Dude, the years between 1992 and 2016 were full of people telling us how charming and charismatic Hillary was, so long as there weren't any cameras, journalists or questioning undergraduates who liked Bernie Sanders around.
I'm not entirely sure we live in the same reality, Flip.
1, 2: Maybe there were a few, but if they wouldn't say this in front of cameras or journalists that would have limited impact.
Everyone on my twitter feed loved her little quip and praised her comedic timing, but later I saw that someone said that it showed contempt for traditional Christian men, and guaranteed she would lose the Midwest. I have so little understanding of my fellow-whiteniks of the Midwest, that I can't be sure this isn't true.
It's possible that the whiteniks might see more of her over the next thirteen months and this might not be the most prominent association with her anymore.
1: Is that relevant? What is being talked about is Warren's charisma in large group settings.
It is hard if not impossible to imagine anyone who would take serious offense at this voting for a woman Democrat running on a pretty liberal platform in the first place. But every Dem candidate ends up having a moment like this (clinging to guns, deplorables, etc) and it's all part of the ride.
Anyone who takes offense at that is looking for a pretext to justify their instinctual dislike of her because she's liberal and/or female.
I've been enjoying the anguished cries of "won't someone please think of the bigots!"
9: Hasn't that been the chorus of the entire Trump epoch?
Anyway 7 and 8 seem right to me, but then I think about the existence of people that voted for Obama and Trump, and once again I'm not sure of anything.
It will hurt her with people in the Midwest, but most of them aren't going to vote for an accomplished woman anyway. That Hillary so corrupt, you know. It's frustrating to think that the election basically turns on 40,000 jackasses from basically my hometown, but that's where we still are.
There's a large number of U.S. voters who won't vote for a woman president, period. It's impossible to know how many, but everyone is aware that the number isn't trivial. I personally think Warren will be up against some strong headwinds if she gets the nomination, but I also have trouble even conceiving of a Biden administration. I haven't been following the primary too closely, though.
If you assume a spherical marriage, then every lesbian marriage makes it harder for that guy to find a wife but every male gay marriage and all polyandrous marriages make it easier. So, he should be trying to encourage those.
Put another way, no one knows how many voters treat the presidential election like a casting call, but the election industry caters to them 24/7. Tell me about Joe Biden, y'all. Does he want to govern? Could he put the government back together if he had the opportunity in 2021?
(Also, for any of a certain type of "Midwest voter" here, it struck me that Warren vs. Sanders is such a pure distillation of west side vs. east side Madison, respectively, that it's uncanny. Biden, I suppose, represents Chicago.)
Madison, WI? You'll have to draw that analogy out for me.
West Side and East Side of Madison Avenue.
Wait, I can do it, and I'm weirdly proud!
I lived with my ex-roommate/landlord on the east side of Madison. She was an excellent cook, as represented by her ability to make a spontaneous turkey soup out of Thanksgiving leftovers. She drank a lot of wine and threw parties where people, including sometimes me, drank too much in ways that sometimes affected their behavior in unfortunate ways. She was an important node in the Madison poly sex tree and when I had sex with another node I joked that we were then connected. We were two blocks from the Willy Street Co-op and sometimes I'd get so excited by all the $1 avocados in the giveaway box that I'd spend Valentines day making a literal gallon of guacamole (okay one time). It was crunchy, lower-rent, and swing-ier to use a seventies term that probably a lot of non-monogamish peeps would resent.
My old graduate school advisor lived in the west side of Madison with his wife, also a professor. He was an excellent cook, as represented by the pasta they served that might have come out of the Chez Panisse cookbook (and that reminded me of the food served by another set of affluent professionals I know, my best friend's parents, who actually are acquainted with Alice Waters), carefully paired with wine that they did not drink to excess. They had an espresso machine build into their cabinets. I don't presume to know who all they might be having sex with, but they'd certainly talk about it a lot less. Any attendant drama would be carefully repressed.
In fact, typing that all out makes me realize that my whole life is characterized by conflict around whether I belong on the west or the east side of Madison.
I think I already wrote up this same thought in an earlier comment here, but possibly not all of you remember every word I write.
I am angry at Clinton for running despite everyone's acknowledgement of her lack of crowd charisma. I am happy to believe she has other types of charisma. But crowd charisma is the entire fucking game for getting elected, and thinking that she could overcome the lack was error and an extremely expensive error. So long as we are playing this stupid game, we will need crowd charisma to win it.
I was at a progressive event in Fresno and heard Jill Stein speak. She was a good speaker (clear, met her timing requirements) but not at all charismatic (people looking away, checking phones). I was dumbfounded. How are the major candidates not charismatic?! Then, this college student from a black student union brought up a good point, and even in the thirty seconds that she spoke, she completely re-caught the crowd. Charisma! Charisma is its own trait, separate from other skills and candidates for big elected positions will need to have it. Maybe not sufficient, but absolutely necessary and they can't power through without it.
It seems to me like the 2016 primary was a collective failure (Clinton for pushing, others for acquiesing), including by Warren, to have a big competitive primary. The 2008 process was healthy; this process is healthy. I don't think Clinton deserves criticism for running, but the entire set of behaviors that let 2016 come down to Clinton-Sanders because a bunch of people sat out is what should never be repeated. Ultimately, the only thing that can conclusively establish that you don't have the right kind of charisma is losing. (It is worth noting that in 2008 she was the runner up in a primary next to the most charismatic politician of my adult life.)
Man, if I am typing on the internet about the 2016 primary I am REALLY procrastinating.
22: I think there is a good argument that Trump, not Obama, is the most charismatic politician of your adult life. It's difficult to disentangle "charismatic" from "I personally like them" but Obama had good solid policy ideas going for him as well as substantial charisma. Trump has no coherent policy ideas at all but he has roused his supporters to an extraordinary level of emotional commitment. That's all charisma.
19: well, so, Sanders or Warren? The mapping is 100% accurate.
Yeah. I am very happy for a healthy primary process. I agree with 23 throughout.
I don't think it's quite charisma if it requires constant lying and telling your base that the worst sides of them are the best and they should indulge destructive fantasies. He's convincing, but that's different.
A charismatic person can sell you on something you don't want to hear. Trump exclusively sells what his base wants to hear, and no one else buys it.
From what I heard, Bill Clinton was intensely charismatic, and so was W, if you like that sort of thing. I totally get that it isn't necessarily aligned with good things, but your candidate has to be able to hold people's attention. From the looks of things, Warren has charisma and I am glad it is showing.
Trump must have charisma, but I just don't see it.
He has a 6th grade vocabulary and is completely unable to stay on-point. I can't bear to watch him talk for more than 30 seconds at a time.
But crowd charisma is the entire fucking game for getting elected . . .
Is that primarily true for presidential races? Even for Senators or governors, crowd charisma is important, but not the entire game. There are plenty of Governors or Senators that aren't that charismatic (though, perhaps, they are in states with a significant partisan lean. Maybe swing state Senators have to be charismatic).
Part of the challenge for the Democratic party has been the tension between, "we would like to nominate and elect people who have been successful in positions that are plausibly preparatory for the office" and "if office X requires skills which weren't required at a lower level, looking for people who succeeded at the lower level may be counter-productive."
I went to a Warren rally and she really delivered a hell of a stump speech.
I think its her experience as a law professor that has thought her how to explain complex ideas while making sure the audience retains interest and can follow what she is saying.
Obama used to do that, but he tended to dumb his ideas down a bit more.
27: I think he is mostly telling them what they want to hear, but not entirely---there are the trade taxes that have hurt farmers in the Midwest, for example. But I think he could actually sell people on things they don't want to hear. If he really had a plan to stop "endless wars," for example, I think he'd be able to sell it. (*) Certainly no Democrat could sell that, and maybe not many Republicans either.
(*) if he could stay on point for more than one sentence at a time, which, as 29.2 points out, is no longer possible
I don't share Spike's amazing endurance. I'd struggle to go 8 seconds (which, having been to more than a few rodeos, can seem plenty long) if I was trying to endure the guy.
I think Clinton did fine in crowds. She always did better engaging with regular people, and lost ground mostly when reporters were intermediaries. Or other people with an investment in her failure. A set of Sanders supporters recently made a deal about Warren's story about losing her teaching job. Will these same people tout their same argument -- prefaced by 'I told you so' -- in the general if Warren is the nominee? I wouldn't want to bet against it.
But yes, the candidate's personal qualities always matter, and matter more the more lower information voters included in the voter set.
Experience is great. But our last three successful candidates were the governors of Arkansas and Georgia, and a very new senator from Illinois. All of whom won both primary and general based almost entirely on their personal characteristics, and almost not at all based on either experience or positions on various issues.
I understand that there is universal agreement that Hillary lacks charisma, and I have never understood that. Her general popularity swung wildly over the course of her career, and her presentation in front of a crowd was just fine. She mopped the floor with Trump in three debates, and more people voted for her than Trump. The idea that she is at fault for the despicable media she received is ridiculous.
For the record, charisma of nominated presidential candidates 1980 and beyond separates into three tiers roughly like this:
Obama
Reagan
Trump
Bill Clinton
Kerry
Hillary Clinton
McCain
George W. Bush
Carter
Gore
George HW Bush
Dukakis
Dole
Mondale
27: Trump brought a lot of Republicans onboard to the idea of open, unapologetic bigotry. That's leadership! That's charisma!
Warren is quite charismatic - right up there with Hillary and Kerry.
I wonder if you could make an objective metric for charisma. Like: number of seconds until 30% of a sympathetic crowd checks phone.
You probably could, but I think Charley's right that it wouldn't line up neatly with the media narrative about who's charismatic, and because more people find out things through the media than attend candidate events themselves, objective charisma isn't enough to overcome a bad media narrative. (See everything Bob Somersby ever wrote about how Al Gore got screwed.)
It's interesting that the only time using pf's scheme where the more charismatic candidate lost was 2004. Which I guess is about right: not changing in the middle of a war is a big selling point. I personally would have put Gore higher, but agree that the intermediaries knocked him down. And you have the odd circumstance where the President couldn't go all out for him.
Where would Warren, Sanders, Biden, Harris, and Booker fall into that scheme? I don't think any of them are top tier, and agree with 36. Where does Biden fit, is, I think, a damn critical question at this moment. My experience with him (2 speeches in the same day) wasn't even 2d tier, but everyone can have a bad day. My experience with Booker (a speech) was high second tier, and with Sanders (two speeches a year apart) high third tier. Obviously, mileage varies a whole lot.
"Marry one woman, if you can find one" is pretty nasty, really.
37: what I was kind of getting at in 23 is that there are two ways of winning political support : you could have policies that people like and agree with or you could be charismatic enough to attract even people who dislike or are neutral towards your policies. Obama got some people who just liked the idea of health care reform and some people who just liked him (and a lot obviously who liked both).
Because none of Trump's policy positions were even coherent, his support must be purely due to charisma.
40: It's really not. Finding love is a contingent crapshoot for anyone. It's a dig, but not a terribly harsh one.
43: What's love got to do with it? Back in the good old days women hardly had any choice, but to marry a man. It was bad enough when it became acceptable for women to work, but now with gay marriage, what chance does a repulsive man have? And that nasty Elizabeth Warren just pouring the salt in the open wound!
I mean, I think it's a dig that could be mean if the context were not one in which it's established that the hypothetical person deserved to be mocked. In this context it's ok. The world in which homophobes get shade is a better one than the world in which they are protected. It might be an inadvisable joke, but that's a different question.
And it's a dig that could be mean if it were aimed at a visible individual who was ugly or badly dressed or something. In context, though, the only thing we know about the hypothetical guy is his marriage views, not anything else that would make him romantically unsuccessful.
46: A little more seriously, it was unfair of her to assume it was a guy. I'm pretty sure about the same percentage of women as men oppose same-sex marriage.
I think what she was actually saying was, "for the sake of my coming spiel and puckish joke, we'll make this a guy," but it did come out sounding like some kind of assertion about who says that kind of thing.
charisma is a retrospectively defined endpoint. E.g. Jimmy Carter won in 76 because of his extraordinary charisma (especially in the primaries, where he was underqualified compared to most of the field, and he had no real policy positions), and lost in 80 because he lacked charisma. If Warren wins it will be because she is so charismatic, if she loses it will be because she lacks charisma.
40: That was my partner's comment as we watched that townhall, when Warren made the remark(s). I had to pause and frown: OK, I get what she's saying -- if you believe marriage is between one man and one woman, go ahead and marry one person (not a series of them, say), and in the meantime don't force everyone else to acquiesce to your beliefs -- but there are frankly too many people unable to grasp that message when delivered sarcastically/sardonically; it needs to be spelled out, spoken aloud. A lot of people can't grok sarcasm (much less satire, apparently).*
* From Harper's Index in the September issue:
Percentage of Americans who think it's "too much" to expect the average person to recognize made-up news and information : 56
Who think it's "too much" to expect the average person to recognize satire : 34
That said, I do find Warren quite charming and charismatic, while I did not find Clinton so at all.
Percentage of Americans who think it's "too much" to expect the average person to recognize made-up news and information
I think it's too much. I think things posing as news sources are culpable and ought not fabricate phoney news items.
Who think it's "too much" to expect the average person to recognize satire
Satire isn't the same as sarcasm. Satire, you have to know what's being satirized. I'd possibly agree with this one, depending on what they're considering to be generic source material. It's cultural fluency, at least.
I'm not sure what 'unable to grasp that message when when delivered sarcastically' means. Are you saying that they are literally confused about the content -- they don't understand what she means -- or is it that the accompanying joke makes them so angry that they reflexively disagree where they might have been persuaded by the same thing said without a joke?
I understand that there is universal agreement that Hillary lacks charisma, and I have never understood that.
Still cracks me up.
54: Had never seen that---it's indeed terrific.
NMM to Harold Bloom.
49 describes how things seem to me, but it could be that this is because I'm charisma-blind. For example an alternate explanation for Carter's success in 1976 and failure in 1980 is that Gerald Ford was totally uncharismatic while Ronald Reagan was charisma personified.
33: Experience is great. But our last three successful candidates were the governors of Arkansas and Georgia, and a very new senator from Illinois. All of whom won both primary and general based almost entirely on their personal characteristics, and almost not at all based on either experience or positions on various issues.
And of those, Carter struggled throughout his term at being an effective president, Clinton struggled in the beginning (DADT) and became more effective until he got swept up in impeachment, and Obama was reasonably effective but initially underestimated the strength of the Republican opposition to him as President. It helped that Obama was both a once in a generation-level political talent and came into office as the Republicans had been pretty thoroughly discredited on the economy. As the party that wants to get shit done, Democrats should worry about effectiveness as well as electability.
We need a taxonomy of charisma. There's folksy, Will Rogers-style communing with and entertaining the common people. But there's also football coach inspirational homilies and clever well-constructed arguments with offbeat wit. I'm guessing most commenters here are, like me, more susceptible to type 3 (type 2 leaves me cold but of course some people eat it up). Charisma isn't on a linear scale (is it?).
Was 58 loosely inspired by Harold Bloom? Because I first thought of taxonomy and had given up trying to cobble together a joke about the levels of understanding who had actually died.
I'm a pretty big fan of Warren but I think the comparisons to Clinton collapse a lot of really substantial differences. The sharpest way I've heard anyone put it is Ryan Cooper saying that Warren is the candidate people pretended Clinton was. I'm very supportive of Warren -- not so much of Clinton. But I think many of the relative merits that people argued Clinton had relative to Sanders in 2016 really are actually true about Warren relative to Sanders.
53: Are you saying that they are literally confused about the content -- they don't understand what she means -- or is it that the accompanying joke makes them so angry that they reflexively disagree where they might have been persuaded by the same thing said without a joke?
Well, both actually. Leaving out the "if you can find one" might have left a pause, a beat, for people to let her point (i.e. that's fine, go ahead, marry one woman!) sink in. Following it with an insult ("if you can find one") turns people away from even wanting to consider the point.
It doesn't really matter - she made the remarks in a context and forum which very few voters will actually ever encounter. At least not voters who would ever vote for her in the first place.
60 I really have no idea what you are talking about. Can you elaborate?
58 As someone who voted for Walter Mondale (3 times! Would do so again!) I've got to say that what appeals to me isn't at all what we're talking about when we talk about charisma making the difference in elections. I thought Reagan was a big phony, and was never, even for a single minute, tempted to suspend disbelief.
(That Warren did not see through Reagan is still, to me, inexplicable.)
She was a temperamentally conservative (not right wing, but cautious) person who'd been brought up Republican, and you were a giant hippie. I mean, I don't really empathize myself, but I never had to break away from a Republican upbringing.
I think both Obama and Trump have charisma, and for both it consists very largely in telling people what they want to hear. "Yes we can" and associated policies were things Democrats (and some others) wanted to hear, just as much "America first" is to Trumpists. Obama prefers to deliver the good news in stylized speeches, Trump in improvised one-liners. (Note that Obama can totally do one-liners -- and much better than Trump -- and doesn't do lose any charisma doing it.) And Obama's good news was immeasurably better anchored in facts than Trump's, but at this point the lasting achievements of his administration are very thin on the ground, largely because a central part of his good news, about his ability to transcend divides and find common values, was in fact delusional (and I for one was never much impressed by him - not quite a transparent fraud, but transparently hollow).
OK, but there's another facet besides 'tell people what they want to hear'. Some people are interesting while they do that and some people are not. I mean, the first this blog heard about Elizabeth Warren was more than ten years ago when Ogged thought we'd want to hear some law professor talk about housing and bankruptcies on a minimally produced YouTube video for an hour.
I keep remembering how Apostropher said his family will all be voting for Clinton, of course, but they would crawl over glass to vote for Warren if they could. That fervor is (at least partially) attributable to charisma.
I'm pretty sure about the same percentage of women as men oppose same-sex marriage.
Possibly not the same percentage of women as men bring up the issue in public to public figures they know disagree with them.
Well, both actually. Leaving out the "if you can find one" might have left a pause, a beat, for people to let her point (i.e. that's fine, go ahead, marry one woman!) sink in. Following it with an insult ("if you can find one") turns people away from even wanting to consider the point.
Have you seen the video? She left a long gap between the two digs, enough for a good laugh plus some reflection. Granted, I could see an argument that the second dig could obviate the first regardless of the timing, but the long pause was definitely there. Her good timing was remarked upon independently.
55: At last, he is deconstructing.
64 Actually it's a misconception Warren was raised Republican.
"Warren didn't inherit the Republican Party from her parents or from her home state. Oklahoma was mostly a blue state while Warren was growing up there. Although partisan politics wasn't much discussed at home, she speculated in a 2018 interview with the Intercept that her parents were New Deal Democrats"
Her good timing was remarked upon independently.
Are we pretending this wasn't a rehearsed moment? The guy asking the question is on the board of directors of the organization hosting the event. I get that's the point if these things but I don't think it's actually telling us much about her comedic timing.
Timing is very important for appealing to people with scripted material too.
THE KEY TO COMEDY IS REPETITION
64. The only year OK went "blue" in a presidential election during Warren's childhood and early adulthood was 1964. (Born in 1949, she just missed it going for Truman in 1948.)
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It's increasingly looking like the whistleblower is Bolton.
Way back in 4: Everyone on my twitter feed loved her little quip and praised her comedic timing, but later I saw that someone said that it showed contempt for traditional Christian men, and guaranteed she would lose the Midwest. I have so little understanding of my fellow-whiteniks of the Midwest, that I can't be sure this isn't true.
This complaint made the New York Times, laundered through talk show host John Ziegler, who produced a documentary with Citizens United's David Bossie, and was last seen stumping for his theory that Joe Paterno was framed. It shows the Times' usual news judgment in 2019 that Ziegler was framed as a "Never Trump conservative" who has insights into the midwest because he was a Philly sports radio guy for a while. (Ziegler the one David Foster Wallace focused on in that piece about talk radio.)
81: RUDY: Why should I change? He's the one that sucks.
Would we take Jesse Jackson? Hell, we'd take Michael Jackson!
You didn't have to be a big old hippy to get what Gil Scott-Heron was saying: https://lyrics.fandom.com/wiki/Gil_Scott-Heron:Re-Ron
You probably had to be a big old hippie to have read it, though. (I mean, having been a big old hippie places you on the right side of pretty much every political dispute and shows good sense. Just that if that's not where you're starting from, moving off your starting position takes some work and some time.)
84: No, but increasingly you will, because those lyrics are pretty dense with what are now obscure references.
Granted, but the way he sings 'we're off to see the Arabs' ought to be enough to send people searching the internet.
I had missed that Elizabeth Warren divorced in 1978 but kept her first husband's name. Lots of good reasons one might do that, but it's also much better politically, I think, than her birth name, Herring, or her second and current husband's name, Mann.
(She would be the third divorced president in history!)
It's a Re-Ron, Milton Berle. It's the Duke of Wayne and the Duke of Earl
Orson Welles doing War of the Worlds
It's the Hardy Boys and Georgy Girl
It's a Re-Ron, a corruption piece
With Raymond Donovan and Edwin Meese
It's a Re-Ron, it's the Latin Plan. Here's our star - Nacho Man!
As true now, as when it was written
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Ok, this is the only place I'd ever say this, but I have the following conversation very often:
Caretaker of some sort:
Them: Your child X is very smart.
Me: Thank you! We're very proud.
Them: No, like really smart. They did [whatever].
Me: Yes, they're bright.
Them: No, you don't understand. I'm going to really belabor the point that I don't think you understand that your kid is bright.
Why are they so convinced that they uniquely see my kid's brightness and need to explain it to me? Why does it not occur to them that I might...also be bright?
It's this peculiar form of really insisting that I'm not seeing what they're saying that I find so bizarre. Yes, I get it?
This feels like such a preening, bragging comment. Again, this is the only safe space for such a thing. Does this happen to other people?! Your kids are legitimately smarter than mine.
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Them: Your child X is very smart.
Me: Thank you! We're very proud.
Them: No, like really smart. They did [whatever].
Me: Yes, they're bright.
Them: No, you don't understand. I'm going to really belabor the point that I don't think you understand that your kid is bright.
Me: You didn't give them your credit card number, right?
90: My mother tells a story about leaving my maybe four-year-old sister with a friend's parents. "She's reading. Did you know that? Is anyone in your family intelligent?" Same sort of thing.
90: My only guess: they feel your response doesn't evince enough shocked-delightful-gratitude and are increasing the emphasis in hopes you increase yours?
It must be that. I mean, it's definitely not insulting, because they are trying to pay a compliment, and it really does just reflect more on them than anything else, but it sure does come off like they're trying to draw a contrast. "Let me enlighten you about your child, you dimwit."
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Boris Johnson appears to have elected Irish Sea border. This is probably oldish news, we USians have been a little preoccupied.
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92 is funny! re: reactions to kids, i enjoy these days being out in the kid's world, not mine, watching him navigate his own people-spaces. a very good family friend ran into canvassers at a bus stop for reelection of the local gov't person the kid interns (and campaigns for) and related with great relish how much she enjoyed asking them if they know the kid, resulting in the candidate being brought over to meet this person-who-knows-the-kid, which was charming and hilarious how much the family friend got into the whole thing.
since the thread has ranged far and wide afield, this is a really good, informative article on east bay seismic issues: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-15/bay-area-earthquake-is-latest-warning-of-high-seismic-danger-in-east-bay
The real tremors are the friends we meet along the way.
The best tremors separate us from our friends at the beginning of a story, and then we're reunited due to pluck and scrabble, and we don't like making new friends.
I thought that Warren put the joke in the mouth of a man because her interlocutor was a man (reasonably attractive man) who kind of sounded like he himself wanted to ask the question, but added a 'hypothetically' structure so he wasn't responsible for what he was saying.
100: No, he was an LGBT rights person, board chair of HRC, which was a cosponsor of that debate.
san francisco with jeanette macdonald is actually a pretty good movie, but of course her bestest of all time role was in love me tonight god that movie is perfect.
i'm really into the pre-code barbara stanwycks on criterion right now, gambling lady was super, including an infant joel mccrea bounding about like a puppy. highly recommend.
How can the chair of Hillary Rodham Clinton still be running the debates?
I'm at a bit of a loss in those conversations. I don't want to say "well, considering my brilliance, he ought to be" and I don't want to overemphasize being smart in his mind. So yeah. I'm downplaying while they're emphasizing and perhaps that's why there's a back-and-forth.
I think that's the way to play it -- there's no way out of a conversation about how awesome your kid is with anyone but family or very very very close friends that's not going to leave you looking like an ass even if they started it. So the only thing to do is to distract. "Look, a squirrel!"
You could try stark honesty: "Yes, it's a curse. Hopefully it won't ruin their life".
The real smarts is that I have the smartest friends along the way.
My honest to god secret momentary fear when this happens is "wait, do I live somewhere that is unusually dumb?"
(I mean, obviously this is a common belief about flyover states and I usually dismiss it whole-heartedly but then once in a while I second-guess myself.)
I kind of blame weird articles about 'giftedness' that make it sound as if a brightish kid is an emergency that requires services. Like, I think part of the conversation is sort of "Shouldn't you be doing something about that?" And for most ordinary bright kids, not really? Not that you wouldn't sort of do in the ordinary course of affairs?
speaking of smart: https://twitter.com/Timcammm/status/1183782929614409729
"If you want a smart kid, you should try fucking my husband."
Like, I think part of the conversation is sort of "Shouldn't you be doing something about that?"
I'm not particularly bright, but a number of things were "done" about that on my behalf when I was a child. A mixed bag overall, but net loss I think.
I believe that's roughly what Tim's second wife thought. I suspect she may have forgotten to take into account that Sally and Newt are mine.
a brightish kid is an emergency that requires services
Well, I kinda feel like that, mostly because I required services and nothing went well for me until I got them. For my kid, I'm trying to keep calm about it and wait to see whether there's a problem to solve.
It might be worth saying that my father will openly say that he considers me and my sister to be (at least academically) examples of regression to the mean.
I'm with soup in 113. I was a somewhat surprising small child, and some stuff got done at/for me that was mostly a bad idea. My kids were in that same sort of mildly peculiar state, we didn't do much about it, and they seem better off socially and emotionally than I was.
I have met two people who probably were "emergencies", in the sense that their families and school systems were completely unprepared to deal with their capabilities by early or middle elementary school. I'm not sure that anything very useful was done for them other get out of their way and put them in touch with people who could try and keep up with them - but their sheer raw talent in a particular area was already always going to bend the rest of their lives around it. I don't think you can plan for that stuff, just try and mitigate the weirdness.
I'm mostly convinced everyone else is, to a first approximation, better off following a "normal" course through school, etc.
Have done. It was quite the saga.
hmmmm we did "stuff" but it was all kid-led, he seems fine. just remarked to my better half last night that our best move was not replacing the piano lessons when his teacher cut back her roster after having a baby,. without the pressure of lessons he gravitated to the piano for relaxation and now plays and plays and plays much to our enjoyment, especially when his sister is in town as then they play-sing together, live aria antiche on tap chez nous!
121: omg. So Tim has an 18 year old, a 20 year old, and a baby. That's ...a lot of years of childrearing.
Actually, the conversation today that prompted 90 is that Pokey's school wants to do something, namely move him up to 4th grade for math and reading, and keep him at 3rd grade for everything else.
(The thing that is annoying is that they told him about it already last week, before talking to us about it.) Anyway I guess we might as well try it out for a few weeks. Jammies has a lot of concerns. I am mostly fine with whatever.
I was one of those kids. The school talked my parents into skipping me 5th grade; my parents went along because all my friends were two grades ahead anyway, so it seemed socially useful. I'm not sure it was a good thing -- I was still bored in school, though I suppose for one year less. And the social aspects got a lot different once puberty hit (for everyone else); I suspect I would have been better off making new friends my own age. All in all, things turned out fine, but I wouldn't recommend it to someone like me (and haven't pursued it for my own mini-me).
I had something like that from 8 to 13 -- went to a very good, very academic school, took Latin O level two years early, that sort of thing -- and then suffered horribly when dumped into a school run by and for normally thick (if rich) boys. On the other hand, if I had been sent to one of the UMC schools that really pushes smart children like Eton or Winchester I would have ended up quite insufferable. Fortunately my father couldn't afford Eton and loathed the products of Winchester.
Signed "I may be a failure but at least I'm not Jacob fucking Rees Mogg"
119: "anything very useful was done for them other get out of their way and put them in touch with people who could try and keep up with them"
That's actually kinda huge.
As for receiving the original compliment/plea, I hope I would have the presence of mind to say something like "Thanks! We do our best to encourage them, sometimes it's hard to keep up."
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Why should cereal grains play such a massive role in the earliest states? After all, other crops, in particular legumes such as lentils, chickpeas, and peas, had been domesticated in the Middle East and, in China, taro and soybean. Why were they not the basis of state formation? More broadly, why have no "lentil states," chickpea states, taro states, sago states, breadfruit states, yam states, cassava states, potato states, peanut states, or banana states appeared in the historical record? Many of these cultivars provide more calories per unit of land than wheat and barley, some require less labor, and singly or in combination they would provide comparable basic nutrition. Many of them meet, in other words, the agro-demographic conditions of population density and food value as well as cereal grains. Only irrigated rice outclasses them in terms of sheer concentration of caloric value per unit of land.
The key to the nexus between grains and states lies, I believe, in the fact that only the cereal grains can serve as a basis for taxation: visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and "rationable." Other crops-legumes, tubers, and starch plants-have some of these desirable state-adapted qualities, but none has all of these advantages. To appreciate the unique advantages of the cereal grains, it helps to place yourself in the sandals of an ancient tax-collection official interested, above all, in the ease and efficiency of appropriation.
The fact that cereal grains grow above ground and ripen at roughly the same time makes the job of any would-be taxman that much easier. If the army or the tax officials arrive at the right time, they can cut, thresh, and confiscate the entire harvest in one operation. For a hostile army, cereal grains make a scorched-earth policy that much simpler; they can burn the harvest-ready grain fields and reduce the cultivators to flight or starvation. Better yet, a tax collector or enemy can simply wait until the crop has been threshed and stored and confiscate the entire contents of the granary.
Compare this situation with, say, that of farmers whose staple crops are tubers such as potatoes or cassava/manioc. Such crops ripen in a year but may be safely left in the ground for an additional year or two. They can be dug up as needed and the reaminder stored where they grew, underground. If an army or tax collectors want your tubers, they will have to dig them up tuber by tuber, as the farmer does, and then they will have a cartload of potatoes which is far less valuable (either calorically or at the market) than a cartload of wheat, and is also more likely to spoil quickly. Frederick the Great of Prussia, when he ordered his subjects to plant potatoes, understood that, as planters of tubers, they could not be so easily dispersed by invading armies.
The "aboveground" simultaneous ripening of cereal grains has the inestimable advantage of being legible and assessable by the state tax collectors. These characteristics are what make wheat, barley, rice, millet, and maize the premier political crops. A tax assessor typically classifies fields in terms of soil quality and, knowing the average yield of a particular grain from such soil, is able to estimate a tax. If a year-to-year adjustment is required, fields can be surveyed and crop cuttings taken from a representative patch just before harvest to arrive at an estimated yield for that particular crop year. As we shall see, state officials tried to raise crop yields and taxes in kind by mandating techniques of cultivation; in Mesopotamia this included insisting on repeated ploughing to break up the large clods of earth and repeated harrowing for better rooting and nutrient delivery. The point is that with cereal grains and soil preparation, the planting, the condition of the crop, and the ultimate yield were more visible and assessable.
From James Scott's Against the Grain quoted here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/14/book-review-against-the-grain/https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/14/book-review-against-the-grain/
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Yes. I predict with confidence that 129 is the sum of insight contained in the book, and no-one need trouble reading it, save for the bibliography. Also (paging teo) I think Pacific North America had the beginnings of states based on maritime production (not nearly as legible or storable as grains); and Central Asia (and I think parts of MENA and the post-contact Americas) had numerous horse-based states which didn't depend on grains (at least not in any straightforward tax-collecting way Scott describes).
Also perhaps that grain cultivation (maybe excepting wet rice) produces an environment far more congenial to horses, with obvious military implications. Also, weren't potatoes the staple of Andean civilization and its numerous states?
Really? Scott is excellent and that's a great review that shows there's a lot more in there.
How much Scott have you read? I'll allow that there may be more insights, but maintain all of them will be found in the introduction.
Based on the review (by, I have to note, a psychiatrist) literally everything in this book is contained in Seeing Like a State, which itself had all its insight in its introduction.Also
Scott reminds us that until about 1600, the majority of human population lived outside state control
Sounds about a millennium too late to me.
Potatoes are just great, but heavy.
A bit, Seeing like a State, the Art of not Being Governed, bits and pieces of some his earlier stuff.
Wouldn't some very large percentage of the human population have lived under the control of the Chinese state at that time?
129. I found the review and the book to be interesting, but deeply reductionist. They both seem to ignore that intent and outcome don't always match up. If some hunter-gatherers ("HGs") find a good stand of grain they might decide it's worth hanging on to it. They might be motivated by wanting to reduce the amount of time they wander around looking for game or pickable veggies or whatever. It might even be that the women in the group thought, "Wow, we can grow this grain, watch it grow (low effort!), harvest it when ripe, and have time for crafts and cooking without actually having to carry all our stuff (pots, tools, etc.) around! Everything we need will be right here. We can take care of our kids while the guys are out drinking hunting wild boar. Sounds like a win!" Little did they know that watching over "their" grain would lead to Leviathan.
These just-so stories are always biased towards guys wanting to promote patriarchy and fight other guys, which was certainly the ultimate outcome, but ... Maybe the women just got tired of traipsing around the landscape when instead they could live by a swamp nice field with delicious grain there for the taking. Basically, once people starting viewing something as property, all that lovely HG anarchy falls apart (because aggressive guys!), but they couldn't have known that.
Anyway, the end result of taxing grain production to pay for military forces to extract the taxes/protect the taxpayers is probably the Lockheed Martin people now moving into this hotel.
Apparently, if you want a free breakfast, you have to say you work for them.
Also, the introduction of potatoes in NZ contributed to a bunch of intra-Maori wars and I'd guess consequently some level of state formation.
Also,
Only irrigated rice outclasses them in terms of sheer concentration of caloric value per unit of land.
is a really massive gloss. Irrigated rice in South China alone fed maybe a 1/4-1/3 of all humans starting in the first millennium AD, and the spread of rice culture there involved a lot of voluntary Han immigration and adoption by non-Han locals (though sometimes it went the other way, Han fleeing beyond the pale). There are similar stories in parts of SEA, and I'd guess Japan and Korea.
137: You are a much more forgiving reader than me.
Also, irrigated rice impoverishes the diet less than other grain cultures, because fish in the canals.
Also there were definitely states in pre-contact Polynesia, and they didn't have grains, nor AFAIK trade with grain-based societies elsewhere.
And Barry, while you're around: Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. Thoughts?
The book was great, haven't seen the film. Are you familiar with Chuck Barris? That may matter.
Doesn't Scott include rice along with the other fascist grains?
Loved the movie.
He does, but rice doesn't fit his story so well if it's a net nutritional improvement.
This paper argues that the Hawaiian Islands represent a separate case for primary state formation, and so provide a critical case for state origins. Most importantly the Islands lack several recurring themes in state origins elsewhere, namely cereal agriculture, world-systems trade, markets, and urbanism. The root crop taro, like cereals, can provide the productivity needed to produce the surplus that supported state-like institutions, and the engineered landscapes of irrigation and intensive dryland farming provided the necessary control through the property system. Our search for particular factors allowing for state emergence should be reconfi gured to evaluate the dynamic processes involved. I emphasize the political economy, its productivity, and its ability to be controlled at specifi c bottlenecks, represented here by irrigation.
ONe of the models of an early state in Robert Bellah's wonderful "Religion in Human Evolution" is Hawaii. Advanced enough to have an extremely nasty form of religion, but no grain in sight.
Also (paging teo) I think Pacific North America had the beginnings of states based on maritime production (not nearly as legible or storable as grains)
Relatively complex societies, yes, but definitely not states. The Northwest Coast is actually kind of fascinating in its combination of a highly elaborated socioeconomic system with a highly decentralized political system that some have even characterized as "anarchistic." Basically it consisted of numerous wealthy but autonomous villages (themselves made up of multiple largely autonomous kinship/residence units) that were constantly fighting each other and only very rarely worked together on anything.
That said, your other counterexamples (Central Asia, the Andes, Polynesia) do seem pretty on-point in refuting this thesis. 148 sounds like a revival of Wittfogel's "Oriental Despotism" theory which is no longer widely accepted.
After China makes the NBA recite Mao's Little Red Book, the theory will return.
What the fuck does Trump think is going to happen if you surprise parents with the person who killed their kid the previous week? I mean, most of his nonsense makes some sense if you figure he doesn't care about anybody but himself, but this suggests he has no idea other people even have actual inner lives.
Not having read 148 or Wittfogel, I think this is different: not that the state developed to meet a need for hydraulic management, but that the state inserted itself into those systems once people had built and become dependent on them. Apparently that happened also in Bali.
Great ratings! Which is the correct measure of everything.
not that the state developed to meet a need for hydraulic management, but that the state inserted itself into those systems once people had built and become dependent on them
Hm, interesting (and plausible), but not exactly a theory of primary state formation as the excerpt in 148 seems to promise.
You can't have a state based on hydraulics before o-rings were invented, which was 1896.
I'm not sure I know what makes something a state, but didn't Peru have a state based on cotton cultivation for making fishing nets and not on any kind of staple food crop?
Coastal Peru? Late Coastal Andean Formative, whatever that is, says:
Domestic Foods. The vast majority of the food eaten by the people of this time period came from irrigation agriculture. The primary domesticates were maize, peanuts, common beans, lima beans, squash, potatoes, sweet potatoes, avocadoes, !ucuma, guava, and cansaboca. Cotton and gourd were also grown for industrial purposes. Depending on the river valley, from one to three crops per year could be grown. Domesticated llamas and guinea pigs were also kept for use as food.
There's a theory that fishing and cotton cultivation developed significantly earlier in coastal Peru than agriculture for food, and that they were the basis of the earliest state-level societies there. I don't think it's universally accepted, though.
Whereas when it's potatoes, it's just a Tatership.
TLDR: 139.
Brookfield's prime example for landesque capital was the intensive root-crop agriculture in Highland New Guinea. With proper maintenance, such improvements continue for generations to raise productivity of the land, and as such the improvements represented substantial fixed capital, the ownership, transfer, and inheritance of which became of social and political concern.
My thesis is that engineered landscapes, especially those with irrigation, were both highly productive and controllable, and were thus used to generate reliable surpluses
Sahlins (1958) had taken a different tack in his dissertation, explaining the complexity of Hawaiian society as based on the gross productivity of its intensive agriculture, not on its irrigation systems' needs for central management. Wittfogel, a member of Sahlins' doctoral committee, aggressively questioned Sahlins' interpretation, and later, when Sahlins was setting up his historical project to study Hawaiian society, he remembered that attack and recruited me to demonstrate that Wittfogel's interpretation was mistaken. Showing that Wittfogel was mistaken for Kaua'i, where I chose to work because of its extensive irrigation complexes, proved to be quite easy.
management was highly variable (local farmers, community officials, or chiefly managers), corresponding not to the needs of irrigation management but to the overarching political structure within which irrigation was embedded.
The bulk of radiometric dates for irrigated agriculture were after AD 1200, corresponding with population expansion and the formative process of chiefdoms. After AD 1400, state authority apparently intervened to maximize surplus production (Allen 1991), and a new system of staple finance was instituted (Earle 1998). By this later period, which provided the foundation for Hawaiian states, these irrigation systems were built with social labour centrally managed by chiefs, but the small scale of these systems reinforces the point that central management was simply not necessary.
taro pondfield agriculture provides exceptionally high productivity that could have created the same surplus derived from cereal grains.
Unlike other forms of intensification, irrigation appears to have increased substantially the productivity of labour on its fields compared to neighbouring, non-irrigated lands (Bray 1986; compare Boserup 1965). The contrast was most dramatic in the deserts of Peru or Mesopotamia
The harder and more carefully a farmer worked, the better they could live and the more that elites could demand from them. In irrigation, the potential for self-exploitation and class-exploitation seems almost inexhaustible.
Ladefoged et al. (2009) emphasize that the risks of dryland farming in Hawai'i would have been substantially higher than for its irrigated fields. The irrigated pondfields of prehistoric Hawai'i would have been productive year-around
Michael Mann (1986) talks of these peasant farmers as being 'caged' by irrigation, because they could not escape central control without losing use rights to the improved land.
Although they operated without state direction, the irrigation systems in Bali, as elsewhere in Asia (Morrison and Lycett 1994), displayed memorial inscriptions that recorded their history, or purported history, of construction by Balinese kings
154: Someone on Twitter suggested that he thought it would be like at the end of Amber Guyger's trial -- everyone would hug and make up. Maybe he was also inspired by Ellen and W.
I don't suppose Trump was expected to remember that Guyger was convicted of murder before the hugging.
Will my life be improved if I figure out what you're talking about?
But that's not important right now.
Charley's right about that particular bit of Trump weirdness, though. The only thing at which he has ever been a legitimate success in his life is reality television and he does, thinks, says, whatever would look great on The Donald Trump show.
Unfortunately no one has scheduled a season opener where we wake and discover it was all a bad dream.
161. 1000-200 BC is quite late by Peruvian standards. Norte Chico is dated from about 3200, more or less contemporary with late Uruk in Sumer. But maize was grown and waas evidently an important component of their diet. The cotton/fishing connection does seem to have been a thing.
I just met somebody from Peru, so it's still a going thing.
Peru is going strong; it's only the bears that move to London.
I was just thinking that if Peru keeps going, eventually 200 BC will seem early.
Also a tactic milked for drama on Queer Eye. (Not by surprise, but over objections from both parties.)
176: I found that pretty shocking, honestly. I was really surprised it "worked" in any sense. There was a lot to that particular episode.
I think that the Trump thing shows a sort of characteristic ignorance of the art behind reality television. I know reality TV isn't real in any meaningful sense, nor is it generally what I personally like as art, but there's something mind-boggling about trying to cut to the denouement - tearful forgiveness and healing - without a thought to anything else.
Lentils and chickpeas should be just as harvestable (and taxable) as grains. Cursory searching says the Babylonians *did* tax them, on the "share of harvest" plan.
But I don't know if it was ever common to grow lentils/beans and not grow grains -- you *could* live on a bean/root/grazing rotation, I think, but was there anyplace that did? It's easy to bring in a pocketful of grains, too.
129 seems to ignore the concept of granaries. You can harvest wheat and store it for months in bulk without further treatment, as long as you keep it dry (which is easy once you discover Pottery). The Peruvians etc could store potatoes because they lived in a climate where potatoes could be easily freeze dried. Most other nations do not. To store lentils beans etc you need to dry them by exposing them to the sun.
After you discover pottery, you should research sailing.
Or calendar, so you can build Stonehenge.
Anyway, unless they invented grain dryers, they also needed to dry grain in the sun.
You just leave it in the sheaf for a couple of days before threshing, don't you? You don't need to absolutely desiccate it like you do with pulses.
I am also sceptical about those calories per acre assumptions.
I don't know wheat very well, but corn has to sit on the stalk for a very long time or be dried in a grain dryer (a big blower with burning propane).
I have literally no idea what you're talking about.
Granted. But my point is that I think ancient grain farmers would have put quite a bit of thought into how to get the grain dry and making sure it was dry enough before storing.
165. The idea that grain growing requires an infrastructure that can be exploited by the state seems pretty solid. I suspect that the exploitation and control by the state part wasn't intended originally. It was, humans being humans, a fairly logical outgrowth of all that infrastructure to enable higher yields and all that yummy grain stockpiled. Certainly irrigation infrastructure is huge push in that direction.
(I remember reading about this when I was teenager, because Larry Niven wrote about the "two province system" and "water empires" in China and elsewhere: when there's a bad harvest, the state makes sure the more loyal province gets the stockpiled food. I'm sure some more reliable work on those topics preceded him, but he's the one I remember. "The Golden Age of science fiction is twelve.")