly and derive joy without being harmed. Well, there is Carl Hart I suppose.
Quite a few successful people use alcohol or marijuana. Elon Musk didn't buy Twitter for $54.20 because he thought it was the optimal price.
(I actually think it was a bad business decision. I just hope he kills Twitter.)
> I was familiar with this work already, which is what pushed me away from social conservatism, when I realized that I agreed with them about nothing except LGBT
You see affirmative action as an economic policy rather than a social policy?
#3. IF liberals are so damn smart how come San Francisco can't solve any of its homeless/drug addiction problems? I don't see any of that kind of behavior in red country where I live. Unless you're telling me that smart people actually like stepping in human feces on their way to the office, I'm not seeing where all these extra IQ points are helping the libs
No amount of intelligence, achievement or book-learnin' can inoculate you or your community from religious uprisings and their consequences.
As Cali is the Vatican City of the Social Justice religion, and those turds come from an officially protected Victim class (the Unhoused), we think of them as holy blessings that hold a whiff of the sacred.
It's safer to bow down to the gods and maybe get your shoes smeared in shit, then proclaim your heresy and be cast out of the community of saints, where the shit then gets smeared all over your reputation, career, family, and future.
Oh I see. The homelessness and mountains of human excrement in liberal utopias are features not bugs. It's all very clear to me now.
small price to pay for being on the Right Side of History!
100% and don't forget to line up for your 7th booster shot!
My main problem with John Oliver is that he's smug, conformist and complacent. I'm not sure he's even left-wing in, say, a Marxist sense.
As a comedian, Oliver’s nemesis would be Bill Hicks. He had no time for smugness or complacency from any quarter, right or left.
There are, of course, plenty of comedians who are on the left. I enjoy some of them. Here in the UK, BBC Radio Four’s house Trotskyists, Mark Steel and the late Jeremy Hardy, never hide/hid their political priors. But Hardy was very willing to poke fun at the “People’s Front of Judea” absurdities of his own side. And Steel goes out of his way to proselytise his genteel take on revolutionary Trotskyism to elderly Tory audiences in the English shires.
I even like Stewart Lee, who is the closest thing we have to a UK Bill Hicks. Lee never attempts to strike even the pretend balance Hardy did. But if you watch his live shows, there’s a note of fear in his lefty audience’s laughter, which I find fascinating. They pay money to see Lee attack the left's current baddies. But Lee’s pummelling assaults always rise to such hysterical, venomous intensity, it’s impossible for his audience to extract the kind of easy, supercilious self-satisfaction that John Oliver sells. There’s a feeling in the air of, “shit, if he’s this frenzied and maniacal towards anyone he dislikes, I really don’t want to get on the wrong side of this guy”. For me, it feels that people nervously laugh at Lee’s jokes the way they nervously clapped at Stalin’s speeches. It’s this near-fear he creates which makes his routine “edgy”, in a way Oliver’s never is.
My favourite lefty comedian is Alexei Sayle. Sayle grew up in a Jewish Communist family in Liverpool. As he likes to say, “my name is Alexei Yuri Gagarin Siege of Stalingrad Glorious Five Year Plan Sputnik Tractor Moscow Dynamo Back Four Balowski. My dad was a bit of a Communist, know what I mean?”.
Sayle knows the territory: “I think despite all the chaos we create, the famines, the gulags, left-wing people are basically good people. Admittedly left-wing regimes might over time devolve into authoritarian kletpocracies whose autocratic rule is enforced by terror and torture. But we do mean well.” These days Sayle insists he’s still a Marxist, but no longer a Communist. I take that to mean he thinks Marx has a good analysis of society’s problems, but not any good practical solutions to them.
In the 80s and 90s Sayle would mercilessly attack the trendy millionaires of Hampstead, fully aware that they trended Labour, electing Glenda Jackson their MP in 1992. His attitude of suspicion towards left-wing luxury yacht owners is the antithesis of John Oliver. Best of all, Sayle said this: “If someone starts agreeing with me, I don't like it. Out of pique, I become something else.” Such reflex contrarianism represents everything the hyper-conformist Oliver isn’t.
UK/USA thing maybe? Americans tend to be very earnest, which may be why British comedy's always had a cult following over here.
The bit on comedy reminds one of that “midwit” meme which depicts a low-IQ person holding an opinion, a person of average to above average IQ holding a contradictory opinion, and a high-iq person agreeing with the low-IQ person. I’m probably not the first person to notice this but conservative bases tend to be dominated by the smartest and dullest people whereas liberal or progressive bases tend to be comprised of, well, midwits. Could this be why we see more conservatives favoring illiberalism, because they don’t trust their less-intelligent fellow conservatives(let alone liberals of average intelligence) to make rational decisions?
1. Valuation shmaluation. This is China, it's about whether the Chinese government thinks this is the next tech leap or not. Has been since 259 BC.
3. What, you mean ordinary people can't have a girlfriend and a submissive while smoking marijuana and holding down a software engineering job? Besides, pagan rituals are more fun than church, and a polycule means you always have enough people for a D&D game. (One of those was actually true in my case.)
4. Yglesias is actually quite right, politics has always been kind of an affiliation-thing more than an implementation-thing for most people. I mean, a gas station attendant in Wyoming isn't really going to spend lots of time worrying about tax policy, he's probably more concerned about his daughter being convinced to cut her breasts off at this point. (I'm actually OK with gender variance, it's the rush to surgery that bothers me. Kids are always experimenting--don't forget 60s long hair and pants on women was its own genderbending in that era.)
9. International trade and income? So you're pro-immigration too? That'll annoy your readers. ;) Seriously I think things like affirmative action make the situation more zero-sum than it would otherwise be--it's one thing to let Jaime from Guadalajara come over here, work as a landscaper before eventually starting his own landscaping business, and send his kids to college (nice American story right?), but if those kids now get *preference* in college admissions over yours...
10. OK, I know what he's trying to say, but I saw 'arty fire' and couldn't help but think he was making fun of some new conceptual art trend.
11a. I think part of the thing in the ex-Eastern Bloc was the Communist government was socially conservative, so if you were for 'progress' (as opposed to tradition) you were socially liberal (more gay rights, abortion, etc.) and economically conservative (more free-market).
Also I wonder if at some point we're going to have to separate out the authoritarian component of what 'socially liberal' is going to mean--a pure libertarian might support the right to gay marriage, transitioning, abortion, polyamory, and the like, but probably wouldn't try to get someone fired for disagreeing. Our modern progressives probably would. So the social-issues curve actually has a U-shape from the libertarian point of view where both the ends want to use the government to impose their views on everyone, though of course the views are different. Is the political compass now a saddle-shape in 3-space, or do we need to start tossing the wokies in the red as opposed to the green quadrant?
11b. I wonder how much information we lose in these sorts of factor-analysis problems because we are beings in a 3D universe and like to cut off principal component analyses at 2 because we can graph them. I mean, personality types apparently have five dimensions (that's the five-factor model). There's no reason politics couldn't have four or six.
12. I mean, there's no dysgenic fertility in Japan, but there's no fertility either. I don't know if it's the cost of living or they're marrying their body pillows, but something ain't working over there. (Though hey, my twenty-year-old Honda still works and their cartoons aren't woke, so I wish the Japanese people nothing but the best.)
16. I think there probably is something to the need-for-cognition argument that liberals like more complex stuff, though it's also true as others have said here that a lot of the 'missing steps' may not be seen by liberals--'Let's Go Brandon' is a joke about media bias as well as an anti-Biden bit.
It is also true that the left's gotten a lot more pious after winning the culture war, which leaves them open to jokes.
22. I'm agnostic on the HBD stuff but don't think it's enough to build a platform on.
24. Ugh. Probably the Ukraine war will continue. Alone among the things on the list, that's going to mean a lot of real human misery.
27. Ugh. Thanks for reminding me why I'm a peacenik. IRL his daughters will wait for him to come home until they hear he got blown up in a ditch somewhere.
32. You never get the ending you want; political careers end in failure, after all, unless you get assassinated. BTW, have you seen the first chapter of Ross's fantasy novel?
35. There was an article in National Review a few decades ago making fun of some vegan business, and someone wrote in saying, "Wait, I thought conservatives were supposed to be for the free market. Why shouldn't an entrepreneur make a product for people who want it and make a profit?"
T1. You know the thing...the modern left is so obsessed with weaponizing every possible double standard against men that I think a lot of righty men are happy to see a woman get caught in the new standards as well.
T7. Lot of truth to this; at least in the USA there's a lot of 'you go do your thing, over there'. I do wonder how they get around cultural pressures to look happy in studies like this.
The irony of Steve Sailer's twitter banning/unbanning is that his most recent thread about the NYT gun violence article is spicier than what got him sent to the gulag originally. For anyone who wants a more complete understanding of how the NYT can be factual but not necessarily truthful, it's worth reading that thread.