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What have unions ever done for us comment:

The worker death rate is huge [in China], but in comparison to the population it’s nothing. Maybe if we started acting like Christians again instead of living in sin as homosexuals and not contributing to society by reproducing as much as we can, we could have a population big enough that a few industrial deaths wouldn’t matter as much as it does now. But noooo. Liberals/homos want to keep the population down for “the environment”. What a load of crap.

And no, based on his previous posts I don’t think he’s kidding.

“Liberals/homos want to keep the population down for “the environment”. What a load of crap.”

Sounds like Floyd Alvis Cooper to me..

I think the math is wrong here, due to a failure to account for the fact that there were Saddam’s wars, the war Bush launched, followed by the war the insurgency launched. It’s that latter war which has caused most of the recent casualties; Bush’s war was over relatively quickly, and as such things go, with few casualties.

No, no, you see, the people whose countries the US invades and bombs are morally obligated to greet the incoming GIs with flowers and kisses, because the US is objectively on the side of Good. Especially its cluster munitions.

Any failure to greet the empire with open arms is the fault of the conquered, not the conquerers. Get it straight.

David, I had a quick scan of Spagat’s paper on main-street bias and it doesn’t seem to be talking about the lancet survey at all. It seems to give the level of bias that would be obtained if one were to do a household sampling survey using a main-street-biassed sample frame if the outcome variable of interest was the presence of a dead person at the time of the interview. Given that the actual variable of interest is “has anyone in this hosuehold died in the last 3 years” the bias Spagat calculates is hardly relevant.

The paper you link to is a rant about how the survey didn’t adhere to some Public Opinion research standards. That’s cute and all but rapid surveys of death rates in war zones aren’t opinion polls, and in fact medical researchers are beholden to their own medical ethics committees, not to the market researchers’ association. Spagat may think that essential health surveys need to be done according to the same moral standards as coke advertising, but I think he would be wrong about that.

Ah, but dsquared, you forgot that on the western front, the war launched by France and England ended rather quickly (and as such things go, with few casualties) but then started another war launched by the French insurgency with the massive help of foreign fighters and weapons. This forced Germany into yet another war despite several diplomatic endeavors to peace all rejected by the British government, this time against England alone, to cut the flow of arms to the insurgents. And don’t forget that a few months later , the US launched another war by extending the pan american security zone eastward.

It was the threat from the Poles and Czechs that made war inevitable, but without French and British aggression, peace could have been attained quickly.

Wow, Spagat has gone off the deep end.

The Labor Movement: The folks who brought you the weekend.

If you think this is a convincing argument, or even just a novel point, to those whom you would regard as anti-union, that proves to me you don’t know why people take the opposing position at all. Remember, “Those who don’t know their opponents’ arguments, don’t really understand their own.”

Comment #7 – David Kane
Comment #8 – Brett Bellmore

It’s like some experiment. Sh*t in the woods and see which noxious scavenger gets there first.

#19, why don’t you cite some of those arguments? Preferably in the form of “they brought you the weekend, but on the other hand…”

Tim,

I realize that you are not Spagat’s biggest fan, but would you also argue that Guha-Sapir and her co-author Olivier Degomme have “gone off the deep end?” After all, they claim (prior to the publication of IFHS) that L2 is clearly too high an estimate and that

Our re-estimation of total war-related death toll for Iraq from the invasion until June 2006 is therefore around 125,000.

This is, for most practical purposes, indistinguishable from Spagat’s position. Note also the criticisms that Guha-Sapir and Degomme make in the text of their paper about L2. Are they “denialists” as well?

What we really need (as I privately e-mailed you) is for someone to provide a forum in which we might all thrash out the strengths and weaknesses of these various papers. Ideally, we would do this at either Deltoid or Crooked Timber. Best would be a separate thread devoted to each paper.

Would you (Tim) or John be willing to just start those threads, even if you don’t have time to make substantive comments yourself?

#24, how does your theory explain the existence of sweatshops all over the world, including those on the US territory? Also things like CEO-to-worker pay ratio in de-unionized US?

Why is omniscient and omnipotent Capitalism cheerfully paying hundreds of millions to the scoundrel CEO while denying 5% pay raise to the worker? I’m sure it’s all in the workers’ best interests, but it seems a bit counterintuitive, so some reassurance would be nice.

No, of course productivity does have something to do with it. It’s just that productivity is necessary but not sufficient.

His/her links are trying to argue that the cost of labor is the same sort of expense as corporate profits, but that’s, of course, just silly. Corporation is designed to minimize the labor costs and to maximize the profit; that’s all there is to it. Workers have to fight to increase their share.

My claim is just that arguments like, “Unions, the folks that gave you the weekend” do not address any actual argument on the other side

It doesn’t address the desire of business interests to use labour however and whenever they like?

What if a right-wing meme was: “Conservatives: the folks that brought you national defense”.

Considering that there were nations before there was conservatism the claim seems false from the outset.

Aagghh. slogans

righteous_bubba: It doesn’t address the desire of business interests to use labour however and whenever they like?

Exactly the misframing of the issue that I was criticizing before. What position exactly are you staking out here, and what are you distinguishing it from? Currently, employers can hire workers to work on the weekends. This is true even in pro-union countries. Currently, people can be paid to do undesirable things, like have sex with strangers, even and *especially* in countries that are pro-union.

righteous_bubba and abb1: Considering that there were nations before there was conservatism the claim seems false from the outset.

This is different – every nation on earth has some sort of national defense.

Sure, and there were workers who didn’t work on weekends before the existence of unions. See? I can misframe the issue every bit as well as you two can.

abb1: Person, please cite an actual argument on the other side that is not obvious bullshit.

Okay, see the links I gave, from real-life economists.

See, it’s, like, if I said “the earth is round” – and you accused me of not addressing the ‘actual’ arguments on the other side, you know: about the elephants on top of the big turtle.

Well, if your ideological opponents did not believe the earth was a sphere, “the earth is round” would provide a proper framing of the debate. However, if you said, “Vote for [my side] … because the earth really is round!” that would imply that the other side does not believe the earth is round — and if that were not the case, I would make the exact same criticism I did here.

Your original “argument” (and I use the term loosely) is that “unions brought us the weekend” implying that the other side is somehow in favor of “weekend work”, when in reality, your opponents (the ones you don’t actually address) hold no such position — the issue is more complicated than can be phrased in terms of being “for vs. against” weekend work. Sort of like being locked into “did/did not” stop beating wife.

barry: And it ignores the fact that the right seems to prosper using slogans like ‘Conservatives: the folks that brought you national defense’.

To clarify, I’m not here to defend conservatives. And if the right used such a slogan, I’d criticize it on the same grounds. Can you just real quick give me an example of one that similarly misframes the issue by stating opposition to a non-existent position?

Analyses might be complex, but slogans are simplistic.

Yes, I accept that slogans will be simplistic. I do not accept that slogans must frame one side as being opposed to some caricature that doesn’t exist, such as the “anti-national defense” person.

btw, It’s kind of funny how ideologically blinded you guys can get when it stops being an echo chamber here.

…implying that the other side is somehow in favor of “weekend work”,

Of course it is. The other side is in favor of exploiting the labor to the maximum extent possible. It’s in favor of weekend work, in favor child work, in favor of hiring illegal immigrants, moving the factories to third-world hellholes, you name it.

In fact, that’s the other side’s fiduciary duty to the shareholders.

If your real-life economists don’t know that, then they are imposters. If they do know and try to muddy the water with their so-called ‘arguments’, then they are hired demagogues.

You know … forget I ever tossed these pearls.

Thanks, person. And that’s because it’s not bumper sticker season yet. The right always seems to have the good ones.