American businesses are pretty efficient, in the sense of ensuring the ratio of dollars devoted to production relative to quantity and quality of goods produced is very low. They are also efficient in the sense of ensuring the ratio btw dollars customers pay and quantity of goods and services produced is high.
From a business perspective both of these are efficiencies. But from a social perspective the 2nd one is not. We can't afford to get anything done, because our businesses are so efficient
@LouisIngenthron yes, i’m sure about it. in racial discrimination law, there’s unusually the idea of liability for disparate impact, as opposed to discriminatory intent, so you might have a chance. but that’s the exception, not the rule. 1/
@LouisIngenthron before the mcdonalds lady could famously win a settlement for getting burned by coffee, she had to present extraordinary evidence that mcdonalds was superheating water in ways likely to produce unusual burns and that mcdonalds had experienced this before. if it had been an unforeseeable outcome of an ordinary business process (as the public was misled to believe), there would have been no liability. 2/
@LouisIngenthron there are already large industries building tools to predict inmate recidivism, or purporting to measure teacher’s “value add” by black-box algorithms independent analysts are deeply skeptical of. (see Cathy O’Neill’s Weapons of Math Destruction.) people spend years in jail or lose their jobs because of these tools. no one is accountable for their processes. 3/
@LouisIngenthron when a self-driving car maker or operator injures or kills in ways that are deemed the “car’s” error, firms might be fined, but a fine as @pluralistic puts it is a price, just a cost of doing business. the level of accountability we apply to decisionmakers at these firms is incredibly attenuated compared to the level of accountability’s — often criminal — that we impose for similar infractions by human drivers. 4/
@LouisIngenthron @pluralistic we do this on purpose, pretty knowingly. the argument is “if we imposed strict liability on decisionmakers at these industries, so their liability would be comparable to that of an unmediated individual making the same choice and causing the same harm, we would strangle all progress, because firms and managers simply would not take the necessary risks.” and that’s not ridiculous! maybe we accept that some eggs need to be broken to make our solar punk omelette. 5/
@LouisIngenthron @pluralistic but we should at least acknowledge it for what it is, an informaly sociaized subsidy to those businesses in the form of tolerating means of neutralizing accountability that more traditional actors would have faced. if you pretend there’s nothing new here, just the same accountability shifted to different relevant decisionmakers, you are mistaken. /fin
@LouisIngenthron that would be an affirmative normative and ultimately legal choice that we could make, and should make. but we haven’t yet. we have not clearly stated that an identified party must accept responsibility and strict liability for outcomes that were arguably “unforeseeable” as a consequence of delegating decisionmaking to some automated system. we should do that, but we have not. yet.
@BenRossTransit I think we’ve seen 75 years of reliance on aggressive deterrence failing to achieve stability or security, and brutalizing two cultures. we don’t know the counterfactuals, sure. but it seems reasonable to wonder whether there really has been no alternative that could have enabled survival less miserably. going forward, i’m kind of done with making apologies for Israel’s strategic habits, and I think the vast majority of diaspora Jews younger than my 53 are as well.
@BenRossTransit the “people” was created as a claim upon the land. and not as real estate, but as moral property. the injury is the perceived theft, not the borders. Lemoine emphasizes the nationalist zeitgeist of mid 20C anticolonialism in his piece. i would very much add to that an enterprise of Palestinian identity construction supported by the much broader Arab community, of a “people” dispossessed and streadfast in determination to reverse that. a confluence of interest and zeitgeist.
@BenRossTransit it has been an astonishingly effective tactic. philo/antisemites allege that Jews are smart but Israel’s utter incompetence at countering or diffusing the tactic, Israel’s reflexive eagerness to deter with disproportionate force (as Lemoine usefully emphasizes) when that plays right into their adversaries’ strategy, should disabuse everyone of that.
@BenRossTransit anti-xxx is always a “factor” in any irredentism. the Russians go on about “khokhols”. in a war, there is always anti-enemy. the Russians become “vatniks”. the bigotry, as it usually is, is downstream from more material conflicts rather than the source of the conflicts. Jews are not as special as we think we are about these things, and we do ourselves disservice analytically and psychologically by pretending we are.
@BenRossTransit why were Americans all “Free Tibet” 30 years ago and hardly thinks about Tibet today? there is no content to demands for consistency in people’s indignation and attention. if it soothes you that you can scry in these inconsistencies some bigotry if those which criticize a party you sympathize with, maybe that’s psychologically useful, but it has no normative content other should defer to.
@BenRossTransit (the obvious answer by the way with Arab obsession with Israel is that they consider it theft of “their” dominion, not merely oppression of coreligionists in random places. indeed we’d probably agree that Arab countries have worked assiduously to ensure the conditions of oppression are not relieved in a way that might diffuse the conflict rather than freeze it in a position of transgenerational agony.)
@BenRossTransit (i consider this Arab irredentism as illegitimate as all irredentisms, and view the UNs complicity in it as a perhaps fatal wound to that organization’s already flagging hopes for legitimacy. but irredentism is distinct from antisemitism, the implicit charge that usually lies behind calling attention to an “obsession” with Israel and its atrocities.)
There’s that quote (usually attributed to a 1970s IBM presentation), “A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.”
Isn’t that the precise opposite of our lived experience of management though? Doesn’t the management consulting industry exist, paid billions primarily to relieve managers of accountability for their own decisions? Wouldn’t purchasing deniability by computerization instead be a tremendous cost savings?
@BenRossTransit i won’t speak for Philippe, but one answer is that “ethnic cleansings” sort and segregate while colonizations mix. often the “cleansing” is a consequence of the colonization — the mixture is unstable or unsupportable — but they are nevertheless distinct. the mid 20th C abjured colonization but embraced ethnic cleansing settle hostilities resulting from past mixing. Israel’s founding was out of phase, as is its clear desire to “cleanse” now.
@BenRossTransit i think Philippe’s piece is, whatever else you want to say about it, refreshingly nonnormative. he is — correctly in my view — neither sympathetic nor unsympathetic to either party, but traces a theory about how they arrive at the pickle they are in, under which both parties’ behavior is pretty understandable.
“a farmer grew a potato, he had no idea who he’d sell it to, he hoped he’d find a buyer later.”
“d’ya know what they call that?”
“a spec tater”
@failedLyndonLaRouchite the box is very annoying. do you not think there are some pretty unique aspects about the founding of Israel, its timing and circumstances? simultaneously an example of ethnic cleansing (by Europe, of Jewish refugees) and an example of colonialism, at the very moment that the normative basis for colonialism had collapsed and very aggressive forms of nationalism overtook both Zionism and its objectors.
@admitsWrongIfProven i'm not sure i can identify a mistake, in such general terms! i may be missing, may not know the medium you are talking about. i don't know whether you are right but i am sure you are not pretentious!
"the Zionist movement was in a sense anachronistic, a colonial project that reached maturity just as colonialism was collapsing everywhere. But unlike the French or British colonialists, the Jews in Palestine didn’t have a state of their own to return to, so they persisted and the state of Israel is still here." #PhilippeLemoine https://www.philippelemoine.com/p/the-zionist-dilemma
@admitsWrongIfProven my god he writes a lot! but though i often disagree, he is also often quite insightful, and though i'm not a huge fan of the rationalists and their pretensions, i do think he does a pretty good job — often, not always — of trying to understand and fairly present views that are not his own.
@eyesquash I don't know that I'd know better than that you don't know what you don't know yourself!
"Substackism is…a kind of center-right enclosure ideology with a vaguely benign-monarchist, as opposed to anarchist, disposition, and a tendency to capture rather than curate the commons… This is not a criticism of Substack in particular, or even really a criticism at all. It is what it is. All Web 2.0 platforms have something like a center-right monarchist enclosure ideology… It is no coincidence…the rise of a politics, neoreaction, sympathetic to it." #vgr https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2023/11/02/the-future-of-the-blogosphere/
@admitsWrongIfProven It should be, initially I intended to include that too. But it got long, so I kept to the dometic policy that the Yglesias piece I was responding to focused upon. I think a lot of damage was done to US moral and military credibility during the Obama administration, as well as the poor domestic economics.
@admitsWrongIfProven he's the most prominent exponent of "the virtue of nationalism" https://www.yoramhazony.org/tvn/
@admitsWrongIfProven ha! he deleted it. paraphrasing from memory, he basically said that israel and gaza both want war so let's just have it and let the chips fall where they may.
"israel" and "gaza" both omit distinctions, like between catastrophic "patriots" and people who just want to live their own lives among friends and family in peace and safety.
i don’t like it when bad things happen to bad people, although i agree that it is necessary sometimes for reasons of accountability and deterrence.
i don’t like it when bad things happen to people.
