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The death of the private citizen?

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Re: The death of the private citizen?

#71

Post by dragonwriter »

coldtea wrote: post #68
dragonwriter wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mob rule is not anarchy. Arguably, it's one of the risks of democracy that motivates anarchists. (Now, there's a case to be made that anarchy also risks devolving into mob rule by a different path than non-anarchic democracy does, but they still aren’t the same thing.)

Mob rule is not anarchism (the ideology). It is however anarchy (the term), which is much older, and used to convey precisely lack of order and mob rule.

> It is however anarchy

No, it's ochlocracy; there's a reason the same people who named anarchy made a separate word for it.

Re: The death of the private citizen?

#72

Post by wahern »

perl4ever wrote: post #50
wahern wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trend has been quietly discussed in political-economic circles for many years. Here's a relatively recent media article about it: https://www.curbed.com/2019/11/22/20976309/migration-millenn... And somewhat recent academic summary: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/1209_mi... (Choice quote: "Back in the 1950s, almost one fifth of all Americans changed residence annually.") In percentage terms i…

The article [on curbed.com] you link to doesn't seem to focus on people who move for work. In fact the chart titled "The reasons people move" doesn't even include "for work"! I don't see what you think is the "it" that "doesn't seem that large". I mean, yes, the fall in the number of people moving for work, but what is the source? [Edit] It seems to say the proportion of people moving for work has increased, while th…

My opinion comes from the literature I read studying political science and international affairs in college during the late 1990s, the literature I read studying law a decade later (I so miss free journal access), and generally following the academic discourse for the past 20 years.

In any particular year people tend to mine the longer trends for evidence related to whatever is most interesting at the time, thus the millennial angle in the Curbed article, or the extended discussion of the Great Recession in the Brookings paper, but if you go down the rabbit hole, both in the data sources and the academic discourse, discussions about the larger trend come into the foreground. Anyhow, I was asked for some links about the trend in work relocations, and I provided some, trying to balance my own sincerity and convenience. The millennial and Great Recession sidetracks notwithstanding, the prima facie evidence is right there. Who cares what graph they're showing? I provided the links for the words, not the pictures, and the heading of that article says "After 40 years of steady declines in domestic migration, mobility has hit a new all-time low". (Anyhow, if the graph presented the only reasons people moved, it would only make my point stronger.) Follow the primary sources, even (or especially) if you're driven by incredulousness--nothing can motivate hours of sleuthing like Internet rage. That's what makes the Internet so great.

Sometimes I catalog useful links to primary or important secondary sources, but I don't really have any at hand for this topic. There's nothing particularly disputable or even (IMO) counterintuitive about the trend except for the implications, but in this case you merely challenged the basic assertion that people are moving less for work.

Re: The death of the private citizen?

#73

Post by mc32 »

0xy wrote: post #67
zozbot234 wrote: post #28

So, the SSC outing/doxxing story is now hitting the Spectator, National Review, Washington Examiner and Free Beacon websites, at least. It will probably spread to other parts of the mainstream media soon enough. How the NYT will react to this whole ruckus is anyone's guess, but sticking to their previous policy of publishing the article without removing sensitive info would be pretty hard at this point. Quite amazing…

This is par for the course for mainstream media outlets. In 2017, CNN threatened to dox an anonymous Twitter user making political memes. I don't know why people continue to speak to these outlets while their records, actions and ethics are appalling. The slide into clickbait and yellow journalism over the last few years has been devastating to the industry. There isn't a major outlet left that hasn't been behind som…

Sadly NPR, and I don’t mean the local programming, are also prone to lapses in journalism—even though I give props to Greene and Shapiro. They’re usually pretty even keeled, unlike Bob Mondello who seems a bit narcissistic.

Re: The death of the private citizen?

#74

Post by JackFr »

dragonwriter wrote: post #26
ycombonator wrote: post #5

So NYTIMES policy is to Dox their sources ? I don’t see them dox the opinion column of the famous “anonymous” government official or other tyrants.

> So NYTIMES policy is to Dox their sources ? Both revealing facts about the subjects of news pieces and offering the subject the opportunity to contribute at iroutine in journalism, and, yes, that generally includes clarifying the identity of the subject if possible. A subject, merely by being offered the opportunity to be heard, does not transform into a protected source.

In general it’s not a bad policy.

Jayson Blair at NYT, Janet Cooke at WaPo, Stephen Glass at the New Republic all fabricated people and stories. Putting in a real name is insurance against that.

Re: The death of the private citizen?

#75

Post by megameter »

Spooky23 wrote: post #53
wahern wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how that would work any better than it has previously. For example, the American South has generally been the more laissez-faire region in the U.S. but the North has remained the industrial powerhouse, despite itself according to mainstream intuition. I think people misunderstand and chaff under many of the very same policies that make them wealthy. We want contradictory things. Anyhow, mobility is lower…

The south isn’t laissez-faire, its cheap due to the legacy of lesser working rights for workers, etc and government organization. There’s downsides though. Toyota put a plant in Ontario because it would take too long to turn assembly instructions into LEGO like instructions. Literacy was too low in Mississippi or wherever.

The legacy of the South with respect to labor can be interpreted as a leftover element of mercantilism: One of the key elements of many mercantile writers(who would be seen as rent-seekers today) was that labor should be made cheap and highly available for national prosperity, and this idea co-mingled with various legalized denials of liberties(enslavement, debt bondage, impressment). They were not challenged at first: Nobody had put together the argument that rent-seeking might be bad for the nation, and the early modern period is colored by this attitude being normalized. It was not until the late 17th century that you started to get writers like Hobbes and Locke that were thinking about liberties across a society, and they struggled to reconcile the nation, the leadership, the people, and the property as they existed under the merchantilist model into one coherent system, which makes their reasoning often feel alienating or poorly articulated today.

The arguments that ultimately challenged the model and led towards utilitarianism and free trade occurred much later, in the 18th century - Bentham, Smith, Mill, etc. By this time the colonial project in the South was well underway, with established stakeholders under the plantation model; and so the argument proceeds that the ideals of merchantalism have held more staying power there than elsewhere, even as the institutions have changed. The North, in contrast, had fewer ties to bonded labor, and so made a smoother transition into capitalist thinking.

Re: The death of the private citizen?

#76

Post by coldtea »

dragonwriter wrote: post #71
coldtea wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mob rule is not anarchism (the ideology). It is however anarchy (the term), which is much older, and used to convey precisely lack of order and mob rule.

> It is however anarchy No, it's ochlocracy; there's a reason the same people who named anarchy made a separate word for it.

Ochlocracy is mob rule.

Anarchy is lack of rule - not the same as anarchism (the ideology and ideal for self-government), as several oppressors can and are still at play in a state of anarchy, or everybody might be fighting each other and there can be constant power shifts...

Ancient Greeks used the term with this meaning, not to describe some anarchist utopia.

So ochlocracy is like the people turning into a mob carrying pitchforks. They are the law...

Anarchy - in the ancient Greek sense - is like there's no state and no all-encompassing rule of law to turn to. It's the "law of the jungle".

Re: The death of the private citizen?

#77

Post by perl4ever »

wahern wrote: post #72
perl4ever wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article [on curbed.com] you link to doesn't seem to focus on people who move for work. In fact the chart titled "The reasons people move" doesn't even include "for work"! I don't see what you think is the "it" that "doesn't seem that large". I mean, yes, the fall in the number of people moving for work, but what is the source? [Edit] It seems to say the proportion of people moving for work has increased, while th…

My opinion comes from the literature I read studying political science and international affairs in college during the late 1990s, the literature I read studying law a decade later (I so miss free journal access), and generally following the academic discourse for the past 20 years. In any particular year people tend to mine the longer trends for evidence related to whatever is most interesting at the time, thus the…

>nothing can motivate hours of sleuthing like Internet rage

Is that your motivation, to produce "Internet rage"?

Re: The death of the private citizen?

#78

Post by perl4ever »

wahern wrote: post #42
perl4ever wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Decades ago moving around for a job was normal People don't move for jobs any more? When did this happen, to what extent, and what's the source of the information?

The trend has been quietly discussed in political-economic circles for many years. Here's a relatively recent media article about it: https://www.curbed.com/2019/11/22/20976309/migration-millenn... And somewhat recent academic summary: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/1209_mi... (Choice quote: "Back in the 1950s, almost one fifth of all Americans changed residence annually.") In percentage terms i…

I didn't notice the brookings link at first, so I checked it out.

Perhaps you could elaborate on what you gleaned from this. It does have information about work related moves, but I'm not going to digest it tonight.

The first impression I get is that the proportion of people moving for work has gone up, while the overall number of people moving has gone down, but presumably population increased, so it seems to me that the relevant question is which trend is winning?

Having an opinion kind of implies you have looked into it, however I don't mind doing some arithmetic later.

Re: The death of the private citizen?

#79

Post by wahern »

topkai22 wrote: post #39
wahern wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how that would work any better than it has previously. For example, the American South has generally been the more laissez-faire region in the U.S. but the North has remained the industrial powerhouse, despite itself according to mainstream intuition. I think people misunderstand and chaff under many of the very same policies that make them wealthy. We want contradictory things. Anyhow, mobility is lower…

Do you have a source for the statement about “the North has remained the industrial powerhouse?” A brief, unscientific look at data from https://www.nam.org/state-manufacturing-data/ suggests that northern manufacturing output has been increasing nowhere near as fast as the south, but I’d love to see better data suggesting otherwise

I actually had in mind total GDP--industrial as in industrialized economy, not manufacturing. In terms of GDP per capita Northern states absolutely dominate. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_territories... But even in manufacturing I think they're still ahead. See https://www.epi.org/publication/the-manufacturing-footprint-...

Yes, the growth in Southern states is greater. But growth rates don't say much; apropos HN, an upstart can easily enjoy quadruple digit growth rates while the dominate players only see single digit growth, even when there's no reason to doubt their continued dominance. Nonetheless, for manufacturing the story is definitely changing, because of politics (e.g. Japanese car manufacturers and Airbus being incentivized to open plants in the Deep South), because of automation (easier to relocate plants to rural areas), and because there's less cheap labor in the north (possibly a cause, not only a consequence, of changing migration patterns).

I couldn't quickly find any links that broke down manufacturing by value-add or by technology--I suspect by that measure Northern states tend to still dominate in manufacturing, the same way the U.S. still does well in upmarket manufacturing viz-a-viz cheaper nations. But that's more of an educated guess; I don't remember ever seeing any data directly on point.

Re: The death of the private citizen?

#80

Post by incompatible »

dragonwriter wrote: post #24
MR4D wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re correct, then democracy will devolve into mob rule, which means anarchy. That’s not a pretty thought.

Mob rule is not anarchy. Arguably, it's one of the risks of democracy that motivates anarchists. (Now, there's a case to be made that anarchy also risks devolving into mob rule by a different path than non-anarchic democracy does, but they still aren’t the same thing.)

Anarchist movements reject representative democracy, but often want direct democracy, with no delegation of powers to hierarchies of leaders or managers. It seems a bit paradoxical, compared to the stereotype of anarchists rejecting all forms of authority, because direct democracy is likely to lead to arbitrary restrictions imposed according to the whims of the majority.

I think the idea is that if you don't like where the majority is going, within a particular community or group, you move to a different group, or found one yourself, so you will be part of a group which is doing what you want.

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