Aux Armes, Citoyens!

originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
That much is true, but it hardly supports the notion that tech investment in the private sector is a "silly replication[] of things that governments are designed to do." At most, what you are arguing is that the government has expanded to replicate things the private sector was designed to do.
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The private sector was not designed to provide public goods. There were very few public goods anywhere prior to the 20th century because most societies were fragmented and agricultural.

We achieved a certain level of development and prosperity in the 20th century, with a huge expansion of public and private sectors. There is no one right way to balance these things, and different societies have experimented with different mixtures. I will give you that.

But I do think it's fair to say that government (as is currently conceived in the wealthy countries) is responsible for shaping the overall contours of society, by providing security, ensuring access to economic opportunity and material well-being. It does not seem like a stretch to say that promoting science falls in that remit.
 
I wish we could eliminate the phrase "was designed," to speak of either government or the private sector. The private sector wasn't designed in any sense, though it may have evolved in patterned ways due to structures that developed. The constitution was designed, but it was designed to be a framework that allowed a lot of freedom for government to develop to meet perceived need. Even the existence of amendments written after the framers who wrote the books on Keith's shelves had left the scene shows that their views can only explain the text that existed when they wrote. Not to start another argument, by the way, but when did the framers' writings become relevant to an anti-intentionalist texualist?
 
originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
originally posted by VLM:

Those are all silly replications of things that governments are designed to do
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Ridiculously stupid point which is obvious just from your use of the passive voice.
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Wow, great arguments. You clearly should stay in your lane.
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Your snideness didn't deserve anything more, and frankly I was juggling 5 things when I saw your post and didn't have the time. But since you're still sitting there so smugly convinced you're right, I'll engage you on the merits.
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Yeah, you're the only one with a job. I bet it's important too.

originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
This nastiness originated in a simple question - how do I personally benefit from someone else's billions?
...
Stay in your own damn lane. You then ignorantly added that investing in space and medical research and philanthropy are "silly replications of things that governments are designed to do and that individuals can't really pull off and probably can't even fund." I found your use of the passive voice striking. Who designed governments to do those things? What governments were so designed?
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I dunno, whatever voice you like. I don't care so much about grammatical fine points.

The fact is that scientific research, medical and otherwise, is very much my lane. I don't think you understand how any of it really works yet you glibly tell us how Gates/Bezos/Koch/Name-your-sociopath will do so many great things with their billions.

It doesn't work. It's purely ego driven and mostly wasteful. IME and IMO.

originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
As it happens, I have on my desk a four-volume set containing all the primary source documents related to the debate and ratification of the Constitution. It goes into great detail about what our government was designed to do, as it contains the actual words of the designers recorded in real-time as they were doing the designing. I guess you'll be surprised to learn that no, our government wasn't designed to do any of those things. ("I'm assuming you don't know anything about this sector," you sniffed at me in apparent reference to things miscellaneously Science-y. That's actually another incorrect and ignorant presumption you had no basis to make, but you weren't making any claims drawing on your own expertise; you were making arguments about history (not your lane), law (not your lane), and economics (not your lane).)
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History and law can be your lane. You are obviously a word person. That's great. I don't think the US Constitution is some sort of sacred text, but I'm not religious in general. In fact, I'm not sure that it works too well anymore, so you can keep your books. History is cool, though.

I'll reserve the right to veer into the Econ lane as it relates to statistical models and behavioral economics, the only things that actually make any sense.

originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
As it happens, the word "science" appears in one place in the U.S. Constitution - the patent clause giving Congress power "[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." So the extent of the manner in which our government was "designed" to promote technological research was to incentivize it in the private sector. Now, you are fully entitled to think those people were stupid and primitive and if only they had the benefit of the wisdom of Marx and Keynes and Ocasio-Cortez they would have realized that it's way more efficient to confiscate private wealth, shut down the pharma industry, and fund these things publicly.
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I'm not sure I follow any of this, though I do think Keynes seems to have got a lot of things right. Maybe I'm just not smart or well read enough to get your point.

originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
But it is simply wrong and ahistorical to state, as you did, that private R&D is a "silly replication[] of things that governments are designed to do," when the facts are literally the other way around at least when it comes to the government you and I live under. Maybe the design of the Soviet government supports your point better.
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You were specifically talking about space craft and life extension and big diseases. None of these things can be effectively done by the private (or NGO) sector. The low hanging fruit is gone and even the stuff that seemed low hanging (mosquito nets for Malaria) didn't turn out to be.

To act like this stuff is easy and Zuckerberg can just parachute in and handle it is misguided and offensive. It's all going to be really slow from here on out. Private philanthropy never seems to have the stomach or the attention span for that. The Gates Foundation does do some wonderful things and to their credit, I think they are reevaluating their practice. However, that money would be put to much better use by Tony Fauci.

originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
And then there is the matter of philanthropy. I mentioned the Gates Foundation, which has done absolutely amazing things to help large numbers of the absolute worst-off people in the world. Maybe your reaction would have been different if I'd mentioned the Clinton Foundation instead. You nevertheless declared that you find this kind of charitable work offensive because you think only the government should be able to make decisions about how to allocate Bill Gates' charitable dollars, and that the government will allocate those dollars better. I have no idea what leads you to believe that this is true. We know how the government allocates the trillions of dollars it already has (vastly more than the Gates Foundation has), and the government doesn't place a high priority at all on the causes served by the Gates Foundation. I am not sure why you think that would change if the government confiscated all the Gates Foundation's assets and shut it down. American voters vastly prefer entitlement programs that benefit Americans to aid programs that benefit the worst-off people in other countries. I appreciate the fact that you think you are the smartest person in the world and that if you were in charge of everybody's money, you'd spend it better. I'm sorry to tell you that you're not the one who gets to be in charge.
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The Clinton Foundation doesn't do anything that I pay attention to professionally, so I don't care. I've commented about Gates above. Zuckerberg and Bezos might as well light that money on fire They'd be much better off if they used it like the Koch's and other right wing asshats to manipulate the country, hopefully back towards something resembling a decent place.

I don't think that the government allocates its resources well now (private companies might be worse, though, if you look at R&D spending). My point was a more narrow point when you veered into my lane with your right wing bromides about how science is better off with billionaires calling the shots. Materially, it isn't. You're thoughts on the matter really don't count, no more than my thoughts on tort law or whatever would. Really, only Prof. Lipton (and maybe Maxwell) gets a vote on this since he's the only one with any relevant expertise or participation in this area (sorry if I'm missing out on anyone else).

I don't think I'm the smartest guy in the world, in fact, I know that I'm not having been in the presence of smarter folks on a regular basis (and knowing exactly where I am on the distribution). I also do think that it would be better if I got to unilaterally allocate resources, but as you correctly point out, I don't.
 
My oh my. We are far afield from the OP, and everyone’s got their Friday afternoon jump suit on.

The current topic is way too complex and nuanced for this forum. So I will just make a small correction for Keith’s originalist benefit: science - authors - copyright; useful arts - inventors- patents.

Ok. What the hell. There is ample place and opportunity in this world for both private and public investment/funding/spending to have a positive public social effect. The balance between the two is so not a straightforward issue. To assert that one can pick one over the other and to what degree and when and how and where and for how long to optimize some notion of public good seems entirely incalculable and unprovable and a waste of time and requires a certain hubris.

The reality is government will do what it wants to do at any moment. And the consequences will put constraints on what the private sector can and will do. That’s reality. If the Gates foundation earned a billion dollars in investment income in a year, it’s an incalculable problem to figure out how much of that money should go to the federal and state governments and how much should stay with the foundation to do whatever is subjectively defined as the most public good. The consideration is not that different if it’s an individual who may use some of her/his income for public good. (In fact, even average Joe used to get tax deductions for such use of private wealth but now that America is heading toward greatness again, that’s effectively gone.)

I do firmly believe that slanting too far toward reliance on government doesn’t put enough faith in the public good that is driven by the private sector and private individuals and small groups using their accumulated private wealth. But, it’s necessarily a matter of degree, and line drawing (particularly through the blunt instrument of setting tax rates) is hard.
 
originally posted by VLM:
originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
originally posted by VLM:

Those are all silly replications of things that governments are designed to do
Click to expand...
Ridiculously stupid point which is obvious just from your use of the passive voice.
Click to expand...

Wow, great arguments. You clearly should stay in your lane.
Click to expand...

Your snideness didn't deserve anything more, and frankly I was juggling 5 things when I saw your post and didn't have the time. But since you're still sitting there so smugly convinced you're right, I'll engage you on the merits.
Click to expand...

Yeah, you're the only one with a job. I bet it's important too.

originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
This nastiness originated in a simple question - how do I personally benefit from someone else's billions?
...
Stay in your own damn lane. You then ignorantly added that investing in space and medical research and philanthropy are "silly replications of things that governments are designed to do and that individuals can't really pull off and probably can't even fund." I found your use of the passive voice striking. Who designed governments to do those things? What governments were so designed?
Click to expand...

I dunno, whatever voice you like. I don't care so much about grammatical fine points.

The fact is that scientific research, medical and otherwise, is very much my lane. I don't think you understand how any of it really works yet you glibly tell us how Gates/Bezos/Koch/Name-your-sociopath will do so many great things with their billions.

It doesn't work. It's purely ego driven and mostly wasteful. IME and IMO.

originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
As it happens, I have on my desk a four-volume set containing all the primary source documents related to the debate and ratification of the Constitution. It goes into great detail about what our government was designed to do, as it contains the actual words of the designers recorded in real-time as they were doing the designing. I guess you'll be surprised to learn that no, our government wasn't designed to do any of those things. ("I'm assuming you don't know anything about this sector," you sniffed at me in apparent reference to things miscellaneously Science-y. That's actually another incorrect and ignorant presumption you had no basis to make, but you weren't making any claims drawing on your own expertise; you were making arguments about history (not your lane), law (not your lane), and economics (not your lane).)
Click to expand...

History and law can be your lane. You are obviously a word person. That's great. I don't think the US Constitution is some sort of sacred text, but I'm not religious in general. In fact, I'm not sure that it works too well anymore, so you can keep your books. History is cool, though.

I'll reserve the right to veer into the Econ lane as it relates to statistical models and behavioral economics, the only things that actually make any sense.

originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
As it happens, the word "science" appears in one place in the U.S. Constitution - the patent clause giving Congress power "[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." So the extent of the manner in which our government was "designed" to promote technological research was to incentivize it in the private sector. Now, you are fully entitled to think those people were stupid and primitive and if only they had the benefit of the wisdom of Marx and Keynes and Ocasio-Cortez they would have realized that it's way more efficient to confiscate private wealth, shut down the pharma industry, and fund these things publicly.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure I follow any of this, though I do think Keynes seems to have got a lot of things right. Maybe I'm just not smart or well read enough to get your point.

originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
But it is simply wrong and ahistorical to state, as you did, that private R&D is a "silly replication[] of things that governments are designed to do," when the facts are literally the other way around at least when it comes to the government you and I live under. Maybe the design of the Soviet government supports your point better.
Click to expand...

You were specifically talking about space craft and life extension and big diseases. None of these things can be effectively done by the private (or NGO) sector. The low hanging fruit is gone and even the stuff that seemed low hanging (mosquito nets for Malaria) didn't turn out to be.

To act like this stuff is easy and Zuckerberg can just parachute in and handle it is misguided and offensive. It's all going to be really slow from here on out. Private philanthropy never seems to have the stomach or the attention span for that. The Gates Foundation does do some wonderful things and to their credit, I think they are reevaluating their practice. However, that money would be put to much better use by Tony Fauci.

originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
And then there is the matter of philanthropy. I mentioned the Gates Foundation, which has done absolutely amazing things to help large numbers of the absolute worst-off people in the world. Maybe your reaction would have been different if I'd mentioned the Clinton Foundation instead. You nevertheless declared that you find this kind of charitable work offensive because you think only the government should be able to make decisions about how to allocate Bill Gates' charitable dollars, and that the government will allocate those dollars better. I have no idea what leads you to believe that this is true. We know how the government allocates the trillions of dollars it already has (vastly more than the Gates Foundation has), and the government doesn't place a high priority at all on the causes served by the Gates Foundation. I am not sure why you think that would change if the government confiscated all the Gates Foundation's assets and shut it down. American voters vastly prefer entitlement programs that benefit Americans to aid programs that benefit the worst-off people in other countries. I appreciate the fact that you think you are the smartest person in the world and that if you were in charge of everybody's money, you'd spend it better. I'm sorry to tell you that you're not the one who gets to be in charge.
Click to expand...

The Clinton Foundation doesn't do anything that I pay attention to professionally, so I don't care. I've commented about Gates above. Zuckerberg and Bezos might as well light that money on fire They'd be much better off if they used it like the Koch's and other right wing asshats to manipulate the country, hopefully back towards something resembling a decent place.

I don't think that the government allocates its resources well now (private companies might be worse, though, if you look at R&D spending). My point was a more narrow point when you veered into my lane with your right wing bromides about how science is better off with billionaires calling the shots. Materially, it isn't. You're thoughts on the matter really don't count, no more than my thoughts on tort law or whatever would. Really, only Prof. Lipton (and maybe Maxwell) gets a vote on this since he's the only one with any relevant expertise or participation in this area (sorry if I'm missing out on anyone else).

I don't think I'm the smartest guy in the world, in fact, I know that I'm not having been in the presence of smarter folks on a regular basis (and knowing exactly where I am on the distribution). I also do think that it would be better if I got to unilaterally allocate resources, but as you correctly point out, I don't.
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I’m a science and law guy. And I respect your view here. But I think your pushing it a bit on the pros and cons of public versus private science R&D and the public good provided. It’s not really predictable, or maybe you are just assuming that it is in certain discrete fields where you think public / publicly-funded research may be better suited to progress based on history and the nature of the work. But it’s not a universal truth.
 
dudg·eon
/ˈdəjən/
noun: dudgeon; plural noun: dudgeons

a feeling of offense or deep resentment.
"the manager walked out in high dudgeon"
synonyms: indignantly, resentfully, angrily, furiously, wrathfully
 
Yikes. What did I start with an off-hand remark about a couple books I dislike! :D

Ok, I'm so sorry, I don't have the spoons to deal with everything that's happened in this post; sorry for the hit and run post. But a couple things I'll try to clarify.

originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
He [pinker] sees himself as a progressive, but he thinks that to improve, we need to recognize how we have achieved the improvements that we have achieved. The point of his argument is not how great things are but that Enlightenment reason is the basis of improvement and we should endorse it, Not attack it.[...] Pinker is guilty of a lot of things, but being a conservative isn't one of them.
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Pinker might see himself as a progressive but I don't think he is. He is a liberal and a status quo proponent - a progressive would want something more than what we have now. Just look at the company he keeps: he's friendly and shares platforms with Jordan Peterson and many others of the so-called intellectual dark web. He is against identity politics. He is transphobic - he's a fan of the pseudo-scientific theory of autogynephilia. He is constantly against political correctness. He wrote a very prescriptive rather than descriptive book on style in language. Do these look like progressive stances on social issues? They sure don't to me. Rather it looks like he is against every single progressive issue in society today. He's also conservative economically basically parroting all right wing economic views. If someone is conservative in social issues and economic issues yet considers himself a progressive, he's a not a progressive.

Also, as that review I linked to states, he misrepresents and cherry picks the Enlightenment in such ways as to misrepresent it entirely. I mean like did he really not consider Immanuel Kant an Enlightenment philosopher? He only regards those bits of Enlightenment thinking that he already accepts and disregards the rest. Isn't that what bad science looks like?

I had a long response to Keith but decided to delete it since I'm not sure he argues from the principle of charity position. Rather it looks more like the opposite: he seeks to find the least charitable view of whatever anyone writes and then goes off on tangents from there. Perhaps I'm wrong but I think for now I'll ignore his posts.
 
I didn't actually take most of the weird positions that Nathan attributes to me (that Zuckerberg can "parachute in" and solve world hunger or that we're better off with billionaires "calling the shots" on science), so perhaps that accounts for why i offended him so.

FWIW, I agree with Otto that Pinker is probably a right-wing closet case. Well, that's imprecise. I believe he 1. holds views that would have put him on the left two decades ago, 2. deviates from politically correct orthodoxies in ways that put him on the right now, but 3. that he is nevertheless tribally left-wing, so he disassociates himself with the right for reasons having nothing to do with which tribe best represents his beliefs. I have no idea, however, how you can come to the view that Pinker's views are *economically* conservative just because he recognizes that market economies generate wealth. He still supports all the programs to redistribute that wealth that any good liberal supports.

Exactly what position have I characterized in "the least charitable" manner? (Relatedly: do you tend to find that people you disagree with characterize others' positions in the least charitable manner, but people you agree with seldom do? Have you noticed anyone characterizing *my* positions in a less-than-charitable manner, or nah?)

Feel free to ignore me if you want. I'd be quite happy to consign this entire thread to the ignore pile - I come here to talk about wine, not argue politics, which as far as I'm concerned is the new religion.

Loesberg's point about "design" is 100% correct. His question about why writings about the framers' intent are relevant to a textualist has an easy answer - textualism is a tool for interpreting laws and statutes, but obviously there are a lot of interesting historical questions that don't relate to the interpretation of laws and statutes for which these documents are useful.
 
So Keith, post notes on all those wines for which you flash tantalizing photos on IG. And we can discuss.

Steering back to the OP, which was about wine, I find the retailer advocacy groups’ comments on WB to be overly optimistic. To summarize, they have an almost religiously-held view that any decision in the Tennessee case necessarily will help the pending cases coming out of MI and IL, where interstate retail is squarely at issue. I say one case at a time. Let’s see what the SC does here to try to square existing case law and the 21st Anendment with the residency statute at issue.
 
If intent is relevant to other historical issues, why is it not relevant to determining the original meaning of a text? If textualism resulted in unambiguous readings, one might be able to argue that the uncertainty of evidence about intention disabled it. But an interpretation, either intentionalist or textualist, is only uuambiguously correct to the person who holds it. All forms of interpretive evidence are always uncertain in some csees, even if they are all but determinative in others. The more kinds one has the better.
 
originally posted by Jayson Cohen:
So Keith, post notes on all those wines for which you flash tantalizing photos on IG. And we can discuss.
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Dunno. His continued reliance on his formative experience with 1995 and 1996 Bordeaux as a collection of reference points is a misinterpretation of the Framers' intent.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
If intent is relevant to other historical issues, why is it not relevant to determining the original meaning of a text? If textualism resulted in unambiguous readings, one might be able to argue that the uncertainty of evidence about intention disabled it. But an interpretation, either intentionalist or textualist, is only uuambiguously correct to the person who holds it. All forms of interpretive evidence are always uncertain in some csees, even if they are all but determinative in others. The more kinds one has the better.
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There are whole long article-length treatments of this. But the short answer is that the meaning of the text originalists are after is something that's come to be called 'original public meaning.' The people who wrote the text may have intended one thing, and their statements may be probative of that intent, but that intent may deviate from the intent of the body as a whole or the intent of people who ratified the document. The key point is that we're not interpreting law like any other type of language where one person says something and you're trying to arrive at the most accurate understanding of what he meant. That doesn't work with constitutional or statutory text because it doesn't come from a single speaker with a single intent, and the relevant communication consists not just of saying words out loud or putting them on the page but putting them through the process to be ratified or enacted by larger bodies. The "speaker" whose meaning you're trying to discern isn't the author of the text but the people as a whole who adopted the text through the constitutional process, and therefore we're trying to determine the meaning the people as a whole would have attached to something, not the meaning the individuals who came up with the words might have had in mind in a sense different from what they expressed on the page. That doesn't mean floor statements are never relevant. An originalist would have no problem citing them if they're probative of original public meaning in some way that, say, a dictionary wouldn't be. (I can't think of an example of this offhand, but I'm sure they're out there.) Also, originalists are going to be a bit more forgiving of citing floor statements from the founding era than modern legislative history, because the phenomenon of gaming the system by slipping in creative interpretations for later courts to glom onto hadn't arisen yet.
 
originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
... Now, you are fully entitled to think those people were stupid and primitive and if only they had the benefit of the wisdom of Marx and Keynes and Ocasio-Cortez they would have realized that it's way more efficient to confiscate private wealth, shut down the pharma industry, and fund these things publicly.
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The Somme of straw men.
 
I'm not going to give Keith the kind of response his statement merits, first because I think no one but we two are interested, and second because it involves unknotting more distinctions than he even goes near. I am coming to believe that, like the New Critical notion of the intentional fallacy, Scalia's concept of textualism is far less objectionable in concept than it is in practice. Part of the problem is Scalia's own sloppy metaphysics about intention. He does not precisely oppose textualism to intentionalism as he thinks. What he says when he speaks about interpretation is that the text or the statute means what it says or promulgates, not what the lawmaker intends. If by "intends," he means a whole series of intentions that may surround the meaning he gives to the sentences he wrote (he wanted to make money, he was a closet fascist, he was intending to achieve x or y as a consequence of the way he debated), he is, of course, correct. But if he means, as I do not think he really can, that the law means what the language says rather than what the lawmaker intended to say, he is speaking the kind of nonsense too many critics do. Language by itself doesn't say anything. Only people intending to invoke its conventional meanings do by so intending. In the absence of someone using language to convey intention, you aren't looking at language, just marks on a page. If one of those infinite monkeys at typewriters did produce a typescript of Hamlet, he wouldn't have written Hamlet and you wouldn't be reading it. He would have produced and you would be reading a typescript that has all the same external features of a text of Hamlet but is in fact a random record of keystrokes that, against all odds, looked like a text. This is true of any bit of language treated as if there were no intention behind it. The difficulties of the fact that laws need to be passed with the intention of all kinds of legislators acting behind what they say and why they vote don't change the basic linguistic reality. To my mind, textualists are obviously right that the first duty of interpretation is to look at what a text says because that's the first and best evidence of what the speaker meant and no kind of intentional evidence ought to be strong enough to make us think it means something other than that. But since texts don't in fact produce unambiguous meanings or have unambiguous contexts controlling possible ambiguities at the sentence level, textual readings alone can never be your endpoint if you want to come to that original meaning. And its silly to ignore evidence such as legislative history because in principle that evidence can't be determinative when in fact it might be damned persuasive in one case or another.

By the way, to make it clear that I'm not criticizing only conservative legal jurisprudence, I consider claims that the constitution is a living thing equally nonsensical, even as a metaphor. Constitutions are records of what was spoken, They don't have intentions and they can't change them. The case isn't made any better by invoking traditions of interpretation as Dworkin does, for the same reason. It may be that we shouldn't care what the framers said because what they knew is no longer relevant to our situation, but in that case you shouldn't make your cases based on your constructions of what they said. Most of what liberal interpreters want to achieve could be achieved by stating what I believe to be the case. By the way it is written, the Constitution states principles, not lists of propositions. When they ban cruel and unusual punishment, they don't mean this or that punishment, they mean punishment that is in excess of normal practices and strikes people in a society as cruel beyond necessity (all punishments are at least somewhat cruel in the sense of causing pain or they wouldn't be punishments). Their normal practices aren't probative for determining what we think of as normal practices. What is probative is that they ban excessive practices and why they did so. They certainly didn't ban waterboarding since they didn't have the technique, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't fit under the meaning of cruel and unusual punishments as they construed the category. The same can be said of the death penalty. We may evaluate the punishment differently than they did, but in calling it cruel and unusual, we haven't changed their meaning of the category and in wanting to place the death penalty under that category, we aren't evolving what they meant, as opposed to applying the meaning differently.

And so we don't bore everyone else to tears, I'll leave you to have the last word, Keith.
 
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